Costume Guide – Beachside Justice Michaela

Exclusive Weapon

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

Official Patch Notes

Overview

Michaela for PVE

Damage analysis

In the original Brown Dust 1, Michaela was a strong supporter. Interestingly, her first costume in Brown Dust 2 is for an attacker role, rather than a supporter role.

Michaela is clearly built for damage. Her base ATK is fairly average at 330, but her base crit and crit damage stats are very high.

Michaela's unique mechanic is that she sacrifices her own HP to greatly improve her M.ATK. The M.ATK buff is very strong, and makes her arguably the strongest magic attacker in the game in terms of raw unboosted damage. At +5 full potential Michaela alone (without other buffers) deals (100 + 200%) x 400% = 1,200% damage.

There's no doubt that this multiplier is extremely high. However, in PVE you are almost certainly using other M.ATK buffers in your team. Multiple buffs of the same type have diminishing returns, because they add to each other (rather than multiplying each other). Once you take into account the effect of other M.ATK buffers, Michaela is still stronger than anyone else out there, but the power gap between Michaela and other magic attackers is not as big as it first seems.

For example, compare Michaela with Last Hope Loen. Last Hope Loen at +5 full potential deals 750% of her M.ATK. This seems a lot lower than Michaela, but compare the situation after B.Helena's buff (+115% M.ATK) is applied:

• With B.Helena, Michaela does (100% + 200% + 115%) x 400% = 1,660% damage.
• With B.Helena, LH.Loen does (100% + 115%) x 750% = 1,505% damage.

As you can see, Michaela still comes out on top by a good margin, but the power creep is only incremental, and is not as big as what it looks like at first glance.

PVE game modes

Michaela is obviously great wherever big magic damage is required. She is quite unique in that she is one of the few light magic attackers in the game (the other two are Angelica, who can only deal HP based damage, and Jayden who is a 4-star), so she has a niche of being very strong against dark bosses and dark fiend hunts with high DEF.

Unfortunately, her 80% HP self-sacrifice makes her tricky to use in PVE. In PVE battles and fiend hunts, she can be very effective as long as she is paired with a healer like B.Helena or otherwise kept out of harm's way.

In Tower of Pride, she cannot be used effectively for high scoring, because her HP loss will reduce your score. In Tower of Salvation, she can be a great damage dealer if you can be lucky enough to pair her with a healer and/or healing relics, but otherwise she is squishy and very vulnerable to being killed off.

In Last Night, she is still a good finisher but note that the effect of her buffs is halved.

Michaela for PVP

Michaela is unlikely to see much play in PVP with her current costume alone. Although her range and cooldown are good, her SP cost is high and her self-sacrifice is really unacceptable for PVP.

There's no good reason to be playing Michaela when DJ Venaka and NB.Eclipse exist as more consistent magic nukers with better range and SP cost.

Conclusion

Michaela reaches new damage records for magic attackers, but at a hefty price of 80% of her HP. As the newest, strongest, magic attacker, Michaela will be necessary for anyone seeking to get a ranking high score in dark fiend hunts. For everyone else, other than her big damage (which is admittedly very big), she does not bring much new to the table, for now. There will probably be other costumes in the future to make use of her self-sacrifice mechanic (e.g. buffs that increase damage when HP is low), but no such costumes exist yet.