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Unit Rankings

Rating Information

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Last week had a bunch of external stuff going on and the units weren’t interesting enough to pull me back to rate them through it, so instead you get a catchup double week now, a day early even!

Determined Dagger

Dagger does something quite impressive here with being the first evoker able to hit 300% Evo Mag, Evoke Dmg, and LB Dmg under wiki parameters, bravo! Unfortunately it’s downhill from there.
She would have the same evoke LB mod as Summoner Yuna does…. If she actually had access to Yuna’s STMR here - since while the upgrade recipe for it is permanent, the free Yuna herself is not so for the part of the playerbase that wasn’t around during that (which will steadily grow) having her is very much not guaranteed, and thus as usual we’re not rating around owning the STMR of another specific NV, since that opens a whole can of worms.
Her skillset has a bit of healing/support stuff in it, but it’s at the cost of literally anything that supports her own damage like an amp or a weapon imperil, so her damage of 16.1t just barely claws at the bottom end of the range for 29.0 and the support side doesn’t offer enough to increase beyond that.

I really hate this “modboosts from equipment” meta that we seem to be moving towards tbh.

Planet Destroyer Kuja

Please welcome our next patron of Cafe de Emperor, who’ll have a 160 imperil on the rocks. Kuja slightly improves the formula by being a shift unit instead of SLB, but has to wait til turn 3 for his CD that has the 89% break and 160% imperil anyway, so it’s mostly moot. He joins his clones at 30.0

Amarant NVA

Amarant does a similar sort of thing to Rikku (with similar TDW gear problems) with having a strong basic attack to chain that can be quadcasted by gearing for dual wield with a source of double basic. He needs no setup for this (since his kit literally doesn’t contain any) so can use it every turn from the getgo for the fast consecutive bonus on his 12t base damage for a score of 29.0.
(Sidenote the rikku counter cheese doesn’t really work well for him because he’s not tag chaining)

EDIT: After finding out that his base form LB also buffs his shift attack (despite only listing one skill on the wiki) his damage after that has increased to 14.9t, but that's not quite enough to increase his rating, so 29.0 remains

Pearl

A 4 turn setup of her shift LB to stack, a chizuru-style stacking amp for two turns later, a basic attack for a 50x modboost and finally a big 430x Shift LB Chain makes for a strong but completely standard one-note dark damage dealer. 34.6t for a 30.0 rating.

Elazul

A 4 turn setup of his base LB to imperil, a chizuru-style stacking amp for two turns later, a basic attack for a 50x modboost and finally a big 400x SLB Chain makes for a strong but completely standard one-note wind damage dealer. 31.7t for a 30.0 rating.

(Also funnily enough his best wiki build turned out to be singlewielding his 1h Sword, since he’s not allowed 2 copies of it or any other good 2H swords for his imperil)

Lord of Light

Bad stats & gearing for awkward-frame sustained chaining that has to wait for an SLB for its full mod. In a JP meta that was also 5 months earlier in the timeline, this had some value as an alright free unit, but here and now with your 9.3t damage you can go straight in the trash. And by the trash, I mean 27.5

Maybe if Alim stopped giving TDH passives to the small handful of units who actually have mechanical reasons to go TDW, we could have slightly nicer things.