Too bad he pops like a soap bubble the instant a mage comes within range. He even gets insta-gibbed by reds.
Less so when you have Triangle Adept that makes him even sturdier (and deadlier against reds and colorless) meaning that your choice is generally a blue mage or a green unit (the latter whom he would die to anyways).
Less so when you have Triangle Adept that makes him even sturdier (and deadlier against reds and colorless) meaning that your choice is generally a blue mage or a green unit (the latter whom he would die to anyways).
But the problem is, you generally want to have one of each color to handle the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the game... and he fails to carry out his duty as a blue in countering reds. Granted, I only had a 4-star, but he was next to Lon'qu and a few others as being one of the units I gave up on leveling because he couldn't survive his necessary role when ramming a leveling creche through the training tower. And the notion that he's somehow a Takumi counter is a bit suspect. He needs about +18 damage in buffs, boons, or passives to one-shot a basic, unbuffed Takumi, and provided Takumi has the double attack, he'll kill Robin on the next round after that first shot.
Plus, Olwen and Cecilia are my primary competitive game killers, and he's total roadkill for both of them when I come across him in the arena.
But the problem is, you generally want to have one of each color to handle the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the game... and he fails to carry out his duty as a blue in countering reds. Granted, I only had a 4-star, but he was next to Lon'qu and a few others as being one of the units I gave up on leveling because he couldn't survive his necessary role when ramming a leveling creche through the training tower. And the notion that he's somehow a Takumi counter is a bit suspect. He needs about +18 damage in buffs, boons, or passives to one-shot a basic, unbuffed Takumi, and provided Takumi has the double attack, he'll kill Robin on the next round after that first shot.
Plus, Olwen and Cecilia are my primary competitive game killers, and he's total roadkill for both of them when I come across him in the arena.
Except I have Triangle Adept and laugh at red and colorless attacks forever. I already have red and a green unit to take care of blue and green units, so Robin takes care of the reds and colorless ones.
Except I have Triangle Adept and laugh at red and colorless attacks forever. I already have red and a green unit to take care of blue and green units, so Robin takes care of the reds and colorless ones.
The thing about putting all your hopes on Triangle Adept and ruby/sapphire/emerald weapons is that the enemy isn't always going to be nice enough to line up so that you can wipe them all out in one turn, and you're going to have to let the next turn roll around with your hyper-specialized units just as disadvantaged by the weapon triangle as they were advantaged. Worse, it specializes your party. You can't win battles assuming each one of your units can counter one specific enemy, you need to make sure there's redundancy in what units each member of the party can counter, so that one casualty doesn't doom your whole party. Triangle Adept and R/S/E weapons are really best saved for when you already have units that can take out everything that isn't one particular color. (I.E. you have Hector and Nino backed up by Eirika mowing down everything that isn't red, THEN, having a sapphire lance user with at least somewhat tanky stats like Tsubaki is justified, since you really JUST need to block reds.) Even then, if you run into an all-one-color enemy team, specialization can really come back to bite you (and I come across all-red teams often enough that it's worth keeping in mind), so you really need to be sure that you have someone whose Def AND Res are high enough to single-handedly win the battle with a monochrome enemy.
Besides, that's ignoring the yawning, inescapable failure of Boy!Robin, which is that even with Triangle Adept, he's not strong enough to get the OHKO on the pure mages like Lilina (and Young!Tiki eats him alive), and odds are good that'll cost you a unit (often Robin, himself) on the enemy's next turn... and if you don't have another unit that ACTUALLY counters those red mages, you're basing your whole strategy around using one unit to counter all reds that winds up getting countered BY a red...
This whole "he's got great defense" thing relies entirely upon the notion that he's only fighting physical attackers, but there's just too many teams out there built around mages with a heavy punch to make that true. (Besides, if you really want a physical tank that crushes everything that stands before their path, just give Effie a brave lance, which is FAR more likely to simply overwhelm all defenses with her highest ATK score in the game and Wary Fighter to mitigate the magic damage at least as well as Boy!Robin does.)
We're dead.
5* Robin: A gorilla that's also a wall
Gorilla as in offensively powerful, and wall as in defensively powerfulHahaBows and Swords die
