PalinBuild and Guide

Palin is an Odd Affinity hybrid between a Support, a Debuffer, and a semi-Sustain, capable of both increasing the damage of her team while massively improving the tankiness of one of her allies.

Skill 1

Palin’s S1 is a two-part skill, with an active and a passive effect. The active is a simple 1-hit attack that has a 75-100%chance of giving Palin a 1 turn [Immunity]. The passive, Return to Life, heals any ally that performs a follow-up attack by 10-15% of their own max HP up to once per turn. Although Immunity is an extremely powerful buff, it’s only applied to Palin, helping her avoid disruptions in order to cast the rest of her more powerful abilities; however, it offers 0 utility to your team. The healing on follow-up attack (FUA) is good on paper, but being based on the ally’s max HP, this skill can only properly heal bruisers and generally high HP/DEF Animuses who aren’t at risk of being 2-shot by most of the competition.

S1 has by far the lowest priority out of all of Palin’s skills; its milestones are level 3 and level 5, however, only seek level 5 if you feel that your S3’s main target struggles to survive.

Skill 2

S2 is a potent AoE Debuffing tool, dishing out 2-hits with each of them having a 30-45% chance of dispelling a buff, and a 60-75% chance to apply [Vulnerable] to each enemy hit. Simple and effective, Palin’s S2 is mostly used to disrupt the enemy after you’ve already set up your team, with the idea of amplifying the relentless assault of Palin’s best allies.

Bringing the skill down to 3 turns of CD massively improves the uptime on the Vulnerable debuff and reinforces the mid/long-term capabilities of her team. Still, lvl4 is already enough for short-term battles, and the skill has lower prio than her S3, which your entire strategy can be based on.

Skill 3

S3 is an AoE Buff giving the whole team a 2-turn [DEF+] as well as a 2-turn [Counterattack Rate+]. On top of those two effects, Palin’s S3 brings its own new Buff, [Threat]! Threat is a new take on the [Taunt] effect, with much more potent upsides, but also serious downsides:

• For the upsides, the unit affected by Threat benefits from a 20-30% Damage Reduction and a 50-100% bonus Eff RES, making them extremely tanky. The enemy is also forced to target them with their Damage skills. On top of that, the effect cannot be stolen or transferred, and its duration cannot be changed with any increase/decrease effects;

• For the downsides, although Threat is applied for 8-10 turns, its duration decreases after each enemy action, which means that against a fast/high action team, your buff will expire very quickly. This can, however, become an amazing upside if you can slow down or delay the enemy. Threat can also be dispelled, so keep an eye out for that. Lastly, enemies can still use all of their skills, and any non-damage skill can still be aimed at other units.

In summary, Threat forces your enemy to adapt their gameplan in a way that favors you: they can either dispel the buff through a whopping +100% Eff RES, or go through as many actions as they can in the quickest way possible and with as few single target attacks as possible, otherwise they’ll have no choice but to suffer a massive amount of counterattacks from your Threat carry while being unable to deal with their preferred targets.

S3 is the highest skill investment priority; make sure to level it up to 4 at minimum, and 5 for mid/long-term battles.

PVE

This will be short, as currently, Palin is lacking in most PVE content at the time of her release. Skill 2 is her best tool; however, it isn’t prioritised by the AI on Auto. S1 is largely useless since it’s impossible to keep a whole team healthy through spamming FUAs without missing a lot of utilities, and even then, most damage dealers are squishy enough that 10-15% of their HP is irrelevant vs Bosses. S3 is a good Defensive Buff; however, the Threat isn’t that big of a deal and most of the dangerous attacks tend to be AoEs anyway, which are not disabled by Threat.

PVP

When it comes to PVP, Palin’s S3 becomes much more intimidating, as forcing the enemy to focus a high counter rate bruiser, buffed up with extra tankiness and 100% Eff RES, can lead to a quick game over from the sheer damage of the counters and the time bought for the rest of the team to perform their roles. In this way, S1’s passive effect also becomes more effective, keeping an already tanky team healthy at no cost, and S2 is a perfect follow-up for a devastating turn 2.

Beware [Block], however, as without S3, Palin serves little to no purpose as a Support and becomes a less-than-mediocre Debuffer when compared to the likes of Plume or Heinrich, to name a few.

Conclusion

Palin specializes in buffing a single, highly durable ally to turn them into a spiked wall, dishing out massive damage and taking very little themselves. She even offers Dispel and Vulnerable, two powerful effects; however, she is difficult to bring in well-optimized teams in PVE, unlike PVP where her lack of versatility doesn’t impact the threat she represents when properly drafted.

To sum it up, Palin is extremely meta-dependent, but when it’s her time to shine, she definitely delivers.