Hey everyone.

Looks like everyone already spilled the beans on the damage of Tifa. We still got some exciting things to cover but if you’re only interested in her damage output, this review won’t show you anything new.

Avalanche Tifa Overview

If you like Pokémon, you’ll love our “Premium” (price, not quality) units. Tifa has 3 active abilities (heal/mp refresh with blind/poison cure), her grandis for all that LB damage and water amp, plus some random SR water chain that has a Walmart 20% water amp. Her Base LB is single hit at 200x Water Damage lol. Already stronger than most other LB finishers to date. Also imperils Water by 125% but with Kafetiria around, nobody cares about that. Huge kicker though: 25% Fist Imperil.

The Brave Shift is another sorry excuse for a unit’s kit. The only change: Take away the Water attack and make it an element-less carbon-copy of it. Good job, devs! The Limit Burst in Brave Shift needs to be activated once before it reaches it’s maximum potential of 350x Water physical. It is a 12 hit chaining move and will break plenty of chains and dreams. Make sure to adjust your macros or conveniently chain her with Bolting Strike or AR. Aerith TAG (Q-casted) also works but you need to adjust Tifa’s hits with a macro.

What does she unlock when EX 2’ing her? 500 Static ATK, full LB gauge at the start of the battle (if you leveled her LB that is!).

Important thing to note: You will certainly run into trouble maxing Tifa’s ATK%. She innately has 200% only. Her VC doesn’t provide any. You have to get the 200% from either equipment or materia slots which is going to be challenging depending on the boss you’re fighting. It certainly will consume one materia slot for something like Unfaltering Fist.

TMR & STMR Evaluation

Tifa’s TMR isn’t good. Might be a hot take but I don’t think it is worth slotting this in over more stats from GF Extension of Dream of the Fayth. While it is cool to reach the maximum damage modifier in a chain quicker, you won’t really notice it (esp not in DV or CoW). Sure, you’re going to deal a bit more damage but since her LB is heavily backloaded (meaning most of the damage is on the very last hit), the upside of getting to max damage chain isn’t all that noticeable. The 60% on top are just to bait you into thinking it’s good.

Tifa’s STMR on the other hand is Best. In. Slot. For every phys dps in the game. There is no way you are not using this. 82 ATK is just too good. Also casually increases static ATK by 500 and has LB damage on top (50%) for Tifa, AC Tifa, Avalanche Tifa, and Cloud variants. No Zack this time.

Vision Card Evaluation

Hands down the best Vision Card in the game. 125 Base ATK, unconditional 50% LB, unconditional 100% Beast Killer (P/M). Nobody does it better. 500 Static ATK on top for FF7 units. Too bad it’s locked behind EX 3. I’d love to have 6 of those. But not at that cost. Also: Sephiroth’s is pretty much identical but different killer.

Damage Calculation & comparison

Physical Team builds (Note: Tifa Builder has too much base ATK, I use her actual ATK value for the calc, which is 9962): Screenshot

Magical Team builds: Screenshot

Assumptions:

• 90% DEF/SPR break
• 400% ATK/MAG/SPR Buff
• 300% LB Buff
• 45% Water Amp & 25% Water Imperil Field
• 30% Fire Amp, 25% Fire Amp Field (not for Terra!)
• 45% Light Amp, 25% Light Imperil Field (may be too unrealistic because … Nyx)
• DV boss at 22.5k DEF/SPR with 60% Passive DEF/SPR, 60% Passive Ele Resistance
• Everybody on the team is geared for max killers possible with nobody getting an unfair advantage (such that Tifa is NOT build against a Beast for example)
• 150% Killer buff is applied (adjustment towards evocation)
• 135% Fire Imperil, 160% Water Imperil (135% 25%), 145% Light Imperil (120% 25%)
• Dagger/Sword/Rod/Gun Imperils (Note: Terra has 30% weapon imperil total due to mixed weapons)

Units in Water Team: Tifa, Zidane, Ardyn, Lunafreya

Units in Light Team: Noctis, Cetra Aerith

Units in Fire Team: Vivi, Louise, Terra

Here are the results at EX 3 shown in millions:

If you’d like to see a screenshot with a few more details, here it is: Picture of it.

Tifa is our new queen. Or as Sinzar eloquently put it yesterday:

everyone a week ago: zidane is 🍆

next week: zidane is 🤏

Content viability

Regarding her shelf-life in Trials: She absolutely destroys trials but there is no phys dps trial coming up. The next one is catered towards magic dps. Cool thing is: I can copy-pasta this entire table next week for Sephiroth.

Should you pull? She didn’t get the increased Base ATK which I feel like is a travesty. Yeah, it never was confirmed or anything. It would’ve been nice because we are going to see another rather huge spike in dps output potentially next week with Sephiroth. If you have to decide whether you want either Tifa or Seph, I can only give you the answer: If you want the best DPS, go for Seph and skip Tifa. If you like Tifa, go for her. Both are excellent units that will carry you for the next 4 months (and beyond probably). Either of them is a great investment, at EX 2 and esp. at EX 3.

Cheers

Livedili