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Value of Mystic Boost? Part 2: Builds I don't quite find convincing

I want to hand it to Vergessen for seeing right away that the 6HP heal is the most important aspect of this skill. I got distracted by the other aspects, and I've come to agree with him.

So what it means is that it's good on units that want to sustain. And I have a long list of candidates, but I'm not convinced about any of them. In part 2 I'd like to see if someone might be able to convince me about it on certain units.

Units that use fury: I tend to recommend fury for ploy artists, units that can't sustain (i.e. desperation dependent), and units who don't even want to fight most of the time anyways (ex: dancers, other support units) to make them extra hard to kill because it's like putting 6 merges on them for a Hinata and a skill slot. I end up agreeing with people who say that nowadays there are skills much more powerful than fury for units who don't fall into the first three categories. Ironically, Nilla said that fury + mystic boost is good, whereas I would say that if fury is garbage, mystic boost doesn't fix it. If swift sparrow is better than fury in that build, then why wouldn't swift sparrow + mystic boost be better than fury + mystic boost? Isn't healing 6 damage better than taking 3 less on any unit that expects to take multiple hits? (And remember, I recommend fury + desperation for units that can't take more than one hit.)

Specific/individual candidates: see replies section

Asked by Seeker2 weeks 1 day ago

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Kaze: I definitely find this build pretty strong. If the entire enemy team is mages, which is not unheard of in AR, he'll just tank and tank and tank and there's not a thing any of them will be able to do about it while he breaks the aether pots and enemy phases them all to death. You can even keep atk smoke and have a teammate spd ploy for him, and he's up to virtually 53 res, all without merges or buffs.

might be better with null dazzle/firesweep (ability soon to be introduced, and I expect it to be a B-slot), and probably safer with dull ranged especially with Veronica and a lot of hone cavalry and Reinhardt and an occasional raven Cecilia. Yes, there's Aversa and there's panic ploy, but I've seen situations where the horse will get danced before engaging, which would remove any panic. Maybe if you want to argue that those cases are rare enough that they should just be accepted as losses?

Time out: How can Kaze have Bottled Juice? Isn't that a green weapon?

It's a dagger. Just like any manakete can inherit and use lightning breath or light breath or etc., so Kaze can inherit daggers regardless of the colour of the unit from which we get the dagger.

Then that applies for bows too?

Fir: has the potential to be surprisingly tanky against units without forced doubles via healing and good spd...

But isn't this better? (And I would prefer swift sparrow, probably with infantry pulse support)

Manaketes: are probably better with special spiral.

Unless they fly, in which case dull ranged is potentially the better option.

Infantry duelists: mystic boost denies brazens, which are some of the best skills for dual phase function without positioning restrictions. Positioning restrictions are problematic because bonds are hard to use on player phase and solo is hard to use on enemy phase.

Plus, null follow-up is an excellent option when you have spd.

Non-infantry duelists: if you're not using galeforce, renewal is probably just as good. We could switch slaying edge + bonfire for wo dao + noontime, for example. L.Ryoma is especially good with that combo because he has Bushido for a big hit on the noontime.

Similar case for something like this (NB 34 spd is designed specifically to exploit slow tanks). Renewal is just fine if he's not getting danced every turn, or null follow-up might be good for cracking wary fighter.

I generally thing mysic boost is worth it if you can make use out of one of other skills.

Saias comes to mind, to copy his dad. But high res units in general aren't too bad.
First: fury+ploy
With mystic boost he can safely draw in staff units. In the turn after he debuffs that unit and will be able to crush them. In theory at least.
This might work best if you have some way to buff his speed.

Close counter + boost can be used to fight dragons.

I don't really understand why people think close counter is the way to do it though.

On Kaze and daggers with similar statlines just grab a cloud maiougi and use desperation. They both cost one rare 5* but the desperation build doesn't require a second premium fodder (Takumi). Unless you're Felicia, in which case you probably want to keep your prf and you need a lot of atk buffs to penetrate their mixed bulk and I'm not convinced it's worth it.

For bows there's no dragon-effective weapon, but if I'm not mistaken there are precisely two bows with the Kaze/Felicia statline: Niles and Nina. Innes is kind of his own thing. So maybe something like this does make sense. He might need some def ploy support though (or infantry flash so that he can do the ploying).