So I just finished my 6th and final playthrough of Triangle Strategy. For this run I had the conditions as Hard, Deathless, Golden Route, and most importantly Itemless. Now that it’s done I wanted to create a tier list of the units based on my experience. Before we start there are a few things I want to explain.

**DISCLAIMER:** So something I want to make very clear is that I don’t think any character in this game is bad without arbitrarily restricting their value. “Itemless” is an arbitrary restriction so there are characters whose values are going to be affected, some very heavily, which is why some characters are ranked very low. I also want to make it clear that rather than “A, B and C” I had wanted to use “A+, A, and A-” because while I do think there are characters who are better than others, I do not think that they are so much better to say that they are 2 full tiers appart. However I thought this would risk confusing people so I decided to use A, B and C format. Unfortunately, this gives the impression that I think the characters in the C tier units are bad. Not true at all. I just think that those in the tiers above them have kits that will be useful more often or extremely useful in certain common but specific situations.

Additionally, you might have noticed that the A tier is split up in an unusual way. There’s something that a lot of modern tier lists screw up and it drives me crazy. Most of the time people will try to fit everyone into the standard letter tiers. The issue with this is that it does not properly account for general vs specialized units. Say a unit is the strongest unit but only on 10% of the maps and worthless otherwise. Is this a good unit or bad unit? Many lists will put this as a low tier unit since most of the time it is not useful but it completely betrays how good the unit is and gives completely the wrong impression of the unit as one that you shouldn’t ever use. In these cases it makes a lot more sense to have a separate tier that reflects how strong the unit is at their best while also acknowledging that this is not how well they will always perform. For this list I split up the A tiers between Generalists (units that are basically always good to bring), Strategists (units that support others and choosing to bring them generally relies on who else you bring and how well they use support), and Specialists (units who you bring to situations that are very favorable to them). It will also be appreciated that even the term Specialist has its limit. If a unit is very good most of the time and just has a few instances where they don’t work, they are a high tier unit whereas a unit that is so specialized for a situation so unbelieve rare that it’s almost nonexistent is well beyond what would be considered specialized and is just a low tier unit.

**Why Itemless?:** To explain why I like doing my runs itemless, while everyone knows that items are created around the notion that you are supposed to manage a resource with a limited supply, items become a problem when you reach a point where you’ve stashed up so many of them that you can treat them as functionally limitless. It’s at this point where, IMO, items break the game. The game was not designed around every unit being able to freely cast Cure Wounds, Sanctuary, buffing spells and magic spells with absolutely no resource management but that is what the game functionally becomes. While this skews the value of many units, the ones whose values are skewed the most are the healers who’re niches get usurped. In fact, I’ve even heard people say that you should not bring healers since items can do their job just fine. Now personally what I enjoy is creating balanced teams and playing in a way that shows I know how to avoid extending my supply lines beyond what I can manage and playing itemless is the best way to do it. Unfortunately this does skew a few very noteworthy units for obvious reasons but still I think playing itemless is the best way to get the true worth of a unit since it really forces you to use each unit’s abilities to their fullest while maximizing all your limited resources.

**Tactics; Prevention vs Cure:** When playing deathless, nothing is more important than utilizing good tactics. There’s a saying that goes “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” which in this context means, you are much better off avoiding a very dangerous situation rather than finding yourself in the situation and trying to fight your way out of it. The most dangerous situation in this game is having tons of melee units in your face, supported by and blocking for mages and archers who are pelting you with ranged attacks. The best units are those who can prevent this situation from occurring, not those who fix this situation once it occurs. The tier list reflects that heavily as units whose kits are better at prevention are listed higher whereas units who are better at curing find themselves lower or in the specialist category.

**D-Tier**

**Medina:** So let’s knock this out of the way first since it’s one that I risk getting an angry knee jerk reaction from. In case anybody skipped the introduction, this is an ITEMLESS tier list. That means, no TP physic, no double items healing herself in a cross, no infinite TP. All you get is a unit with mid-low attack, above average speed/mobility and no abilities. Nothing good here, no reason to bring her. Only used her in the one mission she was forced to be present in and she did nothing of note.

**Lionel:** Itemless extends to no spending money on attacks so I knew Lionel was going to take a hit without his best ability. While I expected Medina to be useless, I thought that maybe I could find instances where Lionel could still be used but sadly that was just not the case. While his abilities and bulk are not bad, his mobility and damage output is abysmal. The range on his fury is good but not astounding and coupled with his poor mobility makes it hard for him to hit mages until after they are in attacking range which is especially bad since there are units who can kill the mages even before then. It’s really his low mobility that kills him. It just makes it so hard for him to get the big value hits on his abilities while they are still relevant. More often than not, when enemies finally are within range for him to cast it on them, I’ve usually already brought them down to killing range and would rather have someone who can help pile on damage which again, his poor mobility makes it hard for him to do. Even Endless Speech is iffy since I’d rather just have 100% to either sleep or silence, not a separate 60% for both and again his low mobility makes it harder for him to use it compared to other characters with similar abilities. There was no situation where I could justify taking him and thus never picked him.

**SS-Tier**

**Quahuag:** With the “Screwed by the nature of Itemless” tier out of the way we are going to wrap around to the top and work our way down and first off, in a tier of his own, is of course the Time Child. As everyone knows Quahuag breaks the game but everyone does it their own special way. In my case, because it was my 6th run I had tons of speed increasing items and I would run everyone with 2-4 extra speed. This raised my average speed well above the enemies so any time I would cast Time Stop, I would both cure 2 TP on everyone and everyone’s turns would be bumped up around 4 spots whereas the enemies would generally lose 4 spots (This is not an approximation, I actually did test this, my slowest unit went from 17->14, the fastest enemy went from 4->7 whereas the slowest enemy went from 25->30). Kind of like a universal delaying strike effect on all enemies. Other than that just basic Quahuag stuff. Repositioning when necessary, pulling enemies closer to get dog piled, off healing with Turn Back Time. I’ve actually never used his complete turn reset skill, since I view it as being too expensive and Time Stop generally does the job just as well. Not too much to say that hasn’t already been said. He’s good.

**S-Tier**

**Archibald:** So the first S-Tier is Archibald and it really comes down to his high damage coupled with his ridiculously range. 6 range on a standard attack (more with high ground) and high accuracy makes him the best sniping archer by far. However, it’s his Inescapable Arrow that pushes him up to S tier. Inescapable Arrow has a ridiculously range of 12 and fairly high damage. This is more than twice the range of most enemy archers and mages. Archers and mages are the bane of a deathless run. Damage from melee units can usually be controlled with good positioning however archers and mages get to target whoever they want and can be hard to manipulate. This can easily result in a single unit getting dog piled and killed. Hence any unit that counters and specifically prevents them from acting is instantly a high tier unit and no one does it better than Archibald. With a full TP meter he can Inescapable Arrow two turns in a row to severely cripple if not outright kill them before they can get into range to attack you. It cannot be overstated how amazing it is for him to be able to do this.

**Cordelia (ft. Geela):** Ngl, I’m not sure if I should include Cordelia in the S tier. There are a lot of reasons why she doesn’t belong here but ultimately I had to ask myself if I felt that she generally performed a tier above Geela and I had to say that yes she often did for one very specific reason. The issue with putting Cordelia in the S tier is she is technically a specialized unit. Cordelia is the best rooted healer in the game. That is, you take her when you do not expect your healer to have to move very much. This can be either because you are being sieged (like Avlora attacking Wolfort) or maps where you move some then stop to fight (like the Bridge). In fact the sole determinant on whether to bring Geela or Cordelia should be how mobile the healer is expected to be. Fortunately, maps that let her stay rooted far outnumber those where she can’t. Because Cordelia generates an extra TP each turn it makes it much easier for her to afford her ultimate skill Above and Beyond. Most of the time when I ran her over half my team, mostly the squishy half, ended the fight with an Above and Beyond boost and on at least one super long map everyone had it. Now just to be clear, this is a side effect of the types of maps she’s good on and I’d bring her to having more down time and the prevention playstyle I was using (preventing damage to my team means she can spend more time Above and Beyonding and less time healing) but there’s more to it than just that and I’ll pick it up again in Geela’s section.

**A-Generalist Tier**

**Serenoa:** So we’re into the A-Generalist tier and who better to start us off than the main man himself Serenoa. Serenoa is just very well rounded having good damage, an AOE ability, a powerful debuff and high damage, ranged, non-line-of-sight attack in Hawk Dive. Now all this is nice but it alone would not have been enough to get him into the A-Tier. It’s Under Conviction’s Banner that really gets him there. Before I got UCB, he was always good at active maps but on passive maps all he would do is spend his time patrolling the perimeter repelling anyone that got too close. Not nothing, but not really a role he does uniquely well. After getting UCB everything changed since he could not also act as a battery. On passive maps it’s not uncommon for your team to bunch together and he would fairly often turn his 4 tp into 7-9 tp for the party which is very useful. This additional boost in utility is exactly what he needed to push him into A-tier.

**Geela (ft. Cordelia ):** Continuing where we left off with Cordelia, Geela is the other main healer in this game. She is very good and very reliable and that alone puts her into the A-tier. However she suffers from lack of TP regeneration. As a side effect of itemless, all mages in this game must be able to spend TP to be effective with their turn but because she doesn’t have any TP regeneration which makes it very hard for her to save up and cast Miraculous Light safely. Compared to Cordelia who after casting A&B only needs skip healing for 1 turn before being full 2 turns later, Geela needs to skip healing for 3 turns before being full 4 turns later. This is why Cordelia is in a tier above Geela. It is just so much easier to cast A&B with Cordelia than it is to cast Miraculous Light with Geela. Having your healer caught unprepared is just not a risk you can take when playing itemless and deathless and just too much can change in 3 turns. Even when she has a full TP bar and there is no one to heal, it’s just better to cast Haste rather than Miraculous Light and ensure she is prepared for anything that might occur. Now I know it sounds like I’m being hard on her but she is really defined more by her ability to stay mobile while outputting great healing whereas Cordelia is more defined by her ability to continuously output high level healing spells when she doesn’t move. She’s still solidly A-Tier but this difficulty in casting her really strong spells keeps her out of S-Tier.

 **Hughette:** Another great archer Hughette benefits greatly from being able to ignore terrain and easily gain high ground as well as being the only archer with a natural 5 move. This combined with her increased range and good strength makes it easy for her to take shots from safety. If the situation calls for it she can easily spread both Blind and Immobilization to further hinder the enemies but it’s really her Shooting Star that ties her whole kit together. Because she usually cannot be targeted by those she’s attacking, it’s easy for her to stockpile TP and being able to cash them out for an extremely powerful attack with exceptional range makes her very good at targeting and eliminating big treats such as mages and archers before they can cause trouble, similar, though not quite as good as, Archibald. As previously mentioned, being able to handle mages and archers before they get in range to attack well will generally make anyone at least an A-Tier though she is a little more reliant on there being good high ground to take advantage of than he is hence why she missed S-tier.

**Corentin:** For a while I was trying to figure out who the best offensive mage in the game was. However as time went on it became more and more apparent that it was Corentin. Corentin has so many things working for him. Easy to set up and reliable TP regeneration, both good AOE and good spike attacks, an amazing ultimate ability with great range and reach and several defensive utility skills. If that wasn’t enough he’s also the only mage in the game with 5 move, probably to counter out the move penalty of all the ice meaning he can keep up with the main group on mobile maps. All these things together make him easily the best mage in the game and an easy A tier. He only missed S-Tier because he needs a little time to get set up and sometimes the enemy can pressure him off of his ice which is when he might start having TP problems.

**Maxwell:** It’s hard to mention Maxwell without also talking about Roland and I was having trouble deciding for both of them if A or B tier made more sense. Ultimately, Maxwell made the cut for A-tier due in large part to the utility of Traverse and the built in Regeneration. Traverse is an amazing skill which acts as both a difficult terrain navigator, allowing him to get verticality to go after perched targets and a hit and run tool allowing him to move in, attack and retreat. Additionally it can act as a move extender, making his move functionally 8 surpassing Roland. You can even use it to jump behind an enemy, attack, then move away so another unit can get a critical in as well. His damage is good being able to use Triple Thrust at 1 TP and his aoe is not bad giving him TP regeneration. However it’s the Auto-Regeneration which in combination with everything else that puts him in A tier. Thanks to his Regen, he’s able to play far more risky and further away from the healer than most other units and it increases the number of units that can start with Regen to 3. This is useful because it allows you to send a strike party (usually the speedy, Maxwell, Anna, Milo and/or Groma) out on their own often to assassinate someone and if all of them have regen, it allows them to move far away from the supply lines without being in danger.

**Milo:** If I had to pick one unit to move up into S-Tier it would be Milo. Milo has a lot of really good things working for her. First of all, an amazing ult in Power of Love. Temptation is easily the best status and being able to apply it reliably as a ranged AOE is incredible. She also is able to attack both Physically and Magically fairly well. Having a decent magical attack is actually very valuable since it allows her to target whichever defense of the enemy which is weaker and bypass certain counters that only target physical damage. Her Blue Night skill is phenomenal vs bosses simultaneously lowering their damage and preventing them from using their high tier skills. All of this, however, is tied together by her Moon Jump. Everything I said about Maxwell’s Traverse applies here as well so I won’t repeat myself. Thanks to Moon Jump, Milo can target spaces up to 15 spaces away depending on the skill you are using. Above where I said Lionell finds it hard to use Endless Speech effectively because of his mobility limitations, Moon Jump is why Milo is not in the same boat. While it might feel scary to send her out, and to a degree it is, it’s actually not as dangerous as you might think. Milo’s defenses are actually quite good. Believe it or not Milo is tied with Geovanna for the highest combined total Physical+Magical defense in the game, her hp is average and her evasion is way above average. That combined with creating Tempted targets means that it is very unlikely for her to get killed in 2 attacks often giving her time to escape. She is definitely borderline S Tier however a few small issues keeps her out. Her damage is good but not great, she’s fairly reliant on TP to be very effective but wants to save it for her ult, and she can sometimes have trouble contributing to very passive maps since she has no ranged attacks or team utility options. All in all she just falls a little bit short of S Tier but still an amazing unit.

**Narve:** Narve is someone who I can see people arguing should be a lower tier because of one main bad point however he also has 1 main good point and several little good points which I believe ultimately is enough for the good to outweigh the bad. First of all, the bad. Narve is the most TP strained unit in the game (arguably tied with Ezana). He is the only unit in the game that relies on TP who has neither 1 cost spells nor a TP regeneration skill. While this is pretty significant, it’s really the only really bad thing about him. On the flip side, the signature ability of all healing mages is the Extending Your Reach passive and Narve is the only healing mage who is also a combat mage thus the only combat mage in the game with increased range on attack spells. This is extremely good for prevention since every tile you can place between your vulnerable units and the enemy is valuable and in a ranged fight, whoever can outrange the other has a massive upper hand. On top of this, having access to every element can be an indirect damage boost by hitting enemies with the spells they are weak to as well as assist with environmental effects (ice, water, fire). Going by the in game numbers, Spark is actually the strongest ability in the game that costs 2 TP or less, however take this with a grain of salt since I don’t think it takes stats into account and based on my testing the other mages were dealing more damage than him likely due to their higher magic attack. Lastly in an emergency he can take on the role as healer if your main healer needs help. Mind you, not a role he wants to do due to his TP issues but being able to do it is still very valuable. Barring situations where a specific element is necessary, Corentin is better than him (albeit not a tier above him), but Extending Your Reach and all these additional small benefits always makes Narve the 2nd mage I bring after Corentin making him an easy A-Tier.

**Flanagan (ft. Erador and Picollete):** The final A-Tier Generalist, and who I assume to be my most contentious placement, is Flanagan. Now I know there are going to be people who disagree with this and insist he should be swapped with Erador but based on my experience, when you are min-maxing everyone’s roles, Flanagan’s specialties are more often more desirable than Erador’s and Picollete’s who are more specialized. So it’s basically impossible to talk about 1 tank without addressing them all because each has their own specialties and because I know people are going to argue this, we are doing the extended version of this explanation. Erador is specialized around brawl type situations where you are expecting your tank to need to take a ton of hits in a very short amount of time to draw agro and protect your other units. Picollete is specialized around situations where you either are trying to group enemies into one location or specifically need magic tanking. Lastly, Flanagan is specialized around maps that require the tank to be more mobile and being able to take several hits across several turns as well as occupying and denying a chokepoint. Of the 3 Picollete is the most specialized due to her uptime being lower than the other 2 and operating very differently so we won’t talk about her any more until her section. The question then becomes between Flanagan vs Erador whose abilities are better suited to be considered the general use tank.

I think the best way to explain this is with an in game example. As part of this run I did all the tavern missions with the same restrictions and the final Tavern mission is a marathon where you have to kill 100 enemies that are constantly spawning in all directions on a massive map. I originally took Erador thinking that there was a good chance that I would get surrounded and need his mass tanking to bail us out. This never happened. The map was so large and the prevention units were so good at their job that by the time any units got close to us the dangerous units were dead and the ones who did make it were badly crippled meaning King’s Shield would be a waste. All Erador really ended up doing was occasionally drawing enemies forward to take 1 hit so the other could dogpile. Near the end of the map (around 80 units in) the game mage rushes you. Although the prevention squad were able to take out some of them, a few got through and I thought that this was finally where I could justify bringing him. I sent him forward to use his first King's Shield of the match to try and bait out some of their magic attacks and to be fair he did but then I made the mistake of assuming that he could remain on the front once it wore off. I had assumed that he could tank 2 attacks as long as only 1 was magic thanks to Desperate Defense and ended up not pulling him back. Spoilers he couldn’t and died. Now this was my fault because I didn’t pull him back and his dying here did not influence my ranking of him (I only mentioned it to explain why I had to play this map twice). However the core issue was that he just was not contributing to this fight in a very meaningful way. Erador basically lives and dies as a pick based on how useful King's Shield will be on the map. Now for sure you can force King's Shield to be useful even if you don’t need it, however as I keep saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Erador carries a pound of cure. If the situation has devolved into something very dangerous he can bail you out of it. However, far better would have been to prevent this from occurring in the first place. His mobility and range do not allow him to contribute to prevention in a meaningful way and so, unless the map is very close quarters right out of the gate (for example the Tournament or fighting Erika and Thalius on the bridge) with little or no breathing room, his mass tanking is not going to be very important unless you go out of your way to force it by playing more recklessly.

On my second attempt I took Flanagan instead of Erador and here’s the thing. For the most part he was fulfilling the same role that Erador did, which was patrolling the perimeter and taking a hit here and there when I needed to draw the enemy closer. The difference is, he is much better at doing this role than Erador. For starters, Erador’s low mobility meant that I had to run him with the Movement Bangle. Flanagan does not have mobility issues meaning I can forgo the Movement Bangle and instead run him with the Bangle of Vitality (The 2nd slot was a Speed Bracelet for both). Next, most people don’t seem to realize this but both Erador’s Steelback and Flanagan’s Ironclad are flat 50% damage reduction on physical attacks. When accounting for guaranteed crits this works out to Erador taking around 60% damage when hit in the back and Flanagan taking 50% when hit from the front. Flanagan has the highest damage reduction of any unit in the game for an “always on'' passive. There’s also this myth that Flanagan cannot take arrow shots because he’s a hawkrider. Although I don’t know the exact percentage increase (I think it’s 25-30%), I can tell you that it is far less than the reduction from Ironclad and in fact he takes the least damage from arrows to the front than any other unit. The only unit in the game that takes less damage than an Ironcladed arrow is a Steelbacked arrow on Erador if you disregard the the passive health regen from Safe Haven. Once the 50 hp that Flanagan heals is factored in, no unit can match Flanagan when taking a single physical hit and because I run him with the Bangle of Vitality this doubles that to 100 hp per turn. All in all this means that, when attacking into Ironclad, enemies must be able to deal a base hit of 100 (200 with the Bangle of Vitality) damage to him to even start getting damage to stick. Spoilers, on hard, most standard enemies can only deal 40~70 damage to him with standard attacks, even archers. Some of the stronger units can hit him for around 100 if they have power abilities like Mighty Strike but obviously they cannot continuously use it and he can just fury them once they do. This means that as he takes hits over several turns, damage is not actually being racked up on him and as a result he doesn’t need a healer to top him off and he can play much further away from her. Above when I said that I was able to get everyone an Above and Beyond boost with Cordelia, a large part of this was because I was controlling the fight so the main unit who was taking damage was Flanagan and that damage was being negated his skills, which again, because itemless, managing your heal economy is very important and having a unit that just doesn’t really take net positive damage over time is phenomenal.

Now you might wonder how this stacks up against the really strong physical enemies. Well as luck would have it, in my most recent run Avlora ended up putting herself in a dead end chokepoint which allowed me to trap her using Flanagan and force her to attack into Ironclad. Thanks to that I was able to collect quite a lot of data. Note that all these numbers were on hard with a Desperate Strike buff (seems to be 30% increase) so this is the absolute strongest she can hit.

 | No Fortify | Fortify
:-- | :-- | :--
Attack (x 1) | 134 | 126
Crit (x 1.23) | 165 | 155
RM (x 1.5) | 201 | 190
RM Crit (X 1.845) | 247 | 233

At her strongest even she has trouble overcoming the combination of Ironclad’s Damage reduction and Safe Haven passive healing (and even more if you run BoV) though it is worth noting that her speed does allow her to act twice occasionally. Usually every 3-4 turns she gets an extra attack so it’s not a flat reduction across the board. That being said, these are still incredible numbers. Even at her absolute luckiest she cannot 2 shot him and realistically she will need closer 5 or 6 rounds to kill him if he’s not being externally healed. By comparison, Benedict, an above average defense unit, took 288 from her standard attack well within 2 hit range (fyi a low defense unit, Quahuag took 435 from her standard attack). This only further puts into perspective how strong Flanagan’s defense is by default when you can force enemies to attack into Ironclad. Thanks to his incredible mobility it is not hard to position yourself to do this on man maps and I’ve been able to set it up so that multiple Avlora’s and even Rufus had no choice but to attack into it with similar results. It’s this combined with his knockback immunity, mobility and the pseudo ranged attack/movement extender Aerial Assault that has led me to choose him over Erador and Picollete in significantly more missions, either to draw enemies forward or shut down a choke and why I do consider him the best generalist tank in this game. Lastly, his Rampart skill has some uses to make your team significantly more tanky but for the most part I found this to be more of a gimmick especially when he was already so good at denying damage by taking the hit himself.

**A-Specialists Tier**

**Erador:** Already covered Erador at length above when talking about Flanagan. The tldr for those of you who skipped it is is that his mass tanking is more useful on specific maps that force you into a brawl like the Tournament or fighting Erika and Thalius on the bridge whereas Flanagan’s mobility, range, damage reduction, healing, and ability to deny a choke are more useful for general use on most other maps when you want to bring a tank.

**Jens:** To put it bluntly, the choice to take Jens is usually based on how useful his Ladders are on a map. For example, 2 missions, where I felt the ladders would have a big impact were Avlora’s Siege (technically done twice in the Golden Route) and ambushed by Trish and Travis in the Abandoned Village and on those missions they were amazing. However, once you remove his ladders all he’s really left with is his spring traps which, don’t get me wrong, are great but restrictive and slightly unreliable/map dependent. Rather than his spring trap I’d rather have someone who can help add damage in a more reliable way. It’s a shame that his turret has such abysmal accuracy because that really could have been the extra damage boost he needed but on average I expect 3.5 of the shot arrows to miss which is just not acceptable for a 4 TP skill. So yes, he’s not bad but often he’s just not the best pick if the ladders are not needed.

**Picollete:** We talked about this a little bit before but Picollete is the 3rd pseudo tank of this game. Choosing to take her generally means that you usually need magic tanking which Erador and Flanagan cannot do or you’re trying to draw the enemies to a specific location that might be a little too hot for Flanagan and not worth waiting for a King’s Shield from Erador. The up time on her tanking is by far the worst, but also comes with the least risk. She was actually my choice of tank for the final mission since there is a lot of magic there. While waiting for another Decoy to charge Picollete can oftentimes find herself with down time and in itemless she cannot use stones. Normally this just leaves her with Copy Cat but even this has the issue that she’s usually copying a skill that needs TP to use defeating the purpose and thus usually I just pass with her to get the 20% speed boost. However, one amusing niche I found out is that she can even copy boss skills. Some boss skills have 0 TP cost so this doesn’t affect her tanking. For those of you who have never tried Copy Cat before, the animations when she copies and uses the skills are amazing. She literally turns into the enemy very briefly while she uses the copied skill. Yes, she can very temporarily turn into the final boss :p. So again, she has bad uptime but is able to tank the widest range of attacks safely though usually one of the two other tanks will be better than her hence being in the specialist tier.

**Giovanna:** So up until now, all the units I listed as being specialists could kind of be used like generalists but other units would generally outperform them unless specific conditions were present. Not so for the next two. If very specific conditions are present Giovanna will be amazing and otherwise do not use her. Giovanna is regularly labeled as one of the weakest units in the game and with good reason. A lot of her abilities are very rigid, requiring very specific terrain to use well. However her Gaia’s Roar is very strong, is not terrain dependent, and has an insane range of infinity although it can only go up/down 2 height. As such she can be an utter monster on large flat maps. Even though it costs 5tp to use, her TP regen skill lets her use it every 3 turns. Additionally the AI has this weird quirk where enemies that are far away will generally line up and march single file to try and reach you so it’s not unrealistic for her to hit 4-6 enemies with it. On some of these mega maps, as enemies spawn in and march towards us, by the time they had reached us it was not uncommon for enemies to have taken 1 if not 2 roars on top of archer and mage hits. This is prevention at its finest. Other than that she’s okay if you run her with Corentin since ice is by far her most easily used element and if you’re lucky you can pull off ivy beams. With a natural move of 7 and jump of 3 makes her very mobile on these large maps and she is also tied with Milo for highest combined Physical Defense and Magical defense so while she isn’t super tanky, she’s not frail either. However, if the map isn’t large and/or relatively flat you usually don’t want to bring her.

**Decimal:** I’ve seen Decimal rated low by some people for not always being useable and this is why I feel it’s so important to split tiers by specialists.  Decimal is borderline S maybe even SS tier on the maps he’s good on. There are 2 situations where he excels. First he’s an amazing counter sieger. These maps generally send a ton of enemies at you up front and when you have 10 or so enemies in his range, it’s not unusual for him to hit anywhere from 2-5 people. Additionally, you generally don’t need to move very much on these maps so when it comes time to charge TP it’s easy for him to pass his turn. Even though this might feel random, damage is still damage and when he’s shelling the enemies this can easily overload their healing. Even better, if you know his turn coming up, you can quickly scan to see if several enemies are susceptible to one of his hits and avoid attacking those enemies while also checking to see if you can get more enemies vulnerable to it. Also there is a 66% chance that any random hp value will be targetable by one of his attacks (if you exclude the 7 attack it’s 60%) so if you get a high value target very low with your other snipers, there’s a decent chance that he can contribute and snipe them down too. However this isn’t where he’s the best. Ironically, he’s actually the best at sieging. Specifically Target Height +5 can just break certain maps. I’m not going to go into the details here but I have a tactic that lets him cast TH+5 several times in a row 2 of which are before most enemies get to do anything. The first 2 casts will bring non boss units below 50% hp and trigger their flight response which only serves to keep them in their high ground. This then lets him follow up with 2 more attacks killing all of them. I kid you not, he’s killed over 12 enemies before any other combat occurs on specific maps that start with several enemies way above you. You know that one tavern mission where you have 100 turns and you are in a valley surrounded by cliffs? The hard part was collecting all the spoils in time due to him having the pinkie ring equipped. You do want to run him with a battery, naturally Julio and Quahuag work however Benedict also works. Due to the unique way Decimal charges TP, if you cast 2 fold turn on him Decimal can use either turn to charge TP which in a sense is just moving 3 TP from Benedict to Decimal.

**A-Strategist Tier**

**Benedict:** As should be obvious, Benedict was built around buffing the other units hence while he will always be useful, how useful depends on the other units you brought. There’s always the issue of why bring a unit who can trade 3 of their turns for 1 of another when you can just bring another unit that does the job right away. Hence you really want to have an idea why you are bringing him when you do. There are several reasons why and they don’t need to be big. It can be as simple as “I need all my units to have 3 jump so Bird of Prey'' or “I want Roland to move twice so he can run out, kill something and then retreat.” However it’s when you pair him with specialists that he really shines. He’s a pivotal member of the “If Decimal can cast height+5 4 times in a row real quickly tons of enemies just die right away” tactic I mentioned above. In fact, specialists are some of the best units to run him with since oftentimes they really want to press their unique advantage and he just lets him do it more. Most of the time I ran him it was because the map was very favorable to either Decimal’s Height +5 or Geovanna’s Gaia’s Roar and I wanted them to be able to attack more frequently. As mentioned above, Decimal especially works well with him because of the unique way Decimal charges his TP.

**Julio:** Most of what I said about when to use Benedict applies to Julio just of course in his own flavor of TP manipulation rather than stat buffing. Julio naturally pairs well with the TP strained mages. He also is part of the Decimal strategy mentioned above and by far my biggest mistake during this run was not taking him to maps where I deemed Geovanna’s Gaia’s Roar to be really strong. Not sure why I didn’t do that but in large flat maps, I would suggest bringing Geovanna, Benedict and Julio and using Gaia’s Roar as much as possible. Nothing else really to say. Julio’s role is pretty easy to understand. The only other thing he did was sometimes reduce boss tp though Milo does this better.

**B-Tier**

**Frederica:** So starting off the B-Tier we have Frederica and just so everyone understands what this tier means, generally the people here are outclassed by people in the generalis tier or need specific conditions to be effective but not in a way that’s absolutely defining like the specialists. In Frederica’s case it’s the former. For the most part Corentin just offers what she does but better. Their basic attacks are both comparable but Corentin is better at generating TP, has more move, has better defensive options and a much better ultimate. In comparison Frederica has more damage, the ability to negate fire damage and needs less setup for TP regen. While more damage is nice, the rest is not even a fair comparison. Not needing to set up the TP regeneration is not worth being more unreliable and being unable to stockpile effectively. From a balance perspective, I think it was a mistake to make her defensive skills so fire oriented. The Devs seemed to think that there would be fire everywhere but it’s just not the case. Even her ultimate is terrible since she got one of the charging ults which honestly are just sick jokes and none of them are worth it. Usually you take her because the map is really good for mages and you’ve already taken Corentin and you just want more mages.

**Roland:** The golden boy himself it’s Roland. There are lots of opinions about Roland and how good he is with many of the negative ones saying he dies too easily and many of the positive ones saying he’s the best damage unit in the game. If you must know, it’s much closer to the later than the former. Roland is a great unit however he is not one that you can shut your brain off and play. Like the name of his passive, Roland is an opportunist. Just because you can deal a lot of damage with him does not mean you should. You need to think whether or not it is safe for him to go forward and take the hit but the thing is, when the opportunity is there, Roland is perfectly equipped to take it with his high damage and high mobility. He’s often compared to his master Maxwell since the two are very similar but generally speaking, Roland does better in wide open maps that let him use his mobility whereas Maxwell does better in maps with awkward terrain thanks to his traverse and ability to play farther away from the healer. That being said, while Maxwell does fine on wide open maps, Roland struggles on maps with awkward terrain and checkpoints that limit his mobility. It’s for this reason that Maxwell was able to make it into A tier but Roland is in B. There are just too many maps with awkward terrain that make it difficult for Roland to operate like he wants.

**Anna:** Everyone’s day 1 S-Tier darling, it’s Anna. As many people have started to realize, Anna isn’t bad but she’s only S-tier if use the “degenerate” strategy of Take Cover, pass turn, Attack-Take Cover. When you play her more like a standard unit her issues really start showing. Her damage is good especially if she can trigger followup attacks though not exceptional, her range is not that great and although she’s designed around being a lone wolf, lone wolves don’t really work on hard where everything is stronger and she will die if you try to send her to the enemy back line alone. I generally find, rather than a lone wolf, she plays much better as part of a strike team generally with Maxwell and Milo who all have similar speed tiers and height traversing abilities and working together to take out enemies in hard to reach locations. Unfortunately that’s about it. I take her on missions where vertical mobility is important but other than that she doesn’t really offer very much and losing access to items definitely hurts when normally she can use 2 a turn. This might sound harsh but I feel that she is the unit whose play style evolved the least as I played the game more. She’s never bad but she’s also never amazing so B tier.

**Hossabara:** It’s time for one of the most controversial units, Hossabara. Many people claim that she does not work and label her as the worst unit in the game. Something I’ve heard many people say is that they just cannot figure out her niche and when they are supposed to use her. Well fear not because I know what her niche is and when to use her. Her niche is that she is the best second healer in the game. Basically you take her to maps when you think that your main healer (Geela or Cordelia) might have trouble fulfilling all your teams’ healing needs by herself and that she will need someone to help support her. Maybe the map is large and you're expecting some of your units to split off and play away from the main healer or maybe because it's a very fierce map you are afraid that 1 healer might get overwhelmed and need some help. You can’t take both Geela and Cordelia since neither can contribute to offense. Narve can’t do it because he’s already very TP strained and only wants to heal in emergencies, not be obligated to and Geovanna’s healing is unreliable. Hossabara however is perfect at this role. I’ve heard people say that her damage is low. This is also not true. While she might not have spike damage, her basic attack is one of the strongest in the game. Going strictly by the in game numbers hers is the 5th strongest after Avlora, Serenoa, Travis, and Anna (Anna's attack is doubled to account for her 2 actions) however this doesn’t seem to factor in strength and/or Tp to Power. Since her strength is good and I’ve heard that TP to Power is a 4-5% increase per, she might actually have the strongest basic attack in the game with a full TP meter. Because she is not obligated to use TP on her turn and she has a reliable TP regeneration skill, she is actually the best TP stockpiler in the game it gives her this niche where she is the best unit in the game at swapping her role between offense, utility and most importantly healing and best unit to bring if you think you’re going to need additional healing. No other character can fulfill this niche adding extra healing without adversely affecting your offense… kind of. I want you to look at the following quote about Hossabara from a recently posted tier list that had Hossabara at the bottom:

*Well there’s an item called Large HP Pellet that heals up to 5 allies for 120 so anyone can use that… so melee units can heal each other with the AOE healing pellets… so her healing is not as relevant as you think.*

I think this quote, better than anything I could say, fully illustrates why I like to play itemless and why I would suggest to others to put some kind of restriction on their item use as they play even after you no longer need to. There should never be a point where you’re playing as if a resource which you are supposed to be managing, whether it be TP or quality healing items, can be treated as limitless. If this happens the balance of the game and unit roles get thrown completely out of whack and Hossabara is by far the character who’s niche gets usurped the hardest when you allow for bottomless item use. Because I play itemless, Hossabara was very important on several maps to support Geela or Cordelia. Whether it was just having someone add extra damage on a unit, helping someone reposition with Catapult or doing a heal so that Geela or Cordelia could save their TP without getting overwhelmed, this was still very useful in managing my damage, TP and healing economy. Not someone I always bring and not impactful enough to be a specialist but still a very solid B tier.

**Rudolph:** IMO Rudolph is one of the most misunderstood units in this game. Almost every guide I’ve seen says “Find somewhere high to put him where he can shoot down at people and set traps if people get too close.” This is completely wrong and you should ignore anyone who tells you otherwise. When I first unlocked him I tried playing him like this and for the most part he was just a much worse version of Archibald and Hughette. He lacked their range and most of the time he was unable to use his abilities even if the enemies were close. Even the traps were underwhelming since if he was high up, enemies generally couldn’t reach him anyway. After playing him like this and being very unimpressed I took a second look at this kit and realized a few things. First, whereas most of the other archers had abilities that could target +8-20 height most of Rudolph’s could only target +5-5 height which was why he was never able to use abilities. Second, Straight Shot has high damage. Like really really high. It’s actually the 3rd strongest non-ult physical attack in the game behind Lionel’s Brute Force (lol, this move doesn’t really exist) and Avlora’s Risky Strike. Rudolph literally has one of the best attacks in the game yet for some reason, everyone thinks you should be playing him in a way that prevents him from using it. What???? Once I realized this I changed how I viewed him from a perched long range archer to a running and gunning archer who plays near though slightly behind the front line and changed the types of maps I brought him to accordingly. Playing him like he really let him show his worth. Being able to pick his targets and take advantage of crits, his Straight Shot became an amazing finisher which is only made better by his Thrill of the Hunt which gives him a speed boost on kill and it’s not insignificant. He goes from 26->34 and it very noticeably shortens his wait. If enemies got too close he could either set a Trap to stop them or use Staggering Shot to knock them back which makes a lot more sense now that they were closer to him. I even took him to the final boss where I got a nice surprise when a skill I had totally forgotten about, Fight or Flight (move increase when enemies are close) was the difference between being able to Straight Shot-Crit-Followup the boss in the back or not. It’s amazing how much better his abilities work when he’s running and gunning vs playing perched. That being said I still play him perched sometimes but only when the map is so advantageous for archers that I was already bringing the other 3 and just determined that 4th archer, no matter who it was, would be good. Bottom line is, he’s the last choice of archer for maps that look like they were designed for archers, but one of the first choices of archers for more active close to mid range map though that being said, his range while good is not amazing and I do think that Archibald is often comparably useful if not better even in these situations since his massive range is just too good. Hence why Rudolph is only B.

**Trish** Finishing up the B-Tier it’s the cute bandit Trish. Now Trish is a bit of an odd ball since although she’s an archer, she’s not really defined by her archery unlike the other 3 archers. What’s even more strange is her niche. As silly as this sounds, her niche is that she’s good at picking up spoils which is reflected in her title of Treasure Hunter. Wait, hold on, I know that sounds silly but there’s more to it than just that. Trish’s game plan is basically this. She casts Act Again the turn before an engagement starts, then she alternates between a turn where you attack/leap twice and turn where you attack/leap once and cast Act Again again. In doing so she gets 3 functional turns every 2 turns. However if you do the math you’ll note that this is a net loss of 1 TP each cycle. This is where her specialty comes in. Thanks to Treasure to TP as long as she can pick a spoil every 2 turns she can maintain the Act Again status for the entire mission and believe it or not she’s very well equipped to do this. With Act Again maintained she functionally gets 2 moves every turn even on the turns where she needs to reapply Act Again. This means she basically has 8 move every turn but it’s even better than that since she doesn’t need to take them all at once and instead can do move, act, act, move. This has several applications such as running out in the middle of the battlefield to pick up spoils (made easier by her not needing to stop on them) while attacking twice from a better range then retreating back to safety. Even better, her leap skill can be made free which only further extends the possible movement from 8 to a ridiculous 18 and can mostly ignore terrain. Her Fire Arrow should generally be avoided unless you can see that the damage will be the difference between picking up a kill and not or she got lucky and managed to pick up a lot of spoils in a short period of time and now has TP to spare. As cool as this is, everything I’ve said so far is just genetically good but doesn’t really tell you when to use her. There are 2 instances where I bring her. First, if the map is advantageous to archers, she is the third archer I’ll choose to bring behind Archibald and Hughette (as previously mentioned paradoxically Rudolph’s abilities do not work very well on maps designed for archers). Second, and more importantly, there are some maps that try to forcibly split up your team into smaller groups. The most notorious one is fighting Erika and Thalius at the harbor/ship. These are dangerous because generally one big team is much better than 2 small ones. On these maps I will usually start most of my team on one side and put characters who specialize in safely crossing the battlefield by themselves on the other side. Being able to move 18 spaces in a single turn 2 turns in a row while mostly ignoring terrain means that Trish is the absolute best at doing this (a few others who can do it but not as well are Anna, Quahuag and Milo). These aren’t huge niches but they were enough to get her picked on a handful of maps hence the B-Tier.

C-Tier

**DISCLAIMER REPEATED:** So we’re on the C-Tier and for anyone who skipped it I want to reiterate this again. Do not interpret C-Tier to mean these are bad characters. There are no bad characters in this game. I’m only trying to show how useful I felt each character’s niche’s and skills were during the Itemless, Deathless run and thus who I found myself picking the most. Characters in the C-Tier I found myself very rarely picking since they usually didn’t have skills which contributed very much to preventing danger which I view as being most important for the challenge.

**Travis:** The big man himself, it’s Travis. The issue with Travis is basically just that he’s designed around being a brawler. He does great up close with the very unique way of relocating enemies in backwards throw and arguably the best (free) Aoe damage+debuff ability in the game in Impending Strike since delay is one of the most reliable debuffs. Unfortunately that’s really it. Units who can kill threats before they become an issue are just generally better than those who handle them after they arrive and Travis really has nothing to offer in that department. With a combination of On your Guard and Steelback he’s pretty tanky so he’s not bad at taking hits and I do take him to some of the more brawly maps but the combination of lacking a really big impact move along with poor prevention options made him one of my least used characters.

 **Avlora:** Ooooo another contentious one. Avlora is basically just Travis but more offense focused and less defense focussed. She has amazing up close damage but again, being able to kill the enemy before they become a problem is generally just more valuable and while she can do a good job or repelling enemies that have gotten close there are other characters who fill the role better. Again she’s a great brawler and I do take her to some of the more brawly maps and while you could argue that her Lone Wolf allows her to do some pretty gimmicky stuff but there just weren’t really many situations where I thought she was the right pick due to not having range, utility or prevention.

**Groma:** Full disclosure, I actually like Groma as a unit a lot but I can’t deny that I had a hard time finding missions to bring her to. Most people know her dodge tanking is more of a pipe dream than a legitimate strategy but what I like about her is that she has very good speed, reasonable mobility, will almost always be able to deal good damage even at mid range thanks to Energy Wave and has huge spike damage in Skyward Uppercut when she saves up, actually the strongest single turn attack in the game. The issue is, although she has range it’s not great and thus her prevention is pretty poor. Usually when I run her it’s either because 3 jump is specifically very important or I want to run her in a strike team with Anna, Maxwell and/or Milo since her speed tier matches theirs and her damage is a lot better. The issue is, without a repositioning skill like they all have, Groma is more often than not the one cut from the team since she cannot go where they can. Because of this I cannot deny that she was one of my least used characters and thus in the C-Tier.

**Ezana:** I’ve purposely saved Ezana for last because I think she’s the one that people are going to disagree with what I’m about to say the hardest. All other characters that I’ve placed in this tier up until this point got here because I felt that their skill set was just less desirable more often though still very good units. Ezana is the only unit who I think actively has problems with her kit. There is one word that comes to mind when I think of Ezana and what she can do and that word is “Unreliable.” It is almost astounding to me how they could have given her so many unique skills and yet almost every single one of them seems to have a critical flaw that makes it unreliable. First of all, despite being a mage and needing at least 2 TP to cast her damage spells, she has no TP regeneration and thus is very TP strained just like Narve. Next the fundamental concept of changing the weather to gain a damage buff is flawed since most of the time, if an ally unit benefits from weather, they benefit from clear weather thus changing the weather can easily end being a net 0 if not a net negative for your team just by default thus making it unreliable. Rights of Rain, puts random water tiles down which by default means that whether or not these puddles are going to be placed to help you is entirely unreliable. I’ve heard some people say that she is good because she can cast Rights of Tempest to neutralize enemy archers by killing their accuracy. Do you know how much a tempest reduces enemy accuracy? Cause I do. It’s 10%. So an enemy archer who had a 100% chance to hit might have a 90% chance to hit instead. Fortunately most of your archers have accuracy above 100% so they aren’t as affected but a 10% drop is a far cry from “neutralizing enemy archers” and thus is unreliable. She can both raise your luck and lower enemy luck but by definition luck is already an unreliable stat so expecting any benefit from modifying it is unreliable. Her main AOE ability is Rights of Wind which as a side option like with Narve is not a unreliable attack however as a main AOE, it has a much more rigid attack pattern than the cross attacks the other 3 mages have and can only go +4-4 in height compared to +10-10 of the crosses and thus as a primary aoe is entirely unreliable. Then we get to the cruelest joke of them all, Rites of Thunderstorm. So let’s put into perspective the true cost of Rites of Thunderstorm pretending we are starting from 0 TP. First we must wait and pass 4 turns before being able to start casting it on the 5th turn. Then we cast it on turn 6 but we’re not done yet. Because she’s a mage and because she needs at least 2 TP to be effective we also must now pass on turn 7. So we have a spell that is equivalent in worth to around 7 turns of value and what do we get for it? An attack all (which is good) with an astoundingly bad average accuracy of below 40% that rarely hits a meaningful number of units and when it does hit rarely paralyzes. If needing to trade 7 turns for such a pathetic attack is not the definition of unreliable I don’t know what is. Yes I’m aware that there are shenanigans you can do with it and Quahuag, no it doesn’t change my opinion of the attack. This leaves us with her final move, Rites of Lighting which actually is a reliable attack and actually has twice the paralysis chance of Narve’s lighting at 60%. Not enough for me to say that the paralysis is reliable but still very nice when it happens.

There is exactly 1 situation that I can think of where Ezana is not only good but the best pick. If you are fighting on a map that is nearly entirely covered with separate bodies of water very close to one another, Rites of Rain will more often not and reliably connect all those bodies of water making it so that shocking an enemy in any body of water shocks all the enemies in all bodies of water. In case it wasn’t obvious I am of course referring to The Source where I always bring her. However, referring to someone as a specialist has its limits and the requirements for her kit to be the star of the show goes well beyond what I would deem reasonable to consider someone a specialist. Excluding this one very specific situation as far as I’m concerned you should not bring Ezana to a map unless you are already bringing all 3 of your other combat mages and think that a 4th one would be useful or the map heavily favors lighting and you’re already bringing Narve and you think a second lighting user would be good. You might have noticed that I made a ton of references to Narve when talking about her. I’ll be frank, as far as I’m concerned, Ezana is just a worse Narve in almost every situation which is not a statement I make lightly. In case you haven’t noticed for the 27 characters I’ve gone over so far who aren’t screwed by the ruleset, I have gone well out of my way to find every conceivable niche and reason why you might want to take them to a map. While Ezana does have slightly more damage it’s not enough to really make a big difference and while her Lighting spell has twice the paralysis chance, 60% vs 30% this is not high enough for me to treat it any differently than I would treat Narve’s lighting. Narve on the other hand has better range on both relevant skills and access to better AOE options making him more reliable. All of Ezana's other skills are unreliable and none of them can match this value. The saddest thing of all is that I actually do think that the weather gimmick was a really cool concept but they just had to do more with it. There needed to be more benefits to more characters and those benefits had to be stronger and more impactful than what they did.