Part 96: Duelist: This deck is not tournament legal
Duelist: This deck is not tournament legal.
The first VFD-original, the Duelist is a bit of an odd duck. Their reliance on card draw RNG means that they can do some absolutely monstrous damage if things line up, but they can just as easily end up with a dead hand and require several turns to search out the cards they need to get going.
Stats
Duelists, fitting for literal children, are more on the fragile side with the 2nd lowest LF and DEF. To make up for that, they have the 2nd highest MN, MAT, MDF, and 3rd highest SPD.
Innate Ability
Draws 1 card at the end of the turn.
Tier 1 Skills
Draw Bonus
The user begins battle with a certain number of cards.
You don't really have much choice with this one. More cards means more chances of getting something good. (read: as many Fire cards as possible) Level this up the moment you have enough SP.
X Burn
User applies a buff that inflicts ranged MAT-based fire damage to all enemies at the end of the turn. Damage increases based on how many Fire cards the user plays during the duration of the buff. Damage formula for this attack is [(User's MAT * Total Card Power) - Target's MDF] * Damage Multiplier. Total Card Power is equal to 1 if no Fire cards have been played. Other Duelists cannot contribute to someone else's X Burn. Cannot trigger Destiny React. Initial buff has priority.
The Duelist's first Continuous Spell, X Burn is kinda fucking nuts! It needs a hand full of Fire cards to get the most out of it, but the damage it can deal ramps up to an insane degree. It also gets better and better as the game goes on, as the Duelist gets access to more expensive skills to play more Fire cards in the two turns you have available. The most expensive fire-based skill costs 3 cards, so if the stars align and you have a full hand of Fire cards ready, a max level X Burn hits a monstrous 25x multiplier on the Duelist's already high MAT! The flipside of all this is that two turns is a tight time limit, so having to stop and play a searcher or heal someone is going to tank the damage significantly.
Summon: Fire I
Summons a Hell Cloud to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based fire damage and a chance to inflict Burn.
Summon: Ice I
Summons a North Crown to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based ice damage and a chance to inflict Freeze.
Summon: Ltg I
Summons an Air Grass to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based lightning damage and a chance to inflict Paralysis.
All of the Duelist's Summon skills are identical for damage and infliction rate, but on their own merits I'd say Summon: Ltg fares the best with a 40% chance to lock out the enemy if it connects. That's on par with 2020-II's Frostburn, and that was an endgame skill!
Of course, the Summons aren't standing on their own, so Summon: Ice and Summon: Ltg have the crippling flaw of not boosting X Burn. They're still worth using if you don't have any Fire cards in a short fight.
The devs clearly knew just how stupidly powerful X Burn is, as every fire focused skill is pegged at a much higher SP cost compared to their Ice and Lightning counterparts.
Trap: Pitfall
Places a buff on the user. If the user is hit with a melee attack from an enemy not weak to aerial damage, the user will counter with melee MAT-based damage and a chance to inflict Null Action. The target's size influences damage. Small enemies take 0.8x, Medium 1x, Large 1.3x, and Extremely Large 1.5x
Trap: Barbed Wire
Places a buff on the user. If the user is hit with ATK-based damage, the user will counter with ranged MAT-based aerial damage and a chance to inflict Bleed.
Trap: Fire Whirl
Places a buff on the user. If the user is hit with MAT-based damage, the user will counter with ranged MAT-based fire damage and a chance to inflict Blind.
The Traps, meanwhile, are extremely eeeeeeeeeeeh.
They cost two cards to play, but they deal incredibly low damage for that kind of cost. Sky high infliction rates (80% chance of Null Action!) for this early in the game is bonkers, but they all have incredibly specific activation requirements (a lot of things have a weakness to aerial, which automatically locks out said Null Action) and the Duelist has no way to draw enemy attacks to reliably set them off. They aren't entirely useless, as there's a later skill that needs them on the field, but you'll never play a Trap for the sake of playing a Trap.
Also, fun fact: these are the only skills that use different colors of cards to use. All other skills use multiples of the same element.
Field: Volcano
Hits all enemies with ranged MAT-based fire damage and inflicts a debuff that increases fire damage taken.
Field: Glacier
Hits all enemies with ranged MAT-based ice damage and inflicts a debuff that increases ice damage taken.
Field: Storm Cloud
Hits all enemies with ranged MAT-based lightning damage and inflicts a debuff that increases lightning damage taken.
The Field Spells are a great source of early AOE damage (provided you can swing the two card cost) and further boost damage of the same element for the rest of the party! X Burn loves Field: Volcano, as it both feeds it two cards and boosts the damage it deals by 30%.
Supply Draw
User draws a number of random cards from their deck and adds them to their hand.
Search: Fire
Adds a number of Fire cards to the user's hand.
Search: Ice
Adds a number of Ice cards to the user's hand.
Search: Lightning
Adds a number of Lightning cards to the user's hand.
The Searchers do nothing on their own, but are a godsend if you've run your hand dry and need to fill up. There's some data in the code suggesting that the dedicated Search skills originally had 5 levels planned, letting you draw almost an entire hand worth of a single element in one shot, but got cut down to just three. That's why the SP costs suddenly take a massive leap from level 2 to level 3.
Tier 2 Skills
MANA Gain
Places a buff on the user that restores the party's MANA at the end of the turn. If no ice cards are used, the party recovers the base amount of MANA. Otherwise, the formula used is Base Mana Restore + [((Base Mana Restore * Restore Power) – Base Mana Restore) * # of Ice Cards Used]. Other Duelists cannot contribute to someone else's MANA Gain.
X Burn's counterpart, MANA Gain trades off the damage from fire and instead gives ice ludicrous levels of MN restoration. You use three Ice cards at max level? Everyone in the party gets 80 MN, and that's just a single turn. Even at a bare minimum, you're looking at 51 MN over the full three turns to the entire party if you never use an ice card. There's zero risk of ever running dry with this much regen! The 2020s were notoriously stingy with easy sources of restoration, with Hacker's noiztank.exe being the only real way to get some, but VFD just switches track entirely and gives you several methods of turning the party into a perpetual motion machine.
Strangely, there's no Continuous Spell for Lightning. I guess the devs figured the Paralysis chances were good enough on their own.
Summon: Fire II
Summons a Death Worm to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Fire damage and a chance to inflict Burn.
Summon: Ice II
Summons a Snow Familiar to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Ice damage and a chance to inflict Freeze.
Summon: Ltg II
Summons an Alien Luzelo to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Lightning damage and a chance to inflict Paralysis.
These all act exactly the same as the tier 1 summons, but with all the numbers bumped up. They feed two cards to X Burn or MANA Gain.
Lucky Roll
At the start of battle, the Duelist has a chance to roll a die that gives a beneficial effect. The effects and their odds are as follows:
- Sun: EXP gain is tripled. (1/12)
- Star: SP gain is tripled. (3/12)
- Moon: Item drop rate is doubled. (4/12)
- Bolt: Party's MN is fully restored. (4/12)
Eh. Eeeeeeeeeeeh.
Like, yeah, boosting EXP/SP/drops is nice, sure, but when you're only allowed a single starting AUTO, I'd rather it be something that can actually kill the enemy and let me move on to the next fight. A full MN heal is also handy, but you also get MANA Gain this tier, which does effectively the same thing.
Also, the animation of throwing the dice and waiting for it to land takes aaaaaaaages, and I'd rather not have to watch it for the rest of the game.
Destiny React
Places a buff on the Duelist that gives them a chance to gain an extra turn every time they deal an odd number of damage. Counters can activate this. X Burn cannot activate this, however, as it goes off at the end of the turn.
That damage requirement effectively gives this a 40% chance of going off every time you attack, which is kinda bad, honestly. That's on par with 2020-II's Destroy React, except a Duelist can't make several attacks a turn like a Destroyer. The Traps can set this off, sure, but why would you ever actually us-
Judgement
When all three Traps are set at once, melee MAT-based damage is dealt to all enemies at the end of the turn. All Traps are dispelled after Judgement activates.
...
This is Tier 2????
What the actual hell are these numbers!? I called God Hand's EX skill insane for having an effective damage of 33x, and Judgement both outdamages it at level 2 (for less SP than an EX Skill!) and nails every enemy on the field! Maxed out, only a very small handful of moves can hope to reach 50x on their own, and those are both single target and have extremely harsh requirements to use.
It isn't all upsides, however, as Judgement requires commitment to bring out. All three Traps need a total of 2 of every type of card to bring out, and each has a 4 turn duration, giving you exactly one turn of leeway if you need to pop a Search to fill out your hand part way through. You're also incredibly vulnerable to disruption throughout the entire process. Need to stop and clear a status ailment or revive someone? Hope your hand is already perfect! Boss uses Power Charge to prepare for a big hit? Hope the Duelist can tank it with their pitiful defenses! Get hit with Null Action, Skill Seal, Paralysis, Sleep, Confusion or just straight up die? Well all that effort you put into it goes right out the window!
Destiny React can give you a little leeway if a Trap sets it off, but that requires the Duelist to actually get hit, which isn't entirely likely if you have a God Hand or Rune Knight on the field.
Tier 3 Skills
My turn!
The Duelist has a chance to extend any buffs on the party by 1 turn at the end of the turn. Does not work on X Burn, MANA Gain, or the Traps. Does not work on any buffs that only have a single turn left.
This is actually a bit of a weird skill, because Duelists just... don't really have any buffs of their own that this works on? I mean, My Turn! is a great skill if you have other people tossing out buffs, but the Duelist themselves get practically nothing from this, aside from, like, Destiny React.
Summon: Fire III
Summons a Criminal Dragon to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Fire damage and a chance to inflict Burn.
Summon: Ice III
Summons a Blizzarus to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Ice damage and a chance to inflict Freeze.
Summon: Ltg III
Summons a Lightning Dragon to hit an enemy with melee MAT-based Lightning damage and a chance to inflict Paralysis.
Same as the first 2 tiers, but holy shit that 82% chance on Ltg III to just utterly shut down an enemy! The Fire and Ice summons are also the biggest single turn way to feed X Burn and MANA Gain.
EX Skill
Summon: Titan
Summons a Stun Deku to hit all enemies with melee MAT-based damage.
Capping things off, the Duelist EX is... kinda pitiful, really.
Like, yeah 14x base damage is good, but that only slightly outdamages a level 1 Judgement, and that's been available since Tier 2. Even as an AOE EX Skill, Samurai's Earth Splitter is only a small bit behind, and they can easily overtake it with all their buffs. Duelists just don't have any natural way to boost their own damage. The only thing it has going for it is the fact that it doesn't have a card cost, making it something you can slap an enemy with if your hand doesn't line up.
All things considered, you'd probably be better off using EX on Summon: Ltg III to double the odds of landing Paralysis.
Team Skills
Charge Time: 3 turns
Duelists are the only class that needs 3 turns to charge the support bar, which slows things down a fair bit.
Buddy
Deals 2.1x melee ATK-based damage, and gives 5% of the damage dealt to the Buddy's MN.
A free MN restore is nice, yes, but that 3 turn charge time means you can only break this out once every 6 turns. That's way, way too long to wait for a piddly 5% MN leech off a class that's focused on MAT.
Oh, all the Buddy skills are ATK-based, by the way, so the magical classes deal jack for damage.
Support
Dispels all status effects from the party.
This, however, is much more useful. A full party, full status heal every third turn is extremely handy, as it lets you patch up the party with no action cost, letting you keep the pressure on.