I played through the game again, and thought to myself why not make one of those fancy tier lists?
So I made one. Like usual with my thoughts and feedback, this list too is based on Infernal difficulty.
Explanation (Wall of Text warning)
This is the closest to my totally not biased tier list. I don’t claim to be as objective as possible,
but instead the list is based on my impressions over the span of several playthroughs. As a disclaimer,
D tier doesn’t necessarily imply the units are bad, I just don’t have much experience using them.
Units aren’t in any particular order within a tier. With all of that out of the way:
S: this is almost self-explanatory; Mackenzie rivals trained Eduardo the moment she joins, and in fact surpasses him in Strength and Defense. Eduardo is faster, but for the most part the Speed difference is 2 or so points, and thus inconsequential: it hardly matters if you have 14 or 11 Speed when enemies have 18-20. Besides, Eduardo gets slowed down by heavier weapons like Steel Greatlance (which is one his favorites mind you).
Equipping Mackenzie with Guts boosts her at times shaky hit rates and is easy to activate by getting hit by knives and daggers. She has enough bulk to withstand most critical hits, even several of them, and Raging Storm is incredibly useful both offensively and defensively for using the boosted movement to retreat. RS is also easy to charge with Sturdy Blade. Heavy Blade might also work, but enemies tend to have higher Str than Def, so Heavy Blade is more reliable. With healer support she straight up solos swaths of enemies on her own.
Dayo is insanely good. What he lacks in bulk he makes up in sheer power. You can two hit kill pretty much anything, and often one-shot even with a handaxe. Wild Abandon with a killer weapon is a delete button for any enemy in the game: you can one hit kill Renee if her Defense boost is gone (but all other boosts, including Half Damage, are present). His survavibility can be helped with Imbue - and Dayo is a good candidate for it with his surprisingly high Magic - but that means you have to give up a skill slot otherwise used for boosting his power or crit rate.
A: Gabriel is being held down by his low Speed. Whereas Mackenzie or Eduardo have the Defense to back up their lack of Spd, Gabriel doesn’t, at least to the same extent. However, like other top tier units he’s very strong. He also has one of the better Combat Arts in the game; Crossblast. Enemies come often in formations, so weakening and even killing several enemies at once is not hard to set up, and is really valuable when every hit counts. He can also retaliate against 2-range with any weapon instead of being limited to weaker weapons like handaxes or javelins.
Ojala is super fast, and has high enough Strength to put in some serious work. Outside of Shining Bow she lacks 1-range options unlike other high/ top tier units. She has other qualities that justify her placing on the tier list, however. She has decent enough bulk and Magic stat to make good use of Imbue, access to Reposition and huge damage boost in the form of Hunter’s Volley and Technician. Getting weapons to low enough uses for Technician is not very hard, especially if you are using other bow units, especially Lakshmi - you can trade her old bows to Ojala, and often reach Technician thresholds rather quickly if you already haven’t. Ojala doesn’t need Technician per se, but being able to one-shot kill on command is a useful thing to have.
Dive Bomb turns Cecile into a player phase powerhouse. Being able to defeat enemies without taking a counterattack is really valuable in a difficulty mode where your units die to 2 hits most of the time. At times her damage is a bit shy from the kill, but you can circumvent that problem with food/Evelia boost or by using a different weapon. However, she has no enemy phase to speak of, she quite often gets killed in one hit in return, so you have to make each action with Cecile count.
Mitzi is great, especially if you can keep her damage output up with something like Steel Poleaxe or Master Axe. She has low/shaky hit rates against some foes, so you might need Fortune to increase it. While Mitzi has some semblance of bulk, it’s by no means reliable.
Nadia’s a dancer, what else do you need? How about being able to charge some of those crazy strong Combat Arts, while being able to move in the range of long-range or siege weapons?
Evelia’s combat prowess is surprisingly good from the moment she’s promoted. You have to keep her out of harm’s way until then (and often she’s relegated to healer duty after), but leveling her up is not hard at all. Evelia has good stats all around with her defenses being somewhat low, but her Speed, Strength and HP are all high. Her ability to heal or increase hit rates and increase Power is a useful niche to have. You’d be surprised how often that +2 pushes your other units’ offenses to one-round / one-shot thresholds.
Balthazar is a strong unit from the get-go. He also has A rank in lances, which is an added bonus
especially if you want to use forged weapons. While Balthazar boasts similar Strength and/or higher Speed than units higher on the list, he has a more limited availability and a Combat Art/ personal skill that is overall less useful than those of higher ranked units. If you didn’t train Ramon, Balthazar makes for a perfectly usable, if not straight up better, replacement.
Eduardo is in a somewhat awkward position. Don’t get me wrong, he has both power and bulk, but neither is quite there. Like previously mentioned, the heavier hard-hitting weapons cut into Eduardo’s Speed, making him lose the one advantage he has over someone like Mackenzie. Eduardo’s defenses are also not on her level, but this doesn’t mean he’s a bad unit. His power and bulk are great in early game, but other units quickly reach and surpass his offensive power, and some even his defenses, so I find it hard to reasonably place Eduardo in a higher tier than B.
Agnes is overall a strong unit with some versatility to her skill set-up, but her personal skill is
high-maintenance, and making consistent use of it can be harder than it seems. After all, you have a
limited amount of ingredients, and you might want to use them for providing necessary buffs to your
other units. You need her personal and/or other Speed buffs for consistent doubling in later chapters,
especially if you plan to use some of the heavier weapons. Frozen Lance also is in my experience way more situational than some other Combat Arts.
Lakshmi is fantastic. Increased bowrange is a neat tool to have, and she has the means to make crit-based set-ups work. Like with Ojala, she doesn’t have many 1-range options and no access to crossbows. She performs well in her archer role, but with the lack of movement options, sometimes lacking Speed and being more limited offensively means it’s hard to rate her any higher.
She’s been in my team in every playthrough, however.
Tybalt is a combat thief. Great Speed, good Strength, middling everything else. Hoarfrost Knife provides him situational bulk, and is a good weapon for him in general. Alchemist Dagger is also a valid choice, but you might find his hitrates a bit too low. Canto+ is good for hit-and-run tactics where you want to weaken an enemy so that one of your other units can safely go for the kill.
Val is a solid unit early on, but starts to fall off towards the later chapters. Her Speed is especially
proving to be a hindrance, and enemies often having the exact damage to kill her in two hits makes her
personal skill hard to work with on top of the skill being somewhat unreliable in the first place.
That is, staying on low HP for extended periods of time is not what I’d consider viable. Her promotion
bonuses are pretty good, and push her out of getting doubled range - except against the fast enemies, anyhow.
Salvador lives or dies by his Strength and Speed growths. If you keep proccing them on level ups, you’ll have a speedy and strong combat unit with good mobility. If you don’t, you’ll have a middling cavalier with lacking combat. In the latter case he’s probably more closer to C tier than B. His new personal somewhat helps with his combat, but it can’t remedy getting screwed in Speed department. Even with decent/good level ups as an axe user his combat is comparable to or worse than higher tier units.
Bennett is a unit who requires a bit of babying or feeding kills, but it starts to pay off big time.
His placement on the list has a lot to do with that hurdle; his combat is not amazing from the start,
and if you’re not making sure Bennett is keeping up, he’ll quickly fall off. I could see him in C tier,
but frankly once he starts hitting doubling thresholds, he’ll quickly become one of your better,
if not the best magic user combat-wise.
Idowu is often my go-to secondary healer. He has a surprisingly high Defense, so even if an enemy reached him he doesn’t immediately evaporate. While you can use him for combat, his low Speed holds him back from being a solid combat unit. However, he is rather easy to level up, and the defensive boost he provides works great in tandem with healing and allowing Mackenzie to wreak havoc. Having a second healer is never a bad option if you have the deployment slots.
Initially I was going to place Hati in C, but I’m willing to cut him some slack and admit there might be
something in the way I play that prevents me from making good use of his personal skill. With that said, I don’t think he’s quite on par with other A rank or even some B rank units. Leveling him up for promotion is a hassle because he basically has to hug Valentina (or a sun mage) in order to be usable in combat. He gets doubled - and killed - quite frequently. With increased enemy offenses the healing his personal would provide doesn’t reliably push him out of getting killed zone. I think his doubling being locked behind specific units is what makes his personal skill overall hard to utilize properly. His defenses aren’t that great either, and his Strength getting capped fast and staying capped for a while means his power doesn’t really outgrow that of many others.
Velma is one of those units I find hard to rate. Her Speed +2 on heal sounds good on paper, but I find it way more situational than Evelia’s power boost, and that Spd +2 doesn’t unlock doubling thresholds for that many units. Units who consistently double don’t require the boost and aren’t enemy phase monsters, and so can’t be left open for several enemies to attack. Velma’s stats are pretty average overall, meaning if you don’t train her from join, she’s very likely to fall behind.
Trudy follows the same trend as other units that generally rank lower on the list; lacking in terms of
Speed and defenses. Guaranteed hits can come in handy, but if you don’t KO you’ll have to eat a
counterattack, which is less than ideal when you die to two hits.
I don’t think Sanite is a bad unit per se, I simply struggle to make room to deploy her. Her prf is awesome, but that’s where the problem lies: her combat can feel a bit underwhelming without Daybringer, but you don’t want to break it too fast, either. What’s more, if you wanted to fully utilize her personal skill, that leaves you with only a couple of weapons to use. This means she will be unprepared against some enemies like cavalry or axe users.
I don’t have that much to say about Yewande. A serviceable thief if you haven’t leveled up Quentin (or he died), gets outclassed by Tybalt. Earliest you can promote Quentin or Yewande is a chapter prior to Tybalt anyhow, so it’s not like you get to have fun with Canto+ long before you get an another rogue.
Hildegard overall is a rather lackluster unit. Latent Power + Runesword is a fantastic combo, but even without Latent Power she doesn’t make good use of regular weaponry. Magic swords are also rare. This, combined with her lacking Speed for a swordmaster means I can’t rank her very high.
Quentin can be tough to level up, and often his hit rates hover in an uncomfortably unreliable area. Fortune staves remedy that issue, but healers are busy healing other units, and Quentin isn’t very likely to benefit from Balms. His combat is mediocre, but he’s a thief.
Thelma’s personal skill is cool, but it being dependent on critical hits makes it too RNG-heavy
to be relied on. Additionally, Thelma too struggles in both Speed and defenses, meaning leaving her exposed to a single enemy can get her killed - unless she crits. She, like many others, also lack AoE.
Wolfram is kind of “jack of all trades, master of none” type of character; he’s a flying unit and can wield
axes and magic. So why is he so low on the list? Simply put, his combat is not on par with higher tier units, and his stats aren’t stellar, either. He doesn’t excel in anything in particular, and as such isn’t ranked any higher.
Jean is one of those units I can never seem to be able to train properly. His crit shenanigans seem interesting enough, but unfortunately low damage output, no doubling and reliance on RNG makes him too difficult to use for me personally, at least. He might be D tier unit, in fact.
Fabrice is a healer with poor combat. Not much to say yet, since there hasn’t been that many chapters where he could be deployed.
Zahir is another one of those units that I can’t seem to be able to make work in the long run. I might deploy him for a chapter or two before benching him.
Ramon is an awkward case; his hitrates are a bit too low for his personal to really shine, and again, Fortune is better used on someone else. As far as lance users go, he has competition in the heavy hitting department already. To make matters worse he gets outclassed by Balthazar, who in most instances doesn’t need a personal skill to double axe users and doesn’t really get doubled by them, either.
I don’t have much experience of using Rhapsody, I often don’t have enough deployment slots to keep her around - or rather, at that point of the game I’m not willing to bench someone just to level her up.
Xavier doesn’t leave a good first impression. His hitrates hover in the 60’s, and he gets doubled if he wields the Hunting Bow. I haven’t used him much at all, simply because often I have Gabriel as my gunner already, and even when I don’t Xavier doesn’t seem to have much going for him. Not enough for me to bench someone on my team, anyhow.
Femi, Reese, Persephone and Tchaka are all characters I have little to no experience of using.
