User blog:Brainwasher5/Experience Grinding Guide for FE: Conquest

You're playing Conquest, and you understand that the game has limited time to gain experience. You could either choose to use some characters and ditch the rest in the interests of keeping your team competitive and alive through the chapters...or you can grind out every last drop of exp this game has to offer. This guide shows how to do the latter: how to optimize experience grinding, the best maps to experience grind on, and the best way to make sure your team can handle whatever Conquest throws at you.

For some this guide totally defeats the purpose of Nohr mode, which is supposed to be a game of limited resources and challenge. That's a legitimate viewpoint and I won't contest it; feel free to stop reading. This guide is meant for either those who view Fire Emblem as a dating simulator and so wants to use as many people as possible, or for those who consistently find themselves struggling on hard or particularly lunatic mode.

A nice bonus to doing this is increasing weapon rank, because no one likes being stuck on bronze weapons.

General tips
Avoid weapons that can crit and then kill the target. Even if the chance is a 2% or so, by definition experience grinding involves hitting a guy multiple times, and eventually you're going to activate the crit.

Certain units have skills that can help you grind by making you do more damage/take less damage/other benefits. These include: Avatar, Felicia, Jakob, Silas, Izana, Beruka, Camilla, Elise (very handy), Laslow, Gunter. Others technically exist but are not useful.

Try to let enemy healers heal, for obvious reasons.

Guard mode is very useful for prolonging your units' combat readiness, and can help the guarding unit gain experience very, very, very slowly.

Dance with Azura until she's on the verge of a level before the end of every chapter. This way, you can guarantee that she has a good level on the beginning of the following chapter by resetting as needed.

A word of warning
Your characters experience rapid drops from gains in experience when they level up too far. This means that most gains in grinding from earlier levels are lost over time--unless you're grinding on a unit you don't plan on using for a while. So, you can pick out a unit you don't like or find useful, grind them to level 20, and then ditch them until you need their firepower for a later chapter.

Equipment
Below is a list of equipment for exp grinding and how they are useful.
 * 1) Bronze/Brass equipment and their magic equivalents: these weapons have low might and cannot inflict criticals, making them perfect for making enemies last as long as possible.
 * 2) Takumi's Shinai/Niles' Bow: neither of these weapons can kill. If the enemy you are fighting is just about finished but you want to reserve the kill for your puniest character, hit them with one of these weapons first. You can get one from visit points in castles.
 * 3) Cupid Bow: This bow HEALS its target. If Niles (your only early game bow user) can inflict less than 6 damage per round of combat, you have the potential to make an enemy last for as long as Niles doesn't get too many strength levels. In this regard, every time Niles gets a level that doesn't have strength, he's buying more time for the rest of the team to train. You can get a cupid bow from castle events, or from battle points in castles.
 * 4) Blessed Bow/Lance/Mikoto's Yumi/Fruit Knife/other healing items: useful for fighting enemies that can't chase you: let your guys take a hit or two from powerful units, then retreat and recharge. Saves you money from healing staves if you already have leveled elise/jakob/felicia to an acceptable level.
 * 5) Enfeeble: if your units just can't make a dent in a strong unit, this will be a temporary fix. An expensive, temporary fix.
 * 6) Entrap: useful for trapping enemies on forts or thrones, where they can heal indefinitely. The Lunge skill fulfills a similar purposes.

Levels in which you can exp grind
Spoilers (duh). Up next: Paralogues and gold grinding.
 * 1) Chapter 3: Gift of the Ganglari. Technically speaking, the Hoshido units can benefit from the healing tiles and therefore can be grinded for a bit. In practice, they're too squishy to be able to grind efficiently. There are better options later.
 * 2) Chapter 4: Journey Begins. There's an archer/samurai combo on a fort in the north-east who do not move. If you kill the samurai, the archer can be used to grind out some more experience for jakob/felicia and avatar. Given their limited range of weaponry and the low def of the archer/samurai, you can't stay here for too long unless you are extremely masochistic and intend on staying here for a long while.
 * 3) Paralogue 1: Tragic Start. You need the Cupid Bow and finished Cold Reception for this. The boss does not move, and given that you've just gotten Niles his strength should be relatively low. I was able to grind Mozu (and everyone else) to about level 12 here thanks to Niles.
 * 4) Chapter 9: Another Trial. The boss, Haitaka, cannot move and is on a throne. He has good defense, too, and high dodge so he can last a nice long time. This is also a good time to get Azura up to speed on exp while grinding the others since you get her on this chapter.
 * 5) Chapter 11: The shrine maiden behind Hinoka is TECHNICALLY grindable as she is on a gate and doesn't move, but her puny defense, coupled with Hinoka standing right in front of her and the chapter ending the moment Hinoka is defeated, makes grinding here an act of extreme desperation.
 * 6) Chapter 12: You can't grind here, but I thought I'd mention that unless you've done some serious grinding on your other units beforehand, Camilla with a Dual Club might be your best hope of taking out Ryoma. That Secret Book he has is quite inviting...
 * 7) Chapter 13: You can grind here on Normal; you cannot grind on Hard/Lunatic. The reason for this is because on Normal you can herd Reina/Takumi onto a gate and then take advantage of them not being able to attack adjacent enemies to grind forever, but on hard/lunatic Takumi has Pass and Reina has a naginata. There are archers on the map that don't have pass, but they're too weak to lure to a gate, let alone exp grind on (unless you've gotten some truly spectacularly bad levels).
 * 8) Chapter 17: Kotaro is on a throne, and doesn't move. However he is quite powerful and your units risk death if you flirt with lady luck for too long. Watch out for his Trample and his multiple weapons (on hard/lunatic mode). Keep Saizo away from Kotaro or he will end the map prematurely.
 * 9) Chapter 20: Fuga is on a throne, and relatively tough, making him a good candidate for grinding. Watch out for the wind mechanic on the map.
 * 10) Chapter 22: Yukimura's on a gate, does not move, has good defense and resistance, and has seal strength. This is one of the last good grinding opportunities in the main story.
 * 11) Chapter 23: Takumi is on a throne and does not move. However, his bow is deadly and he has a couple of very nasty skills, making battling him for too long highly dangerous. Units with Bowbreaker can grind here for a while if they have high enough skill/luck. You can also trap enemies on the forts in the south-west side of the map, though you'll need at least four highly defensive tanks to make this work out.
 * 12) Chapter 26: Treason. Iago is on a throne...but he is very dangerous for grinding due to his high chance to crit. Tomebreaker units can benefit, but it's still risky.