Ceylon, deemed one of the contenders for the “worst 5* unit” in the game by the people. Being a healer, her role is mainly reduced to the utility outside of her healing, because in the later game, pure healing become slightly obsolete when you have stronger and tougher units. Due to many of her stats and what she can offers. Her reputation as a weak healer was formed. How much of that is true? And does it actually matter?

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She got fricking bird pouring tea for her like fuqing Cinderella or something

Overview

Ceylon is the first Wide-range healer in the game, and up until now, the only 3 on CN server. With how large her reach is, she received a few drawbacks to counter it. She was also the first one to receive a weird utility, but crucial at times: Status Resist. Ceylon also has a talent that is at its minimum for the entire game except for her own debut event, so that added to her negative reputation as well. With a large healing range, Ceylon is here to cover your entire team from a decent location.

Stats:

- Offensive (defensive?) stats:

For healer, they don’t attack. Their ATK stat is used when healing someone, for 100% of their attack per heal. Now for Ceylon we will have something later, but that’s later. Ceylon’s ATK stat, however, isn’t quite high. Out of all Single Target (ST) healers, she is on the bottom of the ladder, only higher than the 3*, and slightly less than Gavial, a 4* medic (technically Ceylon has 2 more ATK when both are at max level but that means the scaling at lower level is better for Gavial). Even worse, Ceylon’s ATK stats when compare to the one above her is quite a sad sight. Why does she have such a low healing stat for a 5* medic? Because of her range which we'll get into later.

For her “attack” rate, all medics share the same rate of once every 2.85s. Some has an ATK SPD increase, but it’s rare (Shining, Silence, Sussurro, Ptilopsis). Perfumer even reduce her healing rate, but I’m getting sidetracked. Basically, one heal every 2.85 seconds.

- Defensive stats:

Ceylon’s survivability is a bit mixed. She has the 4th highest HP among the medics (5th when we count CN ops as well). However, her DEF is lower than most others. That said, the difference between them are less than 80, and that is probably a negligible amount. All medics has 0 RES, except for Nightingale, and the Wide-Range Medic, which Ceylon are. But then again, that’s like 5 only (except for Night). Anyway, she does have quite a decent HP for the medics, and the importance of that depends on how you play your ranged unit.

- Cost:

For a wide-range medic, she received a higher cost to “balance” it out. Where the typical 5* ST healer has 17 cost at base (except Folinic, but that’s a slightly different story), Ceylon has 20. This is deliberated as she is a different sub-archetype to the typical medic, and whether it is justified or not, we’ll see for the rest of this post.

Range:

Actually, like Swire, let’s start with Trait as well, it will explain both.

Trait:

Has a large healing range, but the healing power is reduced to 70% on allies that is further away.

How far is further away? It’s pretty bad actually, see image below.

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The range that she can heal for full ATK is very small

This 70% is calculated after all boost and such. Which means, technically, every ATK boost Ceylon get is also reduced by 30%, for those “further tiles”. However, this is deliberated design because of how large Ceylon’s healing range is. With that range at E1, she can cover so many places in the map at once, and thus if she does get her full healing, that would have been broken. To put a better comparison, Ceylon’s area is only 3 tiles less than Saria’s S2 area, with a further frontal reach though, given same position. Those are all without skills, but Ceylon’s ability to heal is quite awkward from this trait alone. She has amazing range in exchange for a “slight” reduced in healing.

Some people may be turned off by this because the reduced in healing is in fact, in many situations, be enough to let Ceylon be unable to keep someone alive, especially in the early-mid game, considering that a normal ST healer is enough to reach allies for a majority of the time. Some other people turned away from Ceylon too in the late game, as her utility become somewhat obsolete except in specific maps, but that’s future sections.

Talent:

Lake Walker: ATK +3%. If there’s water tile on the map, the amount increases to 9%.

At E2, the base amount increases to 5%, and further increases to 18% with water.

Considering that Ceylon is an event operator that can get to potential 6, if you participated in said event, you can get Ceylon to potential 6, and get an extra 1% base, and 6% with water, for 4% - 15% at E1, and 6% - 24% at E2. The amount increase is permanent, but only get good value if you have water on this map, but permanent buff is permanent buff. It pushes her low base ATK slightly higher than before, helping her catching up to other ST healer, and in conjunction with her range, make her better sometime because she does have a large healing range to cover the possible healing focus of 2 healers.

Anyway, what counts as water tiles anyway? Well, again, it’s pretty ugly, and those tiles only appear in the maps of her event. What’s even worse is that, even in that event, only some maps have water tiles, the volcano maps have none. So, in reality, Ceylon only ever get +6% ATK permanently. It’s 6% because there are no realities where you weren’t going to E2 Ceylon already if you have her.

The jump from 4% to 6% at E2 really doesn’t quite fit the cost of E2 so the talent is pretty often shit on, because it’s both just a small boost, and lackluster in flashy reward. More often than not, this talent doesn’t really exist, as mentioned with the amount of water. HG pls, ice is just frozen water, we can get past the scientific technicalities and bring Ceylon to a stronger level in the stage where she is needed, just let her talent works in ice stage >!/s!<

Medic tends to be used for their utilities though, so let’s see what Ceylon can bring.

Skills:

- RIIC skills:

Always available – Scholar: When assigned to the Workshop to process elite materials, by-product rate increases by 80%.

This is actually the best no-downside skill percentage in the workshop as of now, pushing the by-product rate to 18% per craft. Nian can push it to 20%, but that’s at the cost of an extra 2 morale per craft. This is amazing because other 80% booster only gain this much after their E2 promotion (Meteorite, BP,…) while Ceylon just have it straight outta Siesta.

Available at E2 – Originium Study: When assigned to a Factory, efficiency for Originium-related products increases by 35%.

35% is actually the highest specific-recipe efficiency boost you can get, the other being Gravel for Gold metal, and FEater for EXP cards. The problem is that you shouldn’t be making Originium-related stuff in the factory unless you are pretty sure of what you’re doing, so this 2nd base skill rarely gets used, especially with the fact that her first base skill is amazing as well.

First skill: Concentrated Hydrotherapy

The next healing has increased power and the amount will not be reduced by her trait. At level 7, the next heal is 170% of her ATK and will not be affected by her trait, on 9s cooldown, and can stores 2 charges.

Every 9s, her next heal (if she’s already in the middle of her healing animation) will be really strong. The cooldown is actually long enough to make it feel iffy, but as a pure healer, she can be quite solid with this skill, and even if you still want to do 2 healers after that, which you still can, means that the area they can reliably covered is huuuge. It can store 2 charges, but while that’s a big burst of heal, it doesn’t have a trigger limit, so this skill can also be easily wasted on any scratch damage, all charges included.

At M1, you can push the cooldown down to 8s, and it’s the final cooldown of this skill, M3 only pushes the healing scale further to 200% and allows her to stack 3 charges. It just brings the pure healing power up even more, without any other effect. In the late game, when your units are usually tough enough that you can just let a medic doing some light heal, or even just let healing defender to do the healing, investing resources into a pure healing skill might not be a strong decision (yet). Many people would bring a healer in later stages of the game mainly for their utilities, which this skill doesn’t bring that much.

So what would be her utility skill then?

Second skill: Water Blessing

This used to be the first skill of its kind to provide a special buff to allies, and it still is kinda unique right now. When active, she gains a decent % ATK boost, and then is capable to heal 2 allies at once, but that’s nothing compare to the third aspect of this skill, giving all allies in Ceylon’s range Resist, which reduce 50% of the duration for any chill, stun, and freeze effect. At level 7, this skill gives +50% ATK, allow Ceylon to heal 2 allies per interval, and grant Resist to everyone in her range, last for 30 seconds, but having a cooldown of 80, with an initial SP of 32.

The ATK boost might sound nice, which it kinda is, but still remember that her heal is reduced by 30% on further range, which this skill doesn’t help negate it like her first skill does. At those tiles, the boost is effectively only a 35% boost. However, since she heals 2 allies at once now, all effect is practically double, unless if there’s only 1 ally who’s under attack. That honestly rarely happens in later stage of the game, not to mention her large healing range that can reach more people in order to utilize this double heal.

The third aspect is the main aspect of this skill, granting Resist to allies. Before Ceylon, there were nobody that can do that (I don't remember but maybe Breeze was added before her). Thus, Ceylon is the first of her kind that can assist allies by letting them getting disabled for less time, also include Chill which slow their ATK SPD. This, however, does not affect other type of debuff, like burning from Pompeii, who were there in her event (why wouldn’t her water put out fire faster?), or the def debuff from acid slug, but it’s infinite so even if it does works it’s half of infinite, which is still infinite. There are more but you should get the point by now. And from this part onward, I will refer to these stun, freeze, chill effect as “disables”, as a lingering term from my moba days.

Furthermore, the Resist also affect disables that doesn’t even come from an enemy. Allies who self stun like Specter or Liskarm does benefit from this buff as well, which is great at time. But in general, this buff counter enemies like Defense Crusher, who stun your allies every 3rd attack, the Yeti Caster, who inflict Chill every 3rd attack, the ice slugs, which explode and Chill on death, and the Ice Crystal that inflict Chill every couple seconds. Remember that every 2 Chill cause a Freeze for 10s at the moment of the 2nd Chill, and Frozen allies is essentially stunned, except that they can still block, which is sometime worse because the enemies that are in the stage that can cause your allies to be Chill, can also deal huge bonus damage to Frozen units, most notably the Icecleaver.

Those disables are pretty strong, and you’d often want to protect your operators from it. However, there are only a handful of stages where they introduce enemies that can cause these afflictions, even in Chap 6. So most often time, you’re fine without a Ceylon, but you’re really not because you’re missing out on Ceylon in your miserable life okay sorry let’s get serious again. Outside of Ice Crystal, silence can deal with most of the enemies that inflict these disables (except for FrostNova). Even more than that, the resist buff is tied only to Ceylon’s skill level, which means that Ceylon can just stay at E1 Lv1 but with skill level 7 and still kinda do the same supportive role, of course with less healing and survivabilities. So technically, if you do have Ceylon, the commitment to upgrade Ceylon to a decent level for clearing chap 6 is pretty low. Even more than that again, at M3, the maximum possible level for this skill, you can “only” push the duration to 40s, and initial SP to 40, but cooldown remains unchange, so you’d gain only 10 extra seconds of resist buff (and 10% extra ATK), so the power gained from E2 Ceylon isn’t notable either, unless you’re against Chap 6 FrostNova, which only happen twice. But go E2 Ceylon anyway because she deserves it sorry I went into a relapse.

I haven’t really talk about the Resist buff specifically yet, but there are not many things to talk about. First, who can give it. There are only 4 units that can have Resist (Blaze, Breeze, Ceylon, Nian) and 8 in CN server (Purestream who is Ceylon’s weaker/less-controllable version, Whisperain who is also less controllable, but have a little more utilities, Sideroca, and Folinic). Out of those 8, only 5 can gives Resist to allies, and only 4 can gives indiscriminately. Out of those 3, 1 is kinda stuck in CN until further notice, 1 is a limited operator, 1 who's in the future banner, and Ceylon who is not just a free unit, assuming you participated in the event, but also as said above, can easily give said a long duration Resist to allies at just E1 Lv1.

Second, same Resist buff from multiple allies doesn’t stack. I believe the way they work is by granting the buff called Resist, which this buff then reduces disables time by 50%, so multiple Resist buff only refresh the buff itself, but not its content. Now that’s what I believe it works, how it works in practice may be a different story. Just remember that you get a maximum of 50% less disables time to any operator, until further notice. What that also means that, even with Resist, your op can still get Frozen for 5s instead of 10s, which is enough to break some of your formation. However, because Chill now affect for less time, the chance to get Frozen is substantially less, unless there are 2 sources of Chill inflicted at the same time like 2 Ice Crystal, or 2 exploded ice spiders.

Third, the buff works by cutting the any disable duration down by half when it’s applied. If Resist kicks in after a disable is already in place, then the remaining duration is cut by half. However, the reverse is also true, if Resist ran out when the disable is still in place, then the remaining duration is double. This matters for disable that last more than 4 seconds for Purestream, because at E1 she can only grants 2s of Resist, most disable last much longer than that, the stun from Def Crusher last 5s, Chill and Frozen last 10s. Liskarm self stun for 5s, Specter and Amiya self stun for 10s, Gitano 10-15s,… That means you would need to E2 Purestream to remove 8s of disables, and in addition, she also needs to be able to heal said allies in order to grant said Resist, just like Saria with her SP granting talent. Anyway that’s a bit too much about someone that isn’t Ceylon in a Ceylon post, so let’s get back into it.

I did say the Resist is the main aspect of this skill, but that doesn’t mean the healing part suck, it’s still kinda decent with double healing and higher healing power. The bigger problem, and the main reason she doesn’t get used a lot, is something that was alluded to a couple paragraph before: The stages where you need the Resist buff aren’t many. So in reality, Ceylon in most stages is just a pure healer, and pure healer in later game is kinda outdated, as said earlier as well. The other, more used healers, all bring something else other than pure healing. Warfarin with buff and SP regen, Ptilopsis with SP regen (but also one of the strongest burst heal in the game), Shining with DEF, and Nightingale with RES, even Silence, who get falls off somewhat as well, with global-ish AoE heal as a ST healer.

Another issue with Ceylon is that, her cooldown for the skill is really long (80s at any skill levels, 61.5 with E2 Ptilopsis). That is as long as one of those 6* ultra-busted S3 skill. Honestly, in maps that is heavy disable focuses, it might as well be a S3 of a 6*, but that also means that, at most you can only use it to negate 2 waves, and 90% of the time only 1 specific wave. Which means, for the rest of the time, your allies will still be subjected to the Chill and stuffs. If you mistimed it, good luck for the rest of that heavy wave.

Couple those 2 issues with, lower base ATK, weaker healing on outer edge, higher deploy cost, insignificant talent, and you can see why Ceylon isn’t regarded with high respect. After Chap 6 was out, they loved her for like a week, then everything went back into normal, because again, her specialty is no longer needed. But E2 Ceylon is still a high priority people!!!!!

That should be it for me I guess, both this post, and (the first season of) this series as well. I said back in Platinum post that I will do a Ceylon post to end this series, so here I am. The reason I’m stopping isn’t actually burn out or anything, in fact, I love doing these analysis posts. The issue is simply that I ran out of units to actually write something about, a post about meta unit isn’t needed, and I don’t like doing that either, and so I’ll just wait until I got more units and until we get out of this lull phase as well. I also prefer to wait and do a series rather than just some occasional posts here and there because I want to make it a scheduled habit instead of a spontaneous action.

As for specifically Ceylon, how did you find her? Her healing range is pretty amazing as a pure healer, and while her niche is, well, niche, it’s also about one of the best solutions when you do need it, because sources of silences in this game are still few and far between, and all gacha-dependent. Now of course you need to participate in HoSF/OF event way back (it actually only felt like 3 months ago what the hell), so that means some newer player actually miss out on Ceylon, so it’s no longer guaranteed either.

Also, Hades left early access, then [REDACTED] is released (already AR 39 I need a life jeez), and then Kingdom Rush Vengeance is released, it’s like the universe doesn’t want me to play Arknight in this October, which further explains why I lack units to talk about xD. Anyway, thanks for the support so far, I hope you enjoyed this last analysis post in a while, and maybe see you next time for season 2 opening with Bibeak.