HERE WE GOOO… I have been holding off saying anything about Cyrene until all the details of her kit were officially revealed. I’ve been seeing all the doomposting, keeping my mouth shut and letting it slide... So now I can finally share what I hope is a more nuanced opinion with accurate information, and let people make their own decisions about her.
The Most Ambitious Character in the Game
Cyrene is a support similar to a Harmony character, and her main thing is she has a unique buff for every Chrysos heir. Some of these are quite powerful and kit altering, like allowing Castorice to charge newbud to 200% or letting Phainon permanently stay in his Ultimate. I personally like Mydei’s buff, which action advances him and immediately uses Godslayer.
If you have a character that’s not a Chrysos heir, she can grant a simple 40% damage buff. That’s… not good, but she also gives a team wide true damage buff similar to RMC. So there is some value for other characters, but you’ll always want to play her in a team that focuses on Chrysos Heirs.
Why Does Everyone Say She’s Bad?
Most complaints boil down to one problem: her ultimate is slow. To activate her first ultimate and get your big buffs, you need to build 24 stacks of “Recollection”. I will explain how this works in the next section, but for now just know it takes some time to reach 24.
This stands out a lot more when you look at her eidolons. Her E2 will let you start combat with 12 stacks. Obviously, this gets you to her ultimate significantly faster. A lot of people are upset with locking this much power behind an eidolon, and I think that’s understandable to a certain degree. But in practice, I don’t think it’s as big a jump as people are assuming. In my opinion, it’s not much more of a power spike than some other E2’s, like Castorice E2 getting 30% newbud every dragon. It’s probably most noticeable if you’re a sicko like me who tries to 0 cycle everything, and I don’t think that’s most people.
Related to the E2 situation, a lot of people were getting mad about her reveal in the dev stream because it appeared they were showing her at E5+. This is because her trace screen showed traces going up to 12. If you look at the actual gameplay clips though, it shows her with stacks under 12, meaning she would be under E2. So that whole thing was just flat out wrong. Functionally, I don’t think there was anything misleading about what was shown.
Is She Actually Bad Though?
So assuming her biggest problem is building stacks, just how bad is it? Here’s how it works: First, you can start combat with up to 6 stacks by having Chrysos Heirs and/or Remembrance characters on your team. Cyrene herself can add 3 per turn, and with a 180 target speed, she takes a lot of turns. Beyond that, each teammate (including memosprites) builds 1 stack when they take an action, once per Cyrene turn.
Finally, Cyrene’s first ultimate gives full ultimates to the entire team, including herself. So you can immediately buff two characters. All her ults after that take only 12 stacks, allowing you to repeat buffs quickly if needed. So after her first ultimate, it’s smooth sailing.
To be clear, this is all quite slow to ramp up, but the tradeoff is finishing the fight faster with a big spike in power. That’s the key point in all this. Depending on your team, you will probably clear endgame close to the same total cycles as playing other supports. It’s not a perfect comparison, but she kind of reminds me of playing a Nihility character instead of Harmony. It works, even if it’s a little more complicated and not always as good.
I did say “depending on team” because you will want multiple Heirs in your squad and the buffs are not all equally good in all situations. For example, I think Phainon’s buff, while very cool, might be too slow for a lot of fights. Castorice will want the full Evernight/Hyacine team to ramp up faster. I can’t go through all of them in this post, but you should look up what your favorite Heir does before pulling.
If anything, I am more concerned about her only being good with Chrysos Heirs and what that means for future viability. Unlike other supports, we can just automatically assume she will not be good with new characters. I haven’t seen many people talking about that though, mostly just people parroting easy second hand talking points from unreliable sources and blowing things out of proportion… Sorry, I’m trying not to be salty about all the doomposting and misinformation these past few weeks, but had to get that off my chest.
And so overall, I would not say Cyrene is “bad”, I would say she’s “good enough”. Is it a little disappointing that a character this popular and important to the story is mostly a sidegrade and not a super powerful, meta defining support? Maybe, but if she was that good I think people would just complain about being forced to pull her or whatever. Point is, people will always find something to complain about. I’m at peace with her power level, even if she could be slightly stronger.
So Should YOU Pull Cyrene?
I will admit, there’s no strong need to pull her if you already have good supports. It doesn’t help that her banner is running with Tribbie, who I would take over Cyrene 10 out of 10 times. But I also want to push back on the idea that she’s weak and useless and will brick your account if you pull her.
Pull Cyrene If…
- You really like her gameplay and have a specific Chrysos Heir you want to buff.
- You have a lot of Chrysos Heirs and like to experiment with off-meta teams.
- You are a big HI3 fan and can’t pass up on Elysia, you’re even ready to pay $300 for that skin. Sorry, had to get that joke off.
In Conclusion
With Cyrene, I think Hoyo prioritized telling a story with her gameplay, and that is extremely cool in theory. Unfortunately, it also left them with an impossible balance problem, one that they did OK handling but could have done better. It also exposes my #1 problem with this game - everything favors speed. But that’s another topic for another day, *shameless plug* follow me here on Hoyolab and I might cover that later.
In the meantime, who’s pulling Cyrene with me? if you’re still not sure, especially with all the good re-runs coming up, check out my thoughts on the other 3.7 banner characters. I will also do a full “Should You Pull?” post as we get closer to the update.
