Critical Parachute talents
Damage I, Damage II, and Fervor are pretty much always recommended as the go-to talents for your fairies. Fairies are expensive to raise, so you'll end up moving them between echelons constantly. The class-specific talents are decent on paper but become much less useful when you're trying to use your Aim taunt fairy on an ARSMG team.
A topic of discussion I've heard come up a few times relates to the Critical II talent. High-end strategies in the upcoming Polarized Light ranking may use a team with a high rarity (4-5★) parachute fairy that takes several fights in a row under the debuff to declog helipads. While it's not hard to work out the numbers between Crit II and a straight damage talent for any given doll, I thought I'd show the overall relationship here to get a better understanding of the matter.
Normal combat#
This is a sort of heatmap - for any combination of crit rate + crit damage, the DPS improvement of Crit II over Damage II is shown as a color. More yellow = Crit II is better, more blue = Damage II is better. The dark lines show boundaries at intervals of a 5% performance difference, and the gray lines mark common crit rates/crit damage stats (with white text labels).
In normal fights, even with the crazy crit damage boost a 5★ para provides, Crit II drops off quite quickly around 75% base crit rate. Rifles, even with no crit rate boosts, will be over 5% worse off with Crit II compared to Damage II (thus also being better off with Damage I).
In the same situation, most ARs would be at 210% crit damage. Crit II is a little more viable here (~5% advantage) but will fall off quickly if the ARs get crit rate boosts from stuff like M4A1 or UMP45. There are ultimately very few realistic scenarios where Crit II is decent, and this makes it a poor option for almost all fairies.
Under Debuff#
But we already knew Crit II likely wasn't some amazing generalist talent. It's rarely mentioned outside of the Fury Fairy/Jill combo due to its limitations. Let's get to the para debuff charts:
Using your parachute skill applies a 40% crit rate debuff which shifts the hot zone right and widens it up. Now, with the crit damage boost of a para fairy, rifles are looking good with Crit II while ARs are at least breaking even. The massive debuff also results in Crit II keeping an advantage even with some substantial crit rate buffs - at a 120% base crit rate, Crit II is still about 5% better than Damage II on rifles (when your para is 5★, less good at lower rarities). Using the classic M4A1+UMP45 combination in an ARSMG echelon gets the buffed ARs to 110% crit rate (pre-debuff), where Crit II is a little over 5% better than Damage II.
Conclusion & Other comments#
There are few cases where a Critical II talent Parachute fairy is beneficial over a regular damage talent, when not under debuff. Under para debuff, at high rarity, it's usually better than Damage II. On a high rarity para fairy that you intend on largely using for debuffed fights, Critical II could be a viable option - perhaps something nice to have on a third or fourth para. I wouldn't really recommend it otherwise, especially not on other fairies. In normal fights, without substantial critical damage buffs, Crit II is either always worse than Damage II or better by 1-2% in a small window. At night, Crit II becomes much worse on most ARs: using PEQs, they're stuck around a 20% crit rate. A straight damaging talent will ultimately be far more flexible and almost always just straight up better.
The percent differences here aren't that big. Lucky damage rolls, oaths, better kiting, targeting RNG, and such can cover for a 0-5% performance difference.
For sufficiently long fights, Fervor approaches a 15.7% advantage over Damage II. As you may be able to tell from the maximum values on the scales, Crit II won't be able to match up to this. For shorter fights, it'll depend a lot more on the length of the fight. Read more here if you want to see how that breaks down. Despite using Damage II for this comparison, I'd typically be inclined to prefer Fervor over Damage II. The variable buff makes it awkward to compare Crit II with Fervor here.
Keep in mind that calibration tickets are rarely given out, and cost rather absurd amounts of energy to acquire through Defense Drill. It can take many tickets and resources to change talents. Results are not guaranteed. Be very careful before spending calibration tickets, especially if you already have a strong talent (like Damage I/II/Fervor).
At lower rarities, you can't rely on any talent - there's only a percent chance of them activating and resetting talent RNG no longer works. Don't bother with calibrating low-rarity fairies. If you want a specific talent, I personally like to roll for copies of the fairy without raising any until I find one with the right talent (though this can take some storage space).
Crit damage is technically less efficient against armor. However, almost nothing has armor significantly above fully enhanced & calibrated AP (195 AP including the 15 base). It's not something worth worrying about. Rounding/Armor/AP may slightly change the percentages in specific cases.
Extra: Accuracy II#
If Critical II is potentially usable, is Accuracy II any good? Let's take a quick look:
Scouts, one of the more evasive regular enemies out there, tend to cap out at around 80 EVA. FAL is the least accurate AR I'd consider at least usable and has 46 accuracy without any external buffs (she also has a grenade that ignores evasion, but think of this as a lower bound). Even pairing these extremes against each other, Acc II isn't looking good compared to Damage II. Maybe it's ~2% better on average while under a SL10 para debuff.
At a glance, Acc II might look a little tempting for rifles at night. Even with some HGs like Calico/P22 who have strong accuracy tiles (alongside other potent buffs), many rifles will have around 15-20 accuracy. Still, enemies would need to have upwards of 40 EVA for there to be a remotely notable improvement with Acc II, at which point you may as well use M200/use other forms of surehit/reset for the tiniest bit better accuracy RNG.
More like this
(the talent)
Performance analysis