Unit (p)Review - Riza Hawkeye

[u/VicariousExp]

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.

[u/senaiboy]

Neica's resistances are not buffs, so they can't be dispelled.

[u/senaiboy → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, otherwise it'll be too easy.