FE3H - Maddening Blue Lions Rikka's Paralogue
Chapter 8 - The Flame in the Darkness
Monastery Exploration
We now have some added selection to weapons, items, and battalions. I take the time to expand my selection of D and C rank battalions at my disposal, and purchase a few intermediate and advanced seals. As I'm still a bit away from Advanced Classes for most of my characters, I figure it wouldn't be a bad idea to invest in a second Intermediate Class for a handful of my characters in order to acquire some useful class mastery skills. I finish upgrades to the Cethleann statue to receive additional Lance and Faith exp, and recruit Manuela and Hanneman as I intend to play their Paralogue this month.
Statue Upgrades:
Lance +2
Faith +2
Recruitment:
Manuela
Hanneman
Certifications:
Rikka - Brigand
Marianne - Mage
Hilda - Pegasus Knight
Ashe - Brigand
Paralogue: Tales of the Red Canyon
Deploy: Rikka (Flayn), Dimitri (Mercedes), Lysithea, Annette, Dedue, Sylvain, Felix, Ashe, Marianne, Ingrid
Rikka's Paralogue. We head to the Red Canyon again and are ambushed by giant animals. I make it a point to play this map as soon as it is available in order to pick up the Knowledge Gem from the treasure box in the map. I have a bad habit of being fixated more than I should with trading around Knowledge in order to further gain skill and class exp, but we'll see how much of that I get to be doing in this Paralogue.
As the saying goes "Birds are Jerks". The Wolves and Birds on this map are very fast, with just over 20 AS. At this point in the game I have a number of characters who can just barely keep up with the speed of the Wolves, as long as they are not affected by weapon weight, while the Birds will still 2x hit those characters. For the most part, if my Magic users get attacked, they are dead. While there isn't a large number of enemies on the map, the Birds cover a lot of the map once they start to get a move on. The eventual reinforcements that show up on this map do not help either. On Maddening this is a map that tests your ability to take advantage of the mechanics regarding monsters, Gambits, and barrier breaks. Passing around the Thyrsus, using Curved Shot, and having some long range gambits like Fusillade are very helpful tools when facing a map with a large number of beasts as it allows me to be able to both attack enemies at a safe distance and be able to attack the same enemy with a large number of my units.
I start off the map by grabbing the Knowledge Gem with Ingrid, and moving my forces north to meet up with Rikka, taking out the Wolves in my way. Things are pretty uneventful at the start of the map, but escalate quickly once the Demonic Beast leader and its band of Birds starts to move. Enemy reinforcements from the top left of the map spawn an additional Bird compared to Hard mode. This is where the map starts to get interesting.
I am greatly relieved to find out that the enemy reinforcements on this map do NOT get to spawn and attack on the same turn, which would have made the map a lot more terrifying to handle than what I ended up with. When the Hawks on the left spawned, I noticed that the pillars around the healing tile in the top area of the map act as solid walls and cannot be flown over. This becomes an important detail about this map as it provided me some extra cover to hide behind and walk through that the Birds would need to fly around to get to me.
When the first wave of reinforcements spawn, I still have a bit of time before the Birds from the bottom of the map can reach me, so I focus my efforts on taking dealing with the reinforcements first. I draw in the two Birds with Dimitri while standing between the pillars to force them to attack at range 2, so that he can counter attack with a bow. On my turn, I take out the two Birds, then move in with Dimitri to use his Line of Lances Gambit to instantly barrier break the remaining Wolf to prevent it from attacking.
The following turn, I take out the Wolf, and start moving some of my units towards the right to take on the approaching Birds. I take out the one that is closest to me, while I havee Dedue use a Gambit to draw away the aggro from the Bird in the middle while simultaneously standing in the path of the third Bird. I use this time to regroup with my other units.
Another set of reinforcements spawn and suddenly I am surrounded by enemies. However, I am able to make the situation easily manageable due to Dimitri's efforts. Dimitri uses a second Line of Lances to barrier break the Wolf, then parks himself two squares down, two squares left from the heal tile pillars, effectively creating a cage that boxes the two Birds that spawn. This buys me time for the rest of my units to handle the Birds on the right and regroup. From there, the rest of the map goes fairly smoothly.
The Demonic Beast has a weakness to Axes, so I demolish its barrier by passing around a hand axe and breaking each double barrier one axe throw at a time until a barrier break, then wail on it with attacks. Using Gambits and Range 3+ attacks to finish it off once its stun wore off.
The map goes well and we get through with zero Divine Pulse uses. We even managed to perform a barrier break on every beast on the map gathering a nice amount of ore for future use.
Resets: 0 (0)
Divine Pulses: 0 (14)
Roster:
Rikka - L20
Marianne - L20
Dimitri - L19
Ingrid - L19
Lysithea - L19
Mercedes - L18
Annette - L18
Ashe - L18
Felix - L18
Dedue - L18
Sylvain - L17
Flayn - L16
Dorothea - L15
Hilda - L14
Manuela - L15
Hanneman - L15
