Quick Analysis of New Heroes, Skills, and Meta Implications

Not meant to be comprehensive, just ideas to help you out.

- Rally up adds value to feint skills and just improves rallies in general.
- It will soon be possible to grab aether and steady breath from the same B.Ike without sacrificing a 5* exclusive. You can even grab the reposition while you're at it (which is probably good because steady breath tends to go on enemy phase units) because steady breath only requires steady stance 2. This will be the case even if steady stance 3 remains 5* locked.
- Bows are gaining back some place in the meta. Leon just became a lot more viable as a unit thanks to shining bow. He has reasonable spd and good atk and def. Neutral atk with shining bow effect gives him 40 atk before weapon or A-skill. Heck, even Virion suddenly gains value because of his good physical bulk.
- Res ploy gains value due to the introduction of this weapon.
- The colourless 5* exclusive pool has improved.
- Even def wave (Silas) is arguably good on squishy blade mages because they want their atk and spd buffs from an ally at all times, and they can even use the def to try to survive the counterattack that gets them into desperation. Might need to pay 20k feathers though. I suspect that this skill rather than steady stance will be 5* locked.
- Spd/res link is kind of awkward. Def/res link was very intuitive, and atk/def link could be good for someone like Y.Tiki, F.Kana, or even Nowi who might be just a wee bit short of atk otherwise. It's harder to find a frontliner who wants extra spd and res more than they want extra of other stats. The candidates I can think of are Selena, Zelgius, some Berkut's Lance or barrier blade builds, and maybe some CC versions of Boey or M.Robin.
- Ophelia's weapon is super-powerful. If you add special spiral and use a 4-charge special, it will fire on either phase. The weapon makes it 3CD, and special spiral grants 2 charges, so if she takes a hit, it will activate. Have one mage ally so that it will be ready to fire on player phase. She might even be able to use close counter if she has low enough spd to have good defenses (because she'll be a special-based OHKO attacker).
- In all cases, we need to know her statline in order to know exactly how powerful she is.
- Ok, the elephants in the room, Flora and her skills. Her dagger is actually not as OP as it seems. Def+20 sounds comical, but she probably has poor def so she probably gets only to the 30s depending on her A-skill. The guaranteed follow-up is extremely annoying for fast tanks such as Selena, who probably don't use guard and expect to block doubles using their spd. The 2-charge iceberg is going to be especially painful. Even Nowi is going to be a bit uncomfortable despite colour advantage if she's not using guard. (After fast Nowis celebrated at special spiral, they now have this to deal with, though arguably, they were already switching to guard in arena anyways.) The forced double is also especially helpful for cracking wary fighter.
- Solo skills are blatant powercreep, but they are a victory for non-DC or innate-DC dual phase units above all. Player phase units only get a slight upgrade from swift sparrow, not enormously more than the difference between death blow 4 and death blow 3. Enemy phase units probably get more damage from higher-charge specials powered by breath skills. I don't agree with people who are saying that they harmonize poorly with hones, fortifies, and emblem buffs. The whole point of hones and fortifies is that you don't need your ally to find a way to keep their hands on your back while you attack the enemy (which spurs do require). You were always intending to be disconnected from your allies while attacking and then probably repositioned or drawn back. Emblem buffs work at 2-range, and if you're fliers, for example, especially melee units, you will often find yourself without an adjacent ally when attacking. The most frustrating part about these skills is that they're more powerful than bond skills, which are probably harder to use.
- I would be amused if Felicia could wield Hoarfrost. She IS also a child of ice, after all.

Commentary on meta:
- Infantry is gaining back some of its dominance as the class that gets to spam specials after the CYL2 armours threatened it.
- Ophelia's weapon and special spiral are two skills that suggest OHKOs are going to become more part of the meta, and special-spamming is part of it.
- Maybe forced doubles (ex: Flora's dagger) and undoubles (ex: Thunder Armads) are going to become more common even outside of armoured units?
- Spd in general might be losing some value because of these factors and because spd is becoming so polarized (units like Karla and +spd Lewyn double practically everything; anybody that doesn't have like 40 spd with only a weapon refine might just give up).
- None of this matters as long as BST-and SP-based scoring throws mages and most fast units straight out the window for absolutely no good reason.

Banner notes:
- Since rally up + has appeared on a unit that almost certainly will not get demoted, and there are so many new heroes coming these few weeks, I think we can say that Quan might not get demoted and Silvia might also remain locked like Lene. This is not certain, though.
- Colour-sharing doesn't mean 3% gets reduced to 1.5% when pulling blues. The appearance rate of either blue unit is still 1 in 133 stones (of all colours), which would be somewhere around 1 in 33 blue stones. Having an extra blue focus unit just means you encounter an extra blue stone per 133 stones of all colours on average. I'm repeating myself because this myth needs to be put down. It's messing with people's pulling decisions unjustly. Sometime I'll debunk the idea that you got some pitybreaker instead of your focus unit.