Merry Christmas ffbe players!

It has come to my attention that Christine has been completely shafted and missunderstood once again, not by the devs mind you since they did a stellar job with her revamp in August and her latent abilities last week.

Let's begin with a brief reminder that Christine was the best option to beat Scorn of Wicked Moon upon release for a few reasons reasons:

• very high burst capability which allowed her to oneshot Bloody Moon with a dupe from over 40% despite its mitigation
• only unit who could easily solo dps the boss and also skip the 40% threshold by capping piercing chill 4 times after Moon's mitigation wore off, in other words she was by far the best carry option
• tankiest mage in the game (she still is unless you count WKN) which is invaluable against bosses who like to throw fixed attacks around!

She was at first disregarded for being locked to ice which as it turned out wasn't even remotely an issue (Sylvie, Tsukiko's TMR, fire whip, etc).

The reasons I stated above pertain to a general fact about Christine: she's a finisher. If she wasn't in fact a finisher there's no way she could have pulled off any of her outstanding clears as solo dps (Octopus, Dark Espers, Lich, etc).

This all brings us to her latent abilities which actually give her a solid and future proof chaining option, Arctic Blitz. Chaos Wave Awakened (CWA) known as Mystic Cross on JP is set to become one of the leading chaining families for mages.

Arctic Blitz is an aoe ice magic skill (8x) with consecutive increase (4 times, 2.5x each, 18x max) which also decreases ice resistance (100%) for 3 turns to all enemies.

Since she can basically perma quadcast you're looking at 72x mods per turn (18*4) from turn 3 onwards, which is respectable in today's meta.

However the real kicker comes from her finishing moves, cold snap and piercing chill which we'll see in a moment.

Her 2nd latent ability provides a much needed extra 50% tdw, quadcast on turn 1, 30% mag as well as mod increases to snow burial, absolute zero and cold snap (2x).

Christine has now caught up to other tdw mages (100% innate) however her mods and survivability are still higher.

Then comes the quadcast on turn 1 which is huge for her!

• Flexibility: she can set up while imbuing 1-2 chainers and/or giving 50% general mitigation to the tank (perfect for WKN)
• Damage: she can quickly start stacking up or prep for a devastating turn 2 with 152x mods! (turn 1: eternal winter snow surge frostbite imbue/mitig/AZ < turn 2: piercing chill (38x) x4)

Last but not least, the seemingly weak increase to her already high mods will allow her to deal 108x mods per turn with cold snap from turn 3. Now compare that to her Arctic Blitz 72x mods and you get the picture. The trade-off is of course that chainers are "easier" to use than finishers.. at least she can now please everyone!

While her latent abilities did not seem to have much of an impact, here is what happened in my experience: with similar gear and team comp/strat I went from clearing Wicked Moon in 10 turns to 4. If this isn't impactful, then nothing is: https://youtu.be/eanwLjXb-H8

In other words she has not only widened the gap with her direct competition, she has also caught up to the top of the crop (looking at Zyrus in particular) as far as actual content is concerned.

Not convinced? How about a 5-turn clear of Iron Giant: https://youtu.be/q1QMFXVWuxo (last turn damage=more than 50% hp thanks to piercing chill)

Ah this one is pretty funny! Lich bullied by a Christine duo in just over a minute: https://youtu.be/KRRVe8UXd2I (yes 2 units only)

Perhaps OP Zyrus and K Fina users could try and replicate these or even do better since it seems they're a farcry better "on paper"... Makes you wonder huh.

SO, WHERE DOES SHE ACTUALLY FARE IN THE META ?!

Let's just say that for a 2-year old unit she's holding up just fine, broken to roughly the same extent as Kryla in her respective category!

Now let's also address her drawbacks :

• time limited: I'd like to point out that she was made accessible 4 or 5 times this year instead of the usual 1 seasonal time.
• locked to ice: it should be a big issue right. Well in practice it's not since there are max 3 trials she can't complete which are outdated anyway.
• m-tdw locked being stmr: now this is an actual drawback, which begs the question.. Is it worth moogling her stmr and/or spending UoC tickets on Malph's/Nagi's stmr? My answer: I moogled Malph's stmr, used last year's fan festa UoC for Christine and spent 10 UoC tickets for a 4th Nagi. Overall best investment I've ever made in this game despite the old adage "don't UoC for an stmr or offensive gear".

The 3 above-mentioned stmrs will never leave your party even after the owners have become entirely obsolete --> extremely future proof.

Her banner is relatively cheap with only on-banner rainbows and 3 of them are extremely good. We don't know what will happen to Felix and Tiana, they're absolutely terrible as it stands. Let's hope their enhancements come tomorrow or something... It's your call but at least you can make an informed decision :)

Cheers and enjoy your holidays if you have any !!

Neptune

TL, DR: Christine is a very potent chainer but a monster finisher and fares far better than what has been said of her in actual content. So far I haven't seen Zyrus do anything better than her, and am still waiting :)