Thread: Awakening Zola and Barbastroff

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.

Originally Posted by kayfabe

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.

Hm... odd. You're right. I wonder why she seemed like being more durable than the gold mages when they're close physically and obviously superior magically.

Eh, brain farts happen, especially when it's on a subject as niche as ranged unit defenses. I can count on one hand the number of ranged units burly enough to stand out as potential lightning rods and arrow catchers. There's a reason that poor Echidna is always stuck in gimmick tier--nobody wants to pay 25-29 up for a tanky healer unless they can really make use of her SAW dragon buffs. At least she'll always have sideboob on her side.