Full Unit Analysis - Zenia

They told us there were no brakes on the hype train, so Gumi took a stand for public safety.

Link to official unit data

Stats/Arena/Animation

• Zenia remains the glass cannon she always was, capping out at 4300 ATK as lord but remaining barely par or even subpar in every other stat. It's not the end of the world in the present meta to have low HP/DEF/REC, however.
• Arena is one of the areas Zenia's just naturally good for, although mots of her strength comes from her ES and therefore you can't really field more than one of her. In an arena-oriented build, Zenia has high normal attack damage potential that rivals or surpasses Mifune depending on the spheres you have available, easily one-shotting any unit that doesn't have an angel idol or extreme mitigation. Unfortunately, her damage distribution lacks any threshold angel idol breaking hits, so when you face the inevitable Terry/4 Azurai comp, Zenia won't change your luck.
  • As for other colloseum weaknesses, Zenia lacks any defensive merit (no immunities, angel idol or reliable/high value mitigation), and doesn't have AoE normals. Both of these can be covered by spheres/elgifs, but there's not enough room to cover everything she lacks.
• Zenia's animation is actually the last thing I've looked at before starting to write this. Gumi have seen fit to make her SBB a quasi-spark blanket. It has some weird 6 frame gaps in it littered throughout the entire animation, so she doesn't work fully as a spark blanket for sparking other units; on the other hand the animation is short enough that another spark blanket can perfect spark Zenia.
  • Most of the extra hits dealt by the UBB fill in those gaps, making it a pure spark blanket from start to finish.
  • Her BB is moderately special. While the hit pattern is very similar, there are a pair of hits in the middle of it that spark eaech other. Just 2 hits (6% of the total damage). I expect this is more an error in data input than intentional given the small scale of the self sparking that happens.
  • Her normal attack would require two spark blankets; the first half of the animation is on a different track to the second half.
  • Overall, Zenia's animations land their first hit particularly quickly compared to other units, so you may want her on the back row to slow her down so you can spark her more easily.
  • If, for some reason, you want to run two Zenia, they can be dupe sparked using the same methods as Avant or Rize.

LS

• Zenia's LS has changed fairly significantly from her 7* form. It now grants 100% ATK, 40% HP, an extra hit at -50% damage, 2-3 BC on spark and 120% spark damage for 2 turns whenever a unit's cumulative spark total exceeds 15.
  • This means that coming from 7*, she's lost 150% BB ATK, but gained 20% ATK, 40% HP, 1 BC on spark and the entire spark damage and extra hit effects. The current form is pretty inarguably stronger, but feels very different.
  • Heavy ATK boosts are nice in that they can be converted, and they also provide a lot of damage for hit count strategies, which Zenia naturally lends herself to very well, given that the only part of her that doesn't include any form of hit count boost is her BB.
  • The HP is quite low for an OE unit, but it's welcome to have any half-decent amount considering the kind of content hit count strats might be used for.
  • Hit count boosts from passive sources such as an LS will allow the extra hits to generate BC and HC, acting as a very strong form of BC gen compared to BC drop rate. However, as an entirely separate effect, it also scales very well with said BC drop effects, assuming you're willing to use normal attacks at all (you probably are if you're using Zenia). However, extra hits cannot be sparked and/or gain any benefits from doing so.
  • Spark BC is also a solid form of BC gen - one of the most used and most valuable a this point in time.
  • Finally, there's the threshold spark damage. This kind of effect uses a running counter for each of your 6 units, which when triggered will proc the buff, which then lasts through to the end of your next turn. The counter resets on activation and doesn't begin counting again until the start of your next turn.
    • As it's a spark damage buff, it will take effect immediately and boost the damage of any sparks after the spark which activates it in the same turn.
    • You can only gain one copy of the spark damage buff from leader skills or ES/Elgifs/Spheres with the same functionality, so do note that running two Zenia won't allow this to double up, though everything else in her LS will.
• Overall, Zenia's LS works best when used in a squad focused around Zenia herself, but is relatively solid for content that doesn't need the absolute bulkiest LS. Asides from the ramp-up time, it's actually very similar to Eze's, but sacrificing some damage for a hit count boost.

ES

• Zenia's ES hasn't changed much from her 7* form. If equipped with her unique sphere (Obsidian Core Amplifier), she gains 30% all stats and 2 additional hits at 30% damage.
  • The sphere's effect for those who forgot: 80% ATK, 30% chance of 30% mitigation (additive to BB/passive mit).
  • Total stat bonus with the sphere: 110% ATK, 30% HP/DEF/REC, 260% hit count modifier (and gen 200% more BC/HC with normals)
  • The biggest weakness of the ES is the forced sphere; you're getting 10% less HP/DEF/REC than if you'd used Beiorg's Armor or Armor of Seals, but this might be compensated for by ATK->DEF conversions and the mitigation chance. Zenia's BB skills will benefit less than if you'd used a more spark-oriented sphere, but the extra hits go a long way to making her normals as strong as her SBB.

BB

• Zenia's BB remains a single target attack which fills the rest of the squad's BB gauges and grants DEF ignore for 2 turns. As a new bonus, it increases her spark damage by 50% for 3 turns (which stacks with regular spark buffs)
  • As this BB is mostly unchanged, there's not much to say about it. Despite being single target it only has a 300% higher modifier than her SBB, which in real gameplay will rarely be more than 15% extra damage.
  • As always instant BC fill can be used to emergency fill a defensive unit (healer/mitigator/DEF buffer/whatever), which is generally a nice tool to have.
  • The self-spark stacks with her regular spark buff on SBB, which uh... just about compensates (herself only) the no SP enhancement thing. If you even want to switch between BB and SBB.
  • People have noticed there's a single self-spark in the animation of the BB. I'm not sure if this is intended (the hit pattern goes 79, 82, 85, 85, 91, 94 - there's a clear gap where it could have been 88 instead), but it only accounts for 6% of the total damage.

SBB

• Zenia's SBB got a makeover and it's half of the biggest saltstorm we've seen on the subreddit in months. She's completely lost her old BB ATK buff, and now instead buffs spark damage, hit count and has a 100% ATK self-buff.
  • The damage of the SBB itself is actually slightly above average. Including the self-buff, it's effectively got an 800% modifier where most units have around 600%.
  • Zenia's spark damage sits at an end-of-7*-era 100%. It can't be enhanced further.
  • The hit count buff adds 100% to the hit count modifier. This one can, in fact, be pretty heavily enhanced - if you spend 50 SP, it can be increased to 200%, and if you spend 100 SP it can be increased to 300%.
    • Notably, without any SP enhancements, Zenia effectively has a weaker buff set than Avani (100% spark damage/30% spark vuln/100% hit count)
    • Hit count bonuses from a temporary buff such as this do not increase BC/HC/Item drop limits or rates.
  • As a final note, the ATK buff is a self buff and stacks with all other ATK buffs, and can be converted. It's nice to have when using a hit count strategy such as the one Zenia supports.
  • There's an option of adding an AoE normals effect to the SBB as well. It clashes heavily with the enhancements to the hit count buff due to costs, however.
• I have more to say on the interaction of spark damage and hit count later, but I'll cover the UBB first.

UBB

• Finally, Zenia's UBB is the most significant part of her new toolkit, and retains its former glory. It grants the entire squad 3 hit count (200% damage per hit), 350% ATK and 300% Spark Damage.
  • That's 3 hits, 200% each, total is 600% hit count modifier. This is the single largest hit count buff to date, much like with her original release. Your normals will hit hard while it's active.
  • In addition, there's 350% ATK. As this is applied to normal attacks, it again creates some fairly huge final numbers.
  • The spark damage is also a thing. It doesn't add as much damage as you'd expect as far as normals are concerned, but SBBs are still effectively getting 350% ATK and 300% spark damage here, so it's entirely possible for them to come close to normal attack damage even while the UBB is active.
• While there hasn't been much to say about this UBB, just know that it's one of the best UBB for damage in crit-resistant content in the entire game, as long as you're willing to use it properly.

Spark Damage/Additional Hits Interaction

Now, I brought this up briefly earlier, but I'm going to go into more detail here.

tl;dr: Additional Hits cannot be sparked, and prior to testing after somebody questioned me on Zenia's release, I believed they still at least mirrored the damage increase of sparks on the original hit. They don't.

The updated damage formula effectively looks like this:

Damage = (Total ATK - Total DEF) x CritMult x EWDMult x Mitigation x (SparkMult   ExtraHitsMult)

Where the spark multiplier is the entire spark damage multiplier, and the extra hits multiplier is just the bonus from the extra hits (not including the original hit)

To show why that last part looks like an addition, we can show the damage as the following:

Damage = (100% (base hit) * ATK * SparkMult)   (ATK * ExtraHitsMult)
e.g. SparkMult = 300%, ExtraHitsMult=200%
Damage = (100% * ATK * 300%)   (ATK * 200%)
Damage = ATK * (300%   200%)
Damage = ATK * 500%

This basically puts "Additional Hits and Spark Damage" as one of the worst possible offensive buff combinations made of otherwise strong effects (likely only beaten in bad design choices by "Additional Hits and BB ATK", which doesn't exist), as the two effects are effectively additive to each other. Even more laughably, Zenia's SBB doesn't even have high tier spark damage, so you're getting a bad buff combination, that you have to spend at least 50 SP to make one of the buffs viable, and the other just plain isn't.

With this information, I went into detail on comparing Zenia and Tazer at another redditor's request, which you can read about here if you want the math

The tl;dr of that is that due to higher base damage and spark damage combined, Tazer is likely a better nuker than Zenia if you're not using any UBB. In fact, on the same line it's likely all units capable of hitting the ATK cap on SBB will be better nukers than non-UBB Zenia (even when falling 20k short Tazer can still outdamage her)

However, there's a flip side to this: Hit count strategies are significantly less affected by enemy spark resistance. Because our damage is Spark plus Hit Counts, if we have a roughly 50:50 split, enemy spark resistance only affects half our damage instead of anywhere from 70-90%. Unfortunately, spark resistance is relatively rare in known content, with Karna Masta being the most well-known example (I should ask Deathmax to do a datamine on the more recent trials if he has spare time).

Now, there is of course an exception point at which Zenia becomes a superior nuker - when her UBB is active, assuming you built the entire squad for hit count nuking (including converts, spheres, leader skills, whatever buffs and passives you can get), you should reach the point where an SBB user would need approximately 800-900% spark damage to compete.

You could also argue that if you can't SBB or perfect spark consistently, hit count nukers deal more damage over time. This does become more valid in some trials, but has little place in raids, regular quests, most GGC or FG/FH.

Ultimately, I'm not a fan of the changes to Zenia. The best part of her is her UBB; the rest of her has no value compared to taking an HP-scaled nuker or Tazer instead. She's become exceptionally niche as a result, which is impressive, because her old kit of BB ATK and Spark Damage was basically usable anywhere except the arena, where she had her ES and it was pre-colloseum so there weren't common angel idols.

Her SP options don't really change that; while she can give up to 300% hit count multiplier, that can be beaten out by 300% spark damage which is signficantly easier to raise via LS, spheres and relatively common spark damage SP enhancements (even Zenia's own LS brings 120% spark damage to the table comapred to 50% hit count). She can give AoE normals, but gives up on having the superior hit count buff as a result, and in terms of her personal damage, she's better off having 150% ATK/100% spark damage than taking the last 100% hit count as well (and at that point you may as well use Soleil or Ark for hit count instead and just have Zenia use normals forever)

What I'm trying to say is that Zenia's best build is probably the UBB build with ATK/spark/mitigation passives (because her UBB is all that she is). There's no real advantage to actually taking the hit count buffs as she is, which is kinda stupid considering they're supposed to be her purpose (and this is entirely down to how Gumi priced them)