Alencia Review + Alternatives to the Cute Dragon
Table of Contents
Overview
Maternal Aunt of Luna and Yufine, who believes that dragons are the wisest and most graceful beings in the world. As she considers it inelegant to have frequent mood swings like lowly creatures do, she tends to be kind to others unless they cross a line.
Class – Warrior
Element – Earth
Awakened Stats
- Hp – 7054
- Def – 652
- Attack – 975
- Speed – 106
- Eff resistance – 0
- Effectiveness – 0
Pros – Alencia is one of the few warriors who provides any real utility to a team. Most warriors are selfish, and only support themselves.
Cons – Alencia shares her playstyle and utility with other already well-established units.
(I will go into further details in the alternatives section)
Skills:
- One turn, 75% chance def break. Two turn, 100% chance with Soulburn.
- Passive: 50% Chance to grant “Mind’s Eye” when hit. Mind’s Eye trample’s when using S1.
Grants 30% Effect Resistance and Effectiveness - Area of effect dispels buffs, and Def buff for the team.
Analysis
Alencia is the most recent installment of humanoid dragon characters to be added to Epic7 and there has certainly been a lot of controversy around her release. She was showcased in a Korean video late December, 2019, as a character who would be a utility bruiser.
Alencia would deal damage while bulking up the team, and keeping the enemy free of buffs to make an opening for her teammates. However, what we got was a character who can only realize her maximum potential with a conditional buff, and even under ideal conditions doesn’t quite meet expectations.
Alencia’s bread and butter is her “Mind’s Eye” unique buff, which gives 30% Effect Resistance and 30% Effectiveness. This seems good at first, but it only has a 50% chance to activate when you hit her.
Additionally, if you want to avoid being crowd controlled, you’ll need to have some Effect Resistance on her to begin with. Mind’s Eye also gives Alencia the ability to trigger an ability called “Trample”, which deals extra damage to a target, and reduces the cooldown of her skill 3 by one.
Originally, during her Showcase video, it was anticipated that she would excel in a Counter set, and cycle her cooldowns quickly, but in the end this ended up being a translation error. This effect can now only be activated on her turn, reducing the effectiveness of Counter set on her.
Lastly, Alencia has a one-turn defense break on her skill 1 and this can be soulburned to increase the effect chance to 100%, and the duration of the debuff to two turns instead of one. However, I do not encourage the use of this option and as paying 10 souls for a single target def break is incredibly weak, compared with other 10 soul options.
This leaves Alencia in an odd place, because her skill 3 is flexible. Currently, it allows players to utilize her defense buff more efficiently in faster builds, and strips in slower builds when the enemy had a chance to setup before you.
However, this all makes her a niche choice to bring in a team. Everything Alencia wants to bring to the table is covered by another character, in a more efficient manner:
Alternatives
Ken – 5 star/ Fire/ Warrior
Ken is a powerhouse of a bruiser! He has the highest base health in the game, rivaled only by the moonlight 5* hero, Dark Corvus.
He has a 75% chance to defense break and 30% speed up buff on his skill 2. His damage scaling is much better than Alencia’s, allowing him to effectively be a high health threat in pvp, and his skill 3 has stun and attack break, further debilitating a single target.
As far as taking bruisers goes, Ken is top choice.
Krau – 5 star/ Water/ Knight
Krau and Alencia are nothing alike. The only reason he’s in this section is because he too provides a defense buff, and defense buffs are a bit scarce in this game. However, if defense buffs is what you’re trying to slot into your team, Krau brings far more utility.
Krau’s skill 2 provides area of effect defense buff and single target combat readiness suppression, on a three turn cooldown. This is about what you’ll get with Alencia’s skill 3 if you manage to successfully trample your opponent one time
Krau’s skill 3 allows him to deal damage to his opponent, ignoring their defense completely, and the damage scales based on his missing hp. As a knight who can hold the Aurius artifact, he can reliably facilitate his win condition, while providing meaningful utility, crowd control, and damage to single targets
Charles – 5 star/ Earth/ Knight
If you’ve played Epic7 for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of or encountered this unit a few times. But in the event you haven’t, Charles is a high damage dealing knight. This character, creates the most conflict for Alencia because their playstyle is very similar, but their win conditions, strategies and character restrictions, are very different.
Charles’ main job is to buff, strip, and deal damage. His skill 1 has a 60% chance to break attack, and has a 35% chance to activate his skill 2 without consuming the cooldown.
His skill 2 has a 100% chance to strip all buffs from a single target.
His skill 3 is an area of effect attack, with attack buff for the team and self defense buff.
As you can see, Charles is the real deal. He brings his own survivability, while providing much more aggressive options to isolating single targets. However, Charles has access to Elbris Ritual Sword, a 5* artifact which provides up to a 20% chance to counter attack when hitting an ally.
This means coupled with a counter set, Charles will activate his S1 very consistently, allowing him to break attack, potentially trigger all buff strip, and dealing large amounts of damage while it’s not even his turn. These effects can also be triggered from dual attacks.
Alencia has none of these options due to the restrictions on her Mind’s eye buff. So now the big question is:
Should you pull for this character?
First and foremost, if you like this character’s design, she’s waifu, or you have some other personal reason for pulling, you should just pull. Having fun is important!
But with that said, if you don’t have the resources to spare I would strongly discourage pulling for this character.
Smilegate has shown us in the past that they will improve recently released units as both Lilibet and Luluca where underwhelming at their release and both are now decent or better. If you want to pull for Alencia in hopes that she’ll get buffed later, and again, you have skystones to spare, I think she’s a lot of fun.
Recommended Builds
Primary build: Speed set + Immunity set
As with many characters this is going to be a powerful combination in PvP.
Alencia wants to get her turns as consistently as possible, so that in the event her Mind’s Eye buff is activated, she can start trampling to reduce the cooldown of her skill 3. The immunity set is to prevent her from getting crowd controlled until she can use her S3.
Secondary build: Counter + Effect Resistance
This build, while having diminished efficiency on Alencia due to her translation error, still provides Alencia the ability to counter break defense.
The only issue is, the normal defense break only lasts one turn, so if you manage to break a target who’s faster than Alencia, you may not get the opportunity to take advantage of this unless someone else on your team is closer to going taking their next turn.
In both variants, Health % Neck, Health or Effectiveness% Ring, and Speed boots, are recommended for main stats. Alencia can afford to not have double health main stat due her high base health.
Recommended Artifacts
Strak Gauntlet:
Strak is an incredibly potent 4* artifact that will provide up to 60% Effect Resistance for warriors who are above 50% health. This artifact will help Alencia prevent getting crowd controlled and pairs nicely with her Mind’s Eye buff while it’s active.
Crimson Seed:
This was a limited artifact that was released near the beginning of the “God killer” expansion in Epic7. It has a 70% chance to remove one debuff from the equipped character when they get attacked, once per turn.
This is a strong alternative to Strak, as it’s more corrective than preventative. Getting attacked by characters other than a debuffer can not only trigger Mind’s eye, but cleanse Alencia of anything that slipped through the cracks in the process.
For PvE Content
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot to say here. Alencia is not a PvP only hero, but there are better breakers and better buff stripers. If you have no other options for defense buff, buff strip, or your current def breaker is the wrong element for the content you’re trying to pursue, then definitely take her. However, Alencia’s kit doesn’t enable much for PvE content.
For Pvp Content
Alencia has quite the wall of challenges posed for her. Usually, when you’re confronting a team in any mode of pvp, the first thing you’d check is elemental distribution.
Many water units are buff-centric characters which means Alencia should having the advantage in the following characters: Diene, Krau, Angelica, Elena, Dominiel, and Tywin to name a few. However, due to common setups on soulweavers, resist sets will make it incredibly difficult for Alencia to strip Elena, Diene, and Montmorancy.
Other buff type characters she may excel at countering are Crimson Armin, Fallen Cecilia, Maid Chloe, and enemy teams who are equipped with Immunity sets. However, buff heavy compositions might just warrant bringing someone like Basar, who can soulburn his skill 3 to ignore effect resistance, while applying unbuffable and suppressing combat readiness.
Meta Considerations and Conclusions
So how does Alencia fit into all this? She’s is undoubtedly underpowered in her current state.
She has her uses, as many units in this game do, but -use- is not a measure of efficiency.
Due to her lack of damage, or any real reward while her Mind’s Eye buff is active, Alencia really just falls short compared to her competition. She doesn’t have the damage to nuke someone like Seaside Bellona, but trampling her expedites Sellona’s win condition.
Extra attacks on a unit with idol’s cheer means you’re going to push them 40% instead of 20%. Extra attacks against teams that have Elbris Ritual sword are more chances to be retaliated against.
The other characters who do her job, do it so much better, especially Charles, who at the time of writing has a banner running. In good conscious, I would not recommend her over any of the characters I compared her to earlier.
And if it’s worth noting, I did pull for her. I had some spare skystones and enjoyed her design.
Hopefully, in a couple of months, Smilegate will buff Alencia and she’ll be a force to be reckoned with, like her two nieces Luna and Yufine. I do think there’s some merit to her on stall compositions in arena defense, but she doesn’t offer enough to command a spot on guild war defense, and she’s not aggressive enough to be used in Real Time Arena (RTA).