Learning About: Dragon Emblem

I’ve wanted to make a dragon team for a long time. With no bonus horse, my Camus still being a work in progress and the advent of the Battling Camus focus, now’s a good time to chase the team. I intend to return to my horse team soon.

This Learning About will be a little different from the previous one as I’ll be exploring the team’s viability at a high merge count (30+). While I’m fairly certain that a dragon team will be quite good at those levels, it’s really a question of consistent deathless runs will be.

Unit Builds and IVs

As for which dragons I’m running, the young dragons — Tiki, Nowi and Fae — are the obvious choice due to their higher BST. I’ll be running the typical Lightning Breath, Triangle Adept and Quick Riposte build for all of them.

Lightning Breath is the default choice due to Distant Counter, but is mostly chosen by default as the other breaths aren’t all that impressive. Dark Breath is probably the next most used. I can see it being used on a mixed team, but on a bulky dragon team the debuff doesn’t seem necessary. Light Breath has a similar case against it, but is even worse due to the buff not stacking with Fortify Dragons. The last consideration is Flametongue, providing 15 Mt, a value only exceeded by exclusive melee weapons. Perhaps there will be a critical match up in the future where this extra offense is needed, but for now that doesn’t appear to be the case.

The choice of Triangle Adept is rather simple. The biggest argument for running Fury over TA is that you open up the possibility of surviving disadvantageous triangle match ups. However, since each dragon can dominate their positive weapon triangle match ups the added coverage isn’t necessary. TA also increases the ability to get multiple uses out of Quick Riposte as incoming damage will usually be reduced to single digits. The guaranteed follow up combined with the extra damage ensures a kill on the enemy phase, negating the threat of Wings of Mercy.

C skills are tentative, as expected. I’d wager that 3x Fortify Dragons is the way to go despite not stacking, but we’ll see. Reposition is also used as a default and could be changed. I’m using Moonbow due to the +1 special cooldown penalty from Lightning Breath, but it can be replaced by Aether for better scoring.

I chose a +Spd/-Def Tiki. I’ll almost always go +Spd on my highly merged, non-Brave units simply because I think it’s by far the best stat in the game and will probably be more useful in future match ups. In this case, though, a +Spd Tiki will eliminate almost all possibility of a Julia double and will almost always double Hector. A +Spd/-HP IV is slightly better. Assuming weapon triangle advantage, you’re never at risk of dying, but you do want to reduce damage from doubles as much as possible to stay in QR range.

Where I didn’t get a +Spd/-HP Tiki, I did get one for Nowi. She was my first +10 ever and had been collecting dust until recently. With BST being the only way for me to increase my score I’ve started using her more.

Fae is +Spd/-Def. Even with her availability at 4-star, I couldn’t land a +Spd/-HP. While the -Def won’t affect her ability to tank blue mages, I’d prefer to have neutral Def due to all the Effies I run into at higher scores.

In the end, though, I don’t really think the IVs for the dragon girls matter. Like you could easily go +Def on Nowi and +Res on Tiki for even better Falchion and Naga match ups. I’d avoid -Atk, though. Where Spd doesn’t matter too much because of QR, you definitely want to eliminate future corner cases where -Atk might come up short of the ORKO.

I’m using Cordelia as the bonus unit because I already had her built for my main team. I don’t expect to use her that often outside of taking care of Firesweep Cordelias. As such, I adjusted the build to play more of a supportive role. I’m trying out Reciprocal Aid over Ardent Sacrifice, but I think the latter is better. I’m not a fan of Breath of Life, but I figure I’ll give it a chance here as incidentally healing my dragons back into QR range might be relevant.

Corrin?: Female Corrin is available as a bonus unit, but since my Cordelia is already highly merged there’s not much point in spending extra resources in a medium unit just to stay on theme. Cordelia also complements the team better by providing ranged physical damage. A fourth dragon might be more of a consideration if there were more dragon-specific buffs.

Ninian?: This team will very rarely attack on the player phase, making a dancer that doesn’t cover any additional match ups a poor choice. Not to mention her BST is horrible.

Arena Results

This time, I’m posting both the full and segmented videos to YouTube. I’m keeping the segmented videos as unlisted in order to avoid spamming subscribers with new video notifications. Here’s the full video:

Battle 1

I quickly learned that Firesweep Bow and other counter nullifying abilities are this team’s worst enemy. Cordelia is especially problematic as she has enough firepower to ORKO. This also happens to be one of the worst maps for separating units. Luckily, armors are easy to work around.

Battle 2

The other troublesome anti-counter ability is bride Lyn. I actually gained a ton of respect for her abilities this week in Arena. She isn’t broken or anything, maybe not even good, but she definitely makes you play differently which can lead to mistakes. In this case, her being paired with armors makes the engagement mostly trivial.

Battle 3

As expected, full armor teams aren’t much of a challenge. This team has somewhat peculiar unit builds which I can only speculate are to gain the advantage over other armors. Yes, perhaps the Hammer and Armorslayer make that rather obvious, but the inclusion of Life and Death means these armors will be doubling others quite often.

Battle 4

A rare Julia. Tiki took a cool 15; I believe is the biggest single hit I’ll take the entire run.

Battle 5

Now a rare dancer team. With a Firesweep Cordelia. Sigh. I’d normally dodge this type of match up due to the low score, but since I’m trying to learn about the team it was good to go up against a dancer. Luckily, the AI ain’t too smart and is rather easy to manipulate on a wide open map like this.

Battle 6

We already faced this guy in battle #2. Tiki is a champ, tanking both Hectors over two rounds. These Hectors weren’t +Spd, but even if they had been, my +Spd Tiki would’ve doubled them with or without QR active.

Battle 7

Another dancer + mage team. Not much to say.

Assessment

Needless to say, this team performed quite well, mainly because the BST mostly precludes any poor match ups. I believe that living in the enemy phase is a strong strategy that can rarely go wrong. It’s not the most exciting, but it is consistent.

Why Run This Over Armor Emblem?: If all you want is the highest Arena score possible, armors are the way to go. I can’t directly attest to how easy or difficult it is to get a deathless run with that team, but if you’re rocking the full 40 merges you’re generally only going to run into other armor teams which I’d assume are relatively easy to pick off. There are other reasons why armors are better, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

There are various reasons to prefer dragons, but in the end I don’t think they’re enough to compensate for the lower scoring potential. The added movement is generally the best reason, but a pure armor team can generally mitigate most movement problems with Swap or sometimes Pivot. There are other small advantages like magic damage being marginally better in today’s meta and Lightning Breath being more accessible than Distant Counter.

What About C Skills?: The biggest reason to run any of the -emblem teams are the amazing C buffs. Dragons only have Fortify which would seem like a disadvantage, but from my experience I didn’t really need the extra buffs. I’d love access to Ward Dragons as the stacking defensive buffs would make the team even tankier. I don’t think the team needs the offensive buffs at this time, but it would be nice to have the option.

Is Quick Riposte 3 Necessary?: I’ve run Quick Riposte 2 on many different types of units and I can’t say I’ve run into any situations where I wish I had QR 3. This is normally because the units eating a hit would be far below the HP threshold either way. However, it’s a little different with these dragon builds. Due to TA and being merged on top of their natural tankiness, they will frequently take single digit damage. This means the difference between 2 and 3 is more significant. Let’s take my Fae, for example. The HP thresholds for each level of QR are 45/40/35 out of 50. The difference between 40 and 35 HP probably won’t come up very often, but I can definitely imagine a scenario where I’m unable to ORKO due to lacking the QR double, resulting in a Wings of Mercy blowout.

Firesweep Cordelia: This was the biggest obstacle I ran into during my runs and I’d imagine she’ll be fairly common hereon out. A +Atk Cordelia can ORKO any of the dragon girls with neutral, unbuffed Def. Conversely, none of them can ORKO her on the player phase even with the Life and Death penalty. This means I’ll have to manage my Fortify buff carefully so my dragons don’t get ORKOed — a good reason to run duplicate copies — or the fourth unit will have to be a counter.

Swap vs. Reposition: I have a hard time deciding between these two skills. I usually prefer Reposition for the additional movement, but there are always times I wish I had Swap instead, usually on maps that restrict movement. I’ll be sticking with Reposition since it allows me to move units across the map to set up favorable match ups.

Viability of Unmerged Dragon Teams: It should still be viable, but it’s still quite an investment even without the merges. QR2 should be sufficient and maybe the 4-star version of Lightning Breath is enough, too. Fortify Dragons is nice, but not required. Triangle Adept isn’t exactly the most common skill, though, only appearing at 4-star on Roy, and I think it’s a strict requirement for the team. If I ever land more copies of the dragons themselves, I might try an unmerged, budget version of the team.

Going Forward

There’s really not much to say. As I assumed going in, this dragon team tears up 724-736 scoring defensive teams. There are only a couple things I would change. First would be putting Fortify Dragons on all of them. I didn’t run into any cases where Hone Atk or Spd made any difference. While Fortify won’t stack, having redundant copies will allow for more flexible movement and will keep each dragon in QR range more reliably.

The other major change would be running Aether, something I already tried out in-game to much success. Aside from the increased Arena score, the healing is actually quite welcome as it’ll put you back into QR range. I found the extra damage from Moonbow to be mostly irrelevant as the boost from TA and the QR double is usually overkill.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned is that Triangle Adept is even better than I thought. I don’t know if it’s underrated or not, but it should definitely be considered for more teams. The offensive arms race might be escalating — the Quickened Pulse seal should be interesting — but there’s almost always a good answer and TA is one of the best.