Spells

One skill in Fire Emblem Engage changes what a mage is for. Dire Thunder lets a Thunder user attack twice at the start of an exchange, before the enemy has moved. In a game where a mage usually gets one shot and then hopes to survive the reply, striking first and striking twice is not an upgrade to damage, it is a different role.

It is also the most expensive thing in this wiki that is not a story reward, and our own pages contain everything needed to work out exactly how expensive. Nobody adds it up, so here it is.

The price of an S-rank Olwen ring

Dire Thunder comes from an Olwen Bond Ring at S rank, from the Leif Emblem, and Bond Rings are built by melding duplicates rather than found. Our page gives the three rungs of the ladder.

Multiply that out and the real bill appears. One A-rank ring is three B-ranks, and each B-rank is two C-ranks, so an A costs six C-rank Olwen rings. An S needs four of those. That is twenty-four C-rank Olwen Bond Rings pulled from the ring pool for a single skill.

The fragments compound the same way. Each B costs 100, so each A costs 1,000 plus the 300 spent on its three B-ranks, and four A-ranks come to 5,200 before the final step adds 10,000. The total is 15,200 Bond Fragments.

That number only means something next to what else fragments buy, and our Somniel guide supplies the comparison: Emblem training at the arena costs 100 Bond Fragments per level. So the fragments alone for one Dire Thunder ring are the equivalent of 152 levels of Emblem training, which is the currency you would otherwise be spending on bond levels and, through them, on inherited skills for the whole army.

Who it should go to

Our page names Citrinne, one of Alcryst's retainers, recruited in chapter 7, and the reasoning is more interesting than the recommendation. Any Thunder mage with high magic can use Dire Thunder, but the skill is most valuable on a mage with poor speed, because attacking twice up front compensates for never getting a follow-up.

Citrinne fits that description exactly: strong magic growth, weak growth in everything else, and a tendency to stall in a fight because of it. She is also, on our own tier list, ranked 34th of 36. That is the honest version of this recommendation. Dire Thunder is not a way to make a good unit better; it is a way to make a bottom-five unit functional, and it costs twenty-four rings to do it.

The other detail worth carrying away is a general one. Our page notes that Citrinne is the rare case whose best ring is a Bond Ring rather than an Emblem one. For nearly everyone else the answer is the opposite, which is why best emblem pairings is the page to read before you start melting duplicates down.

If you have fragments to spare late in a run and a mage who has stopped contributing, this is a good use for them. If you are early and choosing between this and raising bond levels across your army, the Bond Rings page covers the cheaper rings that do useful things without a four-figure fragment bill.