GamePress

Does anyone find Breath-skills boring?

I get that "tried and true" is real, but I feel Steady Breath + QR is very staple and lazy for a lot of units. Maybe it's partly to do with how powerful it is for how simple and straightforward it is.

Apparently other people feel this way about [offensive A-slot] + Desperation, and I personally never found it boring. Maybe it's because a few characters on my team have L&D, and I'd rather mix other things with Fury.

I don't really know if I want to get my Libra a Breath skill, unless it's a potential Darting Breath. I have a thing for defensive Spd, and I really like how it synergises with Handbell to prevent 99% of doubles. This is why I like a lot of Spd/Def A-slots (namely Steady Posture and Spd/Def Bond).

Asked by Nogitsune3 months ago

Report

Answers

I think the main reason a lot of people overly depend on breath skills (at least currently) has to do with how many armors are abusing Fighter skills, namely Bold Fighter. Since speed can't do anything to prevent a double out of those units the best way to stop them is to get rid of them before they can pop their special, hence why so many Breath skills are run.

It's also true that almost all enemy phase builds that don't involve armors also recommend a Breath skill as optimal so that probably contributes to it.

To fight Bold Fighter, they'll still need a mix of Guard and a 3-Turn special with a Slaying weapon. And if that doesn't garantee the oneshot, they have to take the double...so that requires a mix of Guard, and maybe even an Armourslaying weapon. You could avoid this situation by being able to take them out on Player Phase.

Granted, nothing is perfect, but at least we know the current meta tends to lean towards one or the other.

One of the Steady Breath builds that tend to bore me the most is Steady Breath Nephenee. It only started making more sense now because of the refine, but she was basically a less tanky Lukas before that instead of taking advantage of her good player/mixed phase attributes.

That's true but even then almost all of these units with Bold Fighter are also running DC and typically have high defenses which makes one rounding them difficult under most circumstances. Which is why people will try to line up combat with their own special to make one rounding these possible.

I completely agree though that i would like to see more situations where speed based defense and denying a double was more valuable than just killing the enemy unit before it can even attack you. I enjoyed playing my +Spd Nowi far more than I do my +Def one now with SB, but arena being what it is the +Spd wasn't able to get the job done anymore.

Oh man, finally, an intellectual. Jokes aside though, I feel like doing things that are currently meta isn't as fun as trying out builds, so maybe that's why it feels boring? And as you said, just slap SB+QR and let the magic happen. It feels too simple and there's not much strategy behind it.

It isn't one or the other. Anything can work, but it's just that this situation Steady Breath is arguably the most powerful...for killing, anyway. The catch, when comparing it to something like Steady Posture is that it can be outclassed if you need to fight multiple guys at once.

Another example of things that aren't "meta", a lot of the debuffing strategies dagger users use. It's probably the very essence of strategy seeing Jaffar solo Zephiel Infernal (YES, IT HAPPENED).

It's boring because of how effective it is. Give a unit a skill like Moonbow or Glimmer(Or anything that results in a cooldown of 2) and if attacked the opponent immediately fires it off on their counter. Give Zelgius Black Luna and Bold Fighter and no matter what phase they're on, the second attack that he strikes will activate Black Luna (Excluding Guard). Give M!Grima or Hardin Bonfire and it's the same thing to a lesser degree. Give a dragon with Lightening Breath a skill like Aether and they become much more bulkier because of how often they can fire it off with QR.

IS needs to find a way to counter this without putting in another boring skill for others to abuse.

I don't follow that logic. SS instant Black Luna, Ike's instant R.Aether, AoEs...pretty much anything involving SS is incredibly satisfying to me. And it actually works. And of the examples mentioned, offensive A-slot + Desperation is another thing that just works and I don't find all that boring.

Bold Fighter isn't boring, it's just cheap. Literally. If they at least had some sort of HP limit, it might make sense.

It's kind of like running a B slot in your A slot. I don't find it too boring, but it definitely isn't flashing. The only boring skill i think you can run that is really popular is Guard imo. It's effective, but really boring.

Breath skills just work, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be recommended as good skills.

It's not the most creative solution for an enemy phase unit, but you don't really have that many options - fury threatens long-term sustainability, bonds are even more rare than breath-type skills and it's difficult to get them, brazen skills (especially atk/def) are used as a good alternative and stance skills are also quite rare (especially some variants). Once these enemy phase skills start to become more available, we might start seeing some variety.

You can make some pretty crazy shenanigans with it that aren't the Breath & QR to kill combo. Two I've thought up were a move-type effective weapon, SB/WB and Glimmer to get insta-glimmer procs against your effective types. With that, you can run something like Cancel Affinity, Guard, Wary Fighter, WoM, or really any number of other things.

Another idea would be using SB/WB as a defensive weapon. Using something like a slaying weapon and Pavise, along with the breath skill, Vantage, and Deflect Melee. (This also works on B!Ike with Urvan.) Whenever under 75% HP, you will attack first and get the double charge. Then the enemy will attack and you will take 50% less damage. And then on their second hit you will take 80% less damage, which means your unit will survive for a lot longer than expected.

I get your idea. But some people like me prefers it because of PvE stuffs. You could tank around things with that stuff and heal back.

But just as you said, skills such as SS are more fun to use on Arena.
But vice versa for Arena Defense because it's just weird to run a L&D, Desp on a Defense Team with AI.

I'm not distinguishing between modes. I mean the game as a whole. SS is fun everywhere, irregardless...and I use it a lot (and more effectively) outside of Arena since I can get proper backup.

First off, comparing a Breath skill to Life and Death may not be the best argument. Breath skills are for enemy phase and L&D users generally aren't anything but player phase units.

The Breath skills may be boring, but they work. Breath skills don't require any set-up beside sitting back and waiting to counter. Bond skills are reliant on good unit positioning, which the AI isn't particularly good with when used on Defense teams. Steady Posture isn't bad either, but when compared to Steady Breath, for example, Steady Breath provides the same amount of Defense and while it doesn't provide a flat Atk boost, the +4 Atk boost doesn't match up to being able to spam Specials that will very likely do much more damage than that. Regarding doubling, Breath skills tend to be used on tanky units. If a unit is tanky enough, they don't care about being doubled because they can take the hits.