In the meta of Arknights, most operators are fairly well-balanced and play effectively in most circumstances, with clearly-defined strengths and weaknesses appropriate for their classes. And then there are these guys, operators with extremely broken aspects that resoundingly turns the game's many challenges into a laughing stock. Having just one of them can give you a significant edge, whereas you may struggle to make do without them.
Please add entries in the following format if possible:
- The operator (in alphabetical order).
- Explanation of why their kits are excellent, overpowered, etc...
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Vanguards
- In general, an operator (regardless of archetype) can only be considered Game Breaking if their kit has the tools that help define them as such, but it can generally be agreed that the one archetype that can be considered pretty overpowered as a whole are the Standard Bearer Vanguards. This is due to the fact that they have the most reliable DP generation per skill proc out of all the Vanguard archetypes (very good skill uptime and cooldown), and have among the cheapest DP cost of all Vanguards, allowing them to be deployed fairly earlier than even most other Vanguards. Even their Boring, but Practical S1 is very usefulnote , whereas most other Vanguards would prefer using their second or third skill to get some extra utility apart from DP production. Their starting SP when deployed is pretty high for a low-cost skill, allowing them to generate loads of DP almost immediately after deployment (and can be made even better with Bagpipe's second talent, as detailed below). Sure, their offensive and defensive stats are terrible (with the exception of Saileach with her S3, and even then the skill is more valued for its Slow and Fragile debuff than its raw damage) compared to other members of the Vanguard class, but considering how fighting is not what Standard Bearers are meant to do, this makes their raw stats moot for supporting the team. Their Module makes them even better by providing a surprisingly potent effect, which is increasing the Block of the operator in front of them by 1, and it stacks if all 4 current Standard Bearers are deployed, a godsend for operators who attack multiple enemies equal to block count, giving more incentive to keep them around on the field.Elysium: Who would! Use a flag! As a weapon! On the battlefield!
- On the other hand, the Agent Vanguard archetype has managed to not only become a competitor but even a frequently preferred option over Standard Bearers due to bringing the utility of a fast redeploy DPS unit without compromising their DP generating ability unlike other Vanguard archetypes, and in fact have DP generation rates that match and potentially even exceed Standard Bearers with the condition of having a target to attack. They offer solid damage and increased range over other melee Vanguards at half the redeploy rate of most units, giving them great role compression that lets them perform the role of an Executor specialist when DP is not needed and retreat off the field once their task is done, making them a very effective and versatile option that usually does the task of a Standard Bearer just as well if not better unless non-conditional DP generation or the utility offered by specific Standard Bearers is absolutely required. Not only that, but Agents can actually function decently well even without Bagpipe's talent, as two of the three current members of the archetype carry an on-deploy activation skill while the third has a Power Strike-type skill, and while these skills generally have a slightly lower DP generation rate compared to their chargeable skills, they are still effective thus giving the advantage of not needing to also add Bagpipe to a squad if players are lacking her or if they cannot fit her into a certain squad. It's telling that Cantabile and Ines both quickly became staple Vanguards in the meta after their release, while the "weaker" Agent, Puzzle, whose skills are Offensive Recovery and thus have rather poor synergy with the archetype's Hit-and-Run Tactics playstyle, is still an above average unit and a relatively useful welfare.
- Bagpipe
- Bagpipe is best described as a "DP nuke". Her second talent Martial Tradition allows other Vanguards to deploy with 6 initial SP, up to 8 if Bagpipe is at full potential. This means an almost instant cast of their DP skills (especially at Mastery 3), allowing you to just spam out high-cost operators in a snap; this is particularly powerful on Standard Bearers as mentioned above, which is the source of the infamous "Flagpipe" strategy that serves as the core DP-generation tactic in nearly all high-end gameplay. Her offensive kit is also nothing to sneeze at (especially considering that her second talent also works on herself), with her second skill High-Impact Assault being a charge-type skill that makes her next attack strike twice for massive physical damage, and her third skill Locked Breech Burst inheriting the plus-block capability of Grani before her but putting it to good by giving her a gigantic ATK and DEF buff alongside multi-hit attacks. All of this means that Bagpipe can output surprisingly high levels of damage, which translates into potential DP showers if she can consistently kill things and proc her Talent 1 Precise Reloading for some extra damage while she's at it. Due to the combination of the above, Bagpipe has since supplanted Siege's role as the undisputed top Vanguard in the meta, and she's an invaluable core unit to have at higher Contingency Contract risks.
- Blacknight
- Blacknight is a strong Tactician Vanguard in general content who particularly shines in advanced content. While her stats and DP generation are fairly average by Vanguard standards and don’t hold up to Flagbearers or Agents, she finds her niche in her ability to repeatedly apply the Sleep status effect with her Peaceful Slumber skill. This skill has a relatively low SP cost and puts all enemies within her Slumberfoot’s range to sleep for 6 seconds. During this time, the Slumberfoot is also able to attack Sleeping targets with area of effect Arts damage, which is a niche only shared by Blemishine. This ability also is able to hold two charges, giving Blacknight the ability to repeatedly apply Sleep for long durations. This makes Blacknight a staple for sleep-stall strategies that pair her with other Sleep-inducing Operators (Blemishine, Erato, Iris, Kafka, Sora) and SP battery Operators such as Liskarm to indefinitely hold enemies in place and slowly chip them down with the Slumberfoot. Sleep stalling is generally a slow strategy to use in normal content, but is one of the most reliable strategies in high-risk Contingency Contract, and Blacknight is perhaps the best unit at enabling it. She has been a staple in multiple high- and max-risk clears since her release, appearing in Operations Dawnseeker, Deepness and Fake Waves, which is a testament to her unique value as a crowd control and DPS unit.
- Blacknight is also the best unit to forever stall Sarkaz Sentinels due to her Slumberfoot's quirk: when her first skill is activated, the Slumberfoot will burrow itself back into the ground, but it can still block. This causes the sentinel to remain where it is forever while remaining idle, because it doesn't see the 'roadblock' (the summon) as an attacker.
- Cantabile
- Cantabile makes her debut as the first Agent subclass Vanguard, and she absolutely does not disappoint. For starters, the Agent subclass sports ranged attacks and a reduced redeployment time of at most 35 seconds, and Cantabile capitalizes on those attributes with her excellent skillset. Her first skill, Penetrating Gaze, boosts her ATK upon deployment and generates 1 DP per enemy hit for 20 seconds at max Mastery. This makes her an amazing helidrop who can kill as effectively as she can generate DP, unlike a Flagbearer who isn't meant to engage in combat while they generate DP. If one wants her to stay longer, her second skill Specular Reflection loads up to 18 ammo, and gains an ATK and ASPD buff as well as Camouflage to avoid getting sniped. At max Mastery, the skill costs 25 SP and starts with 20, which means with Bagpipe, Cantabile can immediately pop this skill upon deployment. The cherry on top is her talent Protean, which boosts her ASPD when she isn't blocking enemies, for even faster DP generation with her attacks. While her main shortcoming is that she needs an enemy to attack to generate DP unlike Flagbearers, the sheer damage and speed of DP she can pump out more than makes up for it, and having an incredibly cheap DP cost to boot. Cantabile is considered to rival, if not replace Myrtle as one of the premier DP generators in high end content like Contingency Contract, thanks to her amazing DP generation coupled with swift and formidable killpower.
- Elysium
- Following in the same footsteps as Myrtle (as detailed below), Elysium emerged as the premier DP dispenser in the game, generating up to a whopping 18 points with his S1, and 20 through his S2, and he's only marginally more expensive to deploy than her. As icing on the cake, Elysium's Sniper Support talent also passively reduces the cost for all Sniper operators, making him invaluable if you're looking to place down more expensive units like Meteorite or Executor, and the ASPD increase he offers them can turn some (Exusiai, wink wink!) into literal murder machines. Not to mention, his S2 Monitor grants him conditional True Sight on up to four enemies, making him one of a rare few melee operators that can see cloaked units, along with applying speed and defense debuffs on affected enemies, which gives him extra utility in stalling and enabling physical DPS.
- Ines
- As both a popular NPC and the first 6-star of the inherently strong Agent archetype, many players were eagerly anticipating Ines, and while she was somewhat overshadowed due to being released between two limited banners, one of which being the utterly gamebreaking Kirin R Yato, Ines quickly gained ground in the meta thanks to her versatile kit that combines solid DP generation with strong utility and damage, making her a highly valuable unit for advanced content much like her fellow Vanguard Saileach. While her pure DP generation is slower than her 5-star counterpart Cantabile, Ines makes up for it with the sheer amount of debuffing power in both her talents and her skills, giving her a surprising amount of staying power for a fast redeploy unit. Her first Talent, Shadow Weaver, inflicts a Bind on the first hit against an enemy and Steals up to 100 ATK, the latter of which lasts until either the target is defeated or Ines leaves the field. This Talent's effect has no upper limit, meaning Ines can steal stats from as many targets as she can attack so long as they remain alive, which can be partially enabled through the Talent's Bind effect, as well as her S3. Her second Talent, Shadow Sentry, reveals all enemies in her attack range and passively slows their movement speed by 30%, which is already strong, but what makes this Talent incredible is that when Ines is retreated, she is replaced with an untargetable Shadow Sentry on her deployed tile which retains the Talent's effect, allowing Ines to continue providing utility after she is done generating DP while being off the field. Ines's skills also synergize with these Talents well. Her S2, Murky Night, does several things at once: granting a large ATK buff, expanding her attack range (equivalent to an E0 Mystic Caster) which also expands the range of her second Talent, making her Invisible which effectively renders her invulnerable to everything except environmental damage when not blocking, and making each attack not only generate 1 DP, but Stealing ASPD up to a cap of 10 attacks, which coupled with her first Talent can debuff a single target greatly while also giving Ines a tremendous DPS and DP-generation boost. On the other hand, her S3, Solitary Return makes her first deployment instantly replace her with her Shadow Sentinel at no cost and resetting her redeployment timer, setting down her second Talent's debuff zone instantly for free. Ines can then be deployed again, immediately gaining a huge ATK buff and pulling the Shadow Sentry to her new location, dealing up to 200% of her buffed ATK in damage to up to six enemies in its path and making her attacks generate 1 DP for a short duration. enforcing a hit and run playstyle to deal quick bursts of damage. It's worth noting that because of the way her first Talent functions, each target that is struck but not killed by the Shadow Sentry will have their ATK stolen, potentially giving Ines a massive ATK buff. With a kit that does so much at once, Ines stands out as one of the best Vanguards in the game for her sheer role compression, being a great unit for both beginners and veterans and one of the few Vanguards with a kit strong enough to challenge the Flagpipe meta.
- Myrtle
- Myrtle shines as an excellent 4* operator due to her ability to generate DP really fast, actively heal other operators with her S2 Healing Wings (making her one of the few non-medic, non-defender classes able to use an active team healing ability), and passively heal other vanguards with her Elite 2 talent Glistening that gives them all life regen. Not only does she generate more DP than most other operators in her subclass, Myrtle is also bar none the cheapest to deploy Cost-wise, clocking in at 8 DP at max potential; the combination of her sheer efficiency and dirt-cheap cost makes her arguably one of the most useful Operators in the game, period. This is particularly useful in challenge and Contingency Contract stages that limit DP generation or increase the DP cost of operators. To balance this out, her stats are rather poor. Her DP generation is manually-triggered, and happens gradually instead of instantly like other Vanguards', and also renders her unable to attack or block enemies due to her Trait. However, she is not designed to be an attacker to begin with, focusing on support and the most common strategy is just to plop her down somewhere out of enemy range, and activate her skill. Furthermore, she is easy to raise due to her 4* status.
- Muelsyse
- Muelsyse arguably saved the entire Tactician Vanguard archetype from being dragged down by a Low-Tier Letdown 6* (Vigil) and brought herself up to a very respectable position within the current Vanguard meta. Her main gimmick is that her summon can copy an undeployed operator...for no DP Cost at all and without any need to start a redeployment timer. It can copy up to 90% of the original operator's stats, and while it can't copy traits or skills, this can be used to get rid of certain traits (i.e Aak's HP losing trait, Eunectes' SP only when blocking trait, Rosmontis' not hitting drones trait). Instead, the summon gains a whole new trait to make up for this depending on whether it's ranged or melee - when melee it can outright Steal, and when ranged it can duplicate itself four times over, meaning you can suddenly have four clones of Ebenholz wreaking havoc on the enemy. Her skills are all decent in their own way, but her most universal skill is her third: if the summon is ranged, then it will instantly clone four times, their attacks will Bind and if the summon is melee, then it will pull targets and stun them if they're blocked. Should you copy a fast-hitting ranged operator like Dorothy, this basically means a perma-Bind for the unlucky targets hit while also keeping the duplication consistent, and if you had an already heavy statstick copied, expect any mobs to be cleaned from the range. Even if any of the clones die, there is virtually no moment that there isn't another to do their job until the others pop back into life. Not for nothing has she been said to be the one who fixes all of her predecessor Vigil's issues: his high DP Cost note , his weak summons that can't stand the enemies despite being able to block 3 note , and his inability to hold down enemies note .
- Muelsyse's first module has the base effect of reducing damage taken by her summon by blocked enemies by 15%, which favors melee clones when she is used for holding lanes. Its upgrades are also very impactful, as it allows her clone to copy the full values of the target's stats and gives the clone 5 bonus SP on its first deployment, removing the wind-up time before it is able to transform. The quality of life and stat improvements to her clone make Muelsyse feel smoother to use when initially deployed and allows her clone to take better advantage of large stat-stick units such as Penance, Mudrock or Hoederer.
- Saga
- Saga follows in the steps of Siege (see below), combining devastating offenses and significant support capabilities into a Vanguard capable of simultaneously generating DP, slicing up enemies, and enabling allies. Her main merit is in her Preaching talent that causes her to Cripple enemies instead of killing them, upon which another unit can kill a crippled enemy to gain +2 SP. This allows her to serve as an incredible SP battery for anyone in her vicinity, speeding up the charging of high-cost skills or letting allies spam lower-cost ones. Furthermore, her second skill Evil Cleansing is a charge-storing ability that deals a massive amount of physical damage to up to 6 targets in a large cross as well as killing any crippled enemies in range once it ends, all while generating DP. The real kicker comes with the fact that she can use this to gain the +2 SP from her own Crippled enemies, granting her massive amounts of SP with each use and potentially letting her spam the ability to pump your DP through the roof. Her S3 Fierce Glare is nothing to sneeze at either, generating a whopping 20 DP over its duration, extending her range, and giving her extremely powerful multi-target attacks that strike an additional time against targets with less than 50% HP, letting her stand in as an AoE Guard that also generates DP. The icing on the cake is her second talent Clear Mind that kicks in when she hits 40% HP for the first time, granting her 70% physical dodge and significant life regeneration to give her a second chance at life.
- Saga actually works quite well with Siege instead of simply replacing her. Since she won't kill enemies that have been Crippled (unless she's equipped with her second skill), and Siege gains SP when making a kill, Saga can easily make Siege spamming her second skill like it's nothing. Siege notably bypasses the so-called 'SP Lockout', meaning that (due to her talent) she will always gain SP, even if she has visibly gained 3 charges. This synergy has Saga softening enemies up for Siege to kill, which can be a terrifying combination when dealing with a Zerg Rush.
- Saileach
- Considering that the Flagbearers Myrtle and Elysium were considered game-breaking despite only being of 4/5 star rarity respectively, it wasn't a surprise that their six-star counterpart Saileach was just as strong, if not stronger. In addition to her skills generating large amounts of DP, they offer lots of utility revolving around the Unwavering Banner she carries, which passively buffs the attack speed of nearby units while debuffing the attack speed of enemies. Her second skill Inheritance of Faith generates a whopping 20 DP over its duration while also sending the banner to the most damaged ally in range, significantly buffing their DEF and rapidly healing them for its duration, which lets her moonlight as a buffer and a medic while still generating DP. Her third skill Glorious Banner trades this defensive support for equally strong offensive support, instantly generating 10 DP and throwing the banner at at the nearest enemy to deal area damage and a stun on impact, before the banner slows and inflicts a Fragile effect on all enemies nearby for the duration. The icing on the cake is her second talent Spiritual Influence that lowers the DP cost of the unit deployed right after her, making it even easier to get a strong defense going after she generates enough DP with a skill. With a combination of powerful DP generation, powerful team support, and potent enemy debuffing, Saileach makes for a versatile and very powerful Vanguard.
- It should be noted, however, that as a pure utility 6-star unit, Saileach is generally considered a more attractive choice for players looking to tackle some of the game's most difficult content such as max-risk Contingency Contract, while being considered too specialized to invest in for lower-level content for the expensive costs of raising a 6-star, due to her DP-generation on her first skill being the same as her 5-star equivalent Elysium. For most players, the comparatively cheaper Myrtle is a more efficient choice for investment. For the most difficult content in the game, however, the utility Saileach offers is indispensible.
- Wanqing
- Wanqing follows the foot steps of being just as game-breaking as his fellow Flagbearer Operators. Like his fellow Flagbearer Operators, his skills generate large amounts of DP. However, the meat that makes him game-breaking comes from his second skill, Along Easternly Winds. This skill allows him to not only heal all units surrounding him, the allies in his surroundings facing the same direction as him also benefit from a hefty +25 ASPD at M3 as long as the skill is active, with no regards to which operator class they belong to. This gimmick also applies in his talent, Watching the Weather, which increases the Max HP of the units surrounding him, and further increases that of allies facing the same direction as Wanqing when he is deployed, with it being fairly easy to face Wanqing in a way where it maximizes the benefits of his buffs. Suffice to say, Wanqing proves to be a very powerful Support Party Member along with his DP generation, with his Talent ensuring that your squishier units get to survive longer and your DPS units hit enemies faster. Additionally, he is the free operator for Here a People Sows, making him far easier to build and max out his Potentials for.
Snipers
- Ash
- Ash, being another Limited Operator from the Rainbow Six Siege collab after W before her, has the power to back up her title. From the get-go, her first talent Auxillary Equipment has her throw a stun grenade as soon as she's deployed, giving her the drop on any non-immune enemies, and her Elite 2 Talent Breaching Specialist further helps her early advantage by giving her first deployment a -3 to DP cost and granting her up to 20 SP immediately after deployment, letting her deploy early and almost instantly fire off a skill to boot. Her S2 Assault Tactics is where she really shines, as she throws that same stun grenade before unleashing a rapid-fire 31-shot barrage of bullets, while gaining a significant damage boost against stunned targets for the duration. The sheer damage the barrage does cannot be understated - unless the target is stun immune or really stacking DEF, anything she stuns and then turns her gun on is almost always dead. Her S3 Breaching Round is nothing to sneeze at either, being a delayed explosive that deals massive physical damage and shoves enemies away, but if the explosive hits a high-ground tile while flying along a low-ground tile, it will explode prematurely for even more damage - up to 800% of her ATK at max mastery (albeit only being able to be used twice per deployment). With a combination of crowd-control, insane burst, and massive area damage, Ash is a very versatile and powerful Sniper to have on your squad.
- Blue Poison
- Though she's just a 5-star unit, Blue Poison is often considered a sidegrade to the 6-star Exusiai due to her exceptionally high damage output and crowd clearing for her rarity. She doesn't fire as much Dakka as Exusiai and cannot assassinate single targets through ridiculous burst, but instead offers her Twinshot - Auto skill, which lets her deal boosted damage to 2 enemies every 4th shot. This boosted attack will hit for at least 650 damage at E2 and Skill 7, meaning she can deal respectable damage to enemies with moderate to low defense. At maximum level and Mastery, however, the multiplier increases by a huge amount and triggers every 3rd shot instead of 4th, allowing her to take down even B-DEF enemies and chip away at A-ranked ones, helped by Neurotoxin that lets her attacks apply Arts Damage Over Time. This makes high-defense enemies less of a problem for her while also allowing her to deal consistent multi-target damage, compared to Exusiai who has trouble taking down moderately tanky enemies even at full power and has inconsistent timings on her single-target burst. This means that she can remain relevant in many stages, with her sustained damage output matching or surpassing even her higher rarity counterparts.
- Ch'en the Holungday
- Ch'en's limited summer version made a literal splash in the meta, completely blowing away the already strong Executor and Pinecone and arguably setting a new standard for physical damage output. Her main merit comes from her third skill, Holiday Storm, which significantly buffs her ATK, expands her range, and causes her attacks to strike twice and apply her class trait to all enemies in range. That alone is very strong, but it also causes her attacks to spread liquid over her expanded range, which debuffs the speed and DEF of any enemies standing in it; combined, these make her go from merely good to absolutely ridiculous. To put it into perspective, she'll be doing 2 hits of basically ATK-doubled damage per shot to basically everything in front of her with no upper limit, while her trait effectively makes her deal 150% of the already boosted damage; considering that she's also debuffing everything in range by up to 220 flat DEF at M3, a few bursts will instantly kill many enemies while punching holes through the strongest foes as if they were made of tissue paper. Like SilverAsh's S3, the raw physical damage is enough to tear through even physically bulky foes, and actually surpasses the DPS of Truesilver Slash under many circumstances. The movement speed debuff is the icing on the cake, making sure enemies can't leave her range while she pelts them. You would think the skill would have a cooldown as long as the likes of Truesilver Slash or Volcano, but not only does it have a surprisingly short cooldown of 55 seconds at M3, it's an ammo-based skill, meaning that once activated, the "duration" only goes down when she fires; furthermore, her first talent, Frugality, gives her a chance not to consume ammo, extending the skill even longer, and she can even manually stop it and start recharging for the next usage, making it borderline impossible to waste any of its uptime.
- Exusiai
- Exusiai is one for anything without high enough defense. While she deals fairly mediocre damage per shot, she makes up for this with More Dakka. A lot of dakka in fact, and then some when she's promoted. All of her skills make her superb at dealing massive amounts of burst damage - especially her S3 Overloading Mode, which increases her attack speed and damage while making each attack hit 5 times, all on a relatively short cooldown - melting anyone with low to mediocre defenses out of existence, which the game provides plenty of. In addition, with the help of buffers or debuffers such as Warfarin, Skadi the Corrupting Heart, Aak, Shamare and more, Exusiai can overcome high defense enemies and melt them anyways. Many meta strategies for bosses involve some combination of Exusiai with buff and debuff support, allowing her to simply delete lifebars off of them. Having Exusiai alone can free up a lot of spots in your defense, due to her obscene damage output. There are some players out there who use her as the standard sniper unit in their team.
- She can easily trivialize the otherwise tough story encounters with FrostNova and Mephisto in the main story as soon as she's placed within range of their starting stand-by point - due to both of them having low physical defense, she can quickly eliminate either in under 15 seconds provided that she doesn't switch targets for too long, even counting Mephisto's healing. Retreating her and repeating the process will also make short work of FrostNova's second form, and the same strategy can even be applied to her Chapter 6 encounter with a bit more care, since her DEF only marginally increases in the second fight.
- Kroos the Keen Glint
- Kroos the Keen Glint is commonly regarded as one of the best welfare units in the game, debatably in contention for the best welfare if the 6-stars are excluded from the equation. She functions as a semi-hybrid of Exusiai's multi-hit damage and May's crowd control, with her Bullseye Talent giving her a 20% chance on each hit to deal up to 160% of her ATK and inflict a 0.2 second Stun, which thanks to her fast attack speed and multi-hit on both her skills is far more consistent than it seems. Kroos's skills are both strong in their own regard. Her S1, Traceless, gives her a modest ATK boost and making each attack hit twice, which while not as powerful as similar skills such as Exusiai's or Blue Poison's S2 in terms of raw damage, makes up for it by giving her Camouflage for the duration, giving her more safety compared to her competitors. Kroos is certainly not lacking for damage when needed however, as her S2, Silencer, reduces her attack interval to less than half of its normal amount and also making each attack hit twice. After hitting 40 times (32 at maximum Mastery), however, with the actual number of attacks needed being half of that due to the double-hit, this skill is empowered to make each attack four times instead, escalating her DPS to truly absurd levels. The skill is limited by its long wind-up between its cost and the attacks needed to empower it, but once set up and with an ATK buff, Kroos can shred enemies in her range with ease. With her rapid barrage of attacks, Kroos is also applying Bullseye consistently, giving her the ability to repeatedly apply mini-stuns to her targets which can interrupt enemies with slow attack intervals or knock down hovering enemies, making her a top pick in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor. Despite how much competition the crowded Marksman archetype has, Kroos the Keen Glint still manages to be among the most valuable due to her mix of high DPS, survivability and crowd control, with the bonus of being a free (albeit event-locked) unit.
- Pozëmka
- Pozëmka is a physical nuke who managed to arguably overshadow her limited banner partner by virtue of her sheer DPS and utility. Her main strength is her Automatic Typewriter talent, which allows her to periodically deploy a temporary straight-shooting ballista turret on ranged tiles which not only duplicates her skills, but is untargetable and doesn't take up a deployment slot while still having ATK comparable to Pozëmka herself. At Elite 2, she also gains the Stenographer of Weaknesses Talent which makes her Typewriter debuff enemy DEF on hit, which increases in severity if it's deployed adjacent to her; combined with her high ATK as a Heavyshooter, she can crack through armored units with no problem. As for her skills, her second skill Précis passively reduces the redeployment time of her Typewriter by up to half to let you spam it more often, while being a charge-storing burst skill that deals massive multi-hit damage to a target within range; meanwhile, her third skill Opprobrium slightly extends her range while buffing her ATK and attack speed, while letting her deal critical damage to targets right in front of her. These are fairly standard, but taken to a ridiculous degree by the simple fact that the Typewriter can duplicate them, almost doubling her already high DPS and letting her melt any individual target out of existence if both of them focus on the target at once, especially with her DEF debuff. Pozëmka combines ridiculous damage with incredible map pressure and flexibility from essentially having a second Sniper on demand most of the time, and an invincible one that doesn't even take a deployment slot to boot. To put to perspective of how ridiculous of an Operator Pozëmka is, she is often referred to as a Schwarz who summons a second, invincible Schwarz, and is considered an absolute top tier Operator approaching Surtr and Chen the Holungday in terms of DPS, and has pushed Schwarz out of the meta completely.
- Ray
- Ray continues the recent trend of powerful single target Snipers following Pozëmka and Typhon with incredible flexibility and utility in her kit along with competitive DPS that practically matches that of her predecessors. Her kit is designed to compensate for all the flaws of the Hunter archetype while making full use of its strengths, with her primary mechanic being her Patrol Partner talent which allows her to deploy a sandbeast within her attack range that affects a 3x3 area around it, which allows Ray to prioritize and attack targets within that area dealing up to 15% increased damage to them, lets her expand her attack range (with the potential to increase her frontal range to a ridiculous 5 tiles), and the ability to break normal targeting priority and focus specific targets. This pairs well with her second talent, Focus, which provides Ray an ATK buff stacking up to 3 times for each attack on the same enemy, which magnifies Ray's already high ATK stat along with the Hunter's inherent 120% damage scaling on attacks, giving her massive single target DPS on her normal attacks. Along with her damage, however, Ray offers shockingly high amounts of utility for a damaging archetype, with her first skill, Escape Shot, allowing her to fire up to two charges of an attack that pushes targets away at a large force, something not usually seen outside of the Push Stroker class, while also increasing her maximum ammo count on next reload by 2 on Ray's next reload, which is easily achieved as the attack has an absolutely massive scaling of up to 450%. Ray's second skill, Wide Area Overwatch, is an infinite duration skill which expands Ray's attack range by one tile each to her sides while providing a huge ATK buff (something that works well given Ray's multiple ATK scalings in her kit), but the biggest benefit of all is that the skill reduces the cooldown of Ray's sandbeast and gives it the ability to retrieve any ammo fired in its zone after retreating, which helps to circumvent the Hunter's ammo limitation which serves as the branch's biggest weakness. However, the skill that truly makes Ray match her peers in terms of power is her third skill, Seeing the Light, which immediately forces Ray to fully reload at a massively increased pace before she attacks, expanding her attack range to near that of an Artilleryman Sniper, and enhancing each attack to deal up to 330% damage and Bind the target for 2 seconds, which given that the Hunter's attack interval is 1.6 seconds, allows Ray to persistently Bind a single target for an prolonged period of time while bursting them for thousands of physical damage per hit. Although Ray will have trouble finishing off the target if she's emptied the clip and they somehow aren't dead, the skill makes up for this with incredible skill cycling and uptime, with a duration of 16 seconds and an SP cost of 30 seconds which is reduced by 10 if Ray defeats an enemy during the skill's duration - not just making it easy to have her skill ready whenever she needs it, but also sometimes letting her just use it again if the target hasn't died yet, helped by the sandbeast making it harder for an enemy to escape her gigantic effective range before she's got another skill ready. Despite a poor initial showing of the Hunter archetype's potential with Coldshot, Ray's solidly designed kit that allows its strengths to shine along with great numbers all around has proven her to be an unexpectedly high-tier Sniper that, although having a higher learning curve due to her sandbeast's mechanics and the Hunter's ammo mechanic, bears all the tools needed to be an excellent choice in spite of the competition.
- Rosa
- Rosa has been a fine unit since her release albeit overshadowed by many other powerful units over time, but her Module released in What the Firelight Casts has given her a resurgence. The Besieger Module's base trait increases their damage against 'heavy' enemies (those with a Weight stat of 3 or higher) by 15%, which is already a decent buff, but the upgrade buffs Rosa's Bone Piercer Talent to deal an additional 60% of her ATK to heavy targets. This is on top of the Talent's base effect of ignoring up to 60% of DEF for heavy enemies, which tend to have high DEF. Due to this Talent, Rosa is exceptional at killing bosses which tend to have high Weight due to dealing nearly double her ATK to them passively while also ignoring over half their DEF, making this one of the most impactful Modules in the game. Rosa also has two good skills worth investing in. Her S2, Split Shot, significantly buffs her already high ATK and allows her to hit an additional enemy on each attack with a long duration of up to 60 seconds as well as a quick activation after deployment (though its total SP cost is high), but her S3, Avalanche Breaker, is her staple skill due to combining multi-targeting, damage and crowd control at a relatively low SP cost. This skill targets the four heaviest enemies in her range and Binds them for up to 8 seconds, dealing damage to them each second. While the ATK buff is rather low, the faster application of damage makes up for this, as it deals enough to usually kill most heavy enemies in a single rotation while preventing them from retaliating. The only drawback to Rosa is the expense in a fully upgraded Module and the competition she faces with other powerful ranged physical attackers such as Pozëmka as well as her Besieger cohort Typhon who has absurd single target DPS at global range on a more forgiving ammo system, but for those who have already invested in Rosa or simply want to use her instead, she is still an excellent Operator to use against threatening elites or bosses.
- Typhon
- Typhon is a tremendously powerful Besieger who offers extreme damage output at nearly unmatched range, turning most tough enemies into swiss cheese in a snap. To start things off, her talent Sharp as a Beast's Fang allows her to gradually pierce an increasing amount of the target's DEF as she attacks, up to 60% with a fully upgraded Module, letting her crunch through armor right off the bat. If sustained damage is the call, Typhon's Order of the Icefield gives her an ATK buff, causes her attacks to hit two targets at once (or one target twice if there's only one in range), gives her shots a chance to stun, and most notably lasts indefinitely on the second activation, turning her into an incredible source of AFK damage. The real prize, however, is her third skill 'Eternal Hunt' - Typhon locks onto the first target in range, loads up to 10 ammo, and begins firing slow but incredibly damaging barrages of arrows that strike random targets around the one she's locked on to, dealing up to 5 hits which also inflict a short stun. However, Typhon will also stay locked on to the target until the skill is over or the target dies (upon which the lock-on zone becomes stationary), giving her effectively global range and ensuring that even if the target moves out of range or into her blind spot, they aren't safe until she runs out of arrows. The damage is only average if the arrows strike a group of enemies, but when she's focusing on a single large target like a boss where all the arrows will land on them, Typhon can usually melt them down in only a few shots; furthermore, as an ammo skill, it can be manually deactivated for skill cycling, and can't waste its duration unless she gets distracted by fodder. As the cherry on top, her second talent Heavy as the Swamp's Mire causes her to inflict 60-70% bonus damage and a Slow to enemies the first time she attacks them during one skill duration, upping her damage even more and letting her temporarily hamstring incoming attackers, along with letting her S2 potentially one-shot weaker mooks outright. Even with the Besieger's usual weaknesses of a high DP cost and slow attack rate, along with her skills losing power against groups and needing some setup time to reach their full potential, Typhon has cemented herself as one of the most powerful siege units in the game, with her single-target damage being capable of eviscerating even the toughest foes from halfway across the map.
- W
- W is a Limited Operator whose power befits her status. All of her skills are designed to inflict massive amounts of physical damage and stuns, which synergizes with her second talent Insult to Injury which increases the physical damage taken by all stunned foes in her range. This does not only play with her own skills, but since it counts for all stunned enemies in her range, she also enables some synergy with other operators whose playstyle is stun-based, like Texas, Ash, Mudrock and Bibeak. Out of her skills, her S2 Jack in the Box is notable for letting her plant untargetable bombs in her attack range each time her SP gauge fills up. On contact, these bombs deal massive physical damage and also stun anyone caught in the explosion, and its short cooldown plus the fact that the bombs linger for a while can let W set up veritable minefields during downtime, instantly blowing incoming enemies to kingdom come if she's allowed to spam this. With this, one can no-brain cramped areas where enemies must pass through, such as the right lane of the poison haze map in Integrated Strategies by simply pointing her in the right direction, letting her plant mines alongside almost the entire lane and watch enemies blow up as soon as they appear. Her S3, D12 is even potentially more frightening, as she reuses the attack she used as a boss during Chapter 1 where she attaches bombs that can instantly take out your operators. Redemption Demotion is not in effect this time, as she now does it to 3 enemies at Level 1, and 4 enemies at Mastery 1 - and these bombs have an AoE the same as her normal attack, dealing ridiculous amounts of physical damage and inflicting an even more debilitating stun onto them. The most devastating thing about the skill is that each bomb can hit multiple targets, so if she sticks them onto enemies close to each other, that's causing enemies to take damage from 3-4 already powerful bombs simultaneously, which turns the damage from devastating to almost guaranteed death for anything caught in the blast. And if having high damage isn't good enough, her first Talent Ambush blesses her with a survivability surpassing even Durin and 12F, granting her up to 60% Physical and Arts dodge just from being deployed for 10 seconds. It also reduces her chance of being targeted by enemy attacks, which means that all things considered, you'd almost have to be trying to get her killed for her to kick the bucket. This talent also gives her time to charge her skills and, in the case of her second skill, plant enough bombs while staying safe even in hectic situations or placements.
- Both of W's modules amplify her strengths in different ways. Her X module gives her bonus damage against blocked enemies and increases the damage amplification from Insult to Injury, while also letting her regenerate SP on kills for faster minefields and D12 detonations. Meanwhile, her Y module lets her ignore a bit of DEF and decreases the time needed for Ambush to take effect, while also giving her a fair ATK buff if she doesn't take damage for a certain amount of time, which is almost trivial to activate due to Ambush's innate evasion and Taunt reduction.
Guards
- Bibeak
- Unusual for a welfare operator, Bibeak is deceptively powerful owing to her talent and skills. At first blush, Bibeak doesn't seem to have much going for her, being merely a Moveset Clone of Ch'en who lacks her prime counterpart's utility and damage. However, Bibeak's real strength lies in her Soul Drinker talent, which gives her +6 ASPD for every kill she personally got, and can stack up to 6 times. At max stack, Bibeak's attack pattern becomes a true Blade Spam that deals damage at a ridiculous rate, allowing her to regain her SP in very short order, as her skills are cheap to deploy to begin with. Once she has hit her stride, Bibeak becomes an unstoppable mass stun spamming machine, delivering reliable crowd control using Blade Swap that hits up to 6 enemies at once and disables them for nearly two seconds at Mastery 3, which is not very long for its SP costs, but easily remedied when pairing her with SP batteries like Warfarin or Liskarm, or with ASPD buffers like Angelina. With a constant stream of SP, Bibeak can permanently lockdown a group of enemies until they die. Better yet, it can also hold charges, not that she needs those considering her absurd SP regain rate. While underused normally, that Twilight of Wolumonde being rushed ahead of time on the global release basically turned Bibeak into a superstar almost overnight, even if she's still rather niche, since her stun spams make her a wonderful pick against the normally-dreaded Colossi who are simply too slow to even touch her when in this state, and she's considered one of the top-tier operators for Contingency Contract Blade or Lead Seal if one is aiming for a high risk level. In regards to the aforementioned Ch'en, Bibeak is now widely considered to be superior towards her higher rarity counterpart thanks to her permastunning shenanigans that Ch'en cannot replicate, additionally due to Ch'en having fallen off the meta as time passes until she got her Module upgrade.
- Chongyue
- Memes regarding his noisiness (and following 'nerf') aside, Chongyue has proven himself an extremely broken Operator befitting his role as eldest brother among the Sui siblings, with a powerful kit that sheds most of the the flaws of the Fighter archetype. Though Chongyue's ATK stat like other Fighters can only be called average at best, he compensates for this with his first Talent, An End to War, which has a percentage chance on each normal attack to increase his damage dealt to a target by up to 70% for a few seconds (and with his fast attack speed, he can keep this debuff on a target relatively consistently assuming he doesn't kill them outright), and absurdly high ATK scaling on all of his skills, with his first and second skills having maximum potential scaling of 1200% and 1100% respectively. These pale, however, to his memetic third skill, Anatta, a low cost Spam Attack with a small area of effect which, once activated five times, becomes an automatic skill (similar to the standard Power Strike), permanently buffs his attack range to a cross shape (giving him the potential to support multiple lanes at once) and makes each of his attacks, as well as the skill itself, hit twice, effectively doubling his damage output and halving the cost on this skill permanently. And as if his skills aren't spammable enough, his second Talent, All Are Guests, grants him 3 SP each time his skills defeat at least one enemy, allowing Chongyue to cast his third skill repeatedly which, coupled with the range extension he gets, mostly negates his weakness of being a 1-Block unit as he can easily slaughter entire armies before they even touch him. Additionally, because all of Chongyue's scaling is in his skills' high ATK multipliers rather than raw stats or buffs (similarly to Exusiai), he scales particularly well with ATK buffs, meaning that with buffers like Aak, Warfarin, Skadi the Corrupting Heart or Stainless, he can rip apart even high-DEF enemies within seconds. His lack of self-sustain and only modest defenses are his only real weaknesses and mean he does not completely eclipse his fellow fighter Mountain, but his ridiculous damage and strong synergy with buffs makes him a top-tier unit.
- His module makes him even stronger by giving him 15% physical dodge as a trait, which alleviates his lack of self sustain a bit. The real upgrade however is the buff to his second talent, which makes him gain 4 SP when his skill kills an enemy and gain 1 SP otherwise if it fails to kill. It allows him to get S3 to its full power sooner while spamming it more frequently once set up, increasing the potency of his strikes.
- Cutter
- Cutter makes for a deceptively powerful 4-star due to having extreme burst packed into her kit while being much cheaper to raise than Bibeak, Ch'en, Irene, or Degenbrecher. All of her skills can hit multiple targets on land or air, and have ridiculously high ATK scalings to offset the Dualstrike archetype's moderate ATK - Redshift delivers 4 hits of up to 340% of her ATK to random targets in range (up to 1360% of her ATK if only one target is in front of her), while Crimson Crescent is an AoE skill that deals up to 450% ATK to 5 targets around her and deals double damage to flying units, giving her a choice between single-target evisceration and crowd clearing. Not only do both of these have generously low SP costs, her Photoetched Marks talent gives her up to a 36% chance to recover 1 extra SP whenever she deals damage with a fully upgraded Module (which also lets her ignore 70 DEF), turning her into a Spam Attack monster that can punch through even armored foes. She's especially valuable in Integrated Strategies, as her low Hope cost makes her into a hell of a Disk One Nuke who is easy to recruit early, and her ability to synergize with a wide variety of Collectibles lets her scale even into the lategame.
- Degenbrecher
- Having been hyped up as the legendary Black Knight of Kazimierz, Degenbrecher makes her playable debut as an ungodly powerful Swordmaster Guard. She introduces the Tremble status, inflicted by her Born Warrior talent which gives her a 10% chance to crit on hit and inflict said debuff for 5 seconds, which prevents the enemy she's blocking from attacking. She's a strong duelist when it procs, and she has ways to get around its low proc rate. Her second skill, Mirthless Jest, is a potent charge-storing attack that strikes all enemies in front of her twice, with an additional hit for blocked enemies, and also guarantees the affliction of Tremble on every target hit, letting her disable several targets at once. With a bit of support, such as for her SP generation, she can interrupt attack animations and stall targets with slow attack rates nearly indefinitely. The real fun however, is with her third skill, Return to Silence. She becomes completely intangible, slashes up to 6 enemies (including aerial targets) in a large area around her ten times, guarantees her first talent and Tremble proccing on all of them, and forcibly yanks them towards her to ensure they can't escape her onslaught, finishing with a stronger pull and a more potent slash. Fitting for a Swordmaster, the skill has extremely high ATK multipliers that stack multiplicatively with the guaranteed crits from Born Warrior for some ridiculous damage output surpassing even the likes of Ch'en or Irene,note and like Ch'en's S3, Degenbrecher's intangibility allows her to completely ignore certain bosses' gimmicks (e.g. The Emperor's Blade's instakill cloud, Andoain's evasion fields) to rip them to shreds unhindered. One would think that such insane damage would be gated by a hefty cooldown, but as it so happens, Degenbrecher decided to break the rules of Swordmaster Guards only having Offensive Recovery skills, with her third skill having Auto Recovery with a low SP cost of 30 at max Mastery, meaning she doesn't even need to have something to hit to begin her slaughterfest! And as the cherry on top, her second talent Living Legend ignores 25% of the enemy's DEF when they're Trembled (including the hit that inflicted the Tremble since debuffs in general are applied first before the damage), further boosting her insane offense and letting her crush even physically bulky targets. And as with all other Swordmasters, she synergizes incredibly well with ATK buffers, and appreciates the aid of both Warfarin and Skadi the Corrupting Heart, upon which her third skill becomes so devastating that it can utterly erase most bosses. As fitting of the badass Black Knight, Degenbrecher fully lives up to her reputation, and is easily up there with the likes of Ch'en the Holungday, Surtr, Młynar, Kirin R Yato, and Texas the Omertosa as among the strongest operators in the game.
- Executor the Ex Foedere (post-module)
- Upon his release in Hortus de Escapismo, Executor was regarded as a decent but not particularly amazing operator due to some drawbacks within his kit. For starters, while all his skills run off ammo and conserve uptime, they are all Offensive Recovery and harm his uptime regardless. His first talent The Chosen One gives his attacks a chance to hit twice during the skill duration, but with a 20% chance at baseline that increases by 5% for each ammo he consumes, the odds of it activating are somewhat unreliable, especially with his first and second skills that have lower ammo counts and thus give him less chances for the talent to activate. This is before accounting for both of those skills' individual problems — his first skill has a rather meager ATK buff despite its sizeable DEF ignore, and while his second skill makes him tankier with a defense buff and chance of dodging attacks (which also extends his skill duration by restoring ammo), him being an unhealable Reaper Guard makes it inadvisable for him to actually block enemies with it. This leaves his third skill, Damnatus Ex Foedere as his main option, which is legitimately potent — at the cost of just a slight attack speed decrease, he gains a massive +180% ATK buff, a stacking +6% ATK buff that can stack up to 30 times for another +180% ATK, tripled healing from his class's trait, and a global final slash that deals 250% of his ATK to every enemy who got attacked by him but survived his onslaught during skill at max mastery, along with the highest ammo count of his skills at 16 (or up to 20 if you have four Laterano operators deployed through his second talent Empathy of Bullets) and the ability to manually deactivate it to not waste its uptime while still dealing the final slash. However, the skill is very heavily reliant on his first talent activating, as he gains twice as many ATK buff stacks and twice as much healing from attacks it activates on due to them landing twice, making both his damage output and survival a Luck-Based Mission and thus making his performance heavily unreliable even with his best skill. However, this would change with the release of his REA-X module, an obscenely powerful module that rivals even the likes of Specter the Unchained's PUM-X module. Along with stat increases, among which is an attack speed increase that counteracts his third skill's attack speed decrease, the base chance of his first talent's activation is bumped up to 35% from 20% at max level, making it far more reliable to activate even at the start of his skill and, and this chance only increasing as it progresses. This in turn directly improves his third skill on all fronts, as the increased chance for hit twice makes it easier for him to ramp up his damage and keep himself alive. The kicker, however, is the additional effect of him getting to ignore a whopping 300 DEF on attacks his talent activates on, meaning he can ignore a massive amount of DEF on two attacks that are both boosted by at least +180% ATK, and because the module already increases the odds of this happening and in turn the odds of speeding up the damage ramp-up of that skill, Executor's damage output reaches utterly monstrous levels that truly cement him as a proper Game-Breaker. His module is such a game-changer that the Reaper Guard modules were outright released early in Hortus de Escapismo on the Global, JP and KR servers so that players wouldn't have to wait a few months to truly make him shine note .
- Gavial the Invincible
- After her introduction, Gavial the Invincible has largely dethroned Blaze as the game's most powerful Centurion Guard as her skills largely do what Blaze is capable of but far better. Her first skill, Precision Strikes, gives her a damage boost as well as a lifesteal effect, which gives Gavial a self sustain capability which allows her to hold solo lanes. Her second skill, Chainsaw Assault, is basically Blaze's Chainsaw Extension Module but better in every way. Chainsaw Assault at Mastery 3 grants her a massive +180% ATK and +50% DEF steroid, expands her range to that of a Spreadshooter Sniper, and even turns Gavial into a pseudo-puller as it sucks in enemies towards her. Just about the only thing Chainsaw Assault doesn't have over Chainsaw Extension Module is its infinite duration, but that is greatly offset by the fact that it has a hefty 40 second duration with a shockingly cheap SP cost of 35 at max Mastery. Her third skill, Jungle Spirit, turns her into a nigh unkillable juggernaut with +120% ATK, +100 ASPD, +2 block count, and reduces the amount of damage she takes during this state by 50%, including True Damage of all things, which is later applied to her as a damage over time effect after the skill ends. This gives Gavial the ability to hold highly contested lanes with multiple enemies pushing them down, and wiping them out with massive burst damage. She is further boosted by her talents Battle Axe and Medical Background, which increase her ATK and DEF for every enemy blocked and increase her healing received respectively, the latter synergizing incredibly well with her third skill to quickly heal off the recoil damage. Furthermore, the slow constant damage over time from her third skill allow her great synergy with other SP batteries like Saria and Quercus whose healing skills can be applied repeatedly over time, keeping her patched up while greatly restoring her SP over time.
- Gavial the Invincible is also noteworthy for being an excellent partner to the even bigger Game-Breaker Młynar, due to the uptime of her S2 matching closely to the downtime of Młynar's S3. Pairing the two and rotating between their skills creates an absolutely lethal offensive core that easily decimates everything in their general vicinity.
- Lappland
- Lappland has zig-zagged between being a gamebreaker and being relegated to just another Lord Guard over the course of the game. The current meta view is that she's one of the stronger Lord Guards in general and when she's in a position where her talent and skills can be put to use she's gamebreakingly powerful.
- She follows the same ranged Guard archetype as SilverAsh, but whereas he's specialized in doing a lot of damage, she is unique for her Power Nullifier passive Spiritual Destruction that's unlocked at Elite 1, causing each attack to inflict a Silence that prevents enemies from using their active skills and lasts 5 seconds at Elite 2note . Remember those pesky Sarkaz Casters? Or the Infused Originium Slugs that blow up on death and taking out your operators as well? How about the always annoying Defense Crushers that stun your defenders like a joke? Lappland seals all of their annoying skills on hit. All of them. Just beware that many higher-level enemies and bosses have immunity to Silence, and things like revivals are fixed scripts inside the game. In addition, her second skill Wolf Spirit massively boosts her ATK, takes away the damage penalty normally applied to her ranged attacks, lets her hit two targets simultaneously, and makes her deal Arts damage as though she was a caster, making her guaranteed to punch holes in anything she turns her swords on. Lappland single-handedly renders an incredible variety of enemy types near harmless because of Spiritual Destruction, and she's capable of nearly trivializing the entirety of Chapter 6 due to the Yeti Squadron's reliance on their special abilities - and even when enemies can No-Sell her Silence, she can still output a lot of damage to make up for it. Even on CN builds of the game, she's still one of the premier ranged Guards you could pull, due to the on-hit nature of her talent compared to similar sealing effects of Waai Fu, Nian or Podenco, who need to be manually deployed or have their skill activated with careful timing in order to maximize their effectiveness.
- Unfortunately though, the aforementioned Silence nerf did eventually start dragging down Lappland heavily after some time. In addition to her utility being rendered mostly redundant in later content, her S2 has wonky reliability due to activating automatically when charged, whereas other ranged Guards with a similar ability to convert their attacks into Arts damage, such as Midnight, Ayerscarpe, and Arene, can activate their skills manually when charged. She shot back up in the meta during Dossoles Holiday, where she can silence the Dockworkers' stun and can disable the explosive self-destruct of the bomb boats, which neutralizes the threat of two of the most dangerous enemies. Later content also adds in more enemies that can be neutralized by Silence, notably in Chapter 9 when she can disable the Arts refraction on the Dublinn soldiers as well as the abilities of some of the elites, and Break the Ice where she can shut off the explode-on-death of the Arts soldiers. She is especially useful in "Stultifera Navis" as the newly introduced Sea Terror's have an innate Dodge that can only be removed through debuffs, including Silence.
- La Pluma
- As the first of the Reaper Guards to be introduced, La Pluma left a strong impression on the community. For starters, she can hit everything in her range with no upper limit while also healing for each enemy she hits (up to her block count), making her a monstrously strong crowd-clearing machine right off the bat despite her inability to be healed normally. However, La Pluma enjoys a cheaper DP cost compared to both Centurion and Soloblade Guards, allowing her to be deployed easier than either of them while retaining surprisingly high stats. While she doesn't get any ASPD buffs as she loses health, her talent Into the Groove is similar to Bibeak where she gains a permanent stacking ASPD buff each time she kills an enemy. At full stacks at Elite 2, this translates to a 36% attack speed bonus, increasing the rate at which she tears into enemies and therefore heals herself. Her skills both synergize well with this - her first skill Rapid Slashing is a double-hit ATK multiplier that fires every third attack at M3, while her second skill Reap jacks up her attack speed and ATK, while also giving her a major ATK boost against low health enemies. Together, these make her a Spam Attack monster of the highest caliber, with La Pluma on S1 doling out heavy sustained area DPS, while S2 lets her shred priority targets or waves. Combining many of the strengths of both AoE and Enmity Guards while surprisingly minimizing their weaknesses, La Pluma with a few talent stacks (or even better, her skill up) can bully crowded lanes by herself and even decimate a good chunk of enemy armies with only minimal support. While she has her weaknesses (most notably her below-average HP and comparatively low ATK), her strengths more than make up for them.
- Młynar
- Młynar's promotion to playable status has all but singlehandedly shaken the entire metagame due to his absolutely absurd power that has marked him as a candidate for one of, if not the strongest unit in the entire game. As the first 6-star Liberator Guard, Młynar does not block or attack unless his skill is active, but once it is, total destruction is soon to follow. His third skill, Unbrilliant Glory, is nicknamed "Truegolden Slash" by many players for essentially being SilverAsh's signature skill on steroids, being a massive area of effect attack hitting up to 5 targets for up 180% of Młynar's ATK, which may not seem like that large of a scaling until you realize that the skill also doubles his Trait's ATK bonus when it is activated, meaning Młynar's ATK is increased by +400% with a fully charged Trait. While the Trait buff is reduced by 10% per enemy slain while the skill is active, it completely outdamages Truesilver Slash until Młynar loses most of his Trait bonus by which point everything on the map has likely been completely wiped. Even most bosses cannot withstand the damage
of a fully charged S3 and will fall within the skill's duration. On top of that, the skill also buffs Kazimierz-affiliated Operators to deal True damage to enemies in the skill's range, allowing units like Blemishine, Nearl the Radiant Knight, himself, and even Gravel (who especially benefits due to her attacks hitting twice and the extra damage scaling off Młynar's ATK rather than her own) to deal bonus unmitigated DPS for free. While Młynar cannot be effectively helidropped for his skill like SilverAsh can due to the need to charge his Trait, this is compensated for by his meager DP cost of 12 (10 with max Potential), lower than most Vanguards, allowing him to be deployed early and start charging at the very start of the stage. If that wasn't enough, Młynar also has incredible HP and DEF with 3-Block while attacking, and his Wanderer Talent reduces incoming damage to him by 15% on top of giving him even more ATK when three or more enemies are nearby, meaning he can take damage just as well as he dishes it out; he even manages to have presence on the map while his skill is inactive thanks to his Unmoved Talent which increases his Taunt level and lets all Kazimierz units (including himself) reflect 15% of his ATK as True damage to attackers, giving him utility against ranged threats and allowing him to cover for squishier units without needing to worry about deployment order. As a result of his monstrous area of effect damage and durability, Młynar is an absolutely insane Operator with few, if any real flaws save for his downtime while charging his skill, and challenges other Game-Breaker units such as Surtr and Ch'en the Holungday at the very top of the meta for the title of absolute best Operator in the game.
- Młynar's promotion to playable status has all but singlehandedly shaken the entire metagame due to his absolutely absurd power that has marked him as a candidate for one of, if not the strongest unit in the entire game. As the first 6-star Liberator Guard, Młynar does not block or attack unless his skill is active, but once it is, total destruction is soon to follow. His third skill, Unbrilliant Glory, is nicknamed "Truegolden Slash" by many players for essentially being SilverAsh's signature skill on steroids, being a massive area of effect attack hitting up to 5 targets for up 180% of Młynar's ATK, which may not seem like that large of a scaling until you realize that the skill also doubles his Trait's ATK bonus when it is activated, meaning Młynar's ATK is increased by +400% with a fully charged Trait. While the Trait buff is reduced by 10% per enemy slain while the skill is active, it completely outdamages Truesilver Slash until Młynar loses most of his Trait bonus by which point everything on the map has likely been completely wiped. Even most bosses cannot withstand the damage
- Mountain
- An unexpected one is Mountain. As he belonged to a historically underused archetype, the (Brawler Guard), the expectations for him weren't that high - even with the buffs Hypergryph applied to this archetype in order to scale them better. However, since his cost is low (lower than that of some Vanguards, in fact note ), and his skills turned out to provide a fair level of versatility, he soon rose to becoming a staple in many high-end teams. In particular is his second skill, Sweeping Stance, a toggled skill with a dirt cheap cost of 5 at max Mastery (it follows the same path as Surtr's third skill when it comes to SP Cost in fact) which decreases his DEF but gives him regenerating health per second note , increased block count, the ability to hit all blocked units, and an attack buff. Despite the DEF drop, the life regen makes him able to tank a fair bit similar to SilverAsh, while also letting him deal serious damage to multiple targets at once - it helps that his second talent Sturdy Constitution, which buffs his DEF and gives him physical dodge, helps mitigate the downsides of the skill. The amount of HP granted can become up to 7% per second, enough to let him bully less hectic lanes all by his lonesome considering the DEF drop decreases as you level the skill. His third skill, Earth-Shattering Smash increases his attack interval in exchange for a huge attack buff (it's essentially his base ATK doubled at max mastery), but also raises the chance of his Forceful Fist talent triggering (a Critical Hit that also decreases the ATK of the enemy on hit, which he can easily trigger over and over thanks to his ASPD), and makes his attacks hit twice. This renders the attack interval being increased moot and he can now also hit 3 enemies at once similarly to an AoE Guard. While this doesn't raise his block count, it now also pushes enemies away in the four cardinal tiles that surround him (which makes him a rare melee non-Specialist operator capable of Shifting enemies), and when they try to walk back, they can take even more damage. Whereas this knockback is similar to that of Mostima, it does not make him a Low-Tier Letdown, since the range is way smaller than that of hers.
- In addition, his third skill can, with some calculation, not only push enemies into holes, but also halt certain enemies from casting their abilities, like the Bladehelm Knightclub Trainees and Bladehelm Knightclub Elites. It even has its anti-Wraith and anti-Avenger uses, since it continuously pushes the enemies back, giving others more time to burst them down and prevents the Avengers from dealing high damage, especially when you're in a high-risk Contingency Contract where they're buffed to high heaven.
- Mountain's low DP cost has led to him even being used as a Vanguard, as per Not the Intended Use, for situations where dealing with early pressure and holding a steady ground is preferred above DP generation. This also syncs when one relies on Flagbearer Vanguards to generate DP, since they cannot block nor attack when they're doing so. Multi-target hits as well as being pretty sturdy overall is something that's valued a lot in a unit with such a low windup time and DP Cost, which makes him able to function much like Spot or Cardigan. Since he has staying power, one does not necessarily need to replace him when things do get tougher.
- Nearl the Radiant Knight
- While the original Nearl was still a very solid Guardian Defender since the launch of the game, she sadly suffered a bad case of Overshadowed by Awesome due to Saria (also listed on this page) being a far more versatile Guardian Defender whose excellent utility blows her lower rarity counterparts out of the water. As the Radiant Knight however, Nearl has become the epitome of what a strong and powerful Dreadnought Guard should be, succeeding where the previous 6-star Dreadnought Skadi failed. Her second skill Night Scouring Gleam doubles down on her role as a helidrop asssassin, letting her bypass the deployment limit while giving her a massive ATK buff and damage-blocking shields on deployment; sure, it'll retreat her and extend her redeployment time once the duration ends, but not only can the latter be negated if the last deployed unit was from Kazimierz, the havoc she can wreak during the duration more than outweighs the cost. The skill also has synergy with her first talent Brave the Darkness that causes her to deal heavy True damage and a stun to everything in range on deployment, making her even more of a nuke. Meanwhile, her S3 Blazing Sun's Obeisance summons a Blazing Sun on a nearby tile (stunning and dealing True damage to everything in the area), expands her range, buffs her ATK and DEF, and most notably makes her regular attacks deal True damage when attacking enemies blocked by herself or the Blazing Sun. Not only does the very tanky Blazing Sun alleviate the block weakness of her class, it lets her output terrifying amounts of damage regardless of the target's defense, making her one of the best "boss/elite killers" available. And to top it all off, her Daybreak passive causes her to outright ignore 20% of the target's DEF (and upgrading her Module increases the amount of defense piercing her talent provides), so she's going to be cracking through armored units even without her multiple sources of true damage. She certainly did back up the claim that her shield was holding her back, after all.
- Much like Kal'tsit, Nearl's specialty in dishing out true damage with her S3 lets her stay relevant as a boss killer, cracking through barriers and damage reductions with ease.
- SilverAsh
- Ever since the game's release, SilverAsh has been the Game Breaker personified. He does a lot of things and does them very well.
- As a Lord Guard, he makes for an awesome tank, especially since his second skill Rules of Survival gives him a hefty DEF steroid and high HP recovery to let him survive for far longer than many other guards could, at the easily ignorable cost of restricting him to essentially melee range. At max level, this skill gives SilverAsh defenses that can make even the hardiest Defender green with envy and allows him to replace them if necessary or defend isolated lanes due to his regenerating health.
- SilverAsh is also a surprisingly powerful duelist that also has the advantage of being able to attack at range and hit air enemies. This is due to the fact that at M3, his normally-unremarkable S1 allows it to be triggered in just two attacks, causing every third hit to strike for a massive 290% of SilverAsh's attack power. It is a powerful skill if one opts for a SilverAsh with more consistent damage output, preferably behind someone else for additional protection while defending lanes. If necessary, he also can tank fairly well due to being a Guard with good HP and DEF like any good duelist.
- However, while both S1 and S2 has their uses, it pales in comparison towards his final skill once unlocked: Truesilver Slash. To put it simply, it drops his DEF but grants a ridiculous attack steroid (up to +200% ATK at Mastery 3), massively widens his attack range, and grants his attacks AoE properties that lets him hit up to 6 targets at once at Mastery 3. With it, he can deal high (read: insane) AoE damage over a huge range with a similarly huge duration of 20-30 seconds, without the 20% damage reduction usually found within the Ranged Guard subclass - even better since SilverAsh is a ground unit, which means he has much more flexible placement in the field than high ground units. To put things into perspective of just how busted this skill is, True Silver Slash has such a high damage output that he can comfortably burst down most of the enemy types in the meta, regardless of their resistances - even melting through the likes of Defense Crushers. Sure, it has a long cooldown, but many Annihilation or challenge maps can be cleared simply by deploying and pointing him in the right direction. And if you buff him with Aak's third skill or with Warfarin's second skill, Truesilver Slash will become the true Game Breaker note . Better yet, he can use it a surprisingly short time after he's deployed - combined with his talent (see below), he can create some insane heli-dropping strategies. Sure, the skill decreases his defense, but who needs defense if no enemy can even get close to you?
- His talent Leader naturally reduces the redeployment timer of everyone else, which becomes more effective as he's promoted, which give players more breathing room in case they need to redeploy faster. This talent is tailor-made for helidropping practices, and especially synergizes well with Executor Specialists like Texas the Omertosa and Kirin R Yato. At Elite 2, he also gains the Eagle Eyes talent which confers True Sight, making Detectors redundant and ruining the days of every enemy with invisibility. He's one of the only five operators who can do this in the game as of the time of writing, three of them being Elysiumnote , Tsukinoginote , and Scenenote , whereas SilverAsh does it passively and without an upper limit on how many he can reveal at once. The only operators who can match his consistency with his True Sight are Ines,note who is a Game-Breaker herself in the Vanguards folder, and Sentinel Defenders with their Modules, who are limited to a smaller range.
- To put things into perspective: while Hypergryph had been hard at work introducing 4 and 5-star Moveset Clones of the other operators on this page, none so far have been able to ape SilverAsh's repertoire, especially his True Silver Slash (seeing as it's a S3, odds are nobody under 6-star ever will), which makes him a one-of-a-kind Game Breaker in the meta. Only with the release of the utterly ridiculous 6-star Młynar was SilverAsh's place in the meta finally challenged (read Młynar's own entry for elaboration) yet SilverAsh still remains as a monstrous force within the scope of the game. Nowadays, SilverAsh is mainly used for his utility rather than his damage, yet the combination of the two is still amazing enough for him to keep his title as a game breaker.
- Ever since the game's release, SilverAsh has been the Game Breaker personified. He does a lot of things and does them very well.
- Specter
- As if Blaze wasn't strong enough, Specter with her Bone Fracture skill firing puts everyone else to shame. Put simply, for as long as her S2 is active, Specter has massively boosted attack, but most importantly cannot die, periodnote . In certain aspects, she can even be considered Blaze's superior, as her survivability is tied to a skill instead of a one-time talent, meaning she can shrug off death multiple times per level, completely at the player's discretion instead of automatically firing when below a certain health percentage. As the cherry on top, her self-stun after her S2 expires can be a blessing in disguise, since her threat priority will go down and melee enemies will not attack her, allowing Specter a moment of respite as her Abyssal Regeneration talent restores her HP. Her mettle was put to the test during Contingency Contract, where certain enemies are massively buffed such that they can take out supremely tough Defenders like Hoshiguma in a single tap. In fact, some high-risk strategies basically demand that you have Specter, as any other tank will not work. As such, Specter stands as the queen of tanks in the meta, so long as her S2 can be consistently activated. The only crimp to her kit is the relatively short duration of her S2, even when fully mastered, at a cap of 15 seconds, which can be troublesome when fighting beefy enemies without damage support from other operators. If you lack Specter and a difficult event rolls over (Contingency Contract, for example), you're probably gonna be in for a bad time - no matter how durable an Operator is, it doesn't make much of a difference as long as they can still die in the end. Only with her Unchained alter's PUM-X module released and upgraded was Specter's staying power finally challenged, yet she still remains an great option for holding down a lane.
- Surtr
- Surtr's ridiculous power and ease of use has caused her to garner infamy ever since her release. From the get-go, she deals Arts damage and has the Molten Flame talent which gives her the rare ability to ignore up to 22 RES, which instantly gives her a huge advantage over all other Arts Fighters and even most Arts units in the game. While her second skill Molten Giant is powerful for when she needs consistent damage output on a short cooldown and is a solid skill if one wants to use her as a front-liner, her third skill Twilight takes all of this to huge extremes - it gives her up to +330% ATK at Mastery 3, increases her range and target limit, and gives her +5000 HP while healing her to full HP,note at the cost of her HP burning away every second at an exponentially increasing rate. While she's unlikely to last long while the skill is activenote , she can inflict catastrophic damage while it is, outright deleting hordes of enemies off the face of the earth while shrugging off all harm thanks to the gigantic HP boost. Even high-RES enemies aren't safe due to her talent, letting her crunch through even tough bosses by her lonesome. And on top of this, her second talent Remnant Ash lets her defy death for a few seconds when killed, giving her up to 9 more seconds of nuclear Arts attacks before she kicks the bucket. While the burst and HP-draining nature of her third skill make her unsuited for sustained combat, the sheer damage she can inflict is catastrophic enough to make up for it and more, making her one of the most commonly seen picks for bursting down endgame bosses and hyper-buffed enemies in Contingency Contracts. Furthermore, because her skill is charged seconds after deployment, she has incredible value as a helidrop operator - release her to cause havoc until she burns herself out, retreat her, and repeat. Really, Surtr just trivializes most content in the game, while making extremely difficult content like high-risk CC much easier - after all, who cares about dying when all of the enemies die with you?
- To put it into perspective how powerful Surtr is, a significant amount of content released after her introduction seems to have been balanced with her in mind, particularly the amount of anti-burst and anti-Arts measures present; Operation Lead Seal in particular introduced RES-buffing contracts that hyperinflated enemy RES and HP so much that even a Surtr with a Mastery 3 Twilight wouldn't be able to punch through them easily, along with more redeployment-time contracts to make helidropping harder.note Considering that Hypergryph has shown restraint when buffing or nerfing specific Operators in the past, it's likely going to stay this way for a while.
- Tequila
- Surprisingly for a welfare Operator, Tequila found himself under the spotlight soon after his release. While he cannot attack or block while his skill isn't active, he's an absolute monster when he does, with his S2 Esoteric Bladework giving him a significant damage multiplier and letting him hit 2 targets at once in an expanded range; the skill can also be double-charged to let him hit 3 targets and double the duration. Combine that with the Liberator Guards' trait which ramps up his ATK to triple the original over 40 seconds, and he's capable of dealing well over a thousand damage per hit to multiple enemies with 1000+ DEF, tearing through entire groups of tough foes without breaking a sweat. His inability to block during his chargeup time can also play in his favor, letting him slip right by melee units until he's ready to unleash hell; when he is attacking, not only can he block 3 units, his above-average defensive stats can easily help him stay alive as he goes to town. The real kicker is that not only is he very cheap to deploy (at only 10 DP with full potentials, which are easy to get due to his welfare status), his S2 has a short 20 second cooldown (40 if double-charged, which will also fully charge his trait) and a 15 (30 if double-charged) second duration at Rank 7, giving it good uptime while also being able to be cancelled early, letting Tequila start charging up for when he needs to burst. Some have even compared it to a weaker Truesilver Slash with a much shorter cooldown, which says a lot when it's not only from a free unit, but actually not that far behind the ability in question when it comes to single-target DPS. Further, since he's a melee operator, he allows for much more options in placement than Phalanx Casters like Mint, Beeswax and Carnelian do, and also has a great synergy with SP batteries like Liskarm and Warfarin due to this.
- His talent, Waiting Game, allows him to reflect up to 23% of his ATK as Arts damage to enemies when he is idle, so Tequila isn't just a sitting duck as you wait for his skill to charge up again. The damage reflection helps allow him to become a bait to protect squishier units from enemy snipers and drones, Arts damage from casters, along with elemental damage from the Armorless Union archers from Near Light and the Dublinn Flamerazers from Chapter 9. With some medic help to maintain his health, this allows Tequila to take out enemies by doing nothing at all and rely purely on the reflection damage from his talent.
- Tequila also breaks the game in an entirely different way with his RIIC Base skill Investment, which increases the LMD earned from trade offers of at least 4 Pure Gold when he's assigned to a Trading Post. While impractical on its own, it forms the core of the powerful Tequila/Shamare/Bibeak team — Shamare's skill Whispers grants the other operators assigned to her Trading Post a +45% productivity buff, making up for Tequila's own lack of a productivity-boosting skill, while Bibeak's Tailoring dramatically increases the odds of recieving high-yield Precious Metal orders.note With the two of them supporting him, Tequila will grant you free LMD for almost every order his Trading Post recieves, and this quickly adds up over time. The only real drawback to this combination is that all three operators need to be at Elite 2 in to either unlock or make full use of their relevant skills, but as evidenced by all three of them already having a spot on this page for their combat utility, there are plenty of other benefits to promoting them.
- Thorns
- Thorns is considered to be one of the most overpowered Operators when it comes to versatility and sustained damage output, mostly due to his S3, Destreza, that increases his range to that of a Sniper, buffs his ATK/ASPD, and removes the 20% ATK reduction he normally suffers from as a ranged guard. That would normally be okay, but what makes it so strong is that when used a second time, the bonuses double and the duration becomes infinitenote . Once you let him attack enough to charge his skill twice (which is only 30 attacks in total), he essentially becomes a ground sniper on steroids that can demolish just about anything that dares enter his range, and unlike snipers he not only has more flexibility regarding his placement, but also still retains the high stats of a guard on top of his range and fire rate, essentially turning him into a Master of All. The icing on the cake is that like Blue Poison, his talent Nerve Corrosion makes his attacks deal additional Arts damage over time - but it's a lot stronger than Blue Poison, especially since the damage doubles if it affects a ranged target. While he does need some time to set up (making him a poor choice for very hectic maps),note Thorns with his S3 up is capable of handling a good chunk of most maps (if not the whole map) by his lonesome, especially since his second talent, Echoes of Ancestral Waves, gives him high HP regen when not attacking to make sure he'll almost always be engaging battle at full health as long as he has a bit of breathing room between waves.
- In the first two iterations of Integrated Strategies, he's a very excellent Operator choice on the game mode for his flexible ability to perform just about every role needed (something valuable in a mode with very limited Operators), making him an incredible pick if you happen to get him. He's not as good at specialized tasks as Silverashnote , Blazenote or Surtrnote . It also takes a bit of time to charge his 3rd skill, but once it's up, you get a ranged Operator who can cover 3 lanes by himself, deals high enough damage to deal with high-defense enemies, attacks quickly enough to deal with a Zerg Rushes reasonably well, and has enough self-regen to hold a lane without a healer. His 2nd skill is also useful in specific situations, namely as early-game AoE option, and to tank the Wandering Puppet mid-boss with a single-target Medic support. Unfortunately, the loss of guaranteed Elite 2 starts in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor has hurt his value due to his poor performance without his S3, but he is still a powerful and useful operator should you get him to that point.
- However, it should be noted that Thorns is a somewhat rarer sight for developed accounts nowadays. To be fair, this isn't so much a 'Thorns' problem so much as lane holders in general due to a meta shift largely caused by the advent of incredibly powerful DPS Operators who enable much more fast-paced offensive strategies that don't depend on holding lanes as much as in the past. That said, Thorns does have a couple of issues mostly specific to him that gives him some trouble in modern content. Being the only traditional lane holder unit with absolutely no multi-targeting or area of effect on his main skill means he is often prone to being held up by a particularly tanky enemy while other enemies slip by him, but his reliance on an Offensive Recovery skill that needs to be charged twice is arguably the bigger problem, as the charging requirements not only cause him to struggle with stages that more frequently involve enemies that immediately Zerg Rush towards your base, but also means he interacts badly with the aforementioned DPS units such as Młynar, Horn, Pozëmka, Typhon, etc. who deal so much damage from range that they often just end up wiping mobs off the map near instantly, giving Thorns nothing to attack and charge his skill with. On the other hand, Thorns is still worthy of Game-Breaker status overall due to being the backbone for many players with smaller rosters that don't have those units for all the strengths mentioned above that he still has, meaning he hasn't fallen out of favor as badly as other units such as Blaze and can still hold his weight. In short, how well Thorns performs nowadays tends to depend on how much you need or want to rely on him, as he is still a worthy choice for players more comfortable with the 'older' meta.
- Zuo Le
- Zuo Le is a surprisingly powerful operator despite being a Soloblade Guard, which is an archetype that has historically struggled with various contents in the game, due to his complementary talents and skills. His first talent, Candlelit Shadow, grants him only +70 ASPD when his HP falls below 50% with a fully upgraded module, but he makes up for it by buffing his SP recovery speed by +2.3 SP/s, more than tripling his SP regeneration. It's already a powerful talent on its own, but his second talent, Code of Virtue, doubles down on this by giving him a 20% chance to generate 1 SP every time he attacks, which more than triples to 70% when his HP falls below 50%. Both of these feed well into his primary skills due to their low cooldowns, with his second and third skills costing 20 SP and 25 SP, respectively, and that's before getting into their effects. His S2, Treacherous Journey, when fully mastered cuts his HP by half, but grants him a HP-based shield similar to Penance that scales to 120% of his max HP and can stack up to 200% of his max HP, giving him what's effectively a ton of extra HP without disabling the buffs from his talents. He also gets a +170% ATK buff and a +1 block count buff while striking both enemies at the same time, basically turning him into a pseudo-Reaper Guard. Meanwhile, his S3, Glory Be to Yan, makes him immediately slash 7 times to the three tiles in front of him, with 6 of the slashes each dealing 245% of his ATK as damage to 3 enemies, while the last slash deals 490% of his ATK as damage and stuns those hit for 5 seconds at M3, giving him time to get his skill running again without his targets attacking or getting past him. The skill additionally triples his trait HP recovery and converts the HP gained to a shield that can get up to 200% of his max HP. Such a ridiculously cheap and potent combination of damage, survivability, and utility allow him to tank most types of damages reliably, since his shield can absorb both physical and Arts damages without RNG, deal damage just as hard in the process of regenerating his shield, and address the Soloblade Guard's 1-block weakness by directly buffing his block count or dealing a multi-target stun. The only downside is his shield gradually decaying once his skill ends, but the low effective SP cost means he's likely to survive with only a little hit to his actual HP until he can regain his shield should the worst happen.
Defenders
- Cuora
- Cuora is widely considered to be among the most overpowered 4-star operators and a hell of a Disc-One Nuke if you get her early.note Her absurdly high base defense coupled with Defense Specialist that gives her up to +12% bonus DEF for free gives her physical durability that eclipses even 6-star Defenders, but that's just the beginning - Shell Defense further boosts her DEF to downright silly levels, lets her go up to block 4 (something that almost no other Operators can do), and causes her to rapidly regenerate her HP. Combined, these make her one of the most effective pure physical tanks in the game, with a sufficiently leveled Cuora able to hit nearly two thousand defense all by herself. Coupled with the fact that Protector Defenders tend to lose value once you hit high level content due to most of them doing little but blocking, Cuora's 4-star rarity makes her much less costly to raise in the early game when resources are scarce and where she is most valuable. Furthermore, while this is quite a lot of investment for an early game unit, her Module is another option that gives her more long-term value, as while all it does is give her more DEF when blocking (and its upgrade improves her Talent to 18% bonus DEF, giving her even more), that is all Cuora needs to do her job even against the most dangerous physical enemies in the game. To put things into perspective, with max level and Trust as well as her level 3 Module, and while blocking an enemy for the base Module's effect, Cuora has over 1200 DEF without her skill active, blowing most other Defenders out of the water. The only ones who can compete are her fellow Protectors Hoshiguma and Nian due to their talents and higher stats from being 2 rarities higher, but that alone says a lot about Cuora's strength.note
- Horn
- Horn is an extremely powerful Fortress Defender who specializes in ramping her killpower up the wazoo, while still retaining great survivability as a Defender. Her first skill, Flare Grenade, increases the damage and splash radius of her next attack and creates a zone of light that reveals all invisible enemies in range; although the invisibility reveal is niche at best, the skill's fairly high multipliers and Auto Trigger make it useful as an AFK skill. Her second skill, Tempest Command, buffs her next 10 attacks to deal increased area damage, and after 5 attacks, she enters Overdrive, causing her remaining 5 attacks to deal an additional hit of Arts damage; if cancelled manually during Overdrive, she instead consumes 60% of her HP and fires off all of her remaining attacks at once for humongous damage, making it useful when immediate burst is needed while also notably allowing her to deal splash damage with her melee attacks. However, her third skill, Ultimate Line of Defense, is incredibly cracked. For 24 seconds, Horn gains a huge 70% ATK buff at max Mastery and starts attacking as fast as a Marksman Sniper, and once she hits Overdrive after 12 seconds, the Attack buff doubles at the cost of her gradually losing HP per second - the sheer damage she's pumping out more than makes up for this, plus it can also be manually cancelled to prevent wasted uptime and unnecessary HP loss. Like Saria, all of her skills are generally considered excellent contenders for Mastery 3, making her a very flexible operator. On top of that, Military Fortress grants a good 20% Attack buff to all Defenders when she's deployed, making Juggernauts like Mudrock kill faster, Guardians like Saria heal more, and also increasing her own damage even higher than it already is. Meanwhile, her second talent, Bloodbath, is basically a free Auto-Revive once per deployment, halving her Max HP but granting her bonus ASPD and Defense when her HP hits zero, which offsets her self-damage and actually sometimes makes it advisable to trigger it early with Horn's self damage and give her even more killpower. All of these attributes make Horn one of the strongest operators released by far, capable of flattening entire scores of elite enemies as long as she can keep them in her range.
- Horn's module is a small but appreciable buff to her already massive power. On top of making her deal 10% more damage to blocked enemies, amplifying her ability to flatten chokepoints, it gives her her some more ATK/DEF to work with and up to 8% more ATK on Military Fortress, further buffing her own strength and that of her team.
- Liskarm
- The sheer utility of Liskarm cannot be stressed enough. Despite her otherwise lackluster kit, Liskarm is heavily prized for one reason: her talent. Starting from Elite 1, Liskarm gains the Tactical Defense talent that gives 1 SP to all operators placed on tiles in the four cardinal directions to her, making her an excellent battery for those who require a lot of SP to fire their skills. While one don't normally get much mileage out of it due to the slow attack rate of most enemies in the game, when she's being mobbed or wailed upon by units with very high ASPD (e.g. Brawlers), Liskarm starts churning out SP at a staggering rate, such that most operators won't even have a moment of downtime in between skill uses. If you've got Aak, you can even produce your own SP burst whenever you desire (and Aak's skills are off cooldown). When placed next to Vanguards with auto skills, Liskarm can kick their DP generation into overdrive, while her sitting next to Medics or certain Defenders will allow them to output unparalleled healing, and turn main DPS operators into damage monsters. As a result, Liskarm is extremely valuable in cheese strategies, and can make nearly every operator usable, if not godly (see Bibeak's entry above).
- The sheer utility of Liskarm cannot be stressed enough. Despite her otherwise lackluster kit, Liskarm is heavily prized for one reason: her talent. Starting from Elite 1, Liskarm gains the Tactical Defense talent that gives 1 SP to all operators placed on tiles in the four cardinal directions to her, making her an excellent battery
- Mudrock
- Mudrock managed to have an impact on the meta within the first weeks of her release. As a Juggernaut Defender like Vulcan, she makes up for her inability to be directly healed with very high stats all around and a plethora of ways to make sure she stays healthy. Her first talent Ward of the Fertile Soil causes her to periodically generate stacking shields which not only each negate an instance of damage (no matter how much it would have done), but also heal her for up to 22% of her max HP when one breaks. With this, she can easily brush off an Infused Originium Slug's explosion with even more health than she had before. Not to mention that this also negates certain status effects - for example, if she blocks an attack that would have stunned her, she will not be stunned. In addition to blowing Nian's talent out of the water, this alone gives Mudrock insane survivability considering each stack only takes 9 seconds to generate, but her second skill Crag Splitter is a fast-charging attack that strikes all foes around her for massive damage and a potential stun while also healing her for a percent of her max HP. Combine the two with her high stats, and you get a Defender who can output massive damage while still refusing to die, laughing at onslaughts that would have killed just about anyone else as her shields and S2 keep her HP topped up. And if one wants to forgo a bit of sustain for some crowd control, her third skill Bloodline of Desecrated Earth is both a slow and a delayed AoE stun that also gives her significant ATK and DEF buffs along with rapid multi-target attacks and temporary intangibility and invulnerability during the startup. During this downtime of 10 seconds, she also generates another shield layer as a failsafe should something go wrong. Her Elite 2 talent Unshakeable Solidarity that makes her take 30% reduced damage from Sarkaz enemies is the icing on the cake, since despite its Situational Sword nature, Sarkaz enemies more often than not tend to be Demonic Spiders - which made her a common pick in CC Cinder, where the permanent map almost solely spawns annoying Sarkaz at you. In particular, this talent is part of why she is a great counter against Sarkaz lancers, considering that they tend to spin around long enough for her shields to generate and completely nullify their boosted charge that would One-Hit Kill any other operator.
- Mudrock also has a very potent synergy with Blemishine, whose Knight of Sword and Shield talent causes skills that use defensive SP recovery to also gain SP on attack...which includes Mudrock's Crag Splitter. With its SP rate now effectively doubled in most situations, Mudrock can spam this with even more impunity, often being able to fire it off every other attack if the situation lines up well, which in turn will turn her into a living blender that minces anyone nearby while healing herself faster than enemies can hurt her. Helping further is that since Blemishine's second skill Deterring Radiance is classified as gradual HP recovery instead of healing, it's able to heal Mudrock despite her normally being unable to be healed by allies.
- She's also the perfect Operator to deal with the Londinium Artillery mechanic in Chapter 10, to the point of near-necessity in the harder levels. Not only can her barrier No-Sell the Artillery shots while her beefy HP pool lets her eat a direct hit even if her shields are down, but her second skill will also go into overdrive when she's mobbed by the Reborn Creations that infest the level, allowing her to kill them while keeping herself healed as long as she isn't under Necrosis.
- And on top of that, her Module makes her even more broken than before. Alongside the sizeable stat buffs and giving her 15% damage reduction against enemies she's blocking, it also improves her first talent's barriers to heal slightly more and additionally grant her 2 SP when they pop. This not only greatly improves the uptime on her third skill, but also ramps up her second skill's activation rate into overdrive, making her even more of a blender!
- Penance
- Penance has a lot to live up to as the next 6-star Juggernaut after the excellent Mudrock, and she certainly does not disappoint. She compensates for what appears like a massive Achilles' Heel in her lack of self-healing with her ability to gain Barrier with her Guardian of the Law Talent, which at Elite 2 grants her 50% of her maximum health as Barrier on deployment and recovers 10% Barrier for each kill, up to a cap of 300% of her already significant maximum HP, making her nigh immortal if she can get enough stacks. With her second Talent, Wreathed in Thorns, Penance shows she can give as good as she gets by then reflecting 50% of her solid ATK as Arts damage to attackers as long as she has any Barrier from her talent. While building up Barrier through killing enemies normally may take time, Penance can skip a huge part of the process with her third skill, Trial of Thorns, which immediately grants her up to 130% of her maximum health in Barrier and a staggering +400% ATK. Though it also increases her attack interval, the bonus ATK feeds into the damage reflected with Wreathed in Thorns, allowing Penance to punish enemies foolish enough to attack her (and ranged enemies are forced to do so as her third skill also increases her target priority) with massive damage while being virtually unkillable. Though Penance has the weakness of being much less flexible than Mudrock, due to needing to kill enemies to generate Barrier and thus being susceptible to Kill Steal from allies and thus requiring a team that supports her rather than the other way around, the payoff from Penance's huge power is more than worth it. And under the right circumstances, who needs a team at all when you can bring down Patriot and his forces all by yourself?however...
- Penance's module also makes her even more of a wall by making her take 15% less damage from blocked enemies, and buffing both the initial Barrier on deployment and the amount she gains on kill, making it easier for her to snowball into an unkillable beast.
- Penance has a lot to live up to as the next 6-star Juggernaut after the excellent Mudrock, and she certainly does not disappoint. She compensates for what appears like a massive Achilles' Heel in her lack of self-healing with her ability to gain Barrier with her Guardian of the Law Talent, which at Elite 2 grants her 50% of her maximum health as Barrier on deployment and recovers 10% Barrier for each kill, up to a cap of 300% of her already significant maximum HP, making her nigh immortal if she can get enough stacks. With her second Talent, Wreathed in Thorns, Penance shows she can give as good as she gets by then reflecting 50% of her solid ATK as Arts damage to attackers as long as she has any Barrier from her talent. While building up Barrier through killing enemies normally may take time, Penance can skip a huge part of the process with her third skill, Trial of Thorns, which immediately grants her up to 130% of her maximum health in Barrier and a staggering +400% ATK. Though it also increases her attack interval, the bonus ATK feeds into the damage reflected with Wreathed in Thorns, allowing Penance to punish enemies foolish enough to attack her (and ranged enemies are forced to do so as her third skill also increases her target priority) with massive damage while being virtually unkillable. Though Penance has the weakness of being much less flexible than Mudrock, due to needing to kill enemies to generate Barrier and thus being susceptible to Kill Steal from allies and thus requiring a team that supports her rather than the other way around, the payoff from Penance's huge power is more than worth it. And under the right circumstances, who needs a team at all when you can bring down Patriot and his forces all by yourself?
- Saria
- It's rather difficult to describe how strong Saria is, who combines solid defensive power with some of the strongest utility in the entire game. Basically, all of her skills offer immense utility no matter on what map you're on, as they provide either strong emergency auto-healing (First Aid), frequent wide-ranged area healing with no upper target limit (Medicine Dispensing), or rapid HP regeneration, a potent slow, and a Damage-Increasing Debuff for Arts damage onto every enemy within range (Calcification). Her S2 and S3 in particular affect a very wide radius, and Calcification can outheal many stronger Medics when mastered due to it being applied per second note , regardless of Saria's ASPD. As a further boon, her Elite 2 talent Refreshment lets her give SP to anyone she heals, even to operators with Offensive/Defensive SP recovery that don't get SP passively. This talent not only grants more uptime to any skills in her range provided their users are constantly taking damage, but also gives her extremely good synergy with Glass Cannon operators with low SP costs like Blue Poison, and those that consistently lose HP over time like Aak and Fiammetta. The Arts damage buff Calcification puts on nearby enemies can also reach up to +55% at M3, and is an absolute godsend for anyone who deals Arts damage, especially those with Herd Hitting Attacks (Ifrit, wink wink) or powerful burst skills. The damage amp and slow it inflicts are also not considered "true" Fragile/Slow effects, making it so that these can stack and be effective at full potential at the same time. Her first talent Rhine Charged Suit, while it is an example of Gathering Steam, lets her become progressively stronger from the moment she's deployed, bolstering both her durability and healing since all of her healing is calculated using her ATK. Put simply, Saria is one of the most powerful and flexible support units you can get, and not for nothing is she consistently ranked among the top picks for all past and present runs of Contingency Contract, the most difficult content releases in the game - especially since her status as a Defender bypasses Medic bans. It should also be noted that Saria is one of the only operators generally agreed upon being worth M9-ing (mastering all three skills to their maximum), which is a very expensive privilege, especially for 6-stars.Twilight Raven: Saria is by far my most favorite operator. She offers tons of possibilities to make every maps get easier to tank enemies while keeping other operators in check within her healing tile.
- Saria's two modules both further elaborate on her strengths in different ways. The X module gives her 15% bonus healing on targets below half health (which has great synergy with her emergency healing S1, which only targets units below half health anyways), and lets her provide more SP to allies she heals, furthering her role as a SP battery. Meanwhile, the Y module grants her 15% damage reduction while increasing the ATK/DEF buffs on her Rhine Charged Suit, which grants her a boost to her already high durability while still buffing the overall power of her heals.
- It's rather difficult to describe how strong Saria is, who combines solid defensive power with some of the strongest utility in the entire game. Basically, all of her skills offer immense utility no matter on what map you're on, as they provide either strong emergency auto-healing (First Aid), frequent wide-ranged area healing with no upper target limit (Medicine Dispensing), or rapid HP regeneration, a potent slow, and a Damage-Increasing Debuff for Arts damage onto every enemy within range (Calcification). Her S2 and S3 in particular affect a very wide radius, and Calcification can outheal many stronger Medics when mastered due to it being applied per second note , regardless of Saria's ASPD. As a further boon, her Elite 2 talent Refreshment lets her give SP to anyone she heals, even to operators with Offensive/Defensive SP recovery that don't get SP passively. This talent not only grants more uptime to any skills in her range provided their users are constantly taking damage, but also gives her extremely good synergy with Glass Cannon operators with low SP costs like Blue Poison, and those that consistently lose HP over time like Aak and Fiammetta. The Arts damage buff Calcification puts on nearby enemies can also reach up to +55% at M3, and is an absolute godsend for anyone who deals Arts damage, especially those with Herd Hitting Attacks (Ifrit, wink wink) or powerful burst skills. The damage amp and slow it inflicts are also not considered "true" Fragile/Slow effects, making it so that these can stack and be effective at full potential at the same time. Her first talent Rhine Charged Suit, while it is an example of Gathering Steam, lets her become progressively stronger from the moment she's deployed, bolstering both her durability and healing since all of her healing is calculated using her ATK. Put simply, Saria is one of the most powerful and flexible support units you can get, and not for nothing is she consistently ranked among the top picks for all past and present runs of Contingency Contract, the most difficult content releases in the game - especially since her status as a Defender bypasses Medic bans. It should also be noted that Saria is one of the only operators generally agreed upon being worth M9-ing (mastering all three skills to their maximum), which is a very expensive privilege, especially for 6-stars.
- Shu
- As the fifth Chinese New Year limited coming off the heels of her equally powerful siblings Ling and Chongyue, Shu proves to be an insanely powerful Guardian Defender with a kit that rivals or even surpasses Saria in both defensive and offensive utility. To start, her first talent, Evergreen Crops, allows her to "Sow" a tile and the four surrounding tiles when healing an Operator on that tile, and Sowed tiles will both heal 70 HP per second and give a 10% Sanctuary effect note for allied units who are on those tiles. This is an excellent source of constant sustain and defense, as tiles will remain Sowed forever as long as Shu remains on the field, and most importantly, ANY allied unit can recieve the benefits, including summons (Ling sends her regards). Her second talent, Heavenly Four Seasons, brings three seperate teamwide buffs for meeting their generally uncomplicated conditions: if there are three Operators with different job branches on the field, every operator gains 12% max HP; if there are three Operators with the same job on the field, every operator gains 12 ASPD; finally, if there are four [Sui] Operatorsnote in the squad, every operator gains 12% ATK and gains 1 SP every 4 seconds. Even if it's a stretch to obtain four of the five Sui units as of the time of writing, the other two buffs are no less beneficial to your party, and you can always grab a Sui Operator from the Support Unit list if you just need one more to access the last one. Then, moving onto her skills—right from the offset, her S1, Teachings Unto Vegetation is literally identical to Saria's, which has been consistently excellent ever since the game's launch. And while her S2, Brimming Grains is plenty strong, bringing powerful multi-target healing over a broad range that amplifies her first talent's effects, Shu's true claim to fame lies with her S3. Shu's S3, Wither and Prosper, at M3, boosts her ATK by 50%, greatly expands her skill range, and allows her to heal any Operator within it including herself every time she attacks, causing her healing output to skyrocket and greatly facilitating her creation of Sowed tiles. If there happen to be any enemies on Sowed tiles, all Operators in her skill range gain 25% ATK and 25 ASPD, greatly buffing their damage output, debuff application, or healing output. However, the truly monstrous part of this skill is that, after an enemy enters a Sowed tile within her skill range, upon moving more than two tiles away from that Sowed tile, the enemy is teleported back to that tile. And there is no restriction on the types or numbers of enemies that can be forced back to their starting point as long as Shu is alive and her skill is active. Shu is effectively allowed to hold any quantity of any kind of enemy in the game to three tiles on the map for the skill's duration of 30 seconds, allowing players to unleash all kinds of "killbox" strategies without fears of the target escaping before they're dead, and that's before considering the damage buffs Shu can grant allies or the sustain she can provide to keep them alive while wailing on them. Shu is borderline unmatched when it comes to all the tools she packs within her Guardian Defender kit, to the point that even Saria, who has remained unrivaled within her class and highly coveted in general for the game's entire lifespan so far, has finally found a real challenger for her spot at the top.
Casters
- Ceobe
- Ceobe is an incredibly versatile unit who can perform a wide variety of roles well. One of her primary merits is her first talent Thresher, which causes her to deal bonus Arts damage equal to up to 40% of the target's DEF on hit. Casters are already designed to tackle enemies that would laugh off physical damage, but Ceobe takes this further, eviscerating any DEF-stacking units even if they have lots of HP. On top of her damage output, each of her skills completely modifies her attack pattern and allows her to fill a different role in the team. Really Cold Axe is a fast charge-storing skill that prioritizes unblocked enemies and roots them in place, allowing Ceobe to stall enemies or even outright permanently immobilize them if she's paired with an SP battery like Liskarm, and is excellent at locking down unblockable foes like Wraiths even when other targets are in range. Really Hot Knives significantly boosts her attack speed and makes her go after the highest-DEF enemies in range, meaning that any tanks in her sight range won't be living for much longer due to the insane DPS boost this skill gives. Meanwhile, Really Heavy Spear basically turns her into a slower, heavily ATK-boosted Sniper for about a minute, giving her nuclear physical attacks that seek out foes with the least DEF and Silence them on top of that. With all of these skills at her disposal combined with her talent basically giving her free damage, Ceobe can fill a lot of roles and take on a huge variety of challenges just by changing what skill she has. She's particularly good in modes where enemies have extremely inflated DEF, like high-risk runs of Contingency Contract or Pinch-Out Operation, since Thresher turns the massive DEF steroids many of the enemies gain against them while mitigating any ATK penalties (since they won't reduce Thresher's bonus damage), letting her punch through the buffed foes better than any other - against enemies with high DEF, she can even outdamage Eyjafjalla sometimes. Her second talent is just the icing on the cake, as Lone Journey gives her a free 8% ATK and ASPD buff if she has no adjacent teammates, which depending on the map may be absurdly easy to activate.
- Her module makes her even better, as not only will her attacks ignore 10 RES by default, her first talent's damage now also ramps up when she attacks the same target (up to a whopping 75% of the target's DEF per hit after 5 attacks), doubling down on her role as a tank shredder and making her one of the premier units to tackle enemies with high mixed defenses. Considering her second skill increases her attack speed and is often used to lock on to big beefy targets anyways, this is very easy to stack, and her DPS is significantly improved as a result◊.
- Dusk
- Dusk bucks the trend of AoE Casters being Awesome, but Impractical by having having great damage and utility that more than make up for her hefty deployment cost. Her S1, Transcendent Stroke, is a Boring, but Practical ability that increases her damage and splash radius. Combined with its low SP cost and ability to hold 3 charges, it is very similar to Eyjafjalla's S2 and can actually rival her DPS, having the edge whenever Dusk attacks more than 2 or 3 targets at a time. Her S2, Flowing Ink, allows her to attack all enemies in her attack range simultaneously while increasing her attack power and speed while dealing bonus damage to enemies below 50% health. This is simply a straight upgrade over Gitano's skill and doesn't have the drawback of stunning Dusk after the skill expires. However, where Dusk truly shines is her S3, Image Over Form, which expands her attack range and spawns a Freeling every time she attacks. The Freeling is capable of blocking enemies, and combined with the skill's long 25 second uptime, Dusk can keep constantly summoning Freelings all over the map. This makes Dusk uniquely suited to be the game's best staller, as she can keep throwing disposable blockers that don't take up deployment slots in the path of a boss or elite enemy until your operators' skills refresh or are ready to redeploy. This can be used to continuously bully a boss or stalling dangerous enemies while redirecting fire, considering all her summons are deployed after her.
- Dusk's second module makes her even better, reducing her DP cost by 8, letting her be deployed considerably faster, and also upgrades her second talent to summon two Freelings that have increased stats. Additionally, for every Freeling that's on the field, they will generate 1 SP every 1.5 seconds for Dusk, which significantly reduces the downtime on her third skill that constantly summons Freelings all over the field.
- Dusk bucks the trend of AoE Casters being Awesome, but Impractical by having having great damage and utility that more than make up for her hefty deployment cost. Her S1, Transcendent Stroke, is a Boring, but Practical ability that increases her damage and splash radius. Combined with its low SP cost and ability to hold 3 charges, it is very similar to Eyjafjalla's S2 and can actually rival her DPS, having the edge whenever Dusk attacks more than 2 or 3 targets at a time. Her S2, Flowing Ink, allows her to attack all enemies in her attack range simultaneously while increasing her attack power and speed while dealing bonus damage to enemies below 50% health. This is simply a straight upgrade over Gitano's skill and doesn't have the drawback of stunning Dusk after the skill expires. However, where Dusk truly shines is her S3, Image Over Form, which expands her attack range and spawns a Freeling every time she attacks. The Freeling is capable of blocking enemies, and combined with the skill's long 25 second uptime, Dusk can keep constantly summoning Freelings all over the map. This makes Dusk uniquely suited to be the game's best staller, as she can keep throwing disposable blockers that don't take up deployment slots in the path of a boss or elite enemy until your operators' skills refresh or are ready to redeploy. This can be used to continuously bully a boss
- Eyjafjalla
- Eyjafjalla is a single target Caster pretending to be an AoE Caster, but ramped up to ridiculous levels with none of the drawbacks. On top of her talent Pyrobreath buffing the ATK of all active casters, making her stronger than she already is, her S2 Ignition is a stacking charge type skill that deals high Splash Damage on proc, which allows her to moonlight as an AoE Caster that does a better job than them, due to its low cooldown and on-hit RES debuff. Meanwhile, her S3 Volcano massively buffs her ATK, range, and target limit while significantly reducing her attack interval, giving her a practical "Instant Death" Radius which basically melts anything walking near her and makes Eyjafjalla the Caster equivalent to SilverAsh. At Mastery 3, Volcano can burn up to six enemies at once for massive damage with the only downside being a low duration of 15 seconds, which can be planned around easily. Furthermore, her second talent Wildfire gives her a burst of SP upon deployment, letting her fire off her skills alarmingly soon after deployment. Honestly, Eyja just trivializes most boss fights, where even the hardiest of Guards and Defenders may struggle and even fail all for a cheaper cost than AoE Casters.
- Eyja's module accentuates her strengths by allowing all her attacks to ignore 10 RES while improving her Caster buff while allowing it to activate just by her being in the squad, akin to Schwarz and Siege before her. This not only improves her damage output, but also allows her to take on a more supportive role when not deployed, which is especially prevalent due to how her Volcano often has her deployed for short periods of time as a helidrop unit.
- Goldenglow
- Goldenglow is a Mech Accord caster that that is frighteningly powerful, combining high Arts DPS and AoE, a Supporter's crowd control capability, and a Deadeye Sniper's infinite range. While Goldenglow's first two skills are typical affairs for a Mech Accord caster, Goldenglow's main draw is from her third skill, Crystalline Shine. Whenever the skill is activated, Goldenglow cannot attack conventionally, but she gains two extra drones which have infinite attack range, increased damage, and inflict a slow debuff on hit. This plays well with her talent Beacons' Wrath, which gives her drones a chance to self-destruct after they attack, dealing significant AoE Arts damage. With her fast ASPD and 3 drones attacking simultaneously, this will proc surprisingly often while her skill is active, leading to loads of damage against both swarms and single targets, especially considering their gradually stacking ATK from her Mech-Accord trait. Her second talent Precise Redirection also gives her the ability to ignore up to 18 RES, giving her an edge when it comes to magically bulky foes and offsetting her low base ATK. These tools give Goldenglow the ability to trivialize maps where important enemies spawn on the map, but stand in what are generally unreachable areas or are too dangerous to engage with regular ranged operators. , Goldenglow simply ignores that restriction and doesn't suffer the drawbacks Deadeye Snipers usually have to trade for their infinite range skills; to wit, her third skill is also the first global range skill that retains standard target prioritization. This means that she can prevent leaks due to this prioritization note . As a cherry on top, its masteries are fairly strong as well, on top of the skill having relatively low cooldowns and good uptime to make sure Goldenglow has it ready whenever she needs it.
- She is infamous in Integrated Strategies for becoming a beast once she has garnered certain artifacts under her belt due to her ability to scale well with a variety of stats. This is most notable with ASPD buffing items, which cause her to rapidly kill targets while spending as little time as possible when offing each individual target; saving you resources and time while increasing the chances of her drones exploding for massive damage. There is also this clear of Crimson Solitare's third boss which is practically made for a beefed up Goldenglow. This is because its assistants damage and debuff anyone near it, and Goldenglow can kill them anyway even without being in the area of effect. The assistants also do not detect her drones, letting her gun them down with impunity.
- Goldenglow's module further empowers her by increasing the initial damage her drone can do, which helps with her low base ATK and allows the drone to ramp up its attack percentage on the same enemy quicker. It also buffs her Beacon's Wrath talent, making her drones explode with even more damage, giving her more DPS in the process.
- Ifrit
- Ifrit makes for a very tough and devastating powerhouse, even though making proper use of her can be difficult due to her quirky range. To preface things, Ifrit deals obscene amounts of Arts damage in one puff, and if set up properly can hit all visible enemies in a long line at once with no upper penetration limit note . This is further enhanced by her first talent, Spiritual Dissolution, that reduces the RES of all enemies that merely stand in her range by up to 40% at E2 - and if you manage to keep them there, said enemy is going to have a really bad time, especially if there are more operators in there that deal Arts damage. Like Surtr who ignores RES, this makes her viable even on maps where enemies have higher RES, as it will be whittled down just like it will with any other enemy. All of her skills also deal lasting damage coupled with DEF/RES debuffs, and with her second talent Rhine Loop that increases her SP gain, Ifrit becomes a Spam Attack monster. This is especially notable with her S2 Pyroclasm, a charge-type skill that buffs the damage of her next attack, while making it inflict afterburn and a significant DEF shred - if leveled up and coupled with her talent, she can easily fire this off almost every attack. The afterburn damage deals 33% of her base ATK to enemies every second they're burned, and since the duration of the afterburn neatly falls within her ASPD, when she lets go of all her charges the enemy will be burning a solid nine/ten seconds long, enough to kill plenty of mid to high tier mobs. He S3 is also notable for when burst is needed over consistent damage, as Scorched Earth deals very high Arts damage per second that isn't capped by her low attack speed, along with inflicting an additional flat RES debuff - all with a generous duration and relatively short cooldown, with the cost of HP loss per second easily mitigated if there's a healer in range. The RES debuff is particularly devastating as flat RES reductions are rare, and RES reduces damage on a percentage basis. Her single-line range can also be abused in maps with tight spaces such as in Tactical Drill Mission 4, where she can literally cook the Originium Slugs that attempt to Zerg Rush towards the goal. While a singular straight lane may seem restrictive at first glance, it ultimately doesn't matter if Ifrit hits only one or two tiles due to the sheer damage output and debuff utility she offers. If one takes the fact that Ifrit will hit everything visible on melee tiles and foregoes strict lanes, then one can use her for unconvential means by letting her cover multiple lanes by placing her perpendicular to them instead of linear, similarly to 'wallhacker' Blaze.Dreamy: Burn one tile, nothing is lost. Burn two tiles, great. Burn three tiles, you won the game.
- It should be noted that these debuffs stack, since her skills debuffing is flat and her talent's buff is based on a percentage. This way, even enemies with a full 100 RES will be no problem for her. Because of these buffs, she is a popular pick in Contingency Contract, especially since enemy RES buffs started to pop up since Operation Lead Seal and enemies have been gaining more RES from chapter 9 on.
- Ifrit's module improves on her strengths by making her deal more damage to enemies further from her, along with giving Rhine Loop a chance to restore an additional burst of SP. The former is a minor but welcome change considering her already high damage output and tendency to operate from long range, while the latter is an unreliable, but very potent boon that can notably allow Ifrit to instantly charge Pyroclasm stacks.
- Ifrit makes for a very tough and devastating powerhouse, even though making proper use of her can be difficult due to her quirky range. To preface things, Ifrit deals obscene amounts of Arts damage in one puff, and if set up properly can hit all visible enemies in a long line at once with no upper penetration limit note . This is further enhanced by her first talent, Spiritual Dissolution, that reduces the RES of all enemies that merely stand in her range by up to 40% at E2 - and if you manage to keep them there, said enemy is going to have a really bad time, especially if there are more operators in there that deal Arts damage. Like Surtr who ignores RES, this makes her viable even on maps where enemies have higher RES, as it will be whittled down just like it will with any other enemy. All of her skills also deal lasting damage coupled with DEF/RES debuffs, and with her second talent Rhine Loop that increases her SP gain, Ifrit becomes a Spam Attack monster. This is especially notable with her S2 Pyroclasm, a charge-type skill that buffs the damage of her next attack, while making it inflict afterburn and a significant DEF shred - if leveled up and coupled with her talent, she can easily fire this off almost every attack. The afterburn damage deals 33% of her base ATK to enemies every second they're burned, and since the duration of the afterburn neatly falls within her ASPD, when she lets go of all her charges the enemy will be burning a solid nine/ten seconds long, enough to kill plenty of mid to high tier mobs. He S3 is also notable for when burst is needed over consistent damage, as Scorched Earth deals very high Arts damage per second that isn't capped by her low attack speed, along with inflicting an additional flat RES debuff - all with a generous duration and relatively short cooldown, with the cost of HP loss per second easily mitigated if there's a healer in range. The RES debuff is particularly devastating as flat RES reductions are rare, and RES reduces damage on a percentage basis. Her single-line range can also be abused in maps with tight spaces such as in Tactical Drill Mission 4, where she can literally cook the Originium Slugs that attempt to Zerg Rush towards the goal. While a singular straight lane may seem restrictive at first glance, it ultimately doesn't matter if Ifrit hits only one or two tiles due to the sheer damage output and debuff utility she offers. If one takes the fact that Ifrit will hit everything visible on melee tiles and foregoes strict lanes, then one can use her for unconvential means by letting her cover multiple lanes by placing her perpendicular to them instead of linear, similarly to 'wallhacker' Blaze.
- Lin (post-module)
- Lin initially starts off as a decent Phalanx Caster, able to tank some attacks quite well with her Foolproof Plan's Crystal Barrier, but suffers from poor uptime and long cooldowns on her skills, with her Shrouded Strength not being reliable enough to mitigate it due to only being a 50-55% chance to gain 1 SP when she's attacked. All of that changes drastically once her module is unlocked and fully upgraded. In addition to letting her retain half of her archetype's massively increased defenses when her skill is active, it also upgrades Shrouded Strength to a much more reliable 75-80% chance to gain 2 SP whenever she's attacked, which significantly improves the uptime of her primary skill Riving Nighttails, which massively increases her attack range and power alongside increasing the damage nullification threshold of her Crystal Barrier, which also explodes and instantly reforms for extra damage should Lin score a kill during the skill's duration, turning her into a highly fearsome tank-nuker hybrid. With her module and maxed out defenses, Lin is capable of completely nullifying any physical damage that is 1250 and below, which is nearly every single physical ranged attack in the game, letting her draw in any physical enemy fire and retaliating with exceptional damage. Among the highly cutthroat competition of Casters, Lin manages to stand out with her ludicrous tankiness, capable of taking attacks that not even some Defenders would be comfortable taking.
Medics
- Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska
- Eyjafjalla's Medic incarnation follows in the footsteps of her archetype-defining original self by being a Wandering Medic with such borderline overkill Elemental Damage mitigation that she comes just short of removing it from a level entirely. From the get-go, her first talent Replenishing Mist lets her stack a buff on her healing targets that provides 10% of her ATK as HP and Elemental regeneration per second for each stack, while Volcanic Ash Remedy provides a 6-8% maximum HP buff to targets in her range and makes them take 12% reduced Elemental damage; both of these are comparable to watered-down versions of Honeyberry and Mulberry's skill effects as permanent talents, already making her incredible against Elemental damage even for a Wandering Medic. Her first skill Soundless Sustenance takes a while to activate, but permanently increases Eyja's ATK by up to 40%, lets her heal two targets at once, and passively causes all allies in range to regenerate Elemental Damage equal to 8% of her ATK per second. On top of effectively turning her into a stronger Multi-target Medic with an enormous range, this is already enough to make everyone in range practically immune to all but the most fierce sources of Elemental Damage, and can notably regenerate Elemental Damage on units who normally can't recieve Elemental healing, such as Juggernauts, Soloblades, Reapers, or even summons. If AFK sustain isn't the call, Eyja can bring out her third skill Volcanic Echoes, which gives her global range and turns her healing into a rapid barrage of weaker heals that can target up to 5 units at once, while also providing up to a 5x multiplier to her second talent, giving every ally on the map 30-40% more HP and 60% Elemental Damage reduction. This is already powerful sustain and a strong survivability boost not restricted by positioning, but if less than 5 units are on the field, Eyja can focus all of the heals into only a few units, letting them shrug off entire hordes of Sea Reapers or Crawlers without worrying. On top of that, the skill has a lengthy duration of 50 seconds, meaning Eyja can heal her way through even prolonged enemy waves, albeit with an equally long cooldown. Her only real downsides are the long windups of her skills and the lower raw power of her heals, but since she mitigates the healing issue with her S1 and S3 (with her S1 even being able to outmatch Lumen's already exceptional HPS when healing two targets), her ability to completely trivialize most Elemental Damage threats while still providing decent amounts of healing and utility is unmatched by any other Medic in the game.
- Kal'tsit
- After being removed from the beta for presumably being too overpowered, Kal'tsit returned for the second anniversary with a vengeance. Although her healing power is on the low side for a Medic, not only does she have an extended healing range comparable to that of an AoE Sniper, she retains the ability to actually fight enemies by summoning Mon3tr, an obscenely tanky and hard-hitting 3-block unit that can be redeployed on a short cooldown of 35-25 seconds depending on level. And unlike the beta, she's actually able to directly heal it, letting it stay healthy as it mows down enemies. Her first two skills provide defensive and offensive utility, with Command: Structural Fortification buffing her and Mon3tr's DEF while giving her physical dodge, and Command: Tactical Coordination buffing her healing rate while increasing Mon3tr's ATK and giving it AoE attacks. Her third skill Command: Meltdown is the real kicker - Mon3tr gains a colossal DEF steroid, an obscene (but decaying) ATK boost, and deals true damage on its attacks for the skill duration. Sure, Mon3tr will take a ton of damage if it can't kill anything before the skill ends, but considering it's now dealing upwards of several thousand true damage per hit, it's almost certainly going to kill whatever it gets its claws on - it can even kill Patriot by itself. Furthermore, all of them have ridiculously low SP costs, letting her fire them not long after dropping Mon3tr on someone. The icing on the cake is that at Elite 2, Mon3tr gains the Non-Damaging Restructuring passive which makes it explode when it dies, dealing heavy true damage in an area alongside a lengthy stun. While she does have some shortcomings, like her prioritizing Mon3tr and herself sometimes leaving her allies for dead, her SP for her S2 and S3 being unable to charge if Mon3tr isn't alive (which is offset by their low SP Costs), and Mon3tr's DEF dropping to 0 if deployed outside her range note , she's still a terrifyingly strong unit whose ability to summon Mon3tr alone lets her bully lanes, hold defensive lines, and eliminate key targets, all while still being able to heal allies. How ironic that a healer is one of the biggest offensive powerhouses in the game.
- A big part of what makes Kal'tsit extremely powerful is how relevant she stays throughout the evolving state of the game's content thanks to her specialization in dealing true damage, with Command: Meltdown remaining one of the most consistent sources of true damage over the game's lifetime. As true damage is always an Armor-Piercing Attack, having Kal'tsit often means she can be easily relied on for any boss fight that likes to use damage reduction and evasion tactics, or ones that are just extremely tanky..
- Kal'tsit's PHY-X module makes Mon3tr even better by triggering Non-Damaging Restructuring when it's first brought to 50% HP while buffing the explosion, granting it two uses of its emergency nuke and giving it some more utility when used as a helidrop unit. Her PHY-Y module instead doubles down on her direct combat ability by increasing her healing on low ground units (Mon3tr included), while giving Mon3tr up to 20% more DEF and ASPD while in her range to make it even more ferocious and durable in sustained combat.
- After being removed from the beta for presumably being too overpowered, Kal'tsit returned for the second anniversary with a vengeance. Although her healing power is on the low side for a Medic, not only does she have an extended healing range comparable to that of an AoE Sniper, she retains the ability to actually fight enemies by summoning Mon3tr, an obscenely tanky and hard-hitting 3-block unit that can be redeployed on a short cooldown of 35-25 seconds depending on level. And unlike the beta, she's actually able to directly heal it, letting it stay healthy as it mows down enemies. Her first two skills provide defensive and offensive utility, with Command: Structural Fortification buffing her and Mon3tr's DEF while giving her physical dodge, and Command: Tactical Coordination buffing her healing rate while increasing Mon3tr's ATK and giving it AoE attacks. Her third skill Command: Meltdown is the real kicker - Mon3tr gains a colossal DEF steroid, an obscene (but decaying) ATK boost, and deals true damage on its attacks for the skill duration. Sure, Mon3tr will take a ton of damage if it can't kill anything before the skill ends, but considering it's now dealing upwards of several thousand true damage per hit, it's almost certainly going to kill whatever it gets its claws on - it can even kill Patriot by itself
- Lumen
- Lumen is an exceptional 6-star Therapist Medic thanks to the unique cleansing utility he provides to his team. Like the other Therapists, he offers Status Resistance to any operators he heals with his first talent An Everyman's Wish, but Lumen's buff is considerably longer, lasting 4 seconds, and the duration increasing to 6 seconds if the ally is above 75% HP (unlocking his Module extends this duration to 5 and 8 seconds, respectively). He can also provide instant healing on the spot with his second talent, Quick Fix, immediately healing an ally in range who is afflicted with an abnormal status. His third skill, This Lantern Undying, is what makes him stand out from other Medics. It grants him +55% ATK and +30 ASPD at max Mastery, and loads up 8 ammo that is consumed for a stronger heal and outright removes any abnormal status effects that afflict his allies. Not to mention, the ammo is only consumed when an abnormal status is removed, which means Lumen's ATK and ASPD buffs are effectively permanent if you don't need to deal with status effects, mitigating the weaker healing power from the Therapist archetype, and actually giving him such powerful HPS that he becomes a great choice as a general-use Medic. And the best part? He's a free operator from "Stultifera Navis", just like Gladiia. An excellent showing from the game's first male 6-star Medic!
- Lumen's WAH-Y Module makes him even better by cutting the cooldown on his Quick Fix talent, and outright making his healing work at full efficiency regardless of range, completely nullifying the Therapist archetype's weakness and further solidifying his incredible healing prowess.
- Nightingale
- Nightingale is an amazing Medic thanks to the one-of-a-kind defensive utilities she provides for the team, which to this date no other Operators have even come close to replicating. With her first talent, White Fiend's Protection, she can grant the rare flat RES buff of up to +15 at E2 to any allies inside her range. Her S3, Sanctuary, highly boosts this protection by expanding her range (covering a similar area as Angelina's S3) to reach other operators outside of her original range, increasing the RES of operators and summons within it by up to 150% (which also boosts the RES buff she gives from her first talent) and grants them up to 25% Arts dodge at M3. Combined with her talent, this creates a generously large zone where everything within is borderline immune to Arts damage; with how dangerous Arts damage is and with more content featuring heavy Arts damage, this makes her an excellent choice at mitigating it. In addition, she shines further with her second talent, Fleeting Phantom, which allows her to store and deploy up to three phantomsnote . A phantom has a hefty HP pool of up to 3000 to 6000 HP depending on Nightingale's level, 75 RES, 30% physical dodge and taunts ranged enemies to attack it. This makes it a great bait to draw aggro from ranged enemies and protect the team or even allied NPCs on the map, working against both Arts and physical damage due to its high RES (up to 100 if S3 is activated while the cage is inside the skill range, which also gives Arts dodge) and physical dodge respectively, alongside its taunt and huge HP pool. Overall, this talent gives Nightingale additional utility beyond being an Arts mitigator and makes her invaluable in hard contents. Everything considered, her real place to shine is chapter 8 where Arts damage mitigation is an absolute must since it is so prevalent, and her summons can redirect aggro away from civilians. They also remain on the field even after Nightingale is retreated (a rarity).
- For perspective as to how uniquely powerful Nightingale is, it should be noted that Hypergryph seems to have realized how restricting towards stage design having a unit who effectively provides invulnerability against Arts damage is, as while other old meta units have had newer units attempt to copy or even supplant their roles, no new allied RES-buffer was released until four and a half years later in the 5-star Guardian Bassline, and even his buff is a mere 5 RES with a fully upgraded Module given to allies surrounding him. Considering how Nightingale has the potential to flat out shut down even the hardest stages so long as Arts damage is a primary threat, there is a reasonable chance she will be the only noteworthy RES-buffer to be in the game ever.
- Ptilopsis
- In terms of pure utility, Ptilopsis leaves even higher-rarity Medics in the dust due to her passive talent, Skill Aura, which boosts the SP generation of every operator on the map by up to 0.3/s, including Ptilopsis herself. This means your operators will be able to use their skills much quicker and more often, making Ptilopsis useful in every situation regardless of the map. It is meaningful that on Contingency Contract maps where there is an SP regeneration penalty, Ptilopsis is considered near-mandatory. Her skills are not to be overlooked either as they offer much flexibility. For one, while her skill 1 is a simple attack buff, it can be useful whenever consistent healing is needed as its cooldown is far lower than her second skill. As for the aforementioned skill 2, when activated, Enkephalin offers increased range and an incredible attack interval reduction - so much that player operators in her range are effectively immortal for the entire generous duration unless they get hit by a One-Hit Kill. Her S2 has a hefty cooldown, but it can effectively neuter the threat from even enemy DPS powerhouses if just activated at the right time.
- Reed the Flame Shadow
- In the complete opposite of her original self's low-meta standing, this version of Reed is so hilariously strong that you might as well call her a Caster pretending to be a Medic, due to her sheer offensive power overshadowing her healing ability. Her first talent, Cinder, gives her attacks a 30% chance to inflict a "Cinder" debuff on enemies, which at Elite 2 reduces their ATK by 20% and inflicts a 30% Arts Fragility effect; this gives her powerful utility for Arts heavy teams and even general use ones due to the rarity of ATK debuffs. Her second talent, Reflected Shine, heals her for half of the HP she restores to allies, ensuring that she can simultaneously keep herself healthy while tending to others. As for her firepower, Reed's second skill, Wither and Thrive, has her summon orbiting fireballs around up to two allied Operators (prioritizing ground-based ones), which can both damage enemies and heal the protected ally on hit. Though less flashy than her third skill, this ability's damage is not to be underestimated - in fact, with proper placements of units to have the the fireballs on both targets hitting the same enemy, whether sandwiching the enemy between two blockers or having Operators on either sides of the target, the damage will stack, giving Reed some of the the highest potential DPS in the game. This is generally considered her more unique skill and what makes Reed stand out, as the fireballs can give any Operator a massive boost in damage output and survivability. Putting the fireballs on Surtr, for example, gives her even more Arts damage while also sustaining her for longer while using Twilight. Now her third skill, Ember of Life, is where things get really bananas. Reed gets an ATK buff, can now attack up to two enemies simultaneously, is guaranteed to apply Cinder to any enemies she hits, and the Cinder debuff now also deals Damage Over Time. However, if any Cinder-marked enemies die during the skill duration, they will explode, heavily damaging and also applying Cinder to any unlucky enemies caught in the blast radius. If the explosion is strong enough to one-shot or wound them to the point of dying shortly afterwards from the burn damage; this can repeat among groups of enemies to potentially cause a chain reaction of explosions that wipes the entire map clean. And remember that she's still healing allies for half the damage she's causing and herself for half of that, meaning that her annihilating enemies can pump out ridiculously fast healing on top of everything, making everything in range nigh immortal - not that you'll need the healing with everything in her line of sight reduced to ashes.
- Amusingly, the game can potentially crash if too many explosions graphics occur rapidly, meaning that Reed can literally break your game.
- The fourth Integrated Strategies mode effectively puts her in the spotlight as one of the best Operators to bring as a starter, if not the best for the simple reason that her 2nd Skill will burn and wipe any enemy mob rushing your defensive line, in a gamemode where the main difficulty of many of the harder stages comes from fast enemies Zerg Rushing you. Reed can clear out pretty much all of the first floor stages even on higher difficulties, alleviating the Early Game Hell of the mode, and later in the game even the dreaded Shattered Champions will have trouble getting past her as her fireballs will sustain the blockers and burn them to death while further debuffing their ATK. She can even trivialize the Demon's Blade, a That One Midboss in his own right, by sandwiching him between 2 fireballs as the fireball dps is not affected by Dominion. Once promoted, her 3rd skill is also excellent for sustaining a lineup and nuking an entire enemy rush in one go, and in particular can single-handedly clear out all of the annoying tile blockers in the first ending boss. In fact, the "Overcoming Your Weaknesses" starting squad with Reed, Popukar, and Orchid is generally considered the strongest possible starting squad for runs on higher Braving Nature levels, although you'll need the Tactical Ranged Squad to guarantee this start.
- In the complete opposite of her original self's low-meta standing, this version of Reed is so hilariously strong that you might as well call her a Caster pretending to be a Medic, due to her sheer offensive power overshadowing her healing ability. Her first talent, Cinder, gives her attacks a 30% chance to inflict a "Cinder" debuff on enemies, which at Elite 2 reduces their ATK by 20% and inflicts a 30% Arts Fragility effect; this gives her powerful utility for Arts heavy teams and even general use ones due to the rarity of ATK debuffs. Her second talent, Reflected Shine, heals her for half of the HP she restores to allies, ensuring that she can simultaneously keep herself healthy while tending to others. As for her firepower, Reed's second skill, Wither and Thrive, has her summon orbiting fireballs around up to two allied Operators (prioritizing ground-based ones), which can both damage enemies and heal the protected ally on hit. Though less flashy than her third skill, this ability's damage is not to be underestimated - in fact, with proper placements of units to have the the fireballs on both targets hitting the same enemy, whether sandwiching the enemy between two blockers or having Operators on either sides of the target, the damage will stack, giving Reed some of the the highest potential DPS in the game
- Warfarin
- Warfarin is an incredible Medic who can provide both healing and rare offensive support. Her first skill Emergency Triage can only be used on targets below half health, but can store multiple charges and heals targets for an additional percent of their max HP, a rare ability among Medics that allows her to pump out some of the largest heals in the game when healing a tanky target. Her real merit, however, lies in her S2 Unstable Plasma, which provides a hefty 90% ATK buff for 15 seconds at max Mastery to Warfarin and a a random ally within her healing range, which not only makes Warfarin's heals much more potent, but also makes the buffed ally hit much harder (special mention to Exusiai and Silverash with their third skills), at the cost of both of them losing 3% of their max HP per second. There's also the "random ally" factor, which makes proper positioning a must to make the most out of her potent buff. Her Blood Sample Recycle talent is just the icing on the cake, granting Warfarin and a random ally in range up to 2 SP when an enemy is killed in her range, letting her charge up Unstable Plasma fairly quickly while also serving as an SP battery, so this talent lets you gain a lot of momentum when dealing with a Zerg Rush. Together with operators like Saga and Siege who continuously regenerate SP for themselves by way of either their talent or their skills, they become true Spam Attack operators. The HP loss is not as much of an issue as it seems to be, considering the fact that Warfarin is a Medic herself and is also getting a healing boost from Unstable Plasma. And oh, have we mentioned that her second skill and talent also work on Enmity operators like Mudrock?
Supporters
- Gnosis
- Gnosis is a Hexer Supporter that supplements his debuffs with incredible crowd control and surprisingly high damage. He is among the rare few units who can inflict the Cold debuff, which reduces the target's attack speed, and if applied twice consecutively inflicts Freeze, which not only prevents the target from moving or taking action but additionally reduces RES by a sizable 15. This, coupled with Gnosis' own talent Rigid Ice that can apply up to a 27% Fragile debuff on Cold targets within his range which is doubled to 54% when Frozen (which is the second largest Fragile effect in the game only surpassed by Shamare's S1 at 59.4%, which has a 40% HP condition) gives him some of the highest damage amplification in the game. While Gnosis's base attack speed is too low for him to inflict Freeze with his basic attacks alone, this is alleviated by pairing him with other Cold-inducing Operators (Aurora or Kjera) or with his skills, which all allow him to apply extra stacks of Cold on demand. His S3, Hypothermia, is by far his best skill, drastically increasing his attack speed and causing all Frozen enemies in his range to remain Frozen until the skill ends (up to 13 seconds at M3), while unleashing a massive burst of Arts damage at the end that benefits from his own Fragile. Since targets also have the Fragile debuff for the entire duration, a Frozen enemy is often as good as dead. On the other hand, his S2, Zero-Point Burst, while not having the damage or long-duration Freeze potential of his S3, can apply Cold (or Freeze if Charged) more frequently, especially against single targets as he can attack them once then immediately activate the skill to Freeze on a mere 6 SP cost. The weakness of Gnosis is in his dependency to inflict Cold and Freeze for his utility, while most bosses are immune to the latter or both (though there have been more frequent exceptions such as Manfred in Shatterpoint and the Endspeaker in Stultifera Navis — in fact, he utterly trivializes the latter and the majority of the event as the reviled Nethersea Predators lose their passive dodge while Frozen), but he is exceptional at crowd controlling and severely weakening everything else, which is especially invaluable in special game modes such as Stationary Security Service or Contingency Contract where basic enemies that are otherwise heavily buffed usually retain their vulnerability to status effects. His incredible synergy with attack speed relics in Integrated Strategies and Sniper tactical equipment in Stationary Security Service also makes him top-tier in both modes (though he struggles against IS#2 bosses which are Freeze-immune) as with enough attack speed he can permanently freeze a target with his regular attacks.
- In Mizuki & Caerula Arbor, he is a particularly excellent choice considering the relative weakness of most Supporters in the mode, due to his low cooldown Freeze application being a reliable way to knock down the Skimming Sea Drifters and the Paranoia Illusion, as well as a way to stall the Last Knight in the second ending.
- Gnosis' X Module should not be overlooked. In addition to its base effect of 10% ATK Down on attack (which, unlike his Cold, lasts long enough that he can keep it up permanently with his basic attack), it can also up the Fragile effect on Frozen targets to a whopping 60% (64% with potentials).
- Ling
- Summoners are usually seen as strong but niche options that require meticulous strategy to use well, but Ling basically does away with most of that weakness while taking their strengths to another level. Like Magallan, her summoned dragons are extremely versatile due to their function completely changing with each skill she has equipped, and she has Scene's ability to consistently regenerate them with her skills; her talent So is Writ, an Ode to Wine also gives her SP and permanently buffs her ATK each time her summons are defeated, retreated, or retrieved, facilitating this ability. Her third skill, To Remain Oneself is where the bulk of her power is, as it turns her summons into very expensive but very powerful AoE melee units; however, placing one within the range of an existing summon will cause them to fully heal and fuse together into a "Higher Form". In this state, despite taking up 2 deployment slots and a boatload of DP, each dragon is a tremendously powerful AoE juggernaut with 4 block, stats that put Mon3tr and even some Centurion Guards to shame, and Arts damage on top of that, meaning one is usually enough to hold a lane all by itself. Just in case Ling really wants an enemy dead, she can activate the skill to beef up their ATK and DEF even more while giving each one an aura that deals continuous Arts damage to everything in range, which even overlaps if multiple dragons are close to each other. With the sheer amount of firepower and staying power each dragon boasts, Ling can easily solo many levels with little to none of the meticulous placement and skill micro most other Summoner strategies rely on, since she can usually just plop down her summons to block lanes, evolve them, and then let them go to town until everything is dead, occasionally popping her skill or replacing a damaged dragon. She's also incredibly strong in Integrated Strategies for the same reasons as Scene below, but taken to extreme levels by her massively increased power compared to Scene, albeit being considerably more expensive to recruit.
- Ling's Module makes her even more broken by reducing the costs of her summons by 25% (mitigating the extremely expensive S3 dragons) and letting her hold 3 more summons, while upgrading it post-Lingering Echoes increases both the number of summons she can have out at once and their already towering stats. This translates to more super-dragons (who are now even stronger than before) being deployed, which turns her into a One-Woman Army in her own right, capable of destroying a large number of levels with minimal to no support.
- Proviso
- While not the most powerful Decel Binder in gameplay, Proviso is noteworthy for being a Game-Breaker in a different way in the RIIC Trading Post instead. Her Contract Law and Damages for Breach base skills are some of the fastest gold generation skills in the game despite her total lack of an efficiency bonus, as they turn any trade deal with less than 4 Pure Gold (the highest amount possible per deal) into a Defaulted Trade, which increases the total amounts of gold bars traded by +2 at Elite 2, guaranteeing at least a deal with 4 Pure Gold minimum and 5 Pure Gold at maximum which equals a bonus of +1000 LMD per Defaulted Trade which quickly adds up.note . What's more, her base skill is unreliant on other Operators to perform at its strongest unlike existing combos such as Shamare/Bibeak/Tequila, and she can easily be paired with efficiency and Morale-boosting Operators to make the most out of her skill. To put this into perspective, while other 5-stars most useful for their base skills rather than gameplay performance such as Vulcan or Waai Fu can take over a year to pay off for the cost of promoting them, Proviso can easily pay off her promotion costs in less than half a year on average off her base skill alone. And while she is not the strongest Operator, she is still a solid performer in gameplay, as she is essentially an upgrade to Podenco, who is already one of the better 4-star Supporters in the game, with her S2 Prevailing Argument offering a 10-second long AoE Silence along with a decent burst and temporary DPS buff. With all this in mind, Proviso is perhaps the one Operator worth promoting as soon as possible solely for her base skill alone, while still being decent enough on the field to be worth consideration.
- Scene
- Scene is merely decent in regular gameplay, but she becomes obscenely powerful in Integrated Strategies. In a mode where you have a limited roster determined by luck, Summoners are a big boon to have since their summons are attached to the operator themselves, essentially cheating the system with more units to place down despite said limited roster, especially if one has a lack of melee operators. However, Scene stands above the rest since her S2 Panoramic Overload allows her to regenerate her summons without you having to either redeploy her or retreat the drones via her skills, unlike every other Summoner up until Ling (who is both limited and extremely expensive to recruit in IS as a 6*). This makes her way more forgiving and flexible, especially since her summons have actual staying power on top of having a passive invisibility-revealing effect to boot. Her drones also can attack one cell away and gain surprisingly high levels of offensive and defensive stats when her S2 is active, so they're also useful as DPS options and tanky decoys instead of only serving as blockades. The stun at the end of the skill is not much of a problem as it would seem, since this skill is suited for waves with an inevitable downtime. With the increasing importance of baiting aggro away from your squishies (and civilians in Chapter 8), her role has only been increasing in importance, especially since she's both free and rather easy to get potentials for. Like the other Summoners, she is especially popular in trust farming ranking among names as Kal'tsit and Thorns, since she can take multiple lanes with her army of summons, relieving the pressure on the player when they want to beat a map with minimal operators. note
- Her module makes her first/last deployed summon to take/return no deployment slot. While this is a common module across Summoners, Ling's summons cost more to deploy and Deepcolor's and Mayer's are rather lacking, not to mention finite. Given Scene's skill to replenish her summon while buffing them to threatening level, plus revealing invisible enemies, this essentially make her summon into a Fast-Redeploy that costs only 5 DP, and has essentially no redployment timer as long you retreat and redploy her summon.
- Scene is merely decent in regular gameplay, but she becomes obscenely powerful in Integrated Strategies. In a mode where you have a limited roster determined by luck, Summoners are a big boon to have since their summons are attached to the operator themselves, essentially cheating the system with more units to place down despite said limited roster, especially if one has a lack of melee operators. However, Scene stands above the rest since her S2 Panoramic Overload allows her to regenerate her summons without you having to either redeploy her or retreat the drones via her skills, unlike every other Summoner up until Ling (who is both limited and extremely expensive to recruit in IS as a 6*). This makes her way more forgiving and flexible, especially since her summons have actual staying power on top of having a passive invisibility-revealing effect to boot. Her drones also can attack one cell away and gain surprisingly high levels of offensive and defensive stats when her S2 is active, so they're also useful as DPS options and tanky decoys instead of only serving as blockades. The stun at the end of the skill is not much of a problem as it would seem, since this skill is suited for waves with an inevitable downtime. With the increasing importance of baiting aggro away from your squishies (and civilians in Chapter 8), her role has only been increasing in importance, especially since she's both free and rather easy to get potentials for. Like the other Summoners, she is especially popular in trust farming
- Shamare
- Shamare is often considered one of the most powerful support units to have when taking on endgame stages. To start off, she has Omen of Defeat, a clone of Pramanix's Damage-Increasing Debuff talent that can be permanently boosted to up to 1.8x effectiveness once her S1 Malediction activates. However, her true power is with her S2, Curse Doll, which gives her a doll that can be redeployed again and again. The doll in question lasts 15 seconds, can't attack or be attacked, and nails all enemies within its range with a crippling ATK and DEF penalty. It sounds simple, but the numbers are where it gets strong - at Mastery 3, any enemy standing near the doll will get their DEF and ATK cut in half, meaning that if key enemies are caught in its radius, they'll be taking massive damage while dealing half of the damage they were supposed to. The latter ability is what makes this ability shine, since ATK reductions are rather rare - plop the doll next to an elite or boss enemy, and laugh as their One-Hit Kill attacks are reduced to regular attacks, and any regular attacks are reduced to almost nothing, especially against physical threats due to the way physical damage is calculated. Due to the calculation being a percentage and not a flat amount, this will nerf the ATK and DEF of tough bosses just as it is on other enemies. Furthermore, it can be spammed pretty often, with a Mastery 3 Curse Doll having a 50% uptime. Really, tactical deployments of Curse Dolls can significantly reduce the difficulty of just about any operation, and outright trivialize some battles.
- Skadi the Corrupting Heart
- In contrast to her original iteration's gameplay performance prior to her modules, Skadi the Corrupting Heart has quickly become one of the must have Supporters in the meta due to her sheer utility and ease of use. Along with the passive healing and extremely low DP cost of a Bard (costing a mere 6-8 DP depending on potential), all three of her skills provide incredible benefits depending on the need at the time, and Skadi's talents heavily synergize with them, with Ancient Kin allowing her to summon a Seaborn that can extend her attack range and Predatory Habits increasing her own ATK for free as long as she has someone in range, which is further doubled if that someone is an Abyssal Hunter. This makes it so that cramming everyone inside her range is not strictly necessary, and lets her either heal/buff an expanded area for a large group or affect two groups simultaneously, giving her incredible global map presence. Her first skill Chant of Returning by Varied Paths increases her healing while significantly increasing her own health and allowing her to shield her allies by diverting a good portion of the damage towards her, allowing her to protect her teammates from major threats. However, her second and third skills are where she really shines. Her second skill Wish of Burial Beyond the Light is an infinite duration ability that grants all allies in her attack range an ATK and DEF buff equal to up to 60% of Skadi's own ATK and DEF while up to doubling her passive healing. This makes her incredibly effective at buffing and sustaining operators who have to hold a lane for an extended duration, and the large stat buff and healing in general can turn an entire cluster of operators into a statball of extremely durable powerhouses. Meanwhile, her third skill, The Tide Surges, The Tide Recedes, can buff nearby allies' ATK by up to 110% of Skadi's ATK while also making Skadi begin dealing true damage equal to up to 70% of her ATK per second to all enemies in her attack range at the cost of the loss of 5% of HP per second. This is incredibly effective at dealing with particularly dangerous attack waves, allowing Skadi to output massive amounts of AoE damage while at the same time massively boosting the ATK of her allies. And if Skadi and the Seaborn's attack range overlaps when her third skill is triggered, the true damage aura they both generate stacks, blending most enemies caught between them. Needless to say, Skadi has quite easily overthrown Warfarin as the game's best attack buffer.
- Alternatively, Skadi and Warfarin can simply work together since ironically, Skadi has incredible synergy with Warfarin. Due to the fact that her own buffs are reliant on her ATK, a Skadi that is buffed by Warfarin will increase the power of her already huge buffs she is giving to her own team to even more ridiculous levels.
- Suzuran
- Suzuran takes many of the strengths that other Supporters have and rolls them into one package, combining incredible crowd-control ability with potent team support. Her main merit is the talent she unlocks at Elite 2, Binding Circle which passively inflicts a 20-23% Fragile onto all slowed enemies in range, which not only functions as a universal damage buff appreciable by the entire team (especially with more slow support), it's one of the few sources of Fragile that is not reliant on a skill, threshold, or random proc. Her entire kit is specifically designed to take advantage of that talent, with her S2 Childhood Frolic being a permanent ATK buff that also lets her target up to 3 enemies at once at Mastery 1, kind of like a weaker but permanent version of Angelina's S3; this allows to slow multiple targets at once while also turning her into a surprisingly good lane holder. However, her third skill, Foxfire Haze is where the fun really begins - it expands her range and continously slows all enemies within it, increases the effect of her Fragile by up to double, and rapidly heals all allies in her range. With this skill, not only can Suzuran spread a hefty damage amp to all enemies in a huge area simultaneously, but she can also pump the survivability of her teammates (and herself) through the roof with her rapid AoE healing, all while slowing every enemy nearby to a crawl for the skill's entire generous duration; as a bonus, her healing is classified as passive regeneration, so it can even heal normally unhealable units. The catch is that she doesn't attack while her S3 is active, but that's basically a non-issue if one considers how much support and crowd-control power she's putting out, on a unit not even meant to do that much damage to begin with. While all of her skills are gated by hefty SP costs, her Skill Aura - Supporter that increases the SP generation of all Supporters (including herself) makes this a surprisingly small issue.
- Both of her Modules are a small but appreciable boost to her supportive ability. DEC-X gives her bonus SP regen when enemies are in range, which stacks with her Skill Aura to further reduce her cooldowns, while its upgrades improve said Skill Aura to also provide a small ATK buff to all Supporters as well. Meanwhile, DEC-Y increases her Slow time from 0.8s to 1.2s to give her better slow uptime (especially with S2) and thus more uptime on Binding Circle, and when upgraded not only improves her Fragile (capping at 25% with Potentials and doubled with Foxfire Haze, turning it into the strongest unconditional Fragile effect in the game), but adds in an 8% Enfeeble to weaken enemy ATK, giving her even more supportive power.
- Suzuran also has an extremely powerful synergy with Qiubai, who has a talent that significantly boosts damage against slowed/bound targets and a third skill that multiplies this while outputting high multi-target DPS; however, her S3 lacks the ability to actually debuff the enemies outside of a random chance on her second talent. Enter Suzuran's Foxfire Haze, which not only ensures that everything in range is slowed for the entire duration, but also inflicts a massive Fragile on them to jack up Qiubai's damage even higher,note turning everything in range into mincemeat. More notably is that with Suzuran's talent accelerating her SP generation, both skills have almost identical cycles at equivalent levels, ensuring that they can always be active at the same time.
- Virtuosa
- Virtuosa debuts as a limited 6-star Ritualist Supporter, bringing a whole new brand of damage and support in one package. She specializes in dealing Necrosis damage through her first Talent Wordless Elegy, which constantly slows enemies briefly in her range and inflicts Necrosis damage based off a percentage of her ATK stat, which is further boosted by her second Talent Mental Inversion, which amplifies Necrosis damage taken by 20%, and her skills further capitalize on these strengths. Her second skill "Requiem Mass" boosts her ASPD and lets her hit an extra target, and grants a nearby ally with the highest ATK the ability to also deal Necrosis damage with their attacks, opening up plenty more potent damage strategies. Her third skill "Liberal Tango" though, is where the fun really begins. In exchange for not attacking, Virtuosa's attack range expands to a massive area similar to Suzuran's Foxfire Haze, receives up to a massive +180% ATK boost, amplifies the effect of her second Talent by 2.5 times, and also boosts the HP/ATK/DEF of a nearby ally with the highest of those stats by +30%, including Virtuosa herself. Any enemy that dares to step into her domain will find themselves suffering from Necrosis Fallout pretty much instantly, halving their ATK and causing them to take a hefty 800 elemental damage per second while their Necrosis gauge recovers, which takes long enough for many enemies to just perish outright in the process, and if they still survive, will be weakened enough for her allies to kill instantly, resulting in massive damage potential. As no enemy currently resists elemental damage, thus making Virtuosa effectively deal true damage, this makes her well-suited to take on just about everything with her powerful and unique damage output.
- Virtuosa's heavy emphasis on Necrosis damage also brings an unexpected Operator into the spotlight: Ebenholz. His third module lets him deal additional Necrosis damage with based on 8% of his ATK with every attack he deals, and also upgrades his second talent to deal an extra 30% of his ATK as elemental damage when the enemy suffers from Necrosis Fallout. Virtuosa's S3 also further jacks up Ebenholz's already high ATK stat by 30%, further boosting his damage output. Combined with how easy it is for Virtuosa to inflict Necrosis Fallout, and Ebenholz's very high ATK stat that's further increased with his third skill, this makes him a shockingly powerful boss killer that can punch through almost anything with what is functionally true damage.
Specialists
- Ela
- As the 6-star of the second Rainbow Six Siege crossover banner, Ela brings a powerful and unique playstyle, playing like a Marksman Sniper with a lot more utility. As a Trapmaster, she carries the Grzmot Mines as her traps of choice. Unlike the previous Trapmasters however, the Grzmot Mines aren't as plentiful to deploy, and don't deal any damage, but have a wider blast detection radius, and Ela's skills influence what kind of effects the mines will have. Her second skill, Shock and Hold, causes the Grzmot Mines to stun all enemies caught in the blast, and when the skill is activated, Ela's attack range shortens to that of a Heavyshooter Sniper/Splash Caster, but she gains a massive +300% DEF steroid, and her attacks deal AOE damage that pierces a hefty 800 DEF at max Mastery. This skill makes Ela a powerful ranged bruiser that can blast apart hordes of enemies while being significantly more durable than your usual Sniper. Her third skill, "Bosak Tempest", causes the Grzmot Mines to slow all enemies in the blast, and also inflicts a 35% Fragile debuff on them at max Mastery, and activating the skill grants her a +90% ATK buff and a shortened attack interval with 40 bullets to prioritize killing enemies affected by the mines, which makes Ela an incredibly powerful killer that manages to outdamage her fellow Team Rainbow member Ash and her S2. This is all compounded by her second talent Bull's Eye, which gives her attacks a chance to crit for extra damage, and the chance becomes guaranteed against enemies hit by the Grzmot Mines. Her sole downside is that her Grzmot Mines are slower to generate and require her to manually activate her skills to obtain more, and she can only hold 4 at a time, but the sheer utility and damage she can pump out more than makes up for it.
- And all of the above is what Ela can do even before unlocking her Module. With her Module unlocked, it allows Ela to be deployed on ground tiles, and her traps on high tiles, basically letting you deploy her anywhere on the map. As if her already impressive strengths weren't enough, she now becomes significantly more flexible for positioning, creating an exceptionally powerful Specialist that can moonlight as several different classes depending on the player's needs.
- Ethan (post-module)
- With his ability to semi-consistently apply the Bind crowd control effect, Ethan has always been a solid albeit situational unit in spite of his 4-star rarity, but his Module and upgrade as of the Ideal City event has pushed his utility through the roof. Ethan's main use as an Ambusher is in his second skill, Suspended Cross, which increases his ATK and, more importantly, multiplies the chance of his Talent (25% chance to Bind attacked enemies for 3 seconds) by up to 3 times at max Mastery, for a 75% chance to Bind on every attack. As the Ambusher archetype's base attack speed is 3.5, this leaves a 0.5 interval between Binds where the enemy can move assuming the RNG is in your favor... that is, until you take his fully upgraded Module into account, which not only increases his Talent's chance to proc to 28% (84% chance with S2 activated), but increases the Bind duration to 3.5 seconds, the exact same as his attack interval. This means, assuming you get reasonably lucky with the 84% chance, Ethan can potentially Bind any target he attacks for the entire 30 second duration of his skill. Additionally, the Module also slows enemies within Ethan's attack range by 20%, which helps keep enemies within Ethan's range in case a Bind doesn't proc. This makes him one of the most consistent stallers in the entire game, as he can completely render any short-ranged enemy helpless for your main DPS units to take care of with ease. And thanks to the Ambusher archetype's trait of having 0 Block, 50% Arts and Physical Dodge, and reduced targeting priority, Ethan can be safely placed in many positions to stall the enemy with little to no risk of dying, which gives him an irreplaceable niche even in late-game content such as high-risk Contingency Contract. Additionally, while most bosses have Contractual Boss Immunity to status effects such as Stun or Freeze, the same does not always apply to Bind, examples being Lucian, Blood Diamond in Phantom & Crimson Solitaire who becomes much easier to bring down with focus fire when bound in place. Ethan's Module is so impactful that it has made him considered to be the best Ambusher in the game, surpassing the 5-stars Manticore and Kirara and even the 6-star Mizuki, extremely impressive for a humble 4-star.
- Additionally, Ethan is purchasable in the shop for a mere 150 Shop Vouchers per token (equaling roughly 225 Sanity), which makes him easy to acquire and max potential even for free-to-play users.
- Gladiia (post-module)
- For the longest time, Gladiia was thought of as merely an exceptional welfare unit and an above average 6-star overall. With the release of her Module and upgrade in Ideal City, however, she has become a core unit in the increasingly powerful Abyssal Hunter squad composition. Her HOK-X module upgrade increases the power of her Waves of Aegir talent, which grants a 2.5% (3.5% with fully upgraded module) maximum HP regeneration to all Abyssal Hunter units while Gladiia is deployed, including Gladiia herself, granting massive sustain to Skadi, Specter (and her alter) and Andreana, of which the former two greatly benefit due to their aggressive kits. Additionally, the module upgrade also grants all Abyssal Hunters up to 30% reduced Physical and Arts damage taken. This turns the aforementioned units, as well as Gladiia, into nigh-unkillable beasts as long as Gladiia is on the map. Gladiia herself is no slouch, with a solid Jack of All Trades kit which allows her to substitute for a Guard even when her utility as a puller is unneeded. Her second Talent, Survival of the Fittest, gives her bonus damage to enemies below 3 Weight, which encompasses most non-Elite enemies and gives Gladiia the ability to kill them easily. Her S2, Waterless Grasp of the Raging Seas, expands her attack range to that of a Sniper (minus the two tiles directly to her side), allows her to hit two targets at once, dealing bonus damage and pulling them towards her at the cost of a slight increase in her attack interval. When this skill is active, Gladiia functions similarly to a Lord Guard such as Thorns, giving her laneholding potential. Gladiia's S3, Waterless Dance of the Shattered Maelstrom, pulls all targets in towards the end of Gladiia's attack range repeatedly while slowing them, which traps all enemies below heavy weight for a sizable 8 seconds while dealing significant Arts damage and at the end of the skill, pulls all enemies in towards Gladiia, making it a great setup to pull enemies together for allied area of effect skills. Due to Gladiia's surprising versatility despite being in a niche class and her incredible defensive buff for Abyssal Hunters, Gladiia is a great unit who is near vital for compositions that make use of Skadi or Specter.
- Jaye
- Whereas Specialists, true to their name, have a certain niche, Jaye has become this for them. His DP-consuming trait (which can be mitigated with his Module) is more than compensated in a low DP cost, low redeploy time note , and high stats - his ATK can be increased to over 700 at max level and trust.
- Both of his skills charge quickly, last until he's retreated, and give him substantial ATK buffs along with one of two special effects; his first skill, Shell Splitter, is very useful against exploding spiders, with his quick attack speed, as it nullifies their exploding on hit while also increasing his attack against them as per his talent, Anatomy Master. This turns him into a low-rent Lappland in cases one doesn't have her or she's not able to hit all of them.
- His second skill, Sashimi Platter, however, is where he really shines. This skill will heal him or a nearby ally for (at max mastery) half of his damage dealt, making him potentially self-sufficient as he is dealing 1100 ATK at max consistently, and healing for 550 each hit at maximum after it activates; due to his fast attack speed, his healing can outpace actual Medics. If one would pit him against infected creatures with this second skill, both the ATK and healing will go up. Combined with its low SP cost and its infinite duration, this makes him capable of serving as a source of main DPS while also doing significant healing as a side-job. Buffed, he can take a lot of bosses (including Pompeii) down by his lonesome, and with the healing, he can even sustain Aak and Warfarin's buffing, upping his ATK substantially. When accompanied by a buff army, he can even take down Talulah. That's right - a 4-star operator can take down Talulah.
- As a 4-star, he's not hard to get and easier to build than higher rarity operators. To show how much he stands out from the other Specialists: just ask any (CN) veteran if raising Specialists to E2 is worth it. They will usually say that Specialists are very situational and niche, except for Jaye.
- In Integrated Strategies, he remains a popular pick due to his low (Hope) Cost, DPS and healing capability, especially when the player hasn't acquired any sources of healing; helped by his ability to synergize very well with a large number of Collections (like those that give instant SP Cost because his skills are infinite, or those that increase healing effectivity). He can even solo the IS3 3rd boss up to Surging Wave lvl 8* with just a few Collectibles that boost his health, damage and possibly healing rate. True Damage won't be that big of a problem if you have enough health to tank it and quick enough healing to recover the lost health.
- His first Module gives him some stat boosts that further improves his performance, and even decreases the burden he places on your DP (taking him from -3 to -2 DP per second), making him even easier to field alongside other operators with reduced impact on your deployment tactics.
- It should be noted as well that Jaye has gone as far as to replace Skadi and Hellagur in many builds in the role of helidropping note to deal and or stall a single strong enemy, which says a lot about a humble 4-star. The fact that his higher rarity counterparts haven't managed to outshine him yet is another remarkable feat.
- It wasn't until the introduction of Skadi's module alongside Gladia's that she was finally able to compete with him. That's right. Jaye's ability to helidrop was so good, that it took the introduction of a module for a six-star operator to finally be able to compete with him as a sidegrade.
- Kirin R Yato
- Hot off the heels of Texas the Omertosa (who is listed below), Yato's limited alter from the Monster Hunter collab also proves to be an insanely powerful Executor who brings immense killpower with equally potent accessibility. On top of her first talent Kirin Bolts giving her attacks bonus on-hit Arts damage, all three of her skills unload tremendous amounts of damage in different ways, on top of being rapid multi-hits to proc her talent more often. Demon Mode buffs her ASPD and makes her attacks hit twice, along with making every third attack on a single target a 6-hit combo; this turns Yato into a Spam Attack monster for its surprisingly long duration of 20 seconds, giving her powerful sustained single-target damage. Blade Dance instead opts for frontloaded damage by giving her an ATK buff and a significant multiplier to the Arts damage from Kirin Bolts, before causing her to instantly unleash 16 AoE slashes in front of her; this can erase hordes and deal severe damage to priority targets in a snap, while the boosted Arts damage also helps her a bit against high-DEF enemies. Meanwhile, her third skill Midair Spinning Blade Dance uses the titular Spin Attack well known from the Dual Blades, rapidly dealing massive damage to enemies she collides with during the spin while extending the length of her dash every time she hits an enemy (up to a limit); this can completely eviscerate entire hordes of enemies in a single go, and the high damage per hit means that it'll still hurt a lot even against bulkier foes. On top of that, her second skill makes her immune to crowd-control while active, and her third skill makes her outright intangible while she's spinning, making it nigh impossible for enemies to stop her before she unloads all her damage. The cherry on top is her second talent Archdemon Mode giving her an ATK buff both when her skill is active and for a few seconds after, giving her an extra push when it comes to killing stragglers that survive her burst damage. With incredible damage with multiple specializations, combined with a cheap cost and ease of use, Kirin R Yato lets Yato live up to her combat experience as a powerful elite Operator.
- Specter the Unchained (post-module)
- On her debut, Specter the Unchained had a somewhat poor reputation for being on the opposite end of this trope. This was due to the extremely poor stats of her substitute form, which neither slowed nor dealt enough damage to be meaningful and effectively did nothing but artificially delay the uptime of her skills, giving her the unfortunate title of being the first alter to have lower viability than her 5-star original form. This changed with the release of her module upgrade in the Lingering Echoes update, of which the level 2 and 3 upgrades to Specter Alter's PUM-X module greatly buffs her doll, increasing the area of effect slow from 40% to 60% and Arts damage per second from 40% to 80%. Even more importantly, however, the upgraded module grants Specter Alter an extra 15 SP upon switching back to her original form, which is vital for her uptimes due to the Dollkeeper archetype's skills not recharging while in doll form. With this upgrade, Specter Alter is able to use her powerful skills to their full potential. Her S2, The Thirst to Survive, replicates her Guard form's S2, granting her a massive boost of ATK and attack speed and keeping her from falling below 1 HP for the duration. After the skill ends, it automatically switches her to her doll form, allowing her to slow all enemies around her and output area of effect Arts damage. Her S3, The Pressure to Survive, allows her to attack all blocked enemies like her Centurion Guard form (albeit at 2 Block) while giving her bonus HP and an even larger ATK buff than her S2 which is further increased when attacking enemies with a larger health percentage than Specter Alter (if not, it reduces her own HP by 3% on each hit until she can apply the bonus damage). Given how much Specter Alter's skills revolve around taking damage until switching out, her doll form's low stats and SP lock were the main factor holding it back. With that no longer being a problem, Specter Alter is an amazing offensive unit on par or stronger than her Guard form, with an aggressive kit that allows her to be deployed recklessly to output massive damage until she falls, then transform into her doll form to keep applying damage and crowd control until she turns back, ready to do it again. Specter Alter with her upgraded module is such a huge uplift that the difference has in fact fueled some resentment from her users, who believe that her fully upgraded self is the level she should have been all along.
- Texas the Omertosa
- Texas the Omertosa establishes herself as one of the strongest Executors in the game and arguably one of the strongest units in the game, with each of her skills offering incredible power coupled with the ease of use that comes with an Executor Specialist. Her second skill, Unrelenting Downpour, deals high Arts damage to all surrounding enemies and cuts their RES by up to 30% for 10 seconds, then gives her up to +55% ATK along with double-hitting Arts attacks. This skill does tremendous amounts of damage for how often it can be spammed - combining the RES reduction with her rapid Arts attacks can melt even bulky targets out of existence in a flash. If crowd control is favored over massive single-target DPS, her third skill Torrential Sword Rain takes a leaf out of her Vanguard version's signature attack, dealing heavy Arts damage to surrounding enemies twice and stunning them; only this time, for 8 seconds afterwards, she starts raining down Arts swords every second on up to 4 targets in her range, briefly stunning them per hit. This not only deals surprisingly high area damage, but the constant stuns will ensure enemies cannot escape her onslaught, and in particular can render enemies with slow attacks completely unable to fight back. The sword rain also falls independently of Texas's attacks, which means even if Texas is hit by crowd control, the sword rain is unimpeded. All of this is made even more absurd by her first Talent, Texas Tradition, which gives her a free +20-28% ATK boost when her skill is active and, and if she scores a kill, fully restores her HP and reactivates her current skill, letting her dish out another dose of burst damage and then continue her onslaught for even longer. The cherry on top is her other talent Texas Swordsmanship giving her an ASPD buff and 25-30% damage reduction if she hasn't defeated an enemy yet, making it even more likely she'll live long enough to proc Texan Tradition and recast her skill for massive damage. With absurd damage output matching many other 6-stars and crowd control, alongside a maximum 18-second cooldown and a cheap DP cost, Texas the Omertosa is an incredibly flexible DPS unit that can pop in on demand to solve nearly any problem, then retreat and be ready to do the same thing in less time than it takes most Operators to even charge their skills.
- She's also by far one of the most powerful Operators to take in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor, as her already insane power synergizes with a huge number of different Collectibles, and her flexibility allows her to cover multiple offensive and defensive positions in almost any level, especially when the environment is too dangerous for any other unit to do meaningful work in time. Most of all, her Torrential Sword Rain being a spammable on-demand stun that hits air units is a godsend since many dangerous enemies in the mode have weaknesses to crowd control - she can single-handedly trivialize Skimming Sea Drifters, one of the premier threats in the mode, and can also significantly help neutralize some of the nastier bosses, such as Carmen, the Paranoia Illusion, The Last Knight, and Izumik.note
- Weedy
- Weedy is by far the most powerful Push Stroker Specialist in the game. While her first two skills are very average and have their own niche usesnote , her real strength lies in her third skill, Liquid Nitrogen Cannon. When the skill is activated, she will launch a projectile that pushes all enemies in front of her with a ton of force, instantly dealing up to 350% of her ATK as Arts damage and causing any targets hit to suffer 1,200 true damage per tile they travel for the next few seconds. Not to mention, the Industrial Water Cannon that she can periodically deploy not only allows for some incredible plays by virtue of having a disposable pusher, but will also duplicate Weedy's skill and boost its push strength if it is adjacent to her when she triggers it, causing it to deal an absolutely obscene amount of knockback that will send just about anything across the map.note While Weedy paired with her extra cannon is plenty powerful enough to inflict massive burst damage on large waves, she truly shines when she is paired with Angelina or FEater, who can help push the enemies she hits with her Liquid Nitrogen Cannon even further away, thus inflicting even more True Damage. Such a combination is capable of trivializing even the hardest maps.
Specific to Integrated Strategies
Operators
- In general, the meta for Integrated Strategies is vastly different from the standard game. The vast majority of Operators can become extremely strong if you get the right set of collections for them (even low-rarity operators), but the mode also favors versatility and Operators capable of covering a wide variety of roles, particularly low-rarity ones that cost less Hope to recruit and promote rather than high-cost DPS-units. Units like low-rarity Healing Defenders, Jaye and Podenco for being able to double as Medics, Click for being able to provide cheap DPS potentially outside of her range, May for being able to CC enemies and knock down fliers, Beanstalk being able to generate DP while covering both melee and aerial, just about all Summoners, the list goes on and on. On the other hand, units that were already game-breaking may either become obscure for not being worth the cost of obtaining them, or become even more broken.
- Fitting for how they cannot be obtained outside of the event and don't appear commonly even inside it, the IS-exclusive Elite Operators have a trend of being extremely powerful, especially since they're free recruitments if you happen to luck out and get a chance to recruit them. To make matters better, if you can promote them, you'll have a completely maxed-out Elite 2 unit for your troubles.
- Sharp
- Sharp has the standard high stats expected of a Dreadnought Guard, and his talent Invisible Blade takes it even further by giving him up to 15% bonus ATK and 30% physical dodge for free at Elite 2, both making him hit harder and soak hits better. However, his skill Drawing Sword is what takes him over the top - at the cost of completely nullifying his defense, it gives him a significant amount of max HP and a huge damage multiplier on all his attacks, all for a decent duration and cheap cooldown. An Elite 2 Sharp will be gaining 50% bonus HP and dealing 300% of his ATK with every hit while this skill is active, letting him soak damage while instantly killing anything that gets in his way. The DEF drop isn't nearly as much of an issue as it first appears, considering his inflated HP and passive physical dodge chance, and the sheer damage he can put out more than outweighs the cost - considering his ATK caps at over a thousand when promoted, dealing 3000+ physical damage per hit is effectively an Armor Piercing Attack, slicing anyone without hilariously inflated defenses out of existence, and still significantly hurting anything that can take the hits. With a few collections under his belt, Sharp can effortlessly cut down tough enemies once his skill is up, and is even capable of going toe-to-toe with some of the mode's strongest bosses.
- Touch
- Touch is a 6-star Medic disguised as a 5-star. Her stats are already quite high, and her Apocalyptic Scene ability extends their range by up to 2 tiles when promoted, while letting them heal 2 units at once and giving all Medics an ATK boost for the duration. This is already quite strong, but her talent Promotion is her real strength, letting them restore up to 3 SP to any ally she heals. At the time of her release, the only other unit that could simultaneously heal and restore SP to units was Saria, and Touch does this both at three times the strength and on every attack instead of using a skill. With this, they become both an incredible healer and an insane SP battery, often letting your Operators fire off skills like machine guns, or alleviating the downtime of SP-hungry skills that could turn the tide of battle.
- Tulip
- Tulip doesn't disappoint as the newest edition to the IS-exclusive roster, being a Pioneer with good stats and a powerhouse of a skill in Lingering Scent, best described as a combo of Ch'en and Irene with DP generation on top. After generating 7 DP, she'll launch 8 combo slashes at nearby enemies to deal heavy physical damage while piercing half of their DEF, giving her the versatility of being able to generate DP and eviscerate early waves at the same time. This is helped by Boundless Heart, her talent which gives her up to doubled SP generation until she fires her skill for the first two times per deployment, letting her instantly pump out those first two skills to set up the rest of the defense. Unlike many other Vanguards, even once the early stages of the levels are done, Tulip still manages to have a good amount of presence due to the amount of damage her skill can do, especially with some Collectibles under her belt that'll let her hold her own against even stronger elites.
- Sharp
Introduced in Ceobe's Fungimist
- The Tactical Assault Operative (instantly advance 4* or higher Guards/Vanguards on recruitment) is generally considered to be among the strongest of the starting squads, if not the strongest. Since Guards and Vanguards (especially the former) tend to be some of the stronger units in the game and power spike especially hard when hitting Elite 2, being able to instantly promote them on recruitment can give players an insane lead, allowing them to build up a powerful defense in the blink of an eye or pump their DP generation through the roof. If you can manage to recruit a Game-Breaker guard like an Elite 2 Thorns, Blaze, or SilverAsh early, expect to easily breeze through the first 2-odd chapters.
- This squad, along with the other Tactical squads, recieved a Nerf in Mizuki and Caerula Arbor, changing their function to just reducing recruit and promotion costs by 2 and 1 respectively, with the instant promotion now being tied to a random chance. Although this can still provide a sizeable head start and help with faster teambuilding, it's no longer the win condition that the old one used to be.
- Support Squad grants you 2 extra Hope and 20 Originium Ingots at the start, and these allow you to alleviate much of the Early Game Hell nature of Roguelikes in general. The extra Hope lets you recruit higher rarity Operators or a Collectible at the start, and the Ingots can be spent on whatever you wish in the guaranteed Shop at the end of the 1st zone.
- Basically any of Super Rare upgrades of pre-existing collections are these. They either provide incredible stat buffs that will let Operators power-spike to high heaven, streamline the recruitment of lots of powerful units, or a myriad of other bonuses that'll make the game far easier if you can get your hands on some. A few examples of how these might help are listed below:
- In general, any of the collections that make Operators start with more SP are extremely powerful, considering how valuable a burst of early SP can be for many units. With more starting SP, DPS options become available earlier, units with defensive/recovery abilities can survive brutal onslaughts that they couldn't have without their skill, and Vanguards can fire their DP-generation abilities faster to bring in reinforcements. Timing is in general very crucial in this gamemode, because stages tend to change gimmicks on the spot. Out of all of them, the Fluorescent Lamp/Second Economic Reform Act is the strongest, giving a whopping +18 starting SP, usually enough to instantly fire a skill out of the gate.
- Similarly, collections that increase starting DP can really ruin an enemy's day, since DP is so essential early on that having an advantage can let you set up a defense far earlier than you're supposed to, eliminating the DP crunch that many of the maps try to enforce. It is especially a godsent when maps rush you right out of the gate, which the roguelike has no shortage of. The strongest collection in this family is the Burdenbeast/Dreambind Castle Model which provides a whopping +30 starting DP note , enough to put up a small fortification right off the bat.
- Bend Spears - Bloodbath. Guard skills generally tend to be incredibly powerful, but either take a while to charge up (such as Blaze with her second skill) or are only able to be used at key moments if their value is to be maximized. Bloodbath turns this on its head, allowing Guards to restore 2 SP on every attack. While this has its uses to make slow-charging skills charge faster, its primary value comes with allowing players to spam skills with low SP costs - this is especially good on offensive recovery guards, as they often have low SP costs to make up for the fact that they can only gain SP by attacking, and now they recover 3 SP per hit. Some particularly noteworthy examples include Cutter and Ch'en spamming nuclear burst damage with impunity, Lappland's S2 having an almost permanent uptime, Thorns instantly charging his S3, and Bibeak permanently trapping enemies in a Cycle of Hurting.
- Bend Spears - Deathmatch lowers the DEF of all Guards by 40%, but raises their ATK and ASPD by 40% and 30 respectively. Guards can often take the DEF loss due to their high base HP, and the DPS boosts this item gives them can get hilariously obscene, letting them melt just about anyone out of existence very quickly. And for Guards that can attack more than 1 tile away, this is even less of an issue, as most heavy-hitting physical enemies won't even be able to get close without being obliterated.
- Broken Wand - Malediction is another example of a trade-off with far more benefit than penalty, reducing the HP of Casters by 40% while increasing their Arts damage output by 70%. Casters are already generally Glass Cannons who want to avoid damage in the first place, so the HP loss really doesn't make that much of a difference (especially when a level has no enemies that can hit ranged operators to begin with), but the 70% damage boost massively increases their destructive power considering that most Casters already deal significant amounts of damage that usually can't be reduced much by RES. Under such a significant damage buff, most high-tier Casters will be able to One-Hit Kill lesser enemies while melting through even bulkier ones, and skills that were originally high DPS options will practically become kill buttons, especially if you have more Arts amplifying collections on you.
- Fatal Bolts - Crossfire is a weaker version of Malediction for Snipers, replacing the 70% increased damage for +40% ATK. Although this is less powerful than Malediction in most cases, it accomplishes a similar task, and it being an ATK buff instead of a damage buff can help Snipers overwhelm enemies they would normally deal Scratch Damage to.
- Fatal Bolts - Divine Speed gives all Snipers a 70 ASPD bonus. There isn't much to say about this except that an attack speed boost of this magnitude can turn just about any Marksman Sniper into a DPS monster, while turning higher-tier Snipers into literal murder machines, the sheer volume of attacks tearing apart even physically bulky foes. Furthermore, any Sniper with slow attack speed like AoE Snipers will get that weakness removed, letting them spam their hard-hitting attacks as much as possible. Special mention goes to Exusiai who will be able to fire at an effectively continuous rate while her skill is active.
- Iron Guard - Impenetrable makes Defenders recover 2 SP every time they take damage. On most Defenders, this is already quite good as it lets them inflate their defenses to high heaven, but it becomes disgustingly powerful when paired with healing defenders, letting them spam their healing skills so often that everything in their heal zone becomes basically immortal. It's even stronger on stages with poison haze, as every tick of the haze counts as damage.
- Unleashings from Crimson Solitaire is a weaker version of this (only restoring 1 SP instead of 2), but applies to all classes instead of only Defenders, with all of the absurd strength that it entails. In addition to the aforementioned poison haze maps, it's incredibly strong against the Troupe Mouthpiece since his spawned assistants deal tick damage, letting you pump out skills to take them down.
- Blunt Claws - Inspiration reduces the Redeployment Time of all Vanguards by 50%. This is already good on its own, but it particularly shines when paired with none other than the humble 2-star operator Yato, whose talent reduces her redeployment time by 30 seconds. Because this talent applies after the relic, Yato's redeployment time is reduced to a meager 2 seconds, allowing her to be redeployed almost immediately after retreating. While other Vanguards in Phantom Solitaire are also capable of this, they also require the Brokenblade relic, which can only be acquired from a random encounter and comes with the drawback of lowering all your operators' HP by 30%. This relic alone turns Yato, who is normally a weak unit, into an infinitely reusable Meat Shield as long as you have enough DP to keep deploying her, turning normally hellish stages such as Barrens Cadet/Unending and Absurd Trickeries into complete jokes.
- Civilight Eterna is a situational item that has the potential to snap the game in half if you have the right units to exploit it, by causing enemies to take a whopping +150% True damage. Sources of True damage are rare, but tend to be extremely powerful to begin with; factoring in this bonus results in horrifically powerful nukes that can vaporize nearly any enemy irrespective of their defensive capabilities. Although it was originally unremarkable in Ceobe's Fungimist due to a lack of good users at the time, sources of True damage became more accessible from Crimson Solitaire and onwards, making this item get increasingly powerful. One of its best users is Kal'tsit with S3 due to it being one of the highest and most consistent sources of True damage in the game on an already beefy unit, with a Civilight-boosted Mon3tr regularly dealing over ten thousand armor-piercing damage with each hit, effortlessly cutting down even some of the mode's most dangerous bosses. To add more to this, as Civilight Eterna affects True damage taken and not True damage dealt, it also magnifies things such as the self-Damage Over Time from Enraged Possessed and Winterwisps, as well as the damage from various environmental hazards or conditions, making it so certain levels will practically play themselves as enemies are melted down.
Introduced in Phantom and Crimson Solitaire
- In terms of starting team, First Move Advantage (Vanguard, Sniper, Specialist) composed of Fang, Jaye and Kroos (or Blue Poison if you happen to have some extra Hope) is the best starting team you can get, as they virtually cover everything you need to ensure a smooth start.
- Fang provides a 2-block and steady DP generation. Kroos provides anti-air and long-range DPS. Jaye, being a Game-Breaker himself, will murder anything that gets close to him, even Metal Crabs, while keeping the others alive through his 2nd skill. He can even be used as a Fast-Redeploy, as Fang's DP generation will counter his DP drain. Having 2 ground Operators also give deployment flexibility in case you need to block 2 lanes (e.g. Sniper Squad stage). And finally, the entire team cost only 5 Hope at higher difficulty, with a total DP cost of only 22, so you can always afford them in any run and deploy them quickly to build a defense line.
- In comparison, Slow and Steady gives you good DPS from Caster and Sniper, but with only a single Defender as blocker. Overcoming Your Weakness is a high-risk team to have, as you only have a single Guard to block, and you need to rely on their and your Supporter's damage to kill the enemies, which may not be enough. And both teams are composed of classes with typically high DP cost, which gets further hamstrung with the lack of DP generators.
- And ultimately, none of the other teams can take all of the Metal Slimes spawning as early as the first node. As the other teams only provide you with 1 ground Operator, Crying Thief is out. Gopnik deals too much damage to be healed by a single Medic, let alone a team without one. And Duck Lord may require quick redeployment to camp the spot he will inevitably linger around for a few seconds.
- Sadly, this squad was indirectly nerfed in Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, as many of the mode's maps (especially the early one) focus more on hordes of enemies Zerg Rushing your team, and the squad overall lacks area damage to deal with the incoming mob quickly enough.
- Basically all of the elusive "hand" Collections are this. While they tend to be situational due to only benefiting specific archetypes per artifact, it buffs them to an absurd degree, ramping up their strengths and mitigating or outright nullifying their weaknesses to exponentially increase their power.
- Hand of Spikes causes Protector, Arts Protector, and Duelist Defenders to deal Arts damage every second to all blocked foes equal to their DEF. Considering that they're units who are made to have lots of DEF, and can stack even more DEF with other Collections, this can lead to Defenders who are incredibly tanky and frighteningly damaging, letting them laugh off physical damage and mow down groups of enemies at a time.
- Expeditioner's Joklumarkar rebrands the item as the Hand of Fisticuffs, which slightly changes its usage. Although its damage now applies every 2 seconds instead of on every hit, it's now a Herd-Hitting Attack that damages everything in their surroundings (even aerial units) while Binding them briefly, and it now deals True damage instead of Arts, so even Arts-resistant Casters will be sure to feel it. It also scales with ATK instead of DEF, which is a double-edged sword: while it loses value on Protectors since their ATK is generally much lower than their DEF, the opposite is true for Duelists and Arts Protectors, who can now use their high ATK stats to cause even more mayhem, while Protectors can still use it as a source of continous chip damage on blocked foes.
- Hand of Choker causes Heavyshooter, Deadeye, and Besieger Snipers to instantly kill non-boss targets below 30% HP. While basically useless against fodder, they're usually used to handle heavy enemies like Elites anyways; since Elites (especially in this mode) tend to be very tanky, being able to effectively reduce their maximum HP by 30% can be a godsend when it comes to killing them in time, especially if they're also fast/unblockable. With more attack boosts or skills, they can even start killing tanky elites in a single hit.
- In Mizuki and Caerula Arbor, the HP threshold was nerfed to 20%, but it can now affect all enemies, including bosses. This can be a godsend against the final bosses since they tend to be extremely tanky, and can significantly alleviate the HP steroids that high-difficulty runs give all the enemies. It's particularly useful against the Last Knight as he revives at 25% HP and becomes unblockable during his second stage, meaning that users of this relic can simply execute him as long as 5% of his health is dealt while he's in their range.
- Expeditioner's Joklumarkar reintroduces the Hand of Choker as the Hand of Outburst and makes it even stronger by buffing the user's damage based on the target's missing HP, up to a whopping +50% against enemies below half health, making it even easier for them to bring enemies below the execute threshold.
- Hand of Buckler causes Decel Binder, Hexer, and Abjurer Supporters to deal bonus damage equal to 3% of the target's maximum HP as Arts damage with each hit, making it one of the rare cases of a Percent Damage Attack. This not only mitigates the problem of their low ATK to let them deal significant damage no matter how tanky the target is (even bosses!), it also complements the first two subclasses' usual tactic of showering the enemy in debuffs, since now they'll also be taking huge damage alongside being softened up, especially with ones who already inflict damage amplification like Suzuran or Gnosis. And if you stack it with items or skills that buff attack speed, even the tankiest enemies will find themselves melted in an instant. Caerula Arbor nerfed the item by making it scale off of current HP instead of maximum HP, which is still strong albeit not as much as it used to be.
- Hand of Diffusion is Bloodbath for Splash, Chain, and Blast Casters, making them gain 2 SP each time they damage an enemy. This is a godsend for Casters whose powerful skills have a long cooldown such as the third skills of Dusk and Mostima, especially when coupled together with some ASPD collections. Furthermore, since it applies on instances of damage instead of on attack, attacking groups of enemies (or applying Ifrit's Damage Over Time note ) will generate absurd amounts of SP, rendering their usual drawbacks all but moot when they're able to spam all of their skills with impunity.
- This particular collection brought an unexpected 6-star to the rise: former Low-Tier Letdown Passenger. Ever since his buffs, he has become decent but not a Game-Breaker per say because the SP Costs of his skills are the only thing left untouched (making it so that using him alongside batteries like Liskarm, Saga and Warfarin is still necessary for him to work optimally). However, this collection nullifies that weakness as well, because every single lightning and chain lightning produced by his third skill (one second after it's done resolving) counts as an attack, leading to the following progression of events: Passenger casts his third skill, it ends, and he gets all his SP back, allowing for instant, back to back lightning storms (This video (Youtube mirror) clearly demonstrates Passenger unleashing his skill, followed by a storm of blue SP-gaining numbers floating up as his storms smite the enemies repeatedly). This has made him at least on par with Bibeak as long as he has this particular collection and also caused him being among the top 3 most used Casters in the first three days.
- Caerula Arbor changes the item to affect Fortress Defenders instead of Splash Casters, which helps them just as much with their skill cycling. It's particularly effective with Horn's first skill, as its fast cooldown and charge storing ensures that Horn will almost always instantly recharge it with each shot.
- This particular collection brought an unexpected 6-star to the rise: former Low-Tier Letdown Passenger. Ever since his buffs, he has become decent but not a Game-Breaker per say because the SP Costs of his skills are the only thing left untouched (making it so that using him alongside batteries like Liskarm, Saga and Warfarin is still necessary for him to work optimally). However, this collection nullifies that weakness as well, because every single lightning and chain lightning produced by his third skill (one second after it's done resolving) counts as an attack, leading to the following progression of events: Passenger casts his third skill, it ends, and he gets all his SP back, allowing for instant, back to back lightning storms (This video
- Hand of Shredder makes Dreadnought, Swordmaster and Instructor Guards ignore a whopping 70% of enemy DEF on hit. This mitigates the moderate ATK of the latter two, while the Dreadnoughts effectively start dealing True damage. Swordmasters in particular can make good use of it due to having multihit burst DPS skills, allowing them to completely eviscerate even targets with over 2000 DEF.
- Hand of Superspeed grants +100 ASPD (+120 in Caerula Arbor) to Executor, Ambusher, and Dollkeeper Specialists if they don't have any allies in the surrounding tiles. Given that most of them are made to be deployed alone anyways, this condition is hilariously easy to activate, and will usually end up doubling their DPS. Executors and Ambushers benefit the most from this: helidrop assassination tactics are now even more effective, and Ambushers can mitigate their slow attack speed to start dishing out massive area damage and crowd-control. In combination with their X module, the latter archetype can slow down (usually already-slow) heavy defenses and continuously bombard them with rapid-fire true AoE damage, making it rather fun to torment the enemy this way.
- Hand of Snatcher reduces the costs of Charger, Pioneer, and Tactician Vanguards by 12, and causes them to get 6 extra DP whenever they kill an enemy. Most Vanguards don't even cost 12 DP, meaning that you can deploy them for no DP cost at all, all while they're getting massive amounts of DP on kill that stacks with that of Chargers. If you have Vanguards, this Collection basically invalidates all your DP problems for the rest of the run. In Beanstalk's case, this means you get two units for free, one of which doesn't even take in a deployment slot.
- In Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, the item is reintroduced as the Hand of Adaptability, which slightly nerfs the cost reduction to -10, but changes the secondary effect to reducing the DP cost of all undeployed Operators by 1 each time one of the Vanguards kills an enemy. This reduction stacks without limit, meaning that even killing a few enemies at the start of the level is a considerable discount since it affects your whole lineup at the same time, helping you rush out your expensive units just as much as the previous effect did. On levels with lots of enemies, if you feed your Vanguards enough kills, this can result in you straight up deploying your entire team for free.
- Hand of Spikes causes Protector, Arts Protector, and Duelist Defenders to deal Arts damage every second to all blocked foes equal to their DEF. Considering that they're units who are made to have lots of DEF, and can stack even more DEF with other Collections, this can lead to Defenders who are incredibly tanky and frighteningly damaging, letting them laugh off physical damage and mow down groups of enemies at a time.
- One of the staples and win conditions of many Integrated Strategies runs is a set of 3 items (spearheaded by the Golden Chalice) which slightly increase your units' ASPD for every 5 Originium Ingots you own. It's fairly easy to amass a large amount of Ingots if you don't splurge on shops and chance games, and the buffs stack without limit (especially so if you grab multiple members of the set), turning most units into DPS/HPS monsters once you're rich enough, especially ones that attacked fast to begin with. This can also alleviate the low ATK of Medics and certain operators, letting them pull their weight as if their ATK was higher, and as high ATK operators are often plagued by an innately low ASPD, they will get that weakness removed as well, letting them spam their high damage without impunity. It's also useful on units that can apply debuffs on hit like Decel Binders or Gnosis, since they'll eventually be able to apply their statuses with a nearly 100% uptime, which in some cases can permanently disable anything that isn't immune.
- The Ribbon of Honor adds +100% to a unit's ATK when only blocking one enemy. Somewhat situational in many cases, but absurd on anything with only 1 Block (especially Dreadnoughts and Executors), doubling their already significant damage output to ridiculous levels. It's particularly good when a single large enemy has to be killed quickly, like the Wandering Puppet you can encounter at the end of the third level.
- Royal Alliance Treaty may be situational, but it absolutely trivializes certain levels. It makes your operators take no damage from Sarkaz enemies, which are usually Demonic Spiders, especially Lancers and Grudgebearers; this includes bosses like W or the Sarkaz Centurion. And if the entire map contains nothing but Sarkaz (like the aforementioned W's stage or the infamous Lancer map Unending), this item turns them into Breather Levels in an otherwise punishing mode. Although the item was indirectly nerfed in Caerula Arbor due to there being far less Sarkaz-based stages, it still completely cheeses those that remain, such as the one you can get by accepting the Sarkaz dancer's invitation.
- A series of items, spearheaded by the Wrath of Siracusans, briefly increases your Operators' ATK by up to 100% every time their skill activates. This massively boosts Operators with automatic, low-SP offensive recovery skills such as Kroos and Blue Poison, especially since they stack, giving them the potential to turn the humble Kroos into a murder machine, hitting in excess of 2,000 per hit. And the item increases ATK whenever a skill activates, meaning Medics and Guardian Defenders also benefit from this item, allowing the likes of Saria to do a 3,000+ area heal with her 2nd skill, easily trivializing many encounters.
- One of the best users of the items is the 6-star Instructor Guard Pallas, whose first skill, Strikes of Victory, boosts her next attack's power significantly and makes it hit twice for every third attack with full Mastery. Along with some ASPD buffs, Pallas becomes an absolute DPS monster, capable of even defeating bosses such as the Big Sad Lock in mere seconds.
- One of the best users of the items is the 6-star Instructor Guard Pallas, whose first skill, Strikes of Victory, boosts her next attack's power significantly and makes it hit twice for every third attack with full Mastery. Along with some ASPD buffs, Pallas becomes an absolute DPS monster, capable of even defeating bosses such as the Big Sad Lock in mere seconds
- The Shadow, obtainable in a special Encounter, significantly increases the chances of drawing a Temporary Recruitment unit when recruiting Operators. Mind you, Temporary Recruitments cost no Hope to recruit, can include units that you don't even own (and the 4 IS-exclusive Elite Ops), and most importantly come with maxed levels/attributes for their respective promotion stage. Throw in some Hope to promote them, and they'll become max level Elite 2 units with fully mastered skills; after enough recruitments, you can amass a veritable Elite Army of maxed units on standby for a minimal Hope cost, which will give a huge advantage for the rest of the run, especially if you got the item early.
- Obtained in the same event as the Shadow (or a similar one in Caerula Arbor) is the Bladedance/Chitinous Ripper which, while requiring much better luck to make use of, is also notable for giving a random unit in the squad +100% ATK and HP for the entire battle. Although it's reliant on the RNG hitting a key unit to work properly, a lucky Bladedance will basically win you the level by making the lucky unit almost unstoppable, especially with ASPD buffs; DPS units will tear through even bulky targets like paper, healers will be able to laugh off any enemy offense, and tanks will become virtually immortal. If your strategy revolves around a single keystone, you can even sometimes make them the only unit on your team so that Bladedance always buffs them, turning them into a One-Man Army.
- In Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, the item (now the Frozen Whetstone) is even more powerful due to it also doubling DEF, RES, Block, and initial SP, but it's also harder to use as it now doubles the target's DP cost as well.
- The Rat Thieves is often considered one of the best nodes to encounter and easily the most useful of all the Downtime Recreations. Although it uses the relatively valuable Hope, not only is it guaranteed to give you something useful at the least if you pay up (unlike all the other "gambling" nodes which can leave you empty handed), it has by far the highest drop rates of any of them, making it easy to pick up valuable collectibles and resources even if you don't spend a lot. This is especially useful in runs that rely on minimal operators, as you'll likely have a large stockpile of Hope to spend, allowing you to rake in collectibles, ingots, and lives in the dozens to steamroll everything after.
- Scout's Scope, which was added in the second expansion, is a godsend to any ranged Operator, as it increases their damage dealt the farther their target is from them, capped as a massive +100%, doubling the damage of long-ranged Operators such as Deadeye or Artilleryman Snipers (especially Fartooth, who already has huge distance-based damage multipliers, or Fiammetta who can only hit things at the maximum range with S3), Blast Casters, Fortress Defenders, and Operators with global-ranged abilities such as Goldenglow or Ambriel. Even getting a partial bonus from is very significant, meaning it is valuable to any Operator with above-melee range. It reappears in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor, and although the description claims it has been nerfed significantly to a cap of +50%, this is a text error, meaning it is still as strong as ever.
- The Old Fan also introduced in the second expansion is ridiculously powerful, as it grants a +10% increase to all Operators' ATK for each unique Operator class within the squad, capping out at +80% with at least one Operator of each class. Given that most players will be aiming to round out their squad regardless, getting the most out of this relic is not hard in the least, especially with the availability of Operators in vouchers that qualify as another class (e.g. Amiya and Reserve Squad Operators). An unconditional +80% ATK to all Operators is an absolutely absurd boost, making it one of the best collectibles in the mode.
- Also from the second expansion is the Silence/Black Tulip, which is basically a weaker Liberator trait that applies to all allies, giving them up to 60% ramping ATK if they go a minute without activating their skills, resetting after a skill usage. Given how strong the Liberator trait is, it's a major bonus on pretty much any operator without a Spam Attack skill, and is especially good on those that only activate their skills during key moments, as not only will they be hurting/healing at a massively boosted rate until then, those crucial skills will hit even harder. On top of that, on units that have passive or permanent skills (as long as you wait long enough to activate the latter), this just results in them having +60% ATK forever.
Introduced in Mizuki and Caerula Arbor
- If you can keep your Light full and get lucky with dice rolls, the game can bless you with Enlightenments, which are boons in the vein of Plays from Crimson Solitaire, but much stronger and permanent. Their effects vary but are all extremely powerful, ranging from instantly blessing you with Collectibles or Command EXP, permanent HP and SP regen for one unit, or just significant stat buffs for your units and debuffs for your enemies. Although these become less reliable in harder difficulties or endings (as those tend to make it harder or near impossible to keep your Light full for prolonged amounts of time), getting just one can single-handedly tip the balance of a run in your favor, much less if you stack multiple.
- The People-Oriented Squad is universally regarded as the best starting squad following the nerf to Tactical squads, as it reduces the recruitment and promotion Hope cost of units by 1 each, allowing you to accelerate the development of your squad much more quickly than other options. 4-star Operators only require 1 Hope to recruit and are free to promote, 5-star Hope costs are the equivalent of 4-stars using other starts making them much more attractive options, and 6-stars become much easier to acquire and promote. Additionally, once you have fully leveled its boons in the Cognitive Shaping tree, you gain the additional benefit of being able to receive two bonuses from all Safe Houses, making it even easier to promote units, gain extra Life Points or Squad Size, or restore Light. On the higher Surging Tides levels, this is considered the only really viable starting option due to counteracting the +1 recruitment cost of all units which guarantees a starting 6-star without needing to luck out on a starting Hope bonus, and the additional Safe House bonus, which is the most reliable way of restoring Light as your starting Light is automatically penalized on the higher difficulties. With the second expansion, fully upgrading Cognitive Shaping will also raise the Command Level cap from 10 to 11, rewarding you further if you've fought frequently and amassed a lot of EXP.
- With the second expansion, the Mind over Matter Squad shot up in effectiveness as well, due to the new final node in Cognitive Shaping which lets it start with a Survivor Contract, which is a 20% buff to ATK and DEF for a random operator that increases by a further 20% for every battle you've cleared. This buff stacks without limit, causing them to get ridiculous if you've been constantly picking fights (which the other benefits of the squad encourage anyways); even if you can't choose who they land on, having even one key member of your squad with inflated ATK and DEF is often enough to win many levels. Furthermore, like the Chitinous Ripper, smaller squads can manipulate the randomness to make it more likely or guaranteed to land on someone important, and it sees near universal usage on one operator challenges, where it will turn a unit of your choice into a One-Man Army. The base effects of the squad also still persist, granting a significantly raised chance to get Collectibles after battles, which combined with the Survivor Contract can give you an edge on earlier floors before snowballing into oblivion in the mid and lategame, letting you amass both a hoard of potential game-breaking items and one superpowered Operator per fight to steamroll the last section of the game.
- Caerula Arbor adds a few more "hand" Collectibles, just as strong as the ones from before.
- Hand of Purification causes Bards, Therapists, and Phalanx Casters to deal continous Damage Over Time to enemies in range equal to half their ATK each second. This gives the former two classes actual offensive presence (particularly since Therapists have very long range), and it being per second lets them still deal decent supportive DPS despite their low ATK. Meanwhile, Phalanx Casters have enough ATK to turn the damage into a dangerous threat for any enemy that dares walk into range, which also helps alleviate their skill downtime and further enhance their uptime with the offensive buffs they get during their skills.
- Hand of Pulverization focuses on Gathering Steam with it allowing Flingers, Artillerymen, and Splash Casters to gain 15% ATK each time they hit a target, up to a whopping 150% until they stop attacking for 5 seconds. Since they'll likely be constantly attacking a wave, they'll quickly reach such absurd amounts of ATK that their basic attacks will likely be able to stymie a wave by themselves, and any skills they use will go from powerful to downright devastating.
- Hand of Flowing Water causes Summoners and Core/Mystic Casters to permanently accelerate their SP generation each time they activate a skill, up to +2/sec after four activations. Suddenly, powerhouse skills that are gated by their SP costs suddenly become a whole lot easier to use, and anything with a moderate cooldown becomes downright spammable, giving them incredible uptime; Summoners in particular will have no trouble keeping their armies maintained since most of them can now continously generate more summons or recycle their old ones. It's particularly notable on skills that were already spammable to begin with like Eyja's Ignition, since they'll now become borderline continuous.
- The Hand of Branding from the second expansion causes any kill made by a Duelist, Soloblade, or Dreadnought to give all members of those archetypes +1% HP, +1% ATK, and +1 ASPD permanently, stacking up to 99 times. The buffs persist between stages, so although it'll usually take a few levels to fully stack up, it can easily turn any member of the classes into a ungodly wall of stats to make up for their innate weaknesses, as even a 1-block unit is going to be able to cause some serious mayhem with effectively doubled core stats, and any elites or bosses they duel will fall to pieces in mere moments. Soloblades in particular can take advantage of the ASPD buff to pump their healing through the roof, making them nigh unkillable with their inflated HP.
- Fincatcher's Shawl gives all ranged operators permanent Camouflage. Suddenly, one of their biggest weaknesses - them being Glass Cannons - becomes almost irrelevant outside of splash damage, allowing you to toss them in the most outrageously reckless positions without any repercussions. The sheer freedom the item provides can allow you to rain hell upon an entire map without needing to worry about your units being shot down, and it's particularly effective against the final bosses (outside of the Last Knight) as they all rely on powerful ranged attacks.
- Flames of the Inquisition grants all Operators 2 SP each time they damage a Sea Monster...in a mode where almost every credible threat - and nearly every enemy in general - is a Sea Monster. With the item, skill cooldowns become all but irrelevant, and the game will suddenly get a whole lot easier now that you can spam all of your skills with impunity. The only downside is that unlocking it requires a whopping 325 Ingots invested in Cannot's store, meaning most players will take a while to get it.
- Timeworn Poetry Strips makes all summoned units no longer count towards the deployment limit. This is exactly as broken as it sounds, as the Summoners generally used as Crutch Characters that are swapped out once the player’s squad becomes more rounded out can now use the full might of their summons throughout the entire run with no limitations. If three of Ling’s Higher Form dragons didn’t seem busted enough, picture three dragons being backed up by your entire squad. As an addendum, this collectible works with all summons that normally take a deployment slot, including Kal’tsit’s Mon3tr (removing her only real limitation as a laneholder) and Phantom’s clone.
- Old George Nutritional Paste gives all operators up to 30% bonus ATK depending on how full their HP is. It's a fairly substantial bonus on an incredibly easy-to-meet condition, since keeping your operators healthy is already a major priority in the mode, especially at higher difficulties. It's especially good on long-ranged units, since you'll be keeping them out of the line of fire and out of aggro most of the time anyways, turning it into almost permanent free damage.
- Casters were generally considered somewhat ineffective in Caerula Arbor, due to the high RES boasted by most of the dangerous threats and Surging Waves globally buffing RES even further. Enter Broken Wand - Solving from the second expansion, which globally reduces the RES of all enemies by 12 for every Caster deployed, stacking infinitely. Even with a single Caster on the field, a global -12 RES translates to a whole lot more damage being dealt due to the calculation for Arts damage, making it viable for general teams - for Caster-centric teams, if you field multiple at once, they'll be chewing through enemies that would normally laugh off Arts damage, and can even tear through bosses with a full 90 RES with no sweat. As an extra treat, the item is only a Rare instead of a Super Rare like most other game-breakers, meaning you're relatively more likely to see it as a reward or in the shop.
- Also buffing Casters is Broken Wand - Learning and its stronger version Broken Wand - Light of Wisdom, which grant all Casters a small stacking ATK and ASPD buff for every Collectible you have. This is an infinitely stacking offensive buff that is effectively unconditional given how many Collectibles you're encouraged to amass in an Integrated Strategies run (especially if you took Mind over Matter squad), and has the potential to stack with other Caster/Arts buffs (or even each other) to turn them into absurd powerhouses once the ball gets rolling.
- Added in the second expansion, Iron Guard - Tower gives all Defenders a whopping +70% DEF and 20 RES, along with 60% reduction against Elemental Damage. This is a Simple, yet Awesome buff that renders Defenders all but unkillable except to the most ferocious of attacks or Surging Waves, and the Elemental Damage reduction can be a godsend considering the massive amounts of Corrosion and Nervous Impairment used by the Seaborn.
- Doctor Silver Seal from the second expansion lets you recruit a random, pre-promoted, maxed-out 6-star for free. This is exactly as powerful as it sounds, and can instantly give you a massive advantage for the next while (or even for the rest of the game), as even a Low-Tier Letdown from the 6-star pool will generally still be absurdly powerful for a unit obtained completely for free, even if solely by virtue having completely maximized stats. To a lesser extent, the HR Bronze Seal (effectively the same thing but for 5-stars) is also this, for the exact same reason but scaled down to a 5-star level.
- The Caerula Arbor second expansion introduces a new collectible, the Flashing Sword, where your Operators obtain a whopping +35 ASPD... for each Cursed Curio that you own. While it sounds impractical, accessing the third or fourth endings requires you to obtain at least two ending relevant Cursed Curios, so you are guaranteed to obtain up to +70 ASPD for your Operators by the time you get to floor 5 and 6. Add that total with one extra Cursed Curio you may obtain while playing in higher difficulties or going for the fourth ending, you can easily get up to +105 ASPD (or even more if you obtain another Cursed Curio from encounters) to steamroll the final floors easily, and the potential drawback of losing Light from obtaining some of the relevant Cursed Curios is easily remedied via Safe Rooms and other means to recover Light, especially as the second expansion also introduces collectibles that allows you to both recover Light more easily and mitigate Light losses when losing Life Points.
- If you're going for the Stella Caerula ending, you'll have to pick up an item on the fifth floor that changes depending on how much Light you've managed to get back after losing it all to the Caerula Memory at the start of the run. This can be a -1 Block nerf if your light is too low, which changes to +1 Block if you've managed to keep it above 50 - bring it all the way to 90, however, and you'll be blessed with Determination, which grants all operators a massive +120% HP and DEF, +20 RES, and +2 Block, making high-ground Operators as tanky as Defenders and low-ground fighters nigh immortal. The moment you get it, pretty much every level that isn't the last becomes a cakewalk even on higher difficulties, letting you steamroll through the fifth and sixth floors, as well as the Indigo Cradle. Of course, you'll have to contend with getting your Light back up from 0, which can be tough without a lot of Light boosting artifacts (although the Caerula Arbor that can be obtained in the quest line helps a lot), and the fact that you're in for a hell of a time against Izumik without it, with the massive defensive buffs from Determination going from broken to the bare minimum to survive on higher difficulties.
Introduced in Expeditioner's Joklumarkar
- The Foldartals are a new system introduced in this mode, a set of sigils that come in a top (node selection) and bottom half (effect selection), and can be combined to create new benefits that also lower your Collapse level. The highly powerful Foldartals in particular are Sing, Silence, and Debate, which grant +50 ASPD, +50% max HP, and -30% redeployment time respectively when entering combat, and should you trigger a Concord (when the top and bottom halves are matching colors), they also spawn a Cheering Sponsor Drone that further ramps up ASPD, a highly tanky Shieldguard Defender to help defend the blue box, and grants a random Elite Operator to join you, respectively. These are very powerful effects that can help you turn the tides in particularly difficult battles on higher Braving Nature levels, and as the cherry on top, all of these effects can stack on top of each other (or even themselves if you have multiple of one kind) on the same node, which can greatly ease the difficulty; if you have enough Foldartals, there's nothing stopping you from throwing all of the buffs onto a single tough node to steamroll it. Even the non-combat Foldartals can be a huge boon, as they can let you quickly gather more tools through plain old resource gain or changing nodes into shops or Bosky Passages (see below), or even replace potentially run-ending battles with more beneficial nodes.
- The Special Training Squad is unlocked by accumulating a total of 1000 Command EXP over many runs. It grants 3 objective shields for an easier early game, but most importantly, it makes all Operator promotions free of charge, regardless of rarity. This is an extremely powerful boon that can let you build up your squad much faster, and makes it so that you only ever have to worry about recruitment costs, letting you easily promote anyone with the right voucher. The only real downside to this squad is that it doesn't affect recruit costs unlike the Tactical squads, which on higher difficulty levels forces players to rely on a lucky starting buff to get a 6-star start due to the raised Hope costs of all units.
- Once it becomes unlocked, the Bosky Passage node can be your best friend, giving you the option to use 1 Anti-Interference Index and head to a mini-floor where you'll be hit with a map condition that can either be purely beneficial, detrimental, or anywhere in between. Unlike Mizuki & Caerula Arbor's Wander into Wonderland which would guarantee several grueling battles followed by what could easily be That One Boss if your team isn't in top form (especially on an early floor), Bosky Passages will, at worst, give you some Emergency battles that you'd normally find on the original floor anyways, and at best will offer nothing but shops, encounters, and items, letting you pick up more goodies than you'd normally be able to get at the time. Although it can screw you over if you get unlucky or overestimate your strength before entering, it's relatively easy to prepare for if you know what you're doing, and if frequently taken can result in you practically swimming in Command XP and items to snowball into the later floors. It does get more risky at higher difficulties, as Emergency Battles can spell trouble with the floor debuffs along with Anti-Interference Index being more scarce, but the payoff remains just as good if not moreso due to the higher importance of a strong arsenal.
- The Hunter's Insight allows all Operators to pierce through half the DEF and RES of enemy Collapsals, and briefly slow them down on hit. Given how the Collapsals are major Demonic Spiders in this mode, anything that helps to get rid of them faster is always a massive help. The slow on hit in particular is excellent for shutting down their signature Super-Speed, and while the DEF and RES ignore are more situational on most regular Collapsals,note this is counteracted by the fact that it also works on Collapsal bosses such as the Fallen/Hollow Snowpriests, or even Eikthyrnir and Crazelyseon.
- The Lakebed Aegis gives one Objective Shield upon obtaining it and, if the player has any Objective Shield when entering a battle, increases the health of all units by 60% for the duration of the battle. It's relatively easy to retain at least one Shield with various items or buffs, and the HP buff from this item alone outstrips other top-tier HP buffs like the strongest +HP collectible and the Silence Foldartal (+50%) while having an easy-to-meet condition, potentially turning your entire team into nigh-unkillable juggernauts as long as you don't lose your last Shield. Furthermore, it stacks with any other HP buffs like those mentioned.
- Peek Into the Eternal Night, obtainable from the "Missing Mountains" encounter, grants your operators +25% ATK and 25 ASPD at the cost of draining 25 health per second. This is a bargain for the buffs it provides, as most operators have at least 800 health, so that's at most a measly 3% health loss per second, sufficient time to place a healer to negate the minuscule health loss. And if you get other sources of passive regeneration (like the Actor's Perfume, which regenerates 1% max. HP per second) and some more health buffs, the downside is totally negated.
- A series of 3 collectibles will buff your melee operators, starting with the Frozen Husk which grants +40 ASPD for 5 seconds when your melee operators take damage. That's already very good, but then Frost Buck's Pauldrons will buff their ATK and DEF by 40% for 30 seconds when they are blocking 2 enemies. Considering most melee operators have 2 block and the sheer amount of Zerg Rushing Collapsals in the mode, the activation condition is trivial and will ensure all blocked enemies will be cut down to ribbons in short order. Finally Snow Doe's Gloves requires 3 blocked enemies to activate, so realistically it will only work for Defenders or Centurions (given the lack of block count bonuses in this IS), but will buff ASPD by +80 and grant 50% physical/Arts evasion. Just getting one of these, even the most basic Frozen Husk, is already game-changing, but stacking 2 or even all 3 has the potential to absolutely murder even tougher maps if you have the melee units to back them up.
Specific to Reclamation Algorithm
Introduced in Fire Within the Sand
- You get 2 action points daily, but the Broken Compass token grants you an extra action before Day 12. This means you get to do more given the limited timeframe, potentially up to 9 extra actions if you get it as early as Day 1. While it is rather costly to get (sending 4 Operators with 3 Stamina away for 2 days) and its effectiveness depends on how early you get it, it's SO worth to grab it.
- The base Construct with highest priority is the Transregional Communication Station. It allows you to bring a few items of your choice to your next RA run after the 9th day, essentially making your next run easier. You can upgrade it later on so that it activates after only 6 days, and when you fully upgrade the Road to Prosperity, you can bring up to 15 items with you. This is a significant seed capital for your next run, especially if you bring some high quality Provisions or enough Monitoring Towers to quickly scout the area.
- Provisions are the only source of buffs you can get in this mode, but they can be extremely powerful if used properly. Among them, a few stand out; unsurprisingly, mostly those using the highest quality ingredients, Marrow Fungi that can only be obtained from slaying rare and sometimes dangerous wandering beasts.
- Top of the line is the Folk Festive Feast, which you get by cooking 3 Marrow Fungi. It grants the consumer a whopping +50% ATK and also permanent Camouflage. This means your ranged operators will deal insane damage while being safe from most enemy retaliation, letting you deploy them wherever you please. As the cherry on top, it also restores 3 Stamina, so in practice you can start a Reclamation Algorithm with more than 6 Operators with full Stamina if you happen to carry a few from the previous run.
- Higashinese Bento, made by cooking 2 Marrow Fungi and 1 Rice, increases HP and DEF by 50% each, and might as well be essential to face the Final Bosses of this mode. Feed them to Defenders with high base stats like Hoshiguma, Penance and Mudrock, and they can tank the Dauntless Linebreaker, Ruinbringer and Al-Rafiq, respectively. It also helps Mudrock in particular to tank The Immortal should you raid his home. As added bonus, the food also restores 2 Stamina.
- Low-Pressure Dried Meat uses a much more modest ingredient of 3 Puffball Tenderloins, which you can purchase from Manticore in the Black Market or hunt as relatively common wildlife. But its effect of -8 DP cost is a godsend for Vanguards, especially Myrtle and Elysium who will now cost 0 and 1 DP respectively, allowing them to be deployed and start generating DP immediately, greatly easing the DP crunch before the inevitable Zerg Rush comes. As the ingredients can be purchased repeatedly, you can even feed them to all of your core Operators that don't need other buffs, so they can be deployed even faster.
- In terms of nodes, there are a few nodes that can significantly ease your run, should you encounter them:
- The most important and valuable node would be The Lost Great Wingbeast, where you hunt the titular Great Wingbeast. Don't be shy to bring a full contingent of Operators, as you'll need all the firepower you can get to take down its beastly 450,000 health. It is also capable of flight, so ranged boss killers such as Schwarz, Pozëmka, Rosa and maybe Thorns are preferred. For your troubles, you will get between 6-10 Marrow Fungi, which you can cook into the best Provisions to take on the Final Bosses or carry over to the next run.
- Miserly Trap is the best place to get Wood from. There are multiple Ballistae that will inevitably destroy your harvester stations, but that's easily resolved by putting Guardian Defenders to block the shots and heal themselves. 3 harvester stations placed in the middle, supported by Thorns and/or Mlynar can easily clear the entire Timber area, netting around 60 Wood. The zone also provides water source and a few crabs should you need them as well.
- Clash of Clans is tricky and will likely require 2 actions to clear, but will solve all your Iron Ore and Stone problems. Start by putting some Blockade to prevent the Sarkaz Sentinels from aggroing the horde, and focus on breaking the wall that hides to a secret room to the right side of the map containing an absurd amount of resources. Once the wall is broken, wait for the next action and don't be shy to deploy your full contingent of Operators and multiple harvester stations to clean the entire motherlode. Fully cleared, the node will provide 51 Iron Ores and 120 Stones. Mind the Vein Guardian, but nothing that Jaye can't handle solo.
Event Mechanics
Some of the events and side stories have additional bonus Devices to give you a tactical edge. Sometimes, they can be far stronger than expected.
- Dossoles Holiday had a number of Stickers that could grant tremendous advantages. There were sets to give significant stat boosts for high ground (Caster, Medic, Sniper, Supporter) and low ground (Vanguard, Defender, Guard, Specialist) operators, so you could buff them tremendously to make even EX stages less painful to complete. In addition, some of the rarer ones could greatly mitigate or even nullify the danger posed by High Tide, instantly removing a huge chunk of difficulty from most of the harder maps.
- Ideal City's self-driving karts had some customizable parts that were completely bonkers. One chip gave you self-deploying karts, while another made your karts explode once they collided into something that stopped them. You could attach drills to amplify their collision damage, a freezer unit to apply Chill and Frozen status to enemies on contact, and even attach refresher units that would restore HP and SP to your operators as it drove past them. In addition, the karts had perfect accuracy, so no enemy could try to use Physical Dodge to evade its drill-studded bumper, while their status effects would also often disable the target's dodge altogether. With the proper setup and enough DP to burn, you could release a veritable horde of cars to run over everything, with one of the most popular strategies for the event's toughest stages being to create recursive loops of bumper cars with the Freeze module to permanently lock down an indefinite amount of enemies at once, even the Final Boss if you could ground him first.
- A Flurry to the Flame has 4 gadgets from Monster Hunter become support tools for your operators, and the Wiredrone is the strongest of them all. It has a very short redeploy timer, so you could apply multiple in succession very rapidly, and costs a very cheap 2 DP, so you don't need much investment to use it. It allows you to redeploy operators instantly to another tile, which would immediately reset their status, thus instantly healing said operator, and resetting their skill status as though they were just deployed again (allowing helidrop operators to immediately use their skills again upon being moved by the Wirebug Drone). Used tactically, you can have a single operator consume multiple Wiredrones to intercept multiple tiles on the map at once, allowing you to spam their skills every time you moved them. This lets you shower the entire map with a very prolonged sword rain via Texas the Omertosa, instantly heal and reset Surtr for another round of Twilight, reset the timer on Radiant Nearl's second skill, and perform other such feats. With the right synergy, certain operators can wipe out the entire map by themselves with the help of the Wiredrones, and if used correctly it can turn even Rathalos himself into a joke.
- Lone Trail offers players Planetary Debris, a "neutral" stage hazard that ends up being way more skewed in the player's favor than the enemies'. The Debris are static objects that can be attacked by adjacent allies or shifted to send them hurtling in the target direction, dealing massive amounts of damage and push force to all allies and enemies struck, before either staying there or falling in the direction of gravity. While Debris that hits enemies will deal enough damage to one-shot most frailer mooks and send them flying if they survive (which can also send enemies into pits and erase the otherwise tough Arc Frontliners due to their weakness to shifting), friendlies will take a much more manageable amount of damage with no other side effects; unlike the enemies, you can also just position your team out of the way of the Debris since they travel in a set path, and little to none of the levels have layouts really forcing you to deploy in the path of a collision. The Debris also blocks enemies when not in motion, which means as long as you don't let the enemies screw with gravity too much, you can use them as Roadblocks to build chokepoints. On top of this, the Command Panel gradually unlocked over the course of the event will upgrade the Planetary Debris in ways purely beneficial to the player: Planetary Debris will deal even more damage to enemies while dealing less to allies, shift with even more force, Stun enemies on hit, and become easier to move. With only a few Command Panel buffs, the Debris is already so powerful that if you use it optimally, you can just turn the level into a pinball machine that minces every enemy for you. It says something when the boss of the event not only has Contractual Boss Immunity to Debris collisions in their first phase, but has a kit entirely designed to not let you use them at all.
Game Breakers who have fallen off the meta
While these operators were once fantastically powerful, and make no mistake, some of them are still quite strong, the way content has evolved has affected their usage in the meta, with a few of them falling out of favor entirely.
- Angelina
- Angelina, who is often described as a Caster disguised as a Supporter, will need a lot of investment and time to hit Elite 2 before she can operate at peak efficiency. Once she does, however, her capabilities and talents skyrocket, opening a whole host of possible new tactics and formations. For a dirt cheap DP cost, her Elite 2 skill Arcane Staff - Anti-Gravity Mode offers a highly damaging Arts AoE burst with a good duration at max level while also having comparable range with the likes of SilverAsh and Eyjafjalla, all while slowing foes. The only downside, however, is Angelina not being able to attack normally, which is ultimately offset with her S3's extremely low cooldown which may be reduced further with the help of other operators, allowing the skill to be readily available to handle each wave and assist in DPS when necessary. On top of that, her S3 reduces the weight of all enemies on the field while active, which can enable Shift Specialists and result in some creatively devastating plays. If we're talking about Angelina further, one must not forget about her talents - Accelerator Field gives an ASPD buff to all operators on the field, which can easily be synergized with many operators that work off on attack speed boosts whether via skill or talents. This can make operators like Amiya, Exusiai, and Silence hit/heal exponentially faster or mitigate skills that increase attack interval like Shirayuki. Her second talent Part-time Job, which causes all units to gradually regenerate HP when she's not using a skill, might not seem like much, but it can help in tight situations, especially when paired with Perfumer, the only other global healer which can help sustain the squad in a high risk map like Annihilation 3 with the help of another healer. Notably, Angelina's talent is known for being able to heal those that do not receive healing normally such as Mudrock, but also heals summons and even the imprisonment devices in Mansfield Break. Meanwhile, her module may just seem a simple Slow duration increase, but it syncs quite well with her second skill, which already slows down enemies to a crawl.
- Unfortunately, power creep has caught on to Angelina over time, as the increasing number of powerful units added to the game has left her a bit of a Master of None compared to other 6-star Supporters such as Gnosis and Suzuran. While the wide array of utility Angelina offers can make her useful in any situation, her lack of a defined niche makes her a much rarer sight in the more modern meta, although she retains her crown as the strongest enabler of Shift Tactics, since she reduces the Weight and thus Shift Resistance of enemies with her third skill, making it possible to shift enemies normally too heavy for even Weedy to push.
- Blaze
- An insanely strong AoE Guard can be found in the form of Blaze, mostly because of her second skill Chainsaw Extension Module. It's nothing as flashy as Truesilver Slash, Chi Xiao or Full Moon, but that doesn't stop it from still being extremely powerful despite being a consistent damage skill. Essentially, once it fully charges, it increases her attack and defense dramatically, while also having an infinite duration and increasing her range by one more tile. It doesn't sound like much, but considering that she has good stats to begin with, the buffs she gains from this skill can get so high that she'll be able to take out entire swathes of enemies by her lonesome while the DEF boost gives her survivability only surpassed by Defenders.note The extended range also allows her to attack behind a Defender or any other operator for that matter, opening up new strategies - she can even attack through walls. The only drawback is that that it takes a long time to activate, but this can easily be circumvented with proper planning. Blaze becomes even more deadly when she ranks up to Elite 2, which enables her to attack and block 3 enemies simultaneously, turning her into one of the single most powerful lane holders in the game. Along with all her pros, her talent 1 Emergency Defibrillator allows her to heal herself and temporarily refuse to go under half health the first time her health reaches 25%, which gives her a second chance even if she does take severe damage. The icing on the cake is that her Harsh Training talent passively resists disabling debuffs, meaning that even things like stuns or freezes won't keep her down for long. All of these considered made her a top pick for CC Blade for holding the top lane, and in later chapters where status effects become an issue.
- However, over time Blaze’s cornerstone status has been challenged by the addition of many other strong laneholding operators such as Thorns, Mountain and Mudrock, and as of the release of Gavial the Invincible, the second 6-star Centurion Guard who finds a stronger niche in harder content due to her higher stats and stronger burst skills, Blaze’s place as a ‘must-have’ in terms of the meta has faded. However, her S2's infinite duration and her natural resistance to status effects, coupled with their greater ease of acquiring as a recruitment unit compared to Gavial who is a limited unit, means she is still on the higher end of Operators, and there are still niches where she can shine where consistent range and damage is needed. Blaze still has no trouble shredding recent story and event content, especially since her Module gives her a significant boost in effectiveness (unlike Gavial's which was considered rather mediocre).
- Carnelian
- Carnelian partially follows in the steps of her already fairly solid sister Beeswax by sporting the same regeneration and extreme DEF when she's idle, but takes everything to a more offensively-oriented skillset. To elaborate, Carnelian's second and third skill are both capable of eliminating entire hordes of enemies during their generous durations. Casters often have issues with their crimped range and slow attack speed, but Carnelian has options to bypass either one. Her second skill Sand Fetters hugely reduces her attack interval while every attack also slows the enemy for 0.3 seconds. While this number seems low by itself, her Spam Attack is so fast that she can essentially lock down an entire wave, nevermind that when she charges, the slow is traded for a bind that lasts twice as long while also giving her an attack buff. Many non-Slow Supporters who can slow trade in their attack speed in order to be able to, but Carnelian does the opposite. Her third skill Mark of Gluttony doesn't beat around the bush and goes straight for the kill. Her attack slowly rises to 280% (at full mastery, this is 20% more than Kal'tsit's Mon3tr gets with their third skill in fact) of her original ATK - never mind that Casters' ATK stat is already among the highest ones and that Carnelian in particular is true AoE - while also increasing her attack range to become quite wide note . Her charged effect just adds icing on the cake, as it increases damage the that enemies she hits take, which can stack up to five times per enemy. This in combination with her expanded range makes her able to deal with enemies in tricky places. The general quirkiness of Idle Casters and her charging mechanic is also helped by her second talent, which boosts her SP gain rate once her 'normal' SP bar is full, so one doesn't really need to wait long considering it also stacks with the talents of Ptilopsis and Mostima due to their automatic charging.
- Carnelian has a very good synergy with Aak. With her large DEF pool when idle, surviving Aak's buffing becomes a non-issue. Her own attack interval buff in her second skill is great in itself, but with Aak she can bring everything in her range to an immediate halt by binding them for 20 seconds straight. Aak also works with her third skill, since more attacks mean more debuffs which in turn mean more damage. All things considered, she may be the one ranged operator who can both withstand Aak without external buffs and be extremely destructive right after.
- However, as time has passed and the game developed, the Phalanx Caster archetype as a whole has struggled to maintain relevance (read their entry in Low Tier Letdown for explanations) and Carnelian has suffered the worst of it in particular due to the restrictions on her kit, namely needing to charge her S3 twice and ramp up Mark of Gluttony to deal competitive damage and lacking any way to either 'de-aggro' like her 5-star counterparts Mint and Beeswax or retain some of her defenses short of using her underwhelming S1, and she is generally overshadowed by stronger options for Arts damage such as Eyjafjalla, Goldenglow, or Passenger, and outclassed in the tanking role by her own sister Beeswax. The release of Lin, the next 6-star of her archetype (herself only an average unit at best) who has superior utility has only given her more competition.
- Ch'en
- Ch'en is also a hilariously overpowered operator. All of her skills are strong, but her second and third abilities in particular are just absurd, dealing massive amounts of damage in a snapnote to either all enemies in a highlighted range in front of her (S2), or to a single target (S3). Whereas SilverAsh pummels enemies to dust with his True Silver Slash, Ch'en just outright deletes them. Her second skill, Chi Xiao - Unsheath at Level 3 mastery can also be used immediately upon deployment, leading to some incredible strategies, helidropping or otherwise. In addition, her Scolding talent turns her into an SP battery for all units with non-auto recovery skills as well, giving her important utility beyond being a fast reaction nuker.
- In later content she has fallen off the meta, due to the introduction of another Move Set Clone of lower rarity in the form of Cutter who is easier to use and with lower SP costs to activate her skills, along with Bibeak who is a truer Moveset Clone who can spam her skill 2 more than Ch'en along with dealing crowd-control. That and the introduction of newer enemies having enough bulk to survive her burst damage. While her S2 still has the benefit of instant activation upon deployment for chip damage and is still a competent fighter herself, she is nowhere near the powerhouse she once was. Her sniper counterpart reclaims her game-breaking prestige (detailed in the Snipers folder).
- Interestingly, Ch'en has started to creep back up in later content thanks to her module greatly boosting the damage of her skills, as well as some quirks of how her S3 functions. Specifically, that it takes her off the map when she activates it, which effectively cancels any debuffs on her and removes her from the effect of enemy auras, as well as letting her avoid damage. Because several bosses have debilitating auras and debuffs, this returns Ch'en to one of her shining roles as a boss-killer. Her level 3 module upgrade from the Lingering Echoes update has only made her better, addressing her weakness of having powerful skills held back by horrible SP costs (see her entry in Low-Tier Letdown), albeit still not a top-tier. At the very least, she can be used to support other Game-Breaker units dependent on Offensive/Defensive Recovery skills such as Penance or her fellow Swordmaster Irene thanks to her improved Talent, and her S3 can be used as a devastating anti-boss tool that can oneshot many targets with a few ATK buffs.
- Hellagur
- On a good day, Hellagur will just not die. Not only does he have supremely high ATK and HP compared to his fellow Guards, Hellagur also has innate Life Drain on hit. This means the more he attacks something, the more health he regains for himself. His Elite 1 talent, Waxing Moon comes into play when he's hurt, which scales his ASPD buff inversely proportional to his remaining HP. At Elite 2, his ASPD is effectively doubled when he's at 30% remaining HP, which translates into both ridiculous damage output and self healing coming in at an alarming rate, on top of his Ingenious Strategist talent giving him Regenerating Health when not blocking anything. His absurd 75% physical dodge chance with his S2, Half Moon, active is just further icing on the cake, while his S3, Full Moon, is a burst damage nuke that can strike down scores of enemies at a time while healing him even more than usual. While he does have some considerable drawbacks to him, such as his exorbitant DP cost and inability to be healed by most healersnote , if managed properly, Hellagur can bully most lanes by his lonesome despite his 1 block, and stands to be one of the most popularly-picked operators for Contingency Contract thanks to his insane sustain. After all, who needs healing when you can just heal yourself?
- However, it should be noted that, like Ch'en, Hellagur has slightly fallen off the meta as well. While he is still nothing short of reliable, the introduction of Jaye and Mountain meant that he has now two competitors who do a similar job to him - that do the job cheaper to boot. Jaye notably has the benefit of being able to be helidropped due to his fast redeployment time and his low cost, something that Hellagur does not have. Mountain has fast ASPD with a debuff attached, consistent HP regen as opposed to HP regen on hit and has a self-sustaining ability that also lets him serve as bait for certain enemies. All of this concerned, Jaye and Mountain (both are also on this page) have largely replaced him ever since he was introduced. Nowadays, if Hellagur were to be used, it would be with his S2, in which the potent physical dodge chance can still help carve a niche for him in situations where self-healing alone would not be enough to keep up with incoming damage, such as when fighting the Tiacauh Braves with certain risks in the permanent map of Contingency Contract #6: Wild Scales.
- Nian
- Nian is a ridiculously powerful Defender thanks to the utility and damage she offers. In addition to Tectonic Armor passively buffing the HP of all Defenders in her squad, her Elite 2 Clairvoyance talent blocks up to 3 attacks when she's deployed, letting her completely No-Sell any attack up to 3 times, which is a godsend in difficult stages. Her second skill, Copper Seal, is similar to Cuora's second skill, where she stops attacking, blocks an extra enemy, and gains a massive Defense boost, and any enemy that dares to attack Nian receives Arts damage and is silenced. But her third skill, Iron Guard, is what really makes her shine. Aside from gaining a massive Attack boost, all allied operators within a wide radius of Nian receive a hefty Defense boost, a 50% reduction to crowd control effects, and an additional point of block. This makes it virtually impossible for enemies to break through a sufficiently fortified defense, and also turns AoE Guards like Blaze and Specter into frightening DPS monsters, who can slaughter whole waves of enemies with total ease. There's just one little problem: Nian is the game's first limited operator, so if you can't recruit her by the time her banner ends, you're out of luck.
- Unfortunately, as of more recent content standard blocking has become less and less valuable with more bosses either being unblockable, such as Andoain, the Martyr, or dealing such ridiculous amounts of damage that even Nian is unable to withstand long-term. While she is still excellent at her job and has a place in harder content thanks to the utility of Iron Guard and her talent giving her three Shields to block damage making her a useful helidrop tank, she is generally considered more niche nowadays and too expensive to invest in for how rarely her tankiness is absolutely needed compared to other 6-star Defenders with either more damage or more utility such as Mudrock and Saria. Fortunately, Nian's module does improve upon her niche greatly by giving her even more defense while blocking and a strong upgrade that permanently gives her a stacking bonus to ATK and DEF and restoring 3 SP per Shield broken allowing her to activate her skills more quickly after breaking her shields, helping her role as a helidrop tank. Her S2 in particular has become her primary skill when catering to this niche due to the massive DEF buff it grants. This is only really relevant for advanced content where there are enemies that only Nian can realistically tank, however, and she is still not recommended much for general use.
- Schwarz
- Schwarz, true to her profession, specializes in assassinating high value targets, particularly ones that have very high defense. Her first talent Armor Penetration Arrow gives each of her regular attacks a chance to deal up to 160% extra damage and inflict -20% to her target's DEF. On top of that, her third skill, Final Tactics, which is the one primarily used for her, increases her damage further by up to 180% and guarantees her talent procs on every attack when activated. Combined with her extremely high base attack stat, and Schwarz can deal insane amounts of damage to single targets that overwhelms their armor, normally being able to deal 2000+ damage to enemies with 2000 DEF or higher. On top of that, she also has a second talent Crossfire that passively buffs the attack of Snipers on the map if there is another one deployed with her, which includes herself; upgrading her ARC-X Module improves this by letting her buff all Snipers just by being in the squad, making her excellent for Sniper-centric teams even when not playing an active role. The only drawback is that her firing range narrows to a single three (four at M1 and above) tile line in front of her when her S3 is active, basically restricting her attack range to that of Ifrit's and making landing consistent shots difficult unless the target is immobile or being blocked by someone.
- Unfortunately, with the release of Pozëmka, who is all but a direct upgrade to her, Schwarz's place in the meta has taken a steep decline. Although Schwarz's damage against heavily armored targets is still massive even by current game standards, Pozëmka's absurd scaling on her S3 coupled with the extra damage output on her Automatic Typewriter has completely eclipsed Schwarz against all but the most heavily armored targets, with Schwarz only barely managing to break even against foes with over 2000 DEF (for scaling, Patriot, one of the tankiest bosses in the game in his Marching Stance, has 2100 DEF total) while losing to Pozëmka against a vast majority of enemies currently in the game. While Schwarz is still by no means bad, she brings little to the table that Pozëmka doesn't, making her a direct victim of massive power creep. That said, Schwarz still has ludicrous damage on her own merits and is a reasonable alternative, and there is nothing stopping you from pairing her with Pozëmka to activate her Crossfire Talent to have two empowered ranged threats.
- Siege
- Siege is among the most powerful Vanguards in the game, as she combines the strongest aspects of all Vanguard archetypes to create a Vanguard that could honestly pass for a Guard. She has rather high defense and HP (further bolstered by her talent King of Beasts that passively boosts the ATK and DEF of all Vanguards) and is block 2, allowing her to tank enemies on her own. Her high attack power and second and third skills that boost her offensive ability even further allow her to brawl with many tougher enemies and still come out on top. At Elite 2, she can unlock Skull Breaker, which turns her into an extremely cheap Guard with the extra damage and stun (in exchange for not being able to generate DP at all). However, her Elite 1 Aerial Hammer skill in particular is gamebreaking, since it can store multiple charges, hits all enemies adjacent to Siege for a massive amount of physical damage, and gives 3 DP every time it's used. Combined with her Elite 2 Talent Crushing that gives her bonus SP for every enemy unit that dies next to her, she can use Aerial Hammer as a Spam Attack and rapidly ramp up your DP count to call in additional operators. Her only real weakness is that she cannot passively generate DP with Aerial Hammer, and must be constantly attacking in order to trigger it.
- Sadly though, Siege has fallen off the meta as time goes on, since she gets shafted very hard by many players due to newer Vanguards (especially Bagpipe) released after her being far more versatile in DP production and utility than her, especially since she lacks a manual activation skill that grants DP. Furthermore, other units can fill in as a cheap Guard for lower costs, such as Mountain.
- Kal'tsit (Beta)
- However, a true game-breaker was Beta Kal'tsit, when she was playable in the beta with a different skillset than she was now, but was removed later. It is quite understandable why:
- Her healing range was very long, beating out every other Medic in the game. To put things into perspective, Kal'tsit had about the same range as Platinum's fully-extended S2 simply by being promoted to Elite 1. This is something her later incarnation has kept.
- She was the only medic that could attack directly by summoning an entity called Mon3tr that could be redeployed over and over again by 30 seconds. It could not be healed normally but she had passive innate skills that allowed her to heal it. Within her attack range, it would get a boost in between 18 or 80 percent (40 or 100 when promoted).
- Kal'tsit's second skill was a passive that allowed Mon3tr to attack all nearby enemies and reduces its deployment cooldown. Additionally, every heal that Kal'tsit gave to other operators also restored Mon3tr's health, up to 150% of the original amount at maximum skill level.
- Her third skill (Kal'tsit being a 6*-equivalent like Amiya) caused Mon3tr to use powerful long-range Arts attacks at the cost of its health every second. This also buffed Kal'tsit's healing power and allowed her to directly heal Mon3tr.
- Due to this, some fans say she was like Shining summoning SilverAsh (Or Hellagur or Utage, for that matter, as it could not be healed directly). Take a look for yourself.
- However, a true game-breaker was Beta Kal'tsit, when she was playable in the beta with a different skillset than she was now, but was removed later. It is quite understandable why:
