Analysis and Gifts/Secrets/Help【EA 2.02】

Character list for noobs starting off the game and wants a basic understanding on each character or general help

Intro

This is not a tier list for Chrono Ark 2.2 EA anymore. The more I experiment and play around with different setups/teams the more I realize that the game is extremely balanced. I'm steering away from tier lists and sharing my builds based on different guides and experience. Huge props for the other tier lists for motivating me to make my own. I have all the achievements so I have some credibility.

Categories are not organized in a specific order such as best to worst.

Gifts

Based on this discussion forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1188930/discussions/0/3882723431875459900/
*AND* Sehnder (Gift Guide)

Investigator

Investigator	Gift
Azar	Shonen Manga, Coffee, Decor Pistol
Charon	Art Supplies, Black Tea, Cheesecake, Violin
Hein	Beer, Shonen Manga, Coffee, Butterfly Knife
Helia & Selena	Fashion Magazine, Mystery Novel, Violin, Whiskey (21 years)
Huz	Black Tea, Vocal Microphone, Stuffed Animal, Sake
Ilya	Camera, Fishing Rod, Sake, Vodka
Ironheart	Beer, Decor Pistol, Toolbox
Joey	Drinks (Sake, Whiskey, Black Tea, Coffee, Milk), Guitar
Johan	Frying Pan, Milk, Romance DVD
Leryn	Mugwort, Romance DVD, Sake, SF Novel
Lian	Camera, Frying Pan, Milk
Miss Chain	Beer, Fashion Magazine, Vocal Microphone, Toolbox
Momori	Leash, Fashion Magazine, Frying Pan, Vocal Microphone, Milk
Narhan	Leash, Fishing Rod, Milk, Mystery Novel
Phoenix	Cheesecake, SF Novel, Vodka
Pressel	Art Supplies, Black Tea, Leash
Silverstein	Vocal Microphone, Decor Pistol, Mugwort, Whiskey
Sizz	Coffee, Frying Pan, Stuffed Animal
Trisha	Guitar, Butterfly Knife, Vodka

Gifts

Item	Investigator
Beer	Hein, Miss Chain, Ironheart
Black Tea	Joey, Pressel, Charon, Huz
Butterfly Knife	Hein, Trisha
Camera	Lian, Ilya
Cheesecake	Phoenix, Charon
Coffee	Hein, Joey, Sizz, Azar
Décor Pistol	Azar, Ironheart, Silverstein
Electric Guitar	Joey, Trisha
Fashion Magazine	Miss Chain, Helia and Selena, Momori
Fishing Rod	Narhan, Ilya
Frying Pan	Sizz, Lian, Johan, Momori
Leash	Pressel, Narhan, Momori
Milk	Joey, Lian, Narhan, Johan, Momori
Mugwort	Silverstein, Leryn
Mystery Novel	Helia and Selena, Narhan
Romance DVD	Johan, Leryn
Sake	Joey, Huz, Ilya, Leryn
SF Novel	Phoenix, Leryn
Shonen Manga	Hein, Azar
Stuffed Animal	Sizz, Huz
Toolbox	Miss Chain, Ironheart
Violin	Charon, Helia and Selena
Vocal Microphone	Miss Chain, Silverstein, Huz, Momori
Vodka	Joey, Trisha, Phoenix, Ilya
Whiskey (21 years)	Joey, Silverstein, Helia and Selena

Crimson Wilderness (CW)

Requirements: 4x SoulStones, 2x Keys, and a Lifting scroll. Mapping Scroll can be used to see cellar.

You need to complete the mission with Azar and Lucy only to access the archive for the first time. Keep playing the game and you'll eventually see Azar waiting for Lucy. That's the mission that you need to complete.

Additionally
Once you help the hedgehog enough times (no spoilers), he'll eventually be standing at the entrance to the Crimson Wilderness and he'll break down how to do it in-game. Crimson Wilderness is harder than the Forgotten King and it's usually better to try a run once you're mid-game anyways.

Crimson Wilderness Guide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh8v9_g1-G0

Misc - General/Secrets/Tips

How to Play - Basic

Phoenix teaches you the basic and you can go back to see it again if needed. Phoenix doesn't elaborate on the types of debuffs, speed, and what upgrading cards draw does. This confused me at the beginning of the game as it's kind of expected for you to learn about it on your own.

Debuffs. There are three main types: Pain, Weakness, and Stun. Each of these debuffs have their own icon. Pain is a purple skull which generally cause damage over turns/cards. Weakness lowers stats and is reflected by a red down arrow that you would expect to see in a profit margin. Stun is three yellow lines used in games to show that something is being stunned. Stun is a little tricky because stun doesn't only mean stun. Stun limits how you play your cards/heal/etc. Anything that doesn't do pain or lowers stats. A catch all. See below for an example of one that's not a stun. You can see your resistance and ability to inflict it on the bottom of your character sheet. Generally you want to get relics/equipment to increase your resistance.


Speed. The less speed, the less cards you can play before your opponent hits you. You generally want more speed if you're playing Lian as you can prepare to parry attacks.

Upgrading card draws. You can't upgrade how many cards you get per turn but you can get cards that draw cards. You need to keep getting Lucy cards and try to get as many Lucy's rare cards that you can so your hand is always filled. You also need to balance between getting more mana or leveling up characters. You basically need to find a happy medium between three important elements.

If you want a video explaining everything rather than reading then this is a good one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdyFa1A1wjA

How to Play - Intermediate

The cast are playable and balanced. Most of your losses could be a result of RNG, not getting the right characters for your build, etc. A general strat is to have other characters fulfill specific roles to help each other out or learning how a character plays.

For example, Hein relies on the enemy to have a weakening debuff and hurts himself a lot. Hein also needs a lot of health to scale with his skills to boost up the damage (Merciless explosion, etc). Trisha has an attack skill which debuffs all enemies which is perfect for Heins Assault Slash. Or if you find the relic 'Magic Strawberry' then you have a perm debuff which results in Hein never missing. You can then buff him up even more with equipment such as 'Sacred Black Spiked Armor' that raises his maximum health by 40% and reflecting half of damage that you deal to yourself right back.

As he is an attacker who excels in multiple enemies, you can have another attacker such as Trisha focus on single target which results in a great synergy between the two. Trisha will get equipment that focus on critical damage while Hein gets equipment for health. Once you have good synergy between your team and having specific roles then it's a set game.

Relics

Relics don't give a flat increase to stats but to other factors like to increase like faint resistance or debuffs resistance. Anything that gives mana, plays/adds cards, debuff resistance or gives debuffs/damage (for certain builds) is generally best. You should hold onto relics you don't need to potentially swap them out during runs. It's best to keep trying to get relics into you get a shadow orb.

Steam achievement - Jump but 4 times

You can knock this out early game as you'll be getting a lot of scrolls. You need 1 swift and 2 vitality scrolls or 3 vitality by itself (hard to get usually). One thing I forgot to do is when you activate all the scrolls is to jump 4 times at the same time. Don't forget to JUMP!

Hidden Treasure

Hidden treasure starts from area 2 forward (except boss room at the end). You can use Lifting, purification, and teleport scrolls to reveal them. It looks they buffed teleport scrolls as they teleport to the hidden treasure more frequently. You can use map scrolls to find them but they're rare to get and you generally have to guess where they're at for the most part which isn't too hard.

You generally want to find to incomplete hex pieces going from the boss room to the front. They can appear at the entrance which screwed me over a couple of times but most of the time, I found it near the right side of the map. I've been told that it's near elites but, there are times where it's not there. Lifting and purification scrolls go up to 2 spaces which will cover up to the left of my character. Treasure can be located in the middle rather than the sides. Hidden treasure is worth it as you can get golden apples, skillbooks, stars, and lucy's rare skills. Golden apples can be used to upgrade heroic equipment at the campsite or perm boost your stats. It really depends on what you're building.

Shadow Orb

An amazing relic which saves you the hassle of upgrading Lucy cards. Play a card when you have 2 or less skills and you get to draw cards.

Leryn's Research Lab

More than half of your relics and equipment will be purchased here. There a few unlocks that can only be unlocked by beating the game with certain characters. You have to purchase a certain amount for the shop to refresh. If you're like me and you want to prevent more relics/equipment to be added to the pool then you gotta choose between that or the relic that you want to unlock.

More relics unlocked = less likely to get the relic/equipment that you want.

Mods

Some runs require you to farm items to save for your next run and in a effort to not grind out certain items, you can subscribe to saveitems. You don't have to get OP relics like shadow orb but something average to prevent RNG from ruining a run.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3048659754
Do you want to spend hours to grind out a run to redo a boss battle? With this mod, you can redo a battle. It's not broken as some bosses can't be beat regardless of how many retries.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3047702589

Hidden Memories

To unlock the first two memories, you have to type in the code found at the end of CW by the computer: 1412 at the console in the bed. Click the ???.

Equipment

Rarity: white->green->blue->purple (Heroic)->yellow (Legendary)
Purple is called heroic and on certain prompts the text "Heroic" will be purple. *Golden Apples can be used as a secondary to upgrade heroic to Legendary!* Green and white are not worth upgrading in the campfire and can be used to fill in temporarily until you get better equipment. Sometimes RNG will give you nothing but relics so you'll have make do with what you have. Equipment that give a low % increase is generally only worth it at a higher level such as 20+ attack. 15% increase for 20 attack is +3 attack while at 17 is a +1. In that case a star ring (green) would be better for starting off which gives a flat +2 attack.

Attackers

Charon

Highly recommend if you need another healer to assist as dark heal and Soul Thurible basically makes them another healer with enough moves to cause decent damage. Setups that run characters like Hein or Ironheart should probably have Charon added to their team. Doesn't directly harm enemies and uses pain debuffs and curses to assist the team.

With my runs, I like to capitalize on Soul Stigma. Soul Stigma lasts for 3 turns and inflicts 8+ damage whenever anyone on your team gets damaged and does double damage if another party member does it. If you have Hein and/or 'Let me absorb you' then the damage racks up without you necessarily doing anything due to them hurting themselves and/or the enemy attacking. You can also run another setup where you focus on charging her thurible and healing the team with dark heal. Curses are good and debuffs the enemy team as needed. I like to get the rare card dark blessing because of the perm 10% damage boost that transfers to each enemy until you clear the battle. Cheap swift move that adds damage over the course of the battle. Good for the final boss.

Hein

Can be a turn off at first due to his low-accuracy and him requiring more heals. If you have equipment that raises his accuracy/health or anything to support him then he will sweep through mobs. He excels at bosses due to his DPS being so high. Some of his cards require debuffs which other characters and/or relics (stawberry) can provide. If you don't want to use another character's debuff then 'Intimidation' is a good alternative which lasts 3 turns and hits everyone. Chemical weapon and assault slash is my favorite combo. In the early game where getting cards is annoying, endless rage is a treat.

Hein does a lot of damage for low mana and if you raise his crit chances with a relic then you should be expecting a lot of damage immediately without getting build up from the team. As Hein is 'hit hard and fast', he's beginner friendly until they realize that his accuracy sucks and drops him.

He has a lot of good cards that can go under the radar such as 'Blood Reflux'. Blood reflux fills up a team-mates healing gauge while getting up to a 33% attack boost. Characters like Miss Chain that preserves their healing gauge can be healed up to 60 from a single 0 mana swift card (no other healer can do this). Another card is 'Merciless explosion' which is a high hitting card which preserves your healing gauge for 2 turns. I can hit 100+ with this card sometimes. People can overlook the healing gauge protection but that is what makes this move one of his best. One of my favorite underrated investigator due to his simplicity and damage output as I like big numbers.

Trisha

She's a glass cannon. You would think Hein needs more protection but she goes down easier due to her low health. She has a higher evade than him which helps. She was my DPS for most of my early game as she's easy to manage and crits everything. Shadow slash upgraded to be the first card (innante) is the main reason why I love her. Shadow Slash can be recast on undamaged opponents. It builds up her passive easily which lets you cast a card for free once you play HER cards 5 times.

I recommend to only give her equipment that boosts her crit chance/damage and evade. Shadow Raid which is one of her highest hitting cards can hit 100+ if you put relics that increase crit chance and damage. If your crit chance is above 100 then it gets converted to damage. She's a great DPS and is easier to use than Hein. Put at least one apply bandage in your deck and you can't go wrong with any of her cards.

Azar

Similar play style to Johan where you're going to focus on using only him as a DPS. Most of his cards are reliant on Illusions Swords and their buffs. His play style is reliant on getting the right cards at the right time to hit hard. This can be mitigated with Pressel and her prophecy which allows you to pick your second card to draw whom I recommend getting as a healer. This does not make him sub-par to the rest of the cast as he still hits high regardless of not getting the right cards. Lucy cards that search your deck for certain cards will be extremely userful.

Sizz/Eve has good synergy with Azar and I recommend to give them a try to see how it works. If you're going to get Silverstein as a second attacker then I recommend to get his rare card, 'Blind Fire'. Shoots X amount with X being the amount of cards played that turn. Silverstein passive doesn't work Azar's Illusion Sword if you were opting to use that strat.

Silverstein

I recommend to use him with a team that uses cheap cards to attack. I haven't found a good team that maximizes on his passive but, I'm sure there's a strat out there somewhere. I would say he's average compared to most of the attackers. He has a lot of moves that ignores taunt. I would say he's a combination of Azar and Hein. I don't know any good strats with him. He might be good with Ilya discard skills but I haven't played around with it.

The Twins

Very slow and painful start. Helia end game is better than Hein in DPS and flexibility. Selena is a great healer by herself and has attack skills which support Helia. I'm not a big fan of high cost builds as they are killer for early games. Can only be used together at the start of the game.

Johan

Consistent damage that doesn't rely too heavily on cards. Similar to Azar's Illusions sword, he has his fixed ability which you're going to spam. His fixed ability doesn't ignore taunt. You're going to need a way to handle taunts or build him up to the point where he can kill enemies with taunt quickly. Relies on having a high mana to play cards and consistently spamming his fixed ability. Starts becoming extremely good once you raise his critical chance with equipment and/or relics.

Best rare card is 'Mirage' which shoots your fixed ability twice for two turns. If you have 'Rain of Arrows', the bonus damage is going to stack due to firing your fixed ability twice for .5 of your mana. Burning arrow hit all enemies which can be stacked up to 3 times for 12 pain damage. Similar to Azar, I recommend to have Sizz's Eve help Johan.

Ilya

Great DPS and has a built in discard mechanic which is useful for certain bosses. I personally think his frost build is broken when used with the twins and/or Miss Chain. If you're going to use him, you need to have at least Miss Chain. I'm personally not a big fan as I tend to run Hein for easier DPS with less brain power and rng.

Healers

Joey

The best thing about Joey is probably his healing buffs. A lot of his skills provide a buff that heals over time or increase your maximum health. His heals are slightly worse than power houses like Pressel but makes up for it by providing the team buffs like Chemical Weapon. He's a great healer that's similar to Charon while dishing out pain debuffs.

Sizz

Harder character to use amongst the cast which reflects in game as her difficultly scaling is high. Once you learn how to use Eve and potentially have the rare skill 'Marionette' then she becomes pretty rewarding. Unlike the other healers, she boosts attackers DPS by a considerable margin with buffs and Eve. You might need another healer like Charon to help support. She's best used with Johan or Azar but still a solid regardless.

Pressel

If you want a standard healer then she's a solid choice regardless of what team you're building. Her prophecy is great and helps gets the right card that you need. All her skills are great but I recommend to focus on her healing/debuffs and put healing equipment on her rather than use her to dish out additional damage.

Huz

Her main trait is her ability to heal regardless of a healing gauge. She also has the ability to easily preserve healing gauge as well (carrot and stick). She's not as hard to use as Sizz but takes a while to adjust to her cards. She's a really good choice for elite mode as you're going to be losing your healing gauge a lot.

Leryn

Her healing spells are lower compared to the rest of the cast and focuses on barriers and buffs. Her attack spells are better compared to the rest of the healers and helps you draw cards outside of Lucy which is rare. 'Infinite Spire' is probably one of her best cards as it lets you draw cards for three turns if your enemy is hit once and if you have less than 6 cards. If you run that with Johan on your team then you're able to continuously draw cards easily without over relying on Lucy cards. With less cards, her barriers gets a variety of buffs which usually requires an additional card (Healing Circle).

She becomes a really good choice with Ironheart and her rare skills are good too. I recommend giving her a try.

Tanks

Miss Chain

Easiest tank to play and has one of the best passives for a tank to have, Burn. Burn by itself protects your healing gauge and enhances certain skills with it on. Not only does 'Burn' protect her healing guage, fireground protects it as well. She will usually never lose her healing gauge which makes it easy for your healer to heal or have Hein with his Blood Reflux. She's easy to heal and agros enemies. A tank.

She provides a variety of useful buffs, debuffs, and heals. She has 'Engine Reload' as well which protects her in the event something goes wrong. Great character to play and helps getting your attacker the cards he needs with 'Pursuit' or casting expensive cards with rare card 'Combined Arms'. You can't go wrong with her.

Lian

She performs a little differently compared to how a tank should perform like Miss Chain. She works with giving easy mana in the form of parries. She's more active in causing direct damage to enemies and helps the team by providing stuns, removing debuffs, and providing crits. She's a tank but won't agro enemies as good as Miss Chain. She relies on her parries to do so and her other skills like protect ally.

Her Lucy card is a cheap and easy way to remove taunts and 'Parrying tactics' allows you to get another mana from your attacker. She's a great choice but may take a while to adjust to her parries and play style.

Phoenix

Her play style is so different from the rest of the cast that it almost alienates her. She's a fun meme to play and you can do some crazy stuff with her if you build your team the right way. Give her a try and see what you can do. See below for an example.
https://youtu.be/VyCoUXzYtJw

Ironheart

A tank that can out DPS some attackers lol. If you thought Hein can hit some big numbers then you have to play Ironheart. If you have healers and Leryn then you're going to hit hard. Really hard. His passive converts 66% of excess healing to barrier for all party members. As he handles barriers and shielding, he is technically a tank but performs more like an attacker. He's similar to Charon in that aspect. A must play at least once.

I highly recommend Sizz for her 'Eve Help' to raise his critical chance as everyone wants to see big numbers.

Narhan

If you think of him as a tank then you're not going to like him. He's more of a support and gives buffs, stuns, and shield which scales after his health. He's great for certain builds/teams depending entirely what you're trying to make. He handles taunts the best among the investigators. Great choice with Ironheart.

Momori

The poster investigator. Skills rely on taunt and inner desire. Inner desire absorbs 40% of damage from any of your allies and saves it as pain damage. You can't find a unique way to discard it without taking damage (besides her cards).

I lost the bet. Momori is a good combination of a tank and an attacker.

Team Setups

As I'm finishing up all my achievements, I played around with different setups and teams to see which is the best. Right now the below team is my to go to. No matter what equipment or relics you have, you'll have a consistent run.

Hein/Leryn/Ironheart/Pressel

Setup #1
Busted. Broken team. Ironheart is already OP with Leryn but Hein and Pressel take it up a level. Ironheart has upgrade skills that buff moves based around barriers. You can basically make versions of shield bash on Hein's already heavy hitting moves. Upgrade Merciless Explosion and you're going to hit 100+ even with low barriers. Acceleration Formula (Leryn basic move) makes the top move cost 1 less for I believe 4 cards. You're basically getting 4 mana and it just stacks with shadow orb. Leryn also protects all your teammates healing gauge with all her barriers. Crazy good. Shadow orb + Hein's assault slash + Shield bash/Shockwave is all you need. I cleared the final boss on expert + wilderness. If you're struggling...you can beat the boss with your eyes closed with this team.

Trisha/Pressel/Hein/Miss Chain

Setup #2
Miss Chain has the ability to agro mobs and she excels at absorbing hits and dishing it right back. She requires little to no healing so Pressel can focus on healing Hein/Trisha. Hein and Trisha deal a lot of damage and if Hein has one relic that boosts accuracy then that removes his main drawback. Enemies die rather quickly and Pressel is there for the backup heals. Trisha is more of a single target/support (apply bandage) while Hein excels at mult-target.

Johan/Leryn/Lian/Charon

Setup #3
If you don't want to struggle too hard thinking about your next move. I recommend the below. I did it for bloodmist level 4 and the team swept through everything. I didn't have good equipment so getting the shadow orb at the end helped. I don't know if this is a good team for the final boss as that's more of an endurance run. You can choose whoever for your healer.

Charon/Lian

Charon, Lian are always solid picks with each other or with other members. Joey will be best picking up at a campfire or another healer.

Hein/Charon

Hein is a great starter as he’ll destroy everything in beginning of the game. His passive goes well when you get kill multiple small targets as the damage will stack onto the bigger one. Whenever I start with Hein, I always breeze through the first two stages. Hein and Charon would be a good duo when you’re new at the game as Charon will support Hein with dark heal when he hurts himself.

Ilya/Miss Chain

Surprisingly nice duo. I was hitting 66 pain damage using the both of them together on top of Ilya attacks. Frostbite gives 3 damage whenever it receives a debuff and Miss Chain gives debuff for almost all of her moves. Engine burner by itself hits 24 from its stacks so it's nice.

Final Remarks

It's not as detailed as others but I think it's enough. I recommend to look at the other guides here as I looked through them myself. Everyone has their different strats and broken setups.

Play whoever you want, however you want. Enjoy!

[Just Vivian!]

@Reianor

Crazy amount of moralizing going on here, Azar is literally a child murderer lmfao. Half of the cast commits horrific acts of violence in-front of a minor, but you seem to really have no issue with that.

I just find it funny how upset and tweaked out people seem to get over characters that aren't 2 dimensional and easily fall into either a "perfectly" good or bad category.

[TeejNutsNootsBalls]

I find that Silverstein works really well with Narhan when you choose to run him more crit focused. Guaranteed crits with Snipe and Ricochet, powered up by a full-power Trauma (which Silverstein can actually greatly attribute to via Double Tap and Freeze Bombs cc debuffs) goes crazy hard. I can consistently hit over 100 with a well-placed Snipe. Take Aim also works surprisingly well paired with Narhan as well, since most of Narhan's main damaging skills deal their damage with additional attacks, but if you really want to go overboard, you get Phantom Pain, easily making your damage aoe. I think they are a very slept on combo, and I haven't even went over some of the other minor synergies, especially with Freeze Bomb and Narhans passive.

[Thorf]

You're seriously sleeping on pain synergy teams. The Charon/Miss Chain combo in particular is pretty serious. Charon can easily fill her entire deck with Pain generators, and Miss Chain has a few of her own plus one skill that hits all enemies and (when burning) increases pain debuff duration by one on all targets and another skill that hits all enemies and (when burning) increases all pain debuff stacks by one. Joey happily gets in on some of that action too, and then there are relics and gear that crank it further, plus a few different kinds of card upgrades that push it even further. Chaos debuffs are a kind of nice-to-have by themselves, but when you start stacking them with their synergies they can get to be a seriously big deal.

[Reianor]

That said, he definitely IS full of himself ;P

[Reianor]

As an individual member his power is in how everything scales with HP for him.
His damage is notable when he has high Max HP.
His barriers are a crazy good source of mitigation when he has high Max HP.
And everything else on him is CC. Meaning he can eat many debuffs and still perform at 100%.

P.S. It's also extremely satisfying to pop one-time invulnerability shields on enemies and/or finish off the 1hp-last-chance-survivors with his 1 damage from the base part of nightmare syndrome.

[Reianor]

I actually DO think of Narhan as tank and IMHO he performs satisfactory in that role.
He's not the most orthodox choice for that role but Identify goes a long way towards survival.
Also, most bosses let you pick who's gonna get hit the most hard and Narhan with his health pool works well enough there.
The key to Narhan-tanking is damage prevention. Both his own barriers and Leryn's (kind of a natural partner for him, imho) work wonders when you know how the damage will land.
The thing about Leryn's barriers is that even if the barrier can't halt the whole attack it'll still preserve the entirety of the healing gauge. Essentially turning your entire team into one big miss chain in terms of sustainability. But for that to really work you need to know when and where to put those circles and that's what Nathan does for the party.

[Reianor]

@Wall-A It's a rare+once skill with a 2 turn duration. And all you really get out of it is turning a masochistic disaster into a one-time full heal on momori. In longer fights that one-time ticket is NOT enough. You still have to rely on her own skills to somehow flush all that shirt.
That said it is a useful feature if you're going tor a masochistic party.
But then again the real draw behind the maso-party is Hein and his Endless_Rage skill (I wonder if that+PEH+Shining_Orb can break the game), with charon next after him thanks to being able to put self-inflicted damage to better use (and having PEH isn't going to magically turn your entire maso-card supply into healing permanently, you know).
Momori would fit into the last slot thematically, but if you're already going to pull some volatile shirt as is then she's all that much more likely to be your undertaker, not your guardian. You're frankly better of with a more reliable tank instead of a thematic one for a maso-party.

[Reianor]

Honestly the worst part of Momori is her actual character. She's thematically disgusting in too many ways. She looks trashy, acts like a wannabe delinquent, has extreme issues with both honesty AND pride, and on top of it she's an ACTUAL masochist. Hein may be crazy and reckless but you won't see HIM actually asking to get whipped, and IN FRONT OF A MINOR no less. She's like a walking collection of everything disgusting.

@mabel
Her being a pain in the rear to manage is EXACLTY why she's a bad pick.
Other characters have passives and features that turn into almost straightforward benefit.
Many of them do it almost independently from RNG, and the ones that need RNGesus's seal of approval at least don't outright sink your run when that goes south.
But she's an actual HAZARD to handle.
You take a risk when picking her but you don't really get anything WORTH that risk in return, not when same or better is available more or less for free with most other picks.

[Wall-A]

Momori + Huz goes INCREDIBLY hard especially if you happen to get Huz's rare skill. Her rare skill converts pain to healing pretty much making your party invincible with momori on the team

[VortexMagus]

I don't know how they were during the time of the guide, but as of right now Charon and Joey have really good synergy together. Joey sets up multiple different pain debuffs which Charon can make use of with soul strike. Joey also gains a lot of power from stacked pain debuffs from Charon, as he has chemical #12 which gains huge damage multipliers off pain debuffs.

The team also ends up being incredibly hard to kill as Joey is a decent healer on his own and Charon can support heal very effectively (note: I like running dark heal as her fixed skill for this purpose, as it can double as a finisher on very injured enemies).

Miss Chain ends up being a good tank to run with them since she can set up a third pain debuff that both of them can use their finishers with (grievous burn), and for the final choice you can run whoever you want really.