I get hero skills, but always end him on Warrior

He looks the best as a warrior class with his cooking pot on his head.  I don't use any of Warrior skills, but I make him have it as his end class

No Counter? 

Tho I haven't tried Counter on anyone but my Berserker Vaike (dat low def/res makes Counter hit them hard then Sol to heal back up).

Do you remember what a good order for the children's paralogues is? Doing them by numbers doesn't seem to be a good idea, because paralogue 6 has almost all enemies equipped with blue weapons which is the game's way to cheat the player. Yes, I could figure out a good order by myself, but I am too lazy.

The only real problem in the story chapters are reinforcements which somehow make me always fail a map on my first attempt. While I remember from my first playthrough where reinforcements can appear, I get the order or the exact turn wrong most of the time.

I remember Morgan's is the easiest (only two or three promoted enemies), followed by Owain (just a handful of promoteds) and Kjelle's. Laurent's is tricky: if you don't keep saving the villages, it's the easiest by a country mile, but if you do the map "properly" (and get a pretty good reward out of it), it's middling difficulty: lots of mobile and promoted enemies show up late, but you can control their rate of appearance once you know the trick.

Nah's is probably the most challenging, as everyone's promoted and you will get ambushed and units will get cut off from retreating/reinforcements. Cynthia and Inigo are the next step down. Yarne's gives you a choice of facing a bunch of cavalry, a bunch of armored units, or both: picking a side makes things pretty easy, but also robs you of a ton of XP, while going against everyone means you'll be levelling like mad, but will have a hard time in the early going unless you're extremely well prepared. Finally, if you have strong fliers Gerome's map is a breeze (hold on to your Flying Axes!), but without strong fliers it becomes quite challenging.

So, I went Morgan-Owain-Kjelle-Laurent-Gerome-Cynthia-Inigo-Nah, and it worked out quite well. I have a feeling I'm forgetting someone, but they'd probably be lumped in the middle somewhere, because they're so forgettable.

Edit: I forgot Noire. She'd be before Cynthia: lots of promoteds (cavalry and fliers, mostly), but the waves are well spaced out if you don't stay in the starting position, and you decide when the boss and his group become active.

Don't like the idea of needing to take damage to deal it.

My skills are usually all offensive in nature or dodging.  So I try and not get hit ever and thus counter kind of feels pointless

Edit - Gotta say, it's always funny when you're on a Fort, paired up with Kellam for high defense, enemies have only a 35% chance to hit, 1% critical, and still manage to pull two crits in a row, killing my level 9 Sumia. Love the RNG.

She tripped on nothing. It is to be expected.