Granblue Fantasy Relink - Katalina Character Guide

one of the classic character archetypes in RPGs is the blonde lady KN character of which Catalina seems to belong while likely intended to be a tankier character with supportive abilities she can also do a pretty high amount of damage Catalina is a character all about Resource Management to get the most out of her kit since if you can effectively take advantage of your Aries gauge you can get a lot of benefit and damage out of the character but if you can't you'll likely find her to be one of the weakest characters in the entire game making her a character with a higher risk reward than average especially if you try to lean more into your offens of capabilities that said she does have a lot of cool Tech and ways to maintain her Aries gauge as long as possible and understanding how to do this will be one of the major keys to playing her effectively Catalina has been one of the more highly requested videos so I am happy that I was finally able to get to this and in this video I do want to discuss Catalina discuss General play style and setup talk about some strengths and weaknesses and showcase some practical use in harder raid fights if you enjoy guide content on this game RPGs in general and especially Xenoblade and are interested in seeing more please be sure to subscribe to the channel because it does helped me out so much let's get into it starting things off with the basics Catalina is a character defined by her Aries gauge her two support skills are very tied to this mechanic as well where you can summon areas when this gauge is full by using a combo finisher link attack or a skill and when Aries is summoned your skills in skybound arts will be enhanced and you will also be able to perform the special combo pack strike which does a lot of damage as mentioned Aries will drastically increase both your damage and capabilities and as such as Catalina you want to be taking advantage of Aries as much as possible as such the most important things you can do as a Catalina player is filling and maintaining your Aries gauge which is what the bulk of the section is going to be focused on so the main way to fill the Aries gauge is going to be performing combo finishers of which Catalina has a lot by using X into y or one normal attack into a finisher you can fill the are's gauge just slightly this is good if you need to fill the gauge just a little bit to get full Aries and want to get there as fast as possible by using two normal attacks into a finisher you can fill the gauge about a quarter of the way and by using three normal attacks into a finisher or by using your three normal attacks into a flurry into a finisher you can fill the gauge almost halfway at once you can also press y over and over but this combo is not really recommended in my opinion since it feels slower and doesn't fill the gauge that much now the gauge is kind of cut off at the halfway mark where you cannot overfill past this halfway mark So if you use a stronger combo finisher that fills the gauge more when the gauge is almost at this halfway mark it will still stop at this halfway mark this basically means that you will need to fill the gauge in four different ways no matter what to ensure full Aries gauge since it's impossible to fill the gauge by more than half by any one attack and it will always be cut off by this threshold and naturally get the full gauge being at 99% doesn't matter either so you're going to need that last little bit as well this does give some benefit into the standard X into to Y combo that fills the gauge just slightly as a way to reach these thresholds quickly if that is your best option a link attack will also fill the gauge by well over a quarter of the gauge as well making it a good option to use in many situations and Performing combo finishers after skills will do your strongest combo finisher and fill almost half the gauge in that situation as well making these good options if you need to get Aries back as fast as possible as long as you weave it into the proper Windows you can also do the skill cancel Tech popularized by personal where you activate a skill immediately Dodge out of it before the skill comes out and go into your combo finisher as a way to get gauge even faster if needed but usually you don't have to rely on this method but it can be an option and a good way to get gauge faster while preserving your skill cooldowns if needed and then the final way to build gauge is just by using one of her skills that immediately fills it and summons Aries which is the easiest and ideally what you can rely on in a lot of fights when the gauge does go down and when you lose it learning how the gauge works and the fastest way to build the gauge is key but usually choosing a mix of combo C finishers or skill finishers into combo a finishers to get the extra bid is going to be one of the best and easiest ways to accomplish this quickly now what's more important is maintaining Aries in the Aries gauge so while Aries is active you get a big boost to your damage and skills and get the ability to perform the Aries pack strike by perly pressing the Y button which is basically a new combo that does a lot of damage so as mentioned when the gauge is full you can summon Aries by using any skill a combo finisher a link attack or a skybound art once Aries is summoned it will disappear if you do not input something that will maintain Aries meaning you will only get the benefit of Aries for that one ability if you do not try to keep it up so the ways of maintaining Aries are using a skill using a combo finisher using Aries pack strike using a link attack and using a skybound art this means that in order to maintain and keep Aries active you want to be chaining these inputs together as much as possible and as many in a row as you can to keep Aries active and prevent it from disappearing and resetting this usually means chaining off of a skill you have used into a combo finisher which will immediately chain into an Aries pack strike and using this until you see the animation where you jump in the air and attack and slam back down and after that Aries pack strike is finished and you're going to want to immediately chain from this Aries pack strike into another damaging skill or link attack so you can change the chain this back into another combo finisher and once again into your Aries pack strike once again this is basically your bread and butter way of maintaining Aries of using a skill using a combo finisher using pack strike and repeating throwing in link attacks when available since they can also refresh or allow you to continue pack strike pack strike cannot be chained into itself and utility skills cannot be trained in pack strike in this way either meaning you need damaging skills to make the Bose benefit out of this if you do use utility abilities it needs to be followed up with something offensive to keep this chain going this isn't too difficult to do in a vacuum but it can be very easy to get interrupted by basically anything even dodging can lose Aries if you were in the middle of a combo and being knocked back or anything like that can cause you to lose Aries this can make maintenance very tricky and sometimes you have to choose your windows or change your setup around to maintains Aries up time as much as possible the ideal Catalina gameplay Loop will be keeping Aries up as much as you can by continuously chaining inputs together that keep Aries active usually skills into combo finishers into pack strike as I said which means pressing the Y button a lot and repeating while understanding the ways to build the Aries gauge during downtime sections of fight since you will not be able to keep it up 100% of the time no matter what but limiting this downtime is important and one of the things that you can minimize when you are playing the character this also makes her setup and skills more important to maximizing her damage and utility and understanding how to use these is important as well but we'll discuss everything else in other sections let's get into setup for now so my setup this time around is a mix of a lot of really good traits I do not think this is the absolute most optimal thing you can possibly have and we'll discuss that but I do think it is a mix of a lot of really good things that makes the character work really well with the sigils that I currently have access to the weapon itself is just the catastrophe weapon the Terminus weapon I should say that has the catastrophy bonus effect you get a 50% additional attack damage cap plus 100% when you're below 45,000 Health the best effect in the game sigil boost is a great effect to have as well when you max out the weapon to give all your sigil a little bit of an extra boost also if you don't have this crit R weapon the max ascended weapon are also pretty good options to consider Guardians conviction is going to be the main skill you're going to want to use here as far as her unique sigils this one is absolutely incredible basically every time Aries is active you get even more benefit out of it you get more supplementary damage on all of your effects 10% additional damage on everything that you deal and a damage cap plus 15% as well it'll do even more damage while Aries is active meaning you get even more benefit out of keeping Aries up which means that you want to try to keep Aries up as much as you can my blood gang I almost forgot to mention the imbu traits I have skilled assault here one of Catalina skills has a very high damage cap so even having this with some of the other damage boosters still get some benefit out of this that is just kind of the reason that I have that as one of the imbued traits for that light resistance is kind of a filler skill but there is a lot of late game enemies of light and critical hit rate just to reach as much critical hit rate as I can my over masteries don't allow me to hit 100% with uh even with two critical hit rate Five pluses right now and I didn't really feel like grinding for something better so that's just kind of where I am right now with only 95% critical hit rate but ideally you'll hit that 100% value and the uh critical hit and view will help you do that the sub trait that I have on guardian's conviction is combo booster now like I said Catalina has some some of her moves have a hard damage cap to hit a lot of Catalina players run three or even four damage boosters at time and combo booster is one of the main effects on that just because you get a lot of attacks out with Aries active especially and you're going to be wanting to chain those attacks together as much as possible when Aries is out anyway meaning you can very easily hit this maximum of 72% and get a lot of benefit out of this and that being the subtrate on my unique sigil here makes it a really good way to fit this into the build and one of the absolute best damage boosters you can run on Catalina as far as other damage boosters I got the two critical hit rates here which have stamina and tyranny on them two other very very good Universal damage boosters now if you only want to run these three damage booster stamina tyy combo booster that is completely fine you will still get a lot of benefit out of the character you'll still be capping a lot of your normal attacks just some of your skills are going to be a little bit harder to cap especially your uh main damaging skill you're going to be using a lot but you'll probably still get a lot of bit the most of the benefit out of this but a lot of Catalina players do recommend running uh many damage boosters just because it is hard to hit some of those caps stamina gives 51% boost 100% Health you should be at that most of the time in most combat situations and tyranny just gives 36% boost pretty much un versally at the cost of 20% of your health which is really nice to have and then I got my obligatory four damage cap five pluses this is uh really nice to have just to make sure we're doing as much damage as possible hitting the absolute maximum damage we possibly can I've got quick cool down on one of these cool down reduction is extremely good on Catalina because you want to have your cool Downs up as much as possible so you can chain all your attacks together and keep Aries active more often and it also allows lower skill cool down on that skill that uh summons Aries instantly so when you do lose Aries you have uh more up time on Aries anyway just from having that skill up more often so really good to have quick cool down in that case as well now speaking of quick cool down the other unique sigil that Catalina has offer some cooldown reduction but Catalina players and do not recommend running it because it's only 5% and it's not actually that good of an ability it doesn't really have that much benefit compared to even quick cool down or Cascade so that is why Catalina players do not really recommend running it and why I'm not running it on this build either I also did not really notice many positive benefits with it and with the current amount of cool down reduction the build has you should be fine and most of situations for chaining areas as infinitely as you possibly can in most situations if you can somehow conveniently fit it on the build and you don't need any other sub trits it could be an option to consider but right now it is not a very good unique sigil to consider running the other sub traits I have in my damage caps are cascade once again this is a really good effect to have just one level of this or one schedle of this gives 1.6% cool down reduction well based on the types of attack you deal but just having one level is almost maxed out so that's really nice to have uh I have steel nerves this is to go along with the Stout heart that I have I am running Stout hard on this character because like I mentioned before any kind of interruption will immediately cancel Aries even dodging or something like that so just kind of being able to tank through attacks and uh not take as much damage is probably going to be better in most situations in this specific case taking less damage and uh still being able to continue your combo and keep Aries active is going to give you more benefit in the long run here that is why I kind of like running the Stout hard on this character because I do think there is a lot of benefit out of that and uh just keeping Aries up time is more important than anything else for me potion hoarder helps with this as well you're going to need more healing if you're tanking more attacks so you want to kind of keep the uh potions running and uh keep your health up as well with this especially since you have stamina or stamina as a subtrate now because of this I could only really conveniently fit one supplementary damage five into my build now this only gives 42% I believe with only one of these which is not ideal you do lose some DPS here compared to being able to run two or even three of these but I didn't really have a way to uh conveniently fit more into my build if unless I wanted to give up some more like important sub traits like quick cool down or something like that so I'm only running one right now I still get 42% chance to deal that 20% additional damage it does stack it does stack with Guardian conviction so if it does trigger that is nice at the very least but uh I am losing a little bit of damage because of that but I do think the utility it offers and the ability to have more Aries uptime is more beneficial in the long run in most fights then I have my obligatory War Elemental this is just a straight bypass to the damage cap 20% damage boost absolutely make sure you are running this on pretty much every character it's just so so beneficial as a Sigil very very strong effect to have all of your attacks do a lot more damage and then I have a link together 5 plus and egis 5 plus these both come with quick cool down to max out my coold down reduction on quick cool down the minus 20% there is really nice to have egis gives me more maximum health so I can tank attacks a lot easier gives me up to that 41 41k threshold just about and Link together is just a really nice effect in general for Catalina for the support abilities and because link attacks are actually pretty good for her just because you get more Aries gauge out of it you get to build up to link time link time is pretty beneficial for Catalina in general for Aries as well so that's pretty nice to have you also get more SBA damage as well and uh more chain burst damage there's a lot of benefits out of linked together I do like this as an effect to run in most situations so this is kind of the setup I'm running right now like I said you could replace Stout heart with more supplementary damage if you really don't think you need Stout heart you could probably replace link together as well if you have a supplementary damage 5 plus with a good sub trade or something like that but I do like the set that I'm running right now I do think it is pretty beneficial for both tankiness and just getting the most benefit out of Aries as possible so let's take a look at skills now my current skill set is more off offensive but there is some benefit to some of her utility skills as well so first up we have Frozen blade I do recommend running this pretty much at all time because it is a very short cooldown that you can use multiple times and it's one of the main things that allows you to maintain Aries a lot easier because it's just such a quick spell you're able to immediately chain into your combo finishers with this and uh if you're attacking with Aries it also does a lot more damage as well next up we have Enchanted lands this is probably going to be her best skill in general this ability has a very high damage cap on it it's one of the things you're going to be wanting to stack the damage boosters with the damage cap on and especially when Aries is active this can do a lot of damage so this is one of your best skills it also acts as an effective Gap closer and it also has a pretty short coold down making it one of the best skills that you have it chains into your combo finishers does a lot of damage with Aries run this pretty much at all times as your sword is probably going to be your other mostly required ability here this is the one that immediately summons Aries the cool down is long but the fact that you can immediately get Aries when you use this ability makes it pretty much a required skill it's one of those skills that you're probably going to be holding the cool down of if you do have Aries active already just because uh you're going to want to save it for when you lose Aries so you can kind of immediately get Aries back in a situation uh after like a boss downtime section or after a boss special attack or something like that but this is definitely a 100% recommended skill to run because you're going to want to be using this pretty much all the time to activate Aries especially at the start of fights and especially after downtime SE so you can immediately get back into areas without having to do any combo finishers or waste time trying to get it back Winters rain this is probably the best if you want to go maximum Catalina DPS that's just a multi-hit attack does a of stun it also can chain into your combo finishers also keeps Aries active just a pretty good attacking move in general as just one of your other abilities as far as her other four skills these are kind of situationally useful heal you probably do not need to run at all though because most people are going to have potion hoarder and abilities to heal themselves but this just kind of a heal ability it's very straightforward if you think you need heal I guess it could be something to consider then we have sacred wins now glaciate is one of the best effects in the entire game although Catalina's glaciate is not as good as Lancelot because it's kind of award to use but it could be useful in certain situations depending on the boss fight and depending on team setup glaciate is still really broken if you're able to actually take advantage of it and being able to prolong the effect and uh kind of stop enemies in their track is really nice but it kind of acts as a circle AOE so you have to be kind of close to the enemy and in a specific spot to get the most benefit out of it but glaciate is still really really good actions can't be performed by enemies could be good depending on the situation light wall this is a pretty good utility ability um a friend of mine has used this in matches the where we were doing Proto Baja originally and we really like this during the crystal downtime section so we could just kind of ignore mechanics and just kind of easily make sure we were to get through that but naturally with the skill level increased and uh equipment level increased we don't really have to worry about that at all but at the very least having invincibility to the entire party while Aries is active is just really nice to have as an effect and uh just having invincibility while being able to move around and attack is pretty nice um especially during very tricky or really strong attacks I could see this being a lot more useful when the lucilius raid comes out especially if there's section that's just really really brutal so this is something to keep in mind a good skill to have maybe something you could definitely replace uh Winter's rain with and then finally we have Emerald Shield this is just a defense and stout heart buff to Catalina this is a way you can get Stout heart without the uh sigil effect but it requires using a skill slot and uh it's a utility ability so you can't actually chain into your combo finishers or keep Aries up time with this as easily so that is something to keep in mind but the defense buff and stout heart can be pretty nice and uh if you're able to Grant it to the entire party that can be pretty nice as well if Aries is active so that's another nice utility ability if you want to run want to run Catalina as a more tanky supportive set this is a good ability to consider at the very least so she has a lot of good skills although if you want to run more maximum damage I do recommend this setup but light wall can be useful depending on the situation let's take a look at over masteries really quickly before we get into game play so my over masteries are definitely not the best here but I did get a nice roll of skill damage up which is actually pretty good on her to make sure you're capping out and getting as much damage as you can out of Enchanted land since it has a really high cap skill damage cap up 20% is also nice as well the normal cap up 12% is still pretty nice I also got a skybound art damage cap up roll here so these are not bad over masteries it just doesn't have crit rate which is the kind of the main thing it's missing here which is why I'm only at 95% critical hit rate critical hit rate is still one of the best over Masters you can get so something you should probably be looking for most of the time but these are still pretty four pretty good traits to consider on Catalina and uh something pretty worth having on her stun damage could be good good as well but otherwise these are probably going to be kind of the main kind of six things you going to want to look for normal cap UPS skill damage cap up skill damage up for enchanted lands critical hit rate up Sky Bon art damage cap up stun power same kind of things you would expect on most characters I think that's going to cover it for a general setup so let's get into actual game play now this has been kind of a long window so I do apologize but here is your spoiler warning if you are worried about postgame raid spoilers or anything like that let's get into it so as you may expect the general strategy in a lot of these fights is going to be using AZ your sword instantly to immediately summon Aries and then just trying to keep Aries up time as much as possible even if that means ignoring damage thans of stout heart or anything like that that's going to be my primary goal here most of the time I'm going to be using Enchanted Lance pretty early on as well just because of the high damage that that offers I'm going to be using link attacks when that's available as well and then just using as many Aries pack strikes as I can and then afterwards using my uh Arts to uh or skills sorry to continue my up time even if I get hit here it doesn't matter cuz I'm able to Stout heart through it and kind of damage immune through it and keep attacking here so that is going to be one of the major benefit of having that Stout heart sigil equipped I don't have to worry about Aries getting interrupted or losing it at all until this part so that wind box does make me lose uh my abilities unfortunately and that is one of the uh things you have to worry about with Catalina here so I just go ahead I was going to just kind of wait but uh since veins pops this bubble I go ahead and go ahead and recharge my Aries gauge here so I figured why not and then once I get it charged I'm going to hold on to it because I don't want to use it during this section where I don't do a ton of damage to him so I hold on to Aries here until we can do it more actual effective damage to him since at this point we're at a point where we don't really do that much and now that he's out of that special attack I'm going to immediately summon Aries again and go back into like spamming my combo finishers uh wind boxes can be a little Annoying and when especially when you get in a situation like this when uh I lost Aries there cuz I had to dodge and attack there but fortunately Azure sword was back off cool down again and that is one of the benefits of azure sword you can immediately summon it Aries back when that is off cool down and I can immediately go back into my Aries and pack strikes combo finishers again and from here it's just kind of the same combination use a skill use a combo finisher use Aries pack strike use another skill use another combo finisher use another Aries pack strike keep Aries up as much as possible to get as much damage and benefit out of Aries as I possibly can here so we're kind of got him in a good spot now where we can kind of stun lock him at this point and uh the fight shouldn't be too difficult from here so I did lose Aries a few times in this fight but thanks to uh being able to get him back pretty easily during during that one downtime section and having azzure sword the other time I was still able to maintain most uptime on Aries that I possibly could now after using my SBA I'm going to immediately chain into another skill because you can't chain into pack strike out of SBA so you want to make sure that you are chaining into another skill to keep Aries up afterwards if you are using uh your Aries with an SBA here like this so at this point he is at uh 14% going to jump to the middle soon most likely uh we get a actually no we get a break so we can just kind of end the fight here looks like and have basically no issues link time is also up like I said if link time does activate we don't have enough time here for to really show it off but I think you get infinite Aries during that and uh it makes it very easy to maintain Aries during that section as well without having to worry about doing all these skill cancels but even then during during a link time you probably want to be spamming Enchanted land as much as possible because of the high damage cap on that and just general useful damage that it offers when you have that available so that's just kind of a general fight how you would do this in this kind of situation I'm going to show off one more but I'm not going to show off the full fight cuz the video is kind of already long already but uh s General principles apply we're going to look at a nil Hilla malmer the wolf and uh same kind of strategy I'm going to dodge out of the way first and then activate a Azure sword pop Aries and then immediately go into my combos make sure that I am positioning myself kind of in a way where I'm not taking too much damage even though I have Stout heart but I am going to be taking some damage just because uh that's just kind of the name of the game here to maintain Aries up time and keep attacking with Aries active so this enemy likes moving around a lot I am able to uh keep Aries up to time there so that's nice at the very least I heal make sure I heal myself when I do take damage so I am not not low on health so even though that I'm kind of just face taking a lot of damage here thanks to the steel nerves thanks to Stout heart thanks to my potions I'm in a good situation regardless here and we already kind of get him to this uh threshold where we're at 62% already broken and uh yeah just the sheer amount of damage thanks to keeping Aries up time is able to kind of make short work of a lot of these fights now that is not to say that it will always go this smoothly now obviously he activates KNX ET turna here and uh I'm going to lose Aries in this fight there there's no there's no way I'm going to not be able to keep Aries during this section but what luckily Azure sword is still off coold down is going to be coming off cool down during this section and and immediately after this I'm going to be able to activate that and immediately go back into areas up time without even having to worry about the combo finishers here so just kind of maintaining and keeping your Azure sword when uh for these sections can be really nice so you're able to immediately go back into that attack afterwards all in all I would not say her gameplay Loop is too super difficult it's not too hard to maintain Aries up time and it can just be a little bit tricky sometimes if you're in a situation where you're unable to uh use your abilities as effectively I don't get glaciated there it doesn't really matter because I'm behind the Crystal anyway fight's pretty easy but uh yep a your swords up I can immediately activate this again he does end up getting this attack off again which takes a while and it's just kind of the same thing afterwards so I'm going to kind of cut the fight when we get to that point but uh I just use Azure sword into my uh Enchanted lands and just go into pack stri again and just kind of go into spamming all of my damage again the gameplay Loop is not that hard as I said it's just it's just maintaining areas is important uh when I get the knock back there I do immediately try to use a skill so I do not lose uh Aries there and I was able to maintain it there which was pretty nice which helps a lot I guess I did kind of fit into that timing there which is pretty nice and uh yeah now I just use the nox ETA again but the fight is kind of basically over after this I just don't want to show the entire phase again and we're already at a long video so I'm going to skip ahead at this point there's really not any much more to the fight anyway it's just kind of killing him at this point after this phase is over and uh just maintaining Aries to the very end and uh using those abilities when they're up so I think that's probably going to be the main things I can't really think of anything else is that impactful to talk about maintaining Aries is important and knowing how to get Aries back as fast as possible when you lose Aries is going to be the main keys to playing Catalina and I hope this video was kind of able to kind of teach you the proper ways to do that and kind of understanding the best ways to do that and the best ways to maintain Aries up time I hope you did learn something from watching this and if you did please be sure to like the video comment down below please let me know any feedback you have on how I can improve these even further and if you didn't like the video you can let me know that as well that is fine once again thank you guys so much for the support I do appreciate all of it and as per usual please look forward to all my future character guides I got about five characters left in the game and I do plan to cover all of them and well as well as any future content that comes out for the game and all future characters so once again thank you all so much for watching have a wonderful and blessed day and hopefully I'll see you back here soon

Channel: Enel

Views: 11,699

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Id: sCRz5ewzt1k

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024