Lorentz Butterfly – Prydwen Pre-Release Review

Good evening! Everyone has waited with bated breath for the new 3.5 patch and its basis in the Mexican “Día de los Muertos”. In this, we are introduced to two very interesting characters: Lorentz Butterfly and Ramona. Today we’ll focus on the founder of Institutium Lorentz, because she isn’t what everyone expected her to be.

It’s uncommon for me to do these nowadays, and I can’t promise any degree of stability in these posts due to my work outside of this, but I’ll do what I can to do it semi-consistently.

The translations are from @/ChunxiRavenclaw on the Official Discord.

The usual disclaimers apply: we don’t have modifiers just yet, nor specific details regarding some parts of their kit, so we can’t say for sure if Lorentz Butterfly is good. ALWAYS take preliminary kit reviews with a grain of salt, no matter from what source it is (even ours).

Afflatus: Intellect
Role: Support(?)
Tags: Lingering Glow, Burn, Upgrade

Insight: Aperiodic Flows
Precognition | When an enemy is inflicted with [Burn] or [Halo], accumulate [Lingering Glow], which cannot coexist with [Bloodtithe].

1. Before Incantations in the AP Area resolve, Lorentz Butterfly’s basic Incantations gain additional ranks based on the number of other Incantations in the AP Area of the same type.
2. Upon entering combat, increase Crit Rate.
3. Upon entering combat, gain Moxie. At the end of the round, grant Moxie to all [Lingering Glow] allies that didn’t cast their Ultimate this round, and grant Moxie to self. The maximum [Burn] stacks on enemies increases, and when there are at least [X] number of [Lingering Glow] allies present, further increase this maximum. At the start of the round, depending on the number of [Lingering Glow] allies present, grant additional DMG Bonus and Incantation Might to them scaling with [Lingering Glow] stacks.

Incantation 1: Primer Flutter
1-target debuff. Deals Mental DMG. Inflicts [Burn]. Deals additional Genesis DMG equal to a ratio of DMG Dealt by allied Incantations this round. This damage is not affected by [Stats Up] effects. This ratio will increase with [Lingering Glow] stacks.

Incantation 2: Quantized Criterion
Mass buff. Gain [First Wing] and grant this status to [Lingering Glow] allies.

[First Wing]: When attacking, inflict [Burn].

Ultimate: Dynamic Systems are Unpredictable
Self buff. Gain [Continuous Action I]. Before casting, select several basic Incantations from the Spelldock. After casting, print a copy of the selected Incantations as [Preparation] Incantations, which will be drawn on the next round. Copied Incantations gain [Fractal Dimension].

[Fractal Dimension]: Cannot merge. Does not cost AP to play, but doesn’t grant Moxie to the caster.

Review

The way it appears to be designed is pretty simple, which is something I wasn’t expecting for the Founder of Institutium Lorentz. Her main gimmick appears to be following in line with the [Burn] application required of [Lingering Glow] units. She inflicts it, increases the cap on enemies and allows her allies to inflict extra through [First Wing], extremely standard [Lingering Glow] stuff that we’ve seen with Isolde and Marsha before her.

Insight 1 is nice, giving Lorentz access to high-rank skills quite easily. You don’t really have to do anything for it, the BiS team consists of solely Buff and Debuff cards so it is likely that you will always be casting Lorentz cards at rank 2 or 3.

Insight 3 should allow her to cycle her Ultimate pretty decently and also help cycle Beryl, Isolde and Marsha at the same time. This in and of itself is a pretty decent damage buff, but [Lingering Glow] units aren’t exactly known for their powerful Ultimates (they’re moreso focused on Follow-Up Attacks and Incantations where needed). For this the final line in her I3 is pretty solid, free additional DMG Bonus and Incantation Might (which then scale as you get further into the fight) is always useful and falls in the wants/needs of the archetype.

Let’s start with the most exciting part of her kit, the first Incantation. “Primer Flutter” is a cast that repeats part of the damage done by all other Incantation’s this round as Genesis DMG (unaffected by buffs) to it’s target. Assuming this includes things like “Intermezzo” from Isolde and “Destined Doom” from Beryl, this is bound to hit extremely hard once the team gets going.

But that’s also where the interest kind of dies?

The second Incantation is “Quantized Criterion” and all it does is grant [First Wing] to herself and any [Lingering Glow] allies. This buff simply allows allies to inflict [Burn] on attack, so it’s essentially Isolde’s [Prelude] passive but with a duration instead of stacks.

Her Ultimate “Dynamic Systems are Unpredictable” falls in much the same line. Effectively what it does is give you [Continuous Action 1] and then, in a similar vein to Aleph (but then adding them to your Spelldock instead of the casting area) copy Incantations over to the next round. I don’t really see the point of this? Beryl Incantations do very little once stacked, Isolde barely uses Incantations and Marsha is actively an AFK sustain unit. I think the idea, depending on how many cards you can copy, is to at least include “Primer Flutter” to copy over?

This, in my opinion, is a general problem with the way Lorentz is designed.

Do I think she’s going to be bad? Unlikely, Flutterpage is a very difficult bar to beat and they do seem to want to replace her. Repeating the damage done by “Intermezzo” and “Destined Doom” is going to do a quadrillion damage and the ease of access to get to Moxie via her I3 and [Continuous Action I] will smooth out any nicks in the rotation but…

… There’s just nothing there, is there? No expansion of the archetype, no playing with the theme’s that the character is based around (chaos theory, butterfly effect, predictive systems, there’s so much to work with there). The entire Incantation 2 only buffs the [Burn] infliction of allied units (that’s an Isolde *passive* for Vertin’s sake), the Ultimate essentially reads as “get AP+1 and make sure you don’t have to use Tuning next round”; half the kit mentions “[Lingering Glow] allies” as if BP is deathly afraid of a Support falling out of its archetype again (like Flutterpage who manages to weasel her way into every team ever) and it’s just, disappointing?

I digress because unfortunately I have to keep a modicum of professionality, but as you can tell I am not too happy with nor excited for Lorentz Butterfly. The way her kit is designed, from a game designer’s point of view, appears to be utterly and solely for working out the tiny sharp edges in the Lingering Glow rotation that people were playing around regardless instead of actually expanding on the archetype and allowing Lorentz to be her own character. It’s a case of ‘designing a character for this kit that we need to complete [Lingering Glow]’ instead of ‘designing a kit for this interesting character’. At least “Primer Flutter” seems like an interesting thing to play around with in terms of damage, unfortunately they made sure that the rest of her kit is unusable without (likely) at least 2 [Lingering Glow] allies.

It seems they were overly cautious of the implications that “Primer Flutter” would bring when slotted into other teams with high DPT (looking at you, Brume/Nala and Liang Yue). This is fair, but it’s taking the easy way out to shove ‘[Lingering Glow] ally’ clauses into everything and designing the most ‘minimum kit’ to complete the archetype while trying to avoid it getting out of hand like with the others. There’s elegant ways to do this as a game designer, this is not one of them.

Predicted Tier: S or S+ – Even if solely for Lingering Glow. There’s other tailor-made Supports like Charon/Ulrich for Dynamo and Semmelweis/Sentinel for Bloodtithe but never have we had a character so completely devoted to only filling in the tiny gaps of their archetype as this. This really is the unseasoned chicken of kit designs. Will she be good? It is kind of kit where numbers scream loudest, as there’s no real gimmicks to speak of, so probably yes. Will she replace Flutterpage in Lingering Glow? Hard to say due to said lack of numbers, but if they want to replace Flutterpage they can without much effort.