Is Linko Worth Pulling? — NTE

Linko is a strong unit, and how much she is actually worth to you comes down to which characters are already sitting on your account.

What Linko Brings

Linko is an Anima five-star who spends most of a rotation making the character in front of her hit harder. Her Redirect Skill, Full-Frequency Pulse, opens a wheel of your team and fires the Synced Strike of whoever you pick, dealing damage in that character’s element and shaving 8% off the target’s Esper Ability RES for that same element. She keeps adding damage from the back as well, sending her companion in at the target while another character holds the field, so she asks for very little field time of her own.

The bigger draw is what she does for follow-up attacks. Hexed is the Anima and Incantation cycle, and Linko is the only character on the roster who enhances it: with her on the team Hexed’s follow-up hits harder, and anything sitting under Hexed takes extra follow-up damage from the rest of the team.

Hexed Duo Cycle

Anima Incantation

Deals an additional instance of follow-up attack DMG to the target equal to 20% of Anima or Incantation DMG taken within 12s after triggering Esper Cycle.

Resonance

Linko

Weakness Radar

That is why she reads so differently from one account to the next. Zankou is Incantation, so Linko completes Hexed for her directly. Nanally builds her damage out of Underboss follow-ups, and that is exactly the damage Linko’s buff lands on once Hexed is up. Shinku needs an Anima character for Blossom, and Linko fills that slot.

The First Copy Is a Big One

Awakening nodes unlock in any order, so your first copy can go straight to Love, Loud and Clear. That node lets the Synced Strike fired by Full-Frequency Pulse trigger Cycle effects, so every press of the skill can put a cycle on the board when the ally you pick can cycle with her. You get your setups online almost immediately and your clear times come down by a lot. Coming from A0, it is the largest single jump she has.

When She Is Worth It

If you are missing Iroi , Linko is close to an automatic pull. She hands you a strong Anima support that a Shinku team, a Zankou team and a Nanally team can all use, so she lifts several lineups at once and keeps her value for whatever comes later.

If you already run Zankou, Nanally or Shinku, she is a good pull for all three. Zankou and Nanally in particular get a lot out of her off-field damage, and the follow-up buff plus Hexed is what really moves the needle for them.

When to Skip Her

Owning Iroi already covers the Anima support slot, and Linko loses a chunk of value against that. The same goes if you are missing Shinku and Nanally, since the characters that benefit most from her simply are not there, or if you already have Daffodill dupes covering the Chaos half of a Scorch team.

The 1.4 units are the other consideration. If you want to build further into a Chaos team with Akane, or you are saving for a new top-tier team around Blackbird, Linko becomes a much harder sell.

A1 Zankou or A0 Linko

If you have Zankou at A0, the answer still depends on the rest of the roster.

Without Lacrimosa , you are playing Daffodill in that Chaos slot, and A1 Zankou is the better buy. Lacrimosa is the stronger partner from what I know, and Daffodill dupes even that out enough that the Zankou upgrade wins. With both Lacrimosa and Iroi in hand I would still take A1 Zankou, because Eyes of Abyss is a bigger step for that team than adding an A0 Linko.

It shifts if you have Shinku and Nanally, you actually want to play Nanally, and you do not have her premium team. Linko gets interesting there. Both of those teams want Sakiri , so you are splitting one support between them either way. Even then I would take A1 Zankou and bank the rest for Blackbird to get a second meta team out of it. If Blackbird ends up wanting a Chaos-element character, Lacrimosa can move over and Daffodill goes back to Zankou, though that is a guess on my part and nothing about it is confirmed.

If you already have Chaos and Zankou as your second team, and that Zankou team is in good shape, I would skip Linko and wait for Akane, who should be the upgrade that team is looking for. The other way to read it: if you are short an Anima piece, pulling Linko now and skipping Blackbird gets your account a real upgrade this patch.

Missing a Second Team

Pulling Hotori to fill the gap is tempting, and I would still pass. I love Hotori — she is A2 on my main account — and I cannot shake the feeling that Blackbird is going to be very strong. Nanally is already some distance behind the other DPS options, so spending currency on older units is a hard sell for me right now.

New players sit in a slightly different spot. With a Zankou team already up, Blackbird as the DPS of a second team is probably the better use of your pulls. If you are also short a Chaos-element character, that is where Linko gets interesting again: run a Scorch Zankou team now and build the second team around Blackbird, with Lacrimosa alongside her. This is decent timing to start putting those two together.

The Verdict

Pull Linko if you are missing Iroi and need a strong Anima option, or if you already run Zankou, Nanally or Shinku and want them to hit harder. Her value drops off if you have Iroi and none of the characters that lean on her, and it drops further if what you are actually missing is a second DPS. In that case I would hold everything for 1.4, and Blackbird in particular.

If you are stuck between A1 Zankou and A0 Linko, A1 Zankou is where I land on almost every account. Linko is strong and unusually flexible, and whether she is worth it comes down to the hole in your account right now.

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