So Ballistician...........

[crazy_man]

Thinking about making a 4th Lunatic file (2nd Revelation) to do weird things.

Planning on making Kiragi a Ballistician.  With Camilla as a mother and including aptitude, his important growth rates are:

HP: 60, Str: 75, Skl: 70, Spd: 60, Lk: 65, Def: 55, and Res: 30

Are these good for Ballisticians?  Never even tried the class.

Is it true that they cannot finish off enemies?  Is it a hassle to level them up if true?

Any suggestions on which weapons to use as a Ballistician?

All the skills of Ballistician seem mandatory, so any suggestions on the final skill?

[Roflolxp54]

Ballistician is honestly a rather lackluster class overall. It has a low movement range (base of 4) and rather low defensive stat caps. Its only real outstanding stat cap is its STR cap, being only 1 short of matching that of the Berserker class. All of its class skills are only useful to the Ballistican class; they're useless to any other class. Ballistician class's main gimmick is basically being a mobile turret; use the Cannon command (and perhaps make use of the Opportunity Shot skill) to deal nonlethal (cannot kill; may leave targets at 1 HP) AoE damage to enemy units that are in range. Since the Cannon command allows you to use the Ballistician like a turret, you can use the AoE damage to inflict friendly fire on your own units (if you want to do something like staff training, procing In Extremis, Awakening, or Vantage, or boosting Vengeance damage).

Of course, Ballistician can use bows/yumi to face off against enemy units like normal though the low movement range can be a hindrance.

Warp can fix his movement range problems and make Surefooted and Movement +1 obsolete but it requires having team members who can get to the places the Ballistician wants to be.

Bowfaire is a nice skill given that Ballistician is a bow-locked class. Point Blank can be useful if you hate being attacked at 1-range as a bow class. Strength +2 and Skill +2 can boost combat/cannon damage and Opportunity Shot activation rate respectively. Replicate can be an option for double Opportunity Shot shenanigans.

Ballistician does have the distinction of being the class of choice for doing the most damage in a single hit record in Fire Emblem Fates but Kiragi wouldn't be the person achieving that feat.

In all honesty, there are better bow classes like Sniper and Kinshi Knight.

Edited January 23, 2017 by Roflolxp54

[mangasdeouf]

I've made Takumi my Ballistician in my BR hard playthrough. I'm at the opera chapter with the 22 def great knights and king Garon. Just to say, Takumi with Reika backpack wared down all ennemies to feed them to Kagero and when she died to Kaden (the fox I don't know his English name). Takumi soloed Garon, dealing 8 damage per cannon blast, he nearly OSed the great knights (who he could've kille with his bow afterwards), and he had 90% hit rate on Garon with the bow. What more do you want? put any tank in the front, make your high skill high strength archer shoot at the ennemies or ware them down (depending on what you need) and kill them.

Ballistician is a monster of a class. My level 18 Takumi has 22 base strength + 4 from Reika, 22 base skill +5 from skill +2 and Azura's song, 11 base speed + 3 from A's song, 20 base [edit: luck not speed] + 3 from A's song, 12 base def + 3 from Reika bonus, 4 base res +2 from Fujin Yumi. He litterally OHKOs nearly anyone in range and puts as close to anyone at 1 HP after 1 cannon blast. Hitting in a cross means you have 1 to 5 ennemies at 1 HP waiting for your mobile units to slaughter them. Free kills on the map for underlevelled units, Reika sees some use even if she has never fought...

Edit: Takumi also 2HKOed Xander or 3 I don't remember. Anyway 14 damage on Xander is nice.

Edited February 21, 2018 by mangasdeouf

[joshcja]

On 1/23/2017 at 1:08 AM, crazy_man said:

Thinking about making a 4th Lunatic file (2nd Revelation) to do weird things.

Planning on making Kiragi a Ballistician.  With Camilla as a mother and including aptitude, his important growth rates are:

HP: 60, Str: 75, Skl: 70, Spd: 60, Lk: 65, Def: 55, and Res: 30

Are these good for Ballisticians?  Never even tried the class.

Is it true that they cannot finish off enemies?  Is it a hassle to level them up if true?

Any suggestions on which weapons to use as a Ballistician?

All the skills of Ballistician seem mandatory, so any suggestions on the final skill?

Balistician does not give any anythings about stats, you're just using it as a super busted mobile artillery to trivialize everything by reducing the enemy army to 1 hp with debuffed stats.

They're super underleveled all the time but it really does not matter.

Forged bow (Steel or silver) and Setsuna's Yumi. Balistician skills with Move+1 is technicly ideal. Again it really does not matter.

Edited February 21, 2018 by joshcja

[mangasdeouf]

On 21/02/2018 at 7:37 PM, joshcja said:

They're super underleveled all the time but it really does not matter.

Why would they be underlevelled all the time? It's not like they're using the cannon on each turn so you can feed them kills sometimes. With the archer's base strength largely boosted by the Ballistician's promotion gains, they can OHKO most BR ennemies from the start (or at least tankumi can) and if mine was able to 2 or 3HKO hard Xander in the opera I don't see how he would be hard to train. Just give him the strong ennemies to kill (the ones the others can barely damage or actually hit) while the others kill the normal ennemies. Tankumi lv 17 soloing Garon in the opera in hard is funny to watch. The best is that Garon can't even counterattack with his 3 range weapon. Even in normal I had to play phoenix mode to kill Garon with my units (waring him down with the fox who was the only one to double and barely dealt 2-3 damage with a strength support) but ballistician just trivializes the strongest bosses who you are not even supposed to attack with amazing offensive power comparable to a warrior/berserker with 30% bonus hit rate and bows (and while attacking with the bow you can still benefit from the archer's level 10 skill which raises the damage if you initiate combat for even more damage output). And it's the game with the DLC skill point blank (not using it but it is really OP and Ballitician really uses it the best seeing the bases are much better than archer's base stats except for speed which is not needed when you OS even stronger ennemies than your units should be).

[joshcja]

34 minutes ago, mangasdeouf said:

Why would they be underlevelled all the time? It's not like they're using the cannon on each turn so you can feed them kills sometimes. With the archer's base strength largely boosted by the Ballistician's promotion gains, they can OHKO most BR ennemies from the start (or at least tankumi can) and if mine was able to 2 or 3HKO hard Xander in the opera I don't see how he would be hard to train. Just give him the strong ennemies to kill (the ones the others can barely damage or actually hit) while the others kill the normal ennemies. Tankumi lv 17 soloing Garon in the opera in hard is funny to watch. The best is that Garon can't even counterattack with his 3 range weapon. Even in normal I had to play phoenix mode to kill Garon with my units (waring him down with the fox who was the only one to double and barely dealt 2-3 damage with a strength support) but ballistician just trivializes the strongest bosses who you are not even supposed to attack with amazing offensive power comparable to a warrior/berserker with 30% bonus hit rate and bows (and while attacking with the bow you can still benefit from the archer's level 10 skill which raises the damage if you initiate combat for even more damage output). And it's the game with the DLC skill point blank (not using it but it is really OP and Ballitician really uses it the best seeing the bases are much better than archer's base stats except for speed which is not needed when you OS even stronger ennemies than your units should be).

You're pretty much firing the cannon every turn. Or the rest of the army is so far ahead of tonka tough that there's no combat to be found.

Didn't bother reading past that bit.

[mangasdeouf]

If you're not playing on normal casuel/phoenix then your army will rarely run head on into the ennemy troops, so you have time to use the cannon and Azura/Aqua is here for making the balistician efficient while allowing the others to get free kills instead of loosing half their HP waring down 10+ damage opponents and sometimes even miss so they lost HP for basically nothing. Ballistician have the hit rate coupled with the damage needed to do the job so the others stay full health during PP.

And noone else than tankumi in my team could've solo DPS the ennemies in the opera. In fact they would've died to the 1st GK more than probably. Tankumi did the job, I slaughtered any ennemy in the chapter instead of running away and loose a chest + exp.

Edit: the problem in this chapter is that your units are mostly unpromoted while some ennemies are promoted and hold powerful weapons to deal 15+ damage tou your tankiest units (there are even class-killing weapons to be wary of).

Edited February 25, 2018 by mangasdeouf

[mangasdeouf]

If you're not playing on normal casuel/phoenix then your army will rarely run head on into the ennemy troops, so you have time to use the cannon and Azura/Aqua is here for making the balistician efficient while allowing the others to get free kills instead of loosing half their HP waring down 10+ damage opponents and sometimes even miss so they lost HP for basically nothing. Ballistician have the hit rate coupled with the damage needed to do the job so the others stay full health during PP.

And noone else than tankumi in my team could've solo DPS the ennemies in the opera. In fact they would've died to the 1st GK more than probably. Tankumi did the job, I slaughtered any ennemy in the chapter instead of running away and loose a chest + exp.

[joshcja]

xl17 is low for ch14 BR. Your mainstays are promoted by then and you're in the middle of a long slew of prepromoted goodies and kids. Killing Groans can be done with guage abuse on just about any strong unit.

Killing 2 things max a turn is low exp when your mainstays kill 20. High exp kills go to the big boys to keep on facerollin.

Point blank does nothing meaningful, it's a DLC walled waste of a skillslot.

Losing hp is often a buff in this game.

Edited February 25, 2018 by joshcja

[mangasdeouf]

LV 17 is low? Are you running a team of 2 units? Because at the rate you get exp until chapter 14 you could get no more than 1 lv 20/1 unit. The exp curve is more BS than in older FEs like TSS or FE6/7 since you get around 3 exp per kill very fast when overloevelled and if it's hard mode the exp i probably even rarer. I think this FE has the worst exp curve of any FE since before FE6, at the level of Gaiden but this one at least had a bonus exp system where units brought in combat got passive exp even if you didn't use them. Fates doesn't have passive or BEXP and doesn't offer much exp for overlevelled units. Hell no getting less than 5 exp per kill with a 4 level difference is worse than FE 8 in which you could use bosses to get real exp (abuse entombs and that's it)?

In Fates even bosses give little exp. You can't really solo the game with the avatar since his bases are quite bad and he needs too many level ups to get good enough to survive both PP and EP and his class skills don't help much (veteran skill has been hard nerfed and barely serves any purpose since 0.2 bonus exp per point is irrelevant when the exp you get from kills already sucks, the end of the introduction chapters barely gives any exp to your level 5-6 avatar and when he reaches 10 good luck to give him exp before chapter 10) and his personnal skill is OK but not enough to compensate from having only one class skill that is only useful for damage while in first class you want more sustain or avoid not to get killed when surrounded. You're basically forced to class change to do anything with the avatar since dragonstone's bonus are trash tier compared to any previous FE and they make you unable to double and kill ennemies, while the sword is pulling your barely correct def (if you didn't choose def boon at least) to even worse levels while giving you nearly no avoid.

In a game with stats caps worse than RD's and stat efficiency equal to Awakening which had 10 more in nearly every single stat without limit breaker, you can't rely on EP avoid much and your toughness is really lacking to face hordes of ennemies. That's where a class such as ballistician who can weaken ennemies from afar with AOE damage is really great because it saves you so many hit issues and tanking difficulties especially when the game becomes unforgiving (like the werewolves chapter where you get countered, countered magic etc. if you're not careful and should nearly unequip for EP not to die from a counter). You can kill up to five units per PP without loosing HP with only 1 cannon blast and a few units mobilized to finish off the ennemies.

[joshcja]

Ok. Every single thing on that post is objectively wrong. All of it.

Stop.

 

Edited February 25, 2018 by joshcja

[mangasdeouf]

6 minutes ago, joshcja said:

Ok. Every single thing on that post is objectively wrong. All of it.

Stop.

 

You not even explaining your point of view. Coming to say "it's wong" doesn't lead anywhere. I don't see why you repiled to me if the reply doesn't bring anything to the debate.

[joshcja]

11 minutes ago, mangasdeouf said:

You not even explaining your point of view. Coming to say "it's wong" doesn't lead anywhere. I don't see why you repiled to me if the reply doesn't bring anything to the debate.

I have no words.

[Mandokarla]

Play nice children.

As for the Ballistician -- Free chip damage, which is fun. I can't speak for how useful it is long term, but if you don't mind a class with the movement of an armor knight, have fun. Growths aren't everything, its the class utility that matters. 

[mangasdeouf]

14 hours ago, Mandokarla said:

Play nice children.

As for the Ballistician -- Free chip damage, which is fun. I can't speak for how useful it is long term, but if you don't mind a class with the movement of an armor knight, have fun. Growths aren't everything, its the class utility that matters. 

This. A class that allows you to free kill packs of ennemies with your own is nice to play.

I'm playing a normal playthrough bows/shuriken only (hard to do in hard mode because of the lack of tanks for a while) in Birthright. It's true that I expected the ennemies to deal more damage and my units to get less exp (conquest and hard BR gave me this feeling) but still my units are only level 13 max at chapter 13 even Saizo who started by a skirmish and got 2 level ups before even going inot the scenario and I'm farming his supports to avoid some shitty event that would be uncool in a shuriken/bows only run. I'm spreading exp between 4 couples but the exp they get per kill is tightening even with such a low level advantage and the number of ennemies per map is ridiculously low. I'm happy that I encountered a ninja with a speedwing nd an outlaw with a dracoshield in my skirmishes but still waiting to use them (I will do the trick to min/max logbook units before using definitively my boosters).

Also I tested the my castle stuff and I'm glad I can buy seals in others' castles so I won't be out of heart/buddy/wedding seals before  while. Just sad you can't buy DLC classes with game money (having only 1 pair of glasses for Tankumi is sad in my run). But well having many ballisticians would probably not be very helpful. Even if having 2 pairs of boots from free DLC and bonus items is nice for them.