since i was mentioned…
conan glazing
from experience playing Hag (both in growths and in 0%), magic is basically fully neutral against physical weapons in terms of WT, and there are a LOT of effective weapons and enemies weak to such weapons (e.g. weapon-slayers, hammers, halberds, etc, those kind). because of that, the game actually has a slight bias to axes in general because they have the best MT out of these effective weapons, and effectiveness is a multiplier on weapon MT so the more the better. when you fight for example, an armor, you can either armorslayer, heavy spear or hammer. however, if you consider all the possible weapons they can run:
lances - ideally, you use hammer > heavy spear > armorslayer (because WT)
axes - armorslayer > hammer > heavy spear
magic - hammer > heavy spear > armorslayer (because might, since magic doesn’t interact with the weapon triangle)
more or less, most of the time, the axe is going to come out on top. while this isn’t necessarily meaning axes are the most dominant weapon type, the way the game is designed makes axes have an inherent advantage. it also kinda doesn’t hurt that lances are probably the most common enemy weapon type in this game after tomes lol
conan, being a berserker, is pretty much in position where he can actually make use of these advantages. dahl, his counterpart, has a 1 base str advantage over him, but dahl also uses lances whereas conan has axes, which effectively nullifies any real damage advantage dahl has over conan while conan also benefits from higher speed and CON, meaning he barely loses speed over wielding stronger weapons. conan only loses 1 AS from equipping the hammer, while dahl loses 3 AS from equipping heavy spear, in addition to the heavy spear being a weaker weapon than the hammer.
consider:
dahl - 15 str, 11 mt heavy spear, 15 speed, loses 3 from heavy spear = 26 atk, 48 if effective, 12 AS
conan - 14 str, 13 mt hammer, 16 speed, loses 1 from hammer = 27 atk, 53 if effective, 15 AS
this is also completely discounting conan having a very notable bulk advantage over dahl with 40HP/13DEF/4RES vs 36HP/10DEF/8RES so he can much more effectively frontline lmao
conan additionally has 1 extra advantage that dahl doesn’t have - the berserker class has the innate property to scale terrain, which provides advantages on maps such as
ch 14 - conan can walk into a mountain or peak to basically turn the pegs from annoying to pretty much free if you are lucky he just critkills Aura so you dont have to bother with killing her in chapter 15 and then backtracking to the village for Nicaea
ch 20 - conan can scale across the river on the left to clear out the GKs and wyverns early: this is something dahl literally cannot do, and conan additionally gets WTA against most of the enemies here because there’re only two sword dragoons on that side of the map
ch 21 - this map is chock full of mountains that conan can easily park his ass on and also just tank fliers for nearly free
it’s very possible that people on growths might find their own units outclassing conan, which i think is an entirely reasonable take. on 0%, your early joiners are obviously not going to have good stats by the time conan joins, and conan’s base performance is actually solid enough to be used all the way up to endgame.
anecdotes of 0% conan:
conan in position to critkill the ch19 arbalest sniper, dahl could never because he can’t swim LOL
conan oneshots the ch19 boss with solar brace swordslayer
conan critkills a ch21 flier (i forgot if this crit was necessary but it was really funny when it happened)
conan OHKOes a chapter 22 hoplite with the swordslayer