Grabbing the right class for your favourite Fire Emblem character is a source of satisfaction quite unlike any other. You see, tactical RPG games live and die by their characters, after all on this metaphorical chess board they are all that stands between you and defeat, so it’s best to ensure that they’re up to the task. In the pursuit of variation and choice however, developers often present tremendous amounts of classes, of which only a few will suit your chosen charge. Unfortunately, such a pursuit of variation in content can produce a few… Less than optimal classes. The following are those that, in Three Houses at least, don’t quite cut the mustard.
Fortress Knight
This is probably as close as you can get to a ‘gimme’ when it comes to an article such as this, which veterans of the series will no doubt understand. Now, just because we’ve included the upgraded version of an Armour Knight, doesn’t mean that we don’t understand the theory. Using a massive defensive monster to occupy choke points is a great idea, allowing you to funnel opponents and keep your own units safe behind, and the problem really the class itself, but rather the maps that it inhabits.
See Fire Emblem: Three Houses struggles in a very similar way to prior games in the series. By throwing a huge variation of open, enemy filled maps at the player, these games tend to invalidate low movement classes. Compound this rather damning fact with limited growths, semi-useful skills and a less than stellar Master upgrade choice, and you have the recipe for a novel, but ultimately quite useless class.
Class Failings
- 4 movement is unacceptable in a game like Three Houses, with its huge open maps and limited Defend objectives.
- Learning Heavy Armour requires a significant commitment, and tends to pigeonhole your unit into one particular route.
- Technically this route can transition into the mounted Great Knight, which whilst underwhelming is better than the Fortress Knight, but really isn’t necessary given the wealth of better classes available.
- Pavise and Axefaire are technically quite nice, which does provide a small benefit to the class.
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Mortal Savant
Where our first class was somewhat of a Fire Emblem classic, our next choice is pretty new, all things considered. Sword based magic users aren’t what we’d call super rare, after all the Trickster has been a thing for a while now, but one that slings around purely offensive spells is actually quite unusual. Now this may sound like a good idea, because who doesn’t like some kind of Battlemage right, but in practice it really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Now, we’re not about to claim that the Mortal Savant cannot do some good damage, and we’re certainly not going to argue that a character like Felix on Normal Mode can’t do tremendous amounts of damage with Thoron or such, but in any mode with a serious amount of difficulty, this class has no place in your team. Not only are there far, far better melee attacking options, but much, much better magical options too, so why bother having something that’s half of both. Swordfaire and Black Tomefaire are nice skills to learn for sure, but It doesn’t have any kind of ‘X Factor’ that pushes it to the fore. Yes, there are characters that are somewhat well suited to the class, but to say this is to deny that they’re absolutely better off in classes other than the Mortal Savant!
Class Failings
- This is a class that is worse than other melee classes and simultaneously worse than other magic classes.
- There’s a reason why melee attacking magic users have historically been supportive in nature, because they can heal and be useful rather than taking up a damage slot in place of something better.
- Yes it’s technically useful for a few specific characters, but this requires that you ignore far better class options elsewhere.
- The class is potentially useful for the last few maps, where the poor growths and general performance can be offset against the usefulness of attacking both the Defence and Resilience stat with one unit.
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Holy Knight
Having played through Three Houses countless times, including numerous challenge runs and deliberate handicaps, there’s one class that we’ve used much less than any other: The Holy Knight. We will not once again that, despite this being by far the worst class in Three Houses, it can technically be used by a variety of healing characters and perform to a reasonable level. It’s going to get nowhere near a Gremory of course, and you’ll struggle to make the requirements worthwhile on higher difficulty levels, but you can technically make it work. The question really is, why would you want to?
We’ll start off by saying that the problem isn’t innately with the Holy Knight. Having a mounted healer, replete with a high amount of movement that comes with riding on horseback, is never seriously a bad thing. The problems arise when it’s compared against every other healing option in the game and their requirements. Not only are incredible classes like the Gremory a lot easier to access, since they don’t require you to train riding at all, but they also offer more valuable benefits, like doubling your stock of healing spells.
Perhaps you think that comparing this versus the Gremory is unfair, given that the Holy Knight has White Tomefaire and as such, would prefer to focus on damage? Such things would require a reasonable arsenal of offensive White Magic… Which nobody really possesses, and even those that do would be better off choosing the alternative school of magic. Plus, if we’re going down this route of argument, the Dark Knight is categorically better from an offensive perspective! Outside of challenge runs, or purposefully choosing comedy classes for the wrong characters, we’ve yet to be satisfied with a Holy Knight in any setting, and this is unlikely to change any time soon.
Class Failings
- The Holy Knight lacks the double spell benefits of a Gremory, and given that healing spells have enough range to make up for the lesser movement, it’s categorically worse at healing a team.
- Offensive White Magic is in short supply on almost all characters, and those they have are not exactly powerful.
- Almost all spell casters would be better suited to the Dark Knight, should they want offensive power. Though if we’re approaching this argument, the DLC presented an even better option in the Valkyrie.
- Yes they have access to Canto which is never bad, but there are better and more focused options for both offence and defence.
- This is the one class that feels truly out of place, though now that we think about it, so does the Mortal Savant…
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Categories: Fire Emblem: Three Houses