Iphi/Strategy
General Overview[edit]
Iphi's ability to grant all other frontline team members of the team Lunatic-Risktaker, Cover, and a free revive via Blood Contract, provide mental focus to mages, grant barrier pierce to an ally by consuming blood contract herself, and convert the parties damage to Shade allow her to be used with a wide variety of characters. Moves like Rosa Liliac and Nocturnal Procession give her the ability to fulfill diverse roles such a debuffing, pain/poison setting, and party buffing. While her buffs and debuffs may not be the highest compared to others (especially without Seance stacks), what she does offer is often good enough, allowing more flexibility in party construction by fulfilling multiple roles.
Against some content placing a tank at rightmost (forth) position can result in a team that is effectively unkillable, but that won't work against all opponents. Reapplying blood contract to the party via Walpurgisnacht can also be problematic if entering shade zone would be detrimental to the party DPS or overall survivability.
DPS Support[edit]
While best-suited for enhancing characters doing Shade damage, Iphi can enhance most DPS with ease, able to assist with increasing damage via PWR, INT and SPD buffs as well as via setting pain and poison with a type resistance debuff, and with Shade zone notably increasing all elements damage. She can also grant Mental focus, but as noted above care must be taken about using Walpurgisnacht if a given DPS is reliant on being in a zone other than Shade.
Mob-clearing and HP support[edit]
With an appropriate approach to MP restoration, Hypnophobia can allow her to both assist with mob clearing and help keep the party's HP topped up with a single move.
Limitations[edit]
A lot Iphi's skills do have demerits and below are listed some examples. If you understand the demerits, you can mitigate it to an extent.
- Iphi's Barrier Pierce applies only for 1st move so for characters who have attack again, this will only take effect for the 1st attack.
- In order to enable Barrier Pierce, you must consume Blood Contract, which removes the Lunatic state provided by Iphi which will reduce party members attack damage and will remove extra effects for characters who rely on Lunatic to improve their skill like Yakumo.
- Iphi's Kaleido (Shade) relies on the fact that Biting Shade Stance is active so Walpurgisnacht needs to be done twice in order to enable Kaleido (Shade).
- Blood Contract is not considered a Revival like other skills in this category. Some enemy attacks will ignore Blood Contract's ability to "revive" a character.
- Blood Contract can't "revive" a character if Iphi is disabled by a status condition. Be wary of Environmental Effects or AOE method to inflict Status Effects
