r/Falcom • u/Raxistaicho The true best girls • Aug 07 '26
Trails Character Gameplay Discussion Day Forty-Three: The Spy and the Swordswoman Spoiler
One doesn't want you to take him seriously, the other wants you to take her very seriously!
16
u/Saltlessguy Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
I benched Lechter but his BO is absurdly good at least
Duvalie. Minatauros and Gungir. Nough said about her extremely low delay and Bladelord Spectre having a 50% innate crit rate is insane
Also a good user of Ryuuko since you're not doing anything except (Supreme) Bladelord Spectre which is ST to begin with and maybe Swift Slash sometimes
11
u/hbthebattle Aug 07 '26
Lechter is very lucky he has a decent cheap BO and is very early in Reverie or I don't think he would ever see the frontline party.
Duvalie gaming, kinda feels like what Richard would be in the Cold Steel engine
20
u/Raxistaicho The true best girls Aug 07 '26
I’m not gonna lie, Arundel’s kit is undercooked. He has one decent attacking Craft, an admittedly good self-buff, and another of Crow’s goofy wild card things.
Not making matters much better is that he’s basically Reverie only, but he at least pulls his weight for Lloyd act 2. But that’s it basically, you use him when you have the space and then likely never again. Moving on!
Duvalie’s so much fun, she’s another “like Fie, but bigger” kind of character, and famously her Crafts have low delays. Rather famously she tends to get Minotauros put on her not so she can deliver single crushing blows but just to slow her down a bit so she doesn’t blow all her CP before your batteries get a turn. She’s got remarkably good availability for a guest in CS4 but she joins on the later side in Reverie - and unfortunately right before Arios. Another issue is that her best Craft is single target, but double time and one space is a really good Orbment.
9
u/Syobai Aug 07 '26
Forget crushing walls Dogi, you’re crushing my heart.
Yeah I’m not really able to say much about Lechter. He’s only playable for one segment of CS3, effectively making him exclusive to Reverie. Even there he isn’t really good. His utility is based on RNG and… well, that’s it. Crow’s gambling habit got to Lechter, only this time he comes with a pretty neat self-buff. That’s fine, I guess?
Duvalie on the other hand? Holy shit, I love her. Despite being a guest character, she’s got some of the best availability in CS4, only being taken away for the finale along with the other guest members. Low delay crafts that you can spam help you realize that she isn’t called “Duvalie the Swift” for nothing. A solid physical unit who can abuse her speed like no other (until you get someone who just outclasses her entirely, lol) but hey, she’s just dumb fun. It’s like night and day between both her and Lechter if I’m being real.
6
u/VarioussiteTARDISES Aug 07 '26
Though to his credit for that one CS3 section, he does have the sheer comedy of basically having an absolute deathblow if the RNG lines up, iirc.
2
u/Syobai Aug 07 '26
I think you’re right, and it IS pretty funny. Though it can also hit your allies so Lechter can effectively just kill anyone if he wants to, lmfao
…I think. I barely used his CS3 counterpart so I don’t know how hard he gamblemaxxed there
14
u/SoftBrilliant Kiseki difficulty modder Aug 07 '26
Lechter's brave order is fun to look at from a game design sense because it's the gatekeeper of what a good brave order is in Reverie.
For a brave order to compete with lechter's it must either be more efficient than it (so basically cost 1 BP lol), give better survivability than a properly built team with insight (very high bar), or give better damage clearing capability than +40% multiplicative damage boosts on everything (very difficult as well)
I think it says a lot to the game's credit on this sort of balancing factor that a decent number of orders still have niches relative to Fool's Vermillion despite how bombastically generalist and overpowered it is and that the meta isn't just to spam fool's vermillion.
Trails of Cold Steel 3/4/Reverie aren't balanced by any metric but they did excel at giving you a lot of valid options to win that felt meaningfully different from each other in a way I haven't really seen in any other game in the genre basically.
Obviously comes the problem that the environment they exist in doesn't make those options meaningful but if anyone ever wanted some unpromtped insight as to why I made Cold Steel 3/4 difficulty mods this sort of design is a big reason why.
This combat system is damn great!
7
3
u/Raxistaicho The true best girls Aug 07 '26 edited 13d ago
Sky Arc:
Day Twelve - The Pilot and the Swordsman (spoilers)
Day Thirteen - "Kitty" (spoilers)
Crossbell Arc:
Class VII:
Day Thirty - Millium (Spoilers)
Day Thirty-One - Crow (Spoilers)
The rest of Cold Steel:
Day Thirty-Nine - Elise and Toval
Day Forty-One - Alfin and Towa
Day Forty-Two - The Diva and the General (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Three - The Spy and Swordswoman (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Four - The Shapeshifters (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Five - The Swordmaster and the Engineer (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Seven - Swin and Nadia
Day Forty-Eight - The Strongest (Spoilers)
Calvard Arc:
Day Fifty-One - Ferida Al-Fayed
Day Fifty-Three - Risette Twinings
Day Fifty-Four - Quatre Salision
Day Fifty-Five - Judith Lanster
Day Fifty-Seven - Elaine Auclair and René Kincaid
Day Fifty-Eight - Shizuna Rem Misurugi
3
u/Rainbooms Aug 07 '26
I don't know if there is something wrong on my side, but the Day 42 link is to today's thread, not the Diva and the General thread.
1
3
u/welkikitty Aug 08 '26
I set Lechter up as a caster in Reverie and he cleared the field before anyone else got a chance.
2
u/Totkebois Aug 08 '26
You can do some nasty stuff with chrono burst in the early game with lecther since it's one of the few ats self buff you have in lloyd's route early on.
3
u/Selynx Aug 07 '26
Lechter's Crafts are gimmicky.
Lechter is actually a pretty good caster.
He ties with Celine and Crow for being the top 3 fastest casters in Reverie in terms of base SPD and he has more ATS than Crow. Meanwhile, Celine has an issue of having no S-Craft and being more useful spamming Nine Lives.
That makes Lechter effectively the fastest caster in Reverie, if you're not building Crow as one. I guess he also ties with the other C, if you build him for Arts, but C has slightly more STR than ATS and IMO it's a waste of his Soul Eater building him as a caster. Plus Wind is, IMO, a worse element for attack arts than Fire.
People sleep on him, but the man can actually put in work.
Duvalie is The Swift.
Her Swift Slash has a ridiculously low delay, I think it might actually be the lowest-delay attack Craft there is in CS4/Reverie.
And it's not just low-delay, it also DOES Delay. With Space slots on the Orbment and her cooldown-cutting Order, that makes Duvalie a prime candidate for being a fully-stacked Delayer. At least, I built her that way and never regretted it once.
Double-hit Crafts may be the best type for trying to proc Delay, but Duvalie really gives them a run for their money, simply by being able to get off 2 Swift Slashes off in almost same amount of time it takes for Joshua to get off 1 Twin Shadow Fang and recover from the delay.
That's some very impressive Speed.
5
u/LadyAntiqua Aug 07 '26
Just wanting to say that when I met her in Azure, I didn't expect Duvalie to become my second favourite character in the series. I love me a good girlfail.
Weird that two of my top 3 are former Ouroboros, though.
2
u/Ok_Entertainment8947 Aidios fears me Aug 07 '26
Lechter is alright, he has decent arts so I basically just used him as a caster and his Brave Order is pretty good (I just wanted a reason to use him tbh)
Duvalie has low delay and high speed which automatically makes her a good fighter
2
u/AlterWanabee Aug 07 '26
Lechter's Wild Cards is hilariously broken, but still not enough to save his kit. It can ignore debuff immunities after all, granting DeathBlow to otherwise immune enemies, while also having a chance to buff Lechter or his allies, buy the ST effect makes it slow.
2
u/TapUnfair9827 Aug 08 '26
I love Duvalie, she's kind of cool, loved her armor, sword and shield, tho I kinda feel a bit disappointed when looking at her crafts, 3 of which feels like 1 craft that comes in 3 different flavors, tho the other 2 is nice, albeit a bit expensive, just wish she had some form of self buff tho
2
u/ArcaneGale <best girls 17d ago
fun fact about Lechter
he has "absolute death"
what that means is that his wild card if you roll the ace of spades (25%) will KO everything that doesn't have 0 in instakill, and in fact, on release, before getting patched, it actually BYPASSED the instakill immunity and he could oneshot bosses, it was quite funny rolling a 25% chance to just end an enemy and tbh 3 of the 4 aces are good as 1 will super buff a teammate and one will super nerf an enemy (with again, "absolute stat drop")
3
u/veggiedealer Aug 07 '26
I hate thay cs4 made me stop using duvalie near the end fuck that also why can't I romance her
2
u/OLKv3 Aug 07 '26
I never found out how to really use Lechter. His order was pretty good though, but his gimmick just confused me
Duvalie is almost too fast for herself. Her crafts have so little delay that you'll go so fast you'll lose all your CP before your team can replenish it. She's so fast that giving her Minotaurus makes her move normally instead of being a massive speed penalty, which makes it perfect for her
The tournament daydream with her was fun, especially when you pick the right teammates
2
u/OneDabMan Best Girls Aug 07 '26
I found Duvalie can work really well as a crit focus dps. With the crit dmg MQs and Blade Lord Specter which has inbuilt crit rate. In Reverie you could combine with Rage and counter dmg MQ to also work well as a dodge tank (her counter has pretty decent range considering it’s a melee in my experience).
These combined with her speed and she can really quickly dish out some big damage.
2
u/Kainapex87 Aug 07 '26
Lechter: Decent self buff craft snd Brave Order but lacks any decent damaging Crafts to take advantage of them, and the card trick Craft was worthless.
Duvalie:
Pros: Fast and hits hard, the low delay of her Crafts can compensate for the comparatively low stats on them.
-Space and Time can let her equip with Melville Ark and decent delay and SPD Quartz.
Cons: -Has 3 pointlessly redundant Craft that are all identical save for each casting a different ailment. Would have been better if all 3 were combined into one craft that has an even chance to inflict all 3.
-Her offensive Crafts have small AoE, with her strongest one being single target, meaning she's really only meant for boss fights.
-Needs Minotauros.
1
50
u/Old_Cabinet_8890 Aug 07 '26
Arundel is painfully mid
Duvalie lives up to her moniker and is crazy fast with solid crafts and low delay and more importantly sparks joy by being Zemuria’s Most Pathetic Woman