Arknights Ban List

I play Arknights. This list is written with an audience of Arknights players in mind, and is mostly offered as further reading for those that know a lot more about the game.

To keep gameplay fresh and interesting, I've catalogued a couple operators I've decided bring down the quality of my clears. This includes mostly operators the community has deemed overpowered. Here's how this mutates my gameplay (hopefully for the better):

• The skills of operators are banned individually. If a skill is banned, it cannot be brought into a stage, even if the skill is completely untapped through the entire duration of the stage.
  • Effectively, this means I'm not bringing Texas the Omertosa to any stage whatsoever since all of her skills are banned. But, I can bring Surtr into a stage if I bring her S1 or S2.
• These rules apply to all stages in all gamemodes with the following exceptions. Not ready to make commitments just yet, since this list will only be additive unless I explicitly state otherwise.
  • Integrated Strategies
  • Reclamation Algorithm
• These rules do not apply to subsequent clears of "story" stages, story stages being non-Adverse Environment stages that are not "EX" or "S" stages. This clause is for efficient trust farming.

Note: Crops of operator E2s stolen borrowed from the Arknights wiki.

Wiš'adel Affected Skills: S1, S2, S3

I probably don't need to explain myself here. The example of an operator stepping way out of the bounds set by their archetype (hitting aerial enemies) beyond just being an absolutely ludicrous damage option in any team, if you set aside her extremely potent crowd control. Even the Arknights wiki cannot ignore how powerful this operator is.

Texas the Omertosa Affected Skills: S1, S2, S3

My early game carry was Mlynar, but this operator pushed me into the world of challenge content. Though I want to be clear that I'm not banning all the 6* fast re-deploys because they're 6*s.

My reason for totally banning Texas is that her large damage and micro-stuns make her a very tempting Band-Aid to use when making clears. It's effectively paying a deployment slot to go "Ah, this strategy just barely works, but it doesn't. All I need is a little extra DPS/control." Solutions to stages that come out like this aren't really satisfying.

Note that unlike her high-DPS FRD cousin Kirin X Yato, there are other ways to use Texas besides just a Magic Eraser. It just so happens that she does enough DPS to outright kill any targets she is trying to cripple or incapacitate.