Eyjafjalla the Hvit Aska

• Eyja2 is a Wandering Medic, letting her heal annoying elemental damage. She’s also the first 6* gacha nondps Medic since launch.
• Talent 1 is a simple improvement to her hps and elehps, and being a heal over time helps avoid overhealing. It’s much stronger than it may seem, since it’s per second rather than using ter 2.85s attack interval.
• Talent2 on its own is fairly minor, but still helps her do her job.
• S1 is surprisingly a top sustained hps skill and has ele healing to match, alongside the passive ele regen from this skill being able to affect normally unhealable operators.
• S2 gives a huge chunk of elemental Barrier, but all affected operators use the same pool of Barrier; fantastic for keeping a single target from taking ele damage, terrible for keeping groups safe.
• S3 is good but not gamechanging in terms of hps, though it is excellent when it comes to elehps. The main draw is the global range and bringing talent 2 to +30% max HP and a whopping 60% elemental damage reduction, effectivelly turning off ele damage for its duration.
• Eyja2 is another operator who’s very good at what she does, but what she does is of limited relevance. As annoying as elemental damage can be, you can normally just play around it, and the Berries are sufficient for most situations. And while s1 is still a great skille ven if only considering HP healing, so many operators these days heal themselves, and there are healers with more offensive benefit as well.

Modules

• Centurions already have arguably the best chassis of any branch; CEN-X’s 110% ascale is a straightforward and useful buff that’s worthwhile on any of them you use.
• Blaze’s mod3 gives her 2064 dph and 1927 dps at e2 90 with s2m3, up from 1650 dph and 1375 dps. That’s 25% more dph and 40% more dps, massive improvements by module standards. It’s still just numeric improvments so it won’t fundamentally change how you use her, but it’s hard to pass up if you do use her.
• Gavial2’s module upgrades are comparatively weaker and diluted by her larger +% Attack from skills; on top of that s2 often won’t even get the benefit of the trait upgrade.
• Specter1’s mod3 amounts to 24% more personal dps; while the AH buff is weak it’s still worth considering for the improvement she gets alone, and if you are using other AHs regularly it just gets more valuable.
• Broca and Savage both got mediocre upgrades.
• Estelle is the only current recipient of CEN-Y, reinforcing her role as a tank, and both the module and upgrades are fairly good if you use her.
• Reapers also have a great chassis, and REA-X is a substantial 20% increase to their self-healing (except Humus s1); as with CEN-X getting mod1 is very valuable.
• Executor2’s module nearly doubles the chances of him getting a bonus hit, and adds a lot of Defense ignore to those bonus hits. This amounts to ~30% more dps during his skill downtime (not doing the math for during uptime), and improves his SP gen by 20% on average. While it won’t entirely fix the awkwardness of his rotations, I think it’s effectively mandatory if you want to use him.
• La Pluma’s upgrades are just fairly minor extra damage, with the main reason you’d consider them being that Pluma herself is already very good.
• Highmore, now that IS3 is over, is effectively La Pluma but worse; this module does lean into her one advantage, but it’s not much.
• Humus is another La Pluma downgrade with weaker module upgrades.
• Overall, this batch is very good for mod1s, not so much for mod3s, with the exceptions of Exec2, Blaze, and Spec1.

As far as patches go, this one is rather boring. The welfare is terrible, the 5* is okay in a weird niche, and both the 6*s are relatively situational units that you could probably get away with borrowing when needed rather than pulling them. Modules are very cost-efficient with mod1 being the best level, and are a “the rich get richer” lineup.

First impressions:

Bryophyta

• Bryophyta is an Instructor, a notoriously weak branch; not off to a good start.
• His talent sets the tone for his kit: pure Defense buffing is of limited use, and he comes with a range restriction to boot.
• His module tries to give him better numbers, and doesn’t do much.
• His s1 is a beta skill like 4*s have rather than the vastly superior gamma version that 5-6*s (except Savage) get, and is consequently not very good.
• His s2 is another Defense buff with a poor rotation and unecessary Stun.
• Someone at HG really hates this man.

Poncirus

• Pioneers are a relatively basic branch, not much to say about them.
• Poncirus’s talent is a decent HP boost, and her max HP is already on the high side for her branch.
• Poncirus’s module further doubles down on her general role as a statstick.
• S1 is a generic skill.
• S2 is her primary draw; the Attack buff isn’t enough for her to handle most non-trash mobs, but between her naturally high Defense,this skill, her module, and her trait she gets a considerable amount of bulk for a Vanguard. An average 0.25 DP/s once the skill is infinite is on the low end compared to other autoactivation DP skills (her own s1 gives ~0.32 DP/s).
• Poncirus is rather good at what she does (afk tanking+DP gen while disposing of trash mobs); her main problem is that what she does is of limited relevance. Still, it’s neat to have the option.

Swire the Elegant Wit

• Merchants have surprisingly high stats, on par with Guards, while also being frds. The DP drain can be costly, but module will help with that.
• Talent 1 is mostly a nontalent like Summoners get, free Attack is a useful bonus at least.
• Talent2 can potentially be very useful for stalling, and in general provides a safety net when using her.
• Module 1 is effectively mandatory to reduce the DP gen; mod2 is a small damage boost, and mod3 is only for s3.
• S1 effectively has a 3s cooldown and can hold 3 charges. Having an frd ground Medic like this is potentially very useful utility, and alongside talent 2 Swire2 herself becomes very hard to kill.
• S2 effectively has a 3s cooldown and can hold 5 charges. It’s a weird skill, turning her into a grounded Trapmaster; the damage numbers on it look reasonable, hitting just over 5k total damage/bottle if maxed out. The main downside is that the limited range makes it hard to hit any given enemy with more than 2, which will probably make this skill unsuitable for regular use. The livestream had said that bottles couldn’t be placed on enemy-occupied tiles, but it turns out that was a mistake. Being able to drop the bottles on enemies makes this skill considerably better, allowing it to function as a sustained dps skill, and letting her capitalize on the Slow by spamming bottles onto affected enemies. Also, something I forgot to mention is that this skill and s1 both have no SP lockout, meaning that they’re equivalent to a skill that has a 2s cooldown with SP lockout.
• S3’s double hit is good for dps on its own, especially with talent 1; a maxed Swire2 can put out ~2.5k dps. But the main draw is the yeet nuke; due to how push works it won’t be much, if any, use on bosses, but ti can send most enemeis to the other side of the map.
• Swire2 continues the Merchant tradition of having a grab bag of weird abilities, and will likely have variety of uses in more tactical clears, though those more inclined to brute force thigns probably won’t bother with her.

kbin character limit too low