Wannahon is global's latest exclusive (for like, one or two more days til Silvie lands...) and the first unit in the Guild Raid series, which seems to be interrupting the Galardhon batch for this release. He's proving a little controversial as far as people's reactions seem to be showing, though I don't personally think he's a bad unit, just too niche to be top tier.

Judging by the wording of Wannahon's release gate, he is not an LE unit, and it may be wiser to pull for Silvie at the moment, as she's both LE and seemingly more globally viable. If you have gems to spare, though, read on.

Here's a nice link to his official announcement data: http://forums.gumi.sg/forum/brave-frontier/dev-news/312052-unit-details-blightblade-wannahon

Stats/Arena/Animations

• Wannahon has some serious nuke stats, reaching a very impressive 4.5k ATK as Lord. he doesn't particularly suffer as much as other units tend to for having these stats, however, still comfortably passing 3.2k DEF and 9.3k HP.
• Wannahon has all the features valued by the pre-colloseum arena meta - huge ATK, hit count ES, ATK ES. In the present day, that's not going to fly in colloseum, unfortunately leaving him fairly average asides from being very good at bring a unit's HP down with normal attacks. Wannahon lacks any defensive merits, has no normal attack AoE and his dependency on high hit counts makes him unlikely to break angel idols.
• As for his animation, the SBB has a particularly poor one divided into two sets of hits. The first set of hits (8) suffers from 7 frame delays, meaning no standard spark blanket can spark it alone. The latter set of hits (12) has decent 3f delays, and is worth 76% of his damage, so at least you can spark that well.
  • His movement type is stationary and he has Ensa-Taya style buff timings, so Wannahon is unable to be perfect sparked by his own dupe and will fail to be buffed by the majority of units in a one turn setting.
  • Oh, and comparitively speaking, his BB and normal attack have even worse animations for sparking with. Don't rely on spark BC for him too much.

LS

• Wannahon's LS is huge. It grants Earth units 200% ATK and 60% HP, and also gives EWD immunity, 1 hit at -25% damage and 175% crit damage. In addition to all of that, in guild raids his LS will give an extra 25% all stats to Earth units and 15% Earth/Thunder mitigation
  • To this date, all hit count LS have been 50% penalty. Wannahon's the first unit to have one at only 25% penalty. That's paired with 200% ATK for earth units, making him theoretically the best hit count lead to date - but only for Earth units. I guess he'd work well with something like Hisui, Zelnite and Zeruiah/Quaid.
  • EWD immunity is nice to have here. Wannahon's forcing a mono squad, and even though he'll give you a water buff to damage fire enemies effectively, without this your entire squad would be weak to fire.
  • The crit damage fits with Wannahon's optional buffs. He's being touted as a Guild Raid leader, which I can only hope means crit damage is relevant in Guild Raids - because otherwise this is a pretty bad design.
    • That said, with the current Guild Raid that I've seen, you can't even predict the enemy Guardians to chose which mono squad to bring. At least players with Zeruiah have access to an all-element buffer in Earth currently, but I feel like the guild raid leaders will flop if we can't even know what element to bring.
  • The guld raid bonus is interesting; 25% extra all stats and 15% elemental mitigation is pretty huge when available. It suffers the same issue I just mentioned where we can't seem to adequately predict what elements we'll be facing in guild raids, so I can't see this being easy to use without decent element buffers available to you.

ES

• Also huge, his ES grants 2 hit count (no penalty), up to 100% ATK based on HP remaining and 5 BC per turn.
  • In other words, passively he has better normal attacks than Zenia, less than a month after her release. Doesn't even need to commit to a sphere that only gives 110% ATK, either - we can Sky Harbinger this guy.
  • The BC regen seems odd and out of place compared to the rest of his kit, but given he can't spark as well as other units, it's welcome.

BB

• Wannahon's BB is a standard AoE that grants an Ark tier hit count buff ( 2 hits/no penalty), AoE normals (50% chance...) and a very strong ATK down infliction buff (20% chance to inflict 30% ATK down).
  • Generally speaking, outside of his UBB, the hit count buff is the only place Wannahon loses to Zenia in a comparable sense. But she does have to spend 60 SP to surpass this. For most uses the standard 200% hit count buff is usable, however.
  • The AoE normals at 50% chance is, frankly, bad. No unit with the buff to date has had a chance below 100% to proc AoE normals, and in Wannahon's case it also interferes with his SBB buffs and makes strategies mixing BB and SBB particularly difficult to use.
  • The ATK down infliction buff here is, despite the low-seeming numbers, the best incarnation of the buff to date, matching Sakura Miku's BB effect. Especially in guld raids where the Guardians we've seen in the preview have as much as 16000 ATK, a consistent 30% ATK down is very significant, preventing 4800 damage per attack taken (as much as 14400 DEF). In that sense, Wannahon does seem designed to be effective against Guardians, and I'm hoping his other unpopular buff options actually matter there as well.
    • You know the ones I mean. Crit stuff, EWD. If they matter in guild raids, then it makes sense for the fist Guild Raid Leader unit to be able to buff them. If they don't matter... terrible design choices.
  • Wannahon gets a bunch of additional buff options in his SP enhancements - Crit Chance, Earth ATK/DEF, Earth EWD and Ailment ATK are all available buffs for both his BB and SBB. No enhancement is for his BB specifically, however.

SBB

• Another standard AoE that grants AoE normals (100% chance), 170% ATK, 50% crit damage and Earth/Water/Light element addition buffs for 3 turns.
  • This time the AoE normals are 100% chance. Evidently the design of the guy is such that Gumi don't expect you to bother normal attacking on the turn you use his BB, and then use his SBB once you rother units are free to use normal attacks. That said, the order here significantly interferes with one of his SP enhancements, which bothers me a lot.
    • Specifically, the enhancement that gives his SBB an extra turn. If you do a BB/SBB rotation, you'd do BB first, then SBB to get the better AoE normal buff. But that means you only have 1 turn of hit count left after that, so you have to BB again on the third turn of the SBB's buffs and overwrite the AoE normals, meaning you have to SBB on the 4th turn the SP enhancement was supposed to buy you... so that enhancement is only good for SBB-only Wannahon.
  • The ATK buff more or less completes the Hitcount buffer's kit, so naturally Wannahon got this where Zenia didn't. ATK by itself seems pretty lackluster, but at least in mono-Earth the mitigator we're most likely to pair Wannahon with is Hisui, who only has DEF/REC buffs.
  • Crit Damage is an interesting choice for Wannahon as the crit multiplier is the most significant after ATK% and Hitcount buffs for normal attacks (given that spark damage was recently shown to be effectively additive to hit count rather than multiplicative with the release of Zenia). While crit damage by istelf seems bad, Wannahon has a crit chance option in his SP enhancements to complete it, as well as a 50% enhancement to bring it up to top tier crit damage buffing.
  • The elements here allow Wannahon to make a mono-earth squad unresisted and effective against Fire and Dark units, which in some cases should be enough. For everything else there's Zeruiah.

UBB

• Finally, Wannahon's UBB is another standard AoE that grants AoE normals (100% chance/ 25% damage), 350% ATK, 400% Earth/Water/Light EWD and inflicts a 1500% DoT for 3 turns.
  • The damage on AoE normals is actually an inversion of the penalty, so it's just a small ATK boost. This isn't a significant damage buff, though it is a damage buff never the less.
  • The ATK bost is normally good for hit count nukes, but unfortunately Wannahon doesn't include a hit count bonus in his UBB, and you'd probably still be using Zenia or Zelnite for a hit count nuke UBB at this point in time.
  • 400% EWD is huge when it works, and probably the most significant part of the UBB so you'll only be using it when this does apply. The Water/Light portion may be irrelevant if running Mono-Earth as even with the multi-element buff, EWD only matters for matching base elements to target's weak element.
  • 1500% DoT will deal a lot of damage. As Lord, max imped, it should deal a base of 73.8k damage per tick, which bypasses mitigation, is affected by DEF and increases by 50% against Thunder targets.

SP Enhancements

Wannahon has a lot of these. Seems like Gumi's given a lot of options to this guy, Zeruiah and Silvie, which only serves to make building them harder.

• 10 SP: 50% ATK
  • Standard ATK boost. Strong for normal hit nuking.
  • Less valuable if you're juggling Wannahon's BB and SBB as he'll be landing less normal attacks.
• 10 SP: Boosts Atk (50%) when BB gauge is over 50%
  • Effectively the same as before. Wannahon should very rarely be below 50% BB gauge except for turn 1 and after BB drains.
• 20 SP: Adds probable random status ailment infliction effect to attack (45% Curse, 45% Paralysis, 45% Poison, 50% Weakness, 50% Injury, 50% Sickness)
  • This ailment infliction is added as the passive. Wannahon doesn't have an RT attack, so that's not huge, but it does mean he can inflict ailments with his normal attack at a decent rate.
  • An interesting choice, especially paired with Ailment ATK. The chance stacks additively with ailment infliction buffs, spheres and leader skills, so you could actually push it pretty high...
• 20 SP: Adds fill own BB gauge to max effect to SBB
  • Makes his SBB an iSBB.
  • Not sure why this is a thing, to be honest. Wannahon's SBB doesn't have any nuking factor, nor any one turn effects.
• 20 SP: Adds critical hit rate (60%) boost for 3 turns effect to BB/SBB
  • Completes Wannahon's role as a crit buffer. Decent price, but most crit leaders get crit chance for free.
  • As it's optional you could alternately take somebody else with it. In mono-earth, that's likely to be Daze or Quaid with their crit chance SP as far as I remember.
    • Most OE crit chance buffers also have crit damage, which isn't a great thing for building with Wannahon. Quaid is the best for avoiding this clash because he doesn't have crit damage.
• 20 SP: Enhances SBB's damage ( 25%) of normal attacks hit all foes effect
  • As discussed earlier, the damage boost/penalty of AoE normals is an additive ATK% effect, so this is a relatively small buff.
  • As you're likely to have hit count buffs it may get multiplied up a bit, but ultimately it's fairly small.
• 30 SP: Enhances SBB's critical damage ( 50%) boost effect
  • Ups his crit damage buff to 100%, which is the current top tier for the SBB level of crit damage.
  • If you're reading the data from the official post, Gumi accidentally included a 20 SP version of this which appears to just be a typo. Wannnahon only gets one 50% crit damage enhancement for 30 SP.
  • No real threat of clashing with other units.
• 30 SP: Adds considerable Atk, Def boost (120%) for Earth types for 3 turns effect to BB/SBB
  • A large ATK/DEF boost for earth units only.
  • Especially good if you're running mono-earth with Wannahon lead. It stacks with generic ATK/DEF buffs (such as Wannahon's regular ATK buff)
• 30 SP: Adds damage (160%) boost against status afflicted foes effect to BB/SBB
  • Another large ATK boost. if you can land an ailment, this is also very good for normal attack strategies.
  • The issue is that many end-game enemies are basically immune to ailments. In raids, however, usually at least one ailment will work on any given target, and Wannahon has been designed with raids in mind.
• 40 SP: Adds Earth elemental damage (150%) boost for 3 turns effect to BB/SBB
  • Very strong EWD buff for mono squads. Doesn't give any EWD to non-earth units, however.
  • As I've mentioned before, hopefully the EWD and Crit multipliers are valuable in Guild Raids. However, as I've also mentioned, it seems to be impossible to predict guardian elements reliably in guild raids, making EWD less valuable there than it should be. It's also generally worthless in most RC6 raids (such as Beiorg being immune to it)
  • Basically it's godly if you know for sure it will work and pretty frigging terrible otherwise.
• 40 SP: Allows SBB's buff effects to last for additional turn
  • Will add extra turns to the following buffs: Generic ATK%, Crit chance, Crit damage, AoE Normals and Earth/Water/Light elements.
  • Will not add extra turns to Earth ATK/DEF, Ailment ATK and Earth EWD available through SP enhancements.
  • Crit chance is extended because it's part of the same buff proc as standard stat buffs which are part of the SBB by default (the ATK% part), not because it's been specifically included in in SP enhancement.
  • While good for pure SBB Wannahon, I've already discussed earlier that this enhancement doesn't help if you plan to mix BB and SBB on him. You'd still be SBBing every third turn in that case.
  • In addition just note that because the EWD, Earth ATK/DEF and Ailment ATK buffs aren't extended by this, you shouldn't be using them in the same build.
  • Basically you're most able to use this if you just want Wannahon normal attacking as often as possible, but not being able to use the Earth ATK/DEF buff with it really hurts that build. Unfortunate.

In terms of builds, Wannahon's got a lot of options to consider. I feel that the units you're able to use him with will have a lot of weight towards build decisions, so it's hard to give exact builds. Still, some pointers:

• A selfish Wannahon will want the 4 turn SBB, ATK passives and crit bonuses if relevant, Earth ATK/DEF and ailments or EWD if not (even with one less turn than the rest of the SBB it's still a net damage increase). You can get crit chance from another unit if you want. A selfish Wannahon needs to get the hit count buff from another unit to play effectively, which may not be possible in pure mono-earth at the moment unless you have two Wannahon.
• You can build a general utility Wannahon with stuff like the crit bonuses, Earth ATK/DEF/EWD and ailment infliction/ATK depending on your needs. This is highly dependent on the known immunities of the content you're building him for, the buffs already in your squad as well as whether you're building mono or not.

I might do a build table later, but I think Wannahon's highly dependent on what you can use him with, and you can do all sorts of buff combinations depending on what other units are giving you.

I think Wannahon is very strong in his niche, less valuable outside of it. I'm not so sure about his value in guild raids, however. During the first preview match I was unable to even find a Guardian to test EWD, crit or ailments on it, and without that I don't know if Wannahon's actually been well-designed for the mode or not. Though I still think with the inability to predict enemy guardians EWD isn't going to be good for the mode regardless.

Overall his SP enhancements give him access to effects which make him viable across a variety of content. But I don't think he's top tier anywhere otuside of his niche as a mono leader vs thunder targets or as a hit count nuker likely supported by Zenia (UBB and 300% hit count SBB). As neither of these is heavily used, he might not have the broad desirability needed to convince people to pull for him, especially when shown alongside the LE Silvie.