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murasaki-murasame · 5 years ago

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Since the next batch of mana spiral upgrades should be coming out in the next week or two, I figure now’s probably a good time to go over my predictions for what the first batch of mana spirals for each element might be like, now that we have a good idea of what to expect from them.

This got really long so I’ll put it under a cut.

First off, I think that the adventurers in the first batches of mana spiral upgrades per element will probably be:

Shadow: Nefaria, Curran, Heinwald, OG Cleo, Alex, Audric [maybe], Kleimann, Berserker, and the 3-stars

Water: Xanfried, Laranoa, Lily, OG Elly, OG Celery, Thaniel, Luther, and the 3-stars [except maybe Jakob]

Wind: Hawk, Sylas, Louise, OG Ranzal, Su Fang, Pia, Aeleen, and the 3-stars

Light: Julietta, Lucretia, B-Zardin, OG Luca, Elias, Vixel, Amane, and the 3-stars [except maybe Xiao Lei]

I’m not entirely sure about Lily and Louise since they’re already pretty solid, but I dunno. B-Zardin might be too recent to get buffed but Cassandra was even more recent, lol. And honestly light needs all the buffs it can get, especially when it comes to the non-limited ones.

Botan might have been a special case, but it’d be nice if they include other event units in the mana spiral upgrades as well. Especially since they’ve always been particularly held back by the wonky abilities that event units get. Though I think most of them probably wouldn’t benefit quite as much from a buff as Botan did, since she was already really good.

There’s other units I want to see get buffed, like Annelie and Fritz, but I think other units need the buffs more.

Anyway, let’s break down what changes I think will be made to all of these characters, and what I’d like to see.

Firstly, going by how the flame mana spirals went, we can probably assume that it’ll be the 5-stars and the free story 4-stars who’ll get the most attention put into their upgrades, while the gacha 4-stars and the 3-stars will probably all just have their numbers scaled up across the board, and lots of them will get status afflictions added to their skills. But it’s safe to assume that every single mana spiral unit will get 100% potent status resistance [and off-element resistance units will get their resistances changed to something that actually works for them], and units with any sort of skill prep ability will get it buffed to 100% skill prep + skill charge [aside from unique cases like Naveed].

Either way, this is how I think it’ll go down per element.

SHADOW:

[I’m starting here ‘cause it’ll be the next batch that’ll come out]

As much as I’d love to see my absolute son boy Norwin get a mana spiral upgrade, I think he won’t be in the initial batch since he’s already a pretty solid unit all around. I’d say he’s probably the most well-rounded of the 4-star shadow gacha units, along with Patia.

Orion’s definitely a candidate, but I don’t think they’ll give him an upgrade just yet. Partly because Alex will definitely get one [although they did give both Euden and Karl buffs at the same time], but also because it might really backfire if they give him built-in 100% skill prep since he inflicts blind on his S1, lol. That might lead to some unintended cheese strats, but who knows.

As for the ones who I’m more certain will get buffed, Nefaria’s basically the poster child for ‘absolutely needs a buff’, along with Hawk, but I’m not really certain what I think they’ll do with her. There’s just a lot of fundamental things wrong with her as a unit, and I don’t think that just buffing her stats would be enough. The main thing is just that since blind is such a powerful status affliction, it’s highly resisted by basically every endgame boss, and we haven’t gotten any blind punisher dragons/wyrmprints yet. So a unit like her that’s built around inflicting blind is probably just never going to work because she’ll always be shackled.

Honestly my first suggestion would just be to retcon her entire kit into being about inflicting poison rather than blind, lol. At least then she’d fit in with the poison meta that’s been steadily developing. But that might be too much of a change to make.

The other big issue with her is that her blind affliction is tied to her using her S2 and then using force-strikes. On top of that taking longer to activate than a blind-inflicting S1 would, bow force-strikes are just completely horrible in every way and need to be changed. The bow force-strike should just be a single big charged shot that you charge and fire like you do with the sword and blade force-strikes. That’d make it a lot faster and more reliable to actually hit anyone with them in the first place.

I think her two main abilities will at least get their numbers bumped up, but I think they should take a cue from Naveed’s mana spiral and add an additional effect to one of them along the lines of ‘While Twilight Arrows is activated, increase strength/crit rate/whatever by x%’. It’d at least be SOMETHING to make her stronger, and it’d help justify tying so much to her S2 and it’s effect.

I’m not entirely sure if Curran and Heinwald will get buffed, but I think they at least need it more than Yaten and Natalie do, and it’d be a bit weird if Nefaria’s the only shadow 5-star to get buffed in the next batch, so I’m including them.

For Curran, I think the defense debuff on his S1 should have a 100% chance of applying, and maybe he could get poison punisher added to it as well. And I think his S2 should have either poison punisher or defense debuff punisher [like DY-Malora] added to it. And I feel like they should change his Last Offense ability to just be Resilient Offense like Cassandra. He doesn’t really have a good way of utilizing that sort of ability like she does, but Last Offense is just kinda useless as it is, lol.

For Heinwald, I think he should inflict poison with his S1, and the cap on it’s heal should either be raised or removed. I also think that the team strength buff on his S2 should be changed to not be limited to a short-range AoE around him, but that goes for everyone who has that sort of ranged team buff, and I doubt Cygames would agree with me on this and change all of them, lol. But either way I want either him or Curran to inflict poison so they can synergize with Lathna. Since Heinwald is another unit with an S2 that activates a named effect like Naveed, I could see him getting a similar sort of unique buff added to his skill prep ability that activates while Abyssal Connection is active. Maybe either a recovery potency buff or something related to strength/skill damage/poison punisher.

Kleimann’s a pretty easy one to assume will get a buff since they seem to specifically be trying to correct the whole Gala Cleo issue, and he’s one of the more accessible shadow wand units. But I don’t think they’ll do a whole lot with him beyond making his stats better, and maybe giving him poison on his S1.

Berserker’s one of those units who really needs a bit of a buff, since he’s just a bit too weak and defense-oriented to work well in the current meta. But I think his buffs will also be pretty simple. They’ll probably raise the chance of the strength debuff on his S1, and maybe add poison to it, and his S2 will probably be changed to give him 15% HP per use, which would at least let him hit the cap in two uses of it rather than three. It’d be nice if they also added a temporary strength buff to it though, since he really doesn’t have a lot of personal DPS. I think they’ll add a flurry effect to his first ability that raises his strength or skill damage when he’s got a certain combo count, and like with Curran I think they should change his Last Offense ability to something else. At least he’d benefit more from Resilient Offense since he’s got some self-healing in his kit. [Also with Monster Hunter Berserker on the way, now would be a nice time to buff his OG version]

If they want to buff Audric, I’m not entirely sure what they could do with him aside from just raising the stats of his skills and stuff. He’d at least benefit a lot from getting 100% potent paralysis res, though. Maybe they’d add some kind of ‘dragon attacks dispel enemy buffs’ effect to his third ability, and poison to his S1, to make him even more like Euden.

The fact that Alex already got her kit adjusted before getting a mana spiral makes me unsure if they’re even going to give her one any time soon, but if they do, I think she’ll probably at least get poison punisher added to her S1, and maybe an added effect to her skill haste ability where using skills or force-strikes partially charges her skills.

I think OG Cleo is basically 100% guaranteed to get a buff, but I’m not entirely sure what they’re gonna do with healers in general when it comes to mana spirals. At least the ones that are specifically focused on healing. She should at least get full skill prep and potent paralysis res, and probably a buffed HP = Defense ability. Other than that, I think that either her S1 or her S2 should have a regen heal effect added to it.

For the 3-stars I think that they’ll just get the same sort of basic stat buffs across the board, and status effects added to some of their skills. I dunno if that’d benefit anyone to the extent of how strong Xania became with her mana spirals, though. Althemia might end up getting poison on both of her skills, but since her skill damage ability if locked behind a Full HP criteria, she might not be quite as good as Xania even then. They should also probably retcon Vida’s stun res into either paralysis res or blind res, and it’d be nice if they added blind cleanse to Edward’s S1.

WATER:

In terms of 5-stars, I think Xanfried is the most likely one to get buffed, with Laranoa at a close second, but I’m not even sure if any of the other ones need a buff, since they’re all pretty solid. Really it’s the 3/4-stars that are more in need of a buff here, lol.

For Xanfried, it seems pretty likely to me that they’ll add freeze to his S1, since it’s literally called Dragon Frostfang. It’d at least be better than giving him bog, and we need more water units that have easy access to freeze. And for his S2 I think it’ll be like with Botan where a team crit rate buff for water units gets added to it. Going by how they buffed Euden, I think they’ll buff his Dragon Claws ability to be 45% strength total, and they’ll add enemy buff dispel to his dragon form attacks. Or they’ll just increase the damage that his dragon attacks do, which would at least help justify his dragon time ability. I’m not sure if this would make him meta for HBH or anything, but I think it’d make him a lot stronger in general.

I’m not super familiar with Laranoa since I don’t have her yet, so basically all I can assume from looking at her kit is that it’ll just get buffed across the board. But it’d be nice if the short-range team buff on her S2 got changed into a normal universal one, at least. I’m not entirely sure if they should add any status effects to her S1. In general I’m really worried about what might happen if they give lots of water units bog on their S1, since that didn’t turn out well for the summer units. Maybe if they were willing to rework bog into something that can be applied regularly throughout the fight without being overpowered it’d work, but since you always want to save it for a specific part of the fight, putting it on a skill is kinda bad.

OG Elly is pretty obviously gonna get a mana spiral sooner or later, but I’m a bit worried they’d make her overpowered, lol. Though on the other hand, it’d be kinda funny if in exchange for letting you upgrade her S1 to a 25% team strength buff, it locks it to only working on water adventurers. That’d help balance her to make her more in line with other buff units, but it’d probably make a lot of people mad, and it’d mess with a lot of rainbow Mercurial Gauntlet team compositions. I think it’d be worth it, though. Also they should just commit to giving her 100% burn res. That on it’s own would probably make her even better for HBH since she wouldn’t need to run a burn res print anymore.

It’d be nice to see OG Celery get a buff if only so she can get to full burn res as well, which would hopefully also make her a much better pick for HBH, but we’ll see. I can’t really think of anything to add to her kit aside from that, other than a crit rate/damage buff on her S2.

I can take or leave Luther, but I feel like he literally never gets used in any content so he really needs some sort of buff. Even if it ends up not helping him much. I’d at least want his debuffs to happen with 100% chance, though maybe they could also move the defense debuff to his S1. And he should at least get Flurry Strength added to his third ability.

I’m very biased on this one but I DESPERATELY want Thaniel to get a mana spiral upgrade that makes him as good as if not better than Jiang Ziya, lol. He at least really needs to get a regen heal added to his S2 to that his heals in HBH aren’t as tight. In a perfect world they’d add full skil prep to one of his abilities but that’d be a bit of a pipe dream. I’m curious to see if they’d add anything to basic recovery potency abilities like what he has, or if those will just get buffed for everyone that has them.

Summer Ranzal also needs a buff but since he’s fairly recent I don’t think he’ll get one just yet. But probably later.

I feel like a whole bunch of 3-stars are gonna get bog or freeze added to their skills, and I really don’t think that’d be quite as useful as what happened with flame. At least when it comes to bog, because of how that whole affliction works and how you want to save it. So that might backfire and make a lot of them even more off-putting to use. Waike’s a good example of this, since even though Joe benefited a fair bit from getting even more burn added to his kit, Waike would just use up all the bog inflictions before the boss gets broken in the first place.

Personally I’m hoping that Jurota will get freeze added to his S1 [since it’s called Avalance Blade, lol], and that doing that along with giving him full potent stun res would help make him better, at least for stuff like Void Agni.

WIND:

Hawk’s basically a carbon copy of Nefaria except he’s a wind unit who inflicts stun, so basically everything I said with her applies to him. Like with Nefaria he suffers from the fact that stun is a very powerful status affliction that I think is fairly heavily resisted by most bosses, and we haven’t gotten any stun punisher dragons or wyrmprints yet to capitalize on it. And the recent banner with Kirsty and Joachim just goes to show that wind is leaning even more heavily into favouring poison as a status effect. So my first guess for him would also be to just make him a poison-inflicting unit, but that seems even less likely than it would be with Nefaria, since basically every single other wind bow in the game is about inflicting poison too, and would do it better than him. They could at least add some sort of effect to one of his abilities where his S2 effect also increases his strength/crit rate/stun punisher, but there’s just a lot of issues inherent to niche status-inflicting bow units.

This might require more of a broad overhaul of the status effect system, but maybe to get around the relative uselessness of a lot of statuses, they could introduce some kind of a mechanic where a boss can be ‘marked’ as having a certain status ailment without suffering any debilitating effects from it, so you can still benefit from punisher abilities. Or maybe they could experiment with adding something like Volk’s plague effect to their kits, so that they can manually increase the boss’ vulnerability to status effects. In general I think there’s a lot of potential for the plague mechanic to address the central issue of how there’s nothing you can do when a boss fully resists a status ailment.

Other than him, I think Sylas is the only wind 5-star who I think 100% needs to get a buff soon. The other ones are all up in the air, with Louise and Wedding Aoi probably being my runner-up choices. Even Lin You’s fallen out of relevance a lot lately, but she’s still very strong. Sylas on the other hand is just super wonky. For one thing I think the strength debuff on his S1 should happen all the time, and it should have a poison punisher effect added to it, but the main issue is just his S2. It’s way too expensive for way too little value. The easiest way to improve it would probably just be to lower it’s SP cost to around 8k so you can use it at around the same frequency as Kirsty or Xanfried’s S2s, but really the whole idea of it being a roulette buff is just fundamentally bad. I’d honestly be happy if they just reworked it into being a flat skill haste and crit rate buff. All of the roulette buffs aren’t really that important when wind already has units like Noelle, Kirsty, and Lowen to provide those sorts of buffs more consistently. So he should probably just focus on more unique buffs. Basically I think his S2 should be more like Laranoa’s.

Also, Last Recovery is just a really weak ability, so it’d be nice if they could add some sort of extra affect to that, or just change it into something else. Maybe they could make it happen three times per quest rather than just once, and add a permanent 10% defense buff to each use of it, to make it like a tanky version of Resilient Offense. And the health regen effect would help let him get to low health several times in a fight, like Cassandra.

I don’t think much needs to be done with OG Ranzal aside from just making all of his skills and abilities stronger, but I also think that Last Defense sucks, so they should probably change it to something like a Resilient Defense ability where he gets a permanent defense buff each time he gets to low health up to three times.

Aeleen has a fairly basic kit and I don’t think they’d really add much to it aside from maybe poison or poison punisher on her S1. And maybe an additional short buff on her S2.

Pia is basically Aeleen but in far more need of a buff, lol. Her kit’s just so wonky. There’s really not a whole lot that can be done to salvage her unless they add more energy users to the wind roster. At the very least her S2 should give the team two or three energy stacks, on top of maybe another buff to make it more worthwhile, but I dunno if that’d do much to help her.

I’m not sure if they’d bother buffing Su Fang, but if they do, I think they’ll probably add a crit rate buff to his S2, and make his skill damage ability into a 35% one.

There’s not much to say about the wind 3-stars, but I hope they at least give Philia either bog or freeze res. I could see them also adding poison to her skills [and removing the existing paralysis effect from her S2].

LIGHT:

Light’s just in a really weird situation all around where most of their really good units are event limited ones, so I hope that some of the older, non-limited ones get some good buffs. It feels like a lot of light units in general tend to suffer from being defensive in a way that doesn’t really work in the endgame, or from using energy in a lackluster way. So there’s a lot to improve.

Julietta’s a good example of being too defensive for her own good. At the very least, I think her S2 should be a team-wide defense/knockback resistance buff. A purely selfish defensive buff like what she has now is just kinda useless. It’d at least help her trigger strength doublebuffs and whatnot. And to help her DPS overall I think they should probably add either paralysis or a defense debuff to her S1. And like with Sylas I think they should add something to her Last Recovery ability. Maybe make it so that when her S2 effect is in place, she has a passive HP regen, or something like that.

Lucretia’s not super weak or anything but her energy usage is kinda disappointing, so I think they should at least make her S2 into a team-wide energy buff, and maybe buff it to three stacks rather than two. It’d also probably be nice if they added paralysis to her S1 too.

They might skip over B-Zardin but he probably needs a buff even more than Lucretia. He’s just really bad all around. Both of his skills give energy buffs to him and nobody else, so I think at least one of them should be a team-wide energy buff instead, and the debuffs on his S1 should happen 100% of the time. Though I think they should also focus on giving him a good strength or defense debuff, rather than giving him two mediocre ones at the same time. I feel like his Stunning Visage effect really needs to give him some sort of strength buff or something as well. And he’s one of the many units that make me think there should really be some stun punisher dragons/wyrmprints, lol. His first ability is also sorta weak so it’d be nice if they added something to it, but I dunno what.

I think OG Luca will probably get 100% curse res, paralysis punisher on his S1, and paralysis infliction on his S2, and not much else, so hopefully that’d be enough to make him worthwhile. But probably not. I’d also like to see Summer Luca get a buff, but like with Summer Ranzal it’ll probably take a while for him to get a buff too.

Elias is probably the event unit that needs a buff the most. He at least needs to have his S2 give two or three energy stacks, and his S1 should probably inflict paralysis, or have paralysis punisher on it. And his Last Offense ability should be changed to something like Resilient Offense, but it probably won’t be.

I honestly forgot that Felicia existed since her event happened before I started playing the game, lol. But if she gets a buff, I think her S1 should get poison cleanse, she should get full poison res, and full skill prep. I dunno how good that’d make her, necessarily, but still.

And on the topic of 4-star light healers, Vixel really needs a mana spiral upgrade if only just to fix his goddamn useless sleep resistance. Since Felicia is already based around poison resistance and cleanse, I think it’d make sense if he got turned into a curse res unit. Especially since Lucretia and Elias are also curse res. I’m not sure if he’d get curse cleanse added to his S1, but it’d nice. It might invalidate Hildegarde, though. He’s also got a kind of weird and under-tuned S2 that really needs to be buffed. It should at least be two stacks of energy for the team, and I’m really not even sure that the point of the teamwide recovery potency buff is meant to be, other than making his own S1 stronger. It’s not like you’ll be running with more than one healer on a light team 99% of the time, so nobody else would benefit from it. If they want to really lean into the idea of it powering up his S1, maybe they could have it instantly energize him [though not the rest of the team], or have it immediately ready his S1 for use. Something like that. Or they could replace it with a regular team heal. And of course he’d probably get 100% skill prep. Though if he gets curse res, maybe they could replace the recovery potency buff on his S2 with a team defense buff so that he can basically be like a light version of Thaniel, and help people deal with HZD’s opening blast.

I also kinda forgot about Amane since I don’t use her often, but I really think they should lower the SP cost of her S2 a fair bit [sorta like with Sylas], and make the HP buff into a 15% one so that it only takes two uses to hit the cap. She should probably also get a debuff or paralysis punisher or something added to her S1, and she’d benefit a lot from getting full skill prep and skill charge.

I think Xiao Lei’s the only light 3-star that’d really benefit from a mana spiral, but going by how they skipped over Marty they might also skip over her since she also got added post-launch. But if she gets a flat 35% skill damage buff like Xania on top of a stronger crit rate/damage boost on her S2, and maybe paralysis on her S1, she might become super strong.

Anyway, that’s all far too much effort put into thinking about stuff that I’ll probably get proven wrong on soon enough, lol. There’s just a lot of characters who I really want to see get improved, and with how much the flame mana spirals shook things up, I have high hopes for the rest of them.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #I spent far too much time on this so please validate my bad time management decisions :)

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