Costume Guide – Wind Dancer Venaka

Exclusive Gear

Official Patch Notes

Overview

PVE	PVP	Fiend Hunt/Guild Raid
S	S	SS
Last Night	Tower of Pride	Tower of Salvation
B	S	S

Venaka for PVE

Like Michaela, Venaka is a supporter-type character from Brown Dust 1 (aka Brave Nine) who has been converted into a pure damage dealer in Brown Dust 2. WD.Venaka has a lot of unique features that make her a high value pick.

Damage amplification

First of all, WD.Venaka's skill amplifies wind damage taken by enemies. This is a unique ability that is the first of its kind.

There are other skills that amplify enemy damage: e.g. we have GC.Rafina and Cat.Eris (amplifies physical damage), TF.Levia (amplifies magic damage) and RH.Zenith (amplifies all damage). However, Venaka is the first to amplify damage from a specific element.

Venaka's skill stacks additively with other skills that amplify damage (i.e. it does not multiply the effect of other damage amplification buffs).

Since Venaka has a single hit skill on both costumes, she works perfectly with TF.Levia (4 hits) and BA.Teresse (buff applies for 5 chains or less) together.

Unique AOE

There is another very unique feature about WD.Venaka which is easy to overlook: her AOE.

On first glance, it looks like a standard 3x3 AOE. However, it's actually not like any other 3x3 AOE. Most 3x3 AOE skills have the main target at the center. WD.Venaka's AOE has the main target at the front. This gives her the ability to deal with tricky formations that others can't reach.

Using Venaka in PVE

Venaka is great pretty much everywhere in PVE (except Last Night, because the boss is unaffected by enemy buffs).

In particular, she's great in Tower of Pride thanks to her single hit attack, and she's great in Tower of Salvation because she her AOE is useful for dealing with the weird formations that get thrown at you all the time. Her big AOE also makes her versatile for hitting weak points in fiend hunts and guild raids.

Venaka works very well as your main attacker if you have both Wind Dancer and DJ, because they each have a 3 turn cooldown and can be used on a loop without downtime. What's more, Wind Dancer's buff lasts 4 turns, which means it can be used to amplify DJ.Venaka's damage.

However, WD.Venaka's utility in PVE drops a lot if you don't have DJ.Venaka as a followup. Although WD.Venaka's damage is pretty good and holds its own, the strongest damage is achieved by using WD as the setup and DJ as the big nuke.

Venaka for PVP

DJ.Venaka has been a consistent fixture of the PVP scene since her release back in summer. Her brutal 50% M.RES shred, massive damage and big range make her one of the best attackers for PVP, rivalling even the legendary Nightmare Bunny Eclipse. Until now, Venaka's biggest PVP weakness was the fact that she only had one costume, which left her with an "empty" second turn.

With the release of Wind Dancer, Venaka solves her biggest PVP weakness, and she can now continuously cycle between her Wind Dancer and DJ costumes with no downtime. Wind Dancer has a both a big AOE and a very powerful attack: it's effectively a 1000% damage multiplier.

WD.Venaka also has really interesting synergy with RH.Zenith. It will usually be best to play Zenith after WD.Venaka, because Zenith locks on to targets in the "skip" position whereas WD.Venaka wants to hit the "very front" position to make the most of her forward facing AOE. In addition, by playing Zenith after WD.Venaka, since Zenith is wind-type, Zenith's attack will benefit from WD.Venaka's buff. One of Zenith's biggest weaknesses is her very low skill damage, but with a 2.5x boost from WD.Venaka, suddenly Zenith's attacks become a real threat. Since Venaka is magic type and Zenith is physical type, it is difficult for enemies to survive a "one-two punch" from both Venaka and Zenith, since most units will only gear for DEF or M.RES but not both.

Wind Dancer's entry into the PVP scene may cause some impact to the meta, particularly because Venaka is a hard counter to BV.Morphea, who is currently a popular defense team pick. Not only is Venaka a wind-type (which is strong against Morphea's water type), both of Venaka's skills really punish the front line, which is always filled when using BV.Morphea. It's almost impossible for Morphea to hold the front line against Wind Dancer Venaka. If Venaka continues to pick up in popularity on attack teams, there's a good chance that BV.Morphea will see a corresponding fall in popularity.

Conclusion

Although Nebris is probably going to be the more popular pick on this wind banner rotation due to her pure gyaru power, from a meta perspective Venaka is a must have costume for PVE wind teams, as well as anyone already running Venaka in PVP.

+3 with potential upgrades is the minimum investment required to get her wind buff at full power.