Alaya Zenith YeonhwaInformation and Guide

Alaya Zenith Yeonhwa is a frontline damage dealer / tank hybrid. She is quite durable against sustained damage, but needs protection against burst damage.

Yeonhwa’s Special Skill is a cornerstone of her kit. It spawns a zone that applies a potent defensive buff to allied Defenders / Strikers in range while increasing Yeonhwa’s offensive capabilities against enemies within it. To go more in-depth on the skill:

• Yeonhwa doesn’t actually cast Special Skill. Instead every 0.5s a trigger checks for cooldown and nearby enemies, spawning a zone and depleting cooldown bar if both conditions are met. Notably this means she can “use” her special skill even if Skill Sealed (it still doesn’t work if she is stunned).

• Zones do not expire on their own. Instead, those Zones disappear when Yeonhwa uses her Ultimate Skill (to increase its damage) or when she dies.

• Zones do not disappear when Yeonhwa gets redeployed or manually undeployed. This means that it’s better to redeploy her before she gets killed, as this allows you to keep existing zones, and even get one more as her Special Skill cooldown resets on deployment.

• Yeonhwa deals additional damage against enemies inside the zone. This additional damage is treated as Special Skill damage so it is affected by Special Skill DMG AMP stat found on gear (notably her Exclusive Equipment set) and in her passives

The rest of Yeonhwa’s kit is much simpler. Every 8 seconds (not reduced by Skill Haste) she uses Enhanced Attack - a large AoE nuke that gives her 30% Max HP barrier. This attack gets an increased damage multiplier for every 5 hits she takes during this 8 seconds cooldown window, which caps at double damage multiplier. This is less impactful than might seem as additional Special Skill damage from zones does not get increased by this effect. Her Ultimate Skill is a simple nuke that reaches very far but doesn’t have much going for it outside of range.

Yeonhwa’s Exclusive Equipment set comes with a fixed Special DMG AMP% latent line. This is meaningful for offensive builds, but when played on tank standard gear outperforms.

PVE Review

In PVE, Yeonhwa’s defensive abilities offer newer players gear flexibility while still providing good DPS and serving as the main tank. 

She can be used in a variety of contents that require a durable tank (e.g. Swift Trimming Room 1 and Jungle Trimming Room 1). Most notably, she can act as a solo main tank on Inhibitor 190 Raid while being on DPS gears. 

However, she is quickly outperformed by other damage dealers and those of similar roles later on (e.g. Zodiac of Redemption Esterosa, Great Silence Ecclesia and Eve Meitner). 

PVP Review

In PVP, Yeonhwa functions as a relatively durable unit that threatens the opponent's backline through Enhanced Attacks and Ultimate Skill. At the same time she struggles to survive burst damage enabled by modern offensive operators (e.g. Sasha, Asha, Jisoo). In those situations she relies on backline disruption tools to survive more than a few seconds.

Still, even with those downsides she remains a threat. Her kit naturally kills rangers with 2-3 Enhanced Attacks and her Ultimate Skill can reach and kill everything but highest range snipers. Combined with low cooldowns this makes her a must-remove threat for every team.

As is common with Awakened Defenders, counterplay to Yeonhwa is limited. There just isn’t much you can do outside of “just do more damage”. Still, her Enhanced Attacks can and should be redirected whenever possible. Additionally most of her survivability is removable, meaning that common buff block tools (e.g. Awakened Yuna, Jisoo Operator) work well against her.