Ice Dragon's Analysis Column: Gwendolyn

[Ice Dragon]

We're out of beta!

In light of the two armor-only quests we've gotten recently, I've been looking into effective builds for the game's armored units. Due to their high base stat total, the armored units are powerful with the right skills, but need those skills to really shine.

In the end, what I came up with was basically "the more like Hector you can be, the better," as Quick Riposte and Distant Counter mitigate the armored units' low Spd and weakness to mages, respectively. In the end, the following build is what I came up with as ideal for both Gwendolyn and Sheena.

Draug has a slightly different build due to getting better performance off of the sword-exclusive Wo Dao+ than a Killing Edge+, therefore using Moonbow instead of Bonfire to have the same cooldown, and Effie's absurdly high base Atk gives her more liberties in her choice of weapon and skills. Because Hector comes with Quick Riposte as an innate skill on Armads, he is the only armored unit I would actually recommend using Wings of Mercy, though Vantage is still usually a better choice.

 

As the skill inheritance meta hasn't settled down yet, I'm going to stick with match-ups against opponents with vanilla skills, though I will mention some inherited skills occasionally.

 

Gwendolyn

Armored, Blue Lance
Level 40 Stats:  49 / 30 / 24 / 38 / 28 (Total: 169)
Positive Nature: +3 / +3 / +4 / +3 / +3
Negative Nature: -3 / -4 / -3 / -3 / -4

Default Skills

• Weapon: Killer Lance+
• Assist: (none)
• Special: Escutcheon
• Passive A: (none)
• Passive B: Drag Back
• Passive C: Hone Armor

Overview

• Gwendolyn ties with Draug and Sheena for the highest base stat total in the game.
• Gwendolyn has high HP and Def, as is typical of armored units. Her Res is the second highest among armored units, and her Def is the second highest in the game.
• Gwendolyn has low Atk, tied with Draug and Sheena for the lowest among armored units. A strong weapon or offensive special skill are recommended to compensate.
• Gwendolyn's Killer Lance+ lowers Escutcheon's cooldown to 1, guaranteeing that it will activate often. Escutcheon, however, is made less effective by her already high Def.
• As an armored unit, Gwendolyn has an inconvenient movement range of 1 square, meaning she cannot move through other units.
• Gwendolyn cannot be pulled as a natural 5-star character. This makes it easier to hunt for a good nature and easier for her to gain SP to learn inherited skills, but also requires the high promotion cost to reach 5-star rarity.

Full Armor Team Build

Stats:  49 / 44 / 21 / 38 / 28 (Total: 180)

• Nature: +Atk, -Spd
• Weapon: Killer Lance+
• Assist: Swap / Pivot
• Special: Bonfire
• Passive A: Distant Counter
• Passive B: Quick Riposte 3
• Passive C: Ward Armor / Goad Armor / Hone Armor / Fortify Armor

Bonfire is used as Gwendolyn's special skill to patch up her weaker offenses. With her unboosted 38 Def, Bonfire adds a massive 19 damage to her attack when it activates and has good synergy with Ward Armor and Fortify Armor buffs from other team members. Killer Lance+ lowers Bonfire's cooldown to 2, guaranteeing Bonfire will activate on her follow-up attack on enemy phase. Quick Riposte 3 guarantees that she will be able to perform a follow-up attack despite her low Spd. Distant Counter is required to hit enemy ranged units with her counterattack.

Ward Armor and Goad Armor are preferred in the passive C skill slot due to their 2-square range, but Hone Armor and Fortify Armor can also be used. Defensive buffs help mitigate a full armor team's weakness to magic while also slightly boosting the damage of armored allies' Bonfire activations, whereas offensive buffs increase the number of opponents team members can eliminate in one round of combat.

Swap and Pivot are the recommended assist skills for armored units to compensate for their reduced movement range. Swap has the benefit of always being usable regardless of terrain, but Pivot grants greater mobility.

Against Red

This set kills every vanilla red unit in the game on enemy phase except Draug, +Def Eldigan, Hana, Hinata, all of whom are left with single-digit HP. Hana's Armorslayer+ kills Gwendolyn before she can land her follow-up attack to kill Hana. With the exception of Hana, =Def Karel, and +Atk Caeda, no sword-user is capable of breaking Gwendolyn's Quick Riposte 3 in one round of combat. +Atk Tharja with boosts from Eirika leave Gwendolyn with 11 HP.

With one stack of Ward Armor, Gwendolyn survives Hana and kills her on the follow-up attack. The extra damage dealt by Bonfire due to Ward Armor will also allow her to kill Eldigan and any Draug that isn't +Def. Among sword-users, only Hana and +Atk Caeda are capable of breaking Gwendolyn's Quick Riposte 3, and +Atk Tharja with boosts from Eirika leaves Gwendolyn with a less worrisome 19 HP.

Against Blue

Gwendolyn's has mixed match-ups against lance-users. In particular, Est, +Atk Florina, and Oboro are capable of one-round killing Gwendolyn due to Heavy Spear+, but Florina and any Oboro that isn't +Atk will fail to do so with one stack of Ward Armor. Catria, +Spd Ephraim, and +Atk Shanna are otherwise the only lance-users that can bring Gwendolyn below 50% health in one round.

Unboosted +Atk Linde will leave Gwendolyn with 1 HP after one round of combat, but dies on Gwendolyn's follow-up attack. Other than Linde, Reinhardt, +Atk Robin (M), and Ursula are the only units that can bring Gwendolyn below 50% health in one round. No unboosted blue mage is capable of surviving one round of combat against Gwendolyn. Unlike Effie, unboosted Reinhardt with Death Blow 3 cannot kill Gwendolyn in one round and leaves her with 5 HP instead.

Nowi and Corrin (F) will both survive one round of combat against Gwendolyn, but can be killed on player phase if they are not +Def. With one stack of Ward Armor, Gwendolyn deals enough damage from Bonfire to kill even the +Def variants on player phase.

Against Green

Gwendolyn has predictably poor match-ups against green, but there are a few that she can win, notably any Camilla or Raven that isn't +Atk and Anna. However, she can at least survive one round of combat against most green units that are not equipped with a Hammer+ or magic.

Against Colorless

The only vanilla colorless units that survive a round of combat against Gwendolyn are +Def Gordin with 6 HP and +Def Saizo with 1 HP. +Atk Jaffar deals the most damage to her at 47%, followed by +Atk Takumi and +Atk Jeorge at 45%.

Usage Tips

Gwendolyn is significantly more powerful on enemy phase than player phase due to Quick Riposte 3 and the guaranteed activation of Bonfire. While attacking on player phase can be done, it is usually better to let the opponent initiate combat to take only one round of damage from the opponent instead of two.

Because Gwendolyn relies heavily on Bonfire to deal damage, avoid fighting enemies with Lancebreaker, which will prevent her from performing a follow-up attack unless the opponent is deathly slow.

Team Options

This build is specifically designed to be used with a team of four armored units. It is highly advised to give all four members an armor-specific buff as their passive C skill and to keep the entire team together to maintain those buffs, making copious use of Swap and Pivot to rearrange your units so that the opponent is forced to attack at disadvantage.

Other Options

For non-arena play, Distant Counter is not necessary as long as you avoid battles involving enemy mages. Instead of Distant Counter, Death Blow (49 / 44 [50] / 21 / 38 / 28) can be used to boost Gwendolyn's damage on player phase, or Defiant skills can be used to boost her offenses or defenses when low on health. Svalinn Shield is also a good choice for a passive A skill due to the high usage of armor-effective weapons by enemies in the Training Tower.

A budget version of this build for non-arena play can remove the passive A skill entirely and use Quick Riposte 2 instead of Quick Riposte 3. This way, the only skills that need to be inherited are Bonfire, the assist skill, and Quick Riposte 2.

A Silver Lance+ and Moonbow can be used with the same effect, dealing more damage against high-Def enemies, but less damage against low-Def enemies. The Silver Lance+ has one notable benefit of landing one-hit kills against enemies with very low Def, allowing Gwendolyn to avoid taking a second hit of damage.

Ardent Sacrifice or Reciprocal Aid can be used for the assist skill if a repositioning skill is not needed. This can help keep other team members healthy once there are no more enemies that Gwendolyn is needed to handle or keep Gwendolyn healthy in the case of Reciprocal Aid.

When not in a full armor team, a different passive C skill can be used and depends on the composition of the team.

Using a +Res nature helps Gwendolyn better receive damage from mages, but at the cost of several one-round kills, and a similar effect can be achieved by stacking another Ward Armor buff.

Edited March 29, 2017 by Ice Dragon

[Vaximillian]

24 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Against Blue

… +Atk Thany …

She's officially Shanna in English. Can't judge on anything else, as I'm not that good at the game. I now see that Gwendy can be a monster!

[Ice Dragon]

4 minutes ago, Vaximillian said:

She's officially Shanna in English.

Ugh. The English localization changes are too hard to remember.

[Korath88]

Excellent build as usual, though one thing worth noting is that quick riposte 3 and distant counter are 5* exclusive skills, which means that on top of needing 20k feathers to promote Gwendolyn, you also need to sacrifice 2 other 5*s, including a Hector. Not exactly cost efficient.

Edited March 29, 2017 by Korath88

[Silith13]

Gwendolyn has really good armour and the highest base stats of all characters?

It's like the complete opposite from her FE:6 performance.

[Ice Dragon]

2 minutes ago, Korath88 said:

Excellent build as usual, though one thing worth noting is that quick riposte 3 and distant counter are 5* exclusive skills, which means that on top of needing 20k feathers to promote Gwendolyn, you also need to sacrifice 2 other 5*s, including a Hector. Not exactly cost efficient.

Yep. I have a budget version of the build for PvE play in the Other Options section which uses easier-to-get skills (no Distant Counter because it's trivial to reset the Training Tower for a no-mages match-up). The main build is meant to be fully optimized as much as possible.

[Silith13]

Considering her Speed is piss poor anyways would a +Atk/-Spd set with the Brave Lance work? Or is her attack power too low?

[Ice Dragon]

21 minutes ago, Silith13 said:

Considering her Speed is piss poor anyways would a +Atk/-Spd set with the Brave Lance work? Or is her attack power too low?

You lose a few one-round kills here and there on enemy phase and gain one-round kills on about half of the red units in the game on player phase. Performance against green units is more notably worse, but you shouldn't be squaring off against them in the first place for the most part.

It's definitely a viable choice if you want to play more offensively, but you definitely want at least one Goad/Hone Armor buff (preferably two) to nab a decent chunk more of the game's red units since most of them are surviving only by the skin of their teeth.

The main drawback of playing more offensively on player phase is that you are significantly hampered by your movement range. If that's your play style, though, you can surely make it work, at least with my preliminary calcs.

I think I'll run some more calcs for a Brave Lance+ build sometime later today and see just how much you can get away with. I'd imagine stacking Goad Armor is the way to go on that, as expensive as that ends up being (since Goad Armor is currently only obtainable from Hector).

Edited March 29, 2017 by Ice Dragon

[Silith13]

You are right. I don't like Brave weapons on units that actually want their speed or have too little movement to make good use for it.

I think it's great on a Hinata or Frederick probably.

[BANRYU]

Great work, dude. Sorry to/if I sound like a broken record here, but have you thought about putting this build on the FEH Wiki now that they have a section for it? 

EDIT: Also, a team question: Given that we have so few armor units, I think its inevitable that the question of team composition comes up. Which 4/5 armor units do you use, and will Sheena ever be worth using with the other four being understandably much better (from what I know)? or is the ideal 'Team Armor' always going to consist of Hector, Effie, Gwendy, and Draug (replaced by Zephiel eventually when he comes out, presumably)

Edited March 29, 2017 by BANRYU

[Ice Dragon]

7 minutes ago, BANRYU said:

Great work, dude. Sorry to/if I sound like a broken record here, but have you thought about putting this build on the FEH Wiki now that they have a section for it? 

Ice Dragon is lazy and lives in this forum and would very much like to not leave the comfort of this forum where Ice Dragon can stare at his avatar and badge all day.

 

8 minutes ago, BANRYU said:

EDIT: Also, a team question: Given that we have so few armor units, I think its inevitable that the question of team composition comes up. Which 4/5 armor units do you use, and will Sheena ever be worth using with the other four being understandably much better (from what I know)? or is the ideal 'Team Armor' always going to consist of Hector, Effie, Gwendy, and Draug (replaced by Zephiel eventually when he comes out, presumably)

It's going to depend on the meta more than anything else. In the currently red-dominated arena meta, having 2 blue armors is superior to any other combination. However, I will actually argue that Sheena is probably a better green armor than Hector on an offense team due to her very high Res allowing her to take repeated hits from powerful blue mages better than Hector can. The only thing holding Sheena back is how expensive it is to have her inherit the skills needed to optimize her build compared to Hector who already has most of what he needs out of the box.

Outside of the arena, the best composition is obviously the one that best counters the known enemy composition.

[BANRYU]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

Ice Dragon is lazy and lives in this forum and would very much like to not leave the comfort of this forum where Ice Dragon can stare at his avatar and badge all day.

Righto. Well, until the day when Serenes finds a way to make our builds and analyses accessible for the sake of reference and ease of viewing, the wiki appears to be the best way to do that for now.

Any objections if I put your build(s) up in there myself? (with appropriate credit given, ofc)

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

It's going to depend on the meta more than anything else. In the currently red-dominated arena meta, having 2 blue armors is superior to any other combination. However, I will actually argue that Sheena is probably a better green armor than Hector on an offense team due to her very high Res allowing her to take repeated hits from powerful blue mages better than Hector can. The only thing holding Sheena back is how expensive it is to have her inherit the skills needed to optimize her build compared to Hector who already has most of what he needs out of the box.

Outside of the arena, the best composition is obviously the one that best counters the known enemy composition.

Mm. I was thinking of how it's hard for her to do much damage, but maybe the right weapon would change that. It's certainly nice for Gwendy that she can afford to keep her default weapon and be pretty good with it as well.

And yeah, needless to say I was referring to Arena, ofc otherwise it depends on what you're up against, etc. etc. agreed

Edited March 29, 2017 by BANRYU

[Ice Dragon]

3 minutes ago, BANRYU said:

Righto. Well, until the day when Serenes finds a way to make our builds and analyses easily accessible for the sake of reference, the wiki appears to be the best way to do that for now.

Any objections if I put your build(s) up in there myself? (with appropriate credit given, ofc)

Go on ahead.

 

3 minutes ago, BANRYU said:

Mm. I was thinking of how it's hard for her to do much damage, but maybe the right weapon would change that. It's certainly nice for Gwendy that she can afford to keep her default weapon and be pretty good with it as well.

And yeah, needless to say I was referring to Arena, ofc otherwise it depends on what you're up against, etc. etc. agreed

After running calculations, it turned out that the best way to make Gwendolyn deal more damage was to add a hard-hitting special skill and have it land as often as possible. Comparing the Silver Lance+ with Moonbow against the Killer Lance+ with Bonfire, the two were actually quite similar in performance trading a few kills here for a few elsewhere.

Bonfire, however, scaled up nicely with Ward Armor, dealing 2 more damage for each stack of Ward Armor, and I ended up picking it over the Silver Lance+ with Moonbow. It was just rather convenient that her default weapon (and Sheema's, who runs the exact same build) ended up being as optimal as it was.

[Hawk King]

It's funny. I've been thinking to myself how much better Gwendy is than she has been getting credit for, and you go and post this.

Great work and great research as usual.

What is your opinion on Wary Fighter 3 on Gwendy? Or is that only prefered for Effie because of her much higher Atk. Or whould you run Quick Riposte 3 on Effie too?

[Ice Dragon]

1 minute ago, Hawk King said:

What is your opinion on Wary Fighter 3 on Gwendy? Or is that only prefered for Effie because of her much higher Atk. Or whould you run Quick Riposte 3 on Effie too?

Wary Fighter works better on an arena defense team to prevent your unit from dying in one round and benefits greatly from having Distant Counter and either high Atk to deal heavy damage on the counterattack or high mixed bulk to prevent Wary Fighter from breaking in one round of combat (thus allowing you to charge up a heavy-hitting special like Ignis or Dragon Fang). Effie has the best Atk, and Sheena has the best mixed bulk, making them the best users of Wary Fighter. With a lot of Ward Armor stacking, you can make a very frustrating team to fight, forcing your opponent to take two counterattacks before Wary Fighter is finally broken.

On an arena offense team, Quick Riposte is definitely superior for all of the armors (except Hector who obviously already has it built into his weapon) because you have better control over which of your units are attacked and can bait match-ups in your favor where you have no risk of dying in one round of combat.

[BANRYU]

Yo okay I did the thing. Boom and boom.

I'll have to borrow that template for my future builds/analyses and maybe rework my previous ones into that format. I was admittedly a bit more freeform and disorganized with mine. 

Might kinda copypasta for Sheena without the matchups (can't be bothered with that rn) since you mentioned she runs more or less the same build. 

Edited March 30, 2017 by BANRYU