#OLIVIA BENCH GET HER TO 7K !!!!!!!!!!

[crystalelemental]

Alright, time for some Off-Type Clears!  Because man, I do enjoy doing the F2P clears sometimes, but also I miss using some of my favorites that have been sidelined.

Vs. Hala Champion Iris has been on the bench for a long time in CS, and it's a shame.  5/5 grid when?  Anyway, I opted for C!Elesa who is the eternal best partner for her, and Variety Lorelei, whose offensive buffs perfectly complement Iris'.  Gotta get the Lorelei value in somehow to justify spending on the low-effort alt.  The main struggle here was Iris hitting crit on sync.  She missed it three times out of five runs.  THREE!  It's an 80%!  Anyway.  The other failure was my own fault, I got greedy with gauge and Iris couldn't queue up a move so we fell behind the sync requirement, and Hala's sync is Ice, so it dropped Elesa too.  The next round went better.  Iris still nukes for like infinity billion damage.  Slightly related, but I'm still considering giving her Defense Crush as a lucky skill.  I'm holding off only because I'm really, really hopeful that her grid expansion packs it.  It's like the only thing aside from Power Play and Aggravation I could see benefiting her.

Vs. Olivia My girl Caitlin is so good.  It turns out, the Lucian combo actually does work spectacularly.  His debuffs are perfectly aligned to this comp, with SC Jasmine buffing up special defense, and attack drops keeping her alive against a physical damage dealer.  Caitlin herself just trucks the center, ending on a big explosion.  I do let SC Jasmine take first sync, and we just happened to get the quad queue, so I don't know how well they'd take Olivia's sync.  Also, important note: you might think that, with speed buffs, Jasmine can use Flash Cannon here for guaranteed debuffs if needed.  That's the devil talking.  The gauge isn't that good, even at +6.  Also Absorb recoups a lost gauge which is far more ideal for Caitlin specifically.  Also yes I know this team is filled with redundancy but let me live.

Vs. Kahili I am pissed on Lusamine's behalf, which means now it's everyone's problem.  I opted to bring in Sabrina as the tank, because the condition was permanent field effects, and I figured hey, Sabrina sets Reflect, which boosts speed.  This is an ideal outcome that will in no way harm me.  Spoilers: it harmed me.  Sabrina is not a good physical tank.  Bianca has also finally bitten the bullet.  I gave her Head Start.  At this point, there's no reason not to anymore.  Also we were having legitimate trouble getting the clear without it, so like...I'm calling it an essential change.

Vs. Acerola Now that Zinnia is 3/5, I wanted to see how she did.  Turns out, pretty good.  I will say, this particular team is really nice.  Masked Royal has a lot of benefit with Brutal Swing, kicking off Calem's Buddy move a bit quicker and debuffing defense.  Zinnia herself is just hilarious.  I still can't get over the +3 to all stats condition getting immediately blasted by an AoE Snatch attack with a 70% chance to just flinch everyone.  The sickest part is her sync, which wasn't even full investment, hit for like 35k.  Comparable damage to Iris.  Like okay.  Sure.

Vs. Kukui My girls have languished.  I haven't run this team in a long time, and now they'll be brought out for the 12.5k meta.  And you may be wondering, how'd they do?  Well, it turns out that Lillie could two-shot the sides after Caitlin's sync.  So a double denial, which is hysterical.  Now, the first attempt failed.  Because I forgot, Cynthia's sync is physical, and I had physical damage reduction on so Lillie could hit as hard as possible.  So Cynthia's sync bounced off him for like 7k and then we just didn't recover from that.  His sync is a sure KO against Cynthia, even if you cap defense.  However on the second attempt, sync still happens to us because i still didn't take off physical damage reduction because I didn't leave the fight and hit retry and decided to just let Lillie sync. Turns out she could handle it.  Once again, Healthy Benefits 5 paying off.  And this all got to be with permanent field effects, which is great for H!Caitlin.  You basically just get everything.

Final Thoughts Alola was the last of the old school CS regions, before Sinnoh showed up with the insanity of Entry x2 skills and all that.  As a result, I feel like it's a good middle of the road region.  There's some tough stuff, but nothing outrageous.  This week in particular didn't feel too bad, nothing was all that unreasonable to handle.  But still, I had fun.  I miss using my favorites.  I've gotten too invested in F2P clears, I'm doing off-type for a while.