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Purpose of support daggers?

Let's start by considering every dagger other than smoke dagger, rogue dagger, Deathly Dagger, and Peshkatz. You have a weapon that inflicts def/res -7 on enemies in an area.

That's useful if your team is lacking in firepower. I could see that being useful on AR def because super-tanks are on the rise in the meta; people are discovering that it's nice if one unit can tank anything and everything. It's also useful in arena if your bonus unit is Sharena and the opponent put a Surtr+10 on their def (or any situation remotely similar).

But if you want to tank, the debuff you want to inflict is atk and potentially spd, which means Clarisse's bow or atk smoke are better. Smoke dagger also enters the equation here, and rogue dagger if you're not afraid of panic or some kind of dull skill (which includes refined Fensalir, blue gift, etc.). Now, if you don't use guard, then you're giving most opponents a free pass to build up a big special which is often designed as a battering ram against precisely the kind of wall you're trying to build. If you use guard, you're likely to lose it due to HP requirement, so it's one-and-done, which is antithetical to the slow (not in terms of low spd but in terms of the pace of the battle being a bit like tectonic plates pushing against each other), tanky style characteristic of Omni H's "trash tier units" videos. If you don't use guard there's basically one alternative, which is to put guard on your weapon, i.e. H.Kagero's juice bottle or H.Niles' devilish bow. But for that matter, why not just one-round your opponent and call it done? That even gets around the issue of atk smoke hitting only the units around the unit that was attacked.

Consider a build like the one shown below, and pretend he has Cecilia's boot instead of Kagero's juice bottle. It's not going to kill anything unless we switch to ignis/glacies. Why choose him for a team over something like Kaze using starfish + special spiral + flashing blade + glacies + atk smoke?

Asked by Seeker2 weeks ago

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Answers

In general I don't know if daggers who focus on debuffs really shine too well if they can't fight.

W!Cecilia will be good for a debuff set, but that's because she has both the atk and defences to make use out of it.

I like chip damage daggers more, Jaffar being a favorite of mine, despite still being situational.

I do think debuff/chip teams work best with one or two high mobility units who can rush in and pick off weakened enemies. And at least one dancer.

This is an example of a team I like to use
(it is a bit altered, since it's not fully done and easier to make with feh builder than to use my phone's screenshots)

Ares might be better with DC though, Jaffar with CC/vantage.
Valter is mostly there because he looked good in the team setup. A better lance flier could work as well

Pure support units aren't really preferred in general, with maybe a few exceptions, unless they have the stats to hold their own without having to sacrifice your left artery to make them good.

Like you stated, Winter Cecilia has the stats to justify running pretty much any dagger, and her being armored means she can benefit from "being fast" without actually being so because of the Fighter skills.

Because of support (buffs from teammates), things like Clarisse's Bow is not preferred too often.

"If my tank is hardly taking damage, then what's the point of debuffing their offensive stats?"

This becomes prominent with units with Aether (since they heal anyway), and just monstrous tanks. Sure, you could run skills like attack smoke and/or speed smoke, but at that point you're making a trivial matter even more trivial because the unit can already take on anything (except for maybe AoE Special Lilina, but she's easy to kill).