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So she's got horrible growths, does not have good skills, has only 5 movement, and probably THE worst availability in the game. Oh, and she's loaded down by Aura; a tome with 20 WEIGHT ON IT, making it even heavier than most axes! She actually has -6 Attack Speed, and only 10% on her Speed growth! Looking at all this, she practically looks like a joke character at first glance! Most FE4 players you talk to will probably say that she's worthless.
But I won't. Because for however glaring her faults are, Deirdre actually CAN be really useful, even aside from Silencing Sandima (though believe me, that's good enough as it is). And of course, she's another Staff bot, meaning that she can pull down an instant 27 Levels for the Exp Rank.
Plus, you can win the Magic Ring from Sandima. Of course, I'm not going to be giving it to her, but if you DO decide to go that route, you can very easily get Deirdre up to 48 Attack Power and OHKO EVERYONE in Chapter 2. Or at least, everyone who is not either an Armour unit, a promoted enemy, or a boss. So that's a nice niche right there...
But more importantly, she's got the Circlet. That accessory cannot be sold or broken, and will automatically give not just the Prayer skill, but also Live (5-10 HP automatically restored per turn). Live is pretty convenient, but Prayer is the real hero here. So in spite of her normally horrible Evade, she can literally OHKO an entire squad of enemies near one of the castles in Chapter 2. Again, neat...but as Marty says...
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The issue is that even with prayer unless you get her knocked down into the really low bounds of HP she'll still get hit a fair bit. I did manage to use it in my 0% growths playthrough, but in a ranked run there's no reason to do this as you should never waste combat experience on a staffer.
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Indeed. And what pulls her even further down into mediocrity is the fact that she's only got one Chapter to really do anything. After Chapter 2, Sigurd just asks her to stop coming to anymore maps...so yeah, kind of hard to make any real impact there. Again, to her credit, she can easily clear Arena's with Prayer, give Sigurd some free gold, and can also fetch you 27 free Levels...but otherwise, you're just not going to get much use out of her. And it's not because she's actually worse than, say, Noish or Ardan, it's because she doesn't really have the opportunity to do anything. Rather a shame, that...
3/10
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