Story Campaign - Missions Only Or World Map Levels?

Just curious how other people approach this.

Are you the kind of player who prefers to focus on the storyline missions and avoid the tower/ruins/skirmishes until the story is complete? Or are you the kind of player that will happily use these extra missions regularly during the story?

I tended to find that my unit choices resulted in me going to these extra missions sometimes just to get them to a reasonable level (eg Amelia). But if my army didn't seem to need the levels I'd leave the extra challenges until the Creature Campaign.

Story only, unless I end up using a load of the late joiners for some reason.

Outside of that, it's completely unnecessary and just wastes time really. <_<

Ross is not a huge problem for leveling up since like mentioned, you get him so early in the game that it doesn't matter. My only playthrough of the game so far, saw me just stick to the story campaign and didn't do any Tower grinding or fighting the random enemies on the map. I had Ewan and Amelia on my team as well and my team wasn't that affected with me trying to focus on getting kills for them. Though my Amelia turned out terrible with her horrible attack stat(like it was a 5 when she promoted to her final promotion).

quote Insanity Prevails

Meaning her only stat gain in Str was when she promoted to cavalier? Ouch, that is some massive screwage. Granted she only has a 35% growth rate in Str but even so that is some pretty bad luck.

It was terrible because in a video of someone elses playthrough, they had a really good Amelia so I thought I could get something half that decent but mine just turned out horrible. I really don't know why I didn't replace her after that. I suppose it was because the next three levels she got attack stats but after that she was still terrible. 12-13 was what she got up to I think. She had max speed iirc.