User blog:Secondshadow/Type-Based Teams: A Bad Or Good Idea?

 There several strategies one can adopt when assembling a team in Brave Frontier. A player can create a squad for general game play (e.g., adventure mode), with a specific battle strategy in mind (e.g., sparking, critical damage), or with a specific elemental theme (e.g., mono-elemental teams, rainbow teams).

Here, I propose another category of team building: type-based teams. A few months ago, Brave Frontier introduced units with conversation buffs. This sort of buff takes or converts a percentage of one unit’s stat into a buff that is then added to another stat. For example, Balgran’s SBB converts a unit’s Atk (30% of the unit’s attack) into a Def buff. Similarly, Ruby’s UBB converts 100% of a unit’s Rec to an Atk buff. It’s easy to see that in order to maximize the effects of a conversion buff, one would want a whole team of units with a specific type, either a team with typing that underlies a boost to the stat that gets converted (e.g., in Balgran’s case, Atk gets converted so breaker typing) or receives the buff (e.g., in Balgran’s case, Def receives the buff, so guardian typing). This type-based approach to team building could be another general strategy player’s employ when selecting units for their squad, and I’m curious what other players have to say about it.

Before I really defend the use of type-based teams, I will point out some things worth thinking considering: First, the Balgran example: one could create a breaker-based team to maximum Balgran’s conversion of attack to a defense buff, but, sadly, this might not be a useful strategy: attack and defense are symbiotically related (e.g., breaker typing increases attack at the expense of defense), so it’s possible that Balgran’s SBB breaks even for a breaker-type squad relative to the lord typing. However, it still might be a powerful way to compensate for the anemic defense stats in breakers types, so lobbing together a bunch of breaker-typed units and using Balgran’s SBB could create a team that is heavy in attack but can also withstand a sizable amount of damage. On the other hand, creating a guardian-based team, and then using Balgran’s SBB might be useful in survival settings that require maximizing defense stats, such as boss battles or raid events.

A slightly more practical example might be Ruby’s UBB. If you recall, Ruby’s UBB converts 100% of a unit’s Rec into an Atk buff. Naturally, we might want to create an oracle-based team centered around Ruby’s UBB. Since there is no trade-off between Rec and Atk in oracle typing, assembling an oracle-based team could culminate in a powerful, damage-heavy squad. Alternatively, having a breaker-based team, when coupled with Ruby’s UBB, could also inflict some serious damage. However, an obvious drawback to teams is that the player will not be able to employ Ruby’s UBB that frequently. But still - it would be interesting to compare the damage output of a break- and oracle-based team using Ruby’s UBB.

Final thoughts: Conventional wisdom regarding unit typing during team building is that Anima is always better. While I mostly agree, I can’t help but feel that this may be a limited way to think about unit typing. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on whether a type-based team is good or bad, but it should make for some nice experiments in Brave Frontier. Someone should do the math.



