and therein lies the problem with lucretia doesn't it? since we're both talking of mid-game where self-D matters, but she also matters just as much in the treasure hunt team. so its either commit to treasure hunt or use her as a support/heal.
but it really doesn't take too much brain power to ultimately decide to place her in treasure hunt. simply because there are far better dps-ers and support than her. if she's gonna be stuck in treasure team then those support skills may as well never existed.
by the time late-end game rolls in? I don't even know never reached this far in the game. the goddamn rng drop made me drop this game entirely. see my review on why the gameplay for this SUCKS. and yes, even with the help of the UI mod.
Uh wut...? Self-D matters all the time. What are you on about? It doesn't matter in all phases of the game, but in the late stages in Law, like, 30% of the divisions you face have some measure of Self Destruct. And that's just on Easy. Hell, when you go into the Phoenix missions, there's these 'perfected embryos' that have Self-D 300. That means they do 3 times their health in damage... and that's only if they don't have Max Power Attack too... which you can bet your ass they will in the higher difficulties, along with who knows what else.
Chaos too also has Self-D, but less of it than Law, but there's some nasty warp beasts in some stages with it.
Pretty sure the non-story mode will have it too in enough amounts to make you seriously regret not building it up in all of your main divisions, if not all divisions period, because in Gaia, it's much, MUCH harder to control which enemies will run into which troops. Which means it's significantly more difficult to ensure that just the prepped divisions run into some murder-blend division that will take yours down with it.
You get 4 Commanders that can easily max Self-D Barrier, and one of them is Crimson Dress Milia (who has it by default), which can be janky to use because of how she's set-up. Another is one of the Vanilla special units, but she needs T9 and T10 gear to reach her full potential. This includes Lucy. There's then... hm... ~4 units-ish that can reach Max Self-D Barrier easily without jumping through massive hoops? About that many I think. I'd have to check. Considering that if you want to tackle Despair B5, you'll likely want all of your divisions to be invulnerable to the N00b killer problems, Lucretia is gonna have quite a bit of staying power in some division or another. Even if you don't use her all the time, you'll definitely want to swap her in when those monsters that can one-shot anything when they die start popping out.
Sure, you have the option of, I dunno, having 50-ish Self-D barrier on a division that also has 50-ish Godly Resist on all attacker units... but that's gonna be hard to make fly and you'll still be taking damage because these get added multiplicatively. Your goal in division building is to ensure you take as little damage as possible while hurting the enemy as much as possible. With the exception of stall divisions of course. I suppose you can try to skip-out on Self-D on those ones.
As for Treasure Hunting... I don't know why you'd bother using Lucretia there when there are a lot more units with better TH that can be built up. Especially since there's no difficulty requirement for unlocking Arcana, so you can literally unlock ALL Arcanas on Easy, and then build up the ultimate TH division... which will not include Lucretia because she can't reach high enough. Might include Swimsuit Mary... but I'm not sure how the min-maxing looks there since 2-H weapons don't have any with TH on it... but she does get a wooping 56 with her title which can be raised to 68 with that one T8 robe. After that, you obviously want Shamash, Pandora, Luna, Captain Maiden and Dreaming Onikage.
Sure, this division dies if anything sneezes at it... but at the same time, it has enough TH on it to unlock up to Tier 11 on Easy. I tested it. Got T11 ore to drop on the Law final boss (It's about 3/15 chance, from my testing, but I'm not gonna re-run that fight over and over more than this to see the exact odds... Even if it only takes a few seconds, most of which is clicking through the battle banter. XD). T12 you can cheese with Keys.
Now... Legitimately FARMING for all of this stuff would be hell anyway. It'd work better on Normal, possibly even hard if you can optimize a Division enough to act as baby-sitter even against overwhelming odds... and even then, you'd absolutely have to sweep whatever's in front of the TH division with extreme prejudice.
Eventually, it'll just get tedious, much like a lot of stuff... which is why, much like in Hollow, I honestly, totally, absolutely recommend that once you unlock the ores, regardless of what method you used to do so... that you just cheat the ore amounts and get the gear like that. The grind is NOT worth it. It wasn't worth it in Hollow. It's not worth it in Gaia. It will never be worth it in any VB game ever... but it will likely always be in all of them until the ends of time because this sort of needless grind is a thing in Asian culture and some people legitimately enjoy it.
The sheer Grind you need to get all the gear is absolutely one of the worst aspects of Venus Blood, though I personally don't feel like it detracts that much from the game. Hell. Gaia is actually better than Hollow in some aspects, if only because it lets you unlock 99% of the stuff on any difficulty. So you don't have to do stuff like go to Berzerk 5 for unit X, go to Thanatos for Unit Y, must be this difficulty at the minimum to have enough Law+Chaos points to unlock the last Arcana... etc. Getting all the good shit in Hollow was much more tedious... and then you don't have as much stuff to look forward too in terms of using said good stuff.
If not for the Labyrinth Reset, I'd likely have loved the game just as much as Hollow tbh. Well, maybe a little less. Leon and Anora made for a much cooler couple, and Julia was and is best girl I don't care what anyone else says. Dragon Waifu is best waifu. Also, Theo smokes, which reduces his cool factor by a huge amounts of points for me.
