Fun fact: I’m fairly certain that Path of Radiance has the fewest possible healers of any fire emblem game at 6 units capable of using staves (and this includes Elincia who doesn’t join until practically the end of the game). This funnily makes the mages getting E staff rank upon promotion invaluable in Ironmans. This is especially true since both Rhys and Mist have a high likelihood of dying due to being made of glass.
That's awesome, thank you for making this character guide! Maniac mode has been on my to-do list for a while now, and this will be a great help to gather the confidence to get started!
i love your character guides - like you said the focus on potential makes it more interesting because it's less rigid and based on the peak of optimised play
I just want to add that after one Maniac clear you can play Fixed Mode and also get the bands/rings. Fixed allows for planning if you want to, and consistency while no one gets stat screwed. Not as fun though, imo. The bands are mostly for selling, but the mage band giving +10% magic growth and a few bands that boost important stat growths are probably worth keeping at least on Fixed Mode where they can consistently get you to meet certain stat benchmarks a little early.
A few thoughts backed my massive experience of one whole playthrough, without crit forges but with BEXP abuse: For what it's worth, Soren also happens to be the best user of Sleep/Silence staves with his high Mag *and* Skl. I often had him target enemy Sages with Silence, which he usually had a 50-70% chance of hitting - not so much an ironman strat, but something you can fish for on turn 1 or 2, if you want. I didn't really have any issues using both Marcia and Jill, tbh. Marcia got a BEXP boost to Lv.12 immediately and promoted in chapter 13; Jill got BEXPed to Lv.14 before that same chapter and promoted in chapter 16. But of course, because their levels were better than average, they had an easier time grabbing kills following the initial boost. The real victim of this was Astrid, since there was hardly any BEXP left for her, but even she still managed to catch up and overtake everyone else in levels. I used Rhys as my primary healer, but Mist, BEXPed to Lv.10 and promoted, was honestly a pretty useful filler. I did that around chapter 23 and I think she got fielded four or five times despite her awful stats. Cecilia at home, I suppose. Tanith was great even though I didn't use her Reinforcements. She got a few points of Magic very early, which allowed her one-round enemy tigers *most* of the time, which was a pretty cool feat.
Following up from my comment on last video, I'm going to take a stronger position this time: Deadeye is underexplored in more casual Maniac mode runs (e.g. ironmans). It's usually considered bad because why use a unit that's not one-rounding lol, but in Maniac it's much harder to one-round, and Deadeye effectively does that. It also passively doubles listed hit rates, so you never have to worry about missing. But I think it's biggest unexplored advantage is that sleeping enemies effectively act as obstacles for their comrades, making defensive lines easier to build. I still wouldn't put Shinon above okay (investment), but I think Deadeye's worth considering before pretty much any other potential use of an Occult.
The real problem with deadeye is if you are really going to use a sniper gamble is just way better on them. Guaranteed crit rates with still passable hit rates makes snipers the strongest potential player phase units ( which still sucks because with how many enemies there are most of your combat will be enemy phase and snipers don’t have enemy phase because of the lack of 1-2 range. )If you really want to raise shinon or Rolf just give them a killer bow and gamble and watch them have 80% hit 100% crit. Crit forges are considered to make mages relatively good even despite how costly crit forges are and you can just use a killer bow you grab give a trained shinon or a trained Rolf gamble and call it a day later on for much cheaper. Also unlike how you do have some units with other users with solid skills like the paladins getting sol Ike getting aether there aren’t really any other good gamble users because most other classes aren’t anywhere near as accurate. The closest is swordmasters but snipers actually have good stat caps so they can actually be useful on player phase unlike swordmasters who struggle to do damage in the first place late.
@@ultimaterecoil1136 I dunno, man. To get 80 listed hit with Gamble, you need 160 more Hit than enemy Avo. The slow enemies in C27 have mid-30s Avo, so a Sniper would need over 190 Hit for that, and my Shinon only has about 137 with a Killer Bow. Even a capped Sniper only gets 28*2 + 40 = 96 Hit from their stats, and the Killer Bow has 75 Hit, for 171 total. So it's possible to get close to 80 listed hit through Gamble thanks to supports, but only against really slow enemies, and only with turbo-blessed Snipers.
@@aclashoffireandice4084 tbf I’m typically using Rolf when doing gamble sniper things (since he joins earlier and shinon’s honestly not that much better bases wise so it’s possible to get Rolf better then shinon at the point he’s recruited) and he innately has accuracy in his affinity unlike shinon but generally high 70s low 80s is generally where his accuracy remains during gamble barring some extremely high avoid exceptions ( which are usually still better then a coinflip but at that point it’s just better to take the normal shot imo at that point. Not that it makes them exceptional but it does bring them into the fun kind of bad unit to use tier rather then just miserable.
@@ultimaterecoil1136 Are you playing on Difficult, maybe? Even with 5 ranks of +2.5 Hit supports (because Rolf doesn't have a Heaven partner), you can only reach 196 Hit, which is exactly 80 listed against the slowest enemies I could find in the Maniac lategame. It's barely 65 listed against the actually fast enemies, and remember, this is assuming you cap out your Sniper's Skill and Lck. I don't think even Rolf manages that on average... EDIT: Tbf I think Rolf will probably cap Skill, and Lck is only 0.5 points of Hit per, so he'll probably have the stats for it if invested. But investing in Rolf is pretty rough. Shinon just needs an Occult and maybe a bit of BEXP to have a ~20% chance of sleeping an enemy on any given hit, which I think is worth the cost.
Excellent video! I really enjoy these in-depth videos and I liked your FE9 stream and your current FE10 stream. Here is what I would personally change: - Soren -> Good (Investment) - Ilyana -> Good (Investment) - Shinon -> Filler - Lethe -> Filler - Mordecai -> Special Utility - Muarim -> Filler - Stefan -> Filler - Calill -> Okay (Investment) - Zihark -> Sanity Test - Tormod -> Good (Investment) - Haar -> Special Utility - Bastian -> Okay (Investment) - Geoffrey -> Okay (Investment) - Elincia -> Special Utility - Nephenee -> Good (Investment) - Devdan-> Okay (Investment) I feel like the only units that are truly good without any investment are Tanith and Reyson which is why they are in No Brainer tier.
Last comment, I swear! I, personally, would add Boyd to the No Brainer category. Personally. I don't disagree with your placing here or in an honest guide sense, but I just want to say my piece. Boyd is a unit that has pretty good growths and very high potential. He has the highest STR cap of any Beorc unit, and more often than not, still winds up stronger than Laguz because of weapons but also the Laguz being done dirty for their level/growths. HIs skill cap is also absurdly high tying for 3rd place at 28 SKL just behind Swordmasters/Assassin. His SPD cap is 27. His defense cap is 25. Reaching his caps naturally is uncommon, except for HP and STR, however, with a stat booster or two, it's not all that uncommon. You also don't quite need to reach his caps for him to be amazing, still. It's just that even reaching close to his caps will still put him in a better position than many other units. If you invest in Boyd as heavily as I believe you should, he often reaches promotion by the time you recruit Kieran. This puts his stats roughly equal, on average, to an average Titania of about level 5 or 6(25 or 26 if you wanna get technical), except with higher HP and 5 more STR. He continues to snowball from there. However, what really makes Boyd interesting is that he is unique among your army. He is the only Warrior available to the player in Path of Radiance. He gains access to bows, and while that might seem like a non-advantage, given Bows' aren't all that amazing, it gives him a niche on top of his tremendous potential. This niche being, he is the most modular unit for the purposes of Provoke. Due to how Provoke works, you can control the enemy by equipping 1-2 range, 1 range, or unequipping your weapon. Boyd has the advantage of equipping a 2 range weapon, meaning he has a slight advantage in controlling enemy actions with Provoke. i.e. you could make all 1-2 range enemies attack him by equipping the bow, but the 2 range enemies will go for someone else. You can admittedly do this with Astrid as well, but she has substantially worse bulk than Boyd. You can also do it with Oscar, Kieran, or Makalov, but that means choosing Bows over axes for each of them, and there's really only a case for that for Oscar (unless you're nutty like me *wink*) I still give the edge to Boyd in this regard, though, because of his giant HP and SPD. His RES and DEF are detriments you have to heavily invest(Boosters/Bands) to overcome for him, but he has the most of the two stats that have priority over DEF or RES. He also has higher offenses, generally meaning you want him as a provoke target because he will likely kill whatever attacks him. As far as skills go, he is your best Adept candidate, if you can manage to get it in 17-4, and without Crit Forges, he is one of the better vantage candidates as well, Vantage + Adept procs sometimes killing enemies on enemy phase before they deal damage even without crits. Even without provoke though, this gives him additional options for manipulating enemy actions to improve his and other's survivability. His is Fire affinity and supports with Titania, Mist, Brom, and Ulki. Realistically, this means you can make up for his defense through supports by supporting him with Brom and Titania(or Mist, but on Maniac you should probably prefer having support partners that don't need protection). With A Brom + B Titania, he should gain about 4 MT and 3 DEF along with some hit. These supports also develop fast and early. They also are the bonuses gained by those units. The DEF bonus from support also applies to RES for the purposes of taking damage(I am unsure about status staves). About the only thing Boyd can't do is hurt the final boss, canto, or shove mounts. Colossus is an OK Occult skill, but is outclassed for the purpose of dealing damage by Adept, of course, if you don't make Boyd your Adept user, then this is his next best bet. And he can still equip provoke along with it, iirc. I haven't given Boyd Colossus in a long time.
For the next stage of the Boydish inquisition, I will move on to moving Gatrie and Brom up to the Good with Investment category. Though I kind of want to create a Good with invest, but also without category for Gatrie, due to his role in early game. I think both armor knights in PoR are good investments, because their only downside is easily fixed with the Knight Ward. Beyond that, their incredible bulk for the early-mid to mid-late game speaks for itself. They also have high STR. Brom in particular has slightly worse growth than Gatrie but he also has better support options than Gatrie. Gatrie has supports with Marcia, Astrid, and Ilyana realistically, though Shinon is a late game option as well. Brom has Boyd, Zihark, and Nephenee while also being Water affinity himself. This means that Brom can gain more MT and DEF through supports than Gatrie can as well as avoid. However, Gatrie has better Luck, which might not seem important, but I have used Brom on Maniac several times now, and he almost always winds up facing crit rate from enemies not expected to have it. The only thing holding these amazing walls back is their SPD cap of 24, meaning they will start failing to double enemies as early as Chapter 23. Which is generally a short time after they started doubling with any consistency. Oof! But their big hits, prospects for Luna, and taking almost no damage make up for it in spades! I view Luna as superior to the crit forge slims, because crit forge physical weapons fall off on maniac due to the enemy defense rising to cap or near cap for almost all enemy units. I will also say you should move Muarim to the Good with Investment category. His growths are absurdly good, and even with just 11 levels to gain, he can become quite the mainstay in your army. I will say, the easiest way to make good use of him is to train him on Chapter 21 Without a King on Ena. She's the best training arc/boss abuse in the game, and he can train on her til cap. Alternatively you can just feed him boss kills or something. On Maniac I would really just do a short Ena training arc for him. Something people often overlook about the Laguz in PoR vs. RD is that unshifted they don't lose nearly as much stats, so you can use them to body block and gain gauge faster even unshifted. Of course, he comes with the Demi-band and makes great use of it, but sometimes you want his full stats. You can also, if worried about his downshifts getting him killed, equip the Demi-band just before his gauge runs out, letting him retain near full stats and counter. Another good reason to bring at least one strong Laguz on Maniac is that they save weapon uses and can be used as a small weapons convoy for units that do use weapons. He can also shove most mounted units. All of this together has me always using Muarim on Maniac. One more comment after this :)
i think soren is a nobrainer regardless because at first he only has range chip and can function as titania cleanup but he grows into a monster of a mage with a great support with ike and can be the best siege tome user for a while. when Ilyana joins he will be around lv 8-10 already and severely outclass and outgrow illyana. all the other magea have to contest with calils siege tome utility wheras soren is the best user period so while all the other mages fight for the nr 2 spot soren is always nr1
fwiw I agree with your conclusion but not the reasoning. Soren at lv 8-10 is a bit high imo considering he's only got a couple maps before then, and he's not exactly good at killing or surviving so he's very limited on what kills he can take - giving him 7-9 levels in that time is a lot. But yeah if you do have a lv 8 Soren at that point he is all around better than Ilyana by 1-2 points in each stat other than strength (lol).
big disagree on the boyd placement. Oscar is good because even if he is speed or strengh screwed has has earth affininity, great supports, great bulk (hp/def/res) and is generally easier to train than boyd. Boyd is easily speed screwed while having low def and res making him not that viable of an enemy phase unit. He can be a cool glass canon but he joins bad, needs lots of exp and stat boosters and can still turn out bad sadly. Jill/marcia with statboosters will be mobile powerhouses for example with little that can go wrong (marcia skill sometimes) its just really hard and tedius to traik boyd and he can still turn out really bad with no upsides (like being tanky or having high move)
Boyd is one of the units i think you choose to train or drop after like 10osh levels. Maniac just has so many enemies and exclusing titania, your units kinda struggle to kill that you end up almost being forced to give everyone plenty of xp.
Soren has so bad start that I see his early availability almost as a negative utility thing since, if you want to feed him a lot of kills it is XP in early game where Ike, oscar and boyd are also hungry for same resources. Ilyana comes at the point where you can forge or dump some Bonus XP and skip very early part of the soren grind if you want to play favourites and lastly Tormod comes last and misses some training but this also means that you can save up resources to dump immidiately couple of bonus XP levels and have master seal ready when he is trained enough to promote with decent stats. Overall having build all 3 "super sages" they all should turn out great if showed lots of care and extra resources.
Ok, real commentary on the guide time, now that I'm back at work and procrastinating on paperwork: It's time for the Boydish Inquisition! So, of course, I'll start by saying... Remove Soren and Ilyana from the No Brainer tier *ahem* I mean category, even accounting for Crit Forge glitch. You don't actually get Vantage til half way through the game, and it is missable. Combine that with the fact that you only get a single vantage scroll as it stands, and I gotta say that it's really not a no brainer. It's something that requires several stages of fore knowledge, and even then, you still have to know to maximize hit rate on the crit forge, because neither of them will have perfect hit rates with base hit on the forge which is how your Soren died. However, I will go as far to say, since this is a guide that is accounting for the crit forge glitch, that you can solidly put every single mage into the Good With Investment category. Since every mage has the potential with training to be OHKOs on player phase, they can all make solid contribution far more easily than any of the physical units, though without Vantage, none of them are frontline/EnemP beasts. You'd still order them in the order of recruitment, since that's also order of availability. And all of the early game mages up to Tormod are great, because they have stave use potential. Can never have enough staves! Next I will also drag the fliers out of the No Brainer tier, *ahem* category, as well! Neither Marcia or Jill are units that you just field and then they do well. They are both units that require a bit of care, especially without being able to give either of them BEXP dumps to catch them up to units that have already seen 9~12 maps of combat by the time they are recruitable. Notably, Marcia is quite weak in Maniac mode, particularly by the late game. She gets crit forge slims, sure, but let's put her up against a single Wyvern Lord in Clash. The Wyvern Lords on Clash! have roughly 18 spd, 29 DEF, and 51+ HP. With a max MT Slim crit forge, Marcia at max STR will have a displayed damage of 2 x2 on the Wyvern Lord(3 if it has a lance which is rare). This means with double automatic crits, she will deal 12 of his 51 HP. Meaning she would be better off using a forged silver lance, meaning she now has to compete with any other unit in the game that has a higher STR cap. I will next say that even though Jill has caps more in line with a Paladin, the advantage of flight in PoR only really matters even on lower difficulties for specific maps. Particularly there's about 8 or so maps where flight really really can make a big difference. But in order for that difference to really manifest, they also have to be overwhelming in a combat sense, and neither Jill or Marcia do that on Maniac until they are close to, or in Marica's case at her, caps. And that means heavy investment. Gonna comment again later, cause it's getting too long and I've getting side eyed by my boss. But your lovely, well thought out guide is not off the hook yet! I have to boost its algorithm, *ahem* I mean, give my opinion in full!
Mekkah, you can't gaslight me!
I WILL be treating this as the DEFINITIVE and ONLY PoR tier list in the world
Fun fact: I’m fairly certain that Path of Radiance has the fewest possible healers of any fire emblem game at 6 units capable of using staves (and this includes Elincia who doesn’t join until practically the end of the game). This funnily makes the mages getting E staff rank upon promotion invaluable in Ironmans. This is especially true since both Rhys and Mist have a high likelihood of dying due to being made of glass.
Idk who keeps choosing to put Chrono Cross music for your BGM, but I am HERE FOR IT!
if there's no editor being credited it's me
@@Mekkkah :O O: :O!!!!!!
That's awesome, thank you for making this character guide! Maniac mode has been on my to-do list for a while now, and this will be a great help to gather the confidence to get started!
guys trust me its not a tierlist (it is a tierlist)
i love your character guides - like you said the focus on potential makes it more interesting because it's less rigid and based on the peak of optimised play
Weirdly enough, Marcia and Jill have the same res growth. Jill does have a lower res base and promo bonus though
I just want to add that after one Maniac clear you can play Fixed Mode and also get the bands/rings. Fixed allows for planning if you want to, and consistency while no one gets stat screwed. Not as fun though, imo. The bands are mostly for selling, but the mage band giving +10% magic growth and a few bands that boost important stat growths are probably worth keeping at least on Fixed Mode where they can consistently get you to meet certain stat benchmarks a little early.
A few thoughts backed my massive experience of one whole playthrough, without crit forges but with BEXP abuse:
For what it's worth, Soren also happens to be the best user of Sleep/Silence staves with his high Mag *and* Skl. I often had him target enemy Sages with Silence, which he usually had a 50-70% chance of hitting - not so much an ironman strat, but something you can fish for on turn 1 or 2, if you want.
I didn't really have any issues using both Marcia and Jill, tbh. Marcia got a BEXP boost to Lv.12 immediately and promoted in chapter 13; Jill got BEXPed to Lv.14 before that same chapter and promoted in chapter 16. But of course, because their levels were better than average, they had an easier time grabbing kills following the initial boost. The real victim of this was Astrid, since there was hardly any BEXP left for her, but even she still managed to catch up and overtake everyone else in levels.
I used Rhys as my primary healer, but Mist, BEXPed to Lv.10 and promoted, was honestly a pretty useful filler. I did that around chapter 23 and I think she got fielded four or five times despite her awful stats. Cecilia at home, I suppose.
Tanith was great even though I didn't use her Reinforcements. She got a few points of Magic very early, which allowed her one-round enemy tigers *most* of the time, which was a pretty cool feat.
Steeeephan underrated here, that speed is unmatched. Potentially sole vague katti user and with the exp nerf on maniac has such reliability
Volke charging 50 gold per lock pick makes him much cheaper than IRL locksmiths.
I love ALL Mekkah videos!!!! ❤
Following up from my comment on last video, I'm going to take a stronger position this time: Deadeye is underexplored in more casual Maniac mode runs (e.g. ironmans). It's usually considered bad because why use a unit that's not one-rounding lol, but in Maniac it's much harder to one-round, and Deadeye effectively does that. It also passively doubles listed hit rates, so you never have to worry about missing. But I think it's biggest unexplored advantage is that sleeping enemies effectively act as obstacles for their comrades, making defensive lines easier to build.
I still wouldn't put Shinon above okay (investment), but I think Deadeye's worth considering before pretty much any other potential use of an Occult.
The real problem with deadeye is if you are really going to use a sniper gamble is just way better on them. Guaranteed crit rates with still passable hit rates makes snipers the strongest potential player phase units ( which still sucks because with how many enemies there are most of your combat will be enemy phase and snipers don’t have enemy phase because of the lack of 1-2 range. )If you really want to raise shinon or Rolf just give them a killer bow and gamble and watch them have 80% hit 100% crit. Crit forges are considered to make mages relatively good even despite how costly crit forges are and you can just use a killer bow you grab give a trained shinon or a trained Rolf gamble and call it a day later on for much cheaper. Also unlike how you do have some units with other users with solid skills like the paladins getting sol Ike getting aether there aren’t really any other good gamble users because most other classes aren’t anywhere near as accurate. The closest is swordmasters but snipers actually have good stat caps so they can actually be useful on player phase unlike swordmasters who struggle to do damage in the first place late.
@@ultimaterecoil1136 I dunno, man. To get 80 listed hit with Gamble, you need 160 more Hit than enemy Avo. The slow enemies in C27 have mid-30s Avo, so a Sniper would need over 190 Hit for that, and my Shinon only has about 137 with a Killer Bow. Even a capped Sniper only gets 28*2 + 40 = 96 Hit from their stats, and the Killer Bow has 75 Hit, for 171 total. So it's possible to get close to 80 listed hit through Gamble thanks to supports, but only against really slow enemies, and only with turbo-blessed Snipers.
@@aclashoffireandice4084 tbf I’m typically using Rolf when doing gamble sniper things (since he joins earlier and shinon’s honestly not that much better bases wise so it’s possible to get Rolf better then shinon at the point he’s recruited) and he innately has accuracy in his affinity unlike shinon but generally high 70s low 80s is generally where his accuracy remains during gamble barring some extremely high avoid exceptions ( which are usually still better then a coinflip but at that point it’s just better to take the normal shot imo at that point. Not that it makes them exceptional but it does bring them into the fun kind of bad unit to use tier rather then just miserable.
@@ultimaterecoil1136 Are you playing on Difficult, maybe? Even with 5 ranks of +2.5 Hit supports (because Rolf doesn't have a Heaven partner), you can only reach 196 Hit, which is exactly 80 listed against the slowest enemies I could find in the Maniac lategame. It's barely 65 listed against the actually fast enemies, and remember, this is assuming you cap out your Sniper's Skill and Lck. I don't think even Rolf manages that on average...
EDIT: Tbf I think Rolf will probably cap Skill, and Lck is only 0.5 points of Hit per, so he'll probably have the stats for it if invested. But investing in Rolf is pretty rough. Shinon just needs an Occult and maybe a bit of BEXP to have a ~20% chance of sleeping an enemy on any given hit, which I think is worth the cost.
Talking about characters in the context of who can abuse a glitch the best is kind of wild
I think only change would be bump the mages down one tier without crit forges.
I’m sure Mist and Brom will be in the FUN tier
ilyana fans FEASTING
i'm literally playing a maniac iron man on my other monitor and saw this was posted LFG
Excellent video! I really enjoy these in-depth videos and I liked your FE9 stream and your current FE10 stream. Here is what I would personally change:
- Soren -> Good (Investment)
- Ilyana -> Good (Investment)
- Shinon -> Filler
- Lethe -> Filler
- Mordecai -> Special Utility
- Muarim -> Filler
- Stefan -> Filler
- Calill -> Okay (Investment)
- Zihark -> Sanity Test
- Tormod -> Good (Investment)
- Haar -> Special Utility
- Bastian -> Okay (Investment)
- Geoffrey -> Okay (Investment)
- Elincia -> Special Utility
- Nephenee -> Good (Investment)
- Devdan-> Okay (Investment)
I feel like the only units that are truly good without any investment are Tanith and Reyson which is why they are in No Brainer tier.
Last comment, I swear!
I, personally, would add Boyd to the No Brainer category. Personally. I don't disagree with your placing here or in an honest guide sense, but I just want to say my piece. Boyd is a unit that has pretty good growths and very high potential. He has the highest STR cap of any Beorc unit, and more often than not, still winds up stronger than Laguz because of weapons but also the Laguz being done dirty for their level/growths. HIs skill cap is also absurdly high tying for 3rd place at 28 SKL just behind Swordmasters/Assassin. His SPD cap is 27. His defense cap is 25. Reaching his caps naturally is uncommon, except for HP and STR, however, with a stat booster or two, it's not all that uncommon. You also don't quite need to reach his caps for him to be amazing, still. It's just that even reaching close to his caps will still put him in a better position than many other units.
If you invest in Boyd as heavily as I believe you should, he often reaches promotion by the time you recruit Kieran. This puts his stats roughly equal, on average, to an average Titania of about level 5 or 6(25 or 26 if you wanna get technical), except with higher HP and 5 more STR. He continues to snowball from there. However, what really makes Boyd interesting is that he is unique among your army. He is the only Warrior available to the player in Path of Radiance. He gains access to bows, and while that might seem like a non-advantage, given Bows' aren't all that amazing, it gives him a niche on top of his tremendous potential. This niche being, he is the most modular unit for the purposes of Provoke. Due to how Provoke works, you can control the enemy by equipping 1-2 range, 1 range, or unequipping your weapon. Boyd has the advantage of equipping a 2 range weapon, meaning he has a slight advantage in controlling enemy actions with Provoke. i.e. you could make all 1-2 range enemies attack him by equipping the bow, but the 2 range enemies will go for someone else. You can admittedly do this with Astrid as well, but she has substantially worse bulk than Boyd. You can also do it with Oscar, Kieran, or Makalov, but that means choosing Bows over axes for each of them, and there's really only a case for that for Oscar (unless you're nutty like me *wink*) I still give the edge to Boyd in this regard, though, because of his giant HP and SPD. His RES and DEF are detriments you have to heavily invest(Boosters/Bands) to overcome for him, but he has the most of the two stats that have priority over DEF or RES. He also has higher offenses, generally meaning you want him as a provoke target because he will likely kill whatever attacks him. As far as skills go, he is your best Adept candidate, if you can manage to get it in 17-4, and without Crit Forges, he is one of the better vantage candidates as well, Vantage + Adept procs sometimes killing enemies on enemy phase before they deal damage even without crits.
Even without provoke though, this gives him additional options for manipulating enemy actions to improve his and other's survivability.
His is Fire affinity and supports with Titania, Mist, Brom, and Ulki. Realistically, this means you can make up for his defense through supports by supporting him with Brom and Titania(or Mist, but on Maniac you should probably prefer having support partners that don't need protection). With A Brom + B Titania, he should gain about 4 MT and 3 DEF along with some hit. These supports also develop fast and early. They also are the bonuses gained by those units. The DEF bonus from support also applies to RES for the purposes of taking damage(I am unsure about status staves).
About the only thing Boyd can't do is hurt the final boss, canto, or shove mounts. Colossus is an OK Occult skill, but is outclassed for the purpose of dealing damage by Adept, of course, if you don't make Boyd your Adept user, then this is his next best bet. And he can still equip provoke along with it, iirc. I haven't given Boyd Colossus in a long time.
For the next stage of the Boydish inquisition, I will move on to moving Gatrie and Brom up to the Good with Investment category. Though I kind of want to create a Good with invest, but also without category for Gatrie, due to his role in early game.
I think both armor knights in PoR are good investments, because their only downside is easily fixed with the Knight Ward. Beyond that, their incredible bulk for the early-mid to mid-late game speaks for itself. They also have high STR. Brom in particular has slightly worse growth than Gatrie but he also has better support options than Gatrie. Gatrie has supports with Marcia, Astrid, and Ilyana realistically, though Shinon is a late game option as well. Brom has Boyd, Zihark, and Nephenee while also being Water affinity himself. This means that Brom can gain more MT and DEF through supports than Gatrie can as well as avoid. However, Gatrie has better Luck, which might not seem important, but I have used Brom on Maniac several times now, and he almost always winds up facing crit rate from enemies not expected to have it. The only thing holding these amazing walls back is their SPD cap of 24, meaning they will start failing to double enemies as early as Chapter 23. Which is generally a short time after they started doubling with any consistency. Oof! But their big hits, prospects for Luna, and taking almost no damage make up for it in spades! I view Luna as superior to the crit forge slims, because crit forge physical weapons fall off on maniac due to the enemy defense rising to cap or near cap for almost all enemy units.
I will also say you should move Muarim to the Good with Investment category. His growths are absurdly good, and even with just 11 levels to gain, he can become quite the mainstay in your army. I will say, the easiest way to make good use of him is to train him on Chapter 21 Without a King on Ena. She's the best training arc/boss abuse in the game, and he can train on her til cap. Alternatively you can just feed him boss kills or something. On Maniac I would really just do a short Ena training arc for him. Something people often overlook about the Laguz in PoR vs. RD is that unshifted they don't lose nearly as much stats, so you can use them to body block and gain gauge faster even unshifted. Of course, he comes with the Demi-band and makes great use of it, but sometimes you want his full stats. You can also, if worried about his downshifts getting him killed, equip the Demi-band just before his gauge runs out, letting him retain near full stats and counter. Another good reason to bring at least one strong Laguz on Maniac is that they save weapon uses and can be used as a small weapons convoy for units that do use weapons. He can also shove most mounted units. All of this together has me always using Muarim on Maniac.
One more comment after this :)
In PoR Wyvern Knights use lances, Jill can also use a crit forged slim lance no? It makes their attsck difference smaller after promo tho
I mentioned this a couple secs later!
i think soren is a nobrainer regardless because at first he only has range chip and can function as titania cleanup but he grows into a monster of a mage with a great support with ike and can be the best siege tome user for a while.
when Ilyana joins he will be around lv 8-10 already and severely outclass and outgrow illyana.
all the other magea have to contest with calils siege tome utility wheras soren is the best user period so while all the other mages fight for the nr 2 spot soren is always nr1
fwiw I agree with your conclusion but not the reasoning. Soren at lv 8-10 is a bit high imo considering he's only got a couple maps before then, and he's not exactly good at killing or surviving so he's very limited on what kills he can take - giving him 7-9 levels in that time is a lot.
But yeah if you do have a lv 8 Soren at that point he is all around better than Ilyana by 1-2 points in each stat other than strength (lol).
big disagree on the boyd placement.
Oscar is good because even if he is speed or strengh screwed has has earth affininity, great supports, great bulk (hp/def/res) and is generally easier to train than boyd.
Boyd is easily speed screwed while having low def and res making him not that viable of an enemy phase unit.
He can be a cool glass canon but he joins bad, needs lots of exp and stat boosters and can still turn out bad sadly.
Jill/marcia with statboosters will be mobile powerhouses for example with little that can go wrong (marcia skill sometimes)
its just really hard and tedius to traik boyd and he can still turn out really bad with no upsides (like being tanky or having high move)
Boyd is one of the units i think you choose to train or drop after like 10osh levels.
Maniac just has so many enemies and exclusing titania, your units kinda struggle to kill that you end up almost being forced to give everyone plenty of xp.
Soren has so bad start that I see his early availability almost as a negative utility thing since, if you want to feed him a lot of kills it is XP in early game where Ike, oscar and boyd are also hungry for same resources. Ilyana comes at the point where you can forge or dump some Bonus XP and skip very early part of the soren grind if you want to play favourites and lastly Tormod comes last and misses some training but this also means that you can save up resources to dump immidiately couple of bonus XP levels and have master seal ready when he is trained enough to promote with decent stats. Overall having build all 3 "super sages" they all should turn out great if showed lots of care and extra resources.
definitely a tier list
and Tauroneo is S+ tier
This is definitely NOT a tier list 😉
Ok, real commentary on the guide time, now that I'm back at work and procrastinating on paperwork:
It's time for the Boydish Inquisition!
So, of course, I'll start by saying... Remove Soren and Ilyana from the No Brainer tier *ahem* I mean category, even accounting for Crit Forge glitch. You don't actually get Vantage til half way through the game, and it is missable. Combine that with the fact that you only get a single vantage scroll as it stands, and I gotta say that it's really not a no brainer. It's something that requires several stages of fore knowledge, and even then, you still have to know to maximize hit rate on the crit forge, because neither of them will have perfect hit rates with base hit on the forge which is how your Soren died.
However, I will go as far to say, since this is a guide that is accounting for the crit forge glitch, that you can solidly put every single mage into the Good With Investment category. Since every mage has the potential with training to be OHKOs on player phase, they can all make solid contribution far more easily than any of the physical units, though without Vantage, none of them are frontline/EnemP beasts. You'd still order them in the order of recruitment, since that's also order of availability. And all of the early game mages up to Tormod are great, because they have stave use potential. Can never have enough staves!
Next I will also drag the fliers out of the No Brainer tier, *ahem* category, as well! Neither Marcia or Jill are units that you just field and then they do well. They are both units that require a bit of care, especially without being able to give either of them BEXP dumps to catch them up to units that have already seen 9~12 maps of combat by the time they are recruitable. Notably, Marcia is quite weak in Maniac mode, particularly by the late game. She gets crit forge slims, sure, but let's put her up against a single Wyvern Lord in Clash. The Wyvern Lords on Clash! have roughly 18 spd, 29 DEF, and 51+ HP. With a max MT Slim crit forge, Marcia at max STR will have a displayed damage of 2 x2 on the Wyvern Lord(3 if it has a lance which is rare). This means with double automatic crits, she will deal 12 of his 51 HP. Meaning she would be better off using a forged silver lance, meaning she now has to compete with any other unit in the game that has a higher STR cap. I will next say that even though Jill has caps more in line with a Paladin, the advantage of flight in PoR only really matters even on lower difficulties for specific maps. Particularly there's about 8 or so maps where flight really really can make a big difference. But in order for that difference to really manifest, they also have to be overwhelming in a combat sense, and neither Jill or Marcia do that on Maniac until they are close to, or in Marica's case at her, caps. And that means heavy investment.
Gonna comment again later, cause it's getting too long and I've getting side eyed by my boss. But your lovely, well thought out guide is not off the hook yet! I have to boost its algorithm, *ahem* I mean, give my opinion in full!
soren under a rainbow background. i thank you.
Noob opinion