For all of you going "omg Surtr"

He has 101 physical bulk on enemy phase so an armoursmasher does need to get to around 56-57 atk, which isn't hard if your atk IV is 34+. Armoursmasher + death blow 3 = +20 atk, and go for an atk boon.

But I chose Ophelia to show that the guy isn't as horrifying as people are saying. He's getting faux-OHKO'd by a blue.

You make an interesting point. I mean, he's super-obvious bait for the arena-obsessed. 180 BST, reaches 59 def on enemy phase and has guard without HP threshold at +10 with native A-skill, comes with a 300SP C-skill to give flexibility to use 200SP B-and C-skills, chips and debuffs all the life out of enemies more or less for free, is even green and has freaking half the 3% focus rate so he can merge to +10 with like 700-750 orbs on average variance, banner is up for 3 full weeks.

I'm not entirely sure what to think about IS these days. Some of the things they do are so just, like taking all the trouble to let players replace every last little thing they lost through that rival domains update sill disappearance glitch. And now they release this new mode which seems actually very intelligently designed. I think it has very good potential to measure relative strengths of player-barracks combinations (by this I mean, for example, that the most skilled player with a new account won't get very far), to put the emphasis on strategy rather than on arbitrary mechanisms such as those which make Surtr such an obvious bait, and to force the meta to adapt continually in a natural manner. People are complaining about imbalance, but I'm not convinced yet - once the scoring ranges fill out, I think we'll be doing fine if people understand that it might be relatively normal to lose units in this mode. Also, rebalancing mechanisms such as null follow-up, which they even made an infantry specialty (not that it would be bad for the game on fliers or cavaliers, but it's nice to give infantry special options). But some of the powercreep is pretty disgusting, like dazzling Peshkatz and Garm and fortress def/res and atk/spd solo and the new Corrins and no HP requirement on having guard in the A-slot without even giving up any stat boosting and and and. And then there's this guy.

Too many fudge factors in that mode, and bonus unit killing is not a game I find interesting.

A unit like this should be very manageable using stuff like what I'm suggesting. That's part of the balance of the game. Bonus unit killing throws it out the window.