ZHUANG FANGYI BANNER: PULL STRATEGY & BUILDS

Arknights: Endfield has slid into the awkward middle stretch every live-service title eventually reaches — the point where the post-launch glow gives way to long-term resource math, factory triage, and the quietly anxious arithmetic of gacha planning. With Zhuang Fangyi’s banner winding down and the Fest of Brilliance rerun pulling Gilberta and Laevatain back onto the storefront, the next three weeks are some of the most consequential pull windows Endmins have faced since 1.0. This piece is the practical breakdown of where Zhuang Fangyi sits in the meta, who she pairs with, whether Lone Barge is worth chasing, and how Version 1.3 should reshape your spending. If you have a fat pull stockpile, you want to spend it intentionally. If you are scraping for the next 120, you really want to spend it intentionally.

TL;DR - Key Points

• Zhuang Fangyi is a top-tier single-target burst DPS — her dive attack during ult form is one of the highest single inputs in the game and applies a free cryo proc
• The core team is Fangyi / Arclight / Perlica + flex — Antal is the safe damage flex; Ardelia adds healing; Gilberta adds utility when owned
• Place Fangyi BEFORE Perlica in the lineup — queue order pushes Fangyi’s combo through first even when you input Perlica’s second
• Never pull on a limited banner without a guaranteed 120 stockpile — early luck is not a plan; hard pity is the only honest budget unit
• Lone Barge is roughly a 30% DPS uplift over her battle pass weapon — worth chasing if she is your main DPS and you have arsenal credits
• The Originium Supply tier of the Protocol Pass nets out positive — skipping it because you “don’t reach level 60” is the most expensive habit new players have
• Fest of Brilliance pity does NOT carry to standard limited banners — check this in-game before pulling anything
• Version 1.3 lands ~June 5, 2026 with a preview stream ~one week before — waiting for the stream costs you almost nothing

The Endfield Meta Landscape Right Now

Before you decide where Zhuang Fangyi fits in your roster, you need a clean picture of the four team archetypes currently carrying every endgame mode in the game. Endfield’s combat is forgiving enough that all four clear current content — the differences show up in clear times, stagger windows, and how cleanly the rotation reads when you are tired at 11pm.

Zhuang Fangyi sits outside all four. Her team is electric-coded, fairly mechanically demanding, and rewards exact input timing in a way the four above forgive. She is excellent — she is not a low-effort plug-in.

Zhuang Fangyi’s Kit: What She Actually Does

Zhuang Fangyi is an electric striker built as a single-target burst dealer. Her kit pivots around an ult-form transformation that completely changes how she plays for a short window. The headline mechanic: once you ult, you unlock a dive attack that is one of the most damaging single inputs available to any character in the current roster.

The critical note is that you almost always want to land the dive during ult form. The damage multiplier is huge, and the dive also applies a free cryo proc that synergizes with most of her common teammates. The only edge case is a Yvonne-centric team where the cryo overlap can occasionally cost damage — but you should not be running Fangyi and Yvonne as co-carries anyway, so this is mostly theoretical.

You have a window of just under four seconds to land the dive. That means exactly one attack input. New players reflexively try to squeeze in basic attacks before diving and forfeit the window entirely. Don’t do that. Ult, dive, done.

Skill Investment Order for Zhuang Fangyi

Mastery materials are precious enough that the order genuinely matters. The priority is:

1. Battle skill to M3 first — highest single contribution to her damage profile
2. Ultimate to M3 second — direct damage payoff and the dive multiplier
3. Combo skill to M3 third — mostly valuable for cooldown reduction rather than raw damage
4. Basic attacks last — only worth touching after the rest of your roster has hit core milestones

The reason ult and basic mastery rank lower than people assume is that those nodes mostly buff her basic attack damage inside and outside ult form — and basics are not where Fangyi’s damage lives. If you already have Arclight at combo M1 and Antal’s combo and ult upgraded, then circling back to Fangyi’s basics for the long tail is fine. Not before.

For a deeper breakdown of rotations, weapon scaling, and gear sets, the Zhuang Fangyi rotations and gear guide covers the per-rotation math.

The Core Zhuang Fangyi Team

The standard endgame Fangyi team runs four slots that you can tune to whatever you actually own:

• Zhuang Fangyi — main DPS, ideally with Lone Barge equipped
• Arclight — vanguard support and electric infliction setup
• Perlica — sub-DPS and electric application
• Flex slot — Antal, Avywenna, Alesh, Gilberta, or Ardelia

Antal is the safest pure damage option in the flex slot. Ardelia is your healing pick if survivability is the bottleneck. Gilberta unlocks meaningful utility if you happen to already own her from her original banner or the current Fest of Brilliance rerun.

Team Order: A Trap Even Veterans Fall Into

When Perlica is in the team with Fangyi, Fangyi must be placed earlier in the lineup. Even though you input Perlica’s combo second during the slowdown, her combo lands first due to how the engine queues input order. Getting the lineup wrong measurably reduces your burst damage in actual fights — and most players who suffer from it never notice because the team still clears.

The 120-Pull Rule: Endfield’s Hard Truth

Here is the math nobody likes to hear when they are 70 pulls deep and out of currency.

Hard pity on a limited banner is 120 pulls. Unlike some gacha titles, you cannot meaningfully rely on a 50/50 win to save you — the rate-up is structured such that hard pity is the only honest unit of account. Anyone telling you to “send it” with 50-70 pulls is gambling with your account, not strategizing.

The single load-bearing rule of pulling in Endfield: do not start a banner unless you can reach 120.

Based on accumulation data the community has been tracking, with full event completion and a cleared battle pass, a fresh-from-zero stockpile takes roughly one and a half patches to reassemble. That is a long runway. The implication is that every banner you pull on costs you the option of every other banner for roughly 75 days afterward.

Reading the Banner Schedule Before Pulling

Version 1.3 is expected to drop around June 5, 2026, with the preview stream landing approximately seven days before the current patch ends. That gives you a confirmed window to see what is coming next before you commit your stockpile.

The current Fest of Brilliance banner running alongside Fangyi is genuinely unusual — it stars both Gilberta and Laevatain, two previously limited units, with a 120-pull guarantee that lets you pick either. This is the closest thing Endfield has done to a true rerun, and no one has confirmed whether it becomes the long-term mechanism for older characters or stays a one-off.

The detail that catches most players: pity does not carry between the Fest of Brilliance banner and standard limited banners. If you were planning to bank pity on one and cash it on the other, check this in-game before you pull a single ten. For a fuller breakdown of the rerun mechanics, the Fest of Brilliance rerun analysis walks through the 120-pull selector math.

The Headhunting Dossier Bait

There is a tempting mechanic where running one extra ten-pull on a closing banner grants a Headhunting Dossier that carries to the next banner. The trap: it only applies to chartered headhunting banners, not special banners like the rerun. And the only way to know if those 10 pulls are worth burning is to know who the next featured operator is — which right now you do not. Speculative dossier spending is almost never the right call.

Weapon Decisions: Lone Barge and the Pass Trap

Weapon investment is the quiet hemorrhage. New Endmins overpay here far more often than they overpay on operators.

Lone Barge: Worth It If She Is Your Carry

Fangyi’s signature, Lone Barge, is one of the larger signature-versus-alternative gaps currently in the game — roughly a 30% damage uplift over her battle pass weapon and noticeably more over standard options. If she is your main DPS and you have the arsenal credits for 80-120 weapon banner attempts, it is worth chasing. If she is your second or third carry, you can comfortably skip.

The Battle Pass Weapons Everyone Skips

The most underrated weapon source in Endfield is the Originium Supply tier of the Protocol Pass. It costs orundum up front, but a fully cleared pass returns more than the input. It includes a pass weapon selector containing the second-or-third best weapon for every limited operator in the patch.

The “I don’t reach level 60” excuse is the single most expensive new-player habit in the game. Even on a partial clear, the 30 orundum cost translates to roughly 3.7 weapon pulls or 4.5 character pulls in equivalent value — plus progression mats on top. The pass weapon is almost always net positive.

For this patch specifically, the relevant selector picks are:

• Flickers in the Mist — Fangyi’s second-best
• Glorious Memory — Rossi’s second-best
• Navigator — a strong Yvonne option

Pick based on who you actually run.

Weapon Selector Boxes: A Cheat Sheet

Several box selectors are floating in event rewards right now. The decision tree is simpler than it looks:

The general rule worth internalizing: signature weapons are typically only 7-8% ahead of the best free alternative for any given character, but they cost an enormous amount of premium currency. For everyone outside your main DPS, the free or low-cost option is the correct pick.

Gear Sets and Stat Priorities

Endfield’s gear system reads intimidating, but the underlying logic collapses to three rules.

The Four-Slot System

You have four armor slots: chest, hands, and two kits. The optimal setup is three pieces from one set to activate the three-piece bonus, plus one flex piece from any set chosen purely for raw stats.

Stat Priority

Every operator has a primary stat highlighted gold on their character screen and a secondary stat in white. Armor pieces should roll both of those wherever possible. This is the single biggest damage lever outside skill levels and weapons — and it is almost always where late-game power comes from.

The Set Cheat Sheet

Once you reach gold-tier gear, you spend catalysts (weekly from the Wuling stock redistribution shop) to upgrade each piece’s three stats up to three times for 30% effectiveness per tier. The grind is RNG-heavy and requires feeding identical pieces with equal or higher starting rolls — but this is where the late-game power curve actually lives. For the deeper essence math, the essence and triple-slot meta guide covers the substat optimization in detail.

Factory Pitfalls Every Endmin Hits

Once you are past early story and feeling the resource crunch, the factory matters more than the roster. A few sharp items from the current optimization meta:

The 512 Facility Limit

Wuling caps you at 512 facilities. Pipe logistics (converges, bridges, splitters) do not count toward the cap, but belt logistics do. So do garden plots. If you are hitting the wall, ripping out unused gardens and consolidating sub-AIC layouts is almost always the cleanest fix.

Originium Hydro Rigs Are a Trap

When hydro rigs launched, the community got excited about layering them on every originium field. The math actually punishes you on most setups. A five-node originium field costs you 25 energy and 7 slots with rigs, versus 20 energy and 10 slots without. For two-plot fields it is even worse. Unless you are in a remote outskirt zone where you genuinely save on power infrastructure, plain mining wins.

Test Area Purification Is Modest

The new test area introduced a sewage purification system, but the yield is unimpressive. At a realistic 180/min sewage input you get 6/min effluent — enough for roughly 40% of a heavy xiranite line or 20% of a zircon line. Worth running if your core is already stable. Not worth running if you are still trying to stabilize core production.

Pull Strategy by Player Type

Different rosters call for different decisions. Here is how the pull question actually resolves:

The F2P Saver (0-1 limiteds owned)

Skip Fangyi unless she fills a major gap. Pull on the Fest of Brilliance for Gilberta — she is the highest-utility unit in the selector pool and slots into more teams than Laevatain. Then save hard for the V1.3 preview.

The Selective F2P (2-4 limiteds owned)

Decide based on what your current main DPS is. If you are running physical sustainless or arts crowd control as your primary clear team, Fangyi is a luxury — save instead. If you have been waiting for a single-target burst carry, pull to 120 only if you have 120 banked today, not 80 plus hope.

The Battle Pass Player

You can almost certainly afford one banner this window. Pick between Fangyi and the rerun based on your roster gap, then absolutely buy the Originium Supply pass and grab the relevant battle pass weapon.

The Whale or Dolphin

Pull Fangyi, pull Lone Barge, take Gilberta from the selector if missing. Watch the V1.3 preview before committing past one signature.

Common Mistakes That Drain Your Account

The pattern repeats across new players in this community every patch:

• Pulling without 120 banked. No exceptions, no “I feel lucky” stories that age well
• Mastering Fangyi’s basics before her battle skill. The damage math does not support it
• Skipping the Protocol Pass Originium Supply tier. Net-positive on partial clears, strictly positive on full clears
• Chasing P1 on a non-game-changing constellation. Most operators get 5-12% from P1 — it is almost always the worst orundum ROI available
• Pulling on the Fest of Brilliance expecting pity carryover. It does not carry to or from standard banners
• Building hydro rigs on every originium field. Unless you are in a remote zone, this loses you energy and slots
• Stacking sub-AICs without auditing garden plots. Gardens count against the 512 cap and most players have idle plots

Watch List: What Could Change Before Patch 1.3

A few things to track between now and the V1.3 preview stream:

• V1.3 preview stream — expected roughly a week before patch end; defines whether you save or spend
• Mi Fu kit reveal — rumored Electric carry; could reshape Fangyi team comps with new infliction options
• Vampire operator (Ses’qa / Camille) confirmation — first male six-star; element and weapon class still unconfirmed
• Endgame mode announcement — a permanent challenge mode would meaningfully shift how dupes price in
• Fest of Brilliance rerun cadence — if HG commits to a recurring slot, the urgency of every limited drops
• Sub-AIC stall hotfix — the carry-over bug that drops Buck Capsule output to zero is still unresolved
• Protocol Pass weapon roster — next patch’s selector defines whether you should hoard pass weapon picks now

Final Read

Endfield is going to reward patience more than aggression for the foreseeable future. The factory side keeps deepening, the gear ceiling keeps climbing, and the roster you build now defines the teams you can run six months out. The temptation to chase every new banner is real, but the players who will still be smiling at the one-year anniversary are the ones who picked two or three core teams, invested deeply in them, and let the rest of the roster develop through standard banner luck and selectors.

Zhuang Fangyi is excellent. The Fest of Brilliance is a genuine opportunity if you missed Gilberta or Laevatain. Version 1.3 will arrive with whatever it arrives with. The smartest move you can make right now is to know exactly what your next 120 pulls are for before you spend a single one. For the community-state read on how this banner cycle has split players, the pull drought analysis is worth the follow-up.

Plan your team. Plan your pulls. Don’t let FOMO drive your account into the ground. The Endmin who survives this cycle with resources intact is the one who thrives in the next one.

FAQ

Should I pull on Zhuang Fangyi if I only have 80 pulls?

No. Hard pity is 120 and you cannot rely on the early-luck path. If you are short, save the 80 and wait for the V1.3 preview before committing — the preview lands roughly a week before patch end and gives you a real signal.

Is Lone Barge actually worth chasing?

Only if Fangyi is your main DPS and you have the arsenal credits for 80-120 weapon banner attempts. The damage uplift over her battle pass weapon is roughly 30%, which is one of the larger signature gaps in the game, but it remains a luxury upgrade rather than a requirement.

Does Fest of Brilliance pity carry to the next limited banner?

No. Both 80-pull six-star pity and the 120-pull selector pity stay sealed inside the Fest of Brilliance ecosystem. Anyone planning to bank pity on the rerun and cash it on a standard limited is reading the system wrong — verify in-game before committing.

What flex slot is best for Fangyi’s team?

Antal for pure damage, Ardelia if you need healing, Gilberta for utility when you already own her, Avywenna for dual-striker setups, and Alesh as a budget pick. The right answer is whichever of those you actually have at workable investment.

Why does team order matter for Fangyi and Perlica?

The engine queues inputs in lineup order rather than press order, so Fangyi placed before Perlica means her combo lands first even when you input Perlica’s combo second during the slowdown window. Flipping the order silently costs you burst damage in real fights.

Should I master her basic attacks?

Eventually, yes — but only after battle skill M3, ultimate M3, combo skill M3, and core upgrades on the rest of your team. Basic mastery contributes less per material than people assume because it mostly scales her standard basic damage rather than her dive payoff.

When does Version 1.3 launch?

Current expectation is around June 5, 2026, with the preview stream approximately seven days before the current patch concludes. Treat the preview stream as the real decision point — the cost of waiting one week to hear the next banner is almost always lower than the cost of misallocating 120 pulls.

Is the Originium Supply pass actually worth it for a returning player?

Yes, even on a partial clear. The 30 orundum cost equates to roughly 3.7 weapon pulls or 4.5 character pulls in raw value, plus progression materials and the pass weapon selector. The widely-shared “I don’t reach level 60” excuse is the most expensive habit new players carry forward.

Should I build hydro rigs on every originium field?

No, despite the early hype. A five-node field costs you 25 energy and 7 slots with rigs versus 20 energy and 10 slots without — it is a worse trade on most layouts. The exception is remote outskirt zones where you save meaningfully on power infrastructure.

What is the single most important rule for pulling in Endfield?

Never start a banner without 120 pulls guaranteed. Every other piece of pull advice is a footnote on that one rule — and the players who break it are the ones writing the cautionary tales in the subreddit two weeks later.