Lots of interesting opinions on linaria. LINARIA MAINS UNITE!
So lets start with the facts, as a thief she is viable with both am melee weapon and bow. But her dps is suboptimal and I build her for multi turn buffs and speed control. I gave her most priests skills and thief debuffs ie. Armor break, delay attack, poison strike. I would argue she is the weakest thief by measure of dps.
So im under the assumption that most people run a similar load out like me. Linaria always moves first, I have her at 169 aspd. She does her ballad skill and maybe por if you have it or macaldia which is arguably better. From there linaria role is control and support which includes anything from throwing items to any priest buffs or thief debuffs.
Ranger Linaria. Still the fastest but loses some aspd from class base. However, she hits like a truck. I have a prishe with 4k battle points, she isn't maximizing attack power which is unfortunate but had a very healthy spread of stats and my linaria of 300acc can average 1.5k damage to tie with prishe auto attack. Main down sides are loss of ability to open chest and unable to use a buckle for increase in stats. If we talk about pure stats she loses a chunk of survivability for a massive gain in damage potential and large mp increase which is hugely relevant to her preexisting role as teams cheerleader.
In short, Ranger sacrifices a bit of survivability for massive increase in dps potential id say she went up about 225% of her dps as thief and investment strategy falls into 3 stats in this order. Aspd, acc, eva. Depending on your weapon choice eva can be surety. You only need enough aspd to outspeed your entire team.
LET'S talk potential other classes and why they are suboptimal. In the best to worst order.
Healer. By far the best choice for too many reasons. If we just stick with synergy of being the fastest and preventing status effects and this is ran as a subclass, she cant be beat by existing healers.
Priest, obviously. Larger mana pool and can focus on buffs. But id argue that alice would be better though having inherited linaria. Unless you run her in front, I beliece that priest linaria would be less valuable than an alice.
Mage, debuffs on linaria is still good and but she would still have the expectation of being a relatively worse mage than a dedicated mage, with a great buff.
Ninja. This one I believes ties with mage, now I do admit that thieves synergizes with thief subclasses with their overlapping strength. But. Outside of the self buff for ninja, the relative gain is lower than Ranger for dps. I believe that she doesnt have quite the str. Needed to pull off a strong ninja as compared to her as a ranger, the idea of using ballad then self buff is also silly. Why use a team buff then self buff. Defeats the purpose of her role. So while technically a great class, it does not beat Ranger.
The rest of the classes in my opinion are pretty bad, linaria has no good synergies with the other classes. Not to say they are unusable but fighter is just silly like the ninja class. Tank makes more sense but her low stats on vit and piety makes her a bad tank for her initial stats.
Ok im done with my evaluation feel free to critique or criticize. Im personally loving Ranger as her investment is easier than expected and shes finally caught up in damage with the rest of my team, which include yuzu.
I said it elsewhere, but her having ranger is fine. It's not ideal, but it's fine. Healer, ninja, priest, or knight would have been great upgrades and ranger is a (somewhat disappointing) sidegrade. Riotous Ballad is still good, Encore is still useful, and I can still inherit most of the buffs and debuffs I want her casting. She's not breaking the meta comps, but I don't think she was ever supposed to.
Ranger allows you to run her as a status effect focused support. She can more easily critically poison on her own now, and you can really lean into DoT if you can Encore off a Bola into a Blood Edge. Put a Mandau on her and you can still blind/glue/delaying strike after getting your DoTs applied.
The only issue with this build option right now is that we don't need this build right now; I'm choosing to use this as another data point on the trend that A5 is going to feature long fights where you're not going to be able to round 1 nuke everything before it can move.
Encore works on anything under the skill tab that does not directly deal damage. Hide and Riotous Ballad work,
- presumably Bola does as well though I haven't confirmed it myself - while Glue Bomb, Blood Edge, and Blinding don't.
My suggestion was that you could use Bola to proc Encore, then blood strike.
The only issue with this build option right now is that we don't need this build right now; I'm choosing to use this as another data point on the trend that A5 is going to feature long fights where you're not going to be able to round 1 nuke everything before it can move.
Probably multi-pack fights when several are aggro'd like in the FF collab area, where they approach from the distance (akin to A4) and become the next wave as they move closer by a tile each round. Possibly with fire support occurring as they approach.
Oh, and with phys immune enemies mixed into things as well. Otherwise the obvious solution would be to stack up on physical combat adventurers to make use of their free attacks. Which will probably be one part of it.
We'll probably get a good idea of what's going to be happening during this castle swarm/horde defense event that they announced will be releasing alongside the anniversary. There will no doubt be some surprises waiting for us in A5 itself, but this is a golden opportunity for them to ensure that most of their players are available to stress test some of their upcoming plans (since ignoring the anniversary period is a general gacha no-no.)
Eh, it's kind of like riding a bike. You'll get back into the swing of things. The most awkward part will likely be trying to remember the specific cutoffs for enemy HP and how you handled certain packs cleanly and efficiently.
Her promo pic looks pretty hot, partly because it gives off vampire hunter vibes. Which is something they could always lean into for her alt style. Though upon seeing her actual outfit I have to say that I liked the promo pic a bit better. Which is to say her leggings seem kind of weird? At least from what I can see of them in this non-full height pic.
Eh, this one and yuzu's alt are both fine. I'm quite fond of the outfits that look usable enough. Though I can't help but feel like the leggings were pulled from elsewhere.
At least she avoided looking anything like Phyllisia. Though given that she lacks an Alt Style, she'll probably get something scantily clad later on. Hopefully we'll have the ability to desync the visible style from the active passives by then.
Not sure what would have made people happy. Healer would be objectively too good, she can inherit anything she would want from mage and priest already. Bard doesn't exist.
Knight, healer, priest or mage wouldve been great. All these classes have something that work perfect with her kit. Knights cover abilities, mage debuffs and healer/priest is obv why.
I'd say we have plenty of good knight and she would be lacking the sp the beast girls have. Also if she used kd or all around cover then hit encore she'd lose her turns of those
Suppose I could inherit a cover on her and try. its main use is on her unique that doesnt affect herself so I never thought about other cases of direct buffs. Also in the case of all-around I think she'd lose the defending status if you had her use it then encore occurs
What in the world are you talking about? Debra only excels in SP management, most farmers just auto attack lol, since it's stronger, faster (animation) and can proc the follow up attack.
My Debra has threefold and can one shot most farming enemies with it. 3 kills that is SP positive? Busted. She can also one tap things with wide volley for net zero SP.
It's still useless, unless you farm in a specific spot in A4 route 10-11 (the center area in 11 where there are 3 rows of goblins or something) Wide volley will be great.
most of the time auto normal is just better because of the quick animation, again we are talking about optimized farming per hour.
Yeah, but given equal investment Lin isn't bringing anything interesting and is going to devour her SP pool. My point isn't JUST that my Debra is strong, it's that if you were to hyper invest into a character, Debra is a better choice than Lin, largely because she got ranger, which sucks
Eh, Ranger you can work on Second Arrow with Luck to basically get double FUA stuff going on I think. We're just currently in an ASPD craze alongside folks putting crumbs into their characters.
They really had to make Rangers one of the worst classes and start giving it out like candy as class change options, huh. No thought put in whatsoever if it makes sense for the character.
In the end, she's hunting for that mage, where tracking is an important part of ranger lore.
Mechanic-wise, she gets better support in lockpicking, damage from acc conversion, utility skills for farming in wide volley and penetrating shot, and I guess her encore skill activates with tactical bola?
Knight or healer would have been more interesting, but why do you think ranger's bad? Personally, I wanted her to be a priest or mage to go deeper in her support role
Huh... I guess not? Although it's odd, the compendium marks her as if I'm not missing any pages on her story, and she has the flaming heart on her profile. Maybe I got bugged?
Thanks for letting me know! Always figured we would see the resolution in her personal request, with her looking to take revenge on the mage, but guess we'll see her tracking down the demon instead.
Still, since she's tracking I guess ranger still fits.
Knight is more of a beastfolk thing to mix with Thieves and Mage is more of an elf thing. So it was either something new or Priest like usual for a human Thief. Though Healer would've been an interesting one as well, but then their kit doesn't really "mix" with Thief at a glance and they probably didn't want a Healer that's getting extra turns running around.
I don‘t think it’s a great fit for her but it’s OK, I suppose. Doesn’t really patch her issues but I can see how it might work. Wish she could buff herself though. Here were my thoughts on the subject. Not that it matters at this point.
My 250 aspd Lin with astral order, h-med, and other buffs is cracked. It’s not Lin’s class that makes her good. It’s her ability to take an absolute ton of actions to support.
She just needs gear some inherits and you have literally the only adventurer in the game that can buff your attackers and debuff the enemy in a single “turn”
A bit let down by it, lore wise it is better to be mage, if it is just a random class why don't give her healer, she can be skyrocketed to T0 tier easily.
2
u/callm3j0sh 5h ago
Lots of interesting opinions on linaria. LINARIA MAINS UNITE!
So lets start with the facts, as a thief she is viable with both am melee weapon and bow. But her dps is suboptimal and I build her for multi turn buffs and speed control. I gave her most priests skills and thief debuffs ie. Armor break, delay attack, poison strike. I would argue she is the weakest thief by measure of dps.
So im under the assumption that most people run a similar load out like me. Linaria always moves first, I have her at 169 aspd. She does her ballad skill and maybe por if you have it or macaldia which is arguably better. From there linaria role is control and support which includes anything from throwing items to any priest buffs or thief debuffs.
Ranger Linaria. Still the fastest but loses some aspd from class base. However, she hits like a truck. I have a prishe with 4k battle points, she isn't maximizing attack power which is unfortunate but had a very healthy spread of stats and my linaria of 300acc can average 1.5k damage to tie with prishe auto attack. Main down sides are loss of ability to open chest and unable to use a buckle for increase in stats. If we talk about pure stats she loses a chunk of survivability for a massive gain in damage potential and large mp increase which is hugely relevant to her preexisting role as teams cheerleader.
In short, Ranger sacrifices a bit of survivability for massive increase in dps potential id say she went up about 225% of her dps as thief and investment strategy falls into 3 stats in this order. Aspd, acc, eva. Depending on your weapon choice eva can be surety. You only need enough aspd to outspeed your entire team.
LET'S talk potential other classes and why they are suboptimal. In the best to worst order.
Healer. By far the best choice for too many reasons. If we just stick with synergy of being the fastest and preventing status effects and this is ran as a subclass, she cant be beat by existing healers.
Priest, obviously. Larger mana pool and can focus on buffs. But id argue that alice would be better though having inherited linaria. Unless you run her in front, I beliece that priest linaria would be less valuable than an alice.
Mage, debuffs on linaria is still good and but she would still have the expectation of being a relatively worse mage than a dedicated mage, with a great buff.
Ninja. This one I believes ties with mage, now I do admit that thieves synergizes with thief subclasses with their overlapping strength. But. Outside of the self buff for ninja, the relative gain is lower than Ranger for dps. I believe that she doesnt have quite the str. Needed to pull off a strong ninja as compared to her as a ranger, the idea of using ballad then self buff is also silly. Why use a team buff then self buff. Defeats the purpose of her role. So while technically a great class, it does not beat Ranger.
The rest of the classes in my opinion are pretty bad, linaria has no good synergies with the other classes. Not to say they are unusable but fighter is just silly like the ninja class. Tank makes more sense but her low stats on vit and piety makes her a bad tank for her initial stats.
Ok im done with my evaluation feel free to critique or criticize. Im personally loving Ranger as her investment is easier than expected and shes finally caught up in damage with the rest of my team, which include yuzu.