Banner Guide – Apostle Blade

Official Patch Notes

Exclusive Gear

Overview

PVE	PVP	Fiend Hunt/Guild Raid
A	B	S
Last Night	Tower of Pride	Tower of Salvation
B	A	B

Blade's stats

Blade is the first playable Apostle in the game. Given how strong the Apostles are in the story, it's only fitting for Blade to have strong stats to match. Before looking at her skills, let's take a look at her stats.

Base stats at Lv 100	Base stats at Lv 100 (with awakening)

The first thing to notice is that Blade's ATK is truly sky high. The average 5-star attacker has base ATK of around 352. Blade's base ATK is 429, the highest in the game. After Blade, the next two highest ATK characters are Alec at 418 base ATK (though Alec is limited by his fixed damage skills) and Nebris at 396 base ATK. Blade will therefore hit a lot harder than other characters with the same skill damage multiplier.

Unsurprisingly, her costume bond stats are also mainlu offensively oriented: at full potential, she gets an additional 52% ATK / 5% DEF / 47.20% crit.

On top of this, Blade has base 75% crit damage, which is better than the standard base 50% crit damage.

On the other hand, Blade's base HP is incredibly low, at only 1050 HP. In fact, she has the lowest HP of any character in the game other than Wiggle. Blade's HP is even lower than the weakest 3-stars like Emma and Julie. For scale, Blade's base HP is less than half that of Justia (2121). To add insult to injury, Blade also has no base DEF or M.RES at all. This makes her survivability a significant issue in late game boss fights.

Blade for PVE

There are two parts to Blade's skill: her attack, and her counterattack.

The attacking part of Blade's skill is pretty straightforward: she does a single hit in a T-shaped AOE for up to 700%. This is considered a strong attack, especially when you take into account her strong offensive base stats.

The unique part of Blade's skill is her counter ability. Apostle Blade is the only costume in the game to have a counterattack that damages the whole enemy team. At +5 full potential, she counterattacks for 200% per hit up to 10 times, i.e. up to 2,000% damage. This means that in theory she can do a total of up to 2,700% damage each time she uses her skill. If she can manage to proc all of those hits, then she is amazing value. It's important to make sure that you check enemy attacks before each turn, so that you can position Blade to make the most of her counterattacks.

The fact that she counterattacks against all enemies makes her perfect for fiend hunts and guild raids. It is normally almost impossible to hit all boss parts at once, so the fact that she hits everything means that you get a lot of value out of her counterattack range alone. This is especially true for guild raids, as the guild bosses have much more tiles to hit because of the large field. Also, the fact that her counterattack buff does not have a time limit expiry means that you can get it set up in advance: you don't need to time her skill to be used with enemy multi-hit attack turns (unlike NH.Seir).

At the same time, Blade's terribly low HP means that you will need to be very careful when challenging high level bosses. Gearing to 90% DEF or M.RES will be a given, but you will most likely also need defensive buffers like AD.Diana together with healers to keep Blade alive, and you may also need to keep her out of harms way whilst her counterattack is on cooldown.

Outside of fiend hunts and guild raids, Blade can also be used effectively in story battles where enemies have multi-hit attacks, and you can't clear all the enemies in one turn. She can be used in Tower of Pride, but since we don't have a dark enemy floor yet, she doesn't yet have the chance to shine in that mode. In Tower of Salvation, her counterattack skill is very strong in theory, but she relies on support from defensive relics AND healers to keep her alive, which makes her not very consistent and only a viable pick in late game, if you have built both offensive AND defensive relics.

Blade for PVP

Blade's all team counterattack looks extremely attractive, but is difficult to use in PVP right now.

Firstly, her HP is just too low. She dies to just about anything, and will even die to some normal attacks. Note: testing confirms that the counterattack does not trigger if Blade dies (similar to Lecliss). Therefore, the chances of getting off even a single counterattack is quite low, unless you use energy guard buffers like RH.Rou or AD.Diana.

Secondly, Blade currently doesn't have any secondary costumes. Whilst more costumes have been teased (e.g. the recent Blade onsen costume), at the moment Blade has 2 empty player turns with her 5 turn cooldown.

Thirdly, her 3 SP cost (after potential upgrades) limits the kinds of teams she can be used in. Blade would not be recommended for defense teams, due to her very low survivability and the fact that her counterattack would not kick in until Turn 3. For attack teams though, Blade's 3 SP cost leaves you with very few options for team building. For example, one of the few viable setups for Blade would be Apostle Blade (3 SP) + Killer Doll Lecliss (1 SP) + Anti-Dystopia Diana (1 SP) for a total of 5 SP: Lecliss's role would be to eat up the enemy's best attacks and any buff removal skills, and then Diana would provide an energy guard to keep Blade alive long enough to trigger her counterattacks. The problem with this setup is that Blade's unbuffed initial attack will most likely be wasted against a Comeback Idol Granhildr, and both Blade and Diana will have nothing to do on Turn 3.

Fourthly, physical support in PVE is lacking at the moment. Magic teams have access to B-Helena, who gives a big ATK buff AND a big crit buff AND healing. The crit buff is especially important because it allows magic teams to reach 100% crit rate with the right gearing. On the other hand, physical teams have H.Lathel, who is no doubt very strong, but doesn't allow for crit damage builds for exponential damage. Things will change once Liberta's base costume is released (she will give both ATK and crit rate buffs), but for now the lack of a crit rate buff limits the effectiveness of Blade's counterattack which has a relatively low damage multiplier.

Therefore, Blade is unlikely to be competitive in PVP for the time being. If you get lucky (e.g. against an Empress Rubia) she can be devastating, but she's not consistent enough to work most of the time (which is necessary in high ranking PVP). She could become very strong in the future, but that will depend on what other costumes and supporters are released in the future. She needs to be able to be buffed both offensively and defensively at a cheap cost in order to shine.

Exclusive Gear

Blade's exclusive weapon is... also called Blade? As with most attacker characters, having the exclusive gear provides a healthy 45% ATK boost on the bonus stat. This is nice to have, but she works perfectly fine without her exclusive gear unless you are trying to high score.

Since Blade is slated for more costumes in the coming months, you will have more chances to get her exclusive gear if you miss out this time.

Conclusion

Blade is our first playable Apostle, and her costume absolutely lives up to her canonical power. She has some of the highest damage potential in the game (up to 2,700% damage), and she is unmatched in fiend hunts and guild raids thanks to her unique counterattack ability that damages ALL enemies (yes, you read that right). She also has the highest base ATK in the game. However, Blade is also the very definition of "glass cannon": her HP is so low that even weak 3-star units like Julie and Emma are tankier than her. This makes her difficult to use in late-game content without high level gearing and defensive supporters.

Although she has a long cooldown, devs have foreshadowed that there are more Blade costumes in the pipeline: we already know about Young Lady Blade and Onsen Blade. It's therefore pretty safe to assume that your investment in Blade will become even better value over time.