Acacia - Chrono Echo
Somebody told Acacia to touch grass. She brought her scythe.
Acacia - Chrono Echo
Somebody told Acacia to touch grass. She brought her scythe.
Released in:
Version 3.5 - Back from Bygone
Note that v3.5 also introduces Marian - Aquila
Each get their own article.
This article is about how Chrono Echo affects the games meta. If you only want details on Chrono Echo herself - how to play and build her, then view her article here.
Role: Main DPS
Weapon: Flying Sword
Damage Type: Kinetic
DPS: Strong single-target.
Can also do decent AoE damage as well
Acacia's standard damage rotation does a lot of single-target with some AoE as well.
She can do just AoE hits to increase total damage, but that does drastically reduce her individual per-target damage.
Meta: AoE is good, but not really any better than Enya - Tempest
She lacks the mobility and self-healing of Clarina - Crimson Moon, but does do a bit more dps.
Acacia - Chrono Echo does several new things, although she does make a few small blunders as she does it.
Last patch released Bubu - Specular Soul, and I commented on how it was nice to see some of the lesser-used weapon types get more representation, and that it would be nice to see other new weapon types as well.
Well, Acacia is here to deliver, using the new Flying Sword weapon type.
Despite swords generally being, you know... melee weapons, Acacia's surprisingly good throwing arm and her infinite ammo hack allows her to just endlessly fling them from long range.
...and I do mean long range - Her daggers outrange an SMG, and the optimal range of her daggers is the same as the maximum range of a shotgun.
Her daggers have about the same maximum range as an Assault Rifle, and this gives Acacia surprisingly and deceptively high range.
` ...although there is a caveat to that I'll get into later.
Some previous operatives did only have effectively melee range - either because that's how close they needed to stay to enemies (for example Haru - Absconditus), or because there was a reason to move closer and no reason to move away (e.g. Fenny - Lionheart).
Personally, I wouldn't have had a problem with Acacia's swords being melee range, but her Flying Swords are pretty fun and work well, so her being ranged isn't an issue.
Tap her standard skill to swap between AoE mode and Single-target mode. [AoE mode is the default]
For boss fights, you'll always just immediately switch to single-target mode the moment the fight starts.
Acacia's regular attack flings four daggers at the target
AoE mode Each dagger also deals damage to up to four nearby targets
Single-target mode Each dagger hit also deals extra damage to the target, up to four times.
Each hit also builds her counter. When she has 16 she can ult.
Her ult changes her from teen form to MILF form
This changes her standard attack to a single-target attack - she can't AoE with her basic attack whilst in MILF form.
Her standard skill now does a slicing slash in front of her that has massive AoE
Her counter resets to 0 and the cap becomes 36
All hits still build her counter
Once she's got 36 counter in her ult, use her ult again to deal AoE damage in front of her and reset everything and revert Acacia back to her default form
This is... decently complex, but it's not too bad - you just throw a few daggers, ult as soon as you can, then throw more daggers or slash, and then ult again. Repeat.
There's a bit more too it than that though - Whilst in MILF form (yes, I am going to keep referring to it as that) Acacia's third dagger deals more damage (50% ish) and inflicts 1 stack of another counter of the enemy - when the enemy has 3 of that counter, your next standard skill slice deals double damage to them, and doing that double-damage slice against an enemy gives 3 stacks of yet another counter to Acacia, and when she has 6 of that, she can use her standard skill for a different, even bigger overhead slice.
This makes her standard damage rotation quite a bit more complex:
If fighting a boss, swap to single-target mode immediately
then
Fling daggers until at 16 charge
Ult
Then attack until the enemy has 3 counter then standard skill
then do that again
then hold her standard skill
Then do the above chain again
Then ult
Repeat
Also she keeps her MILF form and counters when swapping off-field, so you'll need to keep track of that if Acacia is ever off-field, as the game doesn't tell you anything about Chrono Echo's status whilst she's off-field, despite it affecting her support skill (not that you'd ever use her support skill, but still...)
I feel you could remove everything in the above paragraphs and just leave Acacia with the above bullet points and she'd still be perfectly fine, mechanically speaking.
Giving Acacia two additional stacks of things just makes her more complex to play with little extra benefit - she already has enough damage and AoE capabilities.
There's a phrase I like:
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
It's a phrase I like a lot, and I am sure you dislike the AI-filled subscription-based enshittified world we live in as much as I do, dear reader, but in Snowbreak simplicity doesn't seem to be the goal - every operative seems to have extra bits of their kit tacked on - be it Bubu - The Geomancer's's manual recharging, Fenny - Pureheart's RMB attack, Haru - Raikou's manual detonation, Mauxir - Lotus' grapple mechanic - Snowbreak has a lot of unnecessary complex baked into its operatives kit, and this is true for... most operatives.
Acacia - Chrono Echo is different though - not because she isn't complex, good heavens no, but rather because she is just so much more complex than all previous operatives.
This might be why Chrono Echo has an actual tutorial inside of her Operative Trial.
Whilst many previous operatives didn't really need a tutorial, some could've benefited from one, and it's a nice thing to have.
Chrono Echo's tutorial is... meh.
Personally, I don't feel like it explained all of her mechanics very well, but you can decide for yourself how good it was or was not.
Regardless of how good the tutorial wasn't, Acacia is certainly one of the (if not the) most complex operatives in the game, and with more stuff to keep track of than basically all other operatives, at least in my opinion, so her having have an actual tutorial seems appropriate, and I like that the devs tried to make her easier to learn.
It's nice that the devs gave her a tutorial... but if the devs were worried about players struggling to learn how to use her, then surely the easier solution would have been to not bolt so much unnecessary crap onto her design in the first place.
Yes, her damage is plenty.
As a purely skill-damage Kinetic-damage main-dps, Acacia competes directly with Clarina - Crimson Moon and Enya - Tempest, both of whom also deal purely-kinetic skill damage.
I do find it unusual that Acacia fulfils the same damage role (Kinetic Skill damage) as two somewhat-decently-recently released operatives, both of whom are still competitive in the meta - heck, Acacia's direct competition are the two best Kinetic-dps operatives in the game, and Clarina is one of the strongest dps operatives in the game - not as strong as Jade Arc or Rhapsody, sure, but Clarina is very strong, and before Acacia she was both objectively strong as well as the strongest kinetic dps.
Could Acacia not have been a purely-ballistic dps? or even just a support? We were fine with Clarina and Enya being our choices for Kinetic [Skill] DPS.
Regardless, Acacia is extremely strong.
For AoE dps Acacia can either just spam her daggers in her standard form, which deals decent damage to the target and nearby foes.
The actual dps per-target isn't great, but her ults slash has a large area and can hit up to 10 targets, which does make it great against groups, although you'll run out of S-Energy eventually, so it's not that great for very long fights.
You can just use her AoE daggers until she can ult, then ult and spam slashes, and then when she runs out of S-Energy, ult, and repeat.
If you just want maximum AoE damage over maximum area then there are better options, such as Mia - Starchaser's standard skill, Katya - Rhapsody's ult, or even just spamming Chenxing - Jade Arc's Standard Skill and ult'ing occasionally, but Acacia performs very well nonetheless, and she's one of the better choices for AoE damage.
The real question is whether she's better than Enya - Tempest, as Acacia and Enya both deal Kinetic skill damage, whereas Mia deals Electric ballistic damage, and hence Mia and Acacia can't always directly compete.
The answer is to whether Acacia is better than Enya is either:
"It doesn't matter"
or
"It depends"
Enya can use her skills and dodge to group up enemies very well, which Acacia can't.
Enya's enhanced vortex does also have a larger total AoE, but it can't be maintained for that long so its uptime isn't that high, whereas Enya's normal standard skill vortex is quite a lot smaller than Acacia's slash size - but then again Enya can group enemies so she doesn't need as much AoE after grouping them up.
Enya has better mobility than Acacia, but Acacia not being PBAoE and having a much higher maximum range means she doesn't always need the extra mobility, although extra mobility is still nice, of course.
You can spam Acacia's ults standard-skill slash back-to-back [if it hits enough targets], but if you do that she'll eventually run out of S-Energy - a problem Enya does not have.
Overall, if you want AoE kinetic skill damage, then I'd strongly recommend Enya over Acacia - Acacia isn't bad - in fact she's very good, it's just that Enya is fantastic.
For single-target, Acacia does very well - given the strength of recent non-Auctus dps operatives, Acacia was never going to be weak, and I can comfortably throw her into the same category that all the other recent main-dps operatives have gone into:
"Definitely not strong enough to make a new dps tier above Chenxing - Jade Arc, but certainly very strong nonetheless."
For the role of single-target dps, the question is why would you use Acacia over Clarina - Crimson Moon?
Clarina has a lot of mobility, and has very strong self-healing capabilities, with her skills also having a more aggressive auto-aim than Acacia's do, so why use Acacia?
The obvious answer might be that Acacia naturally deals some AoE as part of her natural rotation, allowing her to better take care of groups of mixed enemies, as well as dealing with any adds that spawn with bosses.
For general content or groups though you're better off with Enya, due to her vastly better mobility, ability to group enemies, and consistent AoE damage.
Similarly, a boss+trash mob group is extremely uncommon in Snowbreak - you tend to fight either one boss, or a group or trash mobs, and almost never anything else, so Acacia dealing AoE as part of her standard rotation almost feels like a gimmick with how little use it will get for most players.
The real answer as to why you'd use Acacia is thus... dps... maybe?
Chrono Echo does out-dps Clarina, but the difference isn't overly large, such that if you already have Clarina and didn't care about the waifu's and only cared about dps, you could probably skip Acacia quite comfortably.
With max investment Acacia will out-dps Clarina a little, but in practice which is better is just which of them has more investment, as they're not that far apart.
Clarina's mobility, higher DEF, and self-healing mean she will still sometimes be the better choice simply due to her survivability, regardless of which of them actually deals more dps or which one has more investment.
At endgame, this doesn't make much of a difference, but for general content Clarina's mobility and self-healing does truly make her unique - if you want an operative with strong damage, great mobility, and strong self-healing, then Clarina is literally your only choice (regardless of damage type). Acacia does not compete in that regard.
For endgame, Acacia does out-dps Clarina, but which of the two is better in practice is just whichever one has more investment.
In truth, I feel Acacia would have probably been a perfect operative had she not dealt Kinetic-skill-damage.
Looking at the current meta for each damage type:
Kinetic Clarina - Crimson Moon deals very high single-target damage, but with very little in the way of AoE capabilities.
Enya - Tempest deals great AoE damage, but her sustained single-target dps falls behind Clarina by quite a bit.
Thermal Fenny - Pureheart has a lot of AoE built into her kit, including a dedicated AoE ability that is extremely spammable. Fenny is the strongest thermal [skill] dos.
Pureheart is also almost-always used with Siris - Freefin, who works as a sub-dps that can be swapped in for AoE dps.
Bubu - The Geomancer doesn't have the AoE of Fenny (or anybody, really), but is a strong single-target ballistic dps nonetheless.
Frost Katya - Rhapsody is one of the games best single-target DPS-ers, and her ult is fantastic against groups.
Katya - Dawnwing is strong against single-targets, and her standard skills AoE (and mobility) makes her fantstic against groups and in general content alike.
Electric Chenxing - Jade Arc is incredible against single-targets, and her Standard Skill + ult combo can also obliterate groups.
Mia - Starchaser is also very good at single-target, and her Standard Skill is probably the best AoE ability in the game.
Chaos Bubu - Specular Soul is almost entirely single-target, and has very little in the way of AoE
Nerida - Styx Envoy can deal some damage to groups, but in practice ends up being mostly single-target damage.
I feel Acacia probably would have been better off as a Chaos dps - Kinetic, Frost, and Electric already have either one/two operatives who do the same role as Acacia, but better, or they have one operative who is amazing at AoE and another operative is is amazing at single-target, so there's no need to use a new operative outside of powercreep or waifuism.
For Thermal, Pureheart fulfils basically the same role as Acacia - a rotation that's mostly single-target, but does deal some ok AoE as part of it, and has a spammable AoE ability.
For Chaos though, making Acacia a more-AoE focussed operative would have made her a great fit, giving her a unique niche without stepping on the single-target toes of Bubu or Nerida. This could have been achieved by giving Acacia AoE on her ults standard attack, such that her single-target dps was lower, but everything she did had some form of decent AoE on it, thus making Acacia the de-facto best Chaos AoE dps by virtue of her lack of competition.
Alternatively, Acacia could have dealt ballistic damage, that way Clarina and Enya could have kept their positions in the meta due to being skill, not ballistic, although the difference between the two isn't usually that large.
Instead, Acacia fulfils a weird role, because for AoE kinetic dps Tempest is the better choice, but for single-target dps Clarina is still fine, and with some investment Clarina can beat Acacia, so for many players their Clarina won't perform worse than Acacia simply due to their Clarina already having some investment, which closes the gap between Clarina and Acacia.
Well, aside from her main AoE capabilities being something you do separately from her main damage rotation, Chrono Echo doesn't really have many major flaws.
She does have quite a few minor ones though:
Firstly
Acacia spends a decent amount of her time stationary, and on-average she tends to move rather slowly whilst doing her rotation as a result.
She gets time-slowdown for these in single-player, so in single-player it's generally fine, but in multiplayer Acacia can sometimes feel like a sitting duck.
(In Co-Op, my Acacia gets punched in the face so often sometimes that Acacia should probably have been the support and Marian the dps with zero mobility getting pummeled...)
Secondly
The UI disappears when using her ult's Standard Skill overhead slash, so you just kinda have to guess how much charge you have - or just go full-send and ult anyway, even if you might not have 36 yet. Alternatively you can wait a second or so to check, but that does cost you dps.
In practice you will know how much you have, so it's not an issue.
It's not a major thing, but waiting for an extra second or two every rotation will add up.
It would be nice if the charge counter was kept visible. I am fine with the UI being removed for her other skills, although it would be nice if there was an option to keep it.
In-fact, for a lot of Acacia's rotation you just have to press skills and hope the previous skills effects will trigger properly, as waiting for every skill to finish before you start the next one will cost you a truly vast amount of dps.
If spammed, Acacia's standard rotation takes around 17-18 seconds. If you properly wait for all her animations to finish before doing her next skill, it can be well over 20, and potentially even closer to 25 seconds.
Thirdly
Another minor flaw is that you can change Acacia between Teen and MILF forms in the games menus, but the button to actually do this is hidden in the outfit menu, which most players won't see, as you only ever go into that menu to change outfits, so if you don't have any outfits for that operative you'll likely never go into that menu, and hence will never see the button.
Fourthly
Acacia's ult really wants her to inflict 3 Time Scar on enemies so she gains Radiant Tide from her standard skill slash, but whilst Acacia doesn't care which enemy she hits (Time Scar is re-applied to the most recently hit enemy, basically), this leaves Acacia highly vulnerable to the enemy she's targeting being killed by one of your allies (or drones or NPCs or whatever) which can mean that Acacia can standard skill slash into enemies that don't have enough Time Scar, thus not getting the Radiant Tide she wants.
Acacia also doesn't have great lock-on, meaning an enemy being knocked back or pushed around by an ally is often enough for Acacia's basic attack to miss them entirely whilst she's in her ult, which again means that she won't get as many stacks as she needs. These can completely mess up Acacia's rotation.
This means that how effective Acacia can be in Co-Op can vary wildly, depending on who/what Acacia actually hits, and if Acacia actually builds any stacks to fuel her damage rotation. I've found Chrono Echo can feel pretty ineffective when things don't go well for her.
Fifthly
After using her Slash Beyond Time, the camera will reset to the horizon, rather than towards the enemy you aimed the skill at.
For airborne foes (e.g. Njall) this means you'll have to manually look back up at the boss after every single slash, which gets annoying quickly.
Sixthly
The range of Chrono Echo's ult standard skill slash is much lower than the range of her actual attack.
This means that a lot of the range of her Flying Daggers is wasted, as the frequency with which she uses her ult slash means that Chrono Echo is sort of forced to stay within the range of her ult slash.
Having to stay close enough to enemies such that her ult slash can hit does somewhat defeat the point of her weapon/attacks having a massive range in the first place.
Quite frankly, Acacia might play almost the same in endgame content if her weapon range was halved, or more.
Now that Marian - Aquila has released, Chrono Echo's has more options for support operatives.
In my original review I talked about Chrono Echo's shallow support pool.
Now that we have Aquila though, Acacia now has a perfect support pair.
Marian - Aquila provides very generic "+damage dealt" buffs that allow her support basically any operative extremely well.
Since Aquila deals Kinetic damage whilst supporting, if you use Aquila + Celestial Swan then you'll need the main dps to deal kinetic damage (which Chrono Echo does).
Aquila is a great support for kinetic-damage operatives, but she's also great for dual-team content (e.g. Neural Sim) as you can just stick Vidya on one team and Aquila on the other, and they'll both work perfectly regardless of who you pair them with.
Whilst this is pretty bad as far as the games overall pool of good supports go, it does work well, and the problems caused aren't really Marian's fault - they're caused by the game just not having many support operatives, plus the type-matching requirement of Vidya, who is the games strongest support by a huge margin.
Regardless of how good Aquila is generally, Chrono Echo pairs extremely well with her.
Aquila provides very generic damage buffs, which Chrono Echo can make use of.
Aquila's 4* weapon does provide Kinetic-damage buffs specifically, but since Chrono Echo deals kinetic damage that's fine.
Whilst Chrono Echo pairs extremely well with Aquila, since Chrono Echo deals almost entirely skill damage, she also pairs well with Siris - Freefin, who performs about the same.
The games best support is Vidya - Celestial Swan, who Chrono Echo pairs extremely well with - because Vidya pairs well with literally all dps operatives.
Chrono Echo's best team is thus Chrono Echo + Aquila + Celestial Swan.
Freefin also works great if you don't have Aquila or Celestial Swan.
Beyond that you have various cope supports like Eatchel, Riptide, and Kaguya.
Notably though, all of the above about which supports Chrono Echo works with, and works well with, does also apply to Clarina and Tempest as well, as they all deal the same damage type (kinetic skill damage) and thus have the exact same list of viable/useful/good supports.
This means that Chrono Echo is for the most part pretty much completely interchangeable with Clarina and Tempest when it comes to teambuilding.
(Except Clarina pairs best with Eatchel instead of Aquila, and Enya can pair well with Tess - The Magician as well in some content.)
Acacia also feels like a lot of previous operatives, where they've been designed around having strong single-target damage as that's what you'd want for an endgame team, but she has also been given good AoE damage to help clear groups of trash mobs that are what you encounter in 99% of gameplay.
Unlike many recent operatives (Starshine, Pureheart, etc...) Acacia's AoE capabilities don't really feel tacked on or extraneous to her core design - Once you learn her standard rotation, you can just use her AoE abilities when/if you need them, but they don't get in the way. Chrono Echo does also deal some AoE damage as part of her standard rotation, which means that even without using her AoE abilities specifically she's not bad at it.
Her somewhat lacklustre mobility means she's not the best operative for general content, but her good damage and AoE capabilities mean she's perfectly serviceable.
For endgame content, Chrono Echo is basically just completely interchangeable with Clarina - they both deal the same damage type and use the exact same supports.
The only real difference is that Clarina has much better mobility and can actually heal herself. This makes Clarina better in some ways, and whilst Chrono Echo does deal a bit more dps than Clarina, it's not that much, and in my opinion I'd probably prefer to use Clarina - she's much bulkier, has much better survivability, is easier to use, is less complex, and has much better range.
If you just want maximum dps, then Chrono Echo is the new go-to Kinetic-dps operative, but for me the little bit of extra dps she offers over Clarina isn't worth the complexity and fragility Chrono Echo possesses.
Overall, I do like Chrono Echo - her rotation deals good damage, is visually pleasing, can be satisfying to play when you do it right, and Acacia tends to work well against all targets.
All of my complaints about Chrono Echo are relatively minor, and they aren't enough to ruin my enjoyment of playing her.
Would I recommend you invest into Chrono Echo?
No, not really - in the long term you're probably going to be better off investing into Marian - Aquila instead, as a good universal support is the better use of your investment, but Chrono Echo is a perfectly fine dps operative to whale on if you did wish to do so.
Similarly, if you don't hve any investmnt into Clarina, and already have some good supports (i.e. Celestial Swan and Freefin) then Chrono Echo is a great use of your investment.
Similarly, since Snowbreak doesn't really have much endgame content, then since Chrono Echo is only mediocre for casual gameplay, you could skip her without too much issue, and since she performs so similarly to Clarina for endgame content you aren't missing out on much there anyway.
If Snowbreak had more endgame content, or if Chrono Echo was ballistic or was more AoE focussed then things might be different, but as it stands she's just worse than Enya for general content and for endgame content Chrono Echo doesn't offer much that Clarina can't already do anyway.
Chrono Echo is a perfectly fine operative. If she didn't perform so similarly to Clarina she might be considered great, but Chrono Echo is merely serviceable - she doesn't do anything new, although what she does she does well, and doing it is pretty fun.
I think this generally makes Chrono Echo fine - when compared to Clarina, Chrono Echo has some upsides, but also some very major downsides, so whether you think she's good or not depends on how good you think her trade-offs are - i.e whether you think all her downsides are justifiable because she has a bit more dps. Personally, I don't think her trade-offs work out particularly well for her, but you can judge for yourself.
Regardless, Acacia does feel decent in terms of balance, although it's a shame that Clarina's dps has been powercrept (albeit only by a small amount), as Clarina was perfectly fine where she was, although with that being said, Chrono Echo is so close to Clarina that Clarina herself is still viable, and her mobility, insane DEF, and self-healing does still make her unique.