So, a little while ago I did a “try out less trodden class paths” run of Three Houses. It was a Blue Lions run, since I both wanted to revisit that path for fic writing purposes, and because it was the base house that had the largest number of students I wanted to try out different classes on.
The results, as you can imagine, were mixed.
Caspar made for such a good Swordmaster that I took him to the endgame with me, and while I was surprised by this at first, when I thought about it a little more, it didn’t surprise me nearly as much. Caspar may not have a proficiency in swords, but his growths lend themselves well to sword-wielding classes, especially once you reclass him to a sword-wielding class and you get those modifiers to his growth rates. I had made him a Hero in my Silver Snow run purely because I wanted to get his sword rank high enough to wield the rapier so he could take down the Death Knight in his and Mercedes’s paralogue, and he was good with swords in that one, too. Asides from him, Felix and Mercedes were both excellent Bow Knights, filling different niches--Felix with his high strength and speed hit like a truck, and Mercedes with a magic bow absolutely decimated low res units, and even middling res units as well.
On the other end of the spectrum, while neither Ferdinand, Sylvain, nor Leonie were bad at being Holy Knights, per se, and Ferdinand is one of only two units who I think actually looks good in the Holy Knight armor (suits his personality and aesthetic pretty well, I think), I will likely not class them into Holy Knights again. Ferdinand is fine as a Paladin--plenty of the advanced classes are fine as endgame classes, and Paladin is definitely one of them--or a Wyvern Lord, Leonie is so much better as a Bow Knight, and maybe one day I’ll find a class Sylvain actually excels at, because he’s been kinda meh as a Dark Knight for me (Not as meh as poor Lorenz, though). And nowadays, I’ve had Dorothea as a Gremory, a Mortal Savant, and in this playthrough a Swordmaster, and I don’t think I’m ever going to make her into anything but a Gremory, ever again.
But by far, the two stars of this run were Falcon Knight Marianne and Gremory Ingrid.
Classing Marianne away from a magic-wielding class is, I think, probably not the most unconventional thing I could have done, especially since I sent her down the Pegasus line. I think that with every student unit in this game, there are a couple--sometimes up to three or four--different paths that are optimal to send them down, in different ways. For Marianne, you could make her a Swordmaster or a Paladin, and those classes would suit her pretty well thanks to her magic-based Combat Arts. You could level up her Reason Magic and make her a Gremory.
The master class I think the game pushes you hardest towards with Marianne is Holy Knight. On a purely visuals-based level, she is the only unit in the game besides Ferdinand whom I think the armor in that class looks good on, thanks to her color palette making the armor white with gold accents, and the cape a dark blue, which to be honest is exactly what I think of when I think holy knight. More seriously, given her proficiencies in Faith, Swords, Riding, Flying, and that her budding talent is in Lances, the game is pushing you towards mixed attacker with Marianne, and speaking as someone who made her a Holy Knight in every run she played but this one, Marianne excels as a mixed attacker.
She really feels like the only unit in the whole game that the Holy Knight class was really made for. As I said above, Ferdinand, Sylvain, and Leonie weren’t great at it, and designated healer units that I’ve classed into Holy Knight in the past (aka Linhardt and Mercedes) excelled much more as a Bishop or as a Gremory. Marianne, on the other hand, kicks so much ass as a Holy Knight that it isn’t even funny. Out of all the designated healers, I would say that her spell list is the most attack-oriented, because even Manuela only has two attack Faith spells, while Marianne has three. Marianne is one of only three characters in the base game to get two magic-based Combat Arts (the others being Ingrid and Edelgard), which means that even with less spell charges, she’s not in trouble because she has Soulblade and Frozen Lance to fall back on. Her Crest increases damage output on physical attacks. Also, her bloodline’s Relic, Blutgang, is a magic sword that deals magic-based damage; if that isn’t the devs telling us it’s alright to make Marianne a physical class or a mixed attacker if we want to, I don’t know what is. And five Physic uses isn’t that big of a loss, especially since if you’re doing any recruiting at all Marianne is probably not your only Physic user--hell, if you’re playing as female Byleth, you can get a Physic user for free (And just because I don’t think Sylvain is that great of a Dark Knight doesn’t mean I don’t think the game isn’t pushing him towards that).
With all that said, it’s not hard to see how Falcon Knight is the other master class I think the game is pushing Marianne towards. She has all the proficiencies required to get there with plenty of chapters to spare, and even with her low strength growths, high magic plus Soulblade and Frozen Lance means she’s not without recourse for dealing loads of damage. And in my experience, Marianne’s performance as a Falcon Knight was similar to her performance as a Holy Knight, minus being able to wield magic and plus gaining a ton of speed. She was good. She excelled at this.
Ingrid, on the other hand, I wasn’t as confident about going in. Ingrid, I feel, is being pushed by the game first to become a Falcon Knight, and if not a Falcon Knight, then a Paladin. Her growths favor these classes, and her base speed growths are so high that the massive speed penalty that comes with the Paladin class isn’t likely to affect her too much. Incidentally, Ingrid’s proficiencies are almost identical to Marianne’s; the only difference is that she’s neutral in Faith, rather than proficient. She is very much being pushed towards physical classes, rather than magical classes or mixed attacker classes.
But when you look at it, Ingrid has the potential to become a great mixed attacker. Her base growths in strength and magic are the same. Like Marianne, she learns two magic-based Combat Arts, Hexblade and Frozen Lance, though she gets them much later on. Marianne gets Soulblade at C+ in Swords, and Frozen Lance is your reward for unlocking her budding talent; Ingrid, on the other hand, doesn’t get her magic-based Arts until she’s at A in Swords and Lances, almost as if she’s not intended to be dealing magic-based damage until she’s reached an advanced class (More on that later). Her Reason list is almost identical to Marianne’s--both learn Blizzard, Thoron, and Fimbulvetr, which are all spells with high Critical Hit chances, and Marianne only learns one spell in excess of Ingrid’s list, Cutting Gale. From Faith, Ingrid learns Physic, which is a good utility spell, and Seraphim, the monster-killing spell, which makes me think that Falcon Knights were originally meant to be geared towards killing monsters like they were in Echoes, since Ingrid is the only unit in the game being pushed hard towards this class, and she just happens to learn a spell that’s super-effective against monsters.
So Ingrid does have potential as a magic-wielding unit. Sure, she’s hands down the best unit in the game to make into a Falcon Knight (tried it out on Hilda this time, and let me just say: Falcon Knight!Hilda is Wyvern Lord!Hilda Lite; it’s okay, but it feels like a watered down version of Wyvern Lord!Hilda), but she’s got potential as a mage, too. But I was still a little nervous, because while her base magic growth is the same as her base strength growth, both are on the low side, and just judging from what I’ve heard, it’s rare to get an Ingrid who’s been strength-blessed by the RNG gods. Even with class boosts to her growths, there was still a very real chance she’d get screwed on her magic stats.
As you can see above, she did not get magic-screwed. At all.
Yes, this is after I fed her some magic stat boosters, but do you want to know what it was before I did that? 43. She got to 43 magic all by her lonesome, without any help from any Spirit Dusts or any Premium Magic Herbs, and she was fantastic. She was critting left and right, no one could hit her, she could still double Assassins despite no longer being in a class that boosted her speed growths, and she was overall my biggest, most unexpected success story from this run.
As most of you probably know, the next wave of DLC coming out--can’t remember if it’s in the free wave or the paid wave--includes several new classes. Do you want to guess what one of them is? If the rumors are true, one of the new classes we’re getting is Dark Flier.
Previously, I mentioned that I really wanted to make Flayn a Dark Flier if I ever got the opportunity. Her proficiency in Faith, budding talent in Reason, and the fact that she comes with high enough skill bases in Lances and Flying to be immediately reclassed to Pegasus Knight makes me think that the pegasus line was the route we were being pushed towards with her, if we decided Bishop or Gremory wasn’t for us (And speaking as someone who’s made Flayn a Falcon Knight three runs running, she’s amazing as a pegasus unit). The fact that she’s such a potent magic user made me wish we’d get Dark Flier as a class, back when we still didn’t know what the future held in terms of DLC.
Well, nowadays, I still want to make Flayn a Dark Flier. Wanting to make her a Dark Flier is probably the biggest reason my first run after the DLC drops isn’t going to be a Crimson Flower run. But seeing how well Marianne does as a flying unit, how well Ingrid does as a magic unit, and just how much potential both have as mixed attackers, I really want to try them both out as Dark Fliers, too.
I just hope the DLC classes don’t require super-rare seals like Dark Mage and Dark Bishop. That would suck.
