YuzuhaBuild and Guide

Yuzuha is an S-rank Physical Support Agent who serves as the main buffer to the teams she’s present in. She specializes as an Anomaly buffer via various specialized buffs, however, the best part? She does that while also giving some of the strongest general buffs in the game, that any Agent can use and benefit from to an amazing degree. By these factors alone, from the get-go, Yuzuha appears as one of the most valuable Agents in the game. Throughout this review, we’ll see if this claim is true or not — although you probably saw from our Tier List that it is, already.

Let’s start by explaining Yuzuha’s kit. A summary of it is that you simply want to use her Defensive Assist or unique Parry alternative for it, follow that with an Assist Follow-Up, follow that with an EX Special or Ultimate and you’re already done. The rest of her kit happens off-field and both of those attacks happen to trigger a Quick Assist, so Yuzuha has the perfect opportunity to swap out. Honestly, simply keeping this in mind gives you a good baseline to play Yuzuha with, but we can make do with a bit more details in terms of understanding to get the most out of her.

Our main focus will be on what her Defensive Assists, Parries, EX Specials and Ultimates do, and what they additionally trigger/provide to the team. Anything that we won’t mention - which frankly is just her Dodge and regular Basic Attacks - is simply not worth paying much attention to during gameplay. As usual, Yuzuha is one of those characters who don’t want to use their regular Special and instead make much better use of their EX Special when it’s charged up.

Yuzuha a few defining mechanics her kit revolves around, namely the “Sweet Scare” state, the “Tanuki Wish” effect and “Sugar Point” stacks. We’ll start with Tanuki Wish since it’s her main buff contained in her Core Passive:

• Tanuki Wish increases ATK of all squad members by up to 1200 at max level, based on 40% of Yuzuha’s ATK (she maxes this effect at 3000). 

• Tanuki Wish is activated via EX Special or Ultimate.

• The effect lasts 40s and this duration is refreshed when applied multiple times (will be up permanently in battle);

• Via her Additional Ability (with an Anomaly or Spook Shack character in the team), this effect also enhances Anomaly Buildup Rate by 0.2% as well as all Anomaly and Disorder DMG per point of Anomaly Mastery over 100, up to 20% for both effects (she maxes this effect at 200).

It is worth noting both of the effects from her Additional Ability are completely separate multipliers to something like DMG Bonus from Disk Drives — so without getting into calculation details, they’re much bigger buffs than these kinds of effects due to their uniqueness.

Next, let’s detail the properties of Sweet Scare:

• Sweet Scare is a state applied to enemies that lasts 40s, repeated triggers resetting its duration;

• Hitting an enemy with any active character with an attribute attack in this state triggers “Flavor Match” for Yuzuha. This effect changes the element of her off-field attacks (we explain these later) to the element of the character who triggered that effect. In other words, she matches the element of the on-field character you switch into next;

• This matters because Yuzuha can apply additional Anomaly matching your active character’s element, speeding up the process of applying Attribute Anomaly on enemies significantly;

• Triggering Sweet Scare another time allows Flavor Match to be changed to any other element if necessary;

• Sweet Scare is applied following EX Special and Ultimate. 

Something that’s worth additionally keeping in mind is the Anomaly Buildup that Yuzuha applies via her Sweet Scare off-field attacks does not influence the calculation for Anomaly DMG. In this sense, she functions exactly like a Bangboo would. This honestly gets into really complicated math so we won’t explain everything here — the TLDR of it is that this is much better as only your DPS Agent’s numbers are factored in for the damage whereas this usually wouldn’t be the case, but Yuzuha still contributes to the buildup itself which is a perk unique to her.

Lastly, Sugar Points:

• Sugar Points can stack up to 6 times, and Yuzuha gets 3 at the beginning of battle.

• Yuzuha gets 2 Sugar Points when using Ultimate, and when using EX Special. She also gets 1 Sugar Point when executing a Chain Attack.

• Sugar Points can be consumed 1 at a time to trigger Aftershock DMG by causing Yuzuha to spin when off-field, dealing damage to enemies before launching a shell attack (which consumes the point). This occurs whenever other characters land a hit on enemies while Yuzuha has Sugar Points.

Finally, we’ve gotten through her unique resources. Keep in mind, as usual, that it’s important to manage these properly to ensure optimal combat performance, but luckily, this is extremely easy to do.

An additional perk to note is that her Ultimate restores 25 Energy to both of your party members other than Yuzuha.  Additionally, Yuzuha’s EX Special has two variants, one of the two is preferred as it is quicker to perform (even though it has a lower multiplier, this is always much better due to how Anomaly calculations work and helping with minimizing field time). This quicker EX Special is usually triggered by pressing EX Special right after an Assist Follow-Up. 

Yuzuha’s Assist Follow-Up also has two variants. One is much more powerful to execute as it has a much higher DMG and particularly Daze multiplier. This special Assist Follow-Up is performed by pressing Basic Attack after a specific visual cue following a Parry or a Defensive Assist, which should appear as a small yellow flash triggering a different animation than a regular Assist Follow-Up, where Yuzuha spins around instead of immediately attacking forward. This is essential to execute to ensure optimal Daze application, which Yuzuha can contribute a lot towards due to her tendency to execute these Assist Follow-Ups as a core part of her combos.

Yuzuha’s Parries are triggered by holding Basic Attack while she’s on the field, which makes her enter a Parry stance, causing Yuzuha to instantly react with a Parry when attacked. It takes a second or so of holding Basic Attack in order to enter the Parry stance in the first place — hence, it should be used by anticipating an enemy attack instead of reacting to it like you would with Yixuan’s EX Special for example, or simply Yuzuha’s own Defensive Assist by switching her in at the correct timing.

Whether a Parry or a Defensive Assist is triggered really doesn’t matter for Yuzuha as long as you do her proper Assist Follow-Up — just make sure she’s doing one or the other before her EX Special or Ultimate to wrap up her core combo.

We’ve explained all of her off-field mechanics earlier outside of her off-field attacks, so let’s wrap her kit up with those. We already discussed the Sugar Point variant, but at all times her adorable tanuki Kama will assist the active character in attacking enemies by inheriting Yuzuha’s ATK. It also does an extra hit of damage when Yuzuha triggers a Parry. 

Enemies inflicted with Sweet Scare will automatically be attacked by Yuzuha every second with any attribute according to Flavor Match. This applies a lot of Anomaly and helps nicely with filling Anomaly gauges for your active Agent. An additional, more powerful attack will be triggered if the enemy has Sweet Scare and Yuzuha activates her Defensive Assist with proper timing, or if she activates her Aftershock off-field Attack with Sugar Points (only the shell attack triggers it). This has the same properties as the automatic attack, only significantly more powerful. 

This was a mouthful — Yuzuha gets complicated when trying to optimize her kit. All of those details should allow you to think of proper team combos to make the most use of her Anomaly application, as well as execute her combos at the correct times in battle. As usual, Zenless Zone Zero’s combat is very dynamic so giving a proper rotation that can be consistently executed every battle is frankly not possible to do, but her usual combo of Defensive Assist into EX Special or Ultimate into switching out via Quick Assist should be plenty to get you by with Yuzuha. The rest of her kit happens entirely off-field, so she should be fairly easy to play in battle.

In terms of her position in the meta, Yuzuha is one of the most amazing Agents at the time of her release. She outclasses the top-tier Support Astra Yao in every Anomaly team except some Miyabi teams; she gets very close to her in performance in any team outside of Anomaly. Yuzuha’s straight-up amazing by virtue of the damage she can do if built with CRIT while still retaining great buffing potential similar to hers, even without the Anomaly-specific buffs kept in mind. Remember to only build her with CRIT if her Anomaly can be easily ignored, though.

Realistically, Yuzuha is an Agent that can be used in any team to great effect, much like Astra Yao currently. Each having their own niches where they shine best, we can conclude that Yuzuha is one of the best Supports that will easily find a spot in at least one of the teams on your account as the strongest available choice, particularly if you intend to build Anomaly teams. Whether it’s Jane, Yanagi, Vivian, Piper and others, Yuzuha does it all and has you covered. Definitely a strongly recommended pick-up to make your endgame clearing experience as smooth-sailing as possible.