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Why Is Starry-Eyed Aiona the “Must Have” Vassal for New Players?
(A character guide from a closed-beta tester’s perspective)
Author: ILikeBirds
- You can obtain her in about a week as a guaranteed unit from the SSR selector due to the gacha tickets given for free to new players.
- She opens up a wide variety of unique team compositions, reducing the impact of bad luck. Combined with the above this makes her the most free-to-play-friendly support.
- She fulfills two of the three criteria needed for players to progress the story when there is a high battle point deficit between their vassals and the enemy units (more details on page #5).
- Her ult is consistent in both automatic and manual play, unlike other top-tier enchanters who are prone to being countered by crowd control.
Guide Synopsis
[Comparison Section Bookmarks]
Why is Starry-Eyed Aiona free-to-play friendly?
(Page #3)
Why is Starry-Eyed Aiona chosen over other top-tier enchanters like Seth or Acapella?
(Page #4)
(Pages #5 - 8, TLDR: page #8)
(Pages #5 - 12, TLDR: page #12)
What makes Starry-Eyed Aiona different?
(Pages #13 - 16, TLDR: page #16)
Which enchanters to prioritize?
(Page #17)
How does The Blood Moon work again?
(Page #18)
Why is Starry-Eyed Aiona free-to-play friendly?
First, let's just begin with the groundwork that any character with this icon on the right is from the ancestor faction (Ultra-Rare units).
Any non-ancestor characters can be obtained from the Vampiric Coffin, an SSR selector given to players after their 150th and 300th pull on the Blue Dawn standard banner.
Regarding the three characters being compared, only Seth is of the Ancestor faction.
Seth can be guaranteed using the Ancestral Coffin obtained at 450 pulls on the standard banner.
That is just not realistic for free-to-play players after their initial well of resources dries up.
The most important part of this game is the early stages, as resources obtained from the Ritual which is your main source of income is increased the further you are in the story mode.
Every five story missions (normal/hard) completed levels-up the ritual. Thus, it’s disheartening if you get stuck for weeks in the story mode due to a “weak” enchanter you got from your coffin.
Lastly, S.E. Aiona opens up a lot of team comps for newer players, reducing the pain of poor gacha; this will be explained later.
Why is Starry-Eyed Aiona chosen over other top-tier enchanters like Seth or Acapella?
I will begin this section by detailing information on both Acapella and Seth before explaining why they’re lower priority than S.E Aiona.
There are three fundamental things you need to progress in the story when you have a power deficit: crowd control, team movement, and anti-burst.
The only enchanters who can fulfill the crowd control requirement are Pavana who can only be obtained by maintaining the upper ranks of pvp for multiple seasons and Decarlo who releases on the 5th of July. Thus we will ignore this first criteria.
Ami is a buffer designed for specific carry comps and will not be a part of this comparison. Edina is being ignored because, as of this guide’s creation, she’s weaker than the other healing enchanters by a significant margin, but as one of only three healing enchanters, she’ll be mentioned in some sections.
Only two enchanters can provide team movement; Ami and S.E. Aiona.
With this in mind, this comparison will focus on the third criterion of anti-burst and why S.E. Aiona fulfills this criterion better than Seth and Acapella. There will also be explanations of why the lack of team movement is such a limiting weakness.
Acapella is a unique enchanter who spends the entire fight channeling her ultimate skill. While channeling her ultimate buffs and heals the team by consuming notes and provides energy regeneration to your team allowing you to use ultimates more frequently.
Acapella is considered one of the most powerful enchanters in the entire game, but there is crucial context missing.
First, she is a Half Moon phase enchanter, denoted by the partially filled moon in the upper left of her icon.
All Half Moon enchanters are buffers/debuffers and are not dedicated healers; in fact, they’re designed to be used with their healing counterparts.
This raises the question, “If I already have a second source of healing, should I spend a vampire coffin on Acapella?”
The answer to this is simple: do you already have S.E. Aiona? If the answer is yes, then absolutely grab Acapella. If the answer is no, then grab S.E. Aiona first.
This is because as mentioned previously Acapella is a unique channeling focused enchanter who fails at providing anti-burst.
Acapella’s healing is spread across her ten second ultimate
Every three notes consumed is one instance of healing.
She gains a maximum of one note per second.
Thus, she only begins healing three seconds into the ultimate channel and every three seconds thereafter.
This becomes a significant issue due to the way frontline vassals are used in story content, specifically defenders (and some warriors).
Defenders who are powerful in the story, such as Jestel, Bella, and Transcendent Ami, are powerful because of their crowd control.
Crowd control is so important that Jestel, even as an SR rarity character, is hailed by many to be the single best tank for pushing story content due to her ability to cancel and stop enemies from channeling their skills using her five-second taunt.
The defender Theophane’s “Leap of Faith” is arguably better if you can acquire him, but that’s entirely luck of the draw.
Of course, crowd-controlling tanks like Jestel, Bella, and T. Ami are often less resilient than their pure meatshield counterparts.
Without anti-burst, these crowd-controlling tanks are very likely to die in the first few seconds of a fight in high deficit content.
Finally, due to Acapella having no anti-burst, she’s the squishiest of the three top-tier enchanters. This isn’t a particular problem in low-deficit or early on in the story, but after chapter eleven comes the introduction of enemies who’ll ignore your front line, often leading to Acapella being killed early on in the fight.
To finish Acapella’s chapter I’d like to briefly mention how important team movement is for the current state of Silver and Blood.
Beginning past chapter seven of the story enemies will start deploying a significant amount of area-of-effect crowd control.
These skills are always activated after a channel, just like Acappella’s ultimate.
There is an extremely high likelihood that Acapella will get stunned out of her ultimate, rendering it useless, as unless she gets exactly three notes, she will not consume them to heal or buff your allies.
Unlike S.E. Aiona, who can simply move out of the way with her ultimate, or Seth, who, if you’re lucky, can cleanse the stun (emphasis on lucky), you’re forced to watch your Acapella get stunlocked the entire combat phase.
TLDR: Acapella is a fantastic buffing enchanter who excels at increasing team damage but lacks any form of anti-burst, rendering her significantly weaker without a dedicated healer, and the channeling nature of her ultimate rendering her stationary often leads to her dying or being stunned.
She’s still the second most important enchanter to obtain after S.E. Aiona, due to increasing team DPS in a wide variety of content.
Also, to clarify since I’ve been asked, you use buffer/debuff enchanters with their healing counterparts, so S.E. Aiona + Acapella is a support core.
Seth is an enchanter with a unique gimmick. During her ultimate she reverts the health of allies to three seconds prior (if their health was higher). This “healing,” is detached from her base stats.
This means Seth’s “healing” is not penalized by the percentage stat decrease from being in a power deficit.
She’s also able to consistently purify enemy debuffs, prioritizing crowd control allowing your units to shrug off stuns and resistance reducing effects.
These two in combination is why throughout the two years of the closed-beta test for Silver and Blood, Seth held the position of the de facto best anti-burst healer.
Seth seems to perfectly fulfill the criteria of anti-burst, and if she can purify negative effects, doesn’t that remove the need for team movement?
So, what exactly changed for her to be suddenly dethroned?
The answer comes from the changes made to the game's combat. Specifically the introduction of the energy system and how it affected using ultimates.
Seth’s initial listing as “the best healer in the game” was made during a time when ultimates had no skill costs; thus, you could just use all your ultimates off of cooldown.
Nowadays, if you want to use Seth’s ultimate, you have to preemptively conserve energy; four, to be exact, the highest-cost enchanter ult in the game.
This renders you unable to use other ultimates such as a defender’s crowd control or a marksman's burst.
The new energy cost makes Seth’s ultimate significantly worse at reverting the initial damage you take at the start of combat due to needing to wait longer for energy.
Who’s to say your frontline won’t die by then?
Lastly, due to changes in enemy composition Seth’s purification is rendered useless in the story for cleansing specifically crowd control effects.
The enemies who apply stuns and similar effects in an area (introduced in chapter seven) now spawn in groups of three or more.
Seth’s ultimate can only cleanse one effect per cast, which assumes she herself is not hit by the crowd control (before or during casting the ultimate).
Furthermore,
Enemy units who apply single-target crowd control often work by repeatedly applying a stun or sleep debuff for the duration of a channel.
This in turn bypasses Seth’s purification entirely, as the effect is reapplied a second later. To counter these units, a player must employ one of two tactics: long-range crowd control or using team movement to bring defenders (or similar CC heavy vassals) into range of the enemy backline.
TLDR: Seth is a powerful healing enchanter with some of the best anti-burst in the game. She’s the best unit at dealing with non-crowd control debuffs, being a top-tier pick in PvP and non-story mode content.
But due to the addition of energy costs to ultimate skills added to the global launch, Seth is rendered a suboptimal main healer due to her ultimate “cooldown” now being directly affected by the ultimate usages of other vassals in the team composition, requiring a strict timing of her ultimate.
The biggest strength of her ultimate, recouping health to a prior state, also becomes its biggest weakness, as, unlike other enchanter ultimates, you can’t use the skill on demand to preemptively prepare to take damage, and the ultimate itself does nothing to stop a vassal from being truly one-shot, thus making her ultimate weaker at protecting the backline, which is crucial past chapter 10.
Combined with enemy formations that render her unable to cleanse crowd control, whether that be because of multiple instances of crowd control or Seth herself being stunned out of her ultimate, she becomes a significantly weaker main healer compared to S.E. Aiona for story content.
What makes Starry-Eyed Aiona different?
S.E. Aiona, unlike Seth and Acapella, has the most consistent ultimate in the game. As a shielding ultimate, it has no special criteria that needs to be fulfilled before using the ultimate.
It doesn’t even have the criterion of needing your team to have taken damage; you can simply use it on demand.
This is massive for team building, since you don’t need to fear wasting S.E. Aiona’s ultimate “healing,” unlike Seth or Edina, who’ll waste their healing (or, in the case of Seth, do literally nothing) if your units aren’t low on health.
If you try to save Seth’s or Edina’s ultimate skill, you’re locking yourself out of the blood moon, forcing you to run a second New Moon phase vassal for proper skill rotation.
This greatly reduces your DPS in bossing content as all New Moon phase vassals are either defenders or healing enchanters.
Furthermore, S.E. Aiona not only shields your team from massive amounts of damage, but she also heals all allies previously shielded by a percentage of her attack damage. This effect continues forever until the shield is broken.
Any outside sources of shielding, for example, on Jestel’s or Theophane’s ultimate, will refresh this effect indefinitely so long as the initial S.E. Aiona's shield from her talent or ultimate isn't broken.
This enables S.E Aiona and Jestel to be one of the most potent combos for new players (free-to-play especially) as long as you acquire S.E Aiona from the vampire coffin at 150 pulls. You'll have a two vassal combo which can fulfill all three criterias for high deficit story content: crowd control, team movement and anti-burst.
Thus, you can focus the rest of your team on obtaining as much DPS as possible (with the occasional changes for certain stages).
Also, if you can find a way to fulfill the crowd control criteria outside of the defender class, you can drop defenders entirely from your team composition and instead run a double warrior frontline (due to S.E. Aiona’s initial shields).
This can be the difference between beating a boss fight or timing out due to a lack of DPS.
S.E. Aiona is also the most durable enchanter in the entire game. Unlike other healing enchanter ultimates. S.E. Aiona’s ultimate can help squishy vassals survive true one-shot attacks (bosses, marksmen, etc.) that do more than their maximum health in damage.
This is not even considering the fact that on manual play, S.E. Aiona’s team movement allows a player to simply move their team out of the way of telegraphed nukes or stuns prevalent past chapter seven reducing the RNG present in certain boss fights. (The white circle is her movement range).
Lastly, S.E Aiona’s ultimate cast is instantaneous avoiding the issue of the skill being wasted should she be crowd controlled.
This is often the difference between completing the last story mission you need for a level up or being stuck an extra day waiting for resources to accumulate at the ritual.
TLDR: S.E. Aiona is the most powerful healing enchanter in the game; a potent mix of her shielding and healing allows her to provide the most effective anti-burst in the entire game, and unlike Acapella and Seth, she is able to effectively protect squishies from attacks that one-shot them at full health.
Her team movement also enables the player to avoid telegraphed nukes or stuns, allowing a skilled player to continue pushing story content even when their units are considerably weakened. Telegraphed abilities become a major component of many boss battles past chapter seven.
Her ultimate cast time is also instantaneous, removing any chance of the ultimate being cancelled by crowd control. This “immunity” to crowd control is a major reason why she’s more effective than Seth and Acapella.
The shielding nature of her ultimate also means the player never needs to worry about wasting S.E. Aiona’s ultimate. This feature allows more unique compositions, reducing the need for a second New Moon phase vassal (defenders or healers), which can help with smoothing out skill rotations and increasing team damage by fielding more warriors or DPS units.
This increase in team compositions is also why she’s one of the most free-to-play-friendly vassals in the game, significantly reducing the impact of poor luck on a player’s ability to play through the story.
Which enchanters to prioritize?
In general, for new players, if you don’t have Starry-Eyed Aiona, grab her from the vampire coffin selector; if you already have her, then grab Acapella.
If you have both of these characters, grab Edina for faction content. Only obtain Ami if you have all these prior characters and are interested in running auto-attacking DPS compositions.
Grab Seth from the ancestral coffin at 450 pulls on the Blue Dawn banner; she is important for faction-based content and for PvP.
If you already have all of these enchanters, I’d suggest looking at your current roster and choosing an interesting DPS or tank who’d synergize with your composition.
Combat Tips and Tricks!
How does The Blood Moon work again?
Every character in this game belongs to a certain moon phase, these phases being New Moon, Crescent Moon and Full Moon.
When you’ve activated one of each Moon phase you’ll enter the Blood Moon (Ignore the units in the combat deck, look at the icons on the left).
During this enhanced state all units will deal 25% increased damage. More importantly all vassals have their ultimate costs reduced by one.
A large portion of the team-building strategy in Silver and Blood is trying to enter the Blood Moon phase as fast as possible, weighing the pros and cons of using high-cost ultimates without jeopardizing your skill rotation.
Important: You can edit your starting ultimates by accessing a menu on the right side of the screen before combat begins.