Elemental Team-building Guide: Water
Water is extremely versatile, with access to strong debuffs, healing, team-wide buffs, and a wide range of utility skills such as debuff cleansing and overdrive extension. Water is also blessed with an abundance of strong Gatcha SRs and SSRs, event SRs, making it the easiest element to cobble together a strong team for from random Gatcha pulls. While perhaps not the strongest element with a full hand-picked team, the wide selection of useful kamihime makes it fairly easy to build a balanced team without relying on Miracle tickets, rerolling, or excessive whaling. Water’s versatility and free healer (Nike) makes it an especially good choice for free players.
Water has unparallelled access to ATK and DEF debuffs, and this is perhaps its greatest strength. Water can cover class A & class B ATK & DEF debuffs with SR kamihime alone, with event SR Gabriel providing an easily-accessible class A ATK debuff. Water also has multiple options for strong debuffs from SSRs (e.g., Dragon King, Cthulhu, SSR Nike, Snow Raphael). Water is especially strong prior to the debuff cap, as it’s the first element to get a strong type C DEF down debuff (Cthulhu), and gets early access to the event SSR eidolon Jormugand (eidolon-class ATK down) as friend eidolon. Jormugand uniquely allows water teams to stack high amounts of ATK down at the start of the encounter with minimal sacrifice in damage.
Due to its flexibility in debuffs, Water has several options for building an optimal team. Water has at least two core builds: one with Cthulhu and SSR Nike, and an alternative with Dragon King (How to reroll for SSR kamihime). Cthulhu gives early access to the highly-coveted class C DEF debuff (-20%) as well as a class A ATK debuff (-15%) and overdrive reduction. Combined with Nike’s class A DEF debuff (-15%), Sniper Shot (-20%), and Jormugand as friend eidolon (-10%), they can reach -45% ATK and -50% DEF (after the debuff cap). Dragon King provides an alternate path, complementing kamihime combinations that lack the two type A debuffs and bringing along the always-useful utility skill overdrive extension. Snow Raphael adds a type B ATK/DEF debuff (-15%) and valuable damage mitigation (-30%) to both builds.
Free players who are loathe to reroll should look out for the excellent Gatcha SRs Triton and Belphegor. Triton provides the immensely useful combo attack down, which greatly mitigates double and triple attack chances, as well as a class A ATK debuff (-15%). Belphegor provides excellent Rage meter control and a class B ATK/DEB debuff (-12%).