FE3H - Maddening Blue Lions Chapter 20
Chapter 20 - The Impregnable Fortress
We are now heading down to the Empire for real for our final confrontation. As usual, we are going to pass through the Bridge of Myrddin and take on Fort Merceus, where the Death Knight awaits. Given that Arundel was defeated, I wonder if the battle will play out differently or not. Given that the characters in the monastery talk about how we're planning to attack head-on, instead of try to sneak in... perhaps it is different.
I have a number of characters who are close to S+ on their primary weapon, but are still a little bit short by the end of the month. Rikka, Dimitri, Ashe, and Annette will likely hit S+ during the next chapter. But for now, we head into Fort Merceus. I'd imagine as a result of doing Mercedes's paralogue, she gets extra dialogue here before the battle with regards to talking about Emile.
Battle: Taking Fort Merceus
Deploy: Rikka, Dimitri (Gilbert), Lysithea, Dorothea, Annette (Dedue), Ingrid, Hilda, Ashe (Petra), Sylvain, Flayn
The map is indeed a different battle for Fort Merceus compared to Church/Deer route. Our forces start at the top of the map while The Death Knight starts far away at the bottom. There are a large number of Fire Orbs, Ballistas, and Warlocks/Gremory with Bolting/Meteor spread around all over the map. In order to avoid most of the threat of long-range weaponry, it is safest to move clockwise around the map, moving towards the right first then downward. This also lets me pick up the treasure boxes and the Brave Axe drop along the way.
Handling large Demonic beasts tends to be a bit of a team effort, so it's important for me to be dealing with them while I don't have very many enemies on me. While they have a lot of HP, those HP bars can melt pretty quickly through the efforts of Ashe and Lysithea. a 2x hit of Seraphim can take out the second HP bar, while Ashe's high crit and the Inexhaustable can let him quad crit his way through the third HP bar of about 190 HP.
A lot of the enemies on this map have their own Battalions, making it more difficult to abuse Dimitri's Battalion Vantage/Wrath to let them kill themseleves as they will choose to throw low accuracy Gambits at him instead. Thus, progress through the map relies heavily on my ranged attackers and mounted units. As I progressed through the map, I took advantage of my range to run deep into enemy range to reach and take out an enemy Ballista, then use Flayn to Rescue back to safety. Taking advantage of range was also important to be able to cleanly take out small enemy groups without stepping into range of more enemies trailing a bit behind them.
Rescue hit and run tactics were also utilized to down the Falcon Knight and the Bolting Gremory in the center of the map, and I'm able to progress more freely down the right side of the map. Eventually some of the other enemies start to move, but it takes a few turns before they start to threaten my position. By the time they are on me, I am close enough to the wall beside the Death Knight to go in for the kill. One of the large Demonic Beasts were in the way, so I used Lure to move it out, used some gambits to chip the Death Knight, then finished him off with Dark Spikes, as per usual. The Death Knight is defeated, and we have seized Fort Merceus.
One Divine Pulse use, because at the start of the map, Sylvain got clocked by a 3% crit Ballista shot.
Resets: 0 (1)
Divine Pulses: 1 (48)
Roster:
Rikka - L38
Dorothea - L41
Dimitri - L41
Ashe - L40
Annette - L40
Lysithea - L39
Flayn - L39
Hilda - L38
Ingrid - L38
Petra - L38
Sylvain - L37
Catherine - L36
Dedue - L34
We have seized Fort Merceus, and Margrave Gautier has reported that unification of Faerghus lands has been completed. It seems there is other news however, as a person captured seems to have confessed to being a participant of the Tragedy of Duscur, also implicating the lord he serves. So while we are right at the doorstep of Enbarr, we return to the Monastery.
