Zhou Yu Guide for New Players
By Sir Danathan.
So, you recently pulled Zhou and now you’re wondering how to use her and how to build her? Well, you’ve come to the right place!
Zhou is an awakened SSR unit that focuses entirely on doing HUGE damage! By far, Zhou is the absolute Queen of damage dealing in this game. No unit holds a candle to the damage she can dish out. In this guide, we will explore what her skills do, what kind of badges to use, what engravings to use, and provide some sample teams for you to try her on.
Skills
Zhou’s first skill is Sky pillar. This is her first extremely hard-hitting skill. This skill touts a 1200% modifier, adds burn marks, and hits in a 2×2 square area. More often than not, you’ll find yourself killing multiple enemies with this skill alone.
Every skill in this game has its own targeting method and in general at the start of every fight, your Zhou will be targeting your enemies positioned in the top left of their formation. With a bit of testing, you’ll get used to how Zhou’s first skill targets.
Zhou’s second skill, her ultimate skill, is Phoenix on Fire. In line with her first skill this is another incredibly power area of effect (AOE) skill! This skill simply does 1600%!!! Of her attack stat in damage to the WHOLE enemy team. In addition to that, she gets extra damage if an enemy has burn marks on them.
This skill alone will easily wipe enemy teams in one use. Furthermore, the secondary part of her ultimate skill gives her great synergy for fire teams!
Zhou’s passive skill Surging Enthusiasm allows her to enter the Fever state for 1 turn. We’ve seen the fever state on other units such as Carmen and Prometheus but for Zhou the fever state is even more important. Simply entering the fever state gives Zhou 30% final damage at max level! This is just another huge damage boost for her. Furthermore, there is more synergy with the fever state as we’ll explore more when we talk about her awakened skill. Finally, entering the Fever State cleanses all crowd control and debuffs from Zhou making it hard for enemies to stop her from doing her thing.
Zhou’s fourth skill, her attribute passive, is Academism. This skill simply helps her to do more damage by increasing her hit chance and crit chance. Hit helps her not miss against strong story and tower enemies while critting just means even more damage!
Next up we have Zhou’s exclusive equipment skill, Fire Bounce! As stated in the skill Zhou’s normal attacks will bounce between enemies that have Burn Marks! This lets her do extra damage on turns when she doesn’t cast her first skill or ultimate. Additionally, this means running Zhou on a fire team is always a solid option.
Zhou’s final skill is her Awakened skill, Melodic and Tuneful. Whenever herself OR an ally enters the Fever state she has a 50% chance to cast her ultimate skill, Phoenix on fire! This is incredibly power allowing her to cast her ultimate skill multiple times per turn. This means pairing her with other units with the Fever state, Prometheus and Carmen, is insanely powerful.
Badges
As a DPS unit, we want to do two different things when thinking about Zhou’s badges. Do more damage and make her fast. As a fun fact, Zhou is the 3rd fastest unit in the game! The only units faster than her are Mobius and Plato. Thus, if we make her as strong and as fast as possible, she will neutralize most enemy threats before they even get an action!
Firstly, the most important badge you want to put on her is a Gale badge. Speed is incredibly important on Zhou as you want her to do her damage and kill enemy units as soon as possible.
The second badge you want to put on Zhou will be one of two options. This badge you want to maximize her damage with. You can choose either a Fury Badge or a Courage badge. Both are valid options.
Not only are the badges you choose important, so are the sub stats you choose to put on her badges. As we learned speed is important for Zhou. As such, we want to make sure we put Speed sub stat on both of her badges. Our second substat we have a few options. With this second substat we want to just maximize her damage. With this we can choose several different substat options such as %Att, Final Damage, %crit, or even %crit damage.
Here are examples of badges you want to aim to use on Zhou.
Engraves
Throughout this guide we’ve talked about wanting to maximize Zhou’s damage. We want to continue this trend when it comes to her engraving choices. When it comes to engraves, we have 2 different options.
- Option 1: 4x Flame engraves
- Option 2: 2x Flame engraves, 2x Fury engraves
With our first set up, we receive the 25% attack bonus and the 4.5% Final Damage bonus from the Fury engrave set. This is the optimal set up. Without going too much into it here, final damage is by far the best stat you can choose to increase your damage making this better than option 2.
Option two gives us 25% attack bonus from both the flame and fury engrave sets. If you’re unable to obtain the main stats we will soon discuss on 4 Flame engraves, then try this set up instead.
So, what stats do we want on our engraves? Once again want to continue to maximize all the damage we can from Zhou and make her fast. This means we want to choose the following engrave main stats: %HP, Speed, Final damage, and %crit. As a reminder engraves with speed main stat are only available from the Hellfire Engrave Dungeon, Final Damage engraves are only available from the Waterfall Engrave Dungeon, and %crit engraves are only available from the Earth Core Engrave dungeon. Here are examples of engraves you want to use on her.
In terms of susbstats on engraves look to find these substats to maximize your Zhou: %Att, Final damage, %crit. All three of these stats will simply help her do even more damage!
Example Teams
Zhou has many synergies with other fire units allowing her to deal even more damage. However, she is simply an incredible damage dealer and can be put onto any team that can protect her to allow her to cast her skills. Here are a few examples of teams you can try running. As with any unit, experiment on your own to find what works best for you and to find other great combinations!
Conclusion
Zhou is by far the strongest damage dealing unit in the game! So, let’s finish things off with some of her Pros and Cons.
Pros:
- She is an OMEGA damage dealing sporting a Skill 1 with a 1200% damage modifier and a 1600% damage modifier ultimate skill.
- One of the fastest units in the game.
- Able to kill most units on Turn 1 and guaranteed to kill units on turn 2 with multiple ultimate skill casts.
- Insane synergy with fire units as well as with other units that enter the fever state (Carmen and Prometheus).
- While her exclusive equipment skill is nice, it is often not necessary making lv20 on her exclusive equipment enough and saves you some resources.
Cons:
- One of the few crowd control effects fever state cannot cleanse is being frozen while Catherine has her realm active so be careful when facing enemy Catherines!
- With how much damage she can output she is quite vulnerable to dying to Morgana’s passive ability, Magic Biteback, if not properly protected.
While Zhou has a few cons, the damage she deals and pros of using her heavily outweigh them. This is a unit everyone will want to get to help blast your way through Story content, Queen’s Tower content, as well as the Hellfire Engrave dungeon. Hopefully this guide has taught you everything you need to know about how to use your Zhou effectively!
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