Ihsir's Wiles testing

It doesn't inherit the damage for attacks/heals gained via SP enhancements or ES, which rules out every current triple attacker except R&R (who only have single hit extra attacks which Ihsir's Wiles just ignores). This generally means the attack will deal the damage of two attacks on those units unless they also burst heal - but testing has shown the burst heal needs to be one of those ones that has multiple ticks.

All current triple attackers will perfect spark Ihsir's against their third attack (with the exception of R&R, who spark it against their second attack anyway).

KM's a weird case where you can probably dupe-spark a second KM against the first KM's Ihsir pretty easily, but one KM won't get any self-sparks out of it - he'd have hits tied to frame 1 mults, frame 2 mults and frame 0 mults.

I'm still not entirely certain on the interaction with single "hit" burst heals such as Honoka's; they function normally on units with no attacks like Elimo but I need to run a few more tests on units that attack and single-hit burst heal simultaneously to check how they deal damage; the lost hit exists and I don't know if how much damage it's removing. Units that attack and do a single tick burst heal don't gain any damage from the heal.

On multi-hit burst heals, the sphere adds hits for all but one of the heal's "hits" as it does for the second attack on double attackers. I've observed this with Alice. I still need to run damage tests on other similar units, as many of the OE burst healers are single "hit" heals.

Ok, getting back to you on this, it looks like the mechanic is that it drops the last inherited hit from each proc beyond the first when inheriting from a unit with multiple procs. The hit is dropped completely, if the proc only has one hit, Wiles effectively inherits nothing from it.

This basically means "unts that attack and do a single tick burst heal don't gain any damage from the burst heal, but units that attack and multi-tick burst heal do".

With the exception of units like Gabriela who get their burst heal from an SP enhancement, because Ihsir ignores those.

She should do, yeah.

You'll be pin-pricking any content it would work with on Rashil's Stats :)

It doesn't really make Alice usable compared to current units, I just found it interesting that she benefits so much from it as a relatively weak older unit.

The sphere doesn't inherit properly from RT hits. It only sees them as a single hit, and if they're not the first attack of the BB it doesn't see them at all.

At the very least when it does see RT properly, it deals full damage, but it doesn't do anything particularly special from it.

Some examples, huh?

Let's start with the basics. I'll pick a simple unit to demonstrate Ihsir's Wiles on a regular unit with one attack; let's say Thunderous Oracle Fennia.

#On Single Attackers

When attached to a unit with only one attack, and no form of burst heal, Ihsir's Wiles copies all of that attack's damage frames and distribution, but uses its own effect delay. The effect delay matters; when the unit attacks, the effect delay is added to the hit frames to determine the actual frame the hit lands on. In terms of what this means for Wiles, it means that the original hits are usually offset from the Wiles hits by the difference in their effect delay. For example, Thunderous Oracle Fennia's attack data looks like this:

Adding Ihsir's Wiles to her will add an extra ST attack with exactly the same Hit Frames and Damage Dist%, but Ihsir's Wiles always has an Effect Delay of 0 frames. At a glance as frame data, it then looks like this:

However, in-game, we add effect delay to find out the final frame a hit lands on. So Fennia's hit frames can be adjusted for effect delay to show the difference:

Obviously at a glance, none of those hits line up, so none of them will spark until you add other units to the mix. Usually, a unit will only be able to self-spark against Ihsir's Wiles in two potential situations: Either the unit's attack has an effect delay of 0, such as Kaiser Burny (relevant examples are very rare due to effect delay 0 almost never being used for attacks, in order to prevent buff timing issues), or the unit's effect delay is similar to the gap between its hits. I surprisingly had a hard time finding any relevant examples of the latter, but one would be Mariela's BB (but not her SBB), which has an effect delay of 3 and is a perfect 3f spark blanket, meaning that all but one hit of the BB and Wiles attacks would spark - the missed hit being the first hit for Wiles and the last hit of Mariela's BB.

This ends up being similar to how we arrange almost-perfect sparks for non-moving/teleporting units, except that with Ihsir's Wiles, there's no way to adjust the timing with BB delays, resulting in it being hard to make use of it.

In cases where a unit doesn't attack, Wiles will either use the hit data of a burst heal if one exists on the unit (e.g. Elimo), or otherwise will simply hit on frame 0 (e.g. Priestess Snow Miku's BB)

Because nothing special is happening with Wiles interacting with multiple sets of hit data in this case, the damage is exactly as expected for an additional attack with 600% BB mod. The weird stuff begins to happen when we add extra attacks.

#On Double Attackers

OK, with that out of the way, let's look at how Ihsir's interacts with a unit with two attacks; we'll pick two example units - one that will work well, and one that won't. For the first example, we'll go with Eternal Radiance Rize, one of the original double attackers and for the second, keeping it thematic to OG double attackers, we'll use Scorching Steel Gildorf

On units that have multiple attacks, Wiles will draw data normally from the first attack, and for the second attack, it will ignore the first hit, but still take the rest - again including the distribution. As before, Ihsir's Wiles will still be using its own effect delay.

When Ihsir's Wiles generates its attack this way, it's allowed to have more than one attack on a single frame, meaning that it's capable of self-sparking not only the unit's other attacks, but its own hits. This happens with Zelion and Nyami, who self-spark naturally - Wiles pulls the hits of both their attacks, which happen to still self-spark when shifted to another effect delay.

However, Wiles will ignore any extra attack gained through a passive effect - this means it ignores extra attacks gained through ES, such as the season one VA units, and attacks gained through SP enhancements such as Svalinn and Ihsir. These sitll have a strong interaction, which I'll go over later.

So for Rize, our frame data looks like this:

Ihsir's Wiles will copy all of the first attack, and all but the first hit of the second attack, so the Wiles attack looks like this (we're at the point where reddit tables begin to look ugly as hell, so forgive me for not using one this time):

Effect Delay: 0 Hit Frames: 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 66, 69, 72, 75, 78, 81, 84, 90, 93, 96, 99, 111, 115, 119, 123, 127, 131
Damage Dist%: 5, 4, 5, 8, 4, 5, 4, 11, 14, 8, 14, 9, 14, 8, 14, 10, 14, 9, 14, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3

Side note: it looks like Wiles gets a decent amount of self-sparks on Rize.

That aside, notice how Wiles hits 17 times for Rize, one less than the combined hit count of her AoE and ST attacks. The missing hit is the first hit of her second attack, on the 27th frame.

If you're paying enough attention, you'll also note that the Damage Dist% on the Ihsir's Wiles attack totals 192%. The way the game handles this is pretty simplistic - the game merely accepts that this attack deals 192% of the calculated attack damage, and this interaction remains consistent across every unit that Wiles successfully pulls data from more than one attack for.

#When it doesn't work

So I mentioned we'd be using Gildorf as an example earlier. Gildorf was one of the game's first double attacks, with an SBB that simply has a 1 hit AoE attack, and a 1 hit ST attack. His frame data simply looks like this:

When Ihsir's Wiles takes data from any attack past the first it sees, it ignores the first hit of that attack. So Wiles on Gildorf looks like this:

What you're looking at is Wiles seeing two attacks, but completely ignoring the second one because it ignores the first hit of an attack that only has a first hit.

This happens in all cases where Wiles only sees a single frame on a proc, including single tick burst heals, single hit attacks, and RT attacks (unless that proc is the first effect on the unit). So for example, it doesn't have increased damage due to something like Johnny's BB (ST + RT, Wiles cannot see RT attacks as they only have one hit in frame data) or Krantz' SBB (AoE + Burst Heal, but the Burst Heal only has one tick)

#Burst Heals can be Special

There are few relevant cases of this, but because Burst Heals can have a full set of frame data instead of just being a single tick, Ihsir's Wiles will attempt to pull from the frame data for burst heals as well when generating its attack.

For this to be useful for a unit's damage output, the unit needs to meet three criteria:

• The unit already attacks naturally
• The unit has a burst heal that functions in multiple ticks
• That burst heal must not come from a passive effect (i.e. ES/SP/Elgif/Sphere)

In the OE generation, most units we can think of that burst heal in multiple ticks are units such as Krantz, Kulyuk and Sakura Miku. However, the third rule states that the burst heal must not come from a passive effect, and all those examples - and most other OE burst healers with multiple ticks - get their burst heals from SP enhancements.

In practice, this means the only OE unit that gets extra damage from Ihsir's Wiles due to a multi-tick burst heal is Alice. There are a few more at lower rarities, but she's the only unit that has a multi-tick burst heal as part of her core BB/SBB. Every other OE unit with burst heal either gets it via SP, or only has one tick.

For what it's worth, when she uses her BB with Wiles, because her heal and attack have identical frame data and Wiles pulls all of it, she self-sparks 28 out of the 29 hits Wiles has for her.

#Units that gets Additional Attacks from ES or SP

Fundamentally speaking, ES and SP additional attacks are determined using exactly the same logic as Ihsir's Wiles. This means that they're created from every frame of the unit's first attack plus all but the first frame of any following attacks, and they're usually set to effect delay 0.

Now, despite there not being any direct interactions between the effects - the attacks are generated independent of each other - when used together, they are two identical attacks (in terms of frame data) that start on the same frame, and spark perfectly

Following on from that wall of text, we can look at this to get an idea of who Ihsir's Wiles works well on. There are two main groups:

1. Units that have native double attacks (where the double attack is not RT or single-hit)

• e.g. Rize, Nyami, Zelion, Roglizer, Shion, etc.
• Units with native double attacks gain a bonus damage multiplier for Ihsir's Wiles, because it's pulling a sum distribution of more than 100%
• Note that even if a unit's second attack is element-restricted, it still gets used by Ihsir's Wiles even when that element AoE won't hit anything (e.g. Rugarh or Diastima)

2. Units that gain additional attacks via passives

• e.g. Laresa (GRaid only), Ihsir, Svalinn, Blaze (VA batch), Savei (GRaid only), etc
• Units that gain additional attacks via passives will always perfectly spark those additional attacks against Ihsir's Wiles.
  • This is true for all current units, though it's possible it might not be for future units.

The absolute best units to use it on for damage are units that overlap between these groups - in other words, most of our current triple attackers. Right now, this just means all 11 VA units, plus in guild raid, Savei. ES-based Triple Attackers get the best of both worlds - they self-spark the entire Ihsir attack against their natural third attack, and Ihsir gets a large damage bonus on them.

Special mention goes to Zelion as well - because he has such high self-spark capabilities naturally, he also has exceptional self-sparks on an Ihsir's Wiles attack, and can push as much damage as the VA units. Nyami has similar yet weaker results.

One last randomly noteworthy example is Isniel, who has the ideal effect delays to self-spark a chunk of his second ST attack against Ihsir's Wiles. Similar Alice is improved to effectively being a triple attacker. Unfortunately for them, despite the large gains they get from Wiles, they still fall short of the meta.

As for units to avoid using Wiles on:

• It's naturally going to only be a single attack's worth of damage on any unit that isn't in the above lists
• If a multi-attack unit has single hit or RT attacks, Ihsir's Wiles ignores those attacks
• Most notable, Randolph and Ravenna only gain a single attack's worth of damage from Ihsir's Wiles despite being a native triple attacker, because their second and third attacks only have single hits.
  • Though it does let them self-spark their HP-scaled ST attack, which otherwise doesn't happen.

If a unit has absolutely no frame data to pull from on the BB or SBB in question (i.e. a pure buff unit that doesn't even burst heal), Ihsir's Wiles adds a single hit attack on frame 0.

It's in there already.

Ihsir's Wiles is the sphere for rank 130, not the unit Ihsir himself.