Costume Guide – Queen of Signatures Michaela

Exclusive Gear

Base stats (Lv 100)	Max stats (after engraving and awakening)

Official Patch Notes

Overview

PVE	PVP	Fiend Hunt/Guild Raid
B	A	A * (see below)
Last Night	Tower of Pride	Tower of Salvation
S	A	A

Michaela for PVE

Most characters have a "theme" to their costume skills. Interestingly, Michaela's theme is dealing massive damage but screwing herself over in the process. Beachside Justice Michaela could deal massive damage at the cost of 80% of her HP. QOS.Michaela now deals massive damage at the cost of draining your team's SP.

Damage analysis

At current powercreep levels, a damage multiplier of around 600-700% with bonus effects would generally be considered "good" for an attacker. For example:

• Dimension Witch Eclipse deals 3x200% (SP drain), Nightmare Bunny Eclipse deals 3x220% (SP drain, M.RES shred)
• Piercing Magic Bow Eleaneer deals 3x195% (buff removal), B-Rank Idol Eleaneer deals 3x210% (silence)
• DJ Venaka deals 1x700% (M.RES shred)

For "vanilla" attackers with no bonus utility effects (or conditional limitations), a "good" attacker would be expected to have a much higher damage multiplier and/or a better AOE. Some of the strongest vanilla attackers include:

• Night of Jealousy Levia who deals 4x280% (1120%) to the main target
• Esteemed Adventurer Eris who deals 1100% on targets with 7 chain stacks or less

With those comparisons in mind, let's look at QOS.Michaela. At +5 full potential, she has an unconditional damage multiplier of 3x390% = 1170% (before chain damage). This makes her one of the strongest attacking costumes in the game, and certainly the strongest light magic attacker.

Note that although Beachside Justice Michaela has comparable raw damage when unbuffed, QOS.Michaela performs much better with buffs applied after taking into account buff scaling. E.g. B.Helena with BJ.Michaela does (100% + 200% + 115%) x 400% = 1,660% damage, whereas B.Helena with QOS.Michaela does (100% + 115%) x 3 x 390% = 2,515.5% damage.

Even though Michaela's base damage is slightly lower than average (330, compared to the "normal" 352), she has high base crit damage (100%, compared to the "normal" 50%) which further increases her total damage output and makes her a PVE powerhouse.

SP penalty analysis

QOS.Michaela's SP loss activates after you have commenced your turn, and only when the skill activates. Therefore, her skill will not prevent you from queuing up skills during your planning phase.

It also means that you should ideally put any skills that charge SP after QOS.Michaela, if possible. E.g. if you start your turn with 2 SP, G.Refi (+5 SP) into QOS.Michaela (-6 SP) leaves you with 1 SP, whereas QOS.Michaela (-6 SP) into G.Refi (+5 SP) leaves you with 5 SP.

Using Michaela in PVE

QOS.Michaela is obviously amazing in PVE wherever you need raw firepower, which we've already looked at above.

Last Night is especially great for Michaela because her damage is unbeatable and her SP penalty does not apply. QOS.Michaela is necessary for whales who want a ranking high score in Last Night, but will also generally help anyone else trying to reach that 110m damage threshold.

For general PVE battles, Michaela is the only light character so far that has skip targeting. This makes her useful against tough dark enemies in formations that align with her AOE. There's also a good chance that we will get a guild raid or fiend hunt in the future that will make use of her unique skip-X AOE.

In most PVE modes, it is strongly recommended that you pair Michaela with Helena, because Helena's skills perfectly compensate for Michaela's weaknesses. B-Rank Idol Helena comes with her big M.ATK buff and heal (which compensates for BJ.Michaela's HP penalty). Top Idol Helena comes with damage reduction and SP recharge (which compensates for QOS.Michaela's SP penalty).

Sadly, one drawback of QOS.Michaela is that it has poor synergy with BJ.Michaela.

First of all, the AOE of QOS.Michaela does not match well with the AOE of BJ.Michaela. Therefore, if we get a fiend hunt or guild raid with X-shape weak points, QOS.Michaela will work well but BJ.Michaela wont. And vice versa: a boss with straight line weak points will be great for BJ.Michaela, but not good for QOS.Michaela. It's difficult to use the two together effectively in the same battle.

Secondly, BJ.Michaela is already designed to work well on its own in PVE: it has no cooldown, so if you are already running BJ.Michaela you don't really need a second Michaela costume. Also, since BJ.Michaela has a relatively high cost of 4 SP, it can be hard to use it as a followup to QOS.Michaela (after QOS has drained off your SP).

Michaela for PVP

Michaela is surprisingly good for PVP.

Since SP is scarce in PVP, you rarely have any SP left over at the end of your turn (unless you use SP charging skills like PP.Justia). This means that QOS.Michaela's SP penalty is often not such a big deal in PVP.

QOS.Michaela is currently the only costume in the game with a "long X" AOE. This gives her a unique element of surprise. It's simply impossible to build a formation that counters both straight-line AOE attackers AND diagonal AOE attackers. Since most players currently build their formations to counter straight-line AOE attackers (e.g. NB.Eclipse, DJ.Venaka), Michaela has a good chance to catch multiple enemies in her AOE.

It's also worth noting that QOS.Michaela's extremely high damage gives her high chances of lethal damage. As an example, let's take a moderately geared Michaela with 1500 M.ATK, 500% C.DMG and 50% crit (which is far from optimal). Buffed with B.Helena for a total cost of 3 SP, on crit Michaela deals 1500 x 1170% x 600% x 215% x 110% = 249,035 damage (including chain damage). Even against a 90% M.RES geared enemy, that's 24,904 damage: enough to wipe out even most top tier tanks. Add a 0 SP Zenith into the mix, and Michaela can delete almost anything in her path.

After your first turn, on your second turn, you'll be using BJ.Michaela who is also extremely powerful but drains 80% of her current HP. Helena's buff should help compensate for the HP penalty, but otherwise you'll need to finish the game quickly before Michaela toasts herself.

Conclusion

Michaela teaches us that power comes at a price. Her damage is phenomenal, but her limited AOE and SP drawback mean that she is not suitable for every battle, and her use cases in PVE are somewhat limited.

In PVP, Michaela is a real contender to find a foothold in a well-established PVP meta. The simple fact that she has a unique AOE pattern gives her the element of surprise that counters a lot of current popular formations. Although high investment is needed to make her worth your while, again, that's the price you pay for power...