User blog:Linathan/Unit Spotlight: Umbra Halcyon Magress

Summary
“WHAT’S BEHIND THAT HELMET?!” I hear from everyone. People have always wondered what Magress looked like as a… errr… not knight? When you read Magress’ 7* lore, it says that he took off his armor and accepted his fate against the knight who stood before him, also known as Ark. Magress was coined as a true hero back in the day, even though it was thought that he was evil and ruthless.

Guess what? He is evil and ruthless! Thank god he died before anything happened, right? Well, I worded that wrong. Magress is very cool-looking and he has done his fair share in Grand Gaia to fight against the gods. We’ve longed for him to become a mitigator since mitigation became a must in hard content. You can make Magress your mitigator… even as a F2P!

Enough royal talk. Let’s put this mitigation to good use!

Leader Skill
Score: 9/10

Magress is one of the more unique leads of the Six Heroes batch, similar to Lance’s case with his critical null. Magress serves as the elemental variant compared to Lance, which can work well with Lance and other leads that provide crit null.

Magress also carries the 100% Atk boost and the 30% HP boost to all units along with the additional 50% Atk boost and 30% HP boost to Dark units, which is similar to what’s provided by the other heroes in the batch. Very solid bonuses, especially since these are the strongest innate boosts in the game. They only apply to Dark units in this case, but that’s more the reason why the 100% Atk and 30% HP boosts are there for all other units to make this Leader Skill more usable.

Unlike Lance, Magress provides an 8 BC fill upon dealing 5000 damage on that turn rather than taking 5000 damage. This doesn’t add much of a significant change to BB gauge momentum if your squad already has a lot of it, but for those that lack momentum will appreciate this a lot. It’s less effective than BB-on-Spark, but there’s always the friend lead to take advantage of in conjunction to this.

Brave Burst
Score: 8/10

Magress's BB utilizes a 350% damage modifier, which is lower the average 370% seen on most Omni units. This BB will still be very high damage thanks to Magress’s damage modifier being higher than the standard norm for BB damage modifiers: 280%.

Magress provides a 160% Def buff, which is one of the best Def buffs in the game. Though, with the number of Def buffs that are in the game, there will be a bit of clashing involved, especially if you’re using some of the meta units in the game including Azurai and Sirius. However, with little differences in buffs, stat buff clashing isn’t much of an issue with these units.

Magress also provides the additional mitigation when guarding. This can come in handy when enduring certain ultimate attacks that would’ve wiped your squad if no guarding was present. It’s not a significant boost, but it works nonetheless. Its usage doesn’t qualify it to become essential, however.

Super Brave Burst
Score: 9/10

Magress’s SBB utilizes a 560% damage modifier, which is lower the average 580% seen on most Omni units. This SBB will still be very high damage thanks to Magress’s damage modifier being higher than the standard norm for SBB damage modifiers: 500%.

Same thing as the BB, but with some additions. This involves the 3-6% HP drain, which comes in very handy in places where HC drop resistance is highly prevalent and Colosseum. Squads with a lot of damage utility can utilize this to the fullest.

Magress also provides a 75% Dark elemental damage buff, which is cool. It’s not overly amazing since it’s just limited to one element and elemental buffs do not work.

Ultimate Brave Burst
Score: 9/10

Magress's UBB utilizes the average 1500% damage modifier seen on most Omni units. This UBB will still be very high damage thanks to Magress’s damage modifier being higher than the standard norm for UBB damage modifiers: 1000%.

There’s a lot to talk about when Magress holds probably the most amount of defensive utility on his UBB out of all of the units in the game.

Magress was the first unit to utilize 100% mitigation and he’s back with it. These effects are relatively situational as they aren’t used too often due to the short buff duration. This can be enhanced to 2 turns rather than 1 turn with the SP option, but being able to utilize longer duration buffs of UBB mitigation secures the squad in a much safer spot due to the easy recovery of the little damage taken.

Magress adds on the 300% Def buff, which is tremendous. These Def may not serve much purpose in terms of damage reduction, but in terms of conversion stats, this 300% Def buff can convert to extremely high parameters. Alice is a very good example to combo with Magress’s UBB Def buffs.

Magress also provides an additional 30% mitigation when guarding, which really only serves significance for 2 turns. If the UBB damage mitigation SP option is taken, this gets reduced to 1 turn. Overall, this buff doesn’t provide much difference to the squad performance since the 100% mitigation buff takes precedence over the guarding buff anyway.

Extra Skill
Score: 9/10

Magress receives a huge jump in stats with his Extra Skill active. In total, Magress receives a 30% Atk and Rec boost, which aren’t top-notch but still a significant boost, and a 60% HP and Def boost, which is still very solid, especially thanks to the HP boost.

On top of that, Magress gets ignore-Def added onto attacks, which can come in handy in certain situations where Def buffs and high Def parameters become problems. Magress also gets crit null to save himself from some of the most deadly RNG factors in the game.

Arena
Score: 9/10

Magress has a 48 BC normal attack Drop Check, which is a pretty high Drop Check to use in the game. Type 2 is not too shabby thanks to its high chance of proccing BB overall.

Magress is quite known to be an offensive powerhouse lead while being aided by four Mifunes. Magress provides the most stat parameter boosts in the game for Dark units, namely the 150% Atk boost and the 60% HP boost. Utilizing Mifune will jack up his already high Atk to even higher parameters.

Magress can also mitigate damage taken, which is quite useful against enemy defense squads that tend to deal lower damage than their offensive counterparts.

Stats
Score: 9/10

High HP, Atk, and Def stats. However, the Rec is very lacking.

In terms of typing, my type preference for Magress is…

Anima > Guardian > Lord > Breaker > Oracle

Usefulness
Score: 9/10.

Magress still has quite a lot of benefits to the squad, especially considering the fact that he is the first mitigator in the game to ever become easily obtainable at any point of the game. Players have wondered how Magress would have been if he was a mitigator and his Omni form was able to achieve that.

There are better options than Magress, however, including Juno-Seto, Krantz, Stein, etc. Magress provides Def buffs, which are already covered by a lot of the tri-buffers in the game, such as Sirius, Daze, Azurai, etc. Essentially, Magress’s only real role in hard content is being a mitigator. Compared to other mitigators, Magress only seems to fulfill very minimal in terms of the amount of buffs provided.

However, this does not mean that Magress is a bad unit. Magress carries the tankiness and amazing stats granted by the Leomurg and can hold out very well for most or all of the content in the game.

SP Enhancements
Score: 8/10

See SP Enhancement Options: Umbra Halcyon Magress

Magress has achieved his dream of becoming a mitigator. It made no sense as to why he wasn’t a mitigator as a 7*. With these SP options, Magress being a mitigator is an absolute must to take along.

However, because 2-turn mitigation is also useful, Magress is left with very few options, especially with the fact that the options provided are very expensive and inefficient. There’s only so much you can take with the very little SP leftover over just by giving Magress 2-turn mitigation.

Sphere Recommendations

 * Leomurg & Schism Orb
 * Leomurg & Sacred Crystal
 * Leomurg & Projection Device

Conclusion
Total Score: 8.8/10

Gengar is one of the coolest Pokemon ever. Just saying. Which team? TEAM VALOR! TEAM MYSTIC! TEAM INSTINCT!

Comment below on what you think of Magress! Happy to see Magress as a mitigator? Do you still use Magress in this current meta? Leave a comment below!

Check out my list of analyses in [http://bravefrontierglobal.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Linathan/Spotlights:_Table_of_Contents! Spotlights: Table of Contents!]

Check out my other Unit Spotlights:
 * Algor Halcyon Selena
 * Empyrean Juno-Seto
 * Lightning Menace Silas
 * Lux Halcyon Atro