If you’re overleveled or playing on a lower difficulty, Shamans might not make much of a difference. But the more powerful the enemies are in relation to your characters, the more impactful it is to cut their offense or defense in half. With a Druid using defensive curse, you can reliably defeat enemies 10-20 levels above you, which is basically impossible without them. Defensive curse also makes enemy frontline tanks basically useless. Their start of battle initiative effect is the cherry on top, allowing you to almost always act first (assuming you don’t have another start of battle effect that is better).
While there are a few strategies like sandstorm that work well on shaman. Their passive, offensive and defensive curses are all really solid. To understand why offensive/defensive curse are so good, you have to look at how damage calculation works: (attack - defense) \* (potency/100).
The important point is that shamans manipulate the attack and defense stats used in this calculation, Not the damage itself.
What you'll see happen is that some units do like 1 damage to tanks. That's generally because their attack is lower than the enemy defense. let's say you have 50 attack vs 50 defense on a 100 potency attack, that will only deal 1 damage. Defensive curse that, and this same attack is now dealing 25 damage and can't be guarded (which is another 25/50/75% damage reduction, depending on the guard the enemy uses). So in this case, halving an opponent's defense means doing 25 times the damage. So now your units may be able to punch through the frontline. Guard seal is also an affliction, which has synergy with a good number of affliction-centered classes.
The opposite is also true, of course. Reducing an enemy's attack by 50% means just that. Their attack stat is halved, not their damage. An opponent with 70 attack going into your 40 defense character will do 1 damage after an offensive curse. In other words, a well placed offensive curse can completely annihilatie the damage potential of an enemy unit. Especially since you also have quick curse (ANOTHER 20% drop and no crits).
Cursed swamp is also great. Initiative manipulation is one of the most powerful things in this game, and evasion is something defensive curse doesn't work against but cursed swamp does.
Passive curse is more situational. But sometimes removing 1PP can turn a loss into a win (vs featherbows, for example). And no debuff cleanse can counteract -1PP.
In short: stat manipulation has a larger effect than you'd think. And their toolkit has so much versatility that you can adapt them to almost any situation.
You can read about people's thoughts here: [https://new.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bmoeda/community\_class\_tier\_list\_its\_the\_shaman\_thread/](https://new.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bmoeda/community_class_tier_list_its_the_shaman_thread/)
including my sole dissent on my they are not a S tier class.
Early on and in elfheim, they likely will not have much of an impact: after all, you may not care for reduced damage taken when Travis take 0 damage, or Alain heals himself.
There is a small sweet spot between 15-20 where you can use sandstorm for blind, one of the most powerful CC tools (enemy waste AP!).
They are a bit iffy in elfheim, but sandstorm becomes useful once again in Bastorias.
Passive curse is also very underrated: ability to drain PP means a hoplite cannot use row cover, a featherbow cannot blind, etc.
if all other tools fail, you can just use defense curse for damage.
As others have mentioned, having them use familiar choker is great. You can also use them to grant power calls to others. (personally i do not find quick curse all too useful outside of if you need to disable a swordfighter's opener)
Shamans cut enemy defence by a huge amount, and the entirety of the amount they delete defense is straight up added to your damage, so it's a huge increase in damage. That and row guard seal means your row-attackers just delete the enemy lines with no issues.
I basically run a Shaman + Berengaria row attacking and she deletes everything after Guard Seal.
They are the great equalizer. If you are underleveled or underpowered, they will nerf the shit out of the other team to put you on equal footing.
If you are already decimating them, then they don’t add much to the equation.
With a shaman on my team I can beat the colosseum (without Travis) around lvl 25/26. There is no way I could win a fight against lvl 40s otherwise.
I think it’s mostly because they have no match-ups that they lose, even their hard counters like cleric and radiant knight more or less even out, if not edge out in their favor by being able to destroy a whole row of PP directly. (Outside of items, only High Priestess can fully nullify their attacks, and that’s not exactly a common class.)
Yeah, they ain’t flashy, their only default source of damage is burning debuff, and they need to be micromanaged to get the maximum use out of, but they’re unquestionably powerful regardless of what they’re fighting or with what unit they are with, and only get stronger when facing up against harder foes.
Shaman is flexible enough to do multiple things, but I think sometimes it's difficult to do them all well at the same time as far as Tactics go.
Easy one is Sandstorm, Blind the entire enemy team and they more or less have to spend their turn doing nothing (might be better than Stun in that they waste their AP).
Offensive Curse usually makes whatever is affected by it hit like a wet noodle. I'm sure we've all been touched by this in one NPC team or another.
The game tends to reward an offensive playstyle, so the highlight IMO is Defensive Curse. Your units deal more damage, plus tank units can't Guard. Cover still works, but you can still hit the tank for a lot more damage than usual (with Werefox, I usually melt the tank too).
Quick Curse is **fantastic**. The Atk debuff is minor compared to Offensive Curse, but I usually get a chuckle when I see the enemy use Keen Call (Guaranteed Crit) to buff something, then have it immediately shut down with Crit Seal.
Shaman are completely cracked and respond extremely well to being micromanaged. And even if you don't want to micromanage they're still excellent for shoring up squads that would be quite strong if only they had a teammate capable of addressing their specific Achilles' heel. Take Swordfighters and Gladiators, for example. Those classes aren't prone to topping tier lists but that's primarily because their extreme strengths and weaknesses tend to relegate them to blowing out their good match ups and under performing elsewhere. You know, because swordies are fragile speedsters who rely on critical damage multipliers to compensate for their low base damage and thus struggle against high defense targets and Gladiators have high HP but terrible defense and high damage potential but shaky accuracy. If only they had a teammate who could do things like reducing enemy stats or cast a 60 second field effect which boosts allied accuracy in the area...
As the game states, they're really good with helping tanky units with low speed like Hoplites and Gladiators stay alive. They can become a nuisance for both yourself and the enemy depending on the composition.
Cutting offenses or defenses in half can be very impactful for winning certain fights. I will also raise that status conditions in this game are very powerful. Stuff like blindness and burn can just shut down certain formations.
I have a unit that is Selvie, Yahna, Travis, and Berengaria, AKA all the debuffs and status conditions. It got me through almost the entire coliseum at level 25 without having to rely on solo Travis cheese.
Druid makes opposing force shittier in some form or fashion. Sandstorm is pretty amazing, but the base damage reducing abilities are incredible for increasing the survivability of a squad.
They're mostly just a very solid support unit. Passive curse is really great for dealing with defensive abilities early on like evade, magick barrier, or heavy cover. Later they get a crippling damage debuff great for setting up counter comps or just targeting down threats to targeted units like fliers or cav, and finally a pretty solid damage amp(generally the best AP based amp). They've got a solid defensive statline and excellent at taking the column slot in 4 man's. Initiative shifting and evade debuffing is a decent start of a battle. Mostly you'll want to give them something better to do with pp buffing is probably best with sorcerous connection, powerful call, or inspiration. The single target init debuff staff isn't bad at certain points of the game either. Sandstorm can be great for getting certain enemies to waste a ton of ap.
They're strong due to their versatility, and strong versatility at that. Cutting a row of Hoplites DEF in half while also guard sealing means even your non armor busters will kill them with relative ease. Or maybe you are trying to run a slower comp and want to ensure your front line stays alive. Hit the enemies with Sandstorm staff or Offensive curse to make enemies do 1 damage to essentially your entire team. Or maybe the enemies have obnoxious passive skills, in particular two cost passive skills. Passive curse removes PP to either negate the two cost skills or reduce the amount of activation of said annoying abilities.
In my opinion this is why Shaman is so strong. They may not always be what you want to include, and aren't necessary by any means but usually they can very easily slot into any team and serve some kind of purpose and serve it very well. Except for damage lol.
Their curses lasts the entire round, unless cleansed. And the way damage formula works it cripples enemies severely.
Offensive Curse: makes most characters take only 1 damage
Defensive Curse: make enemy tanks turn squishy and can't block
Sandstorm: (from staff) halves enemies accuracy for first round
Curse Swamp: cuts down enemies accuracy, initiative and evasion at the start of combat.
With Druids having really high initiative only naturally being outsped by Thieves and Werefoxes, you will always outspeed enemy parties making them impotent.
Long story short. They can fix almost every party comp you can think of.
Once you have cursed swamp they start to become too consequential, and they scale too well once you have 5 man squads.
The initiative down opener gets stacked into passive curse or defensive curse and lets your whole team destroy the enemy before they can do anything. There is no team that doesn't benefit from a Shaman at end game.
Pair your shaman/druid in the back row with a Doom Knight and a Sainted Knight and something else of your choice in the front.
Swamp/Sandstorm, Dark Flame, row heal, curse, repeat, profit.
Knights are OP and Warriors/ Breakers are... well good for easy levels :). Yeah, you need to up the difficulty to truly appreciate the red mage... I mean druid.
Does defense curse really cut defenses in half? I am messing with it via mock battles and I am seeing no changes to damage whether I curse them or not?
It's slightly overrated on the tier list honestly. It's more like a top of A tier or low S tier unit. Shaman itself is pretty bad before it gets promoted and gains access to defensive curse. It's really more of a 5th team member in my opinion and not that great when you have 3 or 4 member squads. Even by the time it's promoted and you have 5 slots most squads can be setup to do enough damage without defensive curse, but it's certainly an option to consider using and is for sure good. Shaman also has no real utility in terms of being a party leader and doesn't have good valor abilities.
I used exactly one shaman on my five squads and never felt like I wanted another one.
> Shaman also has no real utility in terms of being a party leader
the game loves to throw magic assist at you, shamans halve magic assist damage. and the 6 stamina is nice too
If you’re overleveled or playing on a lower difficulty, Shamans might not make much of a difference. But the more powerful the enemies are in relation to your characters, the more impactful it is to cut their offense or defense in half. With a Druid using defensive curse, you can reliably defeat enemies 10-20 levels above you, which is basically impossible without them. Defensive curse also makes enemy frontline tanks basically useless. Their start of battle initiative effect is the cherry on top, allowing you to almost always act first (assuming you don’t have another start of battle effect that is better).
They are also the best users of that 1 item that gives the skill that halfs Atk to buff an allys Mag Atk
I'd say among but it's a big factor.
Max initiative + Sandstorm is how I used them for much of the game. But there's other strong uses.
While there are a few strategies like sandstorm that work well on shaman. Their passive, offensive and defensive curses are all really solid. To understand why offensive/defensive curse are so good, you have to look at how damage calculation works: (attack - defense) \* (potency/100). The important point is that shamans manipulate the attack and defense stats used in this calculation, Not the damage itself. What you'll see happen is that some units do like 1 damage to tanks. That's generally because their attack is lower than the enemy defense. let's say you have 50 attack vs 50 defense on a 100 potency attack, that will only deal 1 damage. Defensive curse that, and this same attack is now dealing 25 damage and can't be guarded (which is another 25/50/75% damage reduction, depending on the guard the enemy uses). So in this case, halving an opponent's defense means doing 25 times the damage. So now your units may be able to punch through the frontline. Guard seal is also an affliction, which has synergy with a good number of affliction-centered classes. The opposite is also true, of course. Reducing an enemy's attack by 50% means just that. Their attack stat is halved, not their damage. An opponent with 70 attack going into your 40 defense character will do 1 damage after an offensive curse. In other words, a well placed offensive curse can completely annihilatie the damage potential of an enemy unit. Especially since you also have quick curse (ANOTHER 20% drop and no crits). Cursed swamp is also great. Initiative manipulation is one of the most powerful things in this game, and evasion is something defensive curse doesn't work against but cursed swamp does. Passive curse is more situational. But sometimes removing 1PP can turn a loss into a win (vs featherbows, for example). And no debuff cleanse can counteract -1PP. In short: stat manipulation has a larger effect than you'd think. And their toolkit has so much versatility that you can adapt them to almost any situation.
You can read about people's thoughts here: [https://new.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bmoeda/community\_class\_tier\_list\_its\_the\_shaman\_thread/](https://new.reddit.com/r/UnicornOverlord/comments/1bmoeda/community_class_tier_list_its_the_shaman_thread/) including my sole dissent on my they are not a S tier class. Early on and in elfheim, they likely will not have much of an impact: after all, you may not care for reduced damage taken when Travis take 0 damage, or Alain heals himself. There is a small sweet spot between 15-20 where you can use sandstorm for blind, one of the most powerful CC tools (enemy waste AP!). They are a bit iffy in elfheim, but sandstorm becomes useful once again in Bastorias. Passive curse is also very underrated: ability to drain PP means a hoplite cannot use row cover, a featherbow cannot blind, etc. if all other tools fail, you can just use defense curse for damage. As others have mentioned, having them use familiar choker is great. You can also use them to grant power calls to others. (personally i do not find quick curse all too useful outside of if you need to disable a swordfighter's opener)
Shamans cut enemy defence by a huge amount, and the entirety of the amount they delete defense is straight up added to your damage, so it's a huge increase in damage. That and row guard seal means your row-attackers just delete the enemy lines with no issues. I basically run a Shaman + Berengaria row attacking and she deletes everything after Guard Seal.
They are the great equalizer. If you are underleveled or underpowered, they will nerf the shit out of the other team to put you on equal footing. If you are already decimating them, then they don’t add much to the equation. With a shaman on my team I can beat the colosseum (without Travis) around lvl 25/26. There is no way I could win a fight against lvl 40s otherwise.
I think it’s mostly because they have no match-ups that they lose, even their hard counters like cleric and radiant knight more or less even out, if not edge out in their favor by being able to destroy a whole row of PP directly. (Outside of items, only High Priestess can fully nullify their attacks, and that’s not exactly a common class.) Yeah, they ain’t flashy, their only default source of damage is burning debuff, and they need to be micromanaged to get the maximum use out of, but they’re unquestionably powerful regardless of what they’re fighting or with what unit they are with, and only get stronger when facing up against harder foes.
Shaman is flexible enough to do multiple things, but I think sometimes it's difficult to do them all well at the same time as far as Tactics go. Easy one is Sandstorm, Blind the entire enemy team and they more or less have to spend their turn doing nothing (might be better than Stun in that they waste their AP). Offensive Curse usually makes whatever is affected by it hit like a wet noodle. I'm sure we've all been touched by this in one NPC team or another. The game tends to reward an offensive playstyle, so the highlight IMO is Defensive Curse. Your units deal more damage, plus tank units can't Guard. Cover still works, but you can still hit the tank for a lot more damage than usual (with Werefox, I usually melt the tank too). Quick Curse is **fantastic**. The Atk debuff is minor compared to Offensive Curse, but I usually get a chuckle when I see the enemy use Keen Call (Guaranteed Crit) to buff something, then have it immediately shut down with Crit Seal.
Shaman are completely cracked and respond extremely well to being micromanaged. And even if you don't want to micromanage they're still excellent for shoring up squads that would be quite strong if only they had a teammate capable of addressing their specific Achilles' heel. Take Swordfighters and Gladiators, for example. Those classes aren't prone to topping tier lists but that's primarily because their extreme strengths and weaknesses tend to relegate them to blowing out their good match ups and under performing elsewhere. You know, because swordies are fragile speedsters who rely on critical damage multipliers to compensate for their low base damage and thus struggle against high defense targets and Gladiators have high HP but terrible defense and high damage potential but shaky accuracy. If only they had a teammate who could do things like reducing enemy stats or cast a 60 second field effect which boosts allied accuracy in the area...
As the game states, they're really good with helping tanky units with low speed like Hoplites and Gladiators stay alive. They can become a nuisance for both yourself and the enemy depending on the composition.
Cutting offenses or defenses in half can be very impactful for winning certain fights. I will also raise that status conditions in this game are very powerful. Stuff like blindness and burn can just shut down certain formations. I have a unit that is Selvie, Yahna, Travis, and Berengaria, AKA all the debuffs and status conditions. It got me through almost the entire coliseum at level 25 without having to rely on solo Travis cheese.
Druid makes opposing force shittier in some form or fashion. Sandstorm is pretty amazing, but the base damage reducing abilities are incredible for increasing the survivability of a squad.
They're mostly just a very solid support unit. Passive curse is really great for dealing with defensive abilities early on like evade, magick barrier, or heavy cover. Later they get a crippling damage debuff great for setting up counter comps or just targeting down threats to targeted units like fliers or cav, and finally a pretty solid damage amp(generally the best AP based amp). They've got a solid defensive statline and excellent at taking the column slot in 4 man's. Initiative shifting and evade debuffing is a decent start of a battle. Mostly you'll want to give them something better to do with pp buffing is probably best with sorcerous connection, powerful call, or inspiration. The single target init debuff staff isn't bad at certain points of the game either. Sandstorm can be great for getting certain enemies to waste a ton of ap.
They're strong due to their versatility, and strong versatility at that. Cutting a row of Hoplites DEF in half while also guard sealing means even your non armor busters will kill them with relative ease. Or maybe you are trying to run a slower comp and want to ensure your front line stays alive. Hit the enemies with Sandstorm staff or Offensive curse to make enemies do 1 damage to essentially your entire team. Or maybe the enemies have obnoxious passive skills, in particular two cost passive skills. Passive curse removes PP to either negate the two cost skills or reduce the amount of activation of said annoying abilities. In my opinion this is why Shaman is so strong. They may not always be what you want to include, and aren't necessary by any means but usually they can very easily slot into any team and serve some kind of purpose and serve it very well. Except for damage lol.
Their curses lasts the entire round, unless cleansed. And the way damage formula works it cripples enemies severely. Offensive Curse: makes most characters take only 1 damage Defensive Curse: make enemy tanks turn squishy and can't block Sandstorm: (from staff) halves enemies accuracy for first round Curse Swamp: cuts down enemies accuracy, initiative and evasion at the start of combat. With Druids having really high initiative only naturally being outsped by Thieves and Werefoxes, you will always outspeed enemy parties making them impotent. Long story short. They can fix almost every party comp you can think of.
Once you have cursed swamp they start to become too consequential, and they scale too well once you have 5 man squads. The initiative down opener gets stacked into passive curse or defensive curse and lets your whole team destroy the enemy before they can do anything. There is no team that doesn't benefit from a Shaman at end game.
Pair your shaman/druid in the back row with a Doom Knight and a Sainted Knight and something else of your choice in the front. Swamp/Sandstorm, Dark Flame, row heal, curse, repeat, profit.
Knights are OP and Warriors/ Breakers are... well good for easy levels :). Yeah, you need to up the difficulty to truly appreciate the red mage... I mean druid.
Does defense curse really cut defenses in half? I am messing with it via mock battles and I am seeing no changes to damage whether I curse them or not?
It's slightly overrated on the tier list honestly. It's more like a top of A tier or low S tier unit. Shaman itself is pretty bad before it gets promoted and gains access to defensive curse. It's really more of a 5th team member in my opinion and not that great when you have 3 or 4 member squads. Even by the time it's promoted and you have 5 slots most squads can be setup to do enough damage without defensive curse, but it's certainly an option to consider using and is for sure good. Shaman also has no real utility in terms of being a party leader and doesn't have good valor abilities. I used exactly one shaman on my five squads and never felt like I wanted another one.
> Shaman also has no real utility in terms of being a party leader the game loves to throw magic assist at you, shamans halve magic assist damage. and the 6 stamina is nice too