@@SparkyPixel lapis' str growth is 25 and her magic is 20, i feel like going a class that only lets her utilize one of these two is a waste of potentially the best levin sword user in the gam
Especially for someone like you who greatly values enemy phasing, I definitely feel like you didnt experiment with Soren enough. The Hold Out+Vantage build is very popular for a reason. It is expensive, but the Well enables it. Flare tanking with these 2 abilities trivializes enemy phase and can work on a lot of characters that have good accuracy and speed, but works best on Veyle to the absolute meme levels of Crit she can reach with an engraved tome thanks to the hilarious Dragon bonus of Flare of doubling crit rate. This allows Veyle to basically consistently on round everyone that dares to approach her on enemy phase thank to double critting the majority of enemies, even if they get a lethal hit in she has hold out, and the next enemy cant kill her because she vantages and immeditely crit nukes them and heals back to above the hold out threshold so she can keep this up basically infinitely as long as she is engaged. You can basically throw a Soren engaged Veyle in the middle of the map unassisted and she will nuke everything in range, the only things that can potentially disturb this are siege tomes/bows if you are using a non-siege tome yourself, which is usually the case because doubling for crits is usually more valuable, and ballistas/mage canoneers, both of which can be planned around usually. Edit: For a quick and easy to find example of someone abusing it, you can take a look at how Excelblem used it to tackle Fell Xenologue Chapter 3 on Maddening
"The Hold Out+Vantage build is very popular for a reason" Not exclusive to Soren and ENABLES Soren. Soren does not enable hold out vantage, he NEEDS IT to be good. Huge difference here, if anything you should be arguing Roy should be S tier for all the other emblems/tactics he props up by virtue of having one of the most broken passives in the game.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming neither hold out or vantage are strictly necessary for Flare tanking, they just make it basically RNG proof/enemy type proof. Without it crits can kill you and you have to actually think around enemy units/formations as opposed to just lmaoing and throwing the unit in the middle of nowhere; but even then it is a potentially incredibly powerful enemy phase unit. Attacking at -20% res effectively guarantees that you are doing good damage, and thus decent HP recovery. The most popular Soren partner is Veyle because she is a crit nuke but the can also work on a lot of mage classes, and also martial artist due to 100% damage as HP recovery as opposed to 50%. Without Hold Out+Vantage the unit needs ~some~ def/res/spd but given they have it they are hard to remove, requiring doubling conditions/crits/etc if they are not siege units while also having basically no chance of the enemy ignoring them because they will never be at 0 dmg/0% hit rate range against them; with the skills the Soren unit is basically completely unkillable while dealing very good damage; and veyle will one shot anything by hitting 90-100% crit rates with an engraved obscurite and wipes out basically everyone that attempts to attack her at 1-2 range. To make it better, Veyle comes with 2500SP, which is enough for first level of hold out and first level of vantage, which gets you covered for 95% of the cases, and using her at all or giving her some Well SP books quickly gets her to the higher levels. It is a very easy to build hard carry for late game with very minimal investment.
But is a CH 23-26 only build strong enough to justify placing Soren in S tier? By the time you hit CH 23 if you have completed all Divine Paralogues you should be very overleveled with a ton of crazy units. Veyle has terrible availability and even if this build was the best thing in the game I can't give it S tier as an enemy phase build when all of the endgame favors player phase warp strats.
Funny thing with the new mage cannoneer class. It gets a weapon called venom blast that applies 3 layers of poison immediately. Did you know that lucina works with the mage cannoneer and it also applies the poison. She just makes your mage cannoneer one of the best units in the game.
I know that it worked but for some reason it hasn't worked for me for the past couple chapters so if it works for anyone else tell me. Still dual striking from 8 tiles away is busted
I would put edelgard in God tier tier simply becuse you can use the combat art that gives you a turn back, then houses unite+ which refreshed your turn again. On the right unit you can take out a boss all alone, and considering how early you get them, plus the access to failnaught Shield gambit is extremely useful too. Hectors quick repost ability is kinda broken, instead of using two skills to speed fix, you can use one to enemy phase them. You can use his skill with a tomohawk. Sorens debuff skill can be really useful on a seige byleth, allowing you to reduce enemy defence, hit or move from a safe distance before an enemy can attack. Add Corins debuff and youre looking at 7(?) Defence down. Chroms extra physical crit multiplier is nice on the right crit build. Not to mention the additonal +10 magic when engaged, its good for units like gryffin and mage knight. Veronicas reprisal is actually broken. At base, for every 3 and a third health youre missing, you gain 1 damage. It works great on units like wyvern knight that use multiple weapons instead of weapon power, plus a high health pool. About 33 missing health is 10 damage. But at rank 2, every other health you lose increases damage by 1. Since theres no cap to this, using it with vantage and hold out makes you practically invincible given you have enough health. Those are my only takes after using the dlc emblems for a while.
Oops I also forgot to mention that edelgard has lineage which is like mentorship but you can access it earlier, it's cheaper, and it stacks with mentorship. God tier.
I would have moved Celica up because of echo and what it enables. Double hex for when we didn't have the ancient well and couldn't one shot as easily. But if you're running a decent amount of back up units triggering them twice is pretty strong. And you're probably running Lucina so there is at least one back up unit there, and probably a warrior or two
Great video BTW, agree with pretty much every placement outside of Chrom in general. For some specific cases, Soren is where you put him but somehow someone decided to make Veyle into an enemy phase god with him, Corinn engrave on her Obscurité and she'll have 90-120% crit chance against everything in the game while engaged, add hold out and for the few chapters you have her she can solo entire lanes or groups of enemy if they don't have 3+range. Another unlikely and weird case is Leif, he becomes good if you have a Sniper/tireur d'élite for which you don't use Lyn on, that needs Bld to use Silver bow without penalty. Being engaged allows some damage as counter with adaptable against melee weapon enemy(can't tank much more than 1 hit most of the time though) and sometime the Quadruple hit will give 1000g. Adaptable also gives 20Avo, so a cover unit will have huge Avo on an avoid tile (60 from the tile, 20 from adaptable). But those are not general uses, that's for sure.
Hector is amazing of Generals and other Axe main jobs due to their low speed. QR with a Tomahawk is very strong and Storm's eye with Tomahawk(or Runesword if you're some insane and actually invested in magic 😜 ) Hector is at least high A low S imo. Its weird Chrom/Robin does what it does, it feels definitely made for a Thief. Soren on a decent dex mage trivialise some maps (like Fell X 5) Camilla is a scary ring on Mage Knights and Royal Knights.
I love Camilla on the default Alear class, she boosts Res/Spd, both are very useful for Alear. Alear gets all the dragon vein options. Alear also gets free poison curing, and can heal off persistent fire affects on the ground and use dragon vein to clear effects. The on demand ability to become a flying unit, with extra movement and Lance Guard, perfect for a primary Sword wielder. She also get s Camillia's axes to use and a sizable aoe attack. It is a snazzy role playing pair with Alear/Camillia and Veyle/Corrin. and exceptionally useful.
you're underestimating soren. flare turns his mage partner into a drain tank and you aren't restricted to a specific tome to do it. i slap him on ivy with speed taker. you also mentioned 'just use better positioning' instead of using decoy. you should be using positioning + decoy so you can force otherwise riskier extensions. use decoy on your 1-2 range bonded shield carry so the first 3 enemies on that turn just die. controlling enemy targeting is busted.
I found SP conversion (Veronica) and Starsphere (Tiki) really broke things wide open for me. Although I played on Hard and did lots of skirmishes/grinding.
Something you forgot to mention during Veronica is that she gives you Fortify+ which heals all your units (huge area of effect) and cures status. It's basically almost like great sacrifice that you can use 4x during engage. With that, you can let your staff units to deal damage. I think I'd give her high S tier and arguably low god tier with reprisal and all engage weapons she gives.
If you give a unit vantage and holdout ++ her reprisals are insane just one shots everything with casters and gets close to it on melee, book of worlds only needs one proc to be useful and running across the map or setting it for bosses can be monstrous, and fortify + also drops a shit ton of sp and exp like great sacrifice and you can make units op from chapter 6 onwards so yeah high op low God makes since to me
@@superape013 yes Fortify+ also can be used for exp/sp farm tbh. I always get Tiki and Veronica immediately after chapter 6 because 2 of them are so good and useable early on.
Sorren is amazing. Put him on fell dragon Vayle. It doubles her crit rate and her magic attack will kill everything and completely heal her hp. She is going to want Holdout+++ incase she gets crit hit.
Camilla should be in S rank imo, she's pretty comparable to Corrin while having a pretty great special attack, I gave her to Céline and it's honestly a great move to deal damage and slow down enemies (well except fliers), for example to protect frailer or damaged allies. Also the flying definitely helps, for example on the Soren map thanks to Camilla I had Céline flying above rocks to destroy people, and I know it would have been far more difficult to beat had Camilla not allowed her fly.
I would have to push back on Corrin. If you have a covert unit with her, the dragon vein use for them makes them un-hitable. For those that don't know, you get a fog that increases avoid by 30.... and covert doubles avoid. Use that in combo with a tile that already gets avoid, and you're getting +120 avoid. I'm not saying that makes her God tier or anything, but the DV for covert is MILES better than the fire, or anything else. Combined with Pair up and Draconic hex, you have an invincible unit, that's debuffing everything. Alcryst with this is hilarious. But on a good Zelkov or Yunaka.... pure destruction. Almost as good as Ike if you play it right
so, i would argue that hector can do a lot more for units like goldmary than ike can. i ran him with goldmary on FXL, maddening, and she was able to tank, and double on enemy phase and get a LOT of necessary kills. with ike, you may take less dmg, but you arent doing enough to kill unless you have a wrath crit build. Hector is basically what leif was supposed to be but in a practical sense. For that reason, he deserves to be higher. Soren can break the game. Veyle was nosfertanking on FXL Maddening, and never died bc of his crit, healing, and rexcalibur tome which can reliably ohko even griffon knights t. assign decoy can also help out with tanky units bc it forces enemies to target your tank. you can position perfectly, but if units are going to do 0 they will ignore and run right past you. soren fixes that. he is insanely strong. please experiment with him a bit more to see what we all mean.
Considering how most of the popular and broken builds require leif and roy i think they should be moved up tiers. Roy can also fix low strength units. Also Celica on high damage mages can take out two healthbars of a boss so where she is considering that, the free recover staff for exp grinding and full heals for four turns for free, or echo draconic hex means she is too low imo. Chrom isn't being given enough credit here either. +10 mag when engaged, Rally Spectrum + can be used anytime without being engaged and inherited by anyone and is overall a far better byleth instruct. Also if a unit can double putting them in stealth terrain allows them to double without retaliation without having to waste a skill slot if they are equipped with chrobin. Chrobin also gives a good amount of dex spd and str as statboosters for equipping them and robin's thoron is the only thoron in the game that can double and it does really good damage. Hector makes it so an armored unit can set up chokepoints almost anywhere and is a mini ike and quick reposte is really strong. I would argue hector is low a if anything. Imo there is no real bad emblem in FE engage but when talking about equipping leif is the closest to that but he has one of the best inheritable skills in the game so it balances out. Also agree with your take on soren for the most part however he has really good support skills and reflect staff makes powerleveling weaker units easier which is pretty huge and makes enemy mages take damage for hitting some of your units as well.
I’m pairing chrom with sword power celine for some mixed dmg fun. Chrom gives +10 mag when engaged, so he’s good for that. I think chrom fixes a lot of the issues with thieves, where the extra mag will help them deal with armor units, and the extra dmg on crit helps them one shot beefy units with a crit. I put him on yunaka and it made her better
i think veronica is high s tier based off everything but the fortify is basically the only staff you need its got 7 range and removes status effects too
Hector is S tier in Generals/Great Knights, give them a Tomahawk/Spear and throw them in the middle of physical enemies and can easily clear them. You just may need to invest in Hit+10/15 before losing Sigurd.
One thing you can do with Soren is put him on Veyle and make her a crit build with vantage and holdout. He doubles her crit and makes her an enemy phase machine
@@IcedCoffeeGaming that's fair. I put Ike on Panette and made her a crit build but I can see how giving him to someone with better speed would be good. Her low res is starting to hurt too
@@IcedCoffeeGaming To be fair, in your five man team, Alear and Chole (who you made a wyvern knight) were your super carries that took most of the exp. Of course Soren is going to be underwhelming in your highly physical oriented team. I know you had Celine, but she wasn't getting nearly as much exp kills in your run and was more of a hybrid support/damage class. If you were to invest in a magical carry in the same way you invested in Chole/Alear, than let's just say a Celine/Anna + Soren combo would have performed better.
chrom and robin seems tailor made for celica, I’ve run them on my celica every run and it’s pretty great. Though I won’t lie chrom feels underwhelming on other units compared to other emblems
Lyn Clones, B tier for anything but maddening and S tier for maddening just like Soren, Assign Decoy is D tier for anything but maddening and S tier for maddening
This combo was MVP in my hard run. It hasn't been working as well in maddening, though. I'm actually struggling to find a good way to use Hector in maddening. I actually kinda like using Edelgard on Timerra. Works as a good star stick for her by boosting str, dex, and def and gives extra damage with lances when engaged or when Dimitri is up.
EDIT: Lmao wrong reply my bad dude. (The original comment was a reply to something else) Yeah I can see the use case for enemy phase tanking on a heavy nuke weapon.
I think FE engage gameplay is so much fun that you can mix and match units and emblems and you can get many different builds. Like I've seen youtubers putting Ike on B tier (which I very much disagree) while other putting it as broken. Just reading the comment sections alone, giving me so much ideas for the next playthrough lol. The replayability of this game is insane
Yeah, easily one of the best FE games on gameplay alone. Just completely ignore the plot and characters which yeah...that's a lot to ignore, but on your 5th+ run you don't really care about those as much anymore, and it's that gameplay that makes it so replayable
Chroms biggest selling point is robin giving you +10 magic when engaged and gave passive speed dex. It easily the best tome dmg booster consider tome just dont have tome power. you also get +10 dex and +9speed on top which easily fixes a lot of units speed issue.
Don’t sleep on Tiki. Her direct impact does indeed fall off late game but she’s the only emblem that has a permanent impact on your characters through StarSphere. Especially if you keep tiki on an early unit, the impact is incredible.
soren making you heal off of tomes is insane, give someone hold out and throw them into all the enemies and they'll just crash into you and you clear them all during enemy phase
@@IcedCoffeeGaming arguably better than Micaiah Nosferatu cause you can use higher tomes might. Hold out is simply to make sure you don't get accidental crits. I think the most potent Soren build that I've ever seen is one that uses Veyle fell child class because she would get double crit chance so she will always kill enemies with her unique tomes.
Soren on fell child Veyle with a crit engrave plus vantage-hold out (since she has the SP for it anyway) is just too reliable not to use honestly You can switch out a person who's falling off at that point and get a hard carry for almost no effort and that's more than worth it
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Any magic unit fast enough to double with a forged bolgannone becomes more consistent than Ike at enemy phasing. You can't compare the damage potential of a javelin to the stronger tomes in the game piercing resistance with Soren's flare, and as long as they don't get one shot they basically won't die.
Soren's main perk is that he lets you recover 50% of the damage you deal, along with increased effective damage and Rexcalibur. Put Hold Out on a low HP mage (Veyle is the best example but Citrinne, Anna, and plenty other magic units work too) and they're just as unkillable as someone with Ike. You're also guaranteed to oneshot fliers, even high Res Griffin Knights with Soren.
Ivy with speed taker and magic/dex5 was a crazy strong tank for my soren in a recent run I did with the lords she's got the umph for taking out general foes and her heals from it keep her topped off and the bonus damage soren gives to wind tomes makes her a fantastic flyer killer since she can just fly to their spawns
My favorite for this is Mage Knight Pandreo since he has decent HP anyway, so that way I don't even have to bother with hold out if I don't want to, but Veyle's crit build with hold out is pretty fun too.
One really underappreciated strenght of Eirika's is her weapon Sieglinde, bc from when you get her to the end of the game, I want to say that around 80% of the enemies you face are corrupted, and that's counting paralogues which don't have them, so if the unit she's equipped to can double (I gave her to Merrin on my maddening playthrough) they can very easily one round anything outside of bosses and armors without even taking twin strike into consideration
No disrespect, but I gotta be honest bro, your inexperience with the dlc emblems shows hard in this video. For someone who constantly preaches timerra enemy phasing, your ranking of hector is straight ignorant. What does she want? To double. What's her biggest issue? Low build so she can't double. What do storms eye and quick riposte do? Force doubles on enemy phase. Let's not forget piercing glare brings her hp into perfect range for quick riposte, and makes a literal funnel where she can hold down an entire 3 square wide hallway. For good measure, let's put brave bow alcryst behind her just in case enemies have 2 range. As for Soren, cataclysm is an AOE attack that can hit and debuff 9 guys at once if you link him with ike. Inherit draconic hex on top of that and you've crippled an entire squad. Tikis rating is good, and Veronica breaks the sp system entirely and provides the best damage skill in the game with reprisal. I'm not too fond of the others, but you gotta use them more. Trust me.
My 5 man DLC Timerra seemed to be so fast/high BLD from Starsphere that Hector seemed redundant/not needed. She also hit such high stats she could tank without Ike being popped.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming yeah I'm not saying it's necessary, but what I described was a valid use case as you say. Using hector to double instead of starsphere frees up all that sp too and she still has the full weapon triangle, and can even nosferatu tank with runesword. It's a valid build man. I didn't even mention the possibility of a panette crit build to compensate her low speed. Quick riposte+ by itself is worth it. My point wasn't that you were wrong or that they were better, it was more that you provided very in depth analysis for the standard rings, and very surface level analysis of some of the dlc ones that are super useful. I guarantee a bit more experimentation would change your opinion of them.
I mean DLC emblems exist within the context of DLC version of FE Engage and I don't see the need to build a life steal build when I can just steam roll the game with an easier to build emblem archetype that does the same thing with fewer steps. I think the issue is the bar for how good things are on the DLC version of the game is much higher than that of base game, so S tier on Base game effectiveness is not the same as DLC.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming your missing my point bud. We're not talking effectiveness here. We're talking level of analysis and attention to detail. It simply isn't fair to write it off because you don't see the point. We come here for top tier objective analysis, and writing them off with barely any experience is the opposite of objective. I mean c'mon, you had a use case for lief bro. If you can't put that same level of research and care into every emblem, then this tier list is hardly objective and even farther from complete. Look at chrobin. We both agree he's very lackluster. But if anyone can find a valid use case, it's you. And finding those niche use cases and factoring them into the rankings is what makes your content great. Whether you would use them or not is completely irrelevant. Another example would be the engraves. I know you covered them in the engrave video, but they are an inherent part of the emblems total contribution, and should be factored in. Chrobin has one of the best no-downside engraves in the game but that wasn't even considered in his ranking. You can talk context of dlc, but at the end of the day the dlc is a developer intended part of the game. If your going to discuss them at all, it needs to have the same attention to detail as everything else. Think of how different your first run was in comparison to your 4th. Your opinion changed. There's videos documenting that fact. The same will happen as you play with the dlc emblems more.
I see your point, I will do more DLC runs and make some builds for the next one. This is after 1 DLC run on maddening where my team was so blatantly overpowered it turned me off to the DLC in a huge way but for the sake of theorycrafting builds/min maxing I will do a few more for future videos. Within the context of my 5 man DLC run, I came to these conclusions about these emblem rings, and this is limited by my unit choice so my DLC emblem ratings aren't definitive and the overall idea for this video was it was for base game not DLC, and the DLC emblems would be a fun bonus rather than the main focus. I currently have 600 hours in the game and there is still a ton of content I want to make/things to try out. Personally I find base game no DLC the most entertaining/enjoyable due to the limitations and I kind of wish I could go back to 1.0.0 build because it was so rigidly balanced/hardcore it was right up my alley.
Tiki on a General is S tier because when you are engaged you are immortal and provide an AoE damage (on General which has very high strength and defense grants it the most damage without any risk being a smash attack) and gain ice breath which is freeze for up to 4 enemies, so has Corrin's crowd control. Plus the heal and status cleanse for only using wait is most useful on Generals than any other class.
Brother, you need to play more with the DLC emblems. They're bonkers funny! Emphasis on funny. Hector's biggest gimmick for me is to be able to create a 3x3 wall even if not engaged. Soren is crazy on all mages but when you put him on Veyle... I'm saying you have to try that one. Veronica on Panette who has learned Vantage and Wrath is another crazy build. Other than that, Veronica is okay on other characters just because of reprisal. Chrobin gives any character Byleth's instruct but doesn't need engaging. Tiki's engage skill if used beside Marth will charge up maxium turns of engage on top of giving extra life bar. Camilla on a Mage Knight is another bonkers combination, +2 movement plus early brave magic with Lightning plus they make the Mage Knight fly. They're all crazy! I'd put them all to at least S-tier. Soren is easy god-tier. You have to play with them more! 😆
I think soren is almost game breaking if you build for it. When engaged he recovers 50% of magic dmg. Put him on Anna as mage knight and she becomes almost unkillable, you can add hold out++ to make yourself completely invincible. His tome rexcalibur also destroys flying units which can be a bit annoying otherwise. I ran soren on mage knight Chloe on my last maddening run with speedtaker and hold out (takes some well shananigans, or veronicas sp skill). I could leave Chloe anywhere engaged and she would destroy everything enemy phase.
Assign Decoy forced Maddening AI to attack 0 damage / 0% hit units, so that is an S tier skill for Maddening and F tier for normal/hard. And the everything else is great for high magic users with low speed like Citrinne and Gregory. Overall Soren i say is high A tier. Not good on Anna, Anna high very high speed and he only scales with magic and dex. I judge viability based on not being in an over leveled state.
@@MasterStacona I can elaborate on why Anna. If you want to run soren to build an enemy phase build with holdout it's important that you're fast enough to not get 2-hit, so you never start a battle with your hp below the holdout threshold. And if you want to 1 round on enemy phase you preferably want to 2 hit yourself of course, making speed important for that type of build. It doesn't require overleveling to run, it didn't for me at least, by running it the unit will snowboll and get overleveled fairly quick though.
Agree with quite a bit but Chrom is good. I tend to pair him with Celine but Zelestia would seem interesting with him. With all the dlc released I'm redoing and re testing to see if I like any particular builds. But some will always remain. Lucina-Alear, Ike-Panette, Soren-Veyle, Micaiah-Hortensia, Erika-Merrin, Corrin-Yunaka.
Edlegard is god tier, I’ve only ever had that emblem on one character…Chloe, and Goddamn dude if you don’t think having a flyer with a 3 range crit bow and the ability to nullify damage and get extra actions is god tier broken, then that tells me you didn’t give it Chloe and amaze your self with byleth Seadall and Veronica giving even more actions. She can literally fly around the map and kill everything
In praise of Corrin, she’s good at two things: protecting the weak and weakening the mighty. She’s really good at both jobs. I noticed that I was really relying on her, Ike and Lucina in the Xenologue. I gave Corrin to Nel to keep her and Nil safe, for which she was invaluable.
Soren is definitely s teir can turn a mage into a tank can build up speedtaker quickly if there’s a group of weakened enemies I haven’t ran him on Veyle yet but with ivy is extremely potent and she’s mvp in every map especially if bonded sheild she won’t die at all and if she gets hit she gets her health back next turn
Nel is the best Ike user now, access to lances and the 2 range dragon breath with good spd. Then you have the dragon effects on top making her god tier
I don't think I can agree with you about Chrom, Hector and Soren, because you didn't speak about some aspect of them... Chrom gives you str/dex/spd and when engage with him a +10 in magic thanks to Robin. So ok that's not break the game but it can boost mage knight, Ivy, Celine or griffin knight Chloe, a royal knight Mauvier so... Idk statistickly he give some good boosts to me. Hector. He can be useful for doubling things when you lack of speed/build, that's not break the game. But for me you forgot to precise he boosts damages he deal when your build is lower than the weight of the weapon. Do for one turn only, again that's not crazy crazy crazy, but you can't be broken, you can heal with his sword, you always double and you deal more damage... I think he can save some units from death, he's more passive than Ike but you can build around him easely. For Soren, maybe you missed than with a Qi adept he heals 100% of damage he deals. With a build like Hold out you can solo a short map for 4 turns. When use with Veyle, you engrave a crit thing on a tome and Soren double the hit rate she has... 97% crit minimum for me ... For bad positionning, if you don't want to undo your turns or if Lucina is not available, assign decoy can control the target of the foes or positioning them where you want, not game breaking but you can use that to your advantage. For Veronica, I just want to precise her fortify staff, very useful in some cases, and contract + bolting (from Soren) can be good if a big bad foe is far enough and you don't want to deal physicaly with him. A good passive with Sp conversion too if you don't want to use the well or if you farm sp. A very interesting tier list, thank you.
It's been said a lot but Chrom isn't being given nearly enough credit considering just off of the crazy amount of stats he gives out. He supports Strength, Dexterity, Speed, and Other Half grants +10 Magic when engaged letting him make basically any offensive oriented unit significantly better. I also think the power of Brute Force on a Crit Build is also pretty significant. Chrom kind of destroys on a unit like Kagetsu that can make use of basically everything in his kit (good with swords, decent magic, crits pretty often, gets damage mitigation from using swords, and in a worst case scenario can still just rally everyone for support). That is at worst High A or Low S. I put Chrom on a similar level to Eirika in terms of power. In terms of Inheritance, the Spd/Dex skills are probably the most powerful of all the "+ something," based skills as Dex will help with accuracy and Spd has both offensive and defensive utility. Giving a supportive unit Rally Spectrum (+) is also just really good value and can easily swing match ups.
You need to revaluate Soren. He is easily God tier OP mega busted lol. You mentioned valuing enemy phasing, and Soren is one of the best enemy phase rings in the game. Give it to a mystical unit (or Veyle aka a dragon unit with high magic) and they can be played like how you used Timerra in your 5 man run. They heal back the damage they take. Veyle being a dragon unit gets her crit rate doubled (which also means double the healing potency). The main way to use chrom is for units that attack magically. You know how sword and lance power are amazing? Well chrom gives you magic power (magic attack +10 when engaged). Now tomes can have a sword power effect. Pair Chrom with a levin sword user with sword power and now you have +20 to your damage per hit. That is absolutely busted. You need to try both of these rings more.
No offense but you don't seem too sure of your DLC assertions. I think you were pretty spot on with Tiki, but the others I feel you undervalued/haven't played around with enough to see their true strengths. Soren is most definitely no lower than S imo.
Chrom initial impressions i thought he was B tier with S tier Engrave. After some time with him, he is high A tier overall since Brute Force has 400% crit damage instead of 300% crit damage, this is very good for low strength, high speed and and high dex users like Boucheron, Kagetsu, etc. and while engaged he always has a chain attack for Boucheron's passive. Plus Rally+ is very good, especially for hybrid damage-support characters or pure support characters like Hortensia, helps make your nukes be even better. Plus Chrom gives str, dex, and speed for ring stats which is an insane combination for bonus stats and that alone makes him minimum A tier. Veronica initial impressions was i thought was S tier, but after time she is more like B tier. Very much Chrom and Veronica got swapped after some time with them.
Hector is more of a help for slower bulk units Soren next to ike turns catalyst into 3x3 instead of + shape, its good to set up dmg on enemies if you need to or use after great aether for cleanup Chrom is more of a complementary emblem to give extra stuff Veronica's book of world is funny little thing you will sadly barely use on higher than 1st tier in most cases, the dmg after combat can actually kill units
Corrin isn't just limited to fire terrain. Even on maddening, the fog from a covert unit can be really useful for helping your other non covert units that are good at enemy phasing to be able to do so even more reliably. And dragon hex has actually absurd value on multiple health bar bosses, or even just beefy problem units, allowing you to hit harder and reach doubling thresholds that you couldn't otherwise. And freezing units in an AoE while engaged is also really nice as well. She really trivializes boss fights. Also I've found that Hector is particularly amazing on Diamant. Because his defense isn't as high as a general's, it's less likely that units will ignore him on enemy phase, and quick riposte combined with the crit bonus for backup units gives him more kill power than most Ike units could ever have. Give him a skill that grants dex+5(I used str/dex+5) so sol becomes more reliable and he becomes very comparable to the Soren + hold out combo. And the skill that blocks enemy movement can come in clutch as a one man choke point, allowing you to position other units aggressively in a pinch.
i think Hector is better than you give him credit for as he really is basically another Ike minus the crit. Hector probably wants a tankier unit than you would normally give to Ike. storm's eye letting you double despite being at even 0 speed is nuts and you use it on a tomahawk or handaxe to get the 1-2 range. that being said. i do understand that compared to all the other emblems where do you even fit him on a team when theres so many other ones you can and probably should use. god tier and S tier are basically must deploys and thats already 9 units and someone is probably using Sigurd cause hes a nuke and Byleth cause dance and damage. So 1 slot left if its a 12 deploy map which can honestly just be whatever you want. (14 for endgame but eh lol)
Lots of people have already addressed the Soren thing but I'd like to throw one more consideration on the pile: Assign Decoy. Talking about it, you make it sound like it's a crutch to patch up bad positioning, when I think it's honestly more apt to think of it as a tool that expands what good positioning in a given situation can look like. You can potentially take more aggressive positions with squishies while forcing attacks onto units that can handle it (like something that's Bonded Shield-ed, for example). The force-targeting can also be used to fuss with the Maddening AI and make them target units they can't damage/land a hit on at all. Basically, I think it has a lot of interesting use-cases and if you play around it, you can do some nifty stuff, even if it's not a game-breaking skill per se.
Assign decoy can be good for sure, I like to just leave tanks out in groups of enemies as a lightning rod but forcing them to attack key targets is useful. I will admit my perception of the DLC is skewed because it seems to easy to break the game on DLC runs so I need to run more DLC teams to get a better idea of what is good and why within the framework of DLC Engage. I do hope they add Maddening+ so this would get me more interested in doing DLC runs. I was hoping my 5 man would have been really hard but unfortunately it broke all the divine paralogue level scaling and made base game super easy.
Assign decoy is one of my favorite skills. In my maddening run where I am purposefully trying to break the game as much as possible, it’s a great added option for my Martial Master Jean to support with when not engaged. I also have inherited it to Mauvier, which has become my main tactic in FX maddening, using Maivier to assign decoy in Louis and Louis to tank kill everything thanks to pair up and Quick repost (Edelgard ring btw). Unfortunately, only one can be active at a time, but it’s nice to have 2 units who can do it if the other is busy. In chapter 3 of FX, my main goal turn to turn was to kill enemies so that only 3 remained who could attack on enemy phase, and then assign decoy in Louis and buff his bulk to the max (adjacent Alear and Veyle, stony terrain, rally spectrum, the works). It’s a skill I would call a staple to my strategy in FX and one I use a lot in main story.
Lucina can't fix a bad team. She needs strong units to be strong, because when they aren't you're going to run out of bonded shield while some enemies are still left. In a sense she's a win more button. If you're already blazing through the game, then yeah she can help you get to the end faster, but she doesn't enable victory, just speeds it up. You likely would've won anyway playing a bit slower. On the other hand, Micaiah, Ike, Lyn, are units that actively helps you win a game where you otherwise might not be able to. Ike provides a reliable tank, Lyn a damage carry, and Micaiah, a support. That is God tier. Lucina doesn't carry the team, the team carries Lucina.
Honestly you really only need units that are fast enough to not get doubled to completely wall any number of opponents, that alone makes Lucina cracked. Being strong enough to do damage back is optional, your backrow can still demolish the enemy in player phase if your frontline cant dish out in counterattack. And its much easier to make a Lucina setup that can enemy phase well than it is to do the same thing with Ike, because Ike still gets chipped and occasionally chunked by magic amd doesnt work well with magic users, who are very good at killing stuff, Lucina on the other hand is compatible with anything that isnt too slow.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming I'd like an example but here's a more concise summary of my point. If you get fucked, Lyn, Ike, Micaiah, can literally save your playthrough. Lucina can't, probably would give a high A tier but no higher. Yes, if you play absolutely perfectly, no mistakes, fully optimize units, then yeah my argument would apply to everything, because every unit is already a god and you're just enabling them more. Literally every emblem would be A to S tier. Here's a question. Without using Lucina, do your units get worse? Worse as in, do they no longer double, one round enemies? I concede you probably couldn't end the map as fast as possible, but that's an LTC standard. And by LTC standards, Micaiah, Edelgard, Byleth would be among the god tiers. Lucina would even be lower than A since she doesn't enable one rounding like Lyn or Marth. For average play, Lucina isn't all that outstanding, but yeah if you play specifically around her then she is God tier.
@@ProtoTypeFM I agree with you completely, Lucina is really good at tackling large groups of enemies at once, but that has no inherent value in my opinion. Unless it's a rare skirmish map where every enemy zergs you in an open space, not running Lucina isn't a detriment to your team, unlike some other emblems.
For average play as long as you aren't getting doubled, Lucina enables you to be immortal in most circumstances. How is this worse than Ike which does something similar?
Most of this feels right, except you really did Soren dirty. Not bringing up Flare's healing at all is just not correct, and simply dismissing him as a player phase without any discussion is missing the strongest part of the emblem. For example, Soren turns Veyle into a nearly guaranteed crit nosferatu tank with her base SP and a crit engrave on Obscurite - she solos maps just as well as a combo like Timerra + Ike, which you consistently rate highly and put in S tier. Even without Veyle, things like Hold Out/Vantage on any mage unit makes them insanely strong at enemy phase. The same logic for why things like Ike and Lucina are good should apply to Soren, which should at least bump him up to S tier, though personally imo he breaks the game with Veyle just as much as Ike combos or Bonded Shield setups do.
I would agree he is S if it weren't for his build NEEDING other emblems to make him enemy phase viable: Hold Out/Vantage If anything this would bump up Roy/Leif for enabling other things not Soren. Soren healing is nice and the result could be good but if I am evaluating the emblems themselves and what they specifically enable, a holdout vantage build isn't exclusive to Soren or Soren builds and is more of a build archetype than something Soren uniquely achieves. Holdout Vantage without the healing can be viable if you can consistently kill or tank or both.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming My mistake there - I was viewing the tier list more in the lens of "Which emblem rings do you pick to run on your characters", since I didn't really see as much discussion on things like Starsphere being very strong when talking about Tiki's usability, and ultimately the only time you're picking emblem rings in competition are the ones you actually put on the units you deploy. Roy and Leif definitely are extremely important and deserve credit, but Soren is the one you actually give the limited slot to when you actually have to pick between the rings. Either way, regardless of where Soren ends up, the main point is the discussion on the build in the first place is the important bit, since I think this is the way more relevant part when discussing his power than bits like Bolting/Cataclysm etc, which as you mentioned in the video weren't that exciting.
Sure, the end result is a Soren build that is complimented by other passives in this case, so Soren is the major element of the build. Starsphere completely snowballs early game units and in of itself can produce hard carries if used correctly. I might not be that hyped about damage options for DLC emblems because of how much damage your units have access to on their main weapons. In my 5 man DLC run I found my units 1 rounding/tanking almost everything the game threw at them so having more damage options feels redundant as long as you run mostly over leveled power carries+ utility units.
Chrom is also pretty good on a sniper or Alcryst. He adds Strength, Dex and Speed the trifecta of stats that an archer needs and he also adds 1+ move (Covert Bonus) and 10+ magic while engaged for Radiant Bow shenanigans. He is kind of like Roy where the main appeal is being a huge stat stick.
I’ve been running him on Veyle to much success. His strength bonus helps her dagger damage and engaged makes her a magic nuke, and she has rally spectrum for when she needs to back line because she’s squishy
@@tristanbowles7258 Personally at that point in the game I already have my nukes set up and would prefer more support like a Veyle Celica. With draconic hex and echo she can debuff two enemies at a time from the back line like a Sage Byleth. Echo also fixes her bad speed. Seraphim is also good late game with all of the corrupted and you can add 4 + might to it with just 1 dlc augment crystal.
Yes Ike is one of the best emblems in the game because it enables enemy phasing on units who normally can't pull it off in an enemy phased focused game. +7 def at ≤ 75% hp is also insane
There are a few things I disagree with, but I think the main things I'd want to talk about are Byleth and Chrom. Byleth dance feels very undervalued in this list. I'm assuming its because you prioritize EP over PP (ex: Ike & Lucina being higher than I'd place them, Corrin and Sigurd being lower than I'd place them, etc), but even without warp skipping, dancing 3-4 units at once (especially if one of them is Seadall) is still as busted as it sounds for player phase and general fights against boss enemies. If you don't use the dancing aspect, you still have the busted Mystical option. So much additional range on attacks + Byleth's stats being magic and speed help make any sage feel a lot better. Makes it easy to poke w/dhex or take out an enemy while making it easier to utilize sage's skill. Plus still having said dance utility and magic instruct for something like Ivy or any mage knights you may have bond shielded. You also have things like Dex +10 and Spd +5 instruct if you don't want to go the mage route (especially dex+10 because mage knights also love the magic and speed). In non-dlc gameplay, the rally spectrum instruct is also very nice to have access to and Byleth works well with Veyle since Mag+Spd. There's also a discussion to be had about Divine Pulse+ and how it helps with hit rates. Its a cheap inherit but a heavy investment with bond level, so giving Byleth to a secondary staff user that won't be your Micaiah for higher hit rates on things like Entrap, Freeze, etc is also a very nice option to have. Chrom I wouldn't put way higher, but I think Chrom enables mixed attackers in a slightly weaker way that you feel about Ike enabling a fed Timerra/Goldmary. Especially in a draft/low unit count setting, Chrom gives the perfect stats to units like Celine, Chloe, your martial master of choice, Zelestia, etc. Levin sword (the non engage weapon) goes from being already amazing to simply absurd on these units. It creates a situation where you can basically do whatever you want with the unit. EP players can avoid tank with the right engrave, PP players can use Chrom's speed to kill things pretty consistently, and you also have Rally Spectrum+ support if your mixed attacker isn't able to get the job done for some reason or you want your Bond Shield group to have extra stats for the incoming enemy phase.
I will say Dmitri is also pretty disgusting. I have used Chloé with Edelgard to practically solo Lynn paralogue. Get her to 16 bond (iirc) and she unlocks Failnaught and Weapon Sync+. That gives +7 strength with +5 strength from the ring, giving her +12 total. Combined with Failnaught and her speed, she will double the targets. But the real benefit is the Shield Gambit. Shield Gambit is essentially a self Bonded Shield as it blocks the first hit of EVERY ranged attack. Meaning you get some insane damage reduction in that map. Poison Gambit is probably the worst one, but when your target has a couple other enemies next to them, no point in not using it if it’s there, free extra damage on those targets.
Ike can single handedly fix some problem units and even handle dragons with zero support. He may not have the best engage attack but when it does hit it usually rips and tears the enemy front to shreds (assuming the ai doesn't do everything in its power to avoid running into it.)
Ehh, I feel like Goddess Dance is overhyped, and outside of that he offers nothing of value. Magical units get +1 range I guess? Anna gets more luck to farm gold, lol
@@Mordecai.Harris instruct and goddess dance are some of the most broken shit in the game, with proper setup you can kill a boss with 6 healthbars in one turn
Chrom is easily S tier, its understandable you didn't really get it, as you pretty much didn't use it, Hector is at least A. Soren is easily high S. Tikis accurate, Edelguard agreed as well, she's dropped down by RNG. Camilla agreed as well.
I think soren is really good with the right build. Cataclysm hits a 3x3 square if you’re next to Ike, and paired with momentum you can do +3dmg per tile you move on each enemy. Slap that on a high mag unit like citrine and you’ve got a monster. Still not as good as enemy phase tanking, but it’s fun as hell
Soren can actually be good for enemy phase tanking with the right build. Flare makes it so the engaged unit heals for half of the damage dealt, so if you combine it with hold out you can make a squishy mage tank a ridiculous amount of damage and still survive. Flare also doubles the critical hit rate for dragon-type units.
I use veronica on hortensia and soren on ivy in their unique classes. Hortensia is not using her staves that much so she does "wait" somewhat frequently, though the main thing I'm doing is having ivy engage and use bolting and then contracting and dancing her to get a lot of use out of it. It's basically a way to start clearing up or chipping problem units while I'm setting up the enemy phase stuff. I'm sure there are better strats, I'm still on my first hard playthrough
Hector's quick riposte is insane for enemy phase and is inheritable. I used it on my lyn ivy for example and she can one round all the fast units that can't get doubled even after speedtaker max stack. I also like the goldmary hector combo with a byleth engraved spear : the garbage hit rate is fixed, she gets 1-2 range for enemy phase, +5 dmgs from the weight being too high with heavy strike and she doubles so kills most enemies. Lifesphere is a pretty good choice to consistently heal over 60% hp without a healer around all the time, or any speed +5 to compensate for the weight. He might not be on ike's level but come on he deserves better than chrom/celica tier oho.
I did a lord only run and I did Alfred with Hector and gave him a killer sword for enemy phase on storms and even without things like wrath a crit engraved killer blade gets crits and clears foes and he's at that perfect Def and res level for maddening foes to go after him then he gets Hector 30% boost since it's only added when the fight starts
Hector is good on tanks, Ike is good on Fighters, Roy is good on dodging characters who are not as tanky as they want to be. Hector boosts your Res to make up for being a General, and allows you to double even though you're slow.
Honestly I am not against Byleth being in S tier, personally based on my team comps it feels more A tier/the goddess dance is great for some situations but due to the amount of things being deleted from enemy phasing it only really came into play for attacking bosses or warp strats in my runs
Tiki and Veronica is wait with no actions taken. Whenever you see something that occurs from waiting in Fire Emblem it means you cannot use any other actions other than just use Wait, this has been one of the few consistent things between every Fire Emblem.
Chrom standard feature is that IS realised they couldn't design a kit with synergy so they gave him +10Mag while engaged so he make your Mage knight user with innate high Spd double and kill anything that isn't a pure mage enemy with high RES. He is basically the equivalent of 3 houses emblem for magic but magic classes and characters are usually bad in Spd so it's not easy to see. However a Mage knight Anna with Starsphere and chrom bond 20 will be player phase MVP, paired with a wolf knight with lucina bond shield and she'll simply be MVP. With Zelestia it's probably the same and you can use a flying bond shield. I'd say atleast high A tier if but I think she is S and similar to Tiki. +10Mag from engage, +4Spd, +5dex from being equipped some characters just needs some stats to perform and chrom delivers that. TL;DR : Chrom is to Anna, Zelestia mage knigt/speed Mag class what three houses is to Chloe, Kagetsu axe/lance wyvern rider.
Bad list. Soren should be much higher and much more potent than lucina in enemy phase with a tome user that can one round and with hold out. Eirika is only player phase and should be lower. I like how you downgraded byleth because you dont value warp skip and put miciah on god tier anyway. Wow
Unless you run very specific High support and evasion builds with Lucina. The bonded shield isn’t that good. Your setups work sure, but for my teams it never works. The best I had endgame was a stupid tank Louis that physical enemies finally avoided. Other units would always get the attention and die. And I disagree on the enemy phase of this game. A few powerful tanky units usually with Ike, and a mostly offensive team wins. My last run for wave 4 dlc. I will use zero tank only units. Pannette with Ike will be my wall which kills. The rest will be killers just to test this theory, Seadall too cuz of course.
I usually factor supports in when thinking about who the Bonded Shield user will be and who my damage carries will be. I will concede it takes extra planning in order to use it, but then once you have your team planned out it becomes second nature as you just park the damage carries near whoever your bonder is. I have run Qi Adepts, Cav, and Flyer bonders and all are very effective on base game, though I could see how it could fall apart if your bonder has low evasion and can get nuked.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming yeah, just from fav units and other plays for characters. Lucina had no one good except Louis. But he was a terrible user against magic. Other units had no support, or just not enough evasion. So it just didn’t work for me
Sleeping on Hector a little in my humble opinion. The thing with Hector that makes him good and is often over looked, is you can slap him on a high def/low speed unit and it guarantees enemy phase doubles. Legitimately a spear/tomahawk/brionac general like say Goldmary or Jade with Vantage or its plus variants and Hector is just an enemy phase machine. Like from all the videos I've watched, all maddening players agree on basically one thing. Speed rules the game. Speed tiers are very important. The reason Hector is good, maybe even great, is because Quick Riposte takes any unit that doesn't meet the speed tier and would be otherwise irrelevant unless you cheese them into some unintended or less suited class and heavily invest to make them usable, and then makes speed tier irrelevant to them. For eg. I tried your suggestion from a while back of the Dragonic hex/spear Goldmary with Ike, then I got to a point where I was like why run it with Ike when I can give Ike to Timerra or Diamant and make them great units, then give Hector to Goldmary and turn her into a one rounding enemy phase carry as well rather than just a player phase debuffer.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Yeah exactly, tbh the premium character for Hector may be the new Madeleine unit, with 55 Def growth and 50 str growth its an absolute unit with Hector also buffing both. The only thing with just high strength units is you need to make sure they kill or heal in someway because quick riposte has a hp threshold that if they dip below it will no longer activate. Maybe inherit Quick Rip and give them say a Crit weapon with Ephraim and Solar Brace heal? But yeah like an Amber, Alfred and to a lesser extent Panette (high Str but you kind of want her to reach low hp thresholds which is contrary to Hector) or something like that with Hector works just as well. The one that I may low key try on a run is a Halberdier Etie with Hector as she has highish STR growth and Hector though not as good as he could be on an already strong unit theoretically patches a lot of her weaknesses and then you have a way to have her double on player phase and enemy phase. And I mean lets be honest at this point most people who play this game a lot have already played the "good" units a lot and are having fun experimenting now.
Soren in a tier is just flat out wrong lol. Flare lowering enemy res (by half iirc) and then heLong back your magic damage is insane put that on a unit with hould out and rhey are basically unkillable
If Soren had Holdout as one of his passives I'd agree he is S tier. Unfortunately that bad boy belongs to Roy, if anything you are making an argument that Roy is stronger than I've listed him because he enables Soren.
The Chrom ring feels great on Celine. She synergizes well with the mixed benefits to physical and magical damage the ring provides in her unique class. I've had great success running a Levin Sword and a Wo Dao. Obviously not perfect since you gotta crit fish to one round with the Wo Dao+Brute Force combo, but it still feels good to run. Definitely recommend trying the combo if you do a dlc run with Celine.
Just want to point out you never consider the dual combo engage attacks, which are great Hector is a win more unit for generals and great knights which you don’t like or use so you won’t like them.
Chrom is a giant stat sticker engage that just adds more damage and accuracy and gives strength units a quick armor delete button. I like it on DD Alear quite a bit as a general purpose engage ring
For the newest wave you get 20 crystals for the engage augment stuff, and if you upgrade mt on Celica's seraphim tome it gives the most value for 10 crystals as you get +4mt. This is a corrupted effective weapon so in reality seraphim now gives +30 damage instead of +18 on top of your magic stat and other boosts. Combining this with speedtaker due to the well giving easy SP access makes any mage with ok speed able to one round any enemy in the late game so I think this case gives Celica more merit, while you dont get her back until chapter 20 I think being able to nuke enemies and easily gain +8 or more speed in one engage that you can pop at the start of a chapter gives her a lot more utility because the crystals are given to you automatically instead of having to grind tempest trials.
I REALLY think you're underselling Alear. +4(+1 if divine dragon) to all stats on Alear + bonded ally from attuned is MASSIVE +46(+2) hit/avd (passive 30 +16 [base bond 20 is 4 dex/spd + attuned 4]) on those units +30 hit/avd on all allies within 2 blocks away, which increases survivability without discouraging enemies from not hitting a 0 avoid, as well as accuracy-fix Counterattack kill a lot on enemy phase with +8(+1) speed and +4(+1) dmg/hit that's nearly guaranteed doubling for +8(+2) dmg which can help kill most things. Survivability for Alear/bonded also goes up with the +15 hp, +8 crit reduction, and effective damage negation. Slap the engage+ on the unit you S-bonded, and that's A LOT of crit to kill one enemy, and Bond blast also helps you nuke ANYTHING of choice. This is just main-game too, as post-game Alear's engage weapons are VERY easy to build up compared to other emblems as it unlocks augment slots with supports. Side note, Veyle + Soren creates immortal Veyle to make her a ridiculous enemy-phase deletion zone. Her low hp + avoid + okay speed lets her get insta-targeted by nearly all enemies.
Granted, I've only done Normal and a half playthrough of Hard mode, so my opinions are based on the casual experience. As everyone here has said, this game has a lot of setups and combinations that can make each Emblem stand out, but usually the thing that stands out to me is the single use move that each Engage unit can use. That being said here's my ranking (again, if you disagree, that's perfectly fine, I've not experimented a lot with these units and I definitely would not survive a Maddening run). C-tier: Celica: Easily the worst Emblem imo. Solid early game, but has the worst availability in the game. When you get her back, her Warp Ragnarok is pretty sorry for an Engage attack, and her Corrupted counter is only remotely potent at high level. I can also count on one hand the amount of times I've used her Echo skill to anywhere near good effect. Her Seraphim tome is nice, and Recover heals a lot, but Ragnarok is disappointing. Roy: Good for Hold Out and not much else. His stat gains are literally the same as Corrin's, his AoE Engage attack is not helpful for your team, and his weaponry is awful (Should've honestly given him a Brave Sword instead of a Wyrmslayer and made the Binding Blade effective against Wyverns). This is what they gave Brodia? Pitiful. Lucina: I've heard a lot about Bonded Shield, which reminds me of the Guard skill from Radiant Dawn, except it's more like Guard+Pavise. Either way, I could never use it properly because of how niche it was. And speaking of niche, All For One. A single attack preceded by multiple backup attacks. Cool, but it requires a lot of setup to be used effectively. I love turtle strats, but this is ridiculous. Her Noble Rapier is just like the other 5 we get, and I find Parthia worse than Mercurius because of how heavy it is. Only thing I did like was her Dual Strike skill. Activated a lot, but it isn't enough to make her B tier. Sigurd/Leif: What's odd about these two is that their best portion comes from their stat gains. Sigurd gives +5 movement, and Leif gives extra build. Give Sigurd to Louis and he blitzes across the map, and give Leif to Timerra and her build is no longer a problem. It's made even better that you get them back in Ch 17. Sigurd's Override and Leif's Quadruple Hit aren't the most devastating Engage attacks, but they do their job. Their armament is meh too, with the overall best weapon being Leif's Master Lance, although that Hit rate is hot garbage. Alear: Haven't really had much experience with this one since I always equip Alear with an Emblem and his support partner anyway. Still, it does give a magical art, some nice skills, and two Engage attacks depending on how many are Engaged. It's also easy to unlock too since it's support based. B tier: Soren: This should be obvious to anyone but unless you put Soren on a mage, he's not gonna do anything. And even then, he needs high magic to be worth anything. His Cataclysm is easily the worst Engage attack in the game (hitting multiple targets doesn't mean squat if you can't deal damage with that flooping 40% reduction). Assign Decoy is like an Assist Provoke skill, which is nice and Flare and Anima Focus keep him unique. He also has Bolting and Reflect, which are my usual go tos for him. Rexcalibur I don't even touch. Camilla: Aside from some lackluster weapon choices and a rather awful AoE Engage attack, Camilla does her job well. The combo of the her Dragon Veins and Flier utility makes her imo better than Sigurd. Chrom: Rally+ and Thoron. Chrom may have the spotlight, but he'd be nowhere near where he is if he didn't have Robin. Other Half also gives +10 magic. That's crazy good. Aside from that, the Levin Sword and Falchion aren't original enough, and therefore cause Chrom to fall off, but just a little. A tier: Ike: This one's gonna hurt a little. Ike is not my favorite Emblem, primarily because of how odd his Emblem works. It's meant to be a purely defensive Emblem, but imo his Emblem should've been the one to get the Backup Nullify skill. Because he can't do that, he can get body slammed by Backup units while prepping for his Great Aether. And since you can't counter, the amount of health restored might not even be worth it. Luckily it works perfectly on non-Backup units. His weaponry is solid, with a Smash Hammer that'll shred armors, and Ragnell for attacking at range. Urvan got done dirty though. Not my favorite Emblem to use, but I'll take what I can get. Eirika: This one also pains me to say, since I really don't like Eirika. But I'll be darned if she didn't come in handy. Twin Strike is an almost guaranteed one shot that also heals. The option to switch between Luna and Sol is also nice. Her weapon set is okay if not orignal (All 3 weapons have type effectiveness against something). My only complaint comes from her stat spread which is almost identical to Soren's. Edelgard: Edelgard is an odd case, since I wish Areadbhar was the first weapon, then Failnaught, then Aymr. However, the use of the combat arts, gambits, and Engage Attack were well worth the price tag. My biggest complaint comes from Atrocity and Areadbhar, cause my goodness did Dimitri's side of the Emblem get done dirty. Marth: Might not have the best availability, but Marth is an absolute beast on your team early game. Lodestar Rush is a better Astra, the Rapier and Mercurius are excellent builders for your team, and skills like Perceptive and Break Defenses give extra attacks. My only complaint is his availability, which if you can believe it, is still better than characters like Ike, Corrin, and Byleth. S Rank: Micaiah: Now I will say this: Micaiah is an Emblem I don't use for combat, as her tomes are garbage. Shine is situational and weak, Nosferatu is not worth using, and Thani takes too long to unlock, where others get Rapiers at base level. However, what Micaiah does have is the ability to increase staves to their maximum potential, allowing multiple heals per staff usage, an all heal Fortify that consumes her own health, and even self heals when healing her own allies. And this can be used with support staves and affliction staves too. Easily one of the best Emblems also due to how easy it was to staff grind with her. Veronica: Similar to Soren, Veronica loves high magic users. However, she has other supports that make her better. Her Hilo staff can prevent counterattacks, and at midlevel she gains Fortify+. Her Summon Hero is niche, but it still gives some sort of meat shield if you draw poorly. Her contract skill also serves as a Half Dance in case you need to finish off another enemy in range without needing to move, or to change weapons or heal. Tiki: Besides having Starsphere, Tiki is always a menace to have on your team for her Dragon Engage. With access to a ton of support skills, a self heal that works wonders if you're attempting to stall, and an Engage support that gives Revival Crystals, she can turn the tide almost instantaneously. The only thing holding her back is that her 3 weapons are okay, but not great, and she would've benefitted from a range weapon. Byleth: I ain't a big dancer fan, so when I heard an Emblem came with dancing utility, I was hooked. DotG is a powerful Engage support that dances four units. Byleth's base weapon also changes depending on what class you are in (Backup uses Blutgang, Armor uses Aegis Shield, Cavalry uses Areadbhar, etc.). His motivate skill is like a specific rally that increases a singular stat for allies in two spaces. Byleth provides good support to a unit who might be lacking in said area. Corrin: Between the Dragon Veins, the use of Draconic Hex and other support skills, Corrin fits the bill nicely. Similar to Byleth, she can do a lot with the kit she's given. What makes her better than Camilla however, is the Pair Up skill, which nullifes backup damage. As someone who hates the Backup support skill, I slapped this onto all my units. Even if the rest of her kit was garbage, she'd still be A tier for this skill alone. Now the reason she isn't in God tier is strictly due to her weaponry. It's pretty garbage. Dual Katana is very weak, Wakizashi is the worst ranged weapon in the game, and the Yato might as well be a slightly stronger Caladbolg. God tier (How fitting that the only two units in God Tier are from FE7) Hector: Everything in this guy's kit is good. Storm's Eye prevents Breaking, and prevents doubles. Quick Riposte enables doubles. His menace skill prevents a lot of ranged attacks. His adaptability skill reduces a lot of damage. Imo he's a much better Ike. His only problem: the Runesword. Why they gave him a magic weapon, even if it heals slightly, will always bug me. His other two weapons are great though. Lyn: Similar to Eirika, this one hurts because I thought Lyn was awful at first. But after using her in my Hard playthrough, man she was busted. Firstly, Astra Storm takes care of any pesky fliers. Second, Call Doubles is cracked on any high defense unit, as the doubles will take no damage and strike back with the Mani Katti, a high critical, double effectiveness weapon. Third, Alacrity. This skill is the desperation of this game and it activates wayy more than I thought it would, securing kills on high damage dealers or even things like thieves and Wolf Knights. Her weaponry is also great. Killer Bow for high crits, Mani Katti for the reasons I stated earlier, and Mulagir for speed. I could find no fault in her playstyle. I could put her on almost any unit and they'd tear the opponent apart. Whew! That's all 20 emblems ranked.
Other than what everyone else said about Soren giving healing, I found that Soren's Rexcalibur Engage Weapon really helped me late game for helping to one-shot those pesky Wyvern Knights. Also, Assign Decoy helped make late game so much easier by making them attack my dodge-tanks. That skill alone makes him better than A tier IMO, he just has so much to add on top of that Also, Chrom is also better than B tier IMO - he makes Levin Sword users even stronger & is basically a +10 Magic for them when Engaged. Made my Merrin a great evasive magic user that doubles & hits hard consistently
Ah I came up with a God tier build for Leif. A warrior, with hold out++, reprisal+ and a longbow and tomahawk. Once hold out proc, reprisal will be giving you at max 47 additional attack, plus warriors already high strength, plus axes might. Leif allows you to, when engaged, switch between tomahawk and longbow as necessary for counter attacks. Other than specific enemy skills, this is practically an invincible build. Leif's vantage will allow you to counter attack before the enemy attacks, with 1 hp left and reprisal at full proc and when engaged you can take care of thoron/longbow users as well. In theory it's pretty broken, I haven't gotten to test it yet though.
Chrom's standout skill IMO is that Other Half gives +10 Magic while Engaged. That's a pretty sizeable boost for any magic unit fast enough to double.
turns mage knight lapis (the optimal lapis build) into a better celine
@@buttery_gooch6 Same for Merrin. Rally spectrum+ is really good too
@@buttery_gooch6 I like to argue that wyvern is better
@@SparkyPixel lapis' str growth is 25 and her magic is 20, i feel like going a class that only lets her utilize one of these two is a waste of potentially the best levin sword user in the gam
if ur doubling that's a whopping 20 dmg, depending on which part of the game you are in that can be massive.
Especially for someone like you who greatly values enemy phasing, I definitely feel like you didnt experiment with Soren enough. The Hold Out+Vantage build is very popular for a reason. It is expensive, but the Well enables it. Flare tanking with these 2 abilities trivializes enemy phase and can work on a lot of characters that have good accuracy and speed, but works best on Veyle to the absolute meme levels of Crit she can reach with an engraved tome thanks to the hilarious Dragon bonus of Flare of doubling crit rate. This allows Veyle to basically consistently on round everyone that dares to approach her on enemy phase thank to double critting the majority of enemies, even if they get a lethal hit in she has hold out, and the next enemy cant kill her because she vantages and immeditely crit nukes them and heals back to above the hold out threshold so she can keep this up basically infinitely as long as she is engaged.
You can basically throw a Soren engaged Veyle in the middle of the map unassisted and she will nuke everything in range, the only things that can potentially disturb this are siege tomes/bows if you are using a non-siege tome yourself, which is usually the case because doubling for crits is usually more valuable, and ballistas/mage canoneers, both of which can be planned around usually.
Edit: For a quick and easy to find example of someone abusing it, you can take a look at how Excelblem used it to tackle Fell Xenologue Chapter 3 on Maddening
"The Hold Out+Vantage build is very popular for a reason"
Not exclusive to Soren and ENABLES Soren. Soren does not enable hold out vantage, he NEEDS IT to be good. Huge difference here, if anything you should be arguing Roy should be S tier for all the other emblems/tactics he props up by virtue of having one of the most broken passives in the game.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming neither hold out or vantage are strictly necessary for Flare tanking, they just make it basically RNG proof/enemy type proof. Without it crits can kill you and you have to actually think around enemy units/formations as opposed to just lmaoing and throwing the unit in the middle of nowhere; but even then it is a potentially incredibly powerful enemy phase unit. Attacking at -20% res effectively guarantees that you are doing good damage, and thus decent HP recovery. The most popular Soren partner is Veyle because she is a crit nuke but the can also work on a lot of mage classes, and also martial artist due to 100% damage as HP recovery as opposed to 50%.
Without Hold Out+Vantage the unit needs ~some~ def/res/spd but given they have it they are hard to remove, requiring doubling conditions/crits/etc if they are not siege units while also having basically no chance of the enemy ignoring them because they will never be at 0 dmg/0% hit rate range against them; with the skills the Soren unit is basically completely unkillable while dealing very good damage; and veyle will one shot anything by hitting 90-100% crit rates with an engraved obscurite and wipes out basically everyone that attempts to attack her at 1-2 range.
To make it better, Veyle comes with 2500SP, which is enough for first level of hold out and first level of vantage, which gets you covered for 95% of the cases, and using her at all or giving her some Well SP books quickly gets her to the higher levels. It is a very easy to build hard carry for late game with very minimal investment.
But is a CH 23-26 only build strong enough to justify placing Soren in S tier? By the time you hit CH 23 if you have completed all Divine Paralogues you should be very overleveled with a ton of crazy units. Veyle has terrible availability and even if this build was the best thing in the game I can't give it S tier as an enemy phase build when all of the endgame favors player phase warp strats.
With regard to Soren, you didn't read 'Flare'
Funny thing with the new mage cannoneer class. It gets a weapon called venom blast that applies 3 layers of poison immediately. Did you know that lucina works with the mage cannoneer and it also applies the poison. She just makes your mage cannoneer one of the best units in the game.
This sounds gross and I love it
I know that it worked but for some reason it hasn't worked for me for the past couple chapters so if it works for anyone else tell me. Still dual striking from 8 tiles away is busted
Requesting a video on which unit works well with what emblem.
I would put edelgard in God tier tier simply becuse you can use the combat art that gives you a turn back, then houses unite+ which refreshed your turn again. On the right unit you can take out a boss all alone, and considering how early you get them, plus the access to failnaught
Shield gambit is extremely useful too.
Hectors quick repost ability is kinda broken, instead of using two skills to speed fix, you can use one to enemy phase them.
You can use his skill with a tomohawk.
Sorens debuff skill can be really useful on a seige byleth, allowing you to reduce enemy defence, hit or move from a safe distance before an enemy can attack. Add Corins debuff and youre looking at 7(?) Defence down.
Chroms extra physical crit multiplier is nice on the right crit build. Not to mention the additonal +10 magic when engaged, its good for units like gryffin and mage knight.
Veronicas reprisal is actually broken. At base, for every 3 and a third health youre missing, you gain 1 damage. It works great on units like wyvern knight that use multiple weapons instead of weapon power, plus a high health pool. About 33 missing health is 10 damage. But at rank 2, every other health you lose increases damage by 1. Since theres no cap to this, using it with vantage and hold out makes you practically invincible given you have enough health.
Those are my only takes after using the dlc emblems for a while.
Oh bonus, book of worlds on a mage cannoneer with break rounds is a fun combo.
Oops I also forgot to mention that edelgard has lineage which is like mentorship but you can access it earlier, it's cheaper, and it stacks with mentorship. God tier.
I appreciate the shout out for celica echo dual assist combo. This was a great combo for me pre well.
I would have moved Celica up because of echo and what it enables. Double hex for when we didn't have the ancient well and couldn't one shot as easily. But if you're running a decent amount of back up units triggering them twice is pretty strong. And you're probably running Lucina so there is at least one back up unit there, and probably a warrior or two
Great video BTW, agree with pretty much every placement outside of Chrom in general.
For some specific cases, Soren is where you put him but somehow someone decided to make Veyle into an enemy phase god with him, Corinn engrave on her Obscurité and she'll have 90-120% crit chance against everything in the game while engaged, add hold out and for the few chapters you have her she can solo entire lanes or groups of enemy if they don't have 3+range.
Another unlikely and weird case is Leif, he becomes good if you have a Sniper/tireur d'élite for which you don't use Lyn on, that needs Bld to use Silver bow without penalty. Being engaged allows some damage as counter with adaptable against melee weapon enemy(can't tank much more than 1 hit most of the time though) and sometime the Quadruple hit will give 1000g. Adaptable also gives 20Avo, so a cover unit will have huge Avo on an avoid tile (60 from the tile, 20 from adaptable).
But those are not general uses, that's for sure.
The issue for Leif on covert unit is the Quadruple hit is usually has 0 0 3 0 damage 😅
Hector is amazing of Generals and other Axe main jobs due to their low speed. QR with a Tomahawk is very strong and Storm's eye with Tomahawk(or Runesword if you're some insane and actually invested in magic 😜 ) Hector is at least high A low S imo.
Its weird Chrom/Robin does what it does, it feels definitely made for a Thief.
Soren on a decent dex mage trivialise some maps (like Fell X 5)
Camilla is a scary ring on Mage Knights and Royal Knights.
I love Camilla on the default Alear class, she boosts Res/Spd, both are very useful for Alear. Alear gets all the dragon vein options. Alear also gets free poison curing, and can heal off persistent fire affects on the ground and use dragon vein to clear effects. The on demand ability to become a flying unit, with extra movement and Lance Guard, perfect for a primary Sword wielder. She also get s Camillia's axes to use and a sizable aoe attack. It is a snazzy role playing pair with Alear/Camillia and Veyle/Corrin. and exceptionally useful.
you're underestimating soren. flare turns his mage partner into a drain tank and you aren't restricted to a specific tome to do it. i slap him on ivy with speed taker. you also mentioned 'just use better positioning' instead of using decoy. you should be using positioning + decoy so you can force otherwise riskier extensions. use decoy on your 1-2 range bonded shield carry so the first 3 enemies on that turn just die. controlling enemy targeting is busted.
Better yet slap Soren on veyle and you have a 100 critical build
I found SP conversion (Veronica) and Starsphere (Tiki) really broke things wide open for me. Although I played on Hard and did lots of skirmishes/grinding.
Something you forgot to mention during Veronica is that she gives you Fortify+ which heals all your units (huge area of effect) and cures status. It's basically almost like great sacrifice that you can use 4x during engage. With that, you can let your staff units to deal damage. I think I'd give her high S tier and arguably low god tier with reprisal and all engage weapons she gives.
If you give a unit vantage and holdout ++ her reprisals are insane just one shots everything with casters and gets close to it on melee, book of worlds only needs one proc to be useful and running across the map or setting it for bosses can be monstrous, and fortify + also drops a shit ton of sp and exp like great sacrifice and you can make units op from chapter 6 onwards so yeah high op low God makes since to me
@@superape013 yes Fortify+ also can be used for exp/sp farm tbh. I always get Tiki and Veronica immediately after chapter 6 because 2 of them are so good and useable early on.
Sorren is amazing. Put him on fell dragon Vayle. It doubles her crit rate and her magic attack will kill everything and completely heal her hp. She is going to want Holdout+++ incase she gets crit hit.
Camilla should be in S rank imo, she's pretty comparable to Corrin while having a pretty great special attack, I gave her to Céline and it's honestly a great move to deal damage and slow down enemies (well except fliers), for example to protect frailer or damaged allies. Also the flying definitely helps, for example on the Soren map thanks to Camilla I had Céline flying above rocks to destroy people, and I know it would have been far more difficult to beat had Camilla not allowed her fly.
Lucina's skills can also enable funny chain attack shenanigans if you wish to build for that
I would have to push back on Corrin. If you have a covert unit with her, the dragon vein use for them makes them un-hitable. For those that don't know, you get a fog that increases avoid by 30.... and covert doubles avoid. Use that in combo with a tile that already gets avoid, and you're getting +120 avoid.
I'm not saying that makes her God tier or anything, but the DV for covert is MILES better than the fire, or anything else.
Combined with Pair up and Draconic hex, you have an invincible unit, that's debuffing everything. Alcryst with this is hilarious. But on a good Zelkov or Yunaka.... pure destruction.
Almost as good as Ike if you play it right
the book of worlds is mostly useful for the freeze it isn't too hard to get stage 1 just travelling between different parts of the map
so, i would argue that hector can do a lot more for units like goldmary than ike can. i ran him with goldmary on FXL, maddening, and she was able to tank, and double on enemy phase and get a LOT of necessary kills. with ike, you may take less dmg, but you arent doing enough to kill unless you have a wrath crit build. Hector is basically what leif was supposed to be but in a practical sense. For that reason, he deserves to be higher. Soren can break the game. Veyle was nosfertanking on FXL Maddening, and never died bc of his crit, healing, and rexcalibur tome which can reliably ohko even griffon knights t. assign decoy can also help out with tanky units bc it forces enemies to target your tank. you can position perfectly, but if units are going to do 0 they will ignore and run right past you. soren fixes that. he is insanely strong. please experiment with him a bit more to see what we all mean.
Considering how most of the popular and broken builds require leif and roy i think they should be moved up tiers. Roy can also fix low strength units. Also Celica on high damage mages can take out two healthbars of a boss so where she is considering that, the free recover staff for exp grinding and full heals for four turns for free, or echo draconic hex means she is too low imo. Chrom isn't being given enough credit here either. +10 mag when engaged, Rally Spectrum + can be used anytime without being engaged and inherited by anyone and is overall a far better byleth instruct. Also if a unit can double putting them in stealth terrain allows them to double without retaliation without having to waste a skill slot if they are equipped with chrobin. Chrobin also gives a good amount of dex spd and str as statboosters for equipping them and robin's thoron is the only thoron in the game that can double and it does really good damage. Hector makes it so an armored unit can set up chokepoints almost anywhere and is a mini ike and quick reposte is really strong. I would argue hector is low a if anything. Imo there is no real bad emblem in FE engage but when talking about equipping leif is the closest to that but he has one of the best inheritable skills in the game so it balances out. Also agree with your take on soren for the most part however he has really good support skills and reflect staff makes powerleveling weaker units easier which is pretty huge and makes enemy mages take damage for hitting some of your units as well.
I’m pairing chrom with sword power celine for some mixed dmg fun. Chrom gives +10 mag when engaged, so he’s good for that. I think chrom fixes a lot of the issues with thieves, where the extra mag will help them deal with armor units, and the extra dmg on crit helps them one shot beefy units with a crit. I put him on yunaka and it made her better
i think veronica is high s tier based off everything but the fortify is basically the only staff you need its got 7 range and removes status effects too
Im doubling down with Ike on axe general Jade with ukonvasara
Use hurricane axe with Camilla’s engage attack you can easily delete a ton of fliers at once
Would have put Lyn in god tier for pulling bosses. It nicely trivializes Ike's map and the one where you get Hortensia
Hector is S tier in Generals/Great Knights, give them a Tomahawk/Spear and throw them in the middle of physical enemies and can easily clear them. You just may need to invest in Hit+10/15 before losing Sigurd.
You don’t like chroms 5 dex and speed?
But always go on about lyns plain 5 speed
I mostly play base game /no DLC, Dex/Spd is great if welling/low unit count I used it in my 5 man DLC run.
One thing you can do with Soren is put him on Veyle and make her a crit build with vantage and holdout. He doubles her crit and makes her an enemy phase machine
He could be, I found him underwhelming compared to Ike
@@IcedCoffeeGaming that's fair. I put Ike on Panette and made her a crit build but I can see how giving him to someone with better speed would be good. Her low res is starting to hurt too
@@IcedCoffeeGaming To be fair, in your five man team, Alear and Chole (who you made a wyvern knight) were your super carries that took most of the exp. Of course Soren is going to be underwhelming in your highly physical oriented team. I know you had Celine, but she wasn't getting nearly as much exp kills in your run and was more of a hybrid support/damage class. If you were to invest in a magical carry in the same way you invested in Chole/Alear, than let's just say a Celine/Anna + Soren combo would have performed better.
chrom and robin seems tailor made for celica, I’ve run them on my celica every run and it’s pretty great. Though I won’t lie chrom feels underwhelming on other units compared to other emblems
Camilla is Seadall's best ring for the +2 movement and flight while engaged, other than that she is very B tier
Lyn Clones, B tier for anything but maddening and S tier for maddening
just like Soren, Assign Decoy is D tier for anything but maddening and S tier for maddening
A funny thing Hector can do is add another 45% Def to Timerra's Sandstorm damage.
This combo was MVP in my hard run. It hasn't been working as well in maddening, though. I'm actually struggling to find a good way to use Hector in maddening.
I actually kinda like using Edelgard on Timerra. Works as a good star stick for her by boosting str, dex, and def and gives extra damage with lances when engaged or when Dimitri is up.
What is the ike build that is so good?
Generally any tank unit or Timerra/Goldmary on base game or any general fast unit, can also be run on Panette/most tanks
@@IcedCoffeeGaming in the video you mentioned "the right build" but wasnt sure what other skills/classes you were referring to.
hot take only tier list
Lief has S-Tier Synergy with Bow users
Tiki with starsphere
Lief isn't even the best ring from his game ;-;
It sucks that Celica isn't better since she's one of my favorite fire emblem characters
Three Houses ring if you play normally is B tier, maybe low A tier, they are basically just slightly better Leif
Damn Soren only A? Put him on Mage Knight Anna and she'll obliterate anything. Rexalibur is super broken
Sure but just running the DLC is super broken. How can you tell Soren is really putting in a ton of work when DLC makes the entire base game easy?
Bonded sheild and Rexalibur. Its so OP. Cause Annas speed doubles just about anything. It got me through Roys annoying Paralouge.
EDIT: Lmao wrong reply my bad dude. (The original comment was a reply to something else)
Yeah I can see the use case for enemy phase tanking on a heavy nuke weapon.
I think FE engage gameplay is so much fun that you can mix and match units and emblems and you can get many different builds. Like I've seen youtubers putting Ike on B tier (which I very much disagree) while other putting it as broken. Just reading the comment sections alone, giving me so much ideas for the next playthrough lol. The replayability of this game is insane
Yeah, easily one of the best FE games on gameplay alone. Just completely ignore the plot and characters
which yeah...that's a lot to ignore, but on your 5th+ run you don't really care about those as much anymore, and it's that gameplay that makes it so replayable
Chroms biggest selling point is robin giving you +10 magic when engaged and gave passive speed dex. It easily the best tome dmg booster consider tome just dont have tome power. you also get +10 dex and +9speed on top which easily fixes a lot of units speed issue.
Or try throw a levin sword/ flame spear with lance/sword power for a solid plus 20 attack
Don’t sleep on Tiki. Her direct impact does indeed fall off late game but she’s the only emblem that has a permanent impact on your characters through StarSphere. Especially if you keep tiki on an early unit, the impact is incredible.
Did we watch the same playthroughs 😂
The free life multiple times per battle can't be slept on either, it opens up so many tactical options that would otherwise be impossible
@@dadbodenvy4247 1000%.
soren making you heal off of tomes is insane, give someone hold out and throw them into all the enemies and they'll just crash into you and you clear them all during enemy phase
@@IcedCoffeeGaming arguably better than Micaiah Nosferatu cause you can use higher tomes might. Hold out is simply to make sure you don't get accidental crits. I think the most potent Soren build that I've ever seen is one that uses Veyle fell child class because she would get double crit chance so she will always kill enemies with her unique tomes.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Not really. It's actually a better nosferatu since you can equip better tomes plus the buff and debuffs soren inflicts in combat
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Better than Micaiah Nosferatu because Soren works on anything, including stronger tomes like Bolganone and Soren's Rexcalibur
Soren on fell child Veyle with a crit engrave plus vantage-hold out (since she has the SP for it anyway) is just too reliable not to use honestly
You can switch out a person who's falling off at that point and get a hard carry for almost no effort and that's more than worth it
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Any magic unit fast enough to double with a forged bolgannone becomes more consistent than Ike at enemy phasing. You can't compare the damage potential of a javelin to the stronger tomes in the game piercing resistance with Soren's flare, and as long as they don't get one shot they basically won't die.
You need to play dlc emblems some more, mate.
Soren's main perk is that he lets you recover 50% of the damage you deal, along with increased effective damage and Rexcalibur. Put Hold Out on a low HP mage (Veyle is the best example but Citrinne, Anna, and plenty other magic units work too) and they're just as unkillable as someone with Ike. You're also guaranteed to oneshot fliers, even high Res Griffin Knights with Soren.
Ivy with speed taker and magic/dex5 was a crazy strong tank for my soren in a recent run I did with the lords she's got the umph for taking out general foes and her heals from it keep her topped off and the bonus damage soren gives to wind tomes makes her a fantastic flyer killer since she can just fly to their spawns
My favorite for this is Mage Knight Pandreo since he has decent HP anyway, so that way I don't even have to bother with hold out if I don't want to, but Veyle's crit build with hold out is pretty fun too.
One really underappreciated strenght of Eirika's is her weapon Sieglinde, bc from when you get her to the end of the game, I want to say that around 80% of the enemies you face are corrupted, and that's counting paralogues which don't have them, so if the unit she's equipped to can double (I gave her to Merrin on my maddening playthrough) they can very easily one round anything outside of bosses and armors without even taking twin strike into consideration
If you do the fell xenologue, there are a lot of corrupted, so she really pops off. Zelkov regularly hit for 40+x2.
That weapon is at least half the reason Eirika is a great emblem!
Can't the same be said about Celica who also comes back end game and allows for ranged beast damage?
No disrespect, but I gotta be honest bro, your inexperience with the dlc emblems shows hard in this video. For someone who constantly preaches timerra enemy phasing, your ranking of hector is straight ignorant. What does she want? To double. What's her biggest issue? Low build so she can't double. What do storms eye and quick riposte do? Force doubles on enemy phase. Let's not forget piercing glare brings her hp into perfect range for quick riposte, and makes a literal funnel where she can hold down an entire 3 square wide hallway. For good measure, let's put brave bow alcryst behind her just in case enemies have 2 range.
As for Soren, cataclysm is an AOE attack that can hit and debuff 9 guys at once if you link him with ike. Inherit draconic hex on top of that and you've crippled an entire squad.
Tikis rating is good, and Veronica breaks the sp system entirely and provides the best damage skill in the game with reprisal. I'm not too fond of the others, but you gotta use them more. Trust me.
My 5 man DLC Timerra seemed to be so fast/high BLD from Starsphere that Hector seemed redundant/not needed. She also hit such high stats she could tank without Ike being popped.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming yeah I'm not saying it's necessary, but what I described was a valid use case as you say. Using hector to double instead of starsphere frees up all that sp too and she still has the full weapon triangle, and can even nosferatu tank with runesword. It's a valid build man. I didn't even mention the possibility of a panette crit build to compensate her low speed. Quick riposte+ by itself is worth it.
My point wasn't that you were wrong or that they were better, it was more that you provided very in depth analysis for the standard rings, and very surface level analysis of some of the dlc ones that are super useful. I guarantee a bit more experimentation would change your opinion of them.
I mean DLC emblems exist within the context of DLC version of FE Engage and I don't see the need to build a life steal build when I can just steam roll the game with an easier to build emblem archetype that does the same thing with fewer steps. I think the issue is the bar for how good things are on the DLC version of the game is much higher than that of base game, so S tier on Base game effectiveness is not the same as DLC.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming your missing my point bud. We're not talking effectiveness here. We're talking level of analysis and attention to detail. It simply isn't fair to write it off because you don't see the point. We come here for top tier objective analysis, and writing them off with barely any experience is the opposite of objective. I mean c'mon, you had a use case for lief bro. If you can't put that same level of research and care into every emblem, then this tier list is hardly objective and even farther from complete.
Look at chrobin. We both agree he's very lackluster. But if anyone can find a valid use case, it's you. And finding those niche use cases and factoring them into the rankings is what makes your content great. Whether you would use them or not is completely irrelevant. Another example would be the engraves. I know you covered them in the engrave video, but they are an inherent part of the emblems total contribution, and should be factored in. Chrobin has one of the best no-downside engraves in the game but that wasn't even considered in his ranking.
You can talk context of dlc, but at the end of the day the dlc is a developer intended part of the game. If your going to discuss them at all, it needs to have the same attention to detail as everything else. Think of how different your first run was in comparison to your 4th. Your opinion changed. There's videos documenting that fact. The same will happen as you play with the dlc emblems more.
I see your point, I will do more DLC runs and make some builds for the next one. This is after 1 DLC run on maddening where my team was so blatantly overpowered it turned me off to the DLC in a huge way but for the sake of theorycrafting builds/min maxing I will do a few more for future videos.
Within the context of my 5 man DLC run, I came to these conclusions about these emblem rings, and this is limited by my unit choice so my DLC emblem ratings aren't definitive and the overall idea for this video was it was for base game not DLC, and the DLC emblems would be a fun bonus rather than the main focus.
I currently have 600 hours in the game and there is still a ton of content I want to make/things to try out. Personally I find base game no DLC the most entertaining/enjoyable due to the limitations and I kind of wish I could go back to 1.0.0 build because it was so rigidly balanced/hardcore it was right up my alley.
Oh you have to give Soren to Veyle and build a crit build around her. It makes Maddening a joke. Read what Soren gives to dragon units.
Tiki on a General is S tier because when you are engaged you are immortal and provide an AoE damage (on General which has very high strength and defense grants it the most damage without any risk being a smash attack) and gain ice breath which is freeze for up to 4 enemies, so has Corrin's crowd control. Plus the heal and status cleanse for only using wait is most useful on Generals than any other class.
Tiki’s abilities have a ton of upgrade slots too.
And her basic attack has nice crit
@@erikbell1723 upgrade slots is dependent on the amount of characters with B Bond or higher with that emblem lmao
Brother, you need to play more with the DLC emblems. They're bonkers funny! Emphasis on funny. Hector's biggest gimmick for me is to be able to create a 3x3 wall even if not engaged. Soren is crazy on all mages but when you put him on Veyle... I'm saying you have to try that one. Veronica on Panette who has learned Vantage and Wrath is another crazy build. Other than that, Veronica is okay on other characters just because of reprisal. Chrobin gives any character Byleth's instruct but doesn't need engaging. Tiki's engage skill if used beside Marth will charge up maxium turns of engage on top of giving extra life bar. Camilla on a Mage Knight is another bonkers combination, +2 movement plus early brave magic with Lightning plus they make the Mage Knight fly. They're all crazy! I'd put them all to at least S-tier. Soren is easy god-tier. You have to play with them more! 😆
Veronica with holdout ++ and vantage is stupid on makes they just one shot entire maps with thoron
Reprisal’s sound effect is so meaty
I think soren is almost game breaking if you build for it. When engaged he recovers 50% of magic dmg. Put him on Anna as mage knight and she becomes almost unkillable, you can add hold out++ to make yourself completely invincible. His tome rexcalibur also destroys flying units which can be a bit annoying otherwise. I ran soren on mage knight Chloe on my last maddening run with speedtaker and hold out (takes some well shananigans, or veronicas sp skill). I could leave Chloe anywhere engaged and she would destroy everything enemy phase.
Assign Decoy forced Maddening AI to attack 0 damage / 0% hit units, so that is an S tier skill for Maddening and F tier for normal/hard.
And the everything else is great for high magic users with low speed like Citrinne and Gregory.
Overall Soren i say is high A tier.
Not good on Anna, Anna high very high speed and he only scales with magic and dex.
I judge viability based on not being in an over leveled state.
@@MasterStacona I can elaborate on why Anna. If you want to run soren to build an enemy phase build with holdout it's important that you're fast enough to not get 2-hit, so you never start a battle with your hp below the holdout threshold. And if you want to 1 round on enemy phase you preferably want to 2 hit yourself of course, making speed important for that type of build. It doesn't require overleveling to run, it didn't for me at least, by running it the unit will snowboll and get overleveled fairly quick though.
"Soren is underwhelming."
Does he know?
“FEEL WHAT I FEEL”
As a Lucina fan, I was ecstatic to find out that she was one of the best emblem rings when I first played this game
Agree with quite a bit but Chrom is good. I tend to pair him with Celine but Zelestia would seem interesting with him.
With all the dlc released I'm redoing and re testing to see if I like any particular builds. But some will always remain. Lucina-Alear, Ike-Panette, Soren-Veyle, Micaiah-Hortensia, Erika-Merrin, Corrin-Yunaka.
Edlegard is god tier, I’ve only ever had that emblem on one character…Chloe, and Goddamn dude if you don’t think having a flyer with a 3 range crit bow and the ability to nullify damage and get extra actions is god tier broken, then that tells me you didn’t give it Chloe and amaze your self with byleth Seadall and Veronica giving even more actions. She can literally fly around the map and kill everything
chloe is good with any ring. probably good on any class. she is a five star unit.
For soren asign decoy also breaks maddening ai that makes units ignore high Def units
In praise of Corrin, she’s good at two things: protecting the weak and weakening the mighty. She’s really good at both jobs. I noticed that I was really relying on her, Ike and Lucina in the Xenologue. I gave Corrin to Nel to keep her and Nil safe, for which she was invaluable.
Corrin is a very fun/dynamic emblem for sure, the mix of debuff/freeze enables a lot of interesting things that wouldn't be possible otherwise
Soren is definitely s teir can turn a mage into a tank can build up speedtaker quickly if there’s a group of weakened enemies I haven’t ran him on Veyle yet but with ivy is extremely potent and she’s mvp in every map especially if bonded sheild she won’t die at all and if she gets hit she gets her health back next turn
Nel is the best Ike user now, access to lances and the 2 range dragon breath with good spd. Then you have the dragon effects on top making her god tier
I don't think I can agree with you about Chrom, Hector and Soren, because you didn't speak about some aspect of them...
Chrom gives you str/dex/spd and when engage with him a +10 in magic thanks to Robin. So ok that's not break the game but it can boost mage knight, Ivy, Celine or griffin knight Chloe, a royal knight Mauvier so... Idk statistickly he give some good boosts to me.
Hector. He can be useful for doubling things when you lack of speed/build, that's not break the game. But for me you forgot to precise he boosts damages he deal when your build is lower than the weight of the weapon. Do for one turn only, again that's not crazy crazy crazy, but you can't be broken, you can heal with his sword, you always double and you deal more damage... I think he can save some units from death, he's more passive than Ike but you can build around him easely.
For Soren, maybe you missed than with a Qi adept he heals 100% of damage he deals. With a build like Hold out you can solo a short map for 4 turns. When use with Veyle, you engrave a crit thing on a tome and Soren double the hit rate she has... 97% crit minimum for me ... For bad positionning, if you don't want to undo your turns or if Lucina is not available, assign decoy can control the target of the foes or positioning them where you want, not game breaking but you can use that to your advantage.
For Veronica, I just want to precise her fortify staff, very useful in some cases, and contract + bolting (from Soren) can be good if a big bad foe is far enough and you don't want to deal physicaly with him. A good passive with Sp conversion too if you don't want to use the well or if you farm sp.
A very interesting tier list, thank you.
It's been said a lot but Chrom isn't being given nearly enough credit considering just off of the crazy amount of stats he gives out. He supports Strength, Dexterity, Speed, and Other Half grants +10 Magic when engaged letting him make basically any offensive oriented unit significantly better. I also think the power of Brute Force on a Crit Build is also pretty significant. Chrom kind of destroys on a unit like Kagetsu that can make use of basically everything in his kit (good with swords, decent magic, crits pretty often, gets damage mitigation from using swords, and in a worst case scenario can still just rally everyone for support). That is at worst High A or Low S. I put Chrom on a similar level to Eirika in terms of power. In terms of Inheritance, the Spd/Dex skills are probably the most powerful of all the "+ something," based skills as Dex will help with accuracy and Spd has both offensive and defensive utility. Giving a supportive unit Rally Spectrum (+) is also just really good value and can easily swing match ups.
You need to revaluate Soren. He is easily God tier OP mega busted lol. You mentioned valuing enemy phasing, and Soren is one of the best enemy phase rings in the game. Give it to a mystical unit (or Veyle aka a dragon unit with high magic) and they can be played like how you used Timerra in your 5 man run. They heal back the damage they take. Veyle being a dragon unit gets her crit rate doubled (which also means double the healing potency).
The main way to use chrom is for units that attack magically. You know how sword and lance power are amazing? Well chrom gives you magic power (magic attack +10 when engaged). Now tomes can have a sword power effect. Pair Chrom with a levin sword user with sword power and now you have +20 to your damage per hit. That is absolutely busted. You need to try both of these rings more.
No offense but you don't seem too sure of your DLC assertions. I think you were pretty spot on with Tiki, but the others I feel you undervalued/haven't played around with enough to see their true strengths. Soren is most definitely no lower than S imo.
Chrom initial impressions i thought he was B tier with S tier Engrave. After some time with him, he is high A tier overall since Brute Force has 400% crit damage instead of 300% crit damage, this is very good for low strength, high speed and and high dex users like Boucheron, Kagetsu, etc. and while engaged he always has a chain attack for Boucheron's passive. Plus Rally+ is very good, especially for hybrid damage-support characters or pure support characters like Hortensia, helps make your nukes be even better.
Plus Chrom gives str, dex, and speed for ring stats which is an insane combination for bonus stats and that alone makes him minimum A tier.
Veronica initial impressions was i thought was S tier, but after time she is more like B tier. Very much Chrom and Veronica got swapped after some time with them.
Hector is more of a help for slower bulk units
Soren next to ike turns catalyst into 3x3 instead of + shape, its good to set up dmg on enemies if you need to or use after great aether for cleanup
Chrom is more of a complementary emblem to give extra stuff
Veronica's book of world is funny little thing you will sadly barely use on higher than 1st tier in most cases, the dmg after combat can actually kill units
I dont think iced coffee Gaming has used an armor knight before
@@no_life45678 i meant units overall not the classes
@@shadoweclipse8357 i get that but hector is generally best on high defense low spd units and those are generally armor knights
Corrin isn't just limited to fire terrain. Even on maddening, the fog from a covert unit can be really useful for helping your other non covert units that are good at enemy phasing to be able to do so even more reliably. And dragon hex has actually absurd value on multiple health bar bosses, or even just beefy problem units, allowing you to hit harder and reach doubling thresholds that you couldn't otherwise. And freezing units in an AoE while engaged is also really nice as well. She really trivializes boss fights.
Also I've found that Hector is particularly amazing on Diamant. Because his defense isn't as high as a general's, it's less likely that units will ignore him on enemy phase, and quick riposte combined with the crit bonus for backup units gives him more kill power than most Ike units could ever have. Give him a skill that grants dex+5(I used str/dex+5) so sol becomes more reliable and he becomes very comparable to the Soren + hold out combo. And the skill that blocks enemy movement can come in clutch as a one man choke point, allowing you to position other units aggressively in a pinch.
i think Hector is better than you give him credit for as he really is basically another Ike minus the crit. Hector probably wants a tankier unit than you would normally give to Ike. storm's eye letting you double despite being at even 0 speed is nuts and you use it on a tomahawk or handaxe to get the 1-2 range. that being said. i do understand that compared to all the other emblems where do you even fit him on a team when theres so many other ones you can and probably should use. god tier and S tier are basically must deploys and thats already 9 units and someone is probably using Sigurd cause hes a nuke and Byleth cause dance and damage. So 1 slot left if its a 12 deploy map which can honestly just be whatever you want. (14 for endgame but eh lol)
I think that Soren is way to low. He doubles the crit rate of Veil! She can Nosferatu tank with a 100 % crit rate, its insane.
Lots of people have already addressed the Soren thing but I'd like to throw one more consideration on the pile: Assign Decoy. Talking about it, you make it sound like it's a crutch to patch up bad positioning, when I think it's honestly more apt to think of it as a tool that expands what good positioning in a given situation can look like. You can potentially take more aggressive positions with squishies while forcing attacks onto units that can handle it (like something that's Bonded Shield-ed, for example). The force-targeting can also be used to fuss with the Maddening AI and make them target units they can't damage/land a hit on at all. Basically, I think it has a lot of interesting use-cases and if you play around it, you can do some nifty stuff, even if it's not a game-breaking skill per se.
Assign decoy can be good for sure, I like to just leave tanks out in groups of enemies as a lightning rod but forcing them to attack key targets is useful. I will admit my perception of the DLC is skewed because it seems to easy to break the game on DLC runs so I need to run more DLC teams to get a better idea of what is good and why within the framework of DLC Engage.
I do hope they add Maddening+ so this would get me more interested in doing DLC runs. I was hoping my 5 man would have been really hard but unfortunately it broke all the divine paralogue level scaling and made base game super easy.
Assign decoy is one of my favorite skills. In my maddening run where I am purposefully trying to break the game as much as possible, it’s a great added option for my Martial Master Jean to support with when not engaged. I also have inherited it to Mauvier, which has become my main tactic in FX maddening, using Maivier to assign decoy in Louis and Louis to tank kill everything thanks to pair up and Quick repost (Edelgard ring btw). Unfortunately, only one can be active at a time, but it’s nice to have 2 units who can do it if the other is busy. In chapter 3 of FX, my main goal turn to turn was to kill enemies so that only 3 remained who could attack on enemy phase, and then assign decoy in Louis and buff his bulk to the max (adjacent Alear and Veyle, stony terrain, rally spectrum, the works). It’s a skill I would call a staple to my strategy in FX and one I use a lot in main story.
Lucina can't fix a bad team. She needs strong units to be strong, because when they aren't you're going to run out of bonded shield while some enemies are still left.
In a sense she's a win more button. If you're already blazing through the game, then yeah she can help you get to the end faster, but she doesn't enable victory, just speeds it up. You likely would've won anyway playing a bit slower.
On the other hand, Micaiah, Ike, Lyn, are units that actively helps you win a game where you otherwise might not be able to. Ike provides a reliable tank, Lyn a damage carry, and Micaiah, a support. That is God tier.
Lucina doesn't carry the team, the team carries Lucina.
This is true of literally everything in the game.
Honestly you really only need units that are fast enough to not get doubled to completely wall any number of opponents, that alone makes Lucina cracked. Being strong enough to do damage back is optional, your backrow can still demolish the enemy in player phase if your frontline cant dish out in counterattack. And its much easier to make a Lucina setup that can enemy phase well than it is to do the same thing with Ike, because Ike still gets chipped and occasionally chunked by magic amd doesnt work well with magic users, who are very good at killing stuff, Lucina on the other hand is compatible with anything that isnt too slow.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming I'd like an example but here's a more concise summary of my point.
If you get fucked, Lyn, Ike, Micaiah, can literally save your playthrough. Lucina can't, probably would give a high A tier but no higher.
Yes, if you play absolutely perfectly, no mistakes, fully optimize units, then yeah my argument would apply to everything, because every unit is already a god and you're just enabling them more. Literally every emblem would be A to S tier.
Here's a question. Without using Lucina, do your units get worse? Worse as in, do they no longer double, one round enemies?
I concede you probably couldn't end the map as fast as possible, but that's an LTC standard. And by LTC standards, Micaiah, Edelgard, Byleth would be among the god tiers. Lucina would even be lower than A since she doesn't enable one rounding like Lyn or Marth.
For average play, Lucina isn't all that outstanding, but yeah if you play specifically around her then she is God tier.
@@ProtoTypeFM I agree with you completely, Lucina is really good at tackling large groups of enemies at once, but that has no inherent value in my opinion. Unless it's a rare skirmish map where every enemy zergs you in an open space, not running Lucina isn't a detriment to your team, unlike some other emblems.
For average play as long as you aren't getting doubled, Lucina enables you to be immortal in most circumstances. How is this worse than Ike which does something similar?
Most of this feels right, except you really did Soren dirty. Not bringing up Flare's healing at all is just not correct, and simply dismissing him as a player phase without any discussion is missing the strongest part of the emblem. For example, Soren turns Veyle into a nearly guaranteed crit nosferatu tank with her base SP and a crit engrave on Obscurite - she solos maps just as well as a combo like Timerra + Ike, which you consistently rate highly and put in S tier. Even without Veyle, things like Hold Out/Vantage on any mage unit makes them insanely strong at enemy phase.
The same logic for why things like Ike and Lucina are good should apply to Soren, which should at least bump him up to S tier, though personally imo he breaks the game with Veyle just as much as Ike combos or Bonded Shield setups do.
I would agree he is S if it weren't for his build NEEDING other emblems to make him enemy phase viable:
Hold Out/Vantage
If anything this would bump up Roy/Leif for enabling other things not Soren. Soren healing is nice and the result could be good but if I am evaluating the emblems themselves and what they specifically enable, a holdout vantage build isn't exclusive to Soren or Soren builds and is more of a build archetype than something Soren uniquely achieves.
Holdout Vantage without the healing can be viable if you can consistently kill or tank or both.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming My mistake there - I was viewing the tier list more in the lens of "Which emblem rings do you pick to run on your characters", since I didn't really see as much discussion on things like Starsphere being very strong when talking about Tiki's usability, and ultimately the only time you're picking emblem rings in competition are the ones you actually put on the units you deploy. Roy and Leif definitely are extremely important and deserve credit, but Soren is the one you actually give the limited slot to when you actually have to pick between the rings.
Either way, regardless of where Soren ends up, the main point is the discussion on the build in the first place is the important bit, since I think this is the way more relevant part when discussing his power than bits like Bolting/Cataclysm etc, which as you mentioned in the video weren't that exciting.
Sure, the end result is a Soren build that is complimented by other passives in this case, so Soren is the major element of the build. Starsphere completely snowballs early game units and in of itself can produce hard carries if used correctly.
I might not be that hyped about damage options for DLC emblems because of how much damage your units have access to on their main weapons. In my 5 man DLC run I found my units 1 rounding/tanking almost everything the game threw at them so having more damage options feels redundant as long as you run mostly over leveled power carries+ utility units.
Chrom is also pretty good on a sniper or Alcryst. He adds Strength, Dex and Speed the trifecta of stats that an archer needs and he also adds 1+ move (Covert Bonus) and 10+ magic while engaged for Radiant Bow shenanigans. He is kind of like Roy where the main appeal is being a huge stat stick.
Also his crit modifier synergizes well with Snipers' high crit rate
I’ve been running him on Veyle to much success. His strength bonus helps her dagger damage and engaged makes her a magic nuke, and she has rally spectrum for when she needs to back line because she’s squishy
@@tristanbowles7258 Personally at that point in the game I already have my nukes set up and would prefer more support like a Veyle Celica. With draconic hex and echo she can debuff two enemies at a time from the back line like a Sage Byleth. Echo also fixes her bad speed. Seraphim is also good late game with all of the corrupted and you can add 4 + might to it with just 1 dlc augment crystal.
@@curtcoyote369 I mean Chrom Veyle has Rally Spectrum for support as well, and I gave her Draconic hex as well
Yes Ike is one of the best emblems in the game because it enables enemy phasing on units who normally can't pull it off in an enemy phased focused game. +7 def at ≤ 75% hp is also insane
Vantage Brute Force Ike Killer Axe Panette goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
She even makes great use of the killer bow in this set as a Warrior
There are a few things I disagree with, but I think the main things I'd want to talk about are Byleth and Chrom.
Byleth dance feels very undervalued in this list. I'm assuming its because you prioritize EP over PP (ex: Ike & Lucina being higher than I'd place them, Corrin and Sigurd being lower than I'd place them, etc), but even without warp skipping, dancing 3-4 units at once (especially if one of them is Seadall) is still as busted as it sounds for player phase and general fights against boss enemies. If you don't use the dancing aspect, you still have the busted Mystical option. So much additional range on attacks + Byleth's stats being magic and speed help make any sage feel a lot better. Makes it easy to poke w/dhex or take out an enemy while making it easier to utilize sage's skill. Plus still having said dance utility and magic instruct for something like Ivy or any mage knights you may have bond shielded. You also have things like Dex +10 and Spd +5 instruct if you don't want to go the mage route (especially dex+10 because mage knights also love the magic and speed). In non-dlc gameplay, the rally spectrum instruct is also very nice to have access to and Byleth works well with Veyle since Mag+Spd. There's also a discussion to be had about Divine Pulse+ and how it helps with hit rates. Its a cheap inherit but a heavy investment with bond level, so giving Byleth to a secondary staff user that won't be your Micaiah for higher hit rates on things like Entrap, Freeze, etc is also a very nice option to have.
Chrom I wouldn't put way higher, but I think Chrom enables mixed attackers in a slightly weaker way that you feel about Ike enabling a fed Timerra/Goldmary. Especially in a draft/low unit count setting, Chrom gives the perfect stats to units like Celine, Chloe, your martial master of choice, Zelestia, etc. Levin sword (the non engage weapon) goes from being already amazing to simply absurd on these units. It creates a situation where you can basically do whatever you want with the unit. EP players can avoid tank with the right engrave, PP players can use Chrom's speed to kill things pretty consistently, and you also have Rally Spectrum+ support if your mixed attacker isn't able to get the job done for some reason or you want your Bond Shield group to have extra stats for the incoming enemy phase.
I will say Dmitri is also pretty disgusting. I have used Chloé with Edelgard to practically solo Lynn paralogue. Get her to 16 bond (iirc) and she unlocks Failnaught and Weapon Sync+. That gives +7 strength with +5 strength from the ring, giving her +12 total. Combined with Failnaught and her speed, she will double the targets. But the real benefit is the Shield Gambit. Shield Gambit is essentially a self Bonded Shield as it blocks the first hit of EVERY ranged attack. Meaning you get some insane damage reduction in that map. Poison Gambit is probably the worst one, but when your target has a couple other enemies next to them, no point in not using it if it’s there, free extra damage on those targets.
Goddess Dance alone puts Byleth in S tier at the very least. Also Ike shouldn’t be above Tiki, Corrin and Lyn
Ike is broken
Ike can single handedly fix some problem units and even handle dragons with zero support. He may not have the best engage attack but when it does hit it usually rips and tears the enemy front to shreds (assuming the ai doesn't do everything in its power to avoid running into it.)
Ehh, I feel like Goddess Dance is overhyped, and outside of that he offers nothing of value. Magical units get +1 range I guess? Anna gets more luck to farm gold, lol
@Elijah Harris byleth also gives instruct bonuses which can come in clutch but that also depends on the unit type you give it to
@@Mordecai.Harris instruct and goddess dance are some of the most broken shit in the game, with proper setup you can kill a boss with 6 healthbars in one turn
Chrom is easily S tier, its understandable you didn't really get it, as you pretty much didn't use it, Hector is at least A. Soren is easily high S. Tikis accurate, Edelguard agreed as well, she's dropped down by RNG. Camilla agreed as well.
I think soren is really good with the right build. Cataclysm hits a 3x3 square if you’re next to Ike, and paired with momentum you can do +3dmg per tile you move on each enemy. Slap that on a high mag unit like citrine and you’ve got a monster. Still not as good as enemy phase tanking, but it’s fun as hell
Use it on spoiler girl for the best tank build in the game
Soren can actually be good for enemy phase tanking with the right build. Flare makes it so the engaged unit heals for half of the damage dealt, so if you combine it with hold out you can make a squishy mage tank a ridiculous amount of damage and still survive. Flare also doubles the critical hit rate for dragon-type units.
I use veronica on hortensia and soren on ivy in their unique classes.
Hortensia is not using her staves that much so she does "wait" somewhat frequently, though the main thing I'm doing is having ivy engage and use bolting and then contracting and dancing her to get a lot of use out of it. It's basically a way to start clearing up or chipping problem units while I'm setting up the enemy phase stuff. I'm sure there are better strats, I'm still on my first hard playthrough
Hector's quick riposte is insane for enemy phase and is inheritable. I used it on my lyn ivy for example and she can one round all the fast units that can't get doubled even after speedtaker max stack. I also like the goldmary hector combo with a byleth engraved spear : the garbage hit rate is fixed, she gets 1-2 range for enemy phase, +5 dmgs from the weight being too high with heavy strike and she doubles so kills most enemies. Lifesphere is a pretty good choice to consistently heal over 60% hp without a healer around all the time, or any speed +5 to compensate for the weight. He might not be on ike's level but come on he deserves better than chrom/celica tier oho.
I did a lord only run and I did Alfred with Hector and gave him a killer sword for enemy phase on storms and even without things like wrath a crit engraved killer blade gets crits and clears foes and he's at that perfect Def and res level for maddening foes to go after him then he gets Hector 30% boost since it's only added when the fight starts
Hector is good on tanks, Ike is good on Fighters, Roy is good on dodging characters who are not as tanky as they want to be.
Hector boosts your Res to make up for being a General, and allows you to double even though you're slow.
Goddess dance, thysrus frailnaught and the fact that you can get another turn with edelgard dlc emblem puts byleth at S
Honestly I am not against Byleth being in S tier, personally based on my team comps it feels more A tier/the goddess dance is great for some situations but due to the amount of things being deleted from enemy phasing it only really came into play for attacking bosses or warp strats in my runs
the emblem that i dont want to do the paralogue.
Tiki and Veronica is wait with no actions taken. Whenever you see something that occurs from waiting in Fire Emblem it means you cannot use any other actions other than just use Wait, this has been one of the few consistent things between every Fire Emblem.
Chrom standard feature is that IS realised they couldn't design a kit with synergy so they gave him +10Mag while engaged so he make your Mage knight user with innate high Spd double and kill anything that isn't a pure mage enemy with high RES.
He is basically the equivalent of 3 houses emblem for magic but magic classes and characters are usually bad in Spd so it's not easy to see. However a Mage knight Anna with Starsphere and chrom bond 20 will be player phase MVP, paired with a wolf knight with lucina bond shield and she'll simply be MVP. With Zelestia it's probably the same and you can use a flying bond shield. I'd say atleast high A tier if but I think she is S and similar to Tiki. +10Mag from engage, +4Spd, +5dex from being equipped some characters just needs some stats to perform and chrom delivers that.
TL;DR : Chrom is to Anna, Zelestia mage knigt/speed Mag class what three houses is to Chloe, Kagetsu axe/lance wyvern rider.
Bad list. Soren should be much higher and much more potent than lucina in enemy phase with a tome user that can one round and with hold out. Eirika is only player phase and should be lower. I like how you downgraded byleth because you dont value warp skip and put miciah on god tier anyway. Wow
What would your list look like?
Unless you run very specific High support and evasion builds with Lucina. The bonded shield isn’t that good. Your setups work sure, but for my teams it never works. The best I had endgame was a stupid tank Louis that physical enemies finally avoided. Other units would always get the attention and die. And I disagree on the enemy phase of this game. A few powerful tanky units usually with Ike, and a mostly offensive team wins. My last run for wave 4 dlc. I will use zero tank only units. Pannette with Ike will be my wall which kills. The rest will be killers just to test this theory, Seadall too cuz of course.
I usually factor supports in when thinking about who the Bonded Shield user will be and who my damage carries will be. I will concede it takes extra planning in order to use it, but then once you have your team planned out it becomes second nature as you just park the damage carries near whoever your bonder is. I have run Qi Adepts, Cav, and Flyer bonders and all are very effective on base game, though I could see how it could fall apart if your bonder has low evasion and can get nuked.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming yeah, just from fav units and other plays for characters. Lucina had no one good except Louis. But he was a terrible user against magic. Other units had no support, or just not enough evasion. So it just didn’t work for me
Sleeping on Hector a little in my humble opinion. The thing with Hector that makes him good and is often over looked, is you can slap him on a high def/low speed unit and it guarantees enemy phase doubles. Legitimately a spear/tomahawk/brionac general like say Goldmary or Jade with Vantage or its plus variants and Hector is just an enemy phase machine. Like from all the videos I've watched, all maddening players agree on basically one thing. Speed rules the game. Speed tiers are very important. The reason Hector is good, maybe even great, is because Quick Riposte takes any unit that doesn't meet the speed tier and would be otherwise irrelevant unless you cheese them into some unintended or less suited class and heavily invest to make them usable, and then makes speed tier irrelevant to them.
For eg. I tried your suggestion from a while back of the Dragonic hex/spear Goldmary with Ike, then I got to a point where I was like why run it with Ike when I can give Ike to Timerra or Diamant and make them great units, then give Hector to Goldmary and turn her into a one rounding enemy phase carry as well rather than just a player phase debuffer.
This is a solid point especially on high STR units who can't double anyways, it also frees up passives so you don't need SPD fixing.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming Yeah exactly, tbh the premium character for Hector may be the new Madeleine unit, with 55 Def growth and 50 str growth its an absolute unit with Hector also buffing both. The only thing with just high strength units is you need to make sure they kill or heal in someway because quick riposte has a hp threshold that if they dip below it will no longer activate. Maybe inherit Quick Rip and give them say a Crit weapon with Ephraim and Solar Brace heal? But yeah like an Amber, Alfred and to a lesser extent Panette (high Str but you kind of want her to reach low hp thresholds which is contrary to Hector) or something like that with Hector works just as well.
The one that I may low key try on a run is a Halberdier Etie with Hector as she has highish STR growth and Hector though not as good as he could be on an already strong unit theoretically patches a lot of her weaknesses and then you have a way to have her double on player phase and enemy phase. And I mean lets be honest at this point most people who play this game a lot have already played the "good" units a lot and are having fun experimenting now.
Chrom and Robin are really great on Mix attackers. The extra 10 magic while engaged is no joke.
Soren in a tier is just flat out wrong lol. Flare lowering enemy res (by half iirc) and then heLong back your magic damage is insane put that on a unit with hould out and rhey are basically unkillable
If Soren had Holdout as one of his passives I'd agree he is S tier. Unfortunately that bad boy belongs to Roy, if anything you are making an argument that Roy is stronger than I've listed him because he enables Soren.
I believe Soren on Veyle absolutely breaks the game.
The Chrom ring feels great on Celine. She synergizes well with the mixed benefits to physical and magical damage the ring provides in her unique class. I've had great success running a Levin Sword and a Wo Dao. Obviously not perfect since you gotta crit fish to one round with the Wo Dao+Brute Force combo, but it still feels good to run. Definitely recommend trying the combo if you do a dlc run with Celine.
Be careful cause the Wo Dao is the worse version of killer sword
Camilla with dancer is nice for the extra movement and flyer while engaged.
Just want to point out you never consider the dual combo engage attacks, which are great
Hector is a win more unit for generals and great knights which you don’t like or use so you won’t like them.
Soren makes any mage immortal enemy phase nuker when engaged and has big time aoe damage.
Onee-San is a generalist engage unit that imo synergies well with mage or mixed types units like Celene.
Chrom is a giant stat sticker engage that just adds more damage and accuracy and gives strength units a quick armor delete button.
I like it on DD Alear quite a bit as a general purpose engage ring
For the newest wave you get 20 crystals for the engage augment stuff, and if you upgrade mt on Celica's seraphim tome it gives the most value for 10 crystals as you get +4mt. This is a corrupted effective weapon so in reality seraphim now gives +30 damage instead of +18 on top of your magic stat and other boosts. Combining this with speedtaker due to the well giving easy SP access makes any mage with ok speed able to one round any enemy in the late game so I think this case gives Celica more merit, while you dont get her back until chapter 20 I think being able to nuke enemies and easily gain +8 or more speed in one engage that you can pop at the start of a chapter gives her a lot more utility because the crystals are given to you automatically instead of having to grind tempest trials.
I REALLY think you're underselling Alear.
+4(+1 if divine dragon) to all stats on Alear + bonded ally from attuned is MASSIVE
+46(+2) hit/avd (passive 30 +16 [base bond 20 is 4 dex/spd + attuned 4]) on those units
+30 hit/avd on all allies within 2 blocks away, which increases survivability without discouraging enemies from not hitting a 0 avoid, as well as accuracy-fix
Counterattack kill a lot on enemy phase with +8(+1) speed and +4(+1) dmg/hit that's nearly guaranteed doubling for +8(+2) dmg which can help kill most things.
Survivability for Alear/bonded also goes up with the +15 hp, +8 crit reduction, and effective damage negation.
Slap the engage+ on the unit you S-bonded, and that's A LOT of crit to kill one enemy, and Bond blast also helps you nuke ANYTHING of choice.
This is just main-game too, as post-game Alear's engage weapons are VERY easy to build up compared to other emblems as it unlocks augment slots with supports.
Side note, Veyle + Soren creates immortal Veyle to make her a ridiculous enemy-phase deletion zone. Her low hp + avoid + okay speed lets her get insta-targeted by nearly all enemies.
Granted, I've only done Normal and a half playthrough of Hard mode, so my opinions are based on the casual experience.
As everyone here has said, this game has a lot of setups and combinations that can make each Emblem stand out, but usually the thing that stands out to me is the single use move that each Engage unit can use.
That being said here's my ranking (again, if you disagree, that's perfectly fine, I've not experimented a lot with these units and I definitely would not survive a Maddening run).
C-tier:
Celica: Easily the worst Emblem imo. Solid early game, but has the worst availability in the game. When you get her back, her Warp Ragnarok is pretty sorry for an Engage attack, and her Corrupted counter is only remotely potent at high level. I can also count on one hand the amount of times I've used her Echo skill to anywhere near good effect. Her Seraphim tome is nice, and Recover heals a lot, but Ragnarok is disappointing.
Roy: Good for Hold Out and not much else. His stat gains are literally the same as Corrin's, his AoE Engage attack is not helpful for your team, and his weaponry is awful (Should've honestly given him a Brave Sword instead of a Wyrmslayer and made the Binding Blade effective against Wyverns). This is what they gave Brodia? Pitiful.
Lucina: I've heard a lot about Bonded Shield, which reminds me of the Guard skill from Radiant Dawn, except it's more like Guard+Pavise. Either way, I could never use it properly because of how niche it was. And speaking of niche, All For One. A single attack preceded by multiple backup attacks. Cool, but it requires a lot of setup to be used effectively. I love turtle strats, but this is ridiculous. Her Noble Rapier is just like the other 5 we get, and I find Parthia worse than Mercurius because of how heavy it is. Only thing I did like was her Dual Strike skill. Activated a lot, but it isn't enough to make her B tier.
Sigurd/Leif: What's odd about these two is that their best portion comes from their stat gains. Sigurd gives +5 movement, and Leif gives extra build. Give Sigurd to Louis and he blitzes across the map, and give Leif to Timerra and her build is no longer a problem. It's made even better that you get them back in Ch 17. Sigurd's Override and Leif's Quadruple Hit aren't the most devastating Engage attacks, but they do their job. Their armament is meh too, with the overall best weapon being Leif's Master Lance, although that Hit rate is hot garbage.
Alear: Haven't really had much experience with this one since I always equip Alear with an Emblem and his support partner anyway. Still, it does give a magical art, some nice skills, and two Engage attacks depending on how many are Engaged. It's also easy to unlock too since it's support based.
B tier:
Soren: This should be obvious to anyone but unless you put Soren on a mage, he's not gonna do anything. And even then, he needs high magic to be worth anything. His Cataclysm is easily the worst Engage attack in the game (hitting multiple targets doesn't mean squat if you can't deal damage with that flooping 40% reduction). Assign Decoy is like an Assist Provoke skill, which is nice and Flare and Anima Focus keep him unique. He also has Bolting and Reflect, which are my usual go tos for him. Rexcalibur I don't even touch.
Camilla: Aside from some lackluster weapon choices and a rather awful AoE Engage attack, Camilla does her job well. The combo of the her Dragon Veins and Flier utility makes her imo better than Sigurd.
Chrom: Rally+ and Thoron. Chrom may have the spotlight, but he'd be nowhere near where he is if he didn't have Robin. Other Half also gives +10 magic. That's crazy good. Aside from that, the Levin Sword and Falchion aren't original enough, and therefore cause Chrom to fall off, but just a little.
A tier:
Ike: This one's gonna hurt a little. Ike is not my favorite Emblem, primarily because of how odd his Emblem works. It's meant to be a purely defensive Emblem, but imo his Emblem should've been the one to get the Backup Nullify skill. Because he can't do that, he can get body slammed by Backup units while prepping for his Great Aether. And since you can't counter, the amount of health restored might not even be worth it. Luckily it works perfectly on non-Backup units. His weaponry is solid, with a Smash Hammer that'll shred armors, and Ragnell for attacking at range. Urvan got done dirty though. Not my favorite Emblem to use, but I'll take what I can get.
Eirika: This one also pains me to say, since I really don't like Eirika. But I'll be darned if she didn't come in handy. Twin Strike is an almost guaranteed one shot that also heals. The option to switch between Luna and Sol is also nice. Her weapon set is okay if not orignal (All 3 weapons have type effectiveness against something). My only complaint comes from her stat spread which is almost identical to Soren's.
Edelgard: Edelgard is an odd case, since I wish Areadbhar was the first weapon, then Failnaught, then Aymr. However, the use of the combat arts, gambits, and Engage Attack were well worth the price tag. My biggest complaint comes from Atrocity and Areadbhar, cause my goodness did Dimitri's side of the Emblem get done dirty.
Marth: Might not have the best availability, but Marth is an absolute beast on your team early game. Lodestar Rush is a better Astra, the Rapier and Mercurius are excellent builders for your team, and skills like Perceptive and Break Defenses give extra attacks. My only complaint is his availability, which if you can believe it, is still better than characters like Ike, Corrin, and Byleth.
S Rank:
Micaiah: Now I will say this: Micaiah is an Emblem I don't use for combat, as her tomes are garbage. Shine is situational and weak, Nosferatu is not worth using, and Thani takes too long to unlock, where others get Rapiers at base level. However, what Micaiah does have is the ability to increase staves to their maximum potential, allowing multiple heals per staff usage, an all heal Fortify that consumes her own health, and even self heals when healing her own allies. And this can be used with support staves and affliction staves too. Easily one of the best Emblems also due to how easy it was to staff grind with her.
Veronica: Similar to Soren, Veronica loves high magic users. However, she has other supports that make her better. Her Hilo staff can prevent counterattacks, and at midlevel she gains Fortify+. Her Summon Hero is niche, but it still gives some sort of meat shield if you draw poorly. Her contract skill also serves as a Half Dance in case you need to finish off another enemy in range without needing to move, or to change weapons or heal.
Tiki: Besides having Starsphere, Tiki is always a menace to have on your team for her Dragon Engage. With access to a ton of support skills, a self heal that works wonders if you're attempting to stall, and an Engage support that gives Revival Crystals, she can turn the tide almost instantaneously. The only thing holding her back is that her 3 weapons are okay, but not great, and she would've benefitted from a range weapon.
Byleth: I ain't a big dancer fan, so when I heard an Emblem came with dancing utility, I was hooked. DotG is a powerful Engage support that dances four units. Byleth's base weapon also changes depending on what class you are in (Backup uses Blutgang, Armor uses Aegis Shield, Cavalry uses Areadbhar, etc.). His motivate skill is like a specific rally that increases a singular stat for allies in two spaces. Byleth provides good support to a unit who might be lacking in said area.
Corrin: Between the Dragon Veins, the use of Draconic Hex and other support skills, Corrin fits the bill nicely. Similar to Byleth, she can do a lot with the kit she's given. What makes her better than Camilla however, is the Pair Up skill, which nullifes backup damage. As someone who hates the Backup support skill, I slapped this onto all my units. Even if the rest of her kit was garbage, she'd still be A tier for this skill alone. Now the reason she isn't in God tier is strictly due to her weaponry. It's pretty garbage. Dual Katana is very weak, Wakizashi is the worst ranged weapon in the game, and the Yato might as well be a slightly stronger Caladbolg.
God tier (How fitting that the only two units in God Tier are from FE7)
Hector: Everything in this guy's kit is good. Storm's Eye prevents Breaking, and prevents doubles. Quick Riposte enables doubles. His menace skill prevents a lot of ranged attacks. His adaptability skill reduces a lot of damage. Imo he's a much better Ike. His only problem: the Runesword. Why they gave him a magic weapon, even if it heals slightly, will always bug me. His other two weapons are great though.
Lyn: Similar to Eirika, this one hurts because I thought Lyn was awful at first. But after using her in my Hard playthrough, man she was busted. Firstly, Astra Storm takes care of any pesky fliers. Second, Call Doubles is cracked on any high defense unit, as the doubles will take no damage and strike back with the Mani Katti, a high critical, double effectiveness weapon. Third, Alacrity. This skill is the desperation of this game and it activates wayy more than I thought it would, securing kills on high damage dealers or even things like thieves and Wolf Knights. Her weaponry is also great. Killer Bow for high crits, Mani Katti for the reasons I stated earlier, and Mulagir for speed.
I could find no fault in her playstyle. I could put her on almost any unit and they'd tear the opponent apart.
Whew! That's all 20 emblems ranked.
Other than what everyone else said about Soren giving healing, I found that Soren's Rexcalibur Engage Weapon really helped me late game for helping to one-shot those pesky Wyvern Knights.
Also, Assign Decoy helped make late game so much easier by making them attack my dodge-tanks. That skill alone makes him better than A tier IMO, he just has so much to add on top of that
Also, Chrom is also better than B tier IMO - he makes Levin Sword users even stronger & is basically a +10 Magic for them when Engaged. Made my Merrin a great evasive magic user that doubles & hits hard consistently
Ah I came up with a God tier build for Leif. A warrior, with hold out++, reprisal+ and a longbow and tomahawk. Once hold out proc, reprisal will be giving you at max 47 additional attack, plus warriors already high strength, plus axes might. Leif allows you to, when engaged, switch between tomahawk and longbow as necessary for counter attacks.
Other than specific enemy skills, this is practically an invincible build. Leif's vantage will allow you to counter attack before the enemy attacks, with 1 hp left and reprisal at full proc and when engaged you can take care of thoron/longbow users as well.
In theory it's pretty broken, I haven't gotten to test it yet though.