Night vision on rifles!?
The next big client update, hopefully releasing on EN before 2023, includes reworks for some often-forgotten accuracy-focused HGs. Rather than providing accuracy buffs from their skills, they instead give partial night vision.
For a quick refresher (or for a long one),
$$ \text{Hit rate}~(\%) = \frac{\text{ACC}}{\text{ACC}+\text{EVA}} \times 100\% $$and
$$ \mathrm{ACC}_{\mathrm{Night}} = \left\lfloor \mathrm{ACC} \cdot (1 - 0.9 \cdot(1 - \mathrm{PEQ~correction})) \right\rfloor $$We can also solve for the effective accuracy buff a PEQ gives, setting aside rounding parameters:
$$ \mathrm{ACC}_{\mathrm{Increase}} = \frac{\mathrm{ACC} \cdot (1 - 0.9 \cdot(1 - \mathrm{PEQ}))}{\mathrm{ACC} \cdot 0.1} = 9 \cdot \mathrm{PEQ} + 1 $$so a 0% PEQ is equivalent to a 1.0x accuracy multiplier, a 50% PEQ is a 5.5x accuracy multiplier (450% buff), and a 100% PEQ is a 10x accuracy multiplier (900% buff). Relative to your post-night-penalty acc, that is. Compared to your day accuracy, anything below a 100% PEQ is at least some sort of loss.
Recognizing that DPS is proportional to your hit rate, we can generate plots showing the DPS increase various levels of night vision offer, for various evasion/accuracy stat combinations. As insurance against any major adjustments/tweaks, I'll still keep these charts somewhat general. The expected changes: P38's skill reduces night penalty by 50%. C96 reduces the night penalty by 70% (unmodded) or 90% (modded). Illumination's active reduces the night penalty by 10%. Keep in mind that the dolls discussed are more than just this one skill.
First, against a fairly "standard" 15 EVA:
Even 50% night vision gets you most of the way there, offering at least a 40% DPS increase for reasonable levels of accuracy buffing. If you're only getting acc from P38/C96's tiles, it's more like a 60-80% DPS increase.
Paradeus enemies (Strelets, Gunners) and SWAP SF can get a bit dodgier. As always, you can check stats on specific maps using GFLMaps. Versus 40 EVA:
Night vision becomes far more useful as evasion scales up. Here, odds are good these flare skills are at least doubling your DPS.
At 60 EVA, numbers continue to inflate:
These are some big DPS increases, but don't necessarily answer how good this is compared to surehit options. To help compare, here are the actual hit rates you end up with:
Even 50% night vision gets you to a respectable 80-90% hit chance, at which point surehit options are necessarily no more than a 25% DPS increase.
It's a bit dodgier against highly evasive enemies, but C96 mod at least gets you to a respectable 75%+ hit rate. Keep in mind that most surehit options work very differently from standard dolls (M200, SSG3000, AS Val, 4 Shiki,...), so there's no easy 1:1 comparison or calculation for when you should switch to that.
See here for the middle chart.
Type59 was previously the best night accuracy buffer. Her 75% EVA debuff is like a 4x accuracy multiplier, or a 33% PEQ. She's now outclassed for pure hit rate, but her tiles may be more desirable and her skill being a debuff could be more or less valuable depending on team interactions.
Conclusion#
These adjustments look very promising for flare HGs. Even partial night penalty reduction is a massive effective accuracy boost, and standard rifles will benefit greatly. How much accuracy you're getting from tiles/auras introduce a lot of variance, as does enemy evasion, but you're reasonably looking at a 40-150% DPS increase from the skills. C96 and P38 still have subpar tiles, but this seems like enough to make them worth consideration.
Illumination's active is less impactful, but 10% night vision is still often more than it sounds. This can reasonably be a 15-40% DPS increase.
This doesn't necessarily make them universal, though - other HGs may offer special utility (like M950A's speed boost/slow field or P22's shields), surehit dolls are always an option for evasive enemies, and there's not that much night content at the moment.
If you already have your basics and intermediates covered, though, it may be worth raising some of these on the side.
Notes#
- ARs can equip PEQs themselves, so we don't need to worry there (and with chips, not using the scope slot is less of a loss). If you need MGs and aren't exclusively facing 0-EVA enemies, just use Nova.
- Accuracy and evasion seems to be a rather poorly understood mechanic by much of the community. I strongly recommend a careful reading of my overview of it. You may also want to check out a few myths on related topics: 1, 2, 3.
- Flare HGs pre-3.0 weren't exactly "useless," although I'm not calling them "great" either.
- Their skills don't completely negate the night penalty, as new players tend to expect them to.
- Accuracy buffs on rifles at night can be useful.
- Broadly speaking, Type59 and SPP-1's EVA debuffs provide(d) similar or better effective accuracy buffs while having better tiles/more flexibility.
- Accuracy, unlike evasion, has diminishing returns. The DPS increase from additional accuracy buffs shrinks as your accuracy increases. It's unlikely for it to make sense to stack multiple dedicated acc buffers in the same team. Don't use P38+C-96+Illu all at once. Even if it made sense on paper, it would almost surely make even more sense to swap your DPS for surehit options and rebuild accordingly.
- At the same time, "having diminishing returns" doesn't mean it's not worth boosting.
More like this
4 Shiki SPEQ testing
Performance testing