Arknights: In-depth Review - Paprika

Paprika is the future 5★ Chain Healer featured in the Bearing and Sparks banner, which will run around the release of Episode 11. Paprika is the very first Operator of this archetype, which competes with other Medic archetypes (particularly Multi-Target Medics) by delivering their heals in a unique way. Is this new archetype strong enough to compete with the powerhouse Medics among the 5★? Let’s find out!

Chain Healers are a new archetype of Medics focused on providing multi-target healing via having their heals bounce around from Operator from Operator, recovering the HP of up to four with a single attack. This archetype borrows this basic jump effect from Chain Casters, though adjusted with a few differences to account for the extreme change in class, as we will see later.

In regards to their resemblance with Multi-Target Medics, Chain Healers share their range, Attack Interval and target-per-attack limit of 3. Traditional Multi-Target Medics like Ptilopsis and Perfumer are able to provide this healing directly with their attacks, while Chain Healers rely on their bounce effects to reach further units. This constitutes a pretty big issue right from their trait effects, as the kinks of the bounces and their targeting make consistent, predictable and reliable healing a bit of a nightmare when dealing with this archetype.

Much like the aforementioned Chain Casters, the power of each of the attacks decreases with every ricochet. Each successive bounce heals 25% less than the last (yes, it stacks multiplicatively), which means that the second and third heals in the chain will recover 75 and 56.25% the HP, a significantly bigger falloff than Chain Casters themselves.

The bounce can target Operators in the surrounding 8 tiles, and prioritizes whoever has the lowest Max HP% remaining, and if there’s a tie it follows standard last-deployed targeting priorities. These bounces cannot target Operators that cannot be directly healed through normal means (such as Musha Guards), but they can target Operators at full HP with the bounces, though in this case they will not provide any healing. Additionally, they can’t bounce to the same Operator multiple times under normal circumstances.

All these quirks make the Chain Healer’s multi-target capabilities very unreliable, as the heals need a direct path from Operator to Operator to provide any healing, with multiple additional conditions (some completely outside your control) having to be met in order for the projectile to ricochet the way you want to to make use of its full healing potential. Even if you do manage to get this working, the healing effect will have decayed severely from each bounce, providing rather mediocre numbers at the end of the chain.

Paprika’s stats are higher in both HP and Defense in comparison to the more common Medic archetypes of her rarity, Single-Target and Multi-Target Medics. This does not make her tanky by any means, though, and just not as squishy as her class tends to be most often. Her Attack is also somewhere inbetween, 100 points higher than Ptilopsis but lower than Warfarin. On a first glance this could give Paprika some rather strong multi-target healing, but as mentioned in the previous section the quirks of her archetype don’t agree with that idea.

When healing allies with less than 40% HP, Paprika heals an additional 140 (+10 at P5) HP.

This Talent is rather useless and signals an upcoming constant through the entirety of Paprika’s kit: a very uninteresting focus on pure healing. On paper the additional heals of this effect may not look quite so bad, but 140 HP is a really pitiable amount, even moreso if it’s restricted behind 40% remaining HP.

This Talent barely boosts Paprika’s overall healing usefulness, does very little to help her “burst”, and nothing at all to propel her overall kit forwards.

When activated, Paprika’s Attack Speed increases by 85, reducing her Attack Interval to about 1.55 seconds per attack. This Skill has an SP cost of 30 and lasts for 30 seconds, giving it an uptime of 50%.

This Skill acts as Paprika’s “burst” option giving her better total healing than her second Skill, but it doesn’t provide any additional support effects. The cycling of this Skill is undeniably good, but pure healing is a mediocre niche to invest into, and even here she’s beat in burst when compared to Ptilopsis’s Enkephalin. 

When this Skill is activated, Paprika’s Attack increases by 70% and her heals gain one additional bounce. Additionally, the Talent activation condition changes to 80% HP. This Skill takes 30 seconds to charge, and lasts 25 seconds.

This Skill provides Paprika with an additional option to increase her Multi-target healing capabilities by increasing the bounce count of her heals, but it still does nothing to fix her issues. The Attack boost is decent and so is the cycling of the Skill as a whole, but all her heals are still burdened by the falloff from her Trait, with the last one going down to an staggeringly low 42% of her current Attack value. While the Attack boost attempts to bandaid fix this, it still results in rather average healing amounts that still pale in comparison to Ptilopsis and are still unpredictable and unreliable. Worst of all, it still gives Paprika nothing but healing.

This Skill attempts to give Paprika a competitive edge over Multi-Target Medics via her extra bounce target, but ends up doing nothing of the sort due to her archetype.

So, should I pull for Paprika? Does her gimmick make her powerful enough to compete with other Medic powerhouses? Should I expect good support abilities from her kit? The answer is DEFINITELY NOT. Paprika is entering a very crowded class with very well established Operators with a new archetype that does nothing to advance her usefulness. No support, no interesting niches, only pure, raw, and comparatively disappointing healing. Paprika is not a recommended pull nor raise for any player, even should they lack any 5★ or better healer. Just use Perfumer instead.