Hi welcome back I’m doing another one of these, this time for The Unbroken Thread. I picked up the hack on a whim, and it changes a lot of the FE formula while still maintaining the same general vibe. One unit immediately caught my eye (mostly due to me liking his design), the Jagen of this game: Luther.
Luther is really, really interesting in my opinion because he’s sort of a natural teacher of a lot of the game’s unique mechanics. First of all, Str, Mag, Def, and Res are all either removed or completely reworked, so all damage is true damage outside of having very specific skills that give you damage reduction (Luther’s starting skill, Armored Blow, being one of them, reducing damage taken by 2 when he initiates). This means that a lot of Luther’s stats go into his health, so he can still function as a tanky member of the army. However, he doesn’t actually hit that hard, doing either similar damage to the rest of your army or much worse. However, his personal weapon heavily interacts with one of the game’s main mechanics: stagger.
Basically, the game introduces a second HP bar called Poise. When your poise hits zero, you become staggered.
While staggered, the next hit you take is a guaranteed critical hit and has a much higher hit rate (though it is possible to miss if the opponent’s accuracy is really bad). Alternatively, if you don’t take another hit, you instead can’t act until your next turn. Luther’s main claim to fame is being one of the premier stagger damage dealers, as he has a Prf that does an ungodly amount of it (listed as Stg in the weapon stats).
Stagger damage is also influenced by the weapon triangle, so you’ve basically got a guy that can likely stagger lance enemies in one attack, and also probably a lot of archers, mages, and other similarly frail units. This allows one of your other units to swoop in and get a guaranteed crit, which will likely kill the opponent. This allows Luther to set up kills for other units without taking any EXP you don’t want him getting, since typically he’s the one attacking first.
As a result, Luther maintains relevance for a large part of the game as long as a stagger damage dealer is a role you want for the map. He does fall off, though, because his growths are basically nonexistant.
These are his stats at level 12 (I’ve been investing in him), and he has not naturally leveled up Con a single time. I used an item that increases it when held and a stat booster and the issue is that Con is pretty necessary in order to scale. Higher level weapons require a high Con stat before you can start using them, and forging weapons further increases the Con requirement, which means that unless you heavily invest in him with stat boosters, he’s going to perform about the same at every point in the game, which is admittedly a little disappointing.
One major thing he gets later in the game, though, is a personal skill from his personal paralogue. The map itself gives you several nice items, including a Master Seal (which are fairly uncommon), but the final reward is something that helps Luther lean further into his role as a stagger bot:
HP is one of the only stats that Luther actually tends to level, so he’s likely to have more HP than almost every enemy in the game when he’s at 100% HP. This lets him do almost 20 or more stagger damage in a single hit which can be allow you to take out enemies or at least put them out of commission for a turn. He struggles heavily against sword units, but he performs solidly against pretty much everyone else, and also he’s one of the only units that can semi-reliably tank during enemy phase, as he has high enough HP and Poise to not immediately die after taking more than 2 attacks in one turn. He’s always at least semi-viable, and while his scaling is non-existant, his role is fairly valuable and not one that many other characters that I’ve seen can match.
For some other considerations, I’m going to discuss some extra investment that he makes particularly good use of. First of all, you get access to this skill, Agile Fighter, fairly early:
While not really necessary to give him, I’d argue that Luther is one of the best users of it. As shown earlier, his Dex is pretty damn high, and his Spd is awful. Not many units have a similar stat profile (most high dex units also have high speed), and this allows him to both take less doubles and double a lot himself if you give him another weapon (since his Prf weighs him down by a LOT). Basically, he’s one of the best candidates for this skill, since there’s not many characters that have good dex and also don’t have a workable speed stat.
Another thing you can potentially do (which I’m considering but haven’t yet committed to) is to make him your dancer. Similarly to FE3H, this game lets you choose your dancer, but instead of making it your class, it is instead a teachable skill (shown on Luther just to demonstrate but I haven’t actually committed to it yet):
As you can see, he’s still a Great Knight with 7 Mov, but can also dance. This is impactful because not a lot of units are mounted in this game, so Luther has some of the most consistent movement in the game. So far, I’ve only seen one flier, and while he would also likely be a good candidate to be a dancer on the merit of being a flier and having more movement, he is way more geared towards player phase combat and are prone to getting staggered, so he may struggle to make good use of the skill. Luther, on the other hand, doesn’t always have turns where he can do much, and he’s still fairly mobile (even if he’s not a flier). Additionally, his high HP and Poise allows him to take a lot of hits and be directly in the middle of the action without needing to worry as much about getting nuked from orbit like most dancers. It’s definitely not something unique, but it’s something to consider that can help him maintain relevancy after the party starts getting better weapons that he’s not able to use.
Overall, I really like Luther. He’s definitely not the best unit in the game, but he’s incredible early on, can maintain relevancy for a pretty long period of the game due to his specialization, and he can make use of several pieces of investment if you want to keep him relevant in the long term. Also, I just really like his design tbh, haha