When it comes to the Blue Lions, or indeed any class choice you may take, there are no truly bad students. Modern Fire Emblem titles have done away with wilfully poor characters like Meg or Arran, and even the ‘weaker’ characters like Donnel or Cyril have skills that enable them to grow. That being the case, you can pretty much pick and choose who you’d like to focus on, choosing to base your favouritism on things like personality, skills or play style. There are some of us however that tend to see units as pure balls of statistics, like an equation waiting to be solved, and to that end there are technically options that perform better than others. Step up Blue Lions, it’s time to receive maths based judgement!
Blue Lions Tier List
Amazing Tier
- Dimitri
- Felix
- Sylvain
Dimitri
Having played through every Three Houses route multiple times over, we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that the class leaders are always fantastic units. Edelgard has well balanced and high statistics across the board, Claude can turn his hand to any physical class and perform incredibly, and Dimitri is well… Dimitri is a monster. We’ve tackled Normal, Hard and Maddening mode several times over, and we can firmly say that nothing comes close to a fully powered Dimitri.
Not only does he have fantastic statistics, of which the only real sore point may be a bit less speed than others, but he learns two abilities which, when combined, make him nigh on invincible. Battalion Wrath and Battalion Vantage mean that, when the Battalion is below half health, Dimitri will attack first no matter what and have an additional 50% critical chance. Combine this with a nice weapon and his own innate critical chance, and you can get him to 100% crit. So he has massive strength, attacks first no matter what and always crits. This man is a monster, he’s absolutely broken as a unit and yes, he can solo entire maps without issue.
Felix
It was a toss up for second place if we’re honest, between Felix and Sylvain. The grumpy chap won out in the end, and it’s easy to see why. Felix has absolutely incredible growth rates in all of the physical stats you could want, to the point where you can throw him at any physical class and he’ll perform fantastically well. Fire Emblem usually restricts something with the ‘Swordsman’ archetypes – low starting stats for example, or poor strength growths – however none of these things exist with Felix. He has one of the highest strength growths in the Blue Lions, and when you combine this with a fantastic crest and an amazing personal skill, you have a unit capable of dealing with vast swathes of enemies on his own.
Sylvain
In many ways, Sylvain is essentially a very, very slightly worse version of Felix. Or better actually, depending on your perspective. His strength, dexterity and speed are unlikely to reach the absolute peaks that Felix can achieve, but he’ll wind up being slightly better in terms of defence and health to balance this. In real terms, the difference between them is minimal, but we do find that Sylvain lends himself to front line roles a little better than the moody lad. Either way he’ll hold his own and perform fantastically well, despite having a useless personal skill.
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Great Tier
- Ingrid
- Mercedes
- Annette
Ingrid
Oh Ingrid, how we tried to get you into the Amazing Tier, we really did. For reference, Ingrid is a fantastic unit. She has one of the highest speed growths in the entire game, paired with respectable dexterity and surprisingly good defensive statistics. Combine this with the fantastic flying units available to females in Three Houses, and you have an excellent unit overall. Her poor strength growth, middling crest and woeful personal skill stop her reaching our top tier, but she achieves a remarkable amount of combat performance in spite of this.
Mercedes
Most people seem to rate Mercedes quite poorly. They find that her crest does not activate enough to be reliable, and that her personal skill – she heals herself simultaneously whenever she heals another – isn’t actually that useful because your healer shouldn’t see combat. Yes, we’ll agree that there are better healers available in the game, but considered in the vacuum that is the Blue Lions, she’s actually pretty good. For the majority of the game she’ll be nothing more than a heal bot, but if you look after her into the late game she’ll actually contribute quite a lot, especially if you consider making her a Valkyrie. If we’re all honest with each other here, healing isn’t really a problem in Three Houses, so making your healers into a Hybrid damage dealers makes a lot of sense.
Annette
Unfortunately, when considering the whole Three Houses cast, Annette falls off quite a bit. It’s not that she’s a terrible unit, far from it, she’s just a bit… Generic. She’s never going to do as much damage as Hubert or Lysithea, and whilst her personal skill is very useful, especially on higher difficulty levels, she just doesn’t quite stand out. Her crest isn’t fantastic, her growths don’t really stand out and all mages hit hard in Three Houses, so she’s just… An mage. All of this does make her the ideal candidate for becoming a Dancer however.
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OK Tier
- Ashe
- Dedue
Ashe
Similar to Annette in our above tier, Ashe is let down by a few things, each of which position him far below the others. Being an archer type his strength growth is not very good, and whilst this is something present will all archetypes like this, compared to others in the Blue Lions it’s not great. These negatives are usually offset by benefits like a good crest or personal skill, but Ashe is sadly lacking in both. He will help you open chests which is nice, but that’s hardly going to help us push through these tough Maddening enemies now is it?
Dedue
Poor Dedue drew the short straw and has been inflicted with statistics befitting an Armour Knight, or ‘Draug Syndrome’ as we like to call it. Our issue isn’t with the class, after all having a very defensive unit can serve a purpose, but the fact that Dedue has been built to serve as one of these means that he really struggles to do anything else. You can technically make him into any class you like, but no matter what he’s going to do the same thing; hit the enemy once, quite hard, and take little damage in return. The Blue Lions class is filled with units capable of so much more, all of which tend to be available for the entire run too…
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Categories: Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Ranked