Breaking Down: Dimitri- Fire Emblem: Three Houses Unit Analysis

Today we look at the leader of the Blue Lions and future prince of Faerghus, Dimitri!

We hit 500 Subs as this was uploading, just want to say a massive thanks for the support!

[JonoabboFE]

10:30 - I can confirm that Cavalier is not a level 30 class that goes by the name of "Gremory". I genuinely have no idea how I managed that.

[Rengor]

Do we really need to be Breaking Down Dimitri?
He's doing a fine job of it by himself

[baticeer_]

I gotta say thank you for these unit breakdown videos as someone who only got into 3 Houses for the first time recently. It's really nice to have a character building resource I can look at that is more up to date when a lot of the character build guides that I saw were from around when the game first released (so they dont have the DLC or just the benefit of more game expertise). I didn't really know what I was doing on my first runs of the game on Hard but your videos have really helped me with learning how things work and getting ideas for new stuff to try if I replay, or whenever I eventually get around to trying Maddening!

Playing blindly Dimitri was not only my favorite character in terms of writing/personality (I did not expect to love this boy so much) but very fun to use, I made him a Holy Knight for no particular reason other than wanting to try out one of the mounted magic classes plus I could pretend he was doing it to be like Rodrigue (😢) LOL, obviously it's suboptimal since his Mag is so bad, but he is so strong that I didn't really miss losing Lancefaire from paladin and occasionally appreciated the extra Res against all those siege tome users in the late game. I didn't figure out how to make proper use of his Battalion skills though and the way you explain it has me already buzzing to try it out on my next Blue Lions playthrough.

[twobirdsonescone]

i do think there is a little bit more to be said about his crest. casually it’s mostly just frustrating but if you are rigging, it can let base strength wyvern rider! dimitri hit some stupid kill thresholds that he has no right doing. Something i find very impressive is that with +8 from skills (death blow and str+2), base wr dimitri can one shot the first two health bars of hegemon edelgard with blaiddyd smash crits.

[ninjakirby]

Tbh I’ve just gone his canon class and focused all my teachings for him on lance and authority and he’s always been a monster for me, I like it better than Paladin cause it doesn’t have the speed drawback of Paladin while keeping Lancefaire.

[JFarenci]

You don't break down Dimitri, Dimitri breaks down you

[nebby]

I know Swordmaster isn't anywhere near optimal on him, but I certainly don't think it's too bad of an option.

Rapier+ with innate Swordfaire and +10 crit does great damage, and helps him with tanky enemies like Paladins, Fortress Knights and GK's. It has more durability and is cheaper to maintain than Killer weapons as well.

Astra sucks, but it is at least an option to delete something when its absolutely necessary and you don't want to burn a use of Atrocity. Having his Crest proc on Astra hurts my soul though.

And A-Authority, A-Swords and D+ Bows is really low investment build for him. You just get the min requirements for archer, then stick with his boons till level 20, and watch that 70% Growth in Str and Speed snowball him into a monster.

The 5 move is an ugly hindrance, no two ways about it. But Stride, a Dancer, Yuri's Relic or a dedicated Foul Play user to help maneuver him into position will alleviate that problem a fair bit

[twobirdsonescone]

you never mentioned regular vantage + battalion wrath which is just about the same as dimitris with the caveat of needing manage flying battalion endurance. Still performs the same role and as well can usually be done on units with very easy flight like petra, bernadetta, annette and friends. as well the bat wrath men that can slide into hero to do the same thing. notably seteth, base alois, jeritza can do the same thing with no mastery requirements.

[g.n.s.]

Really great video that brought up a lot of things I don't see him being praised enough for!

Personally I'm a huge advocate for Bow Knight Dimitri even though it takes more effort than Paladin. Most notably being a little more hungry on Dexterity and Luck boosters to make up for the lack of the Crit+10 ability due to using a slot for Close Counter. The real benefit here is the ability to attack safely on player phase things that are harder to EP and then position yourself properly after. Fortress knights can be difficult to OHKO in a single crit but a hit beforehand makes the K.O. threshold a lot easier to reach.

[takeyourheart]

War Master gives +20 crit by itself plus axe and fistfaire. The axes let him easily deal with armored units and gauntlets have such a good hit rate that it makes his enemy phase even more reliable. It is his best class in my opinion and absolutely worth the investment. Plus with his personal skill in the second half of the game, you can easily farm his axe and fist skills by sticking him in the woods with rusty weapons on a mid month battle map with a Knowledge Gem. With a high avoid battalion plus his +20 avoid when at full health, he can easily dodge everything and raise his skills even during the chapters you can’t teach him. That’s what I did to get him to War Master since I hadn’t planned on using that class initially.

[oxygen]

I may have just rolled the weirdest Dimitri ever. At level 38 he has 17 speed and 34 dexterity, despite the fact both of these stats start at 7 with a 50% growth…

I mean, dexterity is more important than speed for a wrath/vantage user, but still, what are the odds?

[dijonmustard]

u didn't go in depth on sword dimitri (fair, reasonable), so i'll share. i tried sword dimitri once, just to be wacky and mix things up, and found myself reclassing him from swordmaster to assassin a number of times because i was that desperate for a single crumb of movement. swords also make one of the enemy phase's problematic enemy types, high-avoid pegasi u could have <100 hit on, much more problematic with their swordbreaker+. with lance dimitri i've found i can generally hit lancebreaker+ warriors and fortress knights and such without much trouble. swordbreaker+ pegasi tho...

the only niche thing i can think to say in favor of sword dimitri, besides windsweep, is that the lord class gives +2 sword and +2 authority skill experience, plus statue bonus. nice on paper! but in practice, by the time you've mastered archer, ur gonna be on the cusp of A authority already. u could go lord at level 10 and rush A authority a chapter or so sooner, but ur battalion options don't really open up until chapter 8 anyway. before then there's really just, uhh, jeralt's mercenaries? which provides 0 hit to go with ur lack of hit+20? awesome! so to *ALL* the high-level three houses maddening players who think swordmaster is a good class for units other than earlygame catherine, get this: it's not very good. sword dimitri still provided me S-tier performance because dimitri, but if u want peak male performance in three houses just go paladin dimitri lol.

[MegaJesseman]

Dimitri is pretty meh before the 5-year leap unless you get him an A-Rank in authority. He goes from being meh to obliterating everything. Lance and authority, I found to be the most worth it investments. I also like to ramp him up in riding for the movement +1, so the crap load of cavalry and fliers don't just leave him in the dust. Pre time skip I actually advise against making him into a paladin because you run a very real risk of getting speed screwed. It's okay to leave him as a paladin for a while, but I made the mistake of leaving him as a paladin for the entire first half of the game after unlocking it with him and he couldn't double jack squat of anything after the 5-year leap. I just had to spam atrocity and kept having to repair Aeredbhar every chapter. I turned him into a lord for his pre time skip final class and he did loads better. Lord actually has pretty good growth rates especially for an intermediate class and it gave him extra skill growth in lances and authority which are honestly his two most useful skills. And having the increase growth in swords is kind of nice for wind sweep.

[sadeknight]

I just finished a blue lions play through the other day and B!wrath + B!vantage + War Master = soloing the final chapter

[Starwars-Fanboy]

Battalion wrath + battalion vantage = pwnage incarnate

[jmicjm]

Dimitri doesn't need anything but the easy to get into classes, since training anything but Lance+authority delays his best powerspike. Once I hit A Auth and S Lance I got A flying for alert stance, then grabbed s+ Lance for extra Lance faire and upgraded to alert stance+.

Final build for him, unique lord class with battalion wrath, battalion vantage, Lance crit +10, Lance faire, and battalion defence. The battalion defence made it so once I got his battalion to the right range, I never had to set it up again for the rest of the game (basically all of part 2)

[greg]

Bow Knight Dimitri is definitely interesting, but I don't really see the point in it. Unless you have so much hit and crit (replace bow crit with close counter), there are going to be problems. Also shooting seige tomes with a bow from 10 spaces away is gonna be 40 hit. I will say however it is not ridiculously high investment if you go sniper 1st since he has boons in the other 2 areas. Sniper suffers from the same accuracy issues as bow knight tho.

I would say swordmaster is more worth with how low investment it is and with the +10 innate crit + wo dao, it makes his low luck something you don't have to pay attention to at all.

Also regarding the battalions, the indech sword fighters only have 10 crit so it depends on Dimitri's stats whether you want to use them. You also implied that the Goneril Valkyries are flying when they are infantry. Leicester Mercenaries have the same hit and crit has Goneril so also a great option.

[texteel]

Ive seen a meme video about dmitiri just parking in the middle and isntantly killing attackers with some lightning magic. For the longest time I thought it was something to do with paladin, but now I think it was a combination of bat vantage and bat wrath.

[briankelly]

Made Wyvern Lord in part one but was super difficult

[Matteo_nr_evermore_stan]

Love that paladin mastery could be either Defiant Avoid, defiant speed or aegis according to the graphic haha