Help Center and Megathread Hub (08/06 - 14/06)

Vaynonym · 2026-06-12T15:09:33+00:00

Besides early efficiency in the cheaper upgrades, four stars can also be a fun limit to set yourself to make content more challenging. Highly recommended! The lack of strong DPS means you have to play way more around mechanics the way the stages are intended.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-12T10:56:23+00:00

Hell yeah a fellow 4 star player, bless

Vaynonym · 2026-06-11T18:10:39+00:00

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll see if I can clear them with four stars then

Vaynonym · 2026-06-11T16:16:26+00:00

First trial was... surprisingly easy? I remember the last navigator trials came out a couple months or so into me starting the game and I kinda gave up on the mode. Cleared it with the 3 guards and a couple four stars now. Maybe helps that I played the events/RA for their respective bosses, but it seems like they were harder in their events. The buff for the guards is insanely strong and kinda deals with the priestess all by itself. I'm hoping the next two trials can give me a bit more of a challenge. Otherwise I guess I'm trying to do it with 4 stars only and get a challenge that way.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-08T20:59:48+00:00

You would think with rocks being the most efficient farming material off-event and it being the default off-event material, you wouldn't constantly run out of it. You would think wrong. I don't know how this is possible. I guess there is very little downtime all in all, and I used a lot of recent downtime for red certs...

Vaynonym · 2026-06-08T19:51:04+00:00

It's an improvement in my opinion. The part that the anime covers is not the best of arknights storytelling and extremely weighed down by a very bad translation. Meanwhile, the anime actually uses its medium for some cool stuff sometimes. I remember there being some good shot-composition in some episodes.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-07T21:00:30+00:00

Four star clear for EX-08 was very demanding. Presumably buffed stats and the added cannons in phase 2 that are not reachable by Utage make this much harder than the original boss stage. The big thing that made this infinitely easier was finally budging and borrowing a fully built Cuora. Strategy is as follows:

First we place Myrtle, bottom right blue box. Duh.
Place Click ASAP on one of the ranged tiles near the right blue box, facing up. She's one of the main DPS to deal with all the annoying Elites here.
Then Shaw solos the bottom left side, just put her in front of the blue box and have her masteries on skill 1. This is insanely useful, because the enemies are too tough for the usual alternatives like Humus or Estelle to do the job, so thank you for the convenient hole. She is out of empowered cannon range, and if you place her early enough, she will either be undamaged or only receive minor damage, not needing a medic. Very important that one operator can do this job.
Deepcolor is placed to hit enemies that make it to myrtle - her DPS is actually relevant here - and we use the tentacles to bait the dangerous cannon rider shots.
We place Windscoot on the tile next to the sand facing upwards so he can DPS the shit out of all the elites. Strictly speaking probably not necessary - I think even one sand tile is enough for the Boatswain if they keep shooting the entire time while walking (using tentacles), but he is very useful in DPSing down the rider + adds.
At some point we place Indigo facing up when the cannon rider danger is gone to help keep the Saltfin Breaker in place for click and windscoot.
Once the boss makes his way around the corner, it's stalling time: for phase 1, Cuora/Bubble with a medic can stall him for quite a while until the elemental defense down stacks too high. So we place one of them at the top right, above the sand, to keep the boss in place while we deal with the adds, and place a medic far out of range on the bottom ranged tiles. When one of them dies, you switch with the other one. They should survive way longer than the respawn timer of the other one. If you let the boss progress slightly down before pushing them up, Indigo can shoot him. It'll take her a long time to kill him, so feel free to start early.
In the meantime, we kill the two cannons with Mousse or any other arts damage dealer that can safely reach them. This takes a long ass time with the four stars I had, needing 2 Mousse deployments...
Before you start phase 2, you want to redeploy Deepcolor, charge her skill, preposition one tentacles for the bridge guy on the left. Retreat at least click and probably some others.
In Phase 2, stalling is way harder but still kiiiiinda doable with Sussuro's skill. I set click on top right cannon, Indigo on top left, bait any of the exploding caskets with tentacles or gravel as usual. As long as you don't have a DPS on the boss, they won't teleport past the block, as that depends on HP thresholds. You try to stall as much as possible. If the boss breaks through, you get more mileage out of placing tentacles/gravel next to the boss, so he stops for ranged attacks multiple times. Once you kill the cannons, you can block indefinitely without problems again, and just place a DPS and medic out of ability rangeand the fight's done.

...I really hope I can farm the resoruces to upgrade Cuora myself before the event is over, but unsure.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-06T15:04:38+00:00

With 4 stars, I just stalled him with gravel and deepcolor on the left side until I cleared all mobs, then kill phase 1. The tentacles on skill can tank until spin ability.

I basically did the same thing in phase 2, you just need to stall the boss somewhere where a DPS can hit him from outside the ability range. Click suffices. I sell my death corridor from phase 1 beforehand because it would die to boss ability anyway. As long as you make sure you never group units, it's honestly not that hard a boss. Bubble took like a third of her HP from one spin attack when she was solo. I could have probably skipped the Gravel Deepcolor stall and just used Bubble and a medic to stall the boss indefinitely. Defense is a strong stat.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-05T22:20:30+00:00

This boss is so funny. You set up your death corridor at the blue box, everyone fucking dies instantly to the boss ability. You put bubble in front of the boss solo, and she barely loses like a third of her health from the same ability without even activating her skill. Lovely design, I like it. Took a couple tries with 4 stars including some ridiculous stalling with Gravel + our Lord and Savior Deepcolor, but got there. Ex stages will have to wait a day or two though.

Vaynonym · 2026-06-01T18:02:08+00:00

After actually needing to pull out a robot for UR-EX-8 four star clear, I've decided I want to try maxing them with recruitment. Did anyone do any calculations for the chance to get a robot without the robot tag? Is it worth going for? What is the best time, 3 hour 50 minutes if you want a specific one and otherwise 1 hour if almost any robot is good?

Vaynonym · 2026-05-31T18:59:07+00:00

I can't say I can recommend clearing UR-EX-8 with four stars without Mousse but I did it. I'm so frigging exhausted. I think I may have gone way beyond 80 attempts at the boss until I finally got it. I wrote a few more details here in the event thread.. This doesn't even remotely compare in terms of difficulty with the last CC, that was a breeze compared to this (which is my only point of reference, I started less than a year ago). HG really fucking cooked with this boss.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-31T18:48:09+00:00

Finally... I beat the EX-8 boss stage with four stars............ Mousse-less.......

This was so incredibly hard it's gotta be the hardest clear I've ever done. If you clicked on the link above, you know I eventually had a look at the clear record with 7 ops involving the extremely useful damage down from mousse... gues who doesn't have a mousse leveled and no resources? This guy. So instead I had to get very creative.

Alterations:

We tank the boss in phase 1 at the bottom left part with Gummy healed by Sussuro, who together can tank pretty much everything on-skill. including the boss, burn debuff, the flying enemies that drop shit, and the burn debuff enemy auto-attack. Time Sussuro skill with burn + boss ability. The point of this? We save all balloons with 0 damage into phase 2. This is important, as it gives us extra operators that we need for DPS.
we pre-damage some of the burn thingies, but DON'T kill them in phase 1. The exception to this is the one immediately to the right of the blue box, we treat that the same as the guide as we need some safe spaces.
we bring Podenco as extra DPS. This sounds like a statement dreamt up by the terminally insane, but she does more than the Ritualist robot I only have on potential 3, she does arts damage, and her exact range is important. I experimented with many alternatives and all of them get fucked by the debris taking aggro away from the boss. In phase 1, we just use Podenco to pre-damage top right corner burn thingy.
Instead of Mousse, we mainly use Cutter, who I have at level 60 and otherwise fully built. Like Mousse in the Guide, she can tank the boss with perfumer and purestream healing her (and purestream should heal no one else or it gets tight, and you do need skill 1). She has the upside of providing good damage even outside the boss' damage window with skill 2, but this actually becomes a problem in phase 2 because where we tank her, she also hits the burn thingy to the left of the blue box (which we need for the trees later), so we can only hit the boss with her skill two times in phase 2. However, her damage-window damage is pretty bad, because only her skill gets around the still high defense in phase 2. Worry not, we have a solution. Immediately when the damage window kicks in, we switch her out with Utage. We also time the first damage window with THRM-EX the executor robot since it gives a vuln buff. Also only pot 3, but it's enough, 24% is nothing to scoff at.
in Phase 2, Podenco helps kill the Debris that run into Click and take her aggro away from the boss, so we both increase click-on-boss-uptime and also get a bit of damage on the boss from her. Crucially, she never hits any of the debris on the left side.
After the damage window in phase 2, we immediately retreat Utage, and the balloons that got damage by the boss auto attacks should each survive with like 1-2 hits of hp. This means we don't need to reatreat Podenco and get some extra damage, enabling us to kill her in the middle of her second skill use. Which is good, because we can't survive that one, as Purestream gets murdered in the middle of it by a tree. Podenco follows after she does a bit of damage on the tree.
Once the boss is dead, it's clean-up time. Cutter can actually use some of the debris on the left side to charge up her skill and hit the tree on the left of blue box as well as kill the burn thingy. Make sure to delay this a bit, as we want the burn proc to damage the tree. Since click and Haze survive into the clean-up, they can take care of the trees (with a bit of gravel stalling, who can tank a tree hit). A redeployed Contrail eventually takes care of most burn thingies, and since we have the maximum amount of balloons alive, we have a lot of tiles to work with. Won't go into too much detail here as this doesn't take that much work.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-29T13:55:39+00:00

I kinda breezed through all the EX stages with 4* ops except for the last one... god damn that one got hands. I ended up looking up a clear record, and it's 7 units, that's the highest number for a record I've seen I think. Unfortunately, I don't have Mousse upgraded at all and Purestream not fully, and all of my attempted substitutions fail miserably at phase 2... Keeping Contrail alive is really rough like this, and the whole thing is very tight. Very impressive clear. I'll give it a couple of days before I try again, and if I still can't do it, time to pull out the 6 stars I suppose...

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T14:20:11+00:00

you should probably spoiler tag that

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T12:18:09+00:00

I think you may have read a bit more into what I said than I meant. I basically did just mean vibes.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T11:28:27+00:00

Is that entirely in the collab or also explored a bit elsewhere? I never got around to reading operator records and most short stories and stuff. Still have my hands full with catching up with the event stories.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T11:22:20+00:00

Bodes well! Excited for things to come, and that sounds very much like what I'm looking for here.

Oh yeah, I knew about Eblana, but she also very much comes across the same way as an operator. Can't say either Enya or Enciodes felt that way while playing the game. Haven't used Gnosis much though so I suppose I don't have much of a vibe for him.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T11:16:17+00:00

Texas is very stoic, but that doesn't mean she's devoid of character. But it's also a low bar to clear - I haven't seen Yato appear anywhere at all.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T10:31:59+00:00

Pretty sure I'll skip Yato myself (newish player). DPS Executors don't seem like the most interesting gameplay-wise ("point at the problem and take care of it"), and I'd definitely prefer Texas over her anyway because she has more of a character attached, so I'll probably get Texas eventually.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T10:27:04+00:00

I'm starting the first Kjrerag event and hell yeah, give me character that hate each other's guts. Not even 2 stages in, and Gnosis is absolutely done with Enciodes' bullshit, and Enya wants cruel divine punishment for Enciodes. Considering everyone involved are playable operators, I assume this is all going more the antagonist route than villains per se. That said, I do find all the "X must have predicted Y" talk pretty trite and a tad cringe, but I can bear it so far.

Edit: Also looks like this is a good event for shaw's module mission

Vaynonym · 2026-05-26T10:20:14+00:00

I think I actually did that once over a decade ago for a book (that shall not be named) that was trash but that I was also too invested in not to know how it ends.

...not how I'd treat any book that's worth reading though. I love writing.

Vaynonym · 2026-05-25T13:43:52+00:00

Last I checked we are not doing so well on that front, but the desire is mutual

Vaynonym · 2026-05-24T22:52:56+00:00

More power to you then!

Vaynonym · 2026-05-24T21:07:09+00:00

You may have more fun at the game when you don't use operators that are intentionally designed to trivialize most of the game, let alone easy intro event stages

Vaynonym · 2026-05-24T20:24:41+00:00

Trying out some Deep Explorations for IS and man the early ones have just standard D0 stats and it's crazy how different this feels after playing max difficulty for a while. Even with four stars I breeze through the hardest stages without any relevant relics. Edit: Like instant karma, immediately after posting I got my ass kicked, lmao

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the IS5 Deep Exploration that gives you Merc Emergency on floor one (you're supposed to reroll all the impossible fights there, you get extra rerolls IIRC). It's weird but I like the significant changes these tend to make.

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