The New Sniper Fairy

By BigStupidJellyfish | 2022-March-03

Four fairies got their skills reworked recently, though Defense has been delayed to the 2.09 client. Perhaps we'll go over the others later, but for now, let's just look at this shiny new Sniper fairy skill:

Sniper Command Skill Cost: 1 Fairy Command

Every 3 seconds, fire a sniper shot at the enemy unit with the highest HP, dealing damage that equals 15% of their maximum HP and inflicting 20% vulnerability on them, lasting for 5 seconds. Damage dealt to units below 50% health is doubled. Baseline sniper shot damage is capped at 20000.

Previously, it fired a single shot dealing 20000 damage at SL10, which would land ~10.3 seconds into battle. This was incredibly disappointing, and most sensible players took it as parachute fodder. Not being such a person, I happened to raise one a while back. Now, let's test it out and see how bad of a decision that was, ultimately.

Just by reading its skill, a few things come to mind:

It's more effective against smaller groups (there's a higher chance your dolls are shooting the vulnerable ones)
It's more effective against high-HP enemies. Its damage caps at 20000 for enemies with more than \( \frac{20{,}000}{15\%} = 133{,}333 \text{ HP} \).
With a shot delay of 3 seconds and a vulnerability duration of 5 seconds, it can maintain 100% uptime against a single target.
While it helps the Sniper deal more damage, highest HP targeting often isn't that great. It's likely to prioritize non-threatening tanky frontliners (Guards/Aegis) over deadly backlines (Centaurus/Jaegers/Cerynitis).
Against standard mobs, expect single instances of damage to be disappointing due to link protection. See also: Dreamer's abysmal performance as support in 8-2 SF dragging.

Functional details^#

As skill descriptions tend to be at least a little ambiguous, some other details on its skill:

As usual for fairies (see also: Artillery, Airstrike), there isn't any damage variance.
The vulnerability effect does not stack with itself. See a test of that here. Subsequent sniper shots are affected by its previously applied vulnerability, however.
Against a stationary dummy, its first shots arrived at: 3.67s, 6.67s, 9.67s, and so on. There is some bullet travel time but each shot arrives exactly 3 seconds apart.
Damage is indeed based on maximum HP, rather than per-link HP. It will also do its maximum damage against a 5-linked enemy with 26,667 HP/link or more.
It's not that great at math - against a 100,000 HP dummy it should do 15%*100,000 = 15,000 damage, but instead we see:

Same deal with its vulnerability applied:

While its shots are capped at 20,000 damage, the vulnerability effect lets it go slightly higher (but now we have -1 damage instead of +1 for whatever reason, maybe something floating point related?):

The doubled damage below 50% health is subject to the same cap:

This is once again the 100,000 HP dummy - 15001 damage normally, 18001 with vulnerability. It was below 50% HP, and the damage is clearly still capped.

It is affected by HP-35's vulnerability, and they stack: 20,000*1.2*1.08*1.18=30585.6, which rounds down to 30585 damage:

With future dolls you can even go all the way up to the damage cap. It working doesn't mean it's a killer team combination, though.

Aura^#

Sniper's aura was not changed (36% crit damage, 88% ACC, 28% EVA, 15% armor at 5 stars), so the usual applies. It's not particularly great, but could be worse. In good (read: RFHG) echelons, crit damage is almost entirely interchangeable with regular damage. It's typically in the range of a 35-50% net DPS buff, or up to ~70% when its accuracy is particularly valuable. You can see some more comparisons with other fairies here.

If you aren't using its new active skill, there are much better options. (Although it somehow has CE stacking applications.)

DPS Estimation^#

Combining flat damage and vulnerability all in our heads gets a bit tricky, so let's run a few simple tests with real teams and fake enemies to get ballpark estimations of how much its active skill can contribute. First, with a generic RFHG echelon (Rico/Lee/Calico/P22/5-7), 5* Fervor Sniper:

Dummy HP	EVA	Avg. clear time (no active)	Avg. clear time (active)	Est. DPS (no active)	Est. DPS (active)
500,000	84	30.08	21.14	16622	23648 (+42%)
500,000	14	26.03	19.18	19206	26073 (+36%)
200,000	70	14.36	10.20	13931	19608 (+41%)
200,000	12	12.75	10.17	15682	19672 (+25%)
100,000	210	9.99	7.20	10010	13889 (+39%)

For a little variety, the same dummy set with an ARSMG (STAR/M4/G11/RO/Dorothy):

Dummy HP	EVA	Avg. clear time (no active)	Avg. clear time (active)	Est. DPS (no active)	Est. DPS (active)
500,000	84	43.06	25.96	11611	19258 (+66%)
500,000	14	33.58	22.30	14890	22422 (+51%)
200,000	70	19.19	12.32	10422	16229 (+56%)
200,000	12	14.34	10.30	13944	19417 (+39%)
100,000	210	13.67	8.85	7317	11304 (+54%)

If we arbitrarily assume Sniper gives +40% DPS or so from its aura and +40% from its skill, that's a net ~96% DPS increase against lone, high-HP targets - about on the level of a Parachute fairy. It should perform much better than midrange statsticks like Artillery, at the cost of fairy commands.

Combat Testing^#

Boss battles make up a relatively small percentage of battles in Girls' Frontline. Let's run some more practical tests against everyday foes, and see how its performance compares to more standard fairy picks.

Round 1

Testing 5-star fairies with strong teams runs the risk of all options returning with next to no damage taken, so I'll include some not-so-impressive dolls to make it more of a challenge.

Beach's pushback meant the team often had to walk to the last Doppel, lengthening clear times.

Times are not zero-scaled to make differences readable - all were in a relatively similar 14-15 second range. If you'd like all these charts with 0-scaled clear times, see this album.

Not fantastic - Sniper was one of the slower fairies, and took more damage than most. Then again, those results are about on the level of Artillery's.

Running a similar set of tests to the dummy ones above indicates Sniper's active provided only a ~3% DPS boost here (on top of the aura).

Note that Artillery/Sand Dancer/Defense were tested without their actives. To minimize confounding variables the Artillery tested had Fervor (but is unskilled), while my skilled Artillery has Damage II. Its skill is near-useless anyways. Strategy fairies don't work in target saving - the latter two are just included to give more moderate auras some representation. Clearly, Defense was often not quite enough to clear the Doppels before their grenades start flying. Some results extend off the graph to keep other fairies readable - one run with it took 1139 damage!

Round 2

That was a lot of test runs, so in the interest of time and variety I'll cut out a few fairies on the following tests:

Command is basically just Parachute but marginally worse.
Sand Dancer/Defense, while decent proxies for fairies with weaker auras, aren't exactly being fairly represented.

So, with "only" five fairies to test per configuration:

Sniper and Artillery at the "bottom," this time.

A HG was swapped for RO to not completely die vs the Gunners, and with how few buffs were going around the ROF from Warrior was greatly appreciated. Beach wasn't able to make the encounter 0-damage, but it alongside Para & Warrior had a clear advantage.

Sniper's active did a bit better, giving a ~10% DPS boost in this battle.

Round 3

A small part of the sniper whisker got covered up by the echelon screenshot - it's basically the same as Artillery's.

Beach/Parachute/Warrior performed similarly well, and Sniper was around the level of Artillery.

Sniper's active was only a ~5% DPS boost this time - no individual mob lasted long with or without its vulnerability applied.

Keep in mind...

Taunt and Twin fairies were not included in the testing - this is because they tend to influence teambuilding too much for direct comparisons, even if they are potent options. For example, consider your classic Theater Uhlan battle. With a Taunt fairy, you're free to just throw a normal 2RF3HG echelon at it. Without, you may want to use some M500-LTLX-Python echelon to block their attacks. Trying to compare clear times/damage taken between these will get you nowhere.

But if you're already willing to spend fairy commands, there's a good chance Taunt/Twin will let you clear fights with much less damage taken than any of these. Oh, and Shield too - especially with its reworked skill including a solid damage buff.

Conclusion^#

The rework made Sniper less of an embarrassment to the fairy pool, and there's now some merit to raising one. Somewhat approximately, I'd say it performs at about the level of an Artillery fairy in normal fights (at the cost of commands), and can reach the level of a Command/Para fairy against single targets. It only really shines in boss fights that significantly hinder your doll's DPS (Elisa, for example).

Sniper fairy now has a bit of a niche to its own, but is still underwhelming in most fights. While low priority overall, you'll probably want to raise one eventually.

As always, for maximum fairy DPS, raise a Combo. You'll probably still never use it, but it's at least a nice flex.

Probably not worth it, actually.

If you decide to raise a Sniper, I strongly recommend waiting until you pull one with Fervor and going with that. Aside from being a generally awesome talent, Sniper only really starts to perform in longer (boss-type) battles where Fervor has a huge advantage.

Minor notes^#

For some brief comments on the whole fairy lineup, see this page.

Sniper will contribute more damage if your dolls are weaker, and may be nicer with defense-focused echelons (though its aura isn't fantastic for that either).

Vulnerability lets your HOCs do more damage, but if you're using sniper it's hopefully against high-HP low-link enemies which HOCs don't do much to anyways. RO635's mod skill only works off of the debuffs specifically listed in her skill (plus ROF debuffs), so there's no interaction there.

Sniper was reasonably useful in the final wave of Theater 7/8's Core 8, and against certain event bosses.

I have to wonder why Barrier didn't get a rework - it was surely even worse than Sniper's old state. Or perhaps they're saving it for a batch where they adjust auras as well?

Against bosses, most of Sniper's power comes from its active skill. For newer players, a skilled Sniper may help with cheesing bosses as it lets you focus on staying alive while dealing damage on its own.