[DFFOO JP][Shadow Lufenia+ CPU Raid]Shadow, Vayne, Aerith with CoD friend
0Always love shadow, so I pitied his EX on baby account along with LD. (yes, pitying EX in lufenia+ era)
About Shadow:
Most of Shadow's skills (other than S1 I think) are now ignoring defence now and we have seen how well generally ignore defence units do as shown by the likes of Auron (and maybe Sabin earlier). Unlike most fire and forget LD units, Shadow works like Auron that they get the maximum benefit when enemy takes their turns. Only when he dodges that he "recharges" his LD stacks back to 3 so he can somewhat act like Lightning after LD with 2 free skills and 2 free turns. One thing to note though, you may want to use C65 at the second free ability turn to cycle the use out of it, because sometimes after the 3rd turn, his high turn rate skills would make him take another turn before the enemy moves, and breaking the enemies would warrant how you want to place your c65 as well, so sometimes you may want to consider other options like using EX to not get turn rate.
Overall I think both Shadow's off-turn and on-turn damage are great and can nicely fulfil his niche when the enemy does not have guaranteed hits. He does need a bit more care than some other units, but when it works Shadow can eat up a large chunk of the bosses' HP. I believe this Lufenia+ has 70/90 reduction and under Vayne's BT and Aerith's aura only, I believe other than his S1 his other hits were around 16k when it crits, so I think it is quite comfortable to put him in Lufenia+. We will see how well he performs outside of synergy with further testing, but I suspect he works quite like Auron, maybe with a little bit of extra BRV damage up help.
About the boss: CPU
Orb+6: evading (can activate even if it is the sub-bosses' attacks)
Orb+1: ignore defence damage
I still remember this from chaos era and DE, pretty much the strat was to kill the left ball that buffs, heals and batteries first. Letting it battery is pretty much lethal, so in test runs I tried to delay it or kill it first with Y'shtola or Jecht, but it turned out to be quite a hassle to balance between Shadow's BRV attack lock, number of turns elapsed and the orb. It is doable, but it also wasted a lot of time. Shadow, being mainly a single target sniper and Aerith being synergy gave me a hint that maybe I could just use Aerith to block left ball's buffs while evading the right one's debuffs, so I went with this team instead and tried to snipe the boss.
Regardless, some initial delay and turn manipulation is needed until Aerith has every boss debuffed so that they could not gain buff. The first few turns were the most crucial ones, because the orb started off quite low and a lot needed to happen, and I had Vayne and Shadow being multi-turn units and Aerith and Shadow as both turn rate units as well, so a lot of attention was needed.
The Right ball boss practically only AOEs with debuffs, so the primary focus of Shadow's BRV attack lock needed only to be on the main boss when it is not onto shadow, so that you can save your LD uses. The left ball always starts with team buffing then goes on to single target people. It should be the first or second target to pick off in this fight, but at the beginning it's functionality is suppressed by Aerith, delays and rebreaking.
Since the main boss would cleanse, change attack patterns and resummon the other balls, not killing the sub bosses would save you a lot of trouble. Having Vayne here is great with CoD, since his follow-ups on BT shave everything on the field but damage only one target. His consecutive turns exploit CoD's BT to kill the other balls as well but not as fast than say using Lann and Reynn to 100% AOE nuking the fight (the sub-bosses 100% would die before the big ball). Honestly I was not expecting Vayne + CoD was this devastating until after the summon when I was measuring whether I should continue killing it or cut CoD's turn short and let shadow back to evade to save the orb.
I tried Raines, Y'shtola, Jecht and Prompto (for evasion). While Prompto is easier to use than Shadow, I think his damage potential is much lower than Shadow without ignore defence (Prompto has ID but not the majority of his attacks). Lower skill floor, lower skill ceiling I suppose.
On a side note, I expect a lot of off-turn damage usage in the upcoming DE:T6 with all these units coming lately.