Epic Seven’s first collaboration event has just launched, featuring Arc System Works fighting game series Guilty Gear. The collaboration will span over a month, with limited collaboration heroes and a side story.
During the Collaboration, players will be able to obtain Sol Badguy from the Collaboration Side Story, Baiken from the Limited Summon pool, and Dizzy who will be released later during the collaboration period.
▍Limited Hero Baiken
Baiken is an earth thief with a new “Detonate” mechanic that detonates all damage-over-time debuffs on the target, dealing all the damage the debuff will do over time in a single burst.
■ Skills
S1: Deal damage to a single target with a 45% Bleed Chance (Max: 70%) crit hits reduces skill cooldowns by one. Similar to Karin’s S1 but with a chance to inflict bleed
S2: Deal damage to a single target with a 55% Bleed Change (Max: 85%) crit hits grants an extra turn. Again, similar to Karin, but with
S3 Deal damage to a single target and detonate all bleed stacks. The detonate literally detonates all stacks of bleed on the target, dealing all the damage the DoT (damage over time) effects as additional damage in one single burst. A crit hit will raise all allies’ combat readiness (CR) by 15% (Max: 25%)
▍Builds
The main stats you want to focus on with Baiken is Crit Chance %, Effectiveness, and Attack. Without a high crit chance, you won’t be benefitting from her skills’ crit bonus effects. Effectiveness and Attack both go into the overall damage output. without any bleed stacks, Baiken’s S3 doesn’t do a lot of damage, the bulk of the damage comes from detonating bleed stacks. Hence, you need at least 50% effectiveness on her. Bleed scales with the caster’s attack, so having a high attack will increase the detonate damage.
Gear Sets PvE:
Attack x4 + Crit Chance x2
Artifact: Dust Devil (DD) / Rhianna & Luciella (R&L)
Unlike PvP, a lot of the PvE content is built around a short number of turns. Whilst Torn Sleeve is a great artifact designed specifically for Baiken, ultimately you can benefit more from DD and R&L. You’ll want to get your Crit Chance to be as high as possible since all of Baiken’s skills gain additional effects upon crit hits. Next, you’ll want to focus on Attack and Effectiveness. Having a high base attack will mean you hit harder and your bleed stacks deal more damage per turn. This, in turn, means more damage when your S3 detonates. Effectiveness should be somewhere around 50% to guarantee a staple chance to land bleed on your targets.
For your right-hand main-stats go Crit Chance % (Necklace), Attack % (Ring), and Attack % /Speed (Boots). Speed does depend on the rest of your team. If you’re planning on having Biaken as the main DPS, then you would want to go for full attack main stats on your items so your other heroes can apply all the buffs and debuffs before Baiken uses her skills. Otherwise, having speed boots will mean more frequent turns for your S1 to reduce skill CD.
Dust Devil or R&L
Whilst R&L provides you with more control, Baiken’s skill CD is still too long to make the most out of R&L. DD also gives an additional CD reduction when activated, whereas R&L may use S2 or S3 which might mess up your combo (on auto). If you’re clearing content that requires more manual control (e.g. PvP & Abyss) then R&L may give you more benefits.
Gear Set PvP:
Speed x4 + Crit Chance x2
Artifact: Torn Sleeve
Used in typical speed PvP teams. You want either 100% crit chance or close to 100% to get the extra turn from S2 and the team CR boost from S3. The focus in PvP will be to have more speed over more damage as her role is not to purely deal damage but to soften up enemy units and boost your team’s CR.
Skill Upgrade Priority
S2 (until Max Bleed Chance) > S3 (Until Max CR boost) > S2 & S3 full upgrade (not recommended, save Molagora and catalysts for other heroes)
▍Overall Thoughts:
As a limited hero, Baiken isn’t particularly game-changing. Although she brings a new “Detonate” mechanic to the game which adds a variety of different bleed orientated team compositions, individually she doesn’t have the same kind of impact when compared to the previously limited heroes. The Detonate mechanic opens new team compositions that allow heroes with bleed effects to work together for one massive damage burst, but with the debuff/buff limit at 10, there’s a hard cap to how far the damage can go.
With that being said, Baiken is still a great damage dealer when you have decent gear on her. Her skills are a mix between Karin’s and Surin’s but instead of her skill dealing more damage depending on the bleed stacks on the target, she detonates all bleed stacks, clearing all bleed debuffs on the target to allow for more debuffs. All-in-all works great together and the team CR boost gives you more leeway on how much speed your heroes need.
Ultimately, Baiken doesn’t feel like a “must-have” hero like the previous limited heroes but instead, feels more like a trophy hero that works decently in most of the game’s content. She is one of the few characters with Japanese voice-overs (as of this moment) and for fans of the Guilty Gear series, her S3 animation is exactly the same as the original console version which makes her worth summoning.
Next part, Sol?
