Farmable Monster Analysis: Hel

When I sat down to write my first draft of this Hel post, I didn’t know where to start or how I wanted to structure the post. Most farmable monsters are quite easy to write about. First, they’re usually bad, but after a little research you can usually find a good niche use or two for them. The ones that buck this trend are usually obvious like Zaerog∞ or Scarlet and are also straightforward to write about. Hel, on the other hand, is in a strange place. While her leader skill is limited by the poison clause, the multipliers are actually pretty impressive: 49x ATK and 4x RCV for dark. This post will mainly cover whether her upfront numbers justify the trouble of dealing with poison.

Stats

Stats taken from Puzzle Dragon X

Stats	HP	3418	ATK	1755	RCV	20	Wt	699.47
Active	Change Fire & Water orbs to Heart & Poison orbs. Increase skyfall chance of Poison orbs by 15% for 3 turns. 16 Turns ( 6 Turns at Lv.11 )
Leader	Dark attribute cards ATK x2, RCV x2. ATK x3.5 when simultaneously clearing 6 connected Poison or Mortal Poison orbs.
Awakenings

Active Skill Mechanics

Just to clarify, changing fire and water orbs to hearts and poison means just that: all fire and water orbs will be randomly changed to hearts and poison. There doesn’t appear to be a guaranteed amount of either orb type. This could lead to situations where you don’t get enough poison orbs to activate or you don’t get enough hearts to survive your own poison. In most cases the unpredictability is a downside, but sometimes the randomness is a good thing. Given a board with too few source orbs, a straight orb change is screwed while the random change still gives you a chance.

Poison Monsters and Synergies

To get an overall feel for how relevant Hel could be as either a leader or sub, it’s prudent to look at all other monsters that play into the poison theme.

Monster	Notes
	The most recent poison-generating monster out of JP, neither she or Hel are great fits on each others’ teams. Using Hel leaves Linthia unable to fully activate; you’d rather just sub another Linthia. As a Hel sub, Linthia is weak due to being off-element and her active is worse than Haku or Naraku. It’s unlikely you’ll get the six poison orbs to activate off her board change alone and following up with Hel usually has worse results than after one of the aforementioned board changers as it will result in less dark orbs.
	Naraku is a much better fit on Hel teams than Linthia since his board change is more likely to give you the six poison orbs. In case it doesn’t, it’s still possible to follow up with Hel and change the fire orbs. Still inferior to Haku mainly due to horrible stats, but he’s a pretty good farmable option (although the likelihood of NA getting Shonen Sunday is small). As a leader, Naraku is obviously an inferior lead, but if for some reason you wanted to go all out with poison, he could be an alternate farming lead when you don’t feel like going through the trouble of activating Hel.
	Just one of the many PAD Z rolls that make people want to kill themselves. Who would’ve guessed that not only his poison making ability would be relevant, niche as it still is, but that his dragon damage boost would be relevant on the same team (Hel is also a dragon). He’s still not the greatest Hel sub, though, as breaking hearts isn’t really something you want to be doing when you’re also poisoning yourself.
	This guy was a huge joke the last time we got the Batman collab. He still is, but at least now he can sub on a janky Hel team. His poison orb change (light) is a better fit than Dragon Shogun’s as it doesn’t break hearts and it not clashing with Hel’s (water, fire) is a nice plus, but the awakenings are total garbage.
	Malboro is basically a worse Scarecrow that changes wood instead of light. There’s little chance NA would get FFCD, anyways.

There might be more than this, but these are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. To say the obvious, there isn’t all that much support, but there might be more than most might have guessed. I don’t suspect that GungHo will go all out with poison in the future, but it would be pretty fun to see a top-tier leader that plays a little risky at times, but rewards you greatly for doing so. I’m guessing Linthia is the closest we’ll ever get to that, but who knows. It’s not like PAD has a huge amount of design space so the poison theme maybe inevitable.

Uses as a Sub

Using the previous section as a reference, there really isn’t any use for Hel as a sub. She’s also a marginal sub for herself, but it’s extremely difficult to justify filling half your team slots with only nine awakenings nowadays, no matter how good they are. Outside a poison-based team, there’s absolutely no reason to run her. If you want hearts, just run a Fruit or Toy Dragon or something similar. If you need a skill bind resist, there are plenty of other, better, farmable options. You could get cute and run her alongside orb changers that also change poison, like the Constellations, but it just isn’t worth the work. Unless poison comes on in a big way in the future, Hel will be fairly useless as a sub. That being said, if it does, she’ll likely be a big part of the initial wave.

Uses as a Leader

Limitations of the Leader Skill

49x ATK and 4x RCV sounds pretty damned attractive. That’s basically Juggler or Typhon with a 4x RCV bonus, right? They even share a similar activation. Well, with upside comes downside:

• The team is extremely orb hungry. In addition to the six activation orbs and the three orbs for damage, Hel also wants three hearts to heal back from the poison damage. Outside of Haku-based burst turns, it’s very difficult to get all the orbs necessary to do large amounts of damage. The lack of a Pandora- or Akechi-like sub also hurts.
• The team is largely at the mercy of skyfall RNG to get its poison orbs. Hel’s orb spawn can only do so much to combat it.
• The team has middling damage control. A base 4x ATK for dark puts Hel ahead of Juggler in that regard, but facing the various damage absorb and perseverance spawns in the game will be difficult.
• That whole poison thing.

Individually, these all seem like nitpicks to me, but they definitely all add up and prevent her from being a top-tier lead. Her RCV does much to mitigate many of her weaknesses, but in the end it’s simply not worth the work, at least not until better poison subs are released. To get RCV paired with high damage, players will turn toward the more consistent MP Dragons instead. She’s a very strong gimmick leader, but in the end she’s still a gimmick.

That all being said, it’s not like she’s unviable for the endgame. Like many leaders in this game, just because they’re not in the elite class doesn’t mean they’re garbage. Heck, Zaerog∞ is no longer considered an elite leader, but he’s still quite strong. I don’t think Hel is that far behind.

Potential Subs

I don’t want this to turn into a full blown teambuilding post, but here’s a list of the most common Hel subs:

Monster	Notes
	Haku is pretty much the only auto-include. She serves the same purpose she always does: providing a board change for your burst turns while having solid stats. Combining her with Hel will result in a dark, heart and poison board which almost always has enough poison orbs to activate.
	Zaerog∞ might seem like a strange inclusion, but his skyfall buff works in concert with Hel’s poison skyfall instead of overwriting it and the haste helps you use the orb generation part of Hel’s active more often. You also need dark orbs to do actual damage, so it makes a lot of sense.
	Yomi Dragon seems to be a frequent sub. The bind clear and orb spawner are great fits, but I’m not particularly fond of the chance to spawn over poison orbs.
	Hel’s greatest weakness is finding the opportunity to activate. While her 4x RCV helps immensely in that regard, there are some hits you simply can’t survive. That’s where DIza comes in.

Basically your standard dark subs. There’s very little reason to run any of the poison subs previously mentioned in this post.

Endgame Clears

I was actually expecting a few Arena clears, but the only one I found was from when she was first released:

There’s also a fail video; while it isn’t exactly a great endorsement, you can at least see what she has problems with:

There are other endgame clears as well, like Challenge Dungeons 22 and 23 Lv10 clears:

I thought for such a novelty leader that there would’ve been more endgame content clears. This may say something to her actual endgame viability.

Conclusion

Hel is one of the most interesting monsters GungHo has ever released, but sadly her innate strength doesn’t elevate her above novelty status. She’s still quite capable in spite of the poison gimmick with a respectable 49x ATK and 4x RCV, but the work you have to put in isn’t worth the effort. I’d imagine her use will be relegated to players that want to use her for the uniqueness of her leader skill more than anything else. There may come a time when poison is more relevant, but for now there’s no pressing need to skill one up.