Weekly Unit Spotlight: Shel

The mighty patriot with heart of gold and a penchant for mischief, Shel is a border guard with a dream of serving her country and dying honorably in combat. Her description:

An average villager who worked her way to being a border guard, Shel is very patriotic, and every good deed she does is in the name of Lyrouche. Her average appearance makes people believe she shouldn't stand out , but she is actually very sly and annoying, as she really enjoys picking on people.

Shel is your first armored unit. Typical of armored units, she has low movement and is difficult to dispatch with physical weapons. She is the only knight you will have for a while, because Barcke is not recruited until much later in the game. Therefore, she won't have much competition from her own class, however she still has her uses, and those roles may be filled by other units in your party. Here are her pros:

• High strength: Shel's strength rests at a grand 60%. While not the highest in the project, this is a respectable growth, and with a base of 11, she will not lack in power.
• Good speed growth: Shel isn't slow either. Most knight characters struggle in the speed department, but Shel will not have difficulty maintaining a decent avoid rate or evading follow-ups from her opponent.
• Good defense: Naturally, Shel is a tank unit. She has a defense growth of 75%, which is the second highest of all recruitable units, only behind Hernanda, who is lackluster in most other departments.
• Patriot: Shel's personal skill will give her a great +20 avo. agaist enemies that are not native to Lyrouche. Normally, this would be a sort of situational skill, but since most enemies in the project are not native to Lyrouche, Shel will consistently have a reliable avoid stat.
• Villager reclass: This is a weird one. Shel is capable of reclassing into villager, a class that is exclusive to her and her child, who will inherit the villager class instead of the knight class, although if she marries another knight, she will give her secondary class to him. The villager class is a powerful class to have access to simply because it has a class skill called aptitude, which gives its holder an extra 10% to all growths. With that skill, Shel can become many times stronger than average, causing her to become invaluable to your team.

And Shel's downsides:

• Horrendous base speed: Shel has a speed growth. Not a speed base. Her starting speed is a whopping 2. Which means, while she will eventually have a decent speed stat, for most of her existence, she will be constantly taking follow-up attacks.
• Bad HP growth: Shel's HP growth is 30%. This means her HP growth is the same as Simon's, who is a frail mage :\ Shel's defenses are great, but they will be making up for her poor HP, which makes her less tanky than she appears.
• Poor resistance: Both playable knights suffer from low resistance. Shel's growth of 10% in resistance means she is not taking a magic hit, and her low base speed means that she simply cannot sponge tome damage at all.

So Shel, in most regards, is a typical knight. She's held back by her low movement, speed (or at least the base), resistance, and in her specific case, HP, but she excels in strength in defense, making her a superb wall. If you particularly like her, you can reclass her, gain aptitude, and then switch her back to her native class, making her an even better damage sponge and damage dealer as well.