Game Breaker / Arknights

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• The Abyssal Hunter squad is uniquely a broken faction-based squad in a game full of faction-based squads that are average at best and subpar at worst. Their core is Gladiia with her fully-upgraded HOK-X module, who grants every Hunter regenerating HP and reduces the Physical and Arts damage they take from every enemy by almost a third when deployed. This is a devastating combo on a squad whose members belong to archetypes that have an absurd amount of HP, turning them into almost-unkillable tanks who can outlast enemies without Medics, especially once they get their HP-buffing skills running. Their survivability is complemented by their higher base ATK compared to other Operators, which is also buffed alongside their HP when they use their skills, letting them rip through enemies with hefty Physical damage per hit. Their potential is further boosted the more you bring their members to the stage, as they all have talents that provide buffs to the squad, which becomes more prominent if their modules that buff said talents are upgraded. With a full team, they can stack more ATK, HP, ASPD, SP recovery rate, and percentage-based damage boosts, inflating their stats to borderline boss level and making them into a nigh-unstoppable force that can win even endgame stages or gimmick battles using nothing but overwhelming brute force.

• Standard Bearer Vanguards have the most reliable DP generation per skill proc out of all the Vanguard archetypes while being cheap to deploy. Even their Boring, but Practical S1 is very useful due to their higher DP generation, while their other skills tend to offer valuable utility to support allies even during their downtime. They can also start generating DP quickly after deployment due to their relatively low skill costs and high initial SP. While they're not meant as frontliners due to their low ATK stat and block lost on skill, the utilities they bring make them among the best Support Party Members and staples of most teams.
• Agent Vanguards have halved redeployment time compared to the average operator and the highest DP generation rate during skill with enough attacks. They also have higher attack stat than the average Vanguard and extended ranged attack, letting them kill harder mobs and aerial enemies while producing DP. Because their DP generation is tied to their attacks, there is no real cap on the amount of DP they can generate, and their extended range makes them able to hit tanky enemies at the start of a stage without putting themselves in danger. These grant them amazing role compression that let them hold early lines and continue fighting even later into the level.
• Bagpipe
  • Bagpipe's Military Tradition grants at least +6 SP to all Vanguards on deployment, letting them generate DP much faster or even fire their skills the second they drop onto the battlefield. She herself deals a lot of damage as a Vanguard due to her crits from Precise Reloading augmented by her high ATK, and two skills that can buff her damage with High Impact Assault's spamable double-hitting attacks, or Locked Breech Burst letting her burst two enemies at once while improving her survivability, turning her into a low-cost Guard that can be fielded early in the level.
• Blacknight
  • Blacknight is able to consistently spam Sleep with her summon by using her second skill Peaceful Slumber, which has a low SP cost of 16 and also makes her summon attack Sleeping enemies for Arts damage. Said skill also stores charges, meaning with enough SP or other Sleep units, she can stall enemies indefinitely while chipping them, something that's especially valuable in high-end content.
• Ines
  • Ines is a ridiculously versatile Vanguard who applies multiple debuffs while gaining powerful buffs from her skills, on top of having all the perks of an Agent. Shadow Weaver makes her first hits on enemies Steal ATK to buff herself while Binding them, while Shadow Sentry can also place a field in her attack range that removes invisibility and slows movement speed by 30%, which stays even after retreat. Her S2 Murky Night expands her range, makes her unseen and immune to most damage sources, and lets her additionally steal attack speed, safely dealing huge damage while still generating SP. On the other hand, her S3 Lone Return immediately retreats her on her first (now free) deployment to place her field, then allows her to strike multiple enemies along the way when relocating, potentially stealing a massive amount of ATK and DP in the process, before buffing her ATK to rip into them.
• Myrtle
  • Myrtle is simple to build and get to max potential due to her 4-star rarity, while generating tons of DP quickly and being very cheap to deploy. She also has the additional perks of healing allies directly with her other skill and granting passive regeneration to all Vanguards. All of these let her shine even in endgame contents despite being a humble 4-star, with her pure DP generation for her cost being virtually unchallenged even by higher rarities over 5 years of the game's life.
• SilverAsh the Reignfrost
  • SilverAsh makes his glorious return to the meta as a Strategist Vanguard that's packed with truly absurd utility that easily competes with Ines. His power revolves around his Eye of the Blizzard when he's deployed, granting operators to its left bonus SP and reduced redeployment time when deployed (with SilverAsh himself always receiving these bonuses when he is deployed), and his skills further capitalize on its strengths. His second skill Countergambit is a charge based skill that has him unleash a wide-ranged slash that dispels the enemy's invisibility and inflicts Cold on them for good measure, while also reducing the DP cost of the operator closest to the right of the Eye of the Blizzard by a significant 11, which if repeated a few times can let you deploy half your team much cheaper than expected, or even for free if you use it enough times. On top of that, he also grants a buff to all operators to the left of the Eye that lets them unleash the same slash up to two times when they're deployed based on their own ATK, enabling some potent nuke strategies with high ATK operators (e.g. Mystics, Crushers, or Dreadnoughts). His third skill Castled King has a low initial cost to let it fire almost right away, generates a massive amount of DP over its long duration, dispels invisibility in a large range, and gives him AoE attacks that inflict Fragile, while the first cast swaps the DP costs of the cheapest and most expensive operator in the lineup, allowing you to deploy expensive operators like Juggernauts and Spreadshooters straight away if you brought a cheaper unit as fodder for them. The Eye of the Blizzard also becomes deployable during the skill duration, which goes on the first deployed operator and mirrors SilverAsh's attacks for extra utility and damage, and it can also be redeployed to switch to another operator of his choice, letting him cover a wider area with damage and debuffs, with its sole downside being its very high SP cost for a Vanguard skill, giving him significant downtime. He then caps it off with his second Talent Snow Realm Trailblazer which grants all Kjerag operators immunity to freezing on top of a flat DEF buff and regenerating health that doubles after 15 seconds, patching up the Kjerag team's weakness of lacking sustain and making him deceptively tanky despite his normally unremarkable statline.
  • His second skill also has an unexpected yet very strong synergy with Muelsyse. While Muelsyse chooses an operator to copy for her water clone, all of their DP costs are set to 0. In this state however, they still qualify for gaining stacks from SilverAsh's skill due to being cheaper than the Eye of the Blizzard, letting all of them gain stacks for unleashing slashes on deployment, and they still retain the stacks even when Muelsyse finishes making her choice and even if SilverAsh himself is retreated.

• Ch'en the Holungday
  • Ch'en's limited summer version made a literal splash as a DPS by being able to hit every enemy in her range as a Spreadshooter, which she can buff with her third skill "Holiday Storm" to increase her ATK, expand her range, apply the 150% ATK bonus from her trait to her whole range, and hit twice. On top of that, her attacks now spread a liquid that inflicts a lingering movement speed slow and flat DEF reduction to ensure she can punch through even high DEF enemies while keeping enemies in her range for longer. Her skill also runs on the highly controllable Ammo system, letting her manually deactivate it once she finishes off a wave to start charging again, with her Frugality talent giving her and fellow Snipers a chance to save ammo so they can attack more. Her first Module can even improve her trait damage bonus and the ammo conservation chance while applying it to non-Snipers.
  • Her second Module reduces her DP cost by 8, letting her be deployed earlier, and upgrades her Vestiges of Vacation Talent to grant her an ATK buff alongside ASPD. On top of that, when her skill is active, the entire stage is considered to be a water tile, letting her gain the maximum stat benefits on any stage, elevating her DPS to modern standards.
• Exusiai
  • Exusiai is a reliable Sniper who can tear apart any enemy that doesn't have high defenses by spraying them with More Dakka, a lot of it. All her skills let her fire bursts of bullets, particularly Overloading Mode, which will make her quickly fire 5 buffed shots per attack to completely vaporize anything without enough DEF. She also gains appreciable bonuses to her attack speed and power by default, the latter of which she can share to another operator. Lastly, she synergizes well with buffers and debuffers, letting her shred even bulkier enemies by simply overwhelming their DEF.
  • Her Y Module makes her even stronger by allowing her to ignore up to 250 DEF by constantly attacking, helping her rip apart enemies with moderately high DEF that she'd normally struggle against.
• Lemuen
  • Lemuen proves her deadly reputation in spite of her handicap by packing absurd damage with a twist against priority targets. Her first talent Diploma Persecutionis Internationalis allows any Laterano Operators, including herself, to tag Elite/Boss enemies after they spend some time in their attack ranges, increasing their damage taken and letting her target them globally for the rest of combat, even if they change phases or leave the map. Meanwhile, Modus Extraditio Fugitivi grants her a bonus to her already-high ATK stat and one extra ammo for her skills after a duration. These are exploited well by her second and third skills: Honesta Missio focuses on her single-target damage by giving her ATK and ASPD buffs, the latter offsetting her archetype's slow attack interval, and only expends ammo to aim at a tagged target and fire a dodge-ignoring shot with a huge ATK scaling of up to 425% on top of the ATK buff, letting her easily deal 5-digit damage in a single bullet. Compounding this, she can instantly fire to execute an enemy if her ATK is larger than the sum of their HP and DEF to save time, and can also use it as a permanent DPS skill against Normal enemies or Elites that die before she can lock on, as the buffs won't wear off until she tags enough stronger targets to spend all her bullets. On the other hand, Salutatio Scopleti: Memento Mori allows her to lock on enemies equal to the number of her ammo to call in up to 5 absurdly damaging AoE airstrikes that can wipe whole groups or immediately nuke a priority target, even those outside of her range if they were already tagged, playing into both the archetype's low DEF prioritization and Elite/Boss assassination roles.
  • Her Module, in addition to the standard Deadeye effect that lets her get SP on non-lethal hits (helping her expedite her skills, especially if she's marked an enemy that she'll always be firing at), can increase the personal ATK buff and ammo buff from her second talent, while also giving Laterano Operators an extra bullet. The extra point of ammo for herself is particularly notable as all her skills have low maximum ammo caps to compensate for the massive damage each bullet can do, turning even one more bullet into a sizeable total damage buff.
• Pozëmka
  • Pozëmka is a physical nuke whose main strength lies in her Automatic Typewriter, which can be summoned anywhere while being invincible, not taking a deployment slot, shredding DEF on hit, having a relatively low redeployment time, and most importantly copying her skills. Her second skill Précis lets her spam her Typewriter more often while dealing quick multihit bursts and saving the skill up as charges; meanwhile, her third skill Opprobrium slightly extends her range while buffing her ATK and attack speed, as well as letting her deal critical damage to targets right in front of her. These already-powerful skills are doubled in might when combined with her Typewriter, letting her deal damage in two areas at the same time or quickly melt priority targets by firing on them together with her Typewriter, giving her insane damage and flexibility.
• Ray
  • Ray is a powerful single-target Sniper who can load bullets that deal incredibly high damage per hit when combining her innately high ATK and massive multipliers on her skills. Her killing power is amplified by her ability to summon her Patrol Partner to expand her already-wide range, prioritize targets around it, and increase the damage they take from her in the area. Her skills all deal high damage, but her third one "See the Light" makes her shine by almost instantly reloading her clip before letting her fire Binding shots that can tie down an enemy for the entire duration while dealing massive damage, with its multipliers being so high that it's common to see Ray dealing several thousand damage per hit to enemies with 2000+ DEF, especially given that her multiple stacking multipliers can result in even small buffs to her own ATK translating to a gargantuan increase in damage per hit. This is further enhanced by its relatively low downtime, which becomes even lower if she manages to score a kill during its activation.
  • Her Module alleviates her ammo flaw a bit by letting her load two bullets on an empty clip, and more importantly, upgrades her pet to increase its damage buff and reduce its redeployment time, letting her cycle it and her S3 almost perfectly.
• Rosa (post-module)
  • Rosa is a good unit who had been steadily suffering from powercreep ever since her release, but her module shot her to the higher rung of the meta by letting her deal an extra amount of her ATK to enemies on top of her DEF ignore, up to 60% for both. Because she prioritizes heavier enemies, who are usually Elites or Bosses, this makes her amazing at killing them regardless of their defenses. Her skills also let her spec into consistent damage or burst/CC, as Split Shot allows her to deal buffed shots to two enemies for a massive 60 seconds (albeit with an equally long cooldown), while Avalanche Breaker lets her hook 4 enemies with Bind and deal a lot of damage to them per second on a relatively low skill cost, giving her crowd control utility as well.
• Typhon
  • Typhon is a tremendously powerful Besieger who offers extreme damage output at nearly unmatched range, turning most tough enemies into swiss cheese in a snap. Sharp as a Beast's Fang lets her ignore up to half of the enemy's DEF when she focuses her attacks against them, while Heavy as the Swamp's Mire inflicts bonus damage and a slow for the first attack landed on them, letting her deal huge damage irrespective of DEF while hamstringing incoming targets. Order of the Icefield lets her fire off two shots at once for extra damage and a chance to stun, and activating it a second time makes the duration permanent, perfect for sustained damage throughout a stage. Her third skill "Eternal Hunt" is instead made for boss killing; it locks on to one enemy in her range, and launches up to 10 superpowered shots that hit multiple times and trigger her first Talent per hit, resulting in a ton of damage when focused on one target. The lock on in particular lets Typhon continue targeting and sniping enemies even if they move beyond her attack range, ensuring they can't escape her.
• Wiš'adel
  • Wiš'adel dropped into the fifth anniversary celebration with a literal bang, instantly carving a spot as a monstrously powerful Flinger who single-handedly created an entirely new standard for damage output. She mainly buffs her damage with the aid of her ridiculously tanky Revenant's Shadows that have stats comparable to Guardian Defenders, which can consistently fire highly-damaging and slowing Arts beams while granting Wiš'adel Camouflage if next to her, making her nearly immortal outside of heavy AoE bombardment. Souvenir also makes her and her turrets deal extra damage while applying marks that can randomly explode when hit by her aftershocks for heavy AoE physical damage and a brief Stun. Combined (especially with her Module, which gives her an extra aftershock and buffs her mark damage), their offskill DPS is comparable to an operator with their skill running. Her skills further buff her destructive power, with Saturated Vengeance letting her bombard enemies with volleys that become more powerful after a certain period, while Explosive Dawn lets her fire 6 shots that deal massive damage per shot over a huge area, ^{For reference...}Each shot is able to do upwards of twenty thousand total damage in an area roughly the size of the Londinium Artillery's blast from Episode 10. including air units, while instantly spawning two of her turrets. Blasting Dawn in particular does enough damage to challenge the game's established ceilings of damage, with enormously high multipliers that not only synergize with ATK buffs, but can easily overwhelm even the most defensively sound enemies in the game through sheer force. With a combination of wide range, near invulnerable survivability, and previously unheard of killing power, Wiš'adel is widely considered to be the most powerful operator in the history of the game.
  • She's just as monstrous in Integrated Strategies as she is in the normal game, if not moreso, as the numerous ATK multipliers on her skill mean any buff to her ATK gets heavily amplified (especially since she benefits from the Hand of Rumble, in itself one of the strongest items in the mode), and the sheer damage and invulnerability she offers is enough to overpower even the ridiculous stat boosts enemies get at the highest difficulties or hardest endings. Saturated Vengeance is also one of the best buff-scaling skills in the game thanks to not relying on the Ammo mechanic while dishing out an absurd number of hits per volley, making it incredible at scaling with ATK, ASPD, and SP buffs to turn her into a nearly perpetual storm of explosives that wipes out everything.

• Liberator Guards seems deceptively subpar with their inability to block or attack at first, with the latter even being represented with a low stat number. However, they will first charge their ATK to triple the original over 40 seconds, and once they are ready, they can unleash havoc with their skills, which further boost their charged ATK with substantial damage multipliers, turning them into among the best burst damage dealers in the game. It helps their skill cycle is usually synchronized with their ATK charging time to ensure they'll be at full power outside of the first deployment. Their defensive stats are no slouch either, as they possess unusually high DEF and especially HP stats, letting them outlast their blocked targets or soak up ranged damage while idle to ensure they aren't completely useless when waiting, while gaining 3 block on skill, useful for holding many enemies or stopping ones that need multiple block to hold. To top it all off, they have a low DP cost that's on par with Vanguards, allowing them to be dropped early to tank ranged damage in advance of bursting enemies. One of their modules improves them by granting them the ability to be deployed already half-charged, alleviating their first deployment problem.
• Bibeak
  • Bibeak is deceptively powerful for a welfare operator owing to her talent and skill. Her Soul Drinker talent makes her gather more attack speed 6 times for every kill she gets, allowing her to deal damage and charge her second skill, Blade Swap, quicker. Said skill has a cheap SP cost, can hold 3 charges at a time, and skewers multiple enemies in front of her with Arts damage and a brief Stun, letting her wipe groups of weaker mobs while constantly stalling slow-attacking enemies. She's particularly known for being able to cheese enemies such as the Mudrock Colossi because she can constantly stun them to interrupt their excruciatingly slow but powerful strikes, as well as being able to spam her skill with ridiculous stun uptime through attack speed or SP buffs in other gamemodes.
• Ch'en the Dawnstreak
  • Ch'en's second alternate version takes the skillset of her original self and cranks it up a few notches, creating an absurd force to be reckoned with. All of her skills possess immense damage output and low cooldowns, with the former being augmented by All-Seeing Eye making her attacks deal either Physical or Arts damage depending on what the target is weaker to, meaning any enemy with lopsided defenses will quickly fall to her. Chi Xiao - Shadowless Speed is a version of her original self's S3 that makes her disappear from the map and launch 10 consecutive slashes on the closest foe, with each one dealing massive damage and, if killing the target, refunds the slash and retargets onto another enemy, meaning she can indefinitely chain attacks and mow down an entire horde of squishier enemies in one skill. Should the skill eventually run out of slashes and the enemy still be standing, she'll teleport herself to their position and gain massive ATK and evasion to finish them off. Chi Xiao - Heaven's Plaint instead takes a leaf out of Such is the Joy of Our Reunion by summoning a massive dragon spirit that travels along ground tiles and turns when hitting high ground, dealing massive Arts damage scaling with the target's current HP, while Ch'en herself gains absurdly damaging triple attacks that hit multiple targets in range at once. As the dragon can only deal damage once but resets this counter when turning, trapping Ch'en and an enemy inside a tight enclosed space to maximize the rebounds can result in the tankiest of enemies being blended in seconds, in particular being extremely good in modes like Reclamation Algorithm or Integrated Strategies where bosses have incredibly inflated HP pools, allowing her to melt hundreds of thousands of HP in a flash. As a bonus, To Know Time's Flow makes her self-sustaining by giving her a periodic heal and guaranteed dodge on the next hit she takes if she hasn't been hit for a while, in particular completely shutting down enemies with slow attack speeds as they won't even be able to touch her.
• Chongyue
  • Chongyue is able to perform Spam Attacks that hit hard due to his absurd ATK scalings on all his skills, as well as his first talent An End to War applying a debuff that majorly increases the damage enemies take from him while having an amazing uptime due to his fast attack speed. His memetic third skill Anatta allows him to frequently perform small AoE strikes that, after enough 5 activations, becomes permanently activated and buffed with a long cross-shaped range extension and double hits, offsetting his 1 block weakness as he can simply punch holes through entire armies before they get to him. This spamming is facilitated by his second talent, All Are Guests, granting him 3 out of 8 SP for his skill each time it defeats at least one enemy, allowing Chongyue to get his permanent buffs quicker and then leveraging them more frequently once it's up. His skills also have an incredible synergy with external ATK buffs as their damage scaling is multiplied from his current ATK stat instead of being a raw ATK buff, letting him strike down even heavily-armored enemies when buffed. His module gives him 15% physical dodge to partially deal with his lack of self sustain, as well as allow him to gain 1 SP from nonlethal strikes during skill and 4 SP from lethal strikes, letting him buff Anatta quicker and use it more frequently.
• Cutter
  • Cutter makes for a deceptively powerful 4-star due to having extreme burst packed into her kit while being much cheaper to raise than her higher-rarity alternatives. All of her skills can hit multiple targets on land or air, and have ridiculously high ATK scalings to offset the Dualstrike archetype's moderate ATK - Redshift delivers a powerful strike 4 times to random targets in range, letting her deal absolutely massive damage if only a single enemy is present, while Crimson Crescent is a powerful AoE skill with a higher multiplier that sweeps 5 targets around her once while dealing double the damage to flying units, giving her a choice between single-target evisceration and crowd clearing. Not only do both of these have generously low SP costs, her Photoetched Marks talent gives her a decent chance to recover 1 extra SP that is only increased by her Module, turning her into a Spam Attack monster that can punch through even armored foes, all while being an incredibly cheap pick for Integrated Strategies making her a Disk One Nuke.
• Degenbrecher
  • The Black Knight's playable debut lives up to her reputation and then some as one of the strongest sources of burst damage in the game. Born Warrior is a passive that gives her a chance to crit on hit and briefly Frighten the target (preventing blocked enemies from attacking), giving her more damage and dueling prowess, while Living Legend also lets her pierce some DEF of Frightened targets, offsetting her weaker basic attacks and letting her skills crush even bulky targets. These all feed into her ace in the hole: Return to Silence. The skill is a brief burst that allows her to attack multiple ground and aerial enemies with many powerful slashes that are always bolstered by both of her talents and pull enemies in so they can't get away. The combined buffs from herself yields a huge damage number per cast, enough to overwhelm the stat of many enemies without any external buffs^note Ignoring enemy DEF, she can reach a theoretical maximum of 39,105 damage per target at max level and potential, while with buffs, she can one-shot bosses due to the multiplicative nature of all her scalings^note For reference, Skadi the Corrupting Heart's S2 adding ~250 ATK alone will increase her S3's total damage by almost 20,000.. It also makes her completely intangible to ensure she can't be harmed by her targets or stage mechanics. As the cherry on top, she breaks the Swordmaster Guard rule of attacking enemies to charge their SP, instead only needing to wait for a relatively quick 30 seconds at normal condition to cast her skill.
  • Her second skill, Silent Derision, deserves a special mention for its ability to be spammed through its low SP cost and charge-storing to lock enemy melee attacks and stall them. This can reach a 100% uptime in modes that significantly buff her SP regeneration or ASPD like Integrated Strategies.
• Executor the Ex Foedere (post-module)
  • After releasing as a merely average Operator due to some drawbacks with his kit, the release of his REA-X module salvages him into one of the best laneholders due to its many buffs, which particularly benefit his best skill, Damnatus Ex Foedere. The skill grants him a massive ATK buff that will further ramp up gradually per ammo consumed, making it hit harder the closer it is to running out. It can also deliver a final slash on every surviving attacked enemy no matter their position, which can be manually done early. While it reduces his attack speed, his Module's ASPD buff somewhat alleviates the penalty. His Module also interacts with his The Chosen One talent, almost doubling the chance of it at making Executor launch a doublestrike from 20% to 35% per attack, which ramps up additively by 5% per ammo spent. This allows him to more reliably charge up his skill or deliver double hits when using it. He also gains new effects that allow him to heal more HP per attack and ignore 300 DEF when he crits, alleviating his lack of ability to be healed directly by another Operator and allowing him to take on even waves of Elite enemies. Such is the power of his upgrade that Reaper Guard modules were released with his debut in the Global server instead of being delayed per the original CN schedule so he could shine sooner.
• Gavial the Invincible
  • Gavial the Invincible is a monstrously powerful laneholder and has largely dethroned Blaze as the game's most powerful Centurion Guard. Her most famous skill is her S2 Chainsaw Assault, which grants her a massive ATK and DEF steroid, expands her range to that of a Spreadshooter Sniper, and turns Gavial into a pseudo-Hookmaster as it sucks in enemies towards her. Additionally, it also has one of the most absurd skill cycles of any skill in the entire game, with a very long duration and low SP cost. Her third skill, Jungle Spirit, instead turns her into a nigh unkillable juggernaut with a huge ATK and ASPD boost and extra block count, alongside taking half damage from all types of damage at the cost of later applying it to her as a damage over time effect after the skill ends. This gives Gavial the ability to hold highly contested lanes with multiple enemies pushing them down, and wiping them out with massive burst damage. She is further boosted by her talents Battle Axe and Medical Background, which increase her ATK and DEF for every enemy blocked and increase her healing received respectively, turning her into an immense statstick while the bonus healing helps her quickly heal off the recoil damage from Jungle Spirit.
  • Furthermore, the slow constant damage over time from her third skill allows her great synergy with other SP batteries like Saria and Quercus whose healing skills can be applied repeatedly over time, keeping her patched up while greatly restoring her SP over time.
  • Gavial the Invincible is also noteworthy for being an excellent partner to the even bigger Game-Breaker Młynar, due to the uptime of her S2 matching closely to the downtime of Młynar's S3. Pairing the two and rotating between their skills creates an absolutely lethal offensive core that easily decimates everything in their general vicinity.
• Lappland
  • Lappland is one of the stronger Lord Guards in general, but when she's in a position where her talent and skills can be put to use she's gamebreakingly powerful. She follows the same Lord Guard archetype as SilverAsh and Thorns, which is generally a flexible class due to their ability to hit both melee and air over long range. What sets her apart is her Power Nullifier passive Spiritual Destruction, which is unlocked early on, causes each attack to inflict a Silence that prevents enemies from using their active skills, and can be kept up on one target permanently at Elite 2. Her second skill Wolf Spirit massively boosts her ATK, takes away the damage penalty normally applied to her ranged attacks, and lets her hit two targets simultaneously. She's capable of nearly trivializing stages that feature Silenceable enemies with dangerous abilities, such as those in Chapter 6 and Stultifera Navis. While some contents nerf her performance by introducing Silence immunity to enemies, her module would later help her by letting her inflict an 8% Fragile easily to unconditionally buff her damage and that of her allies.
• Leizi the Thunderbringer
  • Leizi's new form faced stiff competition from her absurdly powerful Liberator partner Mlynar from the get-go, but managed to carve herself out as a powerful sidegrade that can even surpass him in some situations. With Clarity of Judgment, she randomly strikes tiles in range with Arts lightning every second, and more importantly is in a permanent Take Off state akin to Skyranger Specialists while her skill is inactive, which notably renders her just short of invulnerable and lets her be deployed in positions that would make Ambushers envious.^note Units in a Take Off state largely cannot be targeted except by other aerial enemies, making only Drones able to feasibly damage her. Even while her skill is active and she's targetable, she still has the huge bulk of the Liberator statline to fall back on. Her S1 Nobility Enduring plays into this by being a charge-storing skill that unleashes lightning waves in three directions while not resetting her Gathering Steam trait unless she uses the last stack; the skill only lasting for a split second means Leizi often cannot be hit at all with it equipped, and the damage if she directly lands on a target and hits all three waves is staggering, making it incredible burst damage on demand so long as you don't mindlessly spam it. Shock and Awe extends her range along all nearby connected ground tiles (up to a maximum range identical to Saria's Calcification if she's surrounded by open space) and gives her multi-target attacks that slowly ramp up in potency as her passive procs, with the wide range also showering a huge area in lightning strikes as she slashes everything to ribbons. Meanwhile, All the Thunderlight focuses on enemy control by striking foes with slow but powerful AoE lightning that produces currents that bounce off of high ground tiles, inflicting constant Arts damage with a chance to Frighten; given a tight area to bounce off of, the spam of these currents can incur massive damage with no target limit while permanently keeping her foes Frightened. All of her skills are supplemented by Call to Account unleashing a hail of Frightening lightning bolts across her whole range when a skill is activated, letting her get the jump on even enemies that could threaten her and, with her S1, let her chain multiple Frightens to keep enemies disabled.
• Młynar
  • Młynar's Promoted to Playable status shook the metagame due to his power and durability that has marked him as a candidate for the strongest unit in the game. Although his Liberator subclass means he doesn't block or attack until his skill is charged, he benefits from all of their other strengths as a result, such as a dirt-cheap DP cost, constantly ramping ATK, extremely high bulk that is augmented by Wanderer (grants damage reduction and bonus damage when enough enemies are nearby), and even passive map presence thanks to Unmoved that gives him permanent Taunt while conferring a True damage Attack Reflector to himself and Kazimierz operators. Once his skill is activated, not only does he still have his immense defenses and 3-block to go with it, his S3 Unbrilliant Glory unleashes empowered wide-area slashes while multiplying the ATK from his trait and giving him (and other Kazimierz ops) on-hit True damage, resulting in extreme area DPS that cleaves through everything in a massive range. Despite the buff decreasing for every enemy killed, by the time it's decreased enough to matter, chances are everything on the entire map has been wiped, including tough elites and bosses. His low cost also allows him to be deployed early on and charge his trait, while his inability to block makes it incredibly easy to cover for him during his downtime, then stall long enough for him to get his skill back and wreak havoc. His first module makes him even better by half-charging his ATK stack to ensure the first use of his skill will be at full power, while granting him bonus buffs to his ATK by giving him a minor ATK boost and increasing the multiplier of Wanderer.
• Mountain
  • Mountain defied the Fighter Guard's historical weaknesses by retaining their dirt-cheap DP cost (costing less than some Vanguards of equal rarity at max promotion) while having high enough multipliers in his skills to offset his subclass' lower ATK. His second skill, Sweeping Stance is a toggled skill that can be switched quickly, lowering his defense in exchange for more tankiness from a high HP regeneration, increased block count, the ability to hit all blocked units, and an attack buff to turn him into a self-sustaining laneholder, helped by his talents Forceful Fist letting him crit and decrease the ATK of the enemy constantly with his fast attack speed, and Sturdy Constitution offsetting the DEF lost while granting him some Physical dodge. Meanwhile, his third skill, Earth-Shattering Smash, turns him into a burst damage dealer that has him punch more slowly but hitting twice with more strength, striking 3 targets, and increasing his chance to crit with Forceful Fist. It also pushes away enemies from the 4 tiles next to him, letting him stall them throughout the duration despite his low block count.
• Nearl the Radiant Knight
  • Nearl stops holding back from her 5-star Guardian Defender form and unleashes her true strength as the Radiant Knight to become the epitome of what a strong and powerful Dreadnought Guard should be. Her first talent, Brave the Darkness, allows her to deal AoE True damage and Stun on deployment, giving her extra DPS and some deployment leeway. Once on field, her second talent Daybreak causes her to ignore a sizeable percentage of her target's DEF at minimum, letting her deal hefty physical damage to armored enemies. Both of these talents mesh well with her second skill Night Scouring Gleam, as it allows her to be a helidrop who bypasses the deployment limit as a non-1-star unit while giving her a massive ATK buff and damage-blocking shields on deployment, with the strengths outweighing the redeployment time penalty if the last deployed operator isn't from the same faction as her. Meanwhile, her third skill Blazing Sun's Obeisance eschews helidrop in favor of on-field presence by having her summon a Blazing Sun on a tile, with similar effects as her talent while blocking 2 enemies. At the same time, her range, ATK, and DEF get buffed, and she gets the ability to deal True damage to anyone blocked by her or her summon, letting her crack through armor even more.
• Sakiko Togawa
  • The leader and self-proclaimed "goddess" of Ave Mujica proves to be a goddess on the battlefield as well, playing a requiem for her foes. Sakiko is notable in that she continuously attacks even when there aren't any enemies in range with her first talent Notes of Ode, sending out musical notes that home in on enemies and damage them, and for every note present on the field, all Ave Mujica members ignore a portion of DEF and RES with their attacks, up to a maximum of 60% DEF and 30% RES with a maxed Module, ensuring she punches above her weight class. While her other skills are potent AFK skills, Sakiko's main claim to fame is her third skill Crescent Moon Echoes which expands her attack range and fires off a rapid barrage of empowered notes that seek out enemies with the lowest DEF or RES and deal Arts or Physical damage respectively, which combined with the defense ignore results in truly massive damage potential. Her main downside is that all of her skills are Offensive Recovery with Crescent Moon Echoes having a very high SP cost, but her ability to continuously attack even without any enemies in range mitigates this drawback and allows her to charge it up even without anything to attack. Her second Talent Do Not Fear Forgetting allows Sakiko to extend her attack range based on the deployment placement of the other Ave Mujica members within her vicinity, which with tactical deployments can effectively make Sakiko's reach spread across the stage and even behind her (especially with Uika and Umiri). She also gains Fever every time she deals damage, which when maxed out allows for a free skill for all Ave Mujica members and an extended skill duration in the case of her third skill, and also makes her and other Ave Mujica members unable to die for the Fever's duration, albeit retreating at the end if they took lethal damage.
  • Sakiko's ability to continuously attack makes her benefit exceptionally well from ASPD buffs, allowing her to charge up her skills instantly while simultaneously dishing out an outright deluge of immense damage that also ignores defenses. For this reason, she's an incredibly popular pick for Guard vouchers in Integrated Strategies, synergizing with a large number of collectibles that can turn her into a total goddess of destruction.
  • Naturally, Sakiko becomes even more of a terror when her bandmates are on the field with her, with her presence even elevating them to new heights in turn. The speed at which she charges Fever (rivaled only by Mutsumi when she's constantly taking a beating or attacking with her second skill) lets her whole band spam extra skills like no tomorrow, her penetration applying to all members can lead to even the offensively weaker ones punching well above their weight class (especially offsetting Nyamu's lowered ATK on her splash damage and multhits), and the sheer speed of her hits can render Mutsumi near immortal as each hit shortens the time until she can switch back from her Substitute and prepare another. Uika and Umiri have wide ranges that can easily expand her kill zone across the field, and the former even has a specific targeting quirk that causes her to funnel Sakiko with heals while her skills are active. Umiri meanwhile has a lethal synergy between Sakiko's spammable S1 and her own S1, an AoE burst and likely slow that automatically triggers once for free whenever an Ave Mujica member uses their skill, which Sakiko can easily provide to allow Umiri to hamstring everyone in range.
• SilverAsh
  • SilverAsh has been the Game Breaker personified since the start of the game, to the point where his infamy remains long after being powercreeped. He's an insanely versatile Lord Guard whose first two skills give him niches as a duelist and tank respectively, but is most known for being helidropped before obliterating scores of enemies at a time with his infamous Truesilver Slash, which drops his DEF but gives him a massive ATK boost to deal with even high-DEF enemies, removes the damage drop from his area attacks, and shreds multiple targets over a huge range with an equally long duration of 30 seconds. SilverAsh with Truesilver Slash dealt so much damage and could win so many stages just by being deployed that he reigned virtually unchallenged for 3 years, with only the release of the 6-star Młynar finally challenging his place in the meta due to the similarities in his kit and higher damage multipliers, yet SilverAsh still remains as a monstrous force within the scope of the game. This is aided by the Leader first talent reducing redeployment time for every operator and the Eagle Eyes second talent letting him unconditionally reveal invisible enemies over an extended range, giving him utilities almost no operators are able to match. His Module doubles down on his versatility by personally buffing his damage with extra Arts damage on every attack, as well as giving him a stronger self-ATK buff, a special damage multiplier against Elites/Bosses, and further redeployment time reductions for allies around him with his talent, elevating him back to modern standards.
• Specter
  • Specter is one of the most resilient tankers in the game due to a combination of her Abyssal Regeneration talent, which buffs her health and lets her constantly regain health, and her Bone Fracture skill that massively boosts her attack and more importantly renders her totally immortal for its duration. ^note unless you're facing someone like FrostNova or the Emperor's Blade, who can force-retreat Operators regardless of their HP or state. Having the ability to become unkillable on demand is an incredible luxury able to stop even the toughest of foes in their tracks, and although it stuns her after it expires, this can be a blessing in disguise as her threat priority will go down and melee enemies will not attack her, allowing Specter a moment of respite as her she regenerates. Her mettle was first put to the test during Contingency Contract, where certain enemies are massively buffed such that they can take out supremely tough Defenders like Hoshiguma in a single tap, with some high-risk strategies basically demanding that you had Specter. Only with her Unchained alter's PUM-X module released and upgraded was Specter's staying power finally challenged, yet she still remains an great option for holding down a lane, especially with her synergy with the Abyssal Hunters, with her module in particular granting the whole team a damage boost when fully upgraded.
• Surtr
  • Surtr's ridiculous power and ease of use has caused her to garner infamy ever since her release. Her Molten Flame talent gives her the rare ability to ignore a substantial amount of RES on hit, an invaluable ability that lets her bring down even foes designed specifically to soak up Arts. This meshes well with her third skill, Twilight: As a helidrop skill, she only needs to wait for 5 seconds before she can unleash havoc with her massively buffed ATK, range, and flat +5000 HP buff that also heals her to full health,^note which is unaffected by HP debuff modifiers while being able to strike multiple enemies. While the skill slowly kills her off with an exponential HP drain, she can last long enough to destroy waves of enemies, particularly Elites/Bosses, or at least put a severe dent on them with her catastrophic damage. Facilitating this, her second talent Remnant Ash lets her defy death for a few seconds when killed, giving her up to 9 more seconds of nuclear Arts attacks before she kicks the bucket, which also makes her an excellent staller against enemies with significant health like Specter before her. This talent can extend her third skill's duration at best or ensure she can deliver some retaliation even if she's somehow sniped while helidropping before she can activate the skill at worst. She combines the existing powerful mechanics of Arts damage against high DEF enemies and helidropping to such extent that Hypergryph decided to indirectly nerf her by placing enemy buffs/stage debuffs that punish both her Arts and helidrop advantage, such as in the sixth Contingency Contract.
  • While powercreep has left her a little lacking in damage compared to options like Młynar or Wiš'adel, she returned to the spotlight when Reclamation Algorithm was released and later made into a permanent mode. The mode features unrelenting rushes that come at you from early into the stage, and she happens to be the solution with her devastating multihit and easy deployment, which can be further strengthened by Provisions to reduce her DP cost further or halve her redeployment time to ensure she can be spammed.
• Tequila
  • Tequila is already an unusually powerful free operator and 5-star who introduced the powerful Liberator class and can more than pull his weight in battle, but he also breaks the game in an entirely different way with his RIIC Base skill Investment, which increases the LMD earned from trade offers of at least 4 Pure Gold when he's assigned to a Trading Post, letting you quickly accumulate LMD. It forms the core of the powerful Tequila/Shamare/Bibeak team — Shamare grants the other operators assigned to her Trading Post a +45% productivity buff, making up for Tequila's own lack of a productivity-boosting skill, while Bibeak dramatically increases the odds of receiving high-yield Precious Metal orders^note Kafka and Paprika can both fill this role too. While they all need to be Elite 2, Shamare and Bibeak are fellow 5-star game-breakers and the trio only need few months to return their investment, making it worthwhile to raise them.
• Thorns
  • Thorns is considered to be one of the best Operators when it comes to versatility and sustained damage output, mostly due to his S3, Destreza, that increases his range to that of a Sniper, gives him a hefty buff to his ATK/ASPD, and removes the 20% ATK reduction he normally suffers from as a ranged guard. However, if used a second time, the bonuses double and the duration becomes infinite. Once you let him attack enough to charge his skill twice, he essentially becomes a roided up low-ground sniper who can demolish just about anything that dares enter his range, and he not only has more flexibility regarding his placement, but also still retains the high stats of a Lord on top of his range and fire rate, essentially turning him into a Master of All. The icing on the cake is that his talent Nerve Corrosion makes his attacks deal additional Arts damage over time, doubled against ranged targets, giving him a little bit of extra chip damage to whittle at even high-DEF foes. While he does need some time to set up (making him a poor choice for hectic maps without an SP battery), Thorns with his S3 up is capable of handling a good chunk of most maps by himself, especially since his second talent, Echoes of Ancestral Waves, gives him high HP regen when not attacking to make sure he'll almost always be engaging battle at full health as long as he has a bit of breathing room between waves.
  • Thorns's LOR-X module further accentuates his prestige and amazing strengths as a laneholder. On top of his trait letting him deal an additional hit as Arts damage, his Damage Over Time from Nerve Corrosion now deals more damage and stacks, resulting in a significant damage increase that can rip through mobs even faster. Fully stacked, Thorns can deal 540 DPS to melee enemies with poison alone (600 with Potentials), which doubles to 1080/1200 against ranged enemies, adding onto his solid DPS with S3 and giving him help against enemies with high DEF.
  • His Delta module allows him to inflict Nervous Impairment with his attacks and turns his DoT into an amplified Elemental damage version if the target is under a Nervous burst. Thorns can inflict the burst fairly easily with his high ATK while Destreza is running, doubly so if he has a Nervous support with him, and not only does its Paralysis help him survive longer against enemies that can weather his barrage, the damage of Nerve Corrosion becomes higher than even his previous module, while also ignoring RES that would normally weaken his poison damage.
• Ulpianus
  • Despite the notorious flaws of the Crusher archetype, Ulpianus quickly proves to be a ridiculous unit who overcomes his weaknesses through sheer stats and the natural aspects of his kit. His lack of DEF is counteracted by his first talent Natural Holdfast, which heals him for up to 100 HP (160 if he's below half HP) when he takes damage, which notably works on ANY source of damage of any amount, meaning he can casually No-Sell or even reverse DoT effects or Death of a Thousand Cuts. His second talent Nourish the Blood grants him up to 9 stacks of HP and ATK each time he scores a kill, with other Abyssal Hunters gaining half of this amount; this is a welcome stat boost for him to have, as it improves his survivability and damage for free, and the other Abyssal Hunter units certainly won't mind the extra stats. His second skill Boundaries Must Be Kept turns him into one of the most powerful AFK statsticks in the game after it winds up, tremendously buffing his HP, ATK, Block, and first talent's healing, to the point where he can hit over 10000 HP and 4000 ATK without accounting for external buffs or his talent stacks, along with his buffed block and self-heal allowing him to drastically increase his survivability and offense. His third skill Paths Must Be Opened instead boosts his HP and ATK even more than his second skill and having him throw his anchor forward, which upon impact or reaching its maximum range deals a huge amount of splash damage while stunning targets hit for a hefty 6 seconds. However, if the tile his anchor lands on is a deployable tile, Ulpianus will teleport to that tile, giving him the opportunity to wail on them with his massive buffs for 25 seconds, which they might not be able to immediately retaliate against on account of his initial stun; in the event that Ulpianus is somehow in danger, you can manually end the skill to pull him back to his original spot, giving him a chance to recuperate before commencing another assault, which is helped by the skill also only having a 25 second cooldown at M3, giving it insanely good uptime and cycling.
  • Ulpianus is already strong by his own merit, boasting great survivability, fantastic damage, and the capacity to hold lanes and burst down enemies in equal measure. However, it's once you take Ulpianus and give him buffs from the other Abyssal Hunters that things truly get ridiculous, as his immense base stats allow him to take maximum advantage of their various stat buffs.^{To be exact}Gladiia can grant him 30% damage reduction against Physical and Arts damage while restoring 3.5% of his titanic HP pool every second, massively enhancing his survivability and all but neutering the main flaw of the Crusher archetype. Specter the Unchained can pump up that HP pool by another 30% while speeding up his cooldowns by an immense 50%, which solves the problem of his second skill's long time to activate while propelling his first and second skills to new heights by letting him spam them constantly. Skadi can boost his already high ATK by 22% and can ALSO give him an extra 20% max HP, and Andreana can help him beat enemies down even quicker by granting him an extra 20 ASPD. With them in hand, Ulpianus becomes a stat-stick unmatched by any other unit in the game, with a fully buffed Ulpianus being an absolute titan that refuses to die and slaughters damn near anything that gets in his way, and will similarly crank up his fellow Abyssal Hunters' already excellent performance with his flat stat boosts which take effect before any of their own buffs.^note To put it into perspective just how absurd Ulpianus is with full squad buffs, he can easily hit over 15000 HP and 6000 ATK when his skills are running, which with Gladiia's buff translates to 500+ HP regeneration each second alongside 30% DR, while his S2 can effectively reduce incoming damage by another 200-320; for comparison, his healing becomes roughly as much as Ptilopsis' Enkephalin on a permanent regen passive, which combined with the DR and his five-digit health means that almost nothing in the game can even hope to kill him. Offensively, he's just as absurd, with his S3 in particular having single-target DPS and total damage rivaling that of Młynar while being on a sub-20s cooldown thanks to Specter.
  • As an extra bonus, Ulpianus' third skill counts as him being redeployed, so he will not only purge most debuffs from himself when using it (albeit also purging buffs) and reset his aggro to peel for his allies, he also benefits from effects from Integrated Strategies that grant buffs on deployment, or affect initial SP. The latter in particular can be extremely devastating since his S3 starts with very little SP needed to charge it, potentially letting him repeatedly throw his anchor, return, and repeat the process infinitely to burst or stunlock an enemy without any risk of retaliation, with enough SP buffs potentially giving it a cooldown of zero, making him quite literally an infinitely-exploding and unkillable cruise missile as long as you can spam the button fast enough. It also gives him some deceptively powerful Mundane Utility in Reclamation Algorithm thanks to being able to constantly gather resources and return them to the inventory without retreating.
• Zuo Le
  • Zuo Le bucks the usual trend of Soloblades being on the weaker side due to his complementary talents and skills that are designed to fully synergize with the nature of his archetype. His first talent Candlelight's Shadow grants him less ASPD than the usual Soloblade talent, but makes up for it by buffing his SP recovery speed by up to +2.3/s, which is aided by his second talent Self-Evident Virtue also giving him a chance to generate 1 SP every time he attacks, which more than triples when his HP falls below 50%. Both of these feed well into his primary skills due to their low cooldowns, turning him into a Spam Attack monster unmatched by nearly any unit in the game. His S2 Risktaker works around his HP limitations by cutting his current HP by half, but granting him a Barrier scaling off his max HP at M3 and can stack up to twice his max HP, giving him what's effectively a ton of extra HP while still instantly triggering the full buffs from his talents; he also gets a massive ATK buff and +1 block count while striking both enemies at the same time, turning him into a pseudo-Reaper Guard since he can have this skill up nearly permanently. Meanwhile, Blessings Upon Yan makes him immediately slash 7 times in the three tiles in front of him for massive damage, with the last slash dealing twice that and stunning those hit for 5 seconds, while converting his HP recovery from his talent into giving him 3x the Barrier instead; this not only decimates everything in front of him and stuns foes for long enough for him to to get his skill running again without his targets attacking or getting past him, the Barrier can grant him an absurd amount of survivability considering the number of hits he's dishing out, while still not compromising his buffs. Such a ridiculously cheap and potent combination of damage, survivability, and utility address many of the weaknesses of the Soloblade branch: his massive Barriers can reliably tank most types of damages without relying on RNG, he addresses his 1-block weakness by directly buffing his block count or spamming his AoE stun nukes with S3, and naturally deals just as much damage as he can take while also regenerating his Barriers. He does have his downsides, like his Barrier gradually decaying once his skill ends and his need to constantly stay at critical HP to retain his skills' spammability, but the low effective SP cost means he's likely to survive with only a little hit to his actual HP before he just gets his shield back, while the latter weakness actually makes him best-suited to handle high-difficulty content where he can take the enemies' ferocious attacks on the chin to keep his HP low, before retaliating with a vengeance.

• Cuora
  • Cuora is widely considered to be among the most overpowered 4-star operators and a hell of a Disc-One Nuke if you get her early, thanks to her absurdly high base DEF for her rarity, a talent and Module that both simply increase her DEF even more, and a skill in Shell Defense that further raises her DEF to upwards of two thousand, while giving her regen and +1 Block, the latter of which is an extreme rarity even among higher rarity Defenders. Coupled with the fact that Protector Defenders tend to lose value once you hit high level content due to most of them doing little but blocking, Cuora's 4-star rarity makes her much less costly to raise in the early game when resources are scarce and where she is most valuable, and also makes her a cheap pick in Integrated Strategies where she can scale with survivability-buffing Collectibles. Even later in the game with harder-hitting enemies, Cuora's sheer durability lets her outcompete almost every other Defender in the game in terms of pure physical bulk^note It's telling that Cuora is just about one of the only, if not only operator who can reliably facetank the Rampaging Abnormal Manglerbeast from 16-12 with just needing one Medic, relieving a lot of time pressure when it comes to deploying costlier operators who can dispatch the thing as quickly as possible, but are comparatively fragile, with the only credible competitors being Hoshiguma and Nian, who are two rarities higher and limited to Kernel and Limited banners respectively, whereas Cuora can be obtained commonly from Recruitment.
• Horn
  • Horn is an extremely powerful Fortress Defender with excellent killing power and very versatile skills that all see use in many situations. Her first skill Flare Grenade is an automatic charge-based skill that fires off a round with increased splash range that removes any invisibility from enemies, giving her great utility while also being perfect for AFK strategies. Her second skill Tempest Command empowers her next 10 attacks to deal increased splash damage regardless of range, with the remaining 5 attacks dealing extra Arts damage, and when manually cancelled, Horn consumes her HP to immediately fire off all remaining rounds for burst damage, making it excellent for instant extreme burst. Her third skill Ultimate Line of Defense greatly boosts her ATK and speeds up her attacks to that of a Marksman Sniper, with the ATK buff doubling after half its duration has passed in exchange for steadily draining her HP, letting her obliterate waves of enemies at a safe range. Her Talents are also excellent, with her first Talent boosting the ATK of all Defenders when she's deployed, and her second Talent granting her an Auto-Revive that halves her max HP, but also boosts her DEF and ASPD.
  • Horn's FOR-X module is a small but appreciable buff to her already massive power. On top of making her deal 10% more damage to blocked enemies, amplifying her ability to flatten chokepoints, it gives her her some more ATK/DEF to work with and up to 8% more ATK on Military Fortress, further buffing her own strength and that of her team. On the other hand, those seeking to maximize her power as a long-range artillery should look towards her FOR-Y module, which provides her an unconditional +10 ASPD for its base effect on top of adding up to +8 additional ASPD and +8% DEF onto her Bloodbath Talent before its pre-activation, and a further ASPD/DEF buff after activation, giving Horn a significant boost in personal DPS once her Talent is fully set up.
• Hoshiguma
  • Skillset-wise, Hoshi is a very vanilla Defender compared to others in this page. Stats-wise however, she's an absolute monster. She has one of the highest base DEF stats in the game, which can easily be boosted to above 1,000 by her 2nd skill, Thorns, which stands out among other Operators for being one of the few true passive abilities, meaning it buffs her DEF instantly and permanently upon deployment. While the total DEF granted by the skill is low compared to most active skills used by Defenders, the permanent uptime gives it a much greater value than its numbers suggest, as it means Hoshiguma can persistently tank enemies without a dependence on being on-skill, and her ability to Counter-Attack any enemy that attacks her with this skill up lets her take down very long-ranged or global ranged enemies with ease. Thanks to her first talent, Tactical Armor, she also has up to a 31% chance to totally negate any incoming damage, which means if the Random Number God is being kind, she can shrug off multiple One Hit Kills that would fell other Defenders, making her far tankier than even her raw stats would suggest. It says something about her power that for such a vanilla first-gen Operator, she still sees regular use when it comes to tanking the nastiest enemies and bosses, even well into the game's 5th year iteration—if anything, she's often considered better in the modern meta than she was at launch due to heavier-hitting enemies raising the bar for defense in general; if Hoshi (or Nian) can't tank it, that enemy is probably not supposed to be tanked. In general, though a common piece of advice is to prioritize offense over defense when it comes to starting players, Hoshiguma is a valuable unit for the endgame due to her defensive prowess alone allowing her to hold dangerous enemies in challenging game modes that would easily take out otherwise competent and versatile tank archetypes such as Juggernauts or Guardians.
  • She also has great synergy with the PRO-Y module which permanently raises her block cap up to 4 and gives her bonus ATK after her Tactical Armor blocks an attack, not only increasing her holding power against a larger number of foes, but also allowing her to block the occasional enemy with a 4-block requirement such as IS#2's Theatre Golems, Lone Trails's "Traffic Tower" models, and Where Vernal Winds Will Never Blows's Sandwalkers.
• Hoshiguma the Breacher
  • Hoshiguma's alter version proves to be just as amazing of a tank as her original, with massively ramped up killpower to boot. Her main source of durability comes from her first Talent Gouka, which makes her enter the Ātmagrāha state when her HP hits below 0. While in this state, Hoshiguma becomes unhealable by other allies but can take up to 200% of her max HP in damage before going down for real, functionally tripling her already high HP, and if she takes no damage for a few seconds, she'll gradually regenerate that pseudo-HP and leave the state at 1 HP, rendering her just short of immortal as she'll often just withstand the damage until all threats are dead, then recover and keep fighting. This is aided by Oni Battle Stance giving her increasing ATK and RES as she loses health, making it even easier for her to overturn the odds. Her skills are also very versatile and augment her durability and attack power in their own way; Bitter Karma permanently boosts her ATK and DEF while delivering painful Counter Attacks to any enemy that hits her, while Anadi-Avidya has her spin her shield in a wide area around her that rapidly shreds enemies in range while also healing her off the damage dealt and making her attacks hit 3 times while the shield spins. Her main strength is her third skill Hell Itself, which turns her into a multi-target killing machine with a huge range, followed by reactivation of the skill further empowering her for a set time while making her and every ally in range unkillable for the entire duration, albeit at the cost of instantly retreating her when the duration ends - a duration that is often long enough for Hoshi and her team to survive impossible enemy assaults and wipe them all out with no fear of death, or simply allow Hoshi herself to perform a Last Stand against a horde of foes too deadly to tank normally. ^note Despite appearing to forcibly retreat Hoshiguma, it's actually treated as if you manually retreated her, which refunds you half her DP cost!
  • She has insane synergy with Exusiai the New Covenant and her third skill that can redeploy a ground ally with the longest redeployment time. Hoshiguma can drop in, unleash Hell Itself, manually deactivate it to power it up and retreat, then activate Exusiai's third skill to drop Hoshiguma in again, with the bonus SP granted letting her activate Hell Itself right away for another round of superstrong Arts nukes.
• Liskarm
  • The sheer utility of Liskarm cannot be stressed enough. Despite her otherwise lackluster kit, Liskarm is heavily prized for one reason: her talent. Starting from Elite 1, Liskarm gains the Tactical Defense talent that gives 1 SP to all operators placed on tiles in the four cardinal directions to her, making her a great battery for those who require a lot of SP to fire their skills. While one don't normally get much mileage out of it due to the slow attack rate of most enemies in the game, when she's being mobbed or wailed upon by units with very high ASPD (e.g. Brawlers), Liskarm starts churning out SP at a staggering rate, such that most operators won't even have a moment of downtime in between skill uses. If you've got Aak, you can even produce your own SP burst whenever you desire (and Aak's skills are off cooldown). When placed next to Vanguards with auto skills, Liskarm can kick their DP generation into overdrive, while her sitting next to Medics or certain Defenders will allow them to output unparalleled healing, and turn main DPS operators into damage monsters.
• Mudrock
  • Mudrock is a powerful Juggernaut who makes up for her inability to be directly healed with very high stats all around and a plethora of ways to make sure she stays healthy. Her first talent Ward of the Fertile Soil causes her to periodically generate stacking shields which not only each negate an instance of damage (as well as any statuses that it would have dealt), but also heal her for up to 22% of her max HP when one breaks, meaning she can easily brush off normally lethal attacks with even more health than she had before. This alone gives Mudrock insane survivability considering each stack only takes 9 seconds to generate, but her second skill Crag Splitter is a fast-charging attack that strikes all foes around her for massive damage and a potential stun while also healing her for a percentage of her max HP. Combine the two with her high stats, and you get a Defender who can output massive damage while still refusing to die, laughing at onslaughts that would have killed just about anyone else as her shields and S2 keep her HP topped up. And if one wants to forgo a bit of sustain for some crowd control, her third skill Bloodline of Desecrated Earth is both a slow and a delayed AoE stun that also gives her significant ATK and DEF buffs along with rapid multi-target attacks and temporary intangibility and invulnerability during the startup. During this downtime of 10 seconds, she also generates another shield layer as a failsafe should something go wrong. Her Elite 2 talent Unshakeable Solidarity that makes her take 30% reduced damage from Sarkaz enemies is the icing on the cake, since despite its Situational Sword nature, Sarkaz enemies more often than not tend to be Demonic Spiders - which made her a common pick in CC Cinder, where the permanent map almost solely spawns annoying Sarkaz at you. In particular, this talent is part of why she is a great counter against Sarkaz Lancers, considering that they tend to spin around long enough for her shields to generate and completely nullify their boosted charge that would One-Hit Kill any other operator.
  • Mudrock also has a very potent synergy with Blemishine, whose Knight of Sword and Shield talent causes skills that use defensive SP recovery to also gain SP on attack...which includes Mudrock's Crag Splitter. With its SP rate now effectively doubled in most situations, Mudrock can spam this with even more impunity, often being able to fire it off every other attack if the situation lines up well, which in turn will turn her into a living blender that minces anyone nearby while healing herself faster than enemies can hurt her. Helping further is that since Blemishine's second skill Deterring Radiance is classified as gradual HP recovery instead of healing, it's able to heal Mudrock despite her normally being unable to be healed by allies.
  • She's also the perfect Operator to deal with the Londinium Artillery mechanic in Chapter 10, to the point of near-necessity in the harder levels. Not only can her barrier No-Sell the Artillery shots while her beefy HP pool lets her eat a direct hit even if her shields are down, but her second skill will also go into overdrive when she's mobbed by the Reborn Creations that infest the level, allowing her to kill them while keeping herself healed as long as she isn't under Necrosis.
  • And on top of that, her Module makes her even more broken than before. Alongside the sizeable stat buffs and giving her 15% damage reduction against enemies she's blocking, it also improves her first talent's barriers to heal slightly more and additionally grant her 2 SP when they pop. This not only greatly improves the uptime on her third skill, but also ramps up her second skill's activation rate into overdrive, making her even more of a blender!
• Nian
  • Nian is a uniquely powerful Defender who shines in high-end content. Similar to Hoshiguma, Nian boasts among the highest base DEF stats among Defenders, and her skillset further capitalizes on her defensive prowess. Her second skill Copper Seal improves her personal blocking utility by granting her Block, massively boosting her DEF, and damaging and silencing enemies that attack her, improving her already great durability even further, while her third skill Iron Guard focuses on team utility by greatly boosting Nian and her allies' DEF in a large area alongside extra Block and Status Resistance while also massively boosting her own ATK. Her Talents grant her 3 shields that can block any attack on deployment, and boost all Defenders' max HP, which further augments her own durability. With the increasing stat creep on newer enemies and with how high-end content has evolved to better incentivise the use of high-defense blockers, Nian's unique role in boosting her and her team's overall durability becomes a valuable tool to have.
• Penance
  • As the second 6☆ Juggernaut, Penance compensates for what appears like a massive Achilles' Heel in her lack of self-healing with her ability to gain Barrier with her Guardian of the Law Talent, which gives her a hefty Barrier on deployment that recovers on each kill, up to a cap of triple her already significant maximum HP, making her nigh immortal if she can get enough stacks. With her second Talent, Wreathed in Thorns, Penance shows she can give as good as she gets by reflecting half of her current ATK as Arts damage to attackers as long as she has any Barrier from her talent. While building up Barrier through killing enemies normally takes time, Penance can skip a huge part of the process with her third skill, Trial of Thorns, which immediately grants her a massive amount of Barrier and a colossal boost in ATK. While it also increases her attack interval, the bonus ATK feeds into the damage reflected with Wreathed in Thorns, allowing Penance to punish enemies foolish enough to attack her (and ranged enemies are forced to do so as her third skill also increases her target priority) with massive damage while being virtually unkillable. Though Penance has the weakness of being much less flexible than Mudrock, due to needing to kill enemies to generate Barrier and thus being susceptible to Kill Steal from allies and thus requiring a team that supports her rather than the other way around, the payoff from Penance's huge power is more than worth it. And under the right circumstances, who needs a team at all when you can bring down Patriot and his forces all by yourself?^however...It's worth noting that Penance has a specific advantage here as her Talent reflects damage for every tick of Patriot's damaging aura, but this also shows that she excels at punishing rapid barrages of damage, which is something Mudrock's shields is less suited to handle.
  • Penance's module also makes her even more of a wall by making her take 15% less damage from blocked enemies, and buffing both the initial Barrier on deployment and the amount she gains on kill, making it easier for her to snowball into an unkillable beast.
• Saria
  • Saria is an excellent Guardian Defender who has remained consistently powerful ever since the game's launch, thanks to the highly versatile nature of all of her skills that is nearly unmatched by any other support operator. Her first skill First Aid is a charge-based skill that instantly heals any allied operator below half health within her surrounding range by a massive amount, and her second skill Medicine Dispensing greatly heals all allies in a large range around her on a quick charge time. Her third skill Calcification focuses on crowd control and utility by greatly reducing all enemies' movement speed and greatly amplifying the Arts damage they take in a large range, while also rapidly healing all allied operators in said range. Her Talents further improve her strengths, with her first talent steadily boosting her ATK/DEF over time, while her second Talent restores 1 SP to any ally she heals with her skills, further improving her great utility. Her sheer versatility makes all of her skills worthy of full Mastery, and even with the release of Shu outclassing her, Saria still remains an exceptionally potent operator that pulls her weight in basic and advanced content alike.
  • Saria's two modules both further elaborate on her strengths in different ways. The X module gives her 15% bonus healing on targets below half health (which has great synergy with her emergency healing S1, which only targets units below half health anyways), and lets her provide more SP to allies she heals, furthering her role as a SP battery. Meanwhile, the Y module grants her 15% damage reduction while increasing the ATK/DEF buffs on her Rhine Charged Suit, which grants her a boost to her already high durability while still buffing the overall power of her heals.
• Shu
  • Shu proves to be an insanely powerful Guardian Defender with a kit that boasts amazing defensive and offensive utility. To start, her first talent, Myriad Grains, Everlasting, allows her to "Sow" a tile and the four surrounding tiles when healing an Operator on that tile, and Sowed tiles will both constantly heal allies every second and give them a small Sanctuary effect. This is an excellent source of constant sustain and defense, as tiles will remain Sowed forever as long as Shu remains on the field, and most importantly, ANY allied unit can recieve the benefits, including summons and unhealable units. Her second talent, From Seasons Fourfold, brings three seperate teamwide buffs for meeting their generally uncomplicated conditions: if there are three Operators with different job branches on the field, every operator gains max HP; if there are three Operators with the same job on the field, every operator gains ASPD; finally, although a daunting task, if there are four [Sui] Operators in the squad, every operator gains more ATK and a rare SP generation buff. Her main claim to fame is her third skill, Samsara, which greatly expands Shu's healing range and her ATK while simultaneously boosting the ATK and ASPD of all allies on Sowed tiles. More famously, any enemy that steps on a Sowed tile during the skill's duration is immediately warped back to that tile if they dare to go too far. This has very versatile applications both offensively and defensively; particularly slippery enemies cannot escape the onslaught of Shu's empowered allies, and especially dangerous enemies will be unable to threaten Shu's more fragile allies when they are dragged back. With a combination of absurdly high healing per second and a particularly unique utility that no other operator has, Shu's prowess actually manages to rival, if not surpass Saria.
  • Samsara's ability to warp actor/entity objects also literally breaks open a couple of major event mechanics when said events had their reruns after Shu's debut - Lone Trail's Planetary Debris can be made to slide upwards or downwards endlessly as Samsara teleports them back after they slide past and thus allowing players to pummel enemies with the debris repeatedly, while the normally-invincible boss Clement in the CN server rerun of Hortus de Escapimo can be stalled with Samsara until a destructible floor panel gives way, allowing you to drop him into a pit to get rid of him instantly and thus immediately breaking the scripts that would normally have him calling the civilians to run in specific directions to make things harder in defending them.^HoweverSadly, this exploit was patched in the Global Server by making Clement immune to the effects of Samsara. She also can be used to mess with bosses that rely on teleporting to a new area of the map for a phase transition (like Anastasio or Pancho), which when combined with insta-kill hazards that the boss would normally never be exposed to normally can result in an instant win against them by simply teleporting them back into danger.
• Yu
  • Yu is a versatile Defender like his older sisters. His durability is enhanced by his You Feed Me, I Feed You and Midst Markets, Dragons Dwell talents, which respectively gives him a hefty Sanctuary buff when blocking and lets him regenerate HP and his elemental bar if there are at least four Operators on the field. However, the core of his capability revolves around enabling Burn Elemental damage: You Feed Me, I Feed You also grants him the ability to do Arts and Burn Damage Over Time to blocked enemies, dealing significant Elemental damage when it pops, while the Arts DoT takes advantage of the temporary hefty RES cut. This is taken further by his skills; For Guests, Bounteous Gifts boosts his personal ability by allowing him to immediately teleport enemies to himself while giving hefty buffs to his block, HP, and ATK while converting his attack to Arts, letting him quickly proc Burn to leave his enemies vulnerable or just kill them outright. Meanwhile, Enter the Stove's Palm further supports allied Arts damage dealers by creating a firewall that imbues Arts attacks passing through with Burn, with the side ability of buffing both Yu and every Operator, the former with attack power and durability buffs, and the latter by granting Yu's regen to them and randomly destroying projectiles that touch his wall. With this skill running, every Arts dealer becomes Primal-esque Burn damage dealers that can melt down enemies with high RES, which especially synergizes with global range Casters like Goldenglow or Lappland the Decadenza, RES debuffers like Gnosis, or Arts damage Guards with high stats like Viviana, Surtr, Qiubai, or Sakiko.

• Ceobe
  • Ceobe is an incredibly versatile Caster who at first can seem rather underwhelming when compared to the other six star casters, but eventually becomes goes from Awesome, but Impractical into a clear case of Magikarp Power. She specializes in obliterating high-DEF targets with her first talent Thresher, which causes her to deal bonus Arts damage equal to up to 40% of the target's DEF on hit. Casters are already designed to tackle enemies that would laugh off physical damage, but Ceobe takes this further, eviscerating any DEF-stacking units even if they have lots of HP. Her skills all modify her attack pattern and let her take on different roles: Really Cold Axe lets her stall unblocked enemies, Really Hot Knives lets her focus high-DEF enemies to practically liquefy them, and Really Heavy Spear temporarily turns her into a physical unit that seeks out low-DEF targets with incredibly damaging spears that Silence the target. She's particularly good in modes where enemies have extremely inflated DEF, like high-risk runs of Contingency Contract or similar modes, since Thresher turns the massive DEF steroids many of the enemies gain against them while mitigating any ATK penalties (as they don't reduce Thresher's bonus damage), letting her punch through the buffed foes better than any other - against enemies with massive DEF, very few sources of Arts damage are able to compete with her.
  • Her module makes her even better, as not only will her attacks ignore 10 RES by default, her first talent's damage now also ramps up when she attacks the same target (up to a whopping 75% of the target's DEF per hit after 5 attacks), doubling down on her role as a tank shredder and making her one of the premier units to tackle enemies with high mixed defenses, which start showing up often in late-endgame content. Considering her second skill increases her attack speed and is often used to lock on to big beefy targets anyways, this is very easy to stack, and her DPS is significantly improved as a result, single-handedly turning her from a fringe pick into a mainstay in most endgame events. However, because the place that she shines the most happens to be in optional endgame content, some people may overlook her - but put things into perspective, by the time enemies reach DEF in the 4 digits, Ceobe can easily outdo even other fellow Game-Breaker casters like Logos.
• Eyjafjalla
  • Eyjafjalla is a ridiculously powerful Caster who has remained consistently amazing ever since the game's launch, simply thanks to how potent her skills are. Her second skill Ignition fires off a blast that not only deals heavy Arts damage, but also hits in a splash area and debuffs the enemy's RES, which gives her the waveclearing power of a Splash Caster with none of their usual downsides (eg. slow ASPD or high cost), while storing charges with a very fast cooldown. Meanwhile, her third skill Volcano focuses on mass annihilation by turning her attacks into a multi-target shower of magma over a huge range, melting hordes, elites, and bosses alike. Her Talents further accentuate her strengths by increasing the ATK of all Casters including herself, and additionally granting her a large amount of SP upon deployment, letting her either fire off multiple casts of Ignition immediately or expedite her first Volcano. On top of that, getting her Module not just upgrades her Caster buff (also making it take effect even if she's not deployed), but lets her ignore 10 RES by default, which combined with Ignition means not even magically bulky enemies are safe. Such is Eyjafjalla's power in that she has made nearly every Caster in the game struggle to match her prowess, and only with the release of the equally ridiculous Logos was her top spot finally challenged, and she still remains a very powerful operator, especially considering that combining the two makes them both even stronger.
• Goldenglow
  • Goldenglow is a Mech Accord caster that that is frighteningly powerful, combining high Arts DPS and AoE, a Supporter's crowd control capability, and a Deadeye Sniper's infinite range. The core of her kit is her talent, Beacon's Wrath, which bucks the trend of just being a standard drone talent by also gathering a chance for each drone to explode the longer it attacks a target. This also plays well with her skills, but especially with her third skill, Crystalline Shine, that disables her normal attacks but releases her drones...and turns the drones' range into the entire map as well as attaching a brief Slow to every attack that the drones get in. This lets her wreak havoc across the entire map and catch leaks (since she also follows normal targeting priority, unlike the other few operators who have a global range possibility). The cherry on top is her second talent, Precise Redirection, that lets her and her drones ignore a portion of the targets' RES, meaning that it bothers her much less than it does for most other Casters.
  • She is infamous in Integrated Strategies for becoming a beast once she has garnered certain artifacts under her belt due to her ability to scale well with a variety of stats. This is most notable with ASPD buffing items, which cause her to rapidly kill targets while spending as little time as possible when offing each individual target; saving you resources and time while increasing the chances of her drones exploding for massive damage. There is also this clear of Crimson Solitare's third boss which is practically made for a beefed up Goldenglow. This is because its assistants damage and debuff anyone near it, and Goldenglow can kill them anyway even without being in the area of effect. The assistants also do not detect her drones, letting her gun them down with impunity.
  • Goldenglow's module further empowers her by increasing the initial damage her drone can do, which helps with her low base ATK and allows the drone to ramp up its attack percentage on the same enemy quicker, while also significantly buffing the damage her drones do when exploding to further amp up her DPS. Her second Module instead doubles down on her long-term damage by increasing the damage cap of the drone while giving her more RES penetration, making her even more of a terror against singular high-bulk enemies.
• Ifrit
  • Ifrit specializes in burning her enemies to a crisp with her powerful flames, no matter how resilient to Arts they may be, thanks to her Talent Spiritual Dissolution which heavily debuffs the RES of all enemies in her range by a hefty 40%, ensuring she and her fellow Arts damage dealers can put out consistent damage. Ifrit herself is no slouch in the damage department thanks to her massive ATK that hits everything in her long linear range simultaneously, with her second skill Pyroclasm firing off a heavy burst of Arts damage that additionally debuffs enemy DEF and inflicts Damage Over Time on a low cooldown and multiple charges, while her third skill Scorched Earth steadily drains her HP in exchange for dealing constant damage that additionally debuffs enemy RES by a good amount, which synergizes perfectly with her first Talent and makes her support to Arts attackers even more ridiculous. To top it all off, Ifrit's Rhine Loop talent grants her 2 bonus SP every few seconds, speeding up the cooldowns of her already fast charging skills and turning her into a Spam Attack monster. Ifrit has remained exceptionally powerful since launch, and is a very welcome addition to any Arts heavy team compositions.
• Lappland the Decadenza
  • The new, unleashed version of Lappland follows in the footsteps of both her old self and Goldenglow before her by delivering immense amounts of Arts damage and crowd-control anywhere on the map. Alpha Wolf gives her a Gathering Steam effect that gradually ramps up her drones' potency, up to giving her an extra drone and inheriting her Lord version's Power Nullifier, greatly amplifying her damage and letting her shut down ability-based Demonic Spiders just as well as her old self. Her bread and butter is Finale: Catastrofe, which unleashes up to four empowered drones that will independently seek and destroy their closest targets from anywhere on the map, applying Damage Over Time and a movement slow to enemies nearby, while also inflicting Fear when the drones first sink their teeth into their targets. The sheer damage and AoE the drones deal can quickly empty the entire map of smaller enemies while her crowd-control disrupts their formations, and if only a few targets are left, they'll converge and rip them to shreds together, not to mention Lappland herself can still attack enemies directly in her range with her boosted ATK.
• Lin (post-module)
  • Lin initially starts off as a decent Phalanx Caster, able to tank some attacks quite well due to the Phalanx branch's innately high defenses coupled with Foolproof Plan's Crystal Barrier negating any damage below 200, while also shattering to damage and stun enemies that can overcome it as it regenerates. However, she suffers from poor uptime and long cooldowns on her skills, with her Shrouded Strength not being reliable enough to mitigate it due to only being a 50-55% chance to gain 1 SP when she's attacked. All of that changes drastically once her module is unlocked and fully upgraded: In addition to letting her retain half of her archetype's massively increased defenses when her skill is active (while also raising them further when it isn't), it also upgrades Shrouded Strength to a much more reliable 75-80% chance to gain 2 SP whenever she's attacked, which significantly improves the uptime of her primary skill Riving Nighttails, which massively increases her attack range and power alongside increasing the damage nullification threshold of her Crystal Barrier, which also explodes and instantly reforms for extra damage should Lin score a kill during the skill's duration, turning her into a highly fearsome tank-nuker hybrid. With her module and maxed out defenses, Lin is capable of completely nullifying any physical damage that is 1250 and below, which is nearly every single physical ranged attack in the game, letting her draw in any physical enemy fire and retaliating with exceptional damage. Among the highly cutthroat competition of Casters, Lin manages to stand out with her ludicrous tankiness, capable of taking attacks that not even some Defenders would be comfortable taking.
  • In particular, the release of Battleplan Underdawn, the second iteration of the revamped Contingency Contract, practically turned Lin into a celebrity overnight as she became the primary counter (and potentially only real counter) to the Nethersea Reefbreakers at higher risks, where their Gathering Steam ability is so intense that even the tankiest of units would fall in seconds, while also being invisible to negate bombardment; this wasn't helped by the entire map practically being a no-melee zone thanks to the ridiculously damaging Nethersea Brand everywhere. Lin was not only a ranged-tile tank that could ignore the Brand, because the Reefbreakers' ATK-stacking relies on them dealing damage to proc, Lin's Crystal Barrier completely nullifying damage below the threshold allows her to stop their stacking, upon which they would be left futilely attacking her with their minimal base ATK - and with a risk that buffed their ASPD to the point that they had no time between attacks, this allowed her to stall them indefinitely whereas any other unit would have been vaporized. As a result, Lin went from a situational fringe pick to being present in pretty much every high-risk clear of Underdawn.
• Logos
  • Logos lives up to his position as an Elite Operator and heir of the Banshees and then some with his unorthodox yet devastating kit. Lexical Evolution is a chance proc that gives his attacks a chance to inflict an additional weaker hit to a random enemy in range (including themselves) and briefly slow them, letting him moonlight as a psuedo-Chain Caster while giving him free damage, while Requiem Aeternam allows him to strengthen both himself and his fellow Arts users by debuffing targets on hit with a flat RES penalty and addition to Arts damage taken, letting him and his allies crunch through RES and deal even more damage, especially since this stacks with other sources of Arts damage amp. All three of his skills are uniquely powerful, making him one of an elite few 6-stars that are considered candidates for M9 despite its massive cost. Perish is an infinite duration skill that expands his range to that of a Marksman and heavily buffs his ATK, while making it so any enemy that enters his range while under a flat HP threshold is instantly killed, while also dealing damage to another enemy equal to the HP they had at the time of execution; weakened or Armored, but Frail enemies will be obliterated just by stepping in his line of sight, which can also proc his first talent to create a chain reaction of Mooks popping left and right. Synecdoche has a short cooldown and acts as his single-target DPS skill, increasing his RES up to 90 and turning his attacks into a lock-on that inflicts continuous damage while slowing the target, both of which massively ramp up over time to the point of melting even tough bosses out of existence in a snap, while synergizing well with both of his talents due to the skill's rapid damage interval. Extended Acuity instead takes a page out of Eyja's book by being his own version of Volcano: greatly expanding his range, granting him a colossal ATK boost, and barraging up to 4 enemies simultaneously per hit, letting him rip apart groups of enemies in seconds. However, this skill also slows down enemy projectiles by 95% for its duration, and will completely obliterate them if the skill ends while any are still in range (and Logos isn't disabled); giving the player more time to react to attacks, operators more time to pump out heals or charge skills to take the oncoming damage, or even completely negating the enemy's most powerful attacks. With a combination of damage, support, and utility, Logos easily lives up to the Banshees' legendary reputation, and manages to finally challenge Eyjafjalla for not only the top spot of Core Caster, but for Casters in general.
  • Logos' Delta module takes things a step further by letting him moonlight as both a Ritualist and Primal Caster rolled into one, letting his attacks deal bonus Necrosis damage equal to 8% of his damage dealt, improving the chances of his first talent procs, and letting its follow-ups deal up to 60% of his ATK as bonus Elemental damage when attacking a target under Necrosis Burst. As Elemental damage is still unresisted as of his release, this allows him to help cripple enemies - even those that have a high RES - with the extremely debilitating Necrosis that is fairly easily bursted thanks to his high damage output, and swiftly obliterate anything that is under the Burst due to now dealing a huge amount of bonus true damage on each hit. This is one of the very few modules where one can take advantage of no matter what skill is used since all of them interact with it in a meaningful way - from the possible Chain Lethality Enabler that is his first skill, the fast gunning down in his second skill, or his multi-target in his third skill. To make it concrete: with this module equipped, he has a DPS increase of 70% and can deal with enemies up to 70 RES - unsupported by anything else. With support from a Ritualist like Virtuosa, Logos can take advantage of his bonus Elemental damage right off the bat to destroy just about everything in his way.
  • Logos would eventually also get a second Module which, while not as infamous as his absurd Delta module, still provides immense value, with the CCR-Y effect of giving him 1 SP when hitting an Elite or Boss enemy, as well as enhancing the power of Lexical Evolution's follow-up and making it hit two targets. Although he gives up the psuedo-true damage of his Delta module, the Y module significantly improves the ramp-up time of his S1 and the skill cycles of his other two skills, gives him more power against multiple targets, and also allows him to be used in teams using other Elemental Injury types without competing for bursts with his Necrosis.
• Nymph
  • Nymph is uniquely one of the best stallers in the game, while still sporting impressive damage output to go with it, all thanks to her second skill Fear Blast, which fires off a heavy AoE Arts blast that deals double damage against its main target and inflicts the Fear debuff,^note Not to be confused with Degenbrecher's Frighten debuff causing the enemy to run away from her uncontrollably for 5 seconds before attempting to return to their original position. It's worth noting that very few Bosses have Contractual Boss Immunity against Fear, meaning they can often be kited by Nymph. The skill also has shockingly high multipliers and applies a percentage of its damage as Necrosis damage, giving Nymph surprisingly strong Necrosis application even against higher RES targets, and hitting an enemy under Necrosis Burst with the skill increases the Damage Over Time from Nymph's first Talent to equal her entire ATK stat instead of slightly under half. It's also a charge-based skill with a low SP cost, so even a little SP support from Ptilopsis or Mostima can allow Nymph to spam Fear Blast consistently, letting her stall any non-immune elites or bosses indefinitely while still being capable of clearing out waves of trash mobs.
  • Her third skill Crumbling Heart, while more situational than Fear Blast, deserves a special mention. While it requires the aid of a consistent Necrosis applicator like Virtuosa or Valarqvin, the skill grants her a massive ATK and ASPD steroid on top of totally converting the damage she deals to Elemental damage when the enemy suffers from Necrosis Burst. With the burst active, Nymph is capable of completely melting any enemy down no matter how resilient they are, thanks to Elemental damage functionally acting as True damage.
• Pramanix the Prerita
  • Pramanix's alternate version debuts as a Phalanx Caster with an amazingly solid kit that brings the chill to her enemies and is powerful enough to compete with Logos. Pramanix's main selling point is her Unending Snow Talent, which passively spreads snow within her attack range that slows down and deals damage to enemies that step into its range with the slow stacking up to 5 times, patching up the Phalanx Caster's weakness of lacking an offensive presence when off-skill and granting Pramanix very potent crowd control. Her main claim to fame is her second skill Peaks, Clad In Frost, an infinite duration skill that greatly empowers her attacks and massively upgrades her snow tiles to be able to spread past her attack range while also having it inflict Cold and Damage Over Time to enemies that step on it. On top of that, the snow can also pile up on the Protection Objective, freezing it and turning it into a bulky blocker with HP and DEF on par with most Defenders, making Pramanix one of the best operators in AFK strategies. When burst damage is the call, her third skill Towards the Mountains, Bow expands her attack range and grants her stronger and faster attacks that ignore 10 RES, while significantly speeding up the rate at which her snow tiles spread and luring enemies towards her to prevent them from escaping while she blasts them. She also has a lifeline with her second Talent Blessing of Karlan which inflicts Cold on any enemy that attacks her, and should she take lethal damage for the first time, she'll instantly heal herself to full and freeze herself and all surrounding enemies. On top of that, her self-freeze can easily be nullified with her brother's Reignfrost version, whose second Talent grants all Kjerag operators immunity to freezing. Really, the only downside Pramanix does have is the fact that her Module is PLX-Y instead of PLX-X, which only increases her damage and doesn't improve her survivability when on-skill, which leaves her a bit squishy compared to her peers, but the sheer crowd and map control she offers heavily mitigates this issue.

• Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska
  • Eyjafjalla's Medic incarnation follows in the footsteps of her archetype-defining original self by being a Wandering Medic with such borderline overkill Elemental Damage mitigation that she comes just short of removing it from a level entirely. From the get-go, her first talent Replenishing Mist lets her stack a buff on her healing targets that provides HP and Elemental regeneration per second for each stack, while Volcanic Ash Remedy provides a maximum HP buff and Elemental damage reduction to targets in her range; both of these are comparable to watered-down versions of Honeyberry and Mulberry's skill effects as permanent talents, already making her incredible against Elemental damage even for a Wandering Medic. Her first skill Soundless Sustenance takes a while to activate, but permanently increases Eyja's ATK, lets her heal two targets at once, and passively causes all allies in range to regenerate Elemental Damage every per second; on top of effectively turning her into a stronger Multi-target Medic with an enormous range, this is already enough to make everyone in range practically immune to all but the most fierce sources of Elemental Damage, and can notably regenerate Elemental Damage on units who normally can't recieve Elemental healing, such as Juggernauts, Soloblades, Reapers, or even summons. If AFK sustain isn't the call, Eyja can bring out Volcanic Echoes, which gives her global range and turns her healing into a rapid barrage of weaker heals that can target up to 5 units at once, while also providing up to a 5x multiplier to her second talent. This is already powerful sustain and a strong survivability boost not restricted by positioning, but if she has less than 5 valid targets, Eyja can focus all of the heals into only a few units, letting them shrug off entire hordes of Sea Reapers or Crawlers without worrying. On top of that, the skill has a lengthy duration of 50 seconds, meaning Eyja can heal her way through even prolonged enemy waves, albeit with an equally long cooldown. Her only real downsides are the long windups of her skills and the lower raw power of her heals, but since she mitigates the healing issue with her S1 and S3 (with her S1 even being able to outmatch Lumen's already exceptional HPS when healing two targets), her ability to completely trivialize most Elemental Damage threats while still providing decent amounts of healing and utility is unmatched by any other Medic in the game.
• Kal'tsit
  • After being removed from the beta, Kal'tsit returned for the second anniversary with a vengeance. Although her healing power is on the low side for a Medic, not only does she have an extended healing range comparable to that of an AoE Sniper, she retains the ability to actually fight enemies by summoning Mon3tr, an obscenely tanky and hard-hitting 3-block unit that can be redeployed on a short cooldown of 35-25 seconds depending on level. And unlike the beta, she's actually able to directly heal it, letting it stay healthy as it mows down enemies. Her first two skills provide defensive and offensive utility, but her third skill Command: Meltdown is the real kicker - Mon3tr gains a colossal DEF steroid, an obscene (but decaying) ATK boost, and deals true damage on its attacks for the skill duration. Sure, Mon3tr will take a ton of damage if it can't kill anything before the skill ends, but considering it's now dealing upwards of several thousand true damage per hit, it's almost certainly going to kill whatever it gets its claws on - it can even kill Patriot by itself. Furthermore, all of them have ridiculously low SP costs, letting her fire them not long after dropping Mon3tr on someone. At Elite 2, Mon3tr also gains the Non-Damaging Restructuring passive which makes it explode when it dies, dealing heavy true damage in an area alongside a lengthy stun, and her first module improves on this attribute by making Mon3tr be able to use this talent twice per deployment. While she does have some shortcomings, like her prioritizing Mon3tr and herself sometimes leaving her allies for dead, her SP for her S2 and S3 being unable to charge if Mon3tr isn't alive (which is offset by their low SP Costs), and Mon3tr's DEF dropping to 0 if deployed outside her range ^note This is somewhat mitigated by her extremely long range, she's still a terrifyingly strong unit whose ability to summon Mon3tr alone lets her bully lanes, hold defensive lines, and eliminate key targets, all while still being able to heal allies. How ironic that a healer is one of the biggest offensive powerhouses in the game.
  • A big part of what makes Kal'tsit extremely powerful is how relevant she stays throughout the evolving state of the game's content thanks to her specialization in dealing true damage, with Command: Meltdown remaining one of the most consistent sources of true damage over the game's lifetime. As true damage is always an Armor-Piercing Attack, having Kal'tsit often means she can be easily relied on for any boss fight that likes to use damage reduction and evasion tactics, or ones that are just extremely tanky.
• Lumen
  • Lumen is an exceptional 6-star Therapist Medic thanks to the unique cleansing utility he provides to his team. Like the other Therapists, his talent An Everyman's Wish lets him give Status Resistance to allies, and Quick-Fix additionally lets him periodically perform an instant heal on anyone in range inflicted with a negative status. In particular, his third skill, This Lantern Undying, is what makes him stand out from other Medics: it grants him a great buff to ATK and ASPD and loads up to 8 ammo heals that are consumed for a stronger heal and outright removal of any abnormal status effects that afflict the target. Not to mention, the ammo is only consumed when an abnormal status is removed, which means Lumen's ATK and ASPD buffs are effectively permanent if you don't need to deal with status effects, mitigating the weaker healing power from the Therapist's trait, and actually giving him such powerful HPS that he becomes a great choice as a general-use Medic. And even the trait's weakness is nullified with his WAH-Y Module, which makes his healing work at full potency regardless of range. To top it all off, he is a free 6☆ Operator obtainable from the Record Restoration of Stultifera Navis, making him and his potentials very easy to acquire.
• Mon3tr
  • Mon3tr's human form follows in her predecessor Kal'tsit's footsteps by bringing a combination of massive healing, powerful support, and surprising offensive power in spite of the Chain Medic branch's historic weakness. With the decaying Reconstruction she summons with her first talent Self-Repair, she will almost always have something to bounce her first heal off of, which translates to her always being able to bounce heals between targets regardless of their HP due to the Chain Medics' unique quirk, letting her reach faraway targets with ease and giving her an enormous effective healing radius. The Reconstruct also lets her easily charge her Offensive Recovery skills, can draw aggro from ranged enemies, and also buffs the ATK of allies in the vicinity for good measure. Her ability to heal multiple full-health targets at once is augmented by Tactical Coordination granting ASPD to those she heals, which can be amplified into one of the single biggest ally ASPD buffs in the game by Stratagem: Overload, allowing her to casually buff an entire fortification with no trouble.^note For reference, the skill provides a maximum of 56 ASPD (62 with Potentials), even bigger than Aak's S3 at maximum mastery (albeit without its massive ATK boost), while being applied to multiple allies and increasing her healing output instead of damaging the recipient. Stratagem: Meltdown instead takes a leaf out of her old self's book, teleporting to the Reconstruct and gaining a boatload of stats putting her on par with her summon version, while dealing AoE True damage all around her and healing both herself and nearby allies for colossal amounts of health per hit, all for a miniscule HP drain per second which is easily soaked up by her HP or self-healing abilities.^note Similar to Surtr, the HP increase is also a flat buff, meaning it's unaffected by things like HP down risks in Contingency Contract. Her transformation even lets her cheat death and return to her original position when taking lethal damage, upon which she'll usually just heal herself back up unless there are ranged enemies in range already poised to shoot.
• Nightingale
  • Nightingale is an amazing Medic thanks to the one-of-a-kind defensive utility she provides for the team, which to this date no other Operators have even come close to replicating. With her first talent, White Fiend's Protection, she passively grants a flat RES bonus to all allies in her healing range. Her second skill Arts Shield puts up a barrier on all healed allies that blocks Arts damage, and is perfect for AFK strategies or if consistent Arts protection is needed. If significantly more durable protection is needed, her third skill Sanctuary greatly increases her ATK, expands her healing range, massively increases the RES of all allies in range, and additionally grants them Arts evasion to further help mitigate Arts damage. She also has Fleeting Phantom as her second talent, which allows her to summon up to two Phantoms that boast insanely high RES and force enemies to target it, and its RES can also be increased further with Sanctuary, making it excellent for drawing aggro from dangerous Arts attackers. Its high HP also lets it serve as a non-Arts ranged damage bait at the same time.
  • For a perspective as to how uniquely powerful Nightingale is, Hypergryph seems to have realized how having a unit who effectively provides invulnerability against Arts damage restricts how a stage can be designed, as while other old meta units have had newer units attempt to copy or even supplant their roles, no new allied RES-buffer was released until four and a half years later in the 5-star Guardian Bassline, and even his buff is a mere 5 RES with a fully upgraded Module given to allies surrounding him. Considering how Nightingale has the potential to flat out shut down even the hardest stages so long as Arts damage is the primary threat, there is a reasonable chance she will be the only noteworthy RES-buffer to be in the game ever.
• Ptilopsis
  • In terms of pure utility, Ptilopsis leaves even higher-rarity Medics in the dust due to her passive talent, Skill Aura, which boosts the SP generation of every operator on the map by up to 0.3/s, including Ptilopsis herself. This means your operators will be able to use their skills much quicker and more often, making Ptilopsis useful in every situation regardless of the map. It is meaningful that on Contingency Contract maps where there is an SP regeneration penalty, Ptilopsis is considered near-mandatory. Her skills are not to be overlooked either as they offer much flexibility. For one, while her skill 1 is a simple attack buff, it can be useful whenever consistent healing is needed as its cooldown is far lower than her second skill. As for the aforementioned skill 2, when activated, Enkephalin offers increased range and an incredible attack interval reduction - so much that player operators in her range are effectively immortal for the entire generous duration unless they get hit by a One-Hit Kill. Her S2 has a hefty cooldown, but it can effectively neuter the threat from even enemy DPS powerhouses if just activated at the right time.
• Reed the Flame Shadow
  • In the complete opposite of her original self's low-meta standing, this version of Reed is so hilariously strong that you might as well call her a Caster pretending to be a Medic, due to her sheer offensive power overshadowing her healing ability. Her first talent, Cinder, gives her attacks a chance to inflict the "Cinder" debuff on enemies, which reduces their ATK by 20% and inflicts a 30% Arts Fragility effect; this gives her powerful utility for Arts heavy teams and even general use ones due to the rarity of ATK debuffs, while also boosting her healing as it's based on her damage dealt, helped by Reflected Shine also healing her for half the health she restores to others. Reed has two staple skills that contribute to her power; her second skill is Wither and Thrive, which marks two allied operators (prioritizing ground units) with orbiting fireballs that heavily damage any enemy that gets close to them while simultaneously healing them per hit. The sheer frequency at which the fireballs attack results in a humongous DPS ceiling that's capable of rivalling even the most powerful Casters. Meanwhile, her third skill Ember of Life, focuses on waveclearing by boosting her ATK, making her attack 2 targets at once, guaranteeing Cinder's proc chance, and upgrading Cinder to additionally inflict Damage Over Time over the skill's duration. On top of that, any enemy that dies while afflicted with Cinder will explode for splash damage and spread Cinder to whoever is caught in the blast; not only can both the mass burning and explosions provide additional healing to make anyone in her range near invincible, if the enemy wave is weak enough, a single kill from Ember of Life can result in a massive chain reaction of explosions across the map, which can amusingly, literally break the game if your phone can't handle the performance stress.
• Warfarin
  • Warfarin is an incredible Medic who can provide both healing and rare offensive support. Her first skill Emergency Triage can only be used on targets below half health, but can store multiple charges and heals targets for an additional percent of their max HP, a rare ability among Medics that allows her to pump out some of the largest heals in the game when healing a tanky target. Her real merit, however, lies in her S2 Unstable Plasma, which provides a colossal 90% ATK buff for 15 seconds at max Mastery to Warfarin and a a random ally within her healing range (even those that normally can't be healed), which not only makes Warfarin's heals much more potent, but also makes the buffed ally hit much harder (special mention to Exusiai and Silverash with their third skills), at the cost of both of them losing 3% of their max HP per second, which isn't nearly as much of an issue as it seems since Warfarin herself is also getting a healing boost from Unstable Plasma, with the only real caveat being the random targeting that can be mitigated with proper positioning. Her Blood Sample Recycle talent is just the icing on the cake, granting Warfarin and a random ally in range up to 2 SP when an enemy is killed in her range, letting her charge up Unstable Plasma fairly quickly while also serving as an SP battery, so this talent lets you gain a lot of momentum when dealing with a Zerg Rush. Together with operators like Saga and Siege who continuously regenerate SP for themselves by way of either their talent or their skills, they become true Spam Attack operators.

• Gnosis
  • Gnosis supplements his debuffs with incredible crowd control and surprisingly high damage. He can apply the rare Cold debuff to reduce the target's attack speed while Freezing them on subsequent applications (which also inflicts a hefty RES reduction), while his Rigid Ice talent causes afflicted enemies in his range to receive a 27% damage-increasing Fragile debuff that doubles if the target is Frozen. His third skill, Hypothermia, lets him attack rapidly enough to quickly Freeze enemies while keeping them encased in ice for the whole skill, until he shatters them for a huge burst of damage - in case they're still standing after being repeatedly bombarded with talent-buffed hits from him or his allies. Meanwhile, his second skill, Zero-Point Burst, can cheaply spam Cold, which becomes an instant Freeze if he waits long enough, giving him the ability to interrupt attacks and freeze on demand with some timing. All of this allows him to shut down even dangerous Elites or Bosses as long as they lack Freeze immunity, with attack speed buffs from certain events or modes letting him perma-Freeze targets with even his basic attack. His X Module further buffs his Fragile debuff from Cold to 30% to increase the damage taken by enemies, while letting him apply a 10% ATK reduction that can be kept up as long as he's constantly attacking the same enemy.
• Haruka
  • After years of the Abjurer subclass being niche at best and outright awful at worst, Haruka comes in with an exceptionally powerful skillset that really plays to the Abjurer's strengths. Haruka's main source of power comes from the Bubbles from her first Talent Fleeting Foam, which are passively granted to allies in her range (including summons) based off of her attack interval, and grant an insane unconditional 30% Sanctuary buff as long as the Bubble stays active. While the Bubble does pop when the ally is attacked, Haruka can casually reapply it instantly thanks to her naturally fast attack interval, so it's hardly a big deal. On top of that, her second Talent Soaring Fireworks makes it so a popped Bubble heals the ally off a percentage of Haruka's ATK, adding an additional layer of sustain even when Haruka's skill isn't ready yet. Haruka's skills further compound on how powerful her Bubbles are; her second skill Glade of the Fireflies lets her heal and grant Bubbles to an extra ally, and every time she heals an ally, she also damages surrounding enemies for Arts damage based off the amount healed; when the skill is activated a second time, Haruka gains an ATK buff and the skill becomes permanently active, giving her some absurd healing output and even surprisingly high damage all on an AFK skill all for the very low cost of 34 SP when combining the first and second casts. If stronger healing and protection are needed, Haruka can use her third skill The Fins of Summer, which greatly increases her healing range and power, boosts the Sanctuary granted by her Bubbles up to a whopping 60%, and when enemies pop the Bubble regardless of range, they and other surrounding enemies are Levitated and take Damage Over Time, adding an extra layer of protection on top of the massive healing and damage reduction she's already providing. To top it off, her module lets her heal an additional ally when her skill is active, which synergizes perfectly with her second skill, increasing both her healing and damage per second, and when maxed out also makes a popped Bubble have a 20% chance to grant the ally 1 SP. ^note The latter part however, is more of a small bonus and not all that reliable; simply unlocking her module is enough. With an absurdly loaded and synergistic kit boasting massive healing that rivals even the strongest Medics, powerful unconditional damage reduction to protect allies, and even surprisingly high damage output for a Supporter, Haruka completely salvages the weakness of the Abjurers.
• Ling
  • Ling is an extremely powerful Summoner with an arsenal of dragons that are powerful and versatile enough to overcome the usual weaknesses of Summoners through sheer power. Her main claim to fame is her third skill To Remain Oneself, which lets her fuse two of her dragons into a Higher Form that boasts ridiculously high stats and block count, on top of dealing Arts damage by default in exchange for 2 deployment slots, and activating the skill further boosts the dragons' ATK and DEF by a hefty amount, while additionally dealing Arts Damage Over Time to adjacent enemies, making each super dragon the equivalent of a Centurion Guard capable of holding lanes by their lonesome, which is further improved by Ling's Module that boosts their stats and deployment limit. With the amazing strength and versatility of her summons, Ling is a veritable One-Woman Army who can crush entire stages on her own.
• Proviso
  • Proviso is noteworthy for being a Game-Breaker in a different way in the RIIC Trading Post instead. Her Contract Law and Damages for Breach base skills are some of the fastest gold generation skills in the game despite her total lack of an efficiency bonus, as they turn any trade deal with less than 4 Pure Gold (the highest amount possible per deal) into a Defaulted Trade, which increases the total amounts of gold bars traded by +2 at Elite 2, guaranteeing at least a deal with 4 Pure Gold minimum and 5 Pure Gold at maximum which equals a bonus of +1000 LMD per Defaulted Trade which quickly adds up.^note Despite her lack of efficiency bonus, she should not be paired with Shamare due to her first base skill increasing the chance of getting a deal with 4 Pure Gold, lowering profit overall. What's more, her base skill is unreliant on other Operators to perform at its strongest unlike existing combos such as Shamare/Bibeak/Tequila, and she can easily be paired with efficiency and Morale-boosting Operators to make the most out of her skill. To put this into perspective, while other 5-stars mostly useful for their base skills rather than gameplay performance such as Vulcan or Waai Fu can take over a year to pay off for the cost of promoting them, Proviso can easily pay off her promotion costs in less than half a year on average off her base skill alone. With all this in mind, Proviso is notable for being an Operator that is actually worth promoting just for her base skill thanks to how potent it is.
• Raidian
  • Unusually for a welfare unit tied to IS, Raidian has proven to be such an absurd force both inside and out of her IS season that her strength as a Summoner is comparable to Ling of all people. Ring of Fins gives her summons a unique combination of being 2-block melee tile units but with ranged attacks, allowing them to both hold lanes and gun down targets from afar, especially as they both gain a hefty ATK buff and fire triple shots when Raidian activates the skill, mowing down anything in sight. Hand in Hand instead changes her summons to ranged Arts damage dealers, with the unique quirk of being able to effectively combine their ranges by bouncing their shots off each other, while activating the skill majorly amps their lethality by not only giving them a major ATK buff, but also letting them inflict both Slow and Arts Fragility, letting them collectively melt any enemy that steps in any of their ranges. Her power is amplified by Do Your Best~ letting her summons scale on Raidian's own stats, in particular solving the usual problem in IS of summons not being buffed when their summoner is. On top of that, as a Special Operator from IS#6, not only are all her Potentials free, but also all her levels, promotions, and skill masteries if you complete her quest tree, meaning a player can get a completely maxed out Raidian for free just by playing enough of her mode, upon which she has the potential to win many difficult maps all by herself.^note Although said quest tree needs one to clear many runs with different endings and up to difficulty 10, which is a tall order for a new player that just started playing IS.
  • Raidian's Specialized Modules and Proficiencies, while only working in IS#6, further amp up her power. The Alpha module greatly increases how many summons she can carry at once and how fast she can deploy them, as well as defeated or retreated summons both giving her SP and having a chance to be recycled, letting her constantly throw bodies at even enemies that can overwhelm her. The Beta module instead focuses on Raidian's individual power, letting her attack two enemies at once and recycle summons deployed adjacent to her for a hefty heal and permanent stacking power buff, turning her into a powerhouse in her own right without compromising her minions. Meanwhile, her Proficiencies (mode-specific buffs only for her) make her even more absurd, giving her and her summons huge stat buffs, bonus resources when recruited, lowered Hope costs, a guaranteed Raidian start on Special Squad, and even cheaper summons that can be deployed en masse and no longer use deployment slots. All of this turns her from merely a powerhouse pick to one of the strongest units in the whole mode, capable of making a mockery of even the highest difficulties if used correctly.
• Shamare
  • Shamare is often considered one of the most powerful support units to have when taking on endgame stages thanks to her S2, Curse Doll, which gives her a regenerating, invincible doll summon that lasts 15 seconds and nails all enemies within its range with up to a -50% ATK and DEF penalty at maximum investment, massively increasing their physical damage taken while making them dealing half of the damage they were supposed to. The latter ability is what makes this ability shine, since ATK reductions are rather rare - plop the doll next to an elite or boss enemy, and laugh as their One-Hit Kill attacks are reduced to regular attacks, and any regular attacks are reduced to almost nothing, especially against physical threats due to the way physical damage is calculated. Due to the calculation being a percentage and not a flat amount, this will nerf the ATK and DEF of tough bosses just as it is on other enemies. Furthermore, it can be spammed pretty often, with a Mastery 3 Curse Doll having a 50% uptime. Really, tactical deployments of Curse Dolls can significantly reduce the difficulty of just about any operation, and outright trivialize some battles.
• Skadi the Corrupting Heart
  • In contrast to her original iteration's gameplay performance prior to her modules, Skadi the Corrupting Heart has quickly become one of the must have Supporters in the meta due to her sheer utility and ease of use. Along with the passive healing and extremely low DP cost of a Bard (costing a mere 6-8 DP depending on potential), all three of her skills provide incredible benefits depending on the need at the time, and Skadi's talents heavily synergize with them, with Ancient Kin allowing her to summon a Seaborn that can extend her attack range and Predatory Habits increasing her own ATK for free as long as she has someone in range, which is further doubled if that someone is an Abyssal Hunter. This makes it so that cramming everyone inside her range is not strictly necessary, and lets her either heal/buff an expanded area for a large group or affect two groups simultaneously, giving her incredible global map presence. Her first skill Chant of Returning by Varied Paths massively increases the scaling of her trait's healing while significantly increasing her own health and allowing her to shield her allies by diverting a good portion of the damage towards her, allowing her to protect her teammates from major threats. Wish of Burial Beyond the Light is an infinite duration ability that grants all allies in her attack range Inspiration equal to a hefty chunk of Skadi's own ATK/DEF while doubling her trait's healing, making her incredibly effective at buffing and sustaining operators who have to hold a lane for an extended duration, with the large stat buff and healing in general turning an entire cluster of operators into a ball of stats. Meanwhile, her third skill, The Tide Surges, The Tide Recedes, can buff nearby allies' ATK by more than the entirety of Skadi's ATK while also making her deal true damage per second to all enemies in her attack range, at the cost of reversing her passive regeneration into self damage. This is incredibly effective at dealing with particularly dangerous attack waves, allowing Skadi to output massive amounts of AoE damage while at the same time massively boosting the ATK of her allies. And if Skadi and the Seaborn's attack range overlaps when her third skill is triggered, the true damage aura they both generate stacks, blending most enemies caught between them.
• Suzuran
  • Suzuran brings an exceptional combination of crowd-control and damage amplification, with Binding Circle passively inflicting a Fragile effect onto all slowed enemies in range, which not only functions as a universal damage buff appreciable by the entire team (especially with more slow support), but is one of the few sources of Fragile that is not reliant on a skill, threshold, resistable debuff, or random proc. Her entire kit is specifically designed to take advantage of that talent, with her third skill Foxfire Haze being where the fun is at: it greatly expands her range and constantly slows all enemies within it, increases the effect of her Fragile by up to double, and rapidly heals all allies in her range. With this skill, not only can Suzuran spread a hefty damage amp to all enemies in a huge area simultaneously, but she can also pump the survivability of her teammates (and herself) through the roof with her rapid AoE healing, all while slowing every enemy nearby to a crawl for the skill's entire generous duration; as a bonus, her healing is classified as passive regeneration, so it can even heal normally unhealable units. The catch is that she doesn't attack while her S3 is active, but that's basically a non-issue if one considers how much support and crowd-control power she's putting out, on a unit not even meant to do that much damage to begin with. While all of her skills are gated by hefty SP costs, her Skill Aura - Supporter that increases the SP generation of all Supporters (including herself) makes this a surprisingly small issue.
  • Suzuran also has an extremely powerful synergy with Qiubai, who has a talent that significantly boosts damage against slowed/bound targets and a third skill that multiplies this while outputting high multi-target DPS; however, her S3 lacks the ability to actually debuff the enemies outside of a random chance on her second talent. Enter Suzuran's Foxfire Haze, which not only ensures that everything in range is slowed for the entire duration, but also inflicts a massive Fragile on them to jack up Qiubai's damage even higher,^note Qiubai's S3 also deals Arts damage and tends to benefit more from damage amplification as a result turning everything in range into mincemeat. More notably is that with Suzuran's talent accelerating her SP generation, both skills have almost identical cycles at equivalent levels, ensuring that they can always be active at the same time.
• Tragodia
  • Tragodia overcomes his old self's low-meta standing by being a Nervous Ritualist packed with such an absurd amount of crowd control that he practically lobotomizes any enemy that dares exist in the same map as him. Mind Over Matter lets him passively inflict Nervous Impairment in an AoE with his basic attacks, while Descend into Dream strengthens the potency of its Paralysis by not only slowing their ASPD to make it harder to shake off the debuff, but also inflicting more buildup whenever they do actually attack, expediting their next burst. On top of Paralysis crimping the enemy's attacks, all three of his skills inflict potent crowd-control to further prevent enemies from fighting back: Night Echoes is an incredibly spammable Bind that inflicts more Nervous Impairment, while his second skill Folie à Plusieurs permanently buffs his attack rate and AoE while giving him a globally-deployable summon that Lures enemies towards it before exploding. The Lure can attract any non-immune target towards its position before blasting them with heavy Arts/Nervous damage and Slow, and has a short cooldown meaning anything without insane speed or a ranged attack can be stalled in place nearly indefinitely. To lock down a wider area, Tragodia can unleash Le Théâtre du Vide, which buffs his ATK and Elemental Injury infliction, expands his range, halves the cooldown of Nervous Impairment's burst (letting him inflict a second burst much sooner after the first one ends), and deploys cages to trap any enemy that triggered a Burst; the cages require 3 attacks to break through, attacks that the enemy most certainly won't be able to pull off given the constant Paralysis he's dishing out, not to mention he can simply respawn any lost cages as long as the enemy is still in his range and continues suffering Nervous bursts. His combination of enabling Elemental Damage and applying crowd-control turns him into an amazing Elemental support and even a generalist who can more than pull his weight by himself, and on top of that he's not even limited like fellow premium Elemental supports Virtuosa and Yu.
  • Unlike his fellow Ritualist Virtuosa, his Elemental Injury is inflicted on hit rather than fixed per second, meaning that with some ASPD buffs in other modes, he can very easily proc it faster than enemies can attack, locking them down permanently.^note Although this inversely means that he struggles more if his ASPD is crimped, unlike Virtuosa, although he can sidestep this with his S2's summon dealing damage at a fixed rate.
• Virtuosa
  • Virtuosa is a limited 6-star Ritualist Supporter, bringing a whole new brand of damage and support in one package. She specializes in dealing Necrosis damage through Wordless Elegy, which passively deals Necrosis damage and mini-Slows to all enemies in her attack range each second, with Mental Inversion further amplifying her Necrosis output. Her first skill Golden Ecstasy is a charge based skill that disables her normal attacks, but fires off a blast of Arts and Necrosis damage based off a hefty multiplier of her ATK, letting her inflict Necrosis Burst instantly on deployment or in AFK strategies, while her third skill Liberal Tango focuses more on waveclear by greatly expanding her range, massively boosting her ATK, and increasing the multiplier on her second Talent, letting her inflict Necrosis Burst in a much wider area - on top of buffing the HP, ATK, and DEF of whoever has the highest of said stat in range. The burst effect of Necrosis halves the enemy's ATK and makes them take heavy Elemental Damage Over Time while they recover, which is often enough to kill them outright, and as a separate damage type also bypasses any Physical and Arts damage reductions or protective measures on certain enemies and bosses, which makes Virtuosa an excellent supporting damage dealer against any enemy. Because of her incredibly fast Necrosis buildup, she's also the premier support for other operators who capitalize on Necrosis burst to deal Elemental damage, such as Logos and Ebenholz with their Delta Modules (whose own Necrosis damage is dependent on their Arts damage dealt and can be protected against), or Diamante and Nymph (who have few ways of directly inflicting Necrosis).
  • Her Module makes her even better of a support unit by increasing her Necrosis dealt, both overall and with an extra bonus to Elites/Bosses (which combined with the base ATK increase notably allows her to often burst Necrosis in 2 S1 procs instead of 3), and also inflicting Elemental Fragility to enemies in range afflicted with Necrosis burst, increasing her own DoT while giving her even more synergy with Elemental damage dealers.

• Ascalon
  • Ascalon's first talent, Mortal Interrogation, allows her to stack crippling Arts Damage Over Time and movement speed slows that persist for some time even after her targets leave her range. This ability is further boosted by her second skill, Endowment, which gives her a significant ATK buff to put the hurt in her basic attack and DoT while further slowing the movement speed of every enemy in range, while spreading her first talent effect to surrounding enemies after killing a target, making it incredibly hard for her targets to escape her grasp; as if the significant boosts aren't enough, the skill has a generous cost and lengthy duration, giving her plenty of time to hamstring enemies while being able to get it up again quickly. Her AMB-X module is the cherry on the top by granting her yet another movement speed slow that applies passively, helping her pin down enemies before her talent and skill come into play, while the former is buffed to last longer and deal more damage at the same time. With a combination of her talent, skill and module, she's able to inflict a ~85% movement speed slow during S2, and as a "true" movement speed slow, almost no enemies can be immune to it, turning her into an absolute crowd-control monster.
• Ela
  • As the 6-star of the second Rainbow Six Siege crossover banner, Ela has been described less like a Trapmaster and more like a Marksman on steroids. She carries the GRZMOT Mines as her traps of choice, which aren't as plentiful to deploy and don't deal any damage, but have a wider blast detection radius while changing function depending on her equipped skill. Her third skill "The Bosak Tempest" is where she shines; it causes the GRZMOT Mines to slow all enemies in the blast while inflicting a whopping 35% Fragile debuff on them (for reference, this is almost as much as Suzuran's Foxfire Haze but on demand), and activating the skill grants her a hefty ATK buff and a shortened attack interval with 40 bullets to prioritize killing enemies affected by the mines, which makes Ela an incredibly powerful killer. This is all compounded by her second talent Bullseye, which gives her attacks a chance to crit (with the multiplier also helping her punch through DEF), and the chance becomes guaranteed against enemies hit by the GRZMOT Mines, which combined with her S3's Fragile and target prioritization lets her single out and melt nearly any targets of her choosing. Her sole downside is that her GRZMOT Mines are slower to generate and require her to manually activate her skills to obtain more, and she can only hold 4 at a time, but the sheer utility and damage she can pump out more than makes up for it.
  • And all of the above is what Ela can do even before unlocking her Module. With her Module unlocked, it allows Ela to be deployed on ground tiles, and her traps on high tiles, basically letting you deploy her anywhere on the map. As if her already impressive strengths weren't enough, she now becomes significantly more flexible for positioning, creating an exceptionally powerful Specialist that can moonlight as several different classes depending on the player's needs. On top of that, it buffs her Bullseye talent from a 30% chance to crit for 150% ATK to a 50% chance to crit for 170%, majorly increasing her damage output and consistency even when her mines aren't fielded.
• Ethan (post-module)
  • With his ability to semi-consistently apply the Bind crowd control effect, Ethan has always been a solid albeit situational unit in spite of his 4-star rarity, but his Module and upgrade as of the Ideal City event has pushed his utility through the roof. Ethan's main use as an Ambusher is in his second skill, Suspended Cross, which increases his ATK and, more importantly, multiplies the chance of his Talent (25% chance to Bind attacked enemies for 3 seconds) by up to 3 times at max Mastery, for a 75% chance to Bind on every attack. As the Ambusher archetype's base attack speed is 3.5, this leaves a 0.5 interval between Binds where the enemy can move assuming the RNG is in your favor... that is, until you take his fully upgraded Module into account, which not only increases his Talent's chance to proc to 28% (84% chance with S2 activated), but increases the Bind duration to 3.5 seconds, the exact same as his attack interval. This means, assuming you get reasonably lucky with the 84% chance, Ethan can potentially Bind any target he attacks for the entire 30 second duration of his skill. Additionally, the Module also slows enemies within Ethan's attack range by 20%, which helps keep enemies within Ethan's range in case a Bind doesn't proc. This makes him one of the most consistent stallers in the entire game, as he can completely render any short-ranged enemy helpless for your main DPS units to take care of with ease. And thanks to the Ambusher archetype's evasive traits, Ethan can be safely placed in many positions to stall the enemy with little to no risk of dying, which gives him an irreplaceable niche even in late-game content such as high-risk Contingency Contract. Additionally, while most bosses have Contractual Boss Immunity to status effects such as Stun or Freeze, the same is far less common with Bind. Ethan's Module is so impactful that it has made him considered to be the best Ambusher in the game up until the release of Ascalon (who provides a similarly powerful and consistent stall via her powerful slowing skills and Talent, at the cost of not having any "hard" CC) with the "Babel" event, but he still manages to be a competitive option for even endgame players despite his humble 4-star rarity.
  • Additionally, Ethan is purchasable in the shop for a mere 150 Shop Vouchers per token (equaling roughly 225 Sanity), which makes him easy to acquire and max potential even for free-to-play users.
• Exusiai the New Covenant
  • Despite belonging to the gimmicky Geek archetype, she has several ways to offset their weaknesses, including the ones Aak as the first 6* of it displayed, to the point of being considered among the strongest operators in the game. Aside from her debut resulting in all Geeks having their HP drain rate slowed and being unable to die from the drain, she gives ammo-using Operators, including herself, the chance to regenerate her HP and perform a splash attack within their ranges with the Firepower FM talent, which can trigger frequently given the rapid attack speed and huge ammo capacity of her skills. Covenant of Bullets meanwhile gives ammo-using Operators a free ATK buff, which is doubled for Laterano Operators like herself. She also has ways to maximize her number of attacks like her original self, while the debuffs she gives to her allies don't sting much: Shootoholic lowers her own ATK interval and lets her steal a significant amount of ASPD from an ally, but in return, both of them gets a beefy HP barrier that can withstand huge damage, while also giving her her a significant ATK multiplier per hit and extra ammo from the steal to rip through even defensively sound enemies, while the allied demerit can be circumvented by using it on a non-DPS. Meanwhile, Guaranteed Success! gives her both an ATK buff and ATK scale while spamming 5 hits per attack like her original third skill, but the real fun is its capability to immediately redeploy a ground unit with the current longest redeploy timer using her summon, allowing her to instantly deploy broken helidrops like SilverAsh, Surtr, a moduled Młynar, or Hoshiguma the Breacher just after they retreat, while granting them some SP to let them instantly fire again. Her combination of barely-punishing debuffs in return for overwhelming buffs to both herself and her allies, as well as one of the highest single-target damage models in the game, allows her to quickly shred enemies in ways her original self could only dream of, while her utility on S3 is something that not only can't be replicated by anyone else as of her release, but is unlikely to be replicated at all in the foreseeable future.
• Gladiia (post-module)
  • For the longest time, Gladiia was thought of as merely an exceptional welfare unit and an above average 6-star overall. With the release of her Module and upgrade in Ideal City, however, she has become a core unit in the increasingly powerful Abyssal Hunter squad composition. Her HOK-X module upgrade increases the power of her Waves of Aegir talent, which grants a 2.5% (3.5% with fully upgraded module) maximum HP regeneration to all Abyssal Hunter units while Gladiia is deployed, including Gladiia herself, granting massive sustain to Skadi, Specter (and her alter), Ulpianus and Andreana, of which the former three greatly benefit due to their aggressive kits and high base HP. Additionally, the module upgrade also grants all Abyssal Hunters up to 30% reduced Physical and Arts damage taken. This turns the aforementioned units, as well as Gladiia, into nigh-unkillable beasts as long as Gladiia is on the map. Gladiia herself is no slouch, with a solid Jack of All Trades kit which allows her to substitute for a Guard even when her utility as a puller is unneeded, her Survival of the Fittest talent that gives her bonus damage to enemies below 3 Weight (namely most non-Elite enemies), and her skills all offering different ways to pull, trap, and hamstring incoming attackers while damaging them. Due to Gladiia's surprising versatility despite being in a niche class and her incredible defensive buff for Abyssal Hunters, Gladiia is a great unit who is near vital for compositions that make use of Skadi, Specter or Ulpianus.
• Gravel
  • Gravel is one of the most potent stallers in the game by way of being highly spammable thanks to her archetype as an Executor Specialist. Gravel's main claim to fame is her second skill Rat Swarm, which grants her a highly sturdy barrier worth more than double of her max HP when she's deployed that decays over 10 seconds. The massive increase of her effective HP allows her to bait and tank highly damaging attacks while not caring about getting knocked out in the process as she'll be able to redeploy almost right away thanks to her archetype for another round of stalling, letting her buy time very effectively for her other allies to deal more damage or heal up. The best part is that she's only a 4-star Operator, and thus is very cheap to obtain and raise, being readily available in recruitment from Specialist tags to boot. It says a lot to how uniquely powerful Gravel is that practically none of her fellow Executors of a higher rarity are able to replicate the sheer durability she boasts, and given their emphasis on DPS or crowd control, there is a good chance Gravel will remain as the only fast-redeployable tank.
• Jaye
  • Introducing the Merchant Specialist Archetype, Jaye has created a strong impression for a humble 4-Star. Both of his skills have low SP costs, are unlimited duration, and grant substantial ATK buffs alongside different effects depending on which one he uses. His first skill, Shell Splitter, inflicts Silence for 2 seconds at max mastery, while Sashimi Platter instead heals him or a nearby ally for up to half of his damage dealt, making him potentially self-sufficient. Combined in tandem with naturally fast attack speed and his Anatomy Master talent (which increases damage against Infected Creatures), both his ATK and healing will increase even further, allowing him to serve as a source of main DPS while also doing significant healing as a side-job, to the point where he can duel a shocking list of enemies he should reasonably have no right defeating. All of this is combined with a low DP cost, fast redeployment time, and high stats, which is balanced by his DP-consuming trait, though that can be mitigated with his Module Upgrade.
• Kirin R Yato
  • Hot off the heels of Texas the Omertosa, Yato's limited alter from the Monster Hunter collab also proves to be an insanely powerful Executor who brings immense killpower with equally potent accessibility. On top of her first talent Kirin Bolts giving her attacks bonus on-hit Arts damage, all three of her skills unload tremendous amounts of damage in different ways, on top of being rapid multi-hits to proc her talent more often. S1, Demon Mode, buffs her ASPD and makes her attacks hit twice, along with making every third attack on a single target a 6-hit combo; this turns Yato into a Spam Attack monster for its surprisingly long duration of 20 seconds, giving her powerful sustained single-target damage. S2, Blade Dance, instead opts for frontloaded damage by giving her an ATK buff, immunity to crowd-control, and a significant multiplier to her Talent, before causing her to instantly unleash 16 AoE slashes in front of her; this can erase hordes and deal severe damage to priority targets in a snap, while the boosted Arts damage also helps her a bit against high-DEF enemies. Meanwhile, her S3, Midair Spinning Blade Dance, uses the titular Spin Attack well known from the Dual Blades, rapidly dealing massive damage to enemies she collides with during the spin while extending the length of her dash every time she hits an enemy (up to a limit); this can completely eviscerate entire hordes of enemies in a single go, and on top of that, it makes her outright intangible while she's spinning, making it nigh impossible for enemies to stop her before she unloads all her damage. The cherry on top is her second talent Archdemon Mode giving her an ATK buff both when her skill is active and for a few seconds after, giving her an extra push when it comes to killing stragglers that survive her burst damage. With incredible damage with multiple specializations, combined with a cheap cost and ease of use, Yato lives up to her combat experience as a powerful elite Operator.
• Specter the Unchained (post-module)
  • On her debut, Specter the Unchained had a somewhat poor reputation for being on the opposite end of this trope. This was due to the extremely poor stats of her substitute form, which neither slowed nor dealt enough damage to be meaningful and effectively did nothing but artificially delay the uptime of her skills, giving her the unfortunate title of being the first alter to have lower viability than her 5-star original form.
  • The release of her two Modules completely turns this around, drastically improving her performance no matter which one she chooses. Her PUM-X module improves on her kamikaze playstyle with her second skill The Thirst to Survive (increased ATK and ASPD while being unable to die, then switch to her Substitute at the end), increasing the damage and slow of her Substitute, while also granting her bonus SP when she switches back, greatly alleviating her skill's uptime. Meanwhile, her PUM-Y module improves on her fearsome Lightning Bruiser capabilities with her third skill The Pressure to Survive (massively increased HP and ATK, and attack all blocked enemies), further increasing max HP and granting significant SP regeneration for her and her fellow Abyssal Hunters, making her an excellent asset in the aforementioned team. While she'll need quite a bit of investment, the payoff is more than worth it.
• Texas the Omertosa
  • Texas the Omertosa establishes herself as one of the strongest Executors in the game and arguably one of the strongest units in the game, with each of her skills offering incredible power coupled with the ease of use that comes with an Executor Specialist. Her second skill, Unrelenting Downpour, deals high Arts damage to all surrounding enemies and cuts their RES by up to 30% for 10 seconds, then gives her an ATK buff along with double-hitting Arts attacks. This skill does tremendous amounts of damage for how often it can be spammed - combining the RES reduction with her rapid Arts attacks can melt even bulky targets out of existence in a flash. If crowd control is favored over massive single-target DPS, her third skill Torrential Sword Rain takes a leaf out of her Vanguard version's signature attack, dealing heavy Arts damage to surrounding enemies twice and stunning them; only this time, for 8 seconds afterwards, she starts raining down Arts swords every second on up to 4 targets in her range, briefly stunning them per hit. This not only deals surprisingly high area damage, but the constant stuns will ensure enemies cannot escape her onslaught, and in particular can render enemies with slow attacks completely unable to fight back. The sword rain also falls independently of Texas's attacks, which means even if Texas is hit by crowd control, the sword rain is unimpeded. All of this is made even more absurd by her first Talent, Texas Tradition, which gives her a free ATK boost when her skill is active and, and if she scores a kill, fully restores her HP and reactivates her current skill, letting her dish out another dose of burst damage and then continue her onslaught for even longer. The cherry on top is her other talent Texas Swordsmanship giving her another ASPD buff and damage reduction if she hasn't defeated an enemy yet, making it even more likely she'll live long enough to proc Texan Tradition and recast her skill for massive damage. With absurd damage output matching many other 6-stars and crowd control, alongside a maximum 18-second cooldown and a cheap DP cost, Texas the Omertosa is an incredibly flexible DPS unit that can pop in on demand to solve nearly any problem, then retreat and be ready to do the same thing in less time than it takes most Operators to even charge their skills.
  • One simple, but often overlooked aspect of her 3rd skill is it it hits all 8 squares around her, allowing her to attack diagonal spaces from her position, something that's beyond the reach of the vast majority of melee Operators. This grants her flexibility to deal with enemies deployed in isolated tiles, such as the Mortar Gunners in the Refinery Security farming stage.
  • She's also by far one of the most powerful Operators to take in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor, as her already insane power synergizes with a huge number of different Collectibles, and her flexibility allows her to cover multiple offensive and defensive positions in almost any level, especially when the environment is too dangerous for any other unit to do meaningful work in time. Most of all, her Torrential Sword Rain being a spammable on-demand stun that hits air units is a godsend since many dangerous enemies in the mode have weaknesses to crowd control - she can single-handedly trivialize Skimming Sea Drifters, one of the premier threats in the mode, and can also significantly help neutralize some of the nastier bosses, such as Carmen, the Paranoia Illusion, The Last Knight, and Izumik.^note Carmen can waste his shots on Texas and can be stunned to stop his reloading, the Paranoia Illusion can have its flight permanently disabled if it's stunned in the air, the Last Knight is particularly vulnerable to being stalled with debuffs and spammed meat shields, and Izumik spawns hordes of transforming jellyfish that can buff him if absorbed.
• Wang
  • The second brother of Sui makes his playable debut as a horrifically powerful Trapmaster who functions as more of an on-demand Kill Sat than an actual Trapmaster. The Arts damage traps deployed by Mold Stones will automatically deploy an extra one in the adjacent tiles when placed, even on tiles with enemies already on them, and allow the traps to link to adjacent ones and cause chain detonations similar to Dorothy's S3. This is augmented by Every Move Anticipated blessing traps placed in a straight line with stacks of increased damage and RES ignore based on how many you lined up, ensuring he punches holes in even magically bulky foes. His bread and butter is All-Dominating Fight, which gives his traps massive damage over a greatly expanded radius (to the point where they can even hit air units), and when activated stops his attacks in exchange for massively expanding his range and immediately giving him a handful of traps while deploying any excess randomly in his range. Should enemies survive the initial carpet bombing, Wang loads up to 20 ammo to augment any manually placed traps in his range, changing the effect of Mold Stones to consuming ammo to deploy up to four traps around any deployed one (incidentally ensuring all of them get the full bonus from his second talent), letting him throw out on-demand cluster bombs that simultaneously detonate for ungodly amounts of RES-piercing damage. While he won't be able to set up minefields thanks to their massive trigger radius, his traps while S3 is active can deploy directly on enemies in range, meaning there's no need to set up when Wang can just throw traps directly at his foes and watch them get blasted to smithereens. On top of that, he also has an incredibly cheap DP cost (costing 12 DP at base, with his traps costing 2 with the TRP-X Module), meaning all of this devastation can be sent out early and consistently.
• Weedy
  • Weedy is by far the most powerful Push Stroker Specialist in the game. While her first two skills are very average and have their own niche uses^note For example, S1 for golem stalling in Abandoned Mine and S2 for soloing top lane and right lane in Area 6 and Arena 8, respectively, her real strength lies in her third skill, Liquid Nitrogen Cannon. When the skill is activated, she will launch a projectile that pushes all enemies in front of her with a ton of force, instantly dealing up to 350% of her ATK as Arts damage and causing any targets hit to suffer 1,200 true damage per tile they travel for the next few seconds. Not to mention, the Industrial Water Cannon that she can periodically deploy not only allows for some incredible plays by virtue of having a disposable pusher, but will also duplicate Weedy's skill and boost its push strength if it is adjacent to her when she triggers it, causing it to deal an absolutely obscene amount of knockback that will send just about anything across the map.^note As of this writing, it's the strongest push in the game, being the only thing that can achieve an Insanely Strong shift strength at Mastery 3 While Weedy paired with her extra cannon is plenty powerful enough to inflict massive burst damage on large waves, adding in Weightless effects or other shifters is capable of trivializing even the hardest maps from how freely she can shove enemies around.

Operators

• In general, the meta for Integrated Strategies is vastly different from the standard game. The vast majority of Operators can become extremely strong if you get the right set of collections for them (even low-rarity operators), but the mode also favors versatility and Operators capable of covering a wide variety of roles, particularly low-rarity ones that cost less Hope to recruit and promote rather than high-cost DPS-units. Units like low-rarity Healing Defenders, Jaye and Podenco for being able to double as Medics, Click for being able to provide cheap DPS potentially outside of her range, May for being able to CC enemies and knock down fliers, Beanstalk being able to generate DP while covering both melee and aerial, just about all Summoners, the list goes on and on. On the other hand, units that were already game-breaking may either become obscure for not being worth the cost of obtaining them, or become even more broken.
• Fitting for how they cannot be obtained outside of the event and don't appear commonly even inside it, the IS-exclusive Elite Operators have a trend of being extremely powerful, especially since they're free recruitments if you happen to luck out and get a chance to recruit them. To make matters better, if you can promote them, you'll have a completely maxed-out Elite 2 unit for your troubles.
  • Sharp
    • Sharp has the standard high stats expected of a Dreadnought Guard, and his talent Invisible Blade takes it even further by giving him up to 15% bonus ATK and 30% physical dodge for free at Elite 2, both making him hit harder and soak hits better. However, his skill Drawing Sword is what takes him over the top - at the cost of completely nullifying his defense, it gives him a significant amount of max HP and a huge damage multiplier on all his attacks, all for a decent duration and cheap cooldown. An Elite 2 Sharp will be gaining 50% bonus HP and dealing 300% of his ATK with every hit while this skill is active, letting him soak damage while instantly killing anything that gets in his way. The DEF drop isn't nearly as much of an issue as it first appears, considering his inflated HP and passive physical dodge chance, and the sheer damage he can put out more than outweighs the cost - considering his ATK caps at over a thousand when promoted, dealing 3000+ physical damage per hit is effectively an Armor Piercing Attack, slicing anyone without hilariously inflated defenses out of existence, and still significantly hurting anything that can take the hits. With a few collections under his belt, Sharp can effortlessly cut down tough enemies once his skill is up, and is even capable of going toe-to-toe with some of the mode's strongest bosses.
  • Touch
    • Touch is a 6-star Medic disguised as a 5-star. Her stats are already quite high, and her Apocalyptic Scene ability extends their range by up to 2 tiles when promoted, while letting them heal 2 units at once and giving all Medics an ATK boost for the duration. This is already quite strong, but her talent Promotion is her real strength, letting them restore up to 3 SP to any ally she heals. At the time of her release, the only other unit that could simultaneously heal and restore SP to units was Saria, and Touch does this both at three times the strength and on every attack instead of using a skill. With this, they become both an incredible healer and an insane SP battery, often letting your Operators fire off skills like machine guns, or alleviating the downtime of SP-hungry skills that could turn the tide of battle.
  • Tulip
    • Tulip doesn't disappoint as the newest edition to the IS-exclusive roster, being a Pioneer with good stats and a powerhouse of a skill in Lingering Scent, best described as a combo of Ch'en and Irene with DP generation on top. After generating 7 DP, she'll launch 8 combo slashes at nearby enemies to deal heavy physical damage while piercing half of their DEF, giving her the versatility of being able to generate DP and eviscerate early waves at the same time. This is helped by Boundless Heart, her talent which gives her up to doubled SP generation until she fires her skill for the first two times per deployment, letting her instantly pump out those first two skills to set up the rest of the defense. Unlike many other Vanguards, even once the early stages of the levels are done, Tulip still manages to have a good amount of presence due to the amount of damage her skill can do, especially with some Collectibles under her belt that'll let her hold her own against even stronger elites.
• With the summer event Adventure That Cannot Wait For the Sun, new Modules that can only be used within Integrated Strategies were added to the game, and as might be expected from a Module restricted for a single game mode, the majority of these Modules are ridiculously overtuned, single-handedly catapulting Operators several levels in usefulness and even making normally niche picks into run-winners.
  • Kal'tsit's Module buffs her Trait to allow her to heal two targets at once, practically eliminating her issues as a poor healer due to normally prioritizing herself and Mon3tr over any other Operators, but the upgrades are what truly make this Module ridiculous, as the maxed bonuses buff Mon3tr massively, making it no longer take up a valuable deployment slot, as well as granting a straight up +50% bonus to its maximum HP, ATK, and healing received, making it even more of a massive stat stick. This not only catapults Kal'tsit to the top in terms of starting laneholders assuming she is promoted to Elite 2, but also partially negates the issue of Mon3tr falling off in later floors at high difficulties due to not being able to receive the benefit of most relics due to being a summon rather than an Operator and having to rely on specific relics that either buff summons or buff all units in order to keep up with the increased stats of enemies. With the huge stat boost of this Module, this is much less of an issue and Mon3tr can pull its weight even up to the end of a run, while Kal'tsit herself can now make full leverage of her increased range over other Medics with her multi-targeting to serve as a far more adequate healer.
  • Phantom's Module is truly absurd and actually manages to let him distinguish himself from his fellow Executors who have pushed him out of the meta him since their release. Its base effect alone is already a significant buff as it makes attacks from either himself or his clone lower both their redeployment time by 1 second per hit, meaning that if they can get enough attacks off before retreating they can potentially be deployed again almost immediately, allowing both to blink around the map dealing with targets with little to no downtime. The upgrades are even more ridiculous and give Phantom a whole new playstyle as a Puppet Fighter, as it makes his clone also no longer take up a deployment slot and also allows it to reactivate and stack the stat buffs of Phantom's skill each time it is deployed up to a maximum stack of 8, which means his S2's ATK buff can now stack to a maximum of 80 times giving him a total of 1600% ATK that only depletes by 20% per hit, allowing him to stack his ATK up to insane amounts. Without any relics or exterior buffs, Phantom can achieve an ATK stat of over 12,000 at full stacks, and with the right relics can potentially make that number several times higher. This means that Phantom's playstyle now revolves around staying on the field and building up his ATK buff while spamming his clone to deal with enemies around the map, then once fully stacked waits for a threatening foe to come his way and can proceed to slaughter them with only a couple of hits. Phantom still has his downsides even with this Module, as he needs to slowly build up his power though repeated clone deployments which can be costly in DP, and given his lack of defense can still be susceptible to being oneshotted by a dangerous foe which would render all your preparation wasted, but with proper usage he can potentially go as far as to solo several of the endgame bosses with his fully stacked S2. While Phantom has some of the hardest competition within the Specialist class for his 6-star Hope cost that hinders his usage, this Module has managed to give him a niche within Integrated Strategies among some of the strongest units in the game as a high-risk, high-reward unit, which is a significant achievement considering his history as one of the most recognized victims of Power Creep over the years.
  • Angelina's Module breathes new life into what was considered a decent but not exceptional kit, giving her an unprecedented level of enemy control far beyond her usual abilities. From the start, she passively reduces the Weight of every enemy by 1 simply by being on the field, which notably stacks with the Weightless effect (such as from her S3, making her able to inflict a net -2 Weight on everything), dramatically weakening enemy resistance to Levitate and Shift, in turn opening up new possibilities and strategies involving shifters. Speaking of Levitate, once fully leveled, not only will Angelina Levitate enemies on every attack she makes while her skills are active, but also passively inflicts up to 60% of her ATK as Arts damage every half second to any enemy being Shifted or Levitated on the field. The former effect is also incredibly strong as each Levitate lasts easily long enough for her to perma-Levitate all of her skill targets for the whole skill duration, and her Weight reductions mean that only total immunity is likely to save most enemies from her. With her S3, this effectively allows her to permanently immobilize up to 5 enemies for 25 seconds, leaving them wide open while also dealing continous Arts damage to them - and this is on top of her passive enabling of more Shift shenanigans.
  • Rosmontis, despite being historically considered one of the weaker 6-stars in the game, got a Specialized Module that dramatically ramps up her strength to becoming one of the best Sniper picks in the mode. From the start, it turns her into a dual-class unit, not only letting all her attacks deal an extra full instance of Arts damage on hit (helping her offset her weakness to high-DEF-low-RES enemies), but letting her benefit from both Sniper and Caster specific buffs, immediately providing a huge increase to her number of synergies that she can use to snowball into an absolute monster that rivals some of the best Game Breakers in the mode, capable of outputting stunning amounts of damage as well as crowd control from her S2. On top of this buff to her damage potential, the Module also lets her moonlight as a psuedo-blocker by causing all Casters and Snipers deployed to also deploy a Tactical Equipment in their range, which at worst is a little extra tanking or decoy power to protect Rosmontis and hold down enemies, and at best can totally impede an enemy advance by just throwing a ton of walls in their way, especially if you bring April to continously spam them. At maximum level, it also upgrades all of Rosmontis' Tactical Equipments, not only increasing their already solid tank stats, but upgrading the -160 DEF penalty against blocked foes to a far more severe -400 DEF and -20 RES debuff to all enemies in their surroundings, meaning that enemies will be getting both of their defenses shredded just by being in their proximity (which they often will be given how many she can throw out at once), upon which Rosmontis' dual damage types will rip right through them, much less any other operators you've brought with her. In contrast to her disappointing performance in regular gameplay, Rosmontis in Integrated Strategies is a total beast whose stellar performance allows her to compete with, if not rival Wiš'adel.
  • Archetto manages to turn around her struggling position in the meta by totally forgoing trying to patch up her low damage as a Marksman, and going in the other direction by turning her into a ridiculously good Support Party Member. In addition to allowing all Offensive Recovery users to benefit from her passive SP generation talent, it also lets her give 1 SP to said users on every hit - on a character who specializes in rapid, multi-hit attacks. When combined with how Offensive Recovery skills usually have shorter cooldowns to account for the need to hit enemies, this means that while Archetto is on the field, you're liable to be able to spam all Offensive Recovery skills every few seconds, much faster than the game expects you, leading to situations like "power strike" skills hitting on almost every attack, Qiubai being able to effortlessly perma-bind foes, and Irene being able to spam Judgement to wipe the map clean. Once maxed out, it also confers a gigantic 50% ATK buff to said units while their skills are active, which when taking into account how Offensive Recovery skills tend to feature huge multiplicative damage buffs increases their damage output by an insane degree, effectively functioning as a Spinach buff that also benefits non-instant skills. In addition, the Module's base effect makes it so that Archetto gains an extra tile of range for every Offensive Recovery unit on the field (including herself), which gives her the single largest non-global attack range in the game at 8 tiles long with two friends and her S3 running, allowing her to mow down hordes of lower-DEF enemies from across the map and ensuring she always has enemies in her range to charge SP off of.
  • Mizuki, generally ignored in favor of his counterpart Ascalon in both IS and standard content, managed to shoot back into relevance in the former with an incredibly potent Module. The base effect is already strong, giving him an unconditional 50 ASPD and HP regen, heavily boosting his crowd-control uptime and damage output while letting him serve as a self-sustaining laneholder or ranged tank thanks to his innate evasion. However, the upgrades double down on this by making Traumatic Hysteria target one more unit (3 more with skills) and drag enemies towards Mizuki, ensuring that they cannot escape his reach. The shift has a force of 3 (which is equal to Weedy's Liquid Nitrogen Cannon at maximum Mastery), meaning that pretty much only boss-tier enemies by default are even able to move while he's attacking them, while adding in sources of weight reduction can result in everything short of outright immunity being hamstrung or outright launched across the field. Discounting huge swarms of enemies (as Traumatic Hysteria still targets at most 6 enemies), Mizuki is now able to hold down isolated enemies nearly indefinitely or use his skill to do the same to groups of Elite-tier baddies, while still delivering the standard Ambusher amounts of damage and healing off any retaliation.
  • Already infamous for perma-freeze shenanigans by abusing the mode's ASPD buffs, Gnosis' Module further increases his power by supplementing his debuffs with self-sufficient damage, dealing half his ATK every half second as Arts Damage Over Time to Cold or Frozen enemies anywhere on the map, further amplified by his Fragile effect and the RES cut of Freezing. In addition, not only does it expand the effects of his Fragile talent to the entire field, it also causes it to ramp up in potency over time, up to a whopping 80% that ensures any Cold or Frozen target won't be living for much longer, and notably even allows him to trigger the full effect on Freeze-immune elites or bosses. The final icing on top is that it allows all other Kjerag Operators to inflict Cold to enemies in range whenever they activate their skills, allowing those with fast-charging skills or Cold of their own to join in on the fun and potentially be able to permafreeze enemies all by themselves.

Introduced in Ceobe's Fungimist

• The Tactical Assault Operative (instantly advance 4* or higher Guards/Vanguards on recruitment) is generally considered to be among the strongest of the starting squads, if not the strongest. Since Guards and Vanguards (especially the former) tend to be some of the stronger units in the game and power spike especially hard when hitting Elite 2, being able to instantly promote them on recruitment can give players an insane lead, allowing them to build up a powerful defense in the blink of an eye or pump their DP generation through the roof. If you can manage to recruit a Game-Breaker guard like an Elite 2 Thorns, Blaze, or SilverAsh early, expect to easily breeze through the first 2-odd chapters.
  • This squad, along with the other Tactical squads, recieved a Nerf in Mizuki and Caerula Arbor, changing their function to just reducing recruit and promotion costs by 2 and 1 respectively, with the instant promotion now being tied to a random chance. Although this can still provide a sizeable head start and help with faster teambuilding, it's no longer the win condition that the old one used to be.
• Support Squad grants you 2 extra Hope and 20 Originium Ingots at the start, and these allow you to alleviate much of the Early Game Hell nature of Roguelikes in general. The extra Hope lets you recruit higher rarity Operators or a Collectible at the start, and the Ingots can be spent on whatever you wish in the guaranteed Shop at the end of the 1st zone.
  • This squad is further buffed in Sui's Garden of Grotesqueries, where you start with the Coccoon Silk tongbao. Simply put, this tongbao grants a 25% compound interest with every toss. Considering you are likely to toss many times across a run, this could snowball your ingots into absurd amount to buyout Cannot's shop or fuel your Ingot-based ASPD boosters.
  • And then there's the ultimate exploit using this squad. Long story short, Step 1: accumulate 400 ingots. Step 2: replace all tongbaos except the Coccoon Silk with Risk tongbaos. Step 3: find the Leisure node with Ling in Sui's Remnant Consciousness. Now play with her in an infinite loop, accumulating collectibles, coupons and candles as much as you like, until you fully buy out every collectibles and only get Kettles from thereon. Definitive guide here.
• In general, any of the collections that make Operators start with more SP are extremely powerful, considering how valuable a burst of early SP can be for many units. With more starting SP, DPS options become available earlier, units with defensive/recovery abilities can survive brutal onslaughts that they couldn't have without their skill, and Vanguards can fire their DP-generation abilities faster to bring in reinforcements. Timing is in general very crucial in this gamemode, because stages tend to change gimmicks on the spot. Out of all of them, the Fluorescent Lamp/Second Economic Reform Act is the strongest, giving a whopping +18 starting SP, usually enough to instantly fire a skill out of the gate.
• Similarly, collections that increase starting DP can really ruin an enemy's day, since DP is so essential early on that having an advantage can let you set up a defense far earlier than you're supposed to, eliminating the DP crunch that many of the maps try to enforce. It is especially a godsent when maps rush you right out of the gate, which the roguelike has no shortage of. The strongest collection in this family is the Burdenbeast/Dreambind Castle Model which provides a whopping +30 starting DP, enough to put up a small fortification right off the bat.
• Bend Spears - Bloodbath. Guard skills generally tend to be incredibly powerful, but either take a while to charge up (such as Blaze with her second skill) or are only able to be used at key moments if their value is to be maximized. Bloodbath turns this on its head, allowing Guards to restore 2 SP on every attack. While this has its uses to make slow-charging skills charge faster, its primary value comes with allowing players to spam skills with low SP costs - this is especially good on offensive recovery guards, as they often have low SP costs to make up for the fact that they can only gain SP by attacking, and now they recover 3 SP per hit. Some particularly noteworthy examples include Cutter and Ch'en spamming nuclear burst damage with impunity, Lappland's S2 having an almost permanent uptime, Thorns instantly charging his S3, and Bibeak permanently trapping enemies in a Cycle of Hurting.
• Bend Spears - Deathmatch lowers the DEF of all Guards by 40%, but raises their ATK and ASPD by 40% and 30 respectively. Guards can often take the DEF loss due to their high base HP, and the DPS boosts this item gives them can get hilariously obscene, letting them melt just about anyone out of existence very quickly. And for Guards that can attack more than 1 tile away, this is even less of an issue, as most heavy-hitting physical enemies won't even be able to get close without being obliterated.
• Broken Wand - Malediction is another example of a trade-off with far more benefit than penalty, reducing the HP of Casters by 40% while increasing their Arts damage output by a whopping 70%. Casters are already generally Glass Cannons who will quickly die to any concentrated fire, encouraging you to never even let them get hit, so the HP loss really doesn't make that much of a difference (especially when a level has no enemies that can hit ranged operators to begin with), but the 70% damage boost massively increases their destructive power considering that Arts cannot be reduced to Scratch Damage, ensuring that the amplification will always add a significant amount of damage even at worst. Under such a significant damage buff, most high-tier Casters will be able to One-Hit Kill lesser enemies while melting through even bulkier ones, and skills that were originally high DPS options will practically become kill buttons, especially if you have more Arts amplifying items or abilities on you.
  • Fatal Bolts - Crossfire is a weaker version of Malediction for Snipers, replacing the 70% increased damage for +40% ATK. Although this is less powerful than Malediction in most cases, it accomplishes a similar task, and it being an ATK buff instead of a damage buff can help Snipers overwhelm enemies they would normally deal Scratch Damage to.
  • In Sui's Garden of Grotesqueries, the HP penalty of both of these is removed entirely, making them even more of a no-brainer to take.
• Fatal Bolts - Divine Speed gives all Snipers 70 ASPD. There isn't much to say about this except that an attack speed boost of this magnitude can turn just about any Marksman Sniper into a DPS monster while turning higher-tier Snipers into literal murder machines, the sheer volume of attacks chipping down even physically bulky foes. Furthermore, any Sniper with slow attack speed like Artillerymen, Besiegers and Flingers will get that weakness removed, letting them spam their hard-hitting attacks as much as possible. Special mention goes to Exusiai who will be able to fire at an effectively continuous rate while her skill is active, and to Wiš'adel whose immense attack interval increase will also get nullified, making her able to dish out her six nuclear bombs in rapid succession.
• Iron Guard - Impenetrable makes Defenders recover 2 SP every time they take damage. On most Defenders, this is already quite good as it lets them inflate their defenses to high heaven, but it becomes disgustingly powerful when paired with healing defenders, letting them spam their healing skills so often that everything in their heal zone becomes basically immortal. It's even stronger on stages with poison haze, as every tick of the haze counts as damage.
  • Unleashings from Crimson Solitaire (reintroduced as Blossom in the second expansion of Expeditioner's Joklumarkar) is a weaker version of this (only restoring 1 SP instead of 2), but applies to all classes instead of only Defenders, with all of the absurd strength that it entails. In addition to the aforementioned poison haze maps, it's incredibly strong against the Troupe Mouthpiece since his spawned assistants deal tick damage, letting you pump out skills to take them down.
• Blunt Claws - Inspiration reduces the Redeployment Time of all Vanguards by 50%. This is already good on its own, but it particularly shines when paired with none other than the humble 2-star operator Yato, whose talent reduces her redeployment time by 30 seconds. Because this talent applies after the relic, Yato's redeployment time is reduced to a meager 2 seconds, allowing her to be redeployed almost immediately after retreating. While other Vanguards in Phantom Solitaire are also capable of this, they also require the Brokenblade relic, which can only be acquired from a random encounter and comes with the drawback of lowering all your operators' HP by 30%. This relic alone turns Yato, who is normally a weak unit, into an infinitely reusable meatshield as long as you have enough DP to keep deploying her, turning normally hellish stages such as Barrens Cadet/Unending and Absurd Trickeries into complete jokes.
• Civilight Eterna is a situational item that has the potential to snap the game in half if you have the right units to exploit it, by causing enemies to take a whopping +150% True damage. Sources of True damage are rare, but tend to be extremely powerful to begin with; factoring in this bonus results in horrifically powerful nukes that can vaporize nearly any enemy irrespective of their defensive capabilities. Although it was originally unremarkable in Ceobe's Fungimist due to a lack of good users at the time, sources of True damage became more accessible from Crimson Solitaire and onwards, making this item get increasingly powerful. One of its best users is Kal'tsit with S3 due to it being one of the highest and most consistent sources of True damage in the game on an already beefy unit, with a Civilight-boosted Mon3tr regularly dealing over ten thousand armor-piercing damage with each hit, effortlessly cutting down even some of the mode's most dangerous bosses. To add more to this, as Civilight Eterna affects True damage taken and not True damage dealt, it also magnifies things such as the self-Damage Over Time from Enraged Possessed and Winterwisps, as well as the damage from various environmental hazards or conditions, making it so certain levels will practically play themselves as enemies are melted down.

Introduced in Phantom and Crimson Solitaire

• In terms of starting team, First Move Advantage (Vanguard, Sniper, Specialist) composed of Fang, Jaye and Kroos (or Blue Poison if you happen to have some extra Hope) is the best starting team you can get, as they virtually cover everything you need to ensure a smooth start.
  • Fang provides a 2-block and steady DP generation. Kroos provides anti-air and long-range DPS. Jaye, being a Game-Breaker himself, will murder anything that gets close to him, even Metal Crabs, while keeping the others alive through his 2nd skill. He can even be used as a Fast-Redeploy, as Fang's DP generation will counter his DP drain. Having 2 ground Operators also give deployment flexibility in case you need to block 2 lanes (e.g. Sniper Squad stage). And finally, the entire team cost only 5 Hope at higher difficulty, with a total DP cost of only 22, so you can always afford them in any run and deploy them quickly to build a defense line.
  • In comparison, Slow and Steady gives you good DPS from Caster and Sniper, but with only a single Defender as blocker. Overcoming Your Weakness is a high-risk team to have, as you only have a single Guard to block, and you need to rely on their and your Supporter's damage to kill the enemies, which may not be enough. And both teams are composed of classes with typically high DP cost, which gets further hamstrung with the lack of DP generators.
  • And ultimately, none of the other teams can take all of the Metal Slimes spawning as early as the first node. As the other teams only provide you with 1 ground Operator, Crying Thief is out. Gopnik deals too much damage to be healed by a single Medic, let alone a team without one. And Duck Lord may require quick redeployment to camp the spot he will inevitably linger around for a few seconds.
  • Sadly, this squad was indirectly nerfed in Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, as many of the mode's maps (especially the early one) focus more on hordes of enemies Zerg Rushing your team, and the squad overall lacks area damage to deal with the incoming mob quickly enough.
• Basically all of the elusive "hand" Collections are this. While they tend to be situational due to only benefiting specific archetypes per artifact, it buffs them to an absurd degree, ramping up their strengths and mitigating or outright nullifying their weaknesses to exponentially increase their power.
  • Hand of Spikes causes Protector, Arts Protector, and Duelist Defenders to deal Arts damage every second to all blocked foes equal to their DEF. Considering that they're units who are made to have lots of DEF, and can stack even more DEF with other Collections, this can lead to Defenders who are incredibly tanky and frighteningly damaging, letting them laugh off physical damage and mow down groups of enemies at a time.
    • Expeditioner's Joklumarkar rebrands the item as the Hand of Fisticuffs, which slightly changes its usage. Although its damage now applies every 2 seconds instead of on every hit, it's now a Herd-Hitting Attack that damages everything in their surroundings (even aerial units) while Binding them briefly, and it now deals True damage instead of Arts, so even Arts-resistant Casters will be sure to feel it. It also scales with ATK instead of DEF, which is a double-edged sword: while it loses value on Protectors since their ATK is generally much lower than their DEF, the opposite is true for Duelists and Arts Protectors, who can now use their high ATK stats to cause even more mayhem, while Protectors can still use it as a source of continous chip damage on blocked foes.
  • Hand of Choker causes Heavyshooter, Deadeye, and Besieger Snipers to instantly kill non-boss targets below 30% HP. While basically useless against fodder, they're usually used to handle heavy enemies like Elites anyways; since Elites (especially in this mode) tend to be very tanky, being able to effectively reduce their maximum HP by 30% can be a godsend when it comes to killing them in time, especially if they're also fast/unblockable. With more attack boosts or skills, they can even start killing tanky elites in a single hit.
    • In Mizuki and Caerula Arbor, the HP threshold was nerfed to 20%, but it can now affect all enemies, including bosses. This can be a godsend against the final bosses since they tend to be extremely tanky, and can significantly alleviate the HP steroids that high-difficulty runs give all the enemies. It's particularly useful against the Last Knight as he revives at 25% HP and becomes unblockable during his second stage, meaning that users of this relic can simply execute him as long as 5% of his health is dealt while he's in their range.
    • Expeditioner's Joklumarkar reintroduces the Hand of Choker as the Hand of Outburst and makes it even stronger by buffing the user's damage based on the target's missing HP, up to a whopping +50% against enemies below half health, making it even easier for them to bring enemies below the execute threshold. Like the Last Knight before him, it's particularly helpful against Eikthyrnir who enters his unstoppable Self-Destruction rush for every 30% HP lost, meaning that a Sniper with this item can execute him before he hits the 10% threshold, saving you some time and effort.
  • Hand of Buckler causes Decel Binder, Hexer, and Abjurer Supporters to deal bonus damage equal to 3% of the target's maximum HP as Arts damage with each hit, making it one of the rare cases of a Percent Damage Attack. This not only mitigates the problem of their low ATK to let them deal significant damage no matter how tanky the target is (even bosses!), it also complements the first two subclasses' usual tactic of showering the enemy in debuffs, since now they'll also be taking huge damage alongside being softened up, especially with ones who already inflict damage amplification like Suzuran or Gnosis. It's even more effective if you stack enough items that buff attack speed, and even more so when combined with Supporter skills with innately fast attack rates, turning things like Angelina's S2 or Gnosis' S3 into Death Rays that vaporize all but the most Arts-resistant enemies in seconds. Caerula Arbor nerfed the item by making it scale off of current HP instead of maximum HP, which is still strong albeit not as much as it used to be.
  • Hand of Diffusion is Bloodbath for Splash, Chain, and Blast Casters, making them gain 2 SP each time they damage an enemy. This is a godsend for Casters whose powerful skills have a long cooldown such as the third skills of Dusk and Mostima, especially when coupled together with some ASPD collections. Furthermore, since it applies on instances of damage instead of on attack, attacking groups of enemies (or applying Ifrit's Damage Over Time) ^note  Note that this artifact stacks with Ifrit's passive SP regen will generate absurd amounts of SP, rendering their usual drawbacks all but moot when they're able to spam all of their skills with impunity.
    • This particular collection brought an unexpected 6-star to the rise: former Low-Tier Letdown Passenger. Ever since his buffs, he has become decent but not a Game-Breaker per say because the SP Costs of his skills are the only thing left untouched (making it so that using him alongside batteries like Liskarm, Saga and Warfarin is still necessary for him to work optimally). However, this collection nullifies that weakness as well, because every single lightning and chain lightning produced by his third skill (one second after it's done resolving) counts as an attack, leading to the following progression of events: Passenger casts his third skill, it ends, and he gets all his SP back, allowing for instant, back to back lightning storms (This video (Youtube mirror) clearly demonstrates Passenger unleashing his skill, followed by a storm of blue SP-gaining numbers floating up as his storms smite the enemies repeatedly). This has made him at least on par with Bibeak as long as he has this particular collection and also caused him being among the top 3 most used Casters in the first three days.
    • Caerula Arbor changes the item to affect Fortress Defenders instead of Splash Casters, which helps them just as much with their skill cycling. It's particularly effective with Horn's first skill, as its fast cooldown and charge storing ensures that Horn will almost always instantly recharge it with each shot.
    • Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables retooled the item as Hand of Undulation, now targeting Chain, Splash, and Mech-Accord Casters. The new effect for the latter is just as strong since Mech-Accord Casters deliver two hits per attack along with a fast attack rate, supercharging their skills and more often than not allowing them to unleash it again as soon as it ends. As a bonus, if the player also has Broken Wand - Undulation, the Casters affected by the hand also enjoy a decent 20 ASPD buff.
  • Hand of Shredder makes Dreadnought, Swordmaster and Instructor Guards ignore a whopping 70% of enemy DEF on hit. This mitigates the moderate ATK of the latter two, while the Dreadnoughts effectively start dealing True damage. Swordmasters in particular can make good use of it due to having multihit burst DPS skills, allowing them to completely eviscerate even targets with over 2000 DEF.
    • After being absent for two seasons, the Hand makes a return in Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables as the Hand of Rending, now applying its effects to Reapers, Soloblades, and Fighters, almost completely offsetting their low damage per hit and synergizing with their fast attack rates and lethal multi-hit skills to rip apart enemies regardless of their defenses. Soloblades and Fighters will be able to offset their 1 block weakness by simply slaughtering any blocked enemies before the others can move past, while Reapers become able to mow down entire hordes of armored foes at once. As a bonus, if the player also has Bend Spears - Rending, the Guards also regenerate 2.5% HP per second, mitigating the Soloblade/Reaper branches' inability to be healed when out of combat.
  • Hand of Superspeed grants +100 ASPD (+120 in Caerula Arbor) to Executor, Ambusher, and Dollkeeper Specialists if they don't have any allies in the surrounding tiles. Given that most of them are made to be deployed alone anyways, this condition is hilariously easy to activate, and will usually end up doubling their DPS. Executors and Ambushers benefit the most from this: helidrop assassination tactics are now even more effective, and Ambushers can mitigate their slow attack speed to start dishing out massive area damage and crowd-control. In combination with their X module, the latter archetype can slow down (usually already-slow) heavy enemies and continuously bombard them with rapid-fire true AoE damage, making it rather fun to torment the enemy this way.
  • Hand of Snatcher reduces the costs of Charger, Pioneer, and Tactician Vanguards by 12, and causes them to get 6 extra DP whenever they kill an enemy. Most Vanguards don't even cost 12 DP, meaning that you can deploy them for no DP cost at all, all while they're getting massive amounts of DP on kill that stacks with that of Chargers. If you have Vanguards, this Collection basically invalidates all your DP problems for the rest of the run. In Beanstalk's case, this means you get two units for free, one of which doesn't even take in a deployment slot.
    • In Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, the item is reintroduced as the Hand of Adaptability, which slightly nerfs the cost reduction to -10, but changes the secondary effect to reducing the DP cost of all undeployed Operators by 1 each time one of the Vanguards kills an enemy. This reduction stacks without limit, meaning that even killing a few enemies at the start of the level is a considerable discount since it affects your whole lineup at the same time, helping you rush out your expensive units just as much as the previous effect did. On levels with lots of enemies, if you feed your Vanguards enough kills, this can result in you straight up deploying your entire team for free.
• One of the staples and win conditions of many Integrated Strategies runs is a set of 3 items (spearheaded by the Golden Chalice) which slightly increase your units' ASPD for every 5 Originium Ingots you own. It's fairly easy to amass a large amount of Ingots if you don't splurge on shops and chance games, and the buffs stack without limit (especially so if you grab multiple members of the set), turning most units into DPS/HPS monsters once you're rich enough, especially ones that attacked fast to begin with. This can also alleviate the low ATK of Medics and certain operators, letting them pull their weight as if their ATK was higher, and as high ATK operators are often plagued by an innately low ASPD, they will get that weakness removed as well, letting them spam their high damage without impunity. It's also useful on units that can apply debuffs on hit like Decel Binders or Gnosis, since they'll eventually be able to apply their statuses with a nearly 100% uptime, which in some cases can permanently disable anything that isn't immune.
• The Ribbon of Honor adds +100% to a unit's ATK when only blocking one enemy. Somewhat situational in many cases, but absurd on anything with only 1 Block (especially Dreadnoughts and Executors), doubling their already significant damage output to ridiculous levels. It's particularly good when a single large enemy has to be killed quickly, like the Wandering Puppet you can encounter at the end of the third level.
• Royal Alliance Treaty may be situational, but it absolutely trivializes certain levels. It makes your operators take no damage from Sarkaz enemies, which are usually Demonic Spiders, especially Lancers and Grudgebearers; this includes bosses like W or the Sarkaz Centurion. And if the entire map contains nothing but Sarkaz (like the aforementioned W's stage or the infamous Lancer map Unending), this item turns them into Breather Levels in an otherwise punishing mode. Although the item was indirectly nerfed in Caerula Arbor due to there being far less Sarkaz-based stages, it still completely cheeses those that remain, such as the one you can get by accepting the Sarkaz dancer's invitation. Unsurprisingly, as the vast majority of enemies in Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables are Sarkaz, this collectible does not exist in that season.
  • It returns in Expeditioner's Joklumarkar as the Shattered Alliance Treaty, where the damage immunity is nerfed to a 50% reduction, but in exchange also imparts a 50% damage resistance against Possessed enemies. Considering Possessed enemies are also major Demonic Spiders, it's still an incredibly useful item to have, while its use against Sarkaz is merely downgraded from an instant win to a massive advantage.
• A series of items, spearheaded by the Wrath of Siracusans, briefly increases your Operators' ATK by up to 100% every time their skill activates. This massively boosts Operators with automatic, low-SP offensive recovery skills such as Kroos and Blue Poison, especially since they stack, giving them the potential to turn the humble Kroos into a murder machine, hitting in excess of 2,000 per hit. And the item increases ATK whenever a skill activates, meaning Medics and Guardian Defenders also benefit from this item, allowing the likes of Saria to do a 3,000+ area heal with her 2nd skill, easily trivializing many encounters.
  • One of the best users of the items is the 6-star Instructor Guard Pallas, whose first skill, Strikes of Victory, boosts her next attack's power significantly and makes it hit twice for every third attack with full Mastery. Along with some ASPD buffs, Pallas becomes an absolute DPS monster, capable of even defeating bosses such as the Big Sad Lock in mere seconds.
• The Shadow, obtainable in a special Encounter, significantly increases the chances of drawing a Temporary Recruitment unit when recruiting Operators. Mind you, Temporary Recruitments cost no Hope to recruit, can include units that you don't even own (and the 4 IS-exclusive Elite Ops), and most importantly come with maxed levels/attributes for their respective promotion stage. Throw in some Hope to promote them, and they'll become max level Elite 2 units with fully mastered skills; after enough recruitments, you can amass a veritable Elite Army of maxed units on standby for a minimal Hope cost, which will give a huge advantage for the rest of the run, especially if you got the item early.
• Obtained in the same event as the Shadow (or a similar one in Caerula Arbor) is the Bladedance/Chitinous Ripper which, while requiring much better luck to make use of, is also notable for giving a random unit in the squad +100% ATK and HP for the entire battle. Although it's reliant on the RNG hitting a key unit to work properly, a lucky Bladedance will basically win you the level by making the lucky unit almost unstoppable, especially with ASPD buffs; DPS units will tear through even bulky targets like paper, healers will be able to laugh off any enemy offense, and tanks will become virtually immortal. If your strategy revolves around a single keystone, you can even sometimes make them the only unit on your team so that Bladedance always buffs them, turning them into a One-Man Army.
  • In Expeditioner's Joklumarkar, the item (now the Frozen Whetstone) is even more powerful due to it also doubling DEF, RES, Block, and initial SP, but also doubles DP cost as well, making it a high risk, high reward gamble instead of a free buff.
• The Rat Thieves is often considered one of the best nodes to encounter and easily the most useful of all the Downtime Recreations. Although it uses the relatively valuable Hope, not only is it guaranteed to give you something useful at the least if you pay up (unlike all the other "gambling" nodes which can leave you empty handed), it has by far the highest drop rates of any of them, making it easy to pick up valuable collectibles and resources even if you don't spend a lot. This is especially useful in runs that rely on minimal operators, as you'll likely have a large stockpile of Hope to spend, allowing you to rake in collectibles, ingots, and lives in the dozens to steamroll everything after.
• Scout's Scope, which was added in the second expansion, is a godsend to any ranged Operator, as it increases their damage dealt the farther their target is from them, capped as a massive +100%, doubling the damage of long-ranged Operators such as Deadeye or Artilleryman Snipers (especially Fartooth, who already has huge distance-based damage multipliers, or Fiammetta who can only hit things at the maximum range with S3), Blast Casters, Fortress Defenders, and Operators with global-ranged abilities such as Goldenglow or Ambriel. Even getting a partial bonus from is very significant, meaning it is valuable to any Operator with above-melee range. It reappears in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor, and although the description claims it has been nerfed significantly to a cap of +50%, this is a text error, meaning it is still as strong as ever.
• The Old Fan also introduced in the second expansion is ridiculously powerful, as it grants a +10% increase to all Operators' ATK for each unique Operator class within the squad, capping out at +80% with at least one Operator of each class. Given that most players will be aiming to round out their squad regardless, getting the most out of this relic is not hard in the least, especially with the availability of Operators in vouchers that qualify as another class (e.g. Amiya and Reserve Squad Operators). An unconditional +80% ATK to all Operators is an absolutely absurd boost, making it one of the best collectibles in the mode.
• Also from the second expansion is the Silence/Black Tulip, which is basically a weaker Liberator trait that applies to all allies, giving them up to 60% ramping ATK if they go a minute without activating their skills, resetting after a skill usage. Given how strong the Liberator trait is, it's a major bonus on pretty much any operator without a Spam Attack skill, and is especially good on those that only activate their skills during key moments, as not only will they be hurting/healing at a massively boosted rate until then, those crucial skills will hit even harder. On top of that, on units that have passive or permanent skills (as long as you wait long enough to activate the latter), this just results in them having +60% ATK forever.

Introduced in Mizuki and Caerula Arbor

• If you can keep your Light full and get lucky with dice rolls, the game can bless you with Enlightenments, which are boons in the vein of Plays from Crimson Solitaire, but much stronger and permanent. Their effects vary but are all extremely powerful, ranging from instantly blessing you with Collectibles or Command EXP, permanent HP and SP regen for one unit, or just significant stat buffs for your units and debuffs for your enemies. Although these become less reliable in harder difficulties or endings (as those tend to make it harder or near impossible to keep your Light full for prolonged amounts of time), getting just one can single-handedly tip the balance of a run in your favor, much less if you stack multiple.
• The People-Oriented Squad is universally regarded as the best starting squad following the nerf to Tactical squads, as it reduces the recruitment and promotion Hope cost of units by 1 each, allowing you to accelerate the development of your squad much more quickly than other options. 4-star Operators only require 1 Hope to recruit and are free to promote, 5-star Hope costs are the equivalent of 4-stars using other starts making them much more attractive options, and 6-stars become much easier to acquire and promote. Additionally, once you have fully leveled its boons in the Cognitive Shaping tree, you gain the additional benefit of being able to receive two bonuses from all Safe Houses, making it even easier to promote units, gain extra Life Points or Squad Size, or restore Light. On the higher Surging Tides levels, this is considered the only really viable starting option due to counteracting the +1 recruitment cost of all units which guarantees a starting 6-star without needing to luck out on a starting Hope bonus, and the additional Safe House bonus, which is the most reliable way of restoring Light as your starting Light is automatically penalized on the higher difficulties. With the second expansion, fully upgrading Cognitive Shaping will also raise the Command Level cap from 10 to 11, rewarding you further if you've fought frequently and amassed a lot of EXP.
• With the second expansion, the Mind over Matter Squad shot up in effectiveness as well, due to the new final node in Cognitive Shaping which lets it start with a Survivor Contract, which is a 20% buff to ATK and DEF for a random operator that increases by a further 20% for every battle you've cleared. This buff stacks without limit, causing them to get ridiculous if you've been constantly picking fights (which the other benefits of the squad encourage anyways); even if you can't choose who they land on, having even one key member of your squad with inflated ATK and DEF is often enough to win many levels. Furthermore, like the Chitinous Ripper, smaller squads can manipulate the randomness to make it more likely or guaranteed to land on someone important, and it sees near universal usage on one operator challenges, where it will turn a unit of your choice into a One-Man Army. The base effects of the squad also still persist, granting a significantly raised chance to get Collectibles after battles, which combined with the Survivor Contract can give you an edge on earlier floors before snowballing into oblivion in the mid and lategame, letting you amass both a hoard of potential game-breaking items and one superpowered Operator per fight to steamroll the last section of the game.
• Caerula Arbor adds a few more "hand" Collectibles, just as strong as the ones from before.
  • Hand of Purification causes Bards, Therapists, and Phalanx Casters to deal continous Damage Over Time to enemies in range equal to half their ATK each second. This gives the former two classes actual offensive presence (particularly since Therapists have very long range), and it being per second lets them still deal decent supportive DPS despite their low ATK. Meanwhile, Phalanx Casters have enough ATK to turn the damage into a dangerous threat for any enemy that dares walk into range, which also helps alleviate their skill downtime and further enhance their uptime with the offensive buffs they get during their skills.
  • Hand of Pulverization focuses on Gathering Steam with it allowing Flingers, Artillerymen, and Splash Casters to gain 15% ATK each time they hit a target, up to a whopping 150% until they stop attacking for 5 seconds. Since they'll likely be constantly attacking a wave, they'll quickly reach such absurd amounts of ATK that their basic attacks will likely be able to stymie a wave by themselves, and any skills they use will go from powerful to downright devastating. It also lets Flingers in particular to overcome their usual weakness to enemies with high DEF and use their multi hits to rip apart even bulkier foes.
    • In Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables, the Hand of Rumble inherits the effect, now buffing Phalanx Casters instead of Splash Casters. Fortunately, they can use it just as well as Splash Casters if not better, thanks to their high base ATK and wide-ranged true AoE attacks ensuring they'll scale in no time before nuking everything in range.
  • Hand of Flowing Water causes Summoners and Core/Mystic Casters to permanently accelerate their SP generation each time they activate a skill, up to +2/sec after four activations. Suddenly, powerhouse skills that are gated by their SP costs suddenly become a whole lot easier to use, and anything with a moderate cooldown becomes downright spammable, giving them incredible uptime; Summoners in particular will have no trouble keeping their armies maintained since most of them can now continously generate more summons or recycle their old ones. It's particularly notable on skills that were already spammable to begin with like Eyja's Ignition, since they'll now become borderline continuous.
    • Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables renames the item to Hand of Mystery and swaps the Summoner and Mystic Caster targets for Ritualist and Primal Casters, greatly helping with the uptime of their Element application and burst, especially since many of them tend to rely on spammable skills.
  • The Hand of Branding from the second expansion causes any kill made by a Duelist, Soloblade, or Dreadnought to give all members of those archetypes +1% HP, +1% ATK, and +1 ASPD permanently, stacking up to 99 times. The buffs persist between stages, so although it'll usually take a few levels to fully stack up, it can easily turn any member of the classes into a ungodly wall of stats to make up for their innate weaknesses, as even a 1-block unit is going to be able to cause some serious mayhem with effectively doubled core stats, and any elites or bosses they duel will fall to pieces in mere moments. Soloblades in particular can take advantage of the ASPD buff to pump their healing through the roof, making them nigh unkillable with their inflated HP.
• Fincatcher's Shawl gives all ranged operators permanent Camouflage. Suddenly, one of their biggest weaknesses - them being Glass Cannons - becomes almost irrelevant outside of splash damage, allowing you to toss them in the most outrageously reckless positions without any repercussions. The sheer freedom the item provides can allow you to rain hell upon an entire map without needing to worry about your units being shot down, and it's particularly effective against the final bosses (outside of the Last Knight) as they all rely on powerful ranged attacks.
• Flames of the Inquisition grants all Operators 2 SP each time they damage a Sea Monster...in a mode where almost every credible threat - and nearly every enemy in general - is a Sea Monster. With the item, skill cooldowns become all but irrelevant, and the game will suddenly get a whole lot easier now that you can spam all of your skills with impunity. The only downside is that unlocking it requires a whopping 325 Ingots invested in Cannot's store, meaning most players will take a while to get it.
• Timeworn Poetry Strips makes all summoned units no longer count towards the deployment limit. This is exactly as broken as it sounds, as the Summoners generally used as Crutch Characters that are swapped out once the player's squad becomes more rounded out can now use the full might of their summons throughout the entire run with no limitations. If three of Ling's Higher Form dragons didn't seem busted enough, picture three dragons being backed up by your entire squad. As an addendum, this collectible works with all summons that normally take a deployment slot, including Kal'tsit's Mon3tr (removing her only real limitation as a laneholder) and Phantom's clone.
• Old George Nutritional Paste gives all operators up to 30% bonus ATK depending on how full their HP is. It's a fairly substantial bonus on an incredibly easy-to-meet condition, since keeping your operators healthy is already a major priority in the mode, especially at higher difficulties. It's especially good on long-ranged units, since you'll be keeping them out of the line of fire and out of aggro most of the time anyways, turning it into almost permanent free damage.
• Casters were generally considered somewhat ineffective in Caerula Arbor, due to the high RES boasted by most of the dangerous threats and Surging Waves globally buffing RES even further. Enter Broken Wand - Solving from the second expansion, which globally reduces the RES of all enemies by 12 for every Caster deployed, stacking infinitely. Even with a single Caster on the field, a global -12 RES translates to a whole lot more damage being dealt due to the calculation for Arts damage, making it viable for general teams - for Caster-centric teams, if you field multiple at once, they'll be chewing through enemies that would normally laugh off Arts damage, and can even tear through bosses with a full 90 RES with no sweat. As an extra treat, the item is only a Rare instead of a Super Rare like most other game-breakers, meaning you're relatively more likely to see it as a reward or in the shop.
• Also buffing Casters is Broken Wand - Learning and its stronger version Broken Wand - Light of Wisdom, which grant all Casters a small stacking ATK and ASPD buff for every Collectible you have. This is an infinitely stacking offensive buff that is effectively unconditional given how many Collectibles you're encouraged to amass in an Integrated Strategies run (especially if you took Mind over Matter squad), and has the potential to stack with other Caster/Arts buffs (or even each other) to turn them into absurd powerhouses once the ball gets rolling.
• Added in the second expansion, Iron Guard - Tower gives all Defenders a whopping +70% DEF and 20 RES, along with 60% reduction against Elemental Damage. This is a Simple, yet Awesome buff that renders Defenders all but unkillable except to the most ferocious of attacks or Surging Waves, and the Elemental Damage reduction can be a godsend considering the massive amounts of Corrosion and Nervous Impairment used by the Seaborn.
  • Iron Guard - Consolidation from Expeditoner's Joklumarkar is a slightly modified version of this item, nerfing the DEF buff to 40% and removing the Elemental Damage resistance in exchange for also granting +40% HP. As it turns out, this is still just as powerful as it was: the Elemental DR removal isn't particularly relevant as Elemental Damage is largely absent from this season, and adding HP to the mix potentially increases a Defender's survivability even further beyond the 30% lost DEF.
• Doctor Silver Seal from the second expansion lets you recruit a random, pre-promoted, maxed-out 6-star for free. This is exactly as powerful as it sounds, and can instantly give you a massive advantage for the next while (or even for the rest of the game), as even a Low-Tier Letdown from the 6-star pool will generally still be absurdly powerful for a unit obtained completely for free, even if solely by virtue having completely maximized stats. To a lesser extent, the HR Bronze Seal (effectively the same thing but for 5-stars) is also this, for the exact same reason but scaled down to a 5-star level.
• The Caerula Arbor second expansion introduces a new collectible, the Flashing Sword, where your Operators obtain a whopping +35 ASPD... for each Cursed Curio that you own. While it sounds impractical, accessing the third or fourth endings requires you to obtain at least two ending relevant Cursed Curios, so you are guaranteed to obtain up to +70 ASPD for your Operators by the time you get to floor 5 and 6. Add that total with one extra Cursed Curio you may obtain while playing in higher difficulties or going for the fourth ending, you can easily get up to +105 ASPD (or even more if you obtain another Cursed Curio from encounters) to steamroll the final floors easily, and the potential drawback of losing Light from obtaining some of the relevant Cursed Curios is easily remedied via Safe Rooms and other means to recover Light, especially as the second expansion also introduces collectibles that allows you to both recover Light more easily and mitigate Light losses when losing Life Points.
• If you're going for the Stella Caerula ending, you'll have to pick up an item on the fifth floor that changes depending on how much Light you've managed to get back after losing it all to the Caerula Memory at the start of the run. This can be a -1 Block nerf if your light is too low, which changes to +1 Block if you've managed to keep it above 50 - bring it all the way to 90, however, and you'll be blessed with Determination, which grants all operators a massive +120% HP and DEF, +20 RES, and +2 Block, making high-ground Operators as tanky as Defenders and low-ground fighters nigh immortal. The moment you get it, pretty much every level that isn't the last becomes a cakewalk even on higher difficulties, letting you steamroll through the fifth and sixth floors, as well as the Indigo Cradle. Of course, you'll have to contend with getting your Light back up from 0, which can be tough without a lot of Light boosting artifacts (although the Caerula Arbor that can be obtained in the quest line helps a lot), and the fact that you're in for a hell of a time against Izumik without it, with the massive defensive buffs from Determination going from broken to the bare minimum to survive on higher difficulties.

Introduced in Expeditioner's Joklumarkar

• The Foldartals are a new system introduced in this mode, a set of sigils that come in a top (node selection) and bottom half (effect selection), and can be combined to create new benefits that also lower your Collapse level. The highly powerful Foldartals in particular are Sing, Silence, and Debate, which grant +50 ASPD, +50% max HP, and -30% redeployment time respectively when entering combat, and should you trigger a Concord (when the top and bottom halves are matching colors), they also spawn a Cheering Sponsor Drone that further ramps up ASPD, a highly tanky Shieldguard Defender to help defend the blue box, and grants a random Elite Operator to join you, respectively. These are very powerful effects that can help you turn the tides in particularly difficult battles on higher Braving Nature levels, and as the cherry on top, all of these effects can stack on top of each other (or even themselves if you have multiple of one kind) on the same node, which can greatly ease the difficulty; if you have enough Foldartals, there's nothing stopping you from throwing all of the buffs onto a single tough node to steamroll it. Even the non-combat Foldartals can be a huge boon, as they can let you quickly gather more tools through plain old resource gain or changing nodes into shops or Bosky Passages (see below), or even replace potentially run-ending battles with more beneficial nodes.
• The Special Training Squad grants 3 objective shields for an easier early game, but most importantly, it makes all Operator promotions free of charge, regardless of rarity. This is an extremely powerful boon that can let you build up your squad much faster, and makes it so that you only ever have to worry about recruitment costs, letting you easily promote anyone with the right voucher. The only real downside to this squad is that it doesn't affect recruit costs unlike the Tactical squads, which on higher difficulty levels forces players to rely on a lucky starting buff to get a 6-star start due to the raised Hope costs of all units.
• The Eternal Hunting Squad gives +2 starting Life Points and offers you a challenge where you'll gain +1 additional Collapse upon an imperfect clear, but instead reduce your Collapse by 2 on a perfect clear. This starting squad essentially removes the mode's main challenge in the form of Collapse Paradigms, some of which can be truly debilitating; one or two battles gone sour can now be merely written off if you do well in your next few, and it's entirely possible to make it all the way to the sixth or seventh floor without a single Paradigm active. You can also afford to be more reckless by choosing certain options and Collectibles that will cost you some Collapse, knowing the penalty will be cleared in a few combat rounds anyway.
• Once it becomes unlocked, the Bosky Passage node can be your best friend, giving you the option to use 1 Anti-Interference Index and head to a mini-floor where you'll be hit with a map condition that can either be purely beneficial, detrimental, or anywhere in between. Unlike Mizuki & Caerula Arbor's Wander into Wonderland which would guarantee several grueling battles followed by what could easily be That One Boss if your team isn't in top form (especially on an early floor), Bosky Passages will, at worst, give you some Emergency battles that you'd normally find on the original floor anyways, and at best will offer nothing but shops, encounters, and battles that will always give increased rewards, letting you pick up more goodies than you'd normally be able to get at the time. Although it can screw you over if you get unlucky or overestimate your strength before entering, it's relatively easy to prepare for if you know what you're doing, and if frequently taken can result in you practically swimming in Command XP and items to snowball into the later floors. It does get more risky at higher difficulties, as Emergency Battles can spell trouble with the floor debuffs along with Anti-Interference Index being more scarce, but the payoff remains just as good if not moreso due to the higher importance of a strong arsenal.
  • Of note is the Migrate Foldartal which, while rare, has an incredibly powerful Concord of not only turning the targeted node(s) into Bosky Passages, but also completely filling Anti-Interference Index when entering them, which not only completely offsets the cost of entry, but also ensures you can fully scout out your upcoming journey while having nearly all Index-dependent options open to you. It's even better if you use it with a Foldartal that affects multiple nodes, as if you can handle the Passages, you can do multiple of them in succession and scoop up a boatload of rewards without worrying about the cost of entering them, nor that of traversing multiple paths to reach all of them.
• The Hunter's Insight allows all Operators to pierce through half the DEF and RES of enemy Collapsals, and briefly slow them down on hit. Given how the Collapsals are major Demonic Spiders in this mode and make up the vast majority of the enemies in general, anything that helps to get rid of them faster is always a massive help. The slow on hit in particular is excellent for shutting down their signature Super-Speed, and while the DEF and RES ignore are more situational on most regular Collapsals due to most of them having a major weakness in one or more of their defenses, this is counteracted by the fact that it also works on Collapsal bosses such as the Fallen/Hollow Snowpriests, or even Eikthyrnir and Crazelyseon.
• The Lakebed Aegis gives one Objective Shield upon obtaining it and, if the player has any Objective Shield when entering a battle, increases the health of all units by 60% for the duration of the battle. It's relatively easy to retain at least one Shield with various items or buffs, and the HP buff from this item alone outstrips other top-tier HP buffs like the Unknown Instrument and the Silence Foldartal (+50%) while having an easy-to-meet condition, potentially turning your entire team into nigh-unkillable juggernauts as long as you don't lose your last Shield, which in itself is made easier since the massive HP buff also makes it harder for enemies to break through your lines and take your Shields. Furthermore, it stacks with any other HP buffs like those mentioned.
• Peek Into the Eternal Night, obtainable from the "Missing Mountains" encounter, grants your operators +25% ATK and 25 ASPD at the cost of draining 25 health per second. This is a bargain for the buffs it provides, as most operators have at least 800 health, so that's at most a measly 3% health loss per second, sufficient time to place a healer to negate the minuscule health loss, especially since their own healing power is buffed as well. And if you get other sources of passive regeneration (like the Actor's Perfume, which regenerates 1% max. HP per second) and some more health buffs, the downside is totally negated.
• A series of 3 collectibles will buff your melee operators, starting with the Frozen Husk which grants +40 ASPD for 5 seconds when your melee operators take damage. That's already very good, but then Frost Buck's Pauldrons will buff their ATK and DEF by 40% for 30 seconds when they are blocking 2 enemies. Considering most melee operators have 2 block and the sheer amount of Zerg Rushing Collapsals in the mode, the activation condition is trivial and will ensure all blocked enemies will be cut down to ribbons in short order. Finally Snow Doe's Gloves requires 3 blocked enemies to activate, so realistically it will only work for Defenders or Centurions (unless you have the Palmtop Pavilion), but will buff ASPD by +80 and grant 50% physical/Arts evasion. Just getting one of these, even the most basic Frozen Husk, is already game-changing, but stacking 2 or even all 3 has the potential to absolutely murder even tougher maps if you have the melee units to back them up.
• Palmtop Pavilion from the second expansion is a universal +1 block to all units with no strings attached, increased to +2 if a unit has been deployed for at least a minute. This can instantly turn your defensive line into an solid wall even if you didn't draft a lot of blocking power, especially if most of your melee units were fielded early enough to get the full buffs, and if you did have blocking power, not much is getting past 5-block Defenders along with any other units you have to add to it. Like previous block increasing items, it also synergizes with units that attack targets equal to their block count.
• Black Hole Protocol, introduced in the second expansion, will only activate if your DP is currently maxed out, but grants all units +150% HP when activated, equal to three Silence Foldartals that can be activated in any battle. Although it takes some effort to set up and only really benefits strategies that hunker down early and don't rely on redeployment, all of your units might as well become immortal from the second the DP count hits 99, especially if they already have HP buffs from said Foldartals or other items.

Introduced in Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables

• The Blueprint Squad is one of the main ways to snowball your run to a ridiculous degree. Whereas nodes usually require an Plan to refresh if they allow it at all, this squad not only gives one more chance to refresh each node, but makes the first one free. On paper it's just a nice bonus that lets you get rid of any unfavorable nodes for better ones, but what really makes it this is that you're generally guaranteed to be able to choose one of two items near the start of a run: the Doodle of Hope that gives Hope and makes refreshing never give you Emergencies (and seemingly more likely to give you non-combat nodes), or the Talons of Hatred that buffs ally and enemy ATK, and makes refreshing massively more likely to give you Emergencies. Picking the latter with this squad can lead to you rerolling almost every node past the first floor into an Emergency Operation which, while potentially very difficult even with the item's buffs, if handled will result in you being guaranteed to pick up an item and bonus XP/Ingots after every single battle. Combine this with using Thoughts to net you more Collectibles and travel between paths to pick more fights, and you can get way more items than the game expects you to (ie. well upwards of 50 by the end of a run, where 30 is already considered sizeable), turning even weaker operators into monsters or stronger ones into outright run-winners even on high difficulties. The only downsides include the lack of an Elite 2 start as well as the potential hellish nature of continously doing Emergency battles, but this can become less of an issue if you pick starters or early units that can avert Early Game Hell, or even just Crutch Characters that'll hold off the early emergencies until you can grab some carries and soup them up with your buffs. Even using the Doodle of Hope with the squad can break the game in other ways, such as clearing runs way faster than normal by skipping over almost every battle, maximizing resource gains and rapidly accumulating wealth to spend at will, and in one case, beating difficulty 15 without recruiting any Operators.
  • As of both expansions, upgrading the squad in Historical Reconstruction also makes it start with a Plan and +1 Hope, making it even stronger as you're now guaranteed to be able to start with a 6* operator even on higher Facing Souls difficulties. However, the higher difficulties do indirectly nerf the Talons as the extra Plan cost for traveling between paths makes it more expensive to greed for fights, in addition to several painful new additions to the level roster in the expansions making it more risky.
• Following the second expansion, the Ingots Squad shot up in relevance, as in addition to its original effects (granting Ingots when entering a floor or destroying a Spine of Epoch, as well as letting you refresh one node per floor into a Rogue Trader for free), it can be upgraded to give a Plan when entering a Rogue Trader while starting you with the Scales of Avarice (+3 Ingots per non-combat node entered while Mental Toil is above 20). On top of essentially giving you bonus income for nearly any action you take, being able to create Traders wherever you want and get Plans from them essentially gives you a steady stream of items and recruits on demand, while also acting as a get-out-of-jail-free card to reroll an undesirable fight or node. Combined with some items like the Talons of Hatred or Lamp of Wishes (elaborated on below), and you can start scaling very hard without even having to trouble yourself with too many hard fights as you can simply accumulate money and sell your Thoughts before buying your way to victory. Naturally, the large amount of money you'll accumulate also plays well into items that scale ASPD based on money, with the strategy being potent for wiping out the hardest endings after a bit of scaling.
• This IS iteration grants you tons of Thoughts, so many that you'll be swimming in them and it's likely you'll be throwing them away just to remain playable. A few Collectibles provide buffs depending on your Thoughts, but especially notable are Song to Make a Tenacious Mind and Bridge of Knowledge. The former grants you 1 free Shield whenever you use an Inspirer, while the latter buffs your Operators' HP by 5% every time you use an Inspirer, up to a maximum of 10 uses (albeit being non-retroactive). The former is usually more efficient than Interpreting Thoughts for Shields and very damn useful for 1-Life plays, while latter means an unconditional, permanent +50% HP buff at its maximum stacks.
• Out of all the Inspirers, Relocation stands out for being Fincatcher's Shawl on demand, granting all ranged units Camouflage for the duration of the next battle. It might be single-use and unable to be stacked with any other Inspirers, but it can single-handedly win many of the tougher stages by itself. The first expansion even made it easier to get by allowing it to be crafted using one Wall Inspirer and the common Elder's Crown, instead of needing 2 Walls (which are individually quite rare).
• The Shrivel and Sprout Lingerer which can be acquired in a common early floor encounter is a major case of Magikarp Power which can serve as a massive win condition if you keep it. While it's only a 2-star rarity Thought, it duplicates itself on every new floor, and the encounter where you can gain them is almost guaranteed to appear as early as the first floor and gives you two of them. While carrying a lot of them will burden your Toil value heavily, if you manage to hold onto as many of them as possible on the later floors, it's easy to amass over a dozen of them, allowing you to receive a massive payoff of collectibles that can secure your win easily. Even better is if you also manage to acquire the Soul Binding Bone or Soul Furnace's Fuel collectible which grants your Operators +3/5% ATK for every Thought you have, or (after the Second Expansion) the Unripe Yearning which also gives 3% HP/ATK for each one, the combination of which can give your entire squad a significant power boost if you choose to retain the Thoughts instead of using them.
• You can rob Cannot's (well, Mr. Goodenough) shop as usual, and it will pit you in a tough fight against him. Like previous iterations of the fight, it allows you to steal his items while making his shop inaccessible for the rest of the run. Unlike previous iterations, this time you can attack Cannot directly, and if you do this on floor 4 or higher, his retinue comes with several Lost Hovercrafts, with Cannot spawning more if you don't stun-lock him or kill him too fast. If you can take the Hovercrafts down along with the other foes, it can easily grant you 100+ Originium Ingots to immediately jack up your ASPD-boosting Collectibles. The only things stopping you is whether you can actually win the fairly difficult stage he'll throw at you, and whether you're big enough of a jerk to rob him in the first place. Still, those ingots are quite tempting...
• The King's Set (Crown, New Lance, Armor, Legacy) was introduced from as far back as Phantom and Crimson Solitaire, but wasn't seen as particularly useful due to the activation condition requiring you to leak enemies and the lack of Shield mechanic making you a One-Hit-Point Wonder, on top of many of the seasons harshly penalizing you for losing lives or fighting on low HP; useful in theory, but its activation is often a sign of the enemy force overwhelming your defense line and you losing moments later. Not anymore. Using Thoughts to become Mind Fractured makes it trivial to intentionally reduce your Life without harming your Shield nor significantly hampering the rest of your run, and the Interpretation nodes allow you to easily gain Shields to the point where the 1 HP barely matters as you'll have 10+ Shield HP instead. Most importantly, there's an Encounter that allows you grab one or two King's Items... But if you come in with 1 Life (excluding Shields), you get ALL of the King's Set. This means a cumulative buff of +50 ASPD (Lance), 1.5% HP regen and 0.5 SP regen per second (Legacy), free Shield for every perfect clear (Armor), and a +150% ATK buff (Crown), enough to make even weaker operators into ridiculous powerhouses, and stronger ones into outright game-winners. Even getting part of the set is still a huge boon considering you can now have their buffs active for the better part of a run.
  • These items can potentially become even more powerful with the addition of another new item in the second expansion: Visage of Crowned Fates. It forcibly sets your maximum LP to one while granting Shields based on the amount consumed, which is already a no-brainer for King's runs for obvious reasons. However, because it reduces the LP cap, not only does it also largely mitigate the (admittedly trivial) risk of accidentally healing above the threshold, but allows you to double-dip and also benefit from the Sarkaz King's Set, which normally only provides benefits when at the LP cap - which is now 1. So on top of the King's buffs, you can get up to 20% DEF and 10 RES (Regal Rest), 30 ASPD (Torn Banner), and 200% HP (King of Sarkaz's Vessel), albeit on a less accessible condition since there's no way to reliably get the Visage of Crowned Fates, and getting it before hitting Command Level 6 can possibly prevent said double-dipping as you'll still be forced to gain max LP from level-ups.
• Hand of Predation, the new Vanguard Hand, provides Chargers, Pioneers, and Tacticians with a stacking ATK/DEF buff each time they activate a skill, up to +100% after ten activations. In addition to making early rushes a bit easier, this also makes it unnecessary to replace Vanguards quickly when the bulk of the enemy force begins to roll in, as any Vanguard with that much ATK and DEF is nothing to sneeze at, being able to handle many enemies by themselves while still generating DP. Naturally, it goes from powerful to downright lethal on Vanguards that have charge-storing or spammable on-hit skills, as they'll be able to hit max stacks in a very short time before laying waste to anything that enters their range. As a bonus, also having Blunt Claws - Predation gives said Vanguards +0.5 SP regen per second, greatly accelerating both their DP generation and stat scaling.
• Hand of Protraction causes Ambushers, Geeks, and Merchants to gain a stacking 25% ATK buff for every 30 seconds they've been deployed for, stacking up to 5 times, or 8 if you also have Rusted Blade - Protraction. This is a godsend for prolonged fights (which said classes already excel in), in particular turning Ambushers into living death zones that hamstring and mince anything in range.
• Rusted Blade - Lone Force doubles down on the damage aspect of Specialists rather than the utility of the previous generation "black books", giving Specialists a whopping 70% bonus ATK as long as there are no allies in the adjacent tiles. Similar to the Hand of Superspeed, it's incredibly easy to activate this condition since most Specialists tend to work alone, and can result in them being able to pick fights with things that they'd otherwise have no reason trying to face, allowing them to easily eliminate priority targets in a flash or clear out waves before they reach the main force.
• Given that the season will almost exclusively be pitting you against Sarkaz enemies, an otherwise Situational Sword set of items that dramatically increases your power against them can be an enormous boon. On the defensive side, the Halo reduces their movement speed by 30% while the Holy City's Embrace makes operators take 35% less damage from them, making it far easier to prepare for them and withstand them when they arrive. On the offensive side, Dawn of Literature increases Physical/Arts damage dealt to them by a whopping 50%, while Devilbane Banner restores 2 SP on every hit against them, allowing even weaker operators to spam their skills and rip through them. Given the unending hordes of Sarkaz Demonic Spiders that you'll be facing, even just one can tip the scales in your favor, much less if you stack multiple of them at once - while the latter won't guarantee you victory, it'll very often lead to it.
• Getting the Burdenherd Bell from the Burdenbeast Traveler encounter will sort out your DP issues in the early-mid floors singlehandedly. As long as you have this collectible, then each stage will have a pre-deployed burdenbeast, Carrot, who passively generates 2 DP per 5 seconds for as long as they remain on the stage. This is on par with the DP-generation skills of Standard Bearer Vanguards, permanently, and doesn't require you to spend DP to deploy your own Vanguard first. While you do have to protect the burdenbeast as you will lose it permanently if it dies, it's reasonably tanky and will make sure DP is never an issue as long as it's around. Unfortunately, you lose this bonus once you reach the fifth floor, but in exchange you get a free Plan and the Furnace and Assembly Inspirers, which give a +100% bonus to Originium Ingot drops and +50% bonus EXP after combat respectively.
• The Lamp of Wishes, added in the first expansion, has the potential to all but eliminate the randomness factor of runs while guaranteeing you snowball into unkillability. On top of giving 10 Ingots immediately, it causes node refreshes to almost always wind up as Wish Fulfilled nodes, adds a third option to said nodes which always will have a powerful item matching on your squad composition and situation, and adds an option to pay Plans to acquire all three items at once. This can easily guarantee you picking up any or even all of the game-breakers on the list, notably the Hand collectibles (which will always match a unit in your squad, letting you use it right away), King's items (if you're at 1 LP), ingot-scaling items like the Golden Chalice (if you have enough money, making it especially useful right after a successful robbery from Cannot) or more, which means you can pretty much just give the middle finger to RNG as you pick units that power-spike with specific items you'd normally rely on chance to get, guarantee those items, and start wiping out nodes left and right. Similar to the Doodle of Hope, it also serves as a way to reroll undesirable nodes into guaranteed items, especially when used with the aforementioned Blueprint Squad to amass an absurd number of Collectibles to roll right over your run, with manipulation of the Lamp being able to make mincemeat out of even the highest-difficulty endings the mode has to offer. On top of this, it can be obtained incredibly easily from the same F1/F2 encounter that gives the Talons of Hatred/Doodle of Hope (meaning you can get an absurd build as early as the third floor), although this does lead into arguably the item's only downside in that it's mutually exclusive with the other two.
  • After the second expansion, the Lamp of Wishes also guarantee the aforementioned Sarkaz King's Set (if you're at LP cap).
• Added in the second expansion is the Hand of Fireworks, which blesses Marksmen, Loopshooters, and Sentry Protectors with a 25% chance to fire a second explosive shot dealing 200% ATK on each shot. Given the fast attack rates of the beneficents, this will trigger a lot, and the effects simultaneously offset their usual weaknesses of low ATK and single target given the AoE and high multiplicative ATK scaling, letting them mow down hordes of even defensively sound enemies. If you use some of the higher-tier Snipers with obscene fire rate buffs, "fireworks" will be an apt description.
• The Clotheskaz from the second expansion restores a hefty 30 SP to any Operator whose skill finishes for the first time in an operation. This massively expedites their next skill cast and, more often than not, can allow many Operators to straight-up Double Tap and fire their skill a second time right away, which has the potential to snap some encounters in half if you happen to have a skill interaction that synergizes with the effect.
• Cursed Counterbeast, also from the second expansion, provides a small ASPD buff, while consuming an Inspirer at the end of each battle to permanently increase this buff, up to 10 times. Given that most runs will end with you acquiring more Inspirers than you can feasibly use, this is a very easy price to pay for what can ultimately end up as +50 ASPD for free.
• Rhoder's Gate, acquired from a rare encounter, will snowball your run to absurd degrees albeit needing some micromanagement. With this relic, your last deployed Operator at the end of every stage will be taken away as though a Portal or Scout node. This allows you to freely promote any Operator you need with no Hope cost while also leaving you swimming in Plans once you get your Operators back, allowing you to amass a full team of Elite 2 Operators with ease while also having the potential to take vertical paths more regularly, giving the opportunity to take even more combat nodes and thus *more* promotions and Plans. While you do have to be careful to not forget about the effect lest you lose a crucial Operator after a battle, and eventually you find yourself having to throw unneeded Operators into a stage to be taken once your core squad is built to not lose anyone important, the encounter itself helps with this by giving you a full set of Reserve Ops as fodder to sacrifice to the relic if needed.
• The Judgement set added in the second expansion is a series of items (one per class) that buffs their class based on how many "Mystery" items from Bizarre Fragments the player has. While you can only enter so many Fragments in a single run and may be saddled with potentially undesirable debuffs from the Mysteries, not only do runs generally already encourage going for as many Fragments as possible thanks to the boon having extra nodes to loot can provide, the buffs each Judgement provides per Mystery are so massive that even entering one or two Bizarre Fragments will give you a significant leg up, much less if you're able to stack more on top of that.^{List of buffs}Guards/Casters/Snipers gain +20% ATK and +20 ASPD, Specialists/Vanguards have +30% HP and +20% ATK, Defenders get +30% HP and +20% DEF, and Medics/Supporters gain +50% ATK.

Introduced in Sui's Garden of Grotesqueries

• Tongbao are the resident gimmick of the season, letting you activate up to 3 special effects every time you enter a floor or manually reroll them, ranging from purely beneficial to risky but rewarding. Among them are a few standouts that can turn the tide of the current floor:
  • Desire Fulfilled gives all allies a whopping +80 ASPD, with the caveat that the ASPD buff will decrease by 20 every time the coin is tossed. This is usually enough to curb-stomp any levels on the current floor, nevermind that that 60 or even 40 ASPD is already substantial even if you do end up tossing it multiple times; and unlike its counterparts (which have effects that increase with successive tosses), it's a lot more likely to not toss it than it is to toss it, unless you go out of your way to reroll recklessly.
  • The Bulwark and Stove Alight are a pair of Flower coins that respectively give HP based on your Objective Shield and ASPD based on your Ingots. It's easy to obtain a surplus of both if you wisely use your Wander into Wonderland nodes, and the buffs both stack without limit, potentially skyrocketing your offense and defense to new heights if you've gotten rich before tossing them.
  • Bloodshed reduces the squad's max HP by 25%, but in exchange it also reduces all enemies' max HP by a hefty 45%, making the enemy significantly more fragile. While the reduced max HP on your squad can also be crippling, it's a fair tradeoff for being able to kill the enemy much faster, especially on higher difficulties. On top of that, it stacks with the max HP debuff inflicted by Bal: WoodFeedsFlames, making the enemy even squishier.
  • A Good Match buffs the enemy's ATK by 25%, but in exchange also buffs the entire squad's ATK by 60%. Just like Bloodshed Spill, this Tongbao makes the enemy more dangerous but also makes your own team more powerful to help take them down more easily.
  • Falling Word reduces natural DP generation by 50%, but in exchange grants 99 DP right off the bat. The massive start in DP lets you get a huge headstart in deploying your Operators right away, and the reduced DP regeneration can be mitigated if you have Vanguards to make up for it.
  • Lei Fa's Purge, while difficult to use properly, can result in an absolutely insane payoff. It marks a random Vagary Tile on every map that, if deployed on, strikes the target with nine Arts lightning bolts. If this operator survives, they become a Candleguest, akin to challenging a Pathfinder node; however, you can not only do this every level, but you can even do it multiple times in a single level. While the tile can screw you over if it spawns in a bad place, and you'll usually need healing to survive the 3600 Arts damage from the bolts, using it properly can result in having no Candleguests to your entire squad being made of nothing but them in the span of a single floor.
  • The Ascent is a fitting name for a coin that, when tossed, causes every victory on the floor to give a guaranteed, free 6-star voucher. Sure, the units are random, and the coin is consumed afterwards, but going for fights still means that you can add potentially three or more 6-stars to your team for zero cost, saving a ton of Hope and more often than not suddenly spiking your power to make anything upcoming way easier, much less if you get a Game-Breaker.
• Resonant Words, Ling's Leisure node in Sui's Remnant Consciousness, is absurdly exploitable to the point of being an instant win if you know how to game the system. For 10-50 Ingots, you can gamble on tossing Tongbao to get rewards based on which type you gambled on, the most important one being the reward for ganbling on 2+ Risk coins being rolled (a choice between Collectibles, Coupons, or Candles, up to 6/12/6 if you give 50 Ingots). It's fairly easy to rig your coin coffer by buying or exchanging Risk Tongbao in the Remnant Consciousness (either buy them from Ji or use a Plan node to trade), and even after one or two trades, you can get enough Candles or Coupons to either retoss Tongbao that give you money on toss, or use any other repeatable nodes to acquire more Ingots that you give back to Ling. Once you've stabilized your Ingot looping, you can consistently gain more resources and actions than you use to gamble, allowing you to endlessly rack them up - and then, use some of those actions to ask Ling for Collectibles instead. This creates an endless loop where you'll eventually obtain functionally infinite resources and items, to the point that eventually, the game will run out of items to give you and start defaulting to giving you Kettles (which incidentally offers infinite lives and Hope). Needless to say, the run is won from there.
• Ah Meng doubles the amount of Elemental damage taken by all enemies, which is particularly notable as it's one of the only things in the whole game capable of buffing the damage type. Similar to Civilight Eterna and True damage, this is a huge boon as sources of Elemental damage usually hit quite hard to offset the need to set them up - and allied sources of Elemental damage are more common than True damage, making the item easier to exploit. Add in some Ritualists or Primal units, and you can very easily hose down almost anything with massive damage that ignores all enemy defenses.
• Dark Red Mask acts as a godsend for any beefy melee unit by making them take 50% less damage from blocked foes while dealing 50% more damage to them. Combined with the innate high stats of most offense-oriented melee units like Guards, and they'll usually be able to handily overpower any melee enemy that dares attack them, even the likes of dangerous elites or bosses.
• Training Lightning Rod is the previous seasons' Hand of Flowing Water/Mystery given to all operators, giving +0.4 SP/s regeneration on skill use that stacks up to 5 times, effectively cutting the costs of all Auto skills to a third of the original after a few activations. Any character with short to moderate cooldowns turns into a Spam Attack monster who can overwhelm enemies through sheer quantity, while even operators with longer-cooldown skills will greatly appreciate the buff as even one or two activations can lead to the next skills coming online way faster than usual.
• Fist Classics 123 provides a small, but stacking ATK buff whenever an operator uses a skill, up to a whopping 200% ATK after 40 uses. While moot on most operators, it becomes hilariously broken on anyone with spammable skills who can rapidly build up stacks, especially since many of those skills tend to have ATK multipliers that exponentially magnify the stacking ATK buff, turning even units like Kroos or Steward into absolute menaces.
• Family Stir-Fry is already fairly good as a universal 20% buff to ATK and HP, but increases the buff by 10% for every fight you win in the Remnant Consciousness. If you've been on point with promoting your Candleguests (which the game very heavily incentivizes you to do), you can expect to find and beat a good handful of Turmoil nodes during a run, which can multiply the effects of the buff several times and lead to your units punching way above their weight class.
• Metal Expedition Drum gives all operators 15% ATK whenever you toss Tongbao, stacking up to 10 times. If you get it early, this already ensures you'll have built up a sizeable amount of stacks by the time you reach the later floors, but you can very easily force more coin tosses by repeatedly entering the Remnant Consciousness, or just using Coupons to repeatedly reroll your coins. And needless to say, all your units having +150% ATK is enough to make mincemeat out of even harder stages.
• A previously existing item in the Unknown Instrument, already powerful for giving a global +50% HP, receives a buff in this season by giving an additional +30% for Candleguests for a total of 80% more health. Given that promoting Candleguests is a huge part of the gameplay loop, you can very easily turn most of your squad into them, upon which everyone will reap the extra health buff and become bulky enough to laugh off most attackers.
• The "Stamp Collection" node will provide the player with one of 9 potential items based on their choices in the subsequent branching choices, providing either a pure stat buff (stability), a more unique buff in exchange for higher DP cost (prosperity), or a niche but unique buff (extremes) to either melee, ranged, all operators. Many of these can already be very powerful, from the 25-35% stat buff of Plucked/Thrown Balance, Seen Risk increasing all damage to Apparitions (which encompass all of the unique enemies and bosses) by a whopping 50%, or the Barrier spam of Seen Flower, to name a few. However, if you encounter the node in the Remnant Consciousness, you gain a fourth option to pick an item benefitting only Candleholders: while Sui's Balance is already a whopping 50% ATK and DEF for Candleguests, Sui's Flower provides 10% HP/ATK/DEF for every Candleguest in the squad, potentially leaving the former in the dust if you've picked up enough Candleguests by the end of the run, up to +130% to all those stats with a full team of Candleguests.
• The ammo collectibles offer incredibly absurd buffs to any Operator that uses ammo for their skills. Woodblock Prints and Three Feet To All grant +2% ATK for each ammo consumed up to 30 times, and grant +100 ASPD for 15 seconds when activating ammo-based skills respectively, allowing for increasingly potent and much faster burst; Yanese Dictionary and Collection of Elegance instantly replenish ammo count by 30% and 50% respectively after consuming 70% of ammo, allowing for even longer bursts of damage especially with Operators who specialize in firing off massive bursts of damage with their ammo (i.e. Exusiai the New Covenant, Wiš'adel, Ela, Executor the New Foedere).

Operators

• Similar to Integrated Strategies, there are Reclamation Algorithm-exclusive modules. Like the IS counterparts, the RA ones are ridiculously broken to account for their exclusive nature:
  • Eunectes's module further buffs her strength as a Duelist Defender by buffing her SP recovery rate while blocking. Though it's less than one of her regular modules, this module also grants her a similar block count to typical Defenders during her skill and lets her hit all blocked enemies, effectively turning her into a Centurion Guard who can stunlock multiple enemies during S2 or burst up to five of them during S3. As a cherry on top, she applies 40% Physical Fragility to her targets, boosting her overwhelming Physical damage. Combined with food buff, she can become a powerful duelist who is able to deal with other enemies alongside her main target. What makes this module especially insane however is its base effect which forces enemies in a massive range to path towards her whenever she activates a skill. With how easy it is to get SP-buffing support in this mode, Eunectes is not only able to provide a massive range, infinite stall in the mode making it impossible for enemies to ever reach your defense, but also because the rerouted pathing doesn't account for hazard tiles that are coded as being walkable, it's even possible to make enemies commit mass suicide by making them path into holes in some stages, including bosses.
  • Pepe's module all but eliminates the Early Game Hell of the mode, as whenever she attacks a resource tile, she now also generates an aftershock at up to 10 connected resources. While the shockwave is still only half of her ATK, when taking into account Pepe's very high ATK that can be boosted further by buffs, the mass aftershocks she triggers with each attack can easily cut down scores of resources at a time: Wood and Stone will be vaporized in seconds, while even Iron can only hold out so long, making Lighting Ore the only thing she can't effortlessly nab (and most operators are near useless against it anyways). In addition, if Pepe is holding resources, she enjoys a -90% redeployment time refund, allowing you to quickly deploy her again to haul in another motherlode, easily allowing you to strip entire maps clean without having to spend resources on higher-tier Harvesters. It also passively reveals all Treasure locations on the map to save you time when looking for extra goodies, and generates extra aftershocks on the positions of your Guards whenever she hits, giving them a little bit more oomph. Interestingly, the module is also very useful outside of RA, as while Pepe won't benefit from any of the effects, she will benefit from the unusually high +135 DEF bonus (giving her slightly over +40% DEF for free), patching up her Glass Cannon tendencies.
  • Passenger's module gives him a hefty bonus to his ATK and SP regen to let him spam lethal thunderstorms more often, and more importantly grants all allies unconditional immunity to all environmental damage. While this doesn't protect against some secondary effects (like some statuses, Elemental Injury, or stat reductions from weather), this is still enough to completely neuter a huge chunk of the mode's threat as many of its levels rely on environmental hazards to limit your activity (especially early on when you urgently need to gather resources), and allows you to laugh off some of the more painful weather conditions if one happens to strike a node that you really need. The secondary effect is nothing to sneeze at either, randomly striking five tiles (prioritizing those with targets) every 10 seconds with massively damaging AoE lightning that simultaneously fries enemies, gives allies SP, and reveals the area for a considerable amount of time, giving him global (if inconsistent) map presence and allowing you to quickly dominate the field without having to worry about the Fog of War obstructing you.

Introduced in Fire Within the Sand

• You get 2 action points daily, but the Broken Compass token grants you an extra action before Day 12. This means you get to do more given the limited timeframe, potentially up to 9 extra actions if you get it as early as Day 1. While it is rather costly to get (sending 4 Operators with 3 Stamina away for 2 days) and its effectiveness depends on how early you get it, the impact of the token more than makes up for the cost.
• The base Construct with highest priority is the Transregional Communication Station. It allows you to bring a few items of your choice to your next RA run after the 9th day, essentially making your next run easier. You can upgrade it later on so that it activates after only 6 days, and when you fully upgrade the Road to Prosperity, you can bring up to 15 items with you. This is a significant seed capital for your next run, especially if you bring some high quality Provisions or enough Monitoring Towers to quickly scout the area.
• Urban-Style Barriers behave like Roadblocks, forcing the enemy to find another route to their objective (whether a protection objective or your HQ). Tier 1 and Tier 2 Barriers can be destroyed by the enemy, but Tier 2 Barriers (or Tier 3 for Tales Within the Sand) are Camouflaged, allowing you to redirect the enemy's path through a winding maze or a killzone to be eliminated while the enemy won't be able to do anything to it.
  • Second Expansion of the mode introduces Phantomic Barriers. which at face value seems less useful as they have 0 Block. But that also means there won't be any risk of a stray enemy touching the wall and breaking it, and there are certain maps where the enemy has a predetermined rally point that is undeployable, so they can't be reliably rerouted. The 2nd level of Phantomic Barriers is the highest tier of defensive construct, which is Invisible instead of merely Camouflaged - this is a very important distinction as Camouflaged units can still be hit by Splash Damage Abuse, but Invisible ones are immune. Unless a Raid comes with a Reunion Scout (and there won't be, as the Scouts only spawn in certain maps) and there are ranged units to hit the wall, lvl 2 Phantomic Barriers might as well be indestructible.
• Provisions are the only source of buffs you can get in this mode, but they can be extremely powerful if used properly. Among them, a few stand out; unsurprisingly, mostly those using the highest quality ingredients, Marrow Fungi that can only be obtained from slaying rare and sometimes dangerous wandering beasts.
  • Top of the line is the Folk Festive Feast, which you get by cooking 3 Marrow Fungi. It grants the consumer a whopping +50% ATK and also permanent Camouflage. This means your ranged operators will deal insane damage while being safe from most enemy retaliation, letting you deploy them wherever you please. As the cherry on top, it also restores 3 Stamina, so in practice you can start a Reclamation Algorithm with more than 6 Operators with full Stamina if you happen to carry a few from the previous run. Tales Within the Sand did nerf it a bit by reducing the ATK buff to 30% and it now also needing Cartilage Chunks, but the buff can be increased back to the original through Seasonings, while Cartilage Chunks are arguably easier to get than Marrow Fungi.
  • Higashinese Bento, made by cooking 2 Marrow Fungi and 1 Rice, increases HP and DEF by 50% each, and might as well be essential for your Defenders when facing the dangerous bosses in the mode. As added bonus, the food also restores 2 Stamina. Tales Within the Sand even buffs it by adding in Status Resistance, and gives you the ability to use Seasoning to increase the HP/DEF buff even further, up to 75%.
  • Low-Pressure Dried Meat uses a much more modest ingredient of 3 Puffball Tenderloins, which you can purchase from Manticore in the Black Market or hunt as relatively common wildlife. But its effect of -8 DP cost is a godsend for Vanguards, especially Standard Bearers, who will be free or absurdly cheap to deploy, allowing them to be deployed and start generating DP immediately, greatly easing the DP crunch before the inevitable Zerg Rush comes. As the ingredients can be purchased repeatedly, you can even feed them to all of your core Operators that don't need other buffs, so they can be deployed even faster.
    • Tales Within the Sand completely reworked the item into a high-tier Provision that now buffs DEF, RES, and block count, with the role of cheap DP-reducing food being given to the Pine-Smoked Bacon, which has the same recipe but substitutes one Puffball Tenderloin for a Crab Claw, albeit only reducing DP cost by a much lower 4-5.
  • Kazimierzan Knight Supplement reduces the consumer's SP costs by a gigantic 40%, nearly halving skill cooldowns and letting you absolutely spam short to moderate cooldown skills, or drastically reduce the windup time of powerful nuke skills. It's especially dangerous on units with fast-charging crowd control skills, as they'll be able to lock down a single target permanently, which is one of the most reliable ways to lock down the mode's toughest bosses even with their glaring stats. In Tales, you can even enhance it with Seasoning to increase the SP cost reduction to 55%, while also reducing their DP cost by 1.
• In terms of nodes, there are a few nodes that can significantly ease your run, should you encounter them:
  • The most important and valuable node would be The Lost Great Wingbeast, where you hunt the titular Great Wingbeast. It is a highly tanky aerial boss that necessitates the use of several powerful ranged firepowers. However, your effort will be repaid with 6-10 Marrow Fungi, which you can cook into the best Provisions to take on the Final Bosses or carry over to the next run.
  • Miserly Trap, renamed as Within Range in Tales Within the Sand, is the best place to get Wood from. There are multiple Ballistae that will inevitably destroy your harvester stations, but that's easily resolved by putting units that can block and sustain or destroying the Ballistae in Tales Within the Sand. Three harvester stations placed in the middle, supported by other operators for extra firepower on the trees, can easily clear the entire Timber area, netting around 108 Wood in Tales. The zone also provides water source and a few crabs should you need them as well.
  • Clash of Clans is tricky and will likely require 2 actions to clear, but will solve all your Iron Ore and Stone problems. Start by putting some Blockade to prevent the Sarkaz Sentinels from aggroing the horde, and focus on breaking the wall that hides to a secret room to the right side of the map containing an absurd amount of resources. Once the wall is broken, wait for the next action and deploy your best operators and multiple harvester stations to clean the entire motherlode and deal with any enemies. Fully cleared, the node will provide 51 Iron Ores and 120 Stones.

Introduced in Tales Within the Sand

• While it requires some considerable progression to unlock, the Glow Stick trick is the fastest way to farm Prosperity Points if you just want to obtain all the shop rewards. The main things needed are Headquarters at Level 3 to unlock the Glow Stick, and at least 1200+ Wood, which is easy enough to gather. Simply craft as many Glow Sticks (which only cost 2 Wood to craft) as possible using all the gathered Wood, and by the next Calculation Day, it will grant you a hefty 10,000+ Prosperity Points just for doing so. Then load back to the previous day and repeat the process for easy points! This trick is perfect if you hate playing Reclamation Algorithm and just want all the nice shop rewards, but again, you are going to have to play through the mode for a little while to set this loop up.
• Cursed Mire allows you to put a Corrosion tile that debuffs the enemy's DEF and RES. The first tier only debuffs by 15%, but the third tier debuffs by 35%, almost equal to having the more powerful DEF and RES debuff skills 24/7. This is easily enough to rip through even the bulkiest foes in the mode, and also stacks with other debuffs and Fragile effects for even more pain.
• Feral Strange Territory, added in the second expansion, is one of the best ways to amass large amounts of rare resources and wealth. Functionally similar to the usual Strange Territories, the main difference is that the objectives now revolve around hunting, capturing, or protecting Wild Beasts. The objectives tend to be far easier than the usual Strange Territory requests, generally don't pose as much of a threat to the actual Camper Van, and of course let you hunt or capture Exotic Beasts, providing the ingredients to make the most powerful consumables to make the main map far easier. Capturing the beasts instead can instead yield a limitless supply of food, resources, and Gold, including building materials that can construct Auto Hubs to infinitely generate materials like Stone and Iron that'd normally take much more effort to obtain, or equally powerful passive tools. On top of this, unlike Dynamic Strange Territory which is both harder and requires you clear out 6 Inherent Strange Territories spread across the map first, you access Feral Strange Territory very early and can do one every Calculation cycle without spending any actions, essentially giving you an extra few actions for free to grind to your heart's content - at absolute worst, failing the objective only consumes whatever Energy Drinks and Constructs you used, while still giving you all of the spoils you had gotten from playing normally, including any rare Beast materials or the Beasts themselves. You can even just opt to leave early if things go south.
  • In particular, tracking and killing Liquid Shifters will net you not only Seasonings to enhance your Provisions (which are normally extremely scarce drops from normal Strange Territory), but also drop passive tools that would normally require materials from the much tougher Vanillawing or Quicksand Beast. In comparison, the Liquid Shifter is a borderline Piñata Enemy that can be easily dispatched for free goodies.
• Out of all the passive Tools you can get, the Neural Chain is perhaps the strongest of them all, granting a global +10% ATK for every operator on the field that has consumed a Provision before the operation. Find a difficult node or raid, roll out a full squad, and feed all of them even the cheapest foods, and even the Final Boss raids or Pressure 7 Territories can be run over with what amounts to a maximum of +120% ATK for everyone.
• The Omni Umbrella allows Medics and Supporters to grant allies in range +20% HP and total immunity to all weather effects. Given how the wrong weather at the wrong time can completely ruin or change a well-planned strategy, being able to just laugh in its face and operate unhindered can completely overturn the odds of a difficult map and let you score decisive victories even in the harshest conditions. It's also fairly cheap to make for a passive tool.
• Like the previous version, some Provisions can get incredibly powerful if you're willing to fork over the right ingredients, although they now have a time limit. On top of that, the mode adds Seasoning that lets you enhance their effects, powerful new secondary ingredients that can add hefty ATK and ASPD buffs, Rotproof Rockgrains to make them last dramatically longer, or certain Provisions from the Strange Territory that outright last forever.
  • Rotproof Rockgrain is a fairly common drop from the Feral Strange Territory, and adds 20 days to a provision's shelf life. You can add up to 2 of them, bringing their shelf life to a whopping 58 days for the highest tier ones; this is very close to an in-game year of roughly 60 days across 3 seasons. This almost turns Normal provisions into Forever provisions, which is an enormous boon since they tend to provide stronger buffs. Even giving up any potential buffs from the other secondary ingredients is a small price to pay for jacking up your units' power for that long.
  • Musik-Schnellebraten Extract is a defensive boon on par with the Higashinese Bento, providing a whopping 40-75% more DEF and 20-40% evasion for both damage types, while also increasing the user's taunt. Give it to someone who already has solid bulk and watch as they become effectively immortal, while the increased aggro also allows you to disregard deployment order and draw attacks from powerful ranged foes.
  • Columbian Cannonfowl provides the largest ATK boost of any Provision, up to a whopping +50-70% as a Vigor effect as long as the consumer doesn't drop below 70-50% HP. Put it on any ranged unit that can be reasonably kept out of danger and watch them go to town.
  • Ursine Ham Supplement not only lasts forever, but provides an enormous +100-130% to HP along with +2 Block, turning any Guard or Defender worth their salt into an absolute wall that can hold back the brunt of any raid, even in the Monsoon season.
  • Sargonian Grass Jelly permanently reduces the consumer's DP cost by 4-6 while also halving their redeployment time, making it an insane boon for cheap, mobile units like Executors and Agents. Alternatively, one can opt to put it on more expensive nukers (who are usually employed to collect large amounts of resources or do as much damage as possible before their targets leave the area) to shave off over half a minute of their redeployment time, which can result in a huge increase in resources collected now that you can field them more times per mission.
  • Iberian Chitin Cube provides a 25% buff to ATK and HP, negative taunt, and Status Resistance, all while lasting forever. Although not as overwhelmingly strong as some others, the buffs are incredibly universal for a permanent provision as pretty much any unit can make use of it, no matter if they're tanks, DPS units, or even harvesters as the resistance helps shrug off environmental hazards. As a bonus, you'll always get one for free the first time you enter the Feral Strange Territory, and it's also one of the cheapest Forever Provisions to make as it only costs one Exotic ingredient along with two generic ones.
  • Distilled Medulla Booster/Distilled Teardrop Ointment are both only acquireable by clearing Feral Strange Territory at high enough difficulty, but their effects are worth the effort. They respectively allow Operators to deal additional Necrosis/True damage when dealing Arts/Physical damage, while giving them a substantial ASPD or ATK buff. This turns your Arts or Physical powerhouse into even more of one while letting them sidestep enemy RES/DEF at the same time. To top it off, they have an infinite duration.

Introduced in the original

• In general, the faction and class-specific items are Purposely Overpowered, which can be improved to affect the entire faction or class when you deploy 3-4 Operators from the same faction or class. And at 6 Operators, the buffs these items provide are boosted further, and this is before upgrading the items into their elite version, should you be lucky enough to roll some in the barge. The faction items additionally consider the Operator wearing it as part of the faction, allowing shenanigans such as Juggernauts or Soloblades benefiting from Gladiia's HP regen for the Abyssal Hunters.
• The Defender-specific items (Elite Defender Set & Standard Defender Shield) are serious cases of Magikarp Power. While this means filling your team with Defenders, a class that's not known for its offensive power in a mode where wave-clearing is vital, the Defender Set boosts ATK, HP, and Block, thus increasing your Defenders' offensive power and survivability. Meanwhile, the Defender Shield further boosts survivability by granting up to 4% Max HP heal and 3 SP whenever your Defenders get hit. Once you upgrade the Supply Barge to access the more offensive-oriented Fortress Defenders, that's when the fun starts. With seriously boosted offense and survivability from both items, the enemy horde will fall against your nigh-unbreakable frontline and your Fortress Defenders raining ATK-boosted death from afar.
• The M3 Claw and M3 Armor grant 70% ATK and 70% HP respectively, doubled if upgraded. But if you equip both at the same time, they additionally grant 30% bonus True Damage on hit and 5% HP regen per second (50% and 8% if upgraded), turning the user into a ridiculously tanky killing machine that erases anything in front of them while taking just as much damage in stride, though you'll need good luck getting both in the same run.
• Dormant Heir heals the user for 2.5-4% of their Max HP for every enemy hit. Put this on frontline Operators with a Herd-Hitting Attack or high health, and watch them become nigh-immortal.

Introduced in Alliance

• The Foresight alliance is one of the few economy-focused ones, giving 2 bonus Funds per 10 cumulative stacks obtained, while also providing a -1 Fund discount on operators in the store at 100+ stacks, with the alliance still activating even if your Foresight units are on the bench. While there are several ways to stack this and get the ball rolling, Executor the Ex Foedere is the main culprit, as he gains 6 stacks whenever spending 7 ammo, and he can burn through ammo very quickly if he's constantly attacking, resulting in heaps of cash, quick activation of the discount that lets you buy loads of units more readily (many of which can now be sold at a net neutral or gain), and Laterano stacks that increase his bullets per skill and make each subsequent one generate more. As a result, with one other Foresight unit (such as Gitano, who is a starter and can also activate the Marvel alliance for free refreshes), Executor can add value to any team as long as he has the means to survive long enough, and one can go further by buying Lin or Silence the Paradigmatic (who give Agile stacks when buying operators or spending Funds, respectively), and using the massively boosted economy to buy and sell units to accumulate stacks of Agile that increase ASPD, allowing Executor the Ex Foedere to spend more bullets, live longer, and produce even more Funds that you funnel back into stack generation, creating a self sustaining loop that earns more and more money each round. The only downsides are that it hinges on getting Executor the Ex Foedere (a Tier V) as early as possible, you'll be highly pressed for time and finger dexterity with all the buying and selling you'll have to do, and you can bet there'll be multiple players fighting over him and the other keystones of this strategy in the shared pool in co-op.
  • This is also the core of the most infamous strategy for inflating stacks of the Yan and Laterano alliances, especially the former. Laterano will naturally generate huge stacks and snowball into killing machines with infinite ammo just from Executor alter (which incidentally also helps him spend more bullets and make even more money), but he's not the only way to do so - meanwhile, Yan is notable because almost all of its stack generation hinges on buying units (either simply on buy like Waai Fu, or whenever buying any unit while Lin/Wanqing are active) and using the Investor alliance to amplify the effects (which also gains stacks solely from buying units while Mountain is on the bench), both of which are difficult to do without a robust economy. With the economy to buy and sell en masse, you have the only Core alliance that gives infinitely stacking ATK,^note Victoria and Kjerag can infinitely stack multiplicative damage buffs, but it won't help if a unit is doing Scratch Damage to begin with and doesn't scale with %ATK scalings as well. a summon that also infinitely scales with the field's ATK, and a method of stacking that takes place in the rest phase with no dependence on performing actions in actual combat (which can be subject to randomness or arbitrary limitations, especially if your defense is struggling). Played well, you can easily hit hundreds of stacks on top of any other sub-alliances you have active, upon which all your units will have such hilariously inflated stats and top-tier gear that not even a Hidden Core boss will stand a chance. With clever operator choice and use of Damazti Isomorphs, you can even double up and run both Yan and Laterano simultaneously, with predictable results.
  • You can add fuel to the fire if you own Stainless and bring him as a supplementary unit, as his S3 turret allows Executor to keep attacking nonstop for a whole round instead of needing enemies in range (which can possibly kill him), accelerating his stack generation even further.
• Should you bring her as a supplementary unit, Ascalon with the Kjeragi Nevermeltice makes obtaining ridiculous stacks for the Kjerag alliance hilariously easy. The Ice gives her an 18-30% chance to inflict Cold on every attack, which includes every tick of her very potent Damage Over Time applied within a wide area. Most of Kjerag's stacking power comes from Pramanix and SilverAsh generating stacks whenever an enemy in range is Frozen, and Ascalon can dish out Cold much faster than any other member of the alliance. If Ascalon is in either sibling's range, expect a generation of several dozen stacks per round at minimum and several hundred if optimized, cranking up your damage output while the winds perma freeze anything that remains.
• A combination of the Swift alliance (stack-scaling chance to restore SP on skill end) and Passenger (generates Sargon and Precision stacks on skill use) with his S1 can result in him being able to spam his S1 constantly to generate dozens of stacks per round. While Sargon's ATK and ASPD buffs have a hard cap that isn't affected by stacks (it increases the uptime instead), Precision's global ATK buff for ranged units does not, leading to your ranged operators casually punching holes through enemies or healing off all harm even with the inflated stats on later rounds.
• The Investor alliance is already incredibly exploitable (doubling or tripling the "on buy" effects of units depending on stacks) and a core of some obscene stacking shenanigans, but combined with Malkiewicz's starting strategy is where it can get downright silly. Starting with a Commercial Packaging plan (gain another copy of the equipped unit with every 8 units sold) and equipping it to Ethan (gain 1 unit from the most populous faction on buy), in combination with Investor, means every time you sell 8 units, you get up to four immediately. Selling them partially recoups your losses and puts you halfway to the next free Ethan, assuming you didn't pull a unit you actually needed, and if your most populated faction relies on selling to gain power (Yan says hello), then expect to effectively print money and stacks out of nowhere once you get the ball rolling.
• The Resilient alliance grants a stack-scaling chance for low ground units to immediately redeploy after being defeated. This can already be decently potent at moderate stack counts, but can render your lines nearly unkillable if you stack it up a bit more, or heaven forbid you hit 200 stacks and raise the chance to 100%. While it can be overwhelmed if you lack DPS or block to actually kill all the enemies in time, as long as your entire team isn't wiped out, you can very easily throw bodies at them and buy as much time as you need for your core damage units to finish the job. It's especially good if you're running Aegir as your main alliance, as it completely offsets the team-cannibalizing aspect of the faction and simply gives you several insanely boosted units for free.

• Dossoles Holiday had a number of Stickers that could grant tremendous advantages. There were sets to give significant stat boosts for high ground (Caster, Medic, Sniper, Supporter) and low ground (Vanguard, Defender, Guard, Specialist) operators, so you could buff them tremendously to make even EX stages less painful to complete. In addition, some of the rarer ones could greatly mitigate or even nullify the danger posed by High Tide, instantly removing a huge chunk of difficulty from most of the harder maps.
• Ideal City's self-driving karts had some customizable parts that were completely bonkers. One chip gave you self-deploying karts, while another made your karts explode once they collided into something that stopped them. You could attach drills to amplify their collision damage, a freezer unit to apply Chill and Frozen status to enemies on contact, and even attach refresher units that would restore HP and SP to your operators as it drove past them. In addition, the karts had perfect accuracy, so no enemy could try to use Physical Dodge to evade its drill-studded bumper, while their status effects would also often disable the target's dodge altogether. With the proper setup and enough DP to burn, you could release a veritable horde of cars to run over everything, with one of the most popular strategies for the event's toughest stages being to create recursive loops of bumper cars with the Freeze module to permanently lock down an indefinite amount of enemies at once, even the Final Boss if you could ground him first.
• A Flurry to the Flame has 4 gadgets from Monster Hunter become support tools for your operators, and the Wiredrone is the strongest of them all. It has a very short redeploy timer, so you could apply multiple in succession very rapidly, and costs a very cheap 2 DP, so you don't need much investment to use it. It allows you to redeploy operators instantly to another tile, which would immediately reset their status, thus instantly healing said operator, and resetting their skill status as though they were just deployed again (allowing helidrop operators to immediately use their skills again upon being moved by the Wirebug Drone). Used tactically, you can have a single operator consume multiple Wiredrones to intercept multiple tiles on the map at once, allowing you to spam their skills every time you moved them. This lets you shower the entire map with a very prolonged sword rain via Texas the Omertosa, instantly heal and reset Surtr for another round of Twilight, reset the timer on Radiant Nearl's second skill, and perform other such feats. With the right synergy, certain operators can wipe out the entire map by themselves with the help of the Wiredrones, and if used correctly it can turn even Rathalos himself into a joke.
• Lone Trail offers players Planetary Debris, a "neutral" stage hazard that ends up being way more skewed in the player's favor than the enemies'. The Debris are static objects that can be attacked by adjacent allies or shifted to send them hurtling in the target direction, dealing massive amounts of damage and push force to all allies and enemies struck, before either staying there or falling in the direction of gravity. While Debris that hits enemies will deal enough damage to one-shot most frailer mooks and send them flying if they survive (which can also send enemies into pits and erase the otherwise tough Arc Frontliners due to their weakness to shifting), friendlies will take a much more manageable amount of damage with no other side effects; unlike the enemies, you can also just position your team out of the way of the Debris since they travel in a set path, and little to none of the levels have layouts really forcing you to deploy in the path of a collision. The Debris also blocks enemies when not in motion, which means as long as you don't let the enemies screw with gravity too much, you can use them as Roadblocks to build chokepoints. On top of this, the Command Panel gradually unlocked over the course of the event will upgrade the Planetary Debris in ways purely beneficial to the player: Planetary Debris will deal even more damage to enemies while dealing less to allies, shift with even more force, Stun enemies on hit, and become easier to move. With only a few Command Panel buffs, the Debris is already so powerful that if you use it optimally, you can just turn the level into a pinball machine that minces every enemy for you. It says something when the boss of the event not only has Contractual Boss Immunity to Debris collisions in their first phase, but has a kit entirely designed to not let you use them at all.
  • Players who brought Shu to the rerun of Lone Trail soon discovered that her third skill, Samsara, worked just fine on the Planetary Debris, which soon enabled crazy battle strategies involving endlessly sliding and teleporting Debris orbs continuously running over enemies and crushing them repeatedly.
• Unrealized Realities gives players the Raised Platforms that allows your low ground operators to block the flying enemies that are everywhere in this event. The mechanic makes it such that puttting more operators on a Floating Platform than the attached balloons allows will cause it to sink back down to ground level, and in doing so, redeploys the operators onto the lowered ground. This effectively allows you to repeatedly reset helidroppers, as the player Blemichi demonstrates in a showcase video, and I Love Amiya shows off using the same trick to fire off U-Official's stun effect repeatedly.