Leona

Review

Day 1 review. If anything changes, or we discover a proper niche for Leona, we will update this page.

Shotgun compositions are getting more and more units to make them usable in more situations, and Leona is joining that niche with a… peculiar kit. Let’s talk about her skills, where she shines, and team compositions at the end of the review.

Skill 1 increases critical rate for all allies, stacking up to 5 times after 5 normal attacks. This should take between 15–20 seconds to fully stack on her own without units that duplicate the count of stackable buffs like Mica or Tove. It will also increase the maximum effective range, which is… weird.

Shotgun compositions are only used in bosses that are close to you since you can hit more pellets per shot and even with this increased effective range, you would not bring a full shotgun team into Storm bringer or similar bosses.

Skill 2 increases hit rate by a whooping 20% at level 10 which is actually amazing for weapons like SMG and assault rifles (and shotguns, yes, but less important than the other two weapon types). Her buffs seem to work better for other weapon types rather than actual shotguns because of the actual available units, but we’ll talk about that on the team compositions section.

This skill also increases the number of pellets of each shot in your shotguns (by default 10) but doesn’t increase the total damage 💀. This is stupid since it makes that you can actually lose damage if you miss pellets, since now each individual one is dealing less damage than without the buff.

100 total damage divided by 10 is better than 100 divided by 15 if you are constantly missing some pellets. This could be fixed by skill 1 maximum effective range, but once again if the boss is always at the back you will be missing some pellets. Which means shotgun teams are still niche and situational depending on the boss we are facing.

Lastly we have her burst skill which is a straightforward critical damage buff for everyone in the team and extra critical rate for shotgun units if skill 1 is fully stacked.

Team compositions

Sadly, there are not a lot of compositions available right now for shotgun teams. If we consider Leona as our burst 2, this means we need someone to duplicate stack count of buffs for better uptime on her skill 1 (Tove or Mica), which turns into no CDR for your team.

Most people are using Guilty as an off burst for extra damage, which doesn’t solve any of these problems, since now you don’t have CDR or a healer. Maybe the next shotgun DPS we get has cooldown reduction and heals? Until we get more shotgun units that can make use of units like Leona, this is the best composition:

Alternatives to this composition are xMica and Helm: Aquamarine instead of Guilty for the CDR without using her burst.

Copium Soline composition

Have not tested this, hence why I’m calling it the copium composition, but we all know that Soline can be one of the best single target DPS units in the game under the right circumstances. If we pair her with Leona for 20% hit rate + 34% of critical damage + 13.1% critical rate, she could actually find a team finally as long as you can keep her at 100% HP.

All that said, Leona is a unit that most players will find themselves skipping and saving resources for whatever banner Shift Up is planning to release next. Not recommended pulling or MLB unless she is your waifu.