r/arknights

So Kaltsit and Closure have been out in CN for a few hours, so by borrowing some from my friendlist with instant M3, I did a bit of playtesting with them. Here are just my first impressions and there are probably going to be more intricacy moving forward, but I think this time the strength and weaknesses of the units are very straightforward.

Kaltsit - Great archetype, but skills are way too conservative

I think it's no surprise that Kaltsit's archetype is wonderful. For the most part she is functionally invulnerable, and can be placed at any ranged tile safely. However, they went way too conservative with her skills and overcompensated imo.

S2 is the skill that I was initially intending to mastery first, but after testing it a bit, I'm glad I didn't. It's mechanically terrible for all the reasons I feared. I'm not sure how many of you have actually tried Folinic S2 before, because this skill is that, and yet somehow even worse mechanically.

1. It always targets enemies before trying to heal allies, and because she has a rather big attack range, against ranged enemies, or if there are 2 distinct clusters of enemies, she often starts to just ignore the ally under attack. But it gets worse...
2. She spends ammo just for healing if no enemy is in range. In maps where ranged enemies are trying to hit your frontline from just outside of range, Kaltsit starts to spend ammo trying to heal off all those chip damage. And yes, if Exusiai2 is in her range, she just wastes all the ammo quickly. And yes her current event stages have a bunch of environmental damage which wastes all her ammos.
3. As for the positives, this skills is viable as a raw DPS skill, but mostly when there is no other ally in range, because of the aforementioned issue. The damage is firmly in the "okay I guess" territory. The total damage and DPS is a bit on the low side, especially when Wang is able to deal 80k damage on a enemy with infinite res.
4. The slow on the skill is surprisingly good, since it last for 5s on a 2.85 attack cycle, and is AOE. The main downside is still the fact that the targeting mechanics on this skill is atrocious.

S3 is mechanically really cool, and everyone was losing their mind during the PV, but its long cycle time of 85 seconds (35s on/50s off), and slow startup (15s) really holds it back massively.

1. The strengths of the skill is pretty obvious, being able to skill twice in a row is obviously nothing to scoff at, and being able to do it with 2 units, on top of providing really good healing as a bonus is obviously her biggest strength. The problem is that you only get to do it every other skill cycle due to her long downtime, and she indirectly extends your other units' downtime top of that.
2. The long cycle time of 85s is really painful because it is often outright longer than the cycle time of those units you want to use the skill with. Your first back to back skill is instant, but after the second use, your main units have to wait for Kaltsit's skill to end if they want to loop again.
3. They even accounted for helidropping Kaltsit by giving her a long-ass 15s startup, and this in conjunction with the innate 70s redeployment timer, means that you are always locked to a 85s cycle timer.
4. Despite this, this skill is actually surpringly comfortable in daily if you are willing to click a few times. The main benefit this skill gives in daily is that it gives leniency in positioning, as Kaltsit can bring them to another location to correct for mistakes.
5. Edit: There's another downside about S3. Because it always targets the 2 latest deployed units, Kaltsit ends up lugging the same 2 units around everywhere she goes. This is a downside compared to Exu2 S3 because Exu doesn't care about deployment order. (But lugging 2 units around instead of 1 is her advantage). So this is a sidegrade rather than upgrade to Exu2 S3.
6. Edit2: There is a feature/bug where you can redeploy the 2 units picked up mid flight before she lands, into her original range. If they decide to keep this this adds a lot of value to this skill

Closure - Lowkey insane, but lower ceiling than SA2 and Ines

I thought S2 looked insane on the preview stream as they dropped Mudrock, Ifrit and Horn (~90 DP worth of units) within its skill duration. This skill is every bit as insane as it looked on preview.

1. This skill is obviously not outright giving 90 DP during its duration, but it might as well be. It has a short startup of 6s, giving 10 DP upfront and 15 more over its duration of 30s. However, the DP refund mechanics (40%) is absolutely nutty. You can easily drop 4-5 units on the field by the time her skill ends. And while you may think it's unrealistic to deploy so many units in a 3x3 range, but it's surprisingly flexible in practice. Something you can quickly do at the start of every stage is to deploy Closure, activate S2, deploy Pram2, Ulpianus and Haruka in quick succession thanks to the refund, then deploy a unit like Hoshi2 out of range when you don't need the refund.
2. There are a bunch of little tricks you can do to abuse the most out of the 40% refund. The one that I had a lot of fun with is with Bagpipe's. Drop Closure, activate S2 drop Bagpipe and retreat for a lot of frontloaded DP. The other trick is to just deploy everything in the 3x3 range, then use Kaltsit S3 to ship those units to the ideal locations later and this is very very funny.
3. The main downside here is a rather long downtime of 40s, but imo this skill frontloads so much cost that it's worth it.

S3 is a skill that I misunderstood greatly when I first looked at the PV. I thought it was a moderately high DP gen skill with mediocre damage and slow, but in reality it's quite the opposite, it's DP gen is lower than I counted, and it's damage and slow exceeded expectations.

1. Idk if it's a skill issue with my frame counting, but I was counting 1 DP/s during skill uptime on a 30/30 cycle, but in reality it only gives 0.6 DP/s, which means cycle DP/s is at a mere 0.3, which is really bad. The saving grace of the skill is its short startup of 7s, and decent DP/cast of 18.
2. The damage and slow is actually what pleasantly surprised me. I think they did a very poor demo of the skill when they showed it on the Sarkaz Bladeweavers because their HP is too low to visualise the damage, and they die too quickly for the slow to stack up. While the DPH of the skill is not too impressive, it deals a total of 90k damage, while also providing a 60% slow after locking on to units for a while. The range extension on the skill is really nice too to make sure it always has a target.

Viy I don't have a friend who has any of his skill at M3 so lmao.

Overall first impression rating /10:

Kaltsit: I'm gonna get massively downvoted for this lmao

Daily: 6 (S2 has the worst targetting and implementation of ammo mechanics in the game. It's so bad. This is salvaged by S3, which is surprisingly useful even without specifically trying to abuse it, it's also just very fun)

Hard: 8 (S3 is really strong in theory, but they also added too many guardrails which holds it back a lot. Definitely could be centerpiece of new strategies imo)

Closure: Lowkey insane

Daily: 9 (S2 really opens up stages extremely fast, and S3 provides a surprisingly lot of utility and covering fire, despite having lower DP/s)

Hard: 7 (Hard to predict which will be her preferred skill in hard content, but both provides pretty nice utility, her competition with SA2 and Ines holds her back here)