Gather round, children, let me tell you all a story.

Back in the early days of Snowbreak, damage came at a premium and ultimate abilities were something that you worked for. Jotun Tunnel was actually hard, and people were killing Neural Simulation bosses by running literal circles around them for 20 minutes. In this barren landscape where anything you couldn't burst down with Yao - Winter Solstice meant that suffering was in store, Seasun bestowed upon us a gift. Her name was Chenxing - Ethereal Cloud. Her combination of good sustained DPS and ability to rip apart multi-part bosses like Hela and the Ni-Mechs put her solidly at the top of the meta for over half of a year, at which point the first successful challenger would emerge in Katya - Blue Bolt. While Chenxing still had her uses against multi-part enemies, Katya had otherwise usurped her to lay claim to the sustained-DPS crown.

Of course nowadays, both Chenxing - Ethereal Cloud and Katya - Blue Bolt are one foot into the retirement home, long powercrept by other offerings. So why am I telling you all this? Because once again, the meta is dominated by Chenxing, this time in her bow-toting Jade Arc exosuit. And once again, we have Katya, in her brand-new Rhapsody exosuit, challenging her for a spot at the top. Will history repeat itself in this modern-day rematch? Let’s find out.

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A Brief Primer on Gatling Guns

Just like when we first met Katya, she’s brought a brand new weapon to Snowbreak, this time being a gatling gun. I vaguely remember her mentioning something about how she refuses to use guns back then, but ah, whatever. Anyways, the six-barreled freedom dispenser that Katya carries around requires a spin-up time (0.6s) before you can start going ballistic, which is made-up video game nonsense that I am morally obligated to call out as unrealistic. Once it does though, it rips at a blistering 1800RPM, triple the firing rate of the average in-game assault rifle. This firing rate is fixed, and any rate of fire buffs instead get converted 1:1 to a ballistic damage buff.

Funny enough, it also has the opposite behaviour as her original crossbow when it comes to critical hits; where crossbows couldn’t crit at all, gatling guns have all shots guaranteed to crit. This is balanced out by having very low base critical hit damage, which also makes it so that crit rate logistics substats are even more useless than they normally already are (more on that later). All in all, it’s a hard-hitting weapon archetype, and will serve well as your primary damage source.

Abilities

Standard Skill

Supplementing the hail of lead from Katya’s gatling gun is her standard skill. This puts up a Dimensional Barrier in front of her, and shots that pass through it will cause one of the two cannons on either side of the screen to fire a shot as well, up to once every 0.2s. This damage is affected by (hipfire) Ballistic DMG buffs, but can’t crit, and in practice contributes a fifth of your overall DPS at best. But still, damage is damage, and having it is better than not. Only hot takes here.

The Dimensional Barrier has a few other tricks up its sleeve, though. After shooting through it 30 times, it upgrades, up to two times. The first upgrade only makes the Dimensional Barrier larger, but upgrade it again to Phase 3 and you start to get some extra oomph. Alongside another size bump, shots that pass through the barrier and hit an enemy now give Katya a 30% Ballistic Damage buff. With neuronics, this also refunds you 30 bullets immediately upon entering Phase 3 and 7 more each time one of the barrier cannons fire, giving you extra trigger time and reducing the need to go through a lengthy reload if not eliminating it entirely. Neuronics also give Katya CC resistance and reduce the damage she takes while the barrier is up, letting you go full Rambo regardless of what the enemy has to say about it.

These goodies come at a cost though, which is 0.7 S-Energy every 0.1 seconds. This means you get just over seven seconds of barrier uptime, though this is also before her gatling gun has anything to say about it. We'll come back to that. According to the skill text, having the barrier up sets her S-Energy to 0, which I actually don’t understand, because you can clearly see your S-Energy meter not instantly depleted and instead slowly draining to feed the barrier upkeep cost. This was actually supposed to say that Katya's S-Energy regeneration is disabled (regeneration rate set to 0) while the skill is active if I had to guess, but well, you know how Seasun is with text translation sometimes. You have nothing to worry about as far as S-Energy goes though, as once the skill ends and the barrier goes away, you get S-Energy refunded back, up to a full topup of 50 S-Energy if you reach Phase 3.

If you’re shooting with Katya (and you will, more often than not), then you’ll want this skill up, because well, why would you not? Even if you need to reposition, simply recast this skill and the barrier will reappear in front of your new location.

Wait, one more thing. Katya has an extra resource bar for “Temporal Factor,” which is essentially just jet fuel, because sprinting while you have any lets her fly instead of running. But not like actually flying, just the lame kind where you hover like five centimeters off the ground.

At any rate, it’s faster than running normally (now that Seasun’s buffed it),  and while you don’t have a barrier up, it’ll also rapidly regenerate your S-Energy. This means you can hold cast Katya’s standard skill (or dodge through it) to get rid of it and then reposition, letting you recharge your S-Energy bar while you speed to your next firing location. You get a bunch of jet fuel when you enter combat, and dodging will generate more to keep you jetting around. Neat, but honestly something they should have stuck in her Deiwos passive instead of her already-quite-bloated standard skill.

Support Skill

In an act of ballistic showmanship and some questionable physics, Katya’s support skill deals Frost damage to an enemy and then suspends them in the air via the sheer volume of bullets she fires at them, continuing to deal Frost damage over time. This functionally makes it a dollar store version of Mauxir - Shadow Ka’s support skill, as you don’t get the damage amp or damage reduction, and it also doesn’t work on bosses. Good effort, though.

Ultimate Skill

Shooting at enemies one-by-one can get pretty tedious, so Katya has some extra firepower reserved for dealing with crowds. With her ult, she flies up into the air (properly this time) and whips out four cannons of two types:

• Shardstorm Cannons deal Frost damage to up to ten enemies every 0.2s
• Razorhail Cannons deal Frost damage to up to ten enemies every 0.35s, dealing a bit more damage than the Shardstorm Cannons to balance out the slightly lower fire rate.

Like her Dimensional Barrier cannons, this damage is treated as hipfire Ballistic Damage and benefits from the expected variety of Ballistic buffs. Also similarly, this damage can’t crit. As you may expect from a skill that hits this many enemies, the per-target DPS isn’t super high. But it’s still an amazing mobbing tool - and a cheap one at that, too.

With Neuronics, you can cast this ability for free once every ten minutes, but every enemy you plug full of lead reduces the U-Energy cost, making it free to re-use after four enemies killed. Furthermore, enemy kills also tack an extra two seconds to the barrage’s seven-second duration (though it does still cap at seven seconds), making it so that you can keep the close air support going as long as there are baddies to blast. Thanks to Heimdall IFF systems, you don’t even have to worry about friendly fire, which I’m sure any British teammates you match with will be very grateful for.

Deiwos Passive

Pretty straightforward stuff here: as long as Katya has a Frost weapon equipped, she increases her weapon compatibility by 8% (additively). For those that don’t know, compatibility is a stat that all weapons in the game have, and is essentially a skill damage ratio but for shooting. So then, when you consider that the base compatibility stat of all gatling guns in the game is 12.85%, you can probably imagine how much of an impact adding 8% to it makes. If you can’t, that’s almost a 50% increase in damage.

Also, she gets extra ATK based on how much Alignment Index she has. It's far from a useless effect, but it really feels like Seasun just tacks these on as an afterthought nowadays because they have to have Alignment Index do something.

Assessment

Taking Katya into combat, she really does feel a lot like her original Blue Bolt self. Stand in place, activate your standard skill, and let it rip. In an upgrade from what the crossbow could offer though, you also now have an ultimate skill capable of blasting away screen after screen of enemies if you have to deal with a pack of enemies instead. But even just shooting normally, it’s a lot of fun - there really is nothing quite like mowing down wave after wave of bad guys with a gatling gun.

Meanwhile, her meta rival Chenxing has undergone a much more comprehensive evolution, adapting to become a DPS terror for the modern age. And as we look a little deeper, we also see that Rhapsody’s resemblances to Blue Bolt run more than just skin-deep.

Weapons

In terms of damage-boosting effects, Katya’s signature weapon Cobalt Cyclone offers the expected advantages over the free Infinite Chronos - better base stats and access to the less-diluted value of %DMG Taken buffs. Where things get interesting is how they impact her DPS in other ways.

Both of the two weapons feature an S-Energy refund after every six shots fired. This means that these weapons effectively reduce the cost of Katya’s standard skill, giving you better uptime on it and reducing how often you have to spend time recasting it and getting your gatling gun spun up again. Needing six shots may seem oddly specific, but recall that gatling guns fire at 1800RPM. This means 30 shots fired every second, and 6 every 0.2s. Conveniently enough, the S-Energy cost of Katya’s Dimensional Barrier ticks every 0.1s, letting us compare both the cost per second and refund per second, subtract the two, and get the net S-Energy drain. Of course, the premium offering will provide a better S-Energy refill, with Cobalt Cyclone restoring 0.5 S-Energy every six shots to Infinite Chronos’ 0.3. The result is that assuming all of your shots hit, Infinite Chronos will give you nine seconds of skill uptime while Cobalt Cyclone provides just over eleven seconds of time on target.

And remember, even if you do spring for Katya’s shinier signature weapon, still make sure to grab at least one copy of the shop gun and upgrade it to level 50 for the weapon attachment - you can’t get it anywhere else.

Manifests

By and large, Katya’s return on Manifestation investment is pretty linear, with scaling that’s actually below-average among modern DPS operatives.

There are a few quirks to note here:

• Manifest 2’s Frost DMG buff is for the entire team, not just Katya. Is Seasun planning on giving us a Frost sub-DPS soon? Tess, perhaps?
• Katya’s Manifest 5 effect has an extra conditional ATK boost that requires a second Frost operative in the party. Assuming that the upcoming Tess - Rhapsody isn’t Frost as well (Seasun, you cannot possibly be so incompetent as to fumble this, please), you’re kinda stuck using Acacia - Kaguya if you want to access that bonus boost while still bringing an actually useful support.
• The only new buff that Katya’s manifests provide is a DEF pen buff at M3 - every other manifest adds on to buffs she already has, which, combined with a pretty underwhelming M4 skill upgrade, explains her relatively weak investment scaling.

Logistics

I mean, you should know the drill by now. Katya’s designated logistics set, Prism Squad, is your best choice and there’s no real competition. Let’s not waste each others’ time and move on to substats.

There are three statlines that Katya can benefit from: ATK (more damage), Alignment Index (converts to ATK), and crit damage. Unfortunately, gatling guns have just 10% base crit damage, or in other words, only deal 10% extra damage on crits. In Snowbreak, crit damage buffs are applied as a boost to the base damage, and not the overall damage of the hit. For example, a 50% crit damage buff applied to a weapon with 30% base crit damage boosts it to 45% crit damage, but for a weapon with 10% base crit damage, the increase is only to 15%. This means that gatling guns having a base crit damage stat this low makes it incredibly inefficient to try and boost Katya’s damage via crit damage buffs. This is to the extent that even a single above-average Alignment Index roll is enough to beat out the effects of a perfect crit damage roll on all three logistics pieces in the set! It’s certainly still better than nothing, but is ultimately a consolation prize compared to the much more desirable ATK and Alignment Index stats.

See the supplementary material for more in-depth weapons and logistics set comparisons, as well as a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Team Building

For all the firepower that Katya provides, her performance will still be better when given supports to further enhance her damage. And besides, someone has to carry all the ammo she chews through. Given that her primary damage source is shooting, the usual cast of Ballistic supports will all work with Katya, though there are some nuances to this.

The obvious choice will be the upcoming Tess - Phantasia, but she’s not out yet, so come back in like a week for more on that.

It may be tempting to assign Fenny - Starshine as Katya’s fire team partner, but this is actually one of the less effective options. Starshine has generally been one of the weaker Ballistic supports in terms of pure damage buffing potential, with a lot of her value coming from her bonus ammo reducing or eliminating the need for you to reload. However, Katya’s standard skill already does an exceptional job of feeding her ammo to fire, which makes Starshine much less useful than an alternative option.

As far as said other options go, Yao - Nightglow runs into similar issues with her crit damage buffs being of limited effectiveness due to the low base crit damage of gatling guns, though she statsticks harder in other more useful areas to bring her overall contribution to a respectable level. Given that you ideally want to be standing in one spot and shooting as much as you can, Mauxir - Shadow Ka’s ability to summon up a stationary target provides usefulness that goes beyond her raw damage buffing abilities and generally makes the actual gameplay experience less annoying, which is always nice. Katya can also make use of more generic supports like Acacia - Kaguya and Vidya - Celestial Swan (the former of which gets extra value for M5 whales due to being Frost element), and Eatchel - The Cub’s ATK buffs never go unappreciated.

Looking at budget support picks, Katya enjoys the ability to quite possibly squeeze the most damage ever out of a single support skill cast from Fritia - Little Sunshine as all 300 shots you can potentially fire during its buff duration bring along a little extra kick from the Aptitude buff. Siris - The Goldfish works on a similar principle, letting you put down a second wall in front of you that also comes with an Aptitude effect to let you double down on the turret gameplay. Do note that Fritia will be more effective due to being able to use Amarna Squad’s effects for additional buffs, though. And as always, you still have Acacia - Redacted as a way to slow down enemies for Katya to plug full of holes.

Should You Pull?

Okay, dear reader. At this point in time we’ve been together for about nine minutes now (assuming an average reading speed), so I’ll just be frank with you. I am a man, and as such, I have certain urges. Katya, unsurprisingly, does an excellent job of satisfying them. I’m of course talking about the pure catharsis that comes with squeezing the trigger on a gatling gun and burying enemies in a shower of bullets.

Hey, it’s perfectly normal, and I'm sure most men feel this way too. Let’s not make things weird here.

Jokes aside - I often say that fun is subjective, but come on. Are you telling me you don’t even get the slightest bit of enjoyment from tapping into the volume of firepower that only a gatling gun can provide? No? Okay, fine. Let’s talk about her meta competitiveness.

Katya certainly isn’t a slouch when it comes to DPS output, matching or surpassing rivals like Bubu - The Geomancer and Lyfe - Infinite Sight. However, at the time of writing, there’s a Chenxing-shaped obstacle standing in the way of a spot at the top of the podium. To elaborate, Chenxing - Jade Arc, even half a year after her release, still has the meta in a chokehold with her ability to stack ridiculous amounts of burst damage, something that Katya notably can’t do.

Taking another look at Katya’s buff breakdown, we see another issue. Remember how her damage comes from a less diverse range of buffs than other modern DPS operatives? This means that she relies on stacking large values of a small amount of buffs, most notably %ATK and %DMG. As a result, she has a harder time benefitting from further buffs provided by support operatives thanks to our good friend the law of diminishing returns. When you also consider that these two categories of buffs are typically the strongest ones that supports dish out, it should then come at no surprise that Katya - Rhapsody gets some of the lowest damage boosts. Let’s hope the upcoming Tess - Phantasia does some real magic on her.

Katya’s poor buffing compatibility, which ranks as the worst or pretty close compared to other Ballistic DPS operatives, is in sharp contrast to Chenxing - Jade Arc, who enjoys some of the largest jumps in performance. Indeed, Katya’s support compatibility lines up more with year-old operatives like Lyfe - Infinite Sight, or even her original Blue Bolt variant than it does with newer DPS operatives like Bubu - The Geomancer. Even in cases where both her and Chenxing decidedly underperform like with Fenny - Starshine (thanks to both having weapon types too new for Starshine’s M1 to give special buffs to), Chenxing manages to still suffer less despite having much weaker mechanical kit synergy. This “buffing gap” goes a long way to explain why even in pure DPS, Chenxing manages to beat out Katya in the rematch.

But in a game like Snowbreak, where content often requires a pair of DPS operatives, being second isn’t half bad. She’s a solid pickup whose six-barreled glory will serve you well, and as a result mostly lives up to the anniversary unit hype if not in substance than in spectacle. Not to mention, Katya still has some gas left in the tank with the capabilities of Tess - Phantasia still being a mystery. Will she provide the last bit of oomph needed to tilt the scales and turn Katya into a bona-fide world-beater, or will Chenxing continue her reign of terror at the top? Time will tell, so stay tuned.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

Includes weapon calculations, manifest growth calculations, support operative synergy comparisons, and a logistics optimization calculator.

Cheat Sheet