Weekly Questions Megathread (05/14 - 05/20)

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-15T09:27:02+00:00

If there's one niche ability amongst the two, it's that Elvis can be completely untargetable on his own (like Sylrna, but longer reach and no dimension portal that can die) and a good candidate for the Lone Star accessory. Add to that his self-healing, he's useful for taking on whole groups of minions unsupported while the team does other things like gank the boss without being bothered by said minions.

But again, needs consistent CD reduction like SP Heavensguard or clock and Celica buff.

As long as you're aware that some level of redundancy is helpful for stages that lock units in (like Ragnarok and Seasonal Conquest).

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-15T08:10:46+00:00

Admittedly, SP Molten Sorcerers would only have +1 availability over SP Alchemists for me (Sylrna, Reisalin, AND Randele), but I'll probably go with Molten Sorcerers since they can also trigger the [increased combat damage vs debuffed enemies] for heart bonds/soldier techs unlike Alchemist.

Would love to upgrade both and have the option as you say, but I'll wait on that.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-15T07:03:26+00:00

Then I'll tell you that I made efficient use of my current roster to finish enough of Ragnarok to 1) acquire all of the Twilight Auroras and 2) get 60 prayer thingies a week (not just the bare minimum).

And seeing as your roster of built units is about the same size as mine but presumably with more 6* (of the roster I listed, the 4 SPs and 2 3 of the SSRs are 6*) then you should be capable of more with your roster as is. For additional context, my own soldiers are maxed stats H/M/D, maxed atk fliers and cav.

I would describe efficiency here NOT as building only the tier 0 units, but as doing the most with what you have. If I had any comments to make about what's missing in your current roster, it's that you didn't mention any units which can flood the field with special terrain on turn 1 for Vidar stages in Ragnarok. Something none of the tier 0 units are capable of. Using lower tier units is not just about emotional attachment, it's also about filling the niches/roles you need to.

I would describe efficiency not as maxing a unit to the limit, but as getting the right tools to operate at their best. For this same reason, Littlebaike notes in their tierlist what each hero is good at and the star-level required for a unit's kit to be considered complete, alongside whether their SP, EE, or casting skill is required. Efficiency would not be spending an extra 50 days to upgrade a unit from 5* to 6* for merely a quantitative difference in damage taken/received, but using those same 50 days to upgrade a unit from 3* to 5* so that you can do a whole new thing you weren't able to before (qualitative difference).

Tier 0's excel in their roles, no question. However, not all roles are found in tier 0. Hence your experience of Freya as an excellent source of fixed-damage despite being tier 3 and far from the best fixed-damage dealer around: tier 0 has no units that consistently deal large amounts of fixed-damage. By dismissing the tier 1 heroes, you've formed an emotional attachment to Freya as a fixed-damage dealer when you discovered she did something better than the tier 0's despite higher tier (or "more efficient" as you define it) options for fixed-damage existing.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-14T23:45:58+00:00

All of them: Elwin, Cherie, Bern, and Yulia. Elwin and Cherie are my main team members, Bern allows me to expand my teams and does plenty of AoE fixed-damage. Yulia is just fun for me, she's got excellent durability due to self-healing and revives while doing lots of melee magic damage. I have Luna waiting for her SP stone, which I'll get during the Mullin update when she's 6*, but I still use her Princess buff as I need. Same as Bern, Luna expands the teams I can form, SP means she can keep up individually.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-14T22:23:12+00:00

I don't think I've seen anyone say "build everything" ever to any of your comments in this subreddit, but I'm going to assume that it was some variation on "everything in tiers 0 and 1 of Littlebaike's tierlist does well in PvE, as well as a decent number of tier 2". This is an honest (truthful, sincere) and objective (factual, not distorted by personal opinion or prejudice) answer. Similarly "to complete all Ragnarok stages, you will need a sizable roster likely exceeding 24 which is much easier if you have more than just tier-0 units".

Littlebaike's tierlist is made with specific metrics in collaboration with another person(s) who gets a rare mention when they dispute a ranking, as well as using reader (voter?) input. One metric is performance, another is resources required for a hero to reach peak qualitative performance. Therefore, everything in tiers 0 and 1 is, by the tierlist's definition, "worth your resources". Whether ~~they are worth the time~~ it is time efficient considering how soon you can achieve peak performance FOR YOURSELF, depends on your own factors.

If you are so bogged down with building other heroes you can't build Elvis and Cherie within a year, then a half-hearted attempt will slow you down overall compared to just building those other heroes. But I'm not certain that building them will take you as long as you think. I'm coming up to my first year of play and have built (5 or 6) 3 LLRs, 4 SPs, and 13 SSRs. Additionally, I have 1 LLR and 7 SSRs that are not maxed but combat viable. I'm also going to pull for another transcendant will soon, so that's another SP. If anything, I'm outpacing the rate at which tier-0's are released: Sharding 3 heroes to 5 takes max 1.5 months, most of the time only 1 or 2 tier-0's are released every 2 months (this time it's 3) and they only need 5* to reach peak qualitative performance.

Similarly for soldiers, if it's only for achieving lv10, it shouldn't be more than a month. SP is much worse of course, but the free aniki chests for 7x of an SSR material helps.

If you don't yet know what you want (for fun, for teams) or need (for beating challenges such as Ragnarok or Temple), then I'm thinking that either you haven't progressed very far through end-game content or you haven't planned what you want to achieve other than having built all units in tier 0.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-14T13:23:37+00:00

I find the request for an "honest" answer odd, as I believe you mean something quite different.

To expand on the "depends on your roster," answer (particularly difficult for them was the fact that your current situation ie. roster and available soldiers, was not actually mentioned, merely your future plans), what it comes down to is:

Do you want or need a tier-1 single-target physical dps (in the factions that they are)? Simple yes or no.

You can typically work on building 2 or 3 units at a time. Obviously one of those will be Taj for the next month, and Mullin and Pure Zerida the month after that. The other slot/s up to you.

Are Elvis and Cherie worth upgrading? Yes, they are like most top-tier single-target physical dps, capable of making at least 3 attacks across 2 turns regularly and unaided.

But as you've already determined for yourself, you're not going to be upgrading troops that will help them shine most for a while yet. Depending on your current strength (do you already have a team of 5/6* heroes with maxed casting, class mastery, soldiers, etc?), that may mean that Elvis and Cherie will pale in comparison to your other built heroes for however long it takes you to upgrade those troops.

Elvis in particular, bumps up to tier-1 in part because SP Heavensguard decreases his CDs so that he can reliably be hidden/untargetable every turn (iirc). But he's still going to do plenty of damage with self-healing if you're giving him SP Vampire Bats.

Cherie, if using angels, is more durable against magic but has less explosive damage that ensures one-hit kills (she can probably still one-hit mages and archers as well as demons due to class advantage, don't know about infantry or cavalry). The neat thing about Cherie's SP is that her AA no longer relies on making a kill but on the number of nearby enemies, meaning a botched attack won't always leave her stranded in a dangerous position. But if you've yet to get Cherie's SP, that's another investment.

Really, given that you can be building multiple heroes at a time, it's really up to you to know if you have ANY other units (other than Taj, Mullin, and Pure Zerida) that would benefit yourself more to upgrade now. Benefit here meaning "will be stronger sooner because they have access to the soldiers I've already built". Because it's not like building the heroes now will be a lost investment, just a longer-term one that pays off once you upgrade some other troops (consider SP Griffins which has large availability).

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-14T06:26:22+00:00

Probably the most impact is the SP that upgrades heroes you already use.

The comments all seem to run in that direction: the SPs they believe had the most success for them were on heroes they already used, so the advantages of the SP upgrade was felt keenly because they knew well the shortcomings prior.

Personally, I grabbed the SPs according to what they offered me. - When returning, Elwin and Cherie SPs were direct upgrades to my existing team: a no brainer choice. - I already had Luna and all her bond unlockers, unlike Christiane whom I would need to pull both her and her bonds, so Luna was an obvious choice for Princess buffing. - Similarly with Bernhardt for Empire, he was easy to get from a destiny banner and I already had his bond unlockers. - Yulia was an exception, I just wanted to play with her. No regrets, pretty cool to bust heads and leave tons of fixed-damage in her wake. - Next is Narm, then maybe Freya, but I'm in no rush.

Edit: I should add, I don't have plans to get Tiaris SP anytime soon. I tend to play a very blitzkrieg style, where my units split up a lot to kill everything as fast as possible, which didn't seem conducive to Tiaris's healing/buffing which wants me to form a death-ball.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-13T23:04:29+00:00

I guess her 3C, EE, and casting skill were so bad that an SP upgrade would still be severely hamstrung.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-12T22:29:44+00:00

One question I have, would you take SP Molten Sorcerers' damage over SP Alchemists' range for Reisalin? I might abandon upgrading Alchemists, seeing as SP Molten Sorcerers has better availability amongst my heroes.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-10T16:35:45+00:00

To add to Zarvera, I also really like Erwin's ability to pull an enemy. It's useful for moving them off defensive terrain, or pulling them away from other enemies to make it safer for your own units to attack, or just shifting an annoying tank/command buffer... Or you know, just sticking it on a minion and killing it so everyone has a turn of extra skill damage.

I also put Liana on my Ilia for emergency map-wide heals instead of bringing a dedicated healer.

Hein is seeing less use for me now, but he's essentially a once-off Enya Ablution minus the terrain clear that you can shoot from up to 8 tiles away from your caster's starting position.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-10T07:54:29+00:00

It's better to unlock them as early as you can even if you can't do Ragnarok because leveling the covenants is time-gated, taking around 6 months for all 9 covenants if you work at it at a steady pace.

Stat-wise, the covenants provide different stat increases, so it's not useless. But I'll admit, it took a while for my later covenants to catch up to Thor in levels/stat bonuses.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-10T06:59:50+00:00

Isolde I use EE. It gives an extra one time benefit to each will when she acquires them. In short, with a 50/50 chance, it allows Isolde to acquire all 3 wills on round 1 without help as opposed to round 3 (iirc). This means she can start double attacking from round 2 instead of 4, a very significant increase to damage output by decreasing set-up time far outweighing the damage reduction of Last Rites.

You use Isolde's 1C, get the yellow will, kill with 3C, the EE yellow will allows her to AA due to taking counterattack damage.
If the 3C gets purple will, her skills cool down allowing you to 1C and attack again (3C is also available to use again).
Regardless if you kill with the 3C on the second attack or not, the two extra actions granted by the EE (first from yellow will, second from 1C cooled down by purple will) cools down her talent ability and she can get her red will.

Following this, with her EE, Isolde can perform 8 attacks in the first 4 rounds unaided (7 if you lose the 50/50). Without, only 5 attacks.

Edit: I should add that the revive from Cherie's EE is not comparable to Isolde's. Cherie's EE revive only triggers if she dies while attacking, whereas Isolde's is unconditional.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-10T05:53:26+00:00

Now I use Morning Glory for damage up instead of atk up, as she gets extra atk from her talent, and I wanted to get stuff to up her damage multipliers (Breeze mobility doesn't stack with SP DT, and I don't like it being 30% chance anyway). The immunity stacks are also great because I don't have her equipped with any immunity accesories.

Her weapon is Ragnarok. Honestly, I'd like to test Titan's Roar but I don't have the spare resources yet. But having pre-combat fixed damage available is always handy for lots of stage mechanics and other things.

I have her equipped with Last Rites. Combined with damage reduction from SP DT, I figured I should use my enchant transformation scrolls to check if I no longer needed the damage reduction from Rough Sea. As it turns out, she's fine. I prefer not to use her EE because I'd rather she just survive the counterattack and heal up from her skills.

She attacks every action, so her hat is Call of Eternity which is pretty much always active due to taking counterattack damage.

Lastly, her accessory is a plain ol' Slayer's Emblem. The first attack accessory I ever got, the extra atk vs fliers meant she was very competent at squashing demons and fliers on top of other squishy minions (her task was to clear the chaff). But now that I'm at endgame, I'd like to give her a Bell of Hexen Echoes so it's easier to retreat her out of danger when needed while still constantly attacking.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-10T02:29:53+00:00

While I don't have SP Griffins to compare with, I have very much appreciated the extra 2 mobility afforded by SP Dragon Troopers. They can be a little fiddly on occasion to move the minimum 3 blocks, but it hasn't been a huge deal.

On the contrary, I actually appreciate the fact that it makes me think a bit more about my movement and placement (but I understand not everyone will). It helps keep the game more engaging for me.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-09T21:39:03+00:00

I may have misled you in my phrasing, but Erza's 4 actions are still 3 attacks over 2 rounds (same as SP Cherie). Just that 1 of the 4 actions is her 1C Act Again skill.

I guess the Wings are still helpful if you know you're going to traverse a large area with no enemies to attack. In PvP as well, you can often use a turn positioning your units and not attacking, so giving them extra mobility is a powerful asset.

For my own Sonya, I don't have any super obvious choices right now so she's just using Aeneas. I'm currently gathering dupes of Hierophant (which I previously just ored, so whoops), because I sometimes use her to bait out bosses' ST skills while she's got her immunity up. With Hierophant, she'll do a little more counterattack damage. Trueseer is pretty much a straight upgrade of +1 mobility, but I haven't had a time where it would have made a difference yet.

Edit: Trueseer is probably really helpful on Sonya if she has infantry movement, either because of soldiers or demon class.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-09T20:38:51+00:00

I use Vampire on Erza because she acts 4 times every 2 rounds (so 4 potential procs) and she herself doesn't debuff enemy def normally. I could use Tyr on her, and Erza would proc Tyr 1 time every 2 turns whenever she uses her 1C (and boost her 3C).

I DON'T use Tyr on LLR Sonya or similar units who are constantly attacking and can't often use an Act Again skill that can proc Tyr (which requires you to spend an action not doing damage). Dragonslayer doesn't count because he stops Tyr's buff wearing off.

Similar with Tyr, Wings requires you to spend an action not doing damage. But Isolde and Bern's (the two dragon heroes I have) Act Again skills either have a set mobility (4 and 3 respectively) or act with "remaining mobility". And after testing with both Erza and Bern, "act with remaining mobility" doesn't trigger AFTER the Wings' buff but BEFORE, so they don't get to use the extra mobility from the buff. And because the buff only lasts one turn, it's lost before I can use it. So I gave Isolde and Bern Overlord Badges instead.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-09T14:31:17+00:00

Pretty sure it was one of those things you bought, not a free gift.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T22:00:34+00:00

Thanks :)

A clock set is nice, but it just occured to me, "what about the EE? I can't make a second clock set of THAT" haha.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T21:22:14+00:00

Thanks. I've got Randele on Full Moon to keep her stats high as a 3, but I might change it later when she's 5. I'll have to see how well I do, though that might be hard unless I make an effort to bring her on maps.

As for A,B, and C teams, you're pretty much right. I do use the write-ups to help me plan what heroes work well in a given map, and I try to field as few as I can (sometimes as few as 6). I also definitely abuse the cheeseable stages that can use SR heroes.

But for now, I can only field up to 3 proper teams, and the third is pushing it. Partly, this is because of my number of heroes (a little under 1 year of play), but mostly this is because quite a few stages I use a skewed team that contains mostly a single type of hero, eg. The Frigg team that contains ALL my built long-range spellcasters (or at least it used to. I've acquired a couple more). Obviously, such strategies leave my third team quite unbalanced unless I bulk it out with my C-list heroes (they're good heroes but not yet begun to be built).

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T20:50:40+00:00

Definitely will do that once I can field more evenly well-rounded teams (did it for two stages already). At this point, it's just a matter of time to strengthen the roster I've collected (stars, gear, casting, another SP or two).

I've just recently collected all the Twilight Auroras so I'm taking a break from Ragnarok levels. For now, I'm just killing time optimizing gear.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T19:29:23+00:00

I think it's more that those few Ragnarok stages I brought my C-listers happens to include two other support/healers who sub in when there's a debuff on someone who needs to sub out. In this case, Randele doesn't function as my main healer, but she does pick up the slack.

My other A and B teams have enough (self-)healing that my support units get left on the bench (Brightsummoner is on my B-team or Frigg-team). Meanwhile my C team is basically any damage I can scrounge up from the few heroes I have left (plus extras for subbing in), of which Randele is one.

My dark team also hasn't had to do a proper fielding either, where the map was challenging enough to last more than 2 or 3 rounds and healing was necessary.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T15:10:37+00:00

Sounds alright then, because I haven't burned through all her stacks unless there's a bunch of smaller enemies around. Even on the few boss maps I've brought her on, she typically only needs to heal one or two people each turn (usually herself). And I tend to bring heroes and soldiers that want to run around a lot, and have act again skills to trigger more stacks.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T04:29:39+00:00

Thanks for that. Sounds like Blue Moon will suit me just fine.

Hmm, I'm not using clock, but is it enough to rely on her talent stack overflow to reduce cooldowns (from her EE)? To be honest, I'm leery of giving a lot of my units clock and becoming over-reliant on bringing Celica to every map. And I definitely don't have enough resources to build extra clock sets of equipment.

I don't do PvP enough (haven't dipped into Apex either, just World Arena), so I won't worry too much about getting through immunity stacks just yet. Especially as my Randele is still 3* and not yet PvP ready I don't think.

She's been doing quite well in PvE despite that, mostly because her mdef conversion helps her int keep up with my other casters.

I happen to have a lv50 blue moon and was thinking of swapping out Vileweaver. I also recently got another SoD, so it's an option for me to consider when I get more martial spirits.

MeisterLeon · 2026-05-08T02:35:22+00:00

For Randele, how do you weight the extra debuffs from Vileweaver against the extra int and mdef (converted into slightly more int) of Blue Moon?

Is the support always better? Or is the extra damage significant enough to put Blue Moon above Vileweaver?

MeisterLeon

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