This has to be the most requested boot camp of all time, so I’m thrilled to present: Fohlen! Tragically for me, Fohlen is one of the units that insists on evading me, (along with everything else he normally evades), so there is no media for me to accompany this post with, and I may make some errors along the way. Correct me as needed. 🙂 This post has two purposes:
- Educate people about a largely misunderstood unit
- Provide a space where people can share builds, strategies, and friend units.
Fohlen is probably by far the most requested boot camp unit I’ve seen so far, only slightly more requested than Knight Delita. He’s got a super cool sprite, rides a chocobo, and has that dope helmet thatmyDVwantsbutcan’thavesadface. This guide should help you decide how Fohlen can improve your team! All analysis from here on out assumes he’s fully enhanced.
Table of Contents
Pros
- His TMR is BiS for any physical attacker that can’t equip hats.
- His Speedster passive gives him a truckload of nice things, including 30% physical evasion, 50% wind resistance, and a 20% chance to counter with a 75% wind imperil.
- Can equip spears, swords, and daggers. Not the hugest selection, but it’s enough to make him work!
- Can equip helmets, any shields, and medium or heavy armor. This lets him use Dark Knight’s Soul!
- His main chaining move, Sonic Blast, is innately wind element, meaning you can equip non-elemental weapons and retain the elemental chaining bonus. Sonic Blast also has a 5x modifier, which is in line with newly enhanced chainers like Orlandeau and Aileen.
- Reduce Encounter (25%) makes him a great pick for explorations, especially the Bahamut explorations where the encounter rate is super high!
- Fully resistant fo confusion and paralysis, which leaves only petrify as an incapacitating ailment he’s susceptible to.
- Aggravate +2 is a two turn 100% provoke that also lets him ignore the next three physical attacks taken. This can make him a great evade tank, similar to Noctis!
- Vortex enables Fohlen to AoE imperil wind by 50%. It’s not a huge deal, but AoE imperils are rare, wind ones doubly so.
- Spear Mastery +2 gives him a whopping 100% boost to ATK when equipped with a spear. It’s pretty rare in GL to find masteries that climb so high so this is just awesome.
- Fohlen’s chaining frames allow him to at least pseudo-chain with a host of partners.
- Osmose Lance lets Fohlen recover MP. Mostly useful for newer players, but useful all the same!
Cons
- Fohlen’s fully potted ATK is pretty far behind other physical chainers. Current meta chainers live in the 190ish zone, and Fohlen falls a little behind at 175.
- His imperil and chaining skills are separate from each other. Not a huge deal if you’re imperiling externally or his Speedster counters are proccing, but if not it can be a pain.
- His LB is pretty bad. At max the modifier is worse than Sonic Blast and it does an AoE DEF break of 54%. Just pot Timothy’s LB instead.
- Fohlen moves when casting Sonic Blast, similar to units like A2 or Aileen. This means you can get some screwy things with chaining, and it can make it hard to perfectly chain depending on the size of the enemy hitbox.
- Lack of killer passives makes him less specialized, especially when many other chainers have passives of their own.
How to Use Fohlen
There are basically two main ways to use Fohlen: As your dedicated damage dealer, or as your evade tank. In the first case, He’s pretty straightforward to use since you use either Vortex or Sonic Blast depending on if you need to apply the imperil or not. Vortex is also AoE and Sonic Blast is single target, so there could be times where you want the AoE damage anyways. Just kill all the things!
As an evade tank, you have a few options once you’ve got him to 100% physical evade. First of all, you can simply use his Aggravate +2 move as is and use every other turn as his support moves. Second, you can use iNichol’s redirect to allow him to AoE tank, which is awesome. Third, since his innate evasion makes it easy to fully gear him for evade, you could use Moogle Plushie and Golem’s provoke if you wanted extra off-turns between provokes for him to use other supporting moves.
Gearing
Despite his lower ATK stat, Fohlen can still reach respectable numbers with a number of builds. A good example of a dualwield build would use a sword and a spear with accompanying masters. Make sure he’s elementless or purely wind so that you don’t mismatch your elements!
If you’re one of the lucky minority that can pull of a full TDH build, your Fohlen can hit pretty spicy levels of damage! At 7000 HP and almost 1600 ATK, he gets pretty strong, and he gets to take advantage of TDH damage variance from his innate elemental chains! The other advantage of using TDH is that it removes his sliding chain as a problem since the chains no longer break in the middle.
Here’s an overkill physical evade build you can look at as well. His evasion passive makes it easy to get to 100% evade, so plug and play with the items you have to get him set up as your evade tank!
EDIT: As mentioned in the comments, Fohlen can reach 300% ATK and 100% evade in a single build without too much difficulty. A whaley build would look something like this and would give you a super competent damage dealer and evade tank rolled into a single unit!
Synergies
As a chainer, Fohlen can really mesh well with any party. He’s self-sufficient and can really be used for anything that doesn’t resist wind. If you’re using a capper, Fire Veritas comes to mind as one of the best options because of his Aero Axe that would allow him to use Fohlen’s 75% imperil counter in the event that it procs. Honestly he’s like any other chainer in that anyone can play nice with him.
As an evade tank, there are a few more places where Fohlen synergizes well. First of all, he can reliably counter for wind chainers you might be using. Barbariccia, Loren, or anyone equipped with Ventus will usually get a nice bonus to their wind damage when Fohlen tanks for them! iNichol is the other obvious friend of choice for his redirect illusion for AoE tanking.
EDIT: Another notably good unit to combo with Fohlen is Yan, who can apply a 50% wind imperil with a 50% DEF break in the same move, along with the rest of her awesome support kit. She’s great with him!
Fohlen Mythbusting
“Fohlen isn’t a strong/good unit”
Within the meta, this is probably true, but against the backdrop of fights we currently have available, he’s plenty strong! Even if his damage isn’t top of the pack, his usefulness as an evade tank won’t likely fade any time soon.
“Fohlen has lots of chaining partners”
This is true to varying degrees depending on which other chainers you’re talking about. You’ll have more or less success chaining him with those units depending on the hits and the chain delay, but it does open up possibilities for 10 man trials for people who don’t have the canned “DV/Orlandeau + Agrias” combo.
“Fohlen’s limitation to wind element is bad”
I mean, the same can be said for lots of units, but we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water here. In fights like Echidna or Aigaion where wind resistance is prevalent, yeah he will underperform, but when the moose trial finally comes out, he’s going to have a hell of a time. People said the same about Light Veritas but she’s currently enjoying her day in the sun now that the embargo on light chainers has seemingly been lifted.
Tips for New Players
Keep a spear on Fohlen at all times. It’s his second best friend, after his chocobo of course! Other than that, there’s not much else to say for him with new players. Fohlen friends are pretty hard to find to chain with, so if you can’t find any and you have another chainer at your disposal to make friends with, I’d recommend that. Use Fohlen in those niche scenarios where he’s going to outperform other chainers instead.
The Crystal Ball
The Crystal Ball section looks at Fohlen’s future and how he’ll likely fare in the long run. Here are some snapshots of what to expect:
- With his helm equipped, he gains 50% beast/bird/aquian killer! At level 100 this is boosted by another 25%, which helps him a ton!
- His cooldown skill provides 30% damage mitigation, 100% wind resist (maybe useful against Tetra 3 star?) and imperils wind by 75% to all enemies. Not the most impressive, but I’m sure it will have useful moments.
- Fohlen’s true beauty at 7 stars is his new jump skill. With a turn of setup (that also grants him 150% ATK buff), the next turn he comes down with a 15x single target capping skill and 5.5x AoE capping skill! It’s a pretty tremendous amount of damage, and it will be very good if you are running jump chainers for him to cap!
Fohlen’s big transformation at 7 stars is that he becomes a jump capper instead of the chainer he was before, for the most part. If you have 2 Fohlens right now and are wanting to use him as a jump finisher when 7 stars comes around, I think he would be worth the investment, but you could probably get away with not enhancing his chaining skill, only his passives in this case.
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I was hoping that Gimu could hear my prayers in the aether to give me a Fohlen for this boot camp, but alas, my prayers were in vain! They gave me a Lunera instead, so I think we’ll have to see if I can come up with anything fun to do with her. 😉 Share in the comments below how you’ve used Fohlen, how he’s saved your bacon, or what you like most about him! If you feel like collecting Fohlen friends, this is a good place to do the networking for it!
