[pained smile]

[9ofcups]

(pictured: me thinking about the 80 hours i've spent playing fe3h since late december)

i wish i didn't have to keep track of the little things in my stat-building for theoretical best builds because i've been on the ailell chapter for two days now since i've spent two in-game weeks meticulously grinding skills although it's been worth it... you know it's bad when you're like "damn i can't be fucked to look up brawler's mastery skill and felix is 12 points away so fine i'll give it a try" only to realize that brawler's class mastery skill is literally UNARMED COMBAT... i've never felt so humiliated in my life.

in contrast though i took the time to master wyvern rider on both cyril and hilda and learned seal defense which is objectively useless for this run when they're both overpowered and can one-shot everything but it'll definitely be helpful for my eventual maddening run. switched hilda to pegasus knight for a bit so she can master darting blow. ingrid and leonie already have this one so we're good, though i was thinking about teaching cyril armored blow to help push him into a player phase monster... however that would require me shoving him into armored knight so i think it'd be best if he stuck with death blow lol

also forgot that warlocks master bowbreaker as their class skill until lysithea got it and now i think it'll be a good way to go for annette since she's 100% going to be my dark flier on my BL maddening run. she's slower than my faster units who are in flying classes (leonie claude ingrid etc) but she still has enough speed to do some deadly damage and of course canto is always so helpful especially since lysithea has thyrsus and black magic range+1 helps but still requires her to get pretty close

i'm sure i talked about this in my last post but i fucked up so bad with leonie and had her train pegasus knight without training her sword rank up so she could switch to falcon knight so she mastered darting blow and then just Sat There for a bit. thankfully i had the foresight for some reason to also train her riding rank up so now she's a bow knight...? i don't actually know how we got here tbqh i blinked last night and next thing i knew she had a 47% chance of passing her bow knight certification and did so on the first try so uh. here we are? the good thing about leonie is that the pegasus knight to bow knight pipeline is a free ticket to speed stats so high not even the natural rng speed-screwed stats that bow knights typically get can stop her so i expect her to overperform for the rest of the run


other things i need to do:

1. have my mages go back to the basic mage class and master fiendish blow because i overlooked that
2. cyril needs to master death blow and hilda needs to master either darting blow, death blow or both
3. claude needs to learn alert stance so bad it makes him look stupid. that's my fault though i completely forgot to train him up on his flying rank pre-timeskip so now it's hilariously low compared to my fliers with their avg B+ ranking which objectively speaking is so backwards because he's a Wyvern Master. you would think they'd bump his flying skill up a little
4. annette mastering bowbreaker
5. trying to get everyone's authority rank up to B+/A by the end of this run which works out awfully for bitches like felix who have a bane in authority therefore getting less skill points in it as everyone else + he also has the audacity to lose out on so much damage if you assign him a battalion which at the moment doesn't matter because he one-shots even armored units right now but STILL. caspar also having a bane in authority severely irritates me like my god bitch. just be better it's that easy
6. i've been flirting with the objectively hilarious idea of pushing ferdinand into the great knight class but now that i think about this it's kind of weird that great knight is such a ""shitty"" class for him because he requires a high rank in heavy armor to recruit him hence why he's the hardest to get... that being said the requirements for great knight are so ridiculously high. i get the concept of them being heavy armor riding units meaning they need to be beefy as fuck but an A rank in heavy armor is def asking way too much of me and ferdinand is a speedier and stronger paladin anyway so that might be his endgame class

so called "perfect class" discoveries:

1. finding yuri's perfect build has been such a challenge because like i said in my last post he's basically a felix with less strength and more speed which would make him a petra part two but my petra had more strength than him when they were both assassins which was so [rubs temples] Like genuinely what the fuck man. and yes trickster is his unique class but have we considered i hate his outfit for it (and it also screws his str growths over iirc). that being said i've FINALLY figured it out and it's sniper. like just hands down he casually walks around the battlefield with no crit ring just a 45 dex stat at level 37 hitting crits with a 45% chance like nobody's business. and he looks SEXY AS FUCK doing it imo sniper gives him his best battle design 100%
2. grappler felix is great but the 65% str growth = his speed is so much more insane than his strength which is fine because he has 38 str and that's more than enough for this point in the game but... [eyes the warrior class with it's 70% growth rate] well.
3. cyril is by far one of my favorite units to just stick in enemy range to decimate during EP and it's really obvious that wyvern rider is his destined class, not only because of the whole almyra wyverns thing but because he has a unique design as a WR (though not as a wyvern lord which is... shaking sobbing screaming i HATE the generic WL armor please god help me)

anyway aside from gameplay i've been thinking real long and hard about the narratives it creates to recruit people to a class, specifically within the blue lions for some really obvious reasons wrt loyalty, and now i want to write fic about that because i'm crazy. i think it's the idea of felix sylvain and ingrid defecting to the alliance that does it for me because i'm so interested in trying to examine their motivations, like would saving dimitri be such a hopeless cause that even felix would give up? i think ingrid would see defecting to the alliance as a rather roundabout way to save the kingdom and sylvain would do it mostly for a sense of his own freedom but felix is suuuch a wild card because despite everything he says and does he would still run himself into the ground trying to save dimitri from his own fate, etc etc

along the lines of that route i'm also *__* over examining cyril and his motivations further too especially with the way ashe has to be recruited again post-timeskip and i think their rlship is so extremely personal to me lmfao. cyril's blind loyalty to rhea is something that pisses me off so bad and makes me want to murder whoever was in charge of writing the poc characters in this game but i want to unravel that slowly and get into how deeply entrenched he is in this concept of rhea being his white savior when she genuinely does not give a shit about this kid at all... and in doing so unraveling ashe's trauma with the church considering they made 17yo ashe kill his adoptive father.

i think it's so interesting that ashe is the one that doesn't join VW because you would think he would be "loyal" i guess... or actually it's moreso that other BL members would be less loyal i.e. annie (her dad) or mercie (her brother being jeritza/wanting to take care of her mom/having imperial ties alr). even felix joining quickly makes sense because even if his motivations are convoluted he wouldn't be the type to dawdle in a situation so ashe joining late is like... Babe what are you doing in this volcano!!!!!! Damn!!! it does give him so many layers as a character though like nice to know this IS a guy who can make his own decisions and work through his trauma even while struggling to fulfill his idealized standard of duty. why is he literally ingrid minus the racism

back to the fic idea. the blue lions are just such a fun tension-filled house with how strained the quartet's dynamics are and then you add on these random guys (dedue ashe annie mercie) who are all undeniably good people but also are unable to ignore these tensions so like... in a world where byleth teaches the golden deer and recruits sylvain almost instantly how badly would that fracture the rest of BL. i read about this but from the perspective of them defecting to BE which was devastating to think about. i also think it would greatly contribute to dimitri's general spiral

i like that the game puts all these intense feelings into character dialogues even when walking around the monastery or kill off certain units i.e. dorothea's iconic "we killed ferdie, professor" line or a personal favorite—felix's "could i have saved him? could i have stopped him?" about dimitri—so that you're forced to think about the consequences of convincing these units to join your cause against ideals/people they used to stand for. it adds such a heavy level of melancholy in war phase that almost makes you regret recruiting some people lol

but anyway... i'm rambling. will hopefully finish the ailell chapter today and get ashe back but i'm also trying to read so it might take longer to get to this maddening route than i thought LOL