What's the point of Annette.
She and Lorenz are not stacking up for me.
Lorenz is, I think, best as a hybrid. The end goal is Dark Knight--the best way there is either the Warlock path or the Dark Seal path, but either way you slap a lance on him and let him get up close a bit
Speaking of, on my BE run, I had all my characters specialize in basically one combat skill, only splashing into other stuff for class qualification. With few exceptions they basically all carried one weapon and used that same weapon in every single fight. In my GD run, I'm at least outfitting every character with two means of attacking and having them actually substantially hybridize across different skills, and I've been really pleased at how
good it is. I feel like in most games I've played with this measure of flexibility, actually making your characters hybrids is a bit of a trap—specialized characters
always blow hybrids out of the water, and the 'versatility' you get from having characters that can do more than one thing is usually not worth the straight-up tradeoff in skill.
In FETH, it feels like it's actually substantially better to have characters do multiple things. The skill costs starting from ~A through S are so steep that it seems like a focusing character will only get through them by the very end of the game, and the benefits you get for taking a skill to S are not really that meaningful. Alternatively, in the same amount of time, you could bring two skills to at least A, and having two weapon types per character actually makes a big difference and makes fights way more interesting. Hybridizing being more than viable also makes character building way more interesting, like you can actually play around with class paths and archetypes. It makes the prospect of future runs way cooler, too, since you can take actually take characters in different wacky directions
i'm very into it
it also feels like something that the GD are better for than the BE, maybe? like, Leonie, Raphael, Marianne, Lorenz, and Ignatz, at least, feel like they're actually made for hybridizing more than most BE students did