ROTATION BOTTLENECKS

The reason your Ultimate feels slow is rarely the cooldown timer. At zero buffs, three numbers actually decide how often the big finisher fires — and for most of the roster, the binding constraint is how much Skill Point your operator earns per skill cycle, not the ten-to-twenty-second cooldown on the Ultimate itself. Most of the cast generates only ten SP per cycle while their Ultimate sits at seventy to one hundred and ten SP, which translates to seven, eight, nine, or even more full rotations before you can press the button again.

This guide takes every operator in the current Arknights: Endfield roster and combines four numbers — Ultimate cooldown, raw Ultimate SP cost, total SP earned per skill cycle, and the universal fifteen-to-thirty ATB chunk every operator gets on the last hit of their basic combo — to label them as Self-sufficient, Battery-light, Battery-heavy, or Stack-fueled. The data is the same source feeding the Skill Point Generators ranking; this page views it through a different lens, answering "how often does the big button actually fire?" rather than "how fast does this operator press buttons?"

If you are picking a main DPS, planning gear priorities, or trying to figure out which third teammate your squad is missing, the tier label tells you immediately what kind of support that operator needs. A Battery-heavy carry is going to feel painful without the Catastrophe set's Ultimate SP gain bonus; a Stack-fueled DPS reads better than the raw cycle count suggests once their stack mechanic is online; the lone ATB-rich operator (Pogranichnik) is the team's Battle Skill battery whether you want him there or not. For the broader meta picture around these picks, the build templates and combat primer sit one click away.

What this page deliberately does not fold in: Ultimate SP gain rolls on gear essences beyond the Catastrophe 4-piece, passive talent procs (Pogranichnik on Vulnerability application, Perlica on debuff bursts, Arclight's on-buff SP grant), Ultimate refunds, and cross-operator team batteries like Akekuri's fifty-eight ATB team Ultimate dump. Real rotations are faster than the cycle counts here suggest; the numbers describe the baseline floor, not the ceiling.

Quick Answer

The roster splits four ways for Ultimate cadence. Self-sufficient is empty by design — no operator in the current dump charges their Ultimate in one or two cycles at zero buffs. Battery-light covers three to seven cycles, which is the band where one Catastrophe piece or a gentle SP support gets you firing comfortably. Battery-heavy starts at eight cycles and is where most of the roster sits — those operators need gear plus a team battery to feel playable. Stack-fueled is the four-DPS bucket (Laevatain at 300 SP, Zhuang Fangyi at 240, Last Rite at 240, Yvonne at 220) whose raw cost looks brutal but whose kit pays it back through stack consumption, combo refunds, or Sunderblade bursts.

For Battle Skill cadence the split is simpler. Pogranichnik is the only ATB-rich operator at eighty-three ATB per cycle, climbing to ninety-eight at max mastery. Alesh, Akekuri, Tangtang, and Arclight sit in the Self-sufficient tier with thirty-eight to seventy ATB per cycle. Everyone else is ATB-gated and leans on the universal fifteen-to-thirty combo-finisher charge plus passive regen — meaning a comp without one of those five operators is bottlenecked on Battle Skills, not just Ultimates. The single most important gear stat for any Battery-heavy carry is the Catastrophe 3-piece's twenty-percent Ultimate SP gain bonus, which is what shaves a roster of seven-to-ten-cycle operators down to playable cadence.

Three Things Gate Every Rotation

Whether your Ultimate cadence feels comfortable or painful comes down to three numbers, and they are not equally important. The cooldown floor is the absolute minimum wait between casts — ten, fifteen, or twenty seconds for Ultimates, and three to forty seconds for combo skills depending on the operator. In practice the Ultimate cooldown is almost never the binding constraint because SP charge time overruns it for most of the roster; the cooldown only starts to matter at the high end, where a stack-amortized DPS at peak conditions is firing fast enough that the ten-second floor kicks in.

The Ultimate SP cost is the second number, and it is where the roster splits between "normal" and "stack-fueled." Most Ultimates cost seventy to one hundred and ten SP — comfortably inside the on-screen one-hundred-cap UI bar. Four kits report higher raw costs: Laevatain at three hundred, Zhuang Fangyi and Last Rite at two hundred and forty, and Yvonne at two hundred and twenty. Those numbers are not bugs and they are not exaggerations — the data is telling you the kit was designed around amortization, and reading their raw cycle count at face value will mislead you about how often they actually fire.

SP per cycle is the input that actually decides tempo for the rest of the cast. Most operators generate ten SP per cycle from their skill itself, which is the floor of what the dump shows. The "Big Five" SP generators sit in the thirty-one-to-ninety range, but they are the outliers; the rule for the roster is that ten in, seventy-to-one-hundred-and-ten out means seven to eleven full skill rotations before you can press Ultimate. The ratio of cost to per-cycle gain is the cycles-to-Ultimate number this guide sorts on, and lower is better.

How These Tiers Are Decided

For each operator we read four numbers from the SkillPatchTable dump and derive two profiles — one for the Ultimate (the on-screen one-hundred-bar finisher) and one for the Battle Skill (the three yellow ATB bars). The four inputs are the Ultimate cooldown in seconds, the Ultimate SP cost (raw value tagged on the skill data), the SP gained per skill cycle (combo plus battle skill, drawn directly from the Skill Point Generators aggregation), and the derived cycles-to-Ultimate value, which is just ceil(cost ÷ SP-per-cycle).

The Ultimate tier label is what the cycles-to-Ultimate number tells you about external support. Self-sufficient means one to two cycles, which currently no operator hits at zero buffs. Battery-light means three to seven cycles — one SP-gain gear piece or a gentle support is enough to keep them firing. Battery-heavy means eight cycles or more, which is where eighteen of the twenty-six current operators sit; those carries need gear and a team battery before they feel playable. Stack-fueled is reserved for kits with raw cost above one hundred — the data is signalling that the kit assumes the cost gets amortized via stacks, refunds, or multi-stage burst patterns. For those four DPS, the cycle count we display is an upper bound; their real rotation is shorter once the stack mechanic is online.

The Battle Skill tier works the same way but counts ATB. Battle Skill costs one hundred ATB per cast (one yellow bar), and the tier measures how much ATB the operator generates on their own per cycle. ATB-rich is seventy-five or more — currently only Pogranichnik, who self-charges most of a Battle Skill bar before the universal combo-finisher chunk even lands. Self-sufficient is thirty-five to seventy-four, which covers Alesh, Akekuri, Tangtang, and Arclight; their cadence is meaningfully faster than baseline but they still benefit from a battery teammate. ATB-gated is anything below thirty-five — most of the cast, leaning on the universal fifteen-to-thirty combo-finisher charge plus passive regen, and locked into Battle Skill rationing unless they have a Pogranichnik or Akekuri in the squad.

What the tier labels deliberately do not fold in is the practical reality of buffed rotations. The Catastrophe set's Ultimate SP gain percentage is a multiplier on all SP gain that compounds across cycles. Passive talents — Pogranichnik granting SP on Vulnerability application, Perlica on debuff bursts, Arclight on team buffs — add another layer the SkillPatchTable does not surface. Ultimate refunds (Laevatain's combo refunds her Ult bar; Zhuang Fangyi's stacks pay back into her cost) compress the effective cost. Team batteries (Akekuri's Ultimate dumping fifty-eight ATB to the team, Pogranichnik's Physical-team SP buff) lift the whole squad's economy. A Battery-heavy operator with the right gear and the right teammate is comfortably Battery-light in practice.

Gear-Suit Overlay (3-Piece Bonuses)

The rundown table's "w/ Catastrophe" column applies the 3-piece Catastrophe set bonus: +20% Ultimate SP gain. That moves a ten-SP-per-cycle operator to twelve SP per cycle, which can shave a cycle off the Ultimate charge time once the rounding lands in your favor. The 3-piece Frontiers set also exists — it cuts combo skill cooldown by fifteen percent (multiplier 0.85) — but combo cooldown is rarely the binding constraint for Ultimate cadence, so the rundown does not surface it as a column. Per-piece UltimateSpGainScalar rolls and other gear stat lines are not modeled here; they vary by build and stack additively on top of the set bonus. For the full gear roadmap behind these picks, the gearing guide and essence reference have the per-piece detail.

Mastery Overlay (Skill Level 1 → 12)

Each combo, battle, and ultimate skill has twelve mastery levels in the data. The page's default columns show level one (baseline); the L12 columns show the same metric at max mastery. The scaling rules are uneven and worth knowing before you commit a Mastery Materials investment. SP gains and Ultimate costs are level-invariant — Yvonne's Solidification mechanic, Laevatain's combo SP, and every operator's Ultimate cost stay identical from level one to level twelve, so the cycles-to-Ultimate baseline rarely shifts on mastery alone. Combo cooldowns shrink five to fourteen percent on most combos: Pogranichnik drops from eighteen to seventeen seconds, Tangtang from fourteen to twelve. ATB grants scale up to fifty percent on the operators built around them — Pogranichnik's total ATB-per-cycle climbs from eighty-three to ninety-eight, Akekuri from sixty-five-and-a-half to eighty-seven-and-a-half (promoting her from Self-sufficient to ATB-rich), Alesh from seventy to eighty-five (also promoting to ATB-rich), and Arclight from thirty-eight to fifty. Mastery and gear are independent levers and stack additively.

Reading the Tiers

Every operator below is sorted by the same number — how many full skill cycles it takes to charge their Ultimate at zero buffs. Lower is better. Each entry lists three fields in the same order: SP cost, SP gained per cycle, and cycles to fire. The Stack-Fueled bucket is the meta-relevant one; the Battery-Light bucket is where the comfortable supports and tempo carries live; the 18-operator Battery-Heavy majority is covered in the rundown table below.

Stack-Fueled DPS (4–8 Cycles on Paper)

Their Ultimate looks expensive in the data — two hundred and twenty to three hundred SP — but their kit has a built-in discount mechanic that pays it back as you play. Combo stages refund SP, Sunderblade stacks scale up the Battle Skill's SP gain, Solidification stacks shrink the cost, or the rotation itself feeds the bar through Ultimate refunds. The "cycles on paper" number is the worst case (no stacks, no refunds); with the mechanic running, every meta DPS pick in this bucket fires much sooner than the raw count suggests.

• Laevatain — 300 SP cost · 90 SP/cycle · 4 cycles on paper ↳ kit discount: combo stages refund SP
• Last Rite — 240 SP cost · 31 SP/cycle · 8 cycles on paper ↳ kit discount: combo + Ultimate cycle refunds
• Yvonne — 220 SP cost · 40 SP/cycle · 6 cycles on paper ↳ kit discount: Solidification stacks discount the cost
• Zhuang Fangyi — 240 SP cost · 64 SP/cycle · 4 cycles on paper ↳ kit discount: Sunderblade stacks scale Battle Skill SP (up to +54)

The trade-off is stack uptime. Drop your stacks — move out of melee, lose your combo, miss a Sunderblade window — and the discount evaporates. For that fight you are back to the paper cost and sliding toward Battery-heavy cadence. Stack uptime is the real skill ceiling for these four DPS, which is why the per-character build pages spend more text on rotation than on stat priority.

Battery-Light (3–7 Cycles)

Their Ultimate cost stays inside the one-hundred-cap bar and SP generation is decent enough that one SP-gain gear piece or a gentle support gets them firing comfortably. No stack tricks needed; no heavy team battery required. The Battery-Light bucket is where the supports and tempo carries live — the operators you slot when you want a guaranteed Ultimate every minute or so without dedicating an entire team slot to feeding them.

• Chen Qianyu — 70 SP cost · 10 SP/cycle · 7 cycles
• Estella — 70 SP cost · 10 SP/cycle · 7 cycles
• Rossi — 110 SP cost · 45 SP/cycle · 3 cycles

The remaining 18 operators are Battery-heavy — they need eight or more cycles to charge an Ultimate at zero buffs. Their SP cost sits in the seventy-to-one-hundred-and-ten range, SP-per-cycle is mostly five to ten, and the cycles column in the rundown table below tells you how far they sit from playable cadence without gear (Catastrophe), passive talents, or team batteries (Pogranichnik, Akekuri, Alesh). Because that majority is the default, the rest of this guide is mostly about getting them out of that band.

Featured: Zhuang Fangyi 4-Op Team

Zhuang Fangyi sits in the Stack-fueled tier, which means the raw cycle count understates how often she actually fires. Her Ultimate costs 240 raw SP with a 15s cooldown floor; at full Sunderblade stacks she generates 64 SP per cycle (ten from her Combo plus up to fifty-four from her Battle Skill). The raw ratio is 3.75 cycles; the 4-piece Catastrophe set drops that to 3.13 cycles. Both ceil to 4, but the suit puts you over the threshold deeper in the third cycle so the next Combo lands you Ultimate-ready instead of leaving her one rotation short.

The binding constraint when picking her three teammates is that she contributes zero ATB to the team economy. Whatever Battle Skill cadence the squad has, it has to come from the other three slots — which is why every realistic Zhuang Fangyi comp pencils in either Pogranichnik or Akekuri as one of the locked picks. The table below shows the seven operators most commonly slotted around her, sorted by raw cycles ascending so the fastest-charging carry leads.

The battery slot is mandatory and non-negotiable: Pogranichnik at eighty-three ATB per cycle or Akekuri at sixty-five-and-a-half. Zhuang Fangyi puts zero ATB into the team economy, so without one of those two the squad's Battle Skill cadence collapses to the universal fifteen-to-thirty combo-finisher charge and the team stops casting Battle Skills almost entirely outside of finisher windows. The element synergy slot — Arclight or Perlica, both Electric Supports — is where the cross-operator passive SP grants live; their on-buff and on-debuff procs further accelerate Zhuang Fangyi's Ultimate beyond the 3.75-cycle baseline shown above, though those passives are not in the dump and not folded into the cycles column.

The sub-DPS slot has two paths. Avywenna locks in Electric resonance but is heavily Battery-heavy on her own, so the squad's overall Ultimate cadence depends on whether her stat boost outweighs the SP starvation. If you do not need element-locked, Last Rite — listed at eight cycles for SP and thirty ATB per cycle — gives you a second damage source that also feeds the team's Battle Skill economy, which is usually the better call. The one comp shape to avoid is stacking zero-ATB Battery-heavy operators alongside her; the team needs at least one ATB-rich or Self-sufficient battery or everyone is gated on the universal combo-finisher charge. Caveat on the table: cross-operator buffs like Arclight's SP grant, Pogranichnik's Physical-team SP buff, and Akekuri's fifty-eight-ATB team Ultimate dump are not in the SkillPatchTable blackboards, so each row shows that operator's individual contribution — the team's actual Ultimate cadence is faster than the sum suggests.

Full Operator Rundown

Every operator in the current roster appears below, sorted alphabetically for easy lookup. The Cycles column shows how many full skill rotations are needed to fire the Ultimate at zero buffs (lower is better). The "w/ Catastrophe" column applies the +20% SP-gain set bonus; the Cycles (L12) and Combo CD (L12) columns show the same metrics at max skill mastery, with green text whenever mastery shaves a cycle or shrinks a cooldown. The Ult Profile column classifies battery dependence; the BS Profile column classifies how self-sufficient the operator's Battle Skill cadence is.

Two reading notes before you scan the table. First, the Cycles column will show identical L1 and L12 numbers for most rows — SP gains are level-invariant in the data, so mastery only changes the cycles count when the ATB scaling on a kit happens to lift the operator into a different SP-per-cycle bucket. Second, the green/cyan/orange colour coding on Cycles uses the same Battery-light/Battery-heavy thresholds as the tier label, so you can spot Battery-light carries at a glance.

What the table makes clear at a glance is that the cycles column and the Ult Profile column rarely disagree: anyone over eight cycles is Battery-heavy, anyone in the three-to-seven band is Battery-light, and the four Stack-fueled DPS are the ones whose cycles number looks bad until you remember the kit's amortization mechanic is doing most of the work. The L12 columns matter most for Pogranichnik, Akekuri, Alesh, and Arclight — those are the ATB scalars where mastery actually shifts the tier, not just the underlying number.

Battle Skill ATB Breakdown — Where the Self-Generation Comes From

Battle Skill costs one hundred ATB to fire, and the table above only tells you the total ATB self-generation per cycle. The breakdown matters because the sources are not interchangeable: combo-tagged ATB lands every rotation, Battle Skill self-refund only triggers when you actually cast the Battle Skill, and Ultimate-tagged ATB only contributes on the cycles where the Ultimate fires (often team-wide rather than self-only). The table below decomposes each operator's total into those three sources plus the universal Finisher value — the fifteen-to-thirty ATB chunk every operator earns on the last hit of their basic auto-attack combo, regardless of skill picks or tier.

The Tagged Total (L1) column sums the first three sources at skill level one; the L12 Total column shows the same sum at max mastery, with a green delta whenever scaling lifts the operator. Dimmed rows have no skill-tagged ATB at all and rely entirely on the Finisher value plus passive regen — that is the majority of the cast and the reason a team without a battery operator is rationing Battle Skills by default.

Three patterns are worth pulling out of that table. The self-refund kings are Alesh and Tangtang at forty ATB each, plus Last Rite, Catcher, and Snowshine at thirty — their Battle Skill pays a chunk back to itself every cast, and the closer that refund gets to one hundred the closer they edge to free Battle Skill spam. The Ultimate-bomb operators are Akekuri and Pogranichnik: Akekuri's Ultimate dumps fifty-eight ATB to the team in a single cast (the largest single-skill ATB grant in the game), and Pogranichnik's Ultimate adds another thirty on top of his combo and Battle Skill grants. Either one slotted into a team enables Battle Skill spam for everyone, not just themselves.

Pogranichnik is the singular outlier because he is the only operator generating ATB across all three sources — twenty-three from combo, thirty from Battle Skill, and thirty from Ultimate, for a total of eighty-three at level one and ninety-eight at max mastery as the Battle Skill ATB tiers and Ultimate atb_final values scale up. Combined with the team-grant component of his combo, he is the singular ATB battery for any composition that wants Battle Skill uptime. That is also why a comp without him is almost always sliding toward a comp with Akekuri — between the two of them, every Battle-Skill-spam team in the meta has one of those slots booked.

Putting It Together — Practical Takeaways

1. Cooldown Is Rarely the Binding Constraint

Ultimate cooldowns are ten to twenty seconds. With most operators needing eight or more cycles to charge SP, the cooldown floor is almost never what limits your Ultimate cadence — your SP generation is. The exceptions are the four stack-amortized DPS at peak conditions, where stack consumption shrinks the effective cost enough that the ten-second Ultimate cooldown actually matters. For everyone else, "my Ultimate is on cooldown" is functionally a synonym for "I have not generated enough SP yet," and the fix is gear and team support, not patience.

2. The Catastrophe Set Is the Lever for Battery-Heavy Operators

Eighteen of the twenty-six current operators sit in the Battery-heavy tier — they generate five to ten SP per cycle and need eight or more cycles to charge a seventy-to-one-hundred-and-ten SP Ultimate at zero buffs. The Ultimate SP Gain percentage on the Catastrophe set's 3-piece bonus is a multiplier on all SP gain, which compounds across cycles. For a ten-SP-per-cycle operator, the right roll of the Ultimate SP gain stat takes them from ten cycles down to about seven — out of "painful" and into "playable." If you are maining a Battery-heavy operator, this stat is non-negotiable, and the rest of your essence priority falls behind it.

One important note on the gear tier: Catastrophe is T3 (mid-tier) gear, and despite that it is the only set in the current data that grants Ultimate SP gain at any tier. The T4 set called Eternal Xiranite (suit_usp02) is misleadingly named — its 3-piece bonus is +1000 HP and +16% damage for fifteen seconds, not SP gain at all. For the SP-gain niche specifically, Catastrophe stays best in slot until a T4 SP-gain set ships, and per-piece UltimateSpGainScalar primary rolls can appear on T4 essences and stack additively on top of the set bonus.

3. Stack-Fueled DPS Read Better Than the Raw Numbers Suggest

Laevatain's three-hundred-cost Ultimate is not a four-cycle wait in practice — her combo refunds her Ultimate bar through stack consumption, and the kit assumes you fire it inside the stack window. The same logic applies to Zhuang Fangyi with Sunderblade, Last Rite with combo plus Ultimate cycle refunds, and Yvonne with Solidification stacks discounting the cost. The raw cycles count is the upper bound, not the real cadence. The per-character build guide for each of those four is where you find the rotation that turns those numbers into real damage; treating the raw cycle count as the final word will undersell every meta DPS in the roster.

4. Pogranichnik Enables Battle Skill Spam for the Whole Team

Battle Skill cadence is gated by ATB. The roster only has one ATB-rich operator (Pogranichnik at eighty-three ATB per cycle) and four self-sufficient ones (Alesh, Akekuri, Tangtang, Arclight). For everyone else, Battle Skill cadence is dictated by the universal fifteen-to-thirty combo-finisher charge plus passive regen, which means you are casting Battle Skill once every minute or two rather than every rotation. Pogranichnik's grants extend to the team, which is why he is a near-mandatory slot in any team that wants to spam Battle Skills, and why his cross-character pickup rate in the meta is higher than his individual damage output would suggest.

Build Priority for Rotation Tempo

When you sit down to plan a team's gear, the cycle math collapses into a short priority list. The order below is the one most experienced players run for a reason — each step assumes the previous step is already done.

1. Battery-heavy carry? Slot the Catastrophe set first. The SP-gain percentage compounds harder than a damage stat for low-SP operators.
2. Stack-fueled carry? Damage stats over SP gain — their kit handles cost amortization through stacks, so you want to maximize per-cast burst.
3. Need ATB uptime? Pogranichnik in the team. He is the only ATB-rich operator, and his grant is team-wide.
4. Need raw SP top-up? Arclight (Electric) or Gilberta (Nature) — they apply on-buff SP grants that do not show in this data but lift the whole team out of Battery-heavy territory.

Frequently Asked Questions

That is the full rotation picture for the current roster — three numbers gate every Ultimate, the Catastrophe set is the gear lever for Battery-heavy carries, the four Stack-fueled DPS read better than their raw cost suggests once you respect their amortization mechanic, and Pogranichnik is the singular ATB battery the rest of the cast leans on. For the per-cycle SP and ATB inputs behind every number on this page, the Skill Point Generators ranking is the direct upstream source. For matching gear sets to the operators the cycle math just flagged, the gearing guide and essence reference are the next two stops; for the broader team-building picture, the build templates show how these rotation tiers translate into real comps.