Yato Soul Escort Guide for DLC2

The Greatest Discovery of IS5: A Guide to the Yato Soul Escort Squad

Hello IS players, please allow me to recommend the greatest discovery of IS5, the Soul Escort squad! This squad completely revolutionizes our operational strategy with a high power level. On the 26th of March, I achieved a d18 ED245 10x winstreak after only 22 runs, and only losing 2 out of the 22 runs. Now, let me explain why this comp is so powerful.

Why Soul Escort is a Top-Tier Squad

First of all, Soul Escort has three squad effects, the most important one being: when an Inspirer is used before a combat, operator redeployment time is reduced by 12 seconds. This effect makes Soul Escort the second squad with the ability to increase in-combat power after Spearhead, but Spearhead comes nowhere near this squad effect.

A 12-second reduction in redeployment time can turn a Fast-Redeploy operator with redeployment potentials into an operator with only a 4-second redeployment time. To put a 4-second Yato into perspective, imagine you’re a Logos Mum from River Watcher. You need to walk 14 tiles and AFK for 30s before entering the blue box for a total of 86 seconds. Your opponent is a 4s Yato. You can’t move whilst Yato is outputting damage because you’re blocked, so Yato’s actual skill cycle is also 4s. In the 86 seconds it takes you to reach the blue box, Yato can cycle her skill 21 times for a total of 500k damage, but you only have 120k HP. You wouldn’t even leak with tripled HP. This isn’t even accounting for control effects via split boxing, but it gets even more broken.

The Core Duo: Yato and Kafka

Let’s invite the second core of Soul Escort:

Kafka. If Yato has insane stats in Soul Escort, then Kafka is an operator with infinite stats. Without Pledge of Babel and under green toll, an E0 Kafka can sleep enemies for 5 seconds for only 5 DP. This means that as long as a Vanguard is on the field, your DP will increase.

Now, some might say, “won’t you explode to multi-lane maps then?”. Well, no. Kafka can indeed permasleep, but that’s rarely necessary. Minor cycles provide enough damage for most scenarios en route, though some extreme statchecks do require permasleep, such as chaos and Regular Army.

So what is a minor cycle? A classic example is the Timeworn Tensions bottom lane Sarkaz Grudgebearers. Imagine you’re a Sarkaz Grudgebearer and you need to walk 7 tiles to the blue box. Your MSPD is 1.2, or 0.6 tiles/s, for a total of 11.67s or 350 frames. Your opponents are the Yato-Kafka combo. Yato, with Kafka’s redeployment reduction, only needs 0s to redeploy and has no startup frames, which results in 17,253 damage every 5 frames. In the 350 frames it takes you to enter the blue box, Yato can dish out a total of 1.2 million damage. If Yato uses her S2 instead, you would even get permacontrolled via splitboxing.

Aside from this, Kafka can combo with annihilation operators like Logos or Mlynar to effectively make their skills pseudo-infinite duration. Specifically, Kafka can permasleep enemies during their downtime until the skill cycles back.

Overcoming Difficult Stages

Thanks to the presence of Yato and Kafka, Soul Escort is able to easily take on some stages that would be devastating for other squads such as Elusive Merc, Chaos, Regular Army, and Rhine Guardians. Even “The Boat Home” only requires a King’s Crown. This power greatly reduces Soul Escort’s Lamp progress anxiety.

Many squads may have significant progress anxiety due to a lack of power, being unable to take on a plethora of stages if lacking a certain King’s Collectable by a certain point. This can often force a refresh even when undesirable. For example, refreshing a precious combat node for Lamp progress before F4 due to progress anxiety. All is well if Lamp succeeds, but it failing would incur massive losses.

Soul Escort plays differently. With its strong en route power, it can hold back refreshes until absolutely necessary and rely on natural Wishes or extremely low profit nodes for Lamp progress. This ability greatly increases Soul Escort’s winrate, as losing runs are typically due to constant refresh failures or refreshing a high profit node. Soul Escort’s en route power can effectively decrease refresh count and greed for higher profit nodes.

Managing Final Cadence

Soul Escort’s high en route power also partially arises from its ability to handle Final Cadence. Some of you may have heard the saying: “Soul Escort can achieve a similar relic sifting ability to Ingot squad by leaking Cadence.” This is half right and half wrong.

Soul Escort does indeed have the advantage when it comes to leaking Cadence. Its squad effect significantly reduces anxiety from crafting shields, whereas other squads often face scenarios without enough shields to leak Cadence when combats only drop Lingerers or when they’re forced to discard Inspirers due to a low toll. Soul Escort, however, can obtain at least two 2-star Inspirers on every new floor, which can be crafted for at least 2 shields. Soul Escort can also use low rarity Inspirers to increase toll and carry the high rarity Inspirers to “False to Truth” to craft shields.

Aside from that, Yato and Kafka are both Fast-Redeploys, which are suited to leaking Cadence. For most stages, we can use Yato and Kafka to open and not deploy anyone else. Only after Cadence leaks do we deploy them. This minimizes Cadence’s effect on the stage, which means taking Cadence early won’t affect the difficulty of stages.

Of course, there are some edge cases where Cadence can’t be leaked quickly, such as in “Frequent Disputes.” So how can we decrease Cadence’s threat in those cases? As long as we have Kafka, we’re able to chip Cadence from full HP to 1 HP on any given stage to easily finish it off early on an extremely difficult stage. If we don’t wish to kill it, Kafka can protect Cadence with her sleep. She can even protect Cadence through stages like “Crimson Corridor” since the volcano tiles won’t tick twice in a short period of time.

Even though Soul Escort has many advantages when it comes to leaking Cadence, I believe that Cadence control is only icing on the cake and rarely makes a decisive impact. The main reason is because Cadence doesn’t heed to your will. Statistics show that the chance for an encounter to have Cadence is 50%. So there’s over a 10% chance to dodge Cadence in three encounters, and often by the 3rd encounter you’re on F4 or even F5 without enough combats for Cadence to give anything valuable.

Another reason is that Cadence usually gives relatively low quality relics, with a 75% chance for 8-cost relics, a 25% chance for 12-cost relics, and an extremely small chance for 16-cost relics. Within 8-cost relics, the highest damage buff is only a +30% ATK from Commander’s Portrait, so Cadence relics are unlikely to make an impact on your stats. More often, you’re banking on Cadence dropping development relics like Squirrel or Cannot’s Mark. Cadence relic sifting can’t exactly compete with Ingot squad’s relic sifting, so rather than relic sifting, its purpose is to increase your power en route.

Potential Weaknesses and Counter-Strategies

That being said, Soul Escort isn’t invincible en route. Kafka becomes unusable against unsleepable enemies. For example, Kafka is underwhelming in “Frequent Dispute,” which is a multi-lane stage. And every lane has enemies that Kafka can’t deal with. The top lane has invisible enemies and the bottom lane has low-altitude hovering enemies. The best way to use Kafka on this stage is to permasleep the Dreadkaz that spawn after a teammate has killed the hovering enemies to free up damage output to the top lane. Since “Frequent Dispute” is the only stage where Kafka isn’t strong, yet it provides strong development with a Spine, I’ll unconditionally draft one of Mlynar or Logos to counter this stage.

The only other enemies Kafka can’t deal with are Theresis and Quilon, but Kafka is nonetheless useful in the boss stages. For “Court Visit,” Kafka can easily solve the laneholding issue. You just need to draft a Kal’tsit to stall Theresis on p1 and burst him on p2 with Kal’tsit and Amiya. For “The Dhama Sermon,” Kafka is a core laneholder and permasleeps a whole lane with Blacknight and also improves leeway inside the stage. For example, if Greyy the Lightningbearer is the main laneholder for the left lane, I can permasleep leftside enemies with Kafka after Quilon reaches 25% HP to redeploy Greyy to the right lane to help finish off Quilon. In the boss stages, the biggest limitation to Kafka is still DP.

The New Meaning of Deployment Points

Remember when I said Soul Escort is a great discovery at the start? The main reason is because the squad bestows a completely new meaning upon Deployment Points. In other squads, DP is limited to the opener of a stage, and it then becomes a useless stat after the opener. But Soul Escort provides a means to transform DP into damage, infinitely. Those who watch my stream may know that I’ve stated that Yato’s strongest damage relic is “Blunt Claws: Predation”. An infinitely deploying Yato will always have higher damage than a one-time buffed Yato.

Some may now ask, “Didn’t you say Kafka only needs 5 DP to control for 5 seconds? Why would you need more DP?”. Theoretically true, but only in theory. In practice, you can’t guarantee green toll or not deploying more operators, and the ending relics and Commerce Epoch both increase operator DP cost by +5, so DP really is important. This is also why I open with Myrtle. Even though Myrtle is weaker than Beanstalk on F2, I think it’s correct to sacrifice some F2 power in exchange for Myrtle’s higher DP generation, which is useful throughout the entire run. If we don’t open with Myrtle, then it’ll become hard to draft her later on over Blacknight and the Agents.

A lot of people have misconceptions about Blacknight. They think she’s a damage output operator who speeds up the Kafka permasleep, but this is incorrect. In reality, Blacknight has a cooldown of 16s and recovers 4 DP per skill, which seems inefficient at first glance. But every instance of Blacknight’s sleep means saving 1.2 Kafka deployments. After Babel and a t3 egg, Kafka requires 10 DP per deployment. In that scenario, Blacknight recovers an incredible 4 + 10 * 1.2 = 16 DP per skill. Horizontally comparing with Myrtle, Blacknight has a DP recovery rate equivalent to 2.14 Myrtles.

Simultaneously, Blacknight can cover Kafka’s low-level sleep with her high-level sleep to increase leeway against permaslept enemies. In ED4, Blacknight has very high damage on skill with the help of Chalice, which can be used to quickly finish off permaslept Envies and Furies. This then frees up Kafka to assist another lane or to save up some DP.

Operator Analysis: Red and Texas the Omertosa

Finally, let’s talk about my thoughts on

Red and Texas the Omertosa.

First Red. I often see the argument that Red with a control relic is stronger than Kafka, so we’ll analyze this by considering their control efficiency. Let’s say Red has a Tape which increases her stun from 2s to 5s. In this scenario, Red has a DP-per-control efficiency of 7 DP / 5s = 1.4 DP/s, which means Red needs 1.4 DP to control for 1 second. We can see that Red, even with the strongest control relic, can only control for 5 seconds, identical to Kafka’s control duration.

Horizontally comparing with Kafka, she can’t use control relics but has the advantage of being E0, which reduces her DP cost to 5. Kafka’s DP-per-control efficiency is only 5 DP / 5s = 1 DP/s, which means Kafka needs 1 DP to control for 1 second. How do we conceptualize this? Myrtle’s DP/s is only 0.42 DP/s, so even if I did have Tape, Red requires an entire extra Myrtle to permastall compared to Kafka.

Some may now ask, “but Red has the noble stun effect which allows teammates to output damage during the control duration!”. Indeed, standard damage output operators are unable to damage permaslept enemies. Red would have the advantage in that scenario. But there exists a prerequisite, and that is there must be someone available to output damage during the control duration.

We must know that Lamp comps are very poverty, especially non-class squads. In ED4, we usually only have three E2 6-stars. En route, we usually don’t have any damage other than Yato, Kafka, and Amiya, so Yato must carry the majority of damage en route. But Yato has the ability to output her full damage in a very short duration and also has the same cooldown as Kafka. This means we only need the enemies to be out of permasleep for a very short duration to output Yato’s full damage. This is the Yato-Kafka minor cycle I mentioned previously. The minor cycle already has enough damage, so we don’t have to permasleep en route.

Thus we can come to the conclusion that, when Yato is the only damage available, there is no difference between sleep and stun. Even though we have other damage dealers to take advantage of stun in the endings, the aforementioned Blacknight is the most important DP recovery operator in the endings, and comes with strong damage with Chalice and can attack through sleep. So when Blacknight is our main damage in endings and Yato is our main damage en route, Red’s stun doesn’t really have any advantages over Kafka’s sleep.

We have come to the conclusion that, whether by DP efficiency or control quality, we have no reason to draft Red over Kafka en route even if Red has a control relic. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Red is completely undraftable. If you get not a single Specialist ticket en route and only get it on F6 and you have a control relic, then you can draft Red. Because there’s no reason to draft Blacknight without Kafka, and Blacknight isn’t guaranteed if you draft Kafka first.

As for

Texas, she’s an unadulterated Hope and DP thief. As a 6-star operator, her damage output isn’t as good as Kafka, since Kafka effectively buffs Yato’s damage. Her control isn’t as strong as Kafka, and her DP cost is higher than Kafka. The two reasons she exists is to somewhat counter Congestion Epoch and “Frequent Disputes”. Soul Escort will usually have Window in the endings (we’ll discuss this later), so countering Congestion is a bit meaningless. Clearly, sacrificing a massive chunk of your squad strength and hope to draft an operator who counters one specific stage at E2 is worse than drafting Kafka.

The Core Mechanic: Inspirers

We’ve talked enough about Soul Escort’s redeployment buff, now let’s discuss another of Soul Escort’s core mechanics:

Inspirers.

Squad Effect #2: Toll Increase

First, let’s explain the second squad effect: For every Inspirer used, Toll +1. Thanks to this effect, we often see Soul Escort runs have over 100 Toll lategame, quite absurd. And in reality, this effect really is quite absurd. In IS5, a high Toll provides so much benefit. With a high toll, we can carry more Inspirers and Lingers to “False to Truth” nodes, which means we can craft more Shields and relics. We can also carry more combat Inspirers like Flames, Deathmatch, Civil War, or Rise and Fall to counter hard stages en route, further boosting our already strong en route power.

We can also control our Toll to be in the green to beat some hard stages. Imagine you’re routeblocked by an emergency “Frequent Disputes,” and you must keep your Toll in the green to take it. Some other squads may be forced to discard Rise and Fall, Industry, and Plans, and set themselves up to lack resources later on. We can also carry some key Inspirers to use later on, such as Witchcraft.

In a scenario where you temporarily don’t have anyone suitable to send, other squads may choose to pick a random 4-star to clear their Toll. And carrying Industry until after Petal also increases pressure on their Tolls. Some other classics include carrying Relocation until ED5, carrying Window until F5, carrying several Rise and Falls until the endings, and carrying March until ED2.

Some people mightn’t understand the benefits of a high Toll, so we can try to convert Toll into Ingots. The +5 Toll relic is widely accepted as a high value relic by top players. Its effect is to convert 8 Ingots into 5 Toll. Extrapolating this rate, we can convert 1 Toll into 1.6 Ingots. What does this mean in practice? Since every combat is expected to drop 2 Inspirers, we effectively earn 3.2 Ingots more than other squads per combat.

Squad Effect #3: Free Inspirers

Soul Escort’s second squad effect provides us with the ability to carry key Inspirers, but where do those key Inspirers come from? Well, we must mention Soul Escort’s third squad effect and the only effect that existed pre-DLC: gain two 2-star or above Inspirers upon entering every new floor (plus Mercenary).

Before the DLC, this effect was useless. Without the ability to increase Toll, it doesn’t matter how many Inspirers you get if you can’t carry them. Pre-DLC Soul Escort runs would often discard both Inspirers upon entering a new floor, which makes it no different to an effectless squad. But after the DLC, the effect gained a qualitative transformation. Not only because you have a bigger Toll, but also because the DLC added three extremely high value Inspirers:

Industry, Machine, and Grand Wish, whereas pre-DLC only had Witchcraft, Rise and Fall, and Civil War as the strong Inspirers. Some may wonder why Relocation isn’t a stronger Inspirer. I’ll discuss this later.

I have recorded the free Inspirers for 20 runs for a total sample size of 300 instances to help our understanding of the Inspirer rates.

Inspirer Drop Rates (300 Trials)

Inspirer	Drops
Civil War	33
Invasion	29
RnF	27
Flames	27
Witchcraft	22
Reclaim	21
Industry	16
Assembly	16
Grand Wish	12
Demolition	12
Lost	11
Oathbreak	9
Envenom	9
Torment	8
Machine	8
Words	8
Furnace	8
Catastrophes	7
Wall	5
Slumber	5
March	4
Excavate	4
Mercenary	3

Graph

With the data above, we can easily see that different Inspirers have different rates. The most common is

Civil War, appearing 33 times out of 300, which is 30 times more than the least common Inspirer Mercenary. We can also see that the strong Inspirers I mentioned all have high drop rates.

Civil War: The Inspirer with the highest drop rate is Civil War, the uncontested strongest Inspirer en route. Decreasing the deployment cost of operators significantly decreases the DP required for permasleep and minor cycles. Kafka is initially 5 DP; after Civil War, she only costs 3 DP, so you only need 3 DP to sleep 5 seconds. You not only don’t lose DP when permasleeping, but also gain 0.4 DP/s. But in the endings, we must consider our ability to output enough damage to the bosses. Kafka is unable to sleep the bosses, so Civil War has limited power in endings, so we tend to use Rise and Fall instead.
Rise and Fall: The Inspirers with the second highest drop rate are Rise and Fall and its component Invasion. The other component, Reclaim, also has a very high drop rate at 7th place. I don’t think I’ll need to discuss how broken this Inspirer is. Every squad and every comp will save a Rise and Fall for ED4. In my 10x winstreak runs, every run had 2.8 Rise and Falls on average, which doesn’t even include the excess Rise and Falls that weren’t crafted. We can say that Soul Escort has almost non-existent Rise and Fall stress. It’s near impossible to be missing Rise and Fall.
Flames: Next is Flames, which isn’t as strong. It has some decent power on some stages en route, but it doesn’t buff Yato, so we mostly use it to craft Shields.
Witchcraft: Finally is what I consider to be the strongest Inspirer in IS5, Witchcraft. Every Witchcraft yields 5 Hope, 1 Plan, and 1 of any ticket. Many people think that Soul Escort doesn’t have in-class drafts with discounted Hope, nor does it have Ingot or Blueprint’s ability to acquire many Hope relics. So where does Soul Escort’s Hope come from? I mentioned before that Soul Escort is able to decrease its number of refreshes and increase combats taken thanks to its strong en route power. This allows us to level up more effectively since we’re not only not afraid of hard stages, but we can actively take them. Most of the time, we can reach level 8 before ED4. Additionally, in my 10x winstreak runs, I have 2.9 Witchcrafts on average, which yields 14.5 Hope and 2.9 Plans. Plus the Hope from level 8, we can see that I can gain 60 Hope per run on average.
Assembly: Next is Assembly. Many people may misunderstand this Inspirer, thinking it’s weak. Actually, Assembly is a very strong Inspirer. If it’s used on a F3 boss or a pre-Petal EM combat, it yields EXP worth approximately 1 normal combat, which we can see as Hope and Squad Slots. This Inspirer is one of two Inspirers that increases our Hope, the other being Witchcraft.
Industry: Next is Industry. This Inspirer’s main value is allowing us to consistently save up 38 Ingots for Chalice. In the 10 runs where I’ve counted, every run has 2.4 Industries on average, which yields 36 ingots. This makes saving up for Chalice very, very easy for Soul Escort. In the 22 runs I’ve streamed, my Chalice rate is 100%. That’s right, I can get Chalice every single run. We can say that Soul Escort cannot possibly lose out on Chalice because of a lack of Ingots, only because a lack of Plans.
Grand Wish: Finally, Grand Wish, aka Window. Grand Wish is IS5’s second strongest Inspirer, right after Witchcraft. Even though Grand Wish’s drop rate is relatively low compared to the Inspirers above, it’s different to other Inspirers. Other Inspirers are ‘the more, the better’, but we only need one Grand Wish. Excess Grand Wishes don’t provide much power. According to my statistics, Soul Escort has a 4% chance to drop Grand Wish, so one every 25 drops on average. Let’s say we can enter 1 Bosky every run, that would mean we have a ~50% chance to obtain Grand Wish from Soul Escort’s squad effect. In my 10 runs, my Grand Wish rate is 80%. We can see this as obtaining 50% of the Grand Wishes from Soul Escort’s squad effect and 30% from other sources. Grand Wish has 2 main effects: preventing other Epochs and increasing survivability. Both effects are crucial due to ED5 “Fate’s Finale“‘s strict survivability check. The lowest survivability required for t1 egg is +85% external HP to allow E2 Purestream to live Amiya’s auto attack. Grand Wish plus Rise and Fall provides +100% external HP.

Conclusion

In summary, the three effects of the Soul Escort squad are all very powerful. The redeployment reduction effect not only enhances the strength of the squad in the middle of the game but also provides a new direction for team composition. The effects of increasing the backpack capacity and providing Inspirers complement each other, giving us powerful external resources. This makes the Soul Escort squad an invincible force in the middle of the game and also very strong in the final stages. This is why I feel this squad is so overpowered; perhaps only the Ingot squad is stronger than Soul Escort.

This concludes the main points of this video. The focus was on analyzing the strengths of the Soul Escort squad to provide a basic introduction for players who are new to it. I haven’t gone into detail about specific level strategies or operator priorities because I believe these things are difficult to teach through words alone. The randomness in Arknights’ Integrated Strategies is very high, and factors like the year or artifacts can greatly change the strategies and operator choices. It’s impossible to cover all possible scenarios.

Therefore, I recommend that those who want to learn this squad come and watch my live streams. It’s a much more effective way to learn than me trying to explain everything. I’ll be streaming less frequently since I have to go back to school, but my usual streaming time is from 10 AM to 2 PM. Thanks for watching, and goodbye everyone.