Table of Contents
 | Exclusive Weapon |
 |  |
| Base stats (Lv 100) | Max stats (after engraving and awakening) |
Overview
| PVE | PVP | Fiend Hunt/Guild Raid |
| B | A | A |
| Last Night | Tower of Pride | Tower of Salvation |
| S | B | B |
＋ Very high chain stack count, one of the only attackers with 6 hits
＋ Unique AOE that can be effective against the right formations
＋ Largest AOE skill for DEF shredding
＋ Having all 3 Rubia costumes allows you to cycle through skills with no downtime
－ Damage is on the low side
－ Def reduction at full potential is 45%, just shy of 50%.
－ High SP cost that does not reduce with potential
Rubia for PVE
To start with, let's be clear: Empress Rubia is not designed to be your main fire attacker for PVE. Rather, her role is more is to support your team and amplify damage.
Fire element already has many strong attackers that have high skill damage of 700% or more and high offensive base stats: e.g. Maid.Liatris, EA.Eris, LH.Loen, and NJ.Levia. On the other hand, Empress Rubia at +5 full potential deals only 427.5% including chain damage. Although the damage is decent, it is not particularly impressive compared to other fire attackers.
Empress Rubia is mainly played for 2 reasons in PVE.
Firstly, Empress Rubia's skill has 6 hits. This is one of the highest hit count skills in the game (though it's not quite as good as Celia). Each chain stack adds 10% damage to the next hit, so Rubia's hits are effective for amplifying your team's damage in a large AOE. High chain count is particularly important for Last Night, where high chain stacks are the main way of amplifying total damage. It is also great for certain fiend hunts which require high chain stacks to trigger conditional skills.
Secondly, Empress Rubia applies 45% DEF reduction. This is very useful against mobs with high DEF. Rubia's large AOE means that she can get better field coverage than any other DEF shredder. However, it's somewhat annoying that Rubia reduces DEF by only 45% (after potential upgrades) rather than 50% like most other shredders. This is somewhat consistent with her theme of being a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
Rubia for PVP
Empress Rubia's skill costs 4 SP. This makes her unviable for use in attack teams on Turn 1. Still, Empress Rubia can be very effective in PVP if used correctly.
For attack teams, Rubia's Maid costume is her best costume for Turn 1 opening. Her Maid costume costs only 2 SP and also gives her evasion, which greatly improves her survivability. If you want to play Rubia in PVP, you should ideally have a high level Maid Rubia in your costume cycle.
Where Empress Rubia fits in is as a secondary skill to Maid Rubia and/or as a defense team opener. Empress Rubia's wide AOE coverage makes it easy to catch at least 2 enemies, including those hard-to-reach enemies hiding in the middle or in unusual formations. In a meta where many attack teams are still setting their gears and formations to counter NB.Eclipse, an Empress Rubia on defense can win games just on the AOE surprise factor alone.
Although Empress Rubia's damage is on the low side for PVE, in PVE her damage is actually reasonably good at full potential with good gears. Her DEF shred provides her with relatively consistent damage and makes up for her low damage multiplier. What's more, Rubia has a high base crit rate of 20% (double the usual base crit of 10%), which allows Rubia to make up for her low damage multiplier with crits. Crit rate is much more useful in PVP than PVE, and it's not difficult for Rubia to reach a high crit rate with the right gears (especially with buffers like RH.Rou).
If you own all 3 of Rubia's costumes (base, Empress and Maid), you can cycle between the 3 with no downtime. Overall, this makes Rubia a very formidable choice in PVP, though still not quite strong enough to be top tier. Rubia also currently has an unfavorable elemental matchup against two popular frontline tanks, Glacia and Morphea.
Conclusion
Whilst Empress Rubia does have her own uses, due to her low skill damage and "jack of all trades" role, Empress Rubia is very susceptible to being overtaken by powercreep. Newly released costumes are already doing almost double the damage of Empress Rubia. She is therefore good to have, but not a great candidate for investment right now.
