Total Power vs Actual Combat Effectiveness

[Zandel]

OK so by now we all know that Total power is just the Girls HP, Atk and Def added together.
This means that all of the highest total power girls have high hp and generally average or lower atk / def.

My question is this:

At what point is High Atk / High Def better then that extra hp in actual combat?
Or in other words, which girls with lower hp do you find worth using in your squads even tho they lower the total power of the squad?

Just so you know, I'm not interested in the girl you use because she is your waifu because for obvious reasons she doesn't count and should always be in team 1.

I have found myself also taking speed into account recently, St Paulia is one of the strongest 4* but because of her speed i'm considering moving her or even dropping her all together soon.

[Ikki]

In my case i find that defense must be very high to start being valuable (moonvine pre evo gets rekt because her defense is too low atm) so i still prefer hp, but when assembling a team i consider their abilities, their skills and how they react together to clear everything in an effective way, for example a team with st paulia and di yu may have good total power, but that means nothing cause they hit pretty lame (specially di yu) and both of them are slow, so i consider speed (less than 600 speed for me is slow, full of rapid units :c) and actual efectiveness of every team rather than raw total power, because a lot of team just stack hp to boost their total power but that is useless when you need them to actually kill things. On a side note some1 in one post did the maths on the def vs hp matter, but i dont remember what post neither who did it

[Miu]

Well, HP can't be improved with equipment so I think high base HP is useful though I find Attack to be most helpful. For instance ignoring skills and abilities I think Star Lily has the best stats for a 5* pierce. As Ikki said Def needs to be high to be useful because it reduces damage by 1/4 your Def value, so it won't make much difference unless you can block a big chunk of the attack. Atk/Def is good for girls with life drain skills too, I've seen Alpinia take out the 12-5 boss by herself.

But stats don't matter as much as skill and ability (if they are the same number of stars) so I choose based on that first. I have a Lily Rubellum who has great attack for a pierce type but I swapped out for Mountain Lily because her skill and ability does more damage even though she has a lower base attack. And I'll be replacing Mountain Lily with Toad Lily soon because Toad Lily just has top tier abilities even though ML and Star Lily have way better stats and full equip slots. Then there's Edelweiss who has great everything, stats, ability and skill.

[Tenhou]

I honestly find attack to be rather valuable as most of the time my girls just smash the face in of whatever they're facing before it can deal any serious damage to them.

Health and def can be quite good too, but you'll most likely deal less damage and thus have to take another turn where you're hit which somewhat equals it out.

Speed is only important if you need to kill certain things before your fastest team reaches the goal and i tend to not worry too much about it. Sure, they run to the goal faster but who cares about that if you have placed some units correctly, the random tiles mess things up, and i use autorun anyways :P

In the end i guess a lot of kills also depend on whether your skills proc or not.

[Unregistered]

Tenhou is correct...speed in and of itself is not valuable. If all your teams are 800 speed you'll have the same problems with some maps as you would if all your teams were 300 speed. High speed only becomes valuable relative to the speed of your other teams, so for some maps you'll want all the same speed, for some maps you'll want some speed disparity but not too much, and for some maps you'll want a large speed disparity.

[Zandel]

I'm seeing what you guys mean about high atk and def being as good if not better then high hp for many fights. Water Lilly (5* slice) hits like a dam truck and can take quite a beating with her dodge chance as well as half decent hp / def. Been looking at Cepha as well and tho her hp is not that high that massive atk for a 4* and high def as well just seem to work.

I've decided to ignore power differences of less then 2k now and focus on certain stats instead. Also just to note, having moonvine, star lilly and tachibana all in the same team makes round 3 a wonderful thing. Wishing I had the other round 3 pierce buff girl to add to it right now.

[fromelette]

I tend to focus heavily on skills when choosing helpers. A squad with 80k power with a 6* and a couple 5* usually fares worse than another helper I have with 75k and Cattleya + Edelweiss + Camellia as this squad can simply destroy the boss fight in a single turn when their skills activate. Also AoE skills can be very helpful to kill the boss adds and maximize squad uptime.

I agree with Tenhou that speed is relative, although high speed (not 700+ though) tend to have more uses due to being able to avoid small pest clutter. On def x hp I used to prioritize hp heavily, but with the team getting stronger and have less trouble with the content we get I am starting to see def in a new light, mostly because I think that small pests do a %hp damage (I might be wrong), and they're by far the greatest threat as I've limited options to avoid that damage depending on the map.

[Lied]

I usually just use highest power over everything because iirc solar blast damage is based off of your teams' average power and it doesn't really make a difference what you use after a certain point anyway. For my helper squad I prefer high HP and ATK since all I care about is that none of my girls die before Edelweiss can heal them with her passive, and the high DEF/low HP units usually don't get enough defense to outweigh the massive amount less HP they have (damage is reduced by roughly 1/4 of DEF, detailed more HERE, and most of the 12-5 enemies have around 2,300 ATK, so St. Paulia ends up being able to take about 50% more hits than Cepha Lanthera). As other people have said, the main danger is the moving pests, but I don't think those are affected by defense and are just % health based.

[Corintis]

I haven't completed enough tests to provide specific data points, but I have found that when I stack two groups of 4* Knights, one to generalize the Glass Cannons (Cepha, Bianca, Violetta, Casablanca, Dandelion), another for the Tanks (Di Yu, Snowflake, Cyani, Hibiscus, Sweetpea) and pit them against the Bosses of 12-5 (and getting them there at full HP is no cakewalk), as well as Raid Bosses, although no group could reliably take them down, all of them dished out roughly the same amount of damage.

Needless to say, the Cannons dished out more damage in a shorter span of time, while the tanks dolled it out over a longer period of time (from 50% to nearly double the time). One advantage the tanks did have though was more opportunities to activate their skills, but currently, the difference is minimal. Rather than the numbers, like a few others above me, I also heavily emphasize stacking abilities that compliment each other (and also had similar results when stacking Atk/Def abilities); it definitely nets me more damage in the Raids rather than throwing random teams together.

And then, as those that have her would know, Water Lily is also completely defiant of her power level. Numerically, she is currently the weakest 5* Knight and by all rights, should be the first unit to die every-time. Except, she's usually one of the last ones standing and even dishing out a boatload of damage at the same time, thanks to both her Defense boost and Evasion ability, on top of having a 32~37% Skill Activation + a high base Attack to make use of it. So yeah, that just further reinforces my habit of making teams based around abilities instead of Power Level.

As for speed, I usually have one fast group and average every other group, but definitely prefer having one super fast and super slow group to rely on; they tend to make clearing the event maps a million times easier.

[Lied]

I think the main thing is that there hasn't been anything that needs a high degree of customization, outside of speed to get 3 medals. Currently, raid bosses aren't something that we usually need (or want) to nuke as hard as we can and 12-5 has been pretty much the top level of content, with maybe some of the more recent event ?-8 maps being harder(?). As it stands, my helper squad can make it to the final boss of 12-5 and either kill it or weaken it if I'm playing on auto run, or solo clear 12-5, usually without any unit even dying, if I'm actually playing and using solar blast appropriately. The other teams don't need to do anything other than pick stuff up and keep solar blast strong, so it doesn't really matter what's in them besides high total power.