New Doll Equipment: Wave 2

By BigStupidJellyfish | 2022-December-13

Five new equipment pieces have been introduced, with something to offer for every class. Let's go over them one-by-one and see if they are worth your resources.

Teaser/announcement image.

HD-100 Bipod
M200X LRF
S.F. Modified Tactical Light
Mk0 Multi-purpose Choke
Focus Chip

HD-100 Bipod^#

Equippable by MG. Replaces ammo box. Stats at maximum calibration/enhancement: +10 ACC, -2 MS, -2s Reload time.

Standard MG reload speed is floor((4+200/ROF)*30). With this applied, it'd become floor((2+200/ROF)*30). This of course is not helpful for short (first-volley) battles or on (near) infinite magazine MGs like RPK-203/M1895 CB/MG338, aside from the bit of accuracy.

For a simplistic start, let's set aside skills and assume a very long battle. The old boxes are clearly better if looking at short (first-volley) fights, so we'll set those aside.

A MG firing cycle with n rounds consists of n-1 delays between attacks (typically 10 frames, but not always) and one reload. If we take the total number of attacks made in this cycle, and divide that by the length of the cycle in frames, we can get the long-term average attack rate. Current MGs have a base capacity of 8-11 rounds, so plotting the new bipod in the solid lines and ammo boxes in dashed lines:

Solid lines: the new bipod. Dashed lines: the old ammo box. Higher is better.

This might be easier to interpret if we take the relative attack rate, or the attack rate with a bipod divided by the attack rate with a box. Values above 1 mean the bipod should be preferred, values below 1 prefer the box. Note that the +acc from the bipod may make it slightly better (shifting the lines up) if you need accuracy.

Line above one: the new bipod is preferred. Below: the old ammo box is preferred.

As you may have been able to predict, MGs with smaller ammo capacities benefit more from ammo boxes. 11-ammo MGs always (by this metric) prefer the new bipod.

Doll skills and battle circumstances make this hard to turn into a general recommendation, however. Some dolls get an enhanced shot every few bullets. Ammo boxes will be a bit more or less valuable depending on how that lines up. Second-volley MG skills tend to have an 8-second ICD, which depending on ammo count/walk time may be more or less compatible with these options.

As a bonus, for MGs like Lewis who apply a multiplicative reduction to their own reload speed, the bipod subtraction happens after - giving it a much larger effective boost. MGs with fixed reload speeds (M1918 mod, PK w/ SPEQ, RPK-16) are not affected by this box, so steer clear of it on them.

The +acc provides roughly a ~6-8% extra edge in favor of the bipod for (reasonably) low-accuracy scenarios, 2-5% with some more RMRs/acc tiles. This makes the bipod a fairly safe pick across the board, even for something like an 80-ROF/8-capacity MG, but isn't revolutionary as RMRs/flares/Nova remain options and as various MGs don't benefit from this reload decrease.

M200X LRF^#

Equippable by certain RFs. Replaces capes. Stats at maximum calibration/enhancement: +10 FP, -80% ICD.

This is going to super depend on the dolls in question, and the encounters you're using them in. It could be helpful to snipe something specific early, but is more likely to be used to let rifles charge their skill faster, and get a bigger multiplier once HG skills kick in. Exercise caution on bamboo rifles that can crit, though - this replaces capes, hurting crit damage. Classic bamboo rifles like Springfield and Mosin-Nagant still must suffer with the reality that they are not Carcano M91/38/Kar98k mod/a selfbuffer/Type88/Type56R (depending on the scenario).

As these are only equippable by whitelisted dolls, this is likely to get weaker over time - your guess is as good as mine as to whether Mica will remember to enable this for newly released dolls. Their track record hasn't always been great. The current list of supported dolls:

M1 Garand	Springfield	M21	Mosin-Nagant	SVT-38	PTRD
SV-98	Kar98k	NTW-20	PSG-1	Super SASS	M99
OTs-44	DSR-50	PzB39	JS05	Gepard M1	TAC-50
M82A1	SPR A3G	RT-20	KSVK	Falcon	QBU-88
GM6 Lynx

S.F. Modified Tactical Light^#

Equippable by AR/SMG/HG/SG. Replaces scope (accessory). Stats at maximum calibration/enhancement: +8 EVA, +5% Echelon Night Vision.

ARs can already get full night vision, so there's no point to this on supporting HGs/SMGs in ARSMGs. For RFHGs/MGSGs, there's competition:

Post-3.0 flare HGs offer much more night vision, though with partial uptime. This is where the tactical light is likely to see the most use, though, as you're likely to want the utility other HGs offer and rifles don't need that much night vision to get respectable hit rates. Having 3 of these in the echelon can give a ~20-40% DPS improvement to your rifles against evasive enemies.
For MGs, Nova gives more than enough acc post night penalty for reasonable scenarios. Partial night vision on MGs isn't sufficient to make them appealing against evasive enemies.

These are also great for theater CE, as they give SGs (relatively) large amounts of evasion, if you care about that. SG evasion doesn't matter much for normal combat due to flash shells/HP shields/damage reduction skills.

Mk0 Multi-purpose Choke^#

Equippable by SG. Replaces scope. Stats at maximum calibration/enhancement: +5 magazine size, +10 ACC.

SGs tend to have low magazine sizes (3-7 on most), so this significantly improves their shooting uptime. This also reduces the chance of their skill coming up while reloading, and not activating until the reload finishes or you jiggle them. Considering ITI/VFL/EOTs are just moderate DPS adjustments, and most SGs are here for utility over DPS, this should be a nice improvement in most cases.

Focus Chip^#

Equippable by AR/SMG. Replaces exo/processor chip. Stats at maximum calibration/enhancement: +10 FP, -10 ROF, +30% crit damage.

In case AR equipment wasn't annoying enough to optimize already, there's now a sort of reverse chip that subtracts ROF in exchange for adding crit damage.

Let's start out with some broad charts, and see how they compete with chips normally. The first charts will plot

$$ \text{Relative DPS} = \frac{\text{DPS w/ VFL+Focus Chip}}{\mathrm{max}( \text{VFL+Exo},\text{VFL+#2 Chip},\text{EOT+#2 Chip} )} $$

as a function of various stats. Values greater than 1 mean the focus chip is the best equipment option, values below 1 mean previous options are preferred (and old logic applies). Each chart corresponds to a fixed crit chance (from tiles), and variable crit damage (from fairies)+base ROF stat.

Given generic AR statlines, and no crit tiles, these only seem to be worthwhile on dolls with a particularly high ROF stat. There aren't many of these.

With some crit tiles, these now are typically preferred on ARs (as long as you have some sort of crit aura).

Note how the contours are largely vertical - this means the value of this new chip doesn't vary much with your crit damage aura. As we saw a big shift going from no crit tiles to 32%, we could make some charts with that as an axis, but there realistically aren't that many other cases for your AR crit buffs to care about.

Let's also think about ROF buffers. The following charts use fixed crit chance/crit damage combinations, and variable ROF stats/ROF buff percentages.

As seen above, with no crit tiles, it takes a good bit of ROF for these to be attractive. Many ROF selfbuffers will prefer these outright, but they were in a pretty bad spot before.

Adding some crit chance helps a lot. Once again, we can see most ARs (~75+ ROF) liking the new chip. Crit damage aura is an awfully small factor here - try spotting the difference with this chart for para fairies.

Finally, let's do some damage-over-time comparisons for a few specific dolls of interest.

Even with the crit damage penalty on #2 chips, VFL+#2 Chip combinations (and a focus on crits) used to win out over EOT/#2 Chip/FP-focused builds. The focus chip has a moderate edge in such scenarios, even on FP-buffing ARs. It's safer, as you're less likely to waste ROF tiles, and is compatible with ROF buffers - allowing them to compete again.

The focus chip appears to save AR equipment optimization: you can now just use a VFL, HV ammo, and this new thing. ROF overcapping is much less of a concern. I'd only consider the #2 chip for some specific silly farming setup, or if you're actually just fighting dinergates. (Though it'll still generally be optimal on FP buffers, if you have no crit tiles and not many ROF tiles.)

You can always check specific cases with this calculator. The focus chip gains some extra value on fixed-ROF dolls (AUG/Angelica/SAR) as the penalty won't affect their in-skill DPS, but that doesn't necessarily make them better than other ARs. As usual, dolls that have a SPEQ will generally prefer it over any of these options and you won't need many of these given the limited use ARs as a whole see. At night, as PEQs murder your crit rate, PEQ+#2 chip is still optimal.

Other notes:

Dolls with EOT-like SPEQs may prefer those+a #2 chip over SPEQ+Focus or VFL+Focus. It depends, though - Ribey mod, for example, prefers SPEQ+#2 chip over VFL+focus unless she's getting ~30%+ crit rate and crit damage buffs.