5★ Light/Dark Units

E7: Angel of Light Angelica

Noah is an opener/counteropener/controller who can protect her team and CC the enemy.

Using her passive, she gets 24% selfpush every time she is hit by an AOE, and when hit with an AOE for the first time, will cleanse 2 and apply Skill Null as an AOE.

On her turn, her S3 is a nonattack that strips 2 and applies Unbuffable and Silence.

She can be built to opener-grade speeds to cast S3 quickly, high speed to counteropen against the enemy's AOE cleave, or even medium speed as a variant fit. S3 being a nonattack means it cannot be evaded.

Strengths

Very high utility: Manages her team's debuffs and also controls the enemy. Not a common combination of skills. Silence is a high-value debuff and Skill Null forces the enemy to waste a tempo. In theory an extremely disruptive unit.

Multiple build paths: Since Noah can be built around a wide range of possible speeds it can make it hard for the enemy to guess your strategy unless your other 3 units in the team give it away.

Weaknesses

Easy to counteropen against: Debuff spam triggers Obsidian, nonattack triggers Saku (who will conveniently undo everything Noah did, assuming she herself isn't silenced) and Akane.

Mina: Free soulburn S1 to pass the Silence for no cost > S3 is an AOE that will burn off the Skill Nulls & the Bomb will work just fine.

Single target cleave or interdiction: Noah can be assassinated before she can do anything. Alternatively, cooldown push, CC, or silence works as well.

Low base speed: 115 is on the realm of Laiisma, Claire, and Lana. Makes it hard to build her for extremely high speeds.

Lacks offense: Entirely relies on her teammates to dish out damage. This is a bigger problem in Guild War where deck thinning is more important; losing one slot to a unit who does no damage heavily limits your firepower.

Build Guide

If you want her in your defense team, aim for extremely high EHR to deter Saku. Going for tank and even using the Guild bond (Reluctant) for survival is also an option.

A more conventional setup goes for very high speeds and high EHR.

Berrica's bond will let Noah cycle skills extremely quickly as both S3 and S2 are nonattacks.

Book (Flutter) is always a good standard option for offense.

E7: Pirate Captain Flan

Yuri is a debuffer/controller who wields Bombs and Burns to stun and damage the enemy. She is fairly similar to Mina, but has more utility, with a few key differences that set her apart.

As a passive Yuri gains 50% EHR and 30% damage reduction by default, and all of her attacks are unable to crit (similar to Mina).

She has a new effect of "stealing" buffs, which is a buff-strip and a copy effect merged into one. Yuri's S1 steals one buff from the enemy, then detonates any bombs or burns on the enemy at the end of the attack.

Her core skill chain is in her passive, which activates when an ally attacks an enemy, and that enemy has no buffs at the end of the attack. This can either be achieved by a buff-stripping attacking skill, or simply by attacking a non-buffed enemy. When this happens, Yuri will push the whole team by 15% and apply Blink, which is basically a one-time 50% gauge boost applied at the end of turn.

Her S3 is an AOE attacking skill that self-buffs ATK Up, steals 1 buff, applies bomb and burn, and pushes 30%. Note the fact that the debuffs are a part of an attack - this means that the attack must hit for the debuffs to apply.

Therefore, Yuri's intended skill chain is S2 (Passive) > S3 > Next turn > S1.

Strengths

Yuri can build for higher raw stats than Mina allowing her to be tankier. Her +50% EHR passive allows her to get through tanks and healers easily without sacrificing too much stats.

Being a dark element, she has no problem with hitting blue units, unlike Mina (Not that big of an edge since Mina's kit is full of nonattacks that ignore element counters, but still).

Her staying power can be much higher than Mina owing to her higher base stats, 30% damage reduction, and the ability to steal helpful buffs from the enemy. In longer battles, Yuri prevails over Mina who mostly fizzles out after turn 1 and need 2~3 turns to cycle her cooldowns. 

Non-crittable attacks with high damage multipliers are less affected by misses than attacks that rely on critical hits. In other words Yuri will do a decent amount of damage against evasion units on her own.

Weaknesses

Her Bombs are a part of an attacking skill meaning she cannot handle evasion units and will trigger on-hit effects. This is especially a negative since Bombs are one of the few "special" damage types that bypass a lot of mitigation methods. Mina is a much better pick in this aspect, as she applies bombs as an AOE Nonattack, allowing her to bypass evasion units, self-cleanse-on-hit units (Naksha etc), and more.

Her skill chain does not allow for a seamless detonation of bombs on the enemy. While she does gain 50% gauge from her own Blink buff, that is a far cry from a proper Extra Turn. Yuri needs one turn to apply bombs, and another turn to detonate them one by one as her S1 is single target. On her own this is far too slow of a tempo, and Yuri relies on her teammates to make the most of her utility.

S2 is a nonattack skill and will trigger nonattack counters such as Saku.

Build Guide

Don't expect Yuri to perform aggressively like Mina. Her job is to stay alive and pester the enemy, making full use of the guaranteed stuns from Bomb detonations. Her bulk and damage reduction passive shines in longer battles.

Focus on Speed, EHR, ATK, and HP. More HP means more staying power (the effect is amplified due to her passive). Obviously, dump crit rate and CDMG as she cannot crit. 

Right side ATK%/HP% + EHR% + SPD, but HP% rings could be equipped depending on what you want to get out of her.

Dropping a bit of ATK is okay since Yuri self-buffs ATK Up to make up the difference.

Mina's bond is extremely well fit to be used with Yuri as her S1 fulfills the activation requirements & soulburning for an Extra Turn means that she can detonate the bomb right away. Remember that bond effects ignore evasion; Mina's bond can apply bombs even if the attack misses.

Certain units pair better with Yuri due to their affinity with Blink. For example, Julia's S3 grants her 50% gauge push; combined with Blink, she will get a faux-Extra Turn on her first turn, allowing her to attack twice in a row. 

E7: Maid Chloe

CLana is a healer with the ability to revive allies and reduce fixed damage taken.

Her S3, which is a nonattack, is the first AOE revival ability in the game, which brings back all dead allies at 30% HP. The skill cleanses and grants Resuscitate to living allies and grants everyone DEF Up.

Whenever Lana takes a turn she will heal 2 allies with the lowest HP%. In addition, she passively reduces fixed damage taken by allies by 50%, meaning HKD's fully charged S3 will only do 5000 damage instead of 10000, and Belle's fully charged S3 will only do 6000 instead of 12000.

Her S1 carries a 40% stun which isn't reliable but is perfect for creating variables.

Lana's kit was changed a fair bit compared to her leaked version. She lost ATK Up on S3 but instead gained DEF Up, lost a teamwide RES buff, lost 10 base speed, but instead gained fixed damage reduction. These changes turned her much more defensive, and arguably less versatile.

Strengths

As long as the enemy doesn't have hard counters against revival and resuscitation, Lana can tremendously extend her team's staying power. She can bring back an entire team after they've been cleaved in one fell swoop.

S1 having a 40% stun makes her very uncomfortable for attackers because it is a relatively high activation chance hard CC on a healer who should normally be a low priority target.

Her S3 has a fairly short cooldown as far as skills of these sorts go. If Lana can successfully cycle turns and stall, she can bring everyone back, sometimes even multiple times a match.

Weaknesses

She is a bit too hard to use properly. First, Aubrynn must not be alive (prevents revivals for both allies and enemies); the enemy must not kill her allies with Extinction skills (most notably: Mitsuki S3); Lana herself must not die or get crowd controlled; if she buffs Resuscitate on her allies, the buffs must not be stripped away; and finally, if her allies have Resuscitate, they must die before the buff runs out to fully utilize it.

Her stat requirement is also quite steep, requiring at least 15k HP to ensure adequate healing amount from her passive, at least 200 RES to properly resist debuffs, and a good enough speed to take turns often and promptly aid her allies. The speed requirement is a cruel one considering that she lost 10 base speed that she was planned to have.

Revived allies are only given 30% HP with no adequate protection, meaning they can easily be killed again.

HKD can steal Lana's buffs which will complicate the match. She will only do 5000 fixed damage, but that is usually plenty enough to oneshot squishy units after accounting for the raw S3 damage (which is unmitigated).

Build Guide

Speed/Revenge + Health/Resist/Immunity, or a mix of Health, Resist, and Immunity.

Right side HP/HP% + RES + SPD.

Aim for 15k+ HP, 200+ RES, and 190+ SPD, the faster the better.

A Revenge build with very high speed will improve her "clutching" potential by letting her cycle S3 cooldown very quickly while at low health; this however usually ends up sacrificing another important stat such as RES.

E7: Lone Crescent Bellona, but nerfed

Yes you heard that right. She got nerfed while coming here.

Gagarin is a counter-fighter and a brawler, in some ways similar to Seaside Noclyn but also different in other ways.

All of Gagarin's attacks are guaranteed to crit, and she stacks an ATK buff every time she attacks, up to 50%.

Similar to SSN, Gagarin stacks Focus when allies are attacked, and after 5 attacks, fires an AOE. She also self-cleanses one debuff when using this skill, just like SSN.

However, Gagarin lacks all debuffs, has injury on her attacks, and self-pushes with S2, which puts higher emphasis on tempo and damage.

Strengths

Can counter anything: Unlike most counter-fighters who can't counter a counter, followup, or flank, Gagarin only cares about the number of times her allies are attacked.

Can be built tanky: As a warrior with fairly high base HP and zero need to build for crit rate, Gagarin can afford to invest into some HP to improve her durability.

Scaling threat: She stacks an ATK buff on herself, and her S3 self-buffs, making her a more dangerous threat the longer the match goes on.

Weaknesses

NERFED: This is the big catch. She was supposed to have 15% base evasion for every living ally, totaling 45% in Arena and 30% in Guild War. She lost this for some reason and now is just a weird sidegrade of SSN. Her S3 also could have had the ability to grant Vigor to all allies on a kill, but she instead got injury on her attacks.

No particular niche: She doesn't really have any place to shine at the moment. She is outclassed by existing options in every possible application. We will see how the early adopters slot her into the meta but it's going to be a tough battle making her work.

Low multipliers: According to preliminary reports from early adopters her damage is disappointing. That makes her even less useful.

Build Guide

Can be built several ways, placing focus on damage, tank, or even resistance. Theorycrafting data on her is limited at the moment due to the radically different skillset making a lot of existing E7 info inapplicable.

E7: Commander Pavel

Anh is a Cleave component with excellent damage potential, an unstoppable tempo, and a very tricky activation condition.

She starts the battle with a Skill Nullifier and 60 morale. When an ally deals a critical attack through attacking, flanking, countering, or with a followup, she gains 20. When she has 100 morale, she fully self-cleanses, self-buffs ATK Up, fires an AOE attack, and self-pushes 100%.

Her ultimate is a single target nuke that ignores damage redirection (yet another Heidi counter lol?) and pens 70% DEF.

Put simply, this means:

1. Ally deals two critical attacks somehow. Two ATTACKS, not two targets hit with a crit.

2. Anh passive activates, fires an AOE, and gets the next turn.

3. S3 kills someone.

4. Hopefully you can get a win from that point onwards.

Strengths

Zero Need for Speed: When her passive activates she WILL cut the next turn with her 100% selfpush unless something goes wrong. She dumps all speed to build for damage.

Deadly kill potential: Being able to dump all stats except atk, crate, and cdmg gives her a high ceiling to fit insane amounts of damage. She self-buffs ATK Up and her S3 ignores 70% DEF. If Anh fails to kill, something has gone horribly wrong.

Tricky to blitz: Skill Nullifier negates damage once, so you need two attacks if you want to kill her before she can act.

Tricky to disable: Her S2 fully self-cleanses, so spamming her with debuffs won't stop her. Only hard crowd control (sleep, stun) will do.

Weaknesses

Zero followup potential: After using S2 - S3 Anh literally does nothing. She needs five more crits from her allies to refill her morale, and her skills will be in cooldown. She either finishes the match on her first go, or you lose.

Tricky activation: You need two critical attacks with her allies to activate her. Most openers don't even attack (Ith, Lucia, etc). What special units do you use to crit twice in a row during your opening phase? Or do you simply let it happen eventually and hope anh is disruptive enough to grant you a win?

Insane gear requirement: Since it is imperative that she kills, she needs top-tier DPS gear with no speed. If you want to use her properly (activating her passive under your own terms), you also need extreme high speed + 100% crit rate gear for your opener(s). So she demands high quality gear not just for herself, but for your opener, and maybe even a second sub-opener. 18 pieces of gear to run a single unit.

Build Guide

Anh's build guide naturally extends to "who do you even pair with her" because she's so tricky to activate.

1. Openers who attack with a debuff + SDawn fit with crit: This is the most popular combo at the moment as followups do count towards Anh's morale. Sora or Aubrynn fit for extremely high speeds is often used. As soon as they attack, SDawn will followup with an AOE.

2. SSJ or counter-fighter with debuff + SDawn : Less popular combo that relies on counterattack RNG to activate Anh. Easily defeated by Uncounterable skills or hard CC, but Absolute Resistance sometimes screws people over.

3. Laiisma: Initially the most obvious choice at release, also the weakest. Naturally built to attack twice in a row and already designed to be fit with 100% crit rate. Also the easiest to counter: Since S2 grants 100% action gauge and NOT an extra turn, someone with a higher gauge push can cut her (usually urd). Lass also has very poor base speed and limited utility.

4. Two seperate high-speed units who go one after another and attack twice. The obvious downside is that you need TWO units for this.

5. Attacking opener fit with crit + Layla: If your opener has no debuffs, place her on Position 4, then Layla will selfpush 30% to get the next turn.

6. Units who can oneshot an enemy + Akaoni: Most commonly Mitsuki, but other choices are also possible. Akaoni's S2 activates when anyone dies.

7. Units who can do heavy damage + Gail: Similar concept to Akaoni, but you only have to deal 60% of a target's HP worth of damage.

8. Extra turn opener/nuker + Mid speed Celeste: Cele will gain 40% gauge push during the 2 turns your opener takes, and then she can follow with her turn.

9. Units who generate an extra turn to attack twice with no cost: Luna, SJoyce. Both of them are conventionally unfit to be used as an opener.

10. Units who soulburn for an extra turn: This only works on offense, obviously, because AI can't soulburn.

11. Units who use S1 + Silbal: Interesting approach, but the big question is who do you even use as an opener that can use S1 comfortably. The bigger question is how do you pull this off in defense when most AI behavior prefers S3 and S2.

12. Counter fighters: Theory only. You need to get hit in order to counter. If you're cleaving, you're not supposed to get hit at all.

13. Belle: Slightly easier to activate counters since her counter isn't RNG but still, you need to get hit. Also, you would need to fit Belle with crit (yikes).

As for Anh herself:

• No particular emphasis on speed.

• As much damage as you can possibly fit.

• Dump all other stats.

Bond choices:

• Any damage bond, obviously

• Bartoz bond (Breakthrough): If anyone can use this bond, it's Anh. This bond isn't better than the competitors though (especially Hello Customer).

• Delina bond (Trade): If you think 100% gauge push isn't enough, this will give you more.

• Nara bond (Toetip): Maybe? Do you think you'll need heals?

• Cosma bond (Gift): Cloaks at the start of battle, so if you wanted to snipe Anh first now you can't even target her, and must use an AOE to decloak and strip Skill Null then attack again to kill her. Great for defense, probably.

E7: Apocalypse Ravi

Shien is a tanky HP scaling brawler who can snowball the match by reviving allies. She has an innate lifesteal on S1, injury on her attacks, and a strong passive.

Shien starts the match with 50 Morale, and when she is attacked, consumes 10 to trigger her passive. The ability heals her as well as pushing her gauge by 15%. This is per attack, not per self turn.

She also self-cleanses 1 debuff when attacked, which triggers once per self turn.

Her ultimate is a powerful attack that stacks a damage buff each time anyone (enemy or ally) dies. This buff stacks up to 3 times.

More importantly, when her ult kills an enemy, Shien revives a random dead ally back to full HP and pushes them to 100% gauge, with a complimentary Skill Nullifier to go.

Strengths

Highly generalist and well-rounded skillset with no obvious downside, fits well into a lot of different comps.

Extremely tanky against sustained DPS due to her self-healing passive. Effectively killing Shien requires a focused assault. 

Team revival skill acts as an insurace, especially in GW where losses are permanent.

Weaknesses

It is rare that she can pull off her S3 successfully. Using S3 immediately usually means that no one is dead yet to actually make use of the revival; holding S3 until someone dies means that you're leaving unused DPS on the table.

Cannot revive allies if they die to an Extinction skill, or if Aubrynn is present.

Restrict (from Cosma, Heidi, etc) prevents her self-pushes, if it is not cleansed.

CBerrica is a particularly well-fit counter, her resource reduction will drain Shien's morale and the Injury will decrease her damage.

Evasion based counter fighters with lifesteal (namely Julia) typically perform very well against HP brawlers like Shien.

Vulnerable to debuff spam despite her self-cleanse passive.

Standard AI can be baited with a light element unit.

Build Guide

Counter + Penetration with HP and CDMG focus. Do not neglect speed despite her self-pushing passive. 140~160 should be enough for most cases.

Other variant fits can be viable depending on what you're looking to get out of her.

As for bonds, any of the damage bonds can be a good fit, as well as the three lifesteal bonds (Kumone's, SSJ's, and Aoi's). Time Aoi's bond increases HP and forces RNG checks on the enemy in the form of Crit RES.

Builds aiming for high initiative might consider Celeste bond (Gluttony) which can increase her self-pushes.

E7: Sage Baal and Sezan

Chloe is a tanky debuffer with AOE crowd control and a single target nuke.

Her core skill chain is S2 > S3. S2 is an AOE that strips 2 and inflicts Sleep, which can be soulburned to generate an extra turn. 

S3 is a non-crittable HP scaling single target nuke that penetrates 100% HP if the target is asleep.

S1 also has a 75% chance to sleep, which is great for creating variables.

In addition, if S2 is available, Chloe self-pushes 20% every time the enemy takes a turn, meaning she cannot be cleaved easily. If she is left alone, she will self-push and overtake the enemy and put important units to sleep.

Strengths

20% selfpush per enemy turn makes her a ticking time bomb just like Sora. She must be dealt with, or she will deal with you.

Strong soulburn effect (extra turn with obvious followup skill) and carries her own book (no extra mages needed).

Slept enemies cannot retaliate properly, including counters. 

HP scaling, non-crit-dependant high single target damage enables her to reliably secure kills... as long as the enemy is sleeping.

Weaknesses

Chloe in defense cannot soulburn for extra turn, and she loses a ton of tempo due to this. She won't be able to do much more than shut down time-sensitive cleaves.

AOE triggers Urd, who usually can also resist the sleep. However, she cannot cut Chloe's extra turn, so you can still fire S3 and probably kill one unit.

Larlene will counter the S2 completely.

S2's strip and sleep can be evaded by evasion fighters. 

Restrict from Cosma or CHeidi, or Hinder from Bunrica will limit her self-pushes.

Neko will react when Chloe generates an extra turn and will self-cleanse.

Build Guide

Build for medium to high speed, very high HP, very high EHR, and no offense stats.

Right side HP% + HP%/EHR% + SPD.

For offense, Book (Flutter) is the obvious bond choice; for defense, choose anything that might annoy your opponent, such as Truth for random stuns.

E7: Top Model Luluca

Mitsuki is a high-speed nuker with excellent deck thinning potential who cloaks herself and buffs her team.

Her game plan is to build for very high speeds to act as an opener or a sub-opener who grabs an early turn with the help of a dedicated opener. Then, she chains her S2, which buffs her team, into her S3, which self-buffs ATK and ACC Up (the first of its kind) before (ideally) killing someone. Her S3 also boosts her whole team's gauge by 20%.

ACC Up is not to be confused with EHR Up. Accuracy Up counters Evasion; Effect Hit Rate Up counters Effect Resistance.

Mitsuki also constantly cloaks herself, making her very hard to target with single-target attacks.

Strengths

As a caster (mage), she has the most interesting and diverse set of bonds available, with the most notable being First Flutter (AKA Book) which makes her a perfect cleave component, helping your opener soulburn to ignore RES and then boosting your team with ATK Up and Gauge Boost.

Her ACC Up buff allows her to hit evasion units, especially when paired with Just the Two of Us bond (for a combined 70% accuracy vs 75% evasion on most evasion fighters).

She is excellent in a lot of cleave teams due to her perfect utility: High base speed allowing her to act as an opener or subopener, cloak at the start of battle, ATK Up and gauge push for her allies, the ability to hold Book, and great damage to boot.

Weaknesses

Extremely easy to counteropen against. S2 is a nonattack skill that generates an extra turn, which will trigger Akane, Neko, Saku, and give two turns of self-pushing to Chloe and Sora.

Since S3 self-buffs before attacking, HKD will steal ATK Up and ACC Up and give it to the entire enemy team.

Mitsuki in defense has standard AI and can be baited with light element units. Naksha tends to be the best option around due to her 51% damage limiter that completely nullifies S3's high damage.

Build Guide

Mitsuki fills a very similar role to Gail, who also buffs the entire team with ATK Up and boosts them by 20%. The main difference is that Gail does so with an AOE attack and is herself an evasion fighter, while Mitsuki is a single-target nuker who can snipe evasion units with ACC Up. With the proliferation of anti-AOE measures, the gap Gail left behind is being filled with Mitsuki.

Build Speed + Pen/Crit/Riptide/Immune. Destruction instead of Speed is fine if it's very fast.

Right side CDMG + ATK% + SPD.

She can run several different bonds: Book (Flutter) if in a cleave team, accuracy bonds to snipe evasion units, any damage bond for kill potential. An interesting choice is Ferocity (Theresa's bond) which will in theory speed up her skill cycling tremendously.

E7: Twisted Eidolon Kayron more like twisted nipple gayron AMIRITE LADIES

E7: Remnant Violet

Julia is an evasion counter-fighter with extreme single target damage.

Her passive grants her a permanent Foresight buff, 50% base evasion, 30% built-in counter chance, and the ability to fire S3 on a random target when Focus is full. She gains 1 focus every time she uses S1 or evades an attack.

Because 99% of Julias run Chaldea's bond (Candid) adding 25% evasion, most of them will have 75% evasion. This is plenty enough to dodge most attacks from regular units, and maintains 5% evasion against maximum accuracy units (50% base ACC + 20% from bond).

Her S3 self-buffs ATK Up before attacking, and both her S1 and S3 has top-tier damage multipliers resulting in scary damage.

Her dead simple, yet solid, skillset, as well as her unmatched abilty to create uncontrollable variables has solidly placed Julia in one of the most used Defense Team units. A good defense team forces unavoidable RNG checks on the enemy; Julia, who lives and dies by RNG, turned out to be perfect for the job.

Strengths

Very high evasion of 75%. Consider that Chaldea only has 55% against non-water targets. Bringing Clone Kalici to the team will enable an insane 95% evasion, but in practice this is rarely seen due to the poor deck thinning potential of CKali.

Inherent mechanism of evasion, as well as the in-built 30% counter, makes Julia an RNG monster, capable of bullshitting her way out of extremely unlikely matchups if she can get a lucky counter or two. 

A bad attempt at killing Julia will fire right back at the attacker's face when the counter triggers; this makes her untouchable in certain situations where the enemy cannot get rid of the single threat model because she might explode in their face. This is best seen when a misplay in the enemy's part results in Julia being the last one left alive in the team because everyone (including the non-damage dealers) are forced to roll the Counter dice against Julia. 

She also just has really good damage. So good, in fact, that some players put her in any random PvE teams (similar to Erica) because big damage = big good.

Weaknesses

Her inherent randomness works against you in an offense scenario. Full-Focus S3 cannot be targeted and attacks a random enemy, and her counters and evasions cannot be predicted.

She is also highly vulnerable to:

• Non-attack debuffs

• Damage from non-attack debuffs: Curse (Aoi, Luna), Bomb (Mina)

• Damage from Bonds: RVR, SSN, Dapo with Melody bond, etc

• Base accuracy units: Akaoni, Mitsuki, CBerrica (who is the only unit capable of reaching 75% ACC), Anastasia, and more

• Non-crittable high-damage nukes, which are less affected by evasion: Ariel, Chloe (if the sleep lands), SMikael, Dopaeni, etc

• DEF scaling light element tanks as bait: DEF Scalers receive less raw damage, which results in less lifesteal

Build Guide

Almost all Julias will run Lifesteal + Immunity for two reasons:

1. Lifesteal massively improves her staying power which only serves to make her stronger and more annoying.

2. Immunity is an important insurance against Mina's bombs.

Offense-only Julias run Penetration instead of Immunity.

Right side CDMG + ATK% + SPD. Bond is almost always Chaldea bond (Candid).

Niche variant fits build for high HP on her to make her extremely annoying to kill. This, however, limits her lethality against tanky enemies.