Arknights Endfield Character Tier list

We’ve ranked every Operator in Arknights Endfield, including details of their rarity, element, weapon, class, and banner availability.

Image credit:Gryphline/VG247

This tier list and rundown of every character in Arknights: Endfield will give you the best understanding of where each Operator sits within the wider metagame, allowing you to choose your gacha targets and teams wisely.

Arknights: Endfield is a spin-off of the phenomenally popular Arknights, one of the biggest gacha games of the past decade. While the original game is a tower defense tactical RPG, Endfield is taking a leaf out of the competition’s book as a semi-open world action RPG that’s reminiscent of Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves .

Naturally, with a new setting comes a whole new cast of characters, and you’ll still be obtaining them primarily through the game’s gacha. Knowing who you want to pull for is an important part of any gacha game, especially for F2P players, so read on below for our Arknights: Endfield best characters tier list .

On this page:

• Arknights: Endfield Tier List
• Tier List Rationale
• Arknights: Endfield characters explained
• The Endministrator
• Starter Characters
• 4-Star Standard Characters
• 5-Star Standard Characters
• 6-Star Standard Characters
• 6-Star Limited Banner Characters
• Arknights: Endfield character comparison tables

Arknights: Endfield Tier List

Tier List Rationale

S-Tier Operators

Last Rite is an elite damage dealer who, crucially compared to other characters, has a self-contained engine to stack her own Arts and trigger her own Skills and Combos. This makes her perfectly suited to functioning as the lead of your party, but also has the utility of buffing other Operator’s attacks from other slots too.

Similarly, Ardelia also has a self-contained attack engine that requires no set-up (unless you count hitting an enemy with no Arts affliction as a set-up), only she can function completely from a secondary slot rather than being your controlled Operator.

Because she Combos off Final Strikes on un-afflicted enemies, she synergizes best with non-elemental teammates, supplementing their DPS with damage-over-time while applying susceptibility as a launchpad for their abilities. She also has the added advantage of being one of the more accessible 6-star characters, since she appears in the log-in event track.

Image credit:Gryphline/VG247

Speaking of non-elemental characters, Pogranichnik is the best . Again like Last Rite, he works well as the controlled Operator where you can set up stacks of Vulnerable using teammates’ Skills to pull off huge technical combos which deal massive damage. Physical characters tend to work well with other physical characters to stack susceptibilities rather than elemental Arts, but you can unlock them quite easily to make a powerful team with a solid, repeatable gameplan .

Laevatain is the focal point of a fire-type team , feeding on the susceptibilities and Combustion laid down by others to fuel her Skills and dish out the bulk of the squad’s damage.

Finally, Yvonne is a unique Operator who does best in mixed elemental teams . This is because she’s based around taking advantage of Solidification to create Shatter, which is Cryo affliction mixed with another elemental affliction type, then a Physical ailment.

If you roll Yvonne, this lets you form powerful teams from other easy to acquire heroes like Perlica who excel at inflicting statuses, without worrying about shoehorning in weaker characters just to synergize with their element. However, she synergizes best with Nature, making great use of Gilberta and Ardelia.

In gacha games, 4-star characters are usually pack filler, but Antal bucks that trend by being an almost hilariously versatile support character who’s really easy to spec out to max .

Synergizing with a host of common characters, he buffs both Heat and Electricity. However, what makes him universally useful is that he can add an extra stack of any type of affliction to an enemy targeted by his Focus Skill. This essentially provides a shortcut to triggering the Skills of all the most powerful characters in the game.

A-Tier Operators

Ember is a powerful 6-star Operator who provides protection to your lead character, healing and decent attacking power to your team. Basically, whenever you’re about to get hit, she leaps to your defence and slams the attacking enemy with Knock Down before triggering healing if you need it. But while this is obviously a really good Skill, what keeps her from S-tier is that it won’t block the damage from large and Boss enemies, which is when you would really need it anyway. Plus, if you’re playing at your best then you’re perfectly dodging most if not all hits anyway, leaving her unused and taking the space of a more proactive character.

Similarly, Snowshine is one of the best healers in Arknights: Endfield , who can nurse your Operators back to health almost as soon as they’ve taken a big hit. However, like Ember, she doesn’t feel impactful and proactive enough to be in S-Tier . For instance, if her shield ability was a blanket buff you could just activate whenever it wore off, then she’d be an auto-include. But in practice, its range is limited and it’s finicky to time correctly.

Thankfully for role-players Arknights: Endfield has a strong MC, with the Endministrator providing strong DPS and useful physical susceptibilities to a variety of team comps, without consuming or stacking anything that interferes with other meta-Operators’ Combos.

Image credit:Gryphline/VG247

Another strong free character is Perlica, whose strong AoE and easy-set afflictions will see you reaching for her Skill key over-and-over . Unfortunately, electricity as an element doesn’t quite reach the heights of fire or cryo, but if a really good electric Striker comes out in future Perlica could get even better.

Avywenna could be that Striker, but she’s not quite at the level of Last Rite or Pogranichnik . With that said though, she makes really good use of the Electrification that Perlica can apply with aplomb, so much so that she shoves Arclight right down the Tier List. Perlica + Avywenna is a set-and-forget combo that’s sure to be really popular at launch, especially since they’re both very accessible.

Finally, Lifeng is a strong physical DPS who feeds on the ailments laid down by teammates to deal massive damage , particularly Pogranichnik’s Breach. The only issue is that they’re both 6-star characters and it can be tricky to get the most out of characters who trigger when hitting enemies with no ailment stacks.

B-Tier Operators

The B-Tier Operators are good, but situational, requiring another powerful character who you may not have unlocked to shine their brightest. This is the case for both Catcher and Chen Qianyu, who work very well alongside Pogranichnik, but aren’t suited to most other comps.

Xaihi is a good healer, but requires a lot of manual play insomuch as you need to switch to the Operator who needs healing, go through their regular attack string to the Final Strike, then the HP Treatment activates. It’s effective, but fussy compared to more automatic means of healing.

Next, Gilberta is a really solid nature character. The only issue is that, like electricity, nature doesn’t have the same damage ceiling as cryo and fire, given that Perlica is a launchpad for other heroes rather than a focal point. However, Gilberta comes into her own if you can roll the S-Tier character Yvonne, who gains extra Cryo stacks when teamed with nature. This lets you build one of the best team comps which Shatters enemies.

Finally, Wulfgard is a decent addition to fire and electricity focussed teams, who pops up more often than characters below him in the tier list, but is less impactful than characters above him. His Skills complement Laevatain, but you need her to make the most of them.

C-Tier Operators

In C-Tier, I’ve placed the Operators who are decent enough and fun to use as you make your way through story content and unlock more characters, but who’re outclassed by stronger heroes with similar but better Skills and Abilities.

Take Arclight for example. She synergizes really well with the starter Operator, Perlica, but there are just much better options for how to use the Afflictions generated by Perlica than Arclight consuming them for middling damage.

Alternatively, I’ve also put Akekuri in C-Tier because she’s a limited character who’s a bit of a one-trick pony. She’s a solid early-game character for new players because she can really easily apply afflictions to start combos for other characters. However, she’s not offering much more than that. If you’ve got Laevatain then she’s a useful source of Arts affliction, but Wulfgard is better.

D-Tier Operators

The two Operators I’ve placed in D-Tier, Fluorite and Estella, aren’t awful and can have their uses (Estella features in Last Rite’s training mission for example), but as self-contained characters they’re too reliant on others and have too high requirements for triggering their Skills and Combos.

Arknights: Endfield characters explained

Characters in Arknights: Endfield have a variety of attributes to make them stand out, including faction alignment, stats, and unique skills. However, in terms of vital statistics, there are four main things you’ll want to know about your Operators:

• Grade / Rarity: 6-Star, 5-Star, or 4-Star
• Element: Cryo, Electric, Heat, Nature, or Physical
• Weapon: Greatsword, Guns, Orbiter, Polearm, or Sword
• Class: Caster, Defender, Guard, Striker, Supporter, or Vanguard

Like most gacha games, Arknights: Endfield features an elemental system that determines what kind of effects Operators can apply to enemies. Each character also has one weapon type that they can use, with a mix of melee (swords, polearms, and greatswords) and ranged (guns and orbiters) on offer. Furthermore, there are six combat classes , broadly divisible into damage dealers (Guards, Strikers, and Casters) and support units (Vanguards, Defenders, and Supporters).

Of particular interest to gacha game veterans will be the rarity (in-game known as the grade) given to each character. Most gacha RPGs feature a mix of 4-Star and 5-Star characters, with the former being the F2P friendly option and the latter being the premium choice.

However, Arknights: Endfield works a little differently in how it grades characters, and thus in how its gacha operates. This might have something to do with the franchise’s origins as a tower defense game, which featured characters variously graded from 1-Star all the way up to 6-Star.

The starting trio plus Wulfgard make for a well-balanced early-game party. |Image credit:Hypergryph / Gryphline

Endfield wisely does away with the 1-Star, 2-Star, and 3-Star character rarities in deference to the expectations for an ARPG, but it does keep its relatively unusual 6-Star cap. This in turn has a big impact on how gacha pulls work: while the gacha game standard is to guarantee one 4-Star weapon or character with every 10-pull, Endfield character banners instead only feature 4-Star units and above, with a 5-Star guaranteed in every 10-pull and 6-Star units as the premium items.

This means that a 10-pull on a character banner in Arknights: Endfield isn’t mostly composed of filler items (in most gacha games, nine out of those 10 pulls would typically yield 3-Star weapons that are mainly useful for breaking down into levelling materials).

Instead, every pull guarantees a character – although don’t be fooled, the pool of 4-Star characters in Arknights: Endfield is small enough that you’ll very quickly rank all of them up and start running into repeats. However, this does mean that even the most frugal F2P player will be furnished with a passable team in a short amount of time, even if most of those units are ones you’ll want to replace with higher-grade characters when you can.

Below, we’ve outlined more details about every character we’ve encountered so far in Arknights: Endfield, as well as comparison tables further down to help you plan your teams most efficiently.

As in most games of this type, you can choose the gender presentation of your nominal protagonist, but the difference is purely cosmetic. |Image credit:VG247 / Hypergryph / Gryphline

The Endministrator

The Endministrator (6-Star / Physical / Guard / Sword) is your initial playable character and the nominal protagonist of Arknights: Endfield. Unlike other units in the game, you can choose between female and male variants on the Endministrator, and choose their name (although this name doesn’t actually get used in gameplay very much, as they’re typically referred to by title).

Starter Characters

Playing through the prologue and in-story tutorials grants you Perlica (5-Star / Electric / Caster / Orbiter) and Chen Qianyu (5-Star / Physical / Guard / Sword) as permanent additions to your roster of potential party members. Curiously, Chen Qianyu’s basic kit is almost identical to the Endministrator’s. Perlica, meanwhile, is your first ranged attack unit.

You’ll also unlock Ardelia (6-Star / Nature / Support / Orbiter) on your third day as part of the new log-in bonus pass. A support character specialising in healing, she can be very useful for rounding out your initial team of four, as well as ensuring that you have a medic on your side while you’re still learning the ropes.

4-Star Standard Characters

Whenever you pull on a character banner in the gacha, the majority of characters you summon will be one of the five 4-Stars in the game:

• Akekuri (4-Star / Heat / Vanguard / Sword)
• Antal (4-Star / Electric / Supporter / Orbiter)
• Catcher (4-Star / Physical / Defender / Greatsword)
• Estella (4-Star / Cryo / Guard / Polearm)
• Fluorite (4-Star / Nature / Caster / Guns)

A typical 10-pull on the standard banner gives you some idea of how easy it is to max rank the 4-Stars: there’s three Akekuris and three Estellas on there, and all five possible 4-Star units are represented (alongside Alesh as the guaranteed 5-Star). |Image credit:VG247 / Hypergryph / Gryphline

There are, of course, pros and cons to these characters. Naturally, as the lowest-grade characters, they have significantly lower base stats than their 5-Star and 6-Star counterparts; and the extremely small pool compared to higher character rarities means that your options when considering who to add to your team are very limited.

On the plus side, between the five of them you have the opportunity to sample almost every element, weapon, and combat class in the game (with the sole exception of the Striker class). Furthermore, since they will usually make up 90% of all pulls, it’s very easy to rank them all up to their highest level almost immediately – for reference, maxing out all five 4-Star characters with five duplicates each took me just 40 pulls, which were available immediately as free log-in bonuses on the first day of playing the game. This makes them a boon for F2P players, who should be able to plug any gaps in their team with max-ranked 4-Stars while saving up for their chosen higher-grade character banners.

5-Star Standard Characters

In addition to Perlica and Chen Qianyu – both of whom can be ranked up by pulling their duplicates from the gacha – the following 5-Star characters are available on every character banner in the gacha:

• Alesh (5-Star / Cryo / Vanguard / Sword)
• Arclight (5-Star / Electric / Vanguard / Sword)
• Avywenna (5-Star / Electric / Striker / Polearm)
• Da Pan (5-Star / Physical / Striker / Greatsword)
• Snowshine (5-Star / Cryo / Defender / Greatsword)
• Wulfgard (5-Star / Heat / Caster / Guns)
• Xaihi (5-Star / Cryo / Supporter / Orbiter)

With nine different 5-Stars available with a shared drop rate of 10% (and each 5-Star drop can be any one of those nine at random unless they have a drop rate boost), it can take a while to get the 5-Star character you want, and even longer to rank them up to maximum with duplicates. However, they do have better starting stats than their 4-Star counterparts, and unless you’re planning to drop a lot of money on this game right at the start, they’ll likely make up the majority of your team at least for the first little while.

If you’re wondering which 5-Star characters might benefit from more long-term investment, our recommendations at launch include Perlica , Wulfgard , and Snowshine . There is currently no 6-Star Caster except for the limited character Yvonne, so if you favour a ranged combat option for your team, Perlica or Wulfgard are the best options for that role right now.

Meanwhile, Snowshine stands out if you’re keen to save your premium pulls for more offensive characters but don’t want to neglect your shields entirely, since she’s a decent overall defender who’s stronger than Catcher but not as difficult to obtain as Ember.

6-Star Standard Characters

In addition to Ardelia — who first-day players will already have as a log-in bonus, and whose rank-up duplicates can be obtained from any character banner – the following 6-Star characters complete the standard line-up:

• Ember (6-Star, Heat / Defender / Greatsword)
• Last Rite (6-Star / Cryo / Striker / Greatsword)
• Lifeng (6-Star / Physical / Guard / Polearm)
• Pogranichnik (6-Star / Physical / Vanguard / Sword)

After 300 pulls on the permanent standard banner, the player will have the opportunity to select any one of the five 6-Star standard characters to immediately add to their roster. Furthermore, when pulling on a 6-Star limited character banner, there is a 50% chance that the character will be one of the above instead of the nominated 6-Star.

6-Star Limited Banner Characters

Arknights: Endfield launched with Laevatain (6-Star / Heat / Striker / Sword) as its first limited-time banner character. As premium characters with limited availability, these 6-Stars are expected to be amongst the most powerful units in the game, if not the most.

Laevatain is the first 6-Star limited banner character to receive a boosted drop rate in Arknights: Endfield. |Image credit:VG247 / Hypergryph / Gryphline

However, Arknights: Endfield’s limited banners work slightly differently to some other gacha games you might have played. Two other limited characters – Gilberta (6-Star / Nature / Supporter / Orbiter) and Yvonne (6-Star / Cryo / Caster / Guns) – are also already available, with Gilberta due to become the featured character on the limited banner from December 13th onwards, and Yvonne expected to take over from her after a similar three-week stint.

This graph attempts to explain the limited banner rotation between Laevatain, Yvonne, and Gilberta in Arknights: Endfield. |Image credit:VG247 / Hypergryph / Gryphline

All three characters will remain on the limited banner for the first nine weeks, with Laevatain then rotating out to make room for (presumably) a new character, followed by Gilberta three weeks later, and Yvonne three weeks after that. This means that in theory you have a much longer time than is standard to secure your limited 6-Star of choice, although only the featured character will have a 50% chance of being the 6-Star you pull on your first try, with the other two being part of the a standard random chance when you lose a 50/50 – and to guarantee a 6-Star in the first place requires a shockingly high 120 pulls.

Arknights: Endfield character comparison tables

Arknights: Endfield

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The best Arknights Endfield blueprints for the early- and mid-game

For all your seed, battery, and stock bill needs

Image credit:Hypergryph

Finding the right set of blueprints in Arknights Endfield is the difference between spending hours manually configuring your base and just plunking down setups you know will work without tinkering. Which blueprints are best depends on where you’re at in the game. You can’t, for example, get a head start on advanced production with a battery blueprint if you haven’t actually unlocked the processes by which you make batteries. So your best bet is to upgrade your factory as you progress through the game, adding more efficient layouts or swapping one production set for another.

Below, we list some of the best blueprints in Arknights Endfield for the early- and mid-game, including battery farm blueprints.

Best Arknights Endfield blueprints for the early game

Image credit:Hypergryph | VG247

The actual best blueprints for the early game, and for any time when you just want to see how a layout might work or start with the basics, are the blueprints you get by completing tutorial simulations. Once you unlock a new facility or process, you’ll see a prompt encouraging you to try it out in a simulation. These are often lengthy and tedious, but you’ll typically get a blueprint that lets you plunk down a basic setup that mimics what you just used. It takes the fuss out of planning and lets you focus just on producing materials you need.

However, as you start progressing, you’ll want to lessen the amount of space each process takes and have several other factors to consider while building. That’s when community blueprints come in handy.

Best Arknights Endfield blueprints for the mid-game

Image credit:Hypergryph via lChristl

You can opt for full-factory blueprints, but using process-specific blueprints is a lot easier and takes the troubleshooting out of trying to figure out what went wrong, if something were to go wrong. You also have more control over your layout this way.

Anyway, we’ve tested these blueprints from other Endfield players and found they work perfectly.

• Stock bills blueprint (courtesy of lChristl ): EFO01Iao8io0i6975o08
• LC battery blueprint: EFO01893u6Ou8A126UI73
• SC battery blueprint (courtesy of JesusSandro ): EFO01U4Ai8u7E8OO7Oa8
• Buck Capsule C
• Seed blueprint: EFO0172UA40A7I55O0Ai
• Early power plant (courtesy of CautiousBowl7071 , requires 60 Originium and 30 Amethyst)): EFO01893u55O4o1AUI73

While we cautioned against using full-factory blueprints earlier, this one from seas-are-cute is an excellent option for giving you every material you need without having to bother setting up individual processing stations yourself.

• EFO014o5OUA2oO3aE71A

Don’t hesitate to experiment with other blueprints to find what works best for you. Just make sure you have enough power output to keep everything going. Fixing a juice-less factory is much more of a pain than it sounds, so keep up with that as you build.

For more help, check out our guides for how to get Protodisks and where to find the Pink Bolete maps and aketine locations , and head over to our Arknights Endfield code list for some freebies.

Arknights: Endfield

Android , iOS , PS5 , PC

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