While Arknights has a fairly well-balanced character roster, with nearly every operator being useful in a variety of situations, there are those with startlingly sub-par kits that can be rather disappointing even when the player is holding their hands.
Please add entries in the following format if possible:
- The operator (in alphabetical order).
- Explanation of why their kits are criticized for being bad, underdeveloped, etc...
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General
- Generally, welfare operators (i.e. those obtained for free during an event) are considered to be poor outside of their own home field, sometimes even inside, usually due to their clumsily-designed skills and/or talents that make them far too weak or situational for normal use. That is not to say all welfare operators are bad, but most of them tend to be. However, this is mostly a symptom of the earlier events, with some welfare operators (like Mint, Bena, Robin, Gladiia, Tequila, and Lumen to name a few) all being considered to be decent in comparison (and in the case of Gladiia, Tequila, and Lumen; are quite exceptional) to some early welfare operators like Grani and Ceylon. Unfortunately, recent trends for the newly released welfares has been somewhat shaky, ranging from the rather good (Astgenne, Insider, Harold), niche/redundant but usable (Jieyun, Puzzle, Silence the Paradigmatic) and suboptimal (Vigil, Bryophyta, Lessing), with the latter being extremely unfortunate since two of the mentioned units are 6-stars.
- Welfares tied to story chapters are particularly egregious, as not only do they have talents that only work during their home chapter and account for a good chunk of their power budget, unlike event welfares which can be brought to max potential by just playing through and grinding the event, some of their last potential upgrades are locked behind the chapter's Inferno stages.
- 5-star units as a whole are generally considered the most disadvantaged rarity and see appropriately little use in gameplay. This is because while 1-stars are utility tools, 2 and 3-stars are Starter Mons or Crutch Characters, 4-stars are generally Boring, but Practical, and 6-stars are consistently strong if not Game Breakers, 5-stars are stuck in an awkward position of being only marginally less expensive than a 6-star to raise but with a considerably lower power level due to their lower stats and lack of a third skill. Further compounding this is that 5-stars are usually Hypergryph's testing grounds to try out novel concepts or mechanics, which tend to be extremely hit or miss - often either suffering from Crippling Overspecialization, glaring weaknesses that undermine the remainder of their kit, or "necessary" drawbacks or limitations on a kit that would have been below average even without them. To make matters worse for them, 5-stars that introduce new roles or niches have a tendency to be a precursor to a 4 or 6-star that refines the concept while either making it more convenient or more powerful respectively, making them even more obselete. Outside of exceptions like Elysium, Lappland, La Pluma, or Cantabile, you'll seldom see frequent usage of 5-stars in both general and high-end content, unless someone is specifically going out of their way to pick them (ie. 5-star only or faction-themed runs). Fittingly, a large proportion of the operators featured on this list are of this rarity.
Vanguards
- Grani
- Grani by herself is not objectively bad, boasting a highly defense-centric kit with a plus-block ability, giving her increased survivability and multi-hit attacks, the style of which is not present on any other Vanguard of her subclass until the introduction of Bagpipe. However, Grani's main problem is being overshadowed by the other options that are available to everyone, such as Vigna and Plume, both of which can be relatively easily gotten from recruitment or the gacha and are much cheaper to deploy and raise owing to their lower rarities. And if a player has Bagpipe, then they wouldn't be using Grani, period. It is also noted that Grani's kit does not synergize well with the attributes of the Charger Vanguard archetype (who need a high damage output in order to kill enemies more effectively to gain DP), putting too much emphasis on defensive over offense, thus crimping her damage output against anything larger than an Originium Slug. Thus, the general consensus seems to be that those who don't have Grani aren't missing out on anything special, and those who do have her will just use Vigna and Plume instead. Bycoming issue is that Grani's specialization on defense doesn't match with a lot of playstyles, which just make use of Charger Vanguards like they were initially intended to - kill the few first weak enemies to gather DP, and then retreat them and replace them for a Guard or Defender, so one won't make attempts to keep her longer on the battlefield anyway.
- Reed
- Being mostly outperformed by Bagpipe aside, Reed issue is that (similarly to Grani), she doesn't particularly excel greatly in the DPS department compared to her fellow Charger Vanguards. What makes Reed uniquely stand out among Charger Vanguards is her S2, Soul Spark, which allows her attacks to deal some Arts damage based on a portion of her ATK and gain 2 DP per kill instead of 1. It sounds good, but the problem is, as proven with Ch'en's own fall from grace in the meta, mixed damage has proven to not be as effective as physical/Arts-only damage, especially against most enemies in recent content, who play the middle road by having good DEF and RES, which hinders her ability to effectively kill enemies for the extra DP; additionally, even as a Charger Vanguard, her ATK is still lower than Guards (and unlike Bagpipe or Vigna, she does not have abnormally high DPS to compensate), making her not particularly efficient in putting mixed damage to good use in the first place. Her only saving grace is that she is the only Vanguard with Arts RES (via her talent), making her fare a little better against enemy Casters, but otherwise remains not particularly worthwhile in investing your resources towards when there are cheaper options available, such as Vigna or Plume (assuming players don't have or can't promote Bagpipe yet). Fortunately, her Medic self is the complete opposite.
- Not helping her case is the introduction of Modules for the Charger Vanguard in Break the Ice, in which the CHG-X Modules for Bagpipe, Grani, and Wild Mane usurps the selling point of Reed's S2, namely gaining 2 DP per kill instead of 1, but they can now do so innately without needing a skill running (and Bagpipe's insane DPS output makes her an excellent recipient for it, even moreso than Reed herself). Reed gets a CHG-Y Module that increases her ATK to 115% against enemies below 40% which is fine, but is still comparatively underwhelming towards the aforementioned CHG-X Module. Her Module upgrade introduced in Lingering Echoes did little to salvage her either, with its ASPD buff upon taking Arts damage solely improving her niche as an Arts tank, which was something that never performed particularly well as in the first place.
- Siege
- While Siege is by no means bad or incompetent at the Vanguard's basic role, she found herself basically sidelined by many players ever since the introduction of Bagpipe, who is not only ridiculously strong in her own right, but also revolutionized the Vanguard meta due to her second talent providing a small, but insanely useful initial SP boost to all Vanguards just for simply being in the team, which is especially useful for enabling the Flagbearer Vanguards (Myrtle, Elysium, and Saileach, all of whom are Game Breakers themselves) to instantly fire off their skills and gain truckloads of DP to set up the player's team setup very early, dubbed the "Flagpipe Combo". Siege's own talents, namely her first one, can't quite hold a candle to Bagpipe's talent, since the small ATK and DEF buff provided (which only activates if she's deployed) doesn't really matter much if the Vanguards don't intend to stick around on the field for long anyways once enough DP is gained to deploy your proper defenses.
- Even among her Pioneer Vanguard peers, Siege's skills tend to suffer a bit for being rather "simplistic" compared to other Vanguards of her archetype by specializing in hitting enemies hard, but not much else (her S3 does not generate DP even), and "hitting enemies hard" is better left to the task of the dedicated damage dealers. Meanwhile other Pioneer Vanguards such as Saga, Flametail, Texas, Zima, or even Chiave, can offer other useful supportive utility instead of just hitting enemies hard, such as being an SP battery, dodging attacks with a quick skill cycle, inflicting AoE stun against enemies, buffing Vanguards while reducing their DP cost, or debuffing enemy RES, respectively. These help Vanguards such as them to find useful niches in specific situations without getting rendered completely redundant by the "Flagpipe Combo". Worse still, unlike other Pioneer Vanguards that are not of a 3-star rarity or lower, Siege does not have a manual activation skill that can be used anytime so that DP can be generated even during downtime between enemy wave; her S3 is a manual activation skill but again, it does not generate any DP whatsoever, and her S2 is an automatic skill that requires enemies to be in range so that she can gain small amounts of DP every time the skill procs, which makes the skill useless and unreliable for DP generation if there are no enemies nearby. Meanwhile Saga's S2 is identical to Siege's S2 by being able to store charges and gain small amounts of DP per skill proc, but is far superior than Siege's since her skill has bigger range, higher damage mods, and can be used anytime even when no enemies are in range.
- Ever since her release from the start of Arknights's lifetime, Siege's skillset seems to be designed akin to a "low-cost Guard" to justify keeping her on the field longer than normal by being able to deal more DPS on average than the typical Vanguard, making up for her "weaker" DP generation compared to other Vanguards. However, the release of Mountain throws that concept out of the window, due to being a low-cost Guard himself (and having a lower DP cost of 11 at Potential 1 and 9 at Potential 6 compared to Siege's 14 at Potential 1 and 12 at Potential 6), and a terrifyingly strong one at that, with his fast and hard hitting AoE attacks and self-regeneration. Gladiia further diminishes Siege's usage as a low-cost Guard despite being a Puller Specialist, as she has similar DP cost, better stats, skills that can also deal good amount of DPS, self-regeneration, and is a welfare on top of that. And among Vanguards, Vigna (who is a 4-star) and the aforementioned Bagpipe greatly outdamages Siege by their skills having far better DPS on average; the only way Siege can achieve a similar DPS is by using her S3, which sacrifices her DP generation, defeating the purpose of her role as a Vanguard.
- Vigil
- Vigil is plagued by the way his kit is designed and by what are possibly several bugs. For starters, he lacks the usual talent that Tactician Vanguards usually have, instead relying on Wolf Shadows to increase the main wolf's survivability and upping its block count. The thing is that the wolf itself has the lowest stats out of all summons in use by Tactician Vanguards note , and a higher block count means that it will be prioritized as a target by enemies. The summon cannot attack enemies that are 'passing by', like wraiths, and explicitly needs to block enemies, exacerbating this issue. Furthermore, as it cannot revive on its own after 15 seconds, it has to be redeployed after its timer of 25 seconds are over. This also means that stages that contain things like consistent fire or poison haze will cause it to run out of wolf shadows very quickly, and as it is relied on by the Vanguard themselves to function well, it's not even reliable. Unlike Blacknight and Beanstalk, he cannot cast his first skill without his summon being fielded, and when he was first released, the summon also has no range (similar to Beanstalk's crab, but more of an issue in his case since Beanstalk's crab has a higher defense), which seemed to be a bug but was entirely on purpose. This further compounds its inability to hold enemies back and defend itself properly as it needs to be blocking something thus putting itself in danger.
- His skills sound good on paper, but they all rely on having to hit something, which have the same pitfalls as Siege's skills - if nothing gets hit and the skill is over, then there are no refunds, period. Whereas certain operators also need to hit enemies in order to function properly (Aak, Hellagur and Ethan spring to mind), it is very crucial that Vanguards do not suffer from this as, after offing the initial enemies, their DP recovery comes to a screeching halt. Since his summon cannot hit enemies that are passing by, they will also have no effect on enemies that are not blocked by it. Due to this summon having no range and all his skills relying on his summon hitting something, he is considered to be even worse than Siege, who is at least bulkier than Vigil's summon and has one tile of range in front of her. A special mention goes to his second skill which cannot generate DP at all if his summon has not expended the charged attack, meaning it cannot generate anything in downtimes of waves.
- The nail in his coffin is that, as a welfare, he is shockingly expensive for a Vanguard, but this also means that you need all of his potentials to bring his cost back to something remotely normal for a Vanguard. Tactician Vanguards see use in Integrated Strategies, but his high DP and Hope cost due to being a six-star form an obstacle for him to be used even in modes that are not the main story.
- The final insult to his heavy injuries is the release of Muelsyse, who fixes all of his issues mentioned above. Her summon can copy Defenders which adds bulk to support their block count, her summons can induce crowd-control with her third skill note , she lowers her own DP Cost potentially by 3 if she's the first operator deployed, her DP regeneration does not rely on her or her summons hitting anything, and even if her summons somehow struggle to survive, her second skill can give them Shelter and regenerate their HP.
- Vigil's first module does aim to tackle the most outstanding flaws in his design, giving him the base module effect of reducing the damage taken by his summon from blocked enemies by 15% to try and alleviate its fragility, and its upgrades are much more impactful as it allows him to deploy immediately with all three of his Wolf Shadows and, whenever one is defeated, grants the wolf 50% Physical Dodge for up to 10 seconds to give it more survivability. This helps with his unusually long ramp up time for a Vanguard and his wolf's tendency to die too quickly, as it is now able to defeat some elite enemies it would previously die to with a bit of luck. While this module is far above average and may make Vigil not unusable as he was before its introduction, it only fixes one part of his multitude of weaknesses, not to mention the existence of Muelsyse who already offers many of the strengths that one might want to use Vigil for, and whose module makes her even stronger by erasing just about the sole nitpick she had.
- Vigil is plagued by the way his kit is designed and by what are possibly several bugs. For starters, he lacks the usual talent that Tactician Vanguards usually have, instead relying on Wolf Shadows to increase the main wolf's survivability and upping its block count. The thing is that the wolf itself has the lowest stats out of all summons in use by Tactician Vanguards note , and a higher block count means that it will be prioritized as a target by enemies. The summon cannot attack enemies that are 'passing by', like wraiths, and explicitly needs to block enemies, exacerbating this issue. Furthermore, as it cannot revive on its own after 15 seconds, it has to be redeployed after its timer of 25 seconds are over. This also means that stages that contain things like consistent fire or poison haze will cause it to run out of wolf shadows very quickly, and as it is relied on by the Vanguard themselves to function well, it's not even reliable. Unlike Blacknight and Beanstalk, he cannot cast his first skill without his summon being fielded, and when he was first released, the summon also has no range (similar to Beanstalk's crab, but more of an issue in his case since Beanstalk's crab has a higher defense), which seemed to be a bug but was entirely on purpose. This further compounds its inability to hold enemies back and defend itself properly as it needs to be blocking something thus putting itself in danger.
Snipers
- Aosta
- The problem with Aosta is that his skillset does not offer any ways for him to fully circumvent the innate slow attack speed of the Spreadshooter archetype to deal more damage in a short amount of timenote , instead choosing to put more emphasis in stalling mobs, which doesn't really suit the quirks of his archetype. His talent makes all enemies attacked by him "Bleed", in which they will take additional Arts damage based on a portion of his ATK for a few seconds, but this only applies to unblocked enemies whereas Blue Poison and Thorns have a similar talent that applies a flat DoT of Arts damage but is not limited to unblocked enemies, and they attack faster to boot; blocking enemies would be helpful to keep enemies within Aosta's range of increased damage, but his talent pretty much discourages it and his slow attack speed makes it hard to consistently apply the Bleed effect against enemies. His second skill, Shadow Nails, sounds good, allowing him to bind enemies with each attack and doubles the bleeding damage from his talent...until you realize that it decreases his already slow attack speed even further, which kills any potential synergy with his talent, and his small attack range makes it hard to catch many enemies with it.
- Without calculating in his rarity colleague, Executor, or the absurdly broken Ch'en the Holungday, even his lower rarity class-mate Pinecone outclasses him. She manages to be better than Aosta due to straight going for a DEF pierce instead of bothering with damage over time, is significantly easier to raise and cheaper to deploy with her mostly used skill being her first.
- Archetto
- While she's not bad per say, Archetto is commonly seen as the weak link in the repertoire of 6-star Snipers that have been released so far. Her specialty is dealing with large mobs of enemies, with all of her skills being designed to strike multiple targets simultaneously and spam them to death. The problem arises with the fact that she has subpar ATK (less than Exusiai, who already struggles with bulkier enemies) which makes her deal Scratch Damage against anything with at least a B or higher in DEF, and unlike Exusiai she lacks the insane burst DPS to make up for it. Combine that with her putting all her chips into crowd-clearing, and you get a unit that is extremely good at taking out hordes of fodder enemies (especially drones), but not particularly good at anything else. Although her first talent both lets her charge SP over time (mitigating her on-hit charging) and turns her into an SP battery for offensive recovery Snipers, the latter unfortunately aren't too common, note basically limiting its utility to herself. Her second talent gives her a shield that absorbs the first hit and converts it into a burst of SP, but it's still fundamentally a defensive ability on a class not meant to take hits in the first place. Although Archetto excels at her niche and performs decently in general content, the general consensus is that she just can't keep up with her competition in the Marksman Sniper pool when it comes to holistic performance.
- Surprisingly, this ended up being ever so slightly mitigated with the progression of the game rendering the entire Marksman branch struggling to handle later content, and Exusiai herself facing stiff competition within her niche of eviscerating single targets. Given that Archetto's main flaw - her single-target damage - is less of a competing factor, this in turn put Archetto's emphasis on crowd-clearing and versatility under more scrutiny; in particular, her S3's extended range and multi-target letting her attack from outside of aggro range, her skill's manual activation giving much more control than Exusiai's Powerful, but Inaccurate S3, and her shield and Module's on-deploy SP giving a unique niche as a helidrop sniper. She still has exactly the same weaknesses as before, it's just they don't stand out as much because of the general depreciation of Marksman Snipers.
- Executor
- Executor suffers from the same problem that plagues many older 5-star Operators, such as Ceylon and Leizi pre-module, that held them back greatly. Simply put, his SP costs on his skills are horrific, with a large cost of 45 on his first skill and and an staggering 70 cost (at max Mastery) on his second skill. While his damage on uptime is extremely high thanks to the damage modifier on his skills coupled with his Final Modification Talent allowing him to ignore a significant portion of enemy defense, the fact that his uptimes are so poor means he is actually outclassed DPS-wise not only by the absurdly overpowered Ch'en the Holungday, but even by his 4-star counterpart Pinecone, whose first skill is a low-cost Spam Attack which can hold up to three charges and also ignores a portion of defense on hit. While he is not nearly as bad as his fellow 5-star Aosta, his SP costs simply hamper his usefulness too much to make him a meta Operator, even disregarding his competition. His Reaper Guard alter on the other hand is a very powerful laneholder.
- Fartooth
- Like Archetto, Fartooth is a 6 star sniper that isn't necessarily bad, but has a number of weaknesses that hold her back, mainly being too much of a Situational Sword to the point of Crippling Overspecialization. In particular, her S2 gives her infinite range, but only against enemies that are being blocked. While this in itself isn't that bad, the main issue is that she does not gain any damage bonus to her attacks, instead getting an attack speed buff. While this would be good against swarms of low DEF enemies, these aren't necessarily the type of enemies you would prioritize blocking, making the skill somewhat redundant. Her S3 gives her infinite range in a straight line in front of her, but she doesn't gain the full benefit of the skill's buffs unless she's hitting a target outside of her default range. However, since Deadeye snipers have extremely long range to begin with, you'll be hard pressed to find the ideal spot for her to set up. Her S3 also doesn't change her Deadeye target priority, leaving the possibility she'll just shoot at weaker enemies in close range and ignore the higher threat enemies you actually need her boosted attack to put a dent in. Compare her to her closest equivalents like Schwarz who has skills that can ignore DEF making her better at sniping high priority targets, Firewatch who has utility in being able to camouflage herself and calling down AoE attacks, and Ambriel whose lower rarity makes her far easier to raise and has an infinite range skill that doesn't have the limitations Fartooth's does. While Fartooth has a neat kit, there simply aren't really any maps where it would be useful, at least not in a way to justify the cost of raising her when better or more versatile alternatives exist.
- Her second talent stands out as being rather useless as well. Reducing taunt on a ranged operator is entirely unnecessary as you remember that the game teaches you how to redirect enemy attacks very early on, and that Medics are a thing. Furthermore, the physical dodge ignore is mostly redundant as very few enemies have innate evasion, although Hypergryph has shown little hesitation with putting it on more recent foes.
- More recent events such as Guiding Ahead, Shatterpoint and Stultifera Navis all feature enemies with extremely high levels of dodge either passively or on their skills and limited means of negating them, giving Fartooth's niche some more applicability, however this leaves her place in the meta tenuous and entirely dependent on the attributes of the enemies she is facing. Not helping matters is the existence of better or more practical alternatives to dealing with those enemies, such as using sources of true damage or elemental damage like Kal'tsit, Nearl the Radiant Knight or Virtuosa to bypass the physical/Arts dodge, using powerful crowd-control effects like the ones Gnosis or Texas the Omertosa provide to disable the dodge, or using Pozëmka with her module as it gives the dodge ignore trait.
- Jessica
- As a 4-star Marksman sniper, Jessica is considered one of the worst in the subclass, mainly because she deals less DPS compared to her 3-star counterpart, Kroos, at max level Elite 1 even when she's running her first skill. In addition, while her second skill provides physical and Arts dodge on top of attack boost, Snipers are not typically meant to tank and in certain cases where a ranged unit needs to dodge (for example against Patriot's special ability in his second phase), certain operators, such as the 2-star 12F can also fill the role. Defensive skills on ranged operators fall flat since deployment order and Medics are a thing, making it so that excepting W's talent and the trait of Phalanx Casters, such things become void in most playthroughs. It does not help that the attack boost provided by her second skill is not substantial enough to beat her first skill's DPS. Finally, while Jessica can beat Kroos' DPS once she is promoted to Elite 2, and has her operator level leveled up and her skills masteried alongside it, the resources needed are typically better spent on stronger operators instead (including Jessica's higher rarity counterparts). Overall, the consensus is that Jessica is not worth running compared to Kroos, fellow 4-star members of her subclass such as Vermeil and especially May, and obviously her higher rarity counterparts. Meanwhile, her Sentinel Protector Defender alter is a solid unit.
- Provence
- Provence's gimmick is that she excels at finishing off wounded enemies, with her first skill passively giving her increasing damage scaling with how little HP her enemy has, while her second skill gives her a significant ATK buff at the cost of making her unable to target units above 80% HP. While she can do ridiculous amounts of damage provided the right conditions line up, the difficulty of actually setting up these conditions often pushes her into Crippling Overspecialization as a result, since she's reliant on her allies to soften up enemies before she can achieve her maximum potential, with her S1 only reaching max power when an enemy is essential already dead, and her S2 being straight up unable to damage anything that hasn't been significantly wounded already. While her talent gives her a chance to crit enemies for even bigger damage, her slower attack speed and shorter range compared to most Snipers makes the 20% chance a lot lower than it sounds; while it increases to 50% if the target is right in front of her, this basically means that in order to do max damage, the enemy has to be low on HP and right in front of her, and that's only if the odds are in your favor. Not helping the matter is the existence of Schwarz and Pozëmka in her own subclass, who are basically both Provence's Moveset Clone but vastly more powerful due to their damage potential not being crimped by enemy HP, as well as more powerful and reliable DEF-piercing crits, as well as Rosa, Typhon, and Ray from other subclasses, whose damage potentials are also not reliant on enemy HP while having access to skills/talents that let them punch through high DEF enemies.
- Rosmontis
- Rosmontis's kit has aged rather poorly since her introduction. With the Flinger archetype's inherent flaw of being unable to hit aerial targets despite being a ranged class, it attempts to compensate by combining the Deadeye archetype's massive range and the Artilleryman's area of effect attacks, but Rosmontis lacks the high ATK stat that allows those archetypes to function despite their slow attack speed. This is supposed to be compensated for by the Flinger's attacks hitting twice, but this suffers against targets with high-DEF as each hit is being mitigated individually. And while Rosmontis's Armaments of Annihilation Talent attempts to help with this by ignoring a portion of her targets' DEF which is increased on enemies blocked by her Tactical Equipment, this value is flat, and while ignoring 160 DEF (175 at max Potential) was a decent value during her release, it is much less significant nowadays with the advent of more powerful enemies with far greater DEF stats. Rosmontis's kit itself has its own issues as well—while her S3, "As You Wish" has solid DPS in theory by halving her attack interval and giving a modest ATK boost, it's dependent on the deployment of her Tactical Equipment which require deployable melee tiles, limiting her own optimal deployment positions to places where melee unit can be deployed to block incoming targets. This skill also limits her to only attacking enemies that are being blocked, which presents a problem when facing enemies that can't or are too dangerous to be blocked, as Rosmontis will be unable to attack them at all. Worse, the Tactical Equipment can be deployed at the very edge of her attack range and block the enemy from outside of it, also causing her to be unable to attack them, making this ability extremely frustrating to use. For those who are unwilling to deal with the limitations of this skill, her S2, Nociceptor Inhibition is a much simpler option that gives her two more hits per attack and gives each a chance to stun at the cost of increasing her attack interval, but the DPS is significantly lower than her S3 and fares even worse against high-DEF targets. As a result, Rosmontis simply lacks the reliable DPS to be a practical option with extreme limitations on her best DPS skill, and with an increasing variety of dangerous aerial enemies that require strong ranged DPS to deal with, the Flinger's weakness is more noticeable than ever, making her a unit that is unable to handle more than moderately strong ground mobs in most cases. Her module does help her a little, giving her a third hit on each attack and improving her DEF ignore Talent, and admittedly this is a very good improvement on its own merit, but with the stat creep on enemies along with just how many powerful physical AoE units there are nowadays, many of which can also hit aerial units, it's not enough to give her any noticeable improvement in viability. Arguably the most damning evidence against her viability is that she is a Limited unit that only appears twice every year on various Celebration-series event Headhunting banners, leaving you with little wiggle room to actually have mere chances at getting her. Compared to W, Virtuosa, and Muelsyse (these three have been seen in the Game Breaker page for this game), who are in the same figurative boat as her, she is by far the worst off out of all four of them. You kind of feel sorry for her...
Guards
- While most Guard archetypes see varying levels of use in the meta, the one that's very often overlooked are the Fighter Guards (formerly Brawler Guards). Sporting very high ASPD, cheap DP costs, middling survivability, 1 block...and pitiful per-hit damage, Fighter Guards are the poster children of the Death by a Thousand Cuts trope, which doesn't help much. While reasonably powerful against smaller mobs of weak enemies, their viability falls off extremely quickly when the opposition gets higher DEF, since with the way physical damage reduction is calculated, Fighter Guards would be dealing extremely low Scratch Damage, while getting stuck on a single target as his friends slink by unchallenged. As it stands, the class is still rather subpar, even after receiving a buff to their health and ATK; the first Fighter Guard who was spared from this fate is Mountain, and only because his skills are simply that good on their own, by way of bending over backwards to be as little of a traditional Fighter Guard as possible with hard-hitting AoE attacks and self-sustainability, making him very easy to use in both early and end-game. His fellow Fighters aren't so fortunate, with Beehunter being completely useless on anything beefier than The Goomba, while others have at best average kits, with Indra being able to ignore enemy DEF via a skill with very poor uptime, Dagda needing to charge by getting hit and that with a lackluster kit, Flint dealing increased damage against enemies not blocked by her, and Jackie relying on dodging to increase her damage output. The second released 6-star Fighter, Chong Yue, actually does address all the aforementioned weaknesses while not completely diverging from the archetype as Mountain does thanks to extremely high scaling area of effect Spam Attack skills and a permanent self-buff on his third skill that increases his range and essentially doubles his damage, but the lower-rarity Fighter Guards are still considered among the weakest units in the game.
- While the Dreadnought Guards (formerly Duelist guards) aren't bad per se, boasting the highest raw ATK of the Guard archetypes along with having a decent DP cost and attack speed, their main issue is that they tend to be heavily powercreeped by other options available to players as the game goes on. Even though game tutorials encourages using them to fight one-on-one against tough foes (hence the former archetype name), their main competition, the Executor Specialists, are much more versatile in helidropping assassination with their cheap cost, instant skill activation on deployment, and low redeployment time. Some Guards, such as Surtr and SilverAsh (with their monsterously strong S3), can much more easily capitalize on helidropping than the Dreadnought Guards could. It is also noted that the skills of most Dreadnought Guards are mostly focused and specialized in increasing damage output...and not much else, which while not exactly bad (due to their innate high ATK), it gives them less flexibility in performing other combat utility outside of fighting lone enemies one-on-one. Additionally, their physical durability is generally poor (which can become even worse with skills such as Matoimaru and Franka's S2), making them struggle against beefy opponents that can squash them easily (despite the archetype being designed in mind to fight against these guys!), and a more durable boss duelist can be found in Eunectes, who is a Duelist Defender (even though she has her own gameplay problems, as detailed below). With the exception of Nearl the Radiant Knight (who completely outclasses the other members of the archetype), the only few Dreadnought Guards that are widely useful up to the mid-game are the humble 3-star Melantha, simply due to being easier to obtain and raise than her higher rarity counterparts with a lower DP cost to boot, giving her great mileage until the player can recruit higher rarity operators, as well as the 4-star Matoimaru, who can mostly match Melantha's performance at E1 (and can be promoted to E2 if one wants to use Matoimaru in the long run, if desired) and has a good base skill in the trading post to boot. Overall, their good, but not spectacular performance makes them easily replaceable by other versatile archetypes, and is one of the negative factors contributing to Skadi's own low-tier viability, as detailed below.
- However, this tide seems to be turning slightly with the introduction of Nearl the Radiant Knight, whose stun mechanic addresses the 1-block problem and the squishy nature of the archetype, and has a second skill that faciliates their 'assassin' playstyle. Her third skill can place a summon (making her the first Guard with a summon) as well to serve as a blocker while increasing her range. However, this does not help the other members of the archetype, simply because Nearl is just that good on her own, with her versatile kit invalidating all other Dreadnought Guards.
- Dreadnought Guards would get a Module upon the introduction of the Invitation to Wine event; the Y-Module fully restores their health upon taking a fatal blow and gives them an attack speed boost in return for a significantly reduced max HP cap; the X-Module increases their already high ATK when attacking enemies blocked by themselves. The results vary among the Dreadnoughts, but otherwise aren't significant game-changers in making them stand out compared to other options. For some however, these modules managed to open up a few options for them and at the very least gave some of them a niche.
- Another dismissed Guard archetype are the Instructor Guards (formerly Support Guards), who often find very little use among doctors outside of the arguable exception of Pallas, who's mainly used for DPS rather than for her team buff. This is due to their mediocre ATK stat, implemented as a Necessary Drawback for a kit that offers supportive buffs for allies, making them Ineffectual Loners on their own if they themselves are a source for main DPS, often needing the team to be built around them in order to maximize the effectiveness of their supportive power. Their skills offer ways for them to amplify the effects their talent(s) have on allies, but said skills are often gated by very high SP costs. Even then, their kit often tends to give things that are not particularly needed most of the time and/or aren't necessary in the mid to late game. Dobermann, for example, has a talent that buffs 3-star operators, who most doctors will use less and less the further they progress in the game. Her low stats and below average ATK means that she is mostly used in the base for her RIIC trait rather than actually being deployed in battle. The Instructor Guard archetype was eventually buffed with the release of Pallas (CN servers) or the Preluding Lights event (Global/EN servers) by not only increasing their HP and ATK values (increased further with Modules), but allowing them to deal 120% damage (130% damage with Modules except for Dobermann, who instead gains the ability to be deployed on ranged tiles with hers) against enemies they are not blocking, which is fine and all, albeit not solving the various hurdles the player needs to jump through to utilize the full extent of the archetype's supportive talents. It says something when the archetype's only 6-star so far, Pallas, is mainly used as a laneholder with her S1 since her talents also work on her, making it a more efficient choice than placing her behind another operator or utilizing her S3's actual buffs.
- The Soloblade Guard (formerly Enmity/Musha Guard) archetype is one that simply is not well suited for the current state of the game at all. The archetype was originally envisioned as a self-sufficient duelist capable of holding low-pressure lanes while defeating elite foes through solid DPS and attrition via their Life Drain trait, but as it stands this niche is no longer applicable to any real content that has been released in recent years either because they have been replaced with better options (such as Mountain) or are dealing with enemies that are too strong or durable for them to hold without the support they weren't supposed to need. The outdated design of the archetype can be seen most clearly through the fact that all three of the first Soloblade Guards share the exact same Talent (gaining bonus attack speed as their health decreases) that they are so dependent on that it may as well be baked into their trait, effectively depriving them of a true unique Talent (or in the case of Hellagur, only having one unique Talent). Soloblade Guards also suffer from several of the problems that Dreadnought Guards do, namely, rather poor DEF and only 1 Block, but this is made even worse by the fact their ATK is lower than that of Dreadnoughts of equal rarity, meaning they are dependent on their attack speed Talent to deal competitive DPS in a game state where most dangerous enemies would oneshot them were they low enough to get the full benefit of their talent. Worse, they have no answer to the prevalence of Elemental damage, as their trait means Wandering Medics cannot target them (except Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska, who can indirectly heal them through her S1). The releases of the two 6-star Juggernaut Defenders and the entire Reaper Guard archetype, all of which use the Life Drain gimmick more effectively by specializing in dealing with waves rather than individual targets, have completely pushed out the Soloblade archetype in the laneholding role. As it stands, Hellagur's sole remaining niche is as a physical dodge tank which is become less and less relevant as most bosses are majorly Arts damage (and he has competition in that niche in the form of Mizuki with Module Y, who also has self-sustain to boot), Akafuyu is outclassed at the 1v1 dueling niche she tries to specialize in, while Utage does have some value as a budget Surtr with her high Arts DPS, but doesn't measure up to higher-rarity options. It goes to show how much the archetype is in need of updating when the two newest Soloblades, Rathalos S Noir Corne and Zuo Le, have variations on the usual Soloblade Talent. Rathalos S Noir Corne has a Talent that grants less attack speed than his counterparts but more DEF with missing health, giving him a better chance to actually survive duels, and having skills that allow him to block damage and deal high bursts of his own damage that synergize with his second Talent to deal with dangerous threats. Meanwhile, Zuo Le specializes in generating barriers that increase his bulk without compromising the buffs he gets at low health, has means of increasing his block count and damaging groups of enemies, and focuses on SP recovery and Spam Attacks to help him deal with groups of enemies even if he can't block them himself.
- The Crusher Guard archetype has also been nicknamed 'Sacrificial Guard' by the fandom and that already says a lot about one of their core issues that impact them a lot: they sacrifice way too much to still fulfill a role. Their concept is that they have high HP and ATK, but no DEF or RES at all. While they do attack all units they block, unlike their closest equivalent in Centurion Guards, their block count can only reach up to 2, making them sit in a weird spot between Dreadnought Guards and the aforementioned Centurion Guards. This Glass Cannon status means you cannot effectively use them as frontliners to try to utilize that humongous ATK stat, since all damage will end up equalling to True damage for them, and they also cannot take use of any kind of Defense or RES scaling buffs (buffs that have a % added to them) because they have none. The only way to give them any meaningful survivability is to provide a flat DEF buff instead, which is exceedingly rare, mostly found on units who are off-meta themselves with the exception of Skadi the Corrupting Heart, and usually not even that powerful in terms of numbers, meaning even that would only put them at the bare minimum of necessary defense to not crumble under anything that attacks them. Nullifying one's own defenses tends to be a painful drawback that is only worth it if the payoff is extremely powerful, such as SilverAsh's Truesilver Slash which compensates for it with large range and area of effect damage, and less effective variants such as the skill kits of Franka and Matoimaru tend to do a much more subpar job instead. Not only that, but even though the archetype's ATK stat is up to the moon, their attack speed is atrocious, meaning the only advantage they have over a lower ATK but faster attacking unit is the ability to break through high DEF, which most players would simply use an Arts damage dealer for instead. Everything combined makes an archetype that's supposed to be good at dealing hits but is very bad at taking them back, which is unfortunately not a niche that particularly needs to be filled since there are frankly no situations where you'd want to grab one of these. The only Crusher Guard who's not on this list is Hoederer, and that is only because as the 6-star of the archetype, he was clearly designed with a massively loaded kit that includes Life Drain, True Damage, increased range, a spammable Stun, a self-Shelter, and a ridiculous health stat, all to try to make up for all these inherent flaws and to entice players into even trying to pull for him—even then, practically everything holding him back from being a truly top-tier Operator has to do with his horrible archetype, enforcing the notion that the archetype is fundamentally flawed.
- Like its physical counterpart, the Dreadnought Guards, the Arts Fighter Guards suffer from having only one block and thus being designed to duel enemies when there are operators who better excel at the role, such as Executor Specialists or powerful helidrop guards, including Surtr, ironically enough. While they do boast better DEF and have RES, they have lower ATK value. Their lower ATK becomes more problematic with how Arts damage is reduced by a percentage instead of a flat value like physical damage, the occasional presence of anti-Arts mechanics that made the Caster class itself struggle in certain contents, and the presence of Eyjafjalla as a great source of Arts damage since release. Additionally, the archetype tends to lean into balancing both damage and survivability, with operators having kits that try to help them survive using defensive buffs, including ATK debuff, HP restoration, immortality or shield, while also having offensive buffs, such as double hits, range extension, block count buff or ASPD buff at the same time. As a result, Arts Fighter Guards typically suffer from mixed performances, with Surtr as the only exception due to deviating from the archetype as much as possible with her immortality, RES ignore, and an absurd helidrop skill that significantly buffs her HP (though somewhat offset by a progressive HP drain), ATK, range, and enemy hit count, allowing her to excel in dealing huge amounts of damage while taking a good amount of hits herself. Meanwhile, Viviana ends up suffering from her archetype's problems by relying too much on her survivability instead of damage. Outside of Surtr, one will seldom see Arts Fighters used in general and higher-end gameplay, with the dubious exceptions of the 4-star Mousse, who's useful up to mid-game due to having a simple DPS kit while having a niche with her massive ATK debuffing, and Amiya's Guard form, who can provide team-wide buffs along with a True damage nuke on her second skill.
- Bryophyta
- Bryophyta effectively functions as a more defensively oriented version of Swire, and unfortunately shares a lot of her weaknesses as a result. The DEF buffs conferred by his talent and second skill need to have melee allies around him, with all the limitations that it entails, and Bryophyta's lack of strengths outside of them makes it a tough choice giving up a team slot just for him, especially given the lower value of defensive buffs compared to offensive ones. Unlike Swire, Bryophyta can take the buffs for himself if he's blocking an enemy (talent) or is alone (S2), but Instructors aren't built for taking hits in the first place, making him a poor user of them. On top of that, his second skill not only has a disproportionately long cooldown for what it does, it also stuns him after it ends, whereas it would have already been subpar even without the stun.
- Flamebringer
- His primary issue is that he is a Dreadnought Guard, so he is supposed to fill a role similar to Melantha where he duels enemy units with minimal support. However, the issue is that Flamebringer has extremely low DEF in addition to his meager HP, making him liable to just being sniped by enemy ranged units, or crushed by big beefy ones that managed to get within range. Both of his skills are actually useful once he gets to use them, but actually getting there in the first place is where the problem of his kit crops up, since they both require him attacking to charge up SP.
- His first skill does provide healing on hit, but Flamebringer needs to be consistently attacking enemies in order for the healing to overcome his sustained damage if the player doesn't want to charge his SP with Ch'en or Liskarm, and the former is generally a superior and more versatile Guard than Flamebringer. Not to mention that the healing on hit schtick is generally done better by the Soloblade Guards. What power he does have is condensed into his second skill, which permanently gives him a significant damage and attack speed boost, but the charge time for it is so long (anywhere between 60 to 40 attacks) that he would need to be placed far ahead of time for it to be ready; if anything, the skill really only has a use if Flamebringer is used as a main frontline fighter in the player's defensive line, which also negates the intended helidropping role of the Dreadnought Guard.
- Lastly, Flamebringer's niche is that he gains more max HP upon getting a kill, which sounds nice on paper, but by nature it also means he will only be very beefy if he manages to consistently get kills for a long while, which makes him tanky near the end of the level, not when the going actually starts getting tough. In addition, Flamebringer himself must land the killing blow to gain the benefit, so if there are other offensive operators supporting him, there's a high likelihood they'll inadvertently steal Flamebringer's kills, depriving him of buff stacks.
- His Module introduced in Invitation to Wine fully restores his health and boosts his attack speed once he gets KO'ed, in exchange for having a lower max HP cap; the HP stacks from his talent can help mitigate this drawback. Lingering Echoes, however, adds Module upgrades that increase the HP per stack from his Talent and, most importantly, allow him to get stacks even if he doesn't land the finishing blow, as long as enemies die within his adjacent tiles. This essentially removes his aforementioned weakness and allows him to stack a terrifying amount of HP very quickly, although this only really moves him up from "barely usable" to "might show up in themed/specialized clears every now and then".
- Frostleaf
- Operators with her rarity are overall usable and decent, but Frostleaf sticks out within the bunch. She tries to be both a slower and a damage dealer, but ends up doing neither of them particularly well. Her first skill sounds good in theory, with its low SP Cost and instant attack, but due to the way her talent works, she will always end up attacking once when the skill bar is already full, when the target is possibly already either dead or out of her range. If one opts for her second skill, one needs to charge up the 50 SP it costs (at maximum mastery) with no initial SP Cost at all, and even then it has a pitiable uptime of 25 seconds. Her crowd-control is not nearly as consistent as her kit wants it to be, and should one view it as a mere bonus, then the other half (which is her damage) is still way below par, even when calculating in her rarity. What’s more, unlocking her talent by promoting her to Elite 2 actually lowers her DPS, due to it increasing her attack interval in exchange for an expanded attack range. The talent also messes with her crowd control application, making it a near-total disadvantage especially since the extra range she gets is to the sides (the same as an Ambusher) rather than in the front where it would be more useful. The fact that fellow 4-star Arene has a skill that partially replicates Frostleaf, with the exact same range expansion as Frostleaf’s talent without the downside (but minus the bind) that has a shorter duration but a way lower SP Cost adds insult to injury. As a last issue, she has no way to rid herself of her ranged penalty or turn her attacks into Arts, whereas even 3-star Midnight is capable of doing the latter. The nail in her coffin is the introduction of Qiu Bai, who may be more expensive to raise than Frostleaf but improves upon everything Frostleaf herself would want to improve, and fulfills exactly the same niche of a crowd-controlling Guard.
- Hellagur
- While Hellagur himself is not weak by any stretch of the word, he's basically rendered redundant after the introduction of his lower rarity counterparts Utage, Akafuyu, and Rathalos S Noir Corne (Utage is especially much easier to acquire and max out due to her low rarity, while Akafuyu and Rathalos S Noir Corne are rate-up 5-stars on highly coveted limited headhunting banners offering bunches of free pulls). They all boast a skill set that trounces both of his survivability and burst damage potential: their S1 and S2 both give drawbacks in exchange for significant buffs, with their S1 serving to increase their staying powernote , while their S2 is more oriented on their burst damagenote . While Hellagur excels at his specific niches much more than his lower-rarity counterparts do and is the only one of them who can self-regenerate his HP when disengaged in combat, as he is right now, Hellagur is too much of a Mighty Glacier to see widespread general use, being used mostly to gatekeep an enemy entry point from which only a few will emerge, which puts him at a very low place on the operator tier totem pole, while Utage, Akafuyu, and Rathalos S Noir Corne can compete with (and in some cases, outperform) other dedicated units without the need for flashy abilities or high stats. He also lacks versatility that the aforementioned three provide, as his skills are all focused on DPS first and survival after (and only has the "survival" part by way of his S2's physical dodge, which relies on RNG unlike his lower-rarity counterparts, making it harder for him to duel a tough baddie without getting himself killed), not offering much in the way of anything else. He's finally rendered almost, if not completely unviable after his 6-star counterpart in the archetype, Zuo Le, got released. Zuo Le has a modified version of the first Soloblade Guard talent that halves his ASPD buff at base but gives him a SP recovery speed boost to compensate and a second talent that gives him a random chance to gain 1 SP when attacking, which becomes more reliable after he loses enough HP. Both talents synergize with his S2 and S3, as they grant powerful buffs to his damage and survivabilitynote . The shield he gets from his skills scales off his HP like Penance, letting him soak most types of damage reliably, while his skills also have relatively low SP costs that effectively become even lower with both talents active, allowing him to constantly spam his shield and outlive his enemies. All this result in a Soloblade Guard who outclasses Hellagur in every single way.
- Whereas his module gives him a reduction of 25% on all damage he receives when he hits half HP, his fellow members in his archetype also received the same module, and it arguably has better synergy than it does with him, since Akafuyu, Utage, and Zuo Le have ways to immediately fulfill the module's activation condition note , whereas his and Rathalos S Noir Corne's would activate more at extreme emergency situations. His module upgrades, on the other hand, are quite strong, giving him a larger maximum attack speed increase that caps at a higher threshold (from +100 ASPD at 30% HP without module to +130 at 50% at module level 3); this makes it much easier for him to achieve his maximum damage potential, and the increased lifesteal rate combined with his 25% DR makes him ridiculously hard to finish off, though the expensive resource cost for a level 3 module may be difficult to justify for such a niche unit. His module eventually becomes redundant with Zuo Le's release, since he gets the same trait upgrade with stronger first talent upgrade (from +50 ASPD and 2 SP/s at 30% HP to +70 ASPD and 2.3 SP/s at 50% HP at max level). His module effects also mesh well with the rest of his kit, since the 25% DR allows him to live longer at lower HP without his shield until he can regain it, the increased SP recovery speed lets him spam his skills even more, and the ASPD boost gives him an appreciable increase to his DPS offskill and during S2 while activating Talent 2 more frequently.
- Also not helping him here is the introductions of Jaye, Mountain, and modules for Skadi and Gladiia. Jaye is quite spammable due to his low DP Cost, quickly activating infinite skills and fast redeployment time, overall dealing faster DPS with healing added on top that's not restricted to only him, and being easier to obtain and raise since he's a 4-star. Meanwhile, Mountain has a low DP cost, high attack speed with the ability to inflict debuff, consistent innate health regeneration instead of health on hit or when idle, and a block count buff that lets him use hard-hitting attacks on two enemies. Finally, Skadi, as his healable counterpart, can synergize with moduled Gladiia when Gladiia is deployed to regenerate her health rapidly and reduce physical and Arts damages while cutting down her redeployment time or further increasing her tankiness with her own modules, letting her rival or even surpass Hellagur in survivability as long as Gladiia is still on field and her S3 is active.
- Hellagur is further shunted by the presence of other non-Soloblade enmity units that can do his job better, such as the two 6-star Juggernaut Defenders, Mudrock and Penance, as well as the entire Reaper Guard archetype, particularly Executor the Ex Foedere. Mudrock and Penance can block three enemies and have means to deal damage to all of them at once while being tankier as defenders and having more reliable survivability gimmicks. Likewise, Executor the Ex Foedere can heal himself on attack like Hellagur, but he can hit every enemy inside his range and block more, possesses a skill that buffs his healing and killpower by a lot, and has a talent that gives him a chance to deliver double-hitting, DEF-ignoring crits.
- Lessing.
- Crushing many players' hopes that the previous case of a woefully underpowered 6-star welfare in Vigil was merely an outlier between the excellent Gladiia and Lumen, and the very niche but not outright terrible Silence the Paradigmatic, we have Lessing, the newcomer to an already inherently poor archetype (enough so that it is mentioned in the start of this section), who despite having some decent-looking numbers ultimately offers nothing overly new or valuable to the table as far as helidrop duelists go. Lessing appears to specialize in two different niches - the first being the ability to mitigate damage from enemies not blocked by himself by reducing it by 35%, and an on-deploy S2 which buffs the reduction up to 77% while giving him offensive buffs. The damage reduction does help when dueling priority threats backed up by ranged enemies, but not only do players already have the easily accessible Gravel with a far lower DP cost and redeploy time if they need to draw aggro during a duel, Lessing's damage output is somewhat low for a Dreadnought and falls off heavily against high DEF, meaning he'll be in major trouble if the enemy survives long enough to outlast the buffs. The second is in his third skill which lets him purge and become temporarily immune to statuses while also buffing his attacks, which is introduced at a bizarre time considering the 6-star welfare Lumen can already cure status for allies, and if you happen to have Lee, he occupies the niche more consistently since his talent gives him effectively permanent status immunity unless you run out of DP to fuel him or he's receiving an abnormally rapid application of status effects. With these niches already occupied, we are left with a mediocre stat-stick that performs roughly on par with or slightly below a solo Skadi, a year-one unit who already suffered years of being a Low-Tier Letdown before module upgrades and Abyssal Hunter talents propped her up to a decent state, and is utterly trounced by by the utility and true damage of Nearl the Radiant Knight (albeit being a Limited unit and far harder to obtain), as well as Skadi herself since she can benefit from Abyssal Hunter support to become a far bigger ball of stats. Although Lessing is far from unusable and in particular serves as an excellent free-to-play option for those without the luxury of the aforementioned 6-stars, the inherent weakness of Dreadnoughts and large number of units in other classes who also fulfill the same role of being 1-Block heavy hitters make it difficult to justify raising Lessing if you happen to have any of said units, particularly with the huge expenses attached to his 6-star rarity despite him and his potentials coming free.
- Leto.
- Members of the Lord archetype tend to be at least decent, Frostleaf notwithstanding, due to the Jack of All Trades nature of their design, which makes it all the more perplexing that Leto manages to be so underwhelming. The main issue is the fact that her entire kit revolves around pairing her with other members of the Ursus Student Council faction (Gummy, Istina, Zima, and Rosa), of which only Rosa is a particularly meta-relevant unit, but even were she paired with the entire group to fully optimize her kit, her synergies amount to an attack speed buff which only noticeably benefits herself, Istina, and Rosa (whose S3 doesn't even benefit from attack speed as it deals damage in set intervals), and an effect on her S2 which is worthless at best or, more likely, actively detrimental at worst, as it forcibly activates all U.S.S.G operators' skills if fully charged, which means you cannot activate Leto's skill for her own ATK buff and ranged damage penalty removal without most likely wasting uptimes on any other U.S.S.G members on the field (this is especially bad with Zima as her S2 has an extremely low uptime and thus needs to be used precisely) and, even assuming the very unlikely situation where you would want to activate every U.S.S.G operators' skills at once, there is no functional difference between using Leto's skill and manually activating each operator's skill anyway. On her own merit, while Leto's ATK buff is quite substantial with the same effect as Lappland's S2 in removing her ranged damage penalty and allowing her to hit an extra target, on top of being manually activated as opposed to auto-activation, she only deals physical damage, giving her much less versatility considering the number of Lord Guards of and even below her rarity capable of converting their damage to Arts damage to punch through high defense enemies without needing a massive ATK stat.
- Quartz.
- Quartz introduces the Crusher Guard archetype and, unfortunately, has mostly missed the mark in terms of functionality between the archetype's inherent flaws and her own kit's failings. While her HP and ATK stats are absolutely absurd for her rarity, far surpassing even 6-star Dreadnought Guards in terms of raw numbers, they are held back by her utterly crippling 2.5 attack interval (for reference, Centurion Guards which have the same trait in attacking enemies equal to block count have an attack interval of 1.2, less than half) and zero DEF and RES. The concept of having absolutely no defense combined with blocking multiple enemies simply do not mix well, as it means even the most lowly slug can make a visible dent in Quartz's health bar, neutering the benefit of her immense HP stat. If anything, her huge HP can be more of a hindrance than help, as it makes healing less efficient on her. Her painfully slow attack speed also hinders the value of her ATK, as it means her DPS is actually far from exceptional, with the only notable benefit in being able to hurt high-DEF enemies by default. Rather than addressing the Crusher's problems, Quartz's skills actually exacerbate them, with her second skill, All-Out Crash, increasing the damage she takes by 25% in exchange for an ASPD buff, modifying her damage on-hit by 80-120% based on rank and mastery, and having a 25% chance to stun for 2 seconds on each hit. Even with the ASPD buff, her attack speed is so slow that relying on her theoretical niche as an AoE stunner is unreliable at best, and the fact that she takes even more damage means anything dangerous enough to be worth stunning will probably obliterate her in a few hits. Making things worse, she costs Red Certificates to buy from the shop, which could instead be used for Chip Catalysts or to saved up for more useful Operators such as Ethan or Honeyberry instead. Overall, the Crusher archetype has too many flaws to stand out from Centurion Guards, which fill the AoE melee/block role far betternote , making Estelle, Specter or even Broca far better investments.
- Savage.
- The most glaring issue with Savage is her raw stats, which are unusually low for her rarity, being more comparable to that of a 4-star operator instead of her own 5-star rarity. Statwise, she is effectively a 4-star under the guise of a 5-star operator (with the latter's upgrade costs), which is even reflected in her DP cost, being the same as a potential 1 Estelle. Even after promoting her to Elite 2, she still mostly underperforms when compared to your other Centurion Guards, like Broca, Specter, or even Blaze, which doesn't quite justify her expensive upgrade costs.
- Another flaw proving that Savage's stats are of a 4-star powergrade despite being billed as a 5-star is that she uses the β variation of Power Strike as her S1 (generally reserved for 4-star operators), therefore making it much weaker than it ought to be; all operators of a 5 or 6-star rarity who have Power Strike (or any other generic skills denoted with α, β, or γ) as their S1 uses the stronger γ variation.
- Her S2, Precision Blast, is rather neat when she actually uses it, where Savage will hit up to five enemies within the three tiles ahead of her. It also has a ridiculous SP count for an on-hit skill, at a minimum of 17 SP at M3, meaning Savage will need to hit something at least seventeen times with her basic attack before she can proc it. While it isn't that big of an issue considering her role as a Centurion Guard, it's still going to take some significant whacking if she doesn't have an SP battery like Ch'en or Liskarm to help her charge.
- Her passive talent is even more situational, as it will only work if there are more than two ranged tiles in the cardinal directions around her. This severely limits her usefulness during gameplay, as map geometry like that is rather specific and uncommon, making her even less usable compared to even 3-star Guards.
- Savage can only improve her potential once per anniversary of Arknights (early May on CN servers, late December/early January on Global/EN servers), via a token given to players if they already have her prior to that point, but otherwise cannot improve it elsewhere, not even with Epic Guard Tokens. In theory, to fully max out Savage's potential, the player would have to play Arknights for about six years, and the game has only been halfway past its 2nd anniversary.
- This is not to say that Savage is completely and objectively bad, however, it's just that her kit is fairly mediocre compared to most other operators, and hard to make full use of without investing into Mastery upgrades, which is fairly understandable considering her Centurion Guard subclass. Despite its criticisms, one should typically be able to get more mileage out of Savage's S1 than her S2, because its multiplicative damage buff synergizes well will damage buffers like Warfarin, and at Mastery 3, Savage will be able to out-damage a Specter of comparable level with her S2 active due to her lack of a self-stun.
- Sideroca
- Sideroca is what you'd get if you take Flamebringer and go in the other extreme, with Matoimaru's self-heal thrown into the mix. Instead of Matoimaru and Flamebringer's monstrous damage potential, Sideroca puts all of her eggs in a defensive basket, giving her very high RES and uptime on her self-heals, but very disappointing damage potentials, even with the Arts Fighter Guard's inherent flaws in mind. In an ideal situation, Sideroca's skills and stats would make her seem like a nice choice to helidrop and snipe high-DEF enemies or Casters, who usually have low RES by comparison, but her talent actively works against this, as it doesn't confer her any tangible bonus if she has to constantly be redeployed, which wipes all of her stacks, made worse by how she can be easily kill-stolen by a teammate. In this sense, she shares the same Achilles' Heel with Flamebringer, who is already considered to be one of the worst operators by a mile in the current meta. Even in her niche, Guard Amiya, Astesia, Mousse, Viviana, and especially Surtr have her damage beat significantly. At best, Sideroca could be considered a tempting option for a stall unit, as her self-heal, Arts damage, and CC reduction give her an edge against big enemies like Defense Crushers, but situations where one couldn't just use dedicated units to pound them to putty instead are few and far between.
- Swire
- In addition to the Instructor Guard's inherent flaws, in order for Swire to actually buff allies, Swire needs to have units standing around her, whereas all other Instructor Guards will grant buffs regardless of ally position. Additionally, only melee units will benefit from the buffs, and a lot of late game maps don't have a lot of free melee tiles in a cluster to begin with. Furthermore, the high SP cost of her second skill and it being an offensive SP recovery skill makes for a very low uptime, and her skills need a lot of investment in order to last a bit longer. Her Module upgrade in Lingering Echoes improves her SP problems by making her recover bonus SP if an ally is in her surrounding tiles, although it still doesn't solve her problem of needing to be surrounded by allies to function.
- Not helping her is the introduction of Guard Amiya, whose buff may be lower but not limited to the tiles around her or melee operators, and she deals more damage overall. On the other hand, her Merchant Specialist alter, while more a fun option than a top-tier unit, is at least a more competent fighter with some unique tools in all of her skills and the ability to revive herself multiple times by consuming surplus DP.
- Viviana
- While nobody was expecting her to be on par with Surtr within their shared Arts Fighter Guard class, players were nonetheless severely disappointed with Viviana when she released during Zwillingstürme im Herbst due to turning out "merely" average despite how anticipated she was as a playable operator, with the inevitable constant comparisons to Surtr not helping her case. Compared to Surtr, who annihilates whatever crosses her with her third skill at the cost of having little staying power on the field, Viviana tries to find a different niche by staying deployed for a long time and dueling elite and boss enemies with her hefty defenses while wearing them down. To wit, her talents reduce the amount of damage she takes through damage reductions while increasing her own damage, which become doubled when elites or bosses are in her range, and gives her a chance to gain Shields that can nullify one instance of melee damage completely by attacking elites or bosses. Meanwhile, her third and main skill boosts her ATK and defensive stats while doubling or tripling the amount of hits she deals and also increasing her Shield-granting talent's odds of activating. This skill along with her talents shows a clear intention in design being that her third skill will grant her frequent Shields and strong defenses that lets her take heavy hits from powerful enemies while returning damage of her own, which are aided by its relatively low SP cost. However, Viviana is sorely held back by being very poor at fighting more than one enemy at a time — she can only block one enemy as an Arts Fighter Guard and her attacks during her third skill will prioritize an elite or boss, meaning she cannot clear waves of weaker enemies alone effectively and especially can't if they're being accompanied by a higher-level enemy since she'll only target them instead. Her third skill also requires a second cast to access its tripled hits and extended duration, making her less able to take on a powerful threat until she's been on the field long enough to cycle through her full skill duration and cooldown at least once. Furthermore, she lacks any means of bypassing RES the way other Arts operators like Surtr or Goldenglow can, causing her damage to plummet against enemies that are packing RES and leaving her vulnerable to getting whacked if her target is still standing by the time her skill ends and her defensive buffs expire. Finally, her shield's inability to block ranged damage or stack multiple times like Mudrock's shields mean she's particularly vulnerable to ranged damage or melee hits that are fast enough to hurt her before she can gain another shield when offskill. And as mentioned earlier, she had no chance of escaping comparisons to Surtr, who can handily slaughter crowds, elites, and bosses all the same in just a fraction of the time by the time she finally goes down. Although Viviana isn't full-on bad or detrimental to your team and has a defined and usable niche, players who were eagerly awaiting her since Near Light will unfortunately be let down by her lackluster performance and having no real place in high-level content, especially when her fellow Kazimierz knight Degenbrecher would arrive just a month later as an immensely powerful non-limited Guard who is undisputedly at the top of her Swordmaster archetype.
- Wind Chimes
- Wind Chimes is another disappointing failure at implementing a decent attempt at the Crusher Guard archetype. Before even going into her own failings in terms of her skills, it should be emphasized that all the above issues of her predecessor Quartz fully applies to her as well, which comes off even worse for her considering she is a higher rarity and thus requires more resources to raise to her full potential... which is barely an improvement over Quartz if any. Her Talent, Mountain Traveler, buffs her HP and gives her a Vigor buff, increasing her ATK when her HP is above 50%, which only buffs the stats that she already has high amounts of to sheer overkill values while doing nothing for her survivability. Her unique S2, Longing For Home, functions completely contrary to what the Crusher archetype is supposedly intended to do and makes a poor attempt to imitate a Liberator Guard instead, as it stops her from attacking for 5 seconds, gives her Shelter for the duration, and slowly ramps up her ATK throughout its duration. Upon the skill's deactivation, whether manually or after the full 5 seconds, Wind Chimes uses her buffed ATK to make... one attack. Admittedly, it is an attack applying over double her already high ATK stat on top of her buff, but it has no extra range or any unique effects outside of a mere 1 second Stun. This is on top of the fact that the skill has an SP cost of 20, making its uptime ridiculously low for an ability that only does one instance of damage. For reference to just how unimpactful this skill is, it is generally recommended that her generic S1, a simple ATK buff, is used instead simply because its uptime and DPS are better, meaning Wind Chimes has very little of unique value to offer.
Defenders
- Cement
- Cement excaberates the innate weaknesses of the Duelist Defender archetype by sharing all of their major flaws (1 block, extremely high DP cost, no passive SP generation, etc.) but also putting all her eggs into physical bulk at the cost of the damage output that Duelists can normally leverage to offset their shortcomings. Her innate Damage Reduction and ridiculous stacking DEF from her second skill give her some of the highest physical bulk in the game, but it's offset by the 1 block of the Duelist archetype, almost completely wasting her tanking ability since she'll only be able to put it to good use against a singular, tough enemy. Even then, unlike Eunectes or even Aurora who have a way of fighting back, Cement will only be able to hold them in place - using her more damaging S1 not only gives up on the bulk which serves as Cement's main strength, but it's also very clunky as a spammable charge-storing skill on a unit who can only generate SP when blocking. Furthermore, not only does S2 have a concerning SP cost for a unit that can't passively generate SP (albeit with a very long duration and manual deactivation), because its buff stacks rely on her being hit infrequently, her defense falls apart shockingly quick when faced with an enemy with faster attack speed.
- Eunectes
- On paper, Eunectes is a very strong Operator, boasting very high stats across the board and excellent skills; her second skill can stunlock enemies until the end of the skill duration and her third skill grants a massive ATK and DEF steroids, along with HP regeneration in exchange for getting stunned for a short while after the skill expires. Despite this, she is massively held back from qualifying as a very reliable game breaking Operator due to some significant disadvantages that drag her down. The biggest problem that seals her fate in scrappydom is her archetype's trait, which prevents her from generating SP if she isn't blocking enemies. This is easier said than done most of the time, since her high stats, combined with a block count of 1 and 1-tile range, means that she would be killing enemies too quickly with her basic attacks to charge up the SP needed to activate her skills, and they cost alot of SP to fire off (especially her S3). Many bulkier enemies that can withstand several strong attacks before going down (which are usually ideal candidates for Eunectes to charge her SP off of) typically have high ATK that can easily tear apart anyone who tries to block them (possibly even Defenders) without significant Medic coverage; many bosses (that you would want to use Eunectes's S3 on) in recent content are either flat out unblockable or are simply so strong that blocking them is not recommended or outright impossible. This detrimental SP charging quirk of Duelist Defender also notably locks them out from getting SP via SP batteries such as Liskarm, Warfarin, etc., exacerbating the issues Eunectes has when charging up her skills. Her S3 offers some downtime where she cannot attack and possibly kill enemies before she blocks them, but the fact that it's stun means that she cannot block either, making this inevitable effect a hindrance at best. If her block count gets reduced to 0 due to map mechanics or enemy gimmicks, then her SP generation is effectively cut off, and will more or less become a liability if she cannot activate her skills where needed to contribute to the team. Furthermore, many other strong operators can instead opt to kill the opposition before they can even get close, such as Surtr, Eyjafjalla, Goldenglow, SilverAsh, or Młynar with the extended range offered by their S3. Meanwhile, Eunectes's lower rarity counterpart, Aurora, has a talent that disables her regular attacks when her SP total is at or below a certain threshold, allowing her to block enemies to generate SP, somewhat mitigating the drawbacks of her archetype.
- The Module for Duelist Defenders, released during Stultifera Navis, allows them to very slowly recover SP when not blocking anyone. This by itself is not enough to meaningfully boost Eunectes's performance though. Instead, the Module grants a noteworthy side effect that boosts her performance: it allows her to be affected by SP batteries, significantly mitigating the issues of her high SP costs. Lingering Echoes further mitigates her SP problems by significantly increasing her SP gain when blocking enemies, which when combined with the previous effect allows her to generate SP much faster than she did before. While this upgrade does significantly improve her performance and is a welcome addition for diehard Eunectes advocates, her standing in the meta still suffers due to competition with the top Operators who perform better in the roles Eunectes tries to fill, whether it be assassins such as Nearl the Radiant Knight, Texas the Omertosa or Kirin R Yato, laneholders such as Mudrock or Penance, or duelists with massive stats such as the buffed Skadi.
- Surprisingly, another argument can be made for a direct competitor to Eunectes's niche in the 6-star Crusher Guard Hoederer, who fills a very similar role as a high damage-per-hit duelist who can solo most bosses in the game through sheer stat checking. While Hoederer certainly has his own issues, he generally is much easier to use than Eunectes as he can be more effectively helidropped thanks to his lower DP cost and faster charge up on his S3, has comparable (against hard but slower hitting threats) amounts of bulk and sustain with his skill active, offers other perks such as increased range, stun and a True Damage DoT, and doesn't suffer from some of Eunectes's problems such as her SP lockout/slow charge time or 1-Block while off-skill.
- Hung
- The major problem with Hung as a Guardian Defender is that unlike others in his archetype who can charge their skills per second, his skills are charged by getting hit by enemies, similar to Liskarm. This serves as a critical weakness to him compared to others of his archetype, because he won't be able to heal if he has no enemies hitting him, and there's a chance that the heal can be wasted on himself instead of his allies (his S1 is especially prone to this, due to its auto activation nature). Even though the "getting hit" nature of his skills can technically be circumvented via Blemishine's first talent, Hung lacks an extended attack range to reliably attack enemies to build up SP.
- His S2 sounds decent on paper, being similar to Nearl's S2 but with the addition of providing a SP to an ally for every heal similar to Saria's E2 talent, a DEF boost to himself, more ATK increase than Nearl's, has a significantly lower SP cost, and is on a duration as opposed to an instant activation heal (making it so that he is less likely to waste too many heals on himself). However, it also has the aforementioned flaw of requiring enemies to attack Hung to charge SP. The nature of the skill itself also makes Hung pretty weak every time his S2 is not active.
- Finally, compared to other Guardian Defenders of a similar or even lower rarity, Hung has a rather low ATK, being lower than a Nearl of comparable level (including trust because while both's increase their HP, Nearl's also increase her ATK, while Hung's increase his DEF). That being said, Hung is more tanky than others in his archetype and his S2 provides a niche. It's just that his healing is weaker and more impractical than that of other Guardian Defenders, and the SP provision isn't used much. Considering the entire point of his archetype is mainly for healing rather than tanking, people tend to use Nearl, Saria, Gummy, or even Spot over him.
- While Hung does have a niche use case of being an option for zero-damage stall tactics in situations where an enemy needs to be blocked but not damaged due to certain mechanics, this was only ever particularly relevant during CC#9: Operation Deepness where he was used in a specific near-max risk clear to stall the Pocket Sea Crawlers while not activating their retaliation attack. For reference as to how ridiculously specific this use was, the 2-star Noir Corne was similarly used specifically for his low damage output and the clear took six hours of micromanagement. Even if this niche were ever needed again in the future, Hung is very likely to be supplanted by his fellow 5-star Bassline whose S2 also stops him from attacking but lasts far longer at 60 seconds as opposed to 30.
- Vulcan
- As the first "Enmity" type operator (more specifically the Juggernaut Defender archetype) and notably being one of the two very elusive Recruitment-only Operators (the other being Indra), Vulcan has high stats all-around, with the drawbacks to balance out this sheer power being having both a very high DP cost and (most importantly) and a trait that prevents her from being directly healed by allies. Although archetypes with said trait have ways of sustaining themselves to bolster their survivability (which reinforces their role as a solo lane holder), this is where Vulcan's problems come into play:
- Her talent Self-Defense grants her melee physical dodge and HP regeneration while her skills are active, and the HP regeneration can be "enhanced" depending on the skill she is currently using; her S1 increases the amount of HP regenerated while her S2 makes her attacks heal her for up to 10% of her maximum health. These effects sound nice on paper, only problem is that both skills are gated by very high SP costs (though she does start with high initial SP). This makes her somewhat helpless and not reliable at lane holding if her skill isn't running, as she won't be able to regenerate her HP if going up against fierce foes that can tear through Defenders easily or whittle down physically bulky baddies reliably without potentially causing enemy leaks.
- Not helping Vulcan's case is that some other operators released after her can do similar lane holding and self survivability, but far better than her. Jaye, Mountain, and moduled Skadi when paired with moduled Gladiia are cheaper to deploy and have significantly reliable HP regeneration. The Soloblade Guard (formerly Enmity/Musha Guard) and Reaper Guard archetypes are also cheaper to deploy (their DP costs range around the mid 20s, compared to Vulcan's DP cost in the high 30s) and can innately heal themselves for each attack. Vulcan's higher rarity counterpart, Mudrock, also has better survivability than her by way of her first talent giving her stackable shields that restores some HP every time a shield layer breaks, and has decent skill cooldown between procs. Meanwhile, her other higher rarity counterpart, Penance, can reach high levels of both tankiness and damage thanks to her damage reflection and taunt.
Medics
- Breeze
- Her biggest issue is that every other Multi-target Medic provides much more utility than she does. Breeze's talent, Medic Squad Protection, reduces the duration of status effects on Medics (and Supporters at Elite 2) when her skills are active, which means she can only make use of it when dealing with enemies who inflict status effects, unlike Perfumer's global healing and Ptilopsis's SP recovery buff, which are useful in almost any situation. Even Nightingale, also considered somewhat situational, offers much more with her RES buffs and Mirages to Draw Aggro, meaning she excels in her niche whereas Breeze struggles to compete in hers due to said competition, the Therapist Medics (Ceylon, Purestream and Whisperain), providing better ways of Status Resistance. Lingering Echoes adds a bonus HP effect to the talent if her Module is upgraded, but it remains just as situational.
- Both of her skills offer a massive boost to her healing output, giving her some of the strongest healing of any Multi-target Medic. However, Cluster Therapy reduces her number of healing targets by one as a trade-off, undoing one of the main advantages of using a Multi-target Medic, while Widespread Therapy essentially turns her into a Single Target Medic with splash healing, and has a lengthy cooldown on top of that. For most people the increased power isn't enough to make up for the downsides, especially since if you wanted a strong healer who targets fewer operators, you'd likely be using an actual normal (single target) Medic instead.
- Finally, she's only available for purchase with Shop Vouchers. While this means you can get her without having to pray to the Random Number God, her expensive asking price of 600 vouchers is enough to turn many off from recruiting her, let alone getting her to max potential, as they would prefer to spend those vouchers on Chip Catalysts or tokens instead. Besides, most players will already have a Multi-target Medic in the humble 4-star Perfumer, who is readily available from both Headhunting and Recruitment, cheaper and easier to raise than Breeze due to her low rarity, and as mentioned above, boasts a far more useful talent to boot.
- Ceylon
- One of the most notorious examples here despite her decently high popularity as a character, cursed by the negative connotations of being both a welfare and 5* operator. Despite her impressive range as a Therapist Medic, Ceylon is crippled by two aspects: her mediocre stats, and a talent so situational that it might as well be worthless 99% of the time. The way Ceylon's talent works is that it gives her a significant ATK boost when deployed on maps with water tiles, whereas she only gets a small ATK boost on all other maps. Thing is, these water tiles, outside of her own event, have only so far appeared in Annihilation 7: Flooded Seashore and Dossoles Holiday. This leaves her with a very pitiful buff to her already-poor healing output, and the general consensus among players who have her is to use any other Medic instead, although the 50% CC duration reduction she bestows can be very useful on some select maps, mostly during Chapter 6.
- Not helping Ceylon's case is the introduction of Purestream later on, who does everything she does but miles better and with a much more intuitive kit while not being cursed with a wonky talent, despite being of a lower rarity. Purestream is quite easy to max pot from recruitment since the tag combination Support + Medic/Ranged almost guarantees her. Whisperain was later also introduced with the same rarity. While she's not easy to max pot for F2P players note , she makes up for it with a similar, but almost objectively better kit than Ceylon. The introduction of Lumen was the final nail in the coffin, as he provides significantly better status mitigation than both Ceylon and Whisperain and is a free 6*, making him easy to obtain and raise potentials for while also boasting higher stats than either of them.
- Chestnut
- Being the first 4-star in an archetype that already has two (later three) solid 5-star counterparts, it was a given that Chestnut would be overshadowed, but he has an unfortunate reputation for being mediocre even with that in consideration.
- His first skill, Little by Little, heals a single target on activation with the Elemental Damage healing increased to 150%, while being able to hold two charges, giving him some burst healing against Elemental Damage on demand, but this skill does not increase the strength of the HP healing at all, making its general healing value extremely weak when the Wandering Medic archetype's low Attack is taken into account. Worse, this skill does not prioritize the target with the highest amount of Elemental Damage taken, which means it may not even heal the target you need it to in a pinch and go to another unit that doesn't need the healing instead. His second skill, Rising Earth, does increase his healing power, giving him a massive Attack Speed boost and restoring additional HP and Elemental Damage to 150% when healing the same target multiple times, but comes with the massive drawback of reducing his normally large healing range to the three tiles directly in front of him. This greatly limits the number of targets he is able to heal and restricts the positions he can be deployed to get the most out of this skill, meaning it tends to end up doing more harm than actual good.
- As the last nail in the coffin for Chestnut, his higher rarity counterpart, Honeyberry, can be bought in the shop, meaning she can be acquired at any time albeit at a steep price of 600 Purchase Certificates, and is significantly better at healing Elemental Damage on multiple targets with her first skill, making her (or Mulberry) a much more worthwhile investment than Chestnut despite the greater resource cost.
- The release of the powerful Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska later shunts him further to irrelevance due to her powerful auto-heals, her increasing her range instead of shunting it, and her two good talents that both help herself heal more.
- Meanwhile, for any players who don't have her due to her limited status, Harold becomes another useful Wandering Medic after Honeyberry or Mulberry as he is a 5-star welfare like the former and is significantly better at Chestnut's specialty of single target healing, with his talent reducing Elemental Damage to every operator in his range when they go below 50% Elemental HP and his second skill making him heal faster, prioritize the operator with the most Elemental Damage, and give bonus healing if the Elemental HP is below 50%.
- Being the first 4-star in an archetype that already has two (later three) solid 5-star counterparts, it was a given that Chestnut would be overshadowed, but he has an unfortunate reputation for being mediocre even with that in consideration.
- Paprika
- Paprika (and by extension, the Chain Medic branch as a concept) is an unfortunate case of a Medic who seemingly can't decide on the role they want to fill, and as a result ends up as a member of a haphazard archetype that doesn't specialize in anything unique. The gimmick of being able to bounce heals sounds neat on paper, but even though Paprika has higher ATK than a Multi-target Medic, she's usually less reliable since she targets the same number of allies but suffers a -25% to her healing with each bounce, while still having their shorter range. This makes it so that she's only doing her full healing on the first target, and if healing one target is needed, her healing is still vastly inferior to a single-target Medic while having shorter range; she does have a niche of being able to heal full-HP targets to bounce her heals to further ones (including those outside her range), but this also guarantees that they'll be hit by the healing reduction from her trait. Furthermore, her talent causes her to heal an extra flat amount of HP if the target is below 40% HP, which is a nice but unreliable bonus due to the low HP threshold meaning that she's only hitting her peak performance when multiple allies are constantly on the brink of death. While her second skill buffs her ATK, increases the threshold of her talent up to 80%, and gives her attacks an extra bounce, the first two do help her healing power a bit, but the fourth bounce will usually end up being so reduced that it doesn't actually do much in the end, especially considering that other Medic skills can achieve similar results without any of the drawbacks. All of this combines into a unit who tries to emulate both a single and multi-target Medic simultaneously, but ends up not doing anything notable compared to either, outside of her very small niche of bouncing heals to targets out of range (which can also often be handled by just using a Medic with longer range like an ST or Silence whose drone fulfills that exact niche, Therapist, or even Wandering Medic).
- Shining
- Shining is an unfortunate case of an older Operator who has suffered from shifts in the metagame and newer game design. While her niche as a medic who buffs ally DEF is a valuable crutch for beginners when their roster is still underdeveloped and early story content is primarily physical damage, she is generally considered to fall off in late game content compared to other healers with more useful utility. Unlike her partner Nightingale whose niche of buffing RES is a Game-Breaker to the extent that no other Operator can ever be allowed to copy her role for fear of invalidating Arts damage altogether, DEF buffs lack the same amount of meta relevance due to the difference between physical and Arts damage formulae and the general abundance of enemy Arts damage in most high-level content, and the most threatening cases of physical damage tend to be so extreme that even Shining’s buff tends to be insufficient to allow allies to survive longer than a few seconds at most. With that in mind, Shining is frequently overshadowed by healers that provide more utility, whether it be improving skill cycles with Ptilopsis’s SP regen talent, Warfarin’s powerful ATK steroid, Silence’s global drone, or huge DPS in the cases of Kal’tsit and Reed the Flame Shadow. The current usage of Shining tends to be as a partner to the already off-meta Aak, by giving fragile allies enough DEF to survive the damage from his steroid, but that is a very specific use case that requires raising two expensive and highly situational 6-stars; this is especially the case with the release of Silence the Paradigmatic, who is both free and capable of performing the same effect with her Immortality Field.
- Tuye
- The thing about Tuye is, similarly to Breeze's case, is her lack of utility in comparison to the other Medics of her rarity (that is, Warfarin and Ptilopsis). Whereas Warfarin shines through her hefty buff and Ptilopsis shines through her talent and her second skill, Tuye's kit is a watered-down version of Warfarin's first skill and Shining's second skill. Bycoming issue is that her second skill is also crimped by the fact that she will only use it on allies that have fallen under half health, and it will only reach its full potential when the ally is under 20% health. In conclusion, all of Tuye's kit is geared towards emergency, and not for a lot else. This is also similar to Tsukinogi, who also suffers from this.
Casters
- Casters in general have been suffering to shine ever since the game was launched and Eyjafjalla was readily available from the gacha, though she is now only available from the kernel headhunting banners. Due to her being so versatile,note she quickly outshined just about every other source of Arts damage available, and even if one does not happen to have her, she is common enough in the friend support that one can easily rely on a friend who has her. Casters released after her have been struggling to compete with her, forcing them to take on different, supportive roles in order to stay out of her lane note , which can cause them to be a disappointment because they sacrifice damage for utility and support that's not often used except for more niche strats. The increasing amount of non-Caster Operators equally capable of outputting huge amounts of Arts damage, starting with Surtr and following with units such as Texas the Omertosa and Reed the Flame Shadow, certainly does not help matters. What's worse is the tendency of newer stages introducing enemies with massive RES stats (Refraction on Dublinn enemies being an example) in an attempt to counteract the amount of powercreep from Operators who deal Arts damage, which only puts the non-Game-Breaker Casters, particularly those without some means of reducing or ignoring RES, in an even worse position. It's really no surprise that the current Game-Breaker Casters, other than Eyjafjalla, are Dusk, Goldenglow, Ceobe and Ifrit (with Passenger and Amiya being fringe options, while Lin finds use in different cases thanks to her absurd survivability), all of which are Casters who aren't directly specialized in Arts damage but have other ways of applying it, and more importantly have ways of countering enemy RES via their Talents or skills note .
- The Splash Caster archetype (formerly AoE Casters) is usually looked upon down in meta gameplay due to their high DP cost and low DPS output in return, owing to their slow attacks, and they don't even have respectible damage to back it up. With the exception of those who offer crowd control in their kits, such as Dusk and Mostima (and even then, the former does a far better job at it than the latter), Splash Casters are typically not used in high-level content and high-risk Contingency Contract unless one has no other alternatives, since they're hit the hardest by DP cost modifiers. It gets even worse for them when cheaper units like Eyjafjalla (who is a low-cost Core Caster) could output multitarget damage far better for significantly lower costs. It really says something when the Splash Casters widely considered to be the most useful among the bunch after Dusk, who is a limited unit that is difficult to acquire, are Gitano, a 4-star unit that works as a Crutch Character for beginners with her ability to extend her own range with her S2, and the lowly 3-star Lava of all people, due to her low cost and a skill that increases her ASPD, while the gimmicks offered by her higher-rarity counterparts are mostly just fluff.
- In the Guiding Ahead event, the Splash Caster archetype gets Modules. The SPC-Y Module reduces the operator's DP cost by 8 while the SPC-X Module adds a single tile extension to the operator's attack range (which is notably given to operators who already have a range extension within their most used skills). The former Module is arguably much more beneficial than the latter, as that at least solves one of the glaring issues of the archetype as a whole, namely their high DP cost. However, given that high cost operators like Ifrit and Mudrock still find considerable often use despite their high DP cost proves that being expensive to deploy can be justified if the operator themselves possesses enough strengths to make up for that weakness note , whereas Splash Casters bring too little to warrant even a lowered DP cost.
- The Phalanx Caster archetype, though serviceable in story and most event content, tends to fall short in advanced content due to the Awesome, but Impractical nature of their kits. The concept of a Stone Wall ranged unit that can draw ranged aggro that can temporarily output quick bursts of area of effect damage around them sounds strong, but often turns out to be counterproductive in practice.
- The main issues of Phalanx Casters as a whole are twofold. The first problem is that Phalanx Casters are required to use their skills to deal damage and have no offensive presence during their downtime. While this is a weakness that can be compensated for by the rest of a squad, it means their average DPS is actually rather low in relation to other Casters, who have their own damaging skills and can actually contribute while charging. The first 6-star of the archetype, Carnelian, has it particularly bad as not only do her best skills have fairly large costs, but they get bonus effects when Charged, meaning she has to wait even longer to have the most impact. The second problem is that they have to sacrifice their own defenses to use their abilities. While this may not seem that bad considering Casters usually have low defense anyways, Phalanx Casters have extremely short 'forward range' and thus need to be in the thick of battle to have the greatest impact. This means that once they activate their skills, they become even more vulnerable to ranged counterattacks than other Casters, unless aggro is being drawn by other units which would negate the purpose of their increased defenses in their inactive states to begin with. While Liberator Guards have a similar playstyle in needing to charge their abilities to deal damage, they do not need to sacrifice their defenses (which are exceptionally high for Guards) and individually have high scalings that make them strong in their own right (with Młynar being considered to be among the most powerful operators in the game). Carnelian in particular, is considered somewhat disappointing for her rarity, while her fellow 6-star Lin, is significantly more synergistic with her archetype, but requires her module to be fully upgraded to truly shine.
- The value of Mystic Casters has been dubious starting from their introduction with the release of Iris. While they boast the de facto highest ATK among ranged archetypes–and even among all melee archetypes except Crusher Guards–by rarity in the entire game and a mechanic that plays to that massive ATK stat where they stack up charges while not attacking and discharges them to deal multiple hits at once, usually oneshotting their target at maximum stacks, they are held back by their multitude of weaknesses, being single target by default, having higher DP costs than other single target Casters, and a horribly slow attack interval that cripples their overall DPS and makes them all but useless when dealing with waves of enemies. While they appear to be specialized in killing bosses by preparing a massive amount of damage and unleashing it on a dangerous target, in practice it is very difficult to manage their charges due to the fact they can easily waste their attacks on the first enemy that enters their range, be it something as meager as a slug, after which they cannot build their stacks up again as long as there are still enemies within their range. Fortunately, each Mystic Caster has some mechanic which at least allows them to build some stacks while in combat through their skills note but this doesn't solve their targeting issue (with the exception of Ebenholz with his S3 and possibly Harmonie's S2 if the slow field kills the weak mobs before they are blocked) in which they will always attack the target closest to them like other Operators, meaning the player must put in the extra effort to clearing the enemy wave to leave the priority target as the only enemy in their range. And once they use their charged attack, unless measures are taken to stop them from attacking their target again, they are left using their atrocious DPS owing to their long attack interval to try and finish off the target, making them the definition of a one-hit wonder that is disproportionately hard and frustrating to use in most cases. Ironically, this means that in cases where the individual Mystic Casters are used, it is usually due the utility they offer instead of their damage, ignoring their charging mechanic entirely, as Indigo is a strong low-rarity source of Bind when fully invested while Iris finds occasional use in Sleep-stalling strategies. Ebenholz, unfortunately, despite being the highest rarity in his class and the one whose kit does the most to try and optimize the class's gimmick, struggles the most to find serious use due to doubling down on damage rather than utility (which is elaborated upon in his own entry below) only occasionally seeing niche usage in the few instances when a boss's mechanics perfectly cater to his strengths, although his third module managed to give him a completely new mechanic that grants him some potential merit as detailed in his section below.
- Absinthe
- For an event reward Operator, Absinthe has good stats, and her kit is fairly decent. However, her kit is focused on taking out the lowest HP enemy in her range, which sometimes may cause her to miss critical and important target that has higher HP in her range. Her S2 takes this to the extreme, only targeting enemy below 50%, and turns her attacks into small burst similar to Amiya's S2, but weaker. Thankfully her S2 does not have any drawbacks and are focused on a target. However some players who have managed to work around this issue, either by pairing her up someone who can cover her weakness have discovered that she can output an incredible amount of damage, which would turn her a Difficult, but Awesome caster. Unfortunately, this usually requires preparation and raising another operator to partner with her, essentially making it Awesome, but Impractical to most players. This post
further explains that her priority gimmick makes her damage fall off, since she will naturally focus on small fries who naturally are easier to bring back to low HP instead of the big beefy targets that Casters are basically tasked to take down. While her damage with her skill actually outdamages Eyja against low HP targets, such damage will usually be overkill and her nature as single-target Caster means that while these targets may be hit with the full brunt of the damage, the bigger targets won't even get a scratch on them. This makes her highly unreliable as main DPS, since almost all stages aside from the earliest ones will vary between cannon fodder and tougher enemies. - To compare, Deadeye Snipers have a trait that sounds similar on the surface, in that they innately go for low DEF targets. However, because they are Snipers and thus deal physical damage, they don't suffer from this and they can fully take advantage of their high ATK this way, coupled with some large modifiers on certain skills. To bring the similarities up a notch, Andreana will no longer target enemies that have fallen below half HP, so she can't actually kill enemies. However, this is actually a good thing since it serves to soften enemies up and inhibit them with the movement speed reduction, while also fully making use of her high ATK modifier.
- For an event reward Operator, Absinthe has good stats, and her kit is fairly decent. However, her kit is focused on taking out the lowest HP enemy in her range, which sometimes may cause her to miss critical and important target that has higher HP in her range. Her S2 takes this to the extreme, only targeting enemy below 50%, and turns her attacks into small burst similar to Amiya's S2, but weaker. Thankfully her S2 does not have any drawbacks and are focused on a target. However some players who have managed to work around this issue, either by pairing her up someone who can cover her weakness have discovered that she can output an incredible amount of damage, which would turn her a Difficult, but Awesome caster. Unfortunately, this usually requires preparation and raising another operator to partner with her, essentially making it Awesome, but Impractical to most players. This post
- Aroma
- Aroma is yet another example of an ongoing problem of 5-star kit designs that sacrifice too much for questionable and horribly undertuned utility. She is a Blast Caster that focuses on applying Levitate and having her damage revolve around it, but her numbers and the method of which she applies Levitate are incredibly poor. She applies Levitate on her first hit against each target while also dealing bonus damage, but the duration of Levitate is only a pitiful 2.5 seconds and she can only apply it once per enemy. Since she is not a fast redeploy unit like Ines who has a similar mechanic with her Bind, Aroma's crowd control capabilities basically amount to levitating each enemy from far away for a brief period... and then that's it. Not only that, but both her skills rely on the enemy being levitated, as her first skill deals significantly more damage to aerial units while her second skill only deals its bonus damage after levitated enemies in her attack range fall back down and is only a fairly modest ATK boost otherwise, which is a problem when she only levitates each enemy once and then loses the bulk of her skills' effects on any survivors after they land. This amounts to yet another weak 5-star Caster who can barely do her intended job on her own and needs other Levitate-applying units to be paired with her to give her any lasting value, which begs the question of why you would bring her at all if you could just use Qanipalaat or Ho'olheyak instead. Aroma is unfortunately considered on par or possibly even worse than Corroserum, and exists as an example of a Blast Caster that doesn't take advantage of the archetype's strengths (its long range and true area of effect) to focus on dealing DPS but instead provide weak crowd control that is much more powerful and usable when found elsewhere.
- Corroserum
- Corroserum is an unfortunate case of Overshadowed by Awesome and perhaps Tough Act to Follow. He's a Blast Caster, the same archetype as Ifrit (the second one released in the game in fact), boasting high damage, the same range, ASPD and similar DP Cost and SP trait to her, but whereas Ifrit is a Game-Breaker due to her debuffs that can seriously cripple just about everything that walks into her range, Corroserum falls on the other end of the scale due to the lack of debuffs and utility in his kit.
- The only thing remotely related to them as Blast Casters is that he can cast the Silence debuff on his second skill, but the same problem arises as to what made Lappland fall: pretty much every enemy released after the initial run of Gavial: The Great Chief Returns (aka Rage Ironhide) cannot be silenced, with only some of them starting to pop up from Dossoles Holiday and onwards, and many enemies don't have a skill to be silenced to begin with either.
- Corroserum is only built for damage albeit with lower modifiers to his skills than Ifrit has. Whereas bringing 5-stars instead of their higher rarity counterpart is not uncommon due to their lower DP Cost, different roles and other benefits, there are virtually no reasons why one should bring Corroserum over Ifrit because their DP Costs are slightly similar and Corroserum has nowhere the utility that Ifrit has while offering little himself.
- Not helping the case is that Ifrit was already available from launch, meaning that if one needs his niche covered by this point, one already has Ifrit fully raised considering she's been on quite a few banners in the game's earlier years. And by the time of his introduction and debut in Near Light, there would already be Operators who give a far more reliable and consistent casting of the Silence debuff such as Lapplandnote, Podenconote, and Jaye note.
- Ebenholz
- Ebenholz has several issues keeping him from the higher echelons of 6-star Operators. He is designed to be an ideal elite and boss killer with a kit that attempts to address some of the fundamental weaknesses of the Mystic Caster class, such as their need to charge up their attacks to deal meaningful damage and their tendency to waste said charges on weak mobs, but ends up falling short due to multiple aspects. He still suffers from the Mystic Caster archetype's slow attack speed, and his skills range from 'decent, but outclassed' to Crippling Overspecialization in terms of how difficult and limited their uses are.
- His S2 is designed to be his general use skill, allowing him to drop mines on tiles that explode for area of effect damage and pull targets in towards the mine, which can be useful, but neither the damage nor the impact of the pull is particularly spectacular. The pull also has a further issue of making the other mines explode by sucking enemies into them, possibly wasting a lot of damage on a small target. Whereas it is similar to W's S2 and is made to function similarly, it also suffers from its caveats much more than W does as his mines last way shorter and Ebenholz needs more time to replenish them than that W does. Not to mention that since it's an auto skill and the number of mines he spawns depends on his stored charges, this leads to most of his S2 activations being while he's already spending his charges attacking an enemy in range, causing him to summon only a single one.
- His S3 is the skill that gives him his reputation as a boss-killer, giving him a decent attack speed and damage buff, completely stopping him from targeting enemies below elite and boss rank, and giving him the chance to stack charges to hit stronger enemies with a massively empowered hit, but said hit only works once, after which he is left chipping away with non-charged attacks, requiring the player to have a lot of timing and map knowledge to make sure it isn't wasted on being used on the wrong enemy or at the wrong time. The consensus on Ebenholz is that he's neither overly weak like pre-DH Passenger nor bad at his niche (and is in fact useful against a certain boss in Episode 11 that other boss-killers struggle against), but he is a boss-killer among several other 6-stars who are also perfectly usable boss-killers while also not being locked into a singular niche, with his only notable advantage being his One-Hit Kill potential that lets him spawncamp dangerous elites or one-shot bosses if provided with enough support.note To make things worse, he is released at the same time as his first module which amplifies his already monstrous one-shot potential but does not address any of his flaws, and his later released second module, while decentnote , isn't a significant game-changer, so unless Hypergryph is willing to create more than two types of class archetype modules and/or directly modify Ebenholz's skills, Ebenholz currently remains a rather poor long-term investment in the foreseeable future.
- Episode 13 came with the surprise of Ebenholz indeed getting a third Module, which causes his attacks to inflict Necrosis buildup proportional to the damage dealt, and amplifies his isolated target damage bonus while letting him deal bonus element-type damage against foes suffering from Necrosis fallout. While it was certainly an odd choice on paper, especially since there was only one other source of allied Necrosis as of its release (Valarqvin), the Module manages to surprisingly improve Ebenholz's damage; his fully charged hit deals enough damage to instantly or very quickly trigger Necrosis fallout, which in itself is a Damage Over Time coupled with a major ATK reduction to give him support value, and since no enemies can resist element-type damage at the time of Episode 13's release, he'll effectively be dealing bonus true damage on hit. This mitigates one of the main weaknesses of his S3 (being forced to use weaker uncharged attacks when the first shot is used up), retaining a good chunk of his one-shot potential while letting him deal surprisingly severe damage even in prolonged fights where he normally struggles, and its potency will only grow if future Necrosis dealers are addednote until enemies start to actually resist element damage; shortly after its release, he already received a potent synergy with the powerful Virtuosa, who can easily trigger Necrosis for him while buffing both his own Necrosis and his raw attack power. Although the clunkier aspects of his kit still stick out, this module did manage to improve him quite a bit, although it says something about the Mystic Caster archetype as a whole when Ebenholz is arguably at his strongest with a Module that seems to try its best to make him as little of a Mystic Caster as possible.
- Ho'olheyak
- For such a highly anticipated NPC-turned Operator that managed to compete with her limited banner partner Muelsyse, Ho'olheyak has sadly failed to make much of a splash in the meta. While she does have a very unique set of tools in her kit as a Caster specializing in Levitate similar to the 5-star Qanipalaat, her damage and SP costs are rather disappointing when compared to the utter Game-Breaker Casters that have been prevalent in the game. Her first Talent's specialty in dealing extra damage and inflicting Silence to aerial units are both replicable with cheaper existing Operators, particularly Lappland regarding the latter who has been unambiguously the best Silence inflictor since the start of the game, and while her ability to Levitate enemies is fairly unique among 6-stars, only shared by the Swordmaster Guard Irene, and has some interesting synergies with units such as Dorothy, it also comes with its share of downsides such as making melee Operators unable to attack the Levitated target for the effect's duration, and a reduced effect on targets with a Weight level greater than 3. While her second Talent does try to alleviate this by reducing the Weight level of all enemies in her range by 1 (which does not stack with Angelina's S3), this only applies to targets with HP greater than 80%, which can be problematic as trying to use her in tandem with stronger Shift Operators such as Gladiia or Weedy, who deal significant damage on their own, may stop working if said Operators knock their targets' HP below the threshold.
- Ho'olheyak's skills also suffer from their own share of problems. Her S3 looks like a solid combination of damage, range and crowd control, but in practice excels at none of them. Despite looking like an area of effect ability, the tornadoes it shoots stop on the first enemy hit, and need to travel at least three tiles before dealing their maximum damage. This means if a dangerous foe is behind a wave of mobs, it is extremely hard to get the full damage of this skill as the tornadoes will be blocked by the mobs while the elite or boss enemy is approaching. This skill also has a lengthy duration held back by a painfully high SP cost, which means it can only be used two or three times in an average stage at best. Her S2 is a skill similar to Amiya's S2, turning her attacks into multihits each with a small chance to Levitate, but like Amiya's S2 each hit targets a random foe within Ho'olheyak's range, meaning it suffers from the same problem as her S3 in that its effectiveness against priority targets gets diluted if there are any mobs in her range at all, not to mention having less consistency than even her S3. Worse still, Ho'olheyak has no innate means of countering RES in her kit (although she can get 10 RES ignore with her base Module), meaning she is ineffective at dealing damage to many enemies who have high RES stats and is entirely dependent on her situational utility to have impact. Overall, while her kit does not seem overly bad on paper and has the benefit of being fairly unique, Ho'olheyak is held back by disappointing numbers and a reliance on gimmicks that require tailoring the squad to work around them, essentially being an upgrade to the already situational Qanipalaat with more expensive resource costs.
- Speaking of Qanipalaat, he is both easier to obtain than Ho'olheyak as he is present in the red certificate shop as well as easier to raise due to his lower rarity and cheaper to deploy, while his performance is arguably better than Ho'olheyak's own as his signature skill not only keeps the enemy longer afloat (7 seconds compared to Ho'olheyak's first skill having 4 seconds of Levitation time) but is also activated manually in contrast to Ho'olheyak's own first skill, which is automatically activated thus meaning less control.
- Ho'olheyak's second module released with the Babel event has much greater synergy with her kit, as it provides the base effect of restoring 1 SP on each attack against an elite or boss level enemy, which while not entirely consistent can help with her high SP cost on her S3. Its upgrade improves her second talent improving the threshold of Weightless from 80% to a more reliable 50% and inflicting 20% Arts Fragility to targets below 50% HP. While Arts Fragility doesn't help against RES due to amplifying damage dealt post-mitigation, it is still a decent boost to Ho'olheyak's damage that also benefits other Arts damage dealers. Given Ho'olheyak's occasional meta appearances in strategies that rely heavily on Levitate, this module does significantly improve her performance in those niche use cases and also outside of them.
- Nightmare
- Nightmare's biggest problem is the design of her skills, particularly her S2. An AoE effect that deals 800 damage to enemies per tile they travel during its 5 second duration sure sounds like a recipe for a lot of carnage, but no, since this skill also slows. As slowed targets naturally won't be able to move as far in the same amount of time, this severely limits how much damage Nightmare can deal to them, unless you're playing on maps with increased enemy movement speed or resort to using operators capable of shifting enemies. As if the chief mechanics of her S2 working against themselves wasn't bad enough, this skill also does nothing if an enemy doesn't move or is blocked, making her useless when defending a chokepoint, and Nightmare's limited forward range makes it very hard to catch many enemies in it, unlike Eyjafjalla's ultra-wide radius when her S3 is active. It also activates automatically when an enemy is in range, preventing you from choosing when to inflict the debuff. Hypergryph did eventually buff the skill by giving it a 50% damage buff, up to 1,200 per tile traveled per enemy, but did nothing to address the inherent antisynergy flaws of her S2, and was only buffed because Weedy's S3 uses a similar mechanic, and is released a short while after Nightmare received her buff, and her status as a Shift-type operator means she can utilize the "damage-per-tile traveled" boon far more effectively. Other than that, Nightmare still sits squarely in Scrappy territory.
- Her S1 is marginally better than her S2 by allowing Nightmare to heal allies including herself by a percentage of the attack damage every time she attacks (heals by 100% of the damage dealt at Mastery 3) and has an excellent uptime of 1 minute at Mastery 3, but it's still not better by much, since the skill does not increase her damage output whatsoever, and will falter against enemies with high RES since dealing less damage against enemies mean that her healing output will get reduced. The skill also causes her talent to give her Physical/Arts dodge instead of a small innate attack boost, when Casters shouldn't be taking hits in the first place.
- Skyfire
- As if a Splash Caster's usual attack speed isn't abysmally slow enough, we have Skyfire, whose S2, Fire of Heaven, will allow her to (for 25 seconds initially and 40 seconds at Mastery 3) change her usual Arts attack into summoning comets that deal higher damage, has a larger splash damage zone and stuns on contact for a certain amount of time. However, using this skill increases her Attack Interval that cannot be reduced even with Mastery Level, furthermore, her stun duration is shorter than her attack interval, making it not as good as on paper if she is the sole primary damage dealer against a specific wave. Her good base stats and her talent that increases Arts damage taken by blocked enemies however, is her saving grace.
- Her Module introduced in Guiding Ahead gives her a decent attack buff and a small attack speed boost. However, its most notable aspect is that it reduces her DP cost by 8 (at Elite 1 onwards, she costs 25 DP to deploy at Potential 1, or 23 DP at Potential 6); it doesn't solve the issues of her second skill, but having a significantly cheaper DP cost to be deployed much sooner than usual is definitely a beneficial gain, even though it can be said that even with a lower DP Cost, she still doesn't bring enough to the table to be worth raising.
- Tomimi
- Despite having a talent and skill that could increase her attack power to incredible levels, it's not enough to make up for her shortcomings. Tomimi's main focus is that unlike most other Casters, she can change her damage type from Arts to physical. While this in itself is not bad, where there is a lot of value for physical DPS classes like Guards and Snipers dealing Arts damage to bypass DEF, there generally isn't a lot of situations where you want the other way around (Arts DPS classes like Casters switching to physical damage to bypass high RES), since standard protocol suggests sending a Sniper to do the job instead. On top of this, Tomimi sacrifices far too much to trigger her physical damage skills, as her range is reduced to the tiles immediately in front and to her sides and she cannot attack aerial enemies, significantly narrowing the possible targets she can attack as well as limiting where she can be deployed. It also doesn't help that her S2 is completely RNG based, making it a poor choice for maps you want consistent performance in. All in all, unless there's some sort of specific deployment restriction, there's really no reason to bring Tomimi since any Sniper can already do what she does much better. And even if you are seeking a Caster who can deal physical damage, Ceobe can do the same with her S3, but with the added boon of increasing her attack range instead of reducing it (and does not prevent her from attacking aerial enemies), and can silence foes hit.
- While it is possible to mitigate some of the RNG of her S2, you have to spend a boatload of resources leveling it to Mastery 3, and even then you can only remove the issue of its activation, and not which of the three effects the skill will give out.
- Tomimi received a module that addressed the issue of her range somewhat, making it so that it is no longer limited to tiles in front of her when using her skill. However, it requires putting in even more resources into an already impractical operator, and it doesn't do anything to solve her RNG based skill.
- Despite having a talent and skill that could increase her attack power to incredible levels, it's not enough to make up for her shortcomings. Tomimi's main focus is that unlike most other Casters, she can change her damage type from Arts to physical. While this in itself is not bad, where there is a lot of value for physical DPS classes like Guards and Snipers dealing Arts damage to bypass DEF, there generally isn't a lot of situations where you want the other way around (Arts DPS classes like Casters switching to physical damage to bypass high RES), since standard protocol suggests sending a Sniper to do the job instead. On top of this, Tomimi sacrifices far too much to trigger her physical damage skills, as her range is reduced to the tiles immediately in front and to her sides and she cannot attack aerial enemies, significantly narrowing the possible targets she can attack as well as limiting where she can be deployed. It also doesn't help that her S2 is completely RNG based, making it a poor choice for maps you want consistent performance in. All in all, unless there's some sort of specific deployment restriction, there's really no reason to bring Tomimi since any Sniper can already do what she does much better. And even if you are seeking a Caster who can deal physical damage, Ceobe can do the same with her S3, but with the added boon of increasing her attack range instead of reducing it (and does not prevent her from attacking aerial enemies), and can silence foes hit.
Supporters
- The Abjurer Supporters role in battle tries to put more emphasis on the "Support" in Supporter, by augmenting allies with various buffs via their talents and skills, though they ended up falling flat as a whole due to some detrimental quirks that drag them down, especially considering how unlike other Scrappy archetypes listed on this page (who are combat units who are at least fairly usable in general use), Abjurers do not specialize in offensive combat, but rather defensive support. Their main role is to (via their talents) bestow the Shelter effect on allied units, which will reduce the amount of physical and Arts damage they are taking. Sounds good, right? Well it would be a great boon to have, if it weren't for the fact that the ally HP threshold needed for the Abjurer's talent to trigger is unreasonably low, at 40% max HP by default. This significantly hurts their utility, as units that fall to such an HP value without somehow dying is liable to be killed anyway in one or two hits, regardless of being under the protective effects of Shelter or not. If one wants to reduce the incoming damage of their team, it is preferable to rely on DEF or RES buffs from other operators, weaken the enemies otherwise by crowd-control or direct damage reduction from for example Hexer Supporters, make use of the deployment order/enemy targeting to minimize incoming damage, or simply just have good Medic coverage to cover your weak points (the latter two are also taught within an in-game tutorial stage, so the player will likely be familiar with those). The class did receive a buff upon the release of the Break the Ice event by allowing them to heal allies based on 75% of their attack while their skill is active, though the healing won't be a meaningful amount, as Abjurer Supporters have among the lowest ATK of the Supporter operators, not to mention that the healing actively works against the HP threshold of their talents to proc Shelter.
- The release of the Nine-Colored Deer does try to address the archetype's issues, namely the low HP requirements for Shelter . Her S2 makes all allies in range gain the Shelter effect regardless of HP, which is great, but is still fairly short (5 to 20 seconds depending on Mastery). Unfortunately, Nine-Colored Deer has also proven to be an unsuccessful attempt at making the archetype work, with many players considering her even worse than Tsukinogi (who at least has the exclusive utility of being a ranged unit with True Sight for specialized runs) due to the poor values of her Shelter buff coupled with a lack of useful utility and only average healing. Only with the release of Quercus did Hypergryph appear to recognize how to avoid the inherent flaws of the Abjurer's tools, as Quercus is a decent, albeit still far from meta, unit within the archetype.
- The aforementioned Quercus also addresses the HP threshold for Shelter by applying the buff to allies above a certain HP percentage instead of below it (also making the healing no longer antisynergistic with her talent), making it so that protected operators don't fall within range of getting one-shotted, which would have rendered Shelter useless otherwise. It should be noted, however, that the value of Quercus does not come from her ability to apply Shelter, but from her ability to either grant bonus SP when healing with her second skill or simply change her role altogether using S1 to become a Medic instead, meaning the Shelter mechanic itself has still yet to prove itself useful.
- Silence the Paradigmatic as well treats her Shelter as more of a nice extra than it really being the core of her kit, which is serving as an emergency medic and straight up giving allies temporary invincibility rather than bothering with micromanaging Shelter. In addition, when it comes down to it, Silence's Shelter is far more versatile and applicable than even Quercus, as it no longer has a health threshold (and gets stronger the lower the target is), and both her S2 and S3 have ways of amplifying it to make the reduction actually noticable instead of an afterthought.
- Come Catastrophes and Wakes of Vultures introduces Abjurer modules, of which the base effect removes the 75% scaling on the archetype's healing while their skills are active, allowing them to use their full ATK value when healing which, along with their attack speed being higher than single target Medics, gives them a significant buff in HP/s. While this doesn't improve the viability of Tsukinogi or Nine-Colored Deer by a significant margin because the cycling of their skills are simply too poor and their Talents are still counterproductive, this is a noticeable improvement to both Silence the Paradigmatic and Quercus who both have significantly more impactful skills that are now backed up with incredibly strong healing values. Quercus, in particular, stands out as using her S1 with the module has single target HP/s comparable to Lumen and Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska with their own respective infinite duration skills. Though whether this helps the archetype's showing overall is debatable when the potentially best member effectively cheats by becoming another class entirely, it does show that they at least can be functional so long as their kits aren't designed to be counter-intuitive and undertuned.
- Deepcolor
- As a 4-star, it is to be expected that Deepcolor would be outclassed by her higher rarity counterparts; however, her main issue is that, as a Summoner Supporter, she has no means of retrieving or restocking her tentacles, unlike Mayer note , Ling note , Magallan note , and Scene note . This makes it harder to use her effectively (even more unusually so as almost all 4-stars in the game are both low-cost investment and easy to use), since they will be permanently cutting into your deployment limit, where instead of having room to place down your Game Breakers, you're instead stuck with a couple of third-rate 1-block Guards that can't do nearly as many things. While she does have a way to heal them with her S1, if a tentacle is killed which, let's face it, happens pretty easily, Deepcolor's offensive capabilities will be permanently reduced until she's redeployed. Her one true saving grace, however, is her S2, which grants a whopping 50% physical evasion at M3 to everyone within her skill range, including her tentacles, but the real problem is getting there, as Deepcolor as a whole is very subpar compared to the other options made available to you, and her S2 just isn't quite enough of a boon to justify the tedious process of building her Trust and investing into Mastery. Her Module only helps mitigate these problems, increasing the number of tentacles she can carry and lowering their DP cost, but it still doesn't solve the problem of her being unable to retrieve them.
- Deepcolor does enjoy greater viability in Integrated Strategies as an early recruit unit, as stages are short enough that her inability to restock her summons is rarely a problem and she can handle most early stages by herself, while having a lower Hope cost than her counterparts, but this also requires her Module to be optimal which is a heavy investment for a unit with low usability in general content.
- As a 4-star, it is to be expected that Deepcolor would be outclassed by her higher rarity counterparts; however, her main issue is that, as a Summoner Supporter, she has no means of retrieving or restocking her tentacles, unlike Mayer note , Ling note , Magallan note , and Scene note . This makes it harder to use her effectively (even more unusually so as almost all 4-stars in the game are both low-cost investment and easy to use), since they will be permanently cutting into your deployment limit, where instead of having room to place down your Game Breakers, you're instead stuck with a couple of third-rate 1-block Guards that can't do nearly as many things. While she does have a way to heal them with her S1, if a tentacle is killed which, let's face it, happens pretty easily, Deepcolor's offensive capabilities will be permanently reduced until she's redeployed. Her one true saving grace, however, is her S2, which grants a whopping 50% physical evasion at M3 to everyone within her skill range, including her tentacles, but the real problem is getting there, as Deepcolor as a whole is very subpar compared to the other options made available to you, and her S2 just isn't quite enough of a boon to justify the tedious process of building her Trust and investing into Mastery. Her Module only helps mitigate these problems, increasing the number of tentacles she can carry and lowering their DP cost, but it still doesn't solve the problem of her being unable to retrieve them.
- Tsukinogi
- As an Abjurer Supporter, Tsukinogi is very dependent on her skills to make the most of her talents. While useful when your nearby operators are severely damaged, since Tsukinogi can theoretically keep them alive long enough with her Sanctuary effect and bestowing physical and Arts dodge to operators to ensure that they survive long enough so that a Medic can actually heal them back up, such a situation is extremely rare in practice; the Abjurer Supporter entry above lists the flaws in why their role in protecting weakened operators isn't all that great in gameplay. Really, Tsukinogi's only claim to fame is her ability to confer True Sight, and even that is of dubious utility due to its short duration, and the Supporter class' niche nature in general. It also doesn't help that SilverAsh, who is widely considered to have more utility, decloaks stealth enemies passively without having to have a skill running and Scene has a way wider decloaking range as per her summons.
- Windflit
- Windflit exhibits all of his archetype's weaknesses and none of its strengths in particular, with his summons being too gimmicky with a weak effect that only benefits two classes, none of which are particularly worth buffing. He is designed to be a more damage-oriented upgrade to Roberta, except that most of his skills increase his own attack whereas it's not the main job of Supporters to attack since they are, well, Supporters. None of his skills are particularly noteworthy either, and while that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, they don't make use of his archetype's strengths. Even worse, Stainless, who is introduced after him, does not have the class restriction, is focused on both damage and support with his fairly strong devices, and, most noteworthy, does not have a class crimp note. It's certainly depressing that an operator whose arrival was stalled for such a long time note ends up with such an underwhelming kit. Even more unfortunately, Windflit's module with the release of Hortus de Escapismo does little to improve him, as the base module merely gives him one additional device giving him a little more time before his utility runs out assuming his S1 is used, and reducing the DP cost of himself and his devices by 2, neither of which are relevant to his actual issues. His module upgrades are even worse, with a pitiful 5% increase to his device's ATK buff at level 3. Unless some new mechanic to improve Operators besides the Module system is introduced, Windflit is relegated to the lowest rungs of viability for the forseeable future.
Specialists
- Kirara
- Compared to her cohorts in the Ambusher subclass, Kirara suffers from an unfortunate case of Crippling Overspecialization. In a nutshell, her entire kit revolves around DPS and self-sustain while sacrificing the crowd-control best known of the subclass, with her skills dealing Arts damage and her talent giving her regenerating health which increases if she's alone. The problem arises with the fact that not only do her skills have rather poor uptimes, even with her skills active, Kirara doesn't actually end up doing that much damage, meaning she loses out on the potent crowd control of the likes of Ethan and Manticore without gaining much in return; her talent points towards her being used as a lane holder, but she lacks the damage output or stopping power to do much in that role. Her regenerating health (which significantly increases if her S2 is up) makes her extremely hard to kill combined with her 50% evasion, but the problem is that she also isn't going to be doing much else; to add insult to injury, her innate reduced aggro level means that you can't even use her as a bait unit to exploit her absurd survivability.
- It's notable that her Ambusher cohort Mizuki also suffers from similar problems, making him often considered below-par as well. However, Mizuki actually has respectable damage output along with limited crowd control, which often makes him considered far more viable than Kirara despite having the same core issues. The capstone is that Mizuki has two very useful modules that fix some of his issues, with Module Y making him a self-sustaining tank with evasion and heal on kill (which makes him do Kirara's job except way better), and Module X slowing down enemies in his range enough for him to hit them twice while buffing his damage further. On the contrary, while Kirara's own Module gives her the passive slow of Module X, its only upgrade effect is buffing her regen by 0.5% per second.
- Compared to her cohorts in the Ambusher subclass, Kirara suffers from an unfortunate case of Crippling Overspecialization. In a nutshell, her entire kit revolves around DPS and self-sustain while sacrificing the crowd-control best known of the subclass, with her skills dealing Arts damage and her talent giving her regenerating health which increases if she's alone. The problem arises with the fact that not only do her skills have rather poor uptimes, even with her skills active, Kirara doesn't actually end up doing that much damage, meaning she loses out on the potent crowd control of the likes of Ethan and Manticore without gaining much in return; her talent points towards her being used as a lane holder, but she lacks the damage output or stopping power to do much in that role. Her regenerating health (which significantly increases if her S2 is up) makes her extremely hard to kill combined with her 50% evasion, but the problem is that she also isn't going to be doing much else; to add insult to injury, her innate reduced aggro level means that you can't even use her as a bait unit to exploit her absurd survivability.
- Mr. Nothing
- While Mr. Nothing is not strictly weak on his own merit, sporting solid HP, Attack and Defense as well as a fast attack speed, all at a low initial DP cost, his issue is that he doesn't have much to offer compared to both his lower- and higher-rarity counterparts, Jaye and Lee, to justify the Merchant archetype's DP-drain drawback.
- His first skill, Cautious Retreat, is similar to Utage's first skill, reducing his block count to 0 for the duration while healing himself and allowing him to set up his talent, with the passive effect of increasing his block count to 2 when the skill is selected. However, unlike Utage whose skill can be activated manually, Mr. Nothing's skill activates automatically upon falling below 20% HP, making him prone to inadvertently leaking enemies upon taking too much damage or getting taken out by heavy hitting enemies past the HP threshold. This skill also does not grant him any boosts to his attacking stats whatsoever, making him ineffective at dealing significant damage to any enemies with high Defense stats.
- His second skill, Wax and Wane, gives him up to a 60% Attack buff and one of three secondary buffs (reducing enemy Attack Speed on hit, increasing his own Attack Speed, gaining +1 Block and Physical Dodge) with short charge time and permanent duration, but the buff you get upon activating it is random, forcing you to deactivate the ability if you get the wrong effect and wait to reactivate it hoping to get the buff you actually need, adding unnecessary frustration and making him extremely unreliable to deploy on-demand if you need him specifically for one of his buffs. Not helping him is that it is not stated in-game which colors give out which effects, only adding to the confusion of using him.
- Overall, compared to Jaye's ability to 1v1 dangerous foes with his Life Drain on his second skill and Lee's third skill allowing him to block a potentially infinite number of low weight enemies while also granting an Attack and Defense buff and drawing aggro making him a solid duelist and tank, Mr. Nothing doesn't do anything particularly unique that another operator couldn't do just as well or better without constantly draining your DP while deployed. His one noteworthy use lies in his talent, Unexpected Strike, which gives his first attack a stun for up to 4 seconds if Mr. Nothing has not attacked for 4 seconds, allowing him to set up infinite stun-lock combos on a single target with sleep-inducers such as Blemishine, Kafka, Blacknight and Erato, but that is a very narrow niche at best. As a consolation, however, he's found a nice niche in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor as an answer to the Tide-Hunt Knight using the aforementioned stun-lock combo. It should be reiterated that Mr. Nothing is not a bad Operator, per se. He's just overshadowed by Jaye being extremely powerful for his rarity, but has enough of a niche himself to see occasional use in specific strategies.
- While Mr. Nothing is not strictly weak on his own merit, sporting solid HP, Attack and Defense as well as a fast attack speed, all at a low initial DP cost, his issue is that he doesn't have much to offer compared to both his lower- and higher-rarity counterparts, Jaye and Lee, to justify the Merchant archetype's DP-drain drawback.
- Spuria
- Spuria is an excellent example of a gimmick taken too far at the expense of usefulness. She can't block as she's a ranged operator, her DPS is subpar at best, and as a Geek Specialist she requires constant healing support due to her archetype trait, effectively stealing away valuable healing that your other operators may need. Spuria's talent randomly applies an effect on each attack like Aak, but hers only has a 70% chance at E2 to activate on each hit whereas Aak's is guaranteed, and hers does not include a self-heal. Her S1 activates on deployment and gives her up to +100 ASPD... but unlike other Operators with on-deploy skills such as April or Wild Mane she has no deployment time reduction talent and the skill's duration is only 16 seconds (24 seconds at max Mastery), giving it an atrocious uptime as she has to wait out her full redeployment time to use it again. Her S2 buffs herself and a single ally without damaging them like Aak, but whereas Aak can buff any Operator and only requires them take a certain amount of damage which can be alleviated with DEF buffs or Shelter effects after which they get a massive unconditional ATK/ASPD buff (or a DEF buff with S2), Spuria can only buff Snipers. Incidentally, class-restricted buffs are one of the reasons Windflit is so terrible, so the fact Spuria is even more restricted speaks for itself. Worse, the skill not only has a low uptime, it also comes with an RNG effect that can cause the recipients to stun themselves on each attack, which punishes Snipers that attack quickly as they are more likely to stun and waste the buff duration. The buff also comes with an ASPD bonus. This all culminates in a confused design that comes with too many restrictions and negative effects without the value to back it up, making her one of, if not the worst 5-stars in the game, even moreso than Kirara or Windflit who might be useless, but at least aren't outright detrimental to have on the field.
- She has a dubious saving grace in that Deadeye and Artilleryman snipers are unaffected by the stun due to their initial slow attack speed, and ironically, she does have good synergy with Typhon of all people, due to Typhon's S3 greatly increasing her own attack interval, allowing her to receive all of Spuria's benefits while ignoring the downsides... if you are willing to devote the squad slot and another one specifically to healing Spuria herself, when similar amounts of support could be used instead to enable Aak's stronger and less restrictive buff, or you could just use Warfarin or Skadi the Corrupting heart who can both heal the sniper and buff her at the same time. At this point Spuria is almost, if not completely useless since other operators can do what she does in stronger ways without drawbacks.
- Spuria is an excellent example of a gimmick taken too far at the expense of usefulness. She can't block as she's a ranged operator, her DPS is subpar at best, and as a Geek Specialist she requires constant healing support due to her archetype trait, effectively stealing away valuable healing that your other operators may need. Spuria's talent randomly applies an effect on each attack like Aak, but hers only has a 70% chance at E2 to activate on each hit whereas Aak's is guaranteed, and hers does not include a self-heal. Her S1 activates on deployment and gives her up to +100 ASPD... but unlike other Operators with on-deploy skills such as April or Wild Mane she has no deployment time reduction talent and the skill's duration is only 16 seconds (24 seconds at max Mastery), giving it an atrocious uptime as she has to wait out her full redeployment time to use it again. Her S2 buffs herself and a single ally without damaging them like Aak, but whereas Aak can buff any Operator and only requires them take a certain amount of damage which can be alleviated with DEF buffs or Shelter effects after which they get a massive unconditional ATK/ASPD buff (or a DEF buff with S2), Spuria can only buff Snipers. Incidentally, class-restricted buffs are one of the reasons Windflit is so terrible, so the fact Spuria is even more restricted speaks for itself. Worse, the skill not only has a low uptime, it also comes with an RNG effect that can cause the recipients to stun themselves on each attack, which punishes Snipers that attack quickly as they are more likely to stun and waste the buff duration. The buff also comes with an ASPD bonus. This all culminates in a confused design that comes with too many restrictions and negative effects without the value to back it up, making her one of, if not the worst 5-stars in the game, even moreso than Kirara or Windflit who might be useless, but at least aren't outright detrimental to have on the field.
- Verdant
- Verdant's kit attempts to double down on the "unkillable" gimmick shared by Dollkeepers, but unfortunately fails to do anything to stand out within his archetype and beyond, even considering his 4* status. His first skill is a painfully small buff to HP and RES, while his second is intended to be his damage skill, buffing his ASPD and turning his attacks into Arts at the cost of losing health on each hit. HP loss on a Dollkeeper is usually a good thing because it lets them switch to their doll form and interfere with enemies, but Verdant's doll has the ability to regenerate HP...and that's it.note Whenever Verdant switches to his doll form, unlike other Dollkeepers who can leverage various gimmicks or quirks that give their dolls presence, Verdant's doll is essentially 20 seconds of dead time where he can't block (thus mostly wasting his healing), has his already unremarkable damage lowered further, and offers nothing to make up for it, which in turn actively discourages letting him use his doll in the first place, something that's counterintuitive to his entire archetype. The end result is you get a unit who only tries to survive and doesn't do anything else of note (and sometimes even fails to survive at all), with pretty much anything he can do being replaceable by even other low-rarity units. On top of all of this, Bena is a free 5* Dollkeeper who replicates all of Verdant's strengths but more effectively, such as her self-sacrificial S2 giving her a more substantial offensive buff, and her doll having Arts damage as well as up to 48% damage reduction to give it more battlefield presence and even superior tankiness compared to Verdant's regen.
Former letdowns who have ascended from low/bottom-tier
These operators are those who have once performed fairly mediocre in the meta, but were later salvaged due to Hypergryph buffing them or players discovering new tricks that made the operator more versatile than previously thought. While they may still have their flaws and probably won't become significant powerhouses themselves in the current meta any time soon, their improvements will certainly push them in the right direction.
- The Chain Caster archetype used to be considered an extremely poor class in the same vein as Splash Casters. The point of this subclass of Casters is to fill in a "middleground" between the Core and Splash Casters, in which their attacks can innately chain damage to multiple enemies simultaneously (additionally providing a small flavor of slowing capabilities like Decel Binder Supporters). Despite this, the innate weaknesses of the class as a whole only seemed to exacerbate their inability to excel at any sort of combat utility, namely sharing the same weaknesses that drag down the viability of Splash Casters (high DP cost and slow attack speed). Most conspicuously however, their raw attack power is lower than that of Core Casters, whereas the opposite is true for Splash Casters; this point is moot by the Dossoles Holiday event, in which the Chain Caster's ATK is now buffed to be higher than Core Casters, though this does not make their average DPS better, due to the Chain Caster's innately slow attack speed. To make matters worse, the chain damage effect from their attacks weakens with every consecutive jump. Their skills in general are very suboptimal despite the class having the DPS tag, since they either have low uptime, high SP costs, or both. You know something is definitely wrong when the class is performing so badly to the point that Hypergryph needed to buff the class three times to datenote in order for the Chain Casters to perform anywhere close to decent, though they have become much better with their individual buffs, with Passenger and Leizi both finding their place as high-tier options in special game modes.
- Amiya
- Despite being the mascot of the game and likely the first Core caster you get, Amiya suffers from a severe case of Situational Sword as well as Overshadowed by Awesome. Her second skill, Spirit Burst, causes her to bombard random foes around her with rapid-fire Arts, but stuns her at the end of its duration and, most damning of all, activates automatically, meaning that players have no way to control when she goes on a rampage or the subsequent period of helplessness. Meanwhile, her third skill, Chimera, gives her a massive range, ATK, and HP steroid while making her attacks deal true damage - which would be extremely powerful if it didn't also forcibly retreat Amiya once the skill ends, leaving you short a Caster for the next minute or so once she finishes firing. To put it simply, all of her meaningful skills have such severe downsides that the consequences for using them usually outweigh the benefits, making even Casters of equal or lesser rarity often perform her job better than her, much less 6-star Casters. To make matters worse, with the release of units like Kal'tsit and Nearl the Radiant Knight who can deal true damage much more consistently, Amiya's Chimera sees even less usage unless the player is specifically lacking those units or against extremely durable aerial foes that require ranged true damage in particular.
- To make matters worse, her skills are gated by huge SP costs, so they might not even be able to fire off when you actually need them. While her Emotional Absorption talent helps alleviate this, it's only unlocked at Elite 2, which requires significant investment.
- However, it's important to note that not only do several lategame bosses have glaring weaknesses to Amiya's true damage, but having an Elite 2 Amiya is required to progress past a certain point in the story, in this case, she is needed to unlock and play JT8-2. This is compounded by the increasing value of true damage with the prominence of enemies with high-RES, dodge mechanics, and other traits that most Casters struggle against, most of which Amiya's S3 completely bypasses. In addition, after clearing said stage of Chapter 8, Amiya unlocks her Guard form which promptly turns this on its head, becoming a decent (even if a rather very late) option for Arts Guard who's a far cry from the Scrappy her Caster form was. As such, although Amiya is rarely used by long-time players who already have all the Game-Breaker units that fulfill most needed roles, and despite the fact that other Casters of the same or lower rarity may outperform her up to Elite 1, the fact that she is free, required to be raised to progress, and has a unique and powerful tool for a 5-star at Elite 2 means she is considered the most important 5-star Caster in the game to raise among a very crowded pool of average to mediocre units.
- Ch'en
- Like fellow guards Skadi and Hellagur, Ch'en is not bad or weak per se. However, she is losing her place in the meta, starting from her low ATK compared to other guard archetypes as expected of a Swordmaster Guard. However, the archetype do have various skills with high ATK scaling to mitigate this, so this is where the second problem with Ch'en shows up.
- First, while her S2's huge ATK scaling, ability to deal both physical and Arts damage, and instant helidrop use may sound amazing, it is becoming weaker with future contents. To start, enemies are increasingly tankier with higher HP to the point that one strike won't be significant enough to kill them or let Ch'en and other ops deal the finishing blow quickly after S2 use. In addition, enemies currently trend toward a combination of high DEF and decent RES to go with their higher HP, which makes mixed damage ineffective compared to physical/Arts-only damagenote . Finally, there are simply better helidrop and burst damage options than Ch'en, such as Surtr or SilverAsh with their S3. While there's the option of having Ch'en stay as a frontliner, her single burst S2 is rather inferior compared to sustained damage skills like Blaze's S2 or Thorns S3, so Ch'en is replaceable. In fact, a four star operator of the same archetype, Cutter, out-DPS'es Ch'en with her S1 due to having a lower SP cost, pure physical damage, and applying the large ATK scaling to each four hits instead of one snap.
- The problem doesn't end there. Ch'en's S3 is also seen as flawed in the meta. While being able to deal significant physical damage per hit and stun at the end sounds good on paper, this skill suffers from having a large SP requirement to activate. Once again, the lower rarity counterpart of Ch'en, Cutter, beats her in overall DPS department due to her ability to spam her S2 two and a half times in the span of strikes that Ch'en must perform to use S3 once, assuming both skills are at M3.
- Her Module introduced in Break the Ice gives her a bit more attack power and speed, and allows her skills to deal 10% more damage, which is alright, albeit not solving the inherent issues of her skills (SP costs). Unlike Passenger, the Module does not drastically improve her performance, and once again, Ch'en's lower rarity counterpart, Cutter, gets a better Module that allows her attacks to innately bypass a flat amount of enemy DEF.
- Overall, Ch'en has been rendered obsolete by the introduction of more guards with better DPS options and the increasing durability of enemies in later contents. In fact, she is considered as one of the noticeably underwhelming six stars in the game alongside Siege, Mostima, Skadi, Hellagur, Archetto, and the initial release of Passenger by the community. She, Skadi and Mostima are even grouped as the Moody Blues by fans due to their relatively mediocre performance as 6 stars, being rated among the bottom of the meta, and having a predominantly blue color design. Her Sniper counterpart on the other hand, reclaims her game-breaking prestige.
- Fortunately, Ch'en's Module upgrade as of Lingering Echoes has managed to provide her a new lease on life and greatly improved her viability, as it addresses one of her greatest weaknesses—namely, her incredibly high SP costs on her offensive recovery skills, by improving the rate of SP gain on her Scolding talent, giving her additional attack speed, and on the level 3 upgrade, giving Ch'en herself an additional point of SP every time it ticks. This allows her to use her skills, which have high scaling but are held back by low uptime, far more frequently, with the additional benefit of increasing her utility by allowing her to recharge the skills of Operators with offensive/defensive recovery skills. And as of the Il Siracusano update, which removes the alter restriction, she will no longer have to compete with her Game-Breaker alter for a place in the squad. While she still is a victim of power creep, she is significantly stronger with her upgrades and no longer considered a bottom-tier 6-star.
- A quirk of Ch'en's S3 was revealed in Guide Ahead that makes her a devastating Situational Sword against some bosses: when she activates it, the skill makes her leave the map entirely. This resets any elemental debuffs she's suffering, and also renders her immune to boss aura debuffs, such as Andoian's dodge effect, making her a powerful anti-boss tool.
- Lappland
- Once a powerful 5* Operator, Lappland unfortunately became one of the Operators who got left behind by the meta over time. She's certainly not terrible, and can even be a godsend if used on the right stage, but she's held back by the growing list of enemies her tricks no longer work on and the introduction of Operators who can do what she does but better.
- Her talent, Spiritual Destruction, was her biggest claim to fame at launch, giving her the unique ability to inflict silence on her foes. In early content this made her a force to be reckoned with, as she was able to circumvent annoying enemy gimmicks like Infused Originum Slugs exploding on death or Yeti Casters freezing their targets. Even when the game added new Operators who could also silence enemies, she stood out from the crowd by being the only one who could inflict it inherently without using a skill. However, later content would start giving enemies an immunity to silence to stop the player from trivializing them, eventually reaching the point where almost every enemy you'd want to use it on was immune. This heavily damaged Lappland's viability, as her main gimmick had gone from a reliable strategy to something you'd only use in a few rare cases. Fortunately, Hypergryph seems to have noticed this, as many of the newer enemies introduced (such as those introduced in Chapter 9) can have their abilities Silenced.
- Her second skill Wolf Spirit is strong on paper, granting her a massive 90% ATK boost (that can go as high as 120% with full Mastery), switching her damage type to Arts, removing the 20% damage penalty on her ranged attacks, and allowing her to target two enemies at once. However, the fact it activates automatically when fully charged makes it unwieldy, as you have no way of saving it for when you really need it and no way to stop her from wasting it if it procs at the wrong time. This was easy to overlook in early content, both because Spiritual Destruction gave her plenty of utility outside of her skill and because the only other Lord Guard who could deal Arts damage was Midnight. However, after silence got nerfed this drawback made it harder to justify her spot on a team, especially when she had to compete with new additions who could fill the same role in a more reliable way like Arenenote and Thornsnote .
- As of Dossoles Holiday and Chapter 9 onwards, Lappland has shot back up to the meta but she doesn't have the same claim to her early days fame due to heavy competition from newer Operators such as the aforementioned Arene and Thorns. However, there have been popping up multiple Demonic Spiders (including basic mobs that can reach 100% dodge) that can be silenced in large events, such as the Blueflowers, Nethersea Predators and Snack Carts, making her, often together with Jaye, more used in these situations. With Annihilation 19, she in particular is back to cheesing entire maps (as all gimmicky enemies, mostly consisting of Nethersea Predators, are silencable) due to her permanent silence and not draining DP.
- Leizi
- As the first Chain Caster in the game, Leizi already suffers from the innate weaknesses of the Chain Casters as a whole (which her talent doesn't synergize with, as dealing more damage against unblocked enemies is difficult with a naturally slow attack speed), but despite the fact that Hypergryph has (ever since Dossoles Holiday) been handing out buffs to help salvage the Chain Casters (and other underperforming archetypes), Leizi in particular doesn't seem to benefit much from the buffs. Said buffs not only provide stat boosts but also lessens the chain damage reduction and increases the slow duration of their attacks; however, unlike Passenger, Leizi lacks any skills that can help her take advantage of the buffs (particularly the increased slow effect on enemies), since none of her skills circumvent the slow attack speed of her archetype. If anything, the buffs actually hurts her S2 more than helping it, as buffing the damage output of the Chain Caster archetype (via reducing the damage decay from chained attacks) lowers the difference in damage between her basic attacks and her S2.
- When Chain Caster Modules were released starting from Near Light, her lower rarity counterpart Pudding obtains a Module that replicates the selling point of Leizi's S2, which is the removal of the damage reduction of chain damage, allowing Pudding's attacks to always deal full damage against enemies. Leizi's own module is basically a slightly inferior version of Passenger's (Leizi gets increased HP while Passenger gets some extra attack speed), but again, Leizi's skillset won't let her properly capitalize on the increased slow effect provided by the buffs and Module, whereas Passenger can, enough to properly pull him out of Scrappy territory.
- However, Lingering Echoes added upgrades to Leizi’s module which increase her damage to unblocked enemies and most notably allow her to generate one point of SP per target hit (similar to a lesser version of the Hand of Diffusion from Integrated Strategies), giving her significantly improved uptime on her S2. This upgrade, coupled with her excellent performance on the dreaded Stationary Security Service game mode, has given Leizi some newfound popularity among players, raising her to a more favored level among the crowded list of 5-star Casters.
- Mostima
- For a time, Mostima was a fairly solid Splash Caster with a flavor of crowd control in her kit. However, players started placing her on the lower end of meta after some reevaluation, bordering on scrappy as a Caster. This is due to her skills which are decent in practice but are gated by high SP costs and long cooldowns, even with her Talent boosting SP gain for Casters. Those who do have her mainly use her for her S2, which provides a very handy AoE stun for certain occasions, but even then it's still fairly situational, due to its staggeringly high SP cost for a very low skill uptime, and most of the time, using Lava would still be way better.
- Her S3's strong effect and wide area of attack is also hindered by her slow attack speed, not helped by how it swats enemies away from her, making it so that they will be pushed out of its attack range and get slowed. This gives it very poor efficiency, as most of its duration will be spent watching these enemies slowly crawling back into range, only to be swat back out again, rinse and repeat. Unless one is fighting groups of very heavy enemies, or placed so that Mostima can push her enemies against walls or into pits, the knockback effects of her S3 actively works against itself, and is therefore very frustrating to use.
- If having terribly high SP costs for low returns wasn't bad enough, almost every non-Core 6-star Casters released after Mostima can do similar things she can do, but far better than her.
- Dusk is a Splash Caster like her, high DP cost and all, but has a mix of potent crowd controlling and surprisingly good DPS out of her S3. Sure, it has double the SP cost of Mostima's S2, but the gains from Dusk's S3 more than makes up for it, not only boosting her raw attack power, range, and splash radius even higher, but makes all of her attacks during the skill duration summon a Freeling that can block enemies, granting Dusk excellent crowd controlling mishaps that would make Mostima envious.
- Mostima gets overshadowed again by another 6-star Caster, this time by a Phalanx Caster named Carnelian, whose S2 (after factoring in her talents and ally support) offers far better burst crowd-control for lower SP cost and longer skill duration; it additionally reduces her attack interval, meaning when coupled with the skill's good duration, she can deal more damage and crowd-control in 25 seconds than Mostima could in 7.
- Believe it or not, once he obtains his buffs and Module, the Chain Caster Passenger, of all people, is able to be a much stronger crowd-controller than Mostima by way of his S2, which allows him to constantly apply long range-multitarget slow against groups of enemies while chipping away their health, being akin to a stronger version of Angelina's S2, but is not concentrated against a single enemy. While he does have his own issues with SP costs, they aren't quite as pronounced compared to Mostima's own SP costs (with her meaningful skills costing more than Passenger's infamous S3), since Passenger still gets good uptime with his S2 and does not need to wait ridiculously long to be able to use it again.
- The Mech-Accord Goldenglow can extend her attack range to cover the entire map via her S3; the nature of her fast ASPD and having multiple drones to attack means that no enemy is safe from being bombarded with constant slows.
- Her Module introduced in Guiding Ahead gives her a decent attack buff and a small attack speed boost. However, its most notable aspect is that it reduces her DP cost by 8 (at Elite 1 onwards, she costs 26 DP to deploy at Potential 1, or 24 DP at Potential 6); it doesn't solve the SP issues of her skills, but having a significantly cheaper DP cost to be deployed much sooner than usual is definitely a beneficial gain.
- Lingering Echoes added upgrades for Mostima's Module, which improves the passive slow on her talent while notably applying a weaker version of the slow to every enemy on the map, something that no other Operator can do. Although her SP problems remain untouched, the Module manages to improve her niche as a crowd-control unit, with her global slow permanently hampering all enemies, and her S3's improved slow essentially immobilizing anything in the skill range since the slow will hit 90-99% with a fully upgraded Module. Unfortunately, unlike her fellow members of the Moody Blues, Ch'en and Skadi, who both received extremely strong module upgrades that gave them a major boost in viability, Mostima appears to only have been slightly improved overall by her own, still suffering from her extremely high SP costs and all the weaknesses of being a Splash Caster, and her niche of providing a persistent global slow, while unique, is rarely considered to be game-changing in practice.
- The one saving grace to Mostima is that her specific set of utility does allow her to see some meta usage in extremely advanced content where enemies are empowered (or Operators are handicapped) by game mode risks to the extent that raw damage is no longer a viable answer, which is where her S3's ability to nearly completely immobilize everything in range comes into play. She has seen use in cases such as max risk CC#12note and the highest difficulty level of Mizuki & Caerula Arbor where her ability to provide devastating crowd control is exactly what is required, even if only for a few instances. As such, Mostima is not so much unusable as catering to a very specific niche, which is unnecessary for most content that is intended to be beatable with lower-rarity squads, but occasionally manages to see the light in the hardest content in the game. And with how much the best Casters in the game are simply so powerful in terms of damage that they practically overshadow every other Caster out there, Mostima is difficult to appreciate for those simply looking for strong Arts damage, but boasting what may be the most powerful crowd control in the game fortunately makes her much more situationally valuable and relevant than many other Casters.
- As of the Lone Trail event, Mostima's module-boosted global slow effect shuts down several speed-based mechanics that prevent some critical abilities from activating such as the Arc Commandos being unable to fly, making various stages and their challenges vastly simpler to clear.
- Passenger
- In his initial release up until Dossoles Holiday (where he got buffed), Passenger had the unfortunate (dis)honor of being undisputedly regarded as the worst 6-star in the entire game, even moreso when his skillset seemed to be exorbitantly bad to the point that all of the other 6-star operators on this page seemed better by comparison. This is mostly due to a combination of his low stats (which his skillset does not synergize with) along with the innate weakness of Chain Casters as a whole; notably, the class had been buffed during Passenger's release in A Walk in the Dustnote , but it was so insignificant to the point that it barely made any difference, resulting in him underperforming severely, which got to a point that everything Passenger can do can not only be replicated but surpassed by even 4 and 3-star Operators, much less higher rarity ones.note
- His skillset suggests that he is supposed to be a Caster that specializes in long-range burst Arts damage (his S3, Glorious Shards, has a large targetting range and multiplicative ATK modifiers) and multitarget slow (his S2, Focus Command, increases his attack range and speed); this is actually true after his buffs, but before that, his base ATK is too low for his S3 to kill or significantly wound enemies reliably (even moreso for a high cost skill), and a slow duration of 0.2 seconds for Chain Casters won't cut it for his S2 to provide any meaningful amounts of crowd control.
- Perhaps in response to the above issues in regards to the poor and inexcusable flaws of Passenger's kit for his 6-star rarity, along with the timing of his banner taking place before the 2nd anniversary (potentially ripping off players of their hard earned Orundums for Skadi the Corrupting Heart and Kal'tsit), this caused significant outrage among the CN fanbase, wishing justice and some needed buffs for the poor Liberi, with most people feeling that Passenger wasn't properly play-tested by the devs before his release, nor did they fully investigate on what exactly made the Chain Caster archetype very subpar compared to the other Casters. The fact that Carnelian and Pallas (the former being the next 6-star Caster and the latter being the next 6-star of a poor archetype) are able to perform reasonably well made most players feel that Passenger got done dirty by poor balancing and a poorly thought-out kit. As a testament to the extent of this negative feedback, a young man requested Hypergryph to buff Passenger on live TV after passing the national exams. This is notably the first time that an underperforming operator (6-star or otherwise) provoked a huge and significantly pronounced negative response from fans, which has never occurred towards any of the other Tier Induced Scrappies until Passenger's debut.
- However, about 3 months after his shaky debut, Passenger's archetype was buffed again during the Dossoles Holiday event. Said buff increases his class's ATK stat (now being higher than Eyjafjalla and Ceobe at comparable levels, even with trust bonuses), lower the damage reduction of chained attacks from 20% to 15%, and increase the innate slow effects of attacks from 0.2 to 0.5 seconds. His Module released alongside the Near Light event another 3 months later increases his ATK even further, boosts his attack speed a bit, and most importantly, lessens the damage reduction from chained attacks down from 15% to 10% and increases the slow duration from 0.5 seconds to 0.8 seconds, the same as Decel Binder Supporters (and unlike Leizi, Passenger has the tools needed to fully take advantage of this). While the buffs may seem insignificant at first, they have surprisingly improved his gameplay performance (demonstrated by 777ucky and 25thNight, here and here); while he is obviously nowhere near Game Breaking, he's considered to be a very solid mid-tier Caster, with this article analyzing his post buff performance, notably pointing out that he has one of the highest Skill DPS out of the Casters operators.
- As of the Lingering Echoes event, his Module can be upgraded to further boost his performance; in particular, upgrading his original module will enhance his second talent, Lone Soldier, where he will additionally gain a faster SP generation if there are no enemies in the adjacent 4 tiles, mitigating his SP issues; because his skillset encourages him to blast enemies from afar before they get too close, this works very well for him. Alternatively, taking the second module path removes the penalty on his chain attacks and improves his first talent by lowering its HP threshold, increasing its damage buff, and extending its duration, resulting in less frequent but borderline nuclear lightning storms. With all said and done, it is safe to say that Passenger has finally abandoned his Scrappy roots and is now living up to his high rarity as a very solid and competent long-range crowd-controlling Chain Caster.
- Skadi
- The biggest problem with Skadi is not that she's bad, but that she had the unfortunate case of suffering Early-Installment Weirdness as the first 6-star released after the launch of the game. Her kit is fairly simplistic to the point that it doesn't allow her to do anything other than helidropping and sniping the odd Caster. Basically, Skadi is a 6-star Melantha with some beefed-up stats, and all three of her skills basically do the same thing, just in different ways; primarily boosting her stats for varying durations without any unique effects (no extended attack range, status effects, AoE nuke damage, etc.), but that's about it. This makes her very replaceable as a Dreadnought Guard, since she's not doing anything new that Melantha's not already doing, while being a lot harder to obtain and expensive to raise. General consensus is that while Skadi isn't bad per se, she's very boring to use, and there have since been plenty of newer Guards who can do a better job than she can and then some, and her fellow 6-star Dreadnought Guard, Nearl, is just flat out better than her in every way. Her Supporter counterpart on the other hand falls to the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
- Her Module introduced in Invitation to Wine fully restores her health and boosts her attack speed once she gets KO'ed, in exchange for having a lower max HP cap. This can somewhat synergize with her S2 and S3 due to the huge inflated ATK they offer, and the Module can ensure that she survives long enough to maximize the amount of DPS she can deliver before kicking the bucket.
- Like Ch'en, however, Skadi received one of the best upgrades for her kit with the Lingering Echoes update. The main prize for her is her DRE-X module (which gives her even more ATK which is further increased when attacking enemies she is blocking) upgrade that reduces her redeployment time by 30 seconds, essentially making her a pseudo-Executor specialist who exchanges some redeployment time and a higher DP cost for significantly higher stats, making her an extremely powerful assassin that can be helidropped repeatedly on dangerous enemies and kill or heavily damage them with little effort. Also like Ch'en, Skadi will no longer need to compete with her alter Skadi the Corrupting Heart as of Il Siracusano, and the two in fact have synergy in full Abyssal Hunter squads thanks to both having talents that activate with Abyssal Hunters on the field. Skadi's DRE-Y module, which give her a second life when defeated with more attack speed but less HP, and its upgrade which improves her talent that grants ATK to all Abyssal Hunters, is also decent, but much more situational and less relevant for her viability. Skadi still has extremely strong competition in her fellow Dreadnought, Nearl the Radiant Knight, and units like Surtr where Arts damage is superior, but the fact that Skadi can be deployed much more frequently than either of them gives her a valuable niche, and as a result she has become a much stronger Operator in her own right.
- As of Ideal City, another point in Skadi's favor is in her synergy with her fellow Abyssal Hunter Gladiia, whose Module improves the maximum HP regeneration on her Waves of Aegir talent for all Abyssal Hunters and grants up to 30% reduced Physical and Arts damage. This perfectly suits Skadi's massive HP (made even higher by her S3) and relatively low DEF stat, turning her into one of the tankiest Operators in the game, to the point that she can solo bosses that Nearl the Radiant Knight couldn't possibly dream of, such as boss Mudrock.
