FE3H - Maddening Blue Lions Chapter 5

Chapter 5 - Tower of Black Winds

Monastery Exploration

Lysithea recruits herself to my class the first thing in this month, which saves me the need to rush on building my faith level. This month has a number of things open up to me.

-Forging is unlocked, so I forge all my broken weapons into plus versions
-Saint Statue upgrades are now unlocked, I have enough renoun throughout the month to reach the 4th upgrade for Cethleann, Cichol, and Macuil statues, and 3rd upgrade for Indech. So basically, +20% exp, +1 weapon skill exp, +1 class exp, +2 riding/flying exp
-the first exploration session of the month has the "Fistful of Fish" event so I used all the fish bait that I had saved up until this point on this session in order to gain an additional boost to professor exp, as catching multiple fish per bait provides additional prof exp per additional fish
-I reach C+ rank on the first exploration session as a result of the fish event unlocking the ability to do 2 battles per Sunday.
-Opening up the ability to do 2 battles allows me to finish both battle quests, and unlock the merchants so that I can start purchasing gifts, and by a set on gift items before this month ends.
-using the purchased gifts, I am able to get Lorenz, Dorothea, and Bernadetta to B support, I recruit Dorothea

Recruitment:
Lysithea
Dorothea

Certifications:
Dedue - Soldier
Mercedes - Monk
Lysithea - Mage

Battle: The Gautier Inheritance

It's time to storm the tower, most of my characters are level 8 or 9 going into this map. The enemy strength in this chapter spikes up a bit from the previous one as a lot of the enemies are now outfitted with Steels. While their AS is generally more managable and the risk of being destroyed by 2x hits has been reduced, they are swinging at me with a good 6-8 more atk than in the previous chapter. The enemy density as you get to the central room is densly packed and full of steel bow archers, so I have to think a bit carefully to avoid getting someone shot at a few too many times.

Since I have 11 characters now, 1 of them get to sit by as an Adjutant, I decide between Felix and Dorothea to sideline, and came to the conclusion that Felix having Heavy Draw and a bit more general durability would be more useful for me in this chapter, so Dorothea was put on the sidelines for this one.

The action in this map escalated really quickly. Enemy reinforcements on this map move immediately when they spawn, and the first set of them drop down on the second turn and immediately start attacking Gilbert. I decide to keep some of my units to the back and save Gilbert from his predicament, which did require me to use Stride to reliably get my units enough movement to do their actions.

I was intending to take thing slowly and try to bait the archers in the central room to approach the walls so that I could pick them off and thin out their numbers, but it ended up with the other enemies around in the room mobilizing and moving out. As they walk past other stationary enemy groups it causes them to start marching as well until pretty much all the enemies on the map are barreling down the corridor towards my team.

I was a bit concerned that I triggered the enemies to move out, but then gave some thought and figured there's no harm in trying to fight this out. My plan here was that I would just stand by on the right side of the map, before the spot where the ambush spawn for the thieves are. The enemies have differing movement and a lot of ground to walk in order to get to me. I figured that by the time the enemies actually reach me, their group will have spread out and be stretched into more of a long line of enemies. In the mean time, I had just enough time to deal with the second wave of reinforcements from the back and most of the central room archers, so that they would not be an issue. While using Deadeye at range 4 has extremely shaky accuracy, I threw out a bunch of them at the archers in the central room because it was high-reward with little risk. A hit with Deadeye made them easy to finish off with someone like Lysithea. A miss was generally inconsequential because Ashe is not blocking the shooting lane for other attacks. I managed to land 2 or 3 of these hits and they helped a lot to deal with the Archers.

I let Gilbert walk upward and sacrifice himself and hopefully land a few heavy hits onto the enemy to help me out. Gilbert is able to land a couple before he is overrun and is forced to retreat. My plan of action now, was to stand at the edge of the enemy's range and use the space I have behind me to retreat gradually while dealing some damage through counter attacks. However, due to the enemy's movements, they made things easier for me. Instead of just rushing straight down along the wall towards my units, the enemies kind of fanned out and spread themselves across the corridor while walking down. This allowed for more easy separation between the Thieves and Archers from the Armors and Fighters, allowing me to actually just hold the line at the right side of the map. Ranged attacks through Curved Shot and magic helped a lot to let me take out the thieves and archers who stepped forward while minimising my exposure to attacks from the fighters and armors in the back. I also made use of some gambits from Dimitri to help extend my reach to hit some enemies that were deeper into their range in order to stun them for a turn.

Eventually we end up with something like this, and the remaining enemies are fairly simply to clean up.

Once the enemies moving towards me were taken out, the rest of the map can be taken at my leisure. I'm able to take out the enemies at just the right time as I was about to run out of Heal uses between my three mages by the time the combat subsided. I move as a group cautiously around the top right corner in order to spring the ambush in a way that is safely manageable. I kill the fortress knight in the left for the Accuracy Ring, then go on and defeat Miklan. In the heat of the battle, I did forget to actually open the treasure chest in the bottom right, but an Armorslayer is not a big loss to me.

Once Miklan is defeated, we now have to fight the Black Beast. The Black beast has 37 atk and 18 crit, which makes it fairy dangerous if left to do its own thing. Between having Bow Prowess 3 and 10 Luck, I used Ashe to draw in the boss while I stood everyone else out of range and in a formation to receive a Stride. Once it came to my turn, I quickly went for the full armor break and pelted it with attacks. Even with all the attacks thrown at it, including a couple crits, the boss still had about 50HP on its last bar by the next turn. After that I simply finished it off with a combination of Range 3 Curved Shots and Gambits to avoid every having to worry about it being able to attack. And with that the battle has been won.

One Divine Pulse use because I forgot Rikka was in range of being attacked by an archer which would kill me after being hit by an armor knight that was chasing after me, and chose to heal Ashe who wasn't in any danger over healing Rikka. A quick reversal back to the end of my turn to heal Rikka instead of Ashe was enough to fix the issue.

Resets: 0 (0)
Divine Pulses: 1 (4)

Roster:
Rikka - L12
Lysithea - L12
Annette - L11
Felix - L11
Ingrid - L11
Sylvain - L11
Mercedes - L11
Dimitri - L10
Dedue - L10
Ashe - L10
Dorothea - L9