Arknights: Dagda - An In-depth Review

Dagda is the Welfare Operator tied to the 11th Main Story Chapter, Return to Mist. She is a Fighter (Guard) - which are often colloquially referred to as Brawlers, and it’s what we’ll call them for this article. This is a troubled Archetype, and it speaks volumes that Mountain found relevance by functionally being a Centurion (Guard) instead.

Dagda is a difficult Operator to recommend whole-heartedly, but she does offer a modern glow up on the classic Brawler formula.  At a glance, she follows the same pattern laid out by her compatriots Flint and Indra, except with a greater focus on brute strength at the expense of anything else. 

As a Welfare Operator, Dagda pays a small tax on her Potentials. At base, she costs 2 more DP than another Brawler of her Rarity, and she suffers from an 80s Redeploy Timer (70s is the default). Her Potentials reduce her DP cost by 3, and her Redeploy Timer by 10s.

Dagda does not miss out on her Attack Potential, which is uncommon for a Welfare. The effect of this is hard to measure, though, because the alternative for Dagda would likely be a minor Talent boost; either to the activation chance or the multiplier, and both of these outcomes would probably be an equally healthy damage boost.

Brawlers block 1 enemy, have a lower than average Attack stat, and a faster than average attack interval (0.78s). Brawlers are also incredibly cheap to deploy, costing an average of about 9 DP to deploy. In terms of a direct comparison, the closest benchmark is probably Charger (Vanguard).

At E2, Dagda has a 30% chance to hit for 150% of her Attack value. Furthermore, this value increases by 5% (max 240%) every time an enemy is defeated in the 4 tiles adjacent to a Glasgow Group Operator.

This is a significant damage bump for Dagda; without considering anything else, this Talent represents a minimum increase of 319 damage, and a maximum increase of 893 damage. 

Something to keep in mind for this Talent is that max stacks (240% atk_scale) requires 18 enemies to be defeated near a Glasgow Operator. 18 enemies is often a significant chunk of the total enemy count for a stage. This doesn’t exactly diminish the value of this Talent, but it does force Dagda through a sort of ‘warming up’ period.

This is Dagda’s Return to Mist exclusive Talent, she gains access to it at E2. It increases her maximum HP by 20%, and Dagda will recover HP equal to 20% of the damage she deals. 

As with other restricted Talents (e.g. Shalem, and Heidi), this is a powerful effect. +20% HP represents an extra 500 HP at max investment, and the life-steal effect can give Dagda more healing per second than Mountain until fighting enemies with roughly 750 Defence.

This is, painfully, not a Power-Strike adjacent skill. True to its name, Counter Technique is a Defence Recovery skill, meaning it only charges SP when Dagda gets hit. This fact will often be a huge thorn in the side of an otherwise attractive skill.

It costs 4 SP, and activates automatically, striking Dagda’s target for 210% of ATK as Physical damage, and giving her 60% Damage Resistance (DR) against the next instance of Physical damage.

Ignoring the frustration of this skill being Defence Recovery, Counter Technique’s large attack multiplier has the potential to combine with her first Talent to strike an enemy for over 3,000 damage - a happy example of atk_scale being multiplicative.

This potential for explosive damage might be a good reason for why this skill isn’t Attack Recovery, as otherwise Dagda could roll the dice roughly every 4s. Add to this how quickly she would reapply the 60% DR and this could have been a very solid skill.

At M3, this skill gives Dagda a +35% ATK buff, causes her attacks to hit twice, and increases her Talent’s activation chance to 60%. It costs 30 SP to activate (Auto Recovery), and lasts for 15s; this gives a total skill cycle of 45s, and an uptime of ~33%.

In ideal circumstances, Dagda will be able to complete 20 attacks, which means she’ll hit 40 times. With a 60% chance for her Talent to activate, Dagda - on paper - can expect to pop 24 “critical strikes”, with each crit hitting for up to 2,067 damage.

Mastery is important for this skill, with M3 giving a ~14% total damage increase over SL7.

This skill sounds pretty good on paper: it has a total damage ceiling of just over 63,000, it dumps this damage quickly, and it comes back online fast.

Of course, it’s important to remember that this is all just paper maths. This total damage number isn’t guaranteed, and Dagda is deeply reliant on her Talent to keep pace against enemies with any meaningful DEF values; at about 800 DEF, she will have lost half of her total damage. The 63,000 total damage also expects Dagda to have max Talent stacks already, with the number being closer to 45,000 if she has no stacks ready.

Is Dagda worth building? Objectively, no. Dagda will be a pleasant surprise for anyone that’s already interested in building her, she offers some impressive damage numbers on an easy-to-pilot 45s cycle.

However, the nature of her Talent makes her an inflexible Operator that wants to be deployed early and never redeploy, and her single block count is also quite restrictive for the duties she can handle. 

Dagda’s biggest crime, though, is simply how easy it is to replace 5* DPS units. Especially when they’re single-block Melee units that focus exclusively on single-target damage and have no other tricks or utility to offer.

Unlike Mountain before her, Dagda does not do enough to escape the shadows of her Archetype.