Linaria
Basic Info:
Rarity: Legendary
Race: Human
Gender: Female
Type: Dark
Personality: Evil
Starting Class: Thief
Base Traits
| Strength | IQ | Piety | Vitality | Dexterity | Speed | Luck |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | 14 | 12 | 11 | 12 | 14 | 13 |
Portraits
Skills
Inheritable Skill
Increases damage dealt by adjacent allies for 3 turns. Damage increase amount and number of turns are reduced if learned by someone other than Linaria. Damage increase amount and number of turns increased based on skill level.
Unique Skill (Not Inheritable)
After using a non-attack buff or debuff skill, there is a chance that the user can perform another action. During an encore, the user can take an action other than using the skill used immediately prior, but encores will not trigger consecutively. The trigger probability decreases based on the number of times an encore has occurred during the battle.
Discipline Skill
Continuously increases each stat, with SP and Action Speed increased further. SP and Action Speed increased further based on skill level.
Adventurer Reviews
TheAxolotl's Analysis
One thing I've really been pleased with about this game is that the devs do a great job of releasing strong and/or unique adventurers without making them game-breakingly broken. Linaria is a good example of this - many initial reactions were that she's very overpowered, but that's not really the case, and whether or not you use her is ultimately going to boil down to what you want in your party. Let's look at her skills!
First, Riotous Ballad is her buff, and it's quite solid. First and foremost, it's a true damage buff and not an attack power buff, so this has the benefit of boosting magic damage as well as physical damage. While most parties don't run with heavy magic damage, there are some exceptions out there and this will become even more valuable if magic damage ever gets a rework by the devs. As with most buffs, this is not a flat percentage multiplier - there's a multiplicative as well as an additive component. Early testing shows that at skill level 1 on Linaria herself, the buff is somewhere in the order of a 10% increase plus a flat 45ish damage. Inheriting the skill seems to reduce the flat component more than the percentage component, but it's a bit tough to say for sure and will need some more testing to iron out.
As far as practical application, Riotous Ballad will generally perform better for lower attack power, multiple hit weapons than it will for high attack power, single hit weapons, just due to the flat portion of the boost being more noticeable at lower power levels. One important thing to note is that Riotous Ballad does not buff a single row - rather, it buffs the two adventurers on either side of the user plus the adventurer in front or behind the user. For optimal positioning, this means you want Linaria to be placed in either the front or rear middle party slot. As an example, if I were to run her in my party, I could position her as follows:
Shiou - Linaria - Rinne
MC - Yuzu - Sheli
This would enable Shiou, Rinne, and Yuzu to all receive a damage boost. The fact that the buff does not care about alignment is pretty great, and makes it comparable to the Prayer of Rebellion value. Speaking of PoR, it does stack, but it also takes up a standard buff slot, so you'll have to keep an eye on your buffs so you don't accidentally knock off something important.
Her next skill, Encore, appears to be roughly a 50% change to trigger during the first turn. A key thing to note here is that Encore will only trigger on skills. This means that inheriting something like PORTO to her and doing PORTO -> Encore -> Riotous Ballad is not possible. However, it does allow for something like Riotous Ballad -> Hiding.
As far as Discipline goes, she gets ASPD and SP as her featured stats, which does lean into her support-heavy focus.
One of the big downsides to her kit is that she's a Thief class, which generally performs on the weaker side in combat these days. Her Encore skill does open up some interesting potential with class changes, but it's hard to say what value that will have at the moment.
One neat thing is that in camp, she does play her lute and provide some music, which is a nice little aesthetic touch!
Shiro's Analysis
So as people expected we got thief with lute… I want to praise devs on start for visual design and the audio coming along with this character. It surely is a really nice add-on to the game and will be highly appreciated by some people.
But now going to practice, she’s dark element which is the best option for thieves, followed by the human race, so nice luck growth on top of the dark element already supporting it, which means solid stats for chest opening.
Her passive is kind of nice… but I’m not that big fan of heavy RNG in fights so I’m not losing my mind over it and I find it whatever… unless she’ll get knight later on which can be a really interesting option.
Her discipline is ASPD and SP which push her more into the support side which is something I’m really happy about too, Devs did know what to do with it this time.
The interesting thing is her inheritance. It’s not ATK or MATK buff but ALL DMG UP. What does it mean in practice? First it’s active so it’s not worse than passive Lana and Alice in that matter, secondly it buffs characters that are next to her not including her, which means you can pick whichever 3 units you want to buff, cutting her off while she’s supported anyway so no buff slot is wasted. Lastly there’s no personality requested unlike in case of Lana or Alice. And also I might call it kind of future proof thanks to it. Might be better to grab her mainly for inheritance over character and just feed it to Alice. Especially looking how for example Dwarf Cave boss shows that devs might want us to stack damage buffs and supports and focus on 1-2 DPS.
Overall in my opinion the new character is really good with the main selling point being her inheritance. Her being a thief is even better because she can reach high ASPD and have better rotations. And in my opinion thieves are better as controllers and sub-dps or full supports with main selling point being delay and all kind of status/debuff skills supporting your main DPS over thieves doing DMG themselves, which Linaria leans towards, so while I wouldn’t pull for her or go crazy over her I’m really happy that developers know what they are doing.
Adventurer Pull Plans
TheAxolotl's Pull Plan
I'll try to pull for a few copies and experiment with her as an adventurer herself, not just as an inherit. Plus, Bard was probably my favorite class in Wizardry 8, and she's the closest we have to that at the moment!
Duplicate Usage
- Inherit to herself to increase the buff magnitude
- Inherit to someone else
- Discipline will slightly boost her action speed and SP