Reed the Flame Shadow is the first nonlimited 6* alter, of the 5* Vanguard Reed. While Reed1 has long been a fan favorite thanks to her personality, lore, and swishy tail (among many other reasons), she has gotten the short end of the stick in terms of gameplay. Thankfully her alter finally does her justice, boasting outstanding healing, single-target Arts dps, and AoE Arts dps, alongside both offensive and defensive debuffs. Reed2 is an operator with both a high floor and high high ceiling; her raw numbers make it easy to get good performance from her, but her kit rewards skillful use even more, which this guide will hopefully help with.

Basic Information

Reed2 is a 6* Incantation Medic, meaning she’s functionally a Caster who heals allies by attacking enemies. And despite being a hybrid she’s no master-of-none, boasting both the highest hps and Arts dps in the game. And she doesn’t have any major drawbacks to compensate either; the closest thing she has to a “flaw” is that she has to choose between single-target with s2 and AoE with s3, rather than having a skill that does massive single-target damage in an AoE like Surtr/Mlynar/etc.

Offensive Stats

Reed2 has below-average Attack, a 1.6 second attack interval, low dps, slightly below-average hps, and a 3x4 range. While her base stats aren’t impressive, her talents and skills are where most of her power comes from, and her range is good.

Defensive Stats

Reed2 has below-average HP, low Defense, and 20 Res. She can self-heal and isn’t meant to be tanking in the first place so she doesn’t need high defensive stats anyway.

Cost and Trust

Reed2 has a low 17 DP cost, undercutting nearly all Casters and Medics. This is 1 lower than it “should” be since it’s identical to the 5* Incantation Medic Hibiscus the Purifer, but both Surtr and Orchid have had similar discounts for far longer so it’s unlikely to be patched. Reed2’s trust is a mixed +50 Attack +30 Defense, the latter of which is sadly wasted.

Trait: Attacks deal Arts damage. When attacking enemies, recover HP to an ally within Attack Range for 50% of the damage dealt

Something important to note here is that Reed’s healing is based on damage (as opposed to Nightmare s2 which is only based on Nightmare’s own Attack). This means that if Reed2’s attacking an enemy with Res, her healing output will also be reduced. But on the other hand, effects that increase damage taken by enemies will also increase her healing proportionately. Another thing to keep in mind is that Reed2 only heals when she has enemies to attack, so you have to position her more aggressively than most Medics, she can’t top off allies during downtime, and she’s at a disadvantage vs the likes of poison haze and mortars that outrange her. Also, be aware that certain effects that reduce damage to 0 will prevent Reed2’s healing from triggering; this includes the likes of Shields and Barriers (if the latter is enough to absorb all damage from the attack), but not dodge. Reed2’s healing also ignores the “only take 1 damage/attack” property of IW enemies and her own event’s Embers, healing based on how much damage she would have done if they were regular enemies.

First talent: Cinder

When dealing damage, has 30% chance to inflict Cinder (-20% Attack, 30% Arts Fragility) to the enemy, does not stack and lasts for 6 seconds

One of the centerpieces of Reed2’s kit, Cinder is a phenomonal debuff. The Arts Fragility, as hinted above, increases not only her dps but also her hps by 30%, which goes a long way towards compensating for her low base dps/hps. And since it’s a debuff it also amps the damage dealt by other operators; it doesn’t stack with other sources of Arts Fragility, but at the time of writing Hibiscus2 and Qanipalaat are the only other operators with said debuff. Suzuran/Gnosis apply regular Fragile, and Saria s3 applies a unique debuff, so Reed2’s debuff will stack with theirs. The Attack debuff is very powerful as well; it reduces Arts/True damage dealt by enemies by 20%, but due to the physical damage formula being subtractive it reduces physical damage by more than 20%. Both of these combined make Reed2 very effective at keeping operators alive. On its own the 30% chance isn’t enough to reliably maintain 100% uptime of Cinder on a single target, but all of her skills will improve her ability to apply it. As with most debuffs in AK it is applied before damage is calculated, so attacks that apply it will benefit from the 30% Arts Fragility. If Reed2 leaves the field all Cinders are removed.

Second talent: Incandescence

When healing other allies, Reed2 receives 50% of the amount healed.

This talent is not nearly as important as her first, but it’s still handy. It lets Reed2 focus her heals on other units instead of possibly having to heal herself if she takes stray hits.

First skill: Swift Strike γ

At m3{m0}, Swift Strike γ has 15{10} initial SP, costs 35{39} SP, recovers SP over time, lasts 35 seconds, and is manually activated. It gives Reed2 +45%{+34%} Attack and +45{+35} ASPD.

While Swift Strike is a generic skill, it’s one of the best alongside Power Strike, and the faster ASPD gives her more chances to apply Cinder. S1 still pales in comparison to her other skills, however, and loses to s3 in every respect aside from slightly higher uptime (50% vs ~43%).

Second skill: Wither and Thrive

At m3{m0}, Wither and Thrive has 18{15} initial SP, costs 27{33} SP, recovers SP over time, lasts 20 seconds, and is manually activated. It summons rings of 3 fireballs around up to 2 operators, prioritizing the most recently deployed allies on ground tiles, followed by the most recently deployed allies on high tiles. The fireballs rotate around the recipients at a 0.5 tile radius (completing a full revolution every 2.4s) and have a hitbox with a 0.6 tile radius, dealing Arts damage equal to 240%{190%} of Reed’s Attack when they collide with a grounded enemy, with each fireball having an internal 1.5s cooldown on how often it can deal damage. The healing the fireballs produce via Reed2’s trait will always target the operator the fireballs are orbiting; operators like Penance with healing immunity are still valid fireball recipients but the healing will be wasted, while summons like Phantom’s clone are not valid recipients at all. Fireballs will despawn if Reed2 or the recipient leaves the field.

The fireballs have a lot of details to their mechanics, but the tl;dr is that in a “normal” scenario (you deploy a melee unit, then enemies walk up to them and are blocked) s2 will hit every ~0.8s on average, gated by how fast they rotate rather than their internal cooldown. In unusual scenarios (enemies approaching from multiple directions, helidropping the blocker directly on to an enemy so the enemy is closer to the center of the tile) s2 will hit every 0.5s at best. Note that Reed2 does not stop attacking during s2, and the fireballs can apply Cinder; with their hitrate it’s safe to assume 100% Cinder uptime on anything that isn’t dying immediately.

Reed2 s2 has the highest single-target Arts dps in the game, and nothing else even comes close; for perspective even if s2 is only hitting every 0.8s with one set of fireballs (and Reed2’s basic attacks), an e2 90 Reed2 will deal ~2.8k dps, more than Surtr s3 or a no-module Texas2 s2. If you get both sets of fireballs hitting the same enemy and/or get them to hit off cooldown, then the dps skyrockets, up to ~7.8k in ideal circumstances–and while getting a perfect setup is hard, “drop a second melee unit on top of the target who is already blocked” is still ~80% of that maximum strength for minimal effort. Or, given that stacking fireballs is already overkill most of the time, you can simply take advantage of Reed2 being able to put the sets of fireballs into two separate lanes. There’s not much need to worry about the safety of blockers either, as 50% of the fireballs’ enormous dps is already enough to heal through almost anything even before accounting for Cinder’s Attack debuff. And while s2 is intended to be a single-target skill, it’s worth mentioning that thanks to its overwhelming dps it can still burn through groups of enemies quickly.

But what really makes this skill ridiculous is that despite having both the highest hps and the game and highest single-target Arts dps, the rotation is excellent. 20s duration and 27s cooldown is fast enough that s2 can be used almost every wave. While the short duration does make the total dps suffer in theory, in practice s2’s sheer dps is enough to compensate, and if you helidrop in a second blocker as described above then the total damage becomes a six digit number. But even if that’s not enough, Reed2 s2 is a pure attack/damage scale skill instead of using +Attack, making it extremely receptive to buffs, comparable to Exusiai s3 if both sets of fireballs are hitting (Reed s2 has slightly higher ascale/sec, but Exusiai being physical means she gets a greater relative improvement).

The one drawback s2 has is its range, or lack thereof; the maximum range of the fireballs is a 1.1 tile radius circle centered on the recipient, limiting s2’s effectiveness against scattered groups of enemies. A related aspect is that s2 targets operators, so undeployable tiles will limit its potential range. Neither of these are dealbreakers given that it’s inteded as a single-target skill in the first place, but it is a complication that other ranged operators mostly lack.

Third skill: Ember of Life

At m3{m0}, Ember of Life has 30{20} initial SP, costs 40 SP, recovers SP over time, lasts 30 seconds, and is manually activated. It gives Reed2 +60%{+40%} Attack, allows her to attack 2 targets, and gives talent 1 a 100% chance to apply an enhanced Cinder. These enhanced Cinders last until the skill ends and deal Arts damage per second equal to 60%{30%} of Reed2’s Attack in addition to their normal effects. When an enemy dies while inflicted with this enhanced Cinder, all enemies within a 1.7 tile radius have enhanced Cinder applied immediately and after a 0.1s delay take Arts damage equal to 140%{110%} of Reed2’s Attack.

S3 will utterly annihilate trash mobs (and anything else unfortunate enough to be caught inside a group of them) due to the chain reaction of on-death explosions, to the point that it can cause the game to lag on maps with large enough hordes. The 1.7 tile radius is one of the widest splash AoEs in the game (equal to Dusk s1), and both the explosions and the DoT also trigger Reed2’s trait so it produces impressive bursts of healing as well. By modern AK’s standards s3’s rotation is on the long side of things, though not unduly so. There’s not much else to say about s3’s performance vs hordes.

Rather, the main point of discussion is how well s3 does when it’s not able to turn maps into a sea of flames, such as against a smaller number of elite enemies, the survivors of a chain reaction, or a boss. In these situations s3 still has solid dps and excellent; compared to similar dps+debuff skills like Ifrit s3 and Gnosis s3, Reed2 s3 has a weaker offensive debuff but higher personal dps, a defensive debuff, and healing. While in a pure single-target scenario s2 will be better as long as range isn’t an issue (s1 will always be worse), s3 is far from reliant on hordes of trash mobs to be useful.

Mastery Choices

Reed2 has some of the easiest mastery choices in the game: both s2 and s3 are very strong and have high mastery gains, so m6 is the way to go. If you must choose, I favor s2; I consider it overall easier to use, it has a better rotation, and the massive focused dps and hps is generally harder to come by than clearing out large groups of mobs.

Usage

Reed2’s a surprisingly simple operator to use for as complex as her skills can be, with the main thing you need to pay attention to being her positioning.

General Tips

  • Reed2 should normally be treated as a Caster first and a Medic second. Viewed as a Caster, Reed has a range advantage against most of them and her offense is more than enough to compete with even the best Casters, while having additional utility in the form of Cinder and healing. Viewed as a Medic, she does still have higher burst hps and an Attack debuff, but her offskill hps is erratic thanks to Cinder not having 100% uptime and enemy Res reducing her healing, and reliance on hitting enemies can be a dealbreaker if there’s enough enemies that outrange her and/or environmental damage. Furthermore, Reed2’s effectively at a range disadvantage vs normal Medics, as she has to balance her positioning between covering more enemies to enable her healing and covering more allies to recieve her healing, which gets even worse if you try to have her cover multiple lanes.
  • Therefore, if you are focusing on her healing, you shouldn’t expect her to cover all your team’s healing needs the way a dedicated healer can. The fewer operators she’s expected to heal, the more freedom you have when positioning her, and the more reliable her healing will be. Also, keep in mind that in terms of healing her main advantage is her burst hps–s2 has the highest hps in the game so it’s fantastic for sustaining through bosses, and as long as there are multiple targets s3 has top-tier hps so it can easily sustain through heavy waves of elites.
  • Both s2 and s3 have high enough initial SP that you can helidrop them, giving you access to their massive hps (and dps) very quickly. While this generally isn’t fast enough to be used reactively to save a dying operator, proactive use of this can let you helidrop other operators into dangerous situations alongisde her, counting on Reed2 to keep them alive past those first few seconds.
  • While s2’s fireballs prioritize operators on melee tiles and their range is a lot more convenient when you have blockers to keep enemies in place, fireballs ending up on a ranged operator (such as Reed herself) isn’t necessarily a complete waste. They’ll still hit enemies passing by said operator, which is often enough to clean up squisier enemies.
  • Reed2 may have low defensive stats, but her healing still gives her much better survivability than the vast majority of ranged dps. You can exploit this to position her more aggressively and help make sure she has enemies to attack more of the time, possibly even placing her solo. That normally restricts you to using s3, however, as s2 likely won’t have any useful recipients if you do this.

S2 Overlaps

While s2 hardly needs the sets of fireballs to overlap to be great, it’s also not that hard to overlap them, and doing so nets you a couple thousand extra dps.

  • The largest overlap area is when the recipients are orthogonally adjacent, but this more-or-less requires that the enemy be on the tile of one of the recipients. This normally requires a little more setup, such as helidropping in a second unit after the first blocks the enemy, using a block 0 units, or intentionally allowing enemies to leak past the frontmost unit, but also typically makes it so at least one of the sets of fireballs will be hitting off cooldown, giving even more dps.
  • The easiest method is when the recipients are diagonally adjacent, not requiring as much setup–you can even achieve this easily by having Reed2 as one of the recipients, with the other being a melee unit to handle the blocking. This method does have a smaller overlap so enemies that go to one side of a tile rather than moving down the center might escape one of the sets of fireballs, and generally you can’t get the extra hitrate with this setup so the dps won’t be as high as the first, but it’s a fairly small loss.
  • Included for completeness, when there’s 1 tile of space between the recipients there’s still a sliver of overlap, but it’s near impossible to use unless the enemy is obediently idling in the center of the tile.

Synergies

Reed2 inherently works well with just about anyone, so this section is for those that have something special to their interaction with her.

Surtr

S3 Surtr has extremely high Arts dps and ignores some Res, but also ramping HP drain. S2 Reed2 has extremely high Arts dps, inflicts a debuff that increases Arts damage recieved and decreases Attack, and has the highest hps in the game. So not only are these two both very strong on their own, but as if that wasn’t enough Reed2 also provides a massive boost to Surtr’s performance. And both of these skills are even helidrop-friendly, so you don’t even have to change up Surtr’s use case to take advantage of this.

Enablers

I mentioned above that Reed2’s s2 has no +Attack but lots of ascale/s, making her highly compatible with Attack buffers. On top of that s2’s short duration and high dps line up well with the typically short durations of enablers in general.

Skadi2

Due to Reed2’s low base Attack, flat Attack buffs are at an advantage vs % Attack buffs for her, Skadi2’s regen covers for Reed2’s possible healing downtime, and her Defense buff compounds Reed2’s attack debuff. In return Reed2 can keep Skadi2 alive during the latter’s s3, and since Skadi2’s buffs are AoE, other units can benefit from them alongside Reed2’s Arts Fragility.

Fast/Medium Redeploys

Reed2 s2 has a fast rotation, but limited range. F/mrds (such as Executors, Merchants, Agents, and a few others like X3 Skadi1) offer the ability to place fireball recipients where you want them, when you want them, moving their location around between casts of s2. They also make it trivially easy to get orthogonal overlaps for maximum dps. All of them are usable for this, but a few have extra advantages:

Texas2

Texas2 s2 has extremely high Arts and debuffs Res, but she’s squishy. Much like Surtr she pairs well with s2 Reed2; she doesn’t get quite as much on her own since her HP isn’t automatically draining, but she gives more back since she debuffs Res, and she’s also a helidrop. You can even go for a triple whammy by dropping Reed2/Surtr/Texas2 together on some poor victim, but good luck finding things with enough bulk to justify this.

Yato2

Yato2 normally runs s3 or s2; in both cases she’s a poor choice with Reed2 s2 as those skills unload all their damage in only a few seconds, meaning she’d just be standing around doing basic attacks for most of Reed s2’s duration. However, Yato2 s1 has the same duration as Reed2 s2, with one of its main drawbacks being that Yato2 on her own is too squishy to reliably pull off the entire skill, which Reed2 easily resolves. Furthermore, Yato2 s1 also has extremely good scaling with Attack buffers, though much like Reed2/Surtr/Texas2 this is going to be overkill.

Block 0s

Do you want to have the benefits of fireball overlaps but deploying an f/mrd once the enemy is blocked is too much work? Ask yourself, Dokutah, if Block 0s might be right for you! Simply deploy an Ambusher or Liberator in front of your blocker and unsuspecting enemies will walk into the overlap zone by themselves, so all you have to do is activate s2.

Gatherers

Reed2’s s3 can benefit from having a lot of mobs stacked up in one spot, turning them into a nuke to wipe out some tougher target along with them. The main candidates for this are s2 Weedy, s3 Gladiia, and s3 Lee. While this is normally impractical, it may be helpful if fighting a boss that summons minions.

Base Skills

At e0 Reed2’s base skill is Red Dragon’s Blood, a Training Room skill. Red Dragon’s Blood provides +30% skill training speed for Casters and Medics.

At e1 Reed2 gains a second base skill, Leader, a Control Center skill. Leader restores 0.05 morale per hour to all Operators in all Dorms. (Only the strongest stacked effect of this type takes place)

At e2 Red Dragon’s Blood upgrades, providing +45% skill training speed for Casters and Medics.

Reed2’s base skills are inferior to even generic skills.

Closing

There’s a lot more I could say about Reed2, but it’s ultimately minor stuff that you’ll pick up as you use her, though if you have any specific questions don’t hesitate to ask. Since I’ve moved to kbin now, I might work on migrating and updating my older operator guides here as well. The next new guide I intend to make is for Qiubai.

In case you’d like to see Reed2 in action for yourself, here are some videos (possible spoilers ahead). These are generally showing her performance in extreme scenarios and at max level, but they should give you an idea of what her upper limit is like. There are a lot less videos than normal this time, for a few different reasons. One of them is that bilibili searches for Reed2 are oversaturated with videos of giant s3 explosion chains on maps like H7-1 or 11-6, making it hard to find the good stuff. Another is that, while Reed2 is an integral part of Medicknights, Medicknights can’t really use her to full effect the way someone like Blemishine could be used in a Defenderknights clear–Medicknights has no good recipients for s2’s fireballs since Mon3tr is a summon, and if there’s one thing Medicknights doesn’t lack it’s healing. And finally, low op clears tend not to use s2 because it normally needs multiple units (Reed2 and a fireball recipient) to work properly. All of these together make it hard to find videos that showcase s2 especially, but to a lesser extent s3 as well.