William (Lords of the Seas)
I just finished my second playthrough of LotS today. This run was sparked by William the armor knight, a unit I used for a bit on my first run but ultimately dropped pretty quick. But he was so interesting that I wanted to play the game again just to give him a shot long term, and I was not disappointed at all.
William here is an earlygame axe armor knight with very atypical stats. You actually get a much more standard axe armor, Jules, a few maps before him, making the contrast even stronger. William’s only good growths are magic, skill, luck, and HP. Everything else is pretty low. To play into his stats, he comes with a personal weapon, the Bolt Axe. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that William’s stats were designed specifically around using the Bolt Axe. This thing is a high Mt high accuracy 1-2 range magic axe that freezes enemies on hit. Combat ends when an enemy gets statused during a fight, so as long as he has this equipped and doesn’t miss (which is very rare), he can never be doubled. That already helps supplement his just okay bulk and really bad speed. But the Bolt Axe isn’t entirely defensive either, since with how strong it is and how good his magic growth is, William can one shot things with it, which is very satisfying and helps get him growing more.
On promotion, William gains C anima, which is perfect and fits really well into the context of this game. The Misprint tome is a very powerful brave/killer/reaver/devil tome that you get kinda early. His luck is already solid, but there’s also a shop that sells goddess icons in the midgame too, so you can get his luck above 31 and make the Misprint never backfire. The misprint itself also gives +3 luck when equipped, and there are two +5 luck hold items available as well, so you got options. A brave tome with high magic is unsurprisingly very strong, and lets him secure kills he otherwise would miss when just going from one shots.
Additionally, having anima is great for interacting with one of the main elements of LotS: ships! Ships (and ballistae) are weak to all fire attacks, including fire magic like Elfire which he can use at base. And if you train up his anima rank enough, he can use the siege tome Eruption to take out ships/ballistae from range, and even kill them on counterattacks. He’s better suited to this than other anima users due to his bulk being better than the average mage, even if it’s lower than the average armor knight.
But that’s not all, since William also has a secret third tier promotion!.. He doesn’t actually have that, but he kinda does. Yet another big element of LotS is support bonuses. Supports do not give stat boosts when standing near allies, but instead give a variety of effects when you get the support. These can range from handing you items, to giving flat exp amounts, to stat boosts on the spot. William gets perhaps the most powerful support effect in the game from his Edmund A support, as you can see here.
Even a base William will get boosted up to 15 speed, which will prevent him from getting doubled by a lot of things. Or you can toss him some speedwings to make him even faster. LotS enemy speed has a very wide range on account of some enemies using really heavy weapons, so 15 speed can still double some things in late game.
Overall, I’m extremely happy that I did this second run to use William, since he ended up being one of the most fun armor knights I’ve ever used. Here’s him killing the penultimate boss of the game by himself while tanking an effective cannon hit (he crit three times out of four and won). He’s got so much crit because he’s also holding a crit boost item. And his final stats in that run below too.
