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Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H)
Maddening Tips and Guide
A guide to useful tips you need to know before playing the Maddening Difficulty Mode in Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H). Here we list all the necessary info like Limited Experience, Best Ways to Strengthen Characters, Recruitment Tips, Best Classes, and other tips you might not know you even need!
List of Contents
Maddening Difficulty Features
Experience Gains is Halved
The experience points you receive in Maddening is halved. This makes your units extremely underdeveloped against enemies whose levels are way higher than their hard counterparts.
Ambushes Immediately Act
Enemy reinforcements may sometimes approach from strongholds and stairs.
When ambushes for enemy units arrive, they will immediately act. This makes positioning units even more crucial during maddening as a single misstep can cause a unit's death.
Enemy Commanders Will Advance
Enemies that used to stay on heal tiles while weathering your attacks now leave the heal tile. This is most like done to avoid EXP farming, since commanders give more EXP than normal units. Make sure to watch out, especially against the Death Knight!
Enemies Have Rare Abilities
A normal thief encountered in chapter 2 with the Pass ability.
During Normal and Hard mode, the only enemies you would need to watch out for are named enemies. However, in Maddening, even normal enemies have rare abilities, so make sure to check enemy stats before heading into the fray.
Maddening Difficulty Tips and Tricks
- Plan Your Final Roster Immediately
- Activate Danger Radius Before Moving
- Abuse Enemy Priests' Ability
- Use Broken Weapons for Farming
- Recruiting Early V.S. Recruiting Late
- Equip Bows and Ranged Weapons
- Recruit As Many Units As You Can
- Teach Your Magic-Users Faith
- Reclass To Mitigate Weaknesses
- Class Up As Soon As Possible
- Fight With the Map in Mind
- Optimize Actions During Exploration
- Use Mission Assistance
- Assign Battalions for All Units
Plan Your Final Roster Immediately
It is important to plan out which units you will use throughout the game. You will need 13 units—10 for fighting and 3 adjutants. Then, you need to plan how you will train these units.
You should also consider the timing of when you will recruit other units and how their class progression will go. Once you planned it out, make sure to give your most important units EXP in battle.
Activate Danger Radius Before Moving
A misplaced unit will, more often than not, face death in the enemy phase. Moving while having Danger Radius revealed will allow you to make a much safer decision when moving your units.
Abuse Enemy Priests' Ability
| Ability | Effect |
|---|---|
| Renewal | Unit recovers up to 20% of max HP at the start of each turn. |
Enemy Priests will come with the Renewal ability. This is especially useful for grinding in Maddening, since EXP is limited.
Having an enemy you can repeatedly attack for free EXP points is crucial for your party. It will also level up your skill proficiency, since skill EXP is not reduced in Maddening.
Use Broken Weapons for Farming
Do not sell or repair broken weapons. Keep them in your storehouse as they are a valuable source of missed attacks against priests you can trap in battles. Repeatedly attacking these enemies while missing will still build up your weapon skill together with your authority skill (if a battalion is equipped), and class-related support skills (flying, armored, or riding).
Recruiting Early V.S. Recruiting Late
There are advantages and disadvantages to each choice you have, which will be listed below.
Early Recruitment
- Higher skill levels due to class training.
- Classpath can be adjusted according to your preference. (Important for a unit that needs reclassing for stat boosts)
- Learns Abilities faster.
Late Recruitment
- Higher levels than normal.
- Can avoid fighting for EXP points from your starter units, more reason to funnel EXP points at the start of the game rather than leveling everyone.
- Better for units that go to a good classpath (Ingrid's Pegasus Knight, Hilda's Wyvern Lord, etc.)
Equip Bows and Ranged Weapons
To mitigate damage, you face enemies with ranged weapons like Bows, Javelins, or Hand Axes. This will let you safely defeat enemies and farm EXP.
Recruit As Many Units As You Can
Recruiting Everyone is great for three reasons. First, you can get free items, allowing you to save Gold for other resources.
The second benefit is that you can avoid tougher enemies later on. Enemies in the game that are from the monastery will be replaced by weaker enemies. This makes the extremely hard game mode somewhat more tolerable.
Another benefit is that you will unlock Paralogue maps. This is a free source of EXP and also offers handsome rewards like unlocking the Thyrsus after recruiting Lorenz.
Teach Your Magic-Users Faith
In Maddening, EXP earned from healing is not reduced. With more high Faith units, you can give them another way to earn EXP while supporting your other units.
Reclass To Mitigate Weaknesses
This is a method to remedy a unit's lackluster stats. Examples are healers with low defense being reclassed to armored knights. This works because classes have a minimum stat, allowing you to shore up weak stats.
This is again, true for modifying stat growths of units in the game. Units with low strength growth would have higher strength if they are reclassed. This makes units like Petra hit hard if trained as Warrior instead of an Assassin.
Class Up As Soon As Possible
Another topic about classing up is to make sure to do it as soon as possible. An early promotion will let your unit take advantage of higher stat bonuses and growth rates.
Best Classes for Each Character
Fight With the Map in Mind
You should always incorporate the available terrain tiles in your strategy. Stat bonuses gained from heal tiles, forests, and untraversable tiles can be used against enemies.
Optimize Actions During Exploration
Do not waste a good week by doing quests, then ending exploration. You should always make sure to maximize supports with characters and increase your main roster's motivation.
In the early game, in particular, the most important activities are those that increase your professor level!
Use Mission Assistance
With EXP being non-existent, you should ask recruitable units for mission assistance. Aside from helping you in battle, it will also increase your support level with a unit, allowing you to recruit that unit easier.
This is more effective for support characters who are mages like Annette, Ignatz, Linhardt, etc. since they have more opportunities to do actions that raise their Support with you.
Assign Battalions for All Units
Battalions provide several benefits like stats, gambits, and even battalion related abilities, and the higher your authority skill is, the better battalions you equip.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses Related Links
Author
Maddening Tips and Guide
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