Table of Contents
Rarity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Element: Spectro
Weapon: Rectifier
Early Overview
Releasing in the first half of the version 1.3, The Shorekeeper is a 5★ rectifier user of the Spectro element, filling the role of a support. Being an entirely new arrival, nothing concrete is known about her outside of the fact that she protects the Black Shores. If you don’t remember them being a thing, just know that it's the faction Aalto and Camellya are part of.
Compared to Verina and Baizhi, The Shorekeeper trades some raw healing potential for the ability to increase her team’s Crit Rate and Crit DMG via her Resonance Liberation. Curiously enough, she is also the first character to additionally feature a Rover-specific bonus tied to an Inherent Skill, in her case a passive increase to Rover (Female)’s Energy Regeneration while they’re on the same team. With that in mind, it’s not a stretch to say she is more of a buffer type than a healer.
Because having her crit buff scale with Energy Regen wasn’t gimmicky enough, The Shorekeeper has a second mechanic as well. Tied to her Forte Circuit this time, basic attacking an enemy will generate a Collapsed Core next to them. Those cores will then proceed to burst and each spawn a butterfly which flings itself at the enemy. Unlike Zhezhi’s Inklit Spirits, Shorekeeper’s metalmarks do not count as a Coordinated Attack but rather a part of her basic attack.
The Shorekeeper, being the first limited support released since the game’s launch, has been on everyone’s radar ever since the rumours of her hit public discourse. Combining healing and offensive buffs makes her a better generalist than Verina, but make no mistake in assuming that she will strictly invalidate her - The Shorekeeper is a buffer first and healer second, the exact opposite of Verina’s archetype. Rather, she ends up being a strong sidegrade, made especially more valuable due to the overall lacking support lineup.
And more importantly, Shorekeeper’s presence in your roster would allow Verina to finally rest up. Poor girl could use some sleep after all this time supporting every team ever...
Skills
Kuro Games have thankfully toned down the amount of prose in the skill descriptions to manageable levels and mostly limited it to The Shorekeeper’s Forte Circuit, though they still insist on needlessly giving every little thing its own unique name.
As a general rule of thumb - unless specified otherwise, the damage portion of her abilities scales with her ATK stat and the healing portion scales with her max HP.
Basic Attacks
The Shorekeeper can perform four consecutive attacks in moderately quick succession, dealing Spectro damage. Additionally, each successful hit will generate a Collapsed Core near the struck enemy, up to a maximum of five present. More on those in the Forte Circuit section.
Her plunging attack, aside from working exactly as you’d expect it to, will also generate a Collapsed Core on hit. The description does not specify whether hitting multiple enemies will create more than one, but it's fair to assume that is the case. Curiously enough, the Dodge Counter move she also has access to does not seem to generate Collapsed Cores.
The Shorekeeper’s heavy attack works a bit differently from other characters’ however, and as such requires a closer look.
Upon using heavy attack input while her Forte bar is not full, The Shorekeeper will assume the form of a blue butterfly and begin to continuously consume stamina while moving forward. This does not count as actually flying though, so any ideas you might’ve had about soaring the skies this way can be immediately put to rest. As a consolation, she will automatically pick up nearby plants in this form... by turning them into more butterflies. Really.
For every second spent in her alternate form, The Shorekeeper will generate a segment of her Forte bar. Once she uses any offensive action or all of her stamina is spent, she will turn back into human form and deal Spectro damage to a target, as well as generate a Collapsed Core for every Forte bar segment gained this way.
Resonance Skill
The Shorekeeper restores HP of all party members and summons five butterflies to automatically target and kamikaze themselves into nearby enemies. Basic attacking immediately after casting lets The Shorekeeper skip the first portion of the chain. Aside from being able to cast this in mid-air, no gimmicks here.
Forte Circuit
Collapsed Cores
Hitting enemies with basic and plunging attacks creates a Collapsed Core near a struck enemy. Up to five of them can exist at the same time and each can exist for up to 6 seconds.
After the Core expires, it will turn into a butterfly and immediately seek out either the enemy it was created from or the closest enemy within range if the original target had died or moved out of range. If The Shorekeeper creates a new Collapsed Core while the maximum amount already exists, the oldest one will immediately expire.
Empirical Data
Every time The Shorekeeper attacks an enemy with a basic attack, plunging attack or her Dodge Counter, she will gain a stack of Empirical Data, filling up her Forte bar by one section per stack up to 5 maximum. The gain rate is actually listed in the Forte description this time, but the short version is that all mentioned moves grant one stack and Basic Attack 3 grants two.
Casting a heavy attack while her Forte bar is full will have a slightly different effect depending on whether she is mid-air or on the ground. While on the ground, The Shorekeeper will deal five instances of damage and pull all enemies nearby, and while in the air, she will instead use a single stronger attack without the pull effect.
In both cases, all of her Empirical Data gets consumed and The Shorekeeper forces all of her Collapsed Cores to immediately expire.
Resonance Liberation
Upon casting, The Shorekeeper creates a moderately wide zone centred on herself, called Outer Stellarealm, which lasts for 30 seconds. Once created, and every 3 seconds thereafter, the zone will heal all characters present inside it for a portion of The Shorekeeper’s max HP.
When a party member uses their Intro Skill within the bounds of Outer Stellarealm, the zone will be enhanced to Inner Stellarealm. In this state, the zone’s effect will be enhanced to also provide the characters within with bonus Crit Rate of up to 12.5%, scaling with The Shorekeeper’s Energy Regeneration stat.
If another character uses their Intro Skill, the Inner Stellarealm will be further enhanced into Supernal Stellarealm. On top of both effects listed, it will also provide all teammates present within it with up to 25% bonus Crit Damage, again scaling with The Shorekeeper’s Energy Regen. It will also enhance Shorekeeper’s next Intro Skill usage, but more on that in a second.
In case you do not want to do the necessary maths, both crit-related effects require 250% total Energy Regen to reach their cap - 100% base, plus 150% from any other source.
Intro and Outro
Intro
The Shorekeeper’s Intro Skill has two variants.
The first variant, Enlightenment, is the default state of her Intro. After a short delay, The Shorekeeper will heal all nearby party members and summon five butterflies to track and ram into the target, dealing Spectro damage. In this version of the Intro, the damage dealt is considered as Resonance Skill DMG and scales with The Shorekeeper’s ATK.
The second variant, Discernment, is used when her Resonance Liberation reaches the state of Supernal Stellarealm. The Shorekeeper will release her energy, healing all party members and dealing Spectro damage to all enemies nearby. This damage scales with her maximum HP, is considered as Resonance Liberation DMG and is guaranteed to critically strike. However, this variant of the Intro will also consume the Supernal Stellarealm.
Outro
The Outro Skill summons two butterflies to orbit the party members, granting the team a two-part buff that lasts for 30 seconds.
The simpler of the two effects is the team-wide 15% All-DMG Amplify effect. This needs no introduction, but for the reminder’s sake, it applies multiplicatively after all other buffs and effects.
For the second effect, whenever the on-field character gets staggered or knocked up for any reason, pressing the dodge button will immediately break them out of the animation and trigger perfect dodge, with all its benefits and other effects working off it attached. This can happen five times per Outro use and has no cooldown for triggering it - though ideally you’d never want to have to use it, for obvious reasons.
Inherent Skills
The Shorekeeper’s first Inherent Skill, Life Entwined, is a spin on Verina’s skill Grace of Life. Once every 10 minutes, when a character other than the woman herself takes fatal damage, The Shorekeeper will prevent them from going down and transfer 50% of her maximum health to that character. This effect cannot down her and it will heal for that amount regardless of how much of Shorekeeper’s health is actually consumed.
Her second skill, Self Gravitation, increases Shorekeeper’s Energy Regen by 10% when any party member is present within her Stellarealm. If the character in question is Rover (Male), regardless of their chosen element, the effect extends to them as well.
Resonance Chain
| Sequence 1 | The Shorekeeper’s Stellarealms generated by her Resonance Liberation have their radius increased by 150%, their duration increased by 10 seconds and no longer end prematurely upon using her Intro Skill Discernment. |
| Sequence 2 | The Outer Stellarealm now also grants 40% ATK Bonus to the team members inside it. |
| Sequence 3 | Casting the Resonance Liberation now grants an additional 20 Concerto Energy to The Shorekeeper, once every 25 seconds. |
| Sequence 4 | The Shorekeeper gains a 70% Healing Bonus to the healing applied through her Resonance Skill. |
| Sequence 5 | The pulling effect of The Shorekeeper’s Basic Attack 3 and Forte Heavy Attack Illation has its range increased by 30%. |
| Sequence 6 | The Shorekeeper’s Intro Skill has its base damage multiplier multiplicatively increased by 42%. Additionally, casting the Intro Skill will additively increase The Shorekeeper’s Crit DMG by 500%. |
Possible synergies
As a character tailor-made to fill in the support role, The Shorekeeper will synergise well with almost every Resonator in the game, save those filling the same role as her.
Accompanying Rate-ups
The accompanying 4★ units in Shorekeeper's banner are Taoqi, Yangyang and Chixia. Not too terrible, all things considered.
After the much-needed headstart of being given to the player for free as part of the story’s introduction, Chixia and Yangyang both scale fairly well with additional Resonance Chain sequences, with both of them greatly appreciating the extra damage and quality of life they provide. This is especially visible on Yangyang, whose kit suffers a lot without the latter half of her Chain.
The flip side to that is Taoqi. Despite sporting a very desirable Outro, she is stunted a lot by her slow, clunky skill lineup and very low Concerto Energy gain rate. This is somewhat remedied by Discord - which also happens to be on a rate-up - but she would need it to be at rank 5 for any tangible effect. By that point, it’s easier and far cheaper to just run somebody else instead, regardless of the team composition in question.
In the weapon department, we’ve got the newly released Endless Collapse alongside Discord and Comet Flare.
Endless Collapse is a sword that mostly ends up as a different flavour of Commando of Conviction, trading a bit of ATK% bonus for higher base ATK and extra Resonance Energy on skill use. Depending on the specific character it is being used on, it may prove to be a direct upgrade over the Commando thanks to its better energy economy. Even when that’s not the case, it does not fall short enough to call it anything less than a viable alternative that’s about on par with the BP-exclusive Lumingloss.
Discord, although a decent utility broadblade, has few potential use cases. Aside from Taoqi, all other users of the weapon class released to date fill the main DPS role and as such prefer more offensive options like Autumntrace and Waning Redshift.
Comet Flare meanwhile fails to be useful in any capacity. With all three premier supports - The Shorekeeper, Verina and Baizhi - sporting a rectifier and specifically preferring Variation for its high Energy Regen bonus and extra Concerto Energy gained on skill use, the extra healing provided by Comet Flare fails to find a single situation where it’d outperform simply cycling the characters and their skills faster.
Should you pull?
First and foremost: if The Shorekeeper is a character you will enjoy playing or is your waifu, then don't let this stop you from pulling her. At the end of the day, it’s your account. Note that we will be using information provided by the latest beta test and this information is subject to change.
Yes?
- You like The Shorekeeper’s design and her promotional material left you with a positive impression
- You’d prefer running a more offensive sidegrade to Verina in your team
- You need a healer and haven’t built any other unit to that end... for some reason
- You are a fan of the Black Shores faction
No?
- “Fuck it, we ball”
- You consider Verina, Baizhi and Rover (Spectro) to be enough
- You are saving for Camellya
- You have lepidopterophobia
Regardless of your decision, always remember to spend responsibly and to never use “building pity” as an excuse for gambling.
