Katya finally gets over her aversion to guns and stops by the Yggdrasil supply room to pick up both a swimsuit and an assault rifle. The result is a whole new Katya with a moveset as flashy as you’d expect from her. She’s capable of putting out genuinely incredible performance, but all that power comes at a cost. It’s not cheap.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Katya dashes in the target direction and summons a Crystal Vane (which we’ll just call Crystals going forward). During this dash, you can recast the skill (or hold the button down) to dash again and summon two more Crystals. Crystals self-destruct to deal AoE splash damage when summoned if there are nearby enemies, but not the ones summoned by the skill recast. With neuronics, that self-destructing Crystal will respawn if the detonation kills an enemy, which is nice.

Crystals have a second function, however. While Katya is on the field with active Crystals, she builds up charges over time as well as when she shoots enemies. Once she builds up enough charges, up to six active Crystals fire off a laser at the targeted enemy with a portion of them being consumed in the process. This is your main damage source, and it hits pretty hard. Up to twelve Crystals can be active at a time, and you’ll want to make sure you have at least six to get maximum damage out of the pop.

Support Skill

Katya’s support skill is the usual filler that DPS operatives get, dealing a bit of damage and applying a status effect (Freeze, in this case). It can be occasionally useful if you’re missing a Freeze source, but it’s otherwise nothing too noteworthy as Katya would much prefer to be the star of the pool party.

Ultimate Skill

Diving right into Katya’s ult, we get a large single burst of damage before also firing off her Crystal lasers as if you’d maxed out on her standard skill charges. The damage dealt reflects this as well, with this ability somewhat resembling six Crystals in a trench coat. Think of it more as a way to cheat out a Crystal laser volley without having to actually charge one up. Each hit is still technically a separate instance of damage that occurs one after the other, so make sure you don’t accidentally push a boss past an HP trigger if you’re trying to nuke past it with the larger hit from the Crystals.

Deiwos Passive

Finishing off our swim, we get to Katya’s Deiwos which provides free attack just for having Crystals active, just in case there wasn’t enough incentive to spam them out like burgers at the poolside grill. But just like everything else that involves them though, the benefit caps out at six Crystals.

Assessment

There isn’t too much to complain about here from an objective standpoint. The damage is competent, and the versatility of the Crystals lets Katya do well in both mobbing and bossing content. Spam out your Crystals to six or more, shoot the enemy, and watch as they get nuked to oblivion once your Crystals charge up. Top up your Crystal count every now and then, and you’re all set to dominate any potential water fight.

Katya’s summer pool party does have a few clouds in the sky, however. Maintaining a sufficient amount of Crystals can get tedious in longer battles, and those with poor spatial awareness (or are prone to motion sickness) might not enjoy being shoehorned into a playstyle this mobile. Being so reliant on having Crystals up also does mean you’ll have periods of DPS downtime as you spam your E key to regenerate them as fast as possible, but the burst damage that you get from it is good enough to mostly give it a pass.

Overall, Katya makes a splash as she cannonballs into the DPS pool as a competent operative for those who want a fun and flashy operative to pilot. But for players looking for a high-performance carry to get you through content like Neural Sim, it’s a bit more complicated. I hope you have a stash of gacha pulls burning a hole in your pocket.

Manifests

The question to ask about Katya’s manifests isn’t so much whether they’re good, but rather how many you should be getting. The answer to this ends up being “as many as you can afford without bricking your account or going bankrupt”. Unlike other characters, who usually have a manifest or two dedicated to providing utility that may or may not be useful, all of Katya’s serve the single purpose of making number go up. As a result, there isn’t really that much to talk about regarding her manifests except that they’re good to have. Going from a Katya straight out of the gacha to one that's fully manifested out will almost double your damage. Among DPS characters released in “modern” Snowbreak’s history (that is, from Cherno - Enigma and onwards), this is the highest raw damage increase yet.

Logistics

Katya will very predictably want to use the logistics set she released with which is very good on her and only her, Vector Squad. There is nothing interesting to mention about it except that it makes her damage numbers go up and that Seasun robbed us by locking Melina in logistics jail.

Being a skill DPS, Katya doesn’t particularly make good use of stats like crit damage and her cooldowns are short enough that you don’t need skill haste either. She also has a pretty good Deiwos passive, so Attack and Alignment Index are really the only two stats worth digging for. Everything else is varying degrees of cope. Like I said, nothing particularly interesting to cover here. Promote Melina to a playable character please.

See the supplementary material for a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Weapons

It seems that Seasun has settled into a consistent design philosophy when it comes to DPS weapon design. That is to say, the freebie event weapon gets a bunch of damage buff effects to make it decent enough, and the premium gacha weapon provides access to the rare and coveted %Damage Taken effect to handily beat it out. I guess they learned their lesson after the Siris incident. Katya’s weapon selection is no exception, with her gacha weapon pulling a roughly 30% improvement over the freebie gun at T1, and almost 70% at T2, one of the highest of any modern DPS release. Upgrading to even T1 of her gacha weapon is a massive boost, being almost equivalent to the boost you get from her first two manifests. Please roll for this before you gamble for Katya dupes.

There really is no reason to use any weapon that isn’t either Katya’s shop gun or gacha weapon, but here’s a chart of all the extra-cope options in case you were curious:

Should You Pull?

This question has two different answers depending on how much you care about sweating in this game. And how much money you have, I guess.

If you just play casually and enjoyed her gameplay from the operative trial, then sure, go for it. She’s more than competent enough to get you through basically everything the game has to throw at you.

But if you want a character you can use to fight for top Neural Sim placements, things are going to get pricey.

I’ve mentioned earlier that Katya’s best stats are ATK and Alignment Index, but the thing that Katya scales with the best actually turns out to be money. Of all modern DPS operatives, Katya sees the biggest boost from being maxed out, and not by a close margin either. A fully whaled out Katya will do more than triple the damage of one in poverty spec, while the next biggest offender, Cherno, sits just under the 300% mark.

Actually, let’s talk about that. Cherno’ growth curve, while indeed quite steep, is largely a product of the ridiculous strength of her gacha weapon. This can be seen from Katya having a much higher damage increase from manifests when compared with shop weapons and the massive difference in M0 performance when comparing Cherno's weapon options. Rolling a weapon is arguably cheaper (or at least less of a time-gated ordeal) than grinding out five manifest levels, especially when you consider the lower pity threshold on weapon banners and the option to T2 via weapon components. Furthermore, Cherno gets almost all of her damage increase from manifests 2 and 4, making it possible to skip the last (and most expensive) manifest, or even just park her at manifest 2, and still have the majority of her damage on tap. Meanwhile, Katya’s near-linear growth curve demands that you keep investing in her until you max her out or the costs become too much for you to afford.

Despite this, Katya's performance doesn't particularly stand out when compared to the current Big 3 of Cherno - Enigma, Siris - Ksana, and Lyfe - Infinite Sight. Her damage at base just isn’t that amazing, and she only really becomes competitive with the Big 3 at around M3T2 (all of whom come online with a lot less investment). That’s a big ask unless you’ve got cash to burn or you’ve been saving up for a long time.

There’s no doubt that Katya - Dawnwing can put out some truly impressive numbers, but she does it while requiring much more investment than other comparable options. So if you’re on a budget, this pool princess might not be the one for you.

Supplementary Material

Link

Includes weapon calculations, manifest growth calculations, and a logistics optimization calculator.

Cheat Sheet