It's viscerally unpleasant and mechanically suboptimal and largely unneeded to have Seth fight anything ever, given it wastes EXP, until people have largely caught up to him at which point he sucks. He's going to be a below average unit unless it's specifically overgrinding him avoiding that.
So this seems to be the entire crux of your argument, and... no, Terrabrand, killing an enemy with Seth is not a waste. And do you know why? Because the enemy is dead. The point of a strategy game (or at least, the point I'd consider most relevant) isn't to max out every character, it's to get to the end of the game. A unit that gets you to the end of the game more easily is a better unit. If you need an enemy out of your way, or they're about to hurt one of your units, or they're about to grab a chest or burn a village or what have you, you can just throw Seth at the problem, and now it's not a problem anymore.
Actually, let's get theoretical here: let's say I'm doing a playthrough. In one playthrough, I use Franz, in the other, I use Seth. In both playthroughs, they do all the exact same things: they kill the same number of enemies, they go to the same locations, they carry out all the same tactics.
Up until Franz has been raised by a significant margin and promoted, the Seth playthrough is going to be
far easier. Seth can go places Franz can't, kill things that Franz can't, and use weapons that Franz can't. Franz doesn't even catch up to Seth's Speed until level 11, and that's his biggest advantage, with every other stat being far behind. He doesn't catch up to Seth's base Strength until all the way to level 19. Franz also needs a Knight Crest to promote, which is expensive, in short supply for a while, and used by several other characters, meaning that using Seth frees up someone like Gilliam to promote earlier.
In fact, this creates kind of an opposite effect to what you're talking about. Seth doesn't steal XP.
Franz is stealing XP. Franz needs every drop of XP he can get to catch up to Seth. He needs his piece of the pie, while Seth can hold back for a chapter and just do rescue-dropping if you want to raise up Vanessa.
But once he has promoted, he's better... except Seth has gained levels, too. Not as many levels, but enough levels to keep Franz's stat advantages down to "a few points here and there." And this is going to continue--as long as you are using the two equally, Seth will always have a level lead over Franz, until the two are capped out. At that point, the differences between the two are, as you yourself admit, basically marginal.
You know what I call a situation where one character is consistently better than another for large stretches, required less work to get there, opened up options that wouldn't be possible with the other character, and was only, at most, marginally worse at the late game? I call that a situation where one character was much better than the other.
Love how the arguments continue to be 'TERRABRAND IS OBVIOUSLY STUPID OR CRAZY' and not actually arguments as to how the guy with objectively bad stats until excessively high levels in an oversaturated class is, somehow, magically not objectively bad. Love how all the arguments that are materially true hinge on one or both of 'bro waste experience by evenly using units rather than trying to give kills to units of similar levels to what they're killing, which is mechanically optimal' and 'bro seth is good if I count the fact that enemies are bad only in exactly Seth's favor. The fact that enemies suck compared to him changes the fact that he sucks compared to the competition, even though this same statement means the enemies suck even more compared to actually good units'.
Yep. TERRABRAND IS STUPID OR CRAZY, BASED ON THESE INTERNALLY INCONSISTENT ARGUMENTS. What good faith reasonable arguments we have here.
You compared the people who disagreed with you to geocentrists and are currently mockingly screaming at me in all-caps, so
kindly dispense with the "why aren't you treating me with respect and arguing in good faith?"
And I keep asking:
how does Seth have "objectively bad stats"? I'm struggling to find an instance where his stats aren't going to be dominant relative to his opponents, assuming he's taken the same number of kills as his fellows. Maybe against some of the faster bosses, he doesn't double them? I guess?
Why did I bring up the strength of the enemies? Well, because in the early game, Franz
isn't that strong relative to the enemies. Hell, even in the midgame, there are some enemy types he's going to struggle with that Seth blows right past.
Let's take, say... Chapter 8. The most common enemy on that chapter is a knight; with iron lances, they have 26 HP, 17 Attack, and 12 Defense. If Franz is say, level 8, and he uses a steel lance, by far the strongest weapon he can use at this point, he's got 26 HP, 20 Attack, and 8 Defense. He's taking out these guys in five hits, and getting killed by them in three hits. Not a
bad performance, especially since he doubles, but he's very much mortal, and it's going to take him time to chip through them. He can use the armorslayer if he's been training sword rank, though this will weigh him down enough to be doubled by the mercenaries and myrmidons in the same chapter. This is a fair performance (Franz is a good unit in his own right, after all), but not a flawless one.
Meanwhile, base Seth with the exact same weapon has 30 HP, 24 Attack, and 11 Defense. He has to take four hits from these guys before he has to think about using a vulnerary. He's one point of Strength away from two-shotting them, meaning that if he's gotten even one lucky level since the start of the game, he can just blow right through them in a single round. If Seth uses the armorslayer, which he can use with no training, he ends up with a monstrous 35 Attack, which means he can kill the lower-level knights in one shot. Or he can just use his silver lance and annihilate them. He can even 1v1 the boss without too much trouble. These are very concrete advantages, and they come at a point in the game where you kind of need those advantages, because the rest of your units are still pulling themselves out of the low-level doldrums.
Like. To be clear, my original position was in fact this;
People have dragged out all kinds of tier lists and what have you, to show how WRONG THIS HEATHEN IS, but I literally just started out saying the apparently incredibly controversial statement that is objectively true; 'Unfortunately, Seth is basically worse than everyone who can become a paladin at the same level in paladin'.
This is true until extremely high paladin levels. I even said he's useful enough in the short term.
But somehow I'm arguing something CRAZY to say 'so he doesn't hold up once the rest catch up', apparently.
When, objectively, he... doesn't? In expected stats he's just not even with them. he's behind. This is just... true?
Which, y'know. Is why I have little interest in responding to most of these arguments. They're either false or arguing against things I didn't actually say when giving my incredibly controversial opinion that 'unfortunately, seth does not keep up as everyone else passes him'.
You're right, Terrabrand, it is objectively true that Seth has pretty mild statistical shortcomings next to a same-leveled cav-to-paladin. The thing is, this doesn't actually matter. In fact, in my experience,
realizing that a mild statistical shortcoming between a fully-raised growth unit and an untrained prepromote doesn't necessarily matter, and considering the character as a whole and what they bring to the table rather than in a vacuum of maxed-out 20/20 stats is usually the point where a Fire Emblem player starts to get really good at the game. Overvaluing growths and endgame performance, in my experience, is the Fire Emblem equivalent of claiming that Ganondorf must be the best character in Ultimate because he has a really strong forward smash. Once you stop agonizing over XP distribution and start thinking of maps as problems to be solved, that's when a whole mess of things open up.
And it really has to be said: that includes dumb memey shit or raising characters just 'cos they're your favorites. Using Seth opens you up to make plays that would be risky otherwise, it gives you more room to raise units because he doesn't need raising himself, and he works as a fallback option in case things go south. That's why I take issue with the whole thing: it's
bad advice, and moreover, it's bad advice that you have claimed you are Galileo for coming up with. But if anything, the opinion you've been expressing is the comparable one to geocentricism, because highly-valuing growth units
was the majority opinion for well over a decade. Claiming that prepromotes are actually valuable in their own right is the newer opinion, and it became the newer opinion because people backed it up with better results. They cracked open the game's math, they did runs of the games that turned growths off entirely, they started measuring turncounts, and the prepromote-heavy strategies consistently outperformed all expectations.
Basically what I'm saying is, if you use Seth, the game will be overall easier than if you do not use Seth. In fact, generally the more you use Seth, the easier the game will become. That's why people consider him to be a good unit, and recommend using him.
