also i made a chart of student supports

Because I Have A Problem

if you want to ignore supports and just recruit on personality, i also made this mess of a shitpost , which i cant rly edit now so don't @ me

also i only just realized that my tumblr layout doesn't do bold rip me

i'll see if i can fix that

OK NOW IN CAPSLOCK

For the record Hilda can only be recruited in the very narrow window of like, the last chapter of Black Eagles if you pick Silver Snow

Last White Clouds chapter.

yeah that's why i was like "i'm gonna assume probably not tho"

dang I didn't realize Raphael had a support with Dimitri... time to replay blue lions

dimitri & raph's support is cute imo

meanwhile i did golden deer first and only recruited annette out of my own suggestions I WANT... THOSE CLAUDE SUPPORTS...

THIS IS SO SUPER HELPFUL THANK YOU, i'm just starting bleagles so this is perf

Note: if you're playing on normal mode, it's entirely possible to recruit every student on your first playthrough

I did BL for my first playthrough on normal mode and I did in fact recruit everyone, even Ferdinand and Caspar who are imo the most difficult because they involve training skills Byleth is likely never going to use

I also did it with minimal grinding

(Unlike ng+ where I am grinding the SHIT out of everything)

My tactics were, I believe, to focus on recruiting certain characters first, and then as I recruited more and more characters I started pouring more and more of the effort/money I used to get them into focusing down the remaining students I needed to recruit

At one point I was just shamelessly dumping a dozen gifts on kids at once

I got a sizable chunk of the money I used to do this from fishing, which I also did grinding with for professor levels

And if you're on normal mode, you have the free battle missions you can do without spending activity points; provided you can keep yourself in weapons, you could grind levels with a loaner student as your adjutant and build up their support levels with Byleth that way so they're easier to recruit

(Note: I did not need to do this last step to achieve my results, but it's definitely something you could work in to make getting my results even easier)

I think during my first run i recruited like, six students? albeit one of those was free!sylvain. this guide's more for people if they want to priortize certain people just in case
but you are correct, it's definitely possible with the right work! i don't want this to be discouraging, either. thank you for the advice !!

No problem! I just wanted to offer my advice for anyone who wants to do the completionist thing, and how I pulled it off. Because yeah, it's not easy.

(Oh, one other thing I did: I savescummed faculty training to get Great results. I'm not sure you can get Byleth's stats high enough without that, at least on a brand new game. ng+, with accelerated professor levels and more activity points, you might be fine.)

I also wanted to mention that Caspar and Ferdinand are probably the toughest students to get, since Heavy Armor is not ideal for anything Byleth ever wants to do (Byleth's speed and sword skills mean you are probably not going to go for heavy armor axe classes) and Brawling means foregoing Byleth's sword specialty.

All the other students tend to require skills Byleth might naturally level, so it's easier.

Conversely, Felix is one of the easier students to recruit because he wants sword skills (if I recall correctly) and that's already in Byleth's wheelhouse.

i'm laughing because i specifically got caspar first (sans sylvain) in my first run, and i'd somehow missed that upping supports would lower the requirements

the amount of grinding i did....

I BET...

i wanted... fight boy...

I'm over here being a massive completionist so I looked up a guide first thing being like HOW DO I COLLECT ALL THESE KIDS

You know, it's funny

felix uses sword but he has a higher base req for it than the other students'
that said i agree, him and dorothea (who wants authority) tend to be easy

i think ignatz is also authority?

Caspar apparently has one of the lowest base stat sets in the game, and is theoretically garbage tier as a result

(Or maybe it's his stat growths that are bad, I don't remember)

(Something that supposedly makes him Not Ideal)

my poor son

And I'm over here with my War Master Caspar, who does at least 30x4 damage with his training knuckles, just sipping tea going "can't relate"

Caspar has never not been my most beastly unit

lmfao yeah, getting good at brawl is the good shit

I say he does 30x4 damage at least because those are his stats against armor units

caspar oh my god

Against squishier units it's more in the 45x4 range

Caspar is to fists what Lysithea is to magic

ONE PUNCH

I like to send him in against beasts because he can one shot a beast's health bar

And then when he has good dodging and Healing Focus to heal himself when he does get hit?

We stan a legend

i love imagining shit like that happening in-narrative like, caspar just walking up to a big monster and just fucking punching it

Caspar booped the snoot so hard it died

/peers at these

And then he has an identity crisis because he’s not as brawny as Raph...

And I quietly cheer his Punch All The Things

yessss
this is a Caspar Appreciation Space v_v