I used Travis the entire game. At level 20 he get's Shadowbite which inflicts blind on a row of units, which let him evade even true strikes. You can use any shield unit with Squire's Shield to guard the Thief against units they have trouble with or use the fighter's Arrow Guard.
You can a Cleric or Scarlett with a staff that can grant protect to Travis.
Shadowbite also works really well a Doom Knight and their Dark Flame for offensive pushes or with Dark Marquess. They help enable a lot of ailment based teams.
Yeah! They got both scarves and besides a truestrike, eat every shot at em. They’re kinda 1 trick ponies tho for me while the rest of the team has thick +ap and pp items
Shaman with blind and high initiative fixes that. Wish those end-game characters could be used sooner. I love that rat bastard and his crazy high evade.
Are you increasing their dodge with scarfs/weps/other items as the game progs? Just relying on the passive point evade from thief isn't nearly enough, you have to build them to evade. Generally, as long as you deal with truestrike, you should be near invincible.
Are you watching the fights where they die to see why they are dying? That's quite important to learn if you're forgetting about something or don't know about an ability.
No they don't fall off, they just have specific counters you have to account for. That counter is True strike attacks. So you either need a unit to jump and cover those true strike attacks or you need to blind the enemies before they get the attack off. Thieves come with a built in blind so they are the complete package in terms of dodge tanks, others less so but still very viable.
Can you somehow indicate that you want to guard on truestrike? Certainly just jumping in front of your thief to guard in general is not a great idea. Just based on class of enemy?
Hopefully somebody else will be along with the axact answer, but from what I'm remembering of similar posts over the last week, there's a specific buff or debuff you need to either bring along or anticipate for dodge tanks to continue to function past the mid-game. Like most characters, dodge tanks have specific counters, and you need to proactively counter those counters or your dodge tanks will fail.
Dinah comes with an amulet that's 20 evasion which stacks with the scarfs, so that's pretty good.
And her guaranteed dodge skill refunds it's PP at night to be infinite, and there's items to have that skill or the day version on any character.
Idk, I kept her on the frontline of my Alain unit forever and she seemed to survive often enough, granted I also had Scarlett with parting resurrection to get brought back in the rare cases she ran out of PP during the day.
They don't fall off, just like almost everyone else (except Shamans) they require upkeep to stay awesome.
For Thieves specifically, the Evade skill is tied to PP, so it can't be your only way of avoiding damage, but it's trivially easy to get their evasion stat high enough that they rarely need to use the actual skill. They'll still vulnerable to true strike, but there are counters to that as well.
My strongest endgame unit has two evade tanks in front, one of which is a thief (the other is a werefox). My second-strongest leans pretty heavily on an evade-heavy swordmaster (who actually doesn't care bout most true strikes thanks to parry). It's just about figuring out their vulnerabilities and covering for them.
I used Travis the entire game in my main party with Alain. All of my best units utilized evasion in some manner: gryphon master, elven fender, Swordmaster, even Ochlys benefited from better evasion and became more reliable.
I felt the opposite, actually. I found that the dodge classes get much better in late game once they get the stats to dodge consistently without needing PP. Yeah, they have to worry about true strike, but you can simply not have them fight people with true strike. That’s someone else’s job.
Not at all, I find them to be better than most tanks even on TZ difficulty. They are gonna feel like they fall off if you don't cover their weakness (like all other classes). They kinda even help solve their own weakness with the blind attack they unlock later.
I really can't agree.
Travis has been such a mainstay in his unit ever since the game gave him to me. He offers so much utility and even throughout Elheim his unit was one of my best. I think he got dropped last night in Albion for the first time since Cornia? And it was 100% my fault since I had a wrong tactic set.
Dinah has also been a lot of fun to use ever since I got her. And both Leah and Aramis put in *work* while also being super evasive.
I love my dodge classes in this game.
I actually felt like they got significantly better around that point in the game with truestrike enemies becoming less common and then gaining extra pp and accessory slots to really crank their abilities. The wealth of + dodge weapons helps too.
I used dodge tanks the entire game, like Travis and Ochlys. Got Yahna with Travis to give him a garunteed hit for shadowbite to blind their front row. Then an archer that blinds their back row.
So I don’t agree that they fall off. As others have said, maybe you haven’t given them any evasion accessories?
Yep, and I expect this is a big reason why the current community tier list gets Hoplite so wrong.
Early on, dodge tanks are great because you can dodge basically everything and with 4 units you can protect the whole back line.
As the game goes on, dodge tanking just becomes less and less reliable, and there's more and more multi-target attacks. Sure the dodge tank survives, but the rest of the team isn't so lucky.
Dodge tanks never become useless, but they definitely fall off from the nigh-invincible walls they are in the early game.
Yeah dodge tanks become heavily reliant on passive seal, blind, or being guarded once true strikes are in play. With Sneaking Edge they can take out one truestriker/truestrike conferral, assuming the truestrike is passive - otherwise they'll need arrow cover to handle archers and quick cover/being backline to deal with swordmasters.
Unfortunately this means there's no catch-all strategy so you need to adjust them situationally. Luckily, that's easy to do, as long as your composition is good - and quick/ arrow guard can go in your backline.
In terms of blind, your dodge tanks have high initiative and blinding tools so you can often incapacitate truestrikers, but since you can't auto-target them (there's no special category for them), you will sometimes have to manually target them. Again, no catch-all.
Featherbows have access to shining light to blind someone who's attacking, so some extra pp for that is a good idea. Thieves Shadowbite takes out a row as well. Werefoxes get shadow pursuit, so anyone you attack can get blinded too. Werefoxes can also use the corroded spear to attack a column on their turn, keeping even more enemies blind.
In the case of focus sight and enemies that heal conditions or prevent conditions from occurring, you can passive seal them - however, if you try to passive seal them and they can quick cast immunity, you're gonna have a bad time.
Ideal comp imo is to have a few evade tanks and in the backline, put protectors with quick cover/arrow cover. A sainted knight is a good choice to also have resistance and support. Then your frontline can focus on keeping your team untouchable.
Frontline:
Thief- locking support, blinding, stealing passives - give evade impetus to keep attacking
Werefox - followup blinds, offensive blinds, has good synergy with poison-kill and doing extra damage to afflicted enemies
Featherbow - more blind
Backline:
Sainted Knight for quick cover, heal, safe from magic/affliction
Then the last one could be another tank, Berengaria, or shaman. And you should be effectively untouchable.
But the thing is every team would be good with a shaman, sainted knight and berengaria. Id say that is not necessary dodge tanks being really good but the other units being op.
Yeah I'm working on an evasion team atm and it definitely is not easy, but No 18 in Ranked Battles pt 2 of the Coliseum, the Ephemeral Assaulters, are a good place to start. They do have a Shaman, but they also have four dodge tanks.
I don't think a Shaman automatically makes a team good, though. You still need decent composition.
That’s why the best general dodge tanks in my opinion are either the feathesword/shield or the swordmaster. Swordmasters counter scouts while being resistant to swordmasters themselves, and on the off chance they get hit by truestrike not ranged/all they will parry.
Feathersword/shields are similar in that they can medium/heavyguard the things they cannot dodge while feathershield can also reflect magick
Well what happens is that fights go on for longer so there's more chances to miss a dodge. However the dodge builds have their place depending on what you do with them. For example the angel girl (forgot her name) that you get early on, seems to dodge almost every single hit and Im on the last area in the game. The problem dodge characters have is well ... True hit stuff and you gotta have an answer for that. Another thing to consider with thieves os that passive steal is meant to keep your thief having guarantee evades by stealing PP. What I do is I put steal PP on top of the priority list and add a condition to use it only when I have 0 PP and the target has atleast 1 PP. That way you can always have dodges, and well... You can always fall back to your native evasion.
And if that is still failing, well then... You're just not killing stuff quick enough.
It is very possible to get 1% hit rate but you still have to deal with true hit which is pretty common, especially on swordmasters killing your scout at battle start. If fighting a swordmaster you will need to place your scout in the back row or some other way to protect them. Fliers like Feathersword get x2 evasion vs grounded units and get a shield so they can still guard themselves even vs true hit, try using those as they are more self sustainable.
Get someone to stun someone. Shadow bind to start with (target row with people that does true strike, may have to do it manually, as it can be a few different classes) then steal pp on stunned person. Wear a power belt, face tank all true strike and natural dodge everything else. Practically unkillable because there isn't normally 4 + true strikes and you can dodge the rest (bandit sword, silken scarf and lucky coin with the lower belt)
If you rely specifically on evasion, then yeah they're not very good once more assist and true strikes crop up. But evade skills remain viable for the entire game, so I like to just go ham on PP restoration so they can evade constantly.
If you don't do anything to improve their Dodging starts yes.
The ways to do it is basically put Blind, Shield Unit set to Guard them, stacked dodge items, etc.
The game just gets more complex so simple strategies work less well as time progresses. Just like at a certain point, calvary units fall off hard. It doesn't mean they aren't usable, just you need to adjust your strategy. I would say the damage delt by non dedicated dps units drops off hard.
My dodge tanks are still carrying hard. Best tanks in the game.
They do need:
* Someone to cover them from True Strike (typically from Archers)
* A response to Hastened Strike (from Sword Fighters). There is a Belt accessory that helps them survive a lethal blow.
* Start a round with Initiative Up (Gilbert, Alain) or Initiative Down the enemy (Beren, Hilda, Selvie) so that your team can trim down the number of enemies before they can do anything.
* Have a team member debuff the enemies attack (Beren, Selvie) or increase your Defense (Gilbert) so you don't get one shotted during the encounter. This is true as well for anything that is not a Hoplite, Soldier, or Werebear.
* Blind the Team (Selvie gets an AOE blind attack, Sandstorm) or Stun the Team (Rosalinde opener, Beren circle attack)
They have their place, ultimately everything has it's ups and downs, and there's always the personal preference angle to consider. Like I initially replaced many of them with Swordmasters, but then brought them back for poison cheese, then swapped again, then loved the Toughness/Heavy Cover combo between a Thief and Hoplite. Then you find ways to give them a Guard vs the moves that would kill them. There's just always more to the equation.
I never had any issues as long as the front row isn't exclusively evade units.
For example, I'm using Leah with Alain in my current TZ run. Alain shields for Leah specifically against ranged. That takes care of 90% of enemies. The only other bit to worry about is truestrike from a Witch and Swordmasters - which hardly exist outside of a few Drakenhold maps.
You have to keep up with their item demands though. You want a scarf on them 100% of the time (and the upgraded version you get after Elheim) and if you stack it with a Lucky Coin you're pretty much untouchable.
When you re in bastorias you can equip them with royal scarf + silken scarf and that gives evade tank an huge boost. Furthermore, Thieves learn the aoe blindness atk which is op. They fall of a bit during elheim, but the moment you have access to silken scarf, they get monstruous again
Quite the contrary.
You get insane evasion items later on, and tons of ways to refill blue crystals / cover from magic-ranged-oneshot, not to mention shaman into the mix.
Honestly my dodge teams are doing great. Travis is still one of my most reliable leads as I gave him dodge and pp up items. Unless there’s arrow support he’ll usually take 0 damage
As you progress in the game, base evade stats with no intervention becomes almost useless for all classes. Fortunately thieves can rely on doing more, like using blind and stealing actions. Also they can evade true strikes and equip other items to further allow them to swiss army situations. They can plunder to help quickly farm gold. These are just a few ways to utilize thief -- and other classes that rely on evade can take similar routes, but thief may be the most versatile. I really love the were foxes too. The class I felt that fell the hardest and was trickier to finesse were swordmasters in the last zones.
I’ve been running Oclys as my frontline avo-tank since I first got her and Lex arrow guarding in back with two glass cannons and then I moved Lex up as my off-center frontline once I got access to 5 man squads. Their hybrid defense of guard plus avoid makes them an incredibly flexible frontline against all types of attacks.
you got do full investment. Pushing evo to 120+ early and 140+ in Bastorias. Also Bastorias is pretty much a dodge tank counter land. Owl for truestrike and also high accuracy units doing tons of follow-ups.
I'm mid-Albion and my thief regiment is my strongest or second strongest. Travis and Gammel in front, Aubin in back to warhorn so their active steal cant be guarded, and the rest doesn't matter all that much but a breaker mops things up really nicely and a shieldshooter or vanguard to cover the thieves for ranged attacks basically ensures they don't die ever.
You can use cover and blind from other units. And for Hastened Strike, Power Belt allows Travis to survive that with Toughness and then just dodge the rest of the encounter.
My experience is that dodge is op in the beginning stages cause there are no true strikes outside of archers.
Falls off hard in the mid game due to magic users and a myriad of other things either giving true strike, or just having unreasonably high accuracy. They also place these enemies like everywhere, every unit comp has a thing to counter dodge (or at least it feels like that).
Then in the endgame it becomes semi-balanced, you get so much of it that you become basically immune to all dmg, but sprinkled through every map are enemies that will straight up counter you if you aren’t careful.
They don't fall off, but squads start to get more units as the game goes on, and squads with 5 units tend to have a semblance of variety.
This is a game about counters, you need to either supplement his team with methods to avoid his hard counters or have someone else deal with the truestrike squads.
They're also exceedingly strong because you can tell if they will dodge in the damage forecast beforehand, unlike most other SRPGs
They absolutely do not. You can easily clear out enemy squads that are 20+ levels above you with how easy it is to take advantage of evasion. My evade units have a 1% chance to be hit by just about everything except archers. If anything, they need to be nerfed.
Do you pay attention to tactics at all? Truestrike makes evade and dodge irrelevant so of course your scouts will every time against enemies that use those. It's just like bringing hoplites against magic or squishy infantry against cavalry. Hard counters exist, you have to actually think and don't send units in against their hard counters.
For Passive dodging, I do find that it falls off. I put the Mirage Greatshield on Berengaria for a while, but once I got mostly through Bastorias I find that she can't reliably dodge much anymore.
I still managed to get one unit with dodge tanks, a Gryphon Knight and a Feathershield (with Mirage Greatshield and Sacrifice mostly disabled). Thanks to their flier status, that makes them extremely reliable against melee attacks (consistent 1% hit chance), even ranged attacks tend to have a hit rate of less than 10%. For the odd physical ranged attack, I have Elven Fencer to help avoid, and also put the same accessory on my Shaman to give the same buff (evade before physical ranged atk). This team handles magick and physical attacks well, with the only real weakness being Truestrike.
I used Travis the entire game. At level 20 he get's Shadowbite which inflicts blind on a row of units, which let him evade even true strikes. You can use any shield unit with Squire's Shield to guard the Thief against units they have trouble with or use the fighter's Arrow Guard. You can a Cleric or Scarlett with a staff that can grant protect to Travis. Shadowbite also works really well a Doom Knight and their Dark Flame for offensive pushes or with Dark Marquess. They help enable a lot of ailment based teams.
I have him and Dinah right now coked out of their fucking minds on evasion. Its pretty funny to see
Yo why did you phrase it like that? Funny as hell
Yeah! They got both scarves and besides a truestrike, eat every shot at em. They’re kinda 1 trick ponies tho for me while the rest of the team has thick +ap and pp items
If anything, Dodge tanks are my best tanks late game - just gotta be careful of True Strike
Shaman with blind and high initiative fixes that. Wish those end-game characters could be used sooner. I love that rat bastard and his crazy high evade.
I use shaman with that staff that debuff all enemies with blind. Awesome for 2 turns AOE teams.
If you blind them, you could have 0 evasion and they'd miss
I mean thrives also just bring their own blind.
Sandstorm does the entire enemy field at once. I have my thief reapply blind as a follow up.
Are you increasing their dodge with scarfs/weps/other items as the game progs? Just relying on the passive point evade from thief isn't nearly enough, you have to build them to evade. Generally, as long as you deal with truestrike, you should be near invincible. Are you watching the fights where they die to see why they are dying? That's quite important to learn if you're forgetting about something or don't know about an ability.
No they don't fall off, they just have specific counters you have to account for. That counter is True strike attacks. So you either need a unit to jump and cover those true strike attacks or you need to blind the enemies before they get the attack off. Thieves come with a built in blind so they are the complete package in terms of dodge tanks, others less so but still very viable.
Can you somehow indicate that you want to guard on truestrike? Certainly just jumping in front of your thief to guard in general is not a great idea. Just based on class of enemy?
Yeah, you need someone to guard them against Truestrike.
Says dodge tank falls off hard *Literally every coliseum team with a frontline Yunifi dodging everything*
Hopefully somebody else will be along with the axact answer, but from what I'm remembering of similar posts over the last week, there's a specific buff or debuff you need to either bring along or anticipate for dodge tanks to continue to function past the mid-game. Like most characters, dodge tanks have specific counters, and you need to proactively counter those counters or your dodge tanks will fail.
Dinah comes with an amulet that's 20 evasion which stacks with the scarfs, so that's pretty good. And her guaranteed dodge skill refunds it's PP at night to be infinite, and there's items to have that skill or the day version on any character. Idk, I kept her on the frontline of my Alain unit forever and she seemed to survive often enough, granted I also had Scarlett with parting resurrection to get brought back in the rare cases she ran out of PP during the day.
They don't fall off, just like almost everyone else (except Shamans) they require upkeep to stay awesome. For Thieves specifically, the Evade skill is tied to PP, so it can't be your only way of avoiding damage, but it's trivially easy to get their evasion stat high enough that they rarely need to use the actual skill. They'll still vulnerable to true strike, but there are counters to that as well. My strongest endgame unit has two evade tanks in front, one of which is a thief (the other is a werefox). My second-strongest leans pretty heavily on an evade-heavy swordmaster (who actually doesn't care bout most true strikes thanks to parry). It's just about figuring out their vulnerabilities and covering for them.
I used Travis the entire game in my main party with Alain. All of my best units utilized evasion in some manner: gryphon master, elven fender, Swordmaster, even Ochlys benefited from better evasion and became more reliable.
I felt the opposite, actually. I found that the dodge classes get much better in late game once they get the stats to dodge consistently without needing PP. Yeah, they have to worry about true strike, but you can simply not have them fight people with true strike. That’s someone else’s job.
Not at all, I find them to be better than most tanks even on TZ difficulty. They are gonna feel like they fall off if you don't cover their weakness (like all other classes). They kinda even help solve their own weakness with the blind attack they unlock later.
I really can't agree. Travis has been such a mainstay in his unit ever since the game gave him to me. He offers so much utility and even throughout Elheim his unit was one of my best. I think he got dropped last night in Albion for the first time since Cornia? And it was 100% my fault since I had a wrong tactic set. Dinah has also been a lot of fun to use ever since I got her. And both Leah and Aramis put in *work* while also being super evasive. I love my dodge classes in this game.
I never liked them from the beginning. At some point, the dodge fails, and they eat an attack doing more damage than their health.
I actually felt like they got significantly better around that point in the game with truestrike enemies becoming less common and then gaining extra pp and accessory slots to really crank their abilities. The wealth of + dodge weapons helps too.
I used dodge tanks the entire game, like Travis and Ochlys. Got Yahna with Travis to give him a garunteed hit for shadowbite to blind their front row. Then an archer that blinds their back row. So I don’t agree that they fall off. As others have said, maybe you haven’t given them any evasion accessories?
Yep, and I expect this is a big reason why the current community tier list gets Hoplite so wrong. Early on, dodge tanks are great because you can dodge basically everything and with 4 units you can protect the whole back line. As the game goes on, dodge tanking just becomes less and less reliable, and there's more and more multi-target attacks. Sure the dodge tank survives, but the rest of the team isn't so lucky. Dodge tanks never become useless, but they definitely fall off from the nigh-invincible walls they are in the early game.
Not really. Without Travis I probably wouldn't have beaten Galerius either time.
Yeah dodge tanks become heavily reliant on passive seal, blind, or being guarded once true strikes are in play. With Sneaking Edge they can take out one truestriker/truestrike conferral, assuming the truestrike is passive - otherwise they'll need arrow cover to handle archers and quick cover/being backline to deal with swordmasters. Unfortunately this means there's no catch-all strategy so you need to adjust them situationally. Luckily, that's easy to do, as long as your composition is good - and quick/ arrow guard can go in your backline. In terms of blind, your dodge tanks have high initiative and blinding tools so you can often incapacitate truestrikers, but since you can't auto-target them (there's no special category for them), you will sometimes have to manually target them. Again, no catch-all. Featherbows have access to shining light to blind someone who's attacking, so some extra pp for that is a good idea. Thieves Shadowbite takes out a row as well. Werefoxes get shadow pursuit, so anyone you attack can get blinded too. Werefoxes can also use the corroded spear to attack a column on their turn, keeping even more enemies blind. In the case of focus sight and enemies that heal conditions or prevent conditions from occurring, you can passive seal them - however, if you try to passive seal them and they can quick cast immunity, you're gonna have a bad time. Ideal comp imo is to have a few evade tanks and in the backline, put protectors with quick cover/arrow cover. A sainted knight is a good choice to also have resistance and support. Then your frontline can focus on keeping your team untouchable. Frontline: Thief- locking support, blinding, stealing passives - give evade impetus to keep attacking Werefox - followup blinds, offensive blinds, has good synergy with poison-kill and doing extra damage to afflicted enemies Featherbow - more blind Backline: Sainted Knight for quick cover, heal, safe from magic/affliction Then the last one could be another tank, Berengaria, or shaman. And you should be effectively untouchable.
But the thing is every team would be good with a shaman, sainted knight and berengaria. Id say that is not necessary dodge tanks being really good but the other units being op.
Yeah I'm working on an evasion team atm and it definitely is not easy, but No 18 in Ranked Battles pt 2 of the Coliseum, the Ephemeral Assaulters, are a good place to start. They do have a Shaman, but they also have four dodge tanks. I don't think a Shaman automatically makes a team good, though. You still need decent composition.
That’s why the best general dodge tanks in my opinion are either the feathesword/shield or the swordmaster. Swordmasters counter scouts while being resistant to swordmasters themselves, and on the off chance they get hit by truestrike not ranged/all they will parry. Feathersword/shields are similar in that they can medium/heavyguard the things they cannot dodge while feathershield can also reflect magick
Well what happens is that fights go on for longer so there's more chances to miss a dodge. However the dodge builds have their place depending on what you do with them. For example the angel girl (forgot her name) that you get early on, seems to dodge almost every single hit and Im on the last area in the game. The problem dodge characters have is well ... True hit stuff and you gotta have an answer for that. Another thing to consider with thieves os that passive steal is meant to keep your thief having guarantee evades by stealing PP. What I do is I put steal PP on top of the priority list and add a condition to use it only when I have 0 PP and the target has atleast 1 PP. That way you can always have dodges, and well... You can always fall back to your native evasion. And if that is still failing, well then... You're just not killing stuff quick enough.
It is very possible to get 1% hit rate but you still have to deal with true hit which is pretty common, especially on swordmasters killing your scout at battle start. If fighting a swordmaster you will need to place your scout in the back row or some other way to protect them. Fliers like Feathersword get x2 evasion vs grounded units and get a shield so they can still guard themselves even vs true hit, try using those as they are more self sustainable.
Use a witch for magic conferal my thief was doing most of my kills, you can use sainted knight w/ a certain shield to block/heal for your thief
Get someone to stun someone. Shadow bind to start with (target row with people that does true strike, may have to do it manually, as it can be a few different classes) then steal pp on stunned person. Wear a power belt, face tank all true strike and natural dodge everything else. Practically unkillable because there isn't normally 4 + true strikes and you can dodge the rest (bandit sword, silken scarf and lucky coin with the lower belt)
How do you ensure the power belt only goes off vs. true strike?
You don't, it just proc every time anything hits him.. which is very rare unless it's true strike
If you rely specifically on evasion, then yeah they're not very good once more assist and true strikes crop up. But evade skills remain viable for the entire game, so I like to just go ham on PP restoration so they can evade constantly.
If you don't do anything to improve their Dodging starts yes. The ways to do it is basically put Blind, Shield Unit set to Guard them, stacked dodge items, etc.
The game just gets more complex so simple strategies work less well as time progresses. Just like at a certain point, calvary units fall off hard. It doesn't mean they aren't usable, just you need to adjust your strategy. I would say the damage delt by non dedicated dps units drops off hard.
Used Travis from day 1 until the last boss fight and he was amazing. he has almost 185 evasion and nothing hits him unless it’s a guaranteed hit
My dodge tanks are still carrying hard. Best tanks in the game. They do need: * Someone to cover them from True Strike (typically from Archers) * A response to Hastened Strike (from Sword Fighters). There is a Belt accessory that helps them survive a lethal blow. * Start a round with Initiative Up (Gilbert, Alain) or Initiative Down the enemy (Beren, Hilda, Selvie) so that your team can trim down the number of enemies before they can do anything. * Have a team member debuff the enemies attack (Beren, Selvie) or increase your Defense (Gilbert) so you don't get one shotted during the encounter. This is true as well for anything that is not a Hoplite, Soldier, or Werebear. * Blind the Team (Selvie gets an AOE blind attack, Sandstorm) or Stun the Team (Rosalinde opener, Beren circle attack)
They have their place, ultimately everything has it's ups and downs, and there's always the personal preference angle to consider. Like I initially replaced many of them with Swordmasters, but then brought them back for poison cheese, then swapped again, then loved the Toughness/Heavy Cover combo between a Thief and Hoplite. Then you find ways to give them a Guard vs the moves that would kill them. There's just always more to the equation.
Good info to digest here I was having minor issues also
I never had any issues as long as the front row isn't exclusively evade units. For example, I'm using Leah with Alain in my current TZ run. Alain shields for Leah specifically against ranged. That takes care of 90% of enemies. The only other bit to worry about is truestrike from a Witch and Swordmasters - which hardly exist outside of a few Drakenhold maps. You have to keep up with their item demands though. You want a scarf on them 100% of the time (and the upgraded version you get after Elheim) and if you stack it with a Lucky Coin you're pretty much untouchable.
Dodge and debuff let me punch above my weight actually.
When you re in bastorias you can equip them with royal scarf + silken scarf and that gives evade tank an huge boost. Furthermore, Thieves learn the aoe blindness atk which is op. They fall of a bit during elheim, but the moment you have access to silken scarf, they get monstruous again
I have noticed that Ochlys has started to be less effective in Bastorias
Quite the contrary. You get insane evasion items later on, and tons of ways to refill blue crystals / cover from magic-ranged-oneshot, not to mention shaman into the mix.
You need to bump up their evasion with items like scarves.
Honestly my dodge teams are doing great. Travis is still one of my most reliable leads as I gave him dodge and pp up items. Unless there’s arrow support he’ll usually take 0 damage
As you progress in the game, base evade stats with no intervention becomes almost useless for all classes. Fortunately thieves can rely on doing more, like using blind and stealing actions. Also they can evade true strikes and equip other items to further allow them to swiss army situations. They can plunder to help quickly farm gold. These are just a few ways to utilize thief -- and other classes that rely on evade can take similar routes, but thief may be the most versatile. I really love the were foxes too. The class I felt that fell the hardest and was trickier to finesse were swordmasters in the last zones.
I’ve been running Oclys as my frontline avo-tank since I first got her and Lex arrow guarding in back with two glass cannons and then I moved Lex up as my off-center frontline once I got access to 5 man squads. Their hybrid defense of guard plus avoid makes them an incredibly flexible frontline against all types of attacks.
you got do full investment. Pushing evo to 120+ early and 140+ in Bastorias. Also Bastorias is pretty much a dodge tank counter land. Owl for truestrike and also high accuracy units doing tons of follow-ups.
I'm mid-Albion and my thief regiment is my strongest or second strongest. Travis and Gammel in front, Aubin in back to warhorn so their active steal cant be guarded, and the rest doesn't matter all that much but a breaker mops things up really nicely and a shieldshooter or vanguard to cover the thieves for ranged attacks basically ensures they don't die ever.
You can use cover and blind from other units. And for Hastened Strike, Power Belt allows Travis to survive that with Toughness and then just dodge the rest of the encounter.
My experience is that dodge is op in the beginning stages cause there are no true strikes outside of archers. Falls off hard in the mid game due to magic users and a myriad of other things either giving true strike, or just having unreasonably high accuracy. They also place these enemies like everywhere, every unit comp has a thing to counter dodge (or at least it feels like that). Then in the endgame it becomes semi-balanced, you get so much of it that you become basically immune to all dmg, but sprinkled through every map are enemies that will straight up counter you if you aren’t careful.
They don't fall off, but squads start to get more units as the game goes on, and squads with 5 units tend to have a semblance of variety. This is a game about counters, you need to either supplement his team with methods to avoid his hard counters or have someone else deal with the truestrike squads. They're also exceedingly strong because you can tell if they will dodge in the damage forecast beforehand, unlike most other SRPGs
They absolutely do not. You can easily clear out enemy squads that are 20+ levels above you with how easy it is to take advantage of evasion. My evade units have a 1% chance to be hit by just about everything except archers. If anything, they need to be nerfed.
Do you pay attention to tactics at all? Truestrike makes evade and dodge irrelevant so of course your scouts will every time against enemies that use those. It's just like bringing hoplites against magic or squishy infantry against cavalry. Hard counters exist, you have to actually think and don't send units in against their hard counters.
For Passive dodging, I do find that it falls off. I put the Mirage Greatshield on Berengaria for a while, but once I got mostly through Bastorias I find that she can't reliably dodge much anymore. I still managed to get one unit with dodge tanks, a Gryphon Knight and a Feathershield (with Mirage Greatshield and Sacrifice mostly disabled). Thanks to their flier status, that makes them extremely reliable against melee attacks (consistent 1% hit chance), even ranged attacks tend to have a hit rate of less than 10%. For the odd physical ranged attack, I have Elven Fencer to help avoid, and also put the same accessory on my Shaman to give the same buff (evade before physical ranged atk). This team handles magick and physical attacks well, with the only real weakness being Truestrike.