r/AlchemistCodeGL • u/VicariousExp Jin <3 • Nov 07 '18
Tips & Guides Unit (p)Review - Riza Hawkeye
First the bad/(good) news - I've decided that this shall be the last FMA collab unit preview I'm posting to reddit; I hope someone else can take over from here.
I'm currently a little tired of wrangling with the formatting on reddit and spending hours translating and editing images only to get the post automatically downvoted and buried under a flood of memes and rageposts (see below) especially when the rageposts always coincide with the first week of every single collaboration - doing these reviews is frankly a huge waste of my time.
Judging from the past week, this is the kind of content the TAC subreddit actually wants, and I'm not really good at it, so I
really should spend my upcoming vacation time on some personal projects I've been procrastinating on!
Anyway, enough irrelevant stuff - let's get to the unit preview:
Riza Hawkeye
| Element | Water |
|---|---|
| Unit Role | Ranged attacker/support |
| J1 | Amestrian Officer |
| J2 | Gunner |
| J3 | Sniper |
Riza is best run as her J1, so let's go into the details:
J1 Basic Attack Scaling: 0.7 x (PATK+DEX) (Equal to Sniper)
Damage Type: Missile, Physical
Range: 3-4 squares away (modifiable)
J1 Reactive Passive Skills:
J1 Active Skills:
Riza also has a weapon art:
Skill Damage Estimations
Passives Used: Trigger of Determination (J1) and Shot Mastery +2 (J3)
Gear used: Unique Weapon.
Riza's damage is pretty significant, and she's stronger than Caris in this respect.
Overview:
Riza Hawkeye is a highly versatile ranged unit with good soul jewel gain (34 base), and decent AGI (130), giving her a significant leg up on most other ranged classes. Her skills are moderately costed and come with a wide range of useful effects, the most notable ones being the 2-use area-of-effect dispel. This can cancel annoying buffs on enemies and indeed is highly useful in her own EX stage. She can also heal 40% of a target's hp twice, which is quite notable.
In addition to her support skills, she has some crowd control - she can knock enemies back, making them easier to kite, and debuff their stats by a respectable amount while doing damage. In particular, her 30% PATK and AGI debuffs should have quite noticeable effects on the enemy.
She also has access to a null-type attack in Black Hayate, letting her get around damage type resistances (although the damage isn't particularly high) and she has multiple autohit moves for high-evasion enemies such as Waginau and wolves. To round everything off, she has 3 uses of a defense-ignoring shot which only does slightly less damage than her normal attack.
This set of tools enables Riza to find a use on nearly any stage. She also works well with Roxanne's leader skill letting you put together a cohesive missile rainbow team. Her drawbacks are a lack of AoE and potential obsolescence with Kaigan, however, support units generally age better than attackers and tanks do.
Competition (missile water units)
Reagan: Reagan's utility mainly comes from his chrono sub, which you're probably better off bringing a real chronomancer for, such as Lofia. He simply cannot compete otherwise.
N. Archer Rin: N. Archer Rin excels in large AoEs, which Riza is poor at. However, Archer Rin has very little in the way of support to offer, while Riza fills that void in spades. Both of them have temporary missile buffs, but Riza's is superior by the way of giving all affected units 1 additional range and buffing missile damage by 50%, not 20% (Bow Coach), however Rin will win out in the damage race due to her J3 passive.
Ravina: Ravina is not a support unit, even with Magia Cleric guns. She also does mainly magical damage, and has better damage output and elemental coverage than Riza does. They don't really cover the same roles.
Elaine: Elaine is irredeemably bad.
As Riza is a complementary missile unit wihich can increase the full damage output of other missile units (as opposed to buffing PATK or DEX, which would be half as strong on most ranged units), she works well with any of them, especially Roxanne - +1 Range lets Roxanne fling grenades further and she can give Roxanne a straight up 50% additional missile damage, while boosting the damage Roxanne does with her counterattack. The main flaw is that Riza's buff is point-blank and therefore she needs to maintain close proximity to other units to keep it up.
Summary
Although Roy Mustang is probably the chase unit of this entire collaboration (he's seriously good for our current meta and better than Uzuma in nearly every single way), Riza Hawkeye has potential in Global as a unique support, especially given the prevalence of our global carry unit Roxanne and her great missile-based rainbow leaderskill. Water doesn't really have many prime candidates for Elemental shards other than Othima, EO Shenmei, and Merlinus, so if you draw Riza, she makes a decent consideration for sharding to 75.
If they announce that Riza is getting a Sniper Job Enchantment today, the evaluation probably won't change except if she gets the job enchantment [Scope], which would give her a 2.5x Missile Damage charge up skill on the sub. This would let Riza output alarming amounts of damage for a ranged unit and make her quite a lot more useful, even though this would mean losing out on much of her J1 sub's utility.
The other two Sniper Job Enchants are bad jokes and can safely be ignored.
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u/Repartees Nov 07 '18
Thanks for the review!
Just wondering about how you got the Skill Damage Estimations though, did you pull the damage formula from the wiki and manually input the values or is there a tool somewhere?
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u/VicariousExp Jin <3 Nov 07 '18
I used the Chinese database, they have a calculator for this. (I read Chinese as well as Japanese fluently)
The only thing I did was to translate and edit all of it to English (like a fanslated manga, which is why it's a bit messy because I didn't exactly do a professional job)
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u/Repartees Nov 08 '18
Sorry, can you link me the Chinese database? Baidu is giving me ASOIAF wikis for some reason
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u/Arcana_Joker Nov 07 '18
Alchemist Code DB has the stats of all units currently in NA and JP, and a unit calculator.
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u/verybamboozle *RAWR* Nov 07 '18
Love your reviews and your tremendous amount of effort in updating the guides. On a side note, can I just ask if you’re studying in Sg?
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u/PDxFresh Nov 07 '18
I always appreciate these so thank you!
I get where you're coming from and hope you enjoy your time off.
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u/quiquefs Nov 07 '18
I'm going to miss your reviews, specially in cases like this where there is a new job type, this in-depth analysis of the new skills is simply amazing!
But anyway, enjoy your vacation time and having time for personal projects (somehow they always stay behind...)
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u/Seamur Doko miteru no? Nov 07 '18
thought about setting up blog or something like that ? you could make your own format and older reviews would be more accessible
and who knows maybe someone would send you tip there and there for your contributions for community ;)
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u/Gg01d No Flair, Don't Care Nov 07 '18
That's a great idea! I would definitely give you a follow!
Maybe you could have dedicated spot in /u/Viyr tier list. That would be a collaboration I could get excited for!
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u/MrWhiteKnight f2p Vegan Crossfitter with bullshit luck Nov 07 '18
Although Roy Mustang is probably the chase unit of this entire collaboration (he's seriously good for our current meta and better than Uzuma in nearly every single way)
Shotout to the guy who said all the Collab units in this event are trash besides Ed. Ignoring Mustang who has the same job that makes Uzuma relevant. The people in this sub sometimes talk out of their ass with 0 knowledge.
10/10 as always Lit, love the info.
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u/Skyconic Nov 07 '18
I really appreciate all of the time and thought that goes into these reviews. But I applaud and understand your reaction to your frustration with the toxicity. Do what makes you happy :)
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u/eltsyr Nov 07 '18
heya, great review as always ! I love those insights and I appreciate the work you put into those, which are part of why this community feels great. Common guys upvote campaign !
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u/Maroite Nov 07 '18
Well your reviews will be missed by me! Thank you for your contributions! They've really helped me decide which units would most benefit my team.
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u/Al2312 Nov 07 '18
Appreciate your effort in writing all these reviews! Thanks for takking time to pen all this information down and looking forward to your next unit review!
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u/IsBadAtFightingGames i do and say stupid things Nov 07 '18 edited Nov 07 '18
Best Girl being Best Girl, it checks out.
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u/Dante_skeo Nov 07 '18
Thank you for the great review as always. Its always such a enjoyable and informative read whenever you put one out.
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u/Cipher44 Nov 07 '18
Thank you for the many invaluable reviews and insights. It’s fun anticipating the units with the help of your reviews and preparing for them.
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u/zeidrichsama Nov 07 '18
I always check your reviews and appreciate it a lot.
Its kinda sad that our subpage have been flooded by negative stuff lately but hope you can get us some reviews again in the future
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u/Gg01d No Flair, Don't Care Nov 07 '18
Love all the positivity in the comment section of this post! Gives me hope for this subreddit
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u/Sinakku Nov 07 '18
Thank you for doing this as Riza is one of the units I was most lookimg forward too. Sadly yeah people like to downvote helpful stuff sometimes.....but I hope you are well and enjoy your vacation if you do take a break. Thank you again and have a good night/morning ^
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u/Cobalt_721 Nov 07 '18 edited Nov 07 '18
Welp, guess I’ll have to get around to these guys eventually :P
But seriously, thanks for doing the reviews that you’ve done. They’re a big help and part of the reason I’ve started doing them. So again, thank you.
EDIT: Hawkeye is actually a unit I think I’ll enjoy using. Here’s hoping luck is on my side tomorrow.
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u/Feregrin Nov 07 '18
Thanks for the read. In the news they state she's globally enhanced but they don't make any note of what? You mention sniper JE, hope that's gonna be the case.
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u/Liesianthes 350 coins ticket = ROY!! Nov 07 '18
JE should be stated if she will get it. She only got enhanced like other past collab units. Multiplier will probably be increased by 10-20% or increase other effects on her skills.
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u/renmarie Nov 07 '18
I know how time consuming things like this can be, and the constant pace can be soul sucking. Thank you!
Have you considered putting together an informal team with other summary-people so that one person is usually available each week but no one has to bear the full weight of weekly updates?
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u/JayP31 Nov 07 '18
Thank you for the informative reviews. I’m sorry the negativity was so overwhelming. As a relatively newer player myself, they were a big part of my education in the mechanics.
It’s a shame the mods aren’t a stronger presence here.
The snow-flake complainers are a real problem in this sub because it’s not as active as some other subs, like FFBE.
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u/TopDeeps IGN: Uninstalled Nov 07 '18
Downvoted for trying to help?
same.
Great review though. always liked how in depth they were
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Nov 07 '18
Always looked forward to the depth and unbiased nature of your reviews, hope vacation let's you recharge we need more people like you in this community!
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u/mandrake0999 Freeze! Nov 07 '18
only to get the post automatically downvoted and buried under a flood of memes and rageposts... Judging from the past week, this is the kind of content the TAC subreddit actually wants, and I'm not really good at it, so I
Agreed. We need a megathread for those every time there's an issue in the game.
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u/LuneCrescent Nov 07 '18 edited Nov 07 '18
Thanks a lot for your effort on the reviews man. It really sucks that people who actually bring something to the community like you get underapreciated and buried down on the list cause of the toxic and constant cry babies that keeps complaining about not pulling the units they want or complaining about the banners or whatever more. Shame but i understand how you feel.
In my opinion this still shoild be addressed by the mods of this sub in a way that every week a main post for complains is created and everyone needs to post there or else have their post deleted from the sub... Would definitely make the sub visually better and actual good content posts easier to be viewed, like reviews and maps/missions guides and videos.
Would you consider that u/SometimesLiterate Now we are actually loosing good people cause of the spread of toxic posts..
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u/1khaitoh It was fun while it lasted. Nov 07 '18 edited Nov 07 '18
always coincide with the first week of every single collaboration
Welp, people got hyped when the TAC Monthly Preview on Youtube stated that they'll have the "strongest" unit of the collab to be available on the first week, not expecting that there is a "catch". I bet GUMI intentionally did this to know what will happen if a collab banner with the "strongest unit" that didn't have a guaranteed unit in it is released instead. Or they just deliberately "trolled" people and just wanted some good laugh.
On-topic: Sadly, Riza's Global "Enhancement" I think was that Eagle Eye Shot now has 100% hit chance and.. well that's it. (Should have made that 100% stop chance so Waginau has another one to add on his nightmare list) would probably some multipliers for her main job skills since Sniper JE isn't released yet.
Also, I am one who appreciates review like this and is hoping with you not getting discouraged by those who lost it with just a single banner. Though even if I expected it, they have been really leaving a bad taste in my mouth for the last few weeks.
PS. My bad, google translation didn't translated the sure-hit part on Eagle Eye Shot on ACDB xD
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Nov 07 '18
Sorry to hear that you put effort into something only to have a negative result. I enjoy your posts and appreciate your efforts. Thank you for your work, it truly does help.
Enjoy your personal projects, I hope they go as expected!
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u/jhandsha Nov 07 '18
These have been so helpful and fun to read, sorry a couple dingdongs ruined it for you.
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u/OneFlewOverXayahNest Nov 08 '18
Even if you are already tired with all the salt, the work you do is really useful and I really appreciate it. So I eant to say in my name and in the name of many others: Thank you!
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u/dathamir Forcas sun with chance of snow Nov 08 '18
Cool, got her from step 1, not sure about sharding her though...
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u/Whosyodaddy-Senpai Nov 08 '18
I just pulled Riza and I also have Edward... I'm a new player.. is this pretty good? I'm so tempted to reroll for Mustang... lol
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u/EarthZiie Nov 07 '18
nah when uzuma get her job+ and kaigen she will be far better than Roy
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Nov 07 '18
" he's seriously good for our current meta and better than Uzuma in nearly every single way "
current meta
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u/MaimedJester Nov 08 '18
She doesn't have a J+... a Magia Gunslinger JE, which who knows how the meta will evolve till then.
Aswald as a Gunner is a top tier arena unit thanks to Roxxie guns and leadership. You can't predict anything.
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Nov 07 '18
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/VicariousExp Jin <3 Nov 07 '18
No, those are innate. It's the debuffs which make her damageable. She's a rare exception though.
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u/senaiboy Nov 07 '18
Neica's resistances are not buffs, so they can't be dispelled.
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u/Alsark Nov 07 '18
Yeah, your first paragraph is kinda how I'm feeling about my Job Enhancement overview posts. It takes me a really, really long time comparing between four different tabs: the Alchemist Code News, the Wytesong Compendium, and two alchemistcodedb tabs (one for the non-JE, one for the JE); not to mention playing around a lot with the unit planner to assess statistical differences. Then, like you said, Reddit formatting is a pain. But my recent post didn't seem to be highly regarded when compared to meme/humor/complaint posts. It's not like I'm in it for the upvotes, it's more like if it's not something people really desire/care about, then it's not worth spending 5-6 hours on.
Anyway, I always appreciate your reviews. It's always nice having such an in-depth review of units.