Summary
When guns and warfare are the rules of the land, you will need the best of the best to back you up on the battlefield. Special units are the spine of each team in Blue Archive, and it’s good to know who to bring with and what skills they have. Whether you play offensively or want to build your defenses with healers and tanks, it’s important to know who has your back.
There are over a hundred units that can make up your party, and forty-four of them are special students alone. The special units listed below are considered the best of them. They might not fit your current meta, but they’re worth looking into.
10Ibaragi Yoshimi
A Temper Larger Than Her Height
A desire to appear mature with a temper to match, all Yoshimi wants is to be taken seriously and seen as more mature than her stature allows. Despite this, her main focus is eating sweets, so much so that her rifle is aptly named Sweets Driver. She has a decent normal skill that can deal damage in a circular area every 25 seconds.
Her EX skill packs a punch by dealing at least 220 percent attack while causing a stun to anyone unlucky enough to be caught inside the radius. Her passive and Sub Skill offer a decent boost to her skills, and she is capable in battle if you have limited units. But overall, her kit is lacking compared to other students.
9Okusora Ayane
Studious But Shy
The secretary of the Abydos Countermeasure Committee (or “Foreclosure Task Force” depending on localization) has a lot on her plate. The school is nearly abandoned, and the remaining students are attempting to pay off the huge debt that’s been occurring.All while the beautiful yet decaying townis disintegrating around them. Ayane works hard to support this and the school’s eventual restoration. Her desire to support is reflected in her role in combat as well.
Ayane is a healer unit that can heal anyone within her circular radius with her EX Skill, while her normal skill increases crit resistance by at least 15 percent. She also gains a healing buff with her passive ability, Self-Development.As a healer unit, she’s just fine. Great if you don’t have a healer, but there are stronger healers with better move sets.
8Igusa Haruka (New Year)
A Loyal Friend In Arms
While Haruka’s default form is a striker, for the new year, she decided to step out of her comfort zone, visually with her outfit and by switching her role to a special student. She still dons her signature shotgun, but her skill set drastically changes. Haruka’s normal unit focused on heavy attacks and boosting HP and Defense. The new year introduced Haruka the Saboteur.
New Year Haruka comes in heavy with the debuffs, lowering enemies' resistance to critical damage while also increasing the chance for her party to recover the cost of their skills in combat. She doesn’t completely abandon her boosing roots. However, with her enhanced skill, named ‘Unforgivable, Unforgivable!!’ increases the target’s attack by at least 26 percent.
7Kasekura Moe
Bringing Heavy Firepower To The Battlefield
Moe has always been driven to create as much chaos as possible, and what better way to wreak havoc than to blow everything up? Moe’s affinity for explosives was aperfect match for her choice of school, SRT Academy, also known to be impressively heavy in firepower. It’s an explosive match, to be sure.
Her skill set reflects her passion for explosions. Take her EX skill, Steel Rain, for example, which causes an explosion in a line for massive damage and continuously causes damage over time. Moe’s passive abilities reiterate her desire for strength by offering a total minimum 43 percent boost to your attacks.
6Amami Nodaka
Nothing Escapes Her Gaze
Nodaka seeks beauty in everything she can see with the gigantic scope that she carries on her back. So much so, that she often ends up distracted and in trouble with her school, the Red Winter Academy, and is currently suspended and waiting to be reinstated. While waiting, she’s honing her skills with her weapon, the PP-2000.
Complementing her sight, her abilities are tailored to increase the accuracy of any ally in her eyesight. Her passive skills increase her accuracy by a minimum of 43 percent, and her EX skill, Observational Support, increases the accuracy of anyone in her radius by 47 percent. With her in your party, you’ll always hit your target.
5Kuromi Serika (New Year)
A Most Diligent Treasurer
You would think with a schedule as full as Serika’s from The Abydos Task Force, she wouldn’t have time to engage in combat, let alone take time out to visit the shrine as a priestess (according to her outfit). But, somehow she managed to take time away from her striker role within the roster and hopped over to the Special Student side for New Year’s.
Not only does her kit have a powerful arch attack named Part-Time Interference, but her basic and passive skills boost attack power by a significant 43 percent for all party members in the area she aims for. Coupling that with her crit boost named Full-Time Tenacity, she turns the entire party into heavy hitters.
4Sunaookami Shiroko (Swimsuit)
The Poster Child Of Adaptability
Don’t let her stoic disposition fool you. Shiroko will do anything to help her school arise from its debt and her friends that go there. If you have any ill will toward Abydos School, you’ll be in for a rude awakening when you run into her. Her laser focus and willingness to fight translate well into her Special Student skills.
When it comes to her skills, she is an all-rounder who can boost allies’ attacks while decreasing the enemies’ defenses by a whopping 34 percent. It’s not a passive either! The skill, aptly named ‘It’s A Big Catch,’ hits a singular enemy with a whopping 1,117 percent of attack damage, effectively making her a one-hitter quitter.
3Kakudate Karin
No Nonsense Sniper With A Golden Heart
Appearances can be deceiving for Miss Kakudate Karin. She can appear cold and calculating to those outside of her inner circle at Millennium Science School, but those who know her past the veneer of frost see her as a goofball who is overprotective and quite bad at math, if you can believe that.
Of course, once on the field, she holds nothing back. Karin’s anti-tank rifle is pure power incarnate, and her kit doubles that by boosting her attack by over 44 percent from passives alone. Her EX Skill? It hits up to 1,714 percent, depending on how large the target is. The bigger they are, the harder she hits.
2Nekozuka Hibiki
A Peerless Engineer
You don’t need social skills to excel at something you love. Hibiki is proof of this. Due to her being a highly infamous engineer, she is renowned for her ingenious, if not a little confusing, random additions she likes to incorporate in her designs. Something you may see for yourself when you take a look at her Fancy Light.
So, what does she look like amid battle? This Is Gonna Hurt, her EX Skill, is a devastating AOE attack that sends a volley of missiles, targeting a cluster of five areas. You’re all but guaranteed to wipe the field with her backing you up. Already dangerous, this queen is built in with a high crit percentage to make sure nothing gets back up.
1Natsume Iroha
The Tank Who Would Prefer Not To Fight
If there’s one thing, Iroha cares about, being at home and playing video games. Can you blame her? So, if getting back home means taking her tank Toromaru for a quick walk and taking some folks out, then she’s going to do just that. You’d think she’d want to be a striker and stay on the field, but that’s too much effort.
Her Normal Skill can be a little misleading if you only glaze over her skills. Yes, her attack can hit up to four enemies at once. It’s not technically considered an AOE. The artillery rounds act more as a homing shot rather than explosive damage.
