Brave Frontier

/rant on

I am still sour on Andaria's skill set. There has been a push amongst some in the Brave Frontier community to try to convince people she is made-of-awesome, but I really *really* do not see it. One of the review threads on BraveFrontierForum.net (OP writes reviews I normally respect), was downright angry and aggressive in her stance that Andaria is friggin' amazing.


Leadership Skill: Not really ever going to be used.
Extra Skill: The stats portion has the potential to be very nice depending on her Sphere, which we don't know a thing about. The 2-3 BC on hit really annoys the fuck out of me, as it will happily overwrite its betters - the only way to avoid it is to use a different sphere AND give up the stats portion of the Extra Skill. You either have to suck it up and take both or lose out on +40% HP/ATK.
Brave Burst: Cure/Null Ails: Some version of this is on a lot of units nowadays - very useful, but you only need it covered once. 70% Poison/ 50% Paralysis - Very nice odds, but also *very* situational. The status infliction is either really useful or entirely useless, depending on the opponent(s), with not much in between.
Super Brave Burst: 7 BC fill over 3 turns. Ok that is pretty sweet - Yet that skill still plays second fiddle to nicer +BC on Hit skills which can trigger multiple times on the same turn over the entire group when getting AE'd, but as those skills can happily co-exist: Yay. +30% BC Fill Rate, also nice....more units have this than folks realize though....not just units like Bestie that she gets compared to the most, but also units like Nemethgear and Alice and others have +30% BC Fill. Nice but goddamn sure not special. Null Ails: Handy but her SBB version does NOT cure, only null. If your opponents can buff wipe and has any status ailments, you can NOT rely on the SBB on full Auto to keep your units clean.

tl;dr - She has two primary roles: She mostly succeeds at having enough overall muscle in the BC department to handle filling a groups BC needs if you are not already running a superior setup. (Note: She does nothing for BC drop rate, BC Fill alone won't help much on fights where BC isn't already dropping in significant abundance.) Between her BB and SBB both, she can cure/null ails - again, if you were not already running a superior setup that included it. Her poison/paralysis can be handy, but unless you are talking about very specific fights, that can be a minor thing and something you have to manually trigger anyway. That's it. She does nothing to buff a groups damage or defense beyond status protection.

Overall not bad, but underwhelming, especially for an SBS 7-star. Some folks are trying to convince people she is a 10/10 unit, but I'd give her a 8/10, not because her overall skill set is weak, but because she has flaws/drawbacks that keep her overall potential down. Half of the arguments for Andaria being great for a person depends on them NOT having a list of other already-released units, which baffles the fuck out of me. If you can have numerous other/older units that make her second-fiddle, she isn't that goddamn great. I'm not saying she has a *bad* skill set, ok? I am just saying that it was really easy to have groups already set up before she was released that made her irrelevant from minute one - and that is frustrating.

Maybe her unique sphere has the potential to change my impressions of her, but nobody knows what that will look like and the wait for her and Zedus's spheres is getting annoying. There is even the very, very remote possibility that someone raised while data-mining her code, that the way her Extra-Skill BC on Hit is coded that it ***might*** (but again, probably not but won't know for sure until we get her sphere) stack with other BB/SBB BC on hit skills....if that is the case it would be a big deal, and a new development,....but again, probably not and we don't know because her sphere doesn't even exist yet to test it.

One note about her sphere: With +40% HP on her extra skill, it seems very likely that her sphere will be a Status Sphere AND that it won't include HP's. If that is the case and her status sphere has no HP's on it, it would have to be really special to be useful on anybody but Andaria, and those uses' would be niche as hell. If it either A) is not a status sphere or B) is a status sphere but has +HP's on it, then her HP totals could get downright outlandish.

I wanted to like her, but with my current roster, I can't even come up with an excuse to use her.

/rant off