Whenever a tornado is about to arrive, a common phenomenon that occurs is a period of eerie calmness in the weather. Birds fall silent and the air seems to freeze in time, as if trying to stop the inevitable destruction that is to come.

Well, Enya is none of that. She makes her presence known with strong AoE mobbing ability and, somehow, even better single-target damage. In doing so, she also sends a very clear message that this, more likely than not, is just the first storm of many.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

We start off with a bit of a three-in-one value pack, as Enya’s standard skill does quite a lot. On a standard cast, she turns into a tornado (a Howling Vortex, to be specific) that knocks up and continuously damages enemies within its area of effect. This ability costs S-Energy to keep active, but it also restores quite a bit of S-Energy each time it hits an enemy, along with some U-Energy and a special resource called Wind Power. You can theoretically keep this skill up indefinitely If you keep hitting an enemy because of this, but that doesn’t happen in practice as the skill has a maximum duration of 8 seconds. You don’t want to anyways, as it also has another trick up its sleeve.

Holding down the standard skill button or recasting the skill while Howling Vortex is active will activate the Engulfing Vortex, which is basically the same thing as the Howling Vortex, except that it does more damage, has a massively increased range, and consumes Wind Power instead of S-Energy to maintain it. Keeping the skill up will also generate up to five Wall Cloud stacks, which get consumed to provide damage reduction against one hit each while either spin cycle is active. This feels like more stuff for the sake of having more stuff, as you really don’t have to worry about taking damage in most cases, but you don’t lose anything to get this so sure, why not.

While in the Howling Vortex’s little tornado mode, you might often find that the range isn’t all that large, and the reduced movement speed combines to make this frustrating to use at times. This brings us to the final surprise in this already-pretty-packed skill, a passive that transforms Enya’s dodges into mini-tornadoes of their own. It’s essentially a snack-size version of the Howling Vortex, except that you dash in the direction of your choice while using it. It’s much-needed mobility for Enya, who can have trouble closing in to make use of the mobbing power both versions of her standard skill provide.

Support Skill

I’m… not actually sure what the point of this skill is. It does damage and knocks away enemies, then creates a platform that will lift you up a bit into the air. I mean, it’s kinda cool, but what are you supposed to actually do once you’re up there? It’s certainly one of the support skills of all time.

Ultimate Skill

At first glance, there’s nothing super interesting about Enya’s ultimate. It’s just a straightforward AoE burst of damage with a suitably cheap U-Energy cost. However, looking at the fine print reveals a bit more than meets the eye. While it only costs 20 U-Energy to cast, it’ll happily suck up everything you’ve got in the tank to make number go up. At just 50 U-Energy consumed, it nearly doubles the base 870% ATK ratio to 1,620%, and by the time it’s draining 100 U-Energy, the damage ratio increases to a whopping 2,870% of Enya’s attack. I don’t think I have to say this, but that’s a lot of damage. And it’s going to be even more damage because:

Deiwos Passive

Up until now, Enya has seemed like a pretty mobbing-focused character, with large AoE abilities great for wiping out hordes of enemies. However, it seems that Seasun wants her to have her cake and eat it too, because her Deiwos passive increases the damage her skills do when they hit fewer than five enemies. This damage boost ramps up to a maximum of a 150% boost when only hitting one enemy, and is specifically a %Final DMG buff which means it stacks multiplicatively with all the other damage boosts you get, not additively. This takes her already-respectable damage and jacks it up to truly obscene levels.

Also, she converts Alignment Index into extra ATK. You know, because she really needs more damage.

Assessment

Enya really does do it all. She can wipe up trash mobs all day long, and she also has a massive nuke on her ult to deal with any boss enemies she encounters.

But there is a catch, which is that you have to get up close and personal to do it. It can make what should be pretty brainless waveclear a surprisingly tedious chore, especially when you consider other options available for the job. Chenxing - Jade Arc can tap her standard skill to vomit out arrows that can wipe an entire screen of mooks, and Vidya - Agave can autolock enemies while you hold E and check emails on your phone. It makes having to actually chase down enemies to suck them into your tornado feel like a lot of unnecessary work in comparison.

Funnily enough, these problems largely go away when you use her against bosses. With boss arenas largely being free of obstructions and many bosses themselves being more than happy to invade your personal space, Enya unsurprisingly excels at using her ult’s ridiculous damage scaling potential and damage amp from her Deiwos to pop for massive numbers as long as you can feed her enough U-Energy to do so.

Is it strange that a supposedly mobbing-focused character ends up being a better boss killer instead? Perhaps. Maybe it suggests something about Seasun’s inability to make operatives worth using without having to resort to number fudging. But - tedium and all - Enya remains a very competent operative well-suited to any task at hand.

Weapons

There are no surprises here with the split between gacha weapon and event shop freebie. Swamp Snapper, the F2P option, gets two buffs that both end up being the same %DMG buff, while the premium Amethyst Thorns provides a bit less of said buff type at T1 and a lot more at T2. At the same time, it also gets a %DMG Taken buff, which multiplicatively stacks to create the 33% performance difference when comparing T1 of Amethyst Thorns to T5 of Swamp Snapper, and almost 66% damage boost when you dupe Amethyst Thorns to T2.

But if you’ve rolled enough on the weapon banner in the past, there’s a decent chance you won’t have to bother with maxing out Swamp Snapper, even if you don’t plan on pulling for the premium alternative.

As it turns out, Tiny Grains is a pretty good replacement for the gator gun, even at just T1. This comes down once again to it being able to provide a %DMG Taken buff, though here you do have to get hit to trigger it. Even without the buff though, it statsticks hard enough to just be a smidge worse at T1, and it’s simply always better at T2.

Manifests

Despite Enya’s manifest effects being “line goes up” as the trend has been for quite a while, there are actually some interesting things to talk about, because depending on what you use her for, the line might actually stop going up. Oooh, shocking. I’ve split up her manifest damage gains into a graph for her standard skill and one for her ult. Let’s start with the standard skill investment graph.

Everything looks about right here. M3 is a pretty big spike, but do note that M1 provides some nice quality of life by speeding up her Wind Power gain, which will let you spend extra time in the enhanced Engulfing Vortex mode of her standard skill. Alright, now let’s look at what her manifests do for her ult.

Huh.

Yeah, neither M4 or M5 actually affect her ult. Okay well yes, you do get 2% ATK from each manifest, which does technically boost her damage a bit, but if you’re pulling dupes in the gacha just for that, I really don’t think you should be trusted with money. So on both fronts, stopping at M3 is a pretty decent idea, as it’s her standard skill’s biggest damage boost and the last stop for meaningful damage gains on her ult.

Logistics

There is nothing interesting to note about Enya’s logistics set, Gleam Squad. It makes all of her damage numbers bigger and does it better than any other option. Use it. Enya has no need for extra S-Energy regen, has no meaningful cooldowns, and basically never wants to be shooting and is thus unconcerned about critting. This means that the only stats you end up caring about is ATK and Alignment Index (which is just more ATK).

Team Building

Enya’s support options will vary depending on where you use her, as your priorities will be different in casual mobbing content versus going for Neural Sim speedrun kills.

Most of the usual suspects will work well enough in general content, with Marian - Riptide and Acacia - Kaguya being pretty versatile pairings. It is worth noting that her other self Enya - Exuvia can have a bit of a rough time getting maximum value out of her kit, as Tempest’s shoot-less playstyle doesn’t really let her support skill get charged up. This means that it won’t deal the pops of damage that it normally would, which limits Exuvia’s ability to activate her weapon buffs. It’s usually still enough to beat out Riptide though, unless you have to move around too much for Exuvia’s one circle reposition to handle… which does admittedly happen considering how often you have to chase down your enemies. Meanwhile, Mauxir - Shadow Ka will work, but it’s kind of wasted on Enya as there are much more efficient ways to boost her damage.

In the Neural Sim arena, you have access to a pretty spicy toy to play with. Remember how Enya’s ult damage scales up tremendously when you feed it extra U-Energy? Tess’ ability to produce said extra U-Energy naturally makes her a very potent pick to accelerate Enya towards a massive ult nuke. Do note that you’ll need Tess’ M3 though, as you’ll otherwise have to actually shoot with Enya to make Tess’ ult work. That would not be ideal, to say the least.

Another tech option is, surprisingly, Mauxir - Meow. Remember her? Yeah, she exists. For those who have understandably forgotten what she does, her support skill yanks an orb out of an enemy that you can hit with skill damage to transfer a portion of that damage to the enemy itself. Notably, you can actually double dip skill hits with this, allowing Enya to hit an enemy and their Mauxir orb, which transfers the damage back to the enemy again. Since you’re technically hitting more things, this also means that you also get the Wind Power, S-Energy, and U-Energy generated from her Vortexes twice as fast. Her ult will also hit both targets, and while this does slightly reduce the effectiveness of her Deiwos passive, being able to hit a boss 1.66 times with your ult mostly makes up for it.

Oh yeah, did I mention that with neuronics, Mauxir automatically spits out these orbs whenever Enya knocks up enemies with her Vortexes? It is immensely satisfying. Seriously, go try it.

For budget supports (I guess Mauxir counts as one too, to be fair), Chenxing - The Observer’s skill damage buffs are certainly better than nothing. Surprisingly, she can also equip an actually useful logistics set for once, as Xinye Squad’s increase to the U-Energy cap enables bigger ult nukes. Acacia - Redacted also gets extra value over her usual Slow utility, as her Deiwos passive’s free starting U-Energy will let Enya get a head start towards charging up her ult.

Should You Pull?

As is the case with a lot of characters, this question has a short answer and a long answer. But Enya’s case is different.

So let’s get the short answer out of the way first. Yes, you totally should. Enya’s a highly competent multirole operative that can perform exceptionally well in basically all content and, at the time of writing, is a top-tier pick in Neural Simulation as well.

Normally, the long answer involves me talking about some caveat or another about the operative’s capabilities, and Enya’s no exception. There are the range issues of course, and the fact that Enya’s bossing credibility evaporates if she can’t get the kill with her first ult, but these are relatively minor gripes that can largely be played around and accommodated for.

Those aren’t the big issues. Rather, I want to talk about the precedent that Enya sets. This is going to sound weird, but I think she’s too strong. Snowbreak was never designed around operatives that could deal this much burst damage, this quickly. And it shows, with there being plenty of clips floating around of even relatively low-investment Tempests one-shotting bosses before they have a chance to fight back. Here’s one of an M0T1 Tempest bursting Cerberus - Pyroclast so hard it never gets to enter its invulnerability phase.

You’d probably imagine that Seasun isn’t too happy about this though. Or maybe they don’t care at all. Either way, I can see two possible ways they might respond to this kind of behaviour. The first is to give every boss from here on out more hard HP triggers that aren’t allowed to be bursted through. This makes fights more annoying for everybody, but it also severely limits Enya’s burst potential, which makes it especially suck for her. And yet, this is probably the better outcome, because the alternative is to fight broken with broken and further increase the damage potential of future character releases. This is also, I’m afraid, probably the more likely option.

So here’s your long answer. When rampant powercreep becomes a major concern, it becomes difficult to recommend things to players as a “great value” or “future-proof,” because the ever-present threat of someone’s investment becoming immediately obsolete is that much greater. Nobody wants to get backlash about how they wasted their pulls on what turns out to be a one-patch-wonder because of your advice. So in that sense, no. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend her, because I can no longer trust Seasun to keep her relevant. Who’s to say that one patch from now, the next new hotness won’t be even stronger and completely leave her in the dust?

Now to be fair, one-shot shenanigans have been a thing for quite a while in Snowbreak, with DPS operatives like Cherno - Enigma and Siris - Ksana being the first to truly push the limits. However, they were never this powerful, nor this accessible. As of the time of writing, the only operative that matches Enya’s burst capabilities is Chenxing - Jade Arc. This is in itself an indictment against her as well as on her release, she too took burst damage potential to new levels. But while one data point might be an outlier, two makes a trend.

And yeah, a part of me likes how absurdly powerful Enya is. But it’s also not a part of me that I like. It’s a part of me that’s drunk on power, only concerned with immediate gratification at the cost of future potential. Keeping short-sighted desires in check to ensure long-term health isn’t as enjoyable as being able to have all the fun now, but it’s important for being able to still have that fun in the future.

In the lead-up to a storm, the quiet that hangs in the air is often hauntingly reminiscent of the equal lack of noise once the storm has passed through, leaving ruin in its wake. But Enya - Tempest’s release is anything but quiet. Both metaphorically and literally, she’s a storm herself, and quite possibly just one of many to come.

Initially, it was hard to tell if the generational leap in performance that Chenxing - Jade Arc brought would be just a one-off. But now, it’s hard not to see Enya - Tempest as an indication that it’s instead the new normal going forward.

A storm warning, you could say.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

Includes weapon and logistics set calculations, manifest growth calculations, and a logistics optimization calculator.

Cheat Sheet