New Additions Update
Trixie goes in at S for PvE, A for PvP, Tier 1 second form and B for HP boost
With an instant laser blast type of move that only consumes one charge at a time this is effectively a 70TU piercing sweeper which can stack up kills to do all at once. I think that’s the aspect to focus on. The void guardian execute, slayerbane-knockback and looting charge are all situational and a lot slower.
Since this monster has low defence, no hold ground, medium speed and needs to charge before it can do anything it is a fragile strategy to run without support. We’ve seen this with Na’turgoul and similar designs that they can dominate if allowed but usually the opponent has a big enough window to kill them before they take over. The difference with Trixie is she is the best payoff for doing this that we’ve seen, since you can potentially stack up 5+ charges then kill through 5 enemies at once with neither sleep nor stun stopping her. So there is a big reason to try and build around temporarily controlling the opponent to give her room to do that. Sleep, protectors, stealth and/or shield… there are plenty of ways to give her time. Even if you’re not in complete control to charge up lots, she can still do the 70TU sweeping whenever necessary.
A few quick things worth noting. The knockback from smug charge leads well into looting charge. A single charge does ~5.5k damage, but if you keep her at 2+ charges whenever you’re attacking it will do ~11k damage which is enough for buffed PvE. The revenge damage seems to be enough to one-shot most things, but not when a defence buff is involved and it doesn’t make her weak to payback killer.
Given how slow she is to get going, my gut says she is not in one of the S tiers but if you can slot her nicely into a controlling team she should perform very well. I’m putting her borderline A/S-, which may turn into S- if either the revenge proves to give her a good baseline or it’s easier to get her going than I think. In PvE controlling teams are great so she suits that well.
With passives that make her unkillable for ages she was given a horrendous moveset, putting her in a really awkward place in the game. She’s basically stun protection for your team that has stun wave herself. Poison eater is way too weak with her attack stat. We already have tanky stun protection in the game with decent movesets, so it becoming unkillable is not enough of an upgrade to make up for the poor moveset.
One other aspect to consider is the secret skill, which I think is the main thing to go for here. Knocking back everything can do some interesting combo stuff with entrances and since she’s unkillable the opponent can’t easily stop it.
I went on a big rant about this design and how I think it needs fixing, trying to pick out the most interesting part of the design. Feel free to read if if you’re interested: Rant about her
With a moveset that’s almost completely an upgrade over Tenebris, well known as one of the best PvE monsters, this looks absolutely insane!
Hold ground, stealth on entry, reasonable defence and decent speed make this incredibly reliable to come in and clone itself in PvE. It can even stunt double to protect a newly entered Kumashiro if needed. The moves are all enormous damage so take out buffed enemies. This is honestly a one-monster win condition for a lot of the content and, in my mind, easily the best general PvE legendary in the game.
What’s interesting is how it’s also strong enough for PvP. Hazy entrance sets up many different moves and its own sweeping is almost impossible to disable besides with poison so it’s a reliable sweeper itself on top of the synergy it’s enabling. Colossus Crush criticals over 30% of legendaries and mythics. Cloning and stunt double give it even more potential outside of sweeping. If it’s left alive at all it will get extra turns thanks to the boomerang effect so it sweeps even faster than the 130-160TU it initially suggests. I reckon this will become extremely popular in PvP, especially outside the top competitive crowd.
With a passive that gives all the spikiest (hedgehogs) the spikes passive this is extremely flavourful and very cool design. However, this is held back by the spikiest SEs all being weak, particularly with their lack of damage potential. Ultimately what this is doing is giving them all payback revenge, meaning each one will trade 1-for-1… which isn’t quite where you want to be.
Unmovable, hold ground, death immunity and healing every turn this can only be killed with piercing. The designs of all the other leaders of their group have something similar and each of them is done well where they have one counter but are otherwise reliable. I think this should play out the same, but with a caveat I’ll mention below.
Due to the lack of damage potential, I think the setup you want to use is actually very specific. It should be in the front line and consist of: Spikiestest along with the earth, storm and fire spikiest. This lets you knockback with the storm one at 99% speed, then Spikiestest can do any 10TU knocking back necessary before applying taunt to them all. Then the enemy team will be forced into losing their monsters to the spikes and your knocking back can hopefully put you into a strong position.
Here are the issues with all that. Without using taunt, you could be left with any Spikiest that are useless. Without the knockback, they might just mess up your plan (e.g. killing SpikiestBlaze). Gravity field and other things can ruin that plan. So I think it’s overall quite cool and should work fine, but won’t work in a competitive way. The lack of flexibility makes me think it won’t have legs long-term.
With a move that piercing kills all 50%+ speed enemies that can be used on the first turn the ceiling here is enormous, but it’s hard to know how the full setup will function. We’re currently getting the next 6 gummy dragons and a leader is going to come later so for now I’m not going to think too hard about positioning this in the tier list because they’ll all need to be adjusted later.
The original 6 are not very good because they are clunky in the way they create the Vanillawhelps, but these create them on entry which is far better. I expect it should be easy to have at least one on the battlefield due to this. The new 6 also give turn to any Vanillawhelp when they die and there was a recent buff where Vanillawhelp can pull the G.D. turns forward which should mean you can chain together attacks if the opponent ever tries to bypass the protectors. So this new set of 6 seem critical to the setup for giving easy Vanillawhelps that create the annoying wall the opponent must clear through.
With less damage potential than G.D. Matcha above it may prove weaker but for now I’m just going to place it in the same tiers until we can see more of what the gummy dragon team is becoming. I’m placing these ones at the top of where the old gummy dragons are, except for HP boost where these don’t get a defence buff so there’s no point trying to make them tanky.