DFFOO [JP] Hunting Festival with C90 Zidane / Freya Duo
17Apparently I have been blessed today and randomly got Freya's LD. So I threw her with Zidane to form the good old hunting festival duo.
Only BT+0, normal HA for Zidane and Freya though, so Zidane can't use UW or he loses his BT+ effects without the passive. If they can do this well without much investment, people who full on LB their gear would absolutely love them.
Zidane C90
Zidane C90 + rework does not include any form of base skill reworks, so he still have the same mechanics and HP dumps on those skills. Though since he gets free actions and turns when he (re)breaks anything when it is not on his free turn already, even with the base skills he does more DPT than it meets the eye.
His rework is mainly for his LD and self buff update. His LD does one more dump up to 4 now. I am not sure if it is because of its 180% overflow nature, even though his LD is a split HP attack he tends to do full dmg even on 3 targets when I tested him on Garnet's IW without much HP dmg taken dealt up. It is kinda jarring that I even went back to check if it got changed.
His self buff update is quite spicy on the other hand. He now has self 80% BRV dmg up, 40% HP dmg up and 10% refund when attacking a debuffed target, and that is on top of 80% BRV dmg up in and 40% BRV gain up in his C85. I think it is safe to say that Zidane no longer needs BRV dmg support to deal dmg. He probably just needs DEF down, and he already inflicts a decent % of that himself.
The 10% refund on HP dump is really nice as well. I mentioned at least two times that his S2 needs some battery to deal dmg, and now he is self sufficient with that. So his deficits are largely fixed at this point.
Zidane's Ex hits really hard now with 6 HP dumps and batteries the party before launching, so it is a all-in-one complete package for launch dmg on his own. It also got a 20% recast up from C85, so there is his big source of dmg. Devs also made his EX and its associated Mug (BRV++) dealing weakness dmg to "Thief's Mark" inflicted targets (which should be on unless they cleansed beforehand).
Mug also has absolute gravity now before the BRV hits (set target BRV to 0).
It can be an option to perfect shave a target that has enormous BRV gain beforehand, but most of the time I still reserve this as a filler move for stalling one turn in between the breaks so that Zidane can delete turns again on the next.
Freya:
Freya has a similar dragoon mechanic to Kain, but she only needs 3 stacks to activate it. She also does not consume BRV while she is in the air and her aerial follow-up gives the party dmg refund based battery and a small heal.
She has your standard support aura of 30% BRV dmg and 20% HP dmg up. She does come with 30% BRV gain up with C88 on + LD overhead. So it goes really well with her multitude of battery.
She averages on 3-4 HP dumps on her skills outside of her follow-up, so she is quite capable of dealing decent dmg on top of her support auras.
Zidane + Freya:
Similar to what you can do with Kain, Freya's aerial follow-up can be abused with continuous turns and stalling from other characters, so naturally Zidane with his rebreaks and free turns can be a good partner to her. Though a slight flaw to this combo specific to Zidane would be that whenever the enemy naturally recovers from breaks, there is a high chance that Freya's follow-up would immediately break them, denying his chance of naturally breaking the enemy with his skills.
That is not to say Freya prevents Zidane from utilizing his mechanics. He still has ample amount of tools. He has free skills from HP+ (LD), LD uses that you can use it on C88 to stall, also Mug from using his EX is another free action. Zidane also has high turn rate moves on his base skills to join ahead of Freya's turns, so there are still a lot of ways you can get around the lack of natural breaks.
Another good thing is, if Freya happens to satisfy the orb condition, Zidane can keep on going without worrying about orb turns. It is the same thing with other characters that does dmg over consecutive free turns like Thancred.
Freya's mBRV in this setup is a bit low, but by sending her in the air with Ifrit buff on and using someone with overflow aura on CA when she is doing her follow-up, such as Irvine, she can get to much higher holding BRV to get around the problem. Keep her in the air with Zidane and she will keep doing max dmg with Ifrit's increased HP dmg cap.
FFIX in general:
It seems to be a common theme that FFIX people love giving out battery. You can't really run out of BRV when you use Zidane with Garnet and Freya, because there will be an absolute crazy amount of battery follow-up (quite fun in Garnet's IW). Steiner LD gives constant battery, Beatrix follow-up/counter does as well and Eiko is just Eiko. The only one that doesn't is probably good boy Vivi.
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