FE3H - Maddening Blue Lions Final Chapter
Final Chapter: Oath of the Dagger
Battle: Clash at the Imperial Capital
Deploy: Rikka, Dimitri (Gilbert), Flayn, Lysithea, Ashe (Petra), Dorothea (Raphael)
Edelgard has turned herself into a living weapon by Agarthan technology in a desperate struggle to not lose this war. She is able to act twice a turn, and has an attack rangs that spans 90% of the map. While 50 Atk, and 100 Acc is not exactly the most deadly of offense, she is still able to demolish my primary attacking units with her sniping, making for a rather bothersome final map gimmick.
I thought of trying to cheese the map by seeing whether I could utilize Retribution in order to just beat Edelgard by spam counter attacks, essentially letting her kill herself. But apparently Retribution does not let my units counter attack her attacks. At least, not from Range 32. So I will need to do this map in a more honest way...
Or so I thought. In trying to experiment a bit, to better understand her attacking pattern. I learn that while she gets two turns, she is unable to target the same character twice, I learn that once you reach the throne room, her weapon changes to a range 1-6 attack weapon, and I learn that enemies will spawn indefinitely from the top left, top right, and the central staircase once her attack patter changes. The fact that Edelgard will stop long range sniping and switches to a real weapon changes the dynamic of the map and allows me to more realistically set up for Dimitri to just go in solo and pretty much fight Edelgard, 1 on 1, for most of the map.
Before the map, I dropped down all my Energy Drops, Speedwings, and Secret Books onto Dimitri, and give all my Spirit Dust to Lysithea. The Spirit Dust allows Lysithea to have 13 range Warp, allowing her to easily warp someone across past the center room straight into the throne room. I apply a Retribution onto Dimitri, warp him in, and watch as he plows through about 18 enemies with Vantage Wrath. Since I wasn't 100% set up for this run, I didn't repair his Killer Lance+, so it broke before killing all the enemies, but that's fine, Dimitri is a trooper and just busts the mages down with a broken Killer Lance anyways. The initial reinforcements that spawn upon reaching the Throne room consists of 4 units with Bolting, so as it turns out, dealing with this with Solo Dimitri works out way safer than the alternative of having all your units around as potential Bolting targets.
From there, I have Dimitri clean out some of the enemies approaching him, then start fighting Edelgard. He is able to 2x hit her, and hit for about 27 per hit, allowing him to break early HP bars in roughly 4 hits. Edelgard's accuracy against Dimitri is a bit over 50% because Dimitri kept getting level ups which put him out from having full HP to get his +20 evade from his personal skill. A bit of a frustrating thing was that the Durability on Goneril Valkyries was really low so any one hit disabled Dimitir's Battalion, reducing some of his damage output. I spend a few Divine Pulses trying to dodge and get around this, but eventually just decided to take a hit and move on with the fight.
While Dimitri was in combat with Edelgard, my remaining units simply sat in the starting room, fending off enemy war master reinforcements with Ashe and Lysithea. Eventually, I go in for a bit of a risk to finish off Edelgard, as I warp Rikka over to the Throne Room, as the reinforcements started to pile up and become a bit more than I could handle safely. The situation became one where I needed to take Edelgard out before enemy reinforcements can overwhelm the few units I have at the palace entrance.
Rikka hands Dimitri a Speed Ring and a Brave Lance+, which allows Dimitri to 4x hit Edelgard for 21x4 speedning up my DPS and allowing me to quickly wipe out her 3rd HP bar, leaving one more bar remaining. My units at the back are barely hanging on by dropping Gambits onto enemy War Masters and KOing Dark Knights, but they've got one more turn in them before they will be overwhelmed. I hit Edelgard with a Brave Lance for 84 damage, then move Rikka over to beside Edelgard and hit her with a Windsweep, breaking the barrier for the turn. Edelgard attacks Dimitri and Rikka on her own turn, leaving herself at about 20HP left. In order to avoid the risk of Vantage Wrath that she has, Rikka delivers the killing blow by Windsweep Creator Sword, and the battle has been won.
As mentioned there was one Reset on this map for when I was trying to retribution cheese things. On the second run in the map, I had three Divine Pulse uses. One to go back to start and hand Dimitri a healing item before warping him over, two more for trying to avoid Edelgard's 50% accurate attacks with Dimitri to preserve his Battalion before giving up on it.
Resets: 1 (2)
Divine Pulses: 3 (54)
Roster:
Rikka - 409 B / 158 W
Dorothea - 55 B / 25 W
Dimitri - 551 B / 220 W
Ashe - 408 B / 199 W
Annette - 252 B / 168 W
Lysithea - 252 B / 152 W
Flayn - 87 B / 37 W
Hilda - 225 B / 127 W
Ingrid - 403 B / 168 W
Petra - 96 B / 47 W
Sylvain - 286 B / 139 W
Catherine - 72 B / 46 W
Dedue - 247 B / 90 W
Felix - 137 B/ 58 W
Mercedes - 65 B / 32 W
Marianne - 74 B / 37 W
Edelgard has been taken out. Dimitri tries one last time to extend his hand to reach her, but in her dying breath she throws the dagger and stabs Dimitri in the shoulder, and is killed in response. Edelgard is no more, and the war is over. Maddening Blue Lions route has been completed. While the threat of Agarthans still exists at large, and we do quite get a full detailed account of what happened on the day of the Tragedy of Duscur, we can at least move on to rebuilding Foldan into a new age of peace.
With this my Blue Lions Maddening Run has been completed. I will still have one more post tomorrow as a post-game follow up, so stay tuned.
