Oh right, you said you like seeing endgame teams.
Summary
Lyon was really strong, as everyone seems to agree. With Nosferatu equipped he becomes basically unkillable, especially given his defenses are above average for a mage. Giving him the monster weakness makes him risky to use as a boss killer in the lategame, though, which is a neat way of balancing him.
Tiffani was a monster, even by trainee standards. By the endgame she was just unstoppable. Definitely my MVP.
Melina was no slouch either. I went Archer with her since you have a glut of axe users at the point where you get her, which I think ended up being a good idea since she goes with Grado, and an extra archer helps for dealing with fliers.
Lieselott took a while to get going, but once she did she also became a monster. She easily outpaced Aias even with his bonus promotion, and once she picked up the +4 Def from their Ch25 convo she became amazingly tanky for a flier.
Using the bard was a no-brainer, and once he got infinite-use Nosferatu he became a juggernaut. Cheeky of you to canonize the dark magic glitch like that! I really like what you did with him, it’s a fun idea for a burly brigand to be the bard. (Although him keeping the little boy battle sprite was pretty incongruous.) I like that saving him forces you to give up the flute – it’s rare that video games have the guts to make the morally good option require an actual sacrifice. It reminded me a bit of Erritis from Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Boudica smash. Her rock-hard defense made her one of the best tanks – as long as there weren’t any magic users, I could just plonk her down and watch the enemies suicide against her. Tiffani support is a nice bonus, though both of them are so good they don’t really need it.
Tirado was the only one of the armor knights I kept around long-term; the others just fell off too quickly. Unfortunately he still ended up lagging behind my godly trainees, but he still served as effective mounted support.
I love swordmasters, and Ismaire is just a really solid unit that requires no investment. I love that she outclasses Carlyle in basically every way.
Summoning and unbreakable ranged weapons? Yes please. I ended up having to make her hang back in the final maps because she just kept stealing everyone’s kills.
I didn’t expect to get much use out of Rennac, but after I gave him the Fell Contract he really took off and actually outperformed Zabba (who I also promoted to assassin). Silencer compensates for his piddling strength (which actually isn’t all that bad after the assassin promotion boost) and his surprisingly good resistance makes him pretty durable.
Like Ismaire, Mansel is just really good out of the box, especially for the final maps that pit you against waves of monsters.
And finally, McGregor was my main healer for most of the campaign. Mansel outpaced him by the end, but I kept him around as a backup healer and monster deleter.
Oddly enough, I never used the generals very much. I got some use out of Valter, Caellach, and Selena, but by the endgame Lieselott, Ismaire, and Tiffani leave them in the dust. Glen just… consistently sucked, and I just never saw much use for Riev since you don’t fight many dark mages (and a promoted McGregor can do the same thing better). His special Druid promotion looked cool, but I never bothered promoting him to try it out.
I played on normal mode, which was hard enough I don’t want to know what hard mode is like. I would have liked the option to enable casual mode on any difficulty; I ended up resetting after every death since I didn’t want to miss out on any dialogue, which got frustrating in some maps. I also got every special conversation, which heavily restricted my team comp in the later maps. I liked the maps that only had 2-3 conversations, since they encouraged me to mix up my team composition and use units I would have ignored otherwise, but the maps that lock up every deployment slot if you want to see them all were a bit much.
I didn’t have as much trouble with 5x as most people seemed to (probably because I took an aggressive strategy), but chapter 19 had me pulling my hair out trying to save both villages and keep everyone alive. Those pegasus knight reinforcements are just nuts! You can send a flier to take some out early, but then you get nuked by Purge. Are you supposed to exhaust Artur’s Purge before they start showing up?
Finally, bug report I forgot to mention: Once Fomortiis passes level 20, his summons start spawning with iron axes instead of Wretched Air, which makes them pretty useless. Do they, like, loop back around to level 1 or something?
