Tip for her SBA: You actually can use the ares combo after it without a skill. If you use here combo A immediately, you can start the combo from that before Ares fades away.
Man, i like this channel so much, from the days of Xenoblade 2 through Xenoblade 3 and now Granblue, the guides are always top quality from info to explanation and showcases. All the love!
One thing to note about Azure Sword is that the gauge it provides is separate from your normal Ares gauge. You actually keep some of the progress on your original Ares gauge if you use Azure Sword. Great guide! Would love to see one on the Captain
9:33 to clarify about Katalina's other unique sigil "Guardian's Honor" The description is very confusing. It's NOT 5% cool down rate while Ares is up; it's 5% cool down reduction every time you summon Ares, a.k.a. the first significant move you do when your meter is full. (Think Vane's unique sigil, but instead of finisher hits it's Ares being summoned.) There ARE ways to abuse this (Azure Sword -> XY spam), but the current DPS meta for Katalina is to keep Ares out for as long as possible, making the sigil effectively useless.
There’s my girl!!! While some say she’s not that flashy, I love how simple and balanced Katalina is as a character. She was so fun during the story and love coming back to her during endgame. Thank you Enel!
The gods have heard my pleas. This is the one I have been waiting for. Will watch it later tonight and thanks as always for the great content :) hope you and everyone watching is already itching for the livestream on this saturday / the Lucilius raid.
X > Y > Enchanted Lands/Winter's Rain dodge cancel Combo Finisher will always be the fastest way to fill the Ares Gauge in a vacuum but bosses can and will make it hard to land that due to its short effective range. For those bosses who especially like to move around such as Gallanza, Guardian's Honor actually becomes very useful as its effect doesn't make your skills cool down faster passively while Ares is out but instead instantly reduces all skills currently on cooldown by 5% of their max cooldown. Using Azure Sword guarantees that Ares will return for 15 seconds after using it, which allows you to spam your X > Y combo to resummon Ares over and over and reduce all of your cooldowns by a significant amount via Guardian's Honor even without being able to hit a target, all while using a combo that has good range and decent lunge for her to stick to a mobile target better. If you do absolutely nothing but spam the X Y combo without getting hit, Katalina can refund up to 70% of Azure Sword's cooldown during the duration of its buff solely via Guardian's Honor, where having Cascade and Quick Cooldown makes the rest of Azure Sword's cooldown pass in a single Ares Pactstrike (APS) combo, allowing for as little as 5 seconds of downtime between Azure Sword casts in a vacuum. This means in practice, you can reliably spam all your cooldowns except for Sacred Winds immediately and refund around half of their cooldowns before Azure Sword's buff runs out and you have to shift back to regular APS loops. As nice as it all sounds, you do have to give up ~30% of your damage output against a still target to get these cooldowns back so fast. But, in practice, if the boss is leaping and dashing out of range constantly, Katalina will often lose more damage from forced downtime than from the extended effective range and cooldown reduction from the X Y combo, so it is actually a worthy tradeoff against Gallanza or Managarmr. Probably the most important use of this method is it allows Katalina to provide 100% uptime on Stout Heart and +15% DEF for the entire party regardless of whether she can hit a target or not, which is of course insanity when you realize that's effectively a permanent party-wide 40.5% mitigation that can be cast the first time within 3 seconds of starting a fight (Stout Heart's 30% mitigation with +15% DEF: 0.7 * 0.85 = 0.595x damage taken, not to mention Katalina's natural 50% DEF bonus from Ares and the Steel Nerves trait stacking with these) My example of using this in practice was against Gallanza and Maglielle, where I run Steel Nerves and Crabvestment Returns for a total of ~81% damage mitigation any time I have both Emerald Shield and a full Ares gauge, and my skills are Azure Sword, Frozen Blade, Emerald Shield, and Sacred Winds. I am able to achieve 100% Ares uptime and some 90-100% uptime for the entire fight, including during their Bloodthirsty phases. As another testament to Guardian's Honor at least having a niche use, I was once able to maintain ~90% Emerald Shield uptime and also apply Sacred Winds' full Glaciate duration to one boss 4 times in a single run where the in-game elapsed time read 3:29 at the end. Unrelated to Guardian's Honor, Katalina is actually able to retain Ares without skills if you intentionally drop APS any time before the downward dive of the Combo Finisher and carefully time the X Y combo to start APS over. I personally find the 5th Y input of APS to be the most comfortable and effective spot to restart the combo in case I don't have any damaging skills at the ready, as the second hit of APS can't chain into itself and the sixth hit where Katalina jumps up makes for quite a lot of downtime when you're already giving up damage to retain Ares. Additionally, after an SBA with Ares, you can keep her on the field without skills by either carefully timing an X Y combo after the SBA or mashing jump (or launch) and using aerial Y as soon as possible For what it's worth, my mitigation calculation comes from Stout Heart's 30% mitigation x (+15% DEF from Emerald Shield + 50% DEF from Ares) x Steel Nerves' -15% damage taken x Crabvestment Returns' 10% Damage Cut: 0.7 * 0.35 * 0.85 * 0.9 = 0.187425x damage taken aka 81.2575% total mitigation
Simple and clean, as always. The only bonus to add on your guide is showing the input for the combo when it's not extremely intuitive ( like Katarina's rotation, Chalot 's cancel, etc)
You can do a similar thing with Id and Godmight. You can do his finisher and any of his skills right after. I use his skill that refils the gauge right after so I can extend Godmight
Quick Tip: If you add in even a level 15 Firm stance. When the bosses activate their orverdrive and try to push you away it will not work and ares will still remain active.
U can actually maintain ares without skills! Simply not finish ares pactstrike combo and do a combo A, theres timing involved (look up ares drop tech). Dropping ares combo at input 3(YYY horizontal slash) or 6(YYYYYY katalina jumps up) is the easiest to pull off.
I was trying Katalina when you were making that video and ended up in it 😂 Didn't know you could chain a skill after the overdrive pushback to keep Ares. I was running Firm Stance because that feel like the most annoying way to lose Ares. 😅
Katalina is also a good peeling AI partner for most of the game, choose 4 abitilies among the heal, the icy AOE, the stun powered strike, the invicibility and the defense buff. Add some aggro sigils and you'll be safe. This build lacks damage in the last fight of the game where dps check is too important but as you get better with your own character and finish building your team for these late game fights you can swap to a more offensive build and you'll be just fine. edit : I hope Magic gets whatever they were farming for
Oh sick its a guide for my main. And it's interesting that the need of a healer gets lower and lower the further in you go because of a sigil. Is this a Xenoblade 2 reference? (: In all seriousness though, nice guide
Would be cool if in the gameplay part of the video you would let the game volume go higher. I think offering combat tips during the gameplay section is more valuable than continuous commentary over an average run.
She feels so clunky without Ares but feels so good when it's up. Pretty sure that we're playing her differently from what the devs intended since keeping Ares up contradicts her cooldown sigil and the second benefit of Azure Sword. If they fix how we play her, hopefully she'll get some major buffs to her core kit to make up for it
Highly Recommend you ass Firm Stance to this build. The Overdrive knockback will knock you out of Ares and you can’t perfect dodge or block it because that also sends Ares away. Firm Stance prevents that knockback meaning potential 100% Ares uptime
I loved Katalina since the demo. Haven't used her as much since I entered endgame. Thanks again for the help, you're doing tremendous work with all these guides.
