Arknights: Mech-Accord Caster Bug?

The Mech-Accord Caster archetype is a small but great one, composed of Operators Click, Kjera, and the recently released Goldenglow. With this last addition to the group, however, players have started discovering a strange bug that might have plagued the archetype since the very beginning.

Mech-Accord Casters are unique in that their low stats are supported by the ability to summon a Drone to assist them in combat, performing attacks in tandem with the Operator and gaining different boosts and effects when doing so. These Drones can also keep attacking enemies that leave the Operators’ range until they die, and then retarget within the Caster’s range.

The bug is a strange interaction that occurs when any Drone retargets a new enemy, which forcefully removes all special effects from ALL Drones until they are reapplied, such as the Mech-Accord Casters’ archetypal trait, which buffs the damage dealt by the Drones if they are attacking the same target as the Operator.

As an EN player, you shouldn’t worry at all about this. Since Click only has one drone in her possession, she’s completely free from this bug. The future welfare operator Kjera from the Break the Ice event can get hit by this bug, but the chances of this happening are tiny (very specific conditions must be met for this to occur) and the actual effect of temporarily losing the Trait effect is almost imperceptible, so much so that it hadn’t even been reported since she was released.

The reason why this bug has been discovered right now is that it impacts Goldenglow’s combat skills much more heavily, as she can both trigger it much more easily, and loses on a lot more than the other two Mech-Accord Casters when it occurs.

Every individual attack performed by her two or three Drones adds a passive status effect to each individual drone that can stack up to 40 times, which gives them a 1.5% chance of exploding on their next attack, dealing 300% damage in an area. Whenever a Drone bursts, it immediately returns to Goldenglow and retargets in their next attack, following standard targeting priorities. The bug triggers at this time, and immediately rids ALL of her Drones of both the Trait effect and, most importantly, all stacks of the explosion chances, which greatly hinders her performance.

Due to Goldenglow’s third skill expanding her range to the entire battlefield and giving her three Drones to attack with, the chances of triggering this error skyrocket, and her effectiveness is really hindered as a result.

The nature of this strange effect makes it difficult to accurately test, and as such we still lack a lot of information on how it actually works in more specific terms (such as if it triggers when the Drones retarget the same enemy they were previously attacking, for example). Due to how recent the discovery is we also don’t have any official statements from Hypergryph, so this may actually be an obscure but intended interaction.

In the end, players without accounts on the Chinese server shouldn’t worry about this for now, and hopefully never, but if it were to be an intended effect of Mech-Accord Casters or she simply remained broken, it will be worth keeping it in mind when deciding whether or not to pull for Goldenglow.

UPDATE: Hypergryph has acknowledged her multiple bugs and assured they will be fixed in a later update.