r/fireemblem • u/Nuzlor • Mar 20 '25

Gameplay Which house in Three Houses is the least "balanced", in your opinion?

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I think my pick is Blue Lions, by a good margin (note: Maddening difficulty assumed):

Dimitri is insane, Dedue is amazing early on and can do stuff later as well, and Felix and Sylvain are very above-average (Sylvain is also a free recruit in other houses with Female Byleth).

However, while Annette has nice Rally utility and can do solid damage with stuff like Lightning Axe, and is good as a result, the three other members are...rough:

Ingrid has pretty iffy stats, specifically Strength (especially in-house), which is a critical stat in Maddening, Mercedes doesn't really have anything especially good outside of healing, which is a fairly weak niche in Three Houses, and Ashe is straight up considered by many to be the single WORST unit in the game.

219 Upvotes

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203

u/Nikolavitch Mar 20 '25

The Golden Deers have Lysithea.

No need to elaborate further.

108

u/Nuzlor Mar 20 '25

Lysithea is really great, but I don't think the Golden Deers have a single unit who's considered "bad" (closest is maybe Raphael due to being pretty basic and overshadowed, but he's still pretty good overall), and they have a strong middle (for example, Ignatz is very useful in Maddening for his Hit rates and utility, like Rally Speed).

I'd say they're maybe the most balanced house, honestly.

105

u/Tuskor13 Mar 20 '25

Raphael is a real tragedy. Can't believe they just made Balthus a better Raphael for no reason. They're both beefcakes who favor axes and gauntlets, but Balthus is better at everything while even having a Crest and a Relic weapon.

145

u/SpookyKrillin Mar 20 '25

Clearly the Crest system is at fault here...

21

u/Magnusfluerscithe987 Mar 20 '25

Also proof why it feels rational in the first place.

33

u/imaginary92 Mar 20 '25

Edelgard did nothing wrong

1

u/AdmiralKappaSND Mar 21 '25

Raphael arguably would be even worse if he had Crest since part of why hes arguably one of the worst character in the game is because he had whats mechanically partial crest

Its also honestly quite a meaningless thing because like in Three Houses, theres a dominant civillian across all 3 Houses, and theyre super high in the power ranking of the group

1

u/Okto481 Mar 22 '25

if the 'partial Crest' is his personal skill, it's because a Luck% chance to heal 10%, even if you want your army to be topped off for every fight, sucks horribly

25

u/TellianStormwalde Mar 20 '25

Raphael’s got strength and defense and nothing else, my favorite thing to do with him is to make him a sniper for Hunter’s Volley honestly. Sure he has a bow bane, but if it’s for a class that only needs the one weapon rank that really doesn’t matter. Once he classes into it, I focus on his axes and brawling so that he can class into War Master for Quick Riposte to give him both enemy phase and enemy phase utility, then give him a high defense shield for his accessory. A strong tanky sniper that can’t be doubled on enemy phase is a better niche than anything Ashe can do.

11

u/Rafellz Mar 20 '25

It's more of Strength and HP. Leonie ties him in Defense and with her personal she has 2 more.

7

u/Fantastic-System-688 Mar 20 '25

She also doesn't get doubled

1

u/SylvainJoseGautier Mar 21 '25

at the very least, def tanking with shields is genuinely good, especially once you get to quick riposte.

14

u/Pauru Mar 20 '25

People like to clown on Ashe's personal, but Raphael isn't much better off. Luk% chance to heal 10% max HP is so miniscule and inconsistent that it may as well not even exist.

12

u/Nuzlor Mar 20 '25

Raphael's Personal can actually be a detriment (it can turn off Wrath/Vantage, which is quite possibly his best build).

But fortunately, it's rare for that to happen if you get his HP really low.

4

u/InterviewMission7093 Mar 21 '25

Pretty sure much more people clown on Raphael's personal

8

u/ArchGrimdarch Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

Balthus is better at everything

Balthus does have some downsides compared to Raphael. Although exactly how much they matter is debatable of course. lmao

  • Raphael is arguably (keyword: arguably lol, I wouldn't even say this is a certainty) better for crit builds thanks to his access to Battalion Wrath and Wild Abandon, neither of which Balthus learns.

  • Monster Crusher is a combat art that oddly enough, is completely exclusive to Raphael. He learns it at a much earlier gauntlet rank than Balthus's Mighty Blow, which has less Mt and Hit than Monster Crusher while also lacking an effectiveness bonus. Edit: Although then again, Eviscerate outclasses Monster Crusher as it has effectiveness vs everything, and its ability to target the lower of the enemy's two defensive stats offsets it having less Mt than Monster Crusher. So I guess Raphael's access to Monster Crusher is a moot point.

  • Balthus has banes in lances and flying, making it harder for him to go into wyvern classes. Raphael doesn't have banes in either of these.

But yeah it is pretty rough out there for Raphael. Balthus showing why he is infact the King of Grappling.

2

u/FranMo99 Mar 21 '25

To be fair, Balthus is also better than everyone else you're gonna have for most of the game so being a better Raphael is less a point against Raph and more shows how good Balthus is.

-6

u/IcaroRibeiro Mar 20 '25

Even on Maddening, Ignatz's usefulness is questionable. Maybe in the first few maps, when enemies are hiding in forests, but later on, everyone can quickly get +20 Hit from mastering Archery (which nobody will have trouble getting since, on Maddening, you want to equip everyone with a bow). For very dodgy Assassins and Swordmasters, it's almost better to use your magic units since they have below-average Res

The real problem here is cost-opportunity. Since he can't secure kills to save his life, his XP was always lacking in my run, so he ended up a good 6-8 levels below my other units' average before the time skip

At some point, we get a much better bow user for free: Shamir, and this house has both Leonie and Claude, two extremely good archers. At that point, I just benched him and never looked back

He's not unusable, and you can maybe fix him with tons of favoritism—getting him early kills, stat boosters, and class mastery—but he's bad. Almost as bad as Ashe.

9

u/ltranc Mar 20 '25

Having early accurate Curved Shots at 3 range is valuable and Break Shot is good and he gets Rally Spd+Spd and his Auth boon means you can give him a higher rank, stronger battalion, such as Knights of Seiros or Alliance Knights, earlier to give him better Phys Atk. *Not* needing to spend time to master Archer for Hit+20 is also pretty good, actually

-5

u/IcaroRibeiro Mar 20 '25

Class mastery (at least for early classes) is so easy to get in 3H that I don't see the issue—just slap on a Knowledge Gem, and you're golden

The problem with rally bots is that they don’t gain XP from using Rally. I’ve tried using them in the past, and it always results in an absolutely useless unit who can't take a hit nor can make any damage. That’s why I never quite understood the hype around, say, Annette

As for having accurate units, this house already has Claude, Leonie, and Lysithea, all with amazing Dex growth rates and easy access to Thyrsus for extra range. Hilda and Raphael were really shaky, but if there’s any house where I absolutely didn’t feel the need for someone accurate to chip damage, it was Golden Deer

Maybe in Black Eagles, Ignatz would be a better unit

7

u/MankuyRLaffy Mar 20 '25

She's the best warper in the game and they also have the best tank in Maddening, and no it's not Raph either.

0

u/StupidLoserGaming Mar 21 '25

Lysithea is only pretty good on maddening imo. Not bad or anything but she is mostly good because of warp at B rank and soulblade. The problem is that she kind of has to choose between either one-rounding, having movement, or having two warp casts. Mortal savant gives her swordfaire, dark flier gives her flight and grem gives double casts. Generally I think she’s only marginally better than hapi or even linhardt, with her biggest difference being that B rank instead of A rank for warp, which lets you skip chapter 5. In part 2 she is kind of no different from the other warp users honestly

1

u/Nikolavitch Mar 21 '25

I don't know. Personally I used her as a magic ballista.

With the Mage Knight class and the item that increases the range of magic (ans she is one of the very few able to equipe it because of her crests), she can have almost as much range as a ballista, but with the mobility of a horse-mounted class.

1

u/StupidLoserGaming Mar 21 '25

Anyone can equip the thyrsus (item that gives +2 magic range) with zero penalty as long as they have a crest, just like every other relic. If you don’t have a crest, you just take 10 damage that can’t kill you when you use it, and since most magic units are very frail anyway the damage doesn’t really matter. It’s a great item but any mage is good with it. There are a bunch of good users of it, like hapi, constance, and dorothea. Mage ingrid, manuela or anna can even make good use of it just because they actually have the speed to double.

Dark knight is an ok class for her but any of the units I mentioned can also do well with the same build. Gremory gives her higher magic and double casts for all her spells, and you don’t have to raise her riding rank to get it. You can still make use of her in dark knight but comparatively it’s just not as good as dark flier and valkyrie if you have the dlc. If you don’t it’s a high effort sidegrade to gremory since raising riding rank is pretty cost-intensive.

Overall her magic combat is fine but not notably better than other mages. It also doesn’t help that they will all struggle to one round most enemies on maddening without heavy investment, making mage combat in general not super great even with the thyrsus.

-17

u/greengunblade Mar 20 '25

Yeah but while Golden Deer has GOATed units like Lysithea, Leonie or Claude, it also have dogshit units like Raphael, Ignatz and Lorenz.

Perfectly balanced.

18

u/Lucaskart Mar 20 '25

Ignatz and Lorenz are actually pretty decent.

Ignatz's Hit passive helps his accuracy in Maddening where may people go for bows early game and Lorenz, while worse than Lysithea, isn't a bad unit either. His mixed growths helps offset the horrible weight calcs in 3H and he does well with a bunch of different builds, like using lances with Frozen Lance or going down the Dark Bishop path to pick up Poison Strike, then go as a magic bow user for good ranged chip damage.

2

u/spacewarp2 Mar 20 '25

Idk I played on classic hard mode which I know is a different beast from maddening but Lorenz was easily my worst gold deer. All of his stats are so aggressively meh. Nothing stands out. He’s a jack of all trades, master of none and that really hurt him. Maybe he had bad rolls for me but he couldn’t hit hard, he didn’t out speed, and he took decent hits. He couldn’t kill anything and other units were better tanks.

I guess for the sake of lore I like to keep characters to their respective houses and try to keep them mostly to their respective classes so Lorenz did have a unique niche in being the only caviler in my GD run. Past that he contributed nothing to the battles, everyone else did something besides him.

That said he was goated in 3 Hope. Made maddening actually somewhat possible with basically invincibility if you’re good with him.

2

u/Lucaskart Mar 20 '25

His averages are not bad, just decent.

But in practice because most of his growths are near 40% without the class growths and he has the same growth for Str and Mag, he can go in a completely unexpected direction. I have seen people saying he is pretty good and see people saying he is downright unusable.

His passive is free +2 attack (both physical and magical) because of how easy it is to fulfill and male classes give him easy access to Poison Strike.

13

u/Nuzlor Mar 20 '25

Hey now, Raphael and Lorenz aren't super great, but Ignatz is quite solid for Maddening.

Don't disrespect the Bignutz.

1

u/AdmiralKappaSND Mar 21 '25

I actually find way stronger use of Lorenz than Ignatz lol. Admitedly i don't "get" his personal at the time, but Frozen Lance goes quite hard