Transcript
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Introduces the goal of the guide and explains foundational concepts like base boosting. The speaker shows how class minimum stats can give units free permanent gains early on.
In this video, we're going to talk about how to make your units absolute monsters.With the way the merging system works in Fire Emblem Fates, we've reclassing and building your units is more important than ever.Even I've been going back and forth about how I want to do this for the last couple of weeks, and I think with the amount of information available, I'm going to make unit building into a video series onits own and go through it in smaller chunks specifically for every single one.But, this first video is going to handle all of the basics that people should know prior to starting their unit building journey to inform their decisions.I know the game is a month in, but it's taken a lot of time to compile things and really optimize, and so that's why this is coming so late.So, after this video and we've kind of established all of the lingo that we're going to use, in subsequent videos we're going to get into the more granular and unit-specific options for you to get the most out of
your monster super soldier units.So, the first technique or concept is going to be a very basic one that I think many of us are familiar with, but I have to go over this anyways, and I am going to coin this term baseboosting.Every single class in this game has a minimum base stat value and then an additional modifier on top of that.If your unit's base stat is lower than the class minimum base value, then congratulations, you will get a free boost in stats to that level.The Ornery Rider is probably the most useful and biggest example of this in the early game, where you can get your early heavy armored units some free speed levels, like Tobias or Bakura, potentially Esmeralda, since Ornery Rider hasa minimum base speed of eight.So, if your unit has five base speed and you change to Ornery, well, there you go, you get three free permanent speed.
Likewise, with a class like Armored Knight, for example, even though it's a specialty class, it has a high base defense.So, if your mages have like three or four base defense and you want to give them a little bit more bulkiness, you can toss them into armored knight and you will get a free, I think it's 11 basedefense, which is a huge boost for characters that have low growths in that stat.So, that's pretty much base boosting.It's easy, it's free stats, and you should be able to do it very easily.It does get less relevant the further into the game you go because the specialty advanced and even master classes honestly don't really have very high bases.Heck, I think even the divine classes have bases in the high teens, which you will definitely be past by the time you're like midway through part one.
So, this is a technique that you will want to abuse early and as often as you possibly can.
Covers the growth trap and why class bases matter more than tiny growth differences. Then it breaks down which beginner, specialty, advanced, master, and divine class skills are worth mastering.
The second concept we're going to talk about is not an uncommon one in the Fire Emblem community.If you've been around here long enough, you will know about the growth trap.It's very easy to get hung up on growths in games like this where you're doing micro changes of 5 to 10% here and there.What you may think is an optimization will mean probably quite little in the long run.Now, over 50 to 60 levels in the early to late game, yes, a 10% change is going to make a five to six stat point difference and in something like speed, that'll be enough to exceed thresholds of doublingor even not getting doubled.And if you're optimizing for even a 20% boost, that's going to be super significant.You'll see double-digit stat swings.But, if you're trying to decide on one of two classes and the only difference between those is like a 5% growth that you're having over 10 levels, I mean, that's not even a single stat point.
So, make sure you keep that in mind and try not to hyper-fixate on the growths themselves.Otherwise, all you're going to do is make yourself miserable using a class that you may not enjoy using and you'll end up eventually benching that units because they're not performing well.No, instead focus on the bases that the classes are giving you and the modifiers that they're giving you, that is much more important.So, something like the Shido class is going to give you a plus seven boost to your speed, which is a massive swing and decent enough incentive to go into that one.It's not permanent, but it'll make your experience with the class a lot more fun, and your unit will be a lot stronger when leveling.And arguably what is more important than all of this talk that we've been talking about so far is the class skills that you want to master along the way.
And this is going to be the longest section of the video, so bear with me here, or just go to the timestamps and skip to the next section if you don't want to hear it.So, let's break these down section by section and talk about which skills are actually worth mastering.The beginner classes are easy.If this were a tier list, the Ordelius Rider one would probably go all the way to the top for that free plus one attack and magic combined, with Gladiator and Diviner at a close second for giving plus oneto attack and plus one to magic and resistance, respectively.Nothing too crazy here, but that single point can make a difference in the early game and will probably fall off in the late game because of the way stat boosts work.The specialty classes are where things start to get more exciting.
The Crescendo skill on Archer has to be one of the most impactful skills in the game, because plus 30 permanent hit until the end of the map is really good, and especially on your units that are going tobe killing machines, specifically axe units.Great Counter from Armor Knight is another excellent skill, since it's straight up just plus three attack on enemy phase and gives you free damage and can be equipped even in your non-armored classes.So, grabbing this and then benefiting from it on a speedy class is basically plus six effective damage for free on enemy phase, and you did pretty much nothing to earn it.Ravaging Arts from Myrmidon is nice, but if you're critting and not killing, I'm not sure that plus six damage is really going to help too much, and there will be better skills to replace this.In Shadow from Rogue is also nice, but less effective if you're not actually killing things.
And Brigand's Regroup also sounds nice in theory, but you really don't want to be missing in general in the first place, so this should be a pretty dead skill.Everything else in this tier is pretty middling otherwise, so use whatever class you want and figure out the growths however you want, and the ones that I listed are my recommendations.The advanced classes start to have some standouts of their own, and right out the gate Shiro has Ever Vigilant, which is really quite nice for your characters with high crit rate like Dietrich, for example.And this class is honestly rather solid overall anyways, which makes it worth being in.But by far the most broken skill in the entire game probably is the Caladrious class skill Overtake.This gives you plus one move for every enemy you kill up to three move until the end of your next turn, and it can be equipped regardless of what class you're in.
So all you need to do is kill a unit on player phase and then another two units in enemy phase, and you'll just have a flat plus three movement in the next player phase.It's nuts.Movement is by far and away the best stat, and just getting that buff to your movement will make you run through maps like they're nothing.Slightly less consistent, but still in the realm of being great is Countershot, which you can get from Rogue.This gives you a 50% chance to counter at one range with a bow.It's not completely consistent, but it lets you use bows other than the mini bow to fight at one range, so it's worth picking up on units that will be archers or definitely use bows.In the same sort of tiers that I'd also put Brace, the Guardian skill.I think a lot of people write this skill off not realizing that it gives protection plus three after killing an enemy, and that this also stacks with each kill.
So if you are enemy phasing, you will just keep infinitely stacking protection up until the end of the enemy phase, making your tanks even tankier the more they get assaulted.Again, they need to actually kill things to take advantage of this, but it can get very, very nice.I do also want to give a quick shout-out to Marksmanship and Countershot from Sniper and Forest Knight, but these are only really good if you're using a bow class and are struggling to hit or double, but they areconsistent skills.Charioteer skill is, of course, also fantastic, but you have to stay in that class to make use of it.Outside of that, there's not really much else worth mastering in the advanced classes.So, now we move on to the master classes, and for the most part, none of these are earth-shattering.A lot of these classes have fairly decent combat arts as their mastery skills, like Astra from Swordmaster, Strike and Heal from Warmaster, or the really, really good Hunter's Cross from Bow Knight.
None of these are anything crazy, but they can be nice to have in the event that you need to kill something and you need that extra juice.One of the real standouts in this tier, though, is Castle Knight's Intercept.This reduces damage taken by a flat five overall.This is basically identical to having plus five defense and resistance at all times and will make your tanks insane.In addition to that, you can also stack Sentinel skill on top of it, which reduces damage by another five, but only if you're at 100% HP.Look, all I'm saying is pop Aurora's Blessing and put both of these on and you've got an invincible unit.Now, the reason I didn't rank this higher is because this skill is sadly female-only, but Celestial Trooper's Lightning Reflexes is phenomenal and absolutely worth mastering if you have a fast unit and you can get it.
And that's about it for the master rank classes, and I'm not going to really waste much time going through the divine classes since they all just have flat plus 10 stat boost skills if you master the classes andare worth going after for your units depending on the stat that you want to stack.Of note, these plus 10 stat boosts count as your modifier boost, So, once you have them, you will not be able to get any further boost in that stat from any other source.Yes, I confirm this, and yes, this is very, very sad.
Shifts into mounted classes and how mounts can dramatically improve growths and modifiers. The speaker highlights especially strong mounted master class setups and encourages pairing them with the right mounts.
All right, longest part of the guide is done, I promise.Now, since we're in the same vein of classes, let's talk about mounts and combos.This is really only going to be relevant for master classes, unless you're on Khai's route, where they'll be present early on.Honestly, you can get away with most anything on Khai's route, and charioteer is the big standout there, since it doubles the growths you get from the unique mounts.Master classes is where things get really interesting.For example, let's talk about high savant.I famously hated the mortal savant, but I think I'm coming around to the high savant.It's a class that normally has 15% strength and magic with 10% speed, decks, and 5% defense.But, with a black horse, you can actually boost that to a total of 20% strength and speed, 15% decks, and 10% defense, which really makes it an excellent class that is very competitive for a hybrid class.
Bow knight is another fantastic standout here that makes archers really, really good, because even at base, it has good growths, but again, if you slap a black horse on, then you get 15% strength and a whopping 25% speedgrowth to match the highest speed growth classes in the game, which is crazy.At base, it also gives you a plus seven speed modifier, and the black horse gives you another plus three, so you're getting 10 added on to whatever your base speed was.So, you're going to be blitzing everything in this class, and mowing down your enemies quite fast.I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of the mounted master classes are excellent, and pairing them with a custom horse, dragon, or Orneus for even higher stat modifiers, and mixing and matching some excellent growths willtake your units a very long way.
So, don't be afraid to go look up my mounts video, which has everything that you need to know about these mounts, and go ahead and put that extra elbow grease into make some real monsters.
Explains advanced optimization ideas like growth fixing and cross-route unit building. It then warns that skipping the war arc can permanently lock in unit data and reduce future optimization flexibility.
Okay, so now that we've got all of that out of the way, I would like to discuss a few more advanced concepts, and we'll start with one that I call growth fixing.We've all looked at that unit with poor growths in speed, and the inner Fire Emblem optimizer inside of us goes, "I can fix them."I've done it.We've all done it.But, is this optimal to do?This is the head-scratcher.And I think in this game more than any other, you can actually say, "Yes, it is."because of another mechanic we're going to talk about later on.But, for this small section here, I'm going to give my suggestion and say that if you're going to growth fix, let's say Goliath, for example, you're going to need to commit to this all the way through on oneroute, and then build him to his best strength on another route.
Now, I'm not talking strength the that specifically, but rather the strength of the stats that he normally excels in.Now, of course, the issue here also comes with recruitment timing, which is a highly complex science that I'm going to work on an entirely separate video for, but the dilemma becomes, do I spend more levels on this unittrying to fix a stat, or do I spend the extra levels that I have from the early recruitment on this unit trying to pump up their best stat to really get the most specialized version of them that Ican?So, if you recruit a unit at level one with great defense growths, do you just roll with it there and optimize for defense, or do you try and fix their speed in this run because you have the mosttime to do that, and then grab their more average-leaning defenses at a higher level, which is going to already be excellent because that's what they're good at, and then merge them?
It's a tough call, but I'd be interested in hearing what you guys think on this one because I'm kind of undecided on it myself.Now, because we're already talking about multiple routes and merging and fixing things, let's talk about cross route fixing, which goes hand in hand where you basically build a unit in two completely different ways to eventually merge them intoa juggernaut in part three.So, for example, I want my Bakkar to be the best tank he can be, but he gets doubled a lot if I just play with him on one route and put him down the armored classes.So, instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make him into a Myrmidon and Swordmaster on another route to pull up his speed as much as possible so that eventually when I get to part three, bothBakkars kind of meld into one and I get the really good speed from one while I get the very good tank options from the other one, and this ends up being an excellent unit.
Of course, this does cost karma shards, so instead, we are going to metagame this for you even further, but before I can do that, we need to address skipping the war arc.At its core, skipping the war arc seems to be mostly harmless, if not a beneficial feature for you all time-wise as well as getting some free stats.But, you all need to realize that if you want to optimize your builds, and if you do this, you are essentially screwing up your save file permanently, and there's no way you can go back without erasing your data.The reason is that once you clear part two, the way this game works, it creates a base version of your unit in the clear data.So, if your Leda has a base level of 45 after you skip the war arc, and your base speed ends up being around, let's say, 50, no matter how many times you replay part one or part two with
your Leda, and what level you clear it out, your Leda will always default to a minimum of level 45 with a base 50 speed.If you wanted to go back and leave her at level 35 to reclass her to something else in part three, well, tough.You can't do that.She's stuck at level 45 with a base speed of 50.If you got unlucky with those level ups and you want to try and reset to do this all over again, tough.It's not happening.If you want to replay the entire route all over again to get better growths on your Leda, you can do that, but that base 50 speed will never be lower.Now, this can be good because like I said, if you do go back and replay part one and two entirely to let's say level up your Leda in strength instead, when you clear part two, if your strength there
is higher, it will just update your clear data to boost your clear data for that unit to the highest stats that you now have while retaining the high older stats you had to make a super unit.So, if I'm explaining all of this, why do I think this might be bad?Well, that's because if you want to avail of the more advanced tricks in this video, you want the flexibility of entering the war arc with a lower leveled unit.For example, I wanted to build Dante as a fast mage in Caladrius, but for me to really optimize that properly, I need to be able to get the black Magonius Ornius from Kai's feature.So, I played all the way through Theodora's route and leveled her up to around level 34 and classed her into Caladrius.If in this I skip the war arc, she's going to auto level without those mount boosts to level 39 at the start of part three, and I'll never be able to go back, which means that I just lost
five levels of potential speed optimization on my Dante that I'll never be able to fix again.And you all are probably thinking, why is this important?Because I spent a lot of time during this route working on this very specific Dante who had an earlier recruit time in Theodora's route than the other routes.And so it makes a very big difference to me.Again, this is a hypothetical scenario, but I think you guys understand the angle that I'm trying to go down with this.Now again, there is always the option of route replaying which you'll probably tell me that I can do and put her in Cheeto or something, but I don't want to replay an entire route all the way through againjust to fix a mistake I made by being impatient and skipping the war arc.It is a valid fix and you can do it, but this can be permanently damaging to your save file.
So when I watch people advertising war arc skipping to get free stats, sure it's a time save and you'll get some potential benefits on the surface, but you will forever change the base level of your unit and foreversave that cleared data and not be able to go back.So just keep that in mind before you do it.If you don't care about these however many levels of optimization and all of the million ins and outs that we've been talking about, fair enough.The game doesn't need this level of optimization and you can do it by skipping the war arc and it is totally fine and you'll clear it and you'll do great.But I'm someone who wants to give you the best way to juice your units and to do that you do not want to skip the war arc.
Wraps up by reminding viewers to prioritize fun and use only the tips that fit their goals. The speaker closes by previewing future unit-specific deep dives.
Last but not least, we've talked about all of these techniques so far.I think the important thing for you to consider is what is going to be the most fun.You can feel free to mix and match whatever tips you like in this video or say screw it and do none of them, but what's more important is that what I'm doing is helping you achieve your goals.After this there's going to be a series where I do deep dives into each unit specifically.So if you want to see that engineering for a specific unit, wait for my next videos and I will see you all in another video very soon.Peace.
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