AUG and Angelica
Analyzing things on-time is no fun, but I now have an excuse: AUG has finally been announced for a rerun in the Jashin-chan collab, after being gone for over a year (since June 2020)! Let's see how she does compared to Angelica, the modern AUG-equivalent that is also rather difficult to obtain.
Baseline#
AUG and Angelica have exactly equal base stats: 58 FP, 60 ACC, 75 ROF, and 30% base crit chance at 100 affection. Even their irrelevant stats (HP/EVA) match.
Angelica gets an exo-slot SPEQ with +5 FP, giving her an 8% edge or so before any skills are factored in. On the other hand, this makes her a little less appealing to dupe1 as you can only have gotten one of those.
Their tiles are very similar (buff 1/2/5/8/7 from 4), but with two differences: Angelica only buffs SMGs and ARs for 10% FP/20% ACC, while AUG covers all types for 12% FP/20% ACC. 2% FP is not much, and there's little use for either doll outside of ARSMG echelons so you're generally fine considering these equal.
Finally, there's the skills.
Extreme Shooting (Angelica). Initial CD 4s/Skill CD 12s.
Passive: Increase damage by 12% at the start of battle. This buff gradually decays by 4% every 2s, and is completely removed after 6s. The buff will refresh itself every 10s. Active: Sacrifice 0% accuracy to increase rate of fire to a fixed 150 for 5s.
Funeral Rain (AUG). Initial CD 4s/Skill CD 16s.
Sacrifice 0% accuracy to spray at 150 rate of fire for 7 seconds.
So: AUG has a longer skill duration but longer cooldown (43.75% uptime after ICD vs Angelica's 41.67% uptime), while Angelica gets a passive FP buff every so often. Perhaps the biggest difference not made clear here is the targeting. Angelica maintains standard AR targeting in her skill (shoot closest enemy until dead) while AUG switches to a more MG-style sweeping pattern. Perhaps the key question is this: is random targeting better than AR targeting, and if so, is it enough to overcome Angelica's SPEQ/passive?
1: No ARs are really worth duping anyways, so this doesn't matter much.
Some numbers#
I have a chart featuring the damage over time of both AUG and Angelica (shorter fights, <20 seconds) in this older writeup. To get a better sense on uptime differences, passives, and all that, here's a basic damage sim chart:
Angelica looks typical for a 5-star AR long-term, while AUG is a bit lacking. This isn't the whole story, as they do have tiles.
Suppose you had to decide between using 3 copies of STAR in your backline or 2 copies + AUG. The first case: 541,687*3=1,625,601 damage long-term. The second: 541,687*1.12*2+399,553=1,612,932 damage long-term. That's a 0.78% lead with triple STARs, which AUG's 20% accuracy buff will likely make up for anyways. Angelica would be even better by this metric. Also, you don't have 3 STARs.
In other words, I would consider both AUG and Angelica to be competitive with top-end DPS ARs, as long as you are also using strong ARs for their tiles to cover.
Testing#
Rather obviously, damage simulators and theoretical numbers don't tell us anything about targeting differences or the other minor effects that the differences between AUG and Angelica may cause. Let's do a few experiments against typical mobs you may use an ARSMG for. As a sanity check, I'll also put in 89 Shiki to compare them to a strong direct-fire AR and Grizzly for a HG option - aside from picking between Angelica and AUG, it's also important to ask if we should be using either of them at all.
For some easier stuff, here's a test against some random SF from Singularity. No fairy to let at least a few skills activate.
Results suggest a relatively strong ordering of AUGā„Angelica>89 Shiki>Grizzly. The difference was particularly pronounced against the Guard/Jaeger group, with AUG leading to much faster and safer clears.
Taking the difficulty up a notch - now we've got a Guard/Jaeger group almost twice the size. Results are very similar, with the only notable deviation being a bit more damage taken with AUG against the Brute/Vespid group and Grizzly matching 89 Shiki a bit better against the Dragoon/Guards.
Final test set, featuring an upgraded fairy to avoid dying against Gunners. Grizzly appears to outperform Angelica and 89 Shiki, but still doesn't look any better than AUG. If I had to guess, ADS' grenade seemed to do quite a bit of damage against the Strelets, so Grizzly's FP tiles were particularly valuable. MP5's tiles also skip over the middle, benefitting pos4 ARs less.
I'm somewhat surprised by 89 Shiki's poor performance here - Uzi's molotovs were tearing through the Strelets, so I'd expect 89 Shiki's 20% FP/15% EVA tiles to be good when combined with her excellent solo DPS.
Damage percent statistics are excluded as they can't reasonably be compared between ARs and HGs.
Conclusion#
AUG is often criticized for her random targeting. However, this appears to be a substantial edge in her favor for typical ARSMG-oriented battles: despite the lack of a SPEQ and passive, she seems to have an advantage over both Angelica and other non-M4 pos4 options (HGs, strong selfbuffers) in most cases.
A few other notes:
- Yes, M4A1 is a thing. I'm imagining a world in which there's a reason to deploy more than 1 ARSMG echelon ever and we get to make interesting teambuilding decisions.
- No, HGs are not that great in ARSMG echelons, something you can see a bit more proof of here. Damage simulators do not make for good teambuilding guides.
- Being ROF selfbuffers, both AUG and Angelica will do worse against armor. ARSMG echelons in general shouldn't be used against armor so this doesn't matter much. If you have substantial ROF tiles on your SMGs, other ARs may perform relatively better.
- Outside of coalition drills, I wouldn't expect AUG's ALL tiles to come up.
- Ribeyrolles could be an interesting comparison for future study, as could pairing AUG/Angelica with RFB/CR-21 for even more nonstandard targeting.
- This was done before the new equipment/SPEQ rework. AUG benefits much less from chips and Angelica's SPEQ gives +15 damage instead of +5. While AUG's random targeting is nice, she may be harder to justify in your teams now in favor of the new options.
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