Card Review with Cate: Riche

Riche is the newest 7★ GFE GungHo has prepared for us. Riche’s art is gorgeous, she boasts high weighted stats of 1099, a very unique active skill and very powerful leader skill but whether or not her design is useful is the more important issue I’d like to address, anyways without further ado let’s dive in!

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Active Skill: Unlock All orbs. Change all orbs to Fire, Water, Wood, Light, Dark, and Heart orbs. Void damage absorb and attribute absorb shield for 1 turn. (30 max CD)

Currently there are no spawns that have both Damage Absorb shield and Attribute Absorb shield at once so the best way you can utilize it is by using it against different enemies that either have one or the other, but the CD is extremely long and even with the potentially dropping it to 10 turn CD it is still very hard to get the skill charged up fast enough. That said it doesn’t void the fact that you can still use it for multiple scenario, for example in Arena 3 you can use it for Sopdet

, Parvati, Vishnu or HeraDra, but in case you didn’t get those and got a NoahDra instead she will let you bypass those annoying attribute absorb shields just fine.

So currently the best this active is able to provide is the flexibility, aside from that identity, the uniqueness is not quite practical as of yet due to the lack of spawn that will require you to have her.

Let’s start with the base form:

Leader Skill: 3x ATK when attacking with 3 + attributes (or 2 attributes + Heal). 4x ATK and reduce damage taken when matching 4+ connected Water orbs.

The requirement for activation is very easy, you will be able to activate it on every natural board without problem and as long as you clear the entire board you should get a healthy feed of blue orbs to keep reactivating. The parameter sits at 1/144/1 with 43.75% shield, it will be enough for most content without problem. The leader skill invites but not limited to that, you can also utilize , or just fine. The merit to the leader skill of base form is that you can use tricolor board to make up for the discrepancy in leader skill multiplier.

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Moving on to the Evolved form:

Leader Skill: 4x ATK and reduce damage taken when 7+ combos are matched. 4x ATK when attacking with 4+ attributes. Increase orb movement time by 2 seconds.

From a glance I can say that as a leader the evolved form will take you much further than base form, it has a higher multiplier sitting at 1/256/1 with 43.75% shield alongside of 4 second movement time, which is identical to Ea’s

leader skill parameter, and Ea is capable of leading to end game content just fine so this stat line is definitely great. With the multiplier settled let’s look at the activation. In particular I have a concern with “4x ATK and reduce damage taken when 7+ combos are matched” part. While having shield tied to a condition where you can almost always meet is good, it brings up a problem when you need to damage control, for example in Alt. Arena after slowly pinging down Sopdet with 16x multiplier, you may be getting a preemptive of 145,185 damage to the face from Goemon. Another problem I see is that it is very hard to match less than 4 colors while doing 7 or more combo, however all of the conditions I have listed are tied to damage control which can but doesn’t have to be solved by the active skill of Riche.

Overall I’d say the base form has a better leader skill for content up to A3 because it allows a more flexible team building that can utilize tricolor boards, whereas Evolved form will be better for content requiring more damage, less damage control and more emphasis on other mechanics such as time reduction debuff or awakening skill unbinds where the built in movement time from leader skill will really make a difference.

It is very hard to find a team for base Riche, the teams that looks for just happen to be those with lower multipliers such as Hermes

, Ranma and so on, many of which that don’t really boast damage but sustainability, adding her to the team will not really improve anything. While the base form does have a good amount of RCV, it isn’t high enough to really put her on any team just for that. So overall I’d say that base form Riche has very little value to any team due to how evolved from is more flexible.

The Evolved Riche is much more flexible due to combining with high attack, she will be a powerhouse and having the balance type does mean that you can also dedicate her to killing something specific. You will probably want to build around if you can, but it isn’t that bad if you can’t either, it will only matter in extremely long dungeons where you can use the active more than twice. Comparing this to inheriting a absorb shied null active on top of a short base sub, you will still be looking to charge up 20+ turns of skill, and if you never end up using the base skill again, it is no difference from just running Riche and only use her active skill once per dungeon. Overall I’d say she is a very flexible sub and really good in dungeons where you need absorb shield null/attribute absorb null type active where you would only spend about 50~60 turns on the dungeon such as Arena 3. In Alt. Arena where having a high base CD will be a problem because you need every active skill you can get, she will unlikely be as good.

So is she good? Definitely, but I wouldn’t say she’s worth the chase. She’s good in most aspect but still have weaknesses here and there and definitely is not outstanding.