Part 58: My Castle (Paralogue 19)
Only one measly support today, Elise / Camilla B. The obvious comment here is "Camilla isn't merciful and forgiving!" but Elise points that out literally the line after.
I'm broke and I have no interesting prep that needs doing so there's not much to say before I post my army's stats and do some more analyses. It's fun seeing Kana and Sophie team up... The arena is where they should be fighting, not on an actual battlefield.
I have 2 kids left to recruit and I'm grabbing both of them before fighting Ryoma. If all you care about is merely finishing the chapter then it's not too hard just to slowly whittle him to death with a good Corrin and/or some luck, but I really want to see if I can rout the map on Lunatic for the first time ever. It'll be difficult, and it'll take a lot of trial and error and maybe more staff uses than I'm comfortable with, but I'll do it.
I don't know which one I'll get first. Forrest is a staffbot and will always be useful, but Percy's paralogue is a great source of money and I do kind of need that.
Silas has joined the capped stats crew. Hinoka dropped a Speedwings which I need to give out to someone, I'm thinking it'll be either Corrin or Silas, but it doesn't have to be. If I don't immediately use it on Corrin then I'm going to hang onto it until Chapter 25, I want to make sure she's not too slow to avoid being doubled by Ryoma.
Izana
Onmyoji (from Monk) (HS: Samurai, Apothecary)
A+ Support Partners: None
Personal Skill: Peacebringer (Allies and enemies within 2 spaces deal 2 less damage)
Growths (With Default Class):
HP: 45% (45)
STR: 15% (15)
MAG: 35% (55)
SKL 55% (65)
SPD: 30% (45)
LCK: 45% (45)
DEF: 35% (35)
RES: 35% (50)
It's Izana! Leader of Izumo, a nation famed for being neutral in all conflicts to the point of not even having a standing army, is here to fight for Nohr. I guess the developers thought it was a waste to give this guy a portrait and not let you marry him.
Izana is rare in Fates in that he's a unit who's recruitment comes with a cost, which is wasting 3 DVP on a building that is almost entirely useless besides the slight boost to crit avoid it gives you in castle battles. It's not exactly a steep cost in the same vein as spending 20,000 gold to recruit Farina in FE7, but it's still something I feel I should mention when talking about if he's good or not.
Izana shows up after Chapter 22 at the earliest, and his join stats will scale to whenever you recruited him. His high magic and existing staff rank make him ideal as a staff bot, although despite having promoted into Onmyoji from the staff-using Monk class (and being a pacifist!) his tome rank is higher for some reason. Between Elise, the two servants, Flora, Shura, and the two Troubadour kids he's not exactly unique in his staff using abilities, but he's got some stuff going for him that nobody else has.
Onmyoji is a Hoshidan class that you otherwise cannot access in CQ without a specfic Corrin or by marrying Nyx to Niles to get Diviner as a reclass option for Nina. By default Izana comes with two Hoshido unique rallies in Rally Magic and Rally Luck, the former can be very useful for securing kills and the latter can make combat a little safer. Lategame Conquest favours raising the stats of a few core units to very high levels to dipose of troublesome groups of enemies, so the more rallies you can stack the better. His class also learns Tomefaire at level 15, and while it doesn't increase magic (and therefore staff effectiveness) in Fates like it does in Awakening, it's still useful as an offensive tool. Izana himself isn't much of a fighter but Corrin or Kana could steal the skill for themselves. Izana's base speed might be a little low but his magic and skill are very high, so he will be able to deal good damage right off the bat if he needs to, personal skill aside.
The second half of Izana's unique utility is his personal skill - it might sound detrimental, but damage reduction skills can get very silly very fast when stacked with other skills and rallies, meals, tonics, etc. The chokepointy nature of Conquest's lategame maps make it fairly easy to pile as many units like Izana and Elise behind a frontliner as possible to raise their bulk to nigh-invulnerable levels. The damage reduction for your own units can hurt, but even that might be useful in case where you need to avoid a kill to either feed EXP to someone else or prevent your own attackers from being overwhelmed. It does also hurt Izana's own damage output and he's a bit too fragile to want to participate in combat himself all that much for the boost to his own bulk to matter, but Izana's a lover not a fighter and he doesn't care much either way.
He's also got a few interesting reclasses, but there's not much reason to use them. If you want more Izana he can reclass into Mechanist for Replicate, but good luck getting him levels as one. Theoretically he could also go Master of Arms for Life and Death, which combined with Tomefaire and a Lightning tome could be used for some insane player phase damage, but that's a bit too much setup for something your other units could probably do better anyway.
So basically he's a rallybot and a spare staff and tome user if you need either of those things. Bring him along if you need the rallies or if your healers have disappointed you, otherwise it's safe to bench him or not recruit him at all.
My Rating: Not even the second best hair in the game
Flora
Maid (HS: Dark Mage, Mercenary)
A+ Support Partners: Felicia (Mercenary)
Personal Skill: Icy Blood (If user sustains damage in combat from more than 1 tile away and unit's HP is not at full, opponent receives same amount of damage in return and skill & speed -3) [I'm actually a bit confused by this, the in-game description doesn't mention the HP at full thing and Serenes Forest doesn't mention the one or more tiles away thing. I assume both must be true though?]
Growths (With Default Class):
HP: 35% (35)
STR: 40% (50)
MAG: 20% (30)
SKL: 45% (60)
SPD: 30% (45)
LCK: 35% (45)
DEF: 30% (35)
RES: 30% (40)
Flora! The other maid. I called her a candidate for worst unit in all of Conquest and I stand by it. Is she terrible, though? Ehh. Fates's mechanics make it hard for a unit to be completely useless, and you can always do something if you can hold a staff.
Flora shows up at Chapter 19 at the earliest, but I personally wouldn't grab her until the chapter after. She's a Maid without the weird level cap that the other two servants have, which is already a point against her. Statwise she's more similar to Jakob than her sister - she's got high skill and weirdly high physical stats, but her magic is very underwhelming. She's also quite slow.
She can use staves and has a high starting staff rank, and her strength and resistance are both high enough to make her a good answer to mages. That's about it! The other servants join earlier and learn cool skills earlier, and even if their stats aren't all that good I think you could argue they're better distributed than Flora's too. Icy Blood is a interesting skill for sure, but it's not particularly good and has a few too many conditions required for it to activate. One thing to note is that it does not work like Poison Strike - the damage it does to enemies happens during combat and can kill them, which can potentially lead to some silly strategies that allow her to kill Stoneborn from miles away with a counterattack.
One oool thing about Flora is that her default class set gives her 4 breaker skills by default - Tome from Maid, Bow from Sorcerer, Shuriken from Bow Knight, and Axe from Hero. She can even marry Corrin to grab a fifth... Felicia can do the same (and will learn them much earlier), but she has to A+ support Flora in order to grab Bowbreaker.
That's all I have to say about her. Use her if you need a staffbot and didn't train either of your servants (or reclassed them) I guess. They really should have just made her a regular recruit.
My Rating: Has a way more romantic support chain with F!Corrin than she does with M!Corrin