Fire Emblem: Awakening Advanced Classes Guide: Sage, Dark Knight

Now that we have covered all the basic starter classes, it’s time to take a look at the advanced classes included in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Most of these classes are actually more specialized versions of the starter classes and feature overall better growth and skills. It’s important to play around with the class change system to make the advanced classes as strong as they can be. Changing a mage into a physical oriented class won’t be doing you any good since all the bonus stats will be related to the magic stat and so on. It’s still possible to make some drastic changes but it’s going to require more work and it’s probably not worth it. Still, the possibility is there to customize your army to your likings.

• Sage

The Sage is probably one of the best promotions you can award to any of your magic wielding units: they can use both tomes and staves, making them pretty versatile in both offense and defense. However all stats take a hit, with magic, speed and skill only getting avarage growth: in the long run the sage will be much weaker than others specialized units. Still it’s got a nice movement range and decent support effects so they can still be fairly useful. I personally don’t like bringing units who can only heal in battle and do nothing else, so the sagen was a nice addition. It all depends on your play style: sages can be fairly useful or useless depensing on you. Sage learns the Rally Magic skill at level 5 and the Magic Expert skill at level 15. They promote from the Mage, Priest, Cleric starter classes.

• Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is another hybrid unit just like the Sage however way more geared towards offensive uses. The Dark Knights are mounted units so they have great movement range: their HP growth is excellent while everything else is kinda avarage, whith horrible defense growth. They can use both swords and tomes but they’re probably better at magic than direct confrontations: the low defense stat makes them kinda fragile, even though the HP levels are going to be really high. Just like with the Sage, this can’t be considered as a great or useless unit, it will depend on how you play the game: dedicated mages inflict way more damage so the choice is truly up to you. Dark Knights learn the Slow Start skill at level 5 and the Life Absorb skill at level 15. They promote from the Mage and Dark Mage starter classes.