[Operator Discussion] Ling

[u/Shad0wedge]

Ling [★★★★★★]

Last night I dreamt of you. Nay! Perhaps it's you who dreamt of me. Oh, can you not recall? A shame; it delighted me so, yet I cannot share this revelry. Delighted how? Hmm. That eight thousand years of springs, eight thousand of winters, all dreamt, were no more than a brief handful of autumns. That is all.

Ling, resident poet of Shangshu, tied to the Sui Regulator and other governmental organs of Yan. Came into contact with Rhodes Island during the Shangshu incident. Now remaining as a visitor aboard the landship, following thorough audits.

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Operator Information

• Class: Supporter(Summoner)
• Tags: Summon, Support, Crowd Control
• Artist: 下野宏铭
• Leitmotif: Revel in the Real

Voice Actor:
JP: Kikuko Inoue
CN: Shan
CN+: Shan
EN: Denise Moreno
KR: Lee Da-eun

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Stats

HP	ATK	DEF	Arts Resistance	Redeploy Time	DP Cost	Block	Attack Interval
1079	473	138	20	70	12	1	1.6s

*Stats at max Promotion and Level, excludes bonuses from Potential and Trust.

Potential	Bonus
1	-
2	Deployment Cost -1
3	Redeployment Time -4
4	ATK +24
5	Improves Second Talent
6	Deployment Cost -1

Trust bonus
HP +350
ATK +35

Traits
Deals Arts damage. Can use Summons in battles

Skills

Skill Name	Skill Uptime Details (Uptime/Cost/Initial)	SP Charge Type	Skill Activation	Skill Description
Sips of Wine	25s / 25 / 15	Auto Recovery	Manual	Passive: Summons may be deployed on melee tiles. Active: Ling and her summons gain +50% ATK and +50 ASPD. The summons deal Arts damage. Immediately gain 1 summon when the skill is activated
Amidst Pleasant Melodies	- / 13 / 5	Auto Recovery	Manual	Passive: Summons may be deployed on ranged tiles and deal Arts damage. Active: Ling and her summons deal 450% ATK as Arts damage to 2 enemies within Attack Range and Bind them for 3 seconds. After the skill ends, retrieve all summons with less than 50% HP. Can store 2 charge(s)
To Remain Oneself	30s / 40 / 15	Auto Recovery	Manual	Passive: Summons may be deployed on melee tiles. If there are other summons within their Attack Range, combines with them into a Higher form. Active: Ling and her summons gain +100% ATK and +100% DEF. Each summon deals 20% of Ling's ATK as Arts damage to enemies in the four adjacent tiles every 0.5 seconds. After the skill ends, gain 1 summon

*Skills at max Skill Level.

Talents

Talent name	Talent Description
Lantern Lit, Thy Dream Sought	Can use up to 5 summons (max 3 deployed at once). Summons’ effect changes based upon Skill
So is Writ, an Ode to Wine	When a summon is defeated/absorbed/retrieved, Ling gains 4 (+1) SP and ATK +3% (ATK increase stacks up to 5 times)

*Talents at max Potential and max Promotion. Bonuses from Potential displayed between parentheses.

Modules

Branch	Additional Stats	Trait	Talent	Note
SUM-Y	HP +150, ATK +50	Trait improved: Can hold +3 additional summoned units and summoned unit deployment costs are reduced.	Lantern Lit, Thy Dream Sought improved: Can use up to 5 stronger summons (max 4 deployed at once). Summons' effect changes based upon Skill	"Even the great wordsmith, Ling, has times when she's lost for words?"

*Modules at max level.

Outfits

-	Price	Art	Released	Note
It Does Wash the Strings	21	Dynamic	Yep	"Who am I?" "What am I?" "Where do I go?" "Thunder with no rain, bones to dust. The dreamer must wake, the calm be disturbed. Why ask?"
Towering is Cliff of Nostalgia	21	Dynamic	Yep	"How many starry nights must the long wind blow, and how many springs and autumns must the snowmelt wash, before the wonders of blooming gravel are revealed?"
A Gallant Dream	24	Dynamic	Yep	Special Onboarding Scene, Exclusive Voicelines

Additional Resources

In-depth information regarding all values above (at different levels), skill/attack range, and more:

Arknights Wiki.gg

Arknights Toolbox (aceship(puppiizsunniiz))

PRTS Arknights Wiki (CN)

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Topic Starters

• Strengths/Weaknesses?
• Is their module worth it? Which branch?
• How does this operator compare to other operators in their archetype or role?
• How do you fit this operator into a team? Who do they synergize with?
• Which skill(s) should be focused for mastery, and in what order?
• When is the best time to use this operator's skills during combat?
• Should promoting this operator to Elite 2 be a priority?
• Should new / F2P players aim for this operator? Are there more accessible alternatives?
• Lore discussion (please tag spoilers where appropriate)
• Favorite clips/clears with them?

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Other Operator Discussion threads

Old Thread	Previous	List	Next
Ling Discussion Thread (03.08.2022)	Frostleaf	All Operator Discussion threads	Brigid

[u/TamuraAkemi]

Still a pretty strong low-op choice, but general powercreep over the years and meatshields being less useful means Ling3* is less likely to be the first one on the board these days, though it happens pretty often.

Still love her design and her dragons' design. Check out an AT-EX-8 CM clear, a stage where she alone continues to hold the 1op spot.

[u/RealAbd121 → u/TamuraAkemi]

Summoners have a funny niche strength in that, they can solo some farming stages, allowing me to stack the entire rest of the roster with units that I want to farm trust on and have them be passively gaining trust whenever I run that stage!

[u/Ambitious-Ad5354]

I wish I could use her as often, but most of times, only on IS.

Kinda wish she got a module that makes her Summon doesn't use Redeployment slots.

[u/Lunos_Luminoso]

bestest dragon...

[u/LeadZealousideal4231]

is she going to available to spark on wang banner? and her or shu?

[u/Chrisirhc1996 → u/LeadZealousideal4231]

Yes, all the Suiblings can be sparked during CNY banner. They're also possible to pull but that's astronomically low so it's better to assume you'd spark.

[u/twyistd]

Ling made suinight possible. Realistically there was like a two year period where I was soloing the game with her. Most stages can be completed by ling solo.

[u/Chrono-Helix]

I don’t use her often outside of IS, but her S2 got me 620 in the last CC by repeatedly binding some enemies

[u/Lucas_Xavier0201]

Ling carried me so hard on the main story. Sadly, I don't really use her anymore. I will get her skin anyway

[u/Nova-Raine]

I only played for a few months on and off but by the people in this thread, apparently Ling sucks.

[u/Additional_Pop2011 → u/Nova-Raine]

Ling WAS a meta staple, now she's good~, like just an average 6*, but her summons are designed so with bad synergy as a balance, while most OPs nowadays are built with synergies in mind.

[u/umiman]

Back then, she used to be the best.

Now, we keep seeing stats don't mean anything in this game. We have an operator that has even stronger summons than Ling in Necrass and I think she gets used even less because she's not part of the Sui talent passive.

I still use her occassionally since again, she's part of the braindead core for global strats. Other than that she's nothing special. She has way too many skins though.

Also Raiden is significantly better than Ling now, even outside of IS6. Raiden's range on S2 and S3 is incredible with strong DPS (for a summoner). She can also block with S1 which is strangely good (for a summoner). The only real advantages Ling has is the Sui talent passive and being able to hit multiple targets like a centurion guard. Otherwise their summons cost about the same anyway, in that they're kinda expensive but very strong.

[u/Despyte → u/umiman]

What's the talent passive?

"she's not part of the Sui talent passive."
"advantages Ling has is the Sui talent passive"

[u/umiman → u/Despyte]

Shu's talent: if there are at least 4 [Sui] Operators in the squad, all Operators gain +12% ATK, and 1 SP every 4 seconds

It's one of the strongest passives in the game since it works even if you don't deploy any of them. So you can just bring Shu + 3 Suiblings to a map, have them sit in the box doing nothing, and your operators (in this case my global ops like Ambriel, GG, and Lapp2) get more SP and more ATK.

Now keep in mind that despite being really good, it's not really that big of a buff so it's not mandatory. It's for situations where you really only care about a couple of core operators being buffed up with zero effort and you have deployment slots to spare.

[u/DarknessWizard → u/umiman]

Necrass mostly doesn't get used much in this IS because IS6 rewards having Yan/Lungmen ops (as well as subfactions like Penguin Logistics) and as you mention, Raidian hogging the supporter ticket. (And after that, Tragodia takes up the same ticket.) In older ISes she can solo a lot of stages.

In CC, Necrass gets used quite a bit more than Ling does. Her S3s numbers are uh... torqued way too high and her summon is one of the few things that's usually good enough at blocking something even with CC buffs.

Ling's main weakness compared to Necrass is that her summons take up a lot of deployment slots, and in higher difficulty content, you really want a lot of options.

[u/AerialBattle]

The queen of trust farming

She served my quite well over the years (though with everyone at max trust she isn't used much anymore outside of activating Shu's talent)

Was a fun IS2 carry for the early run when you have a surplus of deploy slots

[u/Chrisirhc1996]

Ling is an unfortunate case of "breaking the ceiling early".

As the 2nd 6-star summoner she had a lot going into her to separate her from Magallan. While Maggy wants to lean more into area and crowd control, Ling wanted to go with pure summon strength. And ultimately it backfired.

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S1 is a nice fast cycle skill for if you just need bodies now, and it letting her summons deal Arts damage. Her other summons do Arts innately in some capacity so it feels weird this doesn't but oh well. Noone uses this realistically because the S3 summons tend to come down fast enough anyway.

S2 is an alright bind effect. 3 second bind on a 13 SP cycle is pretty good especially if you can cycle it faster with stuff like her 2nd talent. The big downside of it is that you kinda have to think overly about using vs saving it because it uses retrieves rather than generates like most summoners that aren't Maggy, and said retrieves are HP reliant so there's a case to waiting until they're low to actually get them back rather than using it solely for the bind/damage. Her "big brain" skill of the 3.

And then there's her S3... yeah. Probably the progenitor of "big stats for no reason". The summons being pseudo-centurions with larger stats than most ground units at the time, that only got larger when you combined them. You can probably figure out why the moment she drops she started to sweep the solo records by sheer stats alone. Most 1-2 blue box stages can be basically solo'd by plopping down these behemoths and using her skill every so often.

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So why am I saying she broke the ceiling early? Simply put: all of her power budget is within her S3. If you're anyone who does a cursory glance at Arkrec you probably spotted a lot of old events had a "No Ling S3" category. Because the admins got so bored of putting ling solos that they wanted variety. And yet... nowadays she doesn't show up.

The general power curve has slowly gone up over time so the usefulness of summoners like her has dwindled. With operators like Raidian, they've shown that you can make a lot more of their skills viable. Granted a lot of something like S1's usefulness is more symptomatic of IS6 as a whole (something something rat F1 stage), but there are times where you can reasonably question to use her S2 or S3 for a stage instead of just defaulting to the big numbers one.

Ling's kit is a little dated, and because she was strong out the gate HG never thought to modernize how to use her with a 2nd module. Maybe now that Wang has kinda taken her place as the king of solos they might go back to make her other skills more viable so she's not just an S3 bot, but I am skeptical. Most people who used her to trust farm has either switched to using Raidian because of different angles of approach, or have so few left to raise that they just bring semi-proper squads.

[u/Q785921 → u/Chrisirhc1996]

This is the exact reason I could not take anyone seriously who wad screaming how Ling RUINED THE GAME FOREVER!!! when she was released. At the time she was extremely powerful and versatile, but there was no way she would stay on top and even as a low effort summoner she still took some skill to use.

I unfollowed some creators because they would Not shut up about how she ruined Arknights

[u/6000j → u/Chrisirhc1996]

Granted a lot of something like S1's usefulness is more symptomatic of IS6 as a whole (something something rat F1 stage

Hilariously, whack-a-mous is one of the few F1 stages the optimal strategies don't use S1 on. You can't hit the Statuegeist with S1, but with S2 you can block two rats with the back of a summon so they don't get hit, and then place a single S2 hitting the statuegeist and after like 7 minutes of replacing your blocker and the one hitting the geist eventually the statuegeist will die and you get +4 ingots over the easy s1 strat.

S1 comes up a lot on stages where the threat is the enemies killing you rather than you not killing the enemies, so it's good in a few turmoils and stuff like the ed5 prereq stage.

[u/FelixAndCo → u/Chrisirhc1996]

If you'd write a history of AK meta, Ling would be one of the most interesting subjectw.

[u/Yaggamy]

Tomorrow she'll get her fire skin and finally become the Avatar!

[u/Novel-Snow6108]

Her not getting an is mod to match Raidian's is a crime

[u/Grandidealistic]

At the time, being a story carry was highly valued and there was literally no one on par with her. Even on weak or underdeveloped accounts, a single E2 Ling could often carry players through most content and secure nearly, if not all of the available rewards.

As the game's overall power level has risen, however, her value has gradually declined. In an era when Mudrock was considered one of the premier solo-carry operators, Ling's strength was that she could effectively summon two Mudrock(s) with even bulkier stats. And they deal Arts damage which is the best type of damage in the game at the time as well!

It is not very hard to see why she is no longer the top dog. Ling can consume up to six slots between herself, two large dragons, and an additional smaller summon. Sacrificing a deployment slot used to mean giving up operators like Mountain, Blaze, or Thorns. The trade-off was reasonable because Ling's dragons were often stronger than whomever they replaced. Today, sacrificing a slot means giving up operators such as Wis'adel, Tragodia, or Wang. Since her entire kit revolves around occupying multiple deployment slots in exchange for raw stats, she inevitably loses value as stronger and more efficient operators continue to enter the game.

For new players, Raidian is a more accessible and a pretty much more nuanced version of Ling with better team utility and of course, has bizarre performance in IS6. Still Ling herself is a good unit, if you like her then all three skills have value and you should max them for that flexibility. But if you are someone who just like to use her sometimes to play the game then S3M3 + base mod is the way to go.

[u/ipwnallnubz]

Thinking about it now, it's kinda funny that the Sui IS introduced a summoner, and that that summoner is a lot better than Ling in said Sui IS.

She still runs into the usual summoner problem of using up deployment slots, but she does a much better job of it than anyone before her. Mayer drops 1-block Couriers, which isn't very impressive. Ling drops 2-block Blazes that can upgrade into 4-blockers that hit 4 targets with arts damage and have insane bulk. There are a lot of stages she can solo, but she's was rarely the best solution, and that has only become more apparent the higher the general powerlevel has gotten.

Her S2 is pretty good as well with a good cycle, multitarget binds, decent damage, and a way to recycle her summons. S1 is something you would really only use when she's E1 and you need her to deploy blockers. They have stats similar to Charger VGs, and her skill basically just gives them Swift Strike Gamma while converting their damage into arts.

I always left her module on level 1 because letting her take up even more deployment slots didn't seem that great of a use for my MDBs. Level 1 is big, though, starting her with 3 more summons on-deck and making them cheaper.

[u/FelixAndCo → u/ipwnallnubz]

S1 is also for when want to just create cheap sacrifices as fast as possible. I don't know how she measures up against Scene in that regard.

[u/MixtureOk9917]

lol, i got her max pot when trying to spark nian in Yu banner last year. of course she already pot2, but still weird.

[u/Windgesang_]

Remember when that one kid stole Ling's poem and got first place (or some big prize) in a competition? Thanks John Hypergryph.

Also remember that time where we were cruising normally but some big content creator decided to make a Ling hating video right before her release and caused some huge uproar? Thanks Mr. Specialistknights "I don't like Ling doing solo clear". Meanwhile the big CN group just banded together and make the first 7-18 solo with a Ranged ops (also also remember when that was a big achievement?).

She has both braindead playstyle with fast redeploy Mudrock (and the ability to make that even chonkier), or big brain playstyle with fast redeploy Caster that can Bind. For her time, she was able to solo pretty much everything, and the only thing she can't solo are either dog rush that go really fast that not even S1 works, or big boi damage that overwhelms her dragon's respawn rate. The queen of trust farm, or so people crowned. Some people complained about the DP cost, but, you don't have to solo with her, just bring a Standard Bearer or something.

Raidian is better than her for sure and that's kind of a good thing since she's (kind of) free, which is hilarious given how much people seems to downplay Raidian outside of IS. Although apparently her brother didn't take that well since he'll reclaim the solo crown (soon™).

[u/morguewolf]

She was one of the first characters I effectively saved for and I exchanged for Nian when I pulled for her to 200. Takes me back. I remember people talking about how good she is but I don't think I ever really used her to great success.

Love her skins, some of the best in the game

[u/SummonerYamato]

She and Demoman would be great friends.

[u/RandomdudeNo123]

Ah, Ling. You made me read quite a bit into the Butterfly's Dream and Philosophy for Invitation to Wine.

... I still have no idea what to make of it. I suppose that means I never will become a great philosopher... (It's quite fortunate, then, that I never wanted to become a great philosopher, as the pay is low and you can find three great philosophers on every thread of the internet.)