Thanks for responding!
I think I understand why we had differing views on Chalice and Oriana as I want to tentatively say that you enjoy enabling your units to really shine while I enjoy using my units to efficiently clear a map.
The way I played the game, I was trying to always push forward in every map. The project units I used were trained up because I believed had traits that would help me push forward faster in the future such as Gecko’s galeforce and Krynia’s tenacious with the flag. With this gameplay in mind, I really enjoy using Jagens and Oifeys because, while they do get less exp for combat in the early chapters, they are reaching areas the other units wouldn’t have been able to get to and picking up kills that would’ve been skipped while I was blitzing the map. I wasn’t skipping any enemies, outside of the super strong reinforcements, but this meant that the exp wasn’t being wasted in my eyes.
Now to go over why I think Oriana is better than Chalice, I should quickly go over how I used Chalice. In the early game, she has a surprising amount of bulk and magic, so when you get in her in chapter 3, she can tank a wyvern attack and chip them down low enough for gecko to get a kill thanks to her passive. Since a majority of your units for the early game will be locked into some form of physical damage, her passive is actually even better the higher the difficulty is because of the scaling defenses of misery mode enemies. What’s even more notable than that is her staffing ability as she has a huge range on status staves that’ll be really useful pre-chapter 10 where pretty much everything dies to anyone who’s been hit with the invigorate staff. Her main issue is that she only has 6 move. This isn’t a problem if she’s using a staff, she has like 13 range with them after all, but what this does mean is that she will be falling behind your high move horses and chickens and not being able to apply her personal defense shred outside of the first couple of turns. Along with this, midgame is when physical units start getting access to magical weapons and her personal starts becoming important for reasons I’ll show later.
When it comes to Oriana, she’s a unit you are going to field every combat, she’s a dancer after all. She starts the game with 1 more move than everyone else and can get an effective 12 move with her dance. She’s good at setting up kills with her iron sword and safely taking kills with her 1-2 range wind sword. That wind sword of hers will probably break around chapter 10 if she’s seeing 1 or 2 rounds of combat per chapter, however you can buy another one in chapter 3x’s secret shop. Once she gets her promotions, she gets 8 flying movement with canto with great combat in a route where all your best units are on the other team.
Technically a spoiler for end game misery mode, though the only thing being shown is the class of a named npc whose name isn’t shown.
This here is one of the enemies at the very end of the game, relatively high hp, decent physical bulk, but notably 0 res.
Since most of the enemies in the game have an internal res growth of 0, they’ll always have 0 res regardless of the difficulty mode you play on, so anyone with access to magic weapons have an inherent advantage when it comes to combat.
Now this is my non-wine lvl 30 Oriana
With a wind sword she’s just barely able to one round this endgame enemy and with the light brand, she reaches an effective 40 attack and will one round any enemy in the game.
Now you bring up a valid concern about funds, which is understandable, however by the end of the game, I was carrying 200 items in my convoy and could quite easily get rid of about 150 of them. In the early game, I do concede that money is a tight resource because you want to save what you can to have aged wines ready for your growth units, but by around chapter 18, aged wines fall off in value for everyone except Gil exactly.
I also like to look at units by what I think is their highlight chapters, things that they specifically enable. When it comes to Chalice, I think her highlights are chapters 3 and 25. As previously mentioned, Chalice is able to soften up and tank the stupidly strong wyverns in chapter 3 and during the big village defend chapter, she’s able to chill in the center and fortify every side to keep them alive. When it comes to Oriana, I’m tempted to say every chapter that she’s available in. The utility of having someone who can dance your strongest unit while also being your 2nd strongest unit is fantastic for clearing maps while also being able to dance your project unit while weakening them up for said project unit can’t be underestimated.
That’s enough about all of that, to go over the smaller things, I think Mince gets bowrange+1 along with being able to hit people with bows at 1 range, which I think is really good, but I have no idea how he gets it because I didn’t use Mince for too long. I do think that bows are basically the best weapon type in this game, so even if there are better bow users, it’d be like comparing who is the better galeforce abuser (spoilers, they’d all be broken).
