>>402380
>>402385
I'm looking at Ben and possible gear and I'm a bit uncertain.
I even leveled mine to 50 to get a better idea about his stats because Prydwen is wrong as usual, and Hakushin doesn't exclude his Core Passive effect. Considered leveling him up to 60 but it's too damn expensive, bro.
Mibibi's ball has decent stats but I wonder if it actually outperforms his signature when it's maxed out.
I'm as usual not sure about Woodpecker, because it has all these sorts of unintuitive requirements, but it depends on what does your rotation look like.
2xWoodpecker is great, though, so 4xWoodpecker shouldn't be too bad, though.
I've messed with him in the training and one issue I see is that If you're running Ben + Lighter, on-fielding Ben is ultimately kind of a fluff.
Most of Lighter's buffs are only for Fire Damage and Ben has very few "free" sources of that.
So, realistically, most of your actually competitive damage will come from your EX, Chain Attack, and Ultimate.
Keeping that in mind, Hormone Punk is probably a very good set for your DPS Ben.
I'm not sure how does the math line up for it, as I'd have to write it down to actually understand it properly, but my intuition tells me that if you're boosting your ATK from two separate "resources" on your gear, that would make in-combat ATK% "better than usual" on Ben.
Don't quote me on that, though, because it's probably still an equal weight multiplier...
One thing for sure, his passive makes all sources of flat ATK weaker than usual.
That's why I'm not particularly sold on Lucy as Lighter-enabler, but her W-Engine does work well with Ben.
However, I would also consider maybe running Burnice as the final slot?
Burnice + Lighter is a very powerful combo, so you would have a pretty potent on-fielder (especially if you run CRIT Burnice) for when your Ben isn't ready to deal Fire DPS yet, and she still offers some damage off-field, including a very powerful off-field Ultimate.
You'd be loosing on a very powerful Support W-Engine, though, and your access to Quick Assists will become very limited, so Astral would be pretty complicated to keep up.
Something to look into.
Running Burnice also means you can run arguably the best Drive Disc DPS set in the game - Inferno Metal.
If you are on-fielding Ben (say, active energy generation makes it worth it, or you just want to), I see no reason to ever use his BA1 over his Dash Attack.
It has pretty good multipliers, shortcuts to his BA2, and can cancel recovery of his BA3.
That makes Shadow Harmony a consideration as well - 12% Crit Rate + 12% ATK is generally better than ~18% ATK you'd get from Woodpecker, but keep in mind that 15% Dash Attack damage is very rarely better than 8% Crit Rate from 2xWoodpecker, so it really depends on how well does Woodpecker actually integrate into your burst rotation.
As for how to build him, CRIT is always good. If you're running his W-Engine, it wouldn't hurt to skew the proportion towards the DMG%, but honestly 1:2 ratio is probably the best if you're planning to actually deal most of the damage with him.
DEF% is not an auto-pick over ATK%. I'm staring at numbers, and I'm thinking that ATK% is pretty much always better than DEF%.
So, instead of chasing DEF%, consider it your fourth viable stat.
i.e. CRIT Rate% = CRIT DMG% > ATK% > DEF% >>> the rest
Meaning you can get "more perfect" discs than everyone else, but your rules for rolling discs should be pretty much the same as for everyone else, except for your preference for the fourth stat.
You can also consider running Lighter-less Ben, so you can deal more damage with your BAs but your current options are pretty damn limited it seems.