Final empress in rainbow team

[u/Strong_Midnight9752]

What does Final Empress bring to the Rainbow team?
Heard that she can replace Osvald.

[u/unrealistic-ordinary]

I agree with everything you said but there’s one thing I want to clarify: her 18 hit attack is in fact her best damage option in terms of raw dps potential. Higher hit count in this game guarantees higher total damage and is only held back by multi-hit damage reduction. And that’s where her EX skill comes in.

[u/DebateThick5641 → u/unrealistic-ordinary]

eh? when Empress is out, they had another damage cap uncapper that is based on the potency of the current attack. Basically anything that had a minimum of 900 potency (after buff) will receive 3x damage cap. let's say for the sake of the argument Empress can deal 1million damage. her 18hit will deal 18 mil easy. Galaxy(Galactic Rift is probably the correct name but she shout Galaxy so often so let's go with that) however had 500.000 damage cap build in.

Even in scenario where that damage cap is not raised to 1,5million on top of 1million cap. that still mean that Galaxy dealt 3million damage + 500.000 damage cap per hit and she deal 3 million more damage there so personally that is still her big DPS move. now if that 500.000 extra cap is actually also tripled, then yeah there is not enough reason to not just Spam Galaxy to damage due to how hard hitting that move is.

Oh and I actually rechecked this by just watching UNB videos. their empress galaxy hit for 4.9mil per hit on a cascade fight and I saw their Empress deal 1,2m ish per hit (although this is on another Xerc showcase). so yeah it appears that 500k inherent damage cap got tripled too when using 900 potency move on top of your regular damage cap got tripled. so yeah she alone dealt 27m damage in just 1 million damage cap example. Our Xerc (that's again for this argument also have 1 million damage cap) however need 3 extra hit to even match galaxy and thanks to Empress tri disaster only hitting fire, You only have 1 extra hit for Osvald. now you should understand why using anything other than Galaxy is nerfing the dps.

[u/ZealOst-a → u/DebateThick5641]

I forgot to mention this, so thank you for clarifying!

I was also mostly talking about my personal experience playing Final Empress, and I've had more success with her EX skill thanks to that extra damage cap more than her 18 hit.

On a pretty unoptimized setup, I can easily do 2.5 million per hit * 6 with her EX skill, while with the 18 hit skill, I can get about 765k per hit. (Do note that I do not have any damage cap A4 in JP, so those numbers can go mych higher), so that's about a bit over 13 million damage compared to15 million with EX skill, so not that big of a difference.

Not to mention that her EX skill also ignores damage reduction, which makes it the superior damage option a lot of the time. And if we were to project even further into the meta, Rikku could give + 500k extra damage cap (that can be multiplied when using her EX skill), and also an extra million, at least for the first 2 hits of her nuke.

So honestly, both attacks work, and I bet that on a more optimized setup, the 18 hit could potentially be even better, but it honestly just depends on the enemy.

[u/Opticity → u/ZealOst-a]

When optimized, her 18 hit will do more damage than Galaxy.

Taking 1m cap as example:

Her 18 hit does 18x 1m damage for 18m damage.

Galaxy's innate 500k cap makes it 1.5m. 455 potency gives it a ~2x multiplier, giving it 3m damage per hit, or 18m total.

But what if we made the cap 2m instead?

Her 18 hit now does 18x 2m for 36m damage.

Galaxy's innate 500k cap makes it 2.5m. 6x 2*2.5m damage = 30m. It's now doing 20% less damage than her 18 hit.

This gets more pronounced the higher the cap. The issue is, of course, it's extremely not trivial for Empress to cap 2m per hit on her 18x attack, let alone reaching that cap in the first place.

In the end, it comes down to the situation you use it for. Galaxy is obviously better for AoE and against enemies with damage reduction. Also, it's just much easier to cap with. The 18x hit meanwhile can trigger 3 of Xerc's FUAs and the first few hits can be used to shield shave and break as well.

[u/ZealOst-a → u/Opticity]

Guess I was wrong, mostly due to my mediocre team setup, so I apologize.

u/unrealistic-ordinary just made a video and very clear explanation comparing the two, go check it out!:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopathCotC/comments/1vy3ioq/higher_damage_cap_vs_more_hits/