Fire Emblem: Awakening Starter Classes Guide: Barbarian, Thief

With the possibility to truly switch classes for the first time ever in the series, Fire Emblem: Awakening has a lot of starter classes to choose from, allowing players to have a lot of freedom in customizing their army to their liking. While it’s true that characters won’t be able to switch to all starter classes, the choice is so broad that you will soon be forgetting about the limitations of the system. At the end of day, it will be up to you to create a really effective team with the right combination of classes and skills and we’re here to help you making these choices but going over all the starter and advanced classes of the game, with some general features and skills coming as default for the class.

• Barbarian

The Barbarian is a male exclusive class and no characters in the game start with this class: a handful of characters have this class available as a choice when they are allowed to change their class. And to be honest, you might not want to have this class in your roster at all: it has good HP growth but everything else in pretty standard fare, with really low defense and resistamce growth and low speed. The only reason to use this uniquie but standard class is to wait until it can promote to the way more useful Berserker class. To get a rough idea on how they behave in battle, you can check out the enemy barbarians you’ll meet in the early stages on the game. The Barbarian can only equip axes and can promote to warrior or berserker, depending on your choice. This class learns the Mug skill at level 1 and the Gamble skill at level 10.

• Thief

The Thief class is all focused on speed and stealth and as such, they’re not too suited for front line fighting. However their high speed makes them perfect to finish weakened enemies or to attack enemies with heavy weapons and very low hit rates: the Thief can easily avoid a lot of attacks with ease. The best way to use thieves is to pair them up with some tanks and let them cover them whenever they can: the tank will end up taking the damage and weaken the enemy, the thief will finish them easily. Thieves also have some really good advanced classes to by all means you should try to promote them as soon as you can. The Thief can only use swords and promotes to Trickster or Assassin depending on your choice. The Thief also learns the Locktouch skill at level 1 and the Movement +1 skill at level 10.