September 2

New Banners

Mina [Limited, Debut]

Luciphael [Mysterious, Debut]

Recommendation For Newly Starting Players

Reroll for Neno (Chaldea). This lets you skip Chaldea later in the Rookie Sprint banner, making room for a different unit.

Simple Rerolling (Don't start with limited units): Same process as always (Link to guide)

Advanced Rerolling (Start with at least 1 limited unit): Use the Advanced Rerolling guide (Link) 

Recommendation For Regular Players

Mina should be skipped.

Luciphael can be worth trying for.

New Event: Mina

Elite Mode

Summertime Petra (Boss), Radiant Ith

Recommended Strategy

This Elite stage is extremely easy.

The bosses lack a threat profile and will merely stall the fight. Any amount of DPS that out-damages Petra's heals will eventually win the stage.

Bringing debuffs such as Unbuffable, Unhealable, DEF Down, and SPD Down can help you win faster.

Event Shop

Featured unit: Lucia

Lucia is not useful.

Buy for Rainbow value or skip.

New Unit: Mina

AKA "Regular Mina" - Since New Year Mina will be considered the "default" unit and will continue to be called Mina

E7: Arunka

Mina is an anti-Shield brawler.

As a passive, Mina cannot crit but gains increased ATK. 

Her S3 is a single target attack that penetrates 70% DEF and does increased damage against shielded targets. If S3 secures a kill, its cooldown will reset.

S1 is a single target attack that has a chance to apply 2 Bleeds, and a 50% chance to follow up with another single target attack that heals herself.

Mina's E7 Original, Arunka, was released as a counter to Hwayoung, a Red element HP scaling brawler who used to dominate the meta. However, Arunka turned out to be useless. Here, we don't have Hwayoung, and anti-Shield capability in general is not very useful; Chouko is a better unit for the job, but is hardly used.

Mina, having very poor utility, anemic damage, and questionable usefulness, is not recommended for anyone.

Strengths

Non-crittable attacks are less affected by misses than attacks that can crit. This lets Mina do credible damage against evasion fighters.

Mina gains 50% gauge at the end of turn if she S3s a Shielded target, which increases her turn cycling.

Weaknesses

Her damage is fairly low, partly due to being unable to crit, but mostly due to poor multipliers. 

Shields are not very prominent in the current meta and Mina struggles to find a usecase.

Not having a proper skill chain or any survivability also reduces her usefulness.

Build Guide

Build for very high ATK and high Speed. Most likely Attack + Pen/Riptide, Right side ATK% + ATK% + SPD. 

Being a warrior, her bond choice is limited, CDMG bonds will not work but ATK and damage dealt% bonds will.

New Unit: Luciphael

AKA Luci

E7: Death Dealer Ray

Luciphael is a debuffer/controller and the very first unit with a nonattack sleep capability.

Her skill chain is S3 > S2. S3 is is a nonattack AOE that strips 2, applies Sleep and Venom, then creates an extra turn. Venom is a debuff similar to Poison that deals 10% max HP worth of damage and also inflicts the same amount of injury. 

S2 applies EHR Up and Venom Burst to all allies, then pushes them by 20%. Venom Burst lets her allies apply and detonate Venom on their attacks.

S1 is a single target attack with a 75% chance to sleep that deals additional damage proportional to the amount of injury on the target.

Strengths

Nonattack strip and sleep is currently the safest possible way of dealing with many counter-fighters in the current meta such as Julia and Time Aoi. Remember that Slept enemies lose all evasion and Crit RES. Non-attack effects cannot be evaded and does not trigger on-hit effects such as Counters.

Chloe and Clone Janis in particular have special synergy with Sleeps.

Venom is very dangerous against HP scaling brawlers since they inflict enemy HP scaling damage and deal Injury. 5 ticks of Venom damage will apply the full 50% Injury to a unit, cutting their max HP by half. Venom Burst inflicts Venom to targets regardless of hit/miss and also applies to AOE attacks, which means that an AOE attacker will pair well with Luci.

Weaknesses

Extremely low base speed of 100 makes it near impossible to build her for opener-grade speeds. She will have to sacrifice a lot of stats just to reach competent speed levels. (For comparison, Bunrica is 129, Ith is 121, and Claire is 115.)

S3 is subject to regular EHR/RES checks, and is vulnerable to 15% Absolute Resistance.

Luci belongs in the Healer class despite having no ability to heal allies. Thus she suffers from having very few useful bonds to choose from.

Build Guide

Build as an opener. Speed + Accuracy, right side HP% + EHR% + SPD.

She can also be built slow(er) and with a higher emphasis on tank, with EHR (for anti-turtle) or RES (for anti-cleave), but this is harder to use.

As for bonds: Moira bond (Passionate) increases her skill cycling since S3 and S2 are nonattacks; Dawn bond (Effective) or Raf bond (Deepkiss) lets her heal allies; Mandragora or Tiffany's bond (Unreleased) will probably be a particularly good fit when they release. Glazed Eyes (3★) can also be used to help her land her first S3.

Other News

Bond Shop Refreshes

Mina bond: Useless even for herself. Skip