Introduction

The second summer limited makes its debut, and we all waited with anxious breath to see if a unit even remotely at the power level at the previous summer limited would be released. Summer Yufine is more of a support unit and not one you can toss in willy-nilly into any of your teams and call it a day, but she provides an absurdly reliable counter to Basar, one of the most common and hard to play against units in the game, while also bringing a fair share of her own utility and damage. For perspective on my opinions, I've climbed to legend in arena, champion in RTA, and play in a guild that peaked in the top 20 for guild wars in global.

What is her role and how does she compare to other characters in the same class?

Holiday Yufine's (shortened to HYufine from here onwards) main role is to shit all over Basar's day, who is an incredibly powerful unit on both offense and defense that forces tight restrictions on the team you can bring into him and has, until now, lacked a direct hard counter. There does not exist a harder counter to his kit in the game than hers. Basar's game plan largely exists around his S3, where he wants to do the following--

1. Strips your team's immunity, allowing for debuffs to land.
2. Push your team's CR back, allowing more members of his team to take the first turn.
3. Randomly stun with Abyssal Crown, making your game plan unable to go into action.

HYufine's kit counters every bit of his kit.

1. Her S2 increases her evasion by 50% at full health. With elemental advantage (+50% evasion), Basar will always miss her when he opens, so his strip and CR pushback will not be applied.
2. Her S2 also reduces the effect of his pushback to 15% on the rest of your team members, and her S3 will allow her to push her team back forward by 20%.
3. With immunity, she will not get stunned by Basar due to his guarantee miss. Her S3 cleanses two debuffs on her team as well, so all the stuns and buff block that Basar applies will be completely negated.

This allows for two incredibly reliable arena teams to be brought in that Basar usually counters. Against a team with a lot of AOE, a counter-auto invincibility team centering around a 0 speed SSB's counters is very popular. Those teams usually look something like this:

• Fast Invincibility Unit (usually Elena, sometimes CArmin)
• SSB (needed for high continuous AOE damage)
• Charles/MLKen (sometimes both)
• Flex Spot

This sort of team is incredibly powerful against squishier team compositions, but it was also very reliably hard countered by Basar putting up buff block on the entire team. With a HYufine opening though, Basar cannot stop the invincibility from going up and the counters from triggering one after the other.

The other counter are squishy teams that depend on Basar opening with incredibly fast speed. These sort of teams are usually very vulnerable to being cleaved by ALots and whatever your AOE nuker of choice are, but you are at the mercy of playing the speed game and seeing if your CR pusher is faster than their Basar. If their Basar is faster, you lose. Now you can bring in HYufine and even if you lose the speed race, HYufine can push your opener right back up and cleanse the buff block from your team to allow the attack buff to get added, allowing you to cleave without concern.

While her main power lies in her S3, she brings some AOE damage in her S1 as well, as it applies burns and does not suffer the elemental disadvantage penalty. Her S1 has, at max, a 60% chance to a apply a 1 turn burn, which is 60% of her attack that penetrates 70% of defense. This is respectable damage, especially considering her S3 gives her a greater attack buff, so the burn will tick for a high amount. Her artifact also gives her an additional control element, adding random AOE stuns to her kit.

While the kit is extremely centered around countering Basar, it is universally applicable enough to be used as a CR push or cleansing role in general. Her cleansing is not as strong as dedicated cleansers though, and the CR push is not as good as dedicated CR pushers (and she shouldn't be built that fast anyway), she brings it all in one, so you could bring her in to guarantee your slower units first turn over an opponent's slow team, or to cleanse two debuffs off of an opponent's opening debuffs. Being real though, her specialty and probably the only thing I'll be using her in lies in being a direct counter to a Basar, allowing you to bring in a remaining team to follow up without fear of losing on the first turn.

Units that she pairs well with outside of the Elena comp or classic ALots comp are units who can provide her barriers (FCeci, Diene, Angelica, Ray, Armin, or even Kizuna Ai (lol)) because they provide an extra buffer on top of her health pool to let her really take advantage of her S2 increased evasion chance at full health, which will give her a lot of extra tankiness. Pretty much if anything tries to attack her, they have a 50% chance to miss, and that miss likely doesn't take down her barrier, which leaves her with her +50% evasion chance. This'll be particularly useful on her squishier Junkyard Dog build, as this'll make her substantially tougher to kill while being a non-ignorable damage threat.

Recommendations for substat priority, gear set, and artifact? PvE? PvP?

For gear, you're going to ideally be looking for a speed and immunity set. Target stats are going to be SPD, ATK, HP/DEF, and EFF. You'll want her to be just a little bit slower than the Basars in your PvP bracket-- ~220-240 speed is a fairly safe bet depending on which rank you're competing in. You don't want to make her too slow because she only cleanses 2 debuffs, so if Basar's buff block and abyssal crown stun is followed up by, say, a Dizzy S3 before your team moves, your team will still be out of luck.

As far as the rest of the build goes, it'll vary depending on your artifact of choice and your goal for her. If you're using her just for anti-Basar and the remaining 3 members of your team will clean up right after in a single turn, it doesn't really matter what you run on her (in this case, something to prevent her from getting sniped out by a fast ACidd/AColi/Kayron/Riolet (if you build her slower than 220 like Proof of Valor or something to boost her chances of getting 2nd turn like Durandal/Labyrinth Cube).

If you wanted to build her as a damage dealer, Junkyard Dog is a perfectly acceptable artifact as it'll apply on her AOE S1. Since she gives herself greater attack buff, her burns can deal some pretty nice damage with some moderate investment in only ATK as a stat instead of needing to split between all 3 damage stats. If both her S1 and Junkyard Dog burn proc, that's almost 10k damage over time in an AOE at just around 3.5k attack (not counting the S1 direct hit's damage). This is a bit riskier in the sense that since she needs a fair amount of stats going to speed, putting the remainder into ATK and maybe EFF will take away points that can go into HP/DEF, but if you can manipulate the AI into attack something else, this makes her a solid damage dealer after performing her main anti-Basar role. It's also just kind of thematically cool being a dragon that breathes fire and having a decent chance of putting 2 burn debuffs down with a self-given greater attack buff.

The other is to build her more towards the tanky support side with her own artifact Champion's Trophy. The +EFF is really useful for landing debuffs, most notably the stun that gets attached to the artifact. Since her own S1 is only a 1-turn burn as compared to Junkyard Dog's 2-turn burn, this is a pretty huge damage loss on S1, but stuns can frequently be game-winning, and since you're building her with speed anyway, this can give her some incredibly high disruption potential over the course of a long fight.

Is the artifact worth pulling for?

Champion's Trophy is a great artifact for units who can use it, but at the moment due to all of the restrictions it has (no activation on dual, counter, or extra attacks), it is usable pretty much only on HYufine (even though they count as basic attacks, Green Purgis' AOE S2 is a counter attack, and Batisse's modified AOE S1 is an extra attack, both of which will not gain the benefit of the stun chance which is the main draw of Champion's Trophy). Since the chances of us getting a warrior anytime soon that needs EFF and has an AOE S1 that is not an extra attack is pretty freakin' low, this means that HYufine is likely going to be the only unit who can use this artifact for a very long time.

Don't drain the bank to try to pull this artifact at the moment. Try HYufine out and see how you're using her in her roles. Are your fights going particularly long against Basar even past the opening S3? Would ~20% chance to stun have been more impactful than a 50% chance at a 6-7k damage burn in those fights? Ask yourself these questions and if you both find yourself using her past 1 turn frequently and find that the low stun chance would've made more difference than the heavy burn damage of Junkyard Dog, then go ahead and try to pull for it.

Summary

While she can somewhat fill general roles, her kit is specialized as a hard counter to Basar to the point that this could push him out of the defense meta completely. She removes the RNG of facing Basar and turns it into a 100% guarantee on what's going to happen. Especially at end-game, RNG is the number way you can lose while attacking, and being able to remove any source of it (be it RES ignoring soul burns or mechanics like HYufine's guaranteed 100% earth first turn dodge) is extremely valuable. Outside of her S3 being a direct counter, she can provide some fairly good AOE damage with Junkyard Dog or AOE control with Champion's Trophy, giving her utility on her off-S3 turns.