Card Review with Tb_ax: Dark Witch Veroa

Veroa is the newest addition to the 7★ Witch GFE lineup, and highly anticipated as her release has been slightly delayed compared to the release schedule of the other 4 Great Witches this year. This was further escalated as Corocoro Magazine released a teaser for her a few weeks ago, revealing her artwork and touting her as the “savior of dark teams”. Does she live up to this moniker? Let’s find out.

Active Skill: Change Fire and Light orbs to Dark orbs. Greatly reduce RCV for 1 turn. (Max 5 CD)

Veroa’s active skill is an incredibly efficient double orb converter at 5CD, with a drawback that can be played around. It is also important to note that her active covers almost all of the colors that Eschamali , one of the most economical dark orb converters currently in the game, does not cover. This combination of actives should almost ensure a neverending supply of dark orbs, even if you’re lazily not comboing off-color orbs to get more dark orbs.

Although it is not an extremely common occurrence, the RCV debuff can actually wipe a much longer RCV debuff, for example, Rei Sirius in Arena 4 and Hashihime in Alt. Arena. RCV debuff is usually one of the least threatening mechanics without a resist, but at 5CD, and 2 copies of the active, it’s basically a free mitigation.

Of course, the drawback is not completely ignorable: quartering your RCV for a turn means you’ll basically heal nothing unless you have an insane RCV multiplier (which fortunately, Veroa’s own LS in her evolved form does have). I’ve personally been in my fair share of situations where I died because I didn’t heal just a few thousand more HP to live the next attack, or needed to sweep a menacing but also heal for the next floor’s preemptive with only a heartbreaking active  available. Quartering RCV will only make these situations become more common, so be wary of those 99% gravities and consecutive preemptives.

Leader Skill: Slightly increase egg drop rate when entering dungeon as leader (Not applicable for multiplayer). 5x ATK when 5+ combos are matched.

There is not much to say about Veroa’s base form Leader Skill, other than analysis and speculation of what dungeons it would be useful in. The drop rate increase is only one of 2 in the game and the only one that has a well-defined release schedule in NA, but requires comboing unlike Clean Freak Commander, Levi . Veroa brings to the table a shorter base CD and inherit, but Levi gets unconditional 2x. This loss in damage when swipe farming is an issue when farming the most applicable dungeon where a drop rate enhancing leader skill is desirable, Ganesha’s Treasure Trove. This dungeon is unique in that it not only is a solo-only dungeon worth repeating many times, but also has a <100% drop rate on floors that Levi and Veroa can take advantage of. Outside of Ganesha’s Treasure Trove and similarly structured dungeons that may appear in the future, this Veroa form’s Leader Skill isn’t useful in many dungeons. The only type of dungeon I can think of is the lowest difficulty that can skill up collab rolls with the solo skillup method, like getting slightly more Durandalf drops or Power Pro Trophies while skilling up cards that appear as enemies in those dungeons. Such a limited utility isn’t a big selling point for the worth of this card.

Leader Skill: [No skyfall combos] 3x ATK & RCV when matching 5+ combos. 6x ATK and slightly reduce damage taken when 6+ connected Dark orbs are matched.

The lead form of Veroa is an incredibly strong 324x dark lead that can stack dark rows. This multiplier is more than enough to power through and oneshot most enemies even while making a FUA. The lax combo requirement to hit full multiplier makes activating tricky patterns such as VDP and Combo Orb globs much easier than, say, requiring 7 combos. Her no skyfall clause with 9x and 36x secondary multipliers as well as the freedom to match a row or not match a row gives her fantastic damage control versus a wide variety of absorb shields and voids, an edge she has over the ever-popular combo leads that stack 7c and aren’t no skyfall.

Although she may not outdamage one of the most min-maxed glass cannon leads in recent memory, Chuan , she’s tankier and will have absolutely have no issues healing to full every turn bar Satan sub. Veroa’s leader skill and the sheer damage output from stacking rows (or merely adding 1 Eschamali sub) will effectively handle all damage issues, so her best subs aim to patch up her middling effective HP; 25% shield with no HP multiplier is on the more fragile side in a new metagame with 4x HP leads being the flavor of the month. Fortunately, Dark has access to a consortium of cards with mammoth HP, including Nees , Planar , Rajoa , and Gremory . It should not be too difficult to hit around 60k HP before considering HP badge, giving her an effective HP well into the 6 figures and well ahead of most 1.5x HP leads. With an extra bit of HP whoring, it’s possible to push this figure even higher to be able to tank attacks like Goemon’s AA preempt without a shield. Veroa’s self-sufficient active skill and modest activation requirements allows her to take tons of utility among her subs without being bogged down by not having enough orbs to activate its leader skill.

The elephant in the room is of course, Veroa’s last awakening. Generating Combo Orbs is notoriously difficult to pull off, but twin 5CD double orb converters is about as easy as it’s going to get to get 12 darks to activate. Although it’s a shame that Veroa doesn’t have a subattribute to abuse getting the third Combo Orb on the board with an offcolor 12 match after popping a bicolor board, the awakening is still a welcome addition to assist in climbing the increasingly menacing combo shields in dungeons like A4.

A final addendum: On the topic of Veroa’s dark subattribute, it unfortunately makes it very hard to bypass dark absorbs on high-hp monsters, making it rather unsuitable for lazily blasting through random content with a lot of dark absorbs.

Base Veroa is a premium choice for a Dark VDP. Although her raw attack stat is rather modest, her balanced typing, and mix of 7c and 2x VDP awakenings allows her to hit extremely hard against Damage Void spawns and contribute decent damage when the active isn’t needed.

Evolved Veroa is a rather uninteresting dark row sub with very good HP, but outside of being a sub for Chuan and herself, she doesn’t have a real home. Before these 2 leads, Dark Rows have been dead in the water for the longest time. If you want her for combo orb making on your waifu Pandora or Nephthys team, you know who you are, and what you’re going to use evolved Veroa as a sub for. For everyone else, just stick to the base form which packs tremendously greater utility.

I will have to hand it over to CoroCoro on this one. Veroa is a fantastically designed card, and overall very close to the best Gungho could have possibly done to revitalize dark rows as a viable playstyle. Veterans will remember that back in the day, Pandora , pre-uvo DMeta , D/D Haku , and eventually Juggler and were the pinnacle of the metagame, and among the easiest-to-use, expensive, and highest-damaging leaders available. In fact, combo shields and the disproportionately high amount of dark absorbs were made largely with intention to counter this meta. Veroa arrives in a metagame that’s admittedly still rather unkind to the row playstyle between FUA/resolves, even higher combo shields, and the questionable merit of the Combo Orb awakening, but she arrives as a fully optimized package under her current constraints. And, if dark rows still doesn’t tickle your fancy, she’s still an incredibly premium VDP + FUA sub.