Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-2804:431:B700:C9A:B50A:FE8F:B64F:B932-20180705000151/@comment-177.68.170.86-20180706041030

Fluid-decanter wrote: I have found Vhala to be frustratingly underpowered up until this update, when I bought her a Lean Unbow that significantly boosted her MAG-based skills. Her holy arrows really don't do much damage unless you find a way of speccing her some MAG, but in my experience she is all about the debuffs.

The way I see it, TLS combat is all about taking control of the battle in the first few turns, and there's mainly 3 ways of going about it:

You can try to burst down the more dangerous enemies before they can start messing you up, but that might be hard to do if the dangerous enemies are tanky or there are too many of them.

You can try to use crowd control statuses, but those can be unreliable due to enemy resistances and immunities.

You can play around with buffs and debuffs to reduce the enemy's real damage to the point where they just can't kill anyone in a single turn, and I choose this one because it is the most reliable, only a couple of bosses weren't fully affected by the debuff mechanics and, in Vhala's case, the only unreliability is tied to her accuracy, which is pretty high. Vhala is tanky enough to pretty much never die in a single turn, which pretty much guarantees she can get off 2 defensive rains and then the fight is usually entirely under your control as long as you refresh the debuffs when they are one turn away from running out. Fluid-decanter wrote: I think Nalili is situationally useful, if anything less useful than Yarra. Blade of Lust is great when it works. But otherwise, I bought her an Assault Armor and Durge Sword and still find she lags a bit in damage output. Too reliant on her self-buffs. Perhaps there is a strategy for her that I'm missing. I dont rank her very high for those reasons pretty much. If you're confident the enemy doesn't have much in terms of statuses, you can equip her with a charm of perversion, then you can use masturbate+ twice and then sexual aegis, assuming you had the supports operating in the mean time, she will be doubly buffed and have sexual aegis on by the 4th turn and can start dealing around 5k physical/lust damage uninterruptedly since orgy of blows feeds itself.

You could equip her with a buttplug but that would mean losing the shield slot and making her a bit squishy.

The only other cool thing about Nalili is that I think she is the beefiest character that can lifesteal, so I see the potential if she gains some really sick equipment later on. Stormfellow wrote: (Sidenote: Varia gets *way* too little respect from the rest of the party for her fighting prowess; I mean in my game she pretty much soloed the Incubus Emperor which would, you think, count for something). "I just got 2 crits during blade dance and dealt nearly twenty thousand damage, no one is gonna say anything? really?"

Stormfellow wrote: If S-rank means "there is never a reason you would not want this character in your active party if they are available" I don't think anyone gets there; Qum probably comes closest, but there's plenty of occasions when you're fighting enemies who inflict Sexbind where going in with her as your primary healer is suicide. If you managed to pick up a succubus pin in chapter 3, Qum can have immunity to many status effects including sexbind, and if you also managed to pick up the zirantian vibrator she will have access to masturbate+ as well. If she gets both of those it would take an insanely specific scenario for me to consider taking her out of the team, something among the lines of needing full party heals every turn for the entire duration of the battle.

I explained why I consider Vhala S-tier as well a bit above but the gist of it is that defensive rain is almost a foul-proof way of making sure no one in your team will die after the second turn.

Varia to me is basically tied with Robin and both of them are really close to being S-tier, Varia just isn't there because she risks dying if she ever uses blade dance and isnt immediatelly followed up by a heal, so she might need a dedicated support, which Qum isnt very good at because she'd prefer to be building up SP or throwing out Pretty Lances. And if Varia dies she loses her buffs, which means you have to go through the hassle of buffing her again, which doesn't do any good to her already small mana pool.