Costume Guide – Red Hat Rou

(Updated 25/04/2024 for potential updates)

Official Patch Notes

Potential upgrade details

Overview

Pros:

1. Gives Energy Shields to your entire team, one of the best defensive skills in the game.
2. 50% crit rate buff is very high, on par with B-Rank Helena.
3. With her potential upgrades, she is now S-Tier in PVP.
4. Rou is already has other S-Tier PVP costumes, and this makes her even more versatile.

Cons:

1. Crit rate buff is currently the least useful buff for most PVE battles.
2. Two Tears are required to unlock the SP reduction from her potential upgrades.

Red Hat Rou for PVE

RH.Rou's utility for PVE and PVP has completely changed since she first launched in October 2023. This guide has been completely revised to account for this.

At launch, RH.Rou was primarily a PVE unit. At the time, she was the only unit who could give a full team Energy Guard buff, and she was only one of two units who could give a 50% crit buff.

Since that time, a lot of new powerful buffers have been released. With much better offensive buffers available now, crit rate buffs are no longer as important as they used to be. This is especially since modern fiend hunts now have the "crit rate fix" feature (which sets crit rate to 100% after a certain number of chain stacks).

RH.Rou still has the best team Energy Guard of any costume. Energy Guards are great for bosses that deal heavy AOE damage or damage based on a % of your HP. However, there are still not a lot of battles where you actually can make use of RH.Rou's big energy guards. In addition, now that AD.Diana exists, you no longer need to bring RH.Rou just for her defensive buff, since Diana can fulfil the role of both offensive buffer and defensive buffer in a single team slot.

RH.Rou therefore sees relatively little PVE play now.

Red Hat Rou for PVP

When RH.Rou was first released, the consensus was that she was not a great PVP character. Now, she has now shot up to S-tier in PVP, for the following 3 reasons.

Firstly, RH.Rou's potential upgrade allows her SP cost to be reduced to 2 SP. At 3 SP, RH.Rou was far too expensive to play for a supporter, and the impact did not justify the cost. Now, at 2 SP, RH.Rou is much more versatile and fits into many different strategies.

Secondly, when RH.Rou was first launched, the PVP meta was much faster. Attacking teams were built to reliably take out at least 2 enemies on the first turn, and most games were decided by Turn 3. In that kind of meta, there was simply no reason to play an expensive buffer like RH.Rou in an attack team when you could just go all out offensive, and there was no point playing a buffer in a defense team if you couldn't count on your teammates surviving the first turn.

Since then, thanks to the introduction of Granhildr, the PVP meta has now drastically shifted to a slower pace, and defensive strategies are now much more common. As a defensive buffer, RH.Rou really benefits from the slower meta, because it means that you are more likely to have living team members to buff by Turn 2 or 3.

Thirdly, RH.Rou's biggest weakness is buff removal skills (Schera, Eleaneer, Yuri), which make her energy guards useless. In the current meta however, buff removers have become less of a threat to RH.Rou's energy guards now that Granhildr is around and cheap taunts are more common. The taunters are often able to absorb the enemy's buff removal skill, allowing the rest of your team to remain protected by the energy guards and very hard to kill. For example, a 10,000HP RH.Rou at +5 full potential would give a massive 15,000 HP energy guard to each of your allies. This makes her a formidable threat in PVP.

Conclusion

RH.Rou has gone from being relatively poor value in PVP to being top tier. It requires a lot of investment to be able to use her effectively in PVP (as you need at least +3 and at least 2 Tears to get her to 2 SP cost), but once you've made that investment she generates a lot of value.