This article is part of a directory: Fire Emblem Engage: Complete Guide And Walkthrough
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As you'd expect, your success on the battlefield in Fire Emblem: Engage relies on two things: your ability to plan and react, and the units you have deployed. What makes those units strong are their proficiencies, weapons, and perhaps most importantly, their stats. You need your frontliners to have high HP, your mages to have high Magic, and your tanks to have high Defense, and so on.

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There is an element of chance when it comes to how characters improve their stats. You'll notice when they level up, they don't always get the stat improvements you're looking for, and sometimes they actually get better in all of their stats. What determines this? Growth rates.

Updated May 6, 2023: We've updated this article to include a video guide that breaks down everything you need to know about Growth Rates in Fire Emblem Engage.

How Growth Rates Work

Fire Emblem Engage - Celline level up quote

Growth Rates are internal numbers in the Fire Emblem series that determine the chance of a stat improving when a unit levels up. In this way, units each have specific strengths and weaknesses, though random chance can make them extremely good or very weak. There are two factors that go into a character's growth rate:

  • The character's innate growth rate.
  • The growth rate of that character's current class.

Every character and every class has a growth rate value for each of the ten stats: HP, Strength, Magic, Dexterity, Speed, Defense, Resistance, Luck, and Build. These numbers are added together in pairs to determine their overall growth rate - this can be considered a percentage chance that the character's stat increases when they level up.

Let's take Alear as an example. Alear starts the game with proficiency in Swords, which use Strength to determine damage, so it would be very good if Alear's Strength improved a lot. Alear's Strength growth rate is 35, which is fair.

Alear's class, Divine Child, has a Strength growth rate of ten, which means when Alear levels up, their Strength has a 45 percent chance to improve by one. This is not fantastic - if you wanted a higher Strength on Alear, you could change their class to Hero or Berserker after promoting and learning some new proficiencies. This would increase their overall Strength growth rate considerably.

Growth rates are rather predictable and mostly follow what you'd expect for a character. Alfred has high Strength growth while Louis has a high Defense growth, for example. There are some outliers, though: for example, Anna, who starts in the Axe Fighter class, actually has the highest base Magic growth in the game, so it's a great idea to change her class to something more magical.

It is possible to raise some growth rates above 100, giving the character a chance to get a doubled level boost. For example, Boucheron has an HP growth rate of 85.

In the Berserker class, we'd add 30 to this number, making Boucheron's overall HP growth a very impressive 115. What this means is that Boucheron will always improve his HP by one when leveling up, and there's a 15 percent chance that he gets an extra HP boost, increasing his HP by two, instead.

You can check out the character and class growth rate values on the following pages from Serenes Forest. With these numbers, you can determine every character's current stat growth rates based on their bases and their class. Be wary of possible character and recruitment spoilers, though!

NEXT: Fire Emblem Engage: The Best Weapons To Engrave And Refine