MonikaTSarn fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Oct 21, 2022

Clarste fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Oct 23, 2022

• She's really strong. By which I mean she has good stats and her moves have really good scaling. She can pretty much just walk up to anything and instantly obliterate it, if she feels like it.
  
• However, she has no "engine" for getting infinite turns because One-Shot-One-Kill doesn't work with her good multi-hit moves, nor does she have an insanely good reaction game like Berserker Alisa or Ranger Heixing. The best I've found is stacking Best Condition with her organization passive to get -20 AT at the end of the turn, getting her down to 16 time units between actions in ideal conditions. Which is pretty fast, but still gives the enemies an opening.
  
• This is a problem because her defenses kind of suck. Yes, she can stack dodge, and she does have some masteries that convert dodge into a small amount of damage reduction for emergencies, but it's still not nearly as good as being an unkillable block tank. Which I've found to be more or less mandatory for a melee character.
  
• Instead I think she's supposed to rely on Hiding, but I've found that hiding is way too finicky to be practical. First of all it has both a high cooldown and high Vigor cost, both of which can be solved but also need to be solved, which is a problem. Second of all, it goes away after one attack (with one exception, more on that later), and to get it back you need to run relatively far from the enemies. Even if we assume that she has everything she needs to do this regularly (action points, cooldown reduction, Vigor), this wastes a huge amount of her time when every other character would instead just kill everything in the room in one action, or equivalent. Even the benefits of attacking from stealth aren't amazing enough to be worth bothering with, imo. I suppose maybe they want you to keep her out of battle to target mission objectives or whatever, but the game so far has not been designed for that to be a useful role. Maybe in future DLC missions. But even if you wanted to do that, the duration of Hide is shorter than the cooldown unless you are regularly killing things, so I don't even know. I feel like she really, really needs some kind of "Hide on kill" passive or the whole thing is a non-starter. But that might be too powerful? I dunno, enemies tend to walk into and reveal her pretty often anyway.
  
  
• Getting into her specific classes, Rogue is good at Hiding, Stealing, Poisoning/Bleeding, and obliterating stuff with multi-hit attacks. Only the last thing is useful. I already covered why Hiding is usually a waste of time, and Stealing just gives you free potions or whatever so I don't care. The other stuff will get separate bullet points.
  
• Her poisons are bad because they require action points to apply, have an extremely low chance to proc without certain mastery sets, and their effects are so marginal it's usually not worth bothering, especially since the enemy is likely to be dead anyway. Neurotoxin gets a shout-out for being actually maybe kind of useful sometimes, except you have to equip every other poison that you'll never use just to unlock it, so it's not worth it.
  
• Her Rogue bleed tools are bad because she doesn't actually have a way to reliably apply bleed. I felt like I was going crazy for not seeing the mastery set that goes "slashing attacks always apply bleed" but nope, it's just not there. Her 4-hit move has a default 50% chance, so it's relatively likely to apply over the whole attack, but just having the enemy end up with bleed is pointless; you want them to be bleeding as you hit them for all the bonus stats and AT reduction and Life Drain. So an unreliable bleed is pretty bad. The most reliable bleed she has actually comes from Water masteries, except she only has one Water attack as a Rogue and it's an ult. The bad one, that you'll use less often. So I gave her Call of Water to make all her attacks water, but then it turns out that Eviscerate and Expose Weakness only proc off physical attacks, so both of those are useless now too (and Expose Weakness is worse than Still Water anyway, for block reduction).
  
• She really murders everything with Slice and Dice though. Who cares about Eviscerate, aka Severer Bleed, if the enemy is dead after she attacks it? Like, Improved Slice and Dice is literally the only Rogue thing I have equipped on her - the rest is Water masteries - but it seems significantly better than the other Rogue builds I've tried.
  
  
• Ninja. Ninja is weird. It's a healer, but you have to take off Hide to do so. It's got more ways to Hide, but less Hiding synergies. It has a ranged Water attack, but not a lot of ESP. I'm very confused by this class, to be honest.
  
• What it does have, however, is the ability to throw daggers from stealth and retain stealth. But only if you don't move first. Which honestly isn't so bad since one of her passives gives her -3 cooldown for Support moves on kill, which lets her spam teleport every turn and kinda-sorta move without moving to keep chaining the stealth daggers. Which do massive damage from Ambush buffs, plus their own Still Stance boost. However, they don't work with One-Shot-One-Kill (because you need two action points to retain the stealth), and have big issues with Impulse Fields since it's only a single hit. Also, she has less AT reduction with this set-up, so she is incredibly slow and it's annoying. Kill one dude every so often, might as well not even be there.
  
• Healing. Being a perma-stealthed healer is probably decent, especially with her auto-revive support, but also I don't care. Sorry, I just don't care. I have enough healing already.
  
• Water ninjutsu. I don't know why you'd ever use this, to be honest. Even if you can somehow make it be amazingly strong and spammable (haven't checked if this is possible), you're just making another Black Mage Sion with a finite number of spells per battle. Why?
  
• Mist ninjutsu. Sure, free smoke grenades, why not? But also not exciting. The most exciting part theoretically is being able to auto-hide by using Perfect Preparation while standing in mist, but what do you know that requires you to be out of enemy line-of-sight, making it exactly as difficult to use as all the Hide stuff I mentioned before, with the added wrinkle of needing to waste an action throwing down a smoke bomb outside of enemy line-of-sight. Just let her hide in a smoke cloud, geez, why do they have to make this so complicated?
  
• Dark ninjutsu. Can hide while in enemy line-of-sight. Yay, something actually useful for once! Except for the fact that it's nearly impossible for her to generate significant amounts of Water SP with just her class kit. And then Hide goes away instantly when she attacks. Also does some other defensive stuff, I don't particularly care about them so I forgot what they did though. I wish she had this as a Rogue.
  
• ...Okay, so what if I use my exact same Mostly-Just-Water build, but as a Ninja?! Basically the only difference would be free Hiding sometimes. Or maybe use the other defensive buffs it gives. Also a free tool slot which is kind of amazing.

Clarste fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Oct 23, 2022

Clarste fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Oct 23, 2022

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