A common piece of mythos that floats around the internet claims that the act of "taking an arrow to the knee” (of Skyrim fame) is an old Scandinavian phrase referring to the act of getting married. With that in mind, it’s quite fitting that it’s only with the release of this bow-toting variant of Chenxing that she ties the knot with the Adjutant in the game’s story. However, it serves as much more than just a visual metaphor here, as she puts it to very good use giving any would-be wedding crashers a rather prickly demise.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

On cast, Chenxing fires a flurry of arrows that automatically home in on enemies. And she fires a whole lot of arrows, all right. 72 in total, to be exact. These arrows essentially deal hipfire ballistic damage in all but name, as they deal critical damage alongside which is doubled to shields and benefits from ballistic damage bonuses. It would be a whole lot of damage, except for the fact that each extra time that an arrow hits an enemy reduces the damage dealt by 5%, capped at what the game says is “up to 15%.” This doesn’t mean that the damage reduction caps at 15%, it means that the final damage of each hit can go to as low as 15%. This will not be the only instance of confusing or outright wrong skill text that we’ll encounter. Sigh. Anyways, this skill does enough damage to qualify as pulling its weight, but its main purpose is to set up the rest of your skill rotation, as we’ll see later on. Put an arrow in it for now.

Deiwos Passive

Before we get into Chenxing’s actual Deiwos, let’s talk about bows for a bit, as this is a brand new weapon type. As you may expect, you’ll have to hold down the fire button to charge up each normal shot you fire, but you’ll be rewarded for this as fully charged shots are guaranteed to critically hit. Dodging will also increase the speed at which your next shot charges up, though not quickly enough to make purposefully dodging for this bonus to be worth it.

With that being said, Chenxing’s Deiwos passive provides you with special arrows that add some extra sauce to the equation. You get these arrows for continuously casting your standard skill (one every 0.5s), and you can store up to three. These shots deal 40% more damage and come with aimbot, but reduce the U-Energy generation and object destruction by 70%, which won’t matter in most cases. These shots also automatically fire when fully charged, but you can manually release a bit earlier for a slightly faster rotation if you want. You’ll want to fire off all three of these arrows as they do pretty decent damage and, just like her standard skill, set up for her ultimate.

Alignment Index doesn’t do anything interesting here, instead directly converting to more crit damage at a somewhat underwhelming rate. It’s not really interesting, and it also doesn’t beat getting better actual crit damage rolls on your logistics stats, so it’s kinda just there to make it easier to get usable logistics pieces.

Ultimate Skill

This is the big payoff for using the rest of Chenxing’s kit. You see, as you’ve been slinging arrows, you’ve also been impaling your enemy with them. Your standard skill sticks one arrow in per cast to each enemy hit, and hitting enemies with fully charged standard shots also embeds an arrow in them. When there’s an enemy unfortunate enough to be uh… borrowing an arrow, you can then cast Chenxing’s ultimate to yank it out, understandably dealing damage in the process. Like with her standard skill, the damage dealt is skill damage cosplaying as hipfire ballistic damage, again being a guaranteed crit that hits shields for double and happily taking any applicable ballistic damage buffs on hand. The damage dealt to each enemy is based on how many arrows you pull back, which means while you’ll usually only be pulling out just a handful of arrows per enemy, you could theoretically stack up a whole lot of them (up to 50 on a single body and 200 in total) for one very nasty acupuncture session. Even at just four arrows though, you’ll be doing pretty decent damage, and the ammo refund that comes with it perfectly sets you up to do the skill rotation all over again.

Support Skill

Now that we’ve talked about Chenxing’s active operative capabilities, I am contractually obligated to talk about her support skill. When she uses it, Chenxing shoots up an arrow that then fires down lightning strikes onto random spots on the ground. These areas hit then form an AoE that deal damage to enemies inside, as well as applying Paralyze. You could theoretically use this to turn Chenxing into a somewhat credible Amarna or Twilight support, but like… why? It looks cool and can be funny to use in co-op, but that’s about it.

Assessment

Chenxing - Jade Arc might use a brand new weapon, but her playstyle will be familiar to anyone used to playing other modern DPS characters. Open up with your standard skill to embed an arrow and charge up your Deiwos shots, then fire those off for three more arrows. Finish it off with an ult cast to do a four-arrow pullback, and do it all again. You also have the option of making modifications to this basic damage rotation on the fly, opting to embed more or fewer arrows depending on how much damage you need your ult to do. Most of her damage is backloaded into her ultimate, but the steps along the way do enough damage to give her pretty good sustained damage as well.

As it turns out, the factoid about taking an arrow to the knee being an allegory for marriage is nothing more than just an internet urban legend. Taking a closer look at Chenxing’s damage profile reveals similar differences from how things may initially seem, as she isn’t really a skill damage operative despite most of her damage coming from pressing her ability buttons. Instead, the damage that comes from her skills is effectively treated as hipfire ballistic damage, while also still actually being skill damage. Confused yet? I wouldn’t blame you.

Chenxing ends up being a hybrid DPS not by doing multiple types of damage like Lyfe - Infinite Sight, for example, but by having her DPS output be simultaneously both skill and ballistic damage. Does it come off as the kind of cheap trick a twelve-year-old would use to justify their made-up superhero being able to beat their friend’s (“Oh yeah? Well my superhero does BOTH kinds of damage at the same time!”) in a fight? …Uncomfortably so. But it does give Chenxing the same high levels of team-building flexibility that you’d expect from hybrid DPS characters like the previously-mentioned Lyfe - Infinite Sight. And no matter what kind of damage she’s doing, it’s more than enough to silence anyone who would speak up now instead of forever holding their peace.

Just like Lyfe - Infinite Sight, which was also the version of Lyfe that got married to the Adjutant? Wait a minute...

Weapons

Well, there’s not a lot to discuss here. Being a brand new and unique weapon type, you realistically only have the option of either ponying up the pulls for the premium Skybreaker or getting the free Hidden Hero in the event shop. Surprising nobody, the gacha weapon is better by offering up a grab bag of various buffs, a tactic that will extend to her manifestation effects as well. It’s a lot of text, but you just have to know that doing the basic damage rotation that I covered earlier will easily get you all of the buffs the weapon has to offer. This includes an Electrical damage bonus, attack, damage buffs to her ultimate, and damage taken buffs (very different from normal damage buffs) that Seasun frustratingly still won’t clearly label, causing me quite a bit of grief when calculating her damage.

Interestingly, Hidden Hero has a unique crit damage buff of its own that Skybreaker doesn’t match. It’s not enough to allow it to pull ahead of course, but it does keep the competition relatively close, putting the T1 gacha weapon advantage at the lower end among second-generation DPS operatives. As you’d expect though, the sheer amount of extra numbers that Skybreaker has puts in quite a bit of work to move the T2 difference to somewhere more mid-pack.

Oh yeah, remember that even if you decide to pull for Skybreaker, be sure to at least buy a souvenir copy of Hidden Hero from the event shop for the weapon part that it provides.

Manifests

If you thought Chenxing’s signature weapon gave her a large variety of buffs, you haven’t seen anything. Her manifests throw in everything but the kitchen sink in an effort to get you to roll for “one more dupe bro.”

As seems to be the trend with DPS releases now, all of her manifests do nothing but make number go up, providing nothing in the way of quality-of-life or anything that might change her playstyle. Because of this, I’d normally just tell you to stop when you’re happy with your damage or you feel that the cost isn’t worth it anymore, but there are some interesting things to note this time around:

• M1 gives her ult a very chunky Final DMG buff when it pulls out four or more arrows, that magic number that you just happen to stack up on an enemy from doing Chenxing’s basic combo.
• M3 reduces enemy Electrical resistance for each arrow stuck in them. This bonus is maxed at three arrows and makes modelling Chenxing’s damage output extremely annoying, as if the stacking damage penalty on her standard skill and the range of skill text errors wasn’t enough of a headache. Feel free to ask ArchiveRisen how annoying all of this was, I’m sure he can relate. At any rate, this is a relative high point for Chenxing as far as boost per manifest goes, so feel free to stop here.
• M5 provides a base attack boost, but also a little extra when attacking a CC’d enemy. At the current time of writing it’s just an interesting oddity, but perhaps the upcoming Yao - Nightglow might have something to say about that. We’ll see.

Logistics

As you may expect, the designated logistics set Couplet Squad is the best one to use on Chenxing. No, Mingyi isn’t worth using, though I wish it was because it would be hilarious. As it turns out, an additional 7.5% attack isn’t worth losing 25% crit damage for. Shocker, I know.

There is one alternate option, though. Areca Squad, when fully stacked, gives you 12% attack and an 85% Electric damage boost, which is more than enough to produce much bigger damage numbers than Couplet. The catch? Chenxing can’t stack it on her own, and is instead reliant on a support capable of doing continuous skill damage to stack up her logistics. As well, she has to cast her support skill, which is an obvious time loss. Oh and uh, that support skill cast has to actually hit the enemy since the targeting is random. So in most cases, the amount of hoops you have to jump through really isn’t worth it and Couplet Squad will serve you perfectly fine. But for the Neural Sim malders out there looking to maximize their per-rotation damage in order to hit a specific burst damage threshold, this might actually be worth considering as a very niche tech option, as cursed as it seems.

Regardless of which logistics set you end up using, you’ll want to prioritize attack and crit damage as your substats of choice. Alignment Index is fine too as it directly converts to crit damage, but not at a rate high enough to be as good as an equivalent crit damage roll. If you’re using Skybreaker and Couplet Squad, crit damage just baaaarely ekes out a performance advantage over attack to be your highest priority, but the difference is small enough that you probably won’t lose too much sleep over taking a good attack roll instead.

Team Building

Being a hybrid DPS, Chenxing gets to double dip on her support options and yoink operatives from both the ballistic and skill support pools.

The immediate first pick is of course Yao - Nightglow, but she’s not out for another week so I don’t have to write this paragraph yet. Check back later.

Your next option is Fenny - Starshine, though her range of benefits don’t universally apply. The attack boost from her support skill only applies when she fires shots normally, as does the resist penetration from her signature weapon Heart Hunter. However, the ballistic damage boost from her Deiwos passive, logistics set (Reverie Squad), and as both her signature and event weapon (Pixel Era) apply to her entire damage rotation. It’s still a lot of damage buff, though note that her M1 effect has not been updated to include a special effect for bows, and I honestly doubt it ever will.

With 2/3 of her rotation being skill casts, Enya - Exuvia’s skill damage boosting capabilities can be quite useful here as well. Do keep in mind though that she won’t do anything for the normal shots that you’ll be firing without additional help from logistics sets like Amarna. As well, the uptime of Enya’s support skill damage ticks, which is important for stacking weapon buffs and applying logistics effects, can be difficult to maintain without her M3 unlocked. Beyond this, the whole cast of universal supports like Acacia - Kaguya, Mauxir - Shadow Ka, and Eatchel - The Cub will work great as usual.

Budget team building is more flexible as you’d expect, but does come with bigger caveats. Much like Enya, Chenxing - The Observer’s skill damage buffs only benefit her flashier DPS alt’s skill casts, while Fritia - Little Sunshine’s support buffs can only be applied when Chenxing fires her arrows. Acacia - Redacted’s ever-reliable Slow still works just as well as with any other operative, though, so you still have that.

Should You Pull?

At the time of writing, there’s still a pretty big Yao-shaped question mark over Chenxing’s head. It’s unknown how much the upcoming support will do for her, and if it’ll further distinguish her from other DPS options.

But even with that in mind, Chenxing - Jade Arc is a great operative that any casual player will enjoy. Her damage is good, her rotations are straightforward while also being flexible, and she has very generous team building options thanks to her hybrid damage nature. The first and last points alone are enough to make her useful for more ranking-minded players as at least a rogue pick in Neural Simulation when the weekly modifiers allow for it, and her being the first meta gen-2 Electric DPS operative gives her extra value for players that want more roster depth.

Of course, she also has competition. Her two biggest rivals Katya - Dawnwing and Lyfe - Infinite Sight still show no signs of slowing down as they continue monopolizing the Neural Sim circuit, and Bubu - The Geomancer is hot on their heels as a serious threat as well. If you don’t have more than one of these three DPS powerhouses, Chenxing is a solid choice for your hard-earned gacha funds as you will want a second DPS. But if you do, or you’re eyeing the option to grab Lyfe - Infinite Sight from the rerun selector as an alternative, you’ll unfortunately have to wait for now as Chenxing gets more real-world testing (and her partner in crime Yao - Nightglow). Expectations are high as she’s practically a shoo-in to be a top five DPS, but where exactly her arrow lands on the totem pole is unclear for now. Hopefully that arrow flies higher than lower, lest it actually hit someone in the knee.

Watch this space, there’s still more to come.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

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

Cheat Sheet