Arknights: In-depth Review - Saileach

Saileach is the future 6★ Standard Bearer Vanguard featured in the Saileach on the Hill banner, which will run alongside the release of Episode 9. Saileach belongs to what’s arguably the consistently best archetype in the entire game, featuring meta-defining Operators Myrtle and Elysium. This already gives her a massive head start in many player’s pull priorities, but is this really warranted? Is Saileach truly as powerful as the rest of her archetype?

The issue of whether Saileach is powerful or not is quite simple: she is. She has already seen usage in endgame content in the Chinese server and will probably continue to be that way.  Much more difficult to answer is the question of whether she’s worth pulling for the average player, so much so that another entire article is necessary to explain the reasoning. For this article, let’s just leave her general rating at a tentative “yes”.

It should come as no surprise that Standard Bearer Vanguards remain one of the most important pieces of the Arknights endgame meta, both for their massive DP generation that enables an incredible amount of strategies and for their powerful support abilities like Elysium’s Monitor. Saileach brings her own powerful array of both offensive and defensive support as well, but manages to be different enough to carve herself a new niche where she doesn’t step over other Standard Bearer’s roles, as we will see later.

For now, let’s just take a look at her stats.

As it was to be expected, Saileach’s stats are nothing out of the ordinary. Following the blueprint of her archetype and the increase in rarity over her counterparts, Saileach has slightly better stats compared to Elysium and Myrtle on all but her DP Cost. The only notable difference is perhaps her Attack, as she’s the only Standard Bearer to get a boost to it from her Trust bonuses.

Saileach’s entire kit revolves around the correct utilization of the effects from this Talent: starting at E1, Saileach holds an Ensign that gives all Operators within the 8 surrounding tiles a decent Attack Speed boost and all enemies a debuff to for the same amount, 5 at E1, 10 at E2 (+2 at P5).

The effects of this Talent are not as great as what Elysium’s own ASPD boosting one does for Snipers, but being more generic makes it more widely applicable and a generally noticeable boost that you won’t have to pay much mind to (not yet, at least). The best part about this talent is that her second and third skills are actually capable of moving the banner around, effectively switching its area of effect somewhere else. When carefully planned for, this gives Saileach some versatility as to where she applies her buffs, but the range of her skills often means she will end up affecting the same Operators in the end. It’s still, however, a pretty great boost to take advantage of, and we’ll see how it interacts with her skills later on,

At E2, deploying Saileach will immediately reduce the Deployment Cost of the next Operator by 2 DP. Very simple effect, but a massive point when discussing Saileach’s relevance in the meta, which we will see later.

While this isn’t necessarily always the case, this talent is often considered to be worse than Elysium’s own Deployment Cost reduction, which affects all Sniper Operators in the squad permanently (for as long as Elysium remains on the battlefield) for the same amount of 2 DP. As long as you are bringing at least one Sniper to your squad (and without counting strategies that involve redeploying them), this already puts Elysium ahead on the DP economy, which we will also discuss towards the end of this article.

There really isn’t much to be said about this skill that wouldn’t reiterate on the DP economy issues that have already been mentioned before, so let’s keep it simple: This is Saileach’s main DP generation skill, and it’s exactly the same as Elysium’s, minus the effects granted by their respective Talents. It’s a good skill, simple but effective.

When this Skill is activated, Saileach will immediately throw her Ensign to the Operator with the lowest HP percentage in a 12-tile diamond surrounding her (or to herself if there’s no other Operator nearby), buff their Defense by 50% and heal them for 50% of Saileach’s Attack every second, which is almost a 300 HPS heal. Additionally, while the Skill is active, Saileach will generate 20DP during its 15 second duration.

This Skill is essentially just a better version of Myrtle’s Healing Wings, the skill no one uses. The healing is much better and it provides Operators an extra layer of survivability through the Defense boost, though it does lose the ability to heal multiple different targets as their HP percentages change. DP wise, even though it takes longer for Saileach to start producing DP the actual results are significantly better, with Myrtle falling behind as quickly as the second skill cycle.

Similarly to Myrtle, this is generally not the skill you want to be running for Saileach. Relying on this skill for healing essentially means forgoing the benefits her other skills have (such as heavier DP generation or the strong debuffs we will see in her third skill) for a “mode switch” heal that hyperfocuses a single Operator and has an SP cost of 29 at M3. The role compression is decent, but it’s not enough to actually warrant using it over her other skills most of the time.

This time Saileach throws her Ensign down onto the nearest grounded enemy (following standard targeting and throwing it on herself if there’s no valid target) in a 2 tile long cone in front of her and to the sides, immediately dealing 300% Physical Damage on a radius surrounding the chosen enemy and stunning them for 3.5 seconds. Additionally, all enemies within a 3 by 3 radius surrounding the Ensign will have their movement speed slowed by 80% and take 30% more damage from all sources (plus the debuffs inherent to her first talent). Finally, Saileach will generate 10 DP during the 10 seconds this skill lasts

This is the skill that sets Saileach apart from all other Standard Bearer Vanguards, by bringing a curious mix of Projekt Red and Suzuran together with a cheap deploy cost and DP generation. The effects are pretty great, but they sometimes fall short of what those Operators could do separately.

For starters, the throwing range is pretty limited, which forces Saileach to take up possibly valuable space in the frontlines or find creative positions in order to use her effects to the greatest extent. The actual range and duration of the effects surrounding the Ensign also leave something to be desired. With just 10 seconds of duration, her Fragile effect isn’t enough to cover even the quickest burst skills completely, such as Exusiai, and the effect itself is weaker than Suzuran’s. Finally, it is by far the worst DP generation skill on any Standard Bearer, losing even to her own second Skill and Myrtle’s.

Still, despite all these drawbacks the role compression on this skill is awesome and allows players to save on some much needed Operator slots in high endgame content such as Contingency Contract, and all the maneuvers you need to pull to make her work are definitely worth the hassle once all the pieces fit together. This is the main reason to pull for Saileach, and the skill you should definitely give masteries to should you get her. Just don’t expect it to replace Myrtle!

So, should I pull for Saileach? Is she as broken as every other Standard Bearer in the game? Is she capable of replacing Myrtle as the true Contingency Contract queen? The answer is, surprisingly, MAYBE NOT. Saileach is definitely a very strong Operator, but whether or not she’s worth pulling heavily depends on where each player is currently situated in the game, which objectives they’ve set up for themselves in the future and, sadly most importantly, how willing they are to open their wallets up for Saileach. The article linked below will explore this issue in depth.