Arknights: Lunacub - An In-depth Review

Lunacub is the 5* Gacha Operator coming with Il Siracusano. She is a Deadeye (Sniper), and the fifth of her kind. She is the first Deadeye to truly lean into their Low Defence Priority Targeting; her kit is fine-tuned for handling waves of weaker enemies one after the other, while taking no return fire.

However, Lunacub’s Camouflage-centric kit invites some very stiff competition from units such as Firewatch (Deadeye) and April (Marksman); both of whom have eerily similar kits, and proven results.

For anyone already interested in raising Lunacub, you will find yourself with a unit that is easy to pilot, and one that could be a comfortable addition to a general-use squad. It is hard to recommend her though, as ultimately she is a unit that is greedy for investment, without the strength or versatility to justify such a cost.

Deadeye Snipers prioritise targeting the enemy with the lowest Defence in their range. This is often touted as more of a nuisance for Deadeyes, wasting their powerful - but slow - attacks on enemies that are usually considered low priority. Lunacub, however, fully embraces this targeting priority, with a kit purpose-built for clearing weak enemies.

Deadeyes also enjoy an expanded range, as shown below. The extra range gives them much more freedom when choosing positions.

While her skill is inactive, Lunacub gains Camouflage; at E2, while her skill is active, Lunacub reduces her Attack Interval by 15%. This Talent perfectly encapsulates what she is all about: consistent Camouflage, and faster attacks than her Deadeye cousins.

Lunacub’s Module - and its upgrades - are important pickups for her. She gets the DEA-Y variant, which generates 1 SP every time she strikes an enemy without killing them. This is a welcome boon for her fairly expensive S2; allowing her to reduce the cost by up to 18 SP, shifting its downtime closer to 32s. 

There is the caveat of her hits only generating SP if they fail to kill an enemy, which means that in practice the ideal SP generation from this effect should be less than 18 SP, as otherwise she will be scoring no kills while off-skill. 

An exact number is hard to give, but in its calculations, Viktorlab’s DPS Calculator seems to assume that Lunacub will generate about 13 SP during her 50s downtime.

The secondary effect of this Module is to increase her Talent’s effect to -25%. As Lunacub’s primary way of increasing her damage is through attacking faster, this Talent upgrade represents a roughly 20% increase in S2’s total damage output.

Through her Talent, Lunacub enjoys a near-permanent Camouflage effect, but what exactly does this mean? Generally speaking, Camouflaged units cannot be directly targeted by enemy attacks or skills, they can however be hit by splash damage from an attack that targets someone else. Invisible is largely the same, but typically cannot be hit by splash damage from any attacks.

From the above, we can see this rule in action. The Ballista directly targets Operators for its attacks; so while checking from right to left, it cannot find April, Kafka, or Firewatch, and thus lands on Cliffheart as its target. Then - after Kafka’s Camouflage expires - the Demolitionist attacks her, with the splash damage striking April (Camouflage), but not Firewatch (Invisible).

There are some interesting edge cases to this rule - such as Originium Altars from Chapter 7 affecting Invisible Operators, but not Camouflaged ones - but this is usually just that, the exception, not the rule.

This Skill is a simple self-steroid, increasing Lunacub’s Attack by 100%. It is manually activated, and costs 20 SP at M3. It lasts for 18s, which returns an uptime of about 47% - remember this can go higher, Lunacub only needs two non-fatal attacks to push slightly above a 50% uptime. 

This Skill eschews any method to keep her Camouflage, but in the scenarios where that doesn’t matter, this Skill offers a potent Attack buff on a decently quick cycle. 

Despite this - and despite the considerable gains - Mastery is not really worth considering for this skill, as its total damage numbers are mediocre, and it pushes Lunacub to compete with more generic single-target DPS units. As shown below, Lunacub S1 and Kroos the Keen Glint S1 share a similar cycle, but Kroos wins by a considerable margin. To add insult to injury, Kroos gains Camouflage during her S1, while Lunacub loses it during hers.

This Skill gives Lunacub +140 ASPD for 25s. It’s manually activated and costs 50 SP at M3, when considering the length of her total cycle (75s), this makes for a sad uptime of 33%. This is almost a mirror image of Firewatch S1’s uptime of over 70%. Though as mentioned above, Lunacub can increase this uptime through her Module effect.
Importantly, this Skill offers Lunacub a way to maintain her Camouflage. When the Skill starts, she gains 8s of Camouflage; gaining another 8s for every kill she secures, switching back to her Talent Camouflage when the Skill ends.

This will be Lunacub’s main Skill, and the main target for Mastery priority. The added ASPD - in tandem with her Module and its upgrades - affords her an extra 7 attacks than if you had invested in neither.

It’s hard to avoid saying that there is a lot of pain when analysing this Skill, when viewed in isolation, it looks and sounds pretty good. Lunacub is clearly designed as an Operator that can be placed aggressively without any consideration for support. The problem is that we have two 5* Snipers that already offer something like this, and they do it better.

Firewatch nearly doubles Lunacub’s total damage numbers when fighting her preferred targets, all while offering the stronger Invisible effect, punching much harder per hit, and enjoying a far better uptime.

April offers similar total damage numbers, but again offers a much better base cycle (26/32 on/off vs 25/50), and the ability to move around the map as needed. 

Granted, Lunacub can reduce her downtime; but so can Firewatch, and April’s better cycle comes baked-in and will always be more reliable.

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom, advanced players (or even just those that like Lunacub) will find a use for a “permanently Camouflaged” Sniper. Maybe not now, or soon, but at some point it will crop up.

Lunacub unfortunately released in the CN server with a number of bugs, and considering Yostar’s track record, we could see none, some, all, or more bugs for our own Lunacub.

The most harmless of these bugs was simply that Lunacub enjoyed an anti-air targeting priority that she wasn’t supposed to have.

The worst being that her on-kill Camouflage refresh during S2 didn’t work as intended. To keep things relatively simple, Lunacub’s S2 has two functions for generating Camouflage: “lunacu_s_2[start_cam].start_cam_duration” (Start Camo), and “lunacu_s_2[cam].cam_duration” (Kill Camo). Lunacub’s Kill Camo appears to have been non-renewable on release, meaning she would have to wait for one instance of Kill Camo to expire before being able to generate another. This ruined the intended purpose of the Skill entirely, as she would end up with chunks of downtime for her Camouflage, making her vulnerable to attack.

There was also an issue in the changeover from the Kill Camo gained during S2 and switching back to her Talent Camo as the Skill ended, causing a small window of time where opportunistic enemies could attack her.
Lastly, there was supposedly an issue where Lunacub’s projectiles would sometimes disappear, but only if she lacked Mastery, and wasn’t equipped with her Module.

Lunacub is a unit firmly for the fans. Anyone who is interested for their own reasons should find her to be a comfortable Operator in practice, but she is stuck between a rock and a very hard place. At face value, she has a kit that looks good, but she cannot compete in any category that she might try to occupy. She loses to the Snipers that focus more on single-target damage, and she loses to the Snipers that specialise in stealth.

What’s worse is that each aspect of progression for Lunacub (E2, Skill Mastery, and Module Upgrades) represent big improvements to her performance. Something that might usually be celebrated is perhaps a thorn in the side for her, as she is greedy for investment without much ability to repay the favour.