Fire Emblem: Three Houses, or: 3 Fires, 3 Emblems, 3 Houses

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Finally got around to doing these:

Dimitri.
Dedue.

Good ol' Dimitri and his big ol' pile of stats. Well, that's not entirely fair, he is the only PC to get both Battalion Vantage and Battalion Wrath and he is potentially the best dodgetank in the game should you choose to build him that way but those all come with some notable caveats, for all that I'll swear by them in the end (he's also the Actual Best sword person for what that matters but that's a bit at odds with the Murder Lance.) If he could be a Falcoknight (thanks whatever idiot decided we needed gender-locked classes again) I might actually be tempted to consider him the best PC in the game but as it stands I think he's a bit -too- awkward for that.

Dedue... well the other problem is that even if he can no sell enemy gauntlet users on Maddening, so can dodgetanks for the most part and there's simply way more upside to using those, and while getting into Wyvern Rider isn't actually -that- big a deal for him since even with working against a weakness, C Flying isn't hard to reach at all, going past that is terrible. But hey, Dedue is basically the closest thing 3H has to the typical FE crutch character and by the time that stuff matters you've probably benched him anyways.

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Update 89.


The Ashen Wolves' paralogues were already a cut above the other maps in term of difficulty on Hard, I don't see why it was necessary to make them even harder aside from the standard Maddening stat buffs. Christ.

Oh it wasn't the paralogue I was thinking of, forgot that Felix's paralogue wasn't open yet. But yeesh, making reinforcement spawns happen earlier is always a rude surprise.

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Rea wrote: Would like to note that we completely skipped the reinforcements that spawn if you bring Ingrid to this southwest area beofre killing the merchant. On Maddening, those reinforcements are completely different. Instead of several brigands and archers, you get six warriors and two snipers.
Imagine being the person who didn't know this spawn even existed until playing it on a clean Maddening file and thought it'd be clever to approach the map a different way. Couldn't be me.

Rumored Nuptuals on Maddening is just exhausting to deal with, especially pre-Gronder 1 when you're still stuck with mostly bad battalions. Too many reinforcements and too many archers, about the only nice thing I can say about it is that it doesn't have fog.

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Oh. Right. Upcoming escort mission, that'd do it.

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just throw all escort missions where you can't control the person being escorted into the garbage imo

Impenetrable clusterfuck of monsters sounds like a time and it wouldn't surprise me if the deep dark secret people who do this on Maddening without NG+ privleges use is "wait until like Chapter 10 or 11."

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thanks rodrigue

Also uh that's an "interestingly timed" Dimitri/Hapi support alright. Probably should've locked that off for a couple more chapters.

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Update 95.


Short one today, mostly because I feel like I couldn't add more to the update without it feeling like too much.

thanks diamond axe

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Okay ngl in fairness this usually works more painlessly when you have a wyvern (or axebreaker in the forest I guess) to bait the pegs the right side and someone who can tank the mages on the left side. (That and I think the first time I did this on Maddening I put it off until Chapter 11 but it's been a while.) Still better than every other fog map on Maddening though (not that this is a high bar to clear in the slighest.)

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Update 97.


And with that, we are done with Part 1 paralogues. Part 1 will go by much quicker from here on out.

I could've done Alois and Shamir's paralogue, as well as Anna's, but...I just really didn't want to. The rewards for each just absolutely do not justify the effort, especially given that you'd have to contend with act-on-spawn-turn reinforcements. I like showing off as much as I can, but I have my limits.

We'll see Anna's paralogue in Crimson Flower, but...well, let's just say it has some pretty major differences compared to the other routes.

At least assassins are slightly easier to gambit than most enemies and only have swords, which isn't much of a silver lining but hey.

And yeah really can't blame skipping those two in the slightest, one's just annoying without cheesing the heck out of it and the other has ninja bow knight reforcements which should be considered an actual crime.

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Dimitri/Marianne is good and probably the best lord/out-of-house student support but I've never understood why some people say Marianne fits in better with the Blue Lions than she does with the Golden Deer because she ends up running in the complete opposite direction as opposed to the Blue Lion's overall grin-and-bear-it response. Never mind the whole "but Crests!" situation is pretty much completely different since hers have nothing to do with societal obligations and more to do with the fact that society leads her to think of herself in a certain way that would probably be particularly hellish to someone so inclined to piety, so I'd have a hard time believing those people would say the same if Marianne's issues hit closer to home.

At least Dimitri realizes that little good comes from forcing youself to stoic in the face of grief, regardless of what Faerghus Man culture seems to be leading others to believe.

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Update 99.


Why yes, I am trying to get Part 1 finished off once and for all quickly, why do you ask?

Dimitri/Ingrid B is interesting in the sense that it shows that Dimitri clearly understands -something- to be deeply wrong with the culture he grew up in but the surrounding context thus far makes it unclear as to whether or not he fully understands the whys and wherefores, it's a purely emotional response from someone has no idea how to move forward in a way that's actually consistant with his own ideals so of course Ingrid is going to end up belitting his own feelings in response to her unexamined ideal of knighthood being attacked.

It really is something that would've come from Felix if Felix understood tact in the slightest because Felix/Ingrid B is basically the same except for the part where Felix deliberately weaponizes sexist rhetoric because for all that Felix despises Dimitri for some reason, they both understand the glorification of death to be utterly wrong and the tragedy of it all is that they're both throwing themselves away in pursuit of something that leads to the same thing, only shorn of any possible redeeming value chivalry hypothetically has, and all because they were never allowed to know anything else.

(This is also part of why I don't really like Ingrid much as a character but that's not really here nor there.)

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Update 100.


It's fitting that this update is #100, in my opinion.

(I know it's technically #101 due to the way I zero-index my updates, but shut up.)

Gilbert is indeed Peak Faerghus Man and can go get *fucked.* I think I honestly dislike him the most out of anyone who isn't a Dubsteb Moleman, which is honestly impressive in some fashion considering Rhea exists.

Mounted class balance is... not the best, no. I get what they were trying to do but Cavalier/Paladin in particular is a huge feelbad. Meanwhile, *laughs in wyvern*

I never noticed the refraction on Fimbulvetr either, neat.

Meanwhile, it begins...

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Update 101.


Thought Maddening was pulling some mean tricks before? You ain't seen nothing yet. We're heading into the point where Maddening ceases the pretense of giving you a fighting chance and just becomes openly hostile.

Not gonna lie, knowing that Reunion at Dawn was a thing was what drove me to make Dimitri a dodge tank my first Azure Moon playthrough. It's gross to start with and the additional skills on Maddening alone are just... ugh.

Ah well, at least there's the tragedy of Dimitri and Edelgard to look forward to. Looking forward to unpacking why I really like Azure Moon despite it being uh not very good politics IMO.

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To be perfectly honest if someone looked at Gilbert and somehow thought he *wasn't* the worst PC in 3H I'd have several questions. But yeah Reunion at Dawn is a rough open no matter how you slice it and demonstrates why evade is king.
Rea wrote:Huh. Did the RN queue not get advanced?
I was under the impression that levelups were prerolled at the start of the map and not manipulatable. Is this not actually the case?

Anyways there's something to be said about Dimitri's conception of "strong" and "weak" and whether or not he can distinguish between the strong trampling the weak and the weak trampling themselves in a race to become one of the strong but that probably needs to wait until a fair bit later.

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RandomKesaranPasaran wrote:
Wed Jun 16, 2021 6:49 pm
I was under the impression that levelups were prerolled at the start of the map and not manipulatable. Is this not actually the case?
It's really weird. Adjutant level ups are prerolled, yes, and cannot be manipulated. However, active unit levelups are dependent on the RNs they pull from the current queue, and thus, can be manipulated if you really want to try.

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Image Gilbert.
Image And Alois, too.

Getting as much done as I can before I go on vacation next week to visit friends up in New England. :v:

I'd assume recruits use enemy class growths because they only ever train two skills at once on their own and one of them is usually something you wouldn't want them to over a more useful skill like Authority (special shoutouts to Felix and Catherine training the spectacularly idiotic combo of Swords/Brawling.) This is fine statwise... most of the time, but absolutely does not work for Fortress Knights, especially one more prone than most (granted luck is a pretty irrelevent stat, but 4+15% is still gameworst) to eating shit against anything that actually does manage to meaningfully break his defense, and it's not like his is -that- high compared to a hypothetical Fortress Knight you trained up yourself (not that you would, because Fortress Knight is terrible.)

It doesn't help that the latejoiners (with the exception of Mystery Man because the devs learned their lesson by that time) are badly undertuned skillwise, but the other latejoiners give you at least -something- to work with. Gilbert meanwhile is not only a Fortress Knight with mediocre stats, but he's a Fortress Knight that starts with only D+ Authority because fuck you, that's why, so you can't even give him the good concrete tanking battalions for a while. And even if Great Knight hypothetically wasn't non-existant garbage he'd still make for a pretty terrible one because his stats just don't support it that well.

Meanwhile, Alois... exists. I don't love Brawling/War Master the way some do and Caspar with actually decent Charm is still pretty meh but he's not -shameful- or anything.

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Update 103.


Phew, this is a long one. Quite a few supports, lots of new monastery dialogue, a very long paralogue, and an after-action for auxiliary battles.

With that, I hope you all enjoyed this rapid burst of updates! I'll be going on vacation starting tomorrow and ending the Sunday after next. I think this is my first vacation in, what, four years...? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Count "what nothing's wrong with blatantly emotionally manipulating my daughter into abandoning her dreams and marrying" Galatea.
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Defensive adjutants -are- quite good yet for some reason I've always tended to forget about them until it crops up by accident.

Crusher... exists. If, for whatever reason you're committed to using Annette in an offensive capacity (maybe you have dreams or the RNG liked you or something, I'm not here to judge) you could just load her up on axes, throw her in an Axefaire class (because it's not like her spell list is any good) and live on that/Bolt Axe/Lightning Axe but Warrior isn't that much more mobile and the only flying battalion that boosts magic attack is DLC only so it's strictly worse than say making Hubert a Paladin at Advanced tier.

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Update 104.


Hello, I'm back from vacation! I had a lovely time visiting my girlfriend, but now I'm ready to get back to chewing through this thing. I wonder how far I'll get before NEO TWEWY releases next month.

Also, fun fact, this LP turns two years old on September 5th. I've been LP'ing this game longer than I thought. There's just too much game! Too much! Ahhhhh!

Enemy falcon knights on Maddening, always a delight.

I'd say something about the whole executing Randolph thing but even if there was a theorhetical principled option to take Dimitri would probably just murder him (and probably some hapless prison guards) anyways. Which is a poor excuse for what happened, but Azure Moon is gonna Azure Moon.

e: as for Dimitri's own actions, honestly they do make a certain amount of tragic sense by his own broken logic. The issue that I think some people aren't grasping (I won't speculate as to why) is that Dimitri's own ideal of justice (which, when you distill it, boils down to the law binding and protecting everyone as equally as Fodlan's particularly gross strain of feudalism allows and broken things are fixed before they boil over into violence) is fundamentally incompatable with the system he is meant to embody and the fact that his duty to that system involves, among other things, violently and disproportionately upholding the status quo and that he is, on a fundamental level, aware of this fact, which is why he's still able to acknowledge the depravity of his own actions despite his ongoing mental breakdown. The issue is that Dimitri is becoming what he thinks he needs to be, which is basically full Vlad III, because both the culture of Faerghus tells him that this is good and just and that nothing it does can be as bad as anything that seeks to undermine it, and his own ability to reconcile those two conflicting notions revolves around the fact that the dead are powerless to seek justice themselves.

It's completely, utterly, and indefensibly wrong, of course, but it's pretty easy to see how he got here. The how is just unpleasant as fuck.

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Mythril world problems.

Funny how some contextual changes turns the situation from being a plucky band of resistance fighters trying to move forward to... this, isn't it?

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Rea wrote:Looking at this group really makes me think about how many of Three Houses's good-to-best units are women.
Yeeeeep.

You can't even really blame the class divide for the most part outside of the lance mains really wanting access to Falcon Knight, even, a lot of the male PCs just don't have great stat builds (even if it isn't as pronounced as the disparity in some other FE games) which isn't helped by the fact that some of them compound it with really bad talent (or spell, or combat art) lists. Like, even before taking the class divide into account, the female PCs win almost every category I can think of. Breaking it down a bit:

-Edelgard has both the best overall start of the lords and has both strength in Axes and Authority, and that's even before considering what she gets post-timeskip.
-Lysithea is, even if I hard disagree with calling her the best PC in the game, still pretty unquestionably the best power mage (I'm not counting DLC for this) off of her spell list and Mastermind and actually has some Faith utility with Warp, unlike the male power mages.
-Felix is basically just Catherine who needs more training because you can just straight up reasonably get Catherine by Ch5 which is a ridiculous power move.
-Petra and Leonie are straight up the best non-lord physical fighters in their own houses despite lacking a crest, and Ingrid honestly isn't that far behind because unlike Felix she doesn't have an Authority weakness.
-Bernadetta is deceptively strong despite having one of on-paper worst stat builds and talent list that includes an unfortunate Axe weakness, Ashe/Ignatz meanwhile have very little to make up for their own poor stat builds.
-Even the worst female PCs (Annette/Flayn/Manuela IMO) have something with noting over the worst male PCs.
-We haven't even seen Hanneman yet but suffice to say that while I don't necessarily lump him in with the worst male PCs he isn't breaking this pattern either.

Even if you did hack the game to have non-gender locked classes, how much does it really actually change? Ferdinand/Sylvain/Ashe/Seteth can pick up Darting Blow sure but the former three have relatively decent access to Wyvern Rider/Lord anyways while Seteth is literally free. Dedue and Ignatz have to contend with a Flying weakness anyways. None of the male mages actually gain that much from Gremory other than a point of move over Warlock/Bishop, let alone Dark Knight in the case of Hubert and Lorenz. I guess Hubert would kill for Valkyrie but that's DLC. Meanwhile, there's Dimitri but Dimitri is extremely strong anyways and... Catherine, who gets a non-DLC class that cares about her Brawling talent and is better than Swordmaster, so in the end I can't say it really matters all that much.

Meanwhile, always nice to see an actually straightforward paralogue on Maddening.

E: personally regarding Bernadetta/Yuri A... eh, context still matters so I don't really see it as trying to give Count Varley an out because it would be completely and utterly unconvincing based on Bernadetta's account of the rest of his own behavoir but I agree that Yuri trying to downplay Count Varley's shittiness because he was hired to do a shitty thing by possibly even shittier people is in extremely poor taste, like seriously what the fuck Yuri you don't need to go that hard to paint yourself as the real bad guy.

e2: never mind the whole "sometimes people really are just out to get you" angle which is totally what poor Bernie needed to hear. Honestly the more I think about it the less I like the support for reasons that have little to do with the Bad Dad Problem, which is somewhat impressive.

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