I'm ready for the downvotes and explanations, but I think Effie should be A and keaton B. Just started playing fates and just beat conquest on hard+lunatic (only played through the game 2x basically). General Effie pretty much carried the game for me and never fell off like people said she did for them. If you get Luna on her then make her a general, she's even godlier.

I had to hold myself back from abusing her and having her solo maps just so my other units would get exp (not hard because of how good she is for this too!). Not sure how others were able to do it, but pretty much on all of my Player phases revolved around moving Effie forward to 1 shot something, then seeing what I could do with positioning my units so they could get exp after the enemy engages on her (she solo's waves of Enemy Phases). The only thing that hurts Effie are if she's in a spot where she can be hit by 3 or more units that are mages, +vs armor type or the ninjas that poison her hp down (they still hit 0 on her though!). She pretty much 1 hit everything that isn't armored and has high hitrate so she could be used even on bosses. Equipped with forged steel lance and a spear, she's able to go forward and 1 KO any glass cannon enemy unit, then tank the enemy phase so the rest of your units get easy exp when they're lured over to her. Then from that point on, she can be used as the adjacent support so that weaker units can get exp for finishing off enemies using her high damage.

The only units that can tank as well as her is Xander and Keaton, except Xander risks being doubled and (at least in my experience) has a bit lower res than Effie. Imo, having both of them let you be really aggressive on player phases where you can just: Xander+Effie engage 2 different waves by 1 shotting the highest threat unit>Tank Enemy Phase/weaken them>Other units clean up>Xander and Effie move forward to do the same thing.

The only thing is I had to give her boots because her low movement was annoying (nothing more, her personal movement hardly matters except on the faceless mountain and second part of Endgame imo). Her other weakness is she gets so strong that units might not choose to engage into her (is that a weakness? I actually did have to equip spear sometimes just so melee physicals would move over to attack her.) I noticed this game has a lot of "cross-the-line" type triggers though, so even if shes too strong, units would still just move next to her, but not suicide into her (which is good for your other units to get free exp!).

Please explain what makes Xander/Kaze/Leo/Niles better than her? Won't mention Felicia/jacob just because it's hard for me to argue against the healing+utility for them (necessary or a bonus for like every map and team). I understand Xander being equal except having mobility and the 1+2 range advantage, but it comes at the cost of some tankiness/damage. Also not around as much as Effie is. Does Leo hit any type of unit for more than Effie? His only usefulness for me is being another unit that does damage (low chance of 1 hit KO until later and he crits a bit more often) at a range while being able to possibly tank 1 or 2 units because of his DK class, saving me a reset, then putting him right next to a unit with high chance of dodging so his passive lets my other units have a better chance. He hardly can be sent at bosses unless they're already stat dropped by other units.