“Is Black Swan really strong?” – This is not a technical question, but a question of understanding.
Her existence should be like a sharp pen in the combat mechanism of “Honkai Impact 3: Star Railway”, carefully carving out the rhythm and restraint of the “continuous damage” system. But the players’ sight is like the circled answers in the old textbooks, only looking for the shortest path, regardless of the structural logic, and only asking “did the numbers explode?”
So, Black Swan became another “misunderstood character”.
In the official setting given to her, she is a recorder who masters the words of fate, a wise general who uses the superposition of “Soul Breaking” marks as the main means of output – not the kind of one-shot hit, but the kind of character who lets you die slowly. In a reasonable mechanism, she relies on continuous stacking to put the enemy into a state of continuous weakening, continuous burning, and continuous collapse.
But in the hands of most players, she is either an “inefficient character” who is “not quick enough to burst”, or a “technical burden” who must be stuffed into a double-void team, go for extreme configuration, and stack speed and hits. These labels, like the yellow paper talismans posted on the door of the patient in the old society, are not used to understand her symptoms, but to sentence her to death.
Where exactly is the problem?
It’s because we use “instant damage thinking” to judge “continuous output design”.
Black Swan is a thorough “healing character” – she does not rely on the first round of critical hits to crush, but relies on the “wound festering” in the fifth and sixth rounds to kill the opponent. Her strength is rhythmic and superimposed, which is reflected in “maintaining stability and advancing round by round”. However, many of our players only compare her with “Huangquan” and “Jingyuan” horizontally, and ask her “How much can you hit in one round?” – of course she can’t answer.
Black Swan needs time, relies on stacking in terms of mechanism, requires hits, and requires rhythm control throughout the battle. This is not a strength that can be achieved by simply pressing a button. She is not even a violent solution of “going up and using a skill to destroy in one round”, but a character that needs to carefully arrange speed, hits, combat skill release order, and teammate cooperation.
But players don’t care about these. They only look at:
“Can your Soul Break layer be stacked up instantly?”
“Can you take away the enemy in one round?”
“Did you clear the field in the first 3 seconds when playing M?”
They don’t care why Black Swan is designed like this, don’t care what “functional gap” she wants to fill in the game system, and don’t care which link of the strategy chain she forms with “Kafka” and “Silver Wolf”. What they care about is: “Is it fast?”, “Can it pass the level?”, “Is it mainstream recommended?”
She doesn’t explode, so she is “mediocre”; she needs to be matched, so she is “troublesome”; her cycle is long, so she is “impractical”.
This is a lazy thinking habit and an extremely utilitarian evaluation of the “use value” of the character.
What is even more absurd is that Black Swan can be the core figure of the entire system. She should be the core hub of the overall coordination in the “continuous damage strategy”, but in the player’s operation, she is often regarded as a high-level tool person who “hangs a dot”.
She is not a general, but a “skill board serving Kafka”.
We did not even give her the opportunity to become the leader, but only trapped her in the most familiar combination, letting her always “take the wind of others”. We never tried to study the play route of “she is the core”, but were only satisfied with “whether Kafka can explode or not, whether Black Swan can assist or not”.
This is actually a systematic misunderstanding of all “rhythm-type characters”. We like “sprinters” and are impatient with “marathon champions”. We praise the “second-killing mechanism” and reject “gradual accumulation”. We think that “fast numbers” are strength, and ignore the more complex and real combat levels such as “control ability” and “rhythm continuation”.
And in Black Swan, all this is even more naked.
She was originally a “literary character” – relying on “text marks” to stack damage, her “Soul Break” design is actually a “writing process”:
The first layer is foreshadowing, the second layer is progression, the third layer is emotional climax, the fourth layer is structural collapse, and the fifth layer is a fatal period.
But players don’t have time to “read” this battle article she wrote.
They only care about: “Does this sentence kill the opponent with one punch?”
The sadness of the Black Swan is not only that her mechanism is complex, nor that she needs to be matched with a void character to truly exert her strength, but that the “fast food culture” of the entire player community no longer allows any character to “lay the foundation”. We no longer need “growing damage”, we only need “instantaneous burst”.
So the Black Swan has become the “representative of misunderstanding”. She is not weak, but she is so strong that “players also need to use their brains”. And this is exactly the cost that players are most reluctant to invest.
In this world dominated by “template play”, “T0 list”, and “recommended relic entries”, characters like the Black Swan that require you to slowly experience and gradually control are destined to be marginalized. The more complete, detailed, and logical she is, the harder it is for players to accept her.
It’s not that she doesn’t deserve to be liked, but that we are no longer willing to spend time to understand her.
Black Swan has never been a “output tool person”, she is the word sorcerer who can truly control the rhythm of fate. It’s just that her battle requires you to read the entire novel instead of copying a line.
But unfortunately, we will only give her a score according to “output priority” in the strategy post, and then turn the page.