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Best special for Heavy Blade Ryoma?

This TT is probably the first time my Ryoma has seen significant use, as he'd been previously benched due to his semi-unfortunate IVs (+atk -spd). He still has Night Sky right now because I'm really stuck about what special is best for him. He has Fury, Vantage, and the Heavy Blade seal, which makes his stats 41/56/35/30/24, or 51/60/39/34/28 after TT bonuses. (I'm also running him with Lancina to fix his speed.)

This is my first time really trying to use the Heavy Blade skill and I'm stuck as to what would be best. Ordinarily, I'd take one look at that attack stat and slap Draconic Aura on him, but with Heavy Blade, would he rather have something with a shorter cooldown? And if so, I know everyone loves Moonbow, but would Glimmer be a better choice given its much higher damage potential? (Yeah, Moonbow would help him do better against extreme blue walls like Lukas, but who even sends Ryoma against Lukas in the first place?) Conversely, should I use heavy blade to compensate for a longer-cooldown special, like Dragon Fang? Or in that case would it make more sense to just stick with his native Astra given how much less it would cost?

All of this sounds good in theory (including just sticking with my original idea of Draconic Aura), but if anyone has insight into which would be best in practice I would greatly appreciate it!

Asked by SourPeridot11 months 2 weeks ago

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Answers

With Heavy Blade, using a 3 charge special (4 with an accelerator on cooldown) is optimal for making a unit always hit hard as long as they double. Draconic Aura is never a bad idea on a high attack unit like Ryoma. But if you have a unit like Dorcas who can run infantry pulse, you can run either Astra or Dragon Fang to great effect thanks to the charge being reduced to 3. You could also run a 5 charge such as Galeforce and turn Ryoma into a sweeper unit, although a speed bane does hurt that viability considerably, even if you ran life and death. Depending on your team composition, those are some options to utilize his high attack power.

This. But, I would add Luna to the list of considerations(to kill bulky armor units and potentially dragons that are all the rage now).
And, with Fury, Bonfire could potentially be justified(though I would run the calcs on that just to make sure).

If he did run fury, he could get 15 damage from bonfire due to 30 def, but with draconic aura he could get 16-17 damage (37+16+3=56; 56*.3=16.8), making draconic aura the better choice. Glad you caught the miss on Luna, because that could also be very good against those pesky armor units with higher def, but in order to make the damage meaningful compared to draconic aura, the target would need at least 32 defense to make it as good or better at natural state, 34 for running fury, and 36 for life and death. It would be good against any armor unit and in the upper echelons of TT, but draconic aura would be good for normal use since 56/208 units before TA considerations would make Luna better than draconic aura, and with infantry pulse dragon fang would become a much better solution since no unit has a neutral defense value above 52 (and all non-armor supermerges except a couple dragons and Lukas can’t reach that, with even some supermerges requiring a devoted buff to reach or surpass that value).

Fair. Dragon Fang is a really good option, but I really am hating C!Tharja right now, especially with armor buffs.

A lot.

So, basically, unless you have a dedicated armor breaker, go Luna. If you happen to have someone that can duke it out with C!Tharja and the other ridiculously bulky armor units running around in Arena, then go Draconic Aura for the extra damage.

I did not consider this. I'm not running Ryoma in the arena right now, just the TT, but if I did and I gave him Luna, could he actually kill C!Tharja? Because that would change, like, everything.

Okay, I ran the numbers. The short answer: yes. With Luna, my Ryoma kills unmerged neutral Winter Tharja with a +def weapon and under two Wards, on either phase. If she's merged, he'll have to do it by baiting in order to avoid Vengeful Fighter and then follow up on his turn, but still, this is HUGE. I was seriously considering giving Azura a slaying spear just to deal with her, and turns out my Ryoma could've done it all along. Ignore what I said below, Luna wins.

I would guess that the choice between Luna and Draconic Aura would depend on whether Ryoma needed more help killing higher-def or lower-def units, but that's kind of hard to calculate given the immense number of meta-related factors involved. (He could kill some units better with one special and others better with the other, and for some it might go either way depending on how they're built, but all the damage calculators in the world can't tell you which units you're more likely to encounter, so you pretty much have to guess.)

Thanks so much to both of you for the advice. You've sold me on the 3-turn cooldown, and I'm gonna go with Draconic Aura by virtue of having more currently available fodder for it. ;)

Edit: Rather than guessing at probability, sometimes you have to pick something just because you know you want to counter one specific unit. (Screw you, Winter Tharja.) Never mind about Draconic Aura, Luna will be so worth it.