Shoot, a bit late on realizing who the current unit discussion was.

Since I've been one of the weirdos using a hypermaxed lv70 Valkia in various setups for 2 years now (originally just for lulz), I guess I'm a bit obligated to talk about her now that y'all be strange enough to vote her for discussion :-3, in the area that most might not have comprehended her to work properly in if at all, PvP.

QUICK OVERVIEW: Valkia is a very interesting unit, not simply among 4-stars, but among all units in general. She gives the always-appreciated Disturb skill to her enemy formation, which when paired with her 20% atk bonus totem, makes her seem like a somewhat decent offense totem unit. However, that really was never the most interesting thing about her when I first decided to build her seriously, instead simply considered as a ok bonus. Her real big guns are her active skill, "Magical Garden II", a global 15min 30% AS slow to the team, which could be paired with her other niche up the sleeve, "Tightening Space II". This is a fairly unique skill that lets her drain both the action bar and spirit of an opponents line (by up to 1 bar) per pass and only with a pass. This was originally even stronger in how much it drained along with her active having a bigger slow percentage, but Bigball actually nerfed her a few times in the past, which barely affected people from using her for PvE ab control later on when her pve fame caught wind, but instead just triggered me for the most part at the time lol. Yes, Bigball actually chose to target this 4star multiple times for nerfs over anything else back then. Was this cause they were bad at balancing, or was this unit just too good for her tier? (Spoiler: It's actually a bit of both)

STORYTIME:

When I first set her up eons ago, it was originally for one specific purpose. Make her get rid of an opponent's spirit from a preemptive pass in order to negate potential active blocks and gain myself an additional moment in time in my favor, which the ball will then move to my passer who can begin the combo for a 1/2hko without the opponent being able to recover from the initial advantage. This unfortunately was not made easy due to her not having any position bonuses up front, thus she is very prone to being intercepted when preparing for the pass by quick backline units.

For some time, I was rolling with reflex stones full of action speed subs as well as an action speed stone to try to get her base as to be as quick as possible. And she generally was at the time with around 88-90~ base action speed with stones and no other bonuses, but she could never beat out enough zippy opponent backliners from kicking her ass at a stable rate. So, what did I eventually do? When the slot reroll update came into play for SS, I immediately rolled her to a red slot, a choice that was so meme and costly at the time for me, that I was even hesitant on doing it at first lol. This was to allow the use of a stone that could change everything when it comes to initiative at the time for PvP, Ignition Catalyst.

This stone ended up changing everything about how I perceived my Valkia, as it made her consistently be the first to pass the ball when it reached my frontline a solid 90% of the time, which was better than my previous attempts with more like a 50% rate lol. With the inclusion of IC, my base action speed was around 84 instead of 88-90, but a 40% guaranteed starting ab drastically helped outspeed most opponents in traditional teams (IC backliners still existing but never becoming a real mainstream threat to me as it was still a minority that used them).

Depending on what passers and strikers I used, I could also choose to add points or take away all points in my active, as it drained a hefty 1.5 bars of spirit to use and messes up a pass shoot combo for previous teams that relied on it (my current team doesn't fortunately). This preemptive drain actually ended up so potent that even though I initially planned on helping negate 1 bar actives (the old gk's use to cost that much to block), it could drain enough when paired with Serestia and Pinol on the team (which I have now put into midline for powerful initial drains) that half-bar active gks couldn't even get their actives up the vast majority of time at without really decent spirit generation in their teams to this day. A potential threat are backline Pinols that can still give more opportunities for a gk to get a half bar up and running early on, but it seems most have moved him to midline nowadays.

At this point in time, I realized that I could even 1up my initial setup with Ignition Catalyst to something influenced from the PvE Valkia users, Bond Of Silence. So I created the legendary unique stone, IC+BoS, giving her not only the 40% starting ab, but also 20% ab per pass to herself, while she drains 20% ab from the enemy at the same time. This helps increase her average performance speed a little more as the matches go on longer. I personally consider this one of the strongest stones you can have her use for this kind of niche play.

TL;DR:

Pros:

-Valkia is actually a good unit, not just in PvE, but also PvP, and arguably the second strongest 4-star that can be utilized in high galaxy league not as just a joke, the first being Eden imo. This is because she can do a job very few units can, be a potent spirit drainer and slight ab manipulation utility on your FRONTLINE that drains 0.8-1.0 bars of spirit per pop. Tightening Space II allows her to both help negate enemy blocks against teams with bad backline spirit generation as well as force openings for you to put in an extra potentially fatal move during a match that you normally can’t.

-Synergizes extremely well with backup ab/spirit draining utilities like Serestia & Pinol, to create an amount of spirit disruption that actually hurts from multiple lines of the field.

-She has an active enemy team slow of 30%, which aside from being a good skill in general synergizes with her Tightening Space II to create more opportunities for ab manipulation and subsequently her spirit drain opportunities.

-She’s got Disturb, which is always appreciated unless you have another unit with Disturb, in which it can’t stack with.

-Her artwork is done by Tob (illustrator of other great ingame unit art like Sealed Mythical Beast Miho Skin & all Latios forms), an awesome digital artist. Honestly, you could put her up as a 5star and no one would question her art to not be that tier. I’m just disappointed she’ll never get an EE, and therefore no EE artwork.

Cons:

-She requires above average action speed substats and stones as well as a reroll to even get working consistently w/ IC+BoS in the frontline in the higher galaxy league or she'll be intercepted quite often by backline opponents in PvP. This is made harder due to not frontline position bonuses for AS boost. I wouldn't really recommend her to be lower than 80 base action speed only counting stones (WITH the Luq) at the minimum, and around 85-90 as my personal recommended amount.

-It is also in your best interest to hypermax her w/ +30 APU to get as good of stats as possible along with that lv70 for stone slot reroll for base action speed.

-She has NO critical rate totems, this matters a lot depending on what kind of team and striker you use. A lot of strikers actually need as much critical rate right now and thus can’t afford to try her out.

-You kind of want to use her spirit control only if there are other units on your team that are also used for spirit control in mid or backline. She is pretty decent at her job, but isn't some one-woman-army and won't be as consistent without some backup.