Yeah, the C. Ability of Sephiroth's new weapon is just RIDICULOUSLY good. I've been doing periodic Co-Op battles with that and having Lucia's & Glenn's +20 Event Weapons set as two of his Sub-Weapons to get max Mission Rewards super quickly.
Young Sephiroth's EASILY got the most versatility in his kit at the moment. With his Edged Wing & Training Gear he can swap over to using Ice & Shiva to be extremely effective. Not to mention that Nameless' Telluric Fury is still the only 2 ATB ability
in the entire game, and makes him extremely effective for bursting down Interrupt phases. If you swap out for Cloud's Bandaged Sword & Sephiroth's Torn Wing, you've got very effective PDEF & MDEF if you're focusing on a more defensive strategy. If you've got Aerith's Sun Umbrella being able to drop MDEF & PDEF on a single target now paired with Sephiroth using Kuja's Spirit Blade to drop the PATK & MATK of all targets at once, you've got an ability to push offense really aggressively.
It does feel like the power creep rapidly undercut the utility of Tifa & Red XIII both having Limit Breaks focused on applying a double Defense or Attack debuff respectively to single targets with charge speeds of 800 rather than all other Limit Breaks being 1800 – but they are what they are, and you can still get away with some cheeky interrupts of enemy abilities by timing them correctly.
Speaking of which, if you use an attack and the animation goes far enough but the damage doesn't land because the enemy attack interrupts it, oftentimes you'll still earn the Limit Break charge but keep all the ATB Meter. It can get annoying to deal with in Co-Op when other players trigger a Limit before your attack lands, but if you know a boss's timing fairly well, sometimes you can "throw" an attack that you know won't land just to have the Limit Break. With young Sephiroth, I've been intentionally using Flare Star late just as Black Waltz 3 is going for his "Exterminate Everything" line, that way it'll charge my Limit and can immediately use it again as soon as that's cutscene ends done to charge it again. That also ensures that the second time the animation will complete before getting frozen, and Black Waltz 3 will be debuffed when landing the hit to break that freeze, which I can then immediately follow-up by hitting him with a Limit Break.
Coincidentally for me, RNGeezus has just fed me like 5 of the Mythril Type-0 Katana for Sephiroth when he launched, so it was initially that and Aonibi that were my strongest weapons, but having two buff abilities meant he didn't do much of anything ever except continually add buffs to himself as the first would expire by the time he'd applied the second and had ATB again. So I'd started swapping out Aonibi for other weapons during the events to try and find something that'd be a solid second ability for him. Coincidentally, the R. Abilities for his Mythril Type-0 Katana are Boost HP & Boost Mag. Ability Pot. – which are exactly the same two R. Abilities that Kuja's Attire grants a +10 to, so his banner ended up being particularly good for me (as aside from at least having one 5★ of the
FFIX weapons for the others so that I could slowly upgrade them over time even if they never come back, they're not really ones that are set up for my lineup).
My main Solo team is currently Cloud focused on high Lightning & PATK (Murasame & Apocalypse + Judgment Bolt) with no cure and only Physical Materia, Aerith is focused on high MATK & Healing (Sun Umbrella & Fairy Tale + Healing Wind) with only Magic Materia, while Young Sephiroth works as a more balanced support (Mythril Type-0 Katana & Kuja's Spirit Blade + Ardent Flare) always having Cura to be a focused target healer, and whatever Materia are most useful as a backup, as his other weapon gives him Barrier, Heal, & Regen so he's unlikely to get taken out, and can serve as an anchor to keep everyone else up.
The C. Abilities I'm more curious about now are ones I haven't had a good chance to use yet like Cloud's Organics having Stun & Lucia's Black Rifle having Silence. Those ones are the things that it oftentimes seems like bosses will be immune to, and even if not while the 20%-30% chance may be larger than the 10% Crit chance, but it still feels like they're not QUITE dependable enough to use tactically. Especially the way that the EX battles have become centered on a single tactic solution with extremely tight execution (which is also why I've just been skipping them), it seems like abilities that only work 1/3rd to 1/5th of the time and cost 4 ATB per attempt just don't really have the tight impact that they'd need ...but if Stun or Silence
were any more reliable they would be INSANELY oppressive, so I'm curious how those things will end up being used since they're SUCH niche abilities at the moment you can't cover it by just equipping your who team with Silence / Stun weapons to give yourselves the 1/3 3x odds that essentially break even.
Speaking of guesses, I've got one insofar as what's coming up soon (and not really related to the above bit)
Given that the listing for
Ever Crisis on Steam dropped a little bit back and the
FFIX Crossover ends on December 7th and we now know the December schedule, and that also just so happens to be focused around the same day as The Game Awards, I am fully expecting the Steam version of the game to be a shadow dropped as something close to if not just "now available" sort of release. From a Marketing standpoint, you want the main menu & app icon to be changed back to something that's cross-promotional for the high possibility that we'll be getting the more story-centric Rebirth trailer, and I expect that they want to lead in to that with Ever Crisis given that The Game Awards is one of, if not
THE best public platform to the NA/EU audience who are far less interested in the Mobile gaming space as compared to PC.
Especially since they got the "Nibelheim Flashback" story content in, and they have an established core playerbase it's very much set up to have its best shot at gaining a more active audience and to essentially be the vessel through which they channel a lot of upcoming
Rebirth teases. I would also highly suspect that
Ever Crisis is still gonna have to contend with the face that the additional server side work and other things needed for that release will probably keep that team rather busy and it'll feel a little bit rocky for a bit still.
I've keeping my fingers crossed that that likely launch will allow
Ever Crisis to continue to be the sort of soft
FFVII Remake Project lifeline for little bits and pieces of content while the final title in the trilogy is under development, and the best test case for whether or not it can facilitate that sort of a role is over the next 3 months leading in to the release of
Rebirth.
I am quite curious how much they're going to scale back on events during Rebirth's launch since, ostensibly the
VAST majority of their playerbase will not be sinking their time into
Ever Crisis during at least the first several weeks of
Rebirth's launch. Fingers crossed that's gonna get their team a well-deserved break to catch their breaths.
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