History LowTierLetdown / FireEmblem

For a tier list on ''VideoGame/FireEmblemHeroes'', click [[TierInducedScrappy/FireEmblemHeroes here]].

* In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'', it's a game that's easy enough that even the lowest tier units can generally see use with favoritism. Karla, the little sister of [[BloodKnight Karel]], is an exception to this. She's recruited literally a handful of chapters away from the end of the game, outright ''requires'' that the player train Bartre to use him[[note]]who's already a unit that, while entirely usable and thus exempt from this trope, is considered in tier rankings a resource sink with not enough pay-off to be worth it on average[[/note]], and then survive an engagement with him... and even with 20/1 Bartre, she joins with base stats that he could easily sneeze at where the rest of the game's maps are extremely lance dominated. This altogether gets Karla notoriously solidified as arguably the worst Swordsmaster in the series, with the only one that rivals her for that title being Shannam in ''Fire Emblem: Thracia 776'', who's a ''JokeCharacter''.

* While [[BreakOutCharacter Roy is very popular as a Lord with the casual fandom]], his perfomance in his home game leaves a lot to be desired. Despite joining with perfect availability, he's notorious for only being able to promote literally three chapters away from the True Ending of the game - and in the case of the Bad Ending, ''one,'' long after most of your other units would have promoted and neared their caps. Even though Roy ''does'' get a unique sword with 1-2 range that gives +5 to Defense and Resistance, this delay alongside the long time Roy is without level caps as a reason why he [[NeverLiveItDown never gets to live it down]].

* Every single unit on this list is dwarfed by one in particular though: '''Bantu'''. While all the other units are notoriously bad enough to qualify as a LowTierLetdown (by virtue of having no MagikarpPower to speak of whatsoever), they at least have some merits to them. Bantu has absolutely none--he can't reclass, his growths are awful, his bases are awful, his class is utterly gimped for the game it's in, he has only 6 move that he can't reclass out of, and he's seen as strictly inferior in every conceivable way to Tiki, a unit who in this game is not seen as worth it in the slightest. Even when capped out in every stat, something impossible without hacking, rigging, or pouring literally all the game's statboosters into him, he's ''still'' mediocre at best.

Even [[Franchise/FireEmblem in a series]] that's as big as it is on using your favorites character, [[LowTierLetdown there exists a scarce few units that simply won't work no matter how hard you try, and the fandom knows it]].

[[CasualCompetitiveConflict Do keep in mind]] that due to how the series works and the trope's clarifications of what counts and what doesn't count, that [[MagikarpPower units that start out weak but can potentially get stronger]] don't qualify; a LowTierLetdown example has to have ''no'' MagikarpPower to speak of, either due to issues with their class, kit or set-up that's InherentInTheSystem or being non-functional at even the lowest level of play. For that reason, make sure to include examples of units that either lack any meaningful reward even through training them, and [[MemeticLoser are widely known throughout the fandom as such]].

* Every single unit on this list is dwarfed by one in particular, however: '''Bantu.''' While all the other units are notoriously bad enough to qualify as a LowTierLetdown (by virtue of having no MagikarpPower to speak of whatsoever), they at least have some merits to them. Bantu has absolutely none--he can't reclass, his growths are awful, his bases are awful, his class is utterly gimped for the game it's in, he has only 6 move that he can't reclass out of, and he's seen as strictly inferior in every conceivable way to Tiki, a unit who in this game is not seen as worth it in the slightest. Even when capped out in every stat, something impossible without hacking, rigging, or pouring literally all the game's statboosters into him, he's ''still'' mediocre at best.

* Every single unit on this list is dwarfed by one in particular, however: '''Bantu.''' While all the other units are notoriously bad enough to qualify as a LowTierLetdown (by virtue of having no MagikarpPower to speak of whatsoever), they at least have some merits to them. Bantu has absolutely none--he can't reclass, his growths are awful, his bases are awful, his class is utterly gimped for the game it's in, he has only 6 move that he can't reclass out of, and he's seen as strictly inferior in every conceivable way to Tiki, a unit who in this game is not seen as worth it in the slightest. Even when capped out in every stat, something impossible without hacking, rigging, or pouring literally all the game's statboosters into him, he's ''still'' mediocre at best.

[[CasualCompetitiveConflict Do keep in mind]] that due to how the series works and the trope's clarifications of what counts and what doesn't count, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus actually ''qualifying'' for this trope. Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can still become useful through enough effort, as almost ''anyone'' can become a centerpoint on almost any team due to how the series' gameplay mechanics function. For that reason, make sure to include only units that do not qualify for even ''that,'' by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]], but [[MemeticLoser are widely known throughout the fandom as such]].

Even in a series as big on using your favorites as ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' is, [[LowTierLetdown there exists a few units that won't work no matter how hard you try]], and the fandom knows it.

[[CasualCompetitiveConflict Keep in mind]] that due to how the series works and the trope's clarifications of what counts and what doesn't count, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus actually ''qualifying'' for this trope. Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can become of use through enough effort, as almost anyone can become a centerpoint on almost any team as such. For that reason, make sure to include only units that do not qualify for even that, by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]], but are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

[[CasualCompetitiveConflict Keep in mind]] that due to how the series works and the trope's clarifications of what counts and what doesn't count, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus ''actually qualifying'' for this trope. Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can become of use through enough effort, as almost anyone can become a centerpoint on almost any team as such. For that reason, make sure to only put in units that do not qualify for even that, by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]], regardless of whatever effort is needed to get them to that point, but are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

[[CasualCompetitiveConflict Keep in mind]] that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus ''actually qualifying'' for this trope. Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can become of use through enough effort, as almost anyone can become a centerpoint on almost any team as such. For that reason, make sure to only put in units that do not qualify for even that, by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]], regardless of whatever effort is needed to get them to that point, but are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

Even in a series as big on using your favorites as ''Franchise/FireEmblem'', [[LowTierLetdown there exists some units that won't work no matter how hard you try]], and the fandom knows it.

[[CasualVsCompetitiveConflict Keep in mind]] that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus ''actually qualifying'' for this trope. Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can become of use through enough effort, as almost anyone can become a centerpoint on almost any team as such. For that reason, make sure to only put in units that do not qualify for even that, by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]], regardless of whatever effort is needed to get them to that point, but are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

'''Keep in mind that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad versus qualifying for this trope.''' Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can become of use through enough effort, as almost anyone can centerpoints on any team as such. Make sure to only put in units that do not qualify for even that, by not only lacking [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]] (regardless of whatever effort is needed to get them to that point), but are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

Even in a series as big on using your favorites as ''Franchise/FireEmblem'', [[LowTierLetdown there exists some units that no matter how hard you try, they can't work, and the fandom knows it]].

'''Keep in mind that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad.''' Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can be of use through enough effort, and even become centerpoints on any team as such. Make sure to only put in units that not only lack [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]] (regardless of the effort needed to get to that point), and are widely known throughout the fandom as such.

'''Keep in mind that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad.''' Either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can be of use through enough effort, and even become centerpoints on any team as such. Make sure to only put in units that not only lack [[MagikarpPower any meaningful reward through training them]] (regardless of the effort needed to get to that point), and are known throughout the fandom as such.

Keep in mind that due to how the series works, there exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad, either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, meaning that even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can be of use in those instances. Make sure to only put in units that not only lack any meaningful reward through training them, and are known throughout the fandom as such.

* Due to how the series works, there often exists a wide variety of offsets a unit can have to being bad, either through grinding, [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Bonus Experience]], stat boosters or some other combination, meaning that even characters in classes that are commonly seen as inefficient (such as Armor Knights or Archers) can be of use in those instances. However, there's a select few that are notorious for being untenable even in the best case scenarios.

** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'':
*** While [[BreakOutCharacter Roy is very popular as a Lord with the casual fandom]], his perfomance in his home game leaves a lot to be desired. Despite joining with perfect availability, he's notorious for only being able to promote literally three chapters away from the True Ending of the game - and in the case of the Bad Ending, ''one,'' long after most of your other units would have promoted and neared their caps. Even though Roy ''does'' get a unique sword with 1-2 range that gives +5 to Defense and Resistance, this delay alongside the long time Roy is without level caps as a reason why he [[NeverLiveItDown never gets to live it down]].
*** Poor Gwendolyn, also known as [[SpellMyNameWithAnS Wendy]], has an uphill battle to contend with that left her notorious in the fandom as an unintended JokeCharacter. Being ostensibly a MagikarpPower character who's in the Armor Knight class, Gwendolyn has such hideously poor bases that on Hard Mode she's one-rounded by an archer on her join chapter, joins one (two, if you're going for the Gaiden chapter) chapter before an axe-centric set of levels, and worst of all is an Armor Knight in a game that's unfriendly to Armor Knights by default. While Bors and Barthe are bad for a variety of reasons, they avert this trope due to the former's near-perfect availability and the latter's workable bases, meaning they can at least come to do their jobs well with what they're given. Gwendolyn's growths aren't even that especially impressive compared to her brother Bors, and being in a game with large maps and low move on ''top'' of low bases means that she's simply going to do so much worse than almost every other character in the game even if trained to a level that caps her out in every stat. She's widely held as both the worst unit in the game and a contender for the worst unit in the ''series'', which is disappointing because she does have a fandom that likes her for her design, her being the first Tier 1 female Armor Knight in the series, and [[NarmCharm for how bad she is even in spite of her start]].
*** Sophia is not much better. Joining on [[ThatOneLevel Chapter 14: Arcadia]] as a Level 1 Shaman with base stats even base Roy could laugh at, Sophia is regularly one-rounded if not one-shot by every unit on her joining chapter, and even with a Flux tome she struggles to get hit rates above 40% or 50% on a ''good forecast.'' Even by Est standards, who at least ''do'' [[MagikarpPower get good should you go through the pain of training them]], she has mediocre growths, which combined with the investment needed to get her good, has her as a lost investment even by the standards of Ests. She's regularly held out alongside Gwendolyn as two of the worst units in the game, and some of the worst in the series.
** In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'', it's a game that's easy enough that even the lowest tier units can generally see use with favoritism. Karla, the little sister of [[BloodKnight Karel]], is an exception to this. She's recruited literally a handful of chapters away from the end of the game, outright ''requires'' that the player train Bartre to use him[[note]]who's already a unit that, while entirely usable and thus exempt from this trope, is considered in tier rankings a resource sink with not enough pay-off to be worth it on average[[/note]], and then survive an engagement with him... and even with 20/1 Bartre, she joins with base stats that he could easily sneeze at where the rest of the game's maps are extremely lance dominated. This altogether gets Karla notoriously solidified as arguably the worst Swordsmaster in the series, with the only one that rivals her for that title being Shannam in ''Fire Emblem: Thracia 776'', who's a ''JokeCharacter''.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'' has a few stinkers that are notorious in the fandom:
*** One of the most infamous units amid Beorc characters is Meg. Meg joins as your first Armor Knight in the Dawn Brigade, but with her stats as a wholesale, good luck getting her to help in any meaningful way. She has growths comparable to Amelia and (debatably) the aforementioned Gwendolyn, being a feminine Armor Knight with a great Speed stat, but while Amelia has the benefit of being in a game with grinding that makes anyone easily usable, Meg is like Gwendolyn in being out of luck. Not only is she in a game where there's infinitely better recipients for BEXP, she's in a game where caps matter, and her caps run directly contrary to her stat growths with her Speed cap being at a miserable ''30 Speed'' (which would be great in other earlier installments, but for ''Radiant Dawn,'' is pitiful). This leads her to having no use compared to the Black Knight, Gatrie or even her father Brom, and she's widely known for it as such.
*** At least Meg has stats expected of a farm girl who just put on a suit of armor for defense than combat. Fiona is the daughter of one of the Four Riders, and she has absolutely abysmal base stats that are noticeably worse than the Green Units she rides up with. Made even worse is that due to her join time, she only has so many chapters that puts her otherwise-significant advantage as a mounted unit to use, especially as her Third Tier caps are terrible and the last five chapters of the game are all indoors. She's widely held in the same breath as Meg for some of the most atrocious units in the series, even by bad unit standards.
*** Somehow, Fiona isn't inarguably the worst cavalier in the game, though: she shares her place with Astrid, which is all the more saddening when her performance in [[VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance the prior game]] was rather good. On paper, Astrid is meant as a MagikarpPower unit: she joins very underleveled with bad base stats, but she has the Paragon skill that doubles her XP gain, making her much easier to train... except that in ''Radiant Dawn'', you can freely swap around unit skills, with the only penalty being that they don't initially take up capacity on their users. The moment you take Paragon off Astrid (which is something most people will do, as it's hugely beneficial to anyone who has it and good to swap around in a game that is very stingy with XP), she loses the only reason to consider using her. But even if you do decide to let her keep Paragon and try to train her up, her status as a bow unit means that she has no enemy phase before promotion (handily cancelling out her XP boost), her growths are mediocre by ''Radiant Dawn'' standards, and on top of all that, she's barely ever around: she appears for only ''four'' chapters up until Part 4, and she's overshadowed by nearly every other unit you have in all of them. The only minor niche she has is a decent third-tier Speed cap, but not only does this require you to train her up all the way into endgame, but her Speed isn't high enough to actually ''hit'' that cap reliably. Basically, to make Astrid good requires you to sandbag the rest of your army, and even once you have trained her up, you still don't get anything worth talking about.
*** However, all of the aforementioned are dwarfed by the worst Laguz unit in the game, and by far the worst Beast Unit in the series - Lyre. Joining with a pitiful base '''7 Strength,''' in a game that hates Cat Laguz and with terrible growths, she is pretty much impossible to actually damage anyone with those stats and is practically better off as an actual house cat than a character designed for combat.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemNewMysteryOfTheEmblem'':
*** The game actually does a surprisingly good job at balancing out every class in the game for the most part - even commonly low-tier classes like Armor Knights and Archers have a place in Lunatic Mode due to the former's survivability in that difficulty's EarlyGameHell and the latter being ''especially'' useful for attacking from afar without fear of retaliation, especially in Lunatic Reverse. However, there's one class that is notably worse than any others, much to the disappointment of fans of the class: Warrior. The reason why is simple; [[OvershadowedByAwesome it's overshadowed by more specialized classes]]. Its caps are blown out of the water completely by Berserker caps, its role as an archer is done better by Snipers having a better Speed cap and bow rank, and much of what it offers only comes for its T1 form, the Fighter, which is universally regarded as one of the best options for the GameBreaker Avatar Kris to use aside from the Armor Knight.
*** As a wholesale, the game inverts a lot of the trends in the series of pre-promotes being good or outright [[GameBreaker Game Breakers]], with many of the latter half of units in the remake having barely adjusted base stats from the [=SNES=] days, which leaves them barely passable on Normal and gets them utterly demolished on higher difficulties. These units, known as [[FanNickname Free Silvers]], are seen with disappointment for having such awful stats and only having high growths (and good luck training them with those stats) and good weapons ranks to make up for it. There's literally no reason to use any of the units to join after the Sable Knights, with the possible exceptions of Katarina, Xane, Nagi, and Michalis.
*** Even by Free Silver standards, the Wolfguard that joins in Chapter 19 are pathetic, which is made all the worse by the fact that they're some of the hardest units to recruit in the game (requiring you to go far out of your way, and then recruit each one ''in succession'' from the enemy side, while dodging swarms of incredibly powerful dracoknights). Once they're in your army, their stats are on par with units from Chapter 4, their growths are not nearly enough to save them, and they don't have anything worth noting--something made all the worse by their extremely late join time. On the highest difficulty, the only thing they can see use for is suicide attacks, and even then, they're frequently not that great at it.
*** Every single unit on this list is dwarfed by one in particular, however: '''Bantu.''' While all the other units are notoriously bad enough to qualify as a LowTierLetdown (by virtue of having no MagikarpPower to speak of whatsoever), they at least have some merits to them. Bantu has absolutely none--he can't reclass, his growths are awful, his bases are awful, his class is utterly gimped for the game it's in, he has only 6 move that he can't reclass out of, and he's seen as strictly inferior in every conceivable way to Tiki, a unit who in this game is not seen as worth it in the slightest. Even when capped out in every stat, something impossible without hacking, rigging, or pouring literally all the game's statboosters into him, he's ''still'' mediocre at best.

Regardless of the reasons below, playable units in ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' are generally not created equal, and as a result, trying to balance each game's characters quickly becomes more and more impossible. Some are hated likewise for being way too much effort to get rolling compared to other picks. Do keep in mind that tiering doesn't focus on ''if'' a unit can be good, but ''when'' - how much resources would generally be needed to get a unit to a serviceable quality. Given the game's stat caps are designed across the board to ensure ''anyone'' can be good in theory, the measuring stick often thus comes down to how efficient the process is.

For a tier list on ''VideoGame/FireEmblemHeroes'', click [[TierInducedScrappy/FireEmblemHeroes here]].

* [[ArcherArchetype Archers]] are regarded as this in most games. Archers suffer from being locked at 2-range, meaning that while they can attack melee enemies without being countered, those enemies can do the same thing to them. Many melee characters have ranged attack options, whether in the form of handaxes and javelins for weapon-users and the naturally 1-2 range tomes of mages. Since they can't counterattack most enemies, they fight much less often and tend to have trouble leveling up, meaning they often fall behind in levels, and even when fully leveled, they will almost never kill more than one enemy per turn. While they do have the advantage of countering flying enemies, they aren't unique in this, because they tend to share space with HorseArcher classes that can do the same thing while offering the mobility and versatility of a mount (and often, they can attack in melee), and flying enemies can often be dealt with by other characters. What really kills them, though, is that in the majority of games, they tend to be stuck with absolute bottom-grade statlines, especially the ones that join early, reducing their contributions to ScratchDamage--these characters then tend to get obsoleted ''hard'' whenever a prepromoted sniper shows up. Later games have had to buff archers heavily, to varying degrees of success; giving them actual stats, introducing strong flying enemies, increasing their range with bows, adding strong offensive combat arts or skills, and lopsiding the game more heavily towards player phase combat all serve to improve them, and some archers have since ascended to relatively high positions or at least mid-tier.
* [[MightyGlacier Armor knights]] have had even greater historical issues with this. They mix the worst movement of any class with the worst attack speed of any class, meaning they struggle with getting to the action and don't really do a whole lot once they're there because they can't double. While they do boast rather high defensive statlines, the difficulty in training them up means their defenses can often be outstripped by well-leveled characters or prepromotes, and mages can still take them out. Most games in the series are also heavily focused on reaching objectives (whether in the form of a throne to capture, a village to be rescued, or an enemy to be hunted down), which the armor knight can't really do, meaning their versatility outside of tanking hits is pretty much nonexistent. The vast majority of armor knights in the franchise rank in the bottom rungs of tier lists, and the ones that don't often end up being successful in spite of their class rather than because of it. [[NotCompletelyUseless That said]], there ''do'' exist games where they have some use or are actually, legitimately useful: [[ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman they're one of the best classes in Link Arena matches]] due to their biggest weakness (Move) being a non-factor and otherwise being able to stone wall just about any combat sans Berserkers, they're a very useful class for earlygame ''New Mystery'' in that game's EarlyGameHell, and by far their best showing was in ''Fates'' where Pair-Up ferrying and Wary Guard made them into the tanks they were meant to be and simultaneously nullified a lot of their weaknesses. Sadly, this wasn't to be given ''Three Houses'' set the class in its worst nadir to date (see below), ensuring they'll remain the tactical runt of the litter for quite some time.
* Thieves fell into this. Their function isn't to fight, but to collect resources, unlock doors, and see further in maps with FogOfWar. However, unlike the Dancers and healers ([[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness apart from the first game]]) they didn't get experience from performing these functions and couldn't promote. This meant that their stats and growth would be very ''very'' limited. Unlike other classes that couldn't promote they didn't have anything to make up the difference (ie Dancers being able to make people act twice) and thus ''needed'' to be babysat since they would become an appealing target for the SpitefulAI due to their stats that were rarely much better than when they initially joined. This however only applies to about half the series, as games such as the Jugdral duology would give them a promotion that lets them at least survive a few hits or give a few in return, or allow for a bit of MagikarpPower with the Assassin promotion, and post ''Awakening'', the "Trickster" class allowed the thieves to become backup healers.
* A lot of units in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragonAndTheBladeOfLight'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemMysteryOfTheEmblem'' can only be described as "pity units"--as in, they're worse than other units to fill their role in every single way, and using them is the game's way of taking pity on you if you got someone better killed off. Even then, a couple manage to stand out.
** Gordin suffers from this in most variants of the War of Shadows, due to him setting an unfortunately common trend for archers in the series: that being, base stats that can charitably be called "abysmal." Aside from that, and a stat spread that seems to be trying to make him a MightyGlacier when he needs Speed far more than Defense, he also has to deal with 5 base Move in a game where most other foot classes have 6-7, and his growth rates are mediocre at best. Though he can promote into a Sniper and solve most of his issues, he struggles so much with damage dealing that this is difficult. In the NES and SNES versions of ''Shadow Dragon'', he suffers particularly hard because he's outclassed so hard by nearly every other bow unit, between Castor (better Move, better growths, similar join time, and better-placed stats) Jeorge (skips over Gordin's early-game issues entirely by being far faster, stronger, and more mobile as a Sniper), and even Tomas (sucky stats don't matter when he's only two levels from that Sniper promotion that Gordin needs to grind nine levels to reach). The DS ''Shadow Dragon'' also gives him some of the lowest personal bases in the game, to the point that he's practically a generic Archer with a slightly higher bow rank. That said, his War of Heroes incarnations are actually held in decent regard, due to his level being upped to 5 with appropriate stat buffs, his ''New Mystery'' incarnation gaining better growths and the ability to quickly reclass into Hunter to solve his old issues, and more relevantly, a massive number of strong flying enemies where he's the best candidate to shoot them down.
** Matthis, Roshea, and Vyland all get this to varying degrees, despite their cavalier class being one of the best in the original games. It mostly owes to their stats and growths being mediocre at best and terrible at worst, with the exception of Weapon Level in Matthis's case, and the game throwing you Cain, Abel, Hardin, Jagen, Midia, and possibly Arran to satisfy even the most mount-heavy playstyles. They're also considerably worse in the remakes, due to stat differences being exacerbated by much stronger weapons and the lack of early silver weapons that once gave Matthis a chance. It certainly doesn't help that Matthis is already seen as a bit of a wimp in-story, and that Roshea and Vyland join at the same time as Hardin, letting the player see for themselves how much better he is.
** Speaking of Roshea, while his Book 1 incarnation in ''Mystery'' is a respectable-if-unremarkable unit due to having his growths buffed, his Book 2 incarnation is downright bad. This is mainly due to him suffering pretty hard from LateCharacterSyndrome, only popping up in Chapter 19 with five chapters left in the whole game, with stats on par with Sirius, who joined in Chapter 4. His Paladin class would be a point in his favor--except for two problems. First, you have four other paladins (Arran, Sirius, Abel, and Midia) and five cavaliers (Roderick, Luke, Cecil, Matthis, Cain) to work with, enough to satisfy even the most mount-heavy playthrough, and second, ''Mystery'' features mandatory dismounting in indoor chapters, and only one of the maps remaining is mostly outdoors, so for most of his very limited availability, he's going to have his already mediocre stats reduced further and lose the main merits of his own class. And just to kick him in the teeth even further, Midia joins one chapter later, and outclasses him in every way--she has significantly better stats than him in every category bar HP ''while dismounted''.
** Macellan is in a game where armor knights really tend to struggle, due to their bad movement in a heavily Seize-centric game and their inability to promote, so they need a ''lot'' to try to contribute (like Draug's high availability or Lorenz's excellent stats). But even if Macellan weren't an armor knight, he would still have hideous growths (the only unpromoted combat unit with worse growths is Bantu, who doesn't need stats anyway), and a seriously low level and base stats for when he joins, and in the same chapter is Dolph, who is better in every conceivable way and is still considered bad. It's very hard to imagine a run where Macellan would see regular use.
** Wrys is, oddly, an inversion of this, in that people love him in part ''because'' he sucks. He has terrible stats across the board, his growths are trash despite it taking forever to level him, and his staff rank/Weapon Level is so low that pretty much the only thing he can do is the basic Heal. He also gets outclassed by Lena, who shows up just two chapters later with better stats across the board and much better staff skills, including being the first character who can use Warp, and Wendell, who also has a good staff rank and backs it up with the stats of a prepromoted magic unit. On top of that, his stats mean that even reclassing can't really save him. That said, his status as [[HealerSignsOnEarly your first healer]] means that he at least gets to do stuff for those early bits, giving his old bald head a lot of time to charm players, and his healing focus means that he probably shouldn't be seeing combat anyway. He also sees a bit of use for players who want to do a lot of Warping, though actually getting him to Warp range isn't as easy as you'd probably prefer.
** Est is notorious for starting a trend of late-game units with incredibly low levels and mediocre bases, but insane growths, which are heavily disliked in both casual and serious players for different reasons; for casuals, their mediocre bases in late game can alienate them from using her, and for serious players, they don't opt to use them due to wasting a large amount of turns. Sure enough, while Est does eventually get good, in the end, Marth has enough units to carry him through. She does have a role in utilizing the Triangle Attack, but that also is impractical. How bad Est is has ranged heavily from game-to-game, as she does at least have a good class in Pegasus Knight/Dracoknight/Falcoknight to fall back on, but her DS incarnations tend to bottom out: easy reclassing makes Est's class irrelevant, ''Shadow Dragon'' nerfed her growths to the point that even a raised Est is outclassed by Catria, and ''New Mystery'', while boosting her growths back up, gave pretty much ''every'' unit ridiculously good growths, making Est's focus completely pointless.
** The Shooter class in the NES game is considered a candidate for "worst class in the series." Like many other ''[=FE1=]'' classes, it cannot promote at all, but that's the least of its problems. Jake and Beck are locked to one weapon type that nobody else can use. Said weapons have the same range as bows, and they're also much, much heavier--as in, the lightest one weighs as much as a Silver Lance and all the rest outweigh a Steel Axe, and both Jake and Beck can have 0 Speed when using the heavier ones even after being trained to 20. This makes doubling with a shooter abnormally difficult, which is something nearly ''any'' well-trained unit in ''[=FE1=]'' can do (since doubling thresholds are very low), nullifying their "advantage" of high damage. Stat-wise, they're terrible across the board, with the only good point being high Defense--as in, the stat that a ''ranged class'' needs the least. And on top of all that, they have a Movement of 4, making them one of the least mobile classes in the entire series, in a game where even infantry can often boast 7 Movement after promotion. It wasn't at all surprising that ''Mystery'' cut the class for player use entirely, and when it returned in the remake, it was revamped significantly to be more usable--[[GameBreaker and then some.]]
** Most Pirates in the series have blisteringly fast speed and great strength, but at the cost of defense and resistance, which makes it very odd to find out that Darros, one of the first playable Pirates, is actually ''[[MightyGlacier slower]]'' compared to the 3 axefighters you get at Chapter 2. While he does have a decent Weapon Level, Barst also has the same Weapon Level as him, and is much faster than Darros. The remake doesn't make him better, as his Speed growth has actually gotten ''worse'', to the point that he has a 0% growth in some classes. Thankfully, he's much better in ''New Mystery'', as not only he has good stats for his joining time and being a prepromote, he also has a good speed growth as well, which when combined with the lack of a weapon weight mechanic, allows him to actually potentially double enemies for once.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar'':
** This applies to... basically every unit that isn't mounted. ''Genealogy'' is notoriously one of the most mount-focused games in the series--promoted mounted units have ''9'' movement to a nonmounted unit's 6 at most, maps are much bigger, which exacerbates the movement gap, lack of rescuing and Warp being a lot more limited means that there are considerably fewer ways to narrow the gap, road tiles multiply a unit's movement and makes the gap ''even worse'', and on top of that, the signature mounted skill, Canto, is at its absolute peak here, letting mounted units not only move after attacking, but open the menu and switch weapons or fulfill objectives. Consequently, any unit who ''isn't'' mounted needs to do a hell of a lot to escape the lower tiers, and many of them don't.
** Coirpre, son of Sylvia, is considered so hard to work with as a unit that for a while, it was commonly recommended to kill Sylvia off and take the replacement units instead. He's a level 1 Priest who is usually one of the last characters to join, at which point you probably have tons of viable staff units and healers, and with 5 Move and only C-rank tomes on promotion, he will pretty much always be a weak fighter who struggles to keep up. The only possible way to give him good combat is to make Lewyn his father, at which he inherits Forseti... which he can't use at all before level 20, and which places the tome off-limits for all but the last two chapters of the second generation. Most players just let Claud be his father, at which he can inherit Claud's staves and use them to help out a little, but even then, he's mostly going to be doing it for the sake of leveling him rather than actually contributing to victory.
** Charlot, Coirpre's replacement, is not much better. While he does boast the Paragon skill to make leveling him a bit easier, he misses out on staff inheritance, has one less staff rank at base due to lacking Coirpre's Bragi blood, and shares all of Coirpre's weaknesses--low Movement, mediocre-at-best combat, severely underleveled, and the player has tons of healers already. Charlot's only real advantage is his ability to obtain a Berserk staff through a conversation, which can be used to pull off a few cheesy strategies (in particular, he's pretty much required on a SoloCharacterRun due to a certain exploit).
** Most of the other substitute units certainly feel like a PoorMansSubstitute. There are some exceptions that can match or even exceed some parental setups (Dimna, Hawk, Laylea, Linda), but the vast majority are simply inferior, due to having usually only one skill (or none) to the two or three that most second-generation kids can boast, lower growth rates, and inability to inherit. Some even walk away with worse classes, such as Amid becoming a War Mage instead of a Mage Knight. It's particularly sad since several of them even get more characterization relative to the children they replace, but most players never even see it.
** Arden is by far the worst sufferer of ''Genealogy'''s mount-focused gameplay, to the point of bordering on JokeCharacter. He has only 5 Movement, when all the other melee combat units boast 6 or more, and the other 5-move units either have much better offense (Azel) or staff use (Claud, Deirdre, Edain). Most of his growths are mediocre at best, and while he does boast decent Defense, that's about all he has going for him. Even though his Strength is fairly high, he doesn't have the attacking power to do much damage without the Brave Sword or Pursuit Band, and while he is the one required to find the Pursuit Band, it's generally held to be better on someone who sees more active combat. While he does have some worthiness as a father (his General promotion lets him use, and therefore pass down, A-rank swords and B-rank bows, along with his decent Defense growth and Vantage), nearly everything he does can be surpassed by another father with significantly better usability (Lex passes down Vantage with comparable growths ''and'' Paragon, Jamke and Midir pass down A-rank bows ''and'' much better offensive skills, Beowolf passes down A-rank swords ''and'' Pursuit and Accost). All this means that Arden will rarely get any kind of work in, except for picking up the Pursuit band in a hidden event, unless he's given a lot of favoritism. And he knows it, the poor guy.
** Alec and Noish, the local Christmas cavaliers of the first generation, get a lot of ribbing from the playerbase. Alec has high speed and Pursuit, but such awful damage that he struggles to hurt anything, and Noish has high strength and two damage-boosting skills but lacks Pursuit to push that damage to a respectable level. This also means they're badly OvershadowedByAwesome when they're teamed up with Sigurd, who surpasses them both in every way, not to mention Quan and Lex not long after, and even Finn tends to beat them the moment he isn't fighting axe-users. Their lack of Holy Blood gives them rather mediocre stat growths and no ability to use holy weapons, and their Cavalier class gives them only a maximum of B-rank weaponry (meaning they can't even use Blade weapons), reducing their long-term prospects and their marriageability even further. That said, there's no opportunity cost to using them and they're still fast enough to keep up with the army, leading some players put a little work into bringing them up to par so they can contribute (Alec's damage becomes respectable if he's given a better sword, Noish is a pretty good candidate for the Pursuit ring Arden finds), so they're far from useless on the whole.
** Jamke stands out for a positively ''awesome'' showing at first, with a joining situation that is [[ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman almost designed to show off his strong points]]: a gang of enemy archers are forced to slowly traverse the forest while he uses his Killer Bow to counter them and pick them off with ease thanks to his mix of Pursuit, Adept, and Charge. Unfortunately, after that battle, his usability takes a hard dive: being stuck on foot is painful in ''Genealogy'', so getting Jamke to the action so he can put his combat skills to use is tedious and leaves him lagging behind the army. And when you do get into combat, while his combo of skills means he will almost definitely kill whatever you point him at, enemies in ''Genealogy'' usually travel in packs, so usually Jamke picks off one enemy and then his four or five mates swarm Jamke while he can't do anything back. It's also common to sell Jamke's bow and let Midir have it, simply because while Midir has worse stats, he can engage enemies more easily--and without his bow, Jamke becomes even less desirable, since he can't pass down Pursuit and most non-Killer bows have bad accuracy. Many players simply leave him behind to clear the arena, something he actually does very well.
** Tailtiu is often derided as a waste of time by players who aim for high score, considering that she's the last unit to be acquired in the 1st generation (at Level 3, too), is never on a horse in a game where being mounted is a blessing, the next level after her introduction is swarming with Wind Mages (her natural weakness), and only has a few good husband candidates since both of her children are magic users and unless using the preferred candidate, will largely turn out useless, so they tend to treat her like Sylvia — kill her off for the replacement children Linda and Amid, with Linda being considered more stable and usually more superior than Tine (since Linda's a Thunder Mage, she can use Thoron immediately). This is despite that her and her family's story and development was considered a very strong point for them as story characters, making her some sort of fan favorite storywise, but bogged down with 'bad usability'. And while she does boast solid stat growths and the power of Thoron and Wrath, even her MagikarpPower tendencies are blunted by the fact that she doesn't get Pursuit, which means her offense without Wrath is pretty poor, and she lacks the staff skills that could at least grind her up.
** The axe twins, Iuchar and Iucharba/Johan and Johalva, are MutuallyExclusivePartyMembers and some of the only units in the second generation who can use axes. Unfortunately, axes in general in ''Genealogy'' are considered [[ScrappyWeapon the worst weapon type by a gigantic margin]] due to their colossal weight dragging down Speed to almost nothing (at base level, both of them have ''negative'' Speed while using an axe). With only a single skill each (Vantage for Iuchar, Charge for Iucharba), minor Neir blood, and no holy weapons, their combat is subpar at best for second-generation units, who tend to have all kinds of crazy skills and gigantic growth rates. While they do have basically exclusive access to the Brave Axe, even that can't really save their offense because of their inability to double, unless they somehow scrounge together the gold for the Pursuit Ring. Of the duo, though, Iucharba tends to be picked almost never--Iuchar is at least mounted, and can therefore do a passable impression of Lex from the prior generation (albeit without his Paragon skill), but Iucharba is the game's only playable Fighter, and is therefore stuck slogging on foot, for no real gain except being able to use bows on promotion (and when a bow-user as hard-hitting as Jamke can struggle, you can imagine how clumsy Iucharba is at it).
** Hannibal is the most difficult unit to recruit in the entire game, and let's just say he's not exactly worth it. He doesn't have bad base stats for a prepromoted General when he joins in chapter 8, but considering that the children characters in the second generation can all be absurdly broken war machines if you maximize the benefits they get from their parents (especially given that by the time you recruit Hannibal quite a few of them will have got their hands on their holy weapons), he has trouble distinguishing himself performance-wise, and can't do anything that someone else can't. As with most Generals, he also suffers badly due to his his low movement range, and combined with the gigantic maps in this game, he'll never be able to keep up with the rest of the army. If he does manage to see combat, he'll struggle against the large number of magic-users in chapters 9 and 10, who will tear him apart thanks to his pitiful Resistance. Even against physical fighters, his combat isn't exactly stellar, as he lacks Pursuit; the Pursuit Ring is wasted on him as his low Speed means he can hardly double any late-game enemies anyway, and while he does somewhat compensate for this by having Adept, his low Speed means it won't activate too often. Like Arden in the generation before him, most players end up just leaving him behind to guard a castle.
* The {{interquel}} (''VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776'') is generally considered one of the hardest games to be useless in: low stat caps, weak enemies, the growth-boosting Crusader Scrolls, legitimate downsides for being mounted, and the Fatigue mechanic incentivizing regular unit rotation mean that even the worst units can become pretty usable, particularly if playing on Paragon Mode. Even then, though, some characters tend to have more trouble getting there.
** Ronan's growths favor Magic with a really low Strength and he's rather below average in everything else. Even worse, Ronan is an Archer, which, as mentioned before, is considered one of the worst classes in the entire series. That said, later shifts in the metagame shifted in his favor, as he's pretty mobile for an Archer (which synergizes with his okay Constitution), and he doesn't need much Strength to do a fair bit of damage, bringing him up to more low-tier than bottom.
** Marty gets railed on for being [[CripplingOverspecialization extremely lopsided]] (he starts with '''''zero''''' Speed, Magic, and Skill) in a way that makes his good points almost worthless. He has some good [[MightyGlacier bulk]], but his low speed means that he often gets doubled, and his low magic makes him easy prey for enemy mages. He packs a punch with a high base strength and access to axes, but his [[UnskilledButStrong low speed and skill]] make him extremely unreliable as a attacker. He has a high constitution which allows him to try to capture most enemies, but capturing halves his stats for the attempt. Which includes his awful skill, making him, once again, unreliable. The best he can really do is rescue teammates and pass around already captured units (which is something mounted units tend to do better most of the time). This, along with joining in the same chapter as three other, much better, axe users and having no skills up his sleeve like they do, makes him a common target for mockery. On the other hand, his uselessness and comical design has also made him one of the most popular characters to try and make good, and pretty much any ''Thracia'' LetsPlay will have some attempt to get "[[MemeticMutation Marty Party]]" going.
** Kein and Alva have to deal with sub-bar bases, no abilities or unique stats unlike other units, and coming in at a low level at the midway point of the game during [[ThatOneLevel a hard chapter to begin with]]. As Lance Knights, they both have to [[ScrappyMechanic dismount]] during indoor chapters, forcing them to switch to Swords, which they have pitiful weapon ranks in. This means during the outdoor chapters, Kein and Alva will have to dismount to fight to get a passable sword rank so as not to be completely useless indoors. There's just no reason to use them unless you want to challenge yourself, or need a filler unit.
** Eda is a Wyvern Rider whose constitution is so low that she can't double attack with Lances, as they are too heavy for her. She does, however, have a limited use in ferrying other units, and fliers in ''Thracia'' are quite rare, giving her some utility.
** Most veterans often advise players to never go through the B route of ''Thracia 776'', not just because of the increased difficulty, but also because the ones mentioned on the list are inferior to the other MutuallyExclusivePartyMembers in the A route.
*** Miranda is meant as your standard lategame MagikarpPower character, joining at level 5 in chapter 16 with 70% growths in Magic and Speed. This sounds amazing, but it means very little when stats in ''Thracia'' cap at 20, meaning pretty much any promoted character will cap their important stats by the endgame. Because of this, the meta focuses less on stats and more on a character's unique traits: weapon ranks, personal weapons, movement and leadership stars, Followup Critical Multiplier, or the skills of their class. And in Miranda's case, she has an average FCM of 1, she doesn't have any movement or leadership stars, she lacks any personal weapon and her base weapon ranks suck, and her starting skill is Wrath, a skill that can only be utilized by exposing her to attacks when units can drop her in one hit. She also has the worst promotion she could ask for: Mage Knight grants her a mount and swords, when most of the game's remaining maps are indoors and force her to dismount and her Strength is godawful so her sword hits like a wet noodle. Nearly every other magic unit in the game gains the infinitely better staves on promotion, and the ones that don't have strong skills or personal weapons to fall back on--meaning even a fully-levelled Miranda is still regarded as one of the game's worst magic units! And even if you're a fan of the whole "weak start, high potential" style, Sara joins right around the same time and blows Miranda out of the water in every category.
*** In a bit of inversion, Shannam is one of the only true examples of a JokeCharacter in ''Fire Emblem'', being [[FakeUltimateHero a coward who pretends to be Prince Shannan]]--and he certainly doesn't live up to the powerful Swordmaster that Shannan was in ''Genealogy of the Holy War''. His base stats are beyond terrible (he actually has class base stats, with one point of Luck), with his surprisingly high Strength and Speed growths not making up for them at all, he has an FCM of 0, he lacks decent offensive skills other than the very common Adept, and even his sword rank of C is pretty bad for the point at which you get him. Shannam's only real use is his unique Bargain skill, which gives him the ability to buy items from shops at half price... except that by the time he joins, there's not much useful left to buy, with the exception of stat boosters from the Secret Shop in Chapter 24, and the difficulty of acquiring the Member Card means that some players may choose to skip it anyway. It says something that even with scroll abuse, tweaking Shannam to be a useful combat unit is nigh impossible.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'':
** Juno. She joins pretty late, so unlike her husband Zelot, who can take the advantage of the {{metagame}} shift of protecting weaker units early in the game, Juno joins when your units are probably already strong enough to take care of themselves, making her overall useless. Aside from her A rank in lances, her base stats are awful - in particular a pitiful 11 base Strength which means she can't even contribute reliable chip damage, especially considering the low hit rates in this game (and with a starting E rank in the higher-accuracy swords, she can't compensate that way either). Juno is available only on the Ilia route; if you take the Sacae route instead, you get Sue's grandfather Dayan, a Nomadic Trooper - and while he's not considered a great unit either, he at least has better base stats (in particular, his high Resistance for a physical unit and just enough Speed to double a good number of lategame enemies), and can put his ability to use a Silver Bow to good use against the [[DemonicSpiders Wyvern Riders]] that infest Chapter 21. About the only limited use Juno has is ferrying units around and flying over terrain, but any good cavalry or flying unit can do the former (Dayan even beats her out here too with a massive 16 Aid), and the latter is only worthwhile if all your previous fliers turned out badly, and if you're just not a fan of the Sacae route.
** Wade, one of the obligatory early-game axe-users, stands out for being one of the worst Fighters in the series. Fighters are meant to be powerhouses with their massive axes, only let down by somewhat shaky defenses and speed, but ''Binding Blade'' is also a game where axes are infamously unreliable for their poor hit rates in the early game, putting a major damper on units who have them as their only melee option. While Bartre manages to dodge this problem by being a prepromote and therefore starting with enough stats to put his axe to work, and Lott has just enough in his bases to squeak through EarlyGameHell, Wade decides to trade off higher strength than Lott in exchange for worse speed and defenses (along with a lower base skill). This means that most fights with Wade in the first two-thirds of the game, especially on Hard, tend to involve him marching up to an enemy, missing, and then being doubled on the counter and losing most of his health. Even when he hits, his damage still isn't that great compared to units that can double, and if you don't care about accuracy, then the Berserkers like Gonzales completely blow him out of the water due to superior strength, crit rates, and speed.
** Wolt tends to be labeled as one of the worst archers in the series, which is fairly impressive for a class so oft-maligned. What really kills him is that while he's in a game where archers ''should'' have a lot to offer (enemies are very strong, so taking off chunks of health without risking a counter is actually useful, and many maps feature powerful flying enemies that warrant a bow-user), his bases are just so disastrously poor that on higher difficulties, you start hearing the NO DAMAGE sound effect from him as early as the third chapter, and even fliers aren't all that worried about him. When trained all the way up to a sniper, he gains serviceable enough stats to actually do his job... but why try the tooth-pulling task of training him, when the game hands you two good snipers, two good nomads, and Aircalibur to let mages take down fliers too? It's very rare for Wolt to get deployed the moment the player has a choice in the matter.
** Cath has one of the more involved recruitment quests in the game, requiring Roy to talk to her three separate times over the course of the six maps she can appear in. Unfortunately, even at the earliest time she can be recruited, she is a level 5 Thief with stats barely better than Chad at level 1, whom you got nine maps ago, and blown out of the water by Astore, who starts at level 10 and joined four maps ago. Even with her HardModePerks narrowing the gap, it takes a lot of training for her just to catch up to Astore, against enemies that can easily one-shot her. And on top of all that, by the time she shows up, you've had multiple maps that let you buy Door Keys and Chest Keys, meaning that Thieves have to work hard to justify their presence. She can be the best Thief if trained fully on Hard Mode, but in a game where Thieves can't promote and cap stats at 20, this is pretty much academic. Players not aiming for 100% recruitment tend to just kill her on her first appearance.
** Roy gets a lot of hate for being "weaksauce," doubly so because he's the protagonist whom you're required to use. The fact that he automatically promotes so late in the game doesn't help his cause with the stat hounds, either. To be specific, his growths are spread out like a JackOfAllStats, but his bases are such that he's almost always going to turn out as a MasterOfNone instead (most of Roy's Level 20 ''averages'' are what other classes would call ''stat screwed''). Additionally, his forced promotion doesn't happen until four chapters from the end of the game, at which point he'd be underpowered due to lack of growing room even if he had better growths, and doesn't give him any extra abilities or utility. He's earned the nickname "Backpack Lord" due to the fact that many players opting for a speedrun just assign a unit to carry him and don't have him fight at all. His only boons are a somewhat effective earlygame due to his sword access and the Rapier's effective damage at a time where pretty much everyone is bad, and wielding the titular Binding Blade, and many people consider its PurposefullyOverpowered stats a crutch to prop up a mediocre mandatory unit.
** Sophia joins at level 1, fourteen chapters in, [[ThatOneLevel on a very difficult map.]] From her starting stats, you might expect her to be a MagikarpPower unit, but she broadly isn't; even when dragged up to a good level, she's only on par with Raigh, who joins two maps prior at level 12 and isn't very good to start with. Her stat focus is also terrible for her class: high Magic and Resistance, low Speed and Skill, when she uses the heaviest and most inaccurate magic type. Training her up is a chore because she never doubles, it's a coin toss if she can hit even the slowest enemies in the game, and the vast majority of enemies (even some of the enemies in ''Chapter 1'') can kill her in a single blow. Her sole good quality is that she lets you obtain a Guiding Ring and a legendary weapon if she survives her join chapter, and despite her terrible stats, she's mobile enough to stay out of trouble.
** ''Binding Blade'' is considered one of the lower points for the Armor Knight classline, with a game design (very large maps with lots of side objectives and a focus on Seize) that leaves very little room for it, both of its weapon types suffering from accuracy issues, and having to compete with a surfeit of cavaliers for the rather rare Knight Crest. What's more, all four representatives have their own major issues; it says a lot when Douglas (a tricky-to-recruit unit who struggles to break single-digit Speed) is considered the ''best'' of the bunch, since he at least has base stats suitable to tank in the lategame. Bors gives a poor first impression for being doubled and three-shotted in Chapter 1 on Hard difficulty by most of the starting enemies, and even when raised out of his doldrums never becomes more than a sluggish StoneWall due to his lackluster Strength, Speed, and hit rates. Barth, joining much later, boasts high physical bulk and good Strength, but at the price of ''[[CripplingOverspecialization everything else]]'' being a writeoff, including risible Speed and Skill, Luck so poor he routinely faces crit chances, and a 2% Resistance growth sealing his fate in the face of mages. In what can only have been a joke, the non-Douglas knights also boast a Triangle Attack, and if you thought it was difficult to find a practical use for it when its users were highly mobile flying units, you can try it with horribly slow units where two of the three are too heavy to easily rescue, and the third of them is...
** Gwendolyn's join situation is only a little better than Sophia's, showing up at level 1 in Chapter 8. Her bases are utterly abysmal even by the standards of a level 1 unit, such that she gets one-rounded by almost everything on her joining chapter, even archers--and in a melee-focused class meant to be a MightyGlacier, that's quite a strike against her. The maps right after she joins are laden with axe-users when she's lance-locked, so training her up is borderline impossible; she frequently averages coinflip odds while wielding a slim lance. And her growths, while not terrible, are utterly inadequate to salvage her--for some idea, when raised to level 20 before promotion, her average stats are on par with ''[[CrutchCharacter Zelot's]] bases''. Most tier lists put her at the very bottom alongside Sophia, or argue for her being one of the worst units in the ''franchise''.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'':
** Wil and Rebecca, a duo of archers who join very early, suffer from the traditional archer problems of having a poor class and the worst bases of anyone in the party. However, two things about the game's design drop them to the bottom of most tier lists. First, enemies (even in Hector Hard) are quite weak, meaning even when trained up to have good stats, a character who's usually restricted to killing one enemy at a time is pretty unimpressive when a paladin with a handaxe can wipe out whole formations by the midgame. And second, in the American release, the weapon effectiveness formula was dropped from triple-Might to double-Might. This means that even when shooting a flier, ''the enemy type that they are designed to kill'', Wil and Rebecca still tend to fall short of bringing them down in one turn. Considering Rebecca is Wolt's mom and Wil can be his dad, it's probably hereditary.
** Eliwood. The majority of bad things about Roy also apply to Eliwood, with their stats being almost identical. However, Eliwood also suffers from the fact that swords and effective weapons (previously some of Roy's few good points) are much worse in ''Blazing Blade'' and raw power and 1-2 range rules the day, both things he spends most of the game sorely lacking. While he may be slightly more competent at fighting due to the severely weakened enemy roster, he suffers from the fact that everyone else is ''far'' stronger, meaning the player has little reason to ever really bother with him. And unlike Roy's monstrously powerful personal weapon, Eliwood's Durandal is a classic PenultimateWeapon due to its massive weight, reduced effectiveness, and very limited availability. He thankfully has the best promotion among the Lords, but as a unit, Eliwood has trouble even with that.
** While Lyn is a popular character for various reasons, gameplay is not one of them. Her focus on high Speed becomes rather pointless when ''Blazing Blade'' has a very slow enemy roster and the vast majority of the cast can double anything aside from bosses on promotion, and between lackluster Strength and swordlock, her attacking power when not using her Mani Katti is even worse than Eliwood's. Her durability is also notoriously garbage for a melee unit with no ranged options or other utility, with a pitiful 2 Defense at base level and a 20% growth meaning that she can get two-shotted by the vast majority of enemy types, and while she has a theoretically good dodge rate, it's cancelled out by the massive number of lance-wielding enemies with weapon triangle. Though she can rejoin Eliwood at a decent level if one funnels a lot of Lyn Mode's experience into her, this means XP that isn't going to Sain, Kent, and Florina, who are all much better recipients of it--and if you skip Lyn Mode, then she joins at level 4 with stats that are downright awful. Her promotion into Blade Lord does at least patch her durability problems somewhat, but it only gives her bow access (meaning she ''still'' can't counter at both ranges), and worse, it involves delaying Eliwood's much better promotion for several chapters. And on top of all that, the Sol Katti, her SwordOfPlotAdvancement, is considered the worst final weapon in the franchise--it weighs more than a Silver Axe despite being locked to a unit with poor Constitution, its Might is lower than a Silver Sword, it only deals effective damage to one enemy (the final boss), and even a Strength-capped Lyn takes ''fifteen'' hits to kill said boss while said boss is very likely to kill her in one. Lyn is held in such low regard that it's downright common for players doing speedruns or ranked runs to simply not train her at all, in favor of stuffing her in a corner on the maps where she's force-deployed.
** Renault is widely maligned for joining late [[note]]meaning "joining [[EleventhHourRanger in the second-to-last chapter]]", barring a potential extra stage[[/note]] and having a God-awful magic stat. Of course, it makes the final battle easier to have him spam his fortify staff, but people just see his low magic and resistance and are quick to dismiss him. Players who care more about characterization than stats are more likely to pass him over for their favorites, as he's an optional character with very little dialog as he joins and little time to learn anything about him via support conversations. It doesn't help that you have to intentionally seek support conversations with Renault, as it takes a minimum of 42 turns to unlock one (where the rest of the game can be completed in under 15).
** Nino is probably the classic example among Western fans of the series of a MagikarpPower unit who looks great on paper but doesn't pay off. While her bases are good for her level, her growths are above-average, and her status as a mage unit makes her relatively easy to train up, she joins at a point where there's only a handful of chapters remaining, and does so at level 5 unpromoted. Hector Hard Mode includes a substantial cut to XP and deployment slots, which means less room for her to be used and more work needed to train her on higher difficulties. And with Erk, Canas, and Lucius, who have basically the same job as Nino and only slightly inferior stats but have been around for the whole game, and Pent, who has stats on par with Nino's 20/1 stats ''and'' a great staff rank, the demand for Nino's skillset is ''very'' low. Even a ''trained'' Nino still doesn't perform that well in the final maps--Cog of Destiny is full of enemies with high Resistance, Value of Life has a magic seal that renders her useless, all the minibosses in Light have great Resistance and Nergal has weapon triangle on her, and the FinalBoss has a pretty high chance of killing her in one shot.
** Wallace is one of the game's MutuallyExclusivePartyMembers, showing up if your Lords are underleveled. Unfortunately, he isn't exactly going to make up for them. His class? 12th-level Armor Knight, in a game where that class is very flawed. His stats and growths? Pretty mediocre, especially since you're at the part of the game where really strong prepromotes start cropping up. If you don't mind the weaknesses of a Knight, he isn't exclusive in his role, because Oswin joins a minimum of eleven chapters earlier, [[DiscOneNuke at 9th level,]] with base stats that are on par with Wallace's and growths that are flat-out better. Promoted him in Lyn Mode to make up for his lowish stats? Well, now you can't promote Sain or Kent in Lyn Mode, and since you just blew an expensive item, Lyn isn't likely to start with a White Gem when she rejoins. And his join map is generally seen as harder than the alternative map, where the mutually-exclusive Geitz joins, and Geitz is a prepromoted Warrior, who is much stronger than Wallace, making Wallace even less desirable. On top of all that, actually recruiting him is time-consuming and risky, in a chapter where a rather dangerous boss beelines for you on the first turn, meaning it's downright common to skip Wallace entirely.
** Karla is considered among the worst units in the franchise, and certainly one of the worst prepromotes. The game design really doesn't favor her class and focus; as a swordmaster, she's locked at 1 range without the Light Brand, doesn't get access to multiple weapons, and her increased crit chance isn't reliable enough to count on and ends up being overkill when most enemies get one-rounded anyway (unless you're Karla, who frequently struggles to one-round ''even while critting''). But even if you do want a swordmaster, Guy and Karel are both a lot better, and the game as a whole isn't light on usable sword units--even outside of the generally stellar cavalry in ''Blazing Blade'''s roster, Harken, Raven, Lyn, and Jaffar all outclass Karla at least as much. She joins with only three maps remaining, one of which features ''over a hundred'' lance enemies. But most importantly, her recruitment method is both a GuideDangIt and a massive drain on resources: take Bartre, train him all the way up to level 5 of his promotion, take him to that one specific map, have them fight it out for a round, and hope that neither gets a crit. Keep in mind that most people don't use Bartre, period, past the first few maps where he's force-deployed. Many people were baffled, to say the least, when she was added to ''Heroes'', much less as the meta-defining unit she became.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'':
** Eirika suffers from a lot of the same problems as Lyn above: solid growths but poor bases, [[GlassCannon rather bad durability]], swordlocked in a game where swords are crap, [[FragileSpeedster focuses on Speed over Strength in a game where pretty much anyone can double]], no 1-2 range option outside of rare magic swords, spends most of the game slogging around on foot. The difference is that while Lyn had ten easy maps of fighting hideously weak axe enemies to grind her up and make her look good, Eirika spends her solo part of the campaign being carted around by resident GameBreaker Seth, which makes her look even worse. Add in the fact that her brother [[OvershadowedByAwesome surpasses her in just about every way]] (better base stats, better weapon type, better personal weapon, growths are at least comparable), and she ends up being a very tough sell. It certainly doesn't help her reputation that she already gets hate for [[WhatMeasureIsANonBadass being too weak or naive in the context of the plot]]. She does at least pick up by the later portion of the campaign, thanks to a decent promotion that provides her with a mount and her Sacred Weapon... assuming you bothered to train her, anyway, since she tends to have low stats even when auto-leveled.
** Ewan, a trainee in the Pupil class, is intended as a MagikarpPower unit: he has low base stats, but since he levels up nine additional times and can choose his promotion among many magic classes, he in theory ends up as a lategame powerhouse. Unfortunately, his growths are actually rather mediocre, and he joins quite late in the game, meaning that he will take multiple chapters of being spoonfed kills to even catch up to units like Lute or Saleh, much less surpass them. Though his magic focus allows him to at least attack at range, his bases are ''so'' bad that he deals damage in the low single digits, being a Pupil gives him reduced Movement, and he can be killed in a single hit by most enemies in his joining chapter. Even his ability to choose his promotion largely only ends up being choosing between weapon types, unless the player goes the Summoner route, in which case his stat lead is basically irrelevant.
** Despite being an EnsembleDarkhorse and popular enough to have been introduced to ''VideoGame/FireEmblemHeroes'' well before almost every other [=FE8=] unit, Amelia's actual performance in her home game leaves a lot to be desired. She joins earlier than Ewan, and has poor stats, poor movement, and is initially locked into 1 Range thanks to her Weapon Rank. She also has the choice between Cavalier (in a game where you have a ''lot'' of viable mounted units) and Armor Knight (which is generally awful). The question of which is worse between her and Ewan tends to vary, but the usual answer is that neither one is good unless you feed them an entire floor of the Tower of Valni (which would put any unit ahead of the curve).
** Marisa, despite being a badass myrmidon who's a member of a badass mercenary group, tends to be seen as one of the worst non-Trainee characters, showing up frightfully late for a character of her level and not having anything resembling the stats to back it up. Even when raised up, she's still not a big deal, since Swordmaster is a long way from the game's best class, and even those desiring a Swordmaster have Joshua, who joins with better stats than Marisa and does so a lot earlier.
** Most [[EleventhHourRanger last-joining characters]] in the series are [[EleventhHourSuperpower extremely powerful]], which makes poor Syrene stand out all the more. Her statline, though not irredeemable and backed by pretty good growth rates, lacks any real strong point, and by this stage, you have much better fliers to rely on and shouldn't need to grind anyone up. On top of that, she's a Falcon Knight in a game where that class is wholly outclassed by Wyvern Knight, which means she suffers even more in comparison to her younger peers.
** L'Arachel on paper should have a lot of good qualities: solid growth rates, bases aren't terrible for her level, and her Troubadour class, though somewhat nerfed from prior entries, is still one of the better ones in the game. But, as with many Ests, she shows up fairly late, at a point when most enemies can one-shot her. Furthermore, while most Ests are combat units, letting them pick off massive chunks of XP by killing weakened enemies, L'Arachel is a healer, meaning she's restricted entirely to the slow process of staff-grinding for her levels until she can promote. Her starting staff rank of D just makes things even worse for her, as it means she's initially restricted to Heal and Mend (which are slow and require injured allies) and Torch and Unlock (which require specific map conditions) if she wants to start grinding. When pulled to promotion, L'Arachel is a very versatile and powerful character, but reaching that point without tower-grinding is difficult at best, and there's a handful of characters who can also become mounted mages upon promotion.
** Forde, though well-liked for his personality, gets a fair bit of mockery for being mediocre despite the natural good points of his Cavalier class. Despite joining at level 6, his bases are barely better than Franz's level 1 bases, and his growths aren't great either. His stats are oriented towards him being a FragileSpeedster, but his base Speed is only 8, when Franz (who is level 1) has 7, along with a better growth, and his companion Kyle also has 7, a growth only 5% less, and [[MightyGlacier more points in Strength and Defense to make up for it.]] The result is that Forde ends up being something of a MasterOfNone statistically, with no obvious weak spots but also no real strengths. The low supply of Knight Crests and the large number of fellow cavalier and paladin units also reduce his potential quite a bit. He is rarely considered a terrible unit, but the long pedigree of Christmas cavaliers being incredibly strong causes him to be a disappointment.
** The Trial Map characters are a classic example of a BraggingRightsReward. By the time you've obtained them, there's almost nothing left in the game to do with them, making them only useful for experimentation in the postgame--and if you put that aside, they're still pretty terrible, since they keep their rather lowish boss stats (in particular, most have terrible Speed), they can't build supports, their high base levels make it hard to improve them without a fortune's worth of statboosters, and by that point, the party should be comprised of units that can kick their asses and then some. There's a handful that would at least be good if they joined in the main campaign, though; Glen is in a good class and his stats aren't too low, Riev has a similarly good class and backs it up with great weapon ranks and weirdly high Defense, and Lyon is basically a Summoner on steroids, making him incredibly strong and versatile once capped out [[note]]Keep in mind that this mostly applies to his [[RegionalBonus North American version]]--on the Japanese version, most of his growths aside from Luck, Magic and HP were ''10%'', making him only worthwhile with a full set of statboosters.[[/note]].
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'':
** Sothe is meant to be a MagikarpPower character, with him joining at level 1 and having the Blossom ability (reduces XP gain, increases growths). Unfortunately, he also can't promote, giving him only nineteen levels to let those growths work their magic. He's also a Thief, meaning his combat skills are restricted to the worst weapon type (knives), his Blossom skill blunts BEXP gain, and he's meant to be running around unlocking chests rather than fighting enemies, meaning that his high stats end up being basically trivial. On top of all that, Volke is available earlier, starts with far better bases, and can promote (and at level 20/1, he ties or beats max-level Sothe's averages in everything but Luck), with only the pittance he pays for unlocking keeping him from being better than Sothe at absolutely everything. Pretty much the only reason to use Sothe is if you desperately need a second thief or you're planning to transfer his stats into ''Radiant Dawn.''
** Bastian has flat-out awful bases despite his high level and late join time, and he's chosen knife proficiency over staves (an extremely bad choice). His Corrode skill usually doesn't do much besides destroying a boss weapon you might want to steal. It's difficult to imagine a Sage at this point in the game that wouldn't beat him out.
** The majority of Myrmidon/Swordmaster units are at their worst here, due to their Strength and Strength cap being very low, the surfeit of lance enemies, and the rest of the roster being dominated by powerful mounted units and multiweapon fighters. On top of all that, they lack their signature crit-boosting skill in the Japanese version. Lucia in particular tends to bottom out on tier lists due to sharing Bastian's issues of late join time and low bases.
** Rolf has decent growths, a personalized weapon that's effectively a better Steel Bow, and that's about it. While archers in the series have long had a problem with bad bases, they at least tended to show up really early when their opponents were weak and their stats could be salvaged. But Rolf joins with the typical bad bases in the ''ninth'' chapter, at which point most of his fellow mercs are probably creeping up on double-digit levels and most enemies are taking ScratchDamage from him. Feeding him BEXP sounds like a way to fix this problem... only shortly after Rolf joins, you start seeing a flood of great new units, including Marcia and Kieran, and a few maps after that, you have Astrid, who is also a level 1 bow-user but blows Rolf out of the water as a MagikarpPower unit due to her Paragon skill and mount. On top of it all, ''Path of Radiance'' is probably the worst game for bow-users in the series due to effective weapons being nerfed in all versions to only x2 effectiveness, meaning Rolf ''still'' tends to need two or three shots to bring down a flier. Consequently, most players have him poke enemies for his joining map and then bench him before he gets himself killed.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'' has one of the most notoriously lopsided rosters in the series, between a gigantic cast, very unusual mechanics, and a tendency to have characters simply vanish for large chunks of the game. Consequently, there's a large number of characters who can end up struggling, particularly on Hard/Japanese Maniac, which includes a ''massive'' cut to XP that makes weak units all the harder to use properly:
** Broadly speaking, Mages. While the class had some clear flaws in ''Path of Radiance'' (changing weight to key off Strength meant that they were now a lot slower, and they went from standard infantry movement to armor knight movement), ''Radiant Dawn'' made things even worse for them--healing items are now ludicrously effective, Thunder got retooled into an anti-wyvern weapon which is terrible against every other enemy type, their Speed cap is terrible and ''Radiant Dawn'' is a game where capped stats actually matter, and most pivotally, enemy Resistance is unusually high, meaning their traditional niche of a GlassCannon with an ArmorPiercingAttack is now gone, but the mage itself remains a SquishyWizard. Another thing to note is that the Mage class Mastery Skills (Corona for Micaiah and Bishops, Flare for the others) are the only ones that don't have a damage multiplier associated with them, instead merely a [[ArmorPiercingAttack Res negation effect]]. Most other classes get multiplied power, which effectively turns a skill activation into a one-shot, but Corona and Flare really just brings up their damage to what it would be normally in a different game. The result is a class that's effectively an armor knight that can't take hits, with correspondingly terrible tier listings. Tormod gets the worst of it by only being available for ''four chapters'', three of which he is a CrutchCharacter that barely gains any experience. Once he returns, he's too far too [[CantCatchUp underleveled]] to be worthwhile.
** Micaiah's group, the Dawn Brigade, is rather infamous for struggling next to the rest of the cast. They range from units whose growths are not efficient for their class [[note]]Meg having high speed and poor strength and defense in a MightyGlacier class, Leonardo having poor skill and speed when being the group's only archer[[/note]] to units who come at unreasonably low levels or are otherwise hard to train [[note]]Laura starts at Level 1 and can only level by healing. Fiona comes at Level 7 when the rest of the army is probably more than twice her level, and she's slow enough that the prologue boss is capable of ''doubling her''[[/note]] to units who would actually be useful if it wasn't for certain attributes that weaken them considerably [[note]]Ilyana being forced to use the badly-nerfed Thunder tomes until she promotes, Volug being stuck in half-shift for all of Part 1, though thankfully, he's still useful[[/note]]. A few other units have these problems as well, but it's not quite as pronounced for them because they tend to show up in far more balanced armies and they aren't starved for experience like the Dawn Brigade. The Dawn Brigade's biggest problem is that while their units look usable in a vacuum, the game's structure means they're in competition with other units for use in the endgame, and a savvy player won't want to waste early experience on a unit that has no long-term prospects. For instance, Meg's "armor unit with high speed" shtick is done better by Gatrie, who has even higher speed, enough defense to do his traditional job, and appears in chapters where his low movement isn't a problem. Fiona is measured against cavaliers who have an easier time training, and paladins like Titania who come ready to use. The only significant difference between mages is which SS-ranked weapon they can use, so Ilyana tends to lose out against Soren's better strength and support options, and [[spoiler:Pelleas']] plot significance, unique weapon type, instant promotion time, and instant B-rank in staves upon promotion. And so on.
** Lyre tends to be near or at the bottom of most lists. Cats are considered weak in ''Radiant Dawn'' to begin with, due to their low Strength, a transformation gauge that depletes quickly, and a combination of high HP and low Defense which makes it difficult to keep them healed. Lyre has all of these problems, but unlike Lethe (who can at least dodge) or Ranulf (who is pretty strong for a cat), she can't dodge or take hits at all, or even double most of the enemies in the first map where she is available, in her ''transformed state''.
** The Heaven affinity is practically useless because it only increases Hit rate. Units who use weapons with low hit rates (axes, thunder, and dark magic) all have high enough Skill for it to not be a problem.
** Astrid stands out for being particularly poor due to changing game mechanics. In ''Path of Radiance'', she was pretty great, due to the fact that she had the Paragon skill (which doubles XP gain), allowing her to compensate for her bad base level pretty handily. In ''Radiant Dawn'', you can swap around skills freely, so really, all Astrid having it means for her is that it doesn't initially take up capacity unless you take it off her. Most people do, because it's a great skill and you want to swap it around a lot, at which Astrid becomes a regular ol' bad unit with a really low base level and stats, wonky availability, and an unimpressive statline even if you do let her keep Paragon. Combine that with mounted units on the whole being nerfed from their ''Path of Radiance'' highs, and she becomes almost useless. And even if you wanted a HorseArcher on your team, she isn't the only one, as Fiona, Oscar and Geoffrey promote into Silver Knights, which wields both Lances and Bows (though Fiona is weaker compared to them).
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragon'':
** Marth in the remake was kept pretty close to his original counterpart, who was something of a GameBreaker. Unfortunately, the remake made the game harder and everyone else much better. The existence of the Weapon Triangle puts him on a poor footing against the spear-wielding enemies that flood maps, and many units have improved growth rates and stat caps that let them far outstrip Marth. His ability to kill armors with the Rapier doesn't matter as much when Caeda can do the same thing without facing weapon triangle. On top of that, he can't change class, meaning he can't jump into something to fix his problems. The resulting PowerCreep reduces him from a great Lord to being on par with Roy or Lyn. His only real utility is the Fire Emblem acting as an infinite chest key and him being the only one who can visit villages, and even that tends to be more of a problem for him, since it means he has to be constantly beelining for side objectives and not training.
*** Another thing to note is how most of the lords are able to at least handle their {{Final Boss}}es given enough investment on them, even ones that are nearly bottom-tier, such as Roy (whose Binding Blade allows him to easily pull the finishing blow on Idunn) or Lyn (who can actually try to chip out the Fire Dragon with a body ring and enough capped stats, though Eliwood and Hector do this job much better). The ''Shadow Dragon'' version of Marth, on the other hand, gets ''doubled'' by Medeus on higher difficulties even when capped. Even with the Falchion, he need to get at least one critical hit in order to survive against Medeus (which is basically even more luck-based than sending out their designated suicide attacker to put a massive dent into Medeus' defenses, then sending someone to finish Medeus off). Granted, he can also double Tiki and Nagi as well, though their deaths at least don't end the game like Marth, letting them be revived with the Aum Staff. All of these makes it not worth it to train Marth at all. Fortunately, it seems that Intelligent Systems learned this lesson regarding it, and later gave Marth a EleventhHourSuperpower in the form of the Binding Shield in ''New Mystery'', which is basically an PRF inventory-locked version of the Starsphere, allowing him to at least hold on his own against Medeus and giving him a niche as a Medeus-slayer who can defeat him when given support. He also got his stats buffed all-around, and the enemy roster was changed to be less lance-heavy, making his class-locked status less of a problem.
** Navarre is pretty much the original EnsembleDarkhorse cool myrmidon, which makes it even more obvious that his ''Shadow Dragon'' incarnation is completely mediocre. Like Marth, he is sword-locked in his base class, which is not a good thing when the vast majority of enemies use lances, but he lacks Marth's utility as a Lord or his ability to use a forged Rapier, being stuck with Armorslayers at best. One might try to fix this by reclassing him, but this runs into his most ironic weakness: despite being one of the franchise's most infamous FragileSpeedster characters, Navarre has a ''personal'' base Speed of 0, relying entirely on his myrmidon class bases. Reclass him into anything else and his Speed immediately tanks into the ground, and while he has a fairly decent personal growth, it's not really enough to make up for his start.
** Most of the replacement characters aside from Frey, Etzel and Nagi in ''Shadow Dragon'' get flak not just because of their poor stats and growths, but also because of the fact that you have to have a lot of dead units if you want access to them, meaning they can only ever be used in Iron Man runs or if you deliberately suicide your characters. Of particular is Norne, who is basically a worse version of Gordin (she doesn't even have the benefits of being able to chip strong enemies on Hard, since she's Normal-exclusive), Athena is somehow an even worse Navarre (at least Navarre came in at a time where he was up against the resident WakeUpCallBoss Hyman, in which Navarre had Weapon Triangle advantage against him (though is usually impractical since the weapons he can use at the time weight him down), and can potentially grow stronger than her if trained well), Horace is basically stuck in a class set which does not have a good Lance ranking (though he can at least reclass into Horseman for his bow rank and salvaging his poor speed), and Ymir has alarmingly low stats for an Warrior, and reclassing him into Berserker doesn't help much aside from bringing in an extra Devil Axe. ''New Mystery'' did improve on them somewhat but not much, as Norne is still not that great over there due to her class set not having Horseman even after clearing the game once in Hard Mode and above, and Ryan, Gordin, Jeorge, Warren, Castor and potentially a Male Kris completely blow her out of the water, Horace ''finally'' gets access to Dracoknight, which uses his great lance ranks and combines it with good growths, but only after a NG+, Athena does serve as a great Myrmidon for the prologue chapters, but doesn't return until about a good number of chapters have passed, and Ymir still suffers from LateCharacterSyndrome and is only a filler bow unit at best.
* The DS remake of ''VideoGame/FireEmblemMysteryOfTheEmblem'', ''New Mystery of the Emblem'', is infamous for its generally low (but lopsided) unit quality, to the point listing all of the game's bad units would probably require its own page, on top of featuring the return of the EndGameResultsScreen. It should be noted, however, [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools that no one truly holds the game's awful unit balance against it]], mainly because most people understand that correctly balancing a game with 77 playable units is incredibly difficult, if not impossible--especially a game where reclassing and lack of skills means that most characters are distinguished strictly by weapon ranks and base stats. Another reason is that players who like to turn bad units into killing machines have a lot of material to work with; [[HarderThanHard Lunatic and above]] have a statbooster shop in the preparations screen during the main game, as well as the reclassing mechanics that are available in any difficulty, allowing players to switch a character to another class to mend their weaknesses. Notable examples of Low-Tier Scrappydom in this game:
** Most units that join after Chapter 14, with only a few exceptions (notably [[spoiler:[[CombatMedic Katarina]]]], [[EleventhHourRanger Nagi and Michalis]]). A common FanNickname for them is "Free Silvers", because all their worth is in the free weapons they join with, usually a silver weapon. Common traits among them include high weapon ranks and even higher growths, but horrid bases that cannot stack up to the enemies of their joining chapter at all. If they're used at all, chances are it'll be as cannon fodder or chipping. Many of the cases are not even worth the MagikarpPower points, because even if they're fully raised, they will usually be mediocre at best on average. Though two cases in particular stand out:
*** Astram has become memetic among the fanbase for supposedly being the strongest man on Archanea in-universe [[GameplayAndStorySegregation but being horribly weak in-game]], to the point that if he were to battle his own men or even a thief in his joining chapter in Lunatic Mode, he'd be most likely killed in one round. In spite of having one of the highest defense bases in the game, his survivability is completely negated by his awful base HP of 10 (34 as a Hero, his base class) and his absolutely abysmal base speed of 5 (16 as a Hero). His speed growth is just as bad; putting it into perspective, in spite of a 50% speed growth as a [[FragileSpeedster Swordmaster]] not being awful in a vacuum, it means that on average Astram will hit 25.5 speed out of 30. ''In the game's fastest class'', in which even most bad units can naturally hit at least 28 speed on average, and anything below 27 is considered bad. Couple that with his subpar base strength and his A rank in swords being easy to replicate (especially by this point in the game), and the supposed strongest man in Archanea is little more than a bona-fide MasterOfNone. As an aside, it's not completely uncommon for players not aiming for a perfect playthrough and Tactics ranking to kill Astram when he first appears as an unrecruitable enemy. This is because doing so nets you the Mercurius, one of the game's [[InfinityPlusOneSword strongest weapons]] [[DiscOneNuke as early as Chapter 7.]] It may seem unusable this early in the game, but all reclassed Swordmasters can easily reach the A rank needed for Mercurius if their sword rank is high enough (for instance, Sirius, who joins in Chapter 4, has an A rank in swords at base when he's reclassed into a Swordmaster, and units like Luke and Kris can get sword ranks very easily if trained up).
*** The Wolfguard (Roshea, Vyland, Sedgar and Wolf), while also disliked from a [[ThatOneLevel level]] [[EscortMission design]] and story perspective, are utterly despised as units for exemplifying everything wrong with Free Silvers. Their bases are horrible to an even higher degree than most other Free Silvers, their growths are incredibly high but not high enough to fix their bases, and their weapon ranks are high, but worthless due to their terrible combat. Roshea gets it the worst, not only is his highest weapon rank comparatively bad [[labelnote:note]]Vyland's B sword rank as a Paladin allows him to reclass into an A swords Swordmaster capable of performing cheap chipping strats, while Wolf and Sedgar's B rank in bows allows them to take out or suicide against some of the wyverns in Chapter 21. Meanwhile, Roshea's highest rank is a B lances. Lances are neither inherently good at chipping like bows nor have a C-rank-at-base-class like swords.[[/labelnote]] but he also has the lowest strength base of the quartet, meaning he can't even properly employ chip-enemy-and-die tactics like the other three.
** Not that bad units are always the late ones. For instance, [[SpellMyNameWithAnS Jubelo/Yubello]], who joins at the same time as Sirius, is roundly mocked by most players due to his abysmal base magic of -2 in spite of starting out as a mage, meaning he has a base magic of 1 as a Mage and a base magic of '''-1''' as a Curate, the latter even being [[ReadingsAreOffTheScale displayed as 0]] in the game proper. Reclassing him into a physical class won't help, as he doesn't have the strength base or growth to make it work while also starting with E ranks in every class except for his base one. Coupled with his lack of speed and bulk, and his magic growth being nowhere near enough to make up for his lack of base magic, and you get a unit that almost no one uses seriously.
** Tiki has had some use in most of her appearances, but her ''New Mystery'' incarnation is basically a joke. This is due mostly to her join time; despite her unit design suggesting she's meant as a specialized dragon-killer with her Divinestone's effective damage, she joins right ''after'' such a thing would have been incredibly useful and at a point where there aren't going to be any dragons for her to fight until the endgame. Once she ''is'' in the endgame, the dragons are so powerful on higher difficulties that she can't kill them alone, more or less voiding the whole point of her to begin with, and you have Nagi to do her job better. She's not even good against Medeus due to her Divinestone no longer being effective against him. Outside of her specialization, she has terrible stats even with dragonstone bonuses, she lacks mobility, her weapons come in very limited supply, she has no ranged options, and her admittedly high growths aren't really enough to pull her out of her doldrums. It's particularly painful after her ''Mystery'' incarnation was one of the most fun and versatile units in the game, able to transform into a variety of dragons and take on their abilities (including flight). As an extra kick in the butt, most of the Dragonstones Tiki can use are unavailable in the highest difficulties due to being unreachable without Warp, leaving her with just standard Firestones and her Divinestone.
** However, there is one unit that eclipses all the ones previously listed to the point he's one of the worst units in the entire series... '''Bantu''', the kindly old manakete and Tiki's father figure. Simply put, he's considered to have absolutely nothing going for him. Not his bases (even with the Dragonstone he comes with, he gets one-rounded by everything in his join chapter on any difficulty above Hard), not his growths (on par with Arran's, the game's CrutchCharacter), and not his class (6 movement with infantry restrictions in a game where most classes have 7 movement or more, plus an inability to reclass and being locked to just one weapon that comes in very limited supply, has no 1-2 or other special traits aside from doing damage and is best sold for forge money). The fact that he's fairly inefficient to recruit (he can be recruited on the very first turn, but it requires Marth and [[HeroicSecondWind Phina]] to go out of their way, essentially being out of commission until the third turn, which is specially bad considering the incredibly strong reinforcements that spawn just four turns later) is only the cherry on top. There are many other units throughout the series that are more infamous for being bad, but at least they have something going for them. Bantu's saving grace is that due to the aforementioned statbooster shop, he has more of a chance of being useful than some of the other worst units in the series... but him having the steepest investment cost of any unit in the game and being average at best once ''all his stats are capped'' should say something.
** The game's classes have a lot more thought put into their balance, with almost all of them having a valuable niche.[[labelnote:note]]Even the Armor Knight class, usually a repeat offender of this trope throughout the series, has some use, being very useful as a meat shield early on in the game. Archers were also notably RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap to become one of the game's best classes.[[/labelnote]] The exception? The Fighter/Warrior classline, which is constantly OvershadowedByAwesome.[[labelnote:Why?]]Axe usage? Wyvern Lords have a lower axe rank at base, but they can fly and you can reclass anyone with a decent axe rank to this class to instantly wreak havoc. Berserkers have a lower strength growth, but they are one of the game's fastest classes while still retaining a lot of the Warrior class's raw power and their axe rank, on top of having an innate +15% critical hit rate. Bow usage? Horsemen and Snipers have much higher speed, bow ranks, and better-balanced stats. Horsemen in particular have very high mobility, allowing them to snipe units from the other side of the map, something that Warriors cannot do. Raw strength? There are many other strong classes that don't compromise raw power for speed like the Warrior does[[/labelnote]] They're still not good on their own, with caps evidently meant to make them a Strength-focused MightyGlacier but growths that evoke the feel of a slow, HP-focused GlassCannon. Due to their low speed cap and low defenses in [[RocketTagGameplay a meta]] that favors [[LightningBruiser Lightning Bruisers]] and [[FragileSpeedster Fragile Speedsters]], Warriors are the very epitome of CantCatchUp. Ironically, starting a male Kris off as a Fighter is one of the more popular options, due to a slight dearth of good axe units early on, and it being the easiest way to get Kris's axe rank up... but typically, this is only an appetizer before promoting and reclassing into something else.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'':
** Classes:
*** Unlike in other games where Swordmasters do have an innate critical bonus to make it up for their [[FragileSpeedster great speed and skill, but low strength]], here, they DON'T have it. While Swordmasters do have access to the [[ThrowingYourSwordAlwaysWorks Amatsu]], which is an unusual 1-2 physical sword, their low strength caps don't make up for it and you only get one in the main game and have to get more through the Infinite Regalia DLC, and Ragnell, which is another sword that has a 1-2 range, while it arrives later than Amatsu unless if doing the Infinite Regalia DLC, isn't locked to the Swordmaster class, further adding an negative against Swordmasters. As a result, this class is only recommended for getting [[DeathByAThousandCuts Astra]] and Swordfaire, and then switching to Assassin afterwards, as while it does has [[AwesomeButImpractical somewhat questionable skills]] ([[OneHitKO Lethality]] and Pass), it does [[GlassCannon have a higher strength cap than Swordmaster]], on top of being even faster than Swordmaster to boot, and can also [[BowAndSwordInAccord wield bows]] for indirect kills.
*** War Monks/Clerics only wield axes when fighting and can [[CombatMedic also use staves to support other units]]. In practice, however, expect almost everyone to almost never pick this class for multiple reasons.[[labelnote:Why?]]Axe usage? While the Bolt Axe can make up for some of the characters' low strength growths, unless the player is actively shopping for those in Spotpass shops, it mostly appears in shops near the endgame. Also, other units can use axes much better such as Warriors and Berserkers, who have insane strength caps to make up for their lack of skill (and even Warriors can use bows with them), Dread Fighters are great {{Mage Killer}}s with their Resistance+10 and can learn Aggressor to enhance their Player Phase capabilities and Wyvern Riders and Griffon Lords combine both axe usage with high movement. While Great Knights and Generals are {{Mighty Glacier}}s, both of them make it up for it in different ways: Great Knights have [[MultiMeleeMaster great versatility in all melee weapons]], and Generals can transfer Pavise to other classes, and even then, most of the characters that end up in these classes end up becoming {{Lightning Bruiser}}s in practice, most notably Kjelle. Staff usage? You're better off going Falcon Knight for great flying utility and Sage and Valkyrie for better healing/rescues. Sages and Valkyries in particular can exploit Tomefaire to increase their magic which in turn, increases their potency for healing and rescuing. Falcon Knights can also do this with Lancefaire, but only if they're wielding Shocksticks.[[/labelnote]] The only reason to undertake this class is to get the valuable Rally Luck and Renewal skills, and even then, that's a questionable concern over whether those skills are great or not, and only someone like Libra really works well as one because of his growths.
** Characters:
*** Virion as a father. While Virion is an okay-ish unit thanks to good Speed and Skill growths, as a father he is considered the worst one in the game due to not offering anything good class wise to his potential kids (Archer, Wyvern Rider, and Mage) and having medicore growths in most areas save Speed and Skill, which can seriously gimp a child unit. If you recruit Donnel as well, this causes there to be an uneven number of male characters, often leading to Virion being benched because he doesn't offer anything that would make him worth using.
*** The [[FanNickname Avatarsexuals]] get flak for multiple reasons: Arriving at a time where [[LateCharacterSyndrome most of the first generation characters have paired]] with the exception of Anna, have somewhat mediocre modifiers, and as stated in the name, have very limited supports, and most of them involve Robin, the playable avatar of the game. However, even when Robin can potentially marry them, they still face multiple issues with that being that their modifiers for Morgan are inferior compared to the second-generation characters, which have insane modifiers provided the right parents. That being said, some of the Avatarsexuals are able to provide various niches of their own: Walhart has the unique Conqueror class, which allows him to charge in relentlessly with his Conquest skill which essential nullifies his class' weaknesses which pairs well with his great modifier in Strength, Anna's Locktouch utility allows her to unlock doors and chests early while Gaius is more intended for grinding for levels and building supports for his wives, Priam is a great BraggingRightsReward for clearing some of the more difficult DLC, including Apotheosis, and Aversa can pass down Shadowgift to Morgan, which allows them to use Dark Magic in all Tome-using classes, including Sage, and even grants Morgan a good Magic Modifier if married.
* From ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'':
** Mozu is very similar to Donnel in that she is mostly used as "Marriage potential" or "Breeding stock" as she plays the same role in gameplay. Compared to Donnel, though, she is lower risk and lower reward. On one hand, her potential promotions give her access to the Master of Arms class (which allows her to have the entire weapons triangle at once) and the Merchant class (making her the only first generation character who can do this). But on the other, her stats are atrocious even for the point which you get her and she requires a ''lot'' of babying to even get experience. She does catch a break in ''Conquest'' if one uses a Heart Seal to make her an archer, though.[[labelnote:Why?]]The ''Conquest'' route's roster's only bow user before promotion is Niles, who's better off mage-hunting than getting in shootouts with Sky Knights who have the defense to shrug off his meager strength and could wreck him up close. Mozu has growth modifiers that make her an excellent archer that provides some much-needed anti-air options.[[/labelnote]]
** Hayato, while he thankfully doesn't share a class with any of the Hoshidan Royals [[note]]Swordmaster for Ryoma, Sky Knight for Hinoka, Priestess for Sakura, Archer for Takumi[[/note]], still gets flak in ''Birthright'' for his low level and bases, along with a somewhat wonky personal skill in which he gains increased damage against anyone above his level (which is easy to do, but considering that they can easily kill him too, this is somewhat difficulty to use well), and while Orochi is slower than him, she does have a niche in capturing units even though capturing is less potent compared to ''Conquest''. While he can still be made good, it will usually take a while and may not be worth it in the end, as Izana is basically him except he trounces him in every way possible. Ironically, he's actually one of the better units in ''Revelation'', since he actually gains a lot of levels compared to his ''Birthright'' self and can hold himself well due to his bases, even in Lunatic. When reclassed over there into an Oni Chieftain, he can be one of the few units that can compete with the Royals, especially Leo, who joins 8 chapters later than him.
** The second generation. In ''Awakening'', the second generation was [[GameBreaker stupidly overpowered]] due to the formula used for calculating their base stats and growths, in addition to skill combination. In ''Fates'', they are merely units whose growths and skills are customizable via inheritance. While they do get to avoid grinding if one waits long enough to recruit them, it's not uncommon for most of them to wind up benched just because their parents were part of an established team and their "niche" is already filled by a perfectly usable unit. The only real exceptions are Caeldori, Rhajat, Ophelia, Siegbert, Shiro, Midori, and Percy, since tinkering with their parentage can result in some pretty [[GameBreaker brokenly powerful units]].
** Any unit that shares a class with one of the royal siblings:
*** Setsuna is an archer you get in Chapter 7 in ''Birthright'', where the other immediate options for bow users are the prepromote Reina, and ''[[GameBreaker Takumi]]''; while Setsuna has earlier availability, her growths favor her as a FragileSpeedster where at worst Takumi is a GlassCannon.
*** Hinata is a Samurai that you get midway through ''Birthright'' and ''Revelation''. Unlike most [[FragileSpeedster Samurai]] in ''Fates'', Hinata has a greater emphasis on HP and Defense than Speed and Skill, compared to [[GlassCannon fellow Samurai Hana]]. Unfortunately for both, they share a class with ''[[LightningBruiser Ryoma]]'', who can perform both tasks extremely well at base, and even then, Hana is better than Hinata as a Samurai, meaning Hana at least can stay relative to Ryoma.
** ''Revelation'' suffers from this in many ways, owing to a mixture of skewed joining times, tougher enemies compared to ''Birthright'', and an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit causing everyone to compete with ''eight'' of the Royals as opposed to just four (meaning even more units who were good members of your team in the other two routes are benched just because another royal can fulfill their role). In addition, some units' stats were just poorly balanced for ''Revelation'':
*** Odin, Peri, Laslow, and Niles join much, ''much'' later in ''Revelation'' than they did in ''Conquest'', at the same level. The problem is that they join at the time when a ''lot'' of promoted enemies are mixed in with the unpromoted enemies, which can result in them having to be benched immediately. Their stats weren't adjusted as such, which can result in them getting doubled by enemies that will one-shot them. While they can indeed become usable, a player will have to stop their progress in the story and grind them up so that they can catch up.
*** Setsuna and Azama. They join way later in ''Revelation'', and this has a downside of Setsuna joining long after the player has had Takumi, Reina, and Shura for a while (and maybe even Kiragi, depending on your supports) and Azama joining long after Sakura and Elise have had a head-start. While Azama's unique gimmick of being the best candidate for the Grand Master class is carried over, the ArbitraryHeadcountLimit doesn't give as much wiggle room as ''Birthright'' did.
*** Nyx and Shura in ''Revelation'' are very good demonstrators of the bizarre balancing done in ''Revelation''. Nyx and Shura both join at Level 10 on the same map. Except that they are both clearly ''not'' at the same level — Shura is a Level 10 ''promoted'' character, whereas Nyx is a Level 10 ''un''promoted character. Shura can instantly hold his own, whereas Nyx requires some time training before she won't have to fear being attacked by enemies far stronger than she can handle.
** Much like some of the prepromotes/late joiners in ''Awakening'', the pre-promotes (who aren't royals or Felicia and Jakob) face this as well due to their limited support options(and thus limited reclass options).
** Felicia and Jakob join promoted, but have bases that are more appropriate for an unpromoted unit yet growths fitting of a promoted unit. As a result, they may end up getting benched once more healers sign on, but they are fully usable. Their main issue is that they are OvershadowedByAwesome. Especially in ''Birthright'', where their offensive role as using daggers are also occupied by the three ninjas (four including Asugi) who are much better suited for combat. They're considered better in ''Conquest'' where hidden weapons are much harder to come by and debuffing key enemies can be absolutely crucial. Either way, their main use is to take advantage of their ridiculously low internal level to [[DiskOneNuke get endgame skills before the rest of the party even promotes, then pass those skills on to children]].
** Rinkah is in a class of her own. She appears to be a stereotypical axe user, and her character art shows off her washboard abs. It turns out her strength growth is lower than ''Sakura's'' and her HP isn't much better. Her Oni Savage skills don't sync up with her weapon use, and in general she can be killed very easily. In theory this could be solved if she had a class that focused on what she is good at, her pretty good Defense, Speed, or Skill growths, but none of the Hoshidan classes are geared towards tanking, and with her low Strength, she can't really be used as anything but a StoneWall at best. In fact, it's a common theorycrafting challenge to try and figure out how to make Rinkah decent in normal combat without abusing stat boosting items or just making her switch entirely from axes. In order to really work as an axe unit, she needs to S support the Avatar who has Fighter as a secondary class, or A+ rank with Charlotte on ''Revelation''.
* The ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGaiden'' remake ''Echoes: Shadows of Valentia'' buffed up most of the characters, but outdated practices and maps causes a few of them to lag behind.
** The Knight/Baron class (which Forsyth and Lukas promote into) have horrible movement in a game with ridiculously large open field maps, and are often at the mercy of [[VillainTeleportation teleporting Witches]] because of their awful resistance and low speed.
** Compared to her performance in ''Gaiden'', Sonia received a massive nerf to her spell kit. In ''Gaiden'', she did have Seraphim and Sagittae, which did help her justify choosing her over Deen. However, in ''Echoes'', she no longer has them, and instead has Rewarp and Entrap... which are pretty situational at best, and even then her spell list is completely unremarkable compared to Boey's and Mae's. Furthermore, Deen completely blows her out of the water, in particular that he starts out as a prepromoted Myrmidon, which promotes into the insanely useful Dread Fighter. Because of this, most of them tend to ignore her, even if she has a more developed backstory compared to Deen.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses:''
** Classes:
*** The Armored Knight class line is at indisputably its worst performance in the entire series, [[MedalOfDishonor which is morbidly impressive given the class line's already-spotty track record]], and are typically cited as the worst class progression in the game due to the design choices for the maps in combination with the limited movement of the class. Much like ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar,'' the maps are quite big, and because many maps have extra objectives, you need to be quick to complete them, so armored units can’t keep up and often miss combat and experience because of it. To make matters even worse, not only is ''Three Houses'' one of the only ''Fire Emblem'' games to institute a turn limit, they're the series' only entry to keep the classes' base move '''''locked at 4 Move even when promoted'''''. Even other games with Generals being bad at least gave the class +1 Move upon promoting! This already would be enough to consign the class to the bottom barrel of the series, but that's not the end of their issues; they also inflict negative modifiers to the character's speed growth, making it difficult to justify using since the speed stat is one of the [[OneStatToRuleThemAll most crucial stats throughout the entire franchise alongside Move]], governing if a unit is able to attack twice in combat and thus finish off an enemy faster. Ignoring that as well, their Mastered Skills reduce the weight of weapons and shields they equip, which in theory would alleviate their penalty to attack speed and avoid them being doubled, but considering their already abysmal speed in practice, is largely meaningless for them. Units who have proficiency with Armor work better in classes like the Fighter or Brawler class line, since those class options better use characters like Dedue, Hilda, and Raphael’s strengths. The only viable reason one would want to pursue this class line would be to boost a character's defense growth and get the BoringButPractical weapon weight reduction skills.
*** Edelgard's Armored Lord and Emperor are [[DamnedByFaintPraise better than Armored/Fortress Knight]], but considered by far the weakest of the lords' personal classes. Dimitri's High Lord and Great Lord, while vanilla, give a balance of speed, power, and bulk, making it an excellent BoringButPractical option for him. Claude's Wyvern Master and Barbarossa, meanwhile, are effectively the Wyvern Rider and Wyvern Lord class, except with a preference for bows instead of axes, making it an excellent pick. Edelgard's, meanwhile, give her [[StoneWall excellent modifiers to HP and Defense while not penalizing her resistance...]] but also give no boosts to Strength alongside that. As the maps on Crimson Flower are big and often feature unusual terrain, Edelgard's much better off reclassing to Wyvern Rider/Lord, which maintains the strength in axes, but also provides her with actual Speed and mobility on top of a positive Strength modifier, with the Speed increase making up for the drop in Defense. The Emperor's mastery skill, Flickering Flower, is also a letdown, as Edelgard should be taking out opponents in one round. By contrast, the Great Lord's Paraselene allows Dimitri to hit and run while boosting his evasion and getting a powerful hit in; and the Barbarossa's Wind God allows Claude to snipe from as much as five squares away, the combat art's innate hit boost and Claude's excellent Dexterity making up for the accuracy decay. A consolidation prize, they avoid being the absolute dreck of the tier by having +1 Move over the Fortress Knight, which at least acts as it's sole Hail Mary over the Fortress Knight, given it has move comparable to past Armor Knights.
*** Master Class wise, the Great Knight class generally gets avoided because of the impracticality of obtaining, especially compared to the other mounted classes which are much easier to progress in to. Armored classes do not get used often due to their low movement and poor speed, and so many players skip out leveling a character's Armor proficiency, but the requirement to unlock means having high ranks in Axes, Riding, and Armor, the latter two being inherently conflicting proficiencies that few characters can reasonably obtain ranks in, with someone like Ferdinand being one of the few characters to have proficiency in both (and even then, Armor is a hidden talent for him, which requires a fair amount of investment before it converts to a high growth rate). While their effectiveness in prior installments is a matter of debate, they at least had one claim to fame in their complete control of the Weapon Triangle after their reintroduction in ''Sacred Stones'', but that mechanic has been removed from ''Three Houses'', robbing Great Knights of one of their most prominent advantages.
*** Mortal Savant, a Master Class, is not particularly liked either due to a combination of being infantry, being slow, having two requirements that few characters have at the same time (Sword and Reason), and generally being inferior to Dark Knight when it comes to hybrid weapon-and-magic classes. In addition, it's the only one of two Master Classes that requires a high rank in swords, and the other class, Falcon Knight, is locked to females, and as a flier class with high movement and immunity to terrain, it's seen as largely beneficial. Finally, Mortal Savant inflicts a 10 percent penalty to speed growths, which is awful for the fragile sword-based classes that rely on dodging and doubling to kill enemies and survive battles. Only a few characters pull off Mortal Savant well, those being Felix or Ignatz, and even then, they are probably better off in Swordmaster and Assassin respectively. On the other hand, the class has its defenders, who argue that the lower growths are less of a problem than the detractors contend, since the class becomes available at the end of the game, and may translate into one fewer stat point.
*** The Master Class Holy Knight. The class is intended to be an offensive Faith caster with White Tomefaire, but unfortunately Faith magic is almost always inferior to Reason magic offensively due to lower might, and Holy Knight also sacrifices White Magic Uses x2 when compared to Bishop, meaning less healing and supporting spells, and thus it's also inferior as a support class when compared to the class that precedes it. As such, every character that does well as a Holy Knight would rather go Dark Knight or Gremory for better offense, or stay as a Bishop for better support.
*** This game might as well be the lowest point for the Hero class. In this game, the class is not only locked to male characters, but is almost completely outclassed by Swordmaster (only having +2 HP mod, +5% HP Growth, and +1 Luck mod, compared to Swordmaster having +1 Dex mod, +2 Spd mod and +10% Spd growth). Skill-wise, while both have AwesomeButImpractical Mastered Skills (Defiant Strength on Hero vs. Astra on Swordmaster) and both have Swordfaire, Swordmaster has a better second class skill in Sword Critical +10 compared to Hero's Vantage (which is possible to learn earlier by mastering Mercenary, an Intermediate Class in comparison to Hero's Advanced Class, which is much easier to access and train in). Finally, the one point that the Hero class usually has over the Swordmaster class (axe usage as opposed to Swordmaster being sword-only) is moot in this game, since every class can use every physical weapon. End result: the only reason to ever go Hero is if the character doesn't have the sword rank to go Swordmaster, since Hero only requires B-rank compared to Swordmaster's A, if you're just a perfectionist or completionist who wants to master every class, or if your name is Balthus and you're doing an enemy phase build (in which case [[NotCompletelyUseless Hero rides off of the same ranks you need to get Vantage and Wrath and its Defiant Strength mastery skill synergizes very well with them and with Balthus' personal skill]]).
*** Out of the four new classes introduced with the Wave 4 DLC, War Monk/Cleric is by far the most disliked. Its main issue is that it requires levelling up both Brawling and Faith skills to use, when characters who have proficiency in both and the stats to make good use of both are very thin on the ground. The only characters with proficiency in both Brawling and Faith are Balthus and Byleth (after the latter's budding talent in Faith is unlocked), and neither has an impressive enough Faith spell list to make it worth choosing over Grappler. Among the other candidates, the characters with Brawling proficiency generally have low Magic stats and weak spell lists, and the ones with Faith proficiency usually have too low Strength to make much use of gauntlets. It is also subpar as a support class, as unlike Bishop it does not grant White Magic Uses x2 (though it does have two extra points of movement). Where Grappler and Bishop grant the very useful skills Tomebreaker and Renewal respectively upon mastering them, War Monk/Cleric doesn't get either, and the combat art learned by mastering it, the ranged magic-based Pneuma Gale, is inferior to the Grappler's powerful three-hit attack Fierce Iron Fist. War Cleric does give female units access to a gauntlet-using class, as Brawler, Grappler and War Master are all male-only, but aside from Byleth, only Catherine and Constance (with her budding talent unlocked) have a proficiency in Brawling, and due to the former's poor Magic and the latter's poor Strength, it isn't worth it for them. The only saving grace is that the ability gained for mastering this class is Brawl Avo+ 20, which can allow some of the faster War Masters, such as Alois to dodge attacks more efficiently.
** Units:
*** Gilbert, a Fortress Knight who is automatically recruited on the Azure Moon route only. Despite being an absolute beast of a physical tank, he's got all of the drawbacks of the Armored Knight line - that is, low movement meaning he tends to get left behind on the large maps unless the team moves at his pace[[note]]and considering the game's several bonus objectives are time sensitive, it's an impractical notion[[/note]], low speed that ensures that he's always doubled and can never double enemies in return, and being slowed heavily by terrain. Though he's nigh-invulnerable to physical weaponry even if he is attacked twice, mages (fairly common on maps, especially later in the route) will nuke him down quickly. On top of this, he only joins after chapter 12, roughly halfway through the game - with very little development in any skill. He's a ConvenientReplacementCharacter for Dedue if [[spoiler:the bonus objective of his paralogue wasn't completed in Part I, leading to Dedue's death, or for the first few chapters of Azure Moon if it was and Dedue survived,]] but unlike Dedue, who can be classed into the much less slow and higher-movement, but still fairly tanky and hard-hitting Warrior class, Gilbert is already promoted into Fortress Knight upon recruitment, so he's stuck with the low movement and skills that do nothing for him. Even if Dedue ''is'' classed into the Armored Knight line, he'll overshadow Gilbert through better defense, including a personal skill that buffs his defense if Dedue chooses to wait on his turn, higher strength, and much more time to train skills and proficiencies.
*** Ashe is considered the least useful archer, given his marginally useful personal ability and poor ability spread while still having very comparable stat spreads to other archers like Ignatz and Bernadetta. What's even worse is that if you recruit him out of house in the Verdant Wind or Silver Snow route, [[spoiler:he leaves after the time skip and only rejoins if you spare him in Chapter 15]], meaning at this point, even Bernadetta can pass him in stats. His only saving grace is that his Paralogue features the only Shoes of the Wind in-game, an item that increases movement without having to own DLC [[note]]If playing as the Black Eagles, Ashe is required for this, as the other character that can unlock it, Catherine, is unavailable.[[/note]], and his Lockpick skill can open chests and doors without having to use a Chest Key or Door Key, and even that can be rendered moot provided excellent resource management. He does, however, [[NotCompletelyUseless have a niche on Azure Moon and Crimson Flower;]] due to his axe boon or axes being half of his default study plan, he can be easily (Azure Moon) or immediately (Crimson Flower if recruited on Chapter 6 on) reclassed to Brigand (see High Tiers) and set his study plan to bow/authority for the rest of the game, becoming a Sniper with Death Blow at minimal cost, effectively giving the player one more tutoring session for another character.
*** Hanneman. His only saving grace is a good spell list, including access to Meteor, but compared to any other potential Mage in the game, he will be left in the dust. He cannot be recruited until chapter 8, by which time most of the other main Mage candidates have likely surpassed him in terms of their stats and skill list. Furthermore, Hanneman has no particular niche compared to them - Lysithea will always be able to deal far more raw damage and distinguishes herself by learning Dark magic, Dorothea has a far better mixed Reason and Faith magic list alongside further utility from Songstress and will likely be able to use Meteor far more effectively, and Annette can make an excellent Rally bot and utility unit thanks to her Authority proficiency and learning four Rally skills. Hanneman's bases and growths are shaky overall, and in particular, his Speed will be a problem no matter what you do: he has a pathetic base of 9 at level 15, his base Speed growth of 20% is tied with Dedue for the second-lowest in the game, and he can't easily access any class that could improve his growth. He has proficiency in Bows and Riding, but training him in the former is a bad idea due to his poor Strength, and while the latter allows him a relatively easy path to promoting to Dark Knight, the lack of additional spell charges will hurt him (it doesn't help that, being male, he cannot access the Gremory class). His personal skill Crest Scholar has the same effect as Rally Magic, which can give him a little utility for Golden Deer players as they have no units that can learn it, but Hubert and Ingrid can both learn Rally Magic for the Black Eagles and Blue Lions respectively without too much difficulty, and you're better off using them to do it thanks to their far superior stats. Even so, he’s still better than his DistaffCounterpart...
*** Manuela. While Hanneman suffers from having a range of Reason spells that don’t really account for his shortcomings, he has nothing on Manuela. She suffers from a bane in Reason that keeps her from having a good offensive game, and her Faith spells only consist of the standard Heal, Ward, and Silence, with her only relatively unique spell being Warp. Even then, she has a low Magic stat, which means she will be outclassed in spell range by every other magic unit including [[EnsembleDarkhorse Marianne and Lysithea]] who learn Silence and Warp and have better stats. To make matters worse, Manuela is inexplicably incapable of learning Physic... despite being ''the school’s physician''. Doesn’t help that her Paralogue is [[ThatOneLevel one of the hardest in the game]].
*** Caspar. While he is intended to serve as a GlassCannon counterpart to Dedue, Raphael and Alois, he unfortunately suffers from a weakness in Authority which limits his potential with Battalions given that they could have fixed up his defense issues, and even all 3 overshadow him in various ways in spite of their disadvantages: Dedue can effectively serve as a great tank, even after [[spoiler:he arrives late during Azure Moon if the bonus mission for his Paralogue was completed in order to prevent him from suffering a BusCrash]], Raphael who doesn't need [[spoiler:an optional Paralogue that is required if you want a certain character to survive]], and Alois, in spite of being OvershadowedByAwesome by the other Knights of Seiros except Gilbert, can carve a niche for himself by having none of the [[MightyGlacier drawbacks]] Dedue and Raphael have by having a great speed growth (and in the case of a poached Raphael/Caspar, even comes with a C in Authority to use stronger battalions). The only reason to poach Caspar in other routes is if one is willing to unlock his and Mercedes's paralogue, ''The Face Beneath'', and is also aiming to get the [[spoiler:Scythe of Sariel by having Caspar finish the Death Knight off]], which also is a tough task.
*** Lorenz is unusual among the students, in that he has equal growths in Strength and Magic, and with his proficiencies in Lances, Reason and Riding, he is an easy fit for both the Cavalier and Mage class lines and a natural Dark Knight. Unfortunately, all his flexibility really does in practice is make him a MasterOfNone, especially given his rounded growths - none of them are truly bad, but none of them stand out. If you make him a Cavalier, the class' penalties to Speed growth reduces his already shaky 40% growth in the stat to a poor 30%, and leaves him unable to get the most out of Desperation. He's better off as a Mage, but his spell list isn't the best, and while he does have more physical bulk and durability than the game's other potential Mages, his damage output is likely still going to fall behind theirs. It doesn't help that, in the Golden Deers, he has to compete with the much faster and harder-hitting Leonie as a potential Cavalier, or one of the game's best raw damage-dealers in Lysithea as a Mage, and while the house's other mixed fighter Ignatz still has the utility skills to make him workable despite his mediocre damage output, Lorenz doesn't have much to offer on that front either. He can be made better as a Mage with his Crest of Gloucester, as he has Thyrsus to both boost his magic attack range and potentially halve incoming damage... but any mage with a Crest avoids damage from Thyrsus, and Lysithea ''also'' has the matching Crest of Gloucester to potentially halve incoming damage. If recruited out of house, he's even worse; if recruited to the Black Eagles, he has to compete with the much-faster Ferdinand as a Cavalier, and with the faster and harder-hitting Hubert as a magical damage-dealer; if recruited to the Blue Lions, he has to compete with Sylvain (who even has a budding talent in Reason) and Annette. And on the Silver Snow and Azure Moon routes, he has the further issue of [[spoiler: not rejoining until after Chapter 16(one chapter later than Ashe on Verdant Wind and Silver Snow), meaning he misses out on a lot of experience and lessons]]. To further rub it in, if you're playing as a female, you can recruit Sylvain into the Golden Deer as soon as the ''second month,'' meaning Sylvain can outclass Lorenz in his own house. He also carries an axe proficiency, allowing him to easily class into the excellent Brigand (see High Tier) while Lorenz doesn't get this luxury.
*** Despite her status as DLC, Anna is often regarded as the worst character in the game--while most of the above characters have some kind of niche, Anna is a textbook MasterOfNone. Her growths in Strength, Magic, Defense, and HP are all mediocre at best, with her only somewhat high points being Speed and Charm. Her personal skill gives a +5 to Luck, which sounds impressive... until you realize that [[DumpStat Luck is even more useless than it normally is in this game]]. High Charm seems like she's designed to make use of Battalions... except she has a bane in Authority, the skill that lets her make use of Battalions. Some of her spells and gambits are good on paper... but they also key off her most mediocre stats, like Rescue, don't help her kit, like Battalion Vantage, or are just flat-out useless, like Rally Luck. She has a major crest and the ability to enter Trickster fairly easily... but fellow DLC character Yuri is also good in Trickster and has a major crest with the exact same effect, much better stats, a more sensible spell list, a better personal skill, and a relic weapon (in fact, Anna is the ''only'' character whose crest doesn't have an associated relic). And to cap it all off, she has no support conversations whatsoever, depriving her of all the associated gains from it, which includes a massive loss in accuracy and evasion that renders her high Luck even more useless. The only sensible reason to use her is because she's one of the few people that Byleth can receive Faculty Training on Faith magic... and that's only if they're planning to make Byleth a magic user, and even then, Byleth's Faith spell list isn't the best.
[[/folder]]

Regardless of the reasons below, playable units in ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' are generally not created equal, and as a result, trying to balance each game's characters quickly becomes more and more impossible. Some units get more ire in general for both taking away from other unit's viability in how good they are, or are hated likewise for being way too much effort to get rolling compared to other picks. Do keep in mind that tiering doesn't focus on ''if'' a unit can be good, but ''when'' - how much resources would generally be needed to get a unit to a serviceable quality. Given the game's stat caps are designed across the board to ensure ''anyone'' can be good in theory, the measuring stick often thus comes down to how efficient the process is.

[[foldercontrol]]


[[folder:Low Tiers]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Both]]
premier examples of how higher difficulties can completely ''destroy'' a unit's viability. On Easy, and even Normal to an extent, his rather high LightningBruiser-style growths, great availability by Dawn Brigade standards, and Wrath skill enable him to snowball with relatively little effort in the early chapters, likely ending up as one of the Brigade's best units by the end. But on Hard, suddenly EarlyGameHell is a major concern, and Edward is now being starved for XP, lacks the defense of the weapon triangle, and is surrounded by enemies that can usually kill him in two hits and allies who can do his job much better. The resources needed to make Edward good suddenly becomes very tight, and could be much better spent on making already strong units better, especially when even Zihark, who has an infinitely better start than Edward, can still struggle in a number of maps. And while his growths are fairly high, Edward's stats are at a point where even one or two bad levels can usually leave him stuck well behind the curve on Hard. The result is a character who tends to spark a lot of arguments due to his vastly different performances depending on how you play the game.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'':
** Anyone that doesn't have Galeforce. On one hand, they are absolute monsters on enemy phase, given the right amount of investment and skills needed to bulldoze through the entire game. On the other hand, they don't perform as well during the player phase, as most of them are oriented towards heavy retaliation during the enemy phase with a combination of Pavise and Aegis to tank attacks, while using Lifetaker to restore whatever health they might have lost. This becomes more apparent during Apotheosis, in which enemies over there hit so hard that Pavise and Aegis will not even save them from a massive onslaught of damage. As a result, while they can trivialize one part of the game, they suffer in another in which they are unable to provide a good player phase rush. As a result, ''all'' of the first generation fathers, Miriel, Panne, Nowi, Cherche and their children will suffer due to them not being able to provide Galeforce, which is vital on Apotheosis. That being said, they provide ''excellent'' hard support options, as they can access to classes that provide excellent pair-up bonuses, and are capable to perform great damage with Dual Strikes.
** Sorcerers. On the vanilla base game, they're notorious for having VERY {{Stripperific}} outfits in a game that was becoming even more HotterAndSexier, being pretty much unstoppable juggernauts due to the fact that they have decent defense stats compared to Sages, and had access to a good variety of excellent Dark Tomes, such as Nosferatu (Aversa's Night is also a more powerful Nosferatu, but it's rarer than it) to heal back whatever damage they would have taken and it stacks with Sol as well, Ruin is a more potent version of Wilderwind, Waste is a more available and powerful version of Celica's Gale, and Mire is the only 3-10 tome in the game, though it comes at the cost of being unable to double enemy units. On Apotheosis, however, their weaknesses, which were normally ignored in the vanilla game, become much more apparent over there: Their low skill means that outside of Ruin, they won't be able to crit much and they're more likely to miss when combined with the poor hit rates of unforged Dark Tomes, and Nosferatu doesn't matter much when your magic isn't dealing enough damage in one hit, and Mire, perhaps outside of Aversa and potentially her child Morgan due to them wielding Shadowgift, isn't that useful due to their inability to double as explained earlier. Long story short, while they absolutely destroy the vanilla are stronger and experience gains are lower, and all the experience and resources needed to make him workable could be better spent on making the actual gamebreakers gamebreakers. On many of the Tier Lists on Serenes Forest, the bottom tier is named Donnel after him. However, Donnel's abilities as a parent make him worth recruiting in the first place. For some reason, he passes down to any children he has to reclass into [[JackOfAllStats Mercenaries]] and any daughters he has the ability to reclass into Pegasus Knights. Mercenaries are not only a useful class in terms of stats, but they get the Armsthrift skill from Level 1, which makes weapons degrade much slower, and also synergises with Donny's high luck stat. Pegasus Knights, meanwhile, have the ability to upgrade into Dark Fliers. When they get to level 15, they get the [[GameBreaker Galeforce]] skill, which lets them move again after killing an enemy. He can also pass down his Aptitude skill, which increases stat growths by a lot [[note]]20%[[/note]], as well as useful skills like [[AttackReflector Counter]] and [[StatusBuff Rally Strength]] that a female character wouldn't be able to get otherwise. Pair him up with [[{{Yandere}} Tharja]], and you can have a Noire with extremely high stats that can move and attack twice per turn, with a Nosferatu tome that lasts essentially forever, and [[LifeDrain gains health back after every hit]].
** Owain is an odd example, in that he's either a good magical unit, or a terrible physical unit, all thanks to his mothers influence. Due to Lissa being a magic focused unit, Owain's bases and growths are skewed towards magic despite starting as a Myrmidon, on account of how the second gen units have their stats influence by their parents. If his father is overly focused on physical stats, Owain ends up a MasterOfNone due to his parents growths and stats causing each to drastically weaken each other, leaving him with low overall growths across the board. If he has a magical focused father, he has more advantages because of the doubling down of magical parents, but becomes limited in classes because he won't get a lot of new classes due to the overlap a number of the magical units have. So if you want Owain to be a physical unit, he's not very good unit, but gets access to a number of options, while a magically focused Owain benefits the most stat wise, but he is significantly more limited in skills and classes. The only way to get around this is the Avatar, but that would mean a magically focused Avatar.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'' has some rather unique examples. In general, most units wind up better on different routes compared to ''Revelation'' (where they are all available) owing to different availability, join times, and their niches not being occupied by [[GameBreaker game-breaking royals]].
** Kaze and Silas are some good examples of this. They both join regardless of your choice, and are a ninja and cavalier respectively.
*** In ''Conquest'', Silas is perfectly usable when you get him, but down the road will compete with Xander for a spot on the team, and will also eventually compete with Peri and eventually Gunter. In ''Birthright'', however, he is the only cavalier you get besides Sophie (his daughter), and is one of the few units who can use two weapon types before promotion. On top of that, Silas and Sophie will have access to the entire weapon triangle if promoted to a Great Knight and get some nice defence boosts on top of that, the Hoshidan classes are somewhat squishy and more based around evasion. In ''Revelation'', Silas joins much later than he did on either route (albeit buffed) ''and'' will still have to compete with Xander — and ''seven'' other royals.
*** Kaze, in ''Birthright'' and ''Revelation'', is one of ''four'' (including Asugi) ninjas. Down the line, it is difficult for him to see use as he is competing with Kagero, Saizo, and Asugi. In addition, it's possible for him to [[spoiler:''die'' if he doesn't have an A support with the Avatar]] in ''Birthright''. However in ''Conquest'', he is the only ninja you get, which doesn't give him any competition for his niche aside from the butlers & maids (whose stats are more balanced for healers than fighters anyway). He does have an earlier join time than the other ninjas in ''Birthright'' and ''Revelation'', but the others don't join much later than he does and it wouldn't be hard to bench him.
** Rinkah is unique in that she faces this ''within her own route'' instead of just on ''Revelation''. Her niche is the answer to the axe-fighter class that is locked to Nohr, and is for all intents and purposes the ''only'' axe-user you have until you promote your units in ''Birthright'' (whereas ''Conquest'' gives you two). Unlike them, however, Rinkah's base strength and health are actually pretty low, and her growths don't fix it. Some bench her because of that, but at the same time, her defence is pretty good for someone of her niche as well, and her pair-up bonuses provide good strength and defense in the badly bulk-starved ''Birthright'' route. Whether or not she is usable depends strongly on who you are asking, and even then it might depend on some using her for the novelty. (Short of reclassing units, she is the ''only'' way you can get a playable Blacksmith or Oni Chieftain.)
** Hinoka, in ''Birthright'', can go either way once she is recruited. Almost all of her growths hang around the 50% mark (the exceptions being Magic at 15% and Defense at 35%; everything else is 45%-60%), meaning it's basically a coin-flip whether or not the stat will get raised. If RNG blesses you with steady and generous growths in Hinoka's main stats of Strength, Skill, and Speed, and ''especially'' Luck, she becomes a LightningBruiser capable of doubling anyone and everyone she comes up against, and with certain DLC abilities like Aether, she can waltz around the map, annihilating armies in one or two hits, dodging almost everything, and self-healing in the event that she does get the short end of the stick. However, on the flip side, if the RNG does NOT go in Hinoka's favor, she becomes more and more of a liability as her stats lag behind better characters. In short, whether or not Hinoka turns into a goddess of death or another permanent fixture of your reserve list depends heavily on whether or not RNG fires on level-up. The same could be said of her in ''Revelation'' as well, but she comes late in the route, meaning if the player wanted to get her up to that level, it would take a lot of grinding to boost her stats and get the abilities necessary to bring her up to speed with the roster at that point in the game.
** For a ''class example'' of this, there's Kinshi Knight. On the one hand, it's loathed as a class to level up characters in, as its growth rate additions are mediocre to bad and don't really help any of the characters who can use it. On the other, it's loved as a final class once everyone is mostly done growing, as being a flying class gives it excellent mobility, and bow/yumi access combined with its Air Superiority skill makes it a great AntiAir unit.
* Because of how the way the game works, much like ''Awakening'', ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemGaiden Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia]]'' has certain examples that are great in the main game, especially in a [[{{Speedrun}} Blitzkrieg]] run, but struggle during [[BrutalBonusLevel Thabes Labyrinth]] where Blitzkrieg isn't relevant. Note that DLC is not counted for this one, because most of them can turn even the lower-tiered units into crazy juggernauts.
** Clive in particular has low stats and terrible growths, and doesn't even make an effective meat shield. He has a lot of competition when it comes to being a mounted Cavalier/Paladin/Gold Knight; namely Mathilda (who doesn't come much later than him, and has a decent resistance to magic, something that is very rare for the game) and Zeke (joins much later but has viable enough base stats). He did eventually receive a warmer reception over time, however, if ''only'' because that early on, the only Lance user that isn't him is Lukas, who is an [[MightyGlacier Armor Knight]] with some of the disadvantages and the fact that it takes some time to even have some of the villagers to catch up to his bases, along with being the sole user of [[AntiCavalry Ridersbane]] due to the former issues, but pretty much takes a massive nosedive during the post-game, where level-grinding without having to worry about Blitzkrieg's turn limit requirement exists, and can fall off as a result.
** Atlas also has the quirk of his highest stat being Attack... [[CripplingOverspecialization and everything else being painfully awful]]. He ends up being a strong Archer for that reason, but he has to compete with [[JackOfAllStats Leon]], who normally isn't as squishy, and isn't as slowed down by heavier weapons. The other promotion options for Atlas (Cavalier and Mercenary) aren't recommended since he has no durability, and Celica's party has more than enough mercenaries on her team, hurting Atlas' potential even more. As a result, it's often debated whether it's worth it to train a howitzer that can hit only hit potentially once, or just downright bench him, even in the post-game.
** Luthier is mostly intended to act as Alm's magic user if none of the Villagers were promoted into a Mage, and because Kliff's spell list is nerfed due to him learning his most powerful spells later on, along with Delthea being hard to train up, he can become a mainstay of Alm's army. Post-game, however, since grinding is now possible without consequences, he has to deal with a potentially well-trained Delthea- and ''several other mages'' due to both Celica's and Alm's parties being combined together, along with somewhat awkward growths.
** The two MagikarpPower units aside from Est, namely Delthea and Jesse, aren't really great in the main game due to them joining late and in a game that encourges fast play and low turn counts. While they have good growths, their low bases and level make it hard for them to even promote once. On the post-game, however, they do receive a chance to level grind, but even then there are some risk associated with them: Delthea's [[GlassCannon growths]] can make her even casting a single spell potentially fatal for her, as her low HP base and growth, combined with the daunting HP requirement needed for her most powerful spells, will most likely necessitate a healer on duty, and while she has a good speed growth to avoid getting doubled, there's also the fact that she has to compete with several other mages as well. Meanwhile, Jesse can perform the infinite Dread Fighter loop, but he will have to contend with several other mercenaries in Celica's team. Even Atlas, while starting somewhat underpowered at first, can somewhat become potentially better than him due to his earlier joining time compared to him. He also learns Excalibur earlier compared to other units... But various other mages who join earlier than him have the time to learn it as well. As a result, these can be quite the debates on whether to take them to Thabes Labyrinth or not.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses:''
** Units:
*** Alois is a decent and respectful unit in all routes, but you don't get him until the middle of the game, so you have less time to train his weapon ranks, and has a huge case of OvershadowedByAwesome in two of the routes, first due to you getting Catherine, a LightningBruiser who fulfills a similar offensive role to Alois, but who has a Crest that allows her to use her signature weapon, Thunderbrand, a more powerful Brave Sword, and second because of Cyril, who's proficient in axes and flying, making him a very good candidate for the Wyvern Lord class, which, due to its high movement, immunity to terrain, and good stat spread, is considered one of the best classes in the game, and whose low base stats are offset by the fact that he has the personal skill Aptitude, which raises all of his growth rates, and there's always the option of waiting until he has better bases so you can recruit him. Both are available at least four chapters before Alois. That's not mentioning Seteth, who is a very good Wyvern Ri

axe use, and high attacking power helping him to stand out a fair bit from Lyn and Eliwood, as well as his Wolf Beil's much higher Might making it far more effective than the Rapier or Mani Katti. As the meta has focused more on speed, though, his reputation has declined considerably due to him being footlocked and his promotion actually being a ''[[PowerupLetdown downgrade]]'' for some, due to making him almost impossible to carry. This creates a large chunk of the game where he's pretty mediocre. That said, he's still generally considered the best of the ''Blazing Blade'' lords by far, and definitely the most idiot-proof due to being the only one with a strong early game.
** Geitz is an odd case in that, going in a vacuum, he's indisputedly a pretty good unit, with a decent class in Warrior, high weapon ranks, rather good stats, and even above-average growths by prepromote standards. What puts him in here is his recruitment requirements: to reach his chapter requires that Lyn, Eliwood, and Hector have a combined level of ''50'' or more. While Hector is relatively easy to raise on any difficulty, the hardest difficulty includes a significant cut to both XP ''and'' deployment slots. This makes it very difficult to find space for both Lyn and Eliwood and get both of them to double-digit levels in time for Geitz's joining chapter, on the mode where you would want a character like him the most. This results in him being very difficult to place, because getting a good unit essentially requires you to raise two mediocre units. While he is undeniably better than Wallace, detractors argue that Geitz is hardly what you'd call a GameBreaker, anything he helps you with doesn't really compare to the roadblock of raising Lyn and Eliwood, and while Wallace may be weak, it's much easier to bench all three of them than it is to train Lyn and Eliwood just for the sake of using Geitz.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'':
** Ross, like Ewan and Amelia before him, is a trainee unit and suffers from most of the same weaknesses: very bad base stats, growths on the low side reducing his theoretically high potential, and a weak initial performance next to the enemies he faces. However, he also joins far earlier than either of them, in Chapter 2 as opposed to Chapter 9 or 12, making the gap between him and the rest of the cast much smaller and giving him much more room to dig out of his hole. He also has the odd advantage of being the first possible character who can access water-walking when promoted to Pirate, enabling him to negotiate obstacles that'd otherwise be restricted to Vanessa. This causes many players to consider Ross very good, as he can catch up to or surpass his allies quickly enough and has a few genuine utilities (to the point that he's seen use in [[{{Speedrun}} low-turncount]] or even [[LowLevelRun 0% Growths]] runs), while others find his early-game performance pathetic, his mid-to-lategame performance underwhelming, and his niche too situational.
** Knoll was despised for a long time, due to generally being considered far the worst combat unit in the entire cast. His focus on Dark magic gives him little in the way of benefits, as the majority of Dark tomes have been nerfed into uselessness with colossal weight and bad accuracy, with even the legendary Gleipnir missing the effectiveness of its fellow Sacred Twins while also weighing a ton. He also has some of the worst durability in the game, with 2 Defense meaning he can't take a hit and his ''0'' Luck meaning he faces crit from every single enemy. Compared to Bishops with Slayer or strong Anima-users like Saleh and Lute, he seems utterly outclassed. However, Knoll is also the character who most easily accesses the [[MinionMaster Summoner]] class, able to promote instantly into it with no prior training, and said class provides him with a ''ton'' of extra utility, most notably being able to bait enemy attacks with low-health Phantoms or attack at very long ranges, along with giving him staves to act as a healer, all while never having to face an enemy attack. This has caused many players to reevaluate him as a support unit, with many even claiming that his main problem is simply his availability.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'':
** Ike was perceived for a long time as a GameBreaker, due to his very high growths, good affinity, excellent promotion bonuses, access to Aether, and strong personal weapons, not to mention his status as the game's Lord ensuring that most players made a lot of use of him. As the meta evolved, though, more experienced players discovered Ike's flaws: he is extremely growth-dependent due to his lackluster bases, he is locked to swords in a game that is ''very'' lance-and-range-heavy, he's stuck on foot in a game where mounts are extremely powerful, and his actual promotion time isn't far away from Roy's (end of what's effectively chapter 20, though you at least appreciate it for longer). While Ragnell and Aether are very useful, one is available for only two maps and the other tends to be overkill against the rather weak enemies. This has led to Ike declining significantly in the tiers; though he's still a solid fighter and a very long way from the worst Lord, he's not the god-unit he was once regarded as.
** Shinon starts as a pre-promoted Sniper with bases high enough to one-round most early enemies and even more killing potential in crits from his Killer Bow, and being unable to counter at 1 range combined with his Provoke skill and being very tanky for a bow-user makes him an excellent lure, giving him amazing early-game utility. But then he leaves in Chapter 7 and doesn't rejoin until Chapter 18, via a very convoluted method (the above-mentioned Rolf needs to talk to him, then Ike has to ''defeat him in battle'', something the game [[GuideDangIt never hints at]] and [[ViolationOfCommonSense usually permanently kills recruitable enemies]]). Your reward for managing to get him back? His bases are now ''awful'' for his level and join-time, his incredible growths don't do much to make up for it and Snipers are only good for chip damage on bosses at best. Overall the only reason Shinon ranks higher than Rolf on tier lists is his early-game utility, after he rejoins, he's only considered marginally better than Rolf ''at best''.
** Stefan is very popular with the fanbase for his unique and cool backstory and GuideDangIt recruitment, but he nonetheless suffers from all the problems this game has with Myrmidons and Swordmasters mentioned above. It can't be denied, however, that his base stats and weapon ranks are still incredibly good for his level and join-time, making him more of a CrutchCharacter who happens to join mid-game instead of early-game.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'':
** Gatrie has all the side-effects of being a General, such being being weak against AntiArmor and having low movement, in spite of having some [[CasanovaWannabe interesting characterization]]. On the other hand, however, he has a whopping ''60%'' speed growth, which is about the same as his defense and strength growth, and he comes in with amazing bases too, along with good weapon ranks in both Lances and Axes, and that's not even counting {{Old Save Bonus}}es. This means that he's a surprisingly good endgame pick, though his low movement is something to consider.
** Edward is one of the premier examples of how higher difficulties can completely ''destroy'' a unit's viability. On Easy, and even Normal to an extent, his rather high LightningBruiser-style growths, great availability by Dawn Brigade standards, and Wrath skill enable him to snowball with relatively little effort in the early chapters, likely ending up as one of the Brigade's best units by the end. But on Hard, suddenly EarlyGameHell is a major concern, and Edward is now being starved for XP, lacks the defense of the weapon triangle, and is surrounded by enemies that can usually kill him in two hits and allies who can do his job much better. The resources needed to make Edward good suddenly becomes very tight, and could be much better spent on making already strong units better, especially when even Zihark, who has an infinitely better start than Edward, can still struggle in a number of maps. And while his growths are fairly high, Edward's stats are at a point where even one or two bad levels can usually leave him stuck well behind the curve on Hard. The result is a character who tends to spark a lot of arguments due to his vastly different performances depending on how you play the game.

** Sorcerers. On the vanilla base game, they're notorious for having VERY {{Stripperific}} outfits in a game that was becoming even more HotterAndSexier, being pretty much unstoppable juggernauts due to the fact that they have decent defense stats compared to Sages, and had access to a good variety of excellent Dark Tomes, such as Nosferatu (Aversa's Night is also a more powerful Nosferatu, but it's rarer than it) to heal back whatever damage they would have taken and it stacks with Sol as well, Ruin is a more potent version of Wilderwind, Waste is a more available and powerful version of Celica's Gale, and Mire is the only 3-10 tome in the game, though it comes at the cost of being unable to double enemy units. On Apotheosis, however, their weaknesses, which were normally ignored in the vanilla game, become much more apparent over there: Their low skill means that outside of Ruin, they won't be able to crit much and they're more likely to miss when combined with the poor hit rates of unforged Dark Tomes, and Nosferatu doesn't matter much when your magic isn't dealing enough damage in one hit, and Mire, perhaps outside of Aversa and potentially her child Morgan due to them wielding Shadowgift, isn't that useful due to their inability to double as explained earlier. Long story short, while they absolutely destroy the vanilla game, in Apotheosis, while not exactly that impractical, is instead more of a question of if it's worth it to use.
** Donnel is intended to be a case of MagikarpPower; he joins in the terrible Villager class with pitifully low base stats, but his growths are among the best in the game. However, this is offset by lackluster personal stat caps, the lowest amount of class sets in the game, weapon rank issues, requiring a Second Seal to get out of the Villager class, and that ''everyone'' can level up '''infinitely''', meaning high growths with low base stats and a bad class set aren't that useful if you're playing for tiers. Difficulty is also a factor here, as getting him out of Villager is incredibly hard on the higher difficulty levels where enemies are stronger and experience gains are lower, and all the experience and resources needed to make him workable could be better spent on making the actual gamebreakers gamebreakers. On many of the Tier Lists on Serenes Forest, the bottom tier is named Donnel after him. However, Donnel's abilities as a parent make him worth recruiting in the first place. For some reason, he passes down to any children he has to reclass into [[JackOfAllStats Mercenaries]] and any daughters he has the ability to reclass into Pegasus Knights. Mercenaries are not only a useful class in terms of stats, but they get the Armsthrift skill from Level 1, which makes weapons degrade much slower, and also synergises with Donny's high luck stat. Pegasus Knights, meanwhile, have the ability to upgrade into Dark Fliers. When they get to level 15, they get the [[GameBreaker Galeforce]] skill, which lets them move again after killing an enemy. He can also pass down his Aptitude skill, which increases stat growths by a lot [[note]]20%[[/note]], as well as useful skills like [[AttackReflector Counter]] and [[StatusBuff Rally Strength]] that a female character wouldn't be able to get otherwise. Pair him up with [[{{Yandere}} Tharja]], and you can have a Noire with extremely high stats that can move and attack twice per turn, with a Nosferatu tome that lasts essentially forever, and [[LifeDrain gains health back after every hit]].

*** Alois is a decent and respectful unit in all routes, but you don't get him until the middle of the game, so you have less time to train his weapon ranks, and has a huge case of OvershadowedByAwesome in two of the routes, first due to you getting Catherine, a LightningBruiser who fulfills a similar offensive role to Alois, but who has a Crest that allows her to use her signature weapon, Thunderbrand, a more powerful Brave Sword, and second because of Cyril, who's proficient in axes and flying, making him a very good candidate for the Wyvern Lord class, which, due to its high movement, immunity to terrain, and good stat spread, is considered one of the best classes in the game, and whose low base stats are offset by the fact that he has the personal skill Aptitude, which raises all of his growth rates, and there's always the option of waiting until he has better bases so you can recruit him. Both are available at least four chapters before Alois. That's not mentioning Seteth, who is a very good Wyvern Rider that joins only a chapter later. If the Black Eagles were chosen at the beginning of the game, however, [[spoiler:Cyril and Catherine can't be recruited, and if the player sides with Edelgard instead of the Church of Seiros, Seteth won't join,]] which means Alois has a much easier time fulfilling a niche on your team, as he only has to compete against Caspar (and Raphael if he's recruited) as your axe/gauntlet user and does a very good job within that niche. [[spoiler:He also has more viability on the Silver Snow route than the Verdant Wind and Azure Moon routes, since Catherine and Cyril join a chapter after he does, though the other factors are still at play.]]
*** How much training Flayn pays off is debated. On one hand, she has a Crest that boosts the amount of healing she does half the time. She's one of the only units to learn Rescue, which can teleport an ally out of a dangerous situation[[note]]The others are Anna and Constance (both paid DLC) and Bernadetta (a physical character who wants nothing to do with magic)[[/note]], the valuable Restore spell that cures status ailments, and she's one of only two units in the game[[note]]The other is Mercedes[[/note]] who learn the area of effect heal Fortify spell, all of which make her a very good healer. Her high resistance makes her an effective tank against magical damage, and if her Reason is trained, she will eventually unlock Seal Magic, weakening enemy mages if she attacks them. Unfortunately, she also lacks Physic, meaning her only form of ranged healing is to waste a Fortify charge, meaning that to heal, she has to go into the fray. Her fairly low speed means that she's doubled and easily killed by physical-attacking enemies while being unlikely to double anything herself, making her struggle to kill even low-resistance enemies. Her low speed and low luck make her unlikely to dodge an attack and increases her vulnerability to critical hits, while her low defense means she can not take any hits; even Nosferatu tanking is risky, since she'll usually take more damage than she recovers. She's great Gremory material at the very least, since her budding talent is in Reason. Her only weakness is riding, which means it's difficult to get her into Dark or Holy Knight.
*** Ignatz has balanced but low growths in both Strength and Magic, limiting his damage potential, even with his high Speed and Luck giving him good double chances and critical rates, respectively. Even compared to other hybrid attackers, such as Byleth, Ignatz will never be able to match them in terms of raw damage, to say nothing of dedicated attackers such as Felix or Lysithea. However, as a utility unit, he shines, especially on Maddening. Ignatz learns Rally Speed at D Authority [[note]]Ignatz not only already starts with E+ Authority but also has a boon in the stat[[/note]], which can save an ally from being doubled; he also learns Break Shot at C+ Bows [[note]]Ignatz has both a bow boon and starts at D Bows[[/note]] and Seal Strength through his Reason budding talent, allowing him to cripple any opponent he hits, leaving them easy pickings for a teammate. He can even retain utility even into the endgame, as he leans into Assassin (whose class skill prevents enemies from targetting him so long as an ally is also in range) easily, and learns Rally Strength and Ward Arrow.
*** Cyril, like Donnel and Mozu, is intended to be a case of MagikarpPower, coming in as a level 1 Commoner in Chapter 5 with low bases, but having good growths to make up for it. Unlike them, he's largely considered better than bottom-tier, but it's still debated whether his risk-to-reward ratio is good enough to make training him up worth it. His personal skill Aptitude boosts all of his growths by 20%, which sounds good, but the problem is that his base growths are not particularly good, and when Aptitude is applied, they are only just barely higher than those of your students. In particular, his Defence growth is pretty low for someone built to be a frontline physical attacker. One thing Cyril does have going for him, however, is flexibility: he has proficiency in five skills, including both Riding and Flying as well as Axes, Lances and Bows, and because of this he can easily be classed as a or example, Leonie will have nearly the same growths as him as a Bow Knight, but have the advantage of joining four chapters earlier with more time to work on her skills and abilities). Nevertheless, if he is trained up, Cyril will more than likely still become an excellent damage-dealer with high mobility - it's just a question of whether the player is willing to invest the necessary resources. He is also much harder to use on Silver Snow, as since he joins only [[spoiler:if Byleth didn't side with Edelgard in Chapter 11]], and due to scaling from only commoner growths, he tends to have low stats by the time he joins unless Byleth has saved enough stat-boosting items for him to use.
*** Ferdinand. When recruited out of the Black Eagles, he's considered the hardest student to recruit without help from a NewGamePlus due to his Heavy Armor requirement and being unable to B-support until after the timeskip. However, once recruited, likely late into the academy phase, Ferdinand tends to have [[LightningBruiser Speed and Defense in the high teens and Strength in the low twenties]], allowing him to keep up with the rest of the team in terms of raw stats. While this essentially forces him to stay in the Cavalier/Paladin line without focusing exclusively on another skill, [[note]]Ferdinand's default study plan is lances and axes, causing him to exclusively gain experience in those areas in the monastery[[/note]] his bases allow him to retain at least some usability, and if he learns Swift Strikes, he can quickly become a mainstay of the party. This is [[AvertedTrope averted]] if the player chooses the Black Eagle house, however. On the Crimson Flower route, he underwent a similar situation with Ike. Prior to Jeritza being PromotedToPlayable in the expansion pass' 3rd wave, he was considered to be one of the best horse-mounted units in the Crimson Flower route due to a combination of good speed and strength growths, along with having access to Swift Strikes. When Jeritza was made playable in the 3rd wave of DLC ''for free'', however, players discovered that Jeritza practically does everything Ferdinand did but even better, being helped by the fact that he doesn't even really need to rely on his personal skill for optimal performance. While Ferdinand is late into the game, she learns Meteor, allowing her to attack from a long distance, or at least contribute to linked attacks. Additionally, her sword boon and high charm stat make her a good pick for the dancer. However, Dorothea also has somewhat low growth rates, including some of the lowest Strength and Defense stats in the game. [[note]]Even within her native Black Eagle house, fellow SquishyWizard Linhardt has 30% each in Strength and Defense, versus Dorothea's 20% and 15%, respectively.[[/note]] While she can make a good dancer and is basically guaranteed to win the White Heron Cup, her bane in riding means she will struggle to get Movement+1, which means she may be unable to keep up with the rest of the army, especially with the focus on mounted/flying units.
*** Ingrid. She has some of the highest base stats in the game and the highest growth rate total amongst the non-lord characters, she has no weaknesses in any skill area, allowing for her to fit into most classes without difficulty; and through her Crest of Daphnel, she can use the Burning Quake combat art, which scales off her excellent Speed stat. The problem? While Ingrid's growth rate total is high, her Strength is just 35% before class modifiers, meaning she runs a real chance of falling behind if the growth fails. She's also both a beneficiary and victim of auto-leveling; as Ingrid becomes a Pegasus Knight by default, if recruited late into the academy phase, all of her core stats [[LightningBruiser will be in the mid-teens at the lowest and low twenties at the highest]], just like the aforementioned Ferdinand. [[note]] enemy growth rates are used for auto-leveling, and the enemy Pegasus Knight has some utterly insane growths, including +15% Strength and +25% Defense/Resistance.[[/note]] However, this will effectively lock Ingrid into the Pegasus/Falcon Knight line and deprive her of a solid advanced class. If the player chooses the Blue Lions or recruits Ingrid early, they will be able to utilize her class flexibility to its fullest, but also run the risk of being Strength-screwed.
*** Annette. On one hand, she has the crest of Dominic which has a chance of preserving spells, which is useful for utility spells such as Heal and Recover and offense spells. On the other hand, that isn't significant in later phases of the game due to spells eventually having uses equal to the amount of weapon durability. That, and while she has all of the wind spells, including Excalibur, other mages in the game can outright outperform her such as Linhardt, who happens to also possess the highly useful warp and Flayn, for the reasons mentioned above. That

Shipping-related reasons]] and gameplay reasons. Defenders of Lewyn/Erinys pairings not only claim that this not only allows both Fee and Ced to overclock their speed stats (Fee can have an 75% speed growth, further augmenting her FragileSpeedster stats, while Ced gains an '''''105%''''' speed growth, ensuring that he gains speed every time he levels) and Ced can inherit Forseti to basically become nigh-unhittable, as the game is unable to register his increased speed stat while wielding Forseti, it ''causes his stats to overflow'', but also because that ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776 Thracia 776]]'' canonized it [[labelnote:How?]]Upon looking at his inventory, if one looks at the description of Forseti, it has a star symbol on it. This means that it is a personal weapon, and since only Ced can wield it, this means that Lewyn married Erinys, who is the mother of Fee and Ced[[/labelnote]]. On the other side, those opposed to the pairings claim that it's an overrated pairing, since they can do fine without Lewyn marrying Erinys, and that since Ced is an footlocked unit like Lewyn and Jamke, he's likely to slow down a playthrough if players keep relying of the Lewyn/Erinys pairing. Thankfully, while Erinys ''does'' have other Gen 1 units she can pair with, Lewyn is the most talked about pairing due to it both being infamously broken and the fact that it's basically canon, which does frustrate some people who go for fast playthroughs.
** The substitute children of Sylvia and Tailtiu isn't not just a debated topic, but also a moral dilemma for them. On one hand, Laylea, Charlot, and Linda have better skills than Lene, Coirpre, and Tine, with Laylea possessing Charm, allowing both additional hit and evasion with adjacent units and even gets the Barrier Sword if visiting a certain village in Chapter 7, along actually having a great Strength growth, when combined with her speed, can fend herself in the event that she gets into a fight with another (though her physical defense is [[GlassCannon underwhelming to compensate]]), while Charlot has the Paragon skill to rapidly level up, which is a good thing for those focusing on the Tactics and Combat rankings, and even gets the only Berserk Staff in the game, and Linda has the Paragon skill to level up fast along with having the Wrath skill, and even can actually use Elthunder early unlike Tine. However, there are drawbacks against using them; namely, Laylea will have to buy the Knight to use them while Lene can get it as a inheritance from her mother, while the Berserk staff is both situational and requires a bit of luck to pull off one of the more insane feats, such as having a Loptous Priest reducing the FinalBoss' HPToOne, with Linda being agreed to being the only superior unit towards Tine (and even then, she doesn't promote into a Mage Knight). It also involves losing Arthur for Amid, when Arthur is better than Amid in almost every respect, regardless of which of his main fathers is chosen. Whether it is worth it leaving both Silvia and Tailtiu without children for the substitute children is of debate, but both sides agree that this will alleviate some of the drama both Silvia and ''especially'' Tailtiu go on later in the game.
** Not that they're the only second-gen characters that have mixed opinions on them. Brigid is praised for her extensive character arc along with her children, and Brigid is a prepromoted Sniper, but she, along with her son Febail, nonetheless suffer from the fact that both of them are footlocked bow-users like Jamke. That said, they do come with Yewfelle, which is pretty powerful to compensate for its poor accuracy, and exclusive to them due to their Major Ulir holy blood, and it grants them +10 Strength and +20 Speed to boot, and their joining situations happen to be where amounts of damage, and are usually seen as one of the generation´s major stumbling blocks) can kill him with little effort. In the end, he is often about as useful as his cousins, Ayra´s children, who lack holy weapons, but have better stats uch every regular combat unit you have should be able to one-round enemies reliably. Even after training him up, he doesn't do much that others can't, with Osian, Halvan, Fergus, Asvel, and many others boasting similarly massive crit rates and backing them up with actual combat experience and/or and personal weapons. This is also accentuated by his weapon ranks, with only an E in Swords to start with (the same as a dismounted Lance Knight) and only a D in Lances, heavily limiting what should be a diverse weapon selection. Encapsulating this issue perfectly is his Paragon Sword, which is an excellent weapon and is given to him by the plot--but while it's very much designed for him, ''any'' character who can use E-rank swords can wield it too. This creates the debate over whether to let him keep his sword and blossom properly, or bench him and pass it around to whoever needs it.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'':
** Gonzales has buckets of HP, massive Strength, great Speed, the ridiculous +30 to crit given to Berserkers in this game, an extremely low level on one route and a promotion-ready level on another, HardModePerks... and painfully awful Skill, in perhaps the unkindest entry in the series to low-Skill units, particularly axe-users like Gonzales considering the low accuracy of axes in this game. Gonzales comes in with a base Skill of 5 ([[HardModePerks 8 on Hard Mode]]) and a growth of 15%, in the middle of a series of chapters with a dearth of lance-wielders. Even when promoted as soon as possible for +5 Skill and fed as many Skill-boosting Secret Books as you can find, in a game where both Hero Crests and skillboosters are at a premium, he still tends to range around 60% displayed hit. He also has an absurdly high Constitution, which, when coupled with high Speed, means he doubles a lot with axes (meaning he can actually hit somewhat more reliably than the slower and lower-Con Geese, who is supposed to be the more accurate one)... but upon promotion, his Constitution is 16; literally the only promoted mounted unit in the game who can carry him is Shin, which means getting Gonzales to the frontlines can turn into a chore. He is the hardest-hitting unit in the game by far, but when his hit rates are a coin toss, this can be a difficult gamble, especially when any swordsman will take him apart.
** Cecilia comes in as a pre-promoted Valkyrie and has a great weapon rank in anima magic and staves, including being able to wield Aircalibur at base (good!) and even has a better magic stat than Clarine if trained (also good!). However, she is also recruited in a ''frigging desert map'' and will suffer a movement penalty as a result for that chapter (not so good!), and she'll pretty much always suffer from slightly bad stats, especially when Clarine is far faster (also not good!). She's pretty effective as a support unit outside of that one map, especially since she needs very little investment to do her job, but her terrible first impression tends to get her benched a lot.
** Fir is a very popular character for her cute design, interesting supports, and prominence in ''Heroes'', and is a Myrmidon, the game's best foot combat class for its superb accuracy and insane 30% critical boost on promotion. She receives HardModePerks which, like most ''[=FE6=]'' perks, are fairly insane, to the point that she basically starts with the level 4 stats of Rutger, considered one of the game's top three units, at level 1. But she also starts with Rutger's level 4 stats at level 1, and joins five chapters after he did, at which point Rutger is either promoted or getting close to it. The map she joins on is laden with axe-users that she can hold her own surprisingly well against, but this means slowing yourself down a lot to bring her up to par. Worse, her utility becomes questionable when Rutger's main strong point is that he can take on bosses, and you don't exactly need two characters for that purpose, especially when Hero Crests are in very short supply. Fir does slightly surpass Rutger, but she does so at a time when he's beginning to lose a little of his luster, and many question pouring resources into her when she doesn't decisively beat him.
** Lilina was regarded as one of the game's most broken units for a long time, and it all came down to one thing: her 75% Magic growth. This means that when fully leveled, she will almost always slam right into the Magic cap, being one of the only units in the game who can do so without statboosters. She also has the game's fastest-building support with Roy, meaning you can get a C-support just for one turn of hanging out, and even B and A aren't uncommon, boosting up her offense even further, and as an Anima user, she has the near-broken 90% accurate Fire tome to effectively cancel out her somewhat poor Skill. But all that is countered by the fact that she shows up at level 1 in Chapter 8. This pretty much mandates spending all of [=8x=] babying her up, when [[GlassCannon her durability is nonexistent]] and will probably never get much better, because as a growth unit, she suffers from the fact that Magic and Luck are her ''[[CripplingOverspecialization only]]'' good growths. While she can hit hard on single blows, she's hamstrung by the fact that she almost never doubles due to her lackluster Speed, so even in damage, the thing she's meant to be best at, she can be outdone by Lugh, who has better Speed and shows up a lot earlier. And while you can just use both, this means that Guiding Ring competition, which is already fierce due to the rarity of the promotion item, becomes downright vicious. While she can be pulled out of her rut without ''too'' much work, most experienced players find doing so to be more trouble than it's worth.
** Shanna is basically the opposite of Lilina, being treasured in fast play and derided in casual play. She essentially personifies all the good and bad points of the early pegasus knight, being a blindingly fast and mobile FragileSpeedster who doubles anything, but with such low Constitution, HP, and Strength that she gets weighed down significantly by anything heavier than a Slim Lance, often doubles for zero damage, and struggles to handle anything stronger than a Soldier on Hard (though that last part is hardly unique to her). However, she's also your sole flier for anywhere from eight to ten chapters depending on route, meaning she provides a ton of utility when it comes to rescuing allies and negotiating terrain, and as a lance-user, once she's grown properly, her damage output becomes quite respectable. Because of this, fast players tend to invest a fair bit of work into Shanna to ensure she can do her job, often going so far as to promote her to Falcoknight as soon as possible so she can pick up swords and improve her Constitution at a crucial stage. Casual players, who focus primarily on sheer stats and shy away from early promotion, find an unspectacular flier who dies way too easily and advise people to use her sister Thea instead.
** Thea herself was considered much better than Shanna for some time, but as appraisals of Shanna improved, she started to take a tumble. She was lauded often for receiving some of ''Binding Blade'''s beloved HardModePerks and having better Strength and Defense growths, along with better Constitution, meaning she was seen as the superior pick in Falcoknight. But as the meta shifted towards using Shanna more extensively, players found that Shanna could easily catch up to Thea and then some by the time Thea joined the army, Thea's base stats on Normal are utterly atrocious, meaning she's at-best on par with a raised Shanna on Hard, and Thea's lance rank is pretty bad at D, meaning she wants to promote quickly to raise it (which mostly nullifies her growth advantage). Nowadays, her position has become very debatable; fans note that she is still a reasonably strong flier with usable base stats and a very low-demand promotion item who joins before the most important time to be a flier, and raising her wards off the infamous Sacae route, while detractors point to her lance focus in the axe-heavy Western Isles and the presence of a much stronger flier to carry Arcadia, while believing that a raised Shanna alone can usually keep Sacae off.
** While Melady is near-universally considered the game's strongest unit, her little brother Zeiss, especially on Hard Mode, is an oddball. He seems to have been intended as an Est unit, considering his low level, solid growths, and late join time, but unlike most Ests, his base stats, especially on Hard, are alarmingly high--including a superlative 19 Strength, 15 Defense, and 39 HP, all on a level 7 unpromoted Wyvern Rider. However, he suffers from several problems: his Speed on Hard is a lackluster 11 with a somewhat poor growth, his low weapon rank means he can't use Killer Lances initially and is forced to rely on the much worse Iron and Steel, his level means he needs to be babied up a little to early-promote him, and his joining situation is quite bad, with him being recruited near the very end of the chapter and the next few being full of ballistas, fast enemies, and magic units with siege tomes. Though he does pay off, it can be difficult to justify bringing him along and training him up when you should already have two or three strong fliers at this point.
** Dayan, much like Juno, shows up late in a game where most of your units have enough stats to reliably hit and deal good damage and most of your horseback and flier units decently leveled. Unlike her, however, he starts out with some good weapon ranks and enough stats as a Nomadic Trooper, boasting a A-Rank in bows, which allows him to wield Silver bows to cripple Wvyern Lords in Chapter 22. What really sets him here, however, is the way he is obtained: He's only obtainable by going through the [[ThatOneLevel Sacae route]], which means Sue and Shin having a higher level than Shanna and Thea, whom are units with mixed reception. Because of this, it's debated whether to go through ''Binding Blade'''s most infamous level to get a decent unit who can hold out on his own or go through an easier route at the cost of earning a crappy unit whose only purpose is to complete the AwesomeButImpractical Triangle Attack.
** Sue and Shin themselves also fall into this, due to the Sacae route creating a very strange paradigm. On paper, Sue is the best of the early bow units, while Hard Mode Shin is the best bow unit in the game, period: Nomad gives them accuracy, great Movement, rescuing, sword use on promotion, and anti-flier advantages, along with their stats being notably better than their archer counterparts, particularly Shin's. But overusing them means going to the Sacae route, and dealing with endless swarms of enemy nomads and absurdly dangerous swordmasters, something that few people want to get involved in. This creates a situation where players argue whether to bench them completely, play an odd balancing act where they try to keep Shanna and Thea ahead of Sue and Shin (which isn't ''too'' hard when dealing with bow units), or simply bite the bullet and head to Sacae.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'':
** Marcus is a perfect example of a varying type of Tier Induced Scrappy. In ''Blazing Blade'', Marcus essentially kickstarted the trend of early joining Paladins that are considered "broken" in the tier list. However, Marcus is a bit special in the fact that he has a growth rate that isn't bad, but is still below average, while his successors Seth and Titania have some of the best stat growths in the game--meaning that while he does stay strong for a very long time, he tends to end the game on the lower end of the power curve, especially if his Speed growth isn't working in his favor. Notably, his ''Binding Blade'' incarnation mostly averts this, being seen as one of the few Jagens to actually work as intended--he significantly outstrips the other characters, but is also unable to keep up with the difficulty curve after a while.
** Hector was seen as amazingly broken for a long time, with his tankiness, axe use, and high attacking power helping him to stand out a fair bit from Lyn and Eliwood, as well as his Wolf Beil's much higher Might making it far more effective than the Rapier or Mani Katti. As the meta has focused more on speed, though, his reputation has declined considerably due to him being footlocked and his promotion actually being a ''[[PowerupLetdown downgrade]]'' for some, due to making him almost impossible to carry. This creates a large chunk of the game where he's pretty mediocre. That said, he's still generally considered the best of the ''Blazing Blade'' lords by far, and definitely the most idiot-proof due to being the only one with a strong early game.

** Not that they're the only second-gen characters that have mixed opinions on them. Brigid is praised for her extensive character arc along with her children, and Brigid is a prepromoted Sniper, but she, along with her son Febail, nonetheless suffer from the fact that both of them are footlocked bow-users like Jamke. That said, they do come with Yewfelle, which is pretty powerful to compensate for its poor accuracy, and exclusive to them due to their Major Ulir holy blood, and it grants them +10 Strength and +20 Speed to boot, and their joining situations happen to be where amounts of damage, and are usually seen as one of the generation´s major stumbling blocks) can kill him with little effort. In the end, he is often about as useful as his cousins, Ayra´s children, who lack holy weapons, but have better stats and skills instead, in that he can reliably kill one mook a turn, but not anymore than that. His presence is typically more relevant in playthroughs where the player made poor (or few) first-generation match-ups, but even then he is usually far less useful than the other mandatory units of the generation, like Seliph, Oifey, Julia, Leif or Ares. To put more salt in his wound, there exists an easily-exploited glitch that allows both Larcei and Scathach to obtain Balmung easily (though only if Ayra married Chulainn, because Balmung requires Major Od Holy Blood to wield, and he is the only one capable of providing them with it), making him far less desirable.
** Lene and Laylea are an odd case in that most players agree them to be extremely useful (dancers in ''Genealogy'' are at something of a series peak), but the question of which one is better will start arguments. Most of the purpose of inheritance is to improve a unit's base combat and inventory, but in the case of Lene and Laylea, their combat will basically always be terrible and they therefore don't get much out of the few weapons they can wield or the skills they can inherit. This then caused many players to declare Laylea superior, as she has the Charisma skill, letting her boost the accuracy and avoid of nearby units, which would let her pitch in without being in combat. Later on, however, the prevailing strategy with dancers became to give them the Knight Ring, and often the Leg Ring as well, to let them keep up with the rest of the army and give them more versatility in where you put them--and while Lene can inherit one or both, Laylea will have to buy them, and she's not good at accumulating money.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776'':
** Leif was treated as a joke by the playerbase, between his poor bases, mediocre growths, lackluster skill in Adept, and late promotion that doesn't boost his stats much, leaving him often regarded as one of the worst Lords in the series. It was even more troublesome when the Leif of ''Genealogy'' had high growths and the game's best promotion, making him even more underwhelming. However, his appraisal has drastically improved in recent years, as people started figuring out the game's mechanics and realized that Leif is actually a SupportPartyMember, between his Leadership Star and the large number of units he supports, patching up the rather shaky hit rates of ''Thracia'' and adding on a hefty crit boost. He also has a surprising amount of early game combat to do, and he can do it proficiently, thanks to his Light Brand's range and magic damage and the lack of good units in Manster. Past that point, his promotion has very fast XP gain, and his growths can be patched by scrolls, allowing him to become a pretty effective late-game fighter. And since you CantDropTheHero, he's immune to the Fatigue mechanic. His position's been a comfortable one ever since--not a god-tier unit, but rarely anything below upper-mid.
** Olwen is an unusual example, in that she is considered a below-average (though not bottom-tier) unit overall, but still remains one of the most popular units in the game and sees regular use thanks to having one of the more engaging plot arcs among the cast. While she joins reasonably early with good growths and the immediate advantage of having a mount, she has rather poor bases for a prepromote, and her durability will always be terrible, meaning that she'll have a lot of trouble surviving on the enemy phase. This can be mitigated by giving her the Ambush scroll, allowing her to get in a double attack with Dire Thunder and kill enemies before they can do anything (her high Follow-Up Critical Multiplier of 4 also being a big help here), but she faces a lot of competition for it, and with her standard stats for a level 1 unit, at which point pretty much every regular combat unit you have should be able to one-round enemies reliably. Even after training him up, he doesn't do much that others can't, with Osian, Halvan, Fergus, Asvel, and many others boasting similarly massive crit rates and backing them up with actual combat experience and/or and personal weapons. This is also accentuated by his weapon ranks, with only an E in Swords to start with (the same as a dismounted Lance Knight) and only a D in Lances, heavily limiting what should be a diverse weapon selection. Encapsulating this issue perfectly is his Paragon Sword, which is an excellent weapon and is given to him by the plot--but while it's very much designed for him, ''any'' character who can use E-rank swords can wield it too. This creates the debate over whether to let him keep his sword and blossom properly, or bench him and pass it around to whoever needs it.

* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragonAndTheBladeOfLight'':
** Jagen is all over the place on tier lists. In the original game, he was a target of mockery for a very long time: his base stats (his main selling point) were just not all that great when Cain and Abel could catch up to him around level 5 with a little luck, and his ability to wield the Silver Lance at base wasn't impressive when Caeda could do so as well. However, appraisals of him have improved due to realization that enemies in ''Shadow Dragon'' are weak enough that his low stats are in the "just enough" range, especially if he's given a Speed Ring. His reappearance in the remake had him get a similarly dismal reception, with his small improvements being seen as not enough. Then people started cracking the game open and he proceeded to ''rocket'' up the tier list, as being able to reclass, wield a [[GameBreaker forged Ridersbane]] at base, and actually survive on [[HarderThanHard Hard 5]] without pulling out your teeth ended up giving him a firm place in the top tiers (it's often agreed that only Lena and Caeda surpass him).
** Elice's main gimmick is that she can use the Aum Staff to revive a unit BackFromTheDead, and depending on the game, is usually the only one who can use it (''Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light'') or has a high enough staff rank/level to use it (''Shadow Dragon, Mystery of the Emblem''). Problem is, both ''Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light'' and ''Mystery of the Emblem'' are easy to complete, meaning that her niche of reviving units is only useful in ironman runs. In the DS remake, however, because of how [[SNKBoss ridiculously overpowered]] Medeus is in [[HarderThanHard Merciless]], suicide attacks on him became viable, which is helped by Chapter 24x's rather simple requirements [[note]]simply lose Tiki and don't get the Falchion[[/note]], resulting in Elice going from a "Priestess with an gimmick that almost never gets used" from "actually necessary to survive on Merciless", since the rest of her competition either requires heavy grinding (Maria) or completely impratical to use outside of their intended class (Caeda, Minerva).
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar'':
** Thieves in general tend to get this. Rather than pure combat units, thieves are meant to be a major cog in the game's economy, being able to steal gold from enemies simply by attacking them and then donate the gold to any other unit. However, thieves also possess fairly low Movement, bottom-grade stats, C-rank swords, and do not have Pursuit until after promotion. This can make using thieves initially a risky proposition, and one that many new players simply ignore outright. However, the potential gold gained from thieves being in combat is ''huge'', especially when ''Genealogy'' is a game where getting everyone in good condition and prepared for the arena takes a lot of money (especially in the first generation), and thieves have just enough weapon rank to use magic swords and steal at range, making their poor stats less relevant. This leads to an odd case of the class often being ignored in casual play, and yet regarded as nigh-essential for ranked play.
** The children characters can be all over the place tier-wise depending on who their fathers were, but none of them suffer from this worse than Edain's son Lester. His big problem is that he is a physically-oriented Bow Knight, but his sister Lana is a magically-oriented Cleric. As a consequence, any pairing with Edain that focuses on making Lana as good as possible (such as Azelle or Claud) will render Lester nearly useless; meanwhile, Lana is far less reliant on stats and growths, as she will have utility with staves no matter who her father is, and can inherit some good staves from Edain right off the bat. Even if Lester gets a father who gives him more optimal growths, he can still struggle: if he doesn't inherit the Killer and/or Brave Bow from the first generation, he will only come with an Iron Bow, making his combat mediocre at best, and he badly needs Pursuit in order to bring his damage up to a respectable level as well. The only father who can pass down both is Midir, and with this pairing, Lester becomes a solid unit overall (Jamke and Arden can also work as they can both pass down bows, but not Pursuit unless one of them got the Pursuit Ring, making them inferior options to Midir).
** Speaking of which, there is also Arthur, who probably suffers even worse than Lester. Unlike Lester, who has at least one good father to pass down his good growths, Pursuit and a Killer Bow/Brave Bow, Arthur ''doesn't'', due to having one of the most complicated pairings needed for optimal performance. Did you pair Tailtiu with Lewyn to get that Forseti tome early? Congrats, you have a DiscOneNuke... But at the cost of lowering Ced's usability and potential, and having to pay to repair Forseti in the early game. Did you pair Tailtiu with Lex or Arden? He gets the deadly Wrath-Vantage combination of skills, but his magic growth will suffer in the long run (though Lex has Paragon to make up for it). The only stable pairing for him is Azel and Tailtiu, which boosts his magic growth by 50% and hands down Pursuit, which is an issue considering that Tailtiu is not exactly a great unit, but if Tailtiu is paired with someone, Arthur is notable for being the only Mage Knight unit that can be playable in the second generation. In short, you either get an Arthur with a [[UnskilledButStrong great Magic growth and little besides double-attacking]] or an Arthur with a [[WeakButSkilled terrible Magic growth but having a good combination of skills]].
*** Speaking of which, the entire debate of whether to allow Tailtiu to marry Lewyn also spread to whether Erinys should marry Lewyn or not, both for [[DieForOurShip Shipping-related reasons]] and gameplay reasons. Defenders of Lewyn/Erinys pairings not only claim that this not only allows both Fee and Ced to overclock their speed stats (Fee can have an 75% speed growth, further augmenting her FragileSpeedster stats, while Ced gains an '''''105%''''' speed growth, ensuring that he gains speed every time he levels) and Ced can inherit Forseti to basically become nigh-unhittable, as the game is unable to register his increased speed stat while wielding Forseti, it ''causes his stats to overflow'', but also because that ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776 Thracia 776]]'' canonized it [[labelnote:How?]]Upon looking at his inventory, if one looks at the description of Forseti, it has a star symbol on it. This means that it is a personal weapon, and since only Ced can wield it, this means that Lewyn married Erinys, who is the mother of Fee and Ced[[/labelnote]]. On the other side, those opposed to the pairings claim that it's an overrated pairing, since they can do fine without Lewyn marrying Erinys, and that since Ced is an footlocked unit like Lewyn and Jamke, he's likely to slow down a playthrough if players keep relying of the Lewyn/Erinys pairing. Thankfully, while Erinys ''does'' have other Gen 1 units she can pair with, Lewyn is the most talked about pairing due to it both being infamously broken and the fact that it's basically canon, which does frustrate some people who go for fast playthroughs.

** Not that they're the only second-gen characters that have mixed opinions on them. Brigid is praised for her extensive character arc along with her children, and Brigid is a prepromoted Sniper, but she, along with her son Febail, nonetheless suffer from the fact that both of them are footlocked bow-users like Jamke. That said, they do come with Yewfelle, which is pretty powerful to compensate for its poor accuracy, and exclusive to them due to their Major Ulir holy blood, and it grants them +10 Strength and +20 Speed to boot, and their joining situations happen to be where flying units come in swarms (Chapter 4 for Brigid, Chapter 8 and 9 for Febail), making them useful {{Crutch Character}}s for those maps, and can also clear arenas easily. Patty, on the other hand, will likely need a good father due to her being a thief, which is considered to be one of the game's worst classes and having a poor start, though she can at least bounce back if given a decent father and can steal a lot of money from enemy units pretty well if given a magic sword.
** Ayra was considered a borderline godly unit for a long time. Her class gives her Pursuit at base, her Astra skill allows her to attack five times when it triggers, and she obtains the Hero Sword through a conversation, which boosts her offense up even further. This makes her ferociously good at clearing the arena... but unfortunately, that's about the only place she'll be clearing, because she is one of the worst sufferers of ''Genealogy'''s mount-centric gameplay, usually lagging far behind the rest of the army. And while Ayra's combat skill is rather good, it isn't to the point that she can effortlessly one-round anything, because Astra, while it will usually kill anything whenever it activates, has a low activation rate, the Hero Sword tends to be much better in the hands of units closer to the fighting, and Ayra isn't very durable, which is accentuated by large, lance-and-magic-heavy enemy formations. As a result, her position has dropped from "GameBreaker" to "mid-tier on a good day in slower playthroughs." Her children tend to suffer a lot of the same issues, though a fairly easy-to-activate bug does at least allow them to obtain a holy weapon (at the price of Shannan losing his).
** Her nephew Shannan has even greater issues with this. New players are often ecstatic about him, as he is a prepromoted Swordmaster with high base stats, the Astra skill and gets a Holy weapon in the first turn after joining. More experienced players merely see a combat unit without a mount (in a game where owning one is critical to performing well in battle) with little tactical versatility, horrible growths in everything except skill, and surprisingly poor durability. He can kill just about everything on his own, but when EveryoneIsASuper, this is not quite as valuable, and he is less adept at surviving the enemy turn, and many of the second generation´s bosses (who often deal absurd amounts of damage, and are usually seen as one of the generation´s major stumbling blocks) can kill him with little effort. In the end, he is often about as useful as his cousins, Ayra´s children, who lack holy weapons, but have better stats and skills instead, in that he can reliably kill one mook a turn, but not anymore than that. His presence is typically more relevant in playthroughs where the player made poor (or few) first-generation match-ups, but even then he is usually far less useful than the other mandatory units of the generation, like Seliph, Oifey, Julia, Leif or Ares. To put more salt in his wound, there exists an easily-exploited glitch that allows both Larcei and Scathach to obtain Balmung easily (though only if Ayra married Chulainn, because Balmung requires Major Od Holy Blood to wield, and he is the only one capable of providing them with it), making him far less desirable.

** Olwen is an unusual example, in that she is considered a below-average (though not bottom-tier) unit overall, but still remains one of the most popular units in the game and sees regular use thanks to having one of the more engaging plot arcs among the cast. While she joins reasonably early with good growths and the immediate advantage of having a mount, she has rather poor bases for a prepromote, and her durability will always be terrible, meaning that she'll have a lot of trouble surviving on the enemy phase. This can be mitigated by giving her the Ambush scroll, allowing her to get in a double attack with Dire Thunder and kill enemies before they can do anything (her high Follow-Up Critical Multiplier of 4 also being a big help here), but she faces a lot of competition for it, and with her hit rates being fairly low, she'll be in big trouble if she doesn't manage to land both hits. Olwen's two personal weapons, Dire Thunder and the Blessed Sword, are incredibly powerful and both have the Brave effect, but both also have notable drawbacks: the former is so heavy that it completely tanks her Attack Speed, and the latter isn't acquired until very late and she can't make as much use out of it as she could due to her low Strength (not to mention that it can be hair-pullingly frustrating to get, as it requires fighting through a gauntlet of tough enemies so she can speak to [[ThatOneBoss Reinhardt]] in Chapter 22). It doesn't help that if you recruit her, you can't recruit the statistically superior Mage Knight Ilios--but, given that Olwen has quite an involved story arc with relevance to the main plot where Ilios doesn't, a lot of players end up recruiting and using her anyway despite all her drawbacks compared to him.
** Carrion gets a lot of this, with the playerbase being divided between people who consider him one of the game's best mounted units and people who consider him utterly unremarkable at best. He has a good class in Cavalier, which dodges the problems of the more common Lance Knights by letting him always use swords, and he boasts a great critical multiplier (accentuated by him being one of many units who support with Leif), a movement star, and above-average growths. But much of this is countered by the fact that he shows up around the midgame with standard stats for a level 1 unit, at which point pretty much every regular combat unit you have should be able to one-round enemies reliably. Even after training him up, he doesn't do much that others can't, with Osian, Halvan, Fergus, Asvel, and many others boasting similarly massive crit rates and backing them up with actual combat experience and/or and personal weapons. This is also accentuated by his weapon ranks, with only an E in Swords to start with (the same as a dismounted Lance Knight) and only a D in Lances, heavily limiting what should be a diverse weapon selection. Encapsulating this issue perfectly is his Paragon Sword, which is an excellent weapon and is given to him by the plot--but while it's very much designed for him, ''any'' character who can use E-rank swords can wield it too. This creates the debate over whether to let him keep his sword and blossom properly, or bench him and pass it around to whoever needs it.

*** Cyril, like Donnel and Mozu, is intended to be a case of MagikarpPower, coming in as a level 1 Commoner in Chapter 5 with low bases, but having good growths to make up for it. Unlike them, he's largely considered better than bottom-tier, but it's still debated whether his risk-to-reward ratio is good enough to make training him up worth it. His personal skill Aptitude boosts all of his growths by 20%, which sounds good, but the problem is that his base growths are not particularly good, and when Aptitude is applied, they are only just barely higher than those of your students. In particular, his Defence growth is pretty low for someone built to be a frontline physical attacker. One thing Cyril does have going for him, however, is flexibility: he has proficiency in five skills, including both Riding and Flying as well as Axes, Lances and Bows, and because of this he can easily be classed as a Wyvern Lord or Bow Knight. These are widely considered the most overpowered classes in the game (see High Tiers above), and some argue that he is worth using for that alone, but he can still struggle in the face of competition from the other students and faculty (for example, Leonie will have nearly the same growths as him as a Bow Knight, but have the advantage of joining four chapters earlier with more time to work on her skills and abilities). Nevertheless, if he is trained up, Cyril will more than likely still become an excellent damage-dealer with high mobility - it's just a question of whether the player is willing to invest the necessary resources. He is also much harder to use on Silver Snow, as since he joins only [[spoiler:if Byleth didn't side with Edelgard in Chapter 11]], and due to scaling from only commoner growths, he tends to have low stats by the time he joins unless Byleth has saved enough stat-boosting items for him to use.

[[folder:High Tiers]]
* In general for ''Franchise/FireEmblem'', mounted units (Cavaliers, Pegasus Knights, Wyvern Riders) are top tiers due to their higher movement coming with absolutely no disadvantage except for ONE game in the entire series where they face a disadvantage for being mounted. Since there's always an early joining Paladin as the Jagen unit (Arran, Sigurd, Marcus, Seth, Titania, Frederick), and an early joining pegasus knight (Caeda, Karin, Vanessa, Shanna, Florina, Marcia, Sumia) in each game, expect to see those units at the top of the tier lists, which often comes to the annoyance of those who wish to use tactically lesser units. In fact, fliers and mounts are generally considered so good that it's considered ''very hard'' to make one that isn't worth the effort, and for Wyvern Riders in general, there not being a single truly awful Wyvern Rider in the series. As a result, challenge runs of games with reclassing available tend to ban or restrict mass usage of Wyvern Riders, given how ludicrously easy it is to break the game with them.
* Sigurd from ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGenealogyOfTheHolyWar'' is nigh-infamous for literally soloing the entire first generation thanks to his impressive bases and growths, combined with a good enough starting level which allows him to catapult easily into the higher levels. He's considered to be that great that even with the weapon triangle disadvantage against him, ''[[ScissorsCutsRock he'll still manage to instantly sweep against them]]''. Most importantly, he manages to get a [[InfinityMinusOneSword Silver Sword]], which already turns him from a powerful mounted Lord to a walking disaster area as long as he isn't being attacked by 2-range enemies (and even then, a magic sword or a Javelin will compensate for that). That being said, him soloing the first generation is the actual reason ranked players roll their eyes: He kills so many enemies that [[GoneHorriblyRight he can potentially tank the Experience Rank]] if the other units don't gain enough levels, though thankfully there are situations in which Sigurd can probably get into trouble, and other units are able to pull him out if that happens. His son, Seliph, can also downright solo the second generation, and even gets a decent magic growth which allows him to wield magic swords more efficiently, and his somewhat mediocre start is heavily compensated if Sigurd passes on a good amount of equipment and rings, which can definitely help him once he promotes into Knight Lord.
* In an odd case of a character who isn't considered top tier but still gets dislike for being stronger than another, there's Ilios from ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776''. Ilios is one of the game's MutuallyExclusivePartyMembers, being impossible to recruit if you already have Olwen. Olwen is one of the most popular characters, owing to her CharacterDevelopment and her tragic relationship with Reinhardt, not to mention her impressive potential... but she also joins with pretty awful bases as a prepromote, while Ilios joins with already competent stats in the same class. This means efficiency-minded players tend to ignore Olwen in favor of Ilios, which annoys the people who like Olwen, especially when Ilios is nowhere near as fleshed out.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'' has Rutger, for a simple reason: the Hero Crest. ''Binding Blade'' has a number of popular characters who promote using it, including Dieck, Fir, and Gonzales. It is also astoundingly rare, with you picking up your first in Chapter 7, your second in Chapter 10/11 (depending on route) and your third in Chapter 16 (plus a Secret Shop). Because of this, it's a legitimate question which character will get to access its power... or it would be, if Rutger didn't exist. ''Binding Blade'' bosses are notoriously evasive and hit very hard, meaning you ''need'' a character who can hit and one-round reliably... like, say, a 4th-level sword unit with 14 Skill and 15 Speed on Hard and high growths, who starts with a Killing Edge for a crit bonus and gains an even bigger crit bonus upon promotion. Rutger's absurd accuracy and critical potential make him one of the only characters who can go toe-to-toe with bosses on Hard early on, which means that nearly every player will feed him tons of kills and that Hero Crest so he can turn into a strong Swordmaster as soon as possible. Good for Rutger... and terrible for those units who ''really'' want a Hero Crest so they aren't stuck unpromoted for massive chunks of the game. Fans of those characters tend to gripe about how Rutger renders every other Myrmidon, Fighter, Berserker, or Mercenary less useful by virtue of being unwilling to let go of their promotion item.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'' has Marcus, a level one paladin (the cavalry class promoted, mind) that serves as a ''starting unit'' alongside Eliwood, has access to most of the game's best lances and swords off the bat (which won't be for ''ten'' more chapters, as he's introduced right at the start of Eliwood's story), and can one-shot every enemy, including the first few bosses. He's a special case of High Tiered Scrappy. CharacterTiers based on Hector Hard Mode Ranked runs put him at near the top of the list, while those that are based on non ranked runs outright put him into a tier of his own in God Tier. In short, Marcus is ''extremely'' well-liked by these groups of the fanbase, while being hated by those that cares only for stats. He embodies BoringButPractical play as a reliable unit who ends the game as unspectacular, which annoys the people who prefer to raise up units.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'': Seth is one of the starting units (and a Paladin, a promoted cavalier unit), has access to most of the good swords and lances right off the bat, can one-shot any enemy (including the first few bosses), and has growths that are absolutely '''fantastic'''. ''Sacred Stones'' is already considered the easiest ''Fire Emblem'' game, but Seth is capable of soloing it, so many gamers outright refuse to use him out of belief that he drains the fun out of the game.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'': Haar is a carryover unit from ''Path of Radiance'', where he is [[MasterOfNone painfully]] [[JackofAllStats average]]. But in this game, he has ridiculous starting stats and growths, uses axes (the best among the weapon classes in this game), and is a flier that is ''not'' weak to bows. Plus, in a game where some characters are not playable depending on the chapter, Haar appears all over the place in different factions, even more than the "main characters" of the game, like Ike and Micaiah. Haar's only downsides are his low magic resistance — which isn't much of a problem because magic is nerfed in this game, and a weakness to [[ShockAndAwe thunder magic]] — which is only used by a handful of enemies. Haar is the best unit ever, great for both casual playthroughs and speedruns.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemNewMysteryOfTheEmblem'' has Kris. Already a pretty controversial character in the fandom due to their CanonForeigner status and accusations of being a SpotlightStealingSquad or a CreatorsPet, one thing that ''really'' doesn't help the debates is that Kris is incredibly powerful. Not only do they have parameters that are at least above average in just about every category, and not only can they start in eight different classes, but they also have a pretty lengthy prologue and tutorial where they'll pretty much always be your best character and where most of the units you use won't be playable again for a good while. This means, invariably, the best way to play ''New Mystery'' is to have Kris solo the tutorial, and then join up with Marth's gang as a level 10 or so DiscOneNuke that can proceed to turn even Lunatic into a joke.
* The royal siblings in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'' because they are, simply put, too good at their jobs. The game has a rather large cast (especially on ''Revelation''), and an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit. Naturally, when the siblings join, some units may wind up being benched for the simple crime of not being able to stand up to the royals they share a potential promotion with. This definitely comes into play in ''Revelation'', when you get all ''eight'' of them over the course of the game.
** Takumi deserves special mention for this. On both the routes he is available, he is considered a GameBreaker due to a mixture of his stupidly overpowered weapon and the buffs to the Archer class bumping its usefulness up to this. He joins early as well: chapter 10 in both ''Birthright'' and ''Revelation''.
** Ryoma practically has no restrictions. He's not a mounted character like Xander, so he's not weak to Horseslayers. His exclusive Raijinto can be used at range, meaning magic and arrows are a joke against him. The Swordmaster class learns [[DeathByAThousandCuts Astra]], so he can attack more times than he needs to. He's still one of the strongest, fastest characters in the game, so the rest of the army might as well take a nap if he's deployed. All of this make him border on TheDreaded for players of [=StreetPass=] battles.
** Xander's Siegfried has all the advantages Raijinto does on a mounted unit in addition to buffing Xander's avoid and defense. Xander himself may not be as fast as Ryoma, but he is otherwise a MasterOfAll in everything that isn't magic related, able to tank better than most tanks and hit harder than anyone not named Charlotte or Camilla. While he does have an unfortunate weakness to Horseslayers, the movement being a Paladin offers him more than makes up for it. This does mean, however, that he pretty much renders all Cavalier-class characters in ''Conquest'' (and there are a good number of them) moot.
** And of course, Camilla. Take everything about Xander, make it hit ''harder,'' give it a class with an ability that is basically anathema to the majority of Hoshidan units (Most Hoshidans don't use mounts, meaning Trample gives Camilla essentially a free boost to damage) and finish by making them more accurate, faster, ''and'' a res tank (normally the one weakness besides arrows that flying units that aren't Pegasi have) and you have Camilla. If not nquestionably the best unit in the game, with other characters really only being able to compete with her by devoting themselves entirely to their niches. It's almost comical you get Beruka at the same time as Camilla in any route with the two; outside of HP and a bit of Defense, Camilla trumps her servant by nearly every measure in every category. And as if she didn't have enough going for her, Camilla is considered level 15/1 by the game (most promoted units are counted as 20/1), making her substantially less of an experience hog to actually use.
* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGaiden'' and its remake ''Echoes: Shadows of Valentia'' had Dread Fighters. Sure, they might not be mounted like Cavaliers or Pegasus Knights, but they make up for it by having the most useful ability in the game: The ability to perform the Villager Loop, which allows them to reclass into villager and start anew, essentially allowing for infinite level grinding. Even without that, they're considered by many to be one of the most infamous foot-locked classes in the game due to their good physical stats, and ''Echoes'' made them ''even more dangerous'' thanks to their gaining 2 new abilities: Resistance +5 and Apotrope, which halves magic damage for the latter. While it doesn't sound like much, keep in mind that it's not uncommon for multiple characters to have ''abysmal'' Resistance, and Dread Fighters are able to remedy this problem. It's not entirely uncommon for players to make all of their villagers into Dread Fighters, and even their weakness in being a foot-locked unit doesn't matter when their Resistance is good enough to essentially bulldoze a significant amount of the game. Long story short; expect many players to have a gripe with them just as similar to [[DemonicSpiders when they fought them as enemies]].
* Due to changes to how characters develop in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'', it's not characters, but classes that are getting this. Wyvern Lord and Bow Knight are [[PrestigeClass Master Classes]], but go above and beyond what that implies:
** Wyvern Lord is simply overpowered. It has the high base stat modifications of all Master classes, very good skills (increased axe damage, increased avoid), and is flying so it can ignore terrain and move after acting. It only has two weaknesses, both of which can be mitigated (a vulnerability to bows can be avoided by dismounting, its low resistance isn't unique to the class, and when you have high movement and powerful attacks, why not just kill the offender?). But what really pushes it over the line is the ''utterly insane'' net +65% growth rates in everything that makes the class good already. The cherry on top? It's available to every unit in the game. Only the most lopsidedly magic-focused characters don't fare well as a Wyvern Lord, with the exception of Annette due to her rather average spell list and having a strength in axes. It's ''only'' balancing factor is that, as a result of most units needing battalions to deal good damage and tank hits, you can only make a few units Wyvern Lords on any given new game playthrough - there are only so many B and A rank flying battalions to go around.
** Bow Knight is nearly as bad. It's a one-trick pony, but only needs that one trick - it's a unit with canto and skills that can give its normal attacks base 5 range. That's enough to snipe anything from beyond retaliation range and get back to safety. On open terrain, a Bow Knight has a larger effective range than ''siege magic''. Sure, accuracy drops off with range, but a character with high base strength holding a training bow is still going to cause a ton of damage, probably twice. The class's only drawback is its dismal grown modifiers (Net +10% boosting areas it'll never need with a malus to all-important speed) but as an endgame PrestigeClass, substandard levels aren't going to hurt very much in the long run.
** As far as the classes in the earlier-game tiers go, Brigand stands head and shoulders above the rest, simply because of the skill learned upon mastering it: Death Blow. This skill grants the unit +6 Strength upon initiating combat, and given that Brigand is an Intermediate class accessible from Level 10 onward, this is an enormous boon for the time at which you can get it. It gives a massive net gain of +12 damage on a double attack, and this can be especially game-breaking when combined with a gauntlet, Brave weapon, or another skill that forces a double attack. It's worthwhile to have almost any unit you plan to be a physical fighter master Brigand at some point just to get Death Blow, especially the ones with lower Strength like Ashe.
** When it comes to characters, Lysithea is GlassCannon personified. She has good stats growth in Mag, Spd and Dex which can easly counters her low growth in HP, Def and Res, can learn Death Spikes T (which can one-shot the [[BonusBoss Death Knight]]) once you have her in a B rank in reason [[note]] In contrast, Hubert, the only one who can also learn Death Spikes T, can learn it in A rank.[[/note]]. But her greatest strength comes from her wielding the Crest of Gloucester, which increase the might of her magic spells and enabling the [[DamageReduction Pavise/Aegis effect]] on Thyrsus, which can counterattack her GlassCannon status. Not only that, but Thyrsus gives ''+2'' magic range, meaning she can just pick off enemies from the back lines without worrying about getting hurt.
** To an extent, Felix could be considered as Lysithea's physical fighter counterpart, being a GlassCannon who can deal amazing damage to make up for it. He has great growths in Strength, Speed and Dexterity, which are only amplified by the sword-wielding classes he favours, his Major Crest of Fraldarius having a 40% chance to boost his Might, and his personal skill Lone Wolf raising his damage even further when he doesn't have a battalion equipped. His only real problem, low defences, can easily be rectified with the Aegis Shield - not only does it boost both his Defence and Resistance, but his Crest enables both Pavise and Aegis on it. But what really makes him stand out is that he is considered one of the easiest students to recruit out of their house (with the exception of Sylvain's automatic recruitment for a female Byleth). Considering that most players will want to put Byleth in a sword-wielding class thanks to their proficiency and high starting rank with them, they will almost certainly reach Felix's recruitment requirements (15 Speed and B+ Swords) quickly with no trouble, and as a result he is a staple for even non-Blue Lion players.
** Do you like Lysithea? Do you think there should be more characters like her? Well, with the Ashen Wolves DLC comes [[LadyOfBlackMagic Constance.]] Constance has most of the strengths
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*** Ferdinand. When recruited out of the Black Eagles, he's considered the hardest student to recruit without help from a NewGamePlus due to his Heavy Armor requirement and being unable to B-support until after the timeskip. However, once recruited, likely late into the academy phase, Ferdinand tends to have [[LightningBruiser Speed and Defense in the high teens and Strength in the low twenties]], allowing him to keep up with the rest of the team in terms of raw stats. While this essentially forces him to stay in the Cavalier/Paladin line without focusing exclusively on another skill, [[note]]Ferdinand's default study plan is lances and axes, causing him to exclusively gain experience in those areas in the monastery[[/note]] his bases allow him to retain at least some usability, and if he learns Swift Strikes, he can quickly become a mainstay of the party. This is [[AvertedTrope averted]] if the player chooses the Black Eagle house, however. On the Crimson Flower route, he underwent a similar situation with Ike. Prior to Jeritza being PromotedToPlayable in the expansion pass' 3rd wave, he was considered to be one of the best horse-mounted units in the Crimson Flower route due to a combination of good speed and strength growths, along with having access to Swift Strikes. When Jeritza was made playable in the 3rd wave of DLC ''for free'', however, players discovered that Jeritza practically does everything Ferdinand did but even better, being helped by the fact that he doesn't even really need to rely on his personal skill for optimal performance. While Ferdinand is still considered a good Paladin unit, he's not exactly the best anymore thanks to Jeritza. His access to Swift Strikes, however, saves him on [[HarderThanHard Maddening]], and he has the benefit of having all of Part 1 to train his skills, including the ability to train towards Wyvern Lord.
*** Dorothea. On the one hand, her personal skill provides passive healing for adjacent allies, which can be helpful for saving healing spells/items in the earlygame; she learns Thoron for a 3-tile attack early on (C Reason, Dorothea has both a Reason boon and starts at D), and late into the game, she learns Meteor, allowing her to attack from a long distance, or at least contribute to linked attacks. Additionally, her sword boon and high charm stat make her a good pick for the dancer. However, Dorothea also has somewhat low growth rates, including some of the lowest Strength and Defense stats in the game. [[note]]Even within her native Black Eagle house, fellow SquishyWizard Linhardt has 30% each in Strength and Defense, versus Dorothea's 20% and 15%, respectively.[[/note]] While she can make a good dancer and is basically guaranteed to win the White Heron Cup, her bane in riding means she will struggle to get Movement+1, which means she may be unable to keep up with the rest of the army, especially with the focus on mounted/flying units.

*** Annette. On one hand, she has the crest of Dominic which has a chance of preserving spells, which is useful for utility spells such as Heal and Recover and offense spells. On the other hand, that isn't significant in later phases of the game due to spells eventually having uses equal to the amount of weapon durability. That, and while she has all of the wind spells, including Excalibur, other mages in the game can outright outperform her such as Linhardt, who happens to also possess the highly useful warp and Flayn, for the reasons mentioned above. That said, she does have a proficiency for Axes, meaning that while she can be reclassed various axe-wielding classes (especially Wyvern Lord), the fact that she has a poor strength growth means that she's basically wielding most of the time Bolt Axes and her relic weapon Crusher. Because of this, she must master the Mage class in order to learn Fiendish Blow, as that gives a flat increase of 5+ to magic attacks unlike Death Blow. And the fact that she also has some nice rally skills means that she can act as a utility towards the endgame if one isn't interested in her as an attacker.
*** Manuela. Like Hanneman, her only saving grace is a decent spell list, though unlike him, said spells just happen to be Silence (prevents non-commander enemy mages from attacking) and Warp. On the other side, however, she posseses a rather low magic growth, but compensates with a high speed growth, making her a unusual dodgy utility mage. However, that comes with the caveat that she must work around her weakness in reason in order for her to promote to Gremory, and Holy Knight isn't the best option for her for reasons explained above.
*** Catherine and Hilda when recruited in the Silver Snow route. On one hand, they only join late in the first part if [[spoiler:Byleth didn't side with Edelgard]], and while they have good stats for the most part (even Hilda has [[LightningBruiser 16 defense paired with her high strength and speed]]), Felix can potentially occupy Catherine's niche of a Swordmaster with even potentially higher stats if trained very well, and Hilda has one of the more grueling recruiting requirements. That said, both make up for it by having access to their Relics (though Hilda's relic comes with the caveat that she must clear her Paralogue first) and even Hilda starts off with a high rank in both axes and lances, ensuring that she can become a Wyvern Lord without any trouble.
*** Linhardt is a Both example in that he has a [[CripplingOverspecialization specific niche]] as a WhiteMage support character, and nothing else. In terms of healing and support, Linhardt is incredibly useful because he has Physic, Restore, and Warp, meaning he can provide long-range healing, remove status effects, and throw units long distances, which when combined with his Crest having the chance of providing extra healing, means that a Bishop Linhardt is a powerful support ally. At the same time, he has mediocre growths across the board, with all being below 45% (including Magic and Res), his spell lists having nothing unique or rare enough that would make him better than other units (Lysithea and Manuela for example can use Warp), and pretty much all magic focused characters are more powerful offensively or provide superior raw healing. He also is hurt by being unable to access Gremory to get extra power compared to someone like Mercedes and Marianne. His ability to Warp and Physic is really the best thing going for him, and in that role as a Bishop, he is exceptional and worth using, but if you use him as anything else, he’s one of the weakest students in the game.
*** Yuri. Yuri has low growths across the board save Speed and Charisma, and his ideal class of Trickster leaves him with no bonuses to his Strength or Magic despite having a decent spell list for both Reason and Faith. This makes him a poor fighter since other units can easily fill his role. However, once he gets access to his Hero relic, the Fetters of Dromi, he becomes an amazing support unit thanks to the Trickster's ability to swap allies and MagicKnight skillset, allowing him to use both forms of Magic. Combined with the Fetters giving him extra movement, a Canto effect, and a Pasive/Aegis effect, and Yuri becomes an incredibly powerful support unit who can save allies, hold down enemies, and counter Mages with ease. So if you use Yuri as a Trickster with his Relic, he's a borderline broken support character, but if you use him outside that role, he's a pretty weak unit.
** Classes:
*** The Dark Mage and Dark Bishop lines. On one hand, they are the only classes that come with Dark Magic, which makes them especially viable with Hubert, who benefits greatly from it. On the other hand, the item that is needed for promotion to the Dark Mage class line is notoriously limited, as in early game, it's only available by [[ThatOneSidequest defeating the Death Knight]]. While this can be easily be remedied by training Lysithea to get Dark Spikes T and buying and forging Horseslayer weapons, there's also the fact that it's exclusive to males, and aside from Hubert (who is only playable if the Black Eagles house is chosen), their performance ranges from good (Linhardt) to mediocre at best (Hanneman and Lorenz). That said, their Mastery Skills, such as Poison Strike (deal 10 damage to the enemy after combat) for Dark Mage and Lifetaker (recover 50% of HP after defeating an enemy) for Dark Bishop are great, so it's not a bad idea for them to be in this class.
*** Valkyrie. On one hand, it's supposed to be the more ranged option for mages in this game compared to Dark Knight, which trades that for extra power. In practice, however, the class is very flawed due to it being exclusive to females, and it gets out-ranged by Dark Flier, which is not only a flying class, but also has better speed and health growths compared to Valkyrie, which also has a terrible magic growth. In short, while it is a good class, it just tends to get overshadowed by Dark Flier and the only reason to go with this class is if said female does not have a flying proficiency. That said, it [[NotCompletelyUseless does have a niche for snipers and low-dexterity females]]; its mastered ability, Uncanny Blow, gives a flat Hit+30 when attacking in player phase. This makes the more PowerfulButInaccurate female units more likely to hit during the player phase, and even fixes Constance's one problem of low dexterity, allowing her to actually hit hard with Bolting, and for bow users, even if they were {{Magically Inept Fighter}}s, the extra Hit+30 can be useful when paired with the dangerous Bow Knight class (see above for further reasons why it's broken as hell), given that the game subverts NoArcInArchery. Long story short, while not exactly the best mounted unit for female mages, it is useful for low-dexterity female units for its mastered ability alone.
*** Lord. When used by Edelgard and Claude, it does offer some solid growth buffs, but beyond that the class does little to make it worth using for most players. The class is more of a support class by providing buffs to nearby allies, and acts as an easier way to level up their Authority quicker, but it offers no skills worth using, and the extra proficiency it buffs are Sword and Lances, which means the class is not synergistic with either of them since Edelgard and Claude’s main weapons are Axes and Bows respectively. Not helping is the Mastered Skills, Subdue and Resistance +2, which are very lackluster compared to the other Intermediate Class' skills like Vantage, Death Blow, or Desperation. Finally, they are both handed two unique classes for free post-timeskip, and these have all the benefits of Lord and more. [[NotCompletelyUseless Dimitri, on the other hand, actually makes very good use of this class]]; Lances are his primary weapons while Swords are the backup weapons of both his timeskip personal classes (High Lord and Great Lord) and his favored advanced class (Paladin). In addition, he wants to grind up Authority as fast as possible to unlock Battalion Wrath and Battalion Vantage, which can be combined to [[GameBreaker make him flat-out invincible on enemy phase]]; the Lord is one of the only classes available pre-timeskip that boosts Authority growth, the others being Byleth's exclusive Enlightened One class and the [[SupportPartyMember Dancer class]]. Long story short, the Lord is garbage for Edelgard and Claude and great for Dimitri.
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** And of course, Camilla. Take everything about Xander, make it hit ''harder,'' give it a class with an ability that is basically anathema to the majority of Hoshidan units (Most Hoshidans don't use mounts, meaning Trample gives Camilla essentially a free boost to damage) and finish by making them more accurate, faster, ''and'' a res tank (normally the one weakness besides arrows that flying units that aren't Pegasi have) and you have Camilla. If not for Siegfried Camilla would be better than Xander in nearly all categories, and you get her even ''earlier'' to boot. She is almost unquestionably the best unit in the game, with other characters really only being able to compete with her by devoting themselves entirely to their niches. It's almost comical you get Beruka at the same time as Camilla in any route with the two; outside of HP and a bit of Defense, Camilla trumps her servant by nearly every measure in every category. And as if she didn't have enough going for her, Camilla is considered level 15/1 by the game (most promoted units are counted as 20/1), making her substantially less of an experience hog to actually use.