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Born amidst a severe snowstorm, Qiubai will be slashing her way into Arknights as part of the “A Death in Chunfen” side story event, scheduled to go live on 22nd August 2023, 10 PM (UTC-7).
Qiubai is a Yanese swordswoman from the northeastern city of Jiangqi where heavy winter storms shrouded the land, thus her father gave her a name with a symbolic meaning “to hate the snow’s whiteness”.
Class and Archetype
Qiubai is a 6★ operator who is part of the popular Lord Guard archetype, together with famous meta units like SilverAsh and Thorns. Sometimes colloquially known as Ranged Guards, these operators can attack in both melee and ranged. While Qiubai is blocking an enemy, she will use melee strikes against them, dealing full damage. However, in the event of her not blocking any enemies, she will use ranged attacks with slightly reduced damage, thus also being able to target flying foes. This allows Qiubai to be able to place behind a Defender and still contribute to dealing damage.
Talents
Qiubai is a Lord Guard that is able to inflict both Physical and Arts damage, much like Lappland. What made her a standout among the Lord Guards is her Talents, where her specialization shines in combination with her Skills.
Her first Talent, Find an Opening, enhances her attacks whenever hitting Slowed or Bound enemies, dealing instances of additional Arts damage.
While Talent 1 alone does nothing against enemies that are not under Crowd Control effects, it complements her second Talent and Skills.
Her Elite 2 Talent, Falling Petals, grant Qiubai a chance to Bind enemies with each of her attacks. While in practice, these 2 Talents may be meant to complement each other but due to Falling Petals‘ low activation rate of 20%, Find an Opening rarely gets to shine.
That said, her Talents are designed to combine their power with her Skills, allowing her to inflict bursts of Arts damage while supporting allies with crowd control through the use of Bind and Slow.
Skills
Qiubai’s Skills generally focus on providing crowd control while further boosting her Arts damage output.
Her first Skill, Halting Feather, is an auto-trigger ability that grants her attack the ability to Bind enemies for a short time. When the Bind effect duration ends, additionally inflicts a burst of Arts damage to enemies in the vicinity of the target. Overall, a generally good ability to consistently inflict Bind to enemies while unleashing Arts damage.
Qiubai’s second Skill, Holding Shadow, immediately inflicts a burst of Arts damage to enemies in a range of 4 tiles in front of her upon activation. Thereafter, alter her attack range to a long straight line ahead of her and bolsters her ATK. Additionally, slows any ground enemies within the new attack range and once the skill duration expires, they will all receive a burst of Physical damage. This is an extremely useful ability for Qiubai herself to reliably trigger her Talent 1 but also for her allies, stalling enemies through the Slow effect.
Lastly, her Skill 3, Questioning Snow, is a powerful buff that she applies to herself, granting an expanded attack range of 3×3 tiles with a 1-tile extension in front. Furthermore, bolster her ATK and turn her attacks to inflict Arts damage without the Lord Guard’s ranged attack damage penalty. Qiubai’s attack will also hit up to 3 targets within range, and with each strike, her attack speed increases, up to a limit.
On top of all that, once upgraded with Mastery levels, Questioning Snow will also increase the damage dealt by her Talent 1, Find an Opening. All these benefits made Skill 3 the superior option in many situations and the attack speed buff will additionally enable Qiubai to bind enemies a lot more frequently through her Talent 2, Falling Petals.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Qiubai is a versatile Lord Guard who on top of dealing Arts damage towards enemies, also has a specialized role of constantly inflicting crowd control effects and slowing down her foes’ advancement.
That being said, on her own, Qiubai can feel somewhat unremarkable as her Talent 1, Find an Opening loses its damage potential if there is no reliable way to trigger the effect through constant source of crowd controls. As such her Skill 3, Questioning Snow will also lose out a lot of its damage output if her Talent 2, Falling Petals fails to trigger and Bind enemies during its duration. It also does not help Qiubai much with her Skill 1 and Skill 2 as both Halting Feather and Holding Shadow use offensive SP recovery thus causing the skill to recharge at a much slower rate outside of combat.
On the flip side, Qiubai can be an amazing Operator if you can support her with other units that can provide Slow or Bind like Ethan, Dorothy, Magallan, and others to consistently trigger her Talent 1. Once enemies are regularly Slowed or Bound, her damage output potential skyrockets especially during the Questioning Snow skill duration which allows her to unleash bursts of Arts damage across multiple enemies with attack speed that ramps up. However, note that while Questioning Snow has a good lengthy duration, it comes at a cost of high SP cost that made recharging the Skill slower, so an SP battery like Liskarm or Ptilopsis will benefit Qiubai greatly.
All in all, Qiubai is versatile enough to be a stand-in for other Lord Guards but she requires allies by her back to amplify her damage output which others of her Archetype do not need. Given the proper team composition and situation though, Qiubai can be an amazing Arts DPS who can also provide crowd controls to support her entire squad.
