How to Play Yuki Guide
Never ever freeze a guard. The only one you might consider freezing is Llud (but not likely; I’ve only done it twice) to fully defeat her. Ensure that before your second freeze mark, she has lost at least a quarter of her health. Then, you can finish her off with Yuki and end her game with another unit (preferably those that have kill conditions like Shiori’s basic attack).
Prioritize freezing. Some priorities include the enemy DPS or those about to trigger abilities like Dream Hunter, Poison Devour, or Stealth Banish. It will stall them long enough for you to purify your own unit or just eliminate them first via pushback, banish, etc., or just straight up kill them. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to not freeze an enemy and instead mark another enemy for freezing. This way, just one freeze mark on either unit would freeze them, forcing them to make certain moves while you can stop the follow-up. For example, if you freeze mark their Norza but before you need to apply the second freeze, he gets stunned by your team’s Thundering Entry, you can choose to ignore Norza and freeze other units until the very last turn, then freeze him before his turn to use his stuns.
Do not freeze the enemy units if they have Yuki in the cycle. The only one you would freeze is the enemy Yuki, unless you can sleep or stun the enemy Yuki in the meantime. However, if you’re going to CC Yuki with sleep, it’s preferable not to do it because enemies like Alira or Kirin, or any unit with armor at full health, would regenerate from their Yuki passive of freeze regeneration as long as Yuki gets her turn, even if she is CC’d unless it’s a stun.
To maximize her freeze turn-stealing capability, as some call it, prioritize enemy units whose turns come right after Yuki’s initial freeze mark. Ideally, any enemy whose next turn is more than whatever your Yuki’s turn cost is. For example, for the basic Yuki with a 70tu freeze mark, instead of marking the next enemy unit in line, you can mark their second, third, or even fourth unit in turn who, for example, has 78 tu before their turn. Before they get their turn, you can freeze them, and the freeze would last for 2 of their turns, thereby taking away 200tu from the opponent instead of just 100tu. The conditions for taking away 200tu would be that when you freeze them, their turn is within 20tu of the turn in which you apply your second freeze mark.
Another power factor would be the ability to rid the enemy of a status effect like burn, stealth, or shield (note that this doesn’t affect shields like crisis, full health, or overflow shields). A good start would be to freeze mark units like Fastrid and Wastrid or any similar characters, as they tend to have slightly slower speed than Yuki. Even after their ignite or stealth charge (assuming no change via quicken or Srolo), Yuki would then get the next freeze mark in before their stealth banish or burn attack, and such eat away 200tu if their next turn is within 20tu of the turn in which you freeze them, or 100tu if it’s not within 20tu. This isn’t a bad trade considering you eat an additional 140tu where they lose the effects of their original stealth/ignite, which is 70 tu and have to cast it again, which is another 70tu, so you have the potential of eating away 370tu from the enemy with a cost of only 140tu while gaining 2 spirit.
Yuki works best with low tu costs, so abilities like quicken, weapon skill, and solo leader skill buff her immensely, especially since at any tu cost below 60tu, which is 56tu upon first quicken, 47tu upon second quicken. I don’t know about the third, but you don’t need a third; at that point, it would be a waste of space as solo plus weapon skill would do the trick. You can then permanently disable two enemy units (prioritize their damage dealers or units soon to achieve Survivor’s Fury and such). But at 56tu, that would be much harder to pull off as compared to at 47tu as freeze mark cannot be applied to enemies that are already frozen and 56 tu has an 18 tu difference per freeze as compared to 47tu. But upon reaching that point, just permanently freeze and don’t do anything else (unless you need to kill an enemy with Ice Breaker) and wait for Survivor’s Fury to kick in for your other units. In which upon the enemy unfreezing, you can immediately kill them.
Granting frozen to allies. Note it only works on water allies. This is not recommended but even so, it has its uses and some situations call for them and make them highly viable and perhaps even more useful than your normal freeze. Some things to take note of: you must only grant frozen to allies who have higher tu to their next turn than your tu cost for granting frozen, such that you wouldn’t deprive yourself of 100tu of the frozen unit although some exceptions are to sleeping units as sleep deprives them of much more tu than grant frozen, so it would act as a purify and make it such that that unit can’t sleep anymore and would prevent damage and status effects in the meantime. Another situation would be if your water unit is stunned for long periods of time, for example, Eves, as a stun absorb, he’ll eat all enemy stuns, usually with a guard, you’ll be able to prevent enemies from time striking your Eves, however, to avoid sticky situations, you can grant frozen to your Eves as enemy time strikes can bypass auto guards or units like Shiori can multi-hit, which would not bode well for you. The frozen would then reduce their damage by 90%, thereby making their attack basically negligible, and against a slightly smarter enemy, they wouldn’t even bother using their time strike as it would just be a waste of mana and tu. And should they not unfreeze your unit, your Ice Shards would then proc, and you can then do 350% to 2 targets, mind you, that’s the same as Kaidaros’ overdrive which costs 4 spirit and 160tu while it only costs you 2 spirit and 154tu (with double quicken) but 230tu if you don’t have quicken which is risky. Apart from that, frozen Yuki also has frozen regeneration so for example, when Alira who may die before her next turn or after doesn’t have Nightmare Drain and has lost some health, you can freeze her such that enemies cannot kill her in the meantime and when your Yuki gets her turn again, Alira would regen and if she regens back to full, she’ll get her shield again and allows your ice shards to proc in the meantime, it would be even better if your Alira had more tu than your grant frozen at that time such that you wouldn’t deprive yourself of any tu.
Allied frozen passive utilization. As stated above, grant frozen can be used as a purifier, to purify poison, burn, sleep (to be used only if ally has higher tu in turn (include tu deprived via sleep) than your tu cost for grant frozen or if they were to die next turn then freezing can be a good idea although freezing the enemy before their poison devour or dream hunter procs works too. Furthermore, frozen grants immunity to status effects which is very good if used right, for example freezing an Eves and proceeding to kill all the enemy stun revenge or stun skin units would make it such that you take ZERO stun as the stun would get lightning rodded to Eves and the frozen status effect would totally negate it, or apply it to yourself and kill the enemy at the right time (very important) such that sleep entries like Rei or thundering entries like Finn can be totally negated, for example freezing the Alira who is the third unit in turn, and killing the enemy with Shiori who’s the second unit in turn, their Rei would then make a sleep entry which would be totally negated by the frozen effect although you do lose 100 tu from Alira, but you get to proc ice shards later as well. Keep in mind however that you need to ensure that your Yuki won’t die before her next turn if not it may not be worth it.
Enemy frozen passive utilization, when you freeze the enemy it can really hinder them other than just stealing tu, for example, they can’t grant stealth to a frozen unit so for example killing Wastrid after freezing Delmina would make it just that stealth revenge would not be able to apply stealth to Delmina or when you freeze a burn unit, Maxima’s entry may proc on the frozen unit and the burn will get negated instead this applies for enrage and such as well.
The use of Ice Breaker and Ice Shards without fulfilling its requirements, what people don’t realize is that unlike many other skills, Ice Breaker and Ice Shard don’t have damage down when you don’t fulfill your requirements, in fact, Ice Breaker would do 150% damage while Ice Shard would do 100% damage to two targets if their conditions are not fulfilled. This means Ice Breaker can be used to deal finishing blows should they have very little health but still not enough that any normal hit would kill them (this is especially effective against fire units as it does a whopping 187.5% damage to fire units so you can actually kill an enemy like Needle Pest before it even gets his turn if he is not given a good weapon, my Yuki does slightly more than 10K to fire units) while Ice Shard can be used to finish off low HP units that are in hold ground activated status or just need a slightly harder than unfulfilled condition multi-hit abilities to kill like Shiori’s time strike that hits two targets but does only a few hundred damage to enemies whose tu does not exceed 130 tu while Yuki can do 5-6 thousand instead and have 30 less tu (without any form of quickened status) while also costing less spirit as compared to Shiori.
Note: Hope this helps any Yuki users or those who want to learn to play them. It’s not very helpful for those who play against Yukis though.
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