Alrighty, finished my second misery playthrough and wanted to give my thoughts again.
Units
For the most part, a lot of the units are around the same spot as they were from my first misery playthrough, but some units were adjusted based on their buffs and nerfs alongside some reconsiderations that I had. In terms of how I’ll be judging the cast, I’ll be judging their performance in a decently LTC style where I’m trying to kill every unit and get every objective as fast as possible. I’ll also be giving bonus points on how units perform on chapters 24 and 25 which are what I consider the hardest chapters in the game. Also I’m not gonna be talking about everyone again because that’s a lot of work.
TLDR:
Gecko: I had put Gecko at the top of A before, but I feel like she’s solidly in S tier now thanks to Mince. I’m not sure if I should be giving the credit to Gecko, but I’ll give it to her anyways, I like Gecko. Mince being able to reposition Gecko to get in range and, more importantly, get out of range of enemies makes the wyvern hell that is chapter 3 a lot easier. As always, Gecko has your highest damage potential early on, outside of Oriana’s wind sword, so she’ll be consistently getting 2 kills every turn. This means that she’ll probably promote around chapter 6 and 16. In the chapters following her first promotion, she’s the best user of the plucker’s eye as she’ll be able to blitz through 2 problematic enemies with either the cutlass or her frying pan and once you get the pair of levin swords in chapter 15, she’ll be able to 1-round pretty much every enemy type for the rest of the game.
John XVI: I really wanted to start with John first, she is an absolute monster. The amount of consistency that stalk prey adds to John is just crazy, on top of her fantastic 1-range combat. In chapter 24, John is the best unit to dedicate a section of the map to because of her heal and the ability to hit galeforce, decapitator, body slam, or whatever other crazy combat/mobility skills there are. Did I think she needed a buff? Not particularly, but I’m not complaining.
Xeo: Xeo’s still the goat, the nerfs weren’t enough to stop him. Inevitable fate in melee range into a hullcrusher, 80 damage prolonged pain into any boss enemy, next.
Empress: Not much more to say about the Empress, but access to swords means that she now has access to silver blades and rondel daggers, which I think is really cool with afterimages.
Mince: One weapon is all it took to put this boy at the top of A. The pot is an amazing tool to have at all points in the game, it fixes every problem that Mince had in previous patches. Mince actually has very good combat due to the strength of bows in this game and being able to use both his swarp and bows on the same turn makes him an easy deploy whether you’re trying to raise him or anyone else in your team. I’m gonna also give him bonus points for his hidden promos in chapters 9 and 23 he gets for killing the sun shooter as both of them are a huge boost in Mince’s capabilities with +1 bowrange and bird of prey. All you gotta do is give him an arcane boy midgame and he’ll perform for the rest of the game.
Foxberry: I finally got to use foxberry, both in a previous normal ironman and again in this misery playthrough, and I think she’s a really solid character. Thanks to the +1 range buff to her hook, Foxberry essentially got a +1 move buff to herself and the person she’s pulling and this allows for some really high tempo turn 1s with Ellerie. Even ignoring the buff, Foxberry was always a really good combat unit with her personal pretty much guaranteeing a 1-round of any enemy that was being flanked and foxberry herself sometimes doesn’t even need her personal because she’s just really fast and strong. Her performance in chapter 24 is also very nice as a lot of the enemies are usually a little bit too far away for Ellerie to get into a good position every turn, so having Foxberry ferry her around with chain hooks makes Ellerie really shine.
Dazzledart: Dazzledart is a very good unit that has a bit of a slow start when you get him. I recommend sending him to Orianna’s route, though I could see him being useful on chapter 24 for sniping the wyverns in the corner with airborne. He is really helpful on clearing the top left side of chapter 25 alongside his other chicken brethren as he has really good coverage with effective attacks with da shoota and an incendiary bow.
Rohesia: Rohesia hasn’t changed between patches, but after using her more, I can say that she’s safe to start deploying in chapter 12 where the enemies are around her level and she begins getting decent enough experience from kills.
Tower: The changes to Tower’s personal to basically always give himself and other units WTA is incredible for the first few chapters as he’s able to tank 3 hits rather than 2. Just that alone bumped him up a few places in my eyes as a sort of diet Unari.
Dune: Dropped her down quite a bit from my previous list due to her combat just being so terrible despite the utility that double time has. What Dune provides for the team is a sort of band-aid for mistakes that you make when clearing enemies or getting objectives. If you realize that you’re just a few points of damage off of killing an enemy, Dune can double time halfway across the map and do a little chip to enable your gecko kill. If there was a chest you forgot to get, Dune can zoom right over there and get you your 5th silver axe that you’ll definitely use. Dune can be really useful in chapter 25, but her role is just to circle the map and visit every house and open every chest so your real combat units won’t need to. I’m not saying she’s unusable or anything, you can get her kills with an umbral lance and invigorate, but she really just isn’t worth the effort. She’s basically a worse wisp in many ways.
Archer John: I think this one is probably the best john you can make? With deathblow and bowrange +1, he can dish out some respectable damage, but in the end he just feels like a worse Mince. Not even the extra skill he gets in Chapter 17 saves him.
C and D tier: So the way the tiers work here are that everyone in B and above are units I find useful in either their starting chapter or a chapter after. The units in C and below are units I find bad even in their starting chapter.
Big Berd: Yeah, unfortunately he’s really really bad. On Oriana’s route, he struggles with keeping up with the rest of the party unless he uses a wind tome, which makes his bad accuracy even worse. You can’t even give him the Autogrip without gimping someone like Iosaf who’s just a better character with the same accuracy issues. On Ellerie’s route, he can set up kills for Ellerie and then get in position to get danced if there’s no one else who you want to be danced, but I don’t know if I should call it a strength that he isn’t able to kill anything by himself. He’s just a mediocre mage with bulk and accuracy issues along with bad mobility, even Acielle is better.
Acielle: buff plz
Chapters
Just wanted to highlight some notable chapters and make some addendums to my thoughts on chapters in the past.
Chapter 3: So I previously said that this was one of the hardest chapters on misery mode, but Mince’s new personal weapon makes it a lot more manageable as you can be more aggressive with gecko and still be able to pull her back while also letting mince run away from the pocket spell merc.
Chapter 10: I hadn’t brought up this chapter in the past, but this one is also really tough as a pair of any of the promoted units on this map will kill everyone, sometimes even Krynia. I also think this is the only chapters where chixin and all of the johns other than the axe john are really good, so if you’re interested in using them, use them here.
Chapter 25: I’m talking abotu this chapter before chapter 24 because I believe this is actually the hardest chapter in the game. In terms of enemy quality, chapter 24 is definitely higher, but chapter 25 has an overall weaker team and makes less good use of items like the morale module and odd device. What I mean by this is that you have 12 units in chapter 24 and 10 units in chapter 25 and out of those 10 units, none of them are Gecko, Krynia, or John XVI. Keeping up with the waves of monsters that spawn here can be a nightmare, so this is the only chapter that I’ve felt the need to rush to the end for. I think the hardest section to clear is the bottom left, so focus on getting rid of the root there last. Oh and bonus gamer tip, use Mince to swarp Cherise further into her area to clear it faster.
Chapter 24: So this chapter isn’t the hardest one anymore, but that’s because you have access to busted units like the aforementioned 3, Foxberry, Nerysa, Xeo, and Lindros. Use your morale modules, use the odd device, go crazy, this is pretty much the last real Ellerie chapter before the victory lap that is the rest of the game.
Bugs
So there were 2 main bugs I ran into, one that was a slight annoyance and one that heavily impacted my playthrough. Firstly, during chapter 22, Mince killed the sun shooter and got his hidden promo, but he also leveled in the same combat that he got the kill, which causes the game to soft lock when the next unit engages in combat. I got around this by leveling Mince on a different enemy and then killing the Sun Shooter.
The next bug was really bad and I’m not quite sure what caused it, but I seemed to be losing items when transferring items between the two armies. Since I’m a dirty min-maxer, I would try and use a majority of my stat boosting equips and limited staves on one team and then return them to the convoy with a character that had convoy access, but by doing this I somehow lost my rescue staff between chapters 22 and 23 and my plucker’s between chapters 24 and 25. I could maybe be misremembering and accidentally sold my rescue staff, but I have no idea how I lost my plucker’s. As for how this happened, I can only guess that returning items to the convoy via the Seahawk can cause some of them to go missing.
Misc
I suppose here I’ll write my appreciation of some stuff. In chapter 26, there’s a special conversation between the boss and Ellerie and I was really hung up on the way Ellerie calls them a garbage human being. It just felt really jarring to me for some reason (not that she’s wrong), but the script change felt more fitting. I felt this was necessary to bring up
I like the changes in economy with the offering of the 10k +5% growth for everyone and the two levin swords. At that point in the game, i remember having a lot of gold during this time during my iron man and nothing to really do with it, so this was nice.
I had actually finished the game a few weeks ago, but I had completely forgotten to finish this writeup, game is pretty decent, I’ve done like 4 full playthroughs now. Thanks for making it Rivian
