tl;dr: Rei Ayanami is a limited-time collab unit who also happens to be pretty viable PvP unit. She is an AoE nuker who, when paired with even just one buffer, is capable of cleanly wiping the opposing team. Unfortunately she is a one-trick pony and an MG with low burst gen so she gets countered by Noah and Scarlet-Jackal comps, but so do most other teams nowadays.
Rei Ayanami is a limited-time collab unit that is part of the Nikke x Evangelion collab (other new units are dumb Asuka, drunk Misato, and best girl Mari). She is a B3 machine gun attacker who hits hard with an AoE nuke and buffs her Fire team members with attack buffs. Due to herself also being a Fire unit, her own buffs get included in her burst damage, which makes her one of the strongest AoE nuke units, comparable to (if not stronger) than to Scarlet (in terms of raw Burst damage, Scarlet is still far better due to other aspects).
Rei.A’s Burst has a very respectable 990.2% atk multipler, which puts her in between Maiden and MPrivaty in terms of multipliers. What makes her significantly stronger though is the buff part of her Burst, which grants herself (and other Fire allies) a whooping 48.02% atk damage buff. For reference, this is even more than Crown’s 36.24% atk damage buff. In addition, her S2 gives herself (and other Fire allies) another 25.03% atk buff. The two of these self buffs combined effectively makes her only need one buffer to be able to AoE 1-shot the opposing team, whereas Maiden and MPrivaty both need two. Note that in the new era of damage reduction (e.g. up to -17% dmg from a lvl 15 purple doll and -9.69% from a lvl 7 Tempering cube), you may still want to run two buffers to ensure the kill, but at least you do have the option of running just one as long as the rest of your team can help with cleanup.
Rei.A’s S1 also adds in an extra 112.37% single hit to her target and a self 30.23% elemental damage buff after 100 auto attacks. This happens about 3s into the fight around the time that burst chain starts, so it doesn’t really impact anything (except maybe make your AoE nuke damage look even more impressive when it lands on an enemy Wind unit). The anti-shield part of her S2 doesn’t really matter in PvP (unless you somehow are struggling to break down an enemy Kilo’s shield buff) and her 13% shield from her Burst also won’t do much for the fight.
The main downside to Rei.A however is her class. As an Machine Gun, she has very low burst gen, meaning she will need some burst gen batteries in her team to make up for this. This also makes her die almost-instantly against Scarlet-Jackal comps due to her 30-hits/s rate of fire. In addition, outside of her burst, she has no additional attack angle, meaning if her Burst gets blocked by Noah, the fight is probably over. This, however, is a downside to most AoE nuker comps (exception being Emilia due to her high auto-atk damage and Ein due to her additional Feathers damage). Keep both limitations in mind when team building and comparing using her as your DPS hypercarry pick against other options. She probably won’t see much usage in Rookie Arena but might be viable for SP Arena (mainly for attack) and most likely will have a spot in Champion Arena.
>> Keripo’s PvP tier list rating: A <<
Here’s a quick showcase video of Rei.A dropping a tactical nuke:
https://youtu.be/IbZM3bZpItU
Originally posted on Reddit
