Table of Contents
Pros
- PREEMPTIVE TAUNT! The first and only costume in the game that activates its skill at the start of the battle.
- PREEMPTIVE TAUNT! Getting a taunt and energy guard on a defending team on Turn 1 is insane value in PVP, basically making her a must-have for all defending teams.
- PREEMPTIVE TAUNT! The value in her skill is getting that preemptive taunt up, so even at +0 she is very, very good.
- Highest base HP in the game.
Cons
- Not very useful outside of PVP defense. Can't be used in PVP attack teams.
- Not much difference between +0 and +5 if hit by a buff remover (Schera etc).
- Long CD and high cost for second activation.
Granhildr for PvE
Look, nobody cares about taunts in PVE. For the few battles where you might need a taunting tank (e.g. Very Hard Character Packs), most of the time it's fine to just use 4-star Specialist Andrew and pray.
Granhildr has very little uses for PVE and does not bring much new to the table. In fact, her skill cost is on the high side for a taunter.
The main thing to note, though, is that she has the highest base HP in the game at 4767: this is even higher than Lecliss at 4515. However, the trade off for this higher HP is the fact that she has no base DEF or M.RES, making it harder to build for max DEF/M.RES builds.
Granhildr for PVP
Granhildr completely and utterly changes the meta for PVP. Every attack team team is now going to have to build to play around her. Let's take a look at why.
First of all, being able to start the battle with taunt in a defense team completely changes how the game is played. To date, attack teams have enjoyed high win rates because they have the first mover advantage, and are able to mow down a lot of the defending team's units before the defending team can even make their first move. To date, a defender's best hope has been guess where to put their tanks and hope for the best.
This is no longer the case with Granhildr in play. Granhildr in a defending team basically guarantees that the attacking team will waste their first attack (if not also their second and third attacks) on a brick wall. Granhildr can also be placed in a safe corner to ensure that her teammates do not become collateral damage from AOE. This is likely to result in a significant improvement in the win rate of defense teams.
Secondly, there are only three ways to overcome a well geared Granhildr. One way is to use brute force and hope for the best (e.g. with Gray or Ventana): but that's not a very reliable tactic if your opponent's Granhildr is +5 and has effectively quadruple HP. The second way is to use a buff remover like Schera or Eleaneer in order to dispel the buff and clear the way for your other units to attack. The third way is to use horizontal knockback like Emma (in fact, Emma is the only choice right now), and hope that the knockback pushes Granhildr into AOE range for your other units.
Whichever way you choose, you can see that it completely changes the way that you build your PVP teams. E.g. Nobody plays buff removal on Turn 1 attack right now, but that changes now with Granhildr.
Note that using Granhildr in a defense team does have a drawback in that you use up 6 SP on Turn 1, leaving you with only 6 SP on Turn 2 (the defending team's first action turn). Having said this, the SP drawback is all that bad: Nightmare Eclipse still remains popular in the meta, and her skill regularly drains 3-6 SP from defending teams. Therefore, many defending teams are already building on the assumption that they only have 6 SP to start with.
Granhildr's unique gear (Freinir)
Like most other tanks, Granhildr's unique gear gives +54% HP as its bonus stat. This is a very big boost to Granhildr's survivability.
Granhildr's costume levels do not significantly improve its function, unlike other costumes that have reduced SP cost or longer taunt duration as costume levels improve. Her costume levels only increase her energy guard by 50% per level, other than +1 to +2, which only reduces cooldown. Cooldown reduction is not all that important in PVP because a taunting tank like Granhildr will generally be the first to die, so in most games she won't get the chance to re-activate her skill regardless of whether it cools down in 5 or 7 turns.
Therefore, I would say that having Granhildr's unique gear is more important than having levels. A reliable 54% additional HP that cannot be dispelled (and amplifies the power of Energy Guards) is better than having an additional 50% HP on the Energy Guard alone.
Conclusion
I fully expected Granhildr to be released as a gamechanging unit, and the devs did not disappoint.
Why did I have such high expectations? Because for a long long time, in Brown Dust 1, Granhildr was the face of the game. She was both featured as the evergreen app icon as well as on the game load screen (see below: I had to share it!).
She even got her own official figurine:
Clearly she is beloved by the devs, so I was confident that her debut in Brown Dust 2 would not disappoint: and it didn't!
I don't think I've ever said this about a unit before, but I think Granhildr is a must have for advanced PVP play. Preemptive taunt is an insane new mechanic and basically puts her head and shoulders above all other tanks in PVP for defending teams. I would recommend at least +1 for competitive PVP players.
