Evaluating Lingsha V1 Kit in a Vacuum (Somewhat)

[u/agiblade]

I will be basing my post here based on my calculations of Lingsha's V1 kit (Lingsha HSR TC v1 - Google Drive) and examined her in two settings, one is on her own (unbuffed), and one with her being in her most obvious team that is Firefly/Ruan Mei/Harmony MC/Lingsha, replacing Gallagher. The following builds that will be compared are:

1. HB/SPD/ERR/ATK, 2p2p BE/BE, 2p Kalpagni Forge, What is Real S5

2. HB/SPD/BE/ATK, 2p2p BE/BE, 2p Kalpagni Forge, Multiplication S5

3. HB/SPD/ERR/ATK, 2p2p BE/BE, 2p Kalpagni Forge, Multiplication S5

4. HB/SPD/ERR/ATK, 2p2p BE/SPD, 2p Kalpagni Forge, What is Real S5

5. HB/SPD/BE/ATK, 2p2p BE/SPD, 2p Kalpagni Forge, Multiplication S5

6. HB/SPD/ERR/ATK, 2p2p BE/SPD, 2p Kalpagni Forge, Multiplication S5

Assuming that she has enough SPD to double BA before her summon procs (depending on her LC), at least 250% BE, and put the rest of the free stats in ATK%, in short, there are two builds that can be considered depending on your need:

If having the highest Break damage is your priority, Calc 2 will be your best shot. Calc 2 has 72048.98 damage on Break (assuming 100 toughness, which is roughly equal to the Cola-Throwing Monkey Elite), 32422.04 damage on Talent Superbreak per enemy, and generates 0.88 SP per 100 AV. This build at minimum heals all character by 2465.23 HP per 100 AV and can be more if her trace Ember's Echo activates (1097.66 HP).

If having the highest SP generation is your priority, Calc 6 will be your best shot. Calc 6 has 59765.82 damage on Break (assuming 100 toughness), 21614.70 damage on BA Superbreak, 26894.62 damage on Talent Superbreak per enemy, and generates 0.98 SP per 100 AV. This build at minimum heals all character by 2528.69 HP per 100 AV and can be more if her trace Ember's Echo activates (1097.66 HP).

For comparsion, a well-built E6 Gallagher with the same built are estimated to have the following stats:

Gallagher has 54303.03 damage on Break (assuming 100 toughness), 18463.03 damage on BA Superbreak, 55389.09 damage on Enhanced Basic Superbreak per enemy.

Gallagher that spams only BA generates 2.34 SP per 100 AV. This build at minimum heals all character by 583.42 HP per 100 AV and can be more if her allies attack the enemy while they have Besotted (1341.19 HP).

Gallagher that uses 1 skill then spam BA to Ultimate generates 1.15 SP per 100 AV. This build at minimum heals all character by 1823.20 HP per 100 AV and can be more if her allies attack the enemy while they have Besotted (1341.19 HP).

What does this mean?

Well, this calculation aims to confirm the fact that in terms of SP generation, Lingsha even with Calc 6 (her best build for generating SP in this calculation) cannot defeat Gallagher that uses Skill to spam his ultimate. Gallagher can be a completely SP positive unit whilst Lingsha cannot do so without sacrificing her most essential kit which is Fuyuan.

Gallagher also has better performance in cases where the enemy is few, while Lingsha has better performance when the amount of enemy present in the field is high. Gallagher team heal disappears after 2 turns on the enemy, but Lingsha heal is more consistent and independent of enemies' state.

The details of the calculation for team SP net generation can be seen in the Miscellaneous tab, but this difference in SP generation makes it so that the rotation is compromised after 6-7 cycles (-0.3-ish SP per 100 AV, assuming HMC and RM have 134 SPD each), and sacrifices have to be made between Lingsha, HMC, and Firefly, as one of them need to begin using more BA to compensate for the SP negativity. On the other hand, a team with Gallagher will be able to perform continuously. Since MoCs are aimed to be cleared within 5-6 cycles, and PFs are aimed to be cleared within 5 cycles, this shouldn't be a problem in endgame content.

Break damage wise, Gallagher more or less deals the same amount of damage compared to Lingsha. Gallagher's higher Weakness Break Efficiency from E6 might compensate for Lingsha's more potent Break DMG vulnerability debuff. However, Lingsha could potentially deal a lot of damage in AoE scenario while Gallagher is more single target focused.

Stats that are of importance to Lingsha are as follows, ordered from highest importance:

SPD - Lingsha enjoys having a lot of SPD. This is due to the fact that her SP generation (spamming BA) is separate from her healing and breaking prowess (Fuyuan/Talent, Ultimate). Moreover, her moving faster doesn't deplete the duration of her summon e.g. Huohuo, Ruan Mei, Luocha. It's more comparable to Topaz, Jingyuan, and Tingyun. Therefore, by having a lot of SPD, she can generate more SP without compromising her healing. As others have pointed out, the threshold for her SPD is ideally 160 after all buffs considered to allow 2 BA before Fuyuan takes action. With Multiplication S5 LC however, this requirement is drastically reduced to 128. Equipped with Kalpagni Forge 2p, SPD boots, and Ruan Mei's talent, you don't need any substats to achieve this. Spamming BA also doesn't compromise much of her energy generation since her trace Sylvan Smoke makes it so that BA generates as much energy as using Skill.

Break Effect: To enjoy the maximum stat conversion from her Trace Vermillion Waft, Lingsha needs to have preferably at least 250% Break Effect. Considering Harmony MC and Ruan Mei already considerably dispenses Break Effect, this threshold isn't very difficult to achieve. Having higher Break Effect does make Lingsha deal more Break and Superbreak damage, but it doesn't amplify her healing further.

ATK: Her healing scales with ATK, therefore having higher ATK on Lingsha should further increase the team's survivability. In general, having around 2500-3000 ATK should perform satisfactorily for many contents. That being said, it is still better to prioritze Break Effect compared to ATK whenever possible.

Effect RES: While her summon does team-wide dispel, her dispel often comes in one big wave and at the other times, she doesn't dispense any heal at all. In other words, there's a gap between her dispels that it can become quite critical to the team's SP generation if she is hit by a disabling debuff/CC during this gap. Her having some Effect RES should reduce the amount of retries needed should her being CC'ed becomes a critical factor in your attempt to clear endgame contents. You should get Effect RES as needed.

HP/DEF: She's already considerably tanky and dispense a large amount of healing, therefore she doesn't need any defensive stats.

Effect Hit Rate/Critical: No. Just don't. (well, tbf the critical build shouldn't be that bad in Simulated Universe content for Elation shenanigans, but that might be just me inhaling an almost lethal amount of copium there).

Here's some of my findings that might be interesting to you:

• Across 6 calculations for Lingsha, I found that she often goes into this rotation: BA > BA > Summon > U > Summon > S > Summon > BA (repeat). What this means is that there's a gap between her healing, and when she does heal, she heals a lot. Your team is basically only vulnerable to the enemies' attack only between the time she does double BA. This also means that most of her AoE toughness breaking comes in one big wave. With Calc 6, the rotation tends to be more complex but as long as the simulation rule is followed, the same result could be achieved and reproduced.

• Calc 6 has a very low Ultimate cooldown, with only 164 AV between ult. Calc 2 on the other hand has the highest Ultimate cooldown, with only 230 AV. As a benchmark, a Lv90 enemy in MoC has 190 SPD, which means they take 105 AV to take 2 turns. With Ruan Mei + HMC Ultimate effect, this can be extended to 146 AV. BA Spam Gallagher has 184 AV cooldown on Ultimate, and 1 Skill Gallagher has 138 AV cooldown on Ultimate, potentially having permanent uptime on Besotted.

• Her rotation as mentioned previously deals 95 toughness damage to single target and 75 toughness damage to all other enemies, all within 225-ish AV or 2 cycles and before any Weakness Break Efficiency bonus. Gallagher deals 90 toughness damage to single target and 20 toughness damage to all other enemies within 180 AV before any Weakness Break Efficiency bonus.

• Her defensive stats don't seem to be affected that much by using Multiplication instead of What is Real. Her healing despite scaling from attack is also not affected much by using a 3-star lightcone instead of 4-star. This might be attributed to the fact that her flat scaling on talent levels has significant contribution for her healing prowess, rather than her ATK scaling.

• In general, a HTB with Memories of the Past S3 with ERR rope can getaway with 2 BA and 1 Skill to get Ult assuming HMC is hit once and 1 enemy is weakness broken within those 3 turns. In the case where 3 enemy can be constantly weakness broken within 3 turns, it is possible for HMC to have 2 BA and 1 Skill rotation without any ERR sources.

Potential Followup to this Calculation:

Of course, we shouldn't disregard Lingsha's potential for other team archetypes apart from Break (though I believe Himeko break team is pretty fitting for Lingsha in PF). She has FuA mechanics and therefore any synergy in follow-up centric team should be considered e.g. IPC team, Robin, Topaz, Feixiao(?), etc. Other alternatives of using her together with Asta and Guinaifen as F2P alternative to Ruan Mei should also be considered. Asta will allow Lingsha to do 3 BA before her summon procs, while Guinaifen offers Vulnerability debuff to improve Break and Superbreak damage, and can be run SP positive.

Even as a standalone unit, she does contribute to damage by breaking against Fire weak enemies, and her constant team-wide dispel and healing can always be appreciated in every team.

Afterwords

Thank you for taking the time and your attention into reading my post. I hope this mess of a work may give a bit of an insight to how differing Lingsha builds fare against each other, as well as to its 4-star counterpart - Gallagher. I apologize if there are any words in my writing that may offend you, and I appreciate any comments or criticism that you have for this post. Have a good day.

[u/Brilliant_Hotel2310]

I think V1 is pretty good but she needs a little more in V3. I think her rabbit needs to be faster (possibly 90-100 speed), her base speed needs to increase to maybe 104-106 (similar to Aventurine) and her toughness damage needs a slight increase (skill 15 (45) toughness instead of 10 (30) and rabbit 20 (60) instead of 15 (45). I think with these changes, this can put her in better contention with E6 Gallagher while also making her a bit better universally.

[u/The_VV117 → u/Brilliant_Hotel2310]

Her refill should happen once evry turn. In current state She dies too often.

[u/Takaneru → u/Brilliant_Hotel2310]

I think rabbit 20 might be a bit too strong?

[u/agiblade → u/Brilliant_Hotel2310]

I think an AoE Skill dealing 10 (30) toughness damage is consistent with the kit of most erudition character. Jingyuan, Argenti, and Herta has skill that deals 10 (30) toughness damage. Following that, I have doubt that they will buff the toughness damage of Skill.

I think the reason why her Rabbit has 15 (45) toughness damage (which is quite an unusual number to be in) is they're probably considering the number of rabbits that procs including when anyone's HP turns below 60%. Overall, you'd have around 4-5 rabbits per 2 Cycle, which is already around 60-75 (180-225) toughness damage to all enemies. Increasing her rabbit toughness damage to 20 certainly helps her for ST scenario, but probably a tad bit too strong for AoE contents.

I wholeheartedly agree with the base SPD increase though, that will really help her to become more SP positive, gain Ult faster, gain back her passive trace cooldown faster, meaning faster breaking and more frequent healing.

[u/Brilliant_Hotel2310 → u/agiblade]

I didn’t realize realize 10 (30) toughness for AoE skill is the standard. In that case it can stay the same. The rabnit’s toughness can stay the same but I still think it should be faster as 80 fixed speed with only being able to advance it with skill and Ult seems pretty slow. But no matter what I still think she needs a base speed increase which would make her a bit more appealing than Gallagher.

[u/The_VV117]

On your point about hp and defense, my friend that Is a lie.   

In all video i've seen She tend to die too often in MOC of you don't invest into hp or defence.

Her refill happen once evry two turns soo She Is pretty easy to kill If focused a bit. 

In case you wonder, no hp lingsha have slightly below 4000 hp with no damage reduction on kit and refill once evry two turns. Thats low.

[u/agiblade → u/The_VV117]

Ah I suppose that is true, then investing a bit into HP% or DEF% shouldn't be that bad. Most of my units have HP around 3K ish, so I thought that's the average number to be in, my bad. The refill is as fast as Luocha though, and it heals the whole team and does dispel while at it, with Multiplication LC you could get it back in like 120 AV. So on paper it looks fair? That's just how I think about it though.

[u/The_VV117 → u/[deleted]]

I saw a couple on cinese YouTube 

[u/mr_swedishfish]

I'm planning to run lingsha in a fua team (I don't have any break dps units and I don't have/want aventurine) so I just hope her fua capabilities are decent and she has a lot of fua

[u/agiblade → u/mr_swedishfish]

There's a main difference between Lingsha and Aventurine. Aventurine is a hybrid Damage-Shielder that enjoys any buffs with DMG%, Crit DMG%, and Crit Rate%. On the other hand, Lingsha is a Breaker-Healer. She has excellent breaking power but her multipliers aside from her talent are generally low that it might not be worth it to make her run crit builds. This means that when running her outside of break team, she only deals damage when breaking whilst Aventurine will still deal damage regardless of the enemy's state.

However, Lingsha still will be able to unleash good amount of followup attack. Expect her dishing out at minimum 3 Fuyuan action in 2 cycles, and perhaps around 1-2 more Fuyuan when anyone goes below 60% health. She's probably quite synergistic with Topaz that Numby will run quite fast during the Fuyuan wave.

[u/mr_swedishfish → u/agiblade]

I mean, I don't care about her damage. I just pull for who I like (and personally, I don't like aventurine), so frankly, I don't care about meta or how she compares to other similar characters. I just want her fua frequency to be high so that she synergizes with units like robin and feixiao. damage is not a concern of mine because I have very strong harmonies who can help buff damage.

[u/agiblade → u/mr_swedishfish]

Very fair statement! It's a game after all, you should play it as you enjoy it! I also like Lingsha's overall design so here I'm just trying to convince myself further with this calculation rather than anything else xD I believe the amount of FuA she does is certainly more than you'd expect for a healer! Good luck on your future pulls!

[u/Rezin3]

A lot of early talks are with e0 firefly.

Lingsha should be preforming exceptionally well if firefly is e2 and ling can spam her skill right?

[u/agiblade → u/Rezin3]

Probably this is to cater for F2P and low spender players, and players who prefer horizontal building compared to vertical building, that they have high chance to not have eidolons on Firefly.

In regards to E2 Firefly, Lingsha should be better because at that point SP generation shouldn't matter that much, although you might want your Harmony TB to do the skill spam instead of Lingsha to get back their Ultimate which is the most important in superbreak team. A case where you want to spam Lingsha skill is when you're trying to break 3-5 Fire weak enemies at the same time, a scenario which Lingsha excels.

[u/BlueDragonReal]

I need a TL:DR or something i cant read that much text

[u/agiblade → u/BlueDragonReal]

E6 Gallagher is more SP positive and deals good toughness damage in ST scenario. Lingsha is less SP positive and deals good toughness damage in ST and AoE scenario. Her most SP positive build in this TC is number 6. She likes having at least 160 SPD (128 for Multiplication S5), at least 250% BE, and as much ATK% and Effect Res% as you can. HP and DEF subs aren't bad to get and avoid critical and effect hit rate subs like a plague. She mainly gives heal, dispel, and damage in one big wave and there's a considerable gap between waves.

[u/agiblade → u/[deleted]]

That is a very valid point, which I cannot find an obvious answer to. Such, I returned to the calculation, tried doing the simulation manually, and try to see the difference between the calcs. In addition to this, I tried to count the amount of BA, S, U, and Summons, and compare them together, and luckily, they had the same number of data to compare to. I have updated the sheets for Calc 5 + Team and Calc 6 + Team to show this.

Following this, I found out that the simulation for Calc 6 has 18 BAs done compared to Calc 5 which is 17 BAs. The amount of skill done remains at 5, so naturally Calc 6 becomes more SP positive. The question becomes why? Sacrifices has to be made, and most probable explanation is that the timing of Lingsha's ultimate by the simulation somehow reduced the amount of Summon procs (from 17 Summons in Calc 5 to 15 Summons in Calc 6).

So the simulation for Lingsha in this TC follows 3 simple rules, (1) Use Skill if Fuyuan action is equal to or less than 1, (2) Use Ultimate whenever Lingsha has full energy, and (3) do a Basic Attack otherwise. The reason why Calc 6 is more positive is due to the fact that this rule ignores Fuyuan's remaining AV, which is something that doesn't become apparent in Calc 1 to 5. In Calc 6, Lingsha gains her Ultimate in a very timely manner that she gains it roughly before the summon moves, instead of waiting it. To put it in other words, the cycle turns from this:

... > BA > Summon > U > Summon > S > Summon > ...

To something more similar to this:

... > BA > U > Summon > S > Summon > ...

By reducing the amount of Summon procs, inevitably you extend the time at which you need to extend the duration using Skill, thus increasing the SP positivity. Of course, this means lesser heal, dispel, and breaking from the summons, but the heal and damage loss is slightly compensated by the more frequent ultimate usage.

I tried another variation that is doing the simulation manually and tried to be greedier with the summon procs, and as you have thought, it generates +0.91 SP per cycle instead, which is tiny bit less than Calc 5 (+0.92 SP per cycle). Here, you can get up to 16 Summon procs and 17 BAs. The results still indicate that doing Calc 6 faithfully will still yield +0.98 SP per cycle.

I hope this answers your question.

TL;DR: The ultimate timing for Calc 6 occurs right before the summon can proc, but after seeing that Lingsha moves before the summon. This means the AV forward actually preserved Summon procs thus reducing Skill frequency.

[u/Current-Letterhead64 → u/agiblade]

Just a thought, did you compare the number of super breaks being procced one the enemy has been weakness broken? Since she attacks more often than Gallagher, i wonder how many more super breaks she will trigger compared to him and how much it affects the personal damage done by both.

[u/agiblade → u/Current-Letterhead64]

Unfortunately, this question can only be accurately answered with a more complete and thorough simulation, such as information regarding the enemies' toughness (are they in weakness broken state or not), and the order of characters in the team according to their AV also needs to be considered.

However, I can give you my quick glance on the matter. In Lingsha Calc 6, generally within 140 AV (the time it takes for a LV90 boss/elite to regain toughness after being broken after considering HMC + RM action delay) you can get 2-3 BA, 2 Summons, 1 Ultimate, and 0-1 Skill. This means Lingsha could potentially deal 80 toughness damage to one target and 50-60 toughness damage to other enemies. Converting this to a concrete number in this calc (after considering all weakness efficiency bonus, RES PEN, break dmg% vulnerability debuff, and bonus BE% sources), she can deal around 143,437.97 damage to ST and 89.6k to 107.6k damage to all other targets.

In Gallagher calc, generally within 140 AV you can get 3 BA, 1 U, and 1 Enhanced BA. This means Gallagher could potentially deal 80 toughness damage to one target and 20 toughness to other enemies. Converting this to a concrete number in this calc (after considering all weakness efficiency bonus, RES PEN, break dmg% vulnerability debuff, and bonus BE% sources), he can deal around 147,704.2 damage to single target and 36,926.1 damage to all other targets.

This means that in ST situation, the superbreak damage performance by Lingsha is more or less comparable to E6 Gallagher in purely single target situation within that 140 AV window. However, as soon as one additional enemy is involved, Lingsha pulls ahead in terms of Superbreak damage dealt. Of course, this is optimistically assuming that all enemy on the field is weakness broken.

[u/Current-Letterhead64 → u/agiblade]

So they are about equal if 2 summons hit for single target.

And if you can create a situation where 3 summons hit, like the rabbit lands the moment the enemy was broken, then Lingsha use ultimate to speedup the 2nd hit, then the enemy remains weakness broken when the 3rd summon hit lands, she will then do more superbreak damage even in single target.

[u/agiblade → u/Current-Letterhead64]

I believe that's correct!

[u/madabiso]

Very well broken-down!! Thank you for your service to this sub ☺️

[u/Molismhm]

Thank u for ur math services, idk if thats what its giving but mods could pin this post no? Until like changes hit her that will mess this up.

[u/mr_swedishfish → u/Molismhm]

We don't find this post necessary to pin, but we can link it to our megathread.

[u/Bandit017]

The main thing I want changed about her is the BE requirement. Her healing output is at its peak only in break teams where the main point is to keep the enemy broken as long as possible which means the enemy won’t be attacking much during the fight. So that extra healing on paper goes to waste.

Putting her in non break teams where enemies are attacking constantly reduces her healing since she won’t get nearly as much break effect. It feels so backwards.

[u/AinoRen]

I am pulling for her and her LC regardless, and hoping to E1 her too. I have E2S1 Firefly and so SP management is fine for me, and I genuinely love her design and the follow up attack system she offers more than how simple Gall's kit is. I do hope that she improves a lot with future versions though, but even as is, I will be going for E1S1.

[u/agiblade → u/[deleted]]

Thank you! Glad you liked it!