Arknights: In-depth Review - Heavyrain

Heavyrain is the future 5★ Protector/Normal Defender welfare unit from the A Walk In The Dust event. Her pretty unique kit specializes in granting herself and nearby allies with the Camouflage buff, shielding them from being targeted by enemies (though not from receiving splash or environmental damage!). Do these buffs carve out a unique niche in the meta for her? Let’s find out!

Heavyrain can be obtained through the A Walk In The Dust event missions and shop. You can claim Heavyrain for free after clearing WD-5, and buy her potential tokens for a total of 1400 of the event currency, with the first one costing 200 and each subsequent one 40 more than the previous. Check out the event shop HERE!

Now, about her kit, Heavyrain differentiates herself from all other Protector/Normal Defenders in two aspects: First and perhaps least importantly, despite her sub-archetype, she can still provide heals in the form of the regen status effect. This little caveat lets her surpass the usual pitfalls of the Guardian/Healing Defender archetype, which trades tankiness in favor of sustainability through healing effects for itself and others. This will become obvious when we compare her stats with other defenders.

The second aspect that makes her unique is, as mentioned in the preface, her particular ability to provide the Camouflage status effect to herself and other operators nearby. As of now, this effect is extremely uncommon for allied units without relying on environmental effects: the only units with it are April S2, Kafka's Talent, Scene's Buggies during S1 or Firewatch S1 and Manticore’s Invisibility. Whether or not this is actually enough to make her useful for a developed roster, we’ll have to find out. Let’s take a look!

As previously mentioned, Heavyrain has the stat spread of a Protector/Normal Defender, and in fact she’s pretty decent at it! Both her HP and Def are just barely below Hoshiguma, though due to her welfare status, she’s obviously slightly more expensive to deploy without the potentials, as it’s usual (1 more DP at Potential 1, 2 less at Maximum Potential). Apart from this, her other stats are unremarkably similar to those of other Protector/Normal Defenders apart from her unusually high HP due to the talent stat spread. Still, there’s a very important comparison that needs to be made in the following section: her talent.

Simple and easy but surprisingly deep when you compare it to others: Heavyrain grants all operators within the 8 surrounding tiles and herself with a 23% Physical Dodge buff at Potential 5.

The part that makes this talent so interesting to look at is how she compares to other Protector/Normal Defenders, for which dodge is usually a very important factor. In this regard, Heavyrain does both great and not-so-great things. First and foremost, her buff is only for Physical damage, whereas Hoshiguma and Croissant can deal with Arts as well, which is often considered the more dangerous type of damage. Still, in regards to numbers alone, she’s pretty competent at what she does! Compared to Hoshiguma’s 25% to self and Croissant’s 20% to self/10% in the 4 orthogonal tiles, Heavyrain’s unconditional 23% to all 9 tiles centered on herself is quite impressive. Still, nothing beats Croissant’s S1, with an astonishing 40% to self/20% in the 4 orthogonal tiles.

This skill works similarly to Saria’s first skill. If there’s an ally under 50% HP within the 8 surrounding tiles (or even herself), Heavyrain will grant them Camouflage and a 4 second long 50HP per second regen, all of this at Skill Level 7. While this heal is actually very small when compared to Guardian/Healing Defenders, paired with the Camouflage and her talent it can help others survive for just that tiny bit longer you may be needing. At this level, the skill takes 5 seconds to ready up and can hold a single charge, which becomes 4 seconds at M3 and two charges at M1.

I personally wouldn’t recommend investing too much in this skill, or even really using it at all. The Camouflage part, while nice to have, is much better taken care of with her second skill, and her healing is, again, pretty small. Plus, when M3, it only provides a 80 HP healed increase over SL7. If you don’t desperately need these two effects packaged together, chances are you’re much better off using Gummy or even Spot if you lack any of the higher rarity options.

For 17 seconds at SL7 (+1 per mastery level), this skill grants Heavyrain and all allies in the 4 orthogonal positions the Camouflage effect, stopping ranged enemies from targeting them at all. Additionally, Heavyrain herself obtains a 40% increase in both Def and Max HP (+5% per mastery level), which makes Heavyrain the operator with the fourth highest Max HP in the game, second only to Skadi with her S3, Matterhorn with his S1 or S2 and Surtr with her S3 active. She even beats Nian and Mudrock with Nian’s talent active, and this is only at SL7!

If you want to use Heavyrain, this is probably the skill you’re looking for. It has a nice bundle of support for other operators and makes her very, very tanky, which again is only made better thanks to her talent. 

Still, keep in mind this skill gives her no self sustain and is pretty slow-charging at 48 seconds at SL7, which goes down to 40 at M3, giving her a maximum uptime of only 25%. Think about this when deciding whether to raise her or go for an alternative option such as Cuora.

So, should I purchase Heavyrain? Is this Camouflage revolution a new paradigm in defensive strats? Zebra > Turtle? The answer to all these questions is MAYBE. You should definitely purchase all her tokens, as they will become yellow certificates when the event reruns, but it’s a bit difficult to recommend raising Protector/Normal Defenders with their current position in the metagame. While her Camouflage is undeniably an interesting niche and may get some good use in the distant future, there’s as of now no content where it’s especially valuable. At the end of the day, Cuora still carries the low rarity pure tank burden with grace, making raising Heavyrain as of now a little questionable. Still, who knows? You might benefit a lot from that ever-elusive buff she’s all about.