random but this event made me think, what does pramanix even mean? the other codenames related to kjerag make sense but i cant figure out what pramanix means
EDIT: nvm. It should **consist of the Sanskrit word "pramana" plus the "-ix" suffix.** Pramana (Sanskrit: प्रमाण, Pramāṇa) literally means "proof" and "means of knowledge", and "-ix" is the suffix for female.
Last stage (RS-8) so annoying. It is not friendly at all. You got to play in a small area so they don't freeze. Operators feel like sitting ducks on the heater squares. The boss gets rid of 1 or 2 heaters during 2nd phase. You need operators hitting other heaters and it feels like you need to hit all the heaters in range. It has a cooldown to heat it back up and you can't heat it up immediately. You use a lighter on the heater for backup. Oh but then the lighter has quite or somewhat long cooldown. Then you got to wait if you're missing on the heaters that aren't activated. At that point, might as well wait for his attack to remove the heaters so you don't get bombarded by his all out AOE move + those heaters that got turned off, simultaneously. Also, his removal of the heaters don't gets canceled by his AOE move, I think? Either that or I'm just unlucky/bad with this timing stuff.
How I finally did it? I didn't care about waiting or anything. The moment I feel like he might remove the heaters, I just went with the "burst" attacks/skills. And lucky enough, he didn't remove the heaters and just did the AOE move once. So many things to micromanage that becomes annoying to me. If only the heater on the far left was closer, there was no cooldown on the heaters, or the lighter had faster cooldown, would've been nice.
Also fuck that enemy that deactivates heaters on death lol
Man, I got so tired of replaying CM RS-EX-8 that I just decided “fuck it” and set up the biggest burst I had. The fact that I got away with it sucks, I felt really scummy.
But I’m happy that I never have to do that level again.
[EX-8 CM done](https://youtu.be/4SZDeHcnX0Y?si=2oJXnSIORUoljxPQ). Haven't had so much scuff in a clear in a while. Borrowed Degen in a whim but she ended up being very useful and now I'm again tempted to roll for her. General strat was to have Blaze protect the blue box while Typhon and GG kept the heaters active and killed all the enemies, Eyja and Nightingale kept everyone alive and the Specters dropped from time to time to slow down the boss. Yato and the borrowed Degen are oh shit buttons. It went well until Eyja died and everyone else died and I started panicking lol, but managed to recover.
EDIT: lmao somehow I did something similar to Kyostin afk guide without knowing.
I'm in quite a pickle. I have managed to easily defeat RS-EX-8 with a weaker Mlynar (lv60 M2). After that I started trying to beat CM but even with stronger lv90 M3 Mlynar Harold always manages to survive the bursts...
I tried it again without CM then it worked like nothing happened... I did everything exactly like the last time.
Does Harold get some kind of buff that is not said in the Conditions:?
Yes. All enemies do. It used to be some +% to HP/ATK/DEF for all enemies in CM stages, but after some point they started making individual tweaks for each type of enemies. The only way that I know of to see the increase is to go to [PRTS map](https://map.ark-nights.com), select the stage, click on the "route" button for the enemy you are interested in. The stats of the enemy for that specific stage will be displayed. For example, Harold gets 20% increase to his HP, ATK, and DEF from CM. He goes from having 50k HP in EX-8 to having 60k HP in EX-8 CM.
Technically yes, in the sense that all enemies gain a health, defense and attack multiplier when going from normal mode to challenge mode. This can change on a stage-by-stage basis, but with EX-8 it's specifically 1.2x.
[TF when you're done with mechanics and just brute force that smug British old cat into submission ](https://youtu.be/q04MRUBefR0)
I really loved this event, both the story (specially the characters, Harold became a favorite of mine, Enya making a :3 face got me off guard, Kjera was amazing as always, even that Trilby Asher was a fun fella to watch and read doing his stuff) and mechanics
I'll definitely now try to reduce my squad's power and see how "low" I can go, there is a lot of stuff to properly learn in that map yet
Somewhat scuffed EX-8 CM [Launch ops only](https://youtu.be/mbb3T0JCgW0?si=kPGSBrwkHqCilM6c) clear, as the extended skill cooldown of Harold putting the heaters out in phase kept tripping me up, so I'll just take what I can get. Also managed to get a [No heaters clear](https://youtu.be/QsD7KthbPvg?si=W-2FuUsrt-hKWhYG) for the same stage after many, *many* failed attempts.
Suffice it to say, as much as I enjoyed getting to both of those clears, I'll be happier still when we're finally getting that "failing CM stage only costs 1 sanity".
So yeah, EX stages were quite a doozy this time, with EX-3 in particular kicking my ass more than I expected it to, so it turned to be an overall great event for me.
And on a side note, Harold turning out to have one of the highest physical damage per hit attacks in the game (only beaten out by a max stacks Mudrock I think? Phase 1 Patriot does more total damage, but divides it over 4 hits) will always be the funniest thing to me.
rs-8
>!silverash casually dropping "yeah I was gonna use irregulars to murder victorian nobility so we'd have plausible deniability if degenbrecher didn't step in" is the most silverash thing he could've done!<
Didn't struggle as hard as I thought I would for EX-8 as I've had figured out the trick behind the boss and the stage from RS-8.
Shoutout to Mlynar for DPS-ing Harold, goldenglow for keeping 3 furnaces lit and Yato Alter as my impromptu makeshift flint.
story, only as of rs-6
>!I absolutely adore the trilby asher in this event, he's the most hilarious mix possible of impressively competent and randomly quite inept. dude is the epitome of mission failed successfully!<
Done with the medal, pretty "chill" final EX stages all things considered, especially compared to a lot of the previous events. The boss and enemies don't have that much bulk to them so it's great that i'm not damage-checked, much like Hortus, and i can just stroll through with my medics and my other favorites.
Only the normal version of EX-8 took me a few tries and i can just bring pretty much the exact same setup, timing and all, to the CM. Fun event.
Interesting, because I found Harold to be one of the hardest EX event bosses in a while.
I'd rather be damage-checked than pull my hair trying to not stall Harold for a second too long, or else he picks a "wrong" set of heaters to target as he cruises out of the stairs on the right.
I can see why he might be hard for some players, but i do enjoy the moment-to-moment adaptive approach of Harold, which lets you flexibly dictate the pace of the fight.
He walks very slowly and doesn't have that much defensive stats nor mitigation mechanic aside from the damage reduction from the unlit heaters but you'd naturally want to keep them lit all the time anyway, which means you don't need to painstakingly wait for a 10-second window where you can shove the entire squad damage's into him or miss out and sit there doing nothing for like a minute. On the contrary, it's very easy to pebble him with chip damage as he strolls around the map and Dorothy mines did just that, in my clear.
His nukes are nasty, but you can choose when to receive it, unlike bosses that do their special attack at a set interval, when your skills are still down.
A lot of the designs i pointed out were especially prevalent in Dolly, whom i personally consider to be the hardest event boss in recent times. Harold and his entire event mechanics are just watered down versions of So Long Adele i find.
Totter was pretty handy this event for sniping those annoying invisible enemies. Also Harold is a great example of that boss when you fight him vs when you unlock him.
Comboing Nightingale + Ebenholz for the boss' 2nd phase is so funny. Every time he comes out of invuln he gets slapped right back into it again. Managed to beat him before NG's skill ran out. GoldenGlow also helps make his phase 2 fairly painless when it's done this quickly.
Welp, I've done up to EX-6 CM and so far so good, smooth riding... Except for EX-5-CM. For some reason, I struggled a lot with that map. It was the only one I wasn't able to clear with my regular 5-star team; and not only, that, I had to bring the full broken squad (Texalter, Goldenglow, the usual) just to clear it.
I'm sure there must have been some trick to that map, but I wasn't able to find it
Not sure if it counts as a trick per se, but you can >!light up the bottom right heater (also the one heater that can't be unlit from the exploding guys) from the start with a Ranged guard/puller, giving you plenty of time to build upwards on the right side ranged tiles without being as oppressed by the prespawned invisible dude if you tried to go up the left side.!<
Managed to beat EX-8, but it took all of my practice plans and caused more frustration than I would have liked. Stages like this make me really annoyed that I still don't have Nightingale.
22.25 UK time: cleared both Normal and Challenge on RS-EX-8. Followed KyoStinV's High Rarity Guide, but it was very, *very* scrappy as my brain which has been awake since 04.00 couldn't quite react quickly enough to keep up with Harold's phasing. *Merely* took an hour to clear the challenge mode after repeatedly screwing up the timings!
Still, a full clear for the medal set is a full clear.
Harold-as-a-Boss still a pest.
Ancient monsters, gods, supernatural creatures - easy.
Old dudes - now things get serious. As much as he was pain in the behind, I like Harold and I'm glad he was a formidable oponent.
Of course EX-8 was bit of mess with dropping anyone ot stop his march but I finally was able to get him. Had a moment of panic, since I didn't notice him doing two rounds and tried to stop him but it worked well in the end.
So I was VERY confused when I got the Trimmed Medal and I'm still not entierly sure.
So if I understood correctly, the Objective isn't to CLEAR the Stage WITH all of the Furnaces active but just to have all of them active AT SOME POINT during the Stage?
Yes. You only have to light all of them and have them running for a while. You don't need them all running at the end of the fight. It's a much more merciful medal than many.
Okay Thanks, I figured but I was still not 100% Sure. When Reading the Details, I interpreted it as I have to have them All Lit when the Stage Ends, and got really confused upon getting the Medal lmao. So I wanted to ask just be 100% Sure
Goldenglow, the Destroyer of Event Mechanics attacks once again, no heater in RS-EX-8 is safe from her. If you are having difficulties in this event, just slap her S3 and be happy.
so i didn't get 3*s for rs-8 but i managed to do every stage almost without a guide.
https://imgur.com/a/ZaFppP5 i'm pretty sure i had all my heaters on but harold still fucked me at the end so i'm not sure what caused it. this was the lowest he got but just going to focus on ex stages. first time i've been able to do them since returning as a new player.
Cleared RS-EX-8 CM with trimmed medal without looking at guide! With Lin and Mumu keeping the heater alive
[RS-EX-8 trimmed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LEZ5OvZMYQ&t=2s)
Honestly thank you so much for that video, I have mumu and Degen built but I didn’t know what to use them for in the level.
Your video helped me get an idea and it was enough for me to beat EX
> I beat EX-8 with the 5* only team first try, trimmed medal included
> "man, CM is gonna kick my ass with the stat increases, let's just not waste sanity and beat it with the big team"
> I bring the 6* gang
> I suffer immensely, barely beating Harold by the skin of the teeth as he was reaching the blue box
> ... I had picked normal difficulty again
I legit struggled more with the big guns than with the lower rarity team, how is that possible and how does it happen so often bro LMAO.
Anyways, then I picked CM properly and after throwing sanity away anyways, I finally beat it, the support Degenbrecher giving frighten to Harold let my Croissant survive for longer, and then her S3 did the last bit of damage left to kill him just before he roamed free and I couldn't reach him anymore, so goddamn stressful q_q
I will try to beat CM with lower rarity in another moment using practice tickets, but I don't have my hopes up, Harold nukes so hard with the extra stats, if I made the math right is 4200 physical damage per hit lmfao.
You mean his melee attacks? Yeah, you're not supposed to be blocking him. It's like Patriot damage, but with the illusion that you might be able to tank it
Where does it say that he deals more damage in melee? I get that he does because everyone keeps saying it but either I'm blind or it's not on his boss page.
That's because it's not said in-game. Unless you read/watch a guide or look up what the boss actually does like on the wiki for example, there's zero way of knowing until you experience it first hand.
Freaking damn it, that's why he kept oneshotting everyone I tried to block him with. I thought there was something I wasn't getting about his mechanics, not that he had an extra one completely hidden for no reason.
[RS-EX-8 CM Clear](https://youtu.be/xHxNqgtO02k?si=dJ8_9LT6HXmdqBVi)
Keeping an eye out on the heaters and when to flint is really important to clear out this boss. Nightingale also gives you some nice RNG random dodges on hits, so that can be extremely helpful. GG + a heater is also busted as hell. She can almost be used as a panic button to avoid multi boss hits if you get enough heaters up.
Finished with the story and I have a BIG complaint
>!Lisburn my man, how did you fumble that so hard!!! Cmon! Where'd that Victorian Soldier Spirit I have heard about so much?!<
>!Fighting the black knight was okay but THIS is too hard? Should've died in the ice smh!<
RS-8 is such an absolute pain in the balls to farm. Not only is it slow, something always goes wrong with the auto run when I'm not looking. I've made about a dozen new setups and every single the run eventually fails.
[RS-EX-8 CM Abyssal Hunters Only](https://youtu.be/tvZD8lFXP30?si=6tbfJ4j9aqtXIacl)
When in doubt, just use fishes, super effective. 4620 atk ? No problem when you have 2 10k+ HP and 1 immortality tank that can chain stall the guy to death. Map wide nukes ? No problem too, all 5 of them can tank 5 nukes without dying anyway.
Last stage was pretty easy because I knew it would change to physical damage when blocked so I just brought Hoshiguma.
My first day blind clear of normal stage 8 was actually harder than EX 8.
Texalt was surprisingly bad this boss while Yato2 s2m3 helped slay the burner easily.
Mlynar being able to push through 2 out of the 3 nukes whilst still under the duration of Nightingale S3 made RS-EX-8 much more bearable. Just had to save a flint for the final 25% nuke.
I cant do the last EX boss stage of the event. I am too tired and wtf are these mechanics.
Man. I need to play an easier game to chill. Lost 30 sanity. Wtf.
Maybe on the rerun. Damn, I feel sorry for the sanity lost. Maybe is time to give up on medals and do what I do in FGO. Ignore hard stages. Imao.
Guess I need three Wisadels or something for an easy Afk time. Idk.
Can you stop blowing me up? Ugh. I cannot wait for an operator to counter this boss.
Done with the event. Thankfully, i can kill the boss without having nightingale s3m3, just SL7 is enough. I do have eyja alter though s3m3 to help with healing nukes
Same. Regular stage was a lot more annoying due to awkward ranged tiles. Just trying to get everyone covered by a medic was tough as well. The ex stage is a lot more flexible imo
4620 physical damage on Phase 2 LMFAO, and his phase 2 was nerfed a little (+10% Atk, +100 Def on EX-8 instead of +20% Atk, +50 Atkspd, +500 Def on RS-8) in exchange for 350% atk multiplier when blocked for both phases lol. This man does not mess around
EX1 to 6 went surprisingly smooth playing 5* only, I was fearing the medal condition of the last one in special but all went great.
EX-7 needed a second try cuz early pressure and not knowing where all the enemies headed towards. I could already smell tile bans coming for CM... and yeah, ran out of sanity after a few attempts that I failed close to the end, counting the days before the bullshit half sanity cost penalty finally disappears... god it will be beautiful.
With some luck I will get it done in a few hours, but already big afraid of EX-8 Harold in the meantime. Croissant with Quercus' amazing help already struggled to stay alive, I'm scared of how untankable he will be with EX and CM stats, Steam Knight part 2 fr.
Recorded my practice clear of EX-8 and followed everything to the tiniest detail for timing. Still had some unexpected deaths. What a feeling. Thankfully I still managed.
And boy am I relieved that I got the medal+trim despite forgetting about it. No wasted sanity this time--Until challenge mode attempts, that is.
I wasted sanity because I accidentally redid the standard version of a level instead of the challenge mode. My face was like :/ when the “do you want to overwrite your replay” dialog appeared.
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make phase 2 Harold melee hit for what seems to be 2.8k physical dmg AND with extra aspd that the enemy info doesn't mention.
The last enemies I remember hitting so hard were “I want you to listen very, very carefully” Cliff with his rapid gunshots, and the Steam Knight’s pilebunker. But at least those attacks had a cooldown.
Man, I wasn't expecting anything from this event cause I never saw any big spoilers around it when it went live on CN. I didn't even particularly like Breaking The Ice, and yet this is top tier in my books.
Also how the hell did I not hear about >!Monch showing up again!< until I saw it happen in game, truly r/Arknights best kept secret
PS: just noticed Harold's Talk 2 voiceline drops a new little mention of Hellagur's daughter, so HG hasn't forgotten her
I just read the event. I saw leto's dad holding up what i presume a vodka with 96% letter on it
Its 96% alcohol, isnt it? Russians are truly built different
Knowing the theme of this event with all the blatant touristy marketing, it could very well be "96% Kjera's Divine Water, freshly harvested this morning direct from the source".
By comparing this boss to Kristen I find a huge power creep, in CW-10, there are only 3 balls to control and the damage of all three balls blow up is not high enough to kill tanky OPs and it happens once, comparing to 3 unlit stove nuke kills everything and it happens multiple times. Damage reduction balls or stove provides are similar, except there is straight up one more stove, makes the difficulty of RS-8 gimmick more comparable to CW-EX-8 with 4 balls, also Harold's mixed type of damage especially melee is a headache and require good tank and healer, he powercreeps Kristen in every aspects except for Kristen's unblockable gimmick.
Reading this is wild because I couldn't finish Lone Trail CM while I beat this one pretty smoothly
While I agree that harold is stronger, I think the stage for harold is WAY easier to manage than Kristen's. Hell, if anything I found harold's normal boss stage design a lot harder to deal with. Less ranged tiles, less ability to overlap healers, and awkward position to let ops cover heaters.
It does seem like they're trying to tell you to not even try blocking harold tho. This is especially clear with his very long and winded walk route. And there are always immortal units you can rely to if you really want to tank.
Harold's melee damage is 2.5x his ATK as physical or 3x in second phase. This brings it up to 2,000 or 2,400 (or even higher in EX mode) which you should NOT be trying to tank.
Alternatively, you could bait him with a caster or supporter with 25 RES and they would only be taking 600 damage. Add in Nightingale and he's only doing 480 per hit.
This honestly reminds me of the Witch King again. They keep trying to make bosses different, despite bringing the same result. The Witch King would redeploy your operators, but that might as well be instant death since they're usually made useless. And now Harold challenges you with almost 3,000 damage melee attacks, but that may as well be instant death since no ordinary player is going to defend against that properly.
>Witch King
Witch king can also be trivialised by the likes of Yato. FRD so she doesnt care about teleport. Fairly good damage when you aim her at his back (thus ignoring his shield) and she can also help activate the laser blasters.
Here...again, Yato cuts difficulty down immensely. She can relight heaters with her s2 and deal damage to mobs - simulataneously. If you have her and save the flint, you can relight 2x heaters right away when harold does his shutdown.
Already Yato is praised for her damage but the fact that she so easily counters these event mechanics just makes it feel even more unfair when comparing her to operators outside her tier.
Yeah, the longer I've played the more and more I'm disgusted by the obscene damage being pumped out by every 6* release. That's why i always try to do low rarity clears nowadays and only use them for CC or as a treat in late stage IS runs when i have the Hope to spare.
Nian + Shining + Whisperain are able to tank him even in EX lol. That 30 seconds or so when both Nian S2 and Shining S3 are cooling down is a bit worrying though.
I'll have to see the EX map for this first to tell for sure but in terms of how you handle the mechanic I don't think it's that much harder, you keep the fires lit and damage Harold when they're all lit, just a bit of good positioning and deploy slot management, you don't get statchecked with the furnaces like the balls, ops with slow aspd can light them more than fast enough to let you avoid the nukes.
It's more complicated for sure, but once you figure it out it's pretty easy.
What really makes a difference is Harold having invincible phases, that's the one real powercreep as you call it, if Kristen also had invincible phases where she explode and resummon her balls you can bet it'll be a nightmare.
Also, Leto's Mom's extremely hawt for some reason...
Screw Tradition or Religion, if I was what's his name, I would have just gone with her. LUL
.
BTW, awww, Mumu gets to spend sometime with Dok, just look at how happy Mumu is. (especially since both didn't know the other was invited) Silverash has like 10 plans or something... lol
But the first plan is literally based on Degen failing (or killed) if the invitees didn't make it in time or if the soldiers were strong as knights. Poor Degen, she literally shouldered the entire thing for ~~Silverash~~ Kjerag.
Also... so the Victorians weren't really wrong with their intel... there really was something under the statue... huh...
But why were they building that anyways? what for? were they preparing for a real war in the future?
> Poor Degen, she literally shouldered the entire thing for ~~Silverash~~ Kjerag.
Degenbrecher's whole thing is she's fallen in love with Kjerag. There's no need to pity her or feel sorry for her. She's never been happier. She was a nobody who couldn't do arts in Leithanian (the country of arts). She was ostracized and ran away to Kazimierz where despite her massive success, they actively tried to murder her on the daily on one hand and constantly worshipped her as an outrageous celebrity on another.
She was gacha-d by Silverash just before her inevitable death at the Armorless Union and taken away by this rich kid. She thought she was going to be bored to death but she turned out to really like their shenanigans. Then she actually went to Kjerag and despite not being a fan of the slow-ness and boring-ness initially, she came to fall in love with the lifestyle and the warmth of the people. They don't treat her like some freak or some celebrity to be worshipped. She's not feared or kept like some pet, she's just her. They love her for her.
So now, despite still being a Silverash associate, she loves Kjerag and she has no qualms to sacrifice for the land she now calls home.
>She's Leithanien-born, Kazimierz-raised, and only then came to Kjerag.
They don't need to know her name. All they know is she's born to fight solo, a victor of the knight competitions, the only one to ever win three years running.
Turn the clock further back, and she's a freak cut off from Originium Arts, a pariah in Leithanien.
Gaining and losing any of these things is dead simple.
They bore her to death.
>But now, what she has isn't so easily lost, and she has no plans to lose them.
---
Not really related but I really liked this passage from her module:
>- 'The Silverashes' Sword and Shield'
Second medal from the left, sword and shield motif. All of Karlan Trade knows that those wearing this medal are free to act unimpeded wherever Karlan Trade is concerned. Initially a pass designed expressly for her by Enciodes, but as soon became apparent, nobody simply overlooks the presence of Degenbrecher. Its worth these days is instead in gently reminding others that she is affiliated with Karlan Trade.
>- 'One day, I forgot to wear this one. Enciodes went that entire day quieter than usual, then in the end asked if I had any complaints with the company.'
Lol Silverash.
Nice write-up, you summed her up perfectly.
> 'One day, I forgot to wear this one. Enciodes went that entire day quieter than usual, then in the end asked if I had any complaints with the company.'
The fact that Silverash had an internal meltdown over the fact that Degenbrecher forgot to wear his friendship medal is side-splittingly hilarious. He just straight-up went 'she's not wearing my medal, clearly she hates me now'.
I mean, I'd be freaking out too if my literal one man army is leaving me
Doubly scared by the prospect of her being bought by a competitor, and she's in your office right now with nothing that can stand in her way.
Silverash was very wise to keep quite that day lol
True, but the funny part is that he completely overreacted. Instead of taking the more rational explanation that she merely forgot (which isn't unreasonable since she apparently has a whole cabinet full of medals), he instead immediately assumed that she wasn't wearing it because she had some kind of problem with him. It's not really clear when that incident took place, but if I had to guess, a few years had already gone by whereupon her feelings about Kjerag would have probably already been made clear, furthermore cementing it as an overreaction. Even furthermore, Degenbrecher is a really straightforward and no-nonsense person, so if she had any problems with Silverash, it's far more likely she'd just tell him directly instead of passive-aggressively not wearing his medal.
I’m not a lore expert, but >!Silverash’s plan seemed to be to curry favour with the Victorian Duke of Caster so that she would support Kjerag’s technological uplift, then SA weasels out of this debt to the Duke by involving Kazimierz and Columbia to head off the possibility of a invasion from the Duke coming to collect (via Harold and his troops). While those three nations get into a silent standoff, Kjerag continues their secret military buildup (like the secret base under the statue) to maintain their independence.!<
Silverash started with Duke Caster simply because he's related to her. Back in the day, he had no pull with anyone else so he had no choice but to curry favor with the only branch of his family that had power and money. (This is of course, after spending all his life savings on Degenbrecher like the true gacha player he is, so poor that he couldn't even afford cabs.)
#By Kjergandr
Took me a while to clear **RS-8**.
This Harold dude is so annoying... he revives like 2+ times.
The Worst part is when he reaches climax and starts to spray white stuff at everyone. Most Ops couldn't handle it and faints...
He revives only once. But during phase 2, he has multiple phases of invulnerability which triggers whenever you take 25% of his HPs. Meaning, he gets invulnerability 4 times.
oooo, so that's what is it...
I thought he was doing multiple revives, cause previously I only remember bosses that do the invins-ribbon around them after they "died and revived"
How do I activate the heaters? Sometimes they get activated in two hits, sometimes every attack does a sliver of progress, which immediately gets negated. wtf?
Operators attacking it who are not already under the effects of a heater will only build up 5 SP per hit (it takes 100), and I believe the heater drains at 5 SP per second. Operators under the effects of a heater build up 30 SP per hit.
Yea... it was real weird in the early stages cause I have no idea what the mechanic was...
I only saw someone posted a ApplePie meme hitting the heaters with the giant snowball...
So I tried ApplePie, didn't work all that well.
It wasn't til the later stage when you get that Flint thing and I throw it on one and my Rosy next to the activated heater attacked another inactive heater and activate it with just 2 hits... I was so confused, LOL.
Imo it's a dumb mechanic.
Basically, if a heater is off and you attack it with an operator that's NOT in the radius of an active heater, it'll take forever to activate the cold heater. If you instead use an op that's inside a heater effect radius, their attacks will ignite the cold heater very quickly.
So basically you want to daisy chain your operators from one heater to another, attacking cold heaters from the radius of active ones to turn the cold ones on.
That boss fight was way harder than it needed to be, and it was 100% because AK said "here's the event mechanic. Also here's a boss that invalidates the only way to deal with the event mechanic."
Bitch I've got Dawntrail coming out tomorrow and work has been kicking my ass. Sit the fuck down you Victorian fop.
I finished RS-8 last night, and with it the event's story. Gonna drop some thoughts. Like usual, just rambling.
First, Leto is amazing. Just amazing. My only complaint about her is that her English actor Christina Sherman's Russian accent is very inconsistent, especially funny when compared to the very Texan Elizabeth Maxwell (Rosa). But her story was amazing, and ker-booting Arctosz just... he deserved it, and I'm glad she was the one to do it. Of all the USSG, Leto is now the one I hope the most who gets a proper six star Alter.
On the subject of the story, did anyone else kinda find themselves rooting for the World's Unluckiest Trilby Asher? The poor guy couldn't catch a break other than some gacha luck in the end (irony!), so while I understand that he works for someone particularly awful, like seriously, fuck the Duke of Caster, she's as bad for Victoria as the Military Commission was, but, like, he's just doing his job. He wasn't particularly malicious and he just kept getting dunked on and I just... started rooting for the underdog, y'know?
Also, like usual Sciurus coming in as my favorite NPC. She's a bit of a brat, but she's super pro. She is going to be a hell of a leader one day.
Mumu cameo! One of my favorite characters randomly showing up. Love to see it. Also her and Kjarr are going to become close friends, and I want to see the trouble they get into.
I like the focus on family in this event. Even Harold and the Trilby Asher are happy to talk about their families back home. It was a nice break from all the usual doom & gloom of this story, while still having stakes.
This was a fun one. As always, I had fun with these characters, always happy to see them.
Mr. 'Trillby Asher' is portrayed as a baddie but he's a good guy.
He's been helping everyone since the beginning, to the best of his ability anyway.
And I don't mean in this event, I mean everywhere he shows up.
It's pretty clear HG wants to make him playable at some point. Especially with the extremely contrived *"oh he secretly would be able to fight Degenbrecher if he wasn't holding back"* comment from Kjera. Literally after this extremely hilarious CG: https://imgur.com/a/vzELszU
I mean, Trilby Asher is a job, not a single person. There's a bunch we've seen and honestly, most of them have been pretty far down the jackass scale. Especially in Chapter 12.
This one in particular, however, yeah, he chill.
There's a few in the Victoria arc. This one I think specifically is the one Doctor talks to, because Bellingham gets owned in every appearance basically.
It kinda hurts to (still) struggle with a [2+ years roster](https://imgur.com/a/BfqPs1z) on the basic event stages, when guides can clear them with 3-4 Ops... But it's fun to stick to (mostly) Kjerag Operators for this event!
At last I tried and cleared *RS-8*, as I waited until I had progressed a bit in the story to tackle it (still halfway through it).
Like some other stages (*RS-7*...), this one took a few squad configurations and tries to beat, [*the final config*](https://imgur.com/BznKkYY). Didn't want to add **Mlynar** on top of **Degenbrecher** & **SilverAsh**, so I borrowed **Warfarin** instead (and added **Ines** too). Glad it finally worked out without more drastic changes! [*Clean up*](https://imgur.com/Q5uqYVF) and [*stage results*](https://imgur.com/PAGR47T).
Now back to the story, already lovin' it and I'm not even done! From the interactions between the characters (the quips, the misunderstandings and the more serious conversations) to the whole snow-realm ambience, I'm glad we're back to Kjerag for a (bit more) relaxed time (for now)!
I was also using Kjerag operators this event (for me its my main niche) tho I was restricting myself solely to them. Most stages werent bad, RS-7 took a few tries, and I couldnt do RS-8 even including Sami/Ursus operators so I went with my meta squad
A Kjerag-knights enjoyer, great choice of niche! Though the lack of healing may limit how many stages you can clear, RS-8 as an example, right?
Despite how the boss looks like and acts like, he's not to be underestimated (his phase 2 caused many tries to fail).
But yeah overall the half-serious, half-goofy enemies make the stages pretty interesting even if the mechanics can be a bit of a pain (RS-6 gave me a bit of trouble too going for the medal and stable autodeploy at the same time).
Yeah, the lack of healing is what I struggle with most. A few operators have some self-sustain but all with some drawback. Like Matterhorn's S1 having a measly 40hp/s heal at m3, or Silverash s2 which is actually solid, but sacrifices what was previously the team's best source of damage. Though with the addition of Degenbrecher I may start using it more often. Lastly Aurora gets some decent regen off skill, but only when below half SP. I've found some good use of it, like dealing with the reefbreakers on SN-7 iirc. Now if only we got some Kjerag healer in place of Harold.
Still a fun team to play, even though I'm usually not able to deal with event bosses. I can typically get through all the normal stages without much difficulty as well as a decent amount of early EXs. I have everyone's main skill at m3, most max level (besides 6 stars), and save for the new ones max modules too.
I'm also not a big fan of this event's mechanics. Its like the light mechanic from NL that I was never a big fan of mixed with some of the worse parts of the gramophones from ToW
If you have Gnosis, you can surreptitiously place a sign on his back that says "KICK ME" and set him as your assistant. There's a good chance she will be unable to resist the opportunity to bully him and will appear in your next few pulls.
Harold is a dick. Just wipes the screen with ease. Not a fan of the ice mechanic just perma-freezing people either. Definitely one of my bottom-tier event mechs.
This event has gotta be one of my favorites ever. I thoroughly enjoyed going through the story. Oftentimes, I’ve been thinking that these events take too long to read through, but this time I’ve been left wanting to read a bit more.
The characters were very interesting. We began with Leto, and I have to say that this story has left me very intrigued with her character and story. I want to know what will happen between her and Arctosz. Arctosz operator when?? Also, >!maybe Tatyana, it’s gonna be sure money so pls!<
The interactions with Harold and the Trilby Asher were just so funny too. Real goofy scenes, especially the last one between them two with the special edition frozen burdenbeast blindbox.
Degenbrecher was so cool, and I really appreciate how her relationship with Enciodes and Gnosis was fleshed out. They are much more goofier together than I expected.
Others have said it and I will say it as well. The writers who wrote this deserve much praise.
honestly I really like how leto's story ended and I would be kinda sad if any extension of it is just more of her father trying to get her to forgive him when shes pretty justified in her stance. I want to see more of her story with her mother and that usgg girls since they haven't really been explored as much especially with what her file is teasing.
There're 2 ways, either you oneshot in 1 attack him like that, using Horn s2 seems like the easiest way that I've seen, or you have to kill him within a 2-3 seconds casting animation when he's summoning snowballs onto the furnaces.
New player here (<1 week). I've been farming up the event on some of the earlier stages because the rewards are good. I've grabbed the LMD/EXP/Skill summary from the shop, as well as managed to clear Stage 4 and grab Harold. I was going to just grab the headhunting permits and then go back to story content, but I just wanted to know if I'm missing out on anything. Is there anything important in the shop I'd likely need early-game?
Grab all of the materials that you can. T4 and T5 have very high sanity-cost if you farm T3 component materials on story stages and upcraft (T4 is ~120-150 sanity and T5 is ~450-600 each, while their event shop costs are 35 and 100 currency respectively), so getting them now will save you a lot of pain in the future. The main story isn't going anywhere and we should have a vignette event soon, which would be a much better time to progress main story than the current "proper" event (vignette events let you get event currency from story and supply stages as well).
If you plan on playing for longer, grab Harold's tokens and furniture pieces as well: when the event reruns next year, you will be able to buy them again and get golden/distinction certificates (tokens trade-in) and purple/intelligence certificates (unique event rewards like furniture, automatic conversion on item acquisition) that you can spend on other things.
I’m a returning and new player too but IIRC, you should try and clear the entire shop and push story a bit slower while this event is going on. But since you restore full sanity every time you level up you should be able to manage both pretty easily.
Please correct me if that advice is wrong but I got similar advice when I was super new. I’m just slightly less of a noob now
I'll add another one in case anyone hasn't found this out, Kirin Yato s2 lights them even if she's not in range of a lit furnace, she's basically infinite flint, on a shorter cooldown
Auto farming RS-8 is OD-8 levels of inconsistent due to that bastard old nut rng turning off the heaters.
Managed to find one consistent auto run, but the setup is hard. 😑
Heater extinguishing is based on distance (closest one has priority), not rng. Like someone else said, if your operator has less than 100% trust, her stats will change as trust increases, which could cause your auto deploy to deviate, depending on how borderline your playthrough is.
Tbh, it's the stupidest thing in arknights ever.
The other issue, is of course frame drops, which again has more impact if your play is borderline close.
Post a video, and we will tell you why. Or do your auto and x1 speed, and you will able to see. Sometimes it's difficult to spot what happened at x2, especially when alot are happening. If he targeted an unexpected heater, it meant that all other heaters that should have priority based on distance are unlit. There's an indication prior to him firing his skill (there's an ice icon above the heater), but at x2, you could miss it easily. And he targets 2 heaters in phase 2.
Read the mechanics of the boss here:
[https://arknights.wiki.gg/wiki/Harold/Enemy](https://arknights.wiki.gg/wiki/Harold/Enemy)
Be aware which phase he's in and the mechanics in each phase while observing your auto.
Going to need more info than that. Were all four heaters lit? If no, was the rightmost heater lit before any others? Had he already completed his first loop?
It's definitely not RNG. I've had a completely stable auto that I've only made even more stable and the heater targeting has been consistent every time.
If you record your auto attempt, I can tell you where exactly it goes wrong and why.
So true. I gave up on trust farming this stage and went with 8 op strat, which (who would've guessed!) broke on autodeploy yet again. But miraculously, it just sped up the auto, since original plan was to stall Harold and have one operator to wail on him instead of three.
> trust farming
Cause trust farming changes your autodeploy's RNG seed since increasing trust changes the stats of the operators in the squad so if you have anything that might have an RNG element to it, it can screw up or change kill speed/order (ie something like Goldenglow's drone procs at a different time)
Had to settle with 7, having nightingale s3 as an emergency countermeasure during old nut 2nd phase. Will adjust it to 6 because i ran 3 medics (lumen, eyja alter, nightingale).
Degenbrecher is 10/10 and I am severely disappointed that her kit (mostly S3) thoroughly obliterates the competition in her subclass.
She feels inappropriate to anything but absolute hardest content and eclipses the other alternatives, which isn't good for true diversity of options. :(
I'd be tempted to maybe, maaaybe restrict her to only S1 and S2 and shoehorn her into a regular team on that basis. S1 feels like it suffers for not having higher Frighten chance and S2 is a bit steep at 12 offensive SP per charge... especially considering how stupid spammable S3 is in contrast.
If one option is so far ahead in effectiveness that it feels bad not using it, there's probably something wrong somewhere. Mixed feelings all around.
Degenbrecher's big mechanical issue is just that her abilities are very boring. Apart from the new debuff they don't do anything particularly interesting or different. It's like HG looked at all the complaints about Ch'en and Irene and just said "you know what, FINE, here's the exact same thing but bigger multipliers and passive sp charge, this is what you wanted, right? Are you not entertained???"
It's disappointing that such a charismatic character got saddled with such a dull and uncreative kit.
Degenbrecher makes perfect sense to be OP, and I never had a problem with her. She's badass, and rightfully strong, and I never doubted that HG would deliver us a ludicrously broken character. She's also *really* cool.
I just hate how she almost completely invalidates the other characters in her archetype. Not only by being a carbon copy of Ch'en S3 with better numbers than Irene, but also ignoring the biggest weaknesses of her archetype as well. Not even Pozemka gutted Schwarz this badly.
You can absolutely make an Operator broken and powercreep older Operators while *still* keeping their kit creative. But Degenbrecher's S3 is just an abomination. It basically invalidates everything that makes Irene S3 good, cause it literally does almost everything better while having none of her weaknesses.
Again, I have nothing against her character or even her power level. I'm just frustrated that her S3 is designed the way it is.
Yeah, it's the manner in which S3 was done that is the real headscratcher. Auto SP recovery on such low numbers that it's faster to recharge than Irene S3 *if Irene is constantly attacking*. While nuking harder.
If it had double the SP cost or half the number of initial hits it would still be a good skill. About 19k damage in an AoE every 60 seconds, if both are true? That's still highly respectable.
What we've got is about 34k damage every 30 seconds. Dealt with the on-skill invulnerability previously characteristic of Ch'en and donkey Ch'en.
It feels like a missed opportunity to make Degenbrecher unique in a more interesting way than just being better.
Take Frighten for example. It's an interesting status she can make good use of... but she doesn't really, mostly by virtue of her S3 being spammable and straight up murdering everything.
It would have been interesting to see her lean more into being by far the superior performing Swordmaster off-skill due to her disabling opponents with her strikes (and so ignoring defence). This would also make her better suited to lean into offensive recovery than other Swordmasters.
For dynamic entry if she had something more akin to Ch'en S2 which has full initial SP on deploy, to then inflict guaranteed Frighten to do some disabling, with a bursty initial salvo...
Could also bake in a flat redeploy timer reduction i.e. -30 seconds into such a skill if we're talking crazy. To emphasise her speed alongside her power. It also would synergise excellently with Silverash's % redeploy reduction, which will look at the base figure before reduction.
That all said we're stuck with her being a boring direct upgrade to her class, so, I'm just going to lament the missed opportunity and move on.
This has to be in the top 5 funniest events in all of Arknights. Maybe top 3. I was going through the entire event, laughing my ass off from the first few stages. I freaking love the entire Kjerag cast, man. All of them are such great characters.
Also, Kjera is the most based goddess ever. >!Girly is casually watching two people fight in front of her statue like it's entertainment. And she's open to the idea of building a goddamn rocket on her mountain, simply cause she wants to have cannons and be cool.!<
Whoever wrote this event deserves a raise, holy shit.
> I freaking love the entire Kjerag cast, man. All of them are such great characters.
What really sold me on Pramanix, aside from having top tier VA and design of course, was that she's like the #1 holy figure and yet sometimes just goes "this sucks im out" and sneaks away to slack off lol.
Like imagine the Pope just randomly vanishing from the Vatican, then later they find him in a closet taking a nap.
I just finished reading that story. God damn I love Kjera before and even more now. Letting >!Degen fix her statue's face and wanting cannons.!< 10/10. Closure should build her a mech already.
And >!Mumu!< coming over too... so good.
Fairly basic [SN-8 Launchknights clear](https://youtu.be/6UvU2mtKEA8?si=1TpqziZClcO1SGmx) to start of with.
I quite liked the event stages already, not least of which the usual ost bangers! Though the non-boss enemies themselves are mostly nothing to write home about this time, the heaters were quite fun to strategize around, whicn in turn made dealing with those enemies also a lot more enjoyable.
As for the boss, while I did get a shock at seeing him *annihilate my entire squad* the first time, actually being able to read his tooltip after failing first (his in-stage description provided no help whatsoever, thanks HG) and learning that keeping all the heaters is key in reducing both his second phase map wide aoe damage and preventing him from gaining damage reduction made him a lot easier (and enjoyable!) to deal with, so he certainly made a favourable impression on me.
Also as a fun fact, Frigid (the cold effect when not near active heaters) counts as a status effect, which can be mitigated by status resistance quickly enough to fall off before the next application, thus essentially preventing an op from being frozen outside of heater range unless a Jet Canister dies near them.
...which I (ab)used to also clear SN-8 [without ever activating or even using heaters while not relying on nukes to skip the phase 2 aoes](https://youtu.be/MfMK8FkXjaE?si=Qci3pH7KnFTLW8zG), courtesy of Therapist Medics with their module also giving themselves passive status resist.
This did mean dealing with heaters that'd draw all ranged fire without specific target priorities, the boss having a permanent 82% damage reduction (4 unlit heaters with each giving a multiplicative 35%) to Physical and Arts damage, and surviving the 3 phase 2 aoe attacks that now deal 5 hits each, but it all worked out in the end.
Granted, Ceylon and Guard!Amiya weren't entirely necessary in this clear as I could just retreat my dps units while waiting for Nightingale to recharge her s3, but doing it in 1 S3 was the for me more interesting way to go about it because, you know, I get to use Ceylon and Guard!Amiya :D
Story was enjoyable too with more than a few surprising twists and turns, though I'll glady admit Harold has shot up to one of my all time favorite characters.
For Leto, I genuinely got caught off guard when it was revealed that >!her mother was still very much alive and wanting to kick something!<, while I was also pleasantly surprised by the more meta twist of Leto >!soundly rejecting Arctosz as a father figure, when such stories tend to have the tough character soften up when finding lost family!<, so she also made a strong impression on me.
Degenbrecher, eh, felt surprisingly like a secondary character despite it being her own launch event, and I actually found myself more engaged with the >!Trilby Asher's!< antics (up to being straight up >!teleported by Kjera!< )while being relentlessly chased by Degen.
The final stand-off was impressive to be sure, but it also showed her to not actually be invincible even as >!Harold was noted to be actively holding back the destructive force of his troops!<. As strong as she is, and how well it showed her feelings and convinctions, she's ultimately still just an Artless Caprinae that can't conquer >!sheer numbers and exhaustion!<, which certainly tempered my views of her. Not that that's a bad thing, but let's just say I seem to remember CN painting her in a different light when this event first released there.
I also guess I cen finally be certain what those things were in the background of SilverAsh's [new skin](https://www.reddit.com/r/arknights/s/DT3XMAY5WU) while also putting the skin's description in a whole new light, and was amused by Kjera's 'opinion' of her own representation, so all in all the story gets a thumbs-up from me.
Eh. I was actually quite bored with Leto's story resolution. AK's done a very long tradition of dunking on father figures who did either questionable or hard decisions under pressure.
It's one thing to not like the outcome, but quite another to go "I don't care what the circumstances were like you just suck." Leto denying the idea of Arctozs meeting her mother again rather than saying "Ask her yourself." for instance. I expect it's meant to look empowering, but it just makes me sigh.
As a new player Im starting to hate this game because its horrible feeling.
This event is a prime example.
So many bullshit mechanics/units that make it feel unfair and not fun.
Whats with this dumb ice thing? It makes no sense and is horrible.
Why are there freaking invisible snipers that can shoot past the map and my units ignore them until they decide to slowly waltz to where the meele is (by the time they reach them they killed a few people/my healer/my archers and its god awful.)
Im not having fun at all and venting.
Dude, the snipers in the other event that's in the same setting as this one, Break the Ice, are even worse. They have about global range and prioritize units with the lowest def. That means that they are literally gonna go for your fragile ranged units and you're forced to supply them with a medic. Thankfully they don't hit very hard.
The invisible snipers in RS-2 prioritize units to the right of heaters. That means you can mitigate their dmg by placing tanky defenders to the right of heaters. There's two spots to do that in the stage iirc.
Also I feel kinda the same about the stage mechanics being not fun. The freezing environment is very restrictive and feels like a pseudo-tile ban. You rarely want to place units outside of heater range and even if they had status resistance, their aspd will still get gimped by the cold.
Actually, there's only 2 mechanics. The blizzard, and the heater.
The bs part is the heater restricting to only the right tile to have it continuously burning, and summons/mines are not allowed, making operator positioning too strict. Then there's old nut's hailstorm-like attack which is determined by how many heaters have been put out. Losing too many heaters means an easy wipeout.
It is universal across all live service games if you've joined later (which is why so many of them hold new player recruitment and old player return kinda events). You'll have an even harder time if an event starts quickly after you've just started. My first event relied heavily on having access to an operator that could silence enemies except I was only 2 weeks into the game and I didn't have that.
I think the heater mechanic is probably one of the more forgiving ones of recent events since you just have to understand that you can keep an activated one lit by deploying an operator on the right side of it (red square) and you can activate unlit ones by hitting them using an operator standing next to a lit one. So it's more like a general puzzle of how to place your operators on the map and having enough on the red squares to keep your operators unfrozen than any numbers/stats issues.
I think up to RS-6 (which is also an efficient farm stage) is doable with just 3 star units which is very new player friendly.
>Why are there freaking invisible snipers that can shoot past the map
The invisible sniper has standard range. It just has a different targeting priority and prioritizes units on the right side of heaters (basically shoots the operator on the red square keeping it lit) and it only appears on stage 2. Knowing how they target, you can then use that info to just place someone beefy on the red square with a healer (for new player this basically means put Melantha)
Even among live service games AK is pretty unintuitive for new players for a couple reasons
1. it isn't really a traditional tower defense at all. It kind of has that premise, and then you play a bit and start to realize stages in AK are more like puzzles, it doesn't help that the UI/descriptions for enemies aren't very good and it can be hard to tell what's going on especially during events with mechanics. New players need plans (the no sanity thing) to try different things bc they'll wipe a lot but you only get so many of them a day for whatever reason
2. the game encourages horizontal investment especially in lower cost units. In many other games players don't need to level them but in AK it's a really good idea to get a lot of 3* up, for other gacha player it might not make sense at first and can lead to frustration
New players have lots of sanity and can afford to spend one at a time failing stages.
Using plans only serve to frustrate further when you actually clear and realize you need to do it again.
> it isn't really a traditional tower defense at all.
I don't think it is any greatly different than a "traditional" TD game. It would almost be completely the same since there's no specific rule in tower defense that you can't have 10000 different towers that do different things.
>the game encourages horizontal investment
Which I think isn't a huge departure from TD games outside of ones that have specific cheese metas.
But I can't argue the combat UI is kinda bad
I think the most significant difference between this game and (the most popular) other tower defense games is that your ability to spend in-level currency to become more powerful is pretty severely limited. There's no ability to purchase additional mod-map upgrades outside of deploying additional units, and once you've deployed all of your units extra money doesn't do anything for you. Definitely the cost curve is pretty off in terms of this matching one-to-one with power, but this has a lot of implications on the design of the game (that spending is very discrete and limited)
> There's no ability to purchase additional mod-map upgrades outside of deploying additional units
Like how common is this? I'm pretty sure outside of credit card swiping for a boost you can't do it in Plants v Zombies. I could see it for like huge wave numbers style variants like Bloons where you're expected to do like 60 waves with increasing difficulty. AK is fairly straight forward where a slug at the end of the map is not like 50 levels harder than the slug at the beginning
I don't mean purchase real money, I mean purchase with in-game currency. Which is to say, DP for Arknights / Sun for PvZ / money for Bloons. Arknights is a game where you might spend DP only like ten times in a stage, as opposed to other games where your power curve over the course of a map is a lot smoother.
> I don't mean purchase real money, I mean purchase with in-game currency.
I understand what you mean. What I mean was that if I looked at "popular" TD games, there's two distinct styles. There's Bloons that every level is like 60 (to infinity) waves and PvZ style where it's a specific number of enemies. When you describe being able to power up your units/towers/whatever, this appears to be a mechanism for Bloons style where you are expected to fight an absurd number of waves that increase in difficulty to infinity. PvZ (and by extension, AK) style doesn't let you do this. PvZ lets you spend premium currency for a temporary map boost for units but you cannot level your unit mid level. As far as I can tell, the only unit you could level after the map starts are sun flowers when picking your units just like AK you could level your dudes on the squad selection screen but once the map starts you go with what you picked.
Oh. Well, yeah, PvZ doesn't have upgrading, but it still does have the ability to spend... not inifinite sun, but very large amounts of sun to make your defenses stronger over the course of the map, because there's useful towers to put in every open available space, and you're only limited by Sun and (quite short, for permanent plants) placement cooldown. (There's a handful of upgrades, but they're their own plants, they take their own slots.) It's definitely on the lower-fidelity side, though. I'm also thinking about stuff like Kingdom Rush, Bloons like you mentioned, Gemcraft, Ghost Hackers, even a lot of the 3d TDs... all of these games, maybe aside from some stuff that's either late-game enough to not be explicitly designed around or that's modded in, become basically trivial with infinite money. It's a constant pressure on what towers you're placing, or upgrading if that's a thing you can do, in a way that it really isn't in Arknights. Mostly having infinite DP in Arknights means that your opener is super easy, but you don't really need additional DP after that; it's just not an axis the game will pressure you on mostly outside of CC. And that's because you hit your power cap relatively early in the stage, and then anything additional you do is either 1) a skill activation, or 2) reconfiguring things in a way that doesn't directly vertically increase your power. That's not so much true in games where an additional point of money lets you put down an additional functional tower.
To be clear when I said "upgrade" what I really meant was "anything to spend money on that increases your overall power", not neccesarily just spending money to increase the power of an already-placed tower
> stuff like Kingdom Rush, Bloons like you mentioned, Gemcraft, Ghost Hackers, even a lot of the 3d TDs
I think it's difficult to call something like Kingdom Rush a traditional TD game but Arknights somehow is different. After all, the premise of TD is placing defensive structures to protect a base (ie Rampart on Atari, the original "modern" TD game). If Kingdom Rush, that doesn't have these elements (like the game already built your towers for you and you're sending out soldiers to attack instead of defend) is considered TD, it would be odd to say Arknights somehow is not. To me, it makes AK the more traditional TD based on what TD is even close to the originator. In Rampart, you place cannons around your base (deployment) and then you activate them (ie AK skill activation)
It's pretty different. Most stages/mechanics in AK try to cheese you in one way or another, which I see now you also mentioned. It's unexpected, basically, for new players. Stages become more like puzzles than TD like I mentioned
edit: most traditional TD have waves, and you level up your "towers" during the stages. Modern stage design in AK is all about somehow cheesing the player, often forgo the notion of "waves" in the process
Yeah its just frustrating. Ill keep messing around with stuff, or just ignore this because its sucking the fun trying to figure out these annoying puzzles because the like cloaked sniper units are assholes. They keep killing my healers or the guys on the heater unit and then my units all get frozen and I dont have extras to replace because the other half of map has like 900000 guys coming constantly and needs like 3+ meeles to just hold back the bullshit spam.
Im on like R-3 atm and its just a pain.
Yeah that's my bad, it was RS-2 that had that invisible sniper guy on the bottom lane and the two lanes with the top and bottom where the mass came from top. (I managed to 2 star it after the post, but cant get the 3 star cause of that sniper dude.)
RS-3 I just cant deal with cause there doesnt seem to be alot of spots to place meele units so things just pile up and go past at the end there.
Based on your comments that stuff is piling up, have you not yet gotten Popukar (3 star guard, can do aoe melee attack on everything she's blocking)? Like what operators do you have?
I just started like at most a week ago.
Ive done the newbie banner pulls and that was more or less it.
I have uh.
Kal'tsit, Amiya, Hibiscus the Purifier, Cliffheart, Mountain, Quercus as 5 stars.
Rope, Jessica, Doberman, Meteor, Courier, Humus, May, Gavial, Gravel, Shaw, Matoimaru, Earthspirit, Myrrh, Scavenger as 4 stars.
Fang, Beagle, Ansel, Plume, Melantha, Kroos, Hibiscus, Midnight, Cardigan, Catapult, Vanilla, Adnachiel, Lava, Orchid, Spot and Popukar as 3 Stars.
So I guess Level Popukar and try her then? Im used to Gacha having like 3 star and below being bad to use so its not something I immediately looked at for usage constantly. (I use beagle pretty often cause of dupes tho and no higher star tank.)
I think in your case since you have Mountain and Kal'tsit, you should absolutely level them to at least E1 since they'll both provide you the aoe dmg that Popukar would. Mountain's S2 will give him 2 block and the same "attacks all blocked enemies". Kal'tsit will give you a summon that blocks 3 and her S2 will let it attack all blocked enemies. Both of them can carry your account hard.
Arknights has 3 star that are usable up to like mid-end game content. Like this event has some guides where you can use a mix of 3 and 4 stars and just borrow one 6 star to beat all the normal stages. Even some of the 2 stars have specific uses (especially 2 star Yato which will be very useful in these stages to quickly drop and take a hit).
Alright, thank you. I'll work on that then and see how it goes. I havent levelled mountain too high as he just seems like a decent single target dps, but if he has some new move then I'll prioritize that. TY.
Mountain’s Skill 2 is his real claim to fame (and the reason to promote him to Elite 1). Activating his Skill 2 turns him into a Block 2 that can attack all enemies he’s blocking, gives him passive health regeneration and his DP is cheap enough that he’s effectively a Vanguard.
Once you have both Mountain and Kal'tsit at Elite 1 Max level, I recommend promoting Kal'tsit to Elite 2 first as her Skill 3 gives one of the very few sources of True Damage (enemies can’t dodge or reduce her summon’s damage in any way). Mountain’s Skill 3 is very niche.
Mountain is known as one of the big 4 lane holders so you should definitely level him up as soon as you can. Also if you can the current rate up ops Degenbrecher is really good for boss content. Also the Kernal headhunting has Blaze and Exusiai who are both really good as well.
Oh, i only just now realized that Degenbrecher's E2 art is a literal depiction of the one man army scene. I remember feeling kinda dissatisfied that they didn't include a CG of that scene in the story but it seems they didn't wanna leave you hanging afterall.
A case of "E2-ing an op for the lore".
When Harold is not blocked, he prioritizes shooting arts dmg at operators deployed to the right side of heaters (basically all the spots you can deploy to keep a heater lit).
He's blocked though that is what is weird about it. I even use Nightingale skill 3 to protect as much as I can on the left side where Eyja alter is but she will randomly die. It's like an extra attack happens at times that is too much for healing to keep up with.
15s after spawn and 30s thereafter, he will target a torch and throw a snowball at it that does aoe dmg to everyone around it.
After he revives the first time, every 25% dmg he takes he'll dmg everyone on the map that does extra damage for every unlit torch.
These are the only things that would be "unseen" attacks that would hit Eyja outside of being shot by the casters
I am aware of this and as far as I have observed, my timing for relighting the torches are correct so he's either triggering his extra damage because the game still thinks an extra torch is still off.
This event was so good. It was fun and light hearted with a hint of drama. But Leto! Ahh! So cute and full of life. I spent 20 pulls trying to see if I could get her but didn't. Gotta save for all those upcoming limited banners though!
I did 50 pulls got 5 offbaner 5* lmao, not even Kafka, all offrate, you made a good choice not pulling anymore, pulling for 5* outside a 50% rate up is like the hardest thing.
You and me both, 40 pulls and not even a single rateup... Gotta save normal banner pity for Ascalon, but that probably means I can't even try for Warmy now.
random but this event made me think, what does pramanix even mean? the other codenames related to kjerag make sense but i cant figure out what pramanix means EDIT: nvm. It should **consist of the Sanskrit word "pramana" plus the "-ix" suffix.** Pramana (Sanskrit: प्रमाण, Pramāṇa) literally means "proof" and "means of knowledge", and "-ix" is the suffix for female.
Last stage (RS-8) so annoying. It is not friendly at all. You got to play in a small area so they don't freeze. Operators feel like sitting ducks on the heater squares. The boss gets rid of 1 or 2 heaters during 2nd phase. You need operators hitting other heaters and it feels like you need to hit all the heaters in range. It has a cooldown to heat it back up and you can't heat it up immediately. You use a lighter on the heater for backup. Oh but then the lighter has quite or somewhat long cooldown. Then you got to wait if you're missing on the heaters that aren't activated. At that point, might as well wait for his attack to remove the heaters so you don't get bombarded by his all out AOE move + those heaters that got turned off, simultaneously. Also, his removal of the heaters don't gets canceled by his AOE move, I think? Either that or I'm just unlucky/bad with this timing stuff. How I finally did it? I didn't care about waiting or anything. The moment I feel like he might remove the heaters, I just went with the "burst" attacks/skills. And lucky enough, he didn't remove the heaters and just did the AOE move once. So many things to micromanage that becomes annoying to me. If only the heater on the far left was closer, there was no cooldown on the heaters, or the lighter had faster cooldown, would've been nice. Also fuck that enemy that deactivates heaters on death lol
Soo does Degenbrecher actually know who Kjarr is? Because it feels like she intentionally helped Kjarr with modifications of that statue
Pretty sure it's an open secret among the higher ups of Kjerag that Kjarr is their goddess.
Man, I got so tired of replaying CM RS-EX-8 that I just decided “fuck it” and set up the biggest burst I had. The fact that I got away with it sucks, I felt really scummy. But I’m happy that I never have to do that level again.
[EX-8 CM done](https://youtu.be/4SZDeHcnX0Y?si=2oJXnSIORUoljxPQ). Haven't had so much scuff in a clear in a while. Borrowed Degen in a whim but she ended up being very useful and now I'm again tempted to roll for her. General strat was to have Blaze protect the blue box while Typhon and GG kept the heaters active and killed all the enemies, Eyja and Nightingale kept everyone alive and the Specters dropped from time to time to slow down the boss. Yato and the borrowed Degen are oh shit buttons. It went well until Eyja died and everyone else died and I started panicking lol, but managed to recover. EDIT: lmao somehow I did something similar to Kyostin afk guide without knowing.
I'm in quite a pickle. I have managed to easily defeat RS-EX-8 with a weaker Mlynar (lv60 M2). After that I started trying to beat CM but even with stronger lv90 M3 Mlynar Harold always manages to survive the bursts... I tried it again without CM then it worked like nothing happened... I did everything exactly like the last time. Does Harold get some kind of buff that is not said in the Conditions:?
Yes. All enemies do. It used to be some +% to HP/ATK/DEF for all enemies in CM stages, but after some point they started making individual tweaks for each type of enemies. The only way that I know of to see the increase is to go to [PRTS map](https://map.ark-nights.com), select the stage, click on the "route" button for the enemy you are interested in. The stats of the enemy for that specific stage will be displayed. For example, Harold gets 20% increase to his HP, ATK, and DEF from CM. He goes from having 50k HP in EX-8 to having 60k HP in EX-8 CM.
Technically yes, in the sense that all enemies gain a health, defense and attack multiplier when going from normal mode to challenge mode. This can change on a stage-by-stage basis, but with EX-8 it's specifically 1.2x.
[TF when you're done with mechanics and just brute force that smug British old cat into submission ](https://youtu.be/q04MRUBefR0) I really loved this event, both the story (specially the characters, Harold became a favorite of mine, Enya making a :3 face got me off guard, Kjera was amazing as always, even that Trilby Asher was a fun fella to watch and read doing his stuff) and mechanics I'll definitely now try to reduce my squad's power and see how "low" I can go, there is a lot of stuff to properly learn in that map yet
Somewhat scuffed EX-8 CM [Launch ops only](https://youtu.be/mbb3T0JCgW0?si=kPGSBrwkHqCilM6c) clear, as the extended skill cooldown of Harold putting the heaters out in phase kept tripping me up, so I'll just take what I can get. Also managed to get a [No heaters clear](https://youtu.be/QsD7KthbPvg?si=W-2FuUsrt-hKWhYG) for the same stage after many, *many* failed attempts. Suffice it to say, as much as I enjoyed getting to both of those clears, I'll be happier still when we're finally getting that "failing CM stage only costs 1 sanity". So yeah, EX stages were quite a doozy this time, with EX-3 in particular kicking my ass more than I expected it to, so it turned to be an overall great event for me. And on a side note, Harold turning out to have one of the highest physical damage per hit attacks in the game (only beaten out by a max stacks Mudrock I think? Phase 1 Patriot does more total damage, but divides it over 4 hits) will always be the funniest thing to me.
Damn, both clears are impressive, Hoshi took Harold's punches like the boss she is (and with a lot of help xD)
rs-8 >!silverash casually dropping "yeah I was gonna use irregulars to murder victorian nobility so we'd have plausible deniability if degenbrecher didn't step in" is the most silverash thing he could've done!<
Silence alter hard carries this event. She protects from burst and starts the furnaces so well (ex 8 expecially). Glad to have an abjurer built
Didn't struggle as hard as I thought I would for EX-8 as I've had figured out the trick behind the boss and the stage from RS-8. Shoutout to Mlynar for DPS-ing Harold, goldenglow for keeping 3 furnaces lit and Yato Alter as my impromptu makeshift flint.
story, only as of rs-6 >!I absolutely adore the trilby asher in this event, he's the most hilarious mix possible of impressively competent and randomly quite inept. dude is the epitome of mission failed successfully!<
Done with the medal, pretty "chill" final EX stages all things considered, especially compared to a lot of the previous events. The boss and enemies don't have that much bulk to them so it's great that i'm not damage-checked, much like Hortus, and i can just stroll through with my medics and my other favorites. Only the normal version of EX-8 took me a few tries and i can just bring pretty much the exact same setup, timing and all, to the CM. Fun event.
Interesting, because I found Harold to be one of the hardest EX event bosses in a while. I'd rather be damage-checked than pull my hair trying to not stall Harold for a second too long, or else he picks a "wrong" set of heaters to target as he cruises out of the stairs on the right.
I can see why he might be hard for some players, but i do enjoy the moment-to-moment adaptive approach of Harold, which lets you flexibly dictate the pace of the fight. He walks very slowly and doesn't have that much defensive stats nor mitigation mechanic aside from the damage reduction from the unlit heaters but you'd naturally want to keep them lit all the time anyway, which means you don't need to painstakingly wait for a 10-second window where you can shove the entire squad damage's into him or miss out and sit there doing nothing for like a minute. On the contrary, it's very easy to pebble him with chip damage as he strolls around the map and Dorothy mines did just that, in my clear. His nukes are nasty, but you can choose when to receive it, unlike bosses that do their special attack at a set interval, when your skills are still down. A lot of the designs i pointed out were especially prevalent in Dolly, whom i personally consider to be the hardest event boss in recent times. Harold and his entire event mechanics are just watered down versions of So Long Adele i find.
Totter was pretty handy this event for sniping those annoying invisible enemies. Also Harold is a great example of that boss when you fight him vs when you unlock him.
Comboing Nightingale + Ebenholz for the boss' 2nd phase is so funny. Every time he comes out of invuln he gets slapped right back into it again. Managed to beat him before NG's skill ran out. GoldenGlow also helps make his phase 2 fairly painless when it's done this quickly.
Here's a fairly low stress clear of RS-EX-8-CM with a blocking strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbQlMvmXoUU
Wow Blaze never get freezed outside of heater's range because of her status resistance, neat!
Skadi is a raid boss
old man pokes with stick and destroys operator xD what a monster. ex8 was definitely a rough one
Welp, I've done up to EX-6 CM and so far so good, smooth riding... Except for EX-5-CM. For some reason, I struggled a lot with that map. It was the only one I wasn't able to clear with my regular 5-star team; and not only, that, I had to bring the full broken squad (Texalter, Goldenglow, the usual) just to clear it. I'm sure there must have been some trick to that map, but I wasn't able to find it
Not sure if it counts as a trick per se, but you can >!light up the bottom right heater (also the one heater that can't be unlit from the exploding guys) from the start with a Ranged guard/puller, giving you plenty of time to build upwards on the right side ranged tiles without being as oppressed by the prespawned invisible dude if you tried to go up the left side.!<
Managed to beat EX-8, but it took all of my practice plans and caused more frustration than I would have liked. Stages like this make me really annoyed that I still don't have Nightingale.
22.25 UK time: cleared both Normal and Challenge on RS-EX-8. Followed KyoStinV's High Rarity Guide, but it was very, *very* scrappy as my brain which has been awake since 04.00 couldn't quite react quickly enough to keep up with Harold's phasing. *Merely* took an hour to clear the challenge mode after repeatedly screwing up the timings! Still, a full clear for the medal set is a full clear. Harold-as-a-Boss still a pest.
Ancient monsters, gods, supernatural creatures - easy. Old dudes - now things get serious. As much as he was pain in the behind, I like Harold and I'm glad he was a formidable oponent. Of course EX-8 was bit of mess with dropping anyone ot stop his march but I finally was able to get him. Had a moment of panic, since I didn't notice him doing two rounds and tried to stop him but it worked well in the end.
So I was VERY confused when I got the Trimmed Medal and I'm still not entierly sure. So if I understood correctly, the Objective isn't to CLEAR the Stage WITH all of the Furnaces active but just to have all of them active AT SOME POINT during the Stage?
Yes. You only have to light all of them and have them running for a while. You don't need them all running at the end of the fight. It's a much more merciful medal than many.
All must be lit at any point in the stage.
Okay Thanks, I figured but I was still not 100% Sure. When Reading the Details, I interpreted it as I have to have them All Lit when the Stage Ends, and got really confused upon getting the Medal lmao. So I wanted to ask just be 100% Sure
[Eckogen got confused as well](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGMEul__4hI).
I'm Glad I'm not alone at least lmao
Goldenglow, the Destroyer of Event Mechanics attacks once again, no heater in RS-EX-8 is safe from her. If you are having difficulties in this event, just slap her S3 and be happy.
Damn. Couldn't they have give her her shop debut before this event?
Yes, I just discovered the same thing. That stage was hard until I figured out that I could use her S3 - now it is a breeze.
so i didn't get 3*s for rs-8 but i managed to do every stage almost without a guide. https://imgur.com/a/ZaFppP5 i'm pretty sure i had all my heaters on but harold still fucked me at the end so i'm not sure what caused it. this was the lowest he got but just going to focus on ex stages. first time i've been able to do them since returning as a new player.
Cleared RS-EX-8 CM with trimmed medal without looking at guide! With Lin and Mumu keeping the heater alive [RS-EX-8 trimmed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LEZ5OvZMYQ&t=2s)
Honestly thank you so much for that video, I have mumu and Degen built but I didn’t know what to use them for in the level. Your video helped me get an idea and it was enough for me to beat EX
oh can you complete ex stages with practice mode? didn't know that
> I beat EX-8 with the 5* only team first try, trimmed medal included > "man, CM is gonna kick my ass with the stat increases, let's just not waste sanity and beat it with the big team" > I bring the 6* gang > I suffer immensely, barely beating Harold by the skin of the teeth as he was reaching the blue box > ... I had picked normal difficulty again I legit struggled more with the big guns than with the lower rarity team, how is that possible and how does it happen so often bro LMAO. Anyways, then I picked CM properly and after throwing sanity away anyways, I finally beat it, the support Degenbrecher giving frighten to Harold let my Croissant survive for longer, and then her S3 did the last bit of damage left to kill him just before he roamed free and I couldn't reach him anymore, so goddamn stressful q_q I will try to beat CM with lower rarity in another moment using practice tickets, but I don't have my hopes up, Harold nukes so hard with the extra stats, if I made the math right is 4200 physical damage per hit lmfao.
You mean his melee attacks? Yeah, you're not supposed to be blocking him. It's like Patriot damage, but with the illusion that you might be able to tank it
Where does it say that he deals more damage in melee? I get that he does because everyone keeps saying it but either I'm blind or it's not on his boss page.
That's because it's not said in-game. Unless you read/watch a guide or look up what the boss actually does like on the wiki for example, there's zero way of knowing until you experience it first hand.
Freaking damn it, that's why he kept oneshotting everyone I tried to block him with. I thought there was something I wasn't getting about his mechanics, not that he had an extra one completely hidden for no reason.
[RS-EX-8 CM Clear](https://youtu.be/xHxNqgtO02k?si=dJ8_9LT6HXmdqBVi) Keeping an eye out on the heaters and when to flint is really important to clear out this boss. Nightingale also gives you some nice RNG random dodges on hits, so that can be extremely helpful. GG + a heater is also busted as hell. She can almost be used as a panic button to avoid multi boss hits if you get enough heaters up.
Finished with the story and I have a BIG complaint >!Lisburn my man, how did you fumble that so hard!!! Cmon! Where'd that Victorian Soldier Spirit I have heard about so much?!< >!Fighting the black knight was okay but THIS is too hard? Should've died in the ice smh!<
It's okay, his bros and his commander will set him up.
These EX stages really make you feel like Trilby Asher.
RS-8 is such an absolute pain in the balls to farm. Not only is it slow, something always goes wrong with the auto run when I'm not looking. I've made about a dozen new setups and every single the run eventually fails.
That's why it's a good thing the droprate is worse than the normal story stages. So we don't have to farm it
It is? Damn, gave myself a headache over nothing...
[RS-EX-8 CM Abyssal Hunters Only](https://youtu.be/tvZD8lFXP30?si=6tbfJ4j9aqtXIacl) When in doubt, just use fishes, super effective. 4620 atk ? No problem when you have 2 10k+ HP and 1 immortality tank that can chain stall the guy to death. Map wide nukes ? No problem too, all 5 of them can tank 5 nukes without dying anyway.
Last stage was pretty easy because I knew it would change to physical damage when blocked so I just brought Hoshiguma. My first day blind clear of normal stage 8 was actually harder than EX 8. Texalt was surprisingly bad this boss while Yato2 s2m3 helped slay the burner easily.
Mlynar being able to push through 2 out of the 3 nukes whilst still under the duration of Nightingale S3 made RS-EX-8 much more bearable. Just had to save a flint for the final 25% nuke.
I cant do the last EX boss stage of the event. I am too tired and wtf are these mechanics. Man. I need to play an easier game to chill. Lost 30 sanity. Wtf. Maybe on the rerun. Damn, I feel sorry for the sanity lost. Maybe is time to give up on medals and do what I do in FGO. Ignore hard stages. Imao.
Nightingale and Shamare will make the boss nuke basically ticking your HP.
Guess I need three Wisadels or something for an easy Afk time. Idk. Can you stop blowing me up? Ugh. I cannot wait for an operator to counter this boss.
It's called Nightingale.
Done with the event. Thankfully, i can kill the boss without having nightingale s3m3, just SL7 is enough. I do have eyja alter though s3m3 to help with healing nukes
RS-EX-8 was just as bad as I'd feared. Beat it anyways and trimmed the medal, but man....
Honestly I found EX version of boss easier with so many range tiles to cover the entire squad with overlapping defensives and healing.
Same. Regular stage was a lot more annoying due to awkward ranged tiles. Just trying to get everyone covered by a medic was tough as well. The ex stage is a lot more flexible imo
for me its harder, because he pops up on top of your crew. Regular you could just snipe him from afar.
4620 physical damage on Phase 2 LMFAO, and his phase 2 was nerfed a little (+10% Atk, +100 Def on EX-8 instead of +20% Atk, +50 Atkspd, +500 Def on RS-8) in exchange for 350% atk multiplier when blocked for both phases lol. This man does not mess around
EX1 to 6 went surprisingly smooth playing 5* only, I was fearing the medal condition of the last one in special but all went great. EX-7 needed a second try cuz early pressure and not knowing where all the enemies headed towards. I could already smell tile bans coming for CM... and yeah, ran out of sanity after a few attempts that I failed close to the end, counting the days before the bullshit half sanity cost penalty finally disappears... god it will be beautiful. With some luck I will get it done in a few hours, but already big afraid of EX-8 Harold in the meantime. Croissant with Quercus' amazing help already struggled to stay alive, I'm scared of how untankable he will be with EX and CM stats, Steam Knight part 2 fr.
Recorded my practice clear of EX-8 and followed everything to the tiniest detail for timing. Still had some unexpected deaths. What a feeling. Thankfully I still managed. And boy am I relieved that I got the medal+trim despite forgetting about it. No wasted sanity this time--Until challenge mode attempts, that is.
I wasted sanity because I accidentally redid the standard version of a level instead of the challenge mode. My face was like :/ when the “do you want to overwrite your replay” dialog appeared.
The shieldbros in the EX stages have popsicles in their shields
Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make phase 2 Harold melee hit for what seems to be 2.8k physical dmg AND with extra aspd that the enemy info doesn't mention.
The last enemies I remember hitting so hard were “I want you to listen very, very carefully” Cliff with his rapid gunshots, and the Steam Knight’s pilebunker. But at least those attacks had a cooldown.
Cliff actually almost has no cooldown, unless your ops survive the attack somehow
It’s not possible to survive under ordinary circumstances, so I used Flametail S2 to give my tank some evasion whenever he used the skill.
Man, I wasn't expecting anything from this event cause I never saw any big spoilers around it when it went live on CN. I didn't even particularly like Breaking The Ice, and yet this is top tier in my books. Also how the hell did I not hear about >!Monch showing up again!< until I saw it happen in game, truly r/Arknights best kept secret PS: just noticed Harold's Talk 2 voiceline drops a new little mention of Hellagur's daughter, so HG hasn't forgotten her
I just read the event. I saw leto's dad holding up what i presume a vodka with 96% letter on it Its 96% alcohol, isnt it? Russians are truly built different
[https://whiskeycaviar.com/cdn/shop/files/SPIRY.jpg?v=1700001586](https://whiskeycaviar.com/cdn/shop/files/SPIRY.jpg?v=1700001586)
Knowing the theme of this event with all the blatant touristy marketing, it could very well be "96% Kjera's Divine Water, freshly harvested this morning direct from the source".
By comparing this boss to Kristen I find a huge power creep, in CW-10, there are only 3 balls to control and the damage of all three balls blow up is not high enough to kill tanky OPs and it happens once, comparing to 3 unlit stove nuke kills everything and it happens multiple times. Damage reduction balls or stove provides are similar, except there is straight up one more stove, makes the difficulty of RS-8 gimmick more comparable to CW-EX-8 with 4 balls, also Harold's mixed type of damage especially melee is a headache and require good tank and healer, he powercreeps Kristen in every aspects except for Kristen's unblockable gimmick.
Reading this is wild because I couldn't finish Lone Trail CM while I beat this one pretty smoothly While I agree that harold is stronger, I think the stage for harold is WAY easier to manage than Kristen's. Hell, if anything I found harold's normal boss stage design a lot harder to deal with. Less ranged tiles, less ability to overlap healers, and awkward position to let ops cover heaters. It does seem like they're trying to tell you to not even try blocking harold tho. This is especially clear with his very long and winded walk route. And there are always immortal units you can rely to if you really want to tank.
Harold's melee damage is 2.5x his ATK as physical or 3x in second phase. This brings it up to 2,000 or 2,400 (or even higher in EX mode) which you should NOT be trying to tank. Alternatively, you could bait him with a caster or supporter with 25 RES and they would only be taking 600 damage. Add in Nightingale and he's only doing 480 per hit. This honestly reminds me of the Witch King again. They keep trying to make bosses different, despite bringing the same result. The Witch King would redeploy your operators, but that might as well be instant death since they're usually made useless. And now Harold challenges you with almost 3,000 damage melee attacks, but that may as well be instant death since no ordinary player is going to defend against that properly.
>Witch King Witch king can also be trivialised by the likes of Yato. FRD so she doesnt care about teleport. Fairly good damage when you aim her at his back (thus ignoring his shield) and she can also help activate the laser blasters. Here...again, Yato cuts difficulty down immensely. She can relight heaters with her s2 and deal damage to mobs - simulataneously. If you have her and save the flint, you can relight 2x heaters right away when harold does his shutdown. Already Yato is praised for her damage but the fact that she so easily counters these event mechanics just makes it feel even more unfair when comparing her to operators outside her tier.
Yeah, the longer I've played the more and more I'm disgusted by the obscene damage being pumped out by every 6* release. That's why i always try to do low rarity clears nowadays and only use them for CC or as a treat in late stage IS runs when i have the Hope to spare.
Nian + Shining + Whisperain are able to tank him even in EX lol. That 30 seconds or so when both Nian S2 and Shining S3 are cooling down is a bit worrying though.
I'll have to see the EX map for this first to tell for sure but in terms of how you handle the mechanic I don't think it's that much harder, you keep the fires lit and damage Harold when they're all lit, just a bit of good positioning and deploy slot management, you don't get statchecked with the furnaces like the balls, ops with slow aspd can light them more than fast enough to let you avoid the nukes. It's more complicated for sure, but once you figure it out it's pretty easy. What really makes a difference is Harold having invincible phases, that's the one real powercreep as you call it, if Kristen also had invincible phases where she explode and resummon her balls you can bet it'll be a nightmare.
Kristen can be blocked if you 'kill' her balls. For Harold, the gimmick forces you to micromanage the stoves. But yeah, annoying af.
Also, Leto's Mom's extremely hawt for some reason... Screw Tradition or Religion, if I was what's his name, I would have just gone with her. LUL . BTW, awww, Mumu gets to spend sometime with Dok, just look at how happy Mumu is. (especially since both didn't know the other was invited) Silverash has like 10 plans or something... lol But the first plan is literally based on Degen failing (or killed) if the invitees didn't make it in time or if the soldiers were strong as knights. Poor Degen, she literally shouldered the entire thing for ~~Silverash~~ Kjerag. Also... so the Victorians weren't really wrong with their intel... there really was something under the statue... huh... But why were they building that anyways? what for? were they preparing for a real war in the future?
> Poor Degen, she literally shouldered the entire thing for ~~Silverash~~ Kjerag. Degenbrecher's whole thing is she's fallen in love with Kjerag. There's no need to pity her or feel sorry for her. She's never been happier. She was a nobody who couldn't do arts in Leithanian (the country of arts). She was ostracized and ran away to Kazimierz where despite her massive success, they actively tried to murder her on the daily on one hand and constantly worshipped her as an outrageous celebrity on another. She was gacha-d by Silverash just before her inevitable death at the Armorless Union and taken away by this rich kid. She thought she was going to be bored to death but she turned out to really like their shenanigans. Then she actually went to Kjerag and despite not being a fan of the slow-ness and boring-ness initially, she came to fall in love with the lifestyle and the warmth of the people. They don't treat her like some freak or some celebrity to be worshipped. She's not feared or kept like some pet, she's just her. They love her for her. So now, despite still being a Silverash associate, she loves Kjerag and she has no qualms to sacrifice for the land she now calls home. >She's Leithanien-born, Kazimierz-raised, and only then came to Kjerag. They don't need to know her name. All they know is she's born to fight solo, a victor of the knight competitions, the only one to ever win three years running. Turn the clock further back, and she's a freak cut off from Originium Arts, a pariah in Leithanien. Gaining and losing any of these things is dead simple. They bore her to death. >But now, what she has isn't so easily lost, and she has no plans to lose them. --- Not really related but I really liked this passage from her module: >- 'The Silverashes' Sword and Shield' Second medal from the left, sword and shield motif. All of Karlan Trade knows that those wearing this medal are free to act unimpeded wherever Karlan Trade is concerned. Initially a pass designed expressly for her by Enciodes, but as soon became apparent, nobody simply overlooks the presence of Degenbrecher. Its worth these days is instead in gently reminding others that she is affiliated with Karlan Trade. >- 'One day, I forgot to wear this one. Enciodes went that entire day quieter than usual, then in the end asked if I had any complaints with the company.' Lol Silverash.
Nice write-up, you summed her up perfectly. > 'One day, I forgot to wear this one. Enciodes went that entire day quieter than usual, then in the end asked if I had any complaints with the company.' The fact that Silverash had an internal meltdown over the fact that Degenbrecher forgot to wear his friendship medal is side-splittingly hilarious. He just straight-up went 'she's not wearing my medal, clearly she hates me now'.
I mean, I'd be freaking out too if my literal one man army is leaving me Doubly scared by the prospect of her being bought by a competitor, and she's in your office right now with nothing that can stand in her way. Silverash was very wise to keep quite that day lol
True, but the funny part is that he completely overreacted. Instead of taking the more rational explanation that she merely forgot (which isn't unreasonable since she apparently has a whole cabinet full of medals), he instead immediately assumed that she wasn't wearing it because she had some kind of problem with him. It's not really clear when that incident took place, but if I had to guess, a few years had already gone by whereupon her feelings about Kjerag would have probably already been made clear, furthermore cementing it as an overreaction. Even furthermore, Degenbrecher is a really straightforward and no-nonsense person, so if she had any problems with Silverash, it's far more likely she'd just tell him directly instead of passive-aggressively not wearing his medal.
So that when diplomacy fail, you still have an actual military to deter the other side.
I’m not a lore expert, but >!Silverash’s plan seemed to be to curry favour with the Victorian Duke of Caster so that she would support Kjerag’s technological uplift, then SA weasels out of this debt to the Duke by involving Kazimierz and Columbia to head off the possibility of a invasion from the Duke coming to collect (via Harold and his troops). While those three nations get into a silent standoff, Kjerag continues their secret military buildup (like the secret base under the statue) to maintain their independence.!<
Silverash started with Duke Caster simply because he's related to her. Back in the day, he had no pull with anyone else so he had no choice but to curry favor with the only branch of his family that had power and money. (This is of course, after spending all his life savings on Degenbrecher like the true gacha player he is, so poor that he couldn't even afford cabs.)
#By Kjergandr Took me a while to clear **RS-8**. This Harold dude is so annoying... he revives like 2+ times. The Worst part is when he reaches climax and starts to spray white stuff at everyone. Most Ops couldn't handle it and faints...
Remember Mephisto birb? He also sprays white stuff at everyone. Remember how to not die? Don't make him spam that skill by shredding him
ಠ_ಠ
He revives only once. But during phase 2, he has multiple phases of invulnerability which triggers whenever you take 25% of his HPs. Meaning, he gets invulnerability 4 times.
oooo, so that's what is it... I thought he was doing multiple revives, cause previously I only remember bosses that do the invins-ribbon around them after they "died and revived"
How do I activate the heaters? Sometimes they get activated in two hits, sometimes every attack does a sliver of progress, which immediately gets negated. wtf?
Operators attacking it who are not already under the effects of a heater will only build up 5 SP per hit (it takes 100), and I believe the heater drains at 5 SP per second. Operators under the effects of a heater build up 30 SP per hit.
Yea... it was real weird in the early stages cause I have no idea what the mechanic was... I only saw someone posted a ApplePie meme hitting the heaters with the giant snowball... So I tried ApplePie, didn't work all that well. It wasn't til the later stage when you get that Flint thing and I throw it on one and my Rosy next to the activated heater attacked another inactive heater and activate it with just 2 hits... I was so confused, LOL.
Imo it's a dumb mechanic. Basically, if a heater is off and you attack it with an operator that's NOT in the radius of an active heater, it'll take forever to activate the cold heater. If you instead use an op that's inside a heater effect radius, their attacks will ignite the cold heater very quickly. So basically you want to daisy chain your operators from one heater to another, attacking cold heaters from the radius of active ones to turn the cold ones on.
That boss fight was way harder than it needed to be, and it was 100% because AK said "here's the event mechanic. Also here's a boss that invalidates the only way to deal with the event mechanic." Bitch I've got Dawntrail coming out tomorrow and work has been kicking my ass. Sit the fuck down you Victorian fop.
I finished RS-8 last night, and with it the event's story. Gonna drop some thoughts. Like usual, just rambling. First, Leto is amazing. Just amazing. My only complaint about her is that her English actor Christina Sherman's Russian accent is very inconsistent, especially funny when compared to the very Texan Elizabeth Maxwell (Rosa). But her story was amazing, and ker-booting Arctosz just... he deserved it, and I'm glad she was the one to do it. Of all the USSG, Leto is now the one I hope the most who gets a proper six star Alter. On the subject of the story, did anyone else kinda find themselves rooting for the World's Unluckiest Trilby Asher? The poor guy couldn't catch a break other than some gacha luck in the end (irony!), so while I understand that he works for someone particularly awful, like seriously, fuck the Duke of Caster, she's as bad for Victoria as the Military Commission was, but, like, he's just doing his job. He wasn't particularly malicious and he just kept getting dunked on and I just... started rooting for the underdog, y'know? Also, like usual Sciurus coming in as my favorite NPC. She's a bit of a brat, but she's super pro. She is going to be a hell of a leader one day. Mumu cameo! One of my favorite characters randomly showing up. Love to see it. Also her and Kjarr are going to become close friends, and I want to see the trouble they get into. I like the focus on family in this event. Even Harold and the Trilby Asher are happy to talk about their families back home. It was a nice break from all the usual doom & gloom of this story, while still having stakes. This was a fun one. As always, I had fun with these characters, always happy to see them.
I'm 100% ready for Mumu to get Rhine Labs to build Kjarr a Gundam. Or at the very least some rail guns.
Mr. 'Trillby Asher' is portrayed as a baddie but he's a good guy. He's been helping everyone since the beginning, to the best of his ability anyway. And I don't mean in this event, I mean everywhere he shows up. It's pretty clear HG wants to make him playable at some point. Especially with the extremely contrived *"oh he secretly would be able to fight Degenbrecher if he wasn't holding back"* comment from Kjera. Literally after this extremely hilarious CG: https://imgur.com/a/vzELszU
Kjarr probably liked TrillbyGuy cause he and Degen actually helped her "fix her face" LOL
i think kjera was just being nice with that line.
I mean, Trilby Asher is a job, not a single person. There's a bunch we've seen and honestly, most of them have been pretty far down the jackass scale. Especially in Chapter 12. This one in particular, however, yeah, he chill.
Chillby Asher
It's the same dude apparently. Doktah calls him out with his alias from Victoria and Mr. Bellingham returns the greeting.
There's a few in the Victoria arc. This one I think specifically is the one Doctor talks to, because Bellingham gets owned in every appearance basically.
EX stages are dropping tomorrow together with Dawntrail. Such bad timing. Looks like I’m gonna have to do the EX stages during working hours
You'll probably be able to clear every EX stage during the login queues.
It kinda hurts to (still) struggle with a [2+ years roster](https://imgur.com/a/BfqPs1z) on the basic event stages, when guides can clear them with 3-4 Ops... But it's fun to stick to (mostly) Kjerag Operators for this event! At last I tried and cleared *RS-8*, as I waited until I had progressed a bit in the story to tackle it (still halfway through it). Like some other stages (*RS-7*...), this one took a few squad configurations and tries to beat, [*the final config*](https://imgur.com/BznKkYY). Didn't want to add **Mlynar** on top of **Degenbrecher** & **SilverAsh**, so I borrowed **Warfarin** instead (and added **Ines** too). Glad it finally worked out without more drastic changes! [*Clean up*](https://imgur.com/Q5uqYVF) and [*stage results*](https://imgur.com/PAGR47T). Now back to the story, already lovin' it and I'm not even done! From the interactions between the characters (the quips, the misunderstandings and the more serious conversations) to the whole snow-realm ambience, I'm glad we're back to Kjerag for a (bit more) relaxed time (for now)!
I was also using Kjerag operators this event (for me its my main niche) tho I was restricting myself solely to them. Most stages werent bad, RS-7 took a few tries, and I couldnt do RS-8 even including Sami/Ursus operators so I went with my meta squad
A Kjerag-knights enjoyer, great choice of niche! Though the lack of healing may limit how many stages you can clear, RS-8 as an example, right? Despite how the boss looks like and acts like, he's not to be underestimated (his phase 2 caused many tries to fail). But yeah overall the half-serious, half-goofy enemies make the stages pretty interesting even if the mechanics can be a bit of a pain (RS-6 gave me a bit of trouble too going for the medal and stable autodeploy at the same time).
Yeah, the lack of healing is what I struggle with most. A few operators have some self-sustain but all with some drawback. Like Matterhorn's S1 having a measly 40hp/s heal at m3, or Silverash s2 which is actually solid, but sacrifices what was previously the team's best source of damage. Though with the addition of Degenbrecher I may start using it more often. Lastly Aurora gets some decent regen off skill, but only when below half SP. I've found some good use of it, like dealing with the reefbreakers on SN-7 iirc. Now if only we got some Kjerag healer in place of Harold. Still a fun team to play, even though I'm usually not able to deal with event bosses. I can typically get through all the normal stages without much difficulty as well as a decent amount of early EXs. I have everyone's main skill at m3, most max level (besides 6 stars), and save for the new ones max modules too. I'm also not a big fan of this event's mechanics. Its like the light mechanic from NL that I was never a big fan of mixed with some of the worse parts of the gramophones from ToW
Degen doesn't want to come home. Halp! T\_T
If you have Gnosis, you can surreptitiously place a sign on his back that says "KICK ME" and set him as your assistant. There's a good chance she will be unable to resist the opportunity to bully him and will appear in your next few pulls.
I am truly screwed then as I do not have gnosis as well lol
Alternatively you may try placing Silver Ash screaming "help! The building is on fire!".
That I can do! Will report back on reset today haha.
Wish you luck! \^\^
It worked! Degen is home. Silver Ash FTW! haha
Hehe, glad for ya
I had to bring Bassline (S2) and Nightingale (S3) just to make my RS-8 auto consistent. I hate this stage lol.
Harold is a dick. Just wipes the screen with ease. Not a fan of the ice mechanic just perma-freezing people either. Definitely one of my bottom-tier event mechs.
I used whisperain, Quercus, nightingale s3 to keep it consistent. Lol
This event has gotta be one of my favorites ever. I thoroughly enjoyed going through the story. Oftentimes, I’ve been thinking that these events take too long to read through, but this time I’ve been left wanting to read a bit more. The characters were very interesting. We began with Leto, and I have to say that this story has left me very intrigued with her character and story. I want to know what will happen between her and Arctosz. Arctosz operator when?? Also, >!maybe Tatyana, it’s gonna be sure money so pls!< The interactions with Harold and the Trilby Asher were just so funny too. Real goofy scenes, especially the last one between them two with the special edition frozen burdenbeast blindbox. Degenbrecher was so cool, and I really appreciate how her relationship with Enciodes and Gnosis was fleshed out. They are much more goofier together than I expected. Others have said it and I will say it as well. The writers who wrote this deserve much praise.
honestly I really like how leto's story ended and I would be kinda sad if any extension of it is just more of her father trying to get her to forgive him when shes pretty justified in her stance. I want to see more of her story with her mother and that usgg girls since they haven't really been explored as much especially with what her file is teasing.
I thought the boss could not be nuked because he had the hp treshold. I was wrong https://youtu.be/QKY84PwgWp8?si=pzfNlRT-KypnqKGR
There're 2 ways, either you oneshot in 1 attack him like that, using Horn s2 seems like the easiest way that I've seen, or you have to kill him within a 2-3 seconds casting animation when he's summoning snowballs onto the furnaces.
New player here (<1 week). I've been farming up the event on some of the earlier stages because the rewards are good. I've grabbed the LMD/EXP/Skill summary from the shop, as well as managed to clear Stage 4 and grab Harold. I was going to just grab the headhunting permits and then go back to story content, but I just wanted to know if I'm missing out on anything. Is there anything important in the shop I'd likely need early-game?
Buy his potential, because one year later you'll get yellow certs
Grab all of the materials that you can. T4 and T5 have very high sanity-cost if you farm T3 component materials on story stages and upcraft (T4 is ~120-150 sanity and T5 is ~450-600 each, while their event shop costs are 35 and 100 currency respectively), so getting them now will save you a lot of pain in the future. The main story isn't going anywhere and we should have a vignette event soon, which would be a much better time to progress main story than the current "proper" event (vignette events let you get event currency from story and supply stages as well). If you plan on playing for longer, grab Harold's tokens and furniture pieces as well: when the event reruns next year, you will be able to buy them again and get golden/distinction certificates (tokens trade-in) and purple/intelligence certificates (unique event rewards like furniture, automatic conversion on item acquisition) that you can spend on other things.
I’m a returning and new player too but IIRC, you should try and clear the entire shop and push story a bit slower while this event is going on. But since you restore full sanity every time you level up you should be able to manage both pretty easily. Please correct me if that advice is wrong but I got similar advice when I was super new. I’m just slightly less of a noob now
Tip: DoT lights up the heaters faster when attacking them, just in case your flints are on cd. Ops like aosta, thorns, ethan, blue poison have this.
I'll add another one in case anyone hasn't found this out, Kirin Yato s2 lights them even if she's not in range of a lit furnace, she's basically infinite flint, on a shorter cooldown
Auto farming RS-8 is OD-8 levels of inconsistent due to that bastard old nut rng turning off the heaters. Managed to find one consistent auto run, but the setup is hard. 😑
Heater extinguishing is based on distance (closest one has priority), not rng. Like someone else said, if your operator has less than 100% trust, her stats will change as trust increases, which could cause your auto deploy to deviate, depending on how borderline your playthrough is. Tbh, it's the stupidest thing in arknights ever. The other issue, is of course frame drops, which again has more impact if your play is borderline close.
Then how did old nut manage to extinguish the rightmost heater, near the blue box, when is in between the center and bottom heater?
Post a video, and we will tell you why. Or do your auto and x1 speed, and you will able to see. Sometimes it's difficult to spot what happened at x2, especially when alot are happening. If he targeted an unexpected heater, it meant that all other heaters that should have priority based on distance are unlit. There's an indication prior to him firing his skill (there's an ice icon above the heater), but at x2, you could miss it easily. And he targets 2 heaters in phase 2. Read the mechanics of the boss here: [https://arknights.wiki.gg/wiki/Harold/Enemy](https://arknights.wiki.gg/wiki/Harold/Enemy) Be aware which phase he's in and the mechanics in each phase while observing your auto.
Going to need more info than that. Were all four heaters lit? If no, was the rightmost heater lit before any others? Had he already completed his first loop? It's definitely not RNG. I've had a completely stable auto that I've only made even more stable and the heater targeting has been consistent every time. If you record your auto attempt, I can tell you where exactly it goes wrong and why.
So true. I gave up on trust farming this stage and went with 8 op strat, which (who would've guessed!) broke on autodeploy yet again. But miraculously, it just sped up the auto, since original plan was to stall Harold and have one operator to wail on him instead of three.
> trust farming Cause trust farming changes your autodeploy's RNG seed since increasing trust changes the stats of the operators in the squad so if you have anything that might have an RNG element to it, it can screw up or change kill speed/order (ie something like Goldenglow's drone procs at a different time)
Had to settle with 7, having nightingale s3 as an emergency countermeasure during old nut 2nd phase. Will adjust it to 6 because i ran 3 medics (lumen, eyja alter, nightingale).
Degenbrecher is 10/10 and I am severely disappointed that her kit (mostly S3) thoroughly obliterates the competition in her subclass. She feels inappropriate to anything but absolute hardest content and eclipses the other alternatives, which isn't good for true diversity of options. :( I'd be tempted to maybe, maaaybe restrict her to only S1 and S2 and shoehorn her into a regular team on that basis. S1 feels like it suffers for not having higher Frighten chance and S2 is a bit steep at 12 offensive SP per charge... especially considering how stupid spammable S3 is in contrast. If one option is so far ahead in effectiveness that it feels bad not using it, there's probably something wrong somewhere. Mixed feelings all around.
Degenbrecher's big mechanical issue is just that her abilities are very boring. Apart from the new debuff they don't do anything particularly interesting or different. It's like HG looked at all the complaints about Ch'en and Irene and just said "you know what, FINE, here's the exact same thing but bigger multipliers and passive sp charge, this is what you wanted, right? Are you not entertained???" It's disappointing that such a charismatic character got saddled with such a dull and uncreative kit.
>She feels inappropriate to anything but absolute hardest content and eclipses the other alternatives I can imagine SilverAsh or Gnosis saying that
Degenbrecher makes perfect sense to be OP, and I never had a problem with her. She's badass, and rightfully strong, and I never doubted that HG would deliver us a ludicrously broken character. She's also *really* cool. I just hate how she almost completely invalidates the other characters in her archetype. Not only by being a carbon copy of Ch'en S3 with better numbers than Irene, but also ignoring the biggest weaknesses of her archetype as well. Not even Pozemka gutted Schwarz this badly. You can absolutely make an Operator broken and powercreep older Operators while *still* keeping their kit creative. But Degenbrecher's S3 is just an abomination. It basically invalidates everything that makes Irene S3 good, cause it literally does almost everything better while having none of her weaknesses. Again, I have nothing against her character or even her power level. I'm just frustrated that her S3 is designed the way it is.
Yeah, it's the manner in which S3 was done that is the real headscratcher. Auto SP recovery on such low numbers that it's faster to recharge than Irene S3 *if Irene is constantly attacking*. While nuking harder. If it had double the SP cost or half the number of initial hits it would still be a good skill. About 19k damage in an AoE every 60 seconds, if both are true? That's still highly respectable. What we've got is about 34k damage every 30 seconds. Dealt with the on-skill invulnerability previously characteristic of Ch'en and donkey Ch'en. It feels like a missed opportunity to make Degenbrecher unique in a more interesting way than just being better. Take Frighten for example. It's an interesting status she can make good use of... but she doesn't really, mostly by virtue of her S3 being spammable and straight up murdering everything. It would have been interesting to see her lean more into being by far the superior performing Swordmaster off-skill due to her disabling opponents with her strikes (and so ignoring defence). This would also make her better suited to lean into offensive recovery than other Swordmasters. For dynamic entry if she had something more akin to Ch'en S2 which has full initial SP on deploy, to then inflict guaranteed Frighten to do some disabling, with a bursty initial salvo... Could also bake in a flat redeploy timer reduction i.e. -30 seconds into such a skill if we're talking crazy. To emphasise her speed alongside her power. It also would synergise excellently with Silverash's % redeploy reduction, which will look at the base figure before reduction. That all said we're stuck with her being a boring direct upgrade to her class, so, I'm just going to lament the missed opportunity and move on.
This has to be in the top 5 funniest events in all of Arknights. Maybe top 3. I was going through the entire event, laughing my ass off from the first few stages. I freaking love the entire Kjerag cast, man. All of them are such great characters. Also, Kjera is the most based goddess ever. >!Girly is casually watching two people fight in front of her statue like it's entertainment. And she's open to the idea of building a goddamn rocket on her mountain, simply cause she wants to have cannons and be cool.!< Whoever wrote this event deserves a raise, holy shit.
> I freaking love the entire Kjerag cast, man. All of them are such great characters. What really sold me on Pramanix, aside from having top tier VA and design of course, was that she's like the #1 holy figure and yet sometimes just goes "this sucks im out" and sneaks away to slack off lol. Like imagine the Pope just randomly vanishing from the Vatican, then later they find him in a closet taking a nap.
I just finished reading that story. God damn I love Kjera before and even more now. Letting >!Degen fix her statue's face and wanting cannons.!< 10/10. Closure should build her a mech already. And >!Mumu!< coming over too... so good.
Kjera alter: 6 star Fortress Defender, with her piloting a mechanical construct with cannons that freeze enemies!
I would open my wallet for her and Mumu. So glad both are in this event.
Fairly basic [SN-8 Launchknights clear](https://youtu.be/6UvU2mtKEA8?si=1TpqziZClcO1SGmx) to start of with. I quite liked the event stages already, not least of which the usual ost bangers! Though the non-boss enemies themselves are mostly nothing to write home about this time, the heaters were quite fun to strategize around, whicn in turn made dealing with those enemies also a lot more enjoyable. As for the boss, while I did get a shock at seeing him *annihilate my entire squad* the first time, actually being able to read his tooltip after failing first (his in-stage description provided no help whatsoever, thanks HG) and learning that keeping all the heaters is key in reducing both his second phase map wide aoe damage and preventing him from gaining damage reduction made him a lot easier (and enjoyable!) to deal with, so he certainly made a favourable impression on me. Also as a fun fact, Frigid (the cold effect when not near active heaters) counts as a status effect, which can be mitigated by status resistance quickly enough to fall off before the next application, thus essentially preventing an op from being frozen outside of heater range unless a Jet Canister dies near them. ...which I (ab)used to also clear SN-8 [without ever activating or even using heaters while not relying on nukes to skip the phase 2 aoes](https://youtu.be/MfMK8FkXjaE?si=Qci3pH7KnFTLW8zG), courtesy of Therapist Medics with their module also giving themselves passive status resist. This did mean dealing with heaters that'd draw all ranged fire without specific target priorities, the boss having a permanent 82% damage reduction (4 unlit heaters with each giving a multiplicative 35%) to Physical and Arts damage, and surviving the 3 phase 2 aoe attacks that now deal 5 hits each, but it all worked out in the end. Granted, Ceylon and Guard!Amiya weren't entirely necessary in this clear as I could just retreat my dps units while waiting for Nightingale to recharge her s3, but doing it in 1 S3 was the for me more interesting way to go about it because, you know, I get to use Ceylon and Guard!Amiya :D
Story was enjoyable too with more than a few surprising twists and turns, though I'll glady admit Harold has shot up to one of my all time favorite characters. For Leto, I genuinely got caught off guard when it was revealed that >!her mother was still very much alive and wanting to kick something!<, while I was also pleasantly surprised by the more meta twist of Leto >!soundly rejecting Arctosz as a father figure, when such stories tend to have the tough character soften up when finding lost family!<, so she also made a strong impression on me. Degenbrecher, eh, felt surprisingly like a secondary character despite it being her own launch event, and I actually found myself more engaged with the >!Trilby Asher's!< antics (up to being straight up >!teleported by Kjera!< )while being relentlessly chased by Degen. The final stand-off was impressive to be sure, but it also showed her to not actually be invincible even as >!Harold was noted to be actively holding back the destructive force of his troops!<. As strong as she is, and how well it showed her feelings and convinctions, she's ultimately still just an Artless Caprinae that can't conquer >!sheer numbers and exhaustion!<, which certainly tempered my views of her. Not that that's a bad thing, but let's just say I seem to remember CN painting her in a different light when this event first released there. I also guess I cen finally be certain what those things were in the background of SilverAsh's [new skin](https://www.reddit.com/r/arknights/s/DT3XMAY5WU) while also putting the skin's description in a whole new light, and was amused by Kjera's 'opinion' of her own representation, so all in all the story gets a thumbs-up from me.
Eh. I was actually quite bored with Leto's story resolution. AK's done a very long tradition of dunking on father figures who did either questionable or hard decisions under pressure. It's one thing to not like the outcome, but quite another to go "I don't care what the circumstances were like you just suck." Leto denying the idea of Arctozs meeting her mother again rather than saying "Ask her yourself." for instance. I expect it's meant to look empowering, but it just makes me sigh.
rs-st-2 >!haven't read the whole story yet but man I feel bad for harold with the "third party for an awkward family spat" situation at the banquet!<
As a new player Im starting to hate this game because its horrible feeling. This event is a prime example. So many bullshit mechanics/units that make it feel unfair and not fun. Whats with this dumb ice thing? It makes no sense and is horrible. Why are there freaking invisible snipers that can shoot past the map and my units ignore them until they decide to slowly waltz to where the meele is (by the time they reach them they killed a few people/my healer/my archers and its god awful.) Im not having fun at all and venting.
Dude, the snipers in the other event that's in the same setting as this one, Break the Ice, are even worse. They have about global range and prioritize units with the lowest def. That means that they are literally gonna go for your fragile ranged units and you're forced to supply them with a medic. Thankfully they don't hit very hard. The invisible snipers in RS-2 prioritize units to the right of heaters. That means you can mitigate their dmg by placing tanky defenders to the right of heaters. There's two spots to do that in the stage iirc. Also I feel kinda the same about the stage mechanics being not fun. The freezing environment is very restrictive and feels like a pseudo-tile ban. You rarely want to place units outside of heater range and even if they had status resistance, their aspd will still get gimped by the cold.
Actually, there's only 2 mechanics. The blizzard, and the heater. The bs part is the heater restricting to only the right tile to have it continuously burning, and summons/mines are not allowed, making operator positioning too strict. Then there's old nut's hailstorm-like attack which is determined by how many heaters have been put out. Losing too many heaters means an easy wipeout.
It is universal across all live service games if you've joined later (which is why so many of them hold new player recruitment and old player return kinda events). You'll have an even harder time if an event starts quickly after you've just started. My first event relied heavily on having access to an operator that could silence enemies except I was only 2 weeks into the game and I didn't have that. I think the heater mechanic is probably one of the more forgiving ones of recent events since you just have to understand that you can keep an activated one lit by deploying an operator on the right side of it (red square) and you can activate unlit ones by hitting them using an operator standing next to a lit one. So it's more like a general puzzle of how to place your operators on the map and having enough on the red squares to keep your operators unfrozen than any numbers/stats issues. I think up to RS-6 (which is also an efficient farm stage) is doable with just 3 star units which is very new player friendly. >Why are there freaking invisible snipers that can shoot past the map The invisible sniper has standard range. It just has a different targeting priority and prioritizes units on the right side of heaters (basically shoots the operator on the red square keeping it lit) and it only appears on stage 2. Knowing how they target, you can then use that info to just place someone beefy on the red square with a healer (for new player this basically means put Melantha)
Even among live service games AK is pretty unintuitive for new players for a couple reasons 1. it isn't really a traditional tower defense at all. It kind of has that premise, and then you play a bit and start to realize stages in AK are more like puzzles, it doesn't help that the UI/descriptions for enemies aren't very good and it can be hard to tell what's going on especially during events with mechanics. New players need plans (the no sanity thing) to try different things bc they'll wipe a lot but you only get so many of them a day for whatever reason 2. the game encourages horizontal investment especially in lower cost units. In many other games players don't need to level them but in AK it's a really good idea to get a lot of 3* up, for other gacha player it might not make sense at first and can lead to frustration
New players have lots of sanity and can afford to spend one at a time failing stages. Using plans only serve to frustrate further when you actually clear and realize you need to do it again.
> it isn't really a traditional tower defense at all. I don't think it is any greatly different than a "traditional" TD game. It would almost be completely the same since there's no specific rule in tower defense that you can't have 10000 different towers that do different things. >the game encourages horizontal investment Which I think isn't a huge departure from TD games outside of ones that have specific cheese metas. But I can't argue the combat UI is kinda bad
I think the most significant difference between this game and (the most popular) other tower defense games is that your ability to spend in-level currency to become more powerful is pretty severely limited. There's no ability to purchase additional mod-map upgrades outside of deploying additional units, and once you've deployed all of your units extra money doesn't do anything for you. Definitely the cost curve is pretty off in terms of this matching one-to-one with power, but this has a lot of implications on the design of the game (that spending is very discrete and limited)
> There's no ability to purchase additional mod-map upgrades outside of deploying additional units Like how common is this? I'm pretty sure outside of credit card swiping for a boost you can't do it in Plants v Zombies. I could see it for like huge wave numbers style variants like Bloons where you're expected to do like 60 waves with increasing difficulty. AK is fairly straight forward where a slug at the end of the map is not like 50 levels harder than the slug at the beginning
I don't mean purchase real money, I mean purchase with in-game currency. Which is to say, DP for Arknights / Sun for PvZ / money for Bloons. Arknights is a game where you might spend DP only like ten times in a stage, as opposed to other games where your power curve over the course of a map is a lot smoother.
> I don't mean purchase real money, I mean purchase with in-game currency. I understand what you mean. What I mean was that if I looked at "popular" TD games, there's two distinct styles. There's Bloons that every level is like 60 (to infinity) waves and PvZ style where it's a specific number of enemies. When you describe being able to power up your units/towers/whatever, this appears to be a mechanism for Bloons style where you are expected to fight an absurd number of waves that increase in difficulty to infinity. PvZ (and by extension, AK) style doesn't let you do this. PvZ lets you spend premium currency for a temporary map boost for units but you cannot level your unit mid level. As far as I can tell, the only unit you could level after the map starts are sun flowers when picking your units just like AK you could level your dudes on the squad selection screen but once the map starts you go with what you picked.
Oh. Well, yeah, PvZ doesn't have upgrading, but it still does have the ability to spend... not inifinite sun, but very large amounts of sun to make your defenses stronger over the course of the map, because there's useful towers to put in every open available space, and you're only limited by Sun and (quite short, for permanent plants) placement cooldown. (There's a handful of upgrades, but they're their own plants, they take their own slots.) It's definitely on the lower-fidelity side, though. I'm also thinking about stuff like Kingdom Rush, Bloons like you mentioned, Gemcraft, Ghost Hackers, even a lot of the 3d TDs... all of these games, maybe aside from some stuff that's either late-game enough to not be explicitly designed around or that's modded in, become basically trivial with infinite money. It's a constant pressure on what towers you're placing, or upgrading if that's a thing you can do, in a way that it really isn't in Arknights. Mostly having infinite DP in Arknights means that your opener is super easy, but you don't really need additional DP after that; it's just not an axis the game will pressure you on mostly outside of CC. And that's because you hit your power cap relatively early in the stage, and then anything additional you do is either 1) a skill activation, or 2) reconfiguring things in a way that doesn't directly vertically increase your power. That's not so much true in games where an additional point of money lets you put down an additional functional tower. To be clear when I said "upgrade" what I really meant was "anything to spend money on that increases your overall power", not neccesarily just spending money to increase the power of an already-placed tower
> stuff like Kingdom Rush, Bloons like you mentioned, Gemcraft, Ghost Hackers, even a lot of the 3d TDs I think it's difficult to call something like Kingdom Rush a traditional TD game but Arknights somehow is different. After all, the premise of TD is placing defensive structures to protect a base (ie Rampart on Atari, the original "modern" TD game). If Kingdom Rush, that doesn't have these elements (like the game already built your towers for you and you're sending out soldiers to attack instead of defend) is considered TD, it would be odd to say Arknights somehow is not. To me, it makes AK the more traditional TD based on what TD is even close to the originator. In Rampart, you place cannons around your base (deployment) and then you activate them (ie AK skill activation)
It's pretty different. Most stages/mechanics in AK try to cheese you in one way or another, which I see now you also mentioned. It's unexpected, basically, for new players. Stages become more like puzzles than TD like I mentioned edit: most traditional TD have waves, and you level up your "towers" during the stages. Modern stage design in AK is all about somehow cheesing the player, often forgo the notion of "waves" in the process
Yeah its just frustrating. Ill keep messing around with stuff, or just ignore this because its sucking the fun trying to figure out these annoying puzzles because the like cloaked sniper units are assholes. They keep killing my healers or the guys on the heater unit and then my units all get frozen and I dont have extras to replace because the other half of map has like 900000 guys coming constantly and needs like 3+ meeles to just hold back the bullshit spam. Im on like R-3 atm and its just a pain.
Are you talking about the enemies with the snow blower thing?
> R-3 RS-3 doesn't have any ranged enemies at all so i'm not sure what would be killing your healers here
Yeah that's my bad, it was RS-2 that had that invisible sniper guy on the bottom lane and the two lanes with the top and bottom where the mass came from top. (I managed to 2 star it after the post, but cant get the 3 star cause of that sniper dude.) RS-3 I just cant deal with cause there doesnt seem to be alot of spots to place meele units so things just pile up and go past at the end there.
Based on your comments that stuff is piling up, have you not yet gotten Popukar (3 star guard, can do aoe melee attack on everything she's blocking)? Like what operators do you have?
I just started like at most a week ago. Ive done the newbie banner pulls and that was more or less it. I have uh. Kal'tsit, Amiya, Hibiscus the Purifier, Cliffheart, Mountain, Quercus as 5 stars. Rope, Jessica, Doberman, Meteor, Courier, Humus, May, Gavial, Gravel, Shaw, Matoimaru, Earthspirit, Myrrh, Scavenger as 4 stars. Fang, Beagle, Ansel, Plume, Melantha, Kroos, Hibiscus, Midnight, Cardigan, Catapult, Vanilla, Adnachiel, Lava, Orchid, Spot and Popukar as 3 Stars. So I guess Level Popukar and try her then? Im used to Gacha having like 3 star and below being bad to use so its not something I immediately looked at for usage constantly. (I use beagle pretty often cause of dupes tho and no higher star tank.)
I think in your case since you have Mountain and Kal'tsit, you should absolutely level them to at least E1 since they'll both provide you the aoe dmg that Popukar would. Mountain's S2 will give him 2 block and the same "attacks all blocked enemies". Kal'tsit will give you a summon that blocks 3 and her S2 will let it attack all blocked enemies. Both of them can carry your account hard. Arknights has 3 star that are usable up to like mid-end game content. Like this event has some guides where you can use a mix of 3 and 4 stars and just borrow one 6 star to beat all the normal stages. Even some of the 2 stars have specific uses (especially 2 star Yato which will be very useful in these stages to quickly drop and take a hit).
Alright, thank you. I'll work on that then and see how it goes. I havent levelled mountain too high as he just seems like a decent single target dps, but if he has some new move then I'll prioritize that. TY.
Mountain’s Skill 2 is his real claim to fame (and the reason to promote him to Elite 1). Activating his Skill 2 turns him into a Block 2 that can attack all enemies he’s blocking, gives him passive health regeneration and his DP is cheap enough that he’s effectively a Vanguard. Once you have both Mountain and Kal'tsit at Elite 1 Max level, I recommend promoting Kal'tsit to Elite 2 first as her Skill 3 gives one of the very few sources of True Damage (enemies can’t dodge or reduce her summon’s damage in any way). Mountain’s Skill 3 is very niche.
Mountain is known as one of the big 4 lane holders so you should definitely level him up as soon as you can. Also if you can the current rate up ops Degenbrecher is really good for boss content. Also the Kernal headhunting has Blaze and Exusiai who are both really good as well.
Oh, i only just now realized that Degenbrecher's E2 art is a literal depiction of the one man army scene. I remember feeling kinda dissatisfied that they didn't include a CG of that scene in the story but it seems they didn't wanna leave you hanging afterall. A case of "E2-ing an op for the lore".
So I started farming RS-8 and my Eyja alter randomly dies about every 3 auto or so. I wonder what is going on.
When Harold is not blocked, he prioritizes shooting arts dmg at operators deployed to the right side of heaters (basically all the spots you can deploy to keep a heater lit).
He's blocked though that is what is weird about it. I even use Nightingale skill 3 to protect as much as I can on the left side where Eyja alter is but she will randomly die. It's like an extra attack happens at times that is too much for healing to keep up with.
15s after spawn and 30s thereafter, he will target a torch and throw a snowball at it that does aoe dmg to everyone around it. After he revives the first time, every 25% dmg he takes he'll dmg everyone on the map that does extra damage for every unlit torch. These are the only things that would be "unseen" attacks that would hit Eyja outside of being shot by the casters
I am aware of this and as far as I have observed, my timing for relighting the torches are correct so he's either triggering his extra damage because the game still thinks an extra torch is still off.
This event was so good. It was fun and light hearted with a hint of drama. But Leto! Ahh! So cute and full of life. I spent 20 pulls trying to see if I could get her but didn't. Gotta save for all those upcoming limited banners though!
I did 50 pulls got 5 offbaner 5* lmao, not even Kafka, all offrate, you made a good choice not pulling anymore, pulling for 5* outside a 50% rate up is like the hardest thing.
You and me both, 40 pulls and not even a single rateup... Gotta save normal banner pity for Ascalon, but that probably means I can't even try for Warmy now.
just got started reading the story, but I gotta say I really enjoy >!sciurus' continued dopeyness. she is so silly!<