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.