An exosuit used by Katya when she was a mercenary. It provides the user with excellent mobility while also improving performance on special ops.

Katya Frostcap is the icy variant of the base Katya boss. She's a Neural Sim special that doesn't appear anywhere else in the game, and will be mostly familiar to anyone who's fought Katya in her normal form.

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Attacks and Behaviour

Like her normal version, Katya Frostcap will regularly teleport around the map and turn invulnerable in the process.

After teleports, Katya will also fire an extra-large arrow at you. Being hit by this will freeze you, but the projectile moves slowly enough that you can pretty trivially avoid it as long as you're not standing in place.

Burst Shot

Katya fires bursts of arrows at you while slowly walking side to side. At higher difficulty levels, she'll fire two more arrows per burst. As long as you're not too close to her, this is relatively easy to avoid by just walking to the side of where the arrows are being fired. Katya is also moving in a pretty predictable pattern while doing this attack, so take advantage of it to hit back.

Crouch Shot

It's basically the same thing as Katya's burst shot, but now she's crouching in place and fires a continuous stream of arrows. This is even better for you than the burst shot, as you now have a stationary target to shoot at. At higher difficulty levels, this attack deals more damage and lasts longer, which is great because Katya's arrows can be easily sidestepped just like in her burst shot attack, giving you an even bigger DPS window.

And unlike her normal form, Katya Frostcap actually does this attack more than once in a blue moon. Thank god.

Jump Shot

Katya goes invulnerable and jumps into the air, then fires an explosive arrow at you. This is basically identical to her base form's attack, but being hit by the arrow here will freeze you in place for a period of time. At higher difficulty levels, Katya will fire three arrows instead, which doesn't really matter because you realistically aren't going to be sidestepping this anyways. Get the dodge timing down to avoid this, or you can even consider resetting the run when you see this move if you're aiming for a top time.

Shield Trigger

Once you break Katya's HP shield, she turns invulnerable and teleports to the middle of the map. Here, she'll disappear while firing an expanding rain of arrows outward.

It's worth noting that when Katya teleports to the middle of the map, she'll briefly lose her invulnerability.

This means that if you can aim fast enough, you'll be able to sneak in some extra damage.

Arrow Rain

This attack is only available once Katya's shield is depleted.

Katya disappears from the map, then fire multiple lines of arrow rain towards you. At higher difficulty levels, two more lines will be fired on either side, but this doesn't really make it that much harder as just one dodge is enough to get you out of the danger zone.

The real annoyance that comes with this attack is the fact that you're forced to sit around for a while waiting for Katya to come back so that you can go back to shooting her, which makes it a potential reset condition for anyone going for a top time.

Strategy

Compared to normal Katya, Frostcap is much simpler to wrap your head around now that she's not blinking around the map every five seconds, but also more dangerous. Because she's nowhere near as invuln-happy as the base version but also does quite a bit more damage, this leads to a situation where you can kill her a lot faster, but she can also do the same to you. Pay attention to make sure you don't get hit by too many of her arrows, and you'll find this to be a much less stressful experience than playing moveset roulette with normal Katya.

At lower difficulties, you can knock up and otherwise stagger Katya which will make the experience easier, but she stops letting you do that once you reach higher difficulty levels, so don't rely on that too much.

Team Building

If it wasn't obvious by the resistance chart, bringing a Frost DPS here is not advised. This ironically makes the playable Katya one of the worst picks for this fight.

As for DPS units that you should bring, Katya has a relatively small health pool, of which a good chunk is her starting HP shield. This means that burst-y gun DPS operatives like Yao - Winter Solstice will have an advantage here. But if we're talking about favourable matchups, it would be irresponsible to not put a special focus on Marian - Swift and Lyfe - Infinite Sight. both of these operatives deal Kinetic damage, letting them take advantage of Katya's one elemental weakness. As well, they both have ways of locking onto Katya which makes dealing with her mobility quite a bit easier. These two operatives also have high burst potential, which is exactly what is wanted here to finish the fight quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Bringing some form of Slow is recommended, as it will not only make Katya move and attack more slowly, but also reduce the speed at which her projectiles travel. This greatly reduces her damage threat and gives you wide open windows to gun her down. Acacia - Redacted remains the top pick for this due to her ease of use. Stuns can also achieve a similar effect, but the current pool of Stun appliers don't work amazingly well due to their relatively short ranges.

Pretty much any offensive support will work well against Katya, though Mauxir - Shadow Ka might lead to some extra resetting in order to get a run where Katya doesn't perform an invulnerability attack and shut off Mauxir early. Due to Katya's high damage potential, newer players may also want to consider bringing a healer to stay healthy.