Fern

Fern is a 5-star Ice Mage built entirely around her Focus resource and Speed. She starts the fight with 3 Focus, and each point of Focus raises her Speed by 15% and her Evasion by 20%, so at full stacks she becomes blisteringly fast and very hard to land hits on. Her attacks are single-target nukes: both her main skill and her ultimate self-buff her Attack, scale their damage with her Speed, and her ultimate ignores 70% of the target's Defense. Whenever she dodges an attack she spends one Focus to knock a turn off her own cooldowns, and her main skill also cuts cooldowns while Focus is high, letting her chain her hardest hits faster than her base Speed suggests.

Counters

• Fragile high-Defense single targets — Her ultimate penetrates 70% of the enemy's Defense and scales its damage with her Speed, so heavily armored bruisers and tanks that rely on raw Defense to survive get cut down anyway.
• Slow attackers and unreliable hitters — At full Focus she gains up to 60% Speed and 60% Evasion, so she usually moves first and frequently dodges incoming hits entirely; each dodge spends a Focus to drop her own cooldowns, letting her loop her big attacks faster against anything that cannot reliably connect.
• Enemies on long cooldown setups — Her speed and self-buffed Attack let her open with a powerful nuke before slower threats get rolling, and her main skill shaves a turn off her own cooldowns while Focus is high, so she pressures targets that need time to wind up their key skills.

counterZio62%counterAubade Ludwig56%

Countered by

• Reliable attack-buff removal — Her damage leans on the self-Attack buff she grants before each strike; stealing it, cutting its duration, or dispelling it strips a big chunk of her burst right as she swings.
• Hits she cannot dodge — Her whole engine runs on Evasion converting into Focus and cooldown resets, so attacks that cannot be evaded, or anything that drains her Focus, collapse both her survivability and her cooldown loop.
• Tanks that lower incoming damage — She is purely single-target with no way through flat damage-reduction layers beyond her Defense penetration, so a sturdy front-liner mitigating each hit can simply outlast her nukes.
• Faster burst before she stacks up — Her base Speed is low and her power only materializes once Focus and Speed are rolling; a faster opener that bursts her down or controls her before she gets going never lets the kit come online, and her reliance on a strong Soul setup only widens that early window.

hard counterHarsetti60%counterFrieren61%counterSalome51%counterTori55%counterAmid57%counterLidica59%counterMoon Bunny Dominiel46%counterBriar Witch Iseria57%counterLady of the Scales58%counterEstelle53%counterRuele of Light56%counterUnbound Knight Arowell59%

Who counters Fern? — full guide ›