TC-Bites #1

4.6 beta recently started and I wanted to begin writing a series of posts documenting the betas as they progress, giving my thoughts on any new characters, artifacts and changes as the weeks come. As I’m writing this, we are on 4.5.51 or V2 of the beta. If these end up being interesting or of use to anyone, please let me know and I can carry on. On the flip side, if there’s any mistakes, issues or requests for future TC-Bites, I appreciate those all the same. For now, let’s take a look at Arlecchino.

Kit Introduction

For those who haven’t read her kit, Arlecchino is a 5-star Pyro on-field DPS, who enhances her Polearm’s Normal Attacks when she has a Bond of Life equal to or greater than 30% of her Max HP.So, how does she gain a Bond of Life? Upon using her Elemental Skill, Arlecchino will apply a Blood-Debt Directive to enemies, which deal damage every 3 seconds up to 3 times. When her Blood-Debt deals damage to enemies, it will increase in Level, starting at Level 1 and stopping at Level 3. Upon using a Charged Attack, Arlecchino will absorb any nearby Blood-Debts on enemies, and grant herself a Bond of Life based on the Level of the Blood-Debt Directive.The amount of Bond of Life gained is dictated by Arlecchino’s 1st Passive, Agony Alone May Be Repaid. Level 1 Blood-Debt’s will grant her a Bond of Life worth 20% of her Max HP, Level 2 will grant a Bond worth 25%, and finally, Level 3 will grant a Bond worth 70%. Up to 80% Bond of Life can be gained this way every 20 seconds, whilst her Blood-Debts last 35 seconds, meaning players won’t struggle to enhance her attacks. This also means Arlecchino needs to let her Blood-Debt stack up for 6 seconds before claiming it back, in order to gain as much Bond of Life as possible. Additionally, if an enemy marked with Blood-Debt Directive dies, Arlecchino will immediately gain 70% Bond of Life, avoiding any issues with enhancing her attacks if enemies die during setup. Her Skill grants 5 Pyro Particles on a 15 second cooldown, quite a large amount compared to other characters with similar cooldowns.Once Arlecchino has 30% or more Bond of Life, she will enter the In Praise of Shadows state, causing her Normal, Charged and Plunging Attacks to deal Pyro DMG. During this state, when Arlecchino hits enemies with her Normal Attacks, the damage will be increased further based on the amount of Bond of Life she currently has, whilst consuming 4% of her current Bond of Life. Although that may be a mouthful, it essentially boils down to:

Use Skill to apply her Mark.
Set up with support characters for 6 seconds.
Come back and Charged Attack to gain Bond of Life.
Go to town with Normal Attacks.

How about her Burst? Currently, Arlecchino’s Burst deals a moderate amount of Pyro DMG, whilst granting an additional 15% Bond of Life. Unfortunately though, despite its beautiful animation, the damage and additional Bond of Life currently don’t appear to be worth building Energy Recharge for, instead preferring to aim for more offensive substats, such as CRIT and ATK%. However, it is not a damage loss to use, so players can slot her Elemental Burst in either after her Skill to catch Particles, or before her Charged Attack to buff it via your supports. Her Burst being a 60 Cost also means it has a 15 second cooldown, allowing her to fit shorter rotations without much trouble.Now time to address the elephant in the room… her 3rd Passive. Although it does grant Arlecchino an extra 40% Pyro DMG Bonus whilst in combat, it comes with the caveat of preventing her from recieving any healing from characters other than herself. Thankfully, both her Elemental Skill and 2nd Passive assist with her survivability.
Upon casting her Elemental Skill, any Bond of Life that was accumulated will be cleared, healing her for 200% of the current Bond. Generally, this will heal Arlecchino for around 70-90% of her Max HP, assisting players who struggle with survivability.On top of this, her 2nd Passive grants 1% Elemental and Physical RES for every 100 ATK she has above 1,000, up to a maximum of 20% RES. Although 20% RES is nothing special, it’s a nice bonus to her fragile defenses.

Crimson Moon's Semblance

As with all 5-stars, Arlecchino has her own signature Polearm, Crimson Moon's Semblance, with a high 674 Base ATK and 22.1% CRIT Rate substat. This pairs nicely with Arlecchino’s CRIT DMG Ascension Stat, helping to balance out her CRIT Ratio. However, the weapon’s Passive is VERY tailor made to Arlecchino:

- Upon hitting an enemy with a Charged Attack, the wielder will gain 25% Bond of Life.
- When the wielder has a Bond of Life, they gain 12% DMG Bonus.
- An additional 20% DMG Bonus is gained if the holder's Bond of Life is equal to or greater than 30%.
- Bond of Life can be gained via this weapon every 14 seconds, making it awkward to trigger it’s effect twice in a rotation.
- The weapon not granting more than 30% Bond of Life also locks all other characters out of using it effectively, due to only gaining 12% of the 32% DMG Bonus it provides.

Luckily for Arlecchino, this weapon is a great increase to her, as the extra Bond of Life increases both her enhanced Normal Attack’s damage, and the healing she recieves upon cleansing her Bond, now easily healing over 100% of her Max HP.
Unfortunately for players, her pool of alternative weapons is rather slim. Staff of the Scarlet Sands, Primordial Jade Winged-Spear, Staff of Homa and R5 Deathmatch all pair up relatively similarly against each other, although they are still a bit behind her Signature. In terms of more accessible weapons, its either Deathmatch R1 or White Tassel R5. Arlecchino sadly suffers from the same issue Xiao does with having no easily accessible good F2P options. As Deathmatch is Battle Pass only and White Tassel is a 3-star exclusive to Chests in Liyue, meaning players may have accidentally foddered them, Blackcliff Pole and Missive Windspear are the next available options, with Missive Windspear being free but Blackcliff being slightly better even before triggering its Passive.

New Artifact Sets

Along with the 4.6 update, we are getting two new artifact sets, Fragment of Harmonic Whimsy and Unfinished Reverie, tailor made to Arlecchino and the Burning reaction respectively. Both of these sets grant 18% ATK on their 2-Pc Set Bonus, similarly to the Echoes and Vermillion domain.Fragment’s 4-Pc Set Bonus grants the holder 18% DMG Bonus for 6 seconds when their Bond of Life increases or decreases, stacking up to 3 times for 54% DMG Bonus. Despite some Fontaine weapons granting 25% Bond of Life upon using a Skill, they do not change the Bond of Life’s value frequently enough to get good uptime on this artifact’s effects, making it currently exclusive to Arlecchino.Compared to other artifact sets, it is Arlecchino’s best-in-slot set, however, sets such as 4pc Gladiator’s Finale, or 2pc combinations of ATK% and DMG Bonus can be used without a major loss in performance. If players have a good Gladiator’s set, they may want to avoid farming for Fragment as it may be hard to find a 4-Pc strong enough to replace it.Reverie’s 4-Pc Set Bonus grants the holder 50% DMG Bonus if out of combat for 3 seconds. Upon entering combat, this DMG Bonus will decrease by 10% every second if no nearby enemies are Burning for 6 seconds. When enemies are Burning, the holder will instead gain 10% DMG Bonus every second until it maxes out at 50% again.Although Arlecchino won’t see much use of this set, both Ganyu and Wriothesley can utilise it in Burnmelt archetypes. However, it is currently not a significant increase over other sets ran by these two, making it a relatively inefficient set to farm for.All-in-all, I’d currently only recommend farming this domain if you plan on building Arlecchino and either don’t have a good 4pc Gladiator’s set for her, or want her to be on her signature set.

Extended Thoughts

Although its only the start of the beta cycle, currently, I’m a bit underwhelmed with Arlecchino’s current performance. Due to having no Interruption Resistance and being unable to receive outside healing, she feels oriented to being a glass cannon type of character, allowing for high damage at the expense of low defensive utility. Alternatively, for players who would rather comfort over risk, they can slot in a shielder to solve these issues, at the cost of team DPS. Unfortunately, her current numbers put her performance closer to Yoimiya, a character known to be easy to play with both range and the ability to heal fine. Due to scaling off ATK, her damage is incredibly tied down by Bennett, losing significant amounts of damage without him.

Overloaded

Overloaded is possibly Arlecchino’s most hyped archetype, as she was originally rumoured to have Overload-oriented mechanics as of the release of Chevreuse. Although she doesn’t have specific interactions with the reaction, she can run Overloaded teams to varying effectiveness.Currently, her highest damaging team in this archetype consists of Chevreuse, Bennett and Fischl, being able to run a 16 second rotation. Chevreuse and Bennett provide large amounts of buffs, consisting of ATK, DMG Bonus and RES Shred, with Chevreuse able to deal a noticeable amount of damage on 4-Pc Emblem when buffed by Bennett’s Burst. Fischl’s damage is also very significant, despite needing a small amount of Energy Recharge to Burst every other rotation. Arlecchino also chooses to Burst every other rotation, letting her ER Requirements stay low without extending the rotation significantly. If her Burst is not ready, an extra Bennett Skill is used to fill the support set up time, as it actually falls short of 6 seconds without.Although there are defensive options that can be ran here, they tank the teams damage quite significantly. Chevreuse can’t be replaced due to providing RES Shred for the archetype, meaning losing Bennett drops not only Arlecchino’s damage, but also Chevreuse and Fischl’s quite significantly. In order to keep the rotation length, either Dehya with an R5 Sacrificial Greatsword or Xinyan is required. Dehya’s defensive utility and 50% Interruption Resistance buff may be uncomfortable for players due to acting slightly differently from a shield, and Xinyan’s shield is so thin it may as well not exist. Beidou can also be used over Bennett as an offensive teammate with DMG Reduction, seeing some success in
2-Target scenarios, but requires a slightly desynced rotation.

Vaporize

Although Vaporize allows Arlecchino to make use of EM stats, it falls into very similar issues as Overloaded, having large drops in performance when paired with a shield or losing Bennett. She can reliably Vape her attacks with just Yelan, but may struggle consistently doing so with Furina. Arlecchino’s Furina synergy may also not be desirable to some players, as it takes until the 2nd rotation for Arlecchino to benefit Furina’s Fanfare with her own self-heal.Thanks to Arlecchino’s Blood-Debt, it can be extremely difficult to Swirl both Hydro and Pyro to reduce both element’s RES, meaning Anemo characters like Kazuha may not feel as impactful. Alternatively, Fischl can be used for some Overvape scenarios, which appear to perform quite nicely compared to Arlecchino’s other teams. For players who want to play Overvape with some more safety, Xingqiu and Beidou can be paired for high amounts of DMG Reduction, although I’m currently unsure of it’s exact performance.

Alternative Archetypes

One team archetype I was interested in which grants a mix of offense and defense is Bennett, Chiori, Zhongli. Despite being an unconventional team, it’s one with comfort that performs surprisingly well compared to other shielded teams, although that damage still isn’t anything crazy compared to other Pyro DPS.I was curious to check out a team consisting of Xingqiu, Nahida and Zhongli but currently haven’t had the time to create a sim for it. I’m not expecting it to perform amazingly though, nor am I expecting many people to like it even with Zhongli’s shield.Mono Pyro with Xiangling is always an option although it’s not really performing due to Arlecchino being good but moreso due to the pairing of Bennett Xiangling being good.Melt teams consisting of two of Kaeya, Rosaria or Diona may be a thing but Blood-Debt makes Swirling Pyro a nightmare. VV also wouldn't really be an option in the first place without dropping Bennett, and even then, Lynette would be the only one who can replace a 2nd Cryo character due to her Elemental Burst prioritising absorbing Cryo over other elements.

Conclusion

In short, I’m quite underwhelmed with Arlecchino’s overall performance, but the groundwork is there for a possibly interesting character upon release. In terms of changes I’d like to see, it’s mainly just numbers increases for her personal damage, however, I would be interested in seeing them lower her personal healing but increasing the effectiveness of her 2nd Passive to 30 or 40% RES. I’m not too bothered whether she gets Interruption Resistance at all, but the idea of giving her 100% Interrupt Resistance to simulate this unstoppable force, who’s wrath only ends with death sounds hillarious to me.I’ve opted to ignore her Constellations in this TC-Bites due to worry of making it longer than it already is, as I feel I could provide a whole write up on those alone if people were interested enough. Perhaps I’ll add them in for next week’s write up on changes…I will admit I am quite biased to seeing her go the glass cannon route as it’s something we haven’t got amongst the melee Pyro DPS currently and would provide an interesting high risk high reward factor to her playstyle, with the option of using a shielder for more comfort but less damage. Currently its more like a glass nerf gun, dealing with high risk but meh reward for no shielder, and her shielded performance leaves a lot to be desired.Anyways, it’s the first one of these I’ve wrote whilst being the first one of the beta cycle so I didn’t want to get too in depth with things. If there’s anything people would like more details on for next week, please contact me and I’ll see what I can do. For now though, bye bye!

For those curious on some numbers for team performance, please find a pastebin linked here with some configs that can be used in wfpsim.