Arknights: Astgenne - An In-depth Review

Astgenne is the 5* Welfare Operator associated with the Dorothy’s Vision event. She is a Chain Caster, and as the fourth entry of this archetype, it is obvious that she benefits from many of the lessons that Hypergryph have learned from earlier iterations.

Chain Casters, at their core, are wave-clear oriented Operators. Like Splash Casters, they specialise in handling a multitude of enemies at a time. However, unlike their cousins, Chain Casters tend to be quite simple in how their kit’s express themselves, they have far fewer tricks up their sleeves, instead sporting slighter variations on the archetype’s core identity.

As a Welfare Operator, Astgenne has some surprisingly strong Potentials. Specifically, she doesn’t miss out on her +ATK Potential, something that most Welfares don’t get. This, in addition to a competitive base statline, keeps her in close lockstep with her 5* cousin Leizi.

The burning question, though, is whether Astgenne is worth raising? The answer is somewhere between ‘probably not’ and ‘maybe’. Despite being one of the more competitive Welfares in recent memory, Astgenne still belongs to an Archetype that is not often sought after. With that said, Astgenne does have a fairly interesting kit, and her arrival after an upgraded Leizi does beg the question of who is better, so let’s have a look.

Chain Casters specialise in Multi-Target Arts damage, and for this task they compete mostly with Splash Casters. The major difference between them being that Splash Casters prefer their targets to be stacked close together, while Chains Casters are a bit more ‘agnostic’ with enemy placement, given how their attacks chain between up to 4 targets at E2.

Outside of the very early game, where Lava is an insanely cost efficient slug killer (on top of being a guaranteed story reward), Chain Casters are a fairly competitive choice for handling waves of basic enemies. 

Chain Casters are ranged units that deal Arts damage and share the same range as Core Casters; their statline is fairly similar too, but their attack interval is much longer, sitting at a 2.3s attack interval. 

As the name suggests, their attacks ‘chain’ between up to 4 enemies (just 3 enemies before E2!) within a 1.7 tile radius, losing 15% of the attack’s damage for each time the attack bounces. Unless otherwise stated, these attacks cannot bounce back to a previous target.

Chain Caster attacks also carry the Sluggish effect, which reduces enemy movement speed by 80% for a short duration - in this case, the base duration is 0.5s. As a named effect, this will not stack with other sources of Sluggish, such as from a Decel Binder, or from a unit like May.

At E2, Astgenne gains +4 ASPD for every 15s she’s on the board; this effect stacks up to 5 times, for a total of +20 ASPD. This means that after 75s (roughly one skill cycle from deployment), Astgenne’s attack interval will have shifted from 2.3s to 1.9167s.

This is a healthy DPS bump on paper, and it's an ‘always on’ sort of effect, given that the only condition is to exist for a bit longer than a minute. 

This is also perhaps the reason why Astgenne gets to keep her ATK Potential, since her Module upgrades key into this Talent - it might have been seen as too much of a good thing to have upgrades for this from both her Potentials and her Module.

The base effect of this huge for Astgenne, bounces no longer deal less damage. Going from no Module to Lv1 is an extra ~1,000 Skill DPS (~700 AVG DPS) for her S2, this is nothing to sneeze at, and it speaks volumes to her nature as a beast of consistency.

As for Module Upgrades, Lv2 is another decent bump on top of speeding up the accumulation of Talent stacks (15s -> 10s). Module Lv3, however, represents a meagre boost for the costs involved.

This is a Power-Strike adjacent skill, what this means is that it has a short charge time, activates automatically, and slots neatly into the rhythm of Astgenne’s auto-attacks.

At M3, this skill costs 7 SP(auto recovery), and it can hold 3 charges. When activated, this will deal 125% of ATK to up to 2 targets simultaneously, each attack can bounce between up to 4 enemies.

This ‘dual chain’ feature is Astgenne’s hallmark. In theory she can hit up to 8 enemies! Which sounds cool, but in practice she is more likely to hit the same targets twice - or maybe fewer if one of the chains arc in a weird direction and don’t have another valid target in range.

Rather than focus on the raised ceiling this feature has for target count, it’s probably better to focus on its potential to boost Astgenne’s consistency when fighting fewer than 4 enemies. This feature is similar in function to Pudding’s bounce-back effect in that having 2 chains makes Astgenne better at fighting 2 or 3 enemies, losing less potential damage than someone like Leizi.

In terms of pacing, if we assume that Astgenne is always attacking, then she will activate this skill every fourth attack, roughly. This pace is rather slow, relative to some Power-Strikes, presumably the ability to store charges is to make up for this (as is tradition for Auto-Recovery Power-Strike skills).
With all that said, the DPS numbers on this skill always lose to S2, as is the nature of consistent skills vs burst skills.

This skill modifies Astgenne’s range to match that of a Marksman (Sniper). On top of this, at M3 she gains +40% ATK and, similar to S1, her attacks can target 2 enemies (with each attack chaining to up to 4 enemies). At M3 this skill has a duration of 25s, and costs 40 sp to activate (auto-recovery) - this totals to a cycle of 65s and gives an uptime of ~38%.

A 65s skill cycle is okay, too, it’s not quite fast enough for her to be ready to deal with every wave by herself, but it’s definitely fast enough for her to be part of a package deal. It’s certainly a much more reliable cycle than Leizi’s S2, even with her module and its upgrades.

Astgenne will struggle with Single-Target DPS - as will other Chain Casters - what she excels at is Multi-Target Arts DPS, and for this task she punches squarely within her weight class. 

On paper, Astgenne outperforms both Pudding and Leizi for average DPS at 2 targets. She starts to lose to Leizi as target count increases, but she makes up for this in terms of her more friendly skill cycle.

So, Astgenne or Leizi? To give the bottom line up front, Leizi is stronger, but Astgenne will likely feel so much better to use in actual practice. If you’ve spent much time using Leizi post-module, you’ll know that her S2 is strong, and while it cycles much better than it used to, it can still be painfully slow.

When you get into the nitty gritty of the numbers, there is some interesting back and forth between the pair. Leizi takes the cake for total skill damage, but Astgenne wins for skill DPS - most of this is probably thanks to the extra 10s duration that Leizi enjoys.

What we don’t see from these numbers is perhaps more telling, AVG DPS has been left out on purpose. This is because Viktorlab assumes peak performance, something that deeply favours Leizi. 

In ideal circumstances, what Viktorlab is assuming, Leizi’s S2 can reach a total cycle of roughly 65s (35 on/ 30 off) - but for this, she needs to hit 4 unblocked enemies 13 times in a row. It probably doesn’t need to be said, but this is incredibly unlikely. All of this rigmarole just to reach a total cycle that Astgenne enjoys by simply existing.

It’s worth mentioning here, too, that Astgenne’s damage will sometimes be more consistent, thanks to her dual-chain attacks during her skills. As mentioned earlier, in some circumstances, they will behave similarly to Pudding S2’s bounce-back chains, ‘saving’ some damage when there are fewer targets available by each chain arcing to targets the other had already struck.

Stationary Security Service (SSS) has landed for the global servers in Arknights, and it’s no secret that Chain Casters are strong there with ASPD buffs, thanks to their ability to consistently apply Sluggish to a multitude of enemies.

Astgenne with 5 stacks of Sniper equipment (+200 ASPD) and a fully stacked Talent (+28 ASPD) hits a total of 328 ASPD (every unit has a baseline of 100 ASPD). This shifts her attack interval down to roughly 0.7s, and with a Sluggish duration of 0.5s, this means Astgenne has a healthy uptime on her ability to slow down traffic.

Leizi gets closer to 100% Sluggish uptime, though, and she needs fewer Sniper stacks to get there too; thanks to her 0.8s Sluggish duration from her Module (CHA-X), she only needs 4 stacks to reach functionally full uptime. 

Leizi’s SP generation when striking unblocked enemies is also incredibly easy to proc in SSS, thanks to the size and speed of most waves, and the ASPD buffs you should be giving her.

To state it explicitly, Leizi will outperform Astgenne in SSS, because the gamemode allows her to lean into her strengths, and helps shore up her weakness (slow cycle).

Astgenne has all the makings of a solid and reliable Chain Caster, she performs exactly as you might expect one to. For anyone considering whether or not to raise her is how much you really need a unit that focuses exclusively on handling waves of trash enemies, because Astgenne - like most Chain or Splash Casters - can’t really offer anything else.

So, should you raise Astgenne? Probably not, she’s far from a meta-defining unit, but for those interested in her for other reasons, she offers a solid and reliable kit. And what about Leizi? Well, Leizi is stronger, it can’t be argued any other way; but Astgenne’s kit better represents the paradigm shift that Leizi’s module upgrades attempted to put in place. Astgenne will be a more comfortable, and easy-to-use Chain Caster than Leizi, the price is just some raw strength off the top.

Regardless, you should still buy her Potential Tokens as they will turn into certificates on a rerun of this event.