As is becoming an annual tradition, I forgot to look at the date when publishing, this is not an April Fool's video lmao edit- Also for clarity, arguments made in this video and the footage for the video pertain to US hard mode, not maniac edit edit - I don't know what to tell you guys, I've been in the trenches arguing with people about Soren for years, glad to see maybe sentiment isn't as low on these mages as I thought!
Most of this still very much holds true for maniac in all respects except that Soren's CoD against a mob of enemies will be a touch higher depending on enemy composition and headcount, but that is something that can be controlled. It needs to be said though that mages' niche of hitting res with powerful 1-2 range becomes even more prevalent on Maniac due to how absurdly bulky enemies get. It is that much harder to 1RKO enemies with even maxed out steel, and later silver forges in the mid to lategame once theyre promoted after c18. Maniac also just has more 1-2 range weapons on enemies in general. One thing that isn't mentioned in this video is the funny triple arrow skill build you can do on Soren(Adept, Vantage, Provoke) that has the benefits of adept + vantage outlined in the video, but also has the benefit of highly encouraging Maniac's massive count of siege tomes(there are 6 total in c18 alone!) to target Soren despite his naturally high res stat. Before anyone brings it up, no I am not taking the crit forge glitch into consideration here as the excuse of abusing glitches just because a game/difficulty is poorly designed is very fucking lame.
The mage hate is generally directed at radiant dawn to my knowledge. I think Soren and Ilyana are good! Even on Maniac they have the crit underflow glitch keeping them relevant. My issue here is the hype on Soren’s survivability. On maniac, one hit is often enough to KO him. Soren really wants the chapter 1 seraph robe to be able to tank an attack, but Ike desperately wants that for chapters 2 and 4. Dodge tanking isn’t reliable in the early and early mid game. Soren is a liability until his Ike support is online and until he gets a good bit of speed. Anyways, awesome video as always, and I agree with pretty much everything you said in regard to hard mode! And most of it with maniac in consideration.
I love Ilyana in Radiant Dawn because of her overwhelming availability. She's there for most of Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4. She can be present basically 80% of the time even if she might be the lackluster mage option in the game. Even in Radiant Dawn I love mages, though they fall off hard in the end game due to bosses having such massive resistance ratings. Sages also invalidate priests as they can also use staves.
Radiant Dawn Iliana is at least a viable unit on easy mode. 1. as the enemies are weaker and you get so much experience, she struggles lest with her speed and 2. the +5 omniboost in tower greatly mitigates her speed issues there to the point where she can double Deghinsea with Rexbolt ... and completely wreck him (she does like 66 damage or so to him, lmao). But on anything other than easy they really did her dirty :(
The actual big reason you might use Tormod over other sages is that he comes with free Celerity in a game where you can't steal it off him to give to someone else. Mages' low move can be worked around in the ways you mentioned, but having 2 extra is still inarguably a huge boon.
Celerity is the only benefit Tormod has, but his problem is he just joins too late at too low of a level. Ilyana and Soren at least have a lot more time to develop them especially that staff rank.
While I do often like evaluating units with a lot of nuance, Ilyana just makes me go "hungry thunder girl go brrrrrrrr" and I give her ridiculously blatant favoritism every run I do.
I absolutely adore Ilyana. I always use her first. Though typically I use Soren and Ilyana both because staff utility is good. That said, staff utility is less needed in RD because you're required to have Micaiah for Endgame.
"There's a lot of bonus EXP in Path of Radiance" is like *the* reason that units can only be So Bad in PoR. It's not a premium request to actually level up a unit. Also I have always felt like Tormod had the *easiest* "why this one" out of every mage, because +2 move from Celerity is huge. Remember the whole 'we can get people places'? Tormod doesn't need the shove or rescue. It's the specific reward for investing in him when you already had lots of opportunities with others.
I kinda feel like people just blend together por and rd, and mages got nerfed quite a bit between those games in my opinion. So maybe a lot of people just remember rd and apply that to por
100% agree. Magic users are much harder to use safely in Radiant dawn. They have the durability of wet paper. I had Micaiah get 1 shot by a random archer enemy even after I gave her an angelic robe and had been leveling her up!
Agreed, Soren is solid. Particularly in maniac mode, vantage adept Soren can be a very useful tool to take out bulky enemies reliably, and so many enemies have 1-2 range so comparing the low might of times to high might 1 range weapons doesn't apply since you almost always have a jav/HA equipped. Another solid video
I think you forgot the big deal for why might wanna use Tormod over, that what was suppose to be Tormod's main selling point, Celerity, since skills when removed don't turn into scrolls and you don't get a celerity scroll, Tormod has an effect +2 movement against Ilyana and Soren.
On a run where I used all 3 mages, Tormod was excellent because he could get more actual healing done once he promotes (which is pretty much immediately if you need it). He didn't hit as hard as Soren or especially not my blessed Ilyana but he did still do decent
It's funny that in fully rigged 100% growths LTC's POR mages are literally better than everyone other than marcia. (and early game anima mages in general are just dominant in almost all FEs) The main reasons early game anima mages are good are A: staves B; seige tomes and C: easy early 1-2 range The early 1-2 range is way better when you can assume every enemy just misses, but even so soren way outdamages anyone at 1-2 other than titania Staves are OK but surprisingly there are 0 maps where Soren's higher magic cap matters over Rhys. In spite of this if you're dilligent you can easily get soren to B staves to use rescue, (15 heals 14 mends 12 Physic/ward=41 uses of staves to reach B) and in a casual playthrough his high magic growth matters for some rescues Seige tomes however are really good, you can seige tome a door with bolting to get it out of the way, Seige tome annoying enemies in the way of marcia, or seige tome a boss in a map like chapter 27. Since Path of radiance has roughly 19 uses of anima mage seige tomes available there is a lot of seige to go around your 1-2 seige tome users. POR mages are basically Ballisticians late game
Kind of weird how people would complain about mages in Path of Radiance when it's successor, Radiant Dawn, treats mages much worse. Firstly their speed. Many magic users struggle to double enemies throughout most of the game And the speed cap of mages isn't great either. Especially light magic users suffer, they have the same speed caps as generals! And then we have Thunder magic, which has been nerfed into the ground. It now has even less might than wind, while still being less accurate. The crit bonus is negligible. Its only saving grace is that it's effective against wyverns and dragons.
I’ve never understood the PoR magic hate - the only real issue for me is you have to ignore using multiple magic types if you want to use high level tomes
Soren is the only Mage I ever consider using in Path of Radiance. Never thought to give him the early BEXP, though he always does just fine without it. I could never not use Oscar for the whole game though. I just love having him support with Kieran and travel around maps killing everything. That isn't strictly related to this video though. Either way some things to think about for my next playthrough of Path of Radiance, which is long overdue at this point. Just gotta finish my second playthrough of Engage first...
Yeah, never really thought less of Mages either in Path of Radiance! Though I only ever used Soren and Illyana (I tend to have TWO of a certain unit to spread my army out in a Fire Emblem game! Two or Three Flyers to back each other up and play hit and run flanking, at least TWO or Three Horseriders, Two Main Mages, A Healer or Two who will later be able to use Magic to fight when not healing, and the rest were Foot locked as they usually had BETTER stats to make up for being foot locked. I NEVER benched my Knights or Archers, Frankly I feel I was the ONLY Fire Emblem player that DIDN'T hate the Archer OR Knight class ever. I worked AROUND the lower movement and lack of attacking in the one space. Hence I didn't worship Horseriders, found them as my "they can reach and help out anyone needing them FASTER or get to certain locations if I didn't want to risk flyers" characters. Got finished with my fourth run of Engage Last year, stopped to try and replay a fourth run of Three Houses, but man I'll give Engage a MAJOR plus is I can get into it and out before "It's SO BORING" kicks in as the other Fire Emblems gave me! Three Houses has abt TOO MUCH busy work in it that I reached Chapter 9 and just stopped playing to play Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, It's been two months and I haven't restarted my Three Houses run, just playing Dragon's Dogma. But I feel around playthrough Three of Three Houses which was Golden Deer, I was tapped out! Even if I skipped cutscenes. The month thing wore out it's welcome. Still love Three Houses, but Engage reminded me of WHY I prefer the old traditional way of things. I might give Path of Radiance a try again, but frankly have no idea how to emulate it (It's been a goal of mine to find out how to do this, I made the mistake of TRADING my path of radiance game after beating it all those years ago expecting to buy it back cheaper later on and learned the HARSH reality of limited releases as I NEVER saw that game again and HATE how there was never a remaster or at least release on the WiiU or SWITCH of Path of Radiance, but I was able to play Mystery, Genealogy and Thracia 776 and Binding Blade, so wish me luck in finding a way to emulate this one!) I feel people complain for the sake of complaining, not to invalidate their complaints as some ARE valid (Like how swords have little love in Engage and what the fuck did they do with the Flame Lance with that HUGE WT on it!) but some like "Archers suck without Close Counter" just make me wonder, did they idiotically place their Archer where an enemy could get next to them! Now I know why the tutorial back in Blazing Sword had to TELL ME to be careful leaving them open for Melee! Some idiots NEED to be told this is just fucking SAD as I NEVER left my Archers OPEN like that! Hell I risk my Heavy units moving forward and BLOCKING the way to my squishes in a Fog of War Map! Only time I got caught off guard was one where a FUCKING PEGASUS KNIGHT had a Javelin of all things, meaning covering my Staff wielder meant NOTHING, thankfully they survived and that Pegasus Knight got a ARROW for her trouble, but at least I learned NOT to underestimate the possibility anymore LOL)
I used Illyana and Callil my first run and they were pretty solid, probably could have done better if I were willing to sink money into forged tomes. But while mages are just aight in PoR, they're just godawful in RD where enemies actually have a Res stat which makes the low tome Mt an irreconcilable issue
I loved my mages in PoR, although RD has been a bit unfortunate so far with them... Even with +2 mag, skill, speed, and res from save transfers on soren, illyana, and rhys , their horrible speed cap prevents them from doubling most enemies, and their horrible hp and defense makes them guarenteed to die in 2 hits from even the most basic enemies. With the change in biorhythm and weapon accuracy/damage, trying to rely on dodge tanking will eventually get them killed, so I have to go through every turn making sure there is never more than a single enemy that can reach them or they just die. I'm definitely going to try giving Soren vantage though, he's the best of them and that could work really well for solving some of the enemy phase issue, thank you for the idea!
Are you sure people weren't criticizing Soren's performance in Radiant Dawn? Soren's pretty clearly the most trainable foot unit in PoR (discounting Ike, I guess? depending on how you want to evaluate that). Plus Siege tomes are more prevalent and more relevant. He's still not a world-beater outside of 100% growths, but the only chapter I can think of off-hand where it's optimal to bench him is for a stealth clear of Prison Break. But in RD he's trash (and so are all the mages).
I think bonus exp is not necessary for earlygame POR units to be strong. _Kill feeding_ and denying Titania or ect. the maximum number of finishing blows possible is the main factor for early game unit exp. For example on map 1 generics, Titania is getting about -1 exp(rounded up to 1) on a kill finish. If you convert bonus exp on a value-per-level scale she still gets something like ~5x less total bonusexp per kill here than allies under level 10. And it takes like half of the game for her exp rewards to get much better. It's a puzzle to chose how Titania preforms in the map. Obviously bonus exp is not even accessible yet and the bonus per chapter here is _tiny._ I mention this as the game carefully tries to build your squad for viable kill-feeding ease. Mostly with Ike and Oscar. The game specifically makes swords weak (and Oscar unavailable-ish to lose exp access) and Ike defensively stat-ed for speed/res/luck/def to leave enemies on 1-8 hp, so underdeveloped allies can get freebie kills. (Ike's accuracy is way better though). He does this with enough bulk (when fed a lot of _very_ early game stuff) to get a set-up on player phase and 1-3 on enemy phase too. Like, Even the narrative wants you to prioritize Ike's training here ffs... Later on, if he downgrades back to an iron sword, he can chose to allow all(1-4~ shitters) weaker allies to start progressing with kill self-denial. Even his promotion denial forces a situation where Ike can easily leave targets on low hp. I didn't bexp Soren last time on Hard (like only 50-250 bexp) and he still was my ~3rd highest level unit by chapter 16 (natural, no-seal promotion to level ~2). I beat most chapters 2-3 turns after the Bexp max window. Even if Ike's cap-trapped at level 20, the chip exp compared to kill exp is so much smaller. Not to mention allied shitters like Soren shouldn't need help _much_ by the time Ike's 20. Ike allows your POR team to build up both player and enemy phase power instead of being Juggernaut-locked. Not that Juggernaut-ing doesn't work well. It's just kinda boring and not as tactically engaging.
I actually have used soren in this exact way before. It was pretty flawless and absurdly reliable, and juggernauting with 1-2 range mages just feels fun. Everything you said's true
Yeah, I just dismiss them as QUITTERS who get upset and don't even TRY to do better, just give up because they can't GOD MODE ONE SHOT! I just stop listening to them A LONG TIME AGO!
@@IschmarVI Why Thank You. I do my best to impress! I also sometimes use "Quotations" But I really want to SHOUT them out. But seeing how this is text. CAPITAL is the next option
I think the real over-dramatization in PoR is how bad Nephanee is. Yeah, she's meh but sloting her into your roster in PoR is much less of a hassle than having to deal with RD 2-1 where she doesn't have transfer bonuses.
@@VHuntrD She's beloved by the casual community but the tier list consensus for PoR is that Infantry = bad unless they provide unique utility. Given some BEXP she's a fine combat unit that will need some ferrying around but isn't gonna cause you any real issues. Jill and Nephanee are the only two units who really want a transfer bonus so you may as well get them both to make the harder game easier. Nephanee only needs to hard carry one map in RD but if she has no transfer bonus it can become the most frustrating map in the game if you are going for BEXP objectives.
@@VHuntrD Nephenee is considered a bad unit in tier lists. She's a well loved character, but tier-wise she's considered terrible. This is actually a pretty common thing to see nowadays. Back in the day I always heard about how good Nephenee is, don't use "Jeigans" because they fall off late game, wait to Lvl 20 to promote all units, etc. In terms of high-level play, though, all of these things are considered incredibly bad advice. Similar issue with the Est Archetype. "Est characters are great because they have high growths and will outperform your starting characters if you grind them up!" In reality, Ests are considered garbage because at best they won't be _that_ much better than other units and it takes way too long to actually level them up to make it work while. You have to sit and grind to get them. Despite that I will still never abandon Nino if I replay FE7 so I guess I'm part of the problem. (Though tbf, Nino is my exception; I don't use Sophia, Amelia, Ewan, or Tormod either.)
nephenee has a few things going for her. She can use the knights ward which means she gets very fast very quickly with some bonus experience and she effectively turns into a dismounted paladin. Turns out, beiing a dismounted paladin is still not that bad. Its not outstanding, but it is not bad. perfectly usable unit in a game that is full of units that are at least perfectly usable.
mages arent bad in telius, its just the game throws SO many beefy reinforcements at you that having a paladin sit there and kill 8 things on enemy turn is 1000000000000% better than your mage killing 1 thing and then dying to repeated javelins
Soren is not one rounding those enemies, they've already been set up for him to kill. Puny might have been a bit of an exaggeration though, 7x2 isn't *that* bad.
I have a hard time seeing someone getting through Maniac mode with their sanity intact without training up a sage. There are groups of 10+ wyverns on Clash that a strength capped Marcia can do 4x2 to with a javelin, and the vast majority of them have 1-2 range preventing using stronger weapons on enemy phase. You basically need magic, high rank bows, or Boyd (and maybe resolve Tauroneo?) critting to get through that in a reasonable timeframe.
I can’t say I have a ton of experience with PoR having only played it for the first time last year, but Soren was a vital playthrough of my blind ironman. From staff utility to adept + gamble for ~50% crits with a thunder tome, Soren was in my top 5 units easily. Unfortunately Ilyana died so I never got a chance to use her properly. But I really want to my next time I play PoR. And wind having 2 might isn’t the issue imo, it’s the fact that effective is only x2
This isn't related to the topic of FE9 mages, but I do enjoy seeing what people come up with for forge names for their playthroughs/footage. I especially liked Marcia's TIGER SHOT
Yes. Coming up with forge names in FE9 and FE11 is half the fun! (my favourite naming is probably still dondon151 naming his thunderbolt forge in FE11 "wolt tackle", lmao.
I think for me it's more like infantry are underhyped. Horses and fliers are excellent, but I think sometimes people talk about infantry like it's impossible to get them places
I remember mages feeling extremely fun and good for countering specific units but too slow/squishy with their waddling to keep up with cav and laguz rushes consistently. Great on def and sand maps or against many laguz/on corridor heavy maps. Reinforcements punish them hard as fuck
The thing that makes PoR mages look bad to a lot of people, in my opinion, is that they're never the untouchable gods that they can become in some other games, like FE7 and FE4. Also, people overvalue facetanking on enemy phase. Yes, you _can_ do it, but honestly, even on hard, enemy density is low enough that you can player-phase most things. I also think people overvalue very high move. Not that it isn't valuable, but most maps in PoR don't actually reward you (much) for just bumrushing the objective at maximum speed with paladins and fliers. It's good to have some, but the whole thing where they define entire games is insane to me. Also, when you said that rescued units would _mostly_ be foot units especially in PoR, you're underselling it. Mounted units _cannot_ be rescued in this game, not even by transformed Laguz. Not even by 41-con, 80-weight transformed Nasir. I actually just went and checked on a trial map on one of my completed files. It's just not allowed, period. And, of course, being able to shove mounted units is also incredibly rare. People seriously underestimate the mobility foot units get in PoR due to rescue-dropping and especially shoving. All that said, PoR mages (and sages) are, for the most part, mediocre. They're _fine,_ but not really all that great. Which is disappointing. I wish they were better. But hey, at least Path of Radiance mages don't have lower speed caps than armors. They saved that bit of BS for the sequel. >.>
fun video! ive heard the mages bad in por argument too quite a bit recently and it always takes ne back cause I've always found them useful. Interested to hear your thoughts on mages in rd as I think they're put in a much tougher spot
I just did a recent PoR playthrough after not touching the game since release. One of my main takeaways is that Defense is one of the most important stats in the game. Enemies hit hard and there's lots of them, so being able to take hits is crucial.
I actually enjoy Soren, Ilyana, Callil, and even Tormod was pretty great with the Knight Ring & Celerity to effectively have a mounted Sage in PoR. My one qualm with sages is that Knives could've at least been more interesting of an option 😅
knives could have at least been not completely dogshit. The stiletto is the only knive that doesn't make me wanna leave the room and even that one isn't too great, especially because you get it extremely late. I do like volke though but that is in *spite* of him using daggers; not because of it. He is just way too cool.
@IschmarVI Yeah, the overhaul daggers and knives got in RD was a hugely satisfying change, despite other changes still making them clearly not great compared to axes or lances
I usually only play Maniac mode, and as such usually end up lowmanning it to survive, so staff utility usually doesn't materialize in my playthroughs. I've been meaning to go back and play hard mode again so I can do things like actually forge weapons for maps other than clash & endgame or use units other than titania ike jill and nephenee, so I might end up using Soren. My only issue with him (and by extension other PoR mages) is that the best way to play through it is to invest a large amount of XP skills and items into a small number of units, and by making a mage one of those few units you gamble all of that investment on a character with pitiful defense. On maniac mode, it's simply the case that at one point your Soren will get clapped by an enemy he doesn't one-round, usually at or past ch17 when promoted units start appearing. Of course you can just restart the chapter, but a high defense unit would likely do the same job but more reliably. This applies in a lesser sense to hard mode as well, but as you said the % chance of him surviving combats is high so with the reduced enemy count + easier OHKO you are rolling that chance only a few times per map. Also, unless you are playing that way for real-time quickness, siege tome-ing bosses is a gimmick that hurts your army through lower overall XP gain and weapon leveling. Especially on maniac mode, where BEXP isnt so liberal and the per turn decrease is like -5 assuming you can't clear the map anyway before the decreases start applying. And in a mode where staff utility is at its lowest (staff users will just get swarmed and die and vulneraries have their own 4 inventory slots to take up in an enemy phase focused game), the niche of siege tome-ing lategame bosses is just filled by calill, who can instantly eat your spirit dust from ch14 and the one 2 chapters after she joins. Chapter 17-4 probably has the best use case for it, as it is consistently one of the hardest parts of my runs since they enemies are brutal for the time and Ike is so heavily nerfed by carrying the heron girl and he's usually one of my top units.
I love Soren so much. His supports with Ike are so great. So, I will always believe that he is worth using, whether or not he's actually good for combat. Plus, PoR has so few staff users that training one could never be a bad idea.
To be honest my 2 favorite units in most Fe games are paladins and mages/Sages. I always found having a good supply of both let me handle anything that the game could throw at me, as anything that couldn't get one rounded by a paladin, could get one rounded by mage/sage with enough investment. Also, yeah Soren with good speed and skill growths would often proc skills for some real survivability and damage.
When I was a kid (and didn't realize I was bi) I was definitely gay for and shipping Ike and Soren (even before getting their ending in RD) without realizing. So maybe biased but regardless of stats Soren is best boy
path of radiance mages? Really not that bad imo Radiant Dawn mages though? thats where we start having issues but yeah i agree tome might is a non issue. that elthunder may as well be a steel axe to the majority of enemies you face
I'd recommend you try out Tormod and Calill sometimes. Tormod is pretty cool thanks to his celerity skill allowing him to much better keep up with paladin emblem. And calill, while locked out of staves, has some decent stats for a prepromote. With the usual bexp treatment, she quickly turns into a pretty solid mage unit. Plus, she actually has pretty solid DEF growth which means that levelled up she should survive a few hits in a pinch.
You did forget to mention two pretty impactful things; tomes have a particularly high weight for their might, and you can’t forge anything over basic tomes. The former hurts Soren’s long term potential on the harder modes as an early promotion combined by being slowed by up to 4 when using Elthunder (very likely Soren never gets strength on fixed mode without an energy drop, and if you’re using an energy drop for that, well… it is AN option). Ilyana and Tormod are mostly spared this fate but Soren isn’t, so he kinda needs Adept after units start promoting. I do think that it’s super easy to justify magic dust on your primary magic unit, so that can either help Soren compensate when using lighter tomes, or make the other two early mages have less of a comparative disadvantage in that stat in particular. I do think Soren can work well with enough resources, but I think everyone in this game can; Mia with her high speed really just needs a +5 might forge to justify her high speed niche, and that same vantage scroll can really help out Nephenee, especially on maps with Laguz enemies where she can pick and choose if she wants to take half damage from those guys or full, and then she can equip a better weapon than the javelin like a killer or brave lance.
I’m surprised to hear people think Soren is bad. Maybe it’s because he just seemed a natural BEXP candidate to me, but I found him to be an absolute beast with those siege tomes.
I used to consider Ilyana the best mage in PoR, but having used Tormod once, Tornod is easily the best. That extra 1 move from celerity is a godsend. In my opinion, having less time to raise his staff rank doesn't matter because there aren't many staves in PoR, and your promoted mages really only need the basic heal, which they can use at base. Soren's stats are just the worst of the three mages, I find him not worth investing in even with Adept. With the way stat gains work in fixed mode, training exp with staff use is a slight detriment to long term stat growth btw.
Uh, two things. One, Celerity gives +2 move, not +1, so it's even better. He's a 7-move mage and an 8-move sage, which is pretty amazing. That's incredibly important for him, though, because... Two, how on god's green earth do you figure Soren's stats are the worst?! His strength sucks, yes, but his magic and speed are great. Are you looking exclusively at his bases or something? Seriously, he massively outstrips Tormod every time without fail for me, because Tormod's magic growth is just plain inconsistent. It takes very little poor luck for Tormod's magic to rapidly fall behind to the point of borderline unusability. If Tormod didn't have that two extra move, I wouldn't even consider using him basically ever. I use both Ilyana and Soren basically every run I do (and PoR is one of my favorites, so I do a lot) and Ilyana just consistently needs more favoritism (which I of course give her) to be anything like equal to Soren. Yes, with enough of said favoritism, you can get her to use Rexbolt with no speed loss, but that's only even possible for the final chapter, because you don't even get Rexbolt before that.
@@jemolk8945 Saying 1 move was just a typo, I meant 2. Soren's strength matters a lot. His speed is high, but he's weighed down by pretty much every tome for the entire game, so his attack speed is pretty much the same as Ilyana and Tormod in practice. Tormod's speed also overtakes Soren's on average, shortly after level up promotion, as his growth is higher. The combination of Tormod's higher move and def let him easily get into the front line of battle and stay alive, while Soren requires extra effort to see combat consistently, and when he does there's a higher risk of him dying. Because Soren naturally sees less combat unless you plan your entire strategy around him, he requires more bexp to keep up, while Tormod only requires an initial dump, then he keeps up on his own. The discrepancy in their magic stats is not a big deal, the difference isn't enough for Tormod to not reach the same damage thresholds as Soren. Tormod's base weapon ranks let him use Meteor, Elfire, and Elwind, meanwhile Soren can't train his fire or thunder weapon ranks for a while after he joins due to weapon availability, and his easiest C rank of wind gives him the worst siege tome that's also available later than the other two siege tomes, so you have to put more effort into getting him good weapons for the midgame than Tormod as well.
@@xenofes2 This is just false. Strength does not matter at all, because your mages should be using forged tomes basically always. Tormod overtakes Soren's speed at promoted level 17, on average, and ends up 0.2 higher. While Tormod does indeed have higher move, he will always see less combat than Soren, for durability reasons. Soren with Ike support(Not a given, granted), is essentially unkillable on hard, so he can be rescue dropped with Ike. And due to deployment slots, you will always have rescuers. Tormod sees at most two enemies each enemy phase, Soren can see up to ten and still have a less than 5% chance of dying. Tormod has a far better player phase, of course, but this is not a player phase game. Both require a dump, but Tormod requires nearly triple, since he joins so late. For instance, your Soren will be nearly lv. 10- lv. 13 promoted by chapter 15, with an initial influx of 600-900 BEXP, Tormod will want like 2500 BEXP to get there. Or at least 1500 BEXP to promote, which is a far harder sell. While Soren is not the best target of your early game EXP, he is far from the worst. You pump it into two of Marcia, Oscar, Soren, Boyd, Mia and Illyana (Or wait for Jill), of which Soren is better than Mia for 1-2 range, better than Illyana for durability, and arguably better than Boyd, though this is very contentious. Meanwhile, you get ~2900 BEXP by Tormod's chapter (and this assumes stealth 10 and no kill 15, neither of which are certain), of which at least 1000 is spent on Marcia and your second carry. So Tormod barely promotes, and will require extra BEXP if you want one rounding throughout, since, again, he sees very little enemy phase. As for weapon ranks, Wtf are you smoking? Soren has at least 8,9,10,11,12,13,14 and 15 to grind thunder and fire, mainly thunder. By chapter 10 at max, he should be using exclusively forged thunder... And assuming promotion on 11, he also has 4 maps for staff. If you do go the no laguz kill route, this is 3-4 turns of ward, or D rank.
@qcdragon2225 I was admittedly wrong about Tormod overtaking Soren's speed, that was quick math in my head making a mistake. However, they're within 1 point of each other on average by promoted level 2, so Soren will still have lower attack speed than Tormod with most tomes due to his lower str. Soren's support with Ike is one of thr slowest in the game. You can't reach A rank for 22 avoid until at least Chapter 23, and if you're doing stealth route on the prison you probably won't deploy Soren, making it Chapter 24 instead. 7 or 15 extra avoid before that is not "essentially unkillable" by any means. Tormod gets higher defense than Soren and is actually somewhat durable as a result. Tormod can fight far more than two enemies per turn and survive, and Soren's chances of survival are typically much lower than 5% if he's facing ten enemies; those numbers were pulled out of nowhere. In normal play, Soren will be nowhere near promoted level 10 by Chapter 15. You're lucky if he's 20/1 by then, even with bexp. You'd have to be completely neglecting everybody else in your army to achieve that. Could Soren reasonably have a level lead on Tormod when he joins? Sure. But not by that much. You only get one forged weapon per chapter, and using your early ones just to get a thunder tome to grind Soren's thunder rank is really ill advised. Not only will his thunder rank be automatically bumped to D when he promotes, wasting all of your grinding, but forged hand axes and javelins are much more useful at that point in the game. Soren is also the only mage that really needs forged tomes, because Ilyana and Tormod are able to actually handle the weight of tomes that naturally have higher might. Saying "Soren has 8 extra chapters to waste my limited forge resources to catch up to Tormod" is not a point in his favor. Chapter 11 is also laughably early to promote at compared to normal play, where units promote around chapter 17. I wasn't going to argue about bexp usage, but it is important when you look at comparing characters in PoR. If you look at how every character performs when you dump all of your bexp into them before you compare them, the comparison is pointless, because every character (except Mist) can easily be a main member of your army for the rest of the game. Comparison of bexp dumps doesn't matter. It's a poor way of creating meaningful discussion, it's a suboptimal way of using bexp, and it's not how the majority of people play the game. In normal play, where you don't give massive favoritism to anybody, Tormod is just better than Soren.
@@xenofes2 My experience with Tormod is that if you're even slightly unlucky for a few levels in a row, he ends up sufficiently screwed to no longer be capable of one-rounding. And that's with giving him the Mage Band. Meanwhile, if you rig Soren a single strength level with bexp early, he's set for the rest of the game. He doesn't even need a bexp dump; by the time I get access to bexp, he's already very close to self-sufficient. I'll top characters off on their levels in between chapters if they're close, but I basically never dump piles of bexp into single characters. ...Also, for the record, Tormod's speed growth lead over Soren is 5%. That is nothing, especially considering you can just give Soren one of the speed-increasing bands. Also, on siege tome availability -- you can get a Bolting in chapter 16, you can steal a Meteor in chapter 17 (with great difficulty), and you can steal your first Blizzard in chapter 18. So yes, technically last, but it's so much easier to get than that chapter 17 Meteor tome it's not even funny. Then, in chapter 20, you can steal a _second_ Blizzard tome, and this one's even easier. And you haven't at this point seen a second siege tome of any other type. That's actually looking pretty good for Blizzard, I'd say. I also think people _vastly_ overstate the difficulty of using foot units in Fire Emblem. What the hell are you guys doing that makes it hard for Soren to see combat? Rushing full move every turn with an army of nothing but cavaliers and fliers and undeploying literally everyone else? Getting Soren to combat in normal play is trivial. We're not dealing with LTC strats here. And if he needs a speed boost, you can just rescue-drop him. Not going to say that high move isn't useful -- it's very useful. But the take that if a unit has low move, they're just never going to see much combat, that's just nuts. Not every map is a crazy long linear hallway to the objective, and a lot of them have areas where it's actually useful to leave some units behind. Finally -- once he promotes, he gets staves, and staves give unreasonable amounts of experience in this game. This is especially true if you can get to C rank for physic, which, in my experience, has never been too difficult. Combine that with the fact that, in the second half of the game, you can steal more physic staves than you could hope to use up, and concern over mages training in combat becomes exclusively for weapon rank. Which, given that Soren shreds basically everything aside from dragons in the lategame with a mere Elwind, barely matters, and you'll get the weapon rank for Tornado anyway just off Blizzard uses, which will then suffice for anything slightly too tanky for Elwind. You don't even _need_ to train his fire or thunder rank. Wind is the worst magic type in PoR, and Soren just doesn't care.
I agree that there is a payoff for training the POR mages. If you account for siege tome utility, they actually the easiest way to clear some of the lategame kill boss maps. But you also can't just look at their mid- and lategame performance, the early game is also important, and that is where mages struggle. Investing in a paladin or flyer is way easier because those units become self sufficient very quickly. Training Soren or Ilyana is way more painful than training Oskar or Kieran. On maniac mode, you have to bend over backwards to give Soren any kills in his first few chapters, because he is in constant danger of being onerounded and does very little damage. Training him on hard mode is more realistic, but still awkward because of his very limited enemy phase. Same goes for Ilyana. Kallil is arguably better than both of them from an efficiency perspective, except for the lack of stave utility. So yes, you can use mages in POR, but they require more effort to train, favorism, and are also more expensive because tomes cost a lot. But they do have some utility that only they provide.
One of the best parts of Soren is that he is the only Mage in PoR that can double with siege tomes at base in the game thanks to Adept. Yes, you can put Adept onto another Mage, but Soren has it for free. And if you're putting Vantage on Soren to potentially enemy phase with him, then you're not putting it on another character. I'm also not considering your mages actually getting enough strength to not get slowed down by the siege tomes as that's not realistic thanks to all their poor strength growths. As for Mages in Radiant Dawn, thanks to plot reasons, you can have infinite siege tome usage in the last few maps. There's no feeling quite like slaying a bunch of dragons with 2 Bolting users (only 2 copies in the game and you have to steal both) getting 1-4 blasts per combat thanks to Adept and potential doubling, then using Reyson to refresh them to kill another slaughter another 2 dragons from across the map. My play on those last few maps is to place Soren, Sanaki, and Micaiah around Ena (for accuracy) or Nasir (for power and more speed) and having Reyson refresh them. You could use Rafiel, but he doesn't get Canter or as much movement, so you'd have to reposition after every refresh. And while Micaiah doesn't get Bolting, Purge with Wrath boosting is almost as good, though it makes her much worse sieging down the bosses thanks to Nihil.
IMO, the big problem with PoR is that the paladins and flying units dominate so heavily that, from any tier list perspective, anyone who is not one of them is going to inherently suck no matter how good they are. Even a theoretical Ike who could 1HKO every enemy (not 1RKO, 1HKO) would still probably only hit A and likely be in the B compared to an S-rank unit like Titania, Astrid, or Jill.
I really tried to use mages on my first POR run, but every single time Calil went brrr. I just wish I could have more staves without training these mages.
If you can fix Mage's bad defense early on ,they become nasty! I had a run once where Soren had like 9-10 defense and he could tank the map where the black knight kills Ike's dad.
yeah i was under the impression that it was RD mages that people thought of more, especially with a mage lord. PoR has always seemed like one of the easier games, and the issues that the class has there are much less pronounced
People were sour on Mages in PoR? Soren is one of my fav FE characters and was always a mainstay combat unit for me in PoR and RD. Yeah the other mages are kinda meh I guess, I don't have any recollection of using them much despite usually loving to overindulge the Mage class (especially the Shamans), but I always loved using Soren. Bonus EXP is one of those mechanics I never really got into. I'm still not really sure how it works, and I rarely ever used it in my playthroughs. Maybe to bump an Est's level to usable, but I never did any levelup resetting or anything that I hear Bonus EXP is REALLY good for. The fact that it doesn't exist outside of the GC games is kinda another reason I never bothered to learn it. I hate how (physically) inaccessible PoR and RD are, especially being on two DIFFERENT consoles. really shot those entries in the foot. great games I'd love to play more, I even own physical copies. but no Wii for RD
I wasn't even aware that people thought mages were bad in Path of Radiance; I assumed the title was a typo and you meant Radiant Dawn (I was very curious about how you would justify that)
Radiant dawn really put the boot into mages far more than path ever did. 2x effectiveness is a bummer. I prefer Ilyana to Soren and i think Calill is pretty good despite no staves.
I use Tormod in every playthrough and have never had an issue with him. Sure, Taitania, Oscar, Astrid, and Kieran can casually solo the entire game, but part of Fire Emblem is having fun even if it isn't the most optimal strategy.
Perhaps not _super_ relevent but Sorena is a staple in japanese maniac mode. This is due to a bug existing in the japanese version of the game where if you forge the critical bonus of a weapon which already has a bonus (ie a thunder tome), that weapon's crit loops back around to 255.
There’s one other problem worth mentioning for mages. You mentioned earlier that most units perform well with a solid forged weapon and bonus exp which is true. The problem is forging tomes is both absurdly expensive and you can only forge tier 1 variants on their weapons. When you say oh hey mages perform similarly with a forge and exp same as everyone else giving them the same gold amount of investment as everyone else means that their forges will just be less impactful. Heaven forbid you are using a promoted Rhys and need 22,000 for light to have the same might as a base handaxe
Forging tomes isn't a huge deal imo. PoR gives you quite a bit of money. Soren also doesn't really need a bunch of might on his tomes, a bexped Soren wants some crit if you do vantage shenanigans, but the base thunder might, or base thunder might + 1 is enough for a lot of maps.
@@actuallizard tome forges can make money a problem if you wish to use them. Light especially is ludicrous. And it exasperates the flaws already there. When factoring in lower res a handaxe vs a tome initially looks fine. But when you can afford a max might and max hit handaxe If you need it but the same concessions cannot be made on the regular for a tome user the axe unit’s weapon still has a damage advantage despite targeting the higher defense. However the base might just isn’t enough on maniac. Even with funny 100% crit tome mages usually don’t one shot because of the low initial might that would realistically make the higher tier tomes you can’t buy better a surprisingly high amount of the time and without a seraph robe are often at risk of being 1 shot in return so they need to focus on targets that either have 1 or 2 range but not 1-2 range on player phase. They also can struggle to double due to weight being mitigated by strength and them lacking it. If they get to doubling sure then they are one rounding on player phase but it takes a lot of work to get them there. The other option is relying on thieves to steal their gear which they already do with physic since you just can’t buy those till endgame but now your thief has so much on their plate it’s hard to get it all in a reasonable time frame for bonus exp. Using a mage might cause you to miss out on some other goodies from another unit because while that one thing is a nice thing to give your non mage units get decent things to give your units in shops but your mage may NEED a replacement for their tome right now so that would realistically take steal priority. Mages are usable but this is one of the worst games for staffs since having them is a big If and the game just has a lot easier things to make work. The main standout is the siege tomes but actually safely getting a thief to steal those so you can use them can be tricky.
As someone who likes to use Soren I've never struggled with Funds in PoR, the game showers you in money to the point where it's hard to run out. I'm not sure how forging light ever came up since Rhys isn't a combat unit anyway, you're literally just wasting your forge for that chapter. Forging thunder is more expensive than javelins or hand axes but it's in no way so much so that you won't be able to forge other things you need, it's not like you're forging thunder every chapter. On hard you need less might with the mages massive magic and the enemy res gap, and if we're arguing maniac then I don't think any other class has a leg to stand on when it comes to 1-2 range damage output. I also think they only risk being oneshot if you just don't train them or don't give them any resources, which if you're using them as a primary combat unit you probably should. Also, most mages don't struggle to make up for the weight of the lighter tomes with strenght. Soren when promoted will have 3 anyway, which makes him not get weighed down at all by thunder, fire, and wind which are the tomes he'll use the most anyway. He'll be weighed down by siege tomes but I think that's intended so you don't easily murder anything you want with them. I think a lot of the isses you brought up often don't matter in the grand scheme of things. If the unit is one rounding, living reliably, and has extra utility they're doing a good job. I agree that most Cav/Paladins (minus Makalov and potentially Astrid depending on the context) and the fliers (minus Elincia) would be rated higher but don't see the mages below any of the foot combat units.
@@twigz3214 even maximum possible bulk from levels soren isn’t exactly good enough for primary combat unit late game on maniac. Facing double digits amount of enemies on enemy phase is the norm for primary combat units and soren just ain’t doing that reliably. Avoid support helps but you are still expecting to be hit by some of of the attacks even if you dodge some with the amount of enemies the game throws at you. That’s why for example oscar is so much more reliable at that kind of thing. He’s got the bulk to handle hits if needed a lot if avoid from his support and sol potentially also contributes a decent amount. You need to be able to handle like 15 trash enemies since that’s just a lot of what you are gonna be facing massive swarms of bodies. You’d be pushing your luck trying to dodge tank through clash with a mage on maniac It’s way better to be tanky have solid avoid and sustain then primarily relying on just avoiding things oscar and potentially his support partner has all 3 tanking in one sustain avoid and traditional. Even stuff like the laguz fair better as a supplementary unit especially considering their investment is entirely exp so for example on clash where running out of weapons is genuinely a concern it can be nice to have a few trained. And you said you were considering soren for a primary combat unit and it’s not unusual for you to be sent like 12 units at once. Soren’s gonna be the preferred target because of lower defense. If one unit is genuinely getting all the combat that’s a whole forged weapon broken every map
Good April fools bait I've only played PoR twice, both on hard and the first time with no bexp, and Soren was fine in both runs, not an all star but top 10 for sure. Early mages are always great, gotta my favorite archetype in FE.
…well I mean yeah PoR isn’t exactly hard, and if you dump Bonus EXP into anyone with 1-2 Range, they’ll be fine. I think mages get it rough because their ranks are split across 3 weapons, and you do get late game mages to use siege times without investing into them. The biggest advantage you get from investing into a mage is a unit who can use the Rescue Staff for big plays while also having decent combat/survivability. Which is decent enough but it is very specific. I also do think Oscar is a better BEXP dump on most casual runs than Soren. Just bc Kieran and Titania are also good doesn’t mean another horsie isn’t good.
You don't get equally good 1-2 range out of any unit you bexp. For example, in chapter 11, 20/1 Marcia and 20/1 Oscar can't one round the cavs or knights at 1-2 range (no jav or handaxe forges for a bit), 20/1 soren can one round these enemies with an unforged thunder due to the res/def disparity. Similarly, there are a lot of late game enemies that marcia and Oscar will struggle to one round at 1-2 range that a mage doesn't struggle with (late game tigers, wyverns, and paladins, for example) The reason you bexp a mage is for the good 1-2 range (particularly in the late game), siege tome access and rescue. Fair to prefer other things, and the mounted units are better, that's why I have almost all of them at least 1 tier higher than soren, and some of them 2 tiers higher, but I think it's a decent niche.
Huh. I really like your rescue drop argument. Every time someone makes a tier list for FE games with Rescue, they always say something like "You can leave this flier at Lvl 1 and you still deploy them for rescue drop utility," and then we penalize said units for being rescue dropped? Why is rescue dropping a benefit if it inherently needs someone of value to be rescue dropped? Someone call Wanda bc that doesn't seem fair.
People: Soren is bad in FE9 Me: Sorry what was that? I cant hear u over my A-Support Soren dodging hits and nuking shit! FE9 aint a Powertrip as other Games but a well trained Soren does net u a lot of benefits. Like sending him with Ike to the frontlines without given a shit Service Announcment: This Comment was writen by someone who only played FE9 on normal mode and is not meant to be used for Hard or Maniac mode. Please exercise caution
This is probably the first video where I have to hard disagree with everything across the board. My reasonings: Movement: as pointed out, you can shove and rescue mages which is harder to do for cavs, but I'm really questioning what the benefit of that would be exactly here. Why would I a) want a mage to be deep into enemy lines and b) why would I not want this for a cav instead to get *even more* move? A great example is chapter 13, where you have a defend map with little space to move and yet I would still rather use Mordecai to smite Titania so she can block off the choke point on turn 1 over getting Soren slightly closer to where he could maybe do... something? That something not being enemy phasing here with his paper bulk. I found this to be an issue pretty much everywhere in the game. There is not a single map where I would rather shove a mage than Jill or Titania so they can do their thing more quickly, especially not turn 1. As for rescuing, I also have to disagree. You need 2 player actions to do that and instead of deploying a mage and spending 2 actions every other turn, I'd much rather just deploy a fifth cav to just have more PP power and pick stuff up. PoR has many enemy groups of 3-4 and having 5-6 mounted units will just kill all of those on PP. Additionally, having this PP power also means you're gonna take less damage and need less staff actions, further relativating mage utility. Damage: You're severely overstating the res advantage and understate the mt issue. The standard wind tome has only 2 base mt so vs fliers, this becomes an impressive 4 mt with double effectiveness. With Soren's 6 base mag, he'll do a whole lot of 10 damage vs fliers. Ike starts with 5 str and an iron sword at level 1 and will do the same 10 damage. This is pathetic and far from usable. The benchmark is a 10 or so str cavalier with an iron lance and that's completely disregarding that Titania... exists. So lets assume you're gonna train Soren with his 60% mag growth, how does this compare to other units? Well, it's still shit. By 0/15, he's at 14 mag and let's assume C rank wind magic, which he can use for an Elwind with 4 mt for 18 damage. Who else deals 18 damage? Right, Titania at base with the javelin. Who has 5 more move and needs no training to do it. BEXP: I'm a huge proponent of keeping your BEXP and doing the prison chapter stealthy, because I honestly don't see much of a point in training anyone other than Oscar and Ike for a while. BEXP, especially on harder difficulties is much better used on Marcia and Jill who will far exceed the utility of any other unit and have pretty formidable combat stats after promotion, and giving them basically everything will do much more for you than raising Soren. This game has so much terrain and such large maps, that you'd love to send 2 over flying nukes to every problem and have them solve it for you by eating both halves of the map. Having both fliers over a mage and one flier is just better. Like WAY better. The argument against Jill is that you already have Marcia and the BEXP is sparse at this point, but you really have enough, even on maniac if you just don't waste it on raising a bad unit. Vantage sweeping also sucks because why would I gamble on a 21% death every EP rather than just counting damage with a juggernaut? As for Ike pairing, I also don't like this because Ike is 1 range locked. 2 range enemies will simply pick him over Soren and live to PP and Ike would rather support Oscar and Titania to boost their combat. Additional: PoR also gives you literally hundreds of thousands of gold. You will never spend all money unless you outright waste it, so your consumables are not gonna be detrimental to your economy. I just don't see the point of raising a 5 mov heal bot rather than just another cav like Makalov and Astrid and throwing a bunch of purewaters and vulnaries into their inventory. Actually, I don't even see this compared to footies like Boyd, because at least he's kinda durable. And that really speaks to just how bad they are honestly. There's just never a need for any of them outside of siege tomes for turn saves and at that point you're raising a shit unit for like 25 levels to do 4 siege attacks for some hyperspecific playstyle. Not to mention that Callil exists and can also do it at no cost in casual play, too, so it's not like it does anything outside of that context. I really don't see how that makes them anything other than pretty bad.
Just gonna address a few points. For a lot of the game you have one or two units that can shove a cav. If you need the extra couple spaces of movement on the cav, sure, shove them instead of your mage, you still have like 8 other units, most of which aren't combat carries to shove or rescue around a footie or two. Soren's bulk isn't paper thin on US hard. The math in the video wasn't that Soren had a 21% chance of dying on enemy phase in the chapter, it was that he had a 17% chance (once 2rn is factored in) of getting hit once by a typical enemy on the map. His chance of death against a group of 4 of those enemies on enemy phase was 1.6% without Ike support, under .5% with Ike support I'm not understating the damage issue, it just doesn't really exist on hard once you bexp your mage. Bexpd Soren one rounds most enemies for the entire game on base or lightly forged thunders. I agree he does suck in the early game or if you don't bexp him though, I said that in the video. He's great after you bexp him. Or if you don't want to deal with his early game you can just wait for Ilyana and bexp her. Against some mid-late enemies Soren's 1-2 range combat is even notably better than the premiere physical units. A level 6, chapter 26 wyvern lord has 39 hp and 8 res. To one round them with an unforged thunder tome, you need 24 magic. Soren hits this at 20/11 on avg. That same enemy has 21 defense. To one round them with a max forged javelin, you need 30 strength, or 29 with a max forge hand axe. An avg 20/20 Marcia is 7 points of might away from one rounding. An avg 20/20 Jill is 4 points away. Against higher res enemies like the paladins on the same map (39 hp, 11 res), On avg, Soren needs to either be 20/16 to one round, or at 20/11 he can do it with 3 points of might forged onto a thunder. Against the same paladin (16 def), 20/20 Marcia can't one round with a max forge javelin (though Jill could do this one!). Soren is sweeping enemies at 1-2 range here that Marcia needs to fight at one range. I don't think siege tomes are a specific playstyle thing either, every playstyle benefits from being able to kill something from 10 spaces away. But you aren't leveling a mage for 25 levels just to siege tome, you would do it because their combat is good enough in the early to mid game, great in the late game, and then siege tomes and rescue staffing are the cherry on top.
@@actuallizardI really don't agree with this assessment at all though. Chapter 26 wyvern lords? Why do I need to level up a level 1 early game mage who sucks unless you dump 10 levels worth of BEXP into him? Not to mention, why do I need a mage at all for this? You can simply 2 round them with a high def unit, use a forged weapon or use Tanith with the Sonic Sword. You really don't need to put a mountain worth of xp into a unit who starts with shit stats and has significant problems even when trained. It also doesn't have as much practical use as you'd think. This isn't Fates where half the maps have rout objectives and leaving an enemy alive will get one of your units killed. Even if you let some of them live by missing benchmarks, you really shouldn't let this slow you down. It's far more efficient to press on and let your cav squad and fliers pursue the objectives. The rest can pick off the scraps. You don't need to carry a 6 move unit 45 tiles into the map to get rid of enemies. A stronger action economy with more cavs for PP power will give you better results. As for the BEXP exconomy, I really don't see why I should bother. Soren needs like 10 levels to significantly contribute (I tried with less and it just yielded no worthwhile results). That's enough BEXP to give my Oscar a nice +2 or so on most his combat stats. I'd much rather have those. I honestly don't see how Soren's worth investing in with just so many units to compete for BEXP. Kieran, Astrid, Marcia, Jill, Makalov, Tormod and yes even Mist are better targets for giving large amounts of BEXP to. Mist gets a mount and has better staff rank than Soren, Tormod has Celerity and the rest are mounted axe units. All that is just better. As for siege tomes, yes it's useful but you really don't have that many and Callil is right there ready to use Thoron. I don't need Soren for it. Additionally, the accuracy is less than ideal and you know what also kills enemies 10 spaces away? Marcia and Jill. They can just go there and kill them. Even on hard, enemies really aren't that threatening and they can both just walk in and kill everything. The only time I found siege tomes actually useful was in the boulder chapter to lure the boss out with Jill and siege him to get rid of this guy first. Again, my problem fundamentally is why use a mage when I can just quad dance 4 cavs and send Marcia and Jill to kill everything? They absolutely can do it just fine and have done so in all of my playthroughs. And that way I simply don't need to ferry and shove a mage around who will die in 2 hits. It's easier, more efficient, more consistent and takes less effort. So why even bother?
Good video but i don't agree because of a difference in how we see the game. For me if you need to invest everything to make a unit good it's not a good unit. And without BEXP soren is really a pain to train. For so little reward cause siege tome can be all wield by calil that will dowhat sorens can do without invest. Staff users we have mist and rhys, with mist being a monted unit after promotion , that can wield a 1-2 magic weapon with better chances to survive without vantage + perma crit on soren. Rhys is... a better soren? You can do more with rhys and note waste a lot of time with BEXP+staff grind for a little less Ennemy phase viability....where youhave 10monted unit that doesn't revolve around any RNG to survive. Generals can be beaten by any mage and are not a problem in the game, so you don't need to hyperfocus anyone on that. For me, yes mages have a niche, but use tormod/illyana and not soren for this. It's just so hard to have a good feeling playing him and cost you so much ..... But great content! Thank you for it
mages being bad PoR is feels like an alien statement to me. Cause at worst they glorified priest late game. And making the most out of low use heal is helpful.
Mages aren't bad in PoR. It's RD that they're utter trash in, terrible movement, terrible speed and durability, and terrible caps. They don't have all of those issues in PoR. PoR is just easy enough that your many juggernauts can clear out most things before mages have the chance to fight much. Physic is great though.
I know you're sponsored and all that, and thus can't say anything bad about it, but my god does Dofus Touch look awful. I've seen flash games that look better. As someone who really enjoyed the Wakfu anime (the show set in the Dofus universe) it's been sad watching their attempts at games just become failure after failure. Even the MMO was pretty awful for its time.
It looks like there's a season 4 of the Wakfu anime coming out if it interests you still. Anyway I agree the game looks bad. Looks ok at the start. The Lava environment looked nice. Then they show the gameplay where you'd be spending 95% of your time. Just ugly all around. This is probably petty, but the text boxes look awful, worse than any game I've seen (mobiles games included) in the past 10 years. The UI is bad overall.
![Contemporary Era (Quantum Incursion) [Forge of Empires]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/K6KrRJFBZuw/mqdefault.jpg)
![SAFEPLANET - ดาวเคราะห์ [ THE PLANET ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4X1XL3I_k3c/mqdefault.jpg)
As is becoming an annual tradition, I forgot to look at the date when publishing, this is not an April Fool's video lmao
edit- Also for clarity, arguments made in this video and the footage for the video pertain to US hard mode, not maniac
edit edit - I don't know what to tell you guys, I've been in the trenches arguing with people about Soren for years, glad to see maybe sentiment isn't as low on these mages as I thought!
Most of this still very much holds true for maniac in all respects except that Soren's CoD against a mob of enemies will be a touch higher depending on enemy composition and headcount, but that is something that can be controlled.
It needs to be said though that mages' niche of hitting res with powerful 1-2 range becomes even more prevalent on Maniac due to how absurdly bulky enemies get. It is that much harder to 1RKO enemies with even maxed out steel, and later silver forges in the mid to lategame once theyre promoted after c18. Maniac also just has more 1-2 range weapons on enemies in general.
One thing that isn't mentioned in this video is the funny triple arrow skill build you can do on Soren(Adept, Vantage, Provoke) that has the benefits of adept + vantage outlined in the video, but also has the benefit of highly encouraging Maniac's massive count of siege tomes(there are 6 total in c18 alone!) to target Soren despite his naturally high res stat.
Before anyone brings it up, no I am not taking the crit forge glitch into consideration here as the excuse of abusing glitches just because a game/difficulty is poorly designed is very fucking lame.
Never heard people say PoR marges are bad. RD mages however....
But PoR? Only ever heard praise for them, especially Maniac Mode
@@FalcoFreeling yeah I saw that and was convinced this was just an april fools video
The real fooling is the fact that there's no trick!
Making a serious video is perhaps the best April fools joke possible anyway.
The mage hate is generally directed at radiant dawn to my knowledge. I think Soren and Ilyana are good! Even on Maniac they have the crit underflow glitch keeping them relevant.
My issue here is the hype on Soren’s survivability. On maniac, one hit is often enough to KO him. Soren really wants the chapter 1 seraph robe to be able to tank an attack, but Ike desperately wants that for chapters 2 and 4. Dodge tanking isn’t reliable in the early and early mid game. Soren is a liability until his Ike support is online and until he gets a good bit of speed.
Anyways, awesome video as always, and I agree with pretty much everything you said in regard to hard mode! And most of it with maniac in consideration.
I love Ilyana in Radiant Dawn because of her overwhelming availability. She's there for most of Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4. She can be present basically 80% of the time even if she might be the lackluster mage option in the game. Even in Radiant Dawn I love mages, though they fall off hard in the end game due to bosses having such massive resistance ratings. Sages also invalidate priests as they can also use staves.
@@davekat Ilyana serves as a transport carrier between Micaiah and Ike, pretty sure. So yeah, she's everywhere.
Radiant Dawn Iliana is at least a viable unit on easy mode. 1. as the enemies are weaker and you get so much experience, she struggles lest with her speed and 2. the +5 omniboost in tower greatly mitigates her speed issues there to the point where she can double Deghinsea with Rexbolt ... and completely wreck him (she does like 66 damage or so to him, lmao).
But on anything other than easy they really did her dirty :(
Just gotta say, the mage lizard on the thumbnail is fantastic.
OH thanks for mentioning it I just realized I totally forgot to credit the artist! Gonna add that to the description now
The actual big reason you might use Tormod over other sages is that he comes with free Celerity in a game where you can't steal it off him to give to someone else. Mages' low move can be worked around in the ways you mentioned, but having 2 extra is still inarguably a huge boon.
Celerity is the only benefit Tormod has, but his problem is he just joins too late at too low of a level. Ilyana and Soren at least have a lot more time to develop them especially that staff rank.
While I do often like evaluating units with a lot of nuance, Ilyana just makes me go "hungry thunder girl go brrrrrrrr" and I give her ridiculously blatant favoritism every run I do.
I absolutely adore Ilyana. I always use her first. Though typically I use Soren and Ilyana both because staff utility is good. That said, staff utility is less needed in RD because you're required to have Micaiah for Endgame.
"There's a lot of bonus EXP in Path of Radiance" is like *the* reason that units can only be So Bad in PoR. It's not a premium request to actually level up a unit.
Also I have always felt like Tormod had the *easiest* "why this one" out of every mage, because +2 move from Celerity is huge. Remember the whole 'we can get people places'? Tormod doesn't need the shove or rescue. It's the specific reward for investing in him when you already had lots of opportunities with others.
I kinda feel like people just blend together por and rd, and mages got nerfed quite a bit between those games in my opinion.
So maybe a lot of people just remember rd and apply that to por
100% agree. Magic users are much harder to use safely in Radiant dawn. They have the durability of wet paper. I had Micaiah get 1 shot by a random archer enemy even after I gave her an angelic robe and had been leveling her up!
Agreed, Soren is solid. Particularly in maniac mode, vantage adept Soren can be a very useful tool to take out bulky enemies reliably, and so many enemies have 1-2 range so comparing the low might of times to high might 1 range weapons doesn't apply since you almost always have a jav/HA equipped. Another solid video
yeah, japanese PoR Soren is a sight to behold, especially once he gets access to the vantage skill. -1 crit underflowed thunder tome go BRRRR
I think you forgot the big deal for why might wanna use Tormod over, that what was suppose to be Tormod's main selling point, Celerity, since skills when removed don't turn into scrolls and you don't get a celerity scroll, Tormod has an effect +2 movement against Ilyana and Soren.
On a run where I used all 3 mages, Tormod was excellent because he could get more actual healing done once he promotes (which is pretty much immediately if you need it). He didn't hit as hard as Soren or especially not my blessed Ilyana but he did still do decent
It's funny that in fully rigged 100% growths LTC's POR mages are literally better than everyone other than marcia. (and early game anima mages in general are just dominant in almost all FEs)
The main reasons early game anima mages are good are A: staves B; seige tomes and C: easy early 1-2 range
The early 1-2 range is way better when you can assume every enemy just misses, but even so soren way outdamages anyone at 1-2 other than titania
Staves are OK but surprisingly there are 0 maps where Soren's higher magic cap matters over Rhys. In spite of this if you're dilligent you can easily get soren to B staves to use rescue, (15 heals 14 mends 12 Physic/ward=41 uses of staves to reach B) and in a casual playthrough his high magic growth matters for some rescues
Seige tomes however are really good, you can seige tome a door with bolting to get it out of the way, Seige tome annoying enemies in the way of marcia, or seige tome a boss in a map like chapter 27. Since Path of radiance has roughly 19 uses of anima mage seige tomes available there is a lot of seige to go around your 1-2 seige tome users. POR mages are basically Ballisticians late game
Kind of weird how people would complain about mages in Path of Radiance when it's successor, Radiant Dawn, treats mages much worse.
Firstly their speed. Many magic users struggle to double enemies throughout most of the game And the speed cap of mages isn't great either.
Especially light magic users suffer, they have the same speed caps as generals! And then we have Thunder magic, which has been nerfed into the ground.
It now has even less might than wind, while still being less accurate. The crit bonus is negligible. Its only saving grace is that it's effective against wyverns and dragons.
People complain about RD mages even more.
_banging pots and pans_ siege tomes siege tomes siege tomes
I remember in my first play through I immediately blundered both my healers so Soren suddenly became very useful for me as I desperately needed staves
As an addition to mages having low mov, tormod, a fire mage you get alongside muarim, has celerity, a skill that raises his move by 2 I believe
Tormod has 2 extra movement; that's the reason why he's worth using. He was my go-to mage in my first playthrough.
I’ve never understood the PoR magic hate - the only real issue for me is you have to ignore using multiple magic types if you want to use high level tomes
paladins are op. and self heal with sol.
Soren is the only Mage I ever consider using in Path of Radiance. Never thought to give him the early BEXP, though he always does just fine without it. I could never not use Oscar for the whole game though. I just love having him support with Kieran and travel around maps killing everything. That isn't strictly related to this video though.
Either way some things to think about for my next playthrough of Path of Radiance, which is long overdue at this point. Just gotta finish my second playthrough of Engage first...
Yeah, never really thought less of Mages either in Path of Radiance! Though I only ever used Soren and Illyana (I tend to have TWO of a certain unit to spread my army out in a Fire Emblem game! Two or Three Flyers to back each other up and play hit and run flanking, at least TWO or Three Horseriders, Two Main Mages, A Healer or Two who will later be able to use Magic to fight when not healing, and the rest were Foot locked as they usually had BETTER stats to make up for being foot locked. I NEVER benched my Knights or Archers, Frankly I feel I was the ONLY Fire Emblem player that DIDN'T hate the Archer OR Knight class ever. I worked AROUND the lower movement and lack of attacking in the one space. Hence I didn't worship Horseriders, found them as my "they can reach and help out anyone needing them FASTER or get to certain locations if I didn't want to risk flyers" characters.
Got finished with my fourth run of Engage Last year, stopped to try and replay a fourth run of Three Houses, but man I'll give Engage a MAJOR plus is I can get into it and out before "It's SO BORING" kicks in as the other Fire Emblems gave me! Three Houses has abt TOO MUCH busy work in it that I reached Chapter 9 and just stopped playing to play Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, It's been two months and I haven't restarted my Three Houses run, just playing Dragon's Dogma. But I feel around playthrough Three of Three Houses which was Golden Deer, I was tapped out! Even if I skipped cutscenes. The month thing wore out it's welcome. Still love Three Houses, but Engage reminded me of WHY I prefer the old traditional way of things. I might give Path of Radiance a try again, but frankly have no idea how to emulate it (It's been a goal of mine to find out how to do this, I made the mistake of TRADING my path of radiance game after beating it all those years ago expecting to buy it back cheaper later on and learned the HARSH reality of limited releases as I NEVER saw that game again and HATE how there was never a remaster or at least release on the WiiU or SWITCH of Path of Radiance, but I was able to play Mystery, Genealogy and Thracia 776 and Binding Blade, so wish me luck in finding a way to emulate this one!) I feel people complain for the sake of complaining, not to invalidate their complaints as some ARE valid (Like how swords have little love in Engage and what the fuck did they do with the Flame Lance with that HUGE WT on it!) but some like "Archers suck without Close Counter" just make me wonder, did they idiotically place their Archer where an enemy could get next to them! Now I know why the tutorial back in Blazing Sword had to TELL ME to be careful leaving them open for Melee! Some idiots NEED to be told this is just fucking SAD as I NEVER left my Archers OPEN like that! Hell I risk my Heavy units moving forward and BLOCKING the way to my squishes in a Fog of War Map! Only time I got caught off guard was one where a FUCKING PEGASUS KNIGHT had a Javelin of all things, meaning covering my Staff wielder meant NOTHING, thankfully they survived and that Pegasus Knight got a ARROW for her trouble, but at least I learned NOT to underestimate the possibility anymore LOL)
I used Illyana and Callil my first run and they were pretty solid, probably could have done better if I were willing to sink money into forged tomes. But while mages are just aight in PoR, they're just godawful in RD where enemies actually have a Res stat which makes the low tome Mt an irreconcilable issue
I loved my mages in PoR, although RD has been a bit unfortunate so far with them...
Even with +2 mag, skill, speed, and res from save transfers on soren, illyana, and rhys , their horrible speed cap prevents them from doubling most enemies, and their horrible hp and defense makes them guarenteed to die in 2 hits from even the most basic enemies. With the change in biorhythm and weapon accuracy/damage, trying to rely on dodge tanking will eventually get them killed, so I have to go through every turn making sure there is never more than a single enemy that can reach them or they just die.
I'm definitely going to try giving Soren vantage though, he's the best of them and that could work really well for solving some of the enemy phase issue, thank you for the idea!
Yeah RD is a lot crueler to mages, enemies actually have res in that game
Are you sure people weren't criticizing Soren's performance in Radiant Dawn? Soren's pretty clearly the most trainable foot unit in PoR (discounting Ike, I guess? depending on how you want to evaluate that). Plus Siege tomes are more prevalent and more relevant. He's still not a world-beater outside of 100% growths, but the only chapter I can think of off-hand where it's optimal to bench him is for a stealth clear of Prison Break.
But in RD he's trash (and so are all the mages).
Complete perfection: a mage Lizard
An actual mage Lizard, would you say?
I think bonus exp is not necessary for earlygame POR units to be strong. _Kill feeding_ and denying Titania or ect. the maximum number of finishing blows possible is the main factor for early game unit exp. For example on map 1 generics, Titania is getting about -1 exp(rounded up to 1) on a kill finish. If you convert bonus exp on a value-per-level scale she still gets something like ~5x less total bonusexp per kill here than allies under level 10. And it takes like half of the game for her exp rewards to get much better. It's a puzzle to chose how Titania preforms in the map. Obviously bonus exp is not even accessible yet and the bonus per chapter here is _tiny._ I mention this as the game carefully tries to build your squad for viable kill-feeding ease. Mostly with Ike and Oscar. The game specifically makes swords weak (and Oscar unavailable-ish to lose exp access) and Ike defensively stat-ed for speed/res/luck/def to leave enemies on 1-8 hp, so underdeveloped allies can get freebie kills. (Ike's accuracy is way better though). He does this with enough bulk (when fed a lot of _very_ early game stuff) to get a set-up on player phase and 1-3 on enemy phase too. Like, Even the narrative wants you to prioritize Ike's training here ffs... Later on, if he downgrades back to an iron sword, he can chose to allow all(1-4~ shitters) weaker allies to start progressing with kill self-denial. Even his promotion denial forces a situation where Ike can easily leave targets on low hp. I didn't bexp Soren last time on Hard (like only 50-250 bexp) and he still was my ~3rd highest level unit by chapter 16 (natural, no-seal promotion to level ~2). I beat most chapters 2-3 turns after the Bexp max window. Even if Ike's cap-trapped at level 20, the chip exp compared to kill exp is so much smaller. Not to mention allied shitters like Soren shouldn't need help _much_ by the time Ike's 20. Ike allows your POR team to build up both player and enemy phase power instead of being Juggernaut-locked. Not that Juggernaut-ing doesn't work well. It's just kinda boring and not as tactically engaging.
I actually have used soren in this exact way before. It was pretty flawless and absurdly reliable, and juggernauting with 1-2 range mages just feels fun. Everything you said's true
I think a lot of complaints come from these enemies having more resistance than most FE games. Just the normal "worse = bad" mentality.
Yeah, I just dismiss them as QUITTERS who get upset and don't even TRY to do better, just give up because they can't GOD MODE ONE SHOT! I just stop listening to them A LONG TIME AGO!
@@paulman34340 that is some INTERESTING use of capitalization, I have to say. Makes it look like a TH-cam video title.
@@IschmarVI Why Thank You. I do my best to impress! I also sometimes use "Quotations" But I really want to SHOUT them out. But seeing how this is text. CAPITAL is the next option
I think the real over-dramatization in PoR is how bad Nephanee is. Yeah, she's meh but sloting her into your roster in PoR is much less of a hassle than having to deal with RD 2-1 where she doesn't have transfer bonuses.
This is a thing? I thought the community generally liked Nephanee. She was definitely one of my favorite units in the game.
@@VHuntrD She's beloved by the casual community but the tier list consensus for PoR is that Infantry = bad unless they provide unique utility. Given some BEXP she's a fine combat unit that will need some ferrying around but isn't gonna cause you any real issues. Jill and Nephanee are the only two units who really want a transfer bonus so you may as well get them both to make the harder game easier.
Nephanee only needs to hard carry one map in RD but if she has no transfer bonus it can become the most frustrating map in the game if you are going for BEXP objectives.
@@VHuntrD Nephenee is considered a bad unit in tier lists. She's a well loved character, but tier-wise she's considered terrible. This is actually a pretty common thing to see nowadays.
Back in the day I always heard about how good Nephenee is, don't use "Jeigans" because they fall off late game, wait to Lvl 20 to promote all units, etc. In terms of high-level play, though, all of these things are considered incredibly bad advice.
Similar issue with the Est Archetype. "Est characters are great because they have high growths and will outperform your starting characters if you grind them up!"
In reality, Ests are considered garbage because at best they won't be _that_ much better than other units and it takes way too long to actually level them up to make it work while. You have to sit and grind to get them. Despite that I will still never abandon Nino if I replay FE7 so I guess I'm part of the problem. (Though tbf, Nino is my exception; I don't use Sophia, Amelia, Ewan, or Tormod either.)
nephenee has a few things going for her. She can use the knights ward which means she gets very fast very quickly with some bonus experience and she effectively turns into a dismounted paladin. Turns out, beiing a dismounted paladin is still not that bad. Its not outstanding, but it is not bad. perfectly usable unit in a game that is full of units that are at least perfectly usable.
Soren has been a long running blorbo for me, so i am glad other ppl are on the Soren propaganda train
Every video you make somehow scratches this deep Fire Emblem itch in my brain and I always come out the other end satisfied
mages arent bad in telius, its just the game throws SO many beefy reinforcements at you that having a paladin sit there and kill 8 things on enemy turn is 1000000000000% better than your mage killing 1 thing and then dying to repeated javelins
or in other words: mages are bad in tellius.
Killing one unit is very generous for RD mages
9:00 “forget one rounding, Soren is chipping for pretty puny amounts of damage” *clip shows Soren doubling and K’Oing* I’ll take your word for it.
Soren is not one rounding those enemies, they've already been set up for him to kill. Puny might have been a bit of an exaggeration though, 7x2 isn't *that* bad.
@@actuallizardHe is still doubling though, which shows that being weighed down is pretty irrelevant for him against most enemies.
I have a hard time seeing someone getting through Maniac mode with their sanity intact without training up a sage. There are groups of 10+ wyverns on Clash that a strength capped Marcia can do 4x2 to with a javelin, and the vast majority of them have 1-2 range preventing using stronger weapons on enemy phase. You basically need magic, high rank bows, or Boyd (and maybe resolve Tauroneo?) critting to get through that in a reasonable timeframe.
japanese mages are built differently though due to the crit underflow forge glitch that gives them access to autocrit uberthunder.
Tormod is underrated in path of radiance due to his move
if you arent a paladin or a flyer you are low tier.
JUSTICE FOR MY BOY
I can’t say I have a ton of experience with PoR having only played it for the first time last year, but Soren was a vital playthrough of my blind ironman. From staff utility to adept + gamble for ~50% crits with a thunder tome, Soren was in my top 5 units easily.
Unfortunately Ilyana died so I never got a chance to use her properly. But I really want to my next time I play PoR. And wind having 2 might isn’t the issue imo, it’s the fact that effective is only x2
This isn't related to the topic of FE9 mages, but I do enjoy seeing what people come up with for forge names for their playthroughs/footage. I especially liked Marcia's TIGER SHOT
In this run I named them after soccer shots from the anime "Captain Tsubasa"!
Yes. Coming up with forge names in FE9 and FE11 is half the fun!
(my favourite naming is probably still dondon151 naming his thunderbolt forge in FE11 "wolt tackle", lmao.
As an Infantry Enjoyer, I appreciate your comment on how horses are a bit overhyped.
I think for me it's more like infantry are underhyped. Horses and fliers are excellent, but I think sometimes people talk about infantry like it's impossible to get them places
Agreed. I am so sick and tired of FE metas devolving into Horse/Flyer Emblem....
I remember mages feeling extremely fun and good for countering specific units but too slow/squishy with their waddling to keep up with cav and laguz rushes consistently. Great on def and sand maps or against many laguz/on corridor heavy maps. Reinforcements punish them hard as fuck
The thing that makes PoR mages look bad to a lot of people, in my opinion, is that they're never the untouchable gods that they can become in some other games, like FE7 and FE4. Also, people overvalue facetanking on enemy phase. Yes, you _can_ do it, but honestly, even on hard, enemy density is low enough that you can player-phase most things. I also think people overvalue very high move. Not that it isn't valuable, but most maps in PoR don't actually reward you (much) for just bumrushing the objective at maximum speed with paladins and fliers. It's good to have some, but the whole thing where they define entire games is insane to me.
Also, when you said that rescued units would _mostly_ be foot units especially in PoR, you're underselling it. Mounted units _cannot_ be rescued in this game, not even by transformed Laguz. Not even by 41-con, 80-weight transformed Nasir. I actually just went and checked on a trial map on one of my completed files. It's just not allowed, period. And, of course, being able to shove mounted units is also incredibly rare. People seriously underestimate the mobility foot units get in PoR due to rescue-dropping and especially shoving.
All that said, PoR mages (and sages) are, for the most part, mediocre. They're _fine,_ but not really all that great. Which is disappointing. I wish they were better. But hey, at least Path of Radiance mages don't have lower speed caps than armors. They saved that bit of BS for the sequel. >.>
Wow, a sponsorship I actually give a fuck about. Wakfu was a fun watch maybe I'll check out that game
fun video! ive heard the mages bad in por argument too quite a bit recently and it always takes ne back cause I've always found them useful.
Interested to hear your thoughts on mages in rd as I think they're put in a much tougher spot
SorenXIke hype!!??
I just did a recent PoR playthrough after not touching the game since release. One of my main takeaways is that Defense is one of the most important stats in the game. Enemies hit hard and there's lots of them, so being able to take hits is crucial.
Why are you dropping the Pegasus Band at 11:00?
I used Soren, Ilyana, and Tormod in one playthrough, and they all performed excellently.
I actually enjoy Soren, Ilyana, Callil, and even Tormod was pretty great with the Knight Ring & Celerity to effectively have a mounted Sage in PoR. My one qualm with sages is that Knives could've at least been more interesting of an option 😅
knives could have at least been not completely dogshit. The stiletto is the only knive that doesn't make me wanna leave the room and even that one isn't too great, especially because you get it extremely late. I do like volke though but that is in *spite* of him using daggers; not because of it. He is just way too cool.
@IschmarVI Yeah, the overhaul daggers and knives got in RD was a hugely satisfying change, despite other changes still making them clearly not great compared to axes or lances
I usually only play Maniac mode, and as such usually end up lowmanning it to survive, so staff utility usually doesn't materialize in my playthroughs. I've been meaning to go back and play hard mode again so I can do things like actually forge weapons for maps other than clash & endgame or use units other than titania ike jill and nephenee, so I might end up using Soren. My only issue with him (and by extension other PoR mages) is that the best way to play through it is to invest a large amount of XP skills and items into a small number of units, and by making a mage one of those few units you gamble all of that investment on a character with pitiful defense. On maniac mode, it's simply the case that at one point your Soren will get clapped by an enemy he doesn't one-round, usually at or past ch17 when promoted units start appearing. Of course you can just restart the chapter, but a high defense unit would likely do the same job but more reliably. This applies in a lesser sense to hard mode as well, but as you said the % chance of him surviving combats is high so with the reduced enemy count + easier OHKO you are rolling that chance only a few times per map.
Also, unless you are playing that way for real-time quickness, siege tome-ing bosses is a gimmick that hurts your army through lower overall XP gain and weapon leveling. Especially on maniac mode, where BEXP isnt so liberal and the per turn decrease is like -5 assuming you can't clear the map anyway before the decreases start applying. And in a mode where staff utility is at its lowest (staff users will just get swarmed and die and vulneraries have their own 4 inventory slots to take up in an enemy phase focused game), the niche of siege tome-ing lategame bosses is just filled by calill, who can instantly eat your spirit dust from ch14 and the one 2 chapters after she joins. Chapter 17-4 probably has the best use case for it, as it is consistently one of the hardest parts of my runs since they enemies are brutal for the time and Ike is so heavily nerfed by carrying the heron girl and he's usually one of my top units.
I agree with you, I think people are kinda obsessed with super efficient runs. I always use Soren and he never disappoints me
Playing path of radiance right now and mist just joined. She's level 1 and has 1 strength...soren is lv12 and has 0 strength...
that thumbnail is giving me some serious Ratopombo Nerevarine vibes and I like it
I mean in Japanese Maniac they technically get 255 crit thunder tomes. So that’s a thing. Presuming that’s within acceptable glitch parameters.
glitching is fer scrubs
@@summerwinter89 I’m assuming the misspelling is to convey a joking tone, in which case that’s hilarious! 🤣
I love Soren so much. His supports with Ike are so great. So, I will always believe that he is worth using, whether or not he's actually good for combat. Plus, PoR has so few staff users that training one could never be a bad idea.
To be honest my 2 favorite units in most Fe games are paladins and mages/Sages. I always found having a good supply of both let me handle anything that the game could throw at me, as anything that couldn't get one rounded by a paladin, could get one rounded by mage/sage with enough investment. Also, yeah Soren with good speed and skill growths would often proc skills for some real survivability and damage.
When I was a kid (and didn't realize I was bi) I was definitely gay for and shipping Ike and Soren (even before getting their ending in RD) without realizing. So maybe biased but regardless of stats Soren is best boy
RIP any consideration of Tormod's Celerity
Yeah I undersold him. I think he's going to get his own video as Im working on another playthrough using him and he's pretty interesting
path of radiance mages? Really not that bad imo
Radiant Dawn mages though? thats where we start having issues
but yeah i agree tome might is a non issue. that elthunder may as well be a steel axe to the majority of enemies you face
Now if you wanna see good mages in Tellius, the mages in Radiant Dawn Exalted are great.
Shout out to Calill for being a beast of a unit... in maniac mode 0%... if you allow the crit underflow glitch...
glitching is fer scrubs
I love ALL ActualLizard videos!!!! ❤
I use the two you get early and basically no others.
I'd recommend you try out Tormod and Calill sometimes. Tormod is pretty cool thanks to his celerity skill allowing him to much better keep up with paladin emblem. And calill, while locked out of staves, has some decent stats for a prepromote. With the usual bexp treatment, she quickly turns into a pretty solid mage unit. Plus, she actually has pretty solid DEF growth which means that levelled up she should survive a few hits in a pinch.
I enjoy using Soren because there's some neurons in my brain that likes using the important characters.
You did forget to mention two pretty impactful things; tomes have a particularly high weight for their might, and you can’t forge anything over basic tomes. The former hurts Soren’s long term potential on the harder modes as an early promotion combined by being slowed by up to 4 when using Elthunder (very likely Soren never gets strength on fixed mode without an energy drop, and if you’re using an energy drop for that, well… it is AN option). Ilyana and Tormod are mostly spared this fate but Soren isn’t, so he kinda needs Adept after units start promoting. I do think that it’s super easy to justify magic dust on your primary magic unit, so that can either help Soren compensate when using lighter tomes, or make the other two early mages have less of a comparative disadvantage in that stat in particular.
I do think Soren can work well with enough resources, but I think everyone in this game can; Mia with her high speed really just needs a +5 might forge to justify her high speed niche, and that same vantage scroll can really help out Nephenee, especially on maps with Laguz enemies where she can pick and choose if she wants to take half damage from those guys or full, and then she can equip a better weapon than the javelin like a killer or brave lance.
I’m surprised to hear people think Soren is bad. Maybe it’s because he just seemed a natural BEXP candidate to me, but I found him to be an absolute beast with those siege tomes.
CALILL BEST GIRL BYE
I used to consider Ilyana the best mage in PoR, but having used Tormod once, Tornod is easily the best. That extra 1 move from celerity is a godsend. In my opinion, having less time to raise his staff rank doesn't matter because there aren't many staves in PoR, and your promoted mages really only need the basic heal, which they can use at base. Soren's stats are just the worst of the three mages, I find him not worth investing in even with Adept.
With the way stat gains work in fixed mode, training exp with staff use is a slight detriment to long term stat growth btw.
Uh, two things. One, Celerity gives +2 move, not +1, so it's even better. He's a 7-move mage and an 8-move sage, which is pretty amazing. That's incredibly important for him, though, because...
Two, how on god's green earth do you figure Soren's stats are the worst?! His strength sucks, yes, but his magic and speed are great. Are you looking exclusively at his bases or something? Seriously, he massively outstrips Tormod every time without fail for me, because Tormod's magic growth is just plain inconsistent. It takes very little poor luck for Tormod's magic to rapidly fall behind to the point of borderline unusability. If Tormod didn't have that two extra move, I wouldn't even consider using him basically ever. I use both Ilyana and Soren basically every run I do (and PoR is one of my favorites, so I do a lot) and Ilyana just consistently needs more favoritism (which I of course give her) to be anything like equal to Soren. Yes, with enough of said favoritism, you can get her to use Rexbolt with no speed loss, but that's only even possible for the final chapter, because you don't even get Rexbolt before that.
@@jemolk8945 Saying 1 move was just a typo, I meant 2.
Soren's strength matters a lot. His speed is high, but he's weighed down by pretty much every tome for the entire game, so his attack speed is pretty much the same as Ilyana and Tormod in practice. Tormod's speed also overtakes Soren's on average, shortly after level up promotion, as his growth is higher. The combination of Tormod's higher move and def let him easily get into the front line of battle and stay alive, while Soren requires extra effort to see combat consistently, and when he does there's a higher risk of him dying. Because Soren naturally sees less combat unless you plan your entire strategy around him, he requires more bexp to keep up, while Tormod only requires an initial dump, then he keeps up on his own. The discrepancy in their magic stats is not a big deal, the difference isn't enough for Tormod to not reach the same damage thresholds as Soren. Tormod's base weapon ranks let him use Meteor, Elfire, and Elwind, meanwhile Soren can't train his fire or thunder weapon ranks for a while after he joins due to weapon availability, and his easiest C rank of wind gives him the worst siege tome that's also available later than the other two siege tomes, so you have to put more effort into getting him good weapons for the midgame than Tormod as well.
@@xenofes2 This is just false. Strength does not matter at all, because your mages should be using forged tomes basically always. Tormod overtakes Soren's speed at promoted level 17, on average, and ends up 0.2 higher.
While Tormod does indeed have higher move, he will always see less combat than Soren, for durability reasons. Soren with Ike support(Not a given, granted), is essentially unkillable on hard, so he can be rescue dropped with Ike. And due to deployment slots, you will always have rescuers. Tormod sees at most two enemies each enemy phase, Soren can see up to ten and still have a less than 5% chance of dying. Tormod has a far better player phase, of course, but this is not a player phase game.
Both require a dump, but Tormod requires nearly triple, since he joins so late. For instance, your Soren will be nearly lv. 10- lv. 13 promoted by chapter 15, with an initial influx of 600-900 BEXP, Tormod will want like 2500 BEXP to get there. Or at least 1500 BEXP to promote, which is a far harder sell. While Soren is not the best target of your early game EXP, he is far from the worst. You pump it into two of Marcia, Oscar, Soren, Boyd, Mia and Illyana (Or wait for Jill), of which Soren is better than Mia for 1-2 range, better than Illyana for durability, and arguably better than Boyd, though this is very contentious. Meanwhile, you get ~2900 BEXP by Tormod's chapter (and this assumes stealth 10 and no kill 15, neither of which are certain), of which at least 1000 is spent on Marcia and your second carry. So Tormod barely promotes, and will require extra BEXP if you want one rounding throughout, since, again, he sees very little enemy phase.
As for weapon ranks, Wtf are you smoking? Soren has at least 8,9,10,11,12,13,14 and 15 to grind thunder and fire, mainly thunder. By chapter 10 at max, he should be using exclusively forged thunder... And assuming promotion on 11, he also has 4 maps for staff. If you do go the no laguz kill route, this is 3-4 turns of ward, or D rank.
@qcdragon2225 I was admittedly wrong about Tormod overtaking Soren's speed, that was quick math in my head making a mistake. However, they're within 1 point of each other on average by promoted level 2, so Soren will still have lower attack speed than Tormod with most tomes due to his lower str.
Soren's support with Ike is one of thr slowest in the game. You can't reach A rank for 22 avoid until at least Chapter 23, and if you're doing stealth route on the prison you probably won't deploy Soren, making it Chapter 24 instead. 7 or 15 extra avoid before that is not "essentially unkillable" by any means. Tormod gets higher defense than Soren and is actually somewhat durable as a result. Tormod can fight far more than two enemies per turn and survive, and Soren's chances of survival are typically much lower than 5% if he's facing ten enemies; those numbers were pulled out of nowhere.
In normal play, Soren will be nowhere near promoted level 10 by Chapter 15. You're lucky if he's 20/1 by then, even with bexp. You'd have to be completely neglecting everybody else in your army to achieve that. Could Soren reasonably have a level lead on Tormod when he joins? Sure. But not by that much.
You only get one forged weapon per chapter, and using your early ones just to get a thunder tome to grind Soren's thunder rank is really ill advised. Not only will his thunder rank be automatically bumped to D when he promotes, wasting all of your grinding, but forged hand axes and javelins are much more useful at that point in the game. Soren is also the only mage that really needs forged tomes, because Ilyana and Tormod are able to actually handle the weight of tomes that naturally have higher might. Saying "Soren has 8 extra chapters to waste my limited forge resources to catch up to Tormod" is not a point in his favor.
Chapter 11 is also laughably early to promote at compared to normal play, where units promote around chapter 17. I wasn't going to argue about bexp usage, but it is important when you look at comparing characters in PoR. If you look at how every character performs when you dump all of your bexp into them before you compare them, the comparison is pointless, because every character (except Mist) can easily be a main member of your army for the rest of the game. Comparison of bexp dumps doesn't matter. It's a poor way of creating meaningful discussion, it's a suboptimal way of using bexp, and it's not how the majority of people play the game. In normal play, where you don't give massive favoritism to anybody, Tormod is just better than Soren.
@@xenofes2 My experience with Tormod is that if you're even slightly unlucky for a few levels in a row, he ends up sufficiently screwed to no longer be capable of one-rounding. And that's with giving him the Mage Band. Meanwhile, if you rig Soren a single strength level with bexp early, he's set for the rest of the game. He doesn't even need a bexp dump; by the time I get access to bexp, he's already very close to self-sufficient. I'll top characters off on their levels in between chapters if they're close, but I basically never dump piles of bexp into single characters. ...Also, for the record, Tormod's speed growth lead over Soren is 5%. That is nothing, especially considering you can just give Soren one of the speed-increasing bands.
Also, on siege tome availability -- you can get a Bolting in chapter 16, you can steal a Meteor in chapter 17 (with great difficulty), and you can steal your first Blizzard in chapter 18. So yes, technically last, but it's so much easier to get than that chapter 17 Meteor tome it's not even funny. Then, in chapter 20, you can steal a _second_ Blizzard tome, and this one's even easier. And you haven't at this point seen a second siege tome of any other type. That's actually looking pretty good for Blizzard, I'd say.
I also think people _vastly_ overstate the difficulty of using foot units in Fire Emblem. What the hell are you guys doing that makes it hard for Soren to see combat? Rushing full move every turn with an army of nothing but cavaliers and fliers and undeploying literally everyone else? Getting Soren to combat in normal play is trivial. We're not dealing with LTC strats here. And if he needs a speed boost, you can just rescue-drop him. Not going to say that high move isn't useful -- it's very useful. But the take that if a unit has low move, they're just never going to see much combat, that's just nuts. Not every map is a crazy long linear hallway to the objective, and a lot of them have areas where it's actually useful to leave some units behind.
Finally -- once he promotes, he gets staves, and staves give unreasonable amounts of experience in this game. This is especially true if you can get to C rank for physic, which, in my experience, has never been too difficult. Combine that with the fact that, in the second half of the game, you can steal more physic staves than you could hope to use up, and concern over mages training in combat becomes exclusively for weapon rank. Which, given that Soren shreds basically everything aside from dragons in the lategame with a mere Elwind, barely matters, and you'll get the weapon rank for Tornado anyway just off Blizzard uses, which will then suffice for anything slightly too tanky for Elwind. You don't even _need_ to train his fire or thunder rank. Wind is the worst magic type in PoR, and Soren just doesn't care.
I agree that there is a payoff for training the POR mages. If you account for siege tome utility, they actually the easiest way to clear some of the lategame kill boss maps. But you also can't just look at their mid- and lategame performance, the early game is also important, and that is where mages struggle. Investing in a paladin or flyer is way easier because those units become self sufficient very quickly. Training Soren or Ilyana is way more painful than training Oskar or Kieran. On maniac mode, you have to bend over backwards to give Soren any kills in his first few chapters, because he is in constant danger of being onerounded and does very little damage. Training him on hard mode is more realistic, but still awkward because of his very limited enemy phase. Same goes for Ilyana. Kallil is arguably better than both of them from an efficiency perspective, except for the lack of stave utility.
So yes, you can use mages in POR, but they require more effort to train, favorism, and are also more expensive because tomes cost a lot. But they do have some utility that only they provide.
One of the best parts of Soren is that he is the only Mage in PoR that can double with siege tomes at base in the game thanks to Adept. Yes, you can put Adept onto another Mage, but Soren has it for free. And if you're putting Vantage on Soren to potentially enemy phase with him, then you're not putting it on another character. I'm also not considering your mages actually getting enough strength to not get slowed down by the siege tomes as that's not realistic thanks to all their poor strength growths.
As for Mages in Radiant Dawn, thanks to plot reasons, you can have infinite siege tome usage in the last few maps. There's no feeling quite like slaying a bunch of dragons with 2 Bolting users (only 2 copies in the game and you have to steal both) getting 1-4 blasts per combat thanks to Adept and potential doubling, then using Reyson to refresh them to kill another slaughter another 2 dragons from across the map. My play on those last few maps is to place Soren, Sanaki, and Micaiah around Ena (for accuracy) or Nasir (for power and more speed) and having Reyson refresh them. You could use Rafiel, but he doesn't get Canter or as much movement, so you'd have to reposition after every refresh. And while Micaiah doesn't get Bolting, Purge with Wrath boosting is almost as good, though it makes her much worse sieging down the bosses thanks to Nihil.
Except that Adept isn't reliable lol
It’s rough using mages in Tellius when the god BROM exists… just saying
IMO, the big problem with PoR is that the paladins and flying units dominate so heavily that, from any tier list perspective, anyone who is not one of them is going to inherently suck no matter how good they are. Even a theoretical Ike who could 1HKO every enemy (not 1RKO, 1HKO) would still probably only hit A and likely be in the B compared to an S-rank unit like Titania, Astrid, or Jill.
I really tried to use mages on my first POR run, but every single time Calil went brrr. I just wish I could have more staves without training these mages.
If you can fix Mage's bad defense early on ,they become nasty! I had a run once where Soren had like 9-10 defense and he could tank the map where the black knight kills Ike's dad.
yeah i was under the impression that it was RD mages that people thought of more, especially with a mage lord. PoR has always seemed like one of the easier games, and the issues that the class has there are much less pronounced
People were sour on Mages in PoR? Soren is one of my fav FE characters and was always a mainstay combat unit for me in PoR and RD. Yeah the other mages are kinda meh I guess, I don't have any recollection of using them much despite usually loving to overindulge the Mage class (especially the Shamans), but I always loved using Soren.
Bonus EXP is one of those mechanics I never really got into. I'm still not really sure how it works, and I rarely ever used it in my playthroughs. Maybe to bump an Est's level to usable, but I never did any levelup resetting or anything that I hear Bonus EXP is REALLY good for. The fact that it doesn't exist outside of the GC games is kinda another reason I never bothered to learn it.
I hate how (physically) inaccessible PoR and RD are, especially being on two DIFFERENT consoles. really shot those entries in the foot. great games I'd love to play more, I even own physical copies. but no Wii for RD
I wasn't even aware that people thought mages were bad in Path of Radiance; I assumed the title was a typo and you meant Radiant Dawn
(I was very curious about how you would justify that)
Hey Soren's a viable GM carry in the Radiant Dawn 5 player draft race!
Radiant dawn really put the boot into mages far more than path ever did. 2x effectiveness is a bummer. I prefer Ilyana to Soren and i think Calill is pretty good despite no staves.
I use Tormod in every playthrough and have never had an issue with him. Sure, Taitania, Oscar, Astrid, and Kieran can casually solo the entire game, but part of Fire Emblem is having fun even if it isn't the most optimal strategy.
Perhaps not _super_ relevent but Sorena is a staple in japanese maniac mode. This is due to a bug existing in the japanese version of the game where if you forge the critical bonus of a weapon which already has a bonus (ie a thunder tome), that weapon's crit loops back around to 255.
There’s one other problem worth mentioning for mages. You mentioned earlier that most units perform well with a solid forged weapon and bonus exp which is true. The problem is forging tomes is both absurdly expensive and you can only forge tier 1 variants on their weapons. When you say oh hey mages perform similarly with a forge and exp same as everyone else giving them the same gold amount of investment as everyone else means that their forges will just be less impactful. Heaven forbid you are using a promoted Rhys and need 22,000 for light to have the same might as a base handaxe
Forging tomes isn't a huge deal imo. PoR gives you quite a bit of money. Soren also doesn't really need a bunch of might on his tomes, a bexped Soren wants some crit if you do vantage shenanigans, but the base thunder might, or base thunder might + 1 is enough for a lot of maps.
@@actuallizard tome forges can make money a problem if you wish to use them. Light especially is ludicrous. And it exasperates the flaws already there. When factoring in lower res a handaxe vs a tome initially looks fine. But when you can afford a max might and max hit handaxe If you need it but the same concessions cannot be made on the regular for a tome user the axe unit’s weapon still has a damage advantage despite targeting the higher defense. However the base might just isn’t enough on maniac. Even with funny 100% crit tome mages usually don’t one shot because of the low initial might that would realistically make the higher tier tomes you can’t buy better a surprisingly high amount of the time and without a seraph robe are often at risk of being 1 shot in return so they need to focus on targets that either have 1 or 2 range but not 1-2 range on player phase. They also can struggle to double due to weight being mitigated by strength and them lacking it. If they get to doubling sure then they are one rounding on player phase but it takes a lot of work to get them there. The other option is relying on thieves to steal their gear which they already do with physic since you just can’t buy those till endgame but now your thief has so much on their plate it’s hard to get it all in a reasonable time frame for bonus exp. Using a mage might cause you to miss out on some other goodies from another unit because while that one thing is a nice thing to give your non mage units get decent things to give your units in shops but your mage may NEED a replacement for their tome right now so that would realistically take steal priority. Mages are usable but this is one of the worst games for staffs since having them is a big If and the game just has a lot easier things to make work. The main standout is the siege tomes but actually safely getting a thief to steal those so you can use them can be tricky.
As someone who likes to use Soren I've never struggled with Funds in PoR, the game showers you in money to the point where it's hard to run out. I'm not sure how forging light ever came up since Rhys isn't a combat unit anyway, you're literally just wasting your forge for that chapter. Forging thunder is more expensive than javelins or hand axes but it's in no way so much so that you won't be able to forge other things you need, it's not like you're forging thunder every chapter. On hard you need less might with the mages massive magic and the enemy res gap, and if we're arguing maniac then I don't think any other class has a leg to stand on when it comes to 1-2 range damage output. I also think they only risk being oneshot if you just don't train them or don't give them any resources, which if you're using them as a primary combat unit you probably should.
Also, most mages don't struggle to make up for the weight of the lighter tomes with strenght. Soren when promoted will have 3 anyway, which makes him not get weighed down at all by thunder, fire, and wind which are the tomes he'll use the most anyway. He'll be weighed down by siege tomes but I think that's intended so you don't easily murder anything you want with them. I think a lot of the isses you brought up often don't matter in the grand scheme of things. If the unit is one rounding, living reliably, and has extra utility they're doing a good job. I agree that most Cav/Paladins (minus Makalov and potentially Astrid depending on the context) and the fliers (minus Elincia) would be rated higher but don't see the mages below any of the foot combat units.
@@twigz3214 even maximum possible bulk from levels soren isn’t exactly good enough for primary combat unit late game on maniac. Facing double digits amount of enemies on enemy phase is the norm for primary combat units and soren just ain’t doing that reliably. Avoid support helps but you are still expecting to be hit by some of of the attacks even if you dodge some with the amount of enemies the game throws at you. That’s why for example oscar is so much more reliable at that kind of thing. He’s got the bulk to handle hits if needed a lot if avoid from his support and sol potentially also contributes a decent amount. You need to be able to handle like 15 trash enemies since that’s just a lot of what you are gonna be facing massive swarms of bodies. You’d be pushing your luck trying to dodge tank through clash with a mage on maniac
It’s way better to be tanky have solid avoid and sustain then primarily relying on just avoiding things oscar and potentially his support partner has all 3 tanking in one sustain avoid and traditional. Even stuff like the laguz fair better as a supplementary unit especially considering their investment is entirely exp so for example on clash where running out of weapons is genuinely a concern it can be nice to have a few trained. And you said you were considering soren for a primary combat unit and it’s not unusual for you to be sent like 12 units at once. Soren’s gonna be the preferred target because of lower defense. If one unit is genuinely getting all the combat that’s a whole forged weapon broken every map
While it doesn’t make him viable or anything the innate +2 mov on tormod should have been mentioned
If you think mages are bad, you can SHOVE it.
Yeah I thought mages were pretty good in PoR so when I got to RD I almost started crying
Holy shit a Dofus Add! Are we living in the best timeline? Are the french finally stoping to horde their quality shit for themself?
I think this game getting a port/remake would be way cooler than fe4
"sorennn~" - ike
Good April fools bait
I've only played PoR twice, both on hard and the first time with no bexp, and Soren was fine in both runs, not an all star but top 10 for sure. Early mages are always great, gotta my favorite archetype in FE.
My ilyana ended really fast and tanky for no reason when playing fe9
…well I mean yeah PoR isn’t exactly hard, and if you dump Bonus EXP into anyone with 1-2 Range, they’ll be fine. I think mages get it rough because their ranks are split across 3 weapons, and you do get late game mages to use siege times without investing into them.
The biggest advantage you get from investing into a mage is a unit who can use the Rescue Staff for big plays while also having decent combat/survivability. Which is decent enough but it is very specific.
I also do think Oscar is a better BEXP dump on most casual runs than Soren. Just bc Kieran and Titania are also good doesn’t mean another horsie isn’t good.
You don't get equally good 1-2 range out of any unit you bexp. For example, in chapter 11, 20/1 Marcia and 20/1 Oscar can't one round the cavs or knights at 1-2 range (no jav or handaxe forges for a bit), 20/1 soren can one round these enemies with an unforged thunder due to the res/def disparity. Similarly, there are a lot of late game enemies that marcia and Oscar will struggle to one round at 1-2 range that a mage doesn't struggle with (late game tigers, wyverns, and paladins, for example)
The reason you bexp a mage is for the good 1-2 range (particularly in the late game), siege tome access and rescue. Fair to prefer other things, and the mounted units are better, that's why I have almost all of them at least 1 tier higher than soren, and some of them 2 tiers higher, but I think it's a decent niche.
It's Path of Radiance. Mist can legitimately solo the entire game (sans Ashnard, of course) on Hard Mode. Use whomever you want, the game is easy.
Huh. I really like your rescue drop argument. Every time someone makes a tier list for FE games with Rescue, they always say something like "You can leave this flier at Lvl 1 and you still deploy them for rescue drop utility," and then we penalize said units for being rescue dropped? Why is rescue dropping a benefit if it inherently needs someone of value to be rescue dropped?
Someone call Wanda bc that doesn't seem fair.
2 seconds gang???
Nah, 30 min gang though.
... sorry, brother.
I saw this at 2 secs too but i forgot to comment gang 😢
@@Direblade11 glad you made it to the party brother
People: Soren is bad in FE9
Me: Sorry what was that? I cant hear u over my A-Support Soren dodging hits and nuking shit!
FE9 aint a Powertrip as other Games but a well trained Soren does net u a lot of benefits. Like sending him with Ike to the frontlines without given a shit
Service Announcment: This Comment was writen by someone who only played FE9 on normal mode and is not meant to be used for Hard or Maniac mode. Please exercise caution
This is probably the first video where I have to hard disagree with everything across the board.
My reasonings:
Movement: as pointed out, you can shove and rescue mages which is harder to do for cavs, but I'm really questioning what the benefit of that would be exactly here. Why would I a) want a mage to be deep into enemy lines and b) why would I not want this for a cav instead to get *even more* move? A great example is chapter 13, where you have a defend map with little space to move and yet I would still rather use Mordecai to smite Titania so she can block off the choke point on turn 1 over getting Soren slightly closer to where he could maybe do... something? That something not being enemy phasing here with his paper bulk. I found this to be an issue pretty much everywhere in the game. There is not a single map where I would rather shove a mage than Jill or Titania so they can do their thing more quickly, especially not turn 1. As for rescuing, I also have to disagree. You need 2 player actions to do that and instead of deploying a mage and spending 2 actions every other turn, I'd much rather just deploy a fifth cav to just have more PP power and pick stuff up. PoR has many enemy groups of 3-4 and having 5-6 mounted units will just kill all of those on PP. Additionally, having this PP power also means you're gonna take less damage and need less staff actions, further relativating mage utility.
Damage: You're severely overstating the res advantage and understate the mt issue. The standard wind tome has only 2 base mt so vs fliers, this becomes an impressive 4 mt with double effectiveness. With Soren's 6 base mag, he'll do a whole lot of 10 damage vs fliers. Ike starts with 5 str and an iron sword at level 1 and will do the same 10 damage. This is pathetic and far from usable. The benchmark is a 10 or so str cavalier with an iron lance and that's completely disregarding that Titania... exists. So lets assume you're gonna train Soren with his 60% mag growth, how does this compare to other units? Well, it's still shit. By 0/15, he's at 14 mag and let's assume C rank wind magic, which he can use for an Elwind with 4 mt for 18 damage. Who else deals 18 damage? Right, Titania at base with the javelin. Who has 5 more move and needs no training to do it.
BEXP: I'm a huge proponent of keeping your BEXP and doing the prison chapter stealthy, because I honestly don't see much of a point in training anyone other than Oscar and Ike for a while. BEXP, especially on harder difficulties is much better used on Marcia and Jill who will far exceed the utility of any other unit and have pretty formidable combat stats after promotion, and giving them basically everything will do much more for you than raising Soren. This game has so much terrain and such large maps, that you'd love to send 2 over flying nukes to every problem and have them solve it for you by eating both halves of the map. Having both fliers over a mage and one flier is just better. Like WAY better. The argument against Jill is that you already have Marcia and the BEXP is sparse at this point, but you really have enough, even on maniac if you just don't waste it on raising a bad unit.
Vantage sweeping also sucks because why would I gamble on a 21% death every EP rather than just counting damage with a juggernaut? As for Ike pairing, I also don't like this because Ike is 1 range locked. 2 range enemies will simply pick him over Soren and live to PP and Ike would rather support Oscar and Titania to boost their combat.
Additional: PoR also gives you literally hundreds of thousands of gold. You will never spend all money unless you outright waste it, so your consumables are not gonna be detrimental to your economy. I just don't see the point of raising a 5 mov heal bot rather than just another cav like Makalov and Astrid and throwing a bunch of purewaters and vulnaries into their inventory. Actually, I don't even see this compared to footies like Boyd, because at least he's kinda durable.
And that really speaks to just how bad they are honestly. There's just never a need for any of them outside of siege tomes for turn saves and at that point you're raising a shit unit for like 25 levels to do 4 siege attacks for some hyperspecific playstyle. Not to mention that Callil exists and can also do it at no cost in casual play, too, so it's not like it does anything outside of that context.
I really don't see how that makes them anything other than pretty bad.
Just gonna address a few points.
For a lot of the game you have one or two units that can shove a cav. If you need the extra couple spaces of movement on the cav, sure, shove them instead of your mage, you still have like 8 other units, most of which aren't combat carries to shove or rescue around a footie or two.
Soren's bulk isn't paper thin on US hard. The math in the video wasn't that Soren had a 21% chance of dying on enemy phase in the chapter, it was that he had a 17% chance (once 2rn is factored in) of getting hit once by a typical enemy on the map. His chance of death against a group of 4 of those enemies on enemy phase was 1.6% without Ike support, under .5% with Ike support
I'm not understating the damage issue, it just doesn't really exist on hard once you bexp your mage. Bexpd Soren one rounds most enemies for the entire game on base or lightly forged thunders. I agree he does suck in the early game or if you don't bexp him though, I said that in the video. He's great after you bexp him. Or if you don't want to deal with his early game you can just wait for Ilyana and bexp her. Against some mid-late enemies Soren's 1-2 range combat is even notably better than the premiere physical units.
A level 6, chapter 26 wyvern lord has 39 hp and 8 res. To one round them with an unforged thunder tome, you need 24 magic. Soren hits this at 20/11 on avg. That same enemy has 21 defense. To one round them with a max forged javelin, you need 30 strength, or 29 with a max forge hand axe. An avg 20/20 Marcia is 7 points of might away from one rounding. An avg 20/20 Jill is 4 points away. Against higher res enemies like the paladins on the same map (39 hp, 11 res), On avg, Soren needs to either be 20/16 to one round, or at 20/11 he can do it with 3 points of might forged onto a thunder. Against the same paladin (16 def), 20/20 Marcia can't one round with a max forge javelin (though Jill could do this one!). Soren is sweeping enemies at 1-2 range here that Marcia needs to fight at one range.
I don't think siege tomes are a specific playstyle thing either, every playstyle benefits from being able to kill something from 10 spaces away. But you aren't leveling a mage for 25 levels just to siege tome, you would do it because their combat is good enough in the early to mid game, great in the late game, and then siege tomes and rescue staffing are the cherry on top.
@@actuallizardI really don't agree with this assessment at all though. Chapter 26 wyvern lords? Why do I need to level up a level 1 early game mage who sucks unless you dump 10 levels worth of BEXP into him? Not to mention, why do I need a mage at all for this? You can simply 2 round them with a high def unit, use a forged weapon or use Tanith with the Sonic Sword. You really don't need to put a mountain worth of xp into a unit who starts with shit stats and has significant problems even when trained.
It also doesn't have as much practical use as you'd think. This isn't Fates where half the maps have rout objectives and leaving an enemy alive will get one of your units killed. Even if you let some of them live by missing benchmarks, you really shouldn't let this slow you down. It's far more efficient to press on and let your cav squad and fliers pursue the objectives. The rest can pick off the scraps. You don't need to carry a 6 move unit 45 tiles into the map to get rid of enemies. A stronger action economy with more cavs for PP power will give you better results.
As for the BEXP exconomy, I really don't see why I should bother. Soren needs like 10 levels to significantly contribute (I tried with less and it just yielded no worthwhile results). That's enough BEXP to give my Oscar a nice +2 or so on most his combat stats. I'd much rather have those.
I honestly don't see how Soren's worth investing in with just so many units to compete for BEXP.
Kieran, Astrid, Marcia, Jill, Makalov, Tormod and yes even Mist are better targets for giving large amounts of BEXP to. Mist gets a mount and has better staff rank than Soren, Tormod has Celerity and the rest are mounted axe units. All that is just better.
As for siege tomes, yes it's useful but you really don't have that many and Callil is right there ready to use Thoron. I don't need Soren for it. Additionally, the accuracy is less than ideal and you know what also kills enemies 10 spaces away? Marcia and Jill. They can just go there and kill them. Even on hard, enemies really aren't that threatening and they can both just walk in and kill everything. The only time I found siege tomes actually useful was in the boulder chapter to lure the boss out with Jill and siege him to get rid of this guy first.
Again, my problem fundamentally is why use a mage when I can just quad dance 4 cavs and send Marcia and Jill to kill everything? They absolutely can do it just fine and have done so in all of my playthroughs. And that way I simply don't need to ferry and shove a mage around who will die in 2 hits. It's easier, more efficient, more consistent and takes less effort. So why even bother?
Good video but i don't agree because of a difference in how we see the game.
For me if you need to invest everything to make a unit good it's not a good unit. And without BEXP soren is really a pain to train. For so little reward cause siege tome can be all wield by calil that will dowhat sorens can do without invest.
Staff users we have mist and rhys, with mist being a monted unit after promotion , that can wield a 1-2 magic weapon with better chances to survive without vantage + perma crit on soren. Rhys is... a better soren? You can do more with rhys and note waste a lot of time with BEXP+staff grind for a little less Ennemy phase viability....where youhave 10monted unit that doesn't revolve around any RNG to survive. Generals can be beaten by any mage and are not a problem in the game, so you don't need to hyperfocus anyone on that.
For me, yes mages have a niche, but use tormod/illyana and not soren for this. It's just so hard to have a good feeling playing him and cost you so much .....
But great content! Thank you for it
Hi Lizard!
mages being bad PoR is feels like an alien statement to me. Cause at worst they glorified priest late game. And making the most out of low use heal is helpful.
17:15 WHO IS THAT I SEE CARRYING THE MAP?
Mages aren't bad in PoR. It's RD that they're utter trash in, terrible movement, terrible speed and durability, and terrible caps. They don't have all of those issues in PoR.
PoR is just easy enough that your many juggernauts can clear out most things before mages have the chance to fight much. Physic is great though.
They have all these issues lol in POR
I see Soren in the thumbnail, I click
Lets call Dofus what it is
French Canadian
I know you're sponsored and all that, and thus can't say anything bad about it, but my god does Dofus Touch look awful. I've seen flash games that look better. As someone who really enjoyed the Wakfu anime (the show set in the Dofus universe) it's been sad watching their attempts at games just become failure after failure. Even the MMO was pretty awful for its time.
It looks like there's a season 4 of the Wakfu anime coming out if it interests you still.
Anyway I agree the game looks bad. Looks ok at the start. The Lava environment looked nice. Then they show the gameplay where you'd be spending 95% of your time. Just ugly all around. This is probably petty, but the text boxes look awful, worse than any game I've seen (mobiles games included) in the past 10 years. The UI is bad overall.
thought this was an april fools video given that soren's pretty popular in por at all levels, but then you started talking him up...