King
- Main Game: Final Fantasy Type-0
- Crystal Color: Black
- Class Function: Ranged DPS
- Weapon Type: Guns
- Damage Type: Ranged
Table of Contents
What does King have to offer?
King comes back stronger than ever, and with bigger guns with his 35CP weapon. He returns with a vengeance from being one of the weakest DPS in the game, to the King of Single Target DPS, outshining the likes of Papalymo, Squall, Kain and even Sephiroth!
King’s main source of damage comes from his Rapid Bullet with 6 ability charges, with his ability to reload, it goes up to 12, and with his 35CP it goes up to 18 uses, not to mention, it converts it to a much stronger Rapid Bullet+, and to top it all off, it provides him with a powerful ATK & SPD Up, giving him even more damage potential.
Character Details
- HP: 3/5
- ATK: 4/5
- IBRV: 3/5
- SPD: 4/5
- MBRV: 3/5
- DEF: 2/5
Abilities
Let me tell you right now, pretty much every new character needs both weapon passives to be efficient, you can’t get away with just 35CP as much anymore because it severely hurts their effectiveness. King is an old character, but his main ability is boosted by his 15CP, he needs both too.
Abilities Listed are post-buffs and with weapon passives
- Rapid Bullet – 2-hit Non-Elemental Ranged Single Target BRV Attack (High Turn Rate). Grants to self: MBRV + 40% for 3 turns, ATK + 20% for 1 turn. 140% potency. [6 uses]
- Rapid Bullet+ – 1-hit Non-Elemental Ranged Single Target BRV + HP Attack (High Turn Rate). Grants to self: MBRV+ 40% for 3 turns, ATK + 20% for 1 turn. 180% potency. [Only active with Happy Trigger Buff] [6 uses per reload]
- Reload – Raises BRV by 150% of ATK. Recovers all uses of Rapid Bullet. Grants to self Trigger Happy for 12 turns. [2 uses, one from weapon passive]
Unique Buff
Trigger Happy
- ATK & SPD + 40%
- Converts Rapid Bullet to Rapid Bullet+ (2-hit BRV ATK to a much stronger 1-hit BRV + HP ATK)
To put in summary, King initially starts at 6 Rapid Bullets + 1 Reload, after using his first reload, he replenishes his BRV and his ability uses, and converts his BRV ATK into a BRV + HP, to top it all off, he gives himself an additional 40% ATK and SPD Up. Overall, that’s 60% ATK Buff (20% from Rapid Bullet), 40% MBRV Buff (from Rapid Bullet), and 40% SPD Up, from Trigger Happy.
That’s effectively 20 ability uses overall, and the powerful buffs to boot. This puts King to the top as he provides powerful BRV Shaving ability initially, and puts it into overdrive once he reloads and blast away with 12 uses of BRV + HP, giving him a long lasting potential, which a large number of characters struggle with.
Points of Interest
Some of King’s points of interest come from his crystal passives. Particularly Crystal 5 and Crystal 10
Click here to see his crystal level passives.
Crystal Level 5 and 10 grants 20% and 40% BRV Damage boost respectively.
If you look closely at King’s Rapid Bullet+ his potency is 180%, to put that into perspective, it’s the same damage as Sazh’s Aim (with the passive). Ignoring the passives real quickly, that’s around 4 to 5k per hit, but with King’s Trigger Happy buff, it’s followed up with an HP ATK!
Now here’s the kicker, his crystal passives boost that damage even further, 60% further! That puts him miles ahead in the DPS apartment, and Turn efficiency!
Reload Attack Up grants a 20% invisible ATK UP for 3 turns.
Reload already grants a 40% ATK UP via Trigger Happy, an invisible ATK UP for 3 turns effective gives 60% ATK Up. Then follow it up with Rapid Bullet+ granting 20% more ATK Up and you have 80% ATK Up for 2 of those turns!
His Regular 20% ATK Buff and 40% Max BRV Buff doesn’t stack with other Regular Buffs
Here’s King’s limiting factor, only 40% of his ATK is stackable, the rest of his buffs are regularly applied meaning he’ll have a limit to him, his MAX BRV being the number one limiting factor to his potential, while this puts a set-back to King, he still reigns in the DPS department, as his form of DPS is sustained.
His Rapid Bullet+ is a single-hit BRV + HP Attack
Another limiting factor to King’s potential is his Rapid Bullet+, because of this, his damage is limited to 9999, similarly to Kain’s Gungnir, which is a powerful BRV + HP attack, the limits of the attack, hurt his potential for growth with good party members like Irvine and Sazh, because the limits placed in him makes him waste that added potential to do damage.
Trigger Happy is a Framed Buff
Despite the previous two points, Trigger Happy being a framed buff leaves some doors open for improvement, with this, it allows King to have more potential to do damage; his Trigger Happy stacks with generic buffs, like Sazh or Ramza’s, this allows him to further his potential as he can do even more damage.
Recommended Artifact Passives
ATK + 108
MAX BRV + 330
Mighty Rapid Bullet **
To maximize King’s potential pre-awakening, the best “single orange passives” you can get is, ATK + 108 and 2 pcs of MAX BRV + 330. This allows you to do Maximum Damage without BRV Leakage, in optimal conditions. If the target has high defenses, however, go triple ATK + 108 as always.
Strengths
Extremely high ability count.
Long Lasting Framed Buff.
Highest Ability Damage per Turn.
Weaknesses
No Party Utility
Powerful buff is locked behind use of Reload.
Single Hit BRV + HP Attack limits DPS Potential.
What is his place in the meta
King returns in similar fashion to Sazh, he’s among the lowest rated DPS in the game, and with his buff and 35CP arrival he turns into a powerhouse of a DPS becoming it’s King (at least until awakening comes).
King’s similarly to Sazh is quite unreal, Reload for King is in similar vein to Attack Boost for Sazh, with the difference being it only applies to himself. The similarity doesn’t stop there. King’s Trigger Happy Converts His Rapid Bullet to Rapid Bullet+, turning his BRV Ability to a BRV + HP Attack, for Sazh, his Attack Boost converts his HP Attack to HP+ turning a HP Attack to a BRV + HP Attack.
There’s a lot more similarities to the two, but King’s buffs and 35CP makes him a powerhouse DPS until awakening comes.
King as an Individual Character
King much like Sephiroth, is an example of an independent character, the difference between the two of them however is Sephiroth has more room for growth compared to King which will probably Sephiroth make him more desirable by some people compared to others, with that said, King is still Top Dog, and I’ve got the numbers to prove it.
King vs Sephiroth
The burning question is, is King better than Sephiroth? The answer, it depends. Head to Head, King has 20 ability uses compared to Sephiroth’s 13, on top of that King’s crystal passives and self buffs are stronger than Sephiroth’s with Sephiroth having an advantage over party utility and Max BRV.
Assuming DEF of Target is 1185 (I think, I need to ask Cension again)
To make it simple for those who are confused to what the chart means.
- The Total Damage King does with his abilities is 80,048.
- The Total Damage Sephiroth does with his abilities is 41,899.71.
King with his abilities uses only, does nearly double the damage Sephiroth does with his abilities!
But here’s the kicker, so I don’t appear to be biased, King’s damage is a single hit, and more often than not, you’ll be using it to shave BRV, meaning it won’t crit, but Sephiroth’s ability is multi-hit and so parts of his abilities will crit, so let’s put that in there and just assume, everything for Sephiroth crits.
- The Total Critical Damage Sephiroth does with his abilities is 52,374.63
Now here’s another limiting factor to King, he doesn’t stack very well with some characters given some of his buffs are regular ones, but Sephiroth’s buffs are purely framed, so what happens if we add Sazh’s buffs to the mix?
- The Total Critical Damage with Sazh that Sephiroth does with his abilities is 82,709.55.
Finally, Sephiroth beats King’s damage, by a very small margin. But what happens if we give King the same treatment?
- The Total Critical Damage King does with his abilities is 97,830.62
Once again, King blows Sephiroth out of the water. Now what happens if we add Sazh to the mix.
- The Total Critical Damage with Sazh that King does with his abilities is
129,788
How come King wasn’t hyped in JP?
I’m sure all of you are skeptical, we’re skeptical as well, why was King not hyped in JP if he’s that good? It’s pretty simple.
He’s a character in a side-game for Final Fantasy, as much as Type-0 is one of my favorites, it was still a PSP game that wasn’t connected to any of the mainline titles other than having the same mythology as XIII.
Awakening already happened, 6 characters, among them Cloud and Terra just awakened, so the focus was on them!
Sephiroth followed afterwards, and despite what the numbers say, he is much, much, much more popular.
New stages of powercreep hurt his DPS as DEF Values of monsters become even higher, hurting his DPS given it’s limited to level 50 standards.
All these factors come into play, while numbers wise, King is the superior DPS among the level 50 characters, his popularity hinders his chance to shine. That’s not to say people who pulled for him didn’t notice how strong he was, but given the circumstances of his arrival, he simply did not shine as bright as he will in GL.
We’re getting some content before we get awakening, this is allowing some characters to shine. Among the level 50 characters these ones we’re the ones that had something to offer while it took off.
What does he have to offer post-awakening
Sadly not much other than providing Ranged DPS, he suffers from having part of his buffs being generic which limits his party potential, unlike Sephiroth who has nearly an unlimited amount of it. While he also has the most damage per turn, he’s also hurt by the sustained nature of his abilities.
The upside, having him allows you to forego awakening some DPS characters in favor of others.
Should I pull?
Check the Overall Conclusion
Score
__ out of 10.
Overall Conclusion
King was a powerful DPS that was put to the side due to the arrival of awakening before his 35CP was released in JP. Because of this, and the popularity of his base game being less than stellar, his title as King DPS was put to a halt before it even began.
Despite being the King of DPT (Damage Per Turn), he is still the consolation prize of this banner, Lenna, who is better than Eiko in almost all regards, is the true prize, and King is what I’d call the ultimate consolation prize, as he gives you a powerful DPS to add to your roster, with whatever short time he has, as the King of DPT. In short, pull for Lenna, but pray you get King too.
With that said, King only has a short reign as Awakening is right around the corner, so you only have a few weeks, maybe a month to enjoy his Dominance as the King of DPS.
TL;DR
On their own, King is twice as strong as Sephiroth, but Sephiroth has high MAX BRV and his party potential allows him to go head to head with King given the right party members.
Super TL;DR
- King > Sephiroth
- King + Sazh >= Sephiroth + Sazh
- King + Sazh + x <= Sephiroth + Sazh + Eiko’s Smite Battery
Special credit: Decrith
