She has no title it feels weird.

Leona's our latest ATK-down inflicter/regen buffer collo cancer unit, descended from a long line of collo cancer warriors who regular take part in the King of Fighters tournament. All I can tell you about her in the game she's from is that she's really annoying to fight.

You'll probably feel that way in BF, too.

Stats/Arena/Animations

• Leona's got solid HP and particularly high ATK. While she doesn't quite reach Zekuu's ATK, she does heavily outstat him in both HP and DEF. Her only particularly low stat is REC, which isn't critically important.
• Most of Leona's immediate value lies in the arena, so there's a lot to talk about here. Let's break it down point by point:
  • Her leader skill offers a potent combo of 100% ATK and a 35% chance AoE normal effect, allowing your squad a decent chance to kill enemy units or consume their angel idol effects with regular attacks on the first turn. She also increases BB activation rate by 25%, which means your units are also more likely to AoE for the kill on the second turn.
    • Note that there are players which use squads filled with chance-based angel idols and BC when attacked, which present a serious problem for AoE normals if the angel idols trigger on enough units. However, Leona/Mifune/Zekuu based squads will at least cut through threshold angel idols reliably.
    • Lanza's overall kit may be better suited to the BB activation chance LS as it has BC when attacked, while Asto's is only "better" if you consider AoE normals a bad thing in the tier of colloseum you play at.
    • It also offers point bonuses to all arena/colloseum matches you play using her as your lead. Always nice.
  • Her attacks are all single hits, so she is likely to ignore threshold Angel Idols. Note that when using hit count spheres, angel idols can trigger between the initial hit and extra hit, but this is unlikely to happen on her SBB.
  • She inherently gets Element immunity from her ES, so she's not fragile against popular fire units such as Azurai, Glenn and Rahotep
    • Note that as her attack is still earth element, you may want to give her an element addition sphere to not be resisted by fire units. Ka'rzn spheres work well for this as they also improve AoE normal chance significantly.
  • Her SP enhancement gives her a 70% chance angel idol, which offers a very high chance to survive the enemy's first turn. This synergizes well with her ES giving a stat boost based on HP lost, as chance-based angel idols leave the unit at 1 HP - Leona, if she survives through her angel idol, gains a 150% ATK buff for turn 2.
  • There's also 50% stats in her SP, just to add bulk, 35% evasion self-buff on BB and 25% Fire/Earth mitigation. However, you can't take all of these at once, so there's no single build for colloseum - you'll have to choose between the mitigation 20% stats, or evasion 50% stats (assuming the angel idol is a given)
  • Her BB casts Taunt and can be enhanced for 35% evasion, which forces all non-AoE attacks to hit your extremely defensive Leona. This doesn't disable AoE normals or BB skills, and will never fire when an opponent doesn't potentially have those on deck as the enemy squad is always allowed at least one turn before you can use a BB, so it's not perfect, but it does hurt their chances of winning regardless.
  • Both her BB and SBB inflict DoT, worth about 25/30k damage respectively. It's not bugged for double damage like Ilm's and is affected by fire unit's resistance, so it won't be quite as game breaking - but it does hit non-fire units hard enough to kill, generally, and doesn't require SBB to be used like Ilm does.
  • As a demerit, note that her SBB is HP-scaled and at absolute minimum HP (like after her angel idol) hits weaker than average SBB do - though only slightly thanks to the 300% ATK self buff and 150% ATK in her ES she'd have at that point. It's not a huge loss.
  • Basically, Leona's biggest weakness is the prevalence of fire units in the meta, but Ilm's been working hard to push those out, so she's not unusable (especially considering she can still hit them plenty hard with element spheres, they just resist her DoT at that point)
• As for animations... it's a single hit. On SBB and UBB there's a 3 frame gap between the AoE and the ST, so you can spark them both off any decent 3f blanket. Leona's movement speed is 5, which is Mifune/Nyami tier, and means dupe spark setups for her are possible but will be different to most regular units. Because her hits are so close to each other it should be trivial to line her up with another unit's hits, however.

Passive Skills

LS

• Leona has a clearly arena-focused LS which offers 100% ATK/60% HP, 35% chance AoE normals (50% ATK penalty), 25% higher BB activation rate in arena game modes and 60% ABP/ 35% CBP when used in arena/colloseum.
  • The AoE normals is at a generally higher rate than most AoE normal leader skills (5% less than SP-enhanced Glenn, but more than all other AoE normal LS). This combined with her 100% ATK gives her a clear focus on AoE normals from the start, although she lacks any further boosts to normal attacks beyond her personal stat increases.
    • The damage penalty on AoE normals is an ATK modifier, so it doesn't halve the damage they deal. Stacking lots of ATK% counteracts it well, and will be necessary at the higher ends of collo if you want to risk using it.
  • But she doesn't just enhance AoE normals; she also increases the chances of firing the AoE BB typically baked into any units you bring to the arena. Her value here is 25% and can be enhanced to 35%, which is more than any other unit with the effect (Asto and Lanza cap at 30%). This effect has literally no value outside of the arena as units don't BB randomly in regular gameplay.
    • As for mechanics, as it's never been talked about properly - while testing is difficult due to the RNG nature of arena, we can talk about how the AI works. The AI script in the arena simply goes down a check list of conditions, and when it finds one that it matches, rolls random chance to see if it succeeds, and if not, moves on to the next condition, etc etc.
    • This means there are multiple chances for most units to fire a BB in the arena, and logically effects which increase those chances have to apply to every individual chance, meaning the higher your unit's chance of firing BB, the better this effect is.
    • The big unknown is whether the increased chance is multiplicative or additive. Unfortunately this can't be tested simply, but in either case it's still going to have a very large effect on BB chances, which are typically 68% or more split over at least two activation chances.
  • The last part of her LS is a simple bonus to ABP/CBP after finishing a match in the relevant game mode. As an LS effect this only applies if she's leading (which I hope is obvious), and as you don't earn ABP/CBP in any other modes, it has no value anywhere else (which I also hope is obvious)
• Simply put, if you use Leona outside of the arena her LS is just 100% ATK/60% HP/35% AoE Normals. So don't. It's arena/collo only.

ES

• A multi-part ES which offers a major tri-stat boost dependent on HP lost, a large BC boost on spark and elemental immunity
  • Stat boosts dependent on HP lost are typically bad, but this one has very high values (150% at 1 HP) and is on a unit which can opt to have a chance-based angel idols. When chance-based angel idols trigger, the unit remains at 1 HP, meaning Leona's stat boost would be maxed out for the next turn.
    • As you can only use the chance-based angel idol once per fight, this mostly has value in the arena. 150% ATK doesn't make a huge difference anywhere else considering no amount of DEF conversion would be enough at 1 HP.
    • Note that HP-scaled stat bonuses don't care about HP% like HP-scaled BB attacks do, although judging by how Korzan used to work it's good that they don't.
  • The spark BC here is 10 BC per spark. Leona's SBB hits a single target twice, meaning she can get a maximum of 20 BC if you perfect spark her - and her SBB needs 56 BC total. Considering other sources of spark BC will be even less for her, however, she definitely needs all the help she can get BC-wise, and considering how much damage she'll do on spark, you should definitely be trying to spark her.
  • Elemental immunity is generally nice to have as it lets you take Leona into any content and not be afraid of fire, but shines most in the colloseum and arena, where fire is particularly prevalent at the moment (barring a meta shift towards Ilm as more people pull it).

Active Skills

BB

• An AoE so simple it only has one hit, which Taunts and buffs Leona's DEF by 100% for 1 turn, grants your squad 60% ATK->DEF for 3 turns and applies a DoT effect for 3 turns to all enemies.
  • As a single hit attack it'll typically bypass HP threshold angel idols if the damage exceeds the target's current HP. This doesn't necessarily bypass chance-based angel idols, but the low HP most enemies with those will have at the end of their next turn is likely to synergise with the DoT effect and kill them.
  • Taunt is an effect we haven't seen in a long time. When a taunt is active, the enemy squad cannot target any other unit, but AoE attacks will still strike the rest of your squad. Taunts also come with built-in stat buffs which stack with all other buffs, though Leona's 100% DEF here is a far cry from the 250% DEF Ultor and Deimos got with their taunts.
    • In the current state of the game, I doubt that Leona's taunt is actually safe in any content where you need to use it more than once with her angel idol. It may have interesting applications if you actually use an angel idol on her, but in most raids and end-game bosses the main reason you survive is because single target attacks are randomly spread through your squad, and it would take a massive DEF buff - not just 100% - for Leona to not get killed there. Using her SBB first might help here due to the 300% ATK self buff, though this does mean you can't have 100% taunt uptime.
    • Some people will naturally want to try to make it work, which will require as much defensive benefits from her SP enhancements as you can include, as well as a strong set of spheres/elgif. It's not impossible, but most content isn't designed with this kind of effect in mind and you may just run into things like a boss which targets two specific units for an HP% attack and hits Leona twice and she just can't survive while taunting.
    • There's also going to be potential BC gen issues as with Leona being the only target of ST attacks, BC on hit effects will be poorly distributed. This might help her with BC gen considering her low spark BC output, though.
    • If you want to try hard with it, consider a 100% fire/earth mitigation setup using her SP enhancement, with the evasion buff to cover mitigation-bypassing attacks. It won't be valid in all content but should actually work for Fire/Earth content.
  • Leona's DoT on BB should deal roughly 25k damage baseline. DoT is affected by enemy DEF (usual formula, damage reduction = DEF/3) and base element interactions allow for a 50% decrease from resistance or 50% increase from weakness. No other effects modify DoT damage, including all forms of mitigation or damage buffs (or in other words, DoT bypasses mitigation but you can't make it stronger)

SBB

• A double attack consisting of an HP-scaled AoE and a single hit ST attack with no special features. Upon use, Leona grants the squad 80% DEF->ATK/REC conversion, inflicts a slightly larger DoT than BB for 3 turns and gives herself a variety of self buffs/debuffs: 300% ATK, -30% DEF/REC and 50% spark damage.
  • Leona has no trouble reaching the damage cap on her AoE with decent spheres. As a single hit, you really don't want to miss that spark. She does later on get an SP enhancement to increase her damage cap, which by the nature of HP-scaled attacks is a very rare occasion of this effect being useful.
    • The ST attack needs more support to reach its full potential, and is unlikely to ever benefit from that cap increase. It'll still be valuable to spark it, though.
  • The DEF->ATK/REC conversion is a neat but not huge buff to your squad. While the REC portion will actually be very solid for healing, potentially having more weight than actual REC buffs depending on your squad (especially for Rahotep, I guess), the ATK buff is relatively minor, and unfortunately these buffs are the only squad support Leona brings to the table with her SBB (while depending on where you are and how you build her, her BB may as well read "Leona dies next turn")
  • The DoT here does an extra 4.5k or so damage, closing in on 30k total before DEF. Otherwise it's not very different.
  • Then there's all her self-buffs. These are all self-buffs and, as such, stack with any other buff of the same type which is applied to Leona. Self-inflicted debuffs cannot be cleansed, so if the -30% DEF/REC are proving bothersome for you you'll need to take the SP enhancement which removes them. That said, with 300% ATK included, if you convert her ATK to DEF she'll more than gain enough DEF to make up for the 30% loss.
    • Note that the 30% DEF penalty is applied before her DEF->ATK/REC conversion, so it impacts the value of that buff on herself as well. It's still a net gain for either side of the convert.
  • The self spark buff is noteworthy here as it helps make her a major nuke option. She gets 120% more in SP enhancements and easily breaks the damage cap, so she can hit very hard (there's some potential to compete with Silvie in a non-crit environment, but to compete with Lasswell/Rize in a crit environment you'll likely need a crit UBB to negate their crit passive advantage)
  • One worrying note about Leona's SBB is the high BC cost for her low hit count. Be aware that she'll be hard to maintain on spark BC alone as a nuker for pure auto FH or raids.

UBB

• Finally, Leona's UBB is a similar double attack to her SBB (AoE/ST), and offers a huge tri-stat buff and crit damage buff, inflicts heavy ATK/DEF down on the targets for 3 turns and grants Leona an additional 400% ATK/60% crit chance while self-inflicting 200% DEF down for 3 turns.
  • 350% ATK/DEF/REC with converts becomes a very meaningful number of each stat, making your entire squad tankier, harder hitting and more easily healed. There are of course similar effects on other UBB, but between her BB and SBB Leona has all the converts you might want in one place as well, and the cover provided by her UBB may help you set them up (given that her BB is normally pretty risky)
  • Crit damage is what it is. It seems really out of place with the rest of her, but the value is high enough that it could allow squads to hit the crit damage cap if using crit damage leads, in case you need those leads to use other skills instead of their own UBBs.
    • That said her UBB loses in total damage output to Zekuu's under just about any situation.
  • The ATK/DEF down inflicted is extremely strong at 90%, as most enemies have high base ATK and low damage modifiers. It will also potentially stack with other types of ATK down if necessary. The DEF down is pretty irrelevant at this point in time, though...
    • Note that guild raid bosses appear to be immune to ATK down effects. This really isn't the kind of UBB you should be using for them (if using UBB at all), but this part wouldn't work on them. It works in pretty much every other raid, though.
  • Leona does more self-buff stuff here. The penalty is huge, but again completely offset by the ATK buff if converted to DEF. The crit chancewill stack with regular crit buffs to give her a little crit resistance bypass, and if you don't have crit buffs it'll at least help Leona crit while her crit damage UBB is active.
  • At this point Leona has 1050% ATK, 120% DEF and 320% REC with all her self-buffs active, so her DEF->ATK/REC convert doesn't get much better on herself with UBB active. She doesn't really need much more ATK or REC than this, however.
• Overall, I don't think Leona's UBB is the type that'll see widespread usage. Probably somebody on reddit will try to get her ATK to hit the 130000 cap in-game using a REC->ATK convert or something for a screenshot.

SP Enhancements

These are... almost all selfish. Leona's builds will largely revolve around whether you want her to be tanky or nukey, with variations in how you achieve that for each mode.

• 10 SP: 20% All Stats
  • 10 SP for something that normally costs 20. Bargain price build filler~
  • Increasing Leona's stats can be one way of making her bulky enough for the colloseum.
• 15 SP: 20%-> 50% All Stats
  • 25 SP for 50% all stats is really cheap as well. Most HP-scaled nukers want like 30 SP for just the HP...
  • Another good collo option, affordable in builds which don't take her fire/earth mitigation option.
  • As an HP-scaled nuker, Leona can potentially use this in her nuke build as well (as she needs to hit 130k ATK in that build)
• 15 SP: 100% Spark Damage
  • Nuke stuff!
  • She's an HP-scaled nuker = nuke stuff is good for business
• 10 SP: 100%->120% Spark Damage
  • More nuke stuff!
  • Leona can basically afford all of her nuke enhancements in a nuke build, needing only 60 SP to effectively max her damage output. That said, if you want to make minor adjustments to grab her angel idol, this is probably the one to drop.
• 10 SP: Remove SBB's DEF/REC penalty
  • Considering the tradeoff, 30% DEF/REC honestly isn't much of a loss. That said, this is cheap and you may need to spend 10 points somewhere if you're not making a collo build.
  • Technically a damage increase for the nuke build because her SBB carries 80% DEF->ATK, but 24% of 3600 DEF isn't a huge amount of damage to lose.
• 25 SP: Enhance BB's ATK->DEF Conversion ( 20%)
  • One of Leona's only non-selfish options.
  • Necessary to bring her ATK->DEF conversion to a top tier 80%, but you're relying on a risky strategy to do so and may feel pushed into taking more defensive enhancements for the rest of her build.
• 40 SP: Enhance LS's BB Activation Rate increase ( 10%)
  • Makes Leona's LS have the single highest BB activation rate of the game.
  • Note that the competition for this effect is pretty limited, and arguably somewhat more suited for the effect due to other abilities on those units.
  • As your BB activation rate is likely to be more than enough without this, it's only really for people that have a chronic fear of RNG. This enhancement has literally no value outside of colloseum and cuts into the rest of a colloseum build heavily to boot.
• 50 SP: Adds a chance-based angel idol (70% activation rate, once per fight)
  • This gives Leona a huge chance to survive any attacks for a single turn. Can only trigger once per battle (once per wave in quests, and once per trip to the map in raids)
  • After it triggers, Leona will be at 1 HP until healed, maxing out the ATK/REC buffs on her ES (and less importantly, the DEF buff). Unless healed she will be highly vulnerable to DoT effects, likely dying before HoT can trigger, but this won't be a problem if you win before then.
  • This ability is basically a must have for collo builds, so the rest of your build will revolve around what you do with the remaining 50 points.
  • In other content, it might be good for helping her taunt safely, but you could only use it until the angel idol's been triggered at least once, meaning it's not reliable for long battles.
• 25 SP: Add self-evasion buff to BB (35% chance, 1 turn)
  • Evasion is a buff which randomly prevents hits from even connecting. Over time it has an effective mitigation value equal to the evasion chance, so Leona gives herself an effective 35% mitigation here.
  • Evasion evades individual hits, rather than the entire attack. Hits which are avoided by evasion deal zero damage, and do not drop BC/HC for the attacking squad if this happens in the arena/colloseum. In addition, evasion can avoid literally any attack which deals damage as a hit - including attacks which your units are not meant to be able to survive, such as a boss which uses a single hit for guaranteed unmitigatable 500% HP damage or something similarly powerful.
    • Note that there's a small number of effects which aren't hits and thus can't be avoided, such as Kalon's instant kill and DoT effects.
  • This buff is applied alongside her taunt, and is arguably very important to making her taunt work properly. If you don't intend to use her BB, it's less useful.
• 40 SP: 25% Fire/Earth mitigation
  • An additive 25% mitigation against fire and earth units.
  • Passive Elemental mitigation adds to BB/SBB mitigation, and stacks with other passive mitigation as well. With this enhancement Leona should comfortably be able to hit 100% Fire/Earth mitigation using the right leaders and/or spheres, which leads to situations where her taunt could become exceptional.
  • Note that passive mitigation is capped at 50% and needs to be stacked with BB mitigation to reach past that.

SP Builds

Leona's actally got interesting build choices, as even within Colloseum there's multiple options. Her content builds can roughly be categorized as a Taunt/Support Build and a Nuke build, while her Colloseum builds will have Leader and Sub variants (but still have additional choices at that point)

Support build choices:

• 25% Fire/Earth Mitigation and 20% All Stats
  • This makes the build especially tanky against Fire/Earth units, but falls off against all other elements. Will work very well with double mitigation leads as long as your mitigator has little threat of dying as well.
• 50% All Stats, 100% Spark Damage and Remove SBB Penalty
  • Makes Leona generally bulky, still deals decent damage due to the spark damage. You can opt for 20% more spark damage or an ATK cap increase instead of the SBB penalty removal if you want as it's not a huge DEF loss after Leona's BB ATK->DEF conversion.
• Angel Idol
  • Ths isn't a good choice, as it will only work once and any fight worth taunting needs more than one taunt. Putting it here more or less to recommend not using it this way.

Nuke build choices:

• This one gets very free-form, as if you're going for OTK you don't need any of the other buffs she has to offer.
• You can either spend 10 SP removing the SBB penalty for a tiny damage buff (roughly 24% of Leona's DEF, likely only on her single target hit) and then by one of her BB enhancements just to spend points (leaving 5 unused)
• Or buy the 25% mitigation passive on the off chance it means something somewhere. Or heck, the LS enhancement.
• Either way, the choice isn't going to make much impact to OTK

Collo Leader build choices:

• Not really any choice here. The angel idol is too important to give up, which means her leader build really hurts her otherwise.
• It's worth noting again that as a BB LS she lacks the defensive squad utility of Lanza due to no BC when attacked, and overall I don't see the enhancement making a very significant difference over the base effect of the LS.

Collo Sub build choices:

• Leona gets 50 SP to split between her defensive options here. The most likely pairings will be:
  • 25% Fire/Earth Resistance and 20% All Stats. This counters Fire/Earth units in particular (including Azurai, Rahotep, Glenn, Lanza and Leona) but is weaker against units outside of those elements such as Ilm, Zekuu and Mifune.
  • 50% All Stats and BB Evasion buff. This effectively has some wasted points in the evasion buff except for the rare occasions Leona gets to BB and enemies somehow don't AoE and waste the taunt, but with 50% all stats she's bulkier against non-Fire/Earth units than the resist build.

Leona's overall a very strong collo unit, with her skillset letting her fit into most squads as a sub unit or replace leaders for some players, but I fear she falls off in other content unless you go with a very niche taunt build for her, offering squads very little if you can't taunt safely.

As a nuker, she might have an interesting competition with the current popular double attackers because very few of them have damage cap increases. This will let her compete in a non-crit environment or a crit UBB environment, so I'll be interested to see how she performs in FH in the future. But I feel her low hit count makes her unviable for any long, single target content as a nuker.

I feel like I'm going to have signfiicantly less to say about Benimaru and Athena, but I'm looking forward to Kula's OE at least. She's like a mini Kanon at 7*, which may lead into something truly viable at OE.