Hey, linhardt has no movement! Jump him!

I got a crit!

crying intensifies

Gaming "Journalism" at its finest, folks

That's not Fortress Knight.

gamerant?????

@@aprinnyonbreak1290 fortress knight it's not bad (watch mangs GD MAD MODE)

Can we talk about how they rated dark bishop as the best intermediate class. With the best unique skill. Yet archer, which on maddening has by far one of the best mastery skills for units like Hilda, who need it quite bad, they ranked as one of the lowest. So backwards. Then Brigand isn't even in the top 3! Their lists are fucking delusional

@@Warmaster00 Renewal, Drain Punch, Healing Focus, and Quick Riposte made my Raphael able to enemy phase on his own almost indefinitely, and Tomebreaker even kept swarms of nerds from bringing him down. Unarmed gets slept on in general, I think. In fairness, Raphael and male Byleth are the only competant unarmed units, and neither are popular, I think. I sometimes pretend War Master Hilda is real.

@@Warmaster00 Caspar's problem is that he's probably the worst unit early game. He doesn't have anything to make him relevant like Ferdinand's personal skill or Petra's speed, and his base stats are also only ok at best. He does get better, but early game maddening is the hardest part, so he needs a lot of babying to get there. Even then, he's not some sleeper top-tier when he reaches his best. He's still only an ok unit in comparison to a lot of other characters. I mean sure, he becomes a beast if you put him in war master, but that can be said about literally any physical unit that becomes a war master.

@@Warmaster00 ok, I think you're focusing a little too much on the speed part here. Honestly, if your name isn't Petra, Leonie, Felix or Ingrid eventually, you're getting doubled on Maddening. The problem is that he doesn't get anything to compensate. Raphael at least starts out with good strength, as well as Dedue who also has great defense. Caspar just falls in the middle of the road here. Yes, he has gauntlets, but Gauntlets are actually really weak on their own. They need either high strength to really get any meaningful damage, or high speed to quad. Caspar doesn't really have either of these things. Even then, it's not like Gauntlets are exclusive to him. Every strength you pointed out with gauntlets apply to anyone early game. In fact, having at least one super light weapon on your front liner is recommended. But even then, Caspar's late game isn't anything super impressive either. His growths aren't really all that amazing or anything, and the combat arts he learns aren't anything fancy either outside of Bombard. He's by no means unusable, but he's just underwhelming compared to the rest of the cast

@@Warmaster00 It's a pitfall to make Caspar a Brawler since he can easily get stat screwed by it. Grappler is okay, but axe-focused classes are much better for him.

@@Warmaster00 I'm not talking about 1 or 2 points below average, I'm talking about getting stat screwed in general. Caspar turned out awful when I made him a Brawler twice, and later promotions didn't save him. He was MUCH better as a Brigand. It's the same reason why I don't make Petra an assassin anymore: 0×2 still equals 0, and even just going Swordmaster helps her Strength a LOT.

Fates may have had big issues, but Ambush Spawns weren't one of them.

I'm having a hard time being motivated to keep trying chapter 5 because of that

It felt like they thought, we have divine pulse now so we can put MORE bullshit in

@@megarotom1590 byleth saved my ass that chapter, I put her in the front lines, her avoid was good at the time, so she could dodge tank Thanks to that I have an overleveled byleth and kinda underleveled students, though I counter balanced that and started using byleth to weaken enemy units and kill them with the students But yes chapter 5 is the last hard map pre time skip in my opinion, just be sure to kill Gilbert as fast as possible and be sure to be healed for the miklan boss fight and do not use all your gambit before that because you'll need them for the monster

@@pralenkaman8105 oh wow I commented on this a year ago, ahaha, so my strategy was: go to abyss and now I have 2 more mages and an actually good tank. My pretty much half mage team did pretty well and got through most the game without issue. (exception to chapter 13), in fact I 1 turned every story map after blood of eagle and lion

Isn't that what some people day NG+ Maddening is?

Jouhei Kirisagi then you can just buy skill ranks and have access to broken battalions

Jouhei Kirisagi for me, yes

Fire Emblem has always been awful at making difficulty, but DS Emblem is where it really started to get awful. The fact that Marth always gets doubled and one-rounded by Medeus on Hard 5 is just complete bullshit. New Mystery did it way better, but still not ideal. Awakening took it to a whole new level with Lunatic+.

maddening is hardest on chapters 2,6, and 13. Chapter 2: buy lots of bows and be prepared to trade shields or trade off items so units don't get a speed penalty Chapter 6: MAGE FEST, the enemy doesn't understand res yet, also look up triggers for ambush spawns Chapter 13: look up enemy aggro stuff, once you figure out how to not have all the units rush your squishies, it's just a matter of patience as Claude and Seteth can hit and run while Dimitri is a beast.

But the UI already tells you about traps, terrain, special tiles, locked doors and treasure

@@Bryn-EG Reinforcements sometimes pop up from the ground on normal spaces. The Valley of Torment springs to mind.

@@Bryn-EG Technically scouts exist and they are the players, so the game needs to expose these map details so players can physically see them. For some maps (with many walls), I sometimes find it nauseous to twist the map around to see or check stuff, but that's my personal preference for the scout class to find map objects. I don't mind if the scout class only focuses on finding hidden enemy units.

@@AkameGaKillfan777 Was I the only person who thought of that Dawn of War 2 Ork exchange when that happened?

@@Warmaster00 I mean, realistically, there's already a precedent for it, with thieves getting things like enhanced vision, better terrain movement, and so on. Thieves are already scouts in everything but name, and a few more applications, maybe.

Ultimately they're just trying to drain your DP uses, since tension can only really happen when you run low. Unfortunately it makes a lot of sense. I'd rather they reduced the amount of charges you get substantially to begin with, but barring from that they really didn't have that many options I feel.

Church route is even worse

@@PenguinWithInternetAccess I know, Seteth doesn't come with a super-duper powerful battalion.

@@LukeLol627 I've seen the game over screen, from watching other people play the game. Does that mean I suck?

I think a harder difficult mode should be that enemies have a little better stats, with more items like armorslayers and gambits, the enemies have different positions, making you think clever about "how i can finish this map quick without losing anyone", everyone should be useful, i feel like in the hardest difficulties some characters that are good turn dull to train. Not just spam OP enemies apearing from nowhere, your units feel dull to train, puting a lot of enemies without any thought like "i'm just going to put this enemies here and here, im not going to test It"

I think Maddening is really intended to be played with NG+. It made it so much more bearable with the additional early game exp boost from statues and early Professor level. I gave each unit one class ability from renown and treated it as a sort of second personal skill, but I don't t think it's that's necessary.

@@killean2645 same. Being able to give everyone enough Faith to learn heal, so they could actually gain levels was good, too.

Maddening NG+ is the answer. It can be anything in between maddening hard or completely trivialized depending on how you want to play it.

@@willkirsch6976 nah. Nothing trivializes packs of ambush falcoknights.

@@aprinnyonbreak1290 purchasing S rank authority by chapter 1 for Dimitri then building towards bow knight trivializes the entire game. What do same turn Falcon Knights do against battalion vantage and battalion wrath on a bow user? They just kill themselves.

I think it’s because it’s got the same thing as the healers where it offers the same amount of xp as it would if you were playing normal

Happened to me last night. Can confirm.

wtf

Can confirm as well.

Confirmation x3

@@Lucisev_ It's not the only time the game gives misinformation. The Swordmaster Combat Art Astra reduces your attack power to 30%, not just the weapon Mt. Edit: it does the same for the Sacred Shield Gambit, which makes units affected by it take 0 damage from ALL ranged attacks, not just physical ones. Pretty useful on any boss with the Counterattack ability and those goddamn 4 range Golems with 40+ crit that take 0 damage from magic attacks while their barriers are up.

HE DOES? That's why he levelled up so fast in the chapter after he promoted! I was wondering why he could grow ten levels in a chapter.

His promotion got nerfed so hard compared to FE4

@@kingofthejungle5338 I mean, he technically promoted INTO his FE4 starting class.

@@CorrellLeo yikes

Mangs proves this

Dante Reyna Sorry Edelgard couldn’t hear you over raging storm

Emmett H talk to the Atrocity, *heathen*

lysithea beats both...

I love this comment xD

Dimitri can one-shot and dodge-tank Enemy Phase, the end

*Slams table so hard it breaks* THANK YOU!!!!!

@@Warmaster00 *Plan isn't working:* Instead of coming up with a better plan, burn a few more RNs and try again It's just like when I get lazy on emulators, except in a real fire emblem game!

@@Warmaster00 So what? Why do you care how other people choose to play a single player game? Unlike you, not everyone else finds it fun restarting an entire map because they miss an 80% hit and the enemy counters and kills them, or wants everything to be as brutally difficult as possible, even if it comes at the expense of good game design and actually having fun.

@@aprinnyonbreak1290 "Real Fire Emblem" my ass.

@@Warmaster00 None of this was in your first comment, and RNG abuse is depth of its own. You need to know that the function exists in order to make use of it. Take Alpharad for example: he ran out of Divine Pulse uses because he kept trying the exact same move on Kronya thinking it would hit, even though that's not how the game works. DP doesn't make you worse, YOU make yourself worse by not learning how to play the game, all DP does is makes it so you don't have to be perfect(which is impossible in a game built around random chances btw) and saves you a lot of time and struggle. Map design should not force you to use it, plain and simple. I don't like how enemies can suddenly start moving, or how on a certain map, they start changing into Demonic Beasts. I always try my best to beat maps without using it, unless I beat a unit with someone I just wanted to weaken them with or I'm just doing some skill grinding. I'd much rather have good map design, but less DP uses.

Better forge some Killer *Knuck Knuck, it's Knuckles*

@@AkameGaKillfan777 "the bloat thrower"? Independent flower, magical emerald holder

@@MarceloKatayama I don't need a posse, I get it on by myself, adversaries get CUCKED

@@AkameGaKillfan777 are you singing the og, or the meme version, I can't tell, It's been too long since I heard one of them

@@MarceloKatayama kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fL6Xn6uTvqiViWg.html

You CAN avoid that problem with speed cooking. But it does require fishing and resetting when you don't get what you want out of it, which isn't thrilling. So either the chapters are tedious or the monastery is tedious, you can't really win. In general it's not just maddening, this game really needs some quality of life improvements. Also some rebalancing, but yeah, fat chance of that ever happening.

I agree 100%. The early game is so tedious. But that's just it. It's not even that difficult.

Maybe I'm wrong but I found myself blitzing more with stride and gambits in the earlier chapters, though I suppose that's limited by the uses. Like the first room of the Flayn kidnapping chapter, I had to stride in and make sure everything was immobilized or dead in order to survive.

@@grit1 It's cool that gambits and such matter more but the tedium wins out a lot of the time don't you think?

I agree. I did church route maddening, and there was a certain point where the frustration overtook the fun of the map. It was the imperial city invasion, when the falcoknight reinforcements came, that I just decided I didn't want to spend two hours solving these maps anymore, so just warpskipped it. Then warpskipped Edelgard. Then warpskipped Thales. Didn't even bother finding out what those maps were gonna try, wanted nothing to do with it. Didn't even miss the exp, since we were primarily leveling off of healing eachother in auxiliary battles anyways. Also, the fact that my Dancer Sylvain was able to just facetank the immaculate one, then immediately regenerate it all back through passive healing, because he was like, level 56 from all the dancing rubbed in just how jacked progression in Maddening is. There were a handful of fun maps in Maddening, the Mercedes paralogue with an underlevelled Mercedes and Caspar was... interesting, for example, but those were largely drowned out by the tediousness of it all. I did have a few pretty screwed units, Byleth was almost unusable post timeskip except as a healbot with convoy. Maybe it's fun if you get blessed ones? I dunno. Also, can I get a bit of respect for getting a level 12 Dorothea and level 18 Caspar out of the first timeskip map in one piece, when my best characters were off-house? I planned on just letting them die if I had to, but I got 'em home. Started my Blue Lions Awful Female Armor Knight run and that's so much fun by comparison. Very Hard mode when? Somewhere between Hard and Maddening would be perfect.

Let's also give them +10-20 stat boosts on everything, because nobody ever complained about that, right?

@Chris take the L Let's make our $60 AAA Console release take inspiration from a mobile game with microtransactions. What could possibly go wrong?

Can confirm going back and playing dates is hard because it’s way different but it’s not asshole design it’s just here’s your enemies here’s your units if you can’t beat you have tonics supports and hope for better rng

I didn't like the story in fates, at all. But damn, were the maps fun to beat. Challenging, but not annoying.

Would have happily waited another year if it meant a full-length Crimson Flower instead of short-changing it by 4 chapters.

@@clayschwartzwalter382 no clue why they didn’t do the shambala stuff

@@clayschwartzwalter382 I personally think Crimson Flower's fine being four chapters shorter. The reason for that? 1)You don't have to retake Garreg Mach. 2)You don't need to get reinforcements in Ailell. 3)After dealing with the Alliance, there's no need to go to Gronder Field. 4)Those Who Slither In The Dark are dealt with in the post-game. I personally think Rhea makes for a much better villain and final boss.

That's only if you put her in classes that emphasize the weaponry types she's proficient in.

Eduardo Smanchez I've seen a bunch of blessed Bernadetta's from friends but my one ended up leveling speed for less than 25% of the levels she. RNG is so funny in these games but congrats on your nice luck. I hope I get one on par with that someday

AkameGaKillfan777 you're not wrong but I've not tried her out in other classes much. Maybe I'll try her as a Falcon Knight next time

@@606hunter1 That's what I did. Her personal+Defiant Avoid+Vengeance can be a fun combo.

Eduardo Smanchez every playthrough gives at least 1-2 units like that for me. I once got a Lysithea that had 18 speed without stat boosters at level 40 which was hilarious

I have absolutely had Claude teach flying post time skip, so this is not right - and I’ve done his route 4 times so I am confident in this. Not sure about Petra. I do know budding talent strengths don’t count so Claude won’t teaches axes.

@@mingjianchen9230 "Claude teaches riding *in addition to* his strengths"

ErraticMagics I misread your post as Claude like Petra not teaching flying despite the strength in it. Also, Claude does have a strength in riding so it’s not weird he can teach it. I’m on a silver snow maddening run now, so I’ll pay attention this time to see what Petra tutors after time skip. It will be very weird if she does teach riding instead of flying since unlike Claude she has no strength in it.

Pretty much this, Maddening forces you to leverage as much power out of your units as possible and take full advantage of Gambits and Combat Arts. Going back to hard mode I barely even use divine pulse, because it's so easy once you master the Tactics of Three Houses. The Difficulty jump after the timeskip really botherd me in Maddening CF, pretty much any former Student can one round 90% of my Roster. And dodge tanking even with a favorable weapon type skill is not possible if you arn't a Peg Knight. Forcing me to slowly grind through every map, - especially- fun in the very first timeskip chapter of CF

I kinda want to see a 3H first-timer do NG Maddening now. I'll probably finish NG Maddening only once (I'm in last CF chapter), because the early maps are so big and you have frigging 4 Mov. Give me my Stride battalions dammit.

haiiroyui If Deltre ever comes back that’s probably exactly what he’s going to do. Honestly that would be such s treat to watch

I did this in the 3ds games simply because I said if I don’t know normal than hard becomes normal

They played too much FE4

I made her a dark knight and she performed surprisingly well but it might be because I was gearing her that way from the get go.

Did you use her as a magic class? That's probably the problem. She and dmitri are def the games best units

@@tonymack my dude my comment says she got stat screwed no, I didn't, but I changed her when at ch 14 she had more magic than strength and speed combined.

@@andromidas920 ah ok. I see what you mean. The rng can do weird things.. In my BE/CF I got a super blessed caspar who was on par with Petra and edelgard and from.what I've seen most consider him useless and my Ferdinand was very average on that run.

@@tonymack I think Edelgard's base Magic growth is the same as her strength, not to mention she can learn Lighting Axe, so making her some kind of magic class isn't a bad idea imo. Ferdinand only sucked when I made him a Paladin. He was great as a Wyvern Lord and Swordmaster.

I've played 3H for over 800 hours, and the number of times I've used healing staves on Bernadetta can be counted on one hand

Sammmeeeeeeee

That's how I beat the Death Knight in ch 6 and ch 8

*DARK SPIKES OVERRATED! LONG HAVE WE WAITED! DARK SPIKES OUTDATED! VENGEANCE ACTIVATED!*

Faaaaacts! I think Battalion Vantage and Battalion Wraith Dimitri is so satisfying too. Like "oh your trying to attack me"

Eh, I just make Byleth a Fortnite and the map's difficulty went down.

Church route final boss seriously almost took me 200 turns, man. I probably could have done it faster, but the fact that I needed most of my team to handle the ambush spawn monsters, capturing the place that stops that spawn aggros the whole map, and I only had like, 4 dudes to clear the rest of the map one engagement at a time, plus managing inventories, getting formations ready to stride and stuff, actually fighting the final boss and managing who she's hitting, replacing broken stuff, plus waiting and being cautious of other ambush triggers, it was a nightmare. It wasn't hard, just agonizingly slow. I only had to pulse like, five times, and one of those was me figuring out that stopping reinforcements aggros the map. The rest were crits, and one time joycon drift made me wait instead of attacking something.

the one where u fight thieves in the monastery after the reunion?

@@b.3432 yah, it's somewhat brutal in hard, but in maddening, especially because I had to drop a couple of subpar units

@@megarotom1590 I'm playing BL maddening right now, can't wait to get to that point and get my ass thorougly smacked :D

@Katsu I was talking about the chasing daybreak one...

Only middle ground would be Maddening on NG+ and spend alot of renown. If you dont have much renown i would play hard any day. Rather a game be fun that frustrating. I beat maddening once and never looked back

Same for me with Felix and Petra. Also, Ingrid and/or Marianne.

There is one small instance of Ambush Spawns in Fates. In Chapter 23 of Birthright(yes you heard that correctly) when you stop very near Camilla, a bunch of Sorcerers and Malig Knights will immediately spawn, but you'll most likely not be in range of them. It happened in Mangs's LP.

@@AkameGaKillfan777 Yeah, but I'm talking about Conquest, not Birthright. Conquest is pretty much the only Fates game where they actually gave a shit about gameplay and difficulty.

Enemy Archers don't need to be lvl 10

I'll contest War Master. It's a fantastic endgame class, Quick Riposte single handedly made Raphael go from "can survive one enemy phase exposed" to "can survive as many enemy phases as he needs to exposed". To be fair, that Raphael did channel mangs at times, and misread his own 30ish % crit rate as 100%. I also think it's fair that not many characters besides Raphael can survive being a grappler, let alone also being a bishop.

@@aprinnyonbreak1290 I don't find Quick Riposte that compelling of a skill. Assuming you are strong enough to actually kill the enemy with a second attack, you usually lose it after the first counter because everything on Maddening hits like a truck. If I wanted to have an enemy phase killer, I'd go with Vantage/Wrath and bows instead (Cyril, Ashe, Petra, Claude, Anna). Unlike Quick Riposte, which can only kill the first opponent, they can obliberate anything else but the first opponent with little setup thanks to Adjutant Guard letting them survive almost for sure; also unlike them they can counter everything with 3-range Killer Bow+. War Masters usually also have access to Vantage/Wrath (requires D+ swords), but no access to the Sniper class which would have allowed them to oppose enemy archers. You basically put 960 skill points into gauntlets to kill the first enemy more efficiently, which could have been put into a skill that counters all these pesky arrows instead.

Reverse Uno Card: 5 Range Canto Lysithea, 4 Range Brave Bow Canto Leonie, and Ubertank Dancer Sylvain who is 10 levels higher than you and regenerates 60% HP per turn automatically.

To be fair, it's hard and we don't have Divine Pulses. Took me numerous resets and one lucky Crest activation on Dimitri's part against Edelgard to get through...

You can. Plan well and have a proper dodge tank like ingrid. Use stride to reach there and start dodge tanking. Warping also helps. Basically maddening mode is "have a busted dodge tank" game.

Rescue would have been nice, but Con is unbalanced in it's distribution. Granted, the 5 str requirement to lower weight by 1 is pretty dumb as it do not benefit mages...

@@Jardrin forgot that it hurts mages

I take it none of you have used Flayn?

@@AkameGaKillfan777 Flayn is great to save time but the rescue feature of the GBA games to pick a unit up and transport them across the map or to the hands of another unit is its own amazing feature entirely.

@@AkameGaKillfan777 I might be the only one who thinks Rescue > Warp. You also get 3 Rescues by default, 6 with Bishop/Gremory, compared to 2 Warps. Flayn can rescue you from half the map later in the game. I love to Stride then Rescue the poor unit who was left behind.

That is VERY understandable I almost quit due to that fucking! Chapter

And it's funny how people who defended Ambush Spawns make the blasphemous claim that the same number of the same types of enemies spawn in the same places as they do on lower difficulties. Those Paladins were NOT in the CF final map on hard.

Who do you think is better overall than CF Edelgard? Felix? Hilda?

@@Blue-is2sx Dimitri

@@AkameGaKillfan777 He's awesome and I love him but he doesn't have the crest of flames that makes edelgard so tanky. She is definitely stronger with her constant built in Nosferatu.

@@Blue-is2sx Edelgard could have been the best if Raging Storm worked when she was a wyvern unlike Dimitri where his combat art works no matter what he is. Also his crest gives him avoid which can stack much more reliably than you can rely on a crest proc. She also gets beat by Claude for mobility if you're trying to use galeforce at all. So yea I think Dimitri is way better.

I hope you're just shitposting

@@AkameGaKillfan777 lysithea is factually one of the best units in the game. Although in maddening her uses are limited by how squishy she is. Although again that's not really a problem because every unit is squishy on maddening mode.