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Arknights: In-depth Review - Greyy the Lightningbearer

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Preface

Greyy the Lightningbearer is the future 5Flinger Sniper featured in the Pathfinder of Sands banner, which will run alongside the Dorothy’s Vision event. This rare archetype is finally getting a second member almost two years after the release of Rosmontis. With only a single comparison point it’s a bit difficult to deduce how Greyy the Lightningbearer may perform, but does he even come close to the DPS potential of the prior Flinger Sniper? Let’s find out!

Introduction

As a reminder of the archetype’s basics, Flinger Snipers are ranged Operators with a low-ish Attack Speed and wide ranges, the same as Deadeye Snipers, with the peculiarity of being unable to hit aerial targets by any means. Their attacks also deal splash damage to enemies in a very small area, and have a followup afterhit with halved damage.

Unlike Rosmontis, who was primarily focused on pure burst damage with some Stun utility, Greyy the Lightningbearer is almost entirely centered on providing support through his application of Slow effects, achieved through his Talent. Unlike Greyy’s regular form, however, Greyy the Lightningbearer’s application of Slow is always tied to random chance, which will have a heavy impact all through his skillset.

In general, Flinger Snipers also need to make use of large Attack multipliers to get over the doublehit nature of their attacks and Skills, which double dip into the Defense values of enemies. As a result, they tend to perform worse against high defense values without any help from those multipliers.

Review

General Stats

As expected, Greyy the Lightningbearer has significantly lower stats across the board when compared to Rosmontis, bar his lower DP cost via his rarity. Compared to other Snipers, he excels in HP and Defense in contrast with most other archetypes, but has lower Attack than all but the Marksman Snipers, and at more than double the Attack Interval of those.

Talents

Light-Stealing Chains

Each of Greyy the Lightningbearer’s attacks have a 40% chance to apply an 80% Movement Speed reduction for 2 seconds. Since the Slow infliction chance is compounded between both the regular attack and the aftershock, the actual chance of landing the effect per attack is 64%.

This Talent acts as the crux of Greyy the Lightningbearer’s support abilities, and it sadly leaves much to be desired. Being tied to chance makes the infliction rate significantly worse, and paired with the Attack Interval and effect duration (which already isn’t enough to cover the entire time between attacks), his average Slow uptime is only 61%.


Despite being an integral part of Greyy the Lightningbearer’s kit, the chance-based effect makes this Talent incredibly unreliable, even if the Slow duration itself is quite decent.

Skills

Skill 1: Swift Strike γ

Skill 1 Icon

When activated, Greyy the Lightningbearer’s Attack and Attack Speed increase by 45% and 45 respectively (reducing Attack Interval to 1.45 seconds). This Skill has an SP cost of 35, and a duration of 35 seconds.

The Attack Speed boost of this Skill boosts the overall Slow uptime of Greyy the Lightningbearer to around 88%, but doesn’t do much to help his overall poor damage as such a small multiplier doesn’t stop his damage from falling down a cliff as soon as enemy defense increases to pretty mediocre levels.

As a generic Skill this one is almost bound to underperform, but it can still have some use if you need a higher average rate of slow infliction.

Skill 2: Beacon of Dawn

Skill 2 Icon

When activated, Greyy the Lightningbearer will fire a lightning ball to the target that lasts for 12 seconds. Every 1.5 seconds, the lightning ball will deal 130% Arts damage to all enemies within a small radius of itself and inflict Slow at a 40% chance for 1.6 seconds. This Skill has an SP cost of 25 and can hold up to two charges.

The overall Slow uptime of a single lightning ball from this Skill is of about 42%, increasing to 68% if both charges are spent at once. That’s barely better than Greyy the Lightningbearer’s base attack’s uptime of 61%. Of course, he can still attack enemies while the lightning ball effect is on the field, but the compound RNG effects of both infliction sources make this Skill incredibly unreliable and lacking, even if you were to wait the 50 seconds needed to get two of these spheres on the field.

As for the damage, lacking the doublehit characteristic of the Flinger Snipers also makes the lightning balls have rather poor damage, barely beating some 4Core Casters’ normal attacks. The area of effect is also rather small, resulting in large waves of enemies needing to pile up on top of each other in order to hit multiple of them at once. For comparison, the effect radius of these spheres is slightly smaller than Splash Casters’ normal attacks.

Overall this Skill fails to give Greyy the Lightningbearer either workable damage or decent support tools, compounding the unreliability of his effects with poor damage and bad uptimes.

Conclusion (tl;dr)

So, should I pull for Greyy the Lightningbearer? Is this second Flinger Sniper anywhere close to Rosmontis’ powerlevel? Are his support effects worth the hassle? The answer is DEFINITELY NOT. Greyy the Lightningbearer has interesting-looking Skills that amount to essentially nothing once you crunch the numbers. He brings neither damage nor reliable utility, and most players will find using other archetypes with Slow infliction both easier and much more rewarding, such as Chain Casters.

Greyy the Lightningbearer's E2 Art

Best of luck when pulling, Doctor!

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