Thread: Awakening Zola and Barbastroff

As someone who owns Zola, Garania and Barbie as well as their various silver counterparts I wouldn't declare Zola the hands down best unit due to the Artillery class's inferior splash radius. Lemme put it this way: the fact that Artillery Officers have single target dps comparable to or better than a mage one full rarity tier higher sounds great until one remembers that single target mage dps is actually pretty crappy and that they rely on their special attack properties to pull their weight. So, yes, Zola is a good unit and pretty handy if you need physical AOE like in Crystal Keeper G or if you can create a small killzone via blockers. However, she doesn't really knock widely dispersed gargoyle flocks out of the sky or burninate goblin hordes with the same panache that a Mage can, especially if said mage is rocking an Increase Splash skill. Hence why I tend to think of Garania, Barbie and Valerie more as utility units than true dps--they swiftly clean out the trash so that my heavier hitters can lay down the heavy firepower without any of it getting diverted to small fry. In a very real sense, it almost doesn't matter how much damage they do as long as it's enough to clean the map of potential leakers in 2 or 3 shots. By contrast Zola lives in this weird gray area where she's better on paper than my mages but often wouldn't hit quite enough targets to get deployed instead of my archers or vampire hunters. So yes, by all means, Awaken Zola and stand pat with Barbie. He doesn't need more damage to fill his niche but Zola strongly benefits from being able to chew through chokepoints faster.

An then SAW hits Zola with dat 2x splash radius in addition to her attack multiplier

AW Barblestronk's range makes Golden Armor G (Monday Daily) a hell of a lot easier because there are stationary armors he can target for a while due to his range

Originally Posted by ZeroZet

An then SAW hits Zola with dat 2x splash radius in addition to her attack multiplier

Yeah, it's pretty sweet.

The other big thing in favor of Awakening her over Barbie is that Artillery officers go up in splash radius with every class tier. They never quite catch up with mages, but it's waaaay more competitive post Awakening. And let's be very clear here: she's definitely better than Barbie overall. It's just when you've got her up against the plat mages that it becomes debatable since they don't need to keep a skill up to beat armor. That's impressive for a gold unit, but as I've said before it's not like I have a particularly high opinion of mages in general, so there's only so impressed I can get with her. Granted, I've got a lot more magic damage up my sleeve than most free players and Sophie handles my physical sweeping needs versus ground units (Thank you Based Goddess!), so maybe I'm just biased.

Well, I'd been wondering weather to Awaken Zola for some time now, as I'd maxed her otherwise and I was sitting on a mountain of artillery officer Awakening orbs and no one else to use them on. Only reason I didn't was that I valued her range, and in Awakening she actually loses 10 range (down from 300, admittedly), since she has an Awaken ability which increases fire rate but cancels out the range increase from being Awakened.

But it seems she's popular enough - and this Domination event is starting to make me appreciate her a little more. I mean, I'd CC'd her and maxed her out, so I certainly wanted her to be useful, but I'd never used her much.

You'll hardly feel the range penalty since the aforementioned splash radius increase means that Awakening her is typically a sidegrade or net improvement in time-on-target given that splash can work like a pseudo-range increase when you're targeting the leading edge of a cluster.

10 range is minimal, in exchange for slight AS increase, more stats and access to the eventual Skill AW.

Zola is generally going to be used against clustered enemies anyways, so like Kayfabe said, the AOE sort of re-extends her range.

Zola vs. Mages
+ Lower cost
+ Has both physical and magical attack capability
- Magic attack requires skill, if unavailable then inferior against armored
- Smaller splash radius, no way to increase it (making the Increase Splash mages better against large mobs)

For the most part, she's a great alternative to mages, especially on Crystal Keeper since the eyes have MR. Being cheaper is nice too (mages can be VERY expensive to deploy)

You must be thinking of somebody else on the durability front. Zola has gold mage tier health and defense but without the benefit of 15 mr. The gold mages can all face tank a tengu rod post Awakening while Garania and Estelle can both do it after class evolution. Odette's obviously geared towards lightning rod duties as well but she gets held back a tiny bit by getting defense instead of health from her affection bonus.