I suddenly became inexplicably figher-brained a month or two ago and tried working them into more of the FE games I played and found them to be… not as fun to use? Fighters are just kinda pirates and brigands again, but for indoor maps rather than outdoor ones, just another enemy class to mow down.
Playable fighters aren’t that fun to use either with the exception of one (technically two if you wildly stretch your definition of “axe only fighter” to include Hector). FE games usually have their early game dominated by lances and axes, but even then I dont find much use out of fighters since my other units end up handling said lance wielders just fine. Weapon advantage and big damage cool but they’re still more liable to miss and eat a lot of damage than my other units.
Aside from having being able to use axes in early game where lances are common, I don’t feel much insentive to use fighters over my better, more capable and more consistent units. Axes themselves are fine, but being a class locked to them with not much else to offer on top of mediocre skill at best doesn’t encourage me to take them off the bench unless I force myself to use them to promote them into something usable.
(this turned into more of a rant than i thought oops) So yeah, casual FE player thinks fighter is the worse base class.
problem with mainline fighters is that they usually are given low skill to exacerbate their usual “big attack, no hit, varied degrees of mid-to-low speed”
Mind you, in romhacks (even if some abide to this), you always have some sort of gamechanging kit element (name any Fighter without Frenzy/Wrath/Fiery Blood/Silent Pride/Resolve/etc.) that make their value skyrocket if you are in the zone™️
But outside of that - it’s mainly because of shameful statlines and games usually centered towards offering good matchups to the main lord on early game (yahoo I love random brigand the picosecond political instability arises) and making it hard for axe users to get much value
and afterwards, you usually end up with other characters that can make strong correct use of those axes (prepromotes), or came in with an axe user that was able to circumvent the previous issues (Ross high-hit Hatchet alongside having a large level pool and the pirate→ berserker pipeline)
in short, its not that the class is bad, its the people that job on it that suck
Armor Knight is pretty widely considered to be the worst class because of its reduced movement, low to middling growths, movement penalties, and slayer weapons against it. That said, those things have rarely stopped me from using one. (Having a moving wall is nice)
My rant back when I first joined was myrmidons. (Why would I want to deal 2 damage twice when another baseline unit could deal 7 damage once?)
As for fighters: They’re cannon fodder. Mainline FE seems to tend to either give the player 1 early on or a group of like 3 all at once. They give you a frontline unit that maybe isn’t worth using throughout the whole game. I think of it like a Raticate: easy come easy go. Part of their usefulness imo is in their expendability. Bonus points if the game gives you a handaxe. Then they’re like a secondary archer.
Ik this thread is about fighters, but one of my favorite FE memories is I got stuck on a chapter in FE9 easy mode when I was 11, so I gave a killer axe to largo and threw him at a group of enemies. He died but it cleared the path & I had a smooth path to beating the game after that.
I respectfully disagree. I think that fighters aren’t really meant to solo maps or charge ahead, they are more like support for those units. Axes often have the cheapest and most common effective weapons (Hammer, Poleaxe, etc.), giving early game fighters a niche. They can be good at wearing down enemies and tanking hits. Fighters are damage sponges, they protect your squishier units and work together with them to achieve victory (clerics to heal them, archers and mages to deal chip damage). And their promoted class, warrior, gives them anti-flier and range utility, allowing them to become a bow user with high strength (a pretty rare thing in many fire emblem games). They can even work well with cavaliers or myrmidons because of the fact that they can usually deal soak up damage that your damage dealer could have taken, making them more vulnerable. But that’s just my opinion.
In my opinion the worst class in FE depends on your play style. If you’re like me and like to go slow, then fighters and armor knights can be lifesavers. But if you want to go fast or play offensively, then mercs myrms and cavs are really good. Each class has a purpose it can fulfill: armor knights tank, cavaliers and pegasus knights go for far away objectives, archers have anti-flier utility, etc.
I think that all classes are NOT created equal, but they all have some real use.
Armor knights may not be fast, but they are actually some of my favorite units. I always use gilliam in FE8. Plop him on a Fort and the enemies can’t do shit because they ran into a freaking metal wall.
I agree though that fighters are some of the most frustrating units to use because, well, whatcha gonna do when a myrm comes for you? However, fighters hit so hard they can usually beat the bricks off of an enemy before they react… well, that is if they hit them at all…
Cuz gba axe units had horrid skl growths and Axes had horrid hit back then they just missed alot. Do alot of damage but if ya can’t hit even high damages would become 0. Reason why gba Hero was one of the best class cuz it came out of mercenary which had good skl so the axes didn’t miss as much and had the spd and skl growth to handle their weight with decent con ontop most heros having 9-10 con.
I don’t think it’s the worst class, but them feeling bad? I think it has to do with the tendencies of playable Fighters in vanilla FE: Fighters that come in pairs are worse than the than the ones that join alone (except for Osian and Barst who isn’t even part of the pair), and in most cases the playable Pirate and/or Brigand are better (feel free to count Ross).
Let’s compare them to other classes. They tend to have have high HP and strength, average skill/dexterity, speed and defense and low resistance. So at best they’re compared to the following classes:
Pirates/Brigands: They trade some defense for speed, thus having better combat. It doesn’t help that Berserker is better than Warrior (critical boost is better than having to grind bows from E rank depending on the game).
Mercenary: Despite the lower HP and strength, they have better combat stats overall and promotion, where they share axes.
Wyvern Rider: They trade some HP, strength and resistance for speed and movement, so if they get axes they’re better at using them.
Armor Knight: The fighter has higher speed and movement, lower defense and comparable skill/dexterity. Resistance may vary.
So the Fighter’s class niche is doing a strong single hit and take another single hit back, which isn’t as impressive as taking multiple physical hits or having high enough speed for dealing and/or avoiding double hits and better evasion. Even then axes have the lowest hit of the melee weapons and your skill might not make up for it.
TL;DR: Fighters are outclassed half the time due to a mediocre statline. Either double down on their niche by giving them higher skill or make them mobile tanks by increasing defense, leave the speedier role to Pirate/Brigand/Axe Wyverns.
Even putting aside the inherent, and at times, completely irreconcilable differences between games that drastically change the identity of classes with the same name, the player doesn’t recruit classes but rather characters. No class can be assessed in a vacuum that is in any way helpful.
As an example, if we viewed classes completely devoid of the context units join in, nomad troopers and valkyries are far and away the best classes in FE6. But that doesn’t really matter in context. Neither Cecilia or Clarine have the statspread to make use of their class to the fullest extent like Milady or Sin can. And for the nomad troopers, while Sin is one of the best characters in the game statistically, he’s only one unit. Sue is never going to be the all star that Sin can be, and Dayan joins very late and only on one route.
Ik you weren’t looking for actual analysis here but eh, it was an excuse to write about class design not being nearly as important as we think it is on player units.
Axe users just lack a good niche tbh. Spears already cover the role of the high-damage melee weapon compared to swords while being common enough to be a staple in the player’s army. Axes have to be shoehorned in to be relevant (axe knights, axe armors, axe wyverns, etc.)
In Valentia, the Soldier/Armored Knight line has the stat line of the axe fighter but actually has good bulk to boot. Buffing the armor line’s attack power removes the need for a separate axe-using infantry class entirely!
Think about it: aside from movement, the Armored Knight class line already has the strengths of the typical Fighter. Why even bother with the Fighter class then for playable units?
I usually lack a strong opinion on the viability or “feel” of Fire Emblem classes, mostly because in a vacuum you’re very rarely forced or even incentivised to use a particular pure-combat unit. While it’s still important to understand and discuss the underlying principles that make classes good or bad, their existence doesn’t really affect my personal experience with a game because I can always choose not to use them. Hell, bad units are fun in a way; it’s fun to rag on them and identify all the contextual reasons why they underperform, and it’s also fun to start a run with the express purpose of trying to make them perform anyway.
Incidentally, this neatly segues into the one class I do have a strong opinion on, which earns my own nomination as the worst class in FE, with extreme prejudice: Thieves.
The simple difference is that thieves do have a very large incentive; in most games, they’re the only class who can steal, and if you neglect to deploy them (or train them, if the game has speed steal), you’re missing out on very valuable items like statboosters and promotion items. This is “balanced” by making them distinctly worse at combat, to the point that you would not give them the time of day if you weren’t occasionally forced to waste a deployment slot because some asshole is carrying an Earth Seal or something.
I’m not even joking when I say that stealables and their presupposition as a fundamental, distinguishing feature of the Thief class is unequivocally the worst and most unnecessary aspect of Fire Emblem’s gameplay loop. These units are designed to be bad for general use, and yet I have to waste time and XP on them every other chapter for important items (or at the very least, large amounts of money). Why would you not put these items in a particularly time-sensitive chest or in the inventory of a big-ass enemy? Why have this item as an intermittent FOMO-flavoured obligation to deploy this one specific millstone, rather than a challenge for the rest of my army that I actually care about?
The best Thief I’ve ever used was Julian from FE3, and to my utter lack of shock, it had absolutely nothing to do with him being “the item-stealing guy.” I used him because he had what would nowadays be considered atypically insane growths for that class (sans Weapon Level, which I guess was their first attempt at compensating for their Thief status back then), and it was fun watching him gain gobs of stats and training him to the point where he was killing Medeus with Mercurius. And even with all that said, I’d still be having the exact same issue if I didn’t have that pre-existing interest in seeing how far I could take him.
The weakest class in a given FE campaign will usually be armour, for the simple fact that, if you didn’t change anything else, making any given unit into an armour will make them weaker (turn them into a melee unit with generally low movement). But that’s not to say that the weakest characters in a given campaign will be the armour. Obviously various campaigns put a spin on this (skills, later vanilla campaigns with reclass, Hag in White giving armour magic and a mounted promo, etc.) but you take my point.
Going on from there, being an axe infantryman is pretty rarely a standout bad thing. As far as custom campaigns go, while it’s obviously very hard to generalise, you generally can’t rely on cavalry alone, enemy quality tends to be higher and accuracy tends to be less shaky. You generally won’t be in a situation where most of your units can double and hit reliably, but your fighters can’t; and when they are noticeably slow, their power tends to be ramped up hard to compensate, and to actually matter. I can’t think of any truly bad fighters on the level of Wade, Dorcas or 7!Bartre – outside of guys who are crippled by being underlevelled with a late join – but I can’t think of many that are exactly combat gods, either. As far as my own campaigns go, Driscoll and Gerhard are both pretty… okay. Ludolf is an earlygame powerhouse but tends to fall off somewhat. Maybe that should be the next chart…
Ok, so maybe I have slept on some of fighters’ niches, and they can be useful, I’ll admit, but the problem for me more stems from their complete lack of consistency. In a game all about tactics and strategy, it would be pretty reasonable to not play like you’re getting lucky every time. Criticals are different because even if you play around them, you can at least be dead certain that even if the unit misses their crit, they’ll at least do damage. Fighters might be the only class that struggles to get hits even with weapon advantage. There are some cases where if a unit doesn’t crit they die, but it’s a lot more likely and unfair to be in a situation where if a unit doesn’t hit at all they die, and for me, fighters end up in that situation a lot. And it’s just fighters that have this, their promotions are every fun to use, both pre-promote and base fighter units. It’s simply that the base class feels/is way too risky to use or invest in without the constant risk/feeling that they are going to die way more often. Their pathetic skill growths baked into their class identity kinda makes it unavoidable.
Yeah, stat boosters exist, but only so many exist per game. I shouldn’t have to rely on them just to bring something back up to “usable.” Even if low skill to compensate high damage is balanced, it still doesn’t feel good, especially when the trade-off is “being in constant danger forever” as long as you’re in enemy range.
this is not an unresolvable issue. make axes lighter weight or stronger. armor knights abd fighters have distinctly different strengths already in games where fighters are playable.
This reminds me of a theorycraft I contemplated a while back where the weapon triangle gets condensed into blades and polearms. Poleaxes get lumped in with spear/lances while the shorter axes like hatchets get bundled with swords.
This thread is dumb because if there is one universal constant in any fe game or hack, its that the worst class is usually the swordlocked foot unit, sure some get crit and some get access to universal 1-2 weapon which yeah, now they are better, but this is isn’t about them, think of characters like roy, whose bum ass will do nothing for the rest of the game till he gets blazing blade, marth in all his games for also being a bum who refuses to promote and be cool like everybody, every sword locked foot unit not named corrin or ryoma in fates, literally kagetsu prefers to be reclassed into a wyvern lord than be a swordmaster, sometimes not even good units are saved from this curse, ayra can literally delete enemies, but when the fuck does she have time for that when sigurd’s thick ass fell on the enemies in enemy phase 10 turns before she could even reach them, you expect catherine with her good ass brave legendary sword to kick ass when she is a green unit, but sometimes she can just miss shit in that same chapter and even get killed( also its 3 houses and nobody is ever a foot unit so lel to them) rutger is considered one of the best unit in fe6 which is good, but even that isn’t great bc motherfucker lives in fe6, non existant hit ratelandia and the funniest part is that the singular time swordlocked foot units were any good, was in the one game where you can’t even choose when to use them, literally just give a 1-2 range sword to mia, edward or zihark( lucia staring from the bad unit basement) and they will wreck enemy phase, one gets free wrath, the other is the one time waifubait actually had strong stats and zihark is a peeta activist except he actually likes animals so he alright, oh yeah also ike is here, let be honest he counts as a swordlocked foot unit, nobody is using axes on him except for a singular second to bonk the burger king with a hammer and then continue bonking everybody with the ragnell. Also ps all earlygame fighters are hot asf and i will personally fight whoever says otherwise, anyway happy fee3
