It’s Halloween, again! Almost like it comes around the same time every year.
Let’s take a look at the gacha:
| New Units | |
 | Semi-reliable source of turn-1 Crit for your team, but you’ll likely have better options |
 | All-rounder that can fill a bunch of different roles in the team |
 | Survivable frontliner that disrupts the enemy and gets stronger from debuffs |
 | All the skills a vampire needs: HP/CP stealing, Possession, Curse, the works |
 | Uses Taunt Strengthening to become an unstoppable machine – until he gets hit |
Hot-ei or Not-ei? Unfortunately, there’s not a ton to justify using him over other options.
His main use is getting your team set up on the first turn of the quest, with increased movement in all directions and reasonable access to Crit for adjacent allies (as long as he winds up two squares away from an enemy).
That’s about all he does, though. If he can’t position to get Crit on turn 1, he’s entirely dependent on enemies having steal-worthy buffs, which is a pretty niche space to be in. Maybe he’ll shine in some challenge quests?
(In case you’re worried about giving Crit to the enemy – the timing of the ability ensures it’ll wear off before they can take advantage of the buff. He’d probably be unusably bad if this worked any other way!)
At first glance, Ebisu reads like a support, with reliable access to Bind, Freeze, and Reflect Debuff.
Then he also reads like a tank, with Protection, Bind, Nullify Buff and Remove Buff.
Then he also reads like he can do decent damage, with Concentration, Freeze, and blow-range damage.
In practice, you’ll probably be best off running him as some sort of hybrid of all three – buff him to the gills when there’s that one enemy that has to die right now, then let him sit back and support while the rest of your team cleans up.
You probably could run him as just one of his options, but he’s probably going to be outclassed by more specialised units if you do that.
I’m really not a fan of his CS here – be careful when you’re running him to not let it get in the way of his On Miss skills.
If you’d told me that Azathoth’s skillset was on a 5★, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. There’s not a lot in the way of combos here, so going through his skills in order:
Weapon Change (Long Slash) on the entire enemy team means they have no way of interacting with your backline for the first few turns of the phase. Extend this indefinitely (or until probability works against you/an enemy gets a charge skill up) with Zhurong, spam infinite Guts with Horus, whatever tickles your fancy.
If the battle goes longer than turn 5 (which, so far, it will), he’ll get Crit, for free, every turn. Nice.
If he gets debuffed by the army of enemy long slash units, he’ll likely straight-up remove the debuff, and will get a stacking 1.2x damage boost. The way this is worded to me implies that he can only get one stack per turn, but this is still pretty good – these boosts add up fast (3.5x damage at 6 stacks).
If he gets hit by the army of enemy long slash units, he’ll get ATK Up, Brawn, and Regeneration. We’re pretty comfortably covered for damage at this point, and Regeneration is a great boost, particularly when combined with Evasion. Which he gets when he hits the enemy back. This is probably the weakest point of his kit – he has to hit quite a few enemies for Evasion to actually trigger reliably – but I’m honestly surprised it’s covered at all, given the other toys he has access to.
He’s also immune to a bunch of skill locking effects.
Limit and Berserk+ from his CS feel almost unnecessary at this point, but they’re available in case he hasn’t got his other buffs up and running yet.
To no one’s surprise, Lifewonders releases another 4th variant that is bonkers strong.
Stealing CP from allies is a really cute concept – it won’t take much of a push to get him to full charge for turn 1, if you’re after that sort of thing. It also makes him quite valuable as a non-friend support: stealing CP from allies is a great way to farm quests quickly (AR that disables CS when, Lifewonders?!).
Stealing CP from enemies is also cute, but the potential behind it is a bit harder to pull off; it’s certainly possible for him to chain charge skills into each other, but it’s not going to happen all the time.
Outside of that, there’s not much to talk about – just hit the enemies with your native 5.5x damage boost and Possess them (and Curse them for good measure).
Let’s get the Otohime comparison out of the way – when Alp avoids getting hit, he gets bonkers strong, and if he gets hit, he has to charge up again.
Where the comparison ends is that Alp doesn’t stop being useful when he loses his Taunt stacks – he just drops consistency. He also isn’t guaranteed to drop his stacks of Taunt (since the chance for him to drop them starts at 2%).
If you can maintain his Taunt, the payoffs are pretty great. At two stacks, he’s at 100% chance to apply Fear on hit (which is handy when you want to keep an enemy from hitting you).
At four stacks, he’s giving Ardour, Tenacity, healing and CP at 100%, better than many primary supports.
At five stacks, he gives Crit to his team in a large radius every turn.
These effects don’t suddenly come online – you’ll have turns where he has no stacks and still triggers Crit, for instance – but you should be building around him with the intent to keep his stacks up.
His CS giving him Weapon Change (Magic) is great, as it’ll give a nice boost to his HP/CP generation abilities, as well as better options for kiting enemies with Fear.
If you’re looking for units to pair him with, Azathoth is almost an ideal teammate!
There we have it! Though Hotei was a bit of a miss, the rest of the units in the gacha range from good to excellent. As always, good luck if you’re rolling!
The@Housamo 