As a seasoned operative in this frozen world of Snowbreak, I’ve seen my fair share of characters come and go. And Marian, dear reader, you’re no exception. Now, I’m not one to mince words, so let me tell you straight up: Marian’s more like a well-meaning but forgetful aunt who shows up unannounced with a casserole that’s been sitting in the fridge for a week.

Introduced together with Katya – Dawnwing, Marian serves as your friendly wingman during water fights, providing support and stepping in for strategic bursts of fire. While she’s delightful for casual gaming, her special ability tends to fail when it matters most, occurring more frequently than desired.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Instead of focusing on that skill which isn’t particularly useful, let me discuss instead the enigma of what exactly a Kraken Magazine is.

Essentially, the Kraken Magazine functions similarly to special ammo used by Eatchel – The Cub, dealing standard skill damage per shot instead of typical ballistic damage. This ammo type offers a faster rate of fire, which is advantageous, and Marian’s neuronics amplify the damage based on the amount of ammo loaded. The damage output can be considerable with a fully-loaded magazine. However, keep in mind that since it’s skill damage, you won’t be able to crit, and you also won’t receive the bonus damage to HP shields that comes with ballistic damage. In simpler terms, the Kraken Magazine works as an additional ammo type for Marian, dealing significant damage quickly but without critical hits or bonus damage to HP shields.

As a gamer, I’ve found that Marian’s default neuronics lower the cool-down of her ability when she fires at enemies, but the reality is, playing Marian as my main DPS can be awkward more often than not. The only function this skill performs is to load a special bullet, then it goes back on cooldown. The cooldown doesn’t even begin until I’ve unloaded my Kraken Mag entirely. Sure, you could set up a skill haste to keep the ability almost constantly active, but at that point, you might as well switch to Yao – Winter Solstice.

Support Skill

As the primary Damage Per Second (DPS) character struggles in the heat of battle, an interesting turnaround occurs when Marian is temporarily benched. During this downtime, Marian meticulously gathers ammo charges by searching through a water park storage shed for additional bullets. This process can be accelerated when the main DPS utilizes their standard skill, and you can monitor how much ammo Marian has accumulated via a display that appears when she’s out of action. Once enough rounds have been collected (up to four), you can activate Marian’s “assault” support ability, which substitutes her into the fight and transfers the stored ammo into a Kraken Mag, along with one shot from her standard skill for a total of five shots. After depleting the Kraken Mag, remove Marian from the field and repeat the process. This technique forms a classic sub-DPS rotation, providing periodic bursts of damage support to your main DPS character.

Ultimate Skill

In the heat of battle, Marian swiftly retrieves a grenade and hurls it towards the opposition, causing it to detonate thrice, inflicting harm. Additionally, it immobilizes any foes it strikes, making sense given the intense force of the explosion.

Why did we let Marian bring grenades to a water park again?

From a story perspective within the game world, this ability is quite amusing. However, when considering gameplay mechanics, it’s relatively insignificant. What truly matters to us is its passive effect, which grants your entire team a 12% reduction in resistance for skill damage just by being present. It may not be flashy, but it certainly proves useful.

Deiwos Passive

One way to rephrase this description in a more engaging manner could be:

Assessment

Assessing Marian can be challenging due to the wide range of effectiveness she exhibits based on your game progression and commitment level. If you’re primarily focusing on completing event content or enjoying game modes like Paradoxical Labyrinth, Marian performs adequately as a secondary DPS, and I must admit, she’s quite entertaining. If you happen to be reading this during Azure Paradise, it means you obtained her for free, which is an added advantage.

Regrettably, those aiming for intensive play may need to scrutinize the capabilities of Marian, as she’s not the initial instance of a sub-DPS character in Snowbreak. Previously, players have utilized characters like Cherno – Enigma and Siris – Ksana during boss phases to quickly finish off kills in Neural Sim.

In contrast to Cherno and Siris, Marian’s damage style sets her apart from other operatives since she inflicts sustained damage through numerous shots instead of a single massive instance. Unfortunately, this characteristic makes it challenging for her to fulfill the main role of sub-DPS characters effectively. When used in this capacity, she merely pushes bosses past their trigger point, rendering her subsequent rotation ineffective. This also means you must endure the invincibility period associated with the triggered boss. There seems to be no solution (for you or Seasun) that doesn’t involve drastically increasing Marian’s damage, adding a powerful mechanic like invuln pierce, or significantly redesigning her kit. However, she can still step in to finish off bosses if your main DPS’ rotation falls short, but in optimal scenarios, Marian as a sub-DPS is not well-suited for the game’s current meta.

While it’s true that Marian’s sub-DPS prowess might not be exceptional, she can indeed serve as an effective backline character, offering passive buff support. However, her ability to provide supporting utility can vary from “fairly good” to “quite good”, depending on the level of investment you put into her logistics set, manifest, and potentially even her gacha weapon. For a more detailed explanation, keep reading below.

Manifests

As a devoted admirer, I’d like to highlight that while each of Marian’s Manifests significantly enhances her sub-DPS abilities, it’s important to note that only one of them amplifies her supportive prowess.

Manifest 1 offers a substantial yet not overpowering bonus to her damage finality, which maintains its worth even when combined with other abilities in her arsenal, thus ensuring it remains impactful.

In simpler terms, when Marian’s special ammo count alters (either increases or decreases), Manifest 2 boosts your team’s skill damage by 20% for a limited time. However, keep in mind that if you decide not to use Marian, this supportive buff will only last for 8 seconds after she reaches her maximum bullet capacity.

Boosting Marian’s ammunition production speed with Manifest 3 allows for quicker and more frequent switching of her weapon. However, based on your desired frequency, you might need to halt at M2, unless you possess sufficient resources to proceed further.

Manifests 4 and 5 are the priciest and, not surprisingly, offer the greatest increase in damage. Manifest 4 multiplies the bullet numbers, while Manifest 5 grants percentage defense penetration. If affordability weren’t a factor, they would be my top picks, but alas, we can’t always have everything we desire.

Logistics

It’s notable that many people found the standout aspect of Marian’s release to be the ability to apply her logistics set to any character for a team-wide 30% boost in skill damage. Unfortunately, this feature has since been removed, leaving some players feeling as though Seasun is overly restrictive and dampening the fun.

In other words, it seems clear that this logistics setup is ideal for Marian, enhancing her personal damage output while also boosting the overall damage of her team with a powerful skill buff.

For Marian, the Attack and Alignment Index might be your focus, but if you’re planning to utilize her solely as a passive barrier, then you could concentrate on AI alone.

See the supplementary material for a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Weapons

On certain occasions, I find myself regretful about the delay in publishing these articles, as there was initially an excitement within our community regarding Opal Prism, a free shop gun, potentially outperforming Abyssal Nymph, the premium gacha weapon, when aiming to maximize Marian’s sub-DPS damage.

This is uh, not correct.

Opal Prism offers a significant 80% skill damage boost when fully upgraded, compared to Abyssal Nymph’s 54% at Tier 1. However, the benefit of stacking buffs is evident here, and the 18% resistance penetration on Abyssal Nymph’s stats card is enough to compensate for this difference and even exceed it. At Tier 2, the gap between them is as noticeable as one would expect in a gacha game.

In simple terms, only Abyssal Nymph significantly enhances an active operative’s combat effectiveness by passively increasing their skill damage. If you don’t intend to utilize Marian’s sub-DPS rotation, you could theoretically replace her with any other Chaos shotgun in the game without affecting her support performance. This principle applies to Lapis Lazuli as well, but due to Marian’s unique support skill that requires a full switch-in, the buff instead benefits Marian herself, which can be quite helpful for boosting her sub-DPS rotation if needed. Interestingly, this buff is almost comparable to the damage output of Opal Prism.

Absolutely! If you’re aiming for a team boost when equipping weapons on Marian, unfortunately, your only option is to give it a spin in the gacha roll.

Should You Pull?

No, you got her for free.

To put it simply, despite being funny, Marian finds herself in an unusual predicament. In game modes where her secondary DPS capabilities could be beneficial, her weapon and abilities are excessively powerful. She deals a significant amount of damage from the start, but if you’re having trouble with general content, it’s usually more worthwhile to invest in your main DPS character, who will take up most of the screen space during combat.

In a different context, Marian’s specialized Sub-DPS skill is primarily utilized as a finishing move in demanding game modes such as Neural Simulation. If she had been introduced a year or more ago, she would have been an excellent choice for quickly defeating bosses (making her particularly useful during Njall’s active phases). However, given the current state of the game, top DPS picks offer higher burst and overall damage potential, along with the widespread use of bosses with HP triggers. This results in Marian contributing relatively little when she is deployed, often delaying your primary DPS who could be making better use of that time. Even against bosses without HP barriers, current DPS characters are so powerful that the battle may already be over before Marian even gets her chance to act.

In essence, Marian functions primarily as a static character with high stats similar to Eatchel – The Cub. However, Eatchel has a broader application and continuously improves during battles, whereas Marian’s M2 buff lasts for a limited time. Despite this, Eatchel is costlier to utilize in this role, which could be one advantage Marian possesses.

Regarding the comparison of Marian’s skills with other support characters who focus on dealing damage while boosting allies, it can be said that she doesn’t particularly excel in this area.

In a direct comparison, Marian manages to narrowly surpass Enya – Exuvia and Acacia – Kaguya in one instance, but this is far from impressive given Enya’s limited versatility. Fortunately for Marian, she performs better than Chenxing – The Observer, sparing her the humiliation of losing to a 4★ operative (additional comparisons are provided in the supplementary material). However, if Chenxing had access to Aileron equipment, she would outperform Marian, who lacks such gear. In fact, granting all operatives in this comparison access to Aileron significantly reduces Marian’s advantages and exacerbates her existing disadvantages. It’s no surprise that Seasun removed Aileron’s universal applicability from the game.

It seems as though character-specific logistic sets in Seasun’s game are designed not just for enhancing creative freedom in game design, but also to provide a foundation for fresh character releases. This setup helps them maintain control over the game dynamics without unintentionally boosting the efficiency of previously existing characters. After all, we wouldn’t want that, would we?

Anyways, Marian also has the benefit of providing all of her buffs with zero input required, which can be useful for absolute upper-limit Neural Sim runs where you don’t need the full buffing power of Enya and even the animation duration of her support skill cast would make up a major portion of the clear time. But for everyone else, there’s little reason to bring Marian along if you have other supports available. This is especially true when you consider that Marian is even more restrictive in her uses, being on a timer before her M2 buff runs out and primarily benefiting standard skill-based DPS operatives specifically while sharply dropping off in usefulness elsewhere. Furthermore, Marian also provides little in the way of unique value beyond her hands-off buff support. Compare this to Kaguya being universally useful even beyond just skill DPS characters, and Enya’s support skill providing near-immunity to CC effects.

In summary, despite some criticisms, Marian has one notable advantage: the game’s character selection is limited at present, so even if she resembles a budget version of Enya, she remains valuable in the current context. However, if the game offered a broader range of support characters, her usefulness might be questioned, making her seem like an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Marian is useful, but much of her power comes from her logistics set and M2, which can be acquired (provided you’re willing to spend time farming them). If you didn’t receive her for free, she’s worth the effort to obtain, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way for her unless you’re serious about the game. For most players, I would only suggest considering her if you have spare resources available.

Supplementary Material

Link

Features weapon analysis, growth projections for manifests, and an optimized logistics calculator.

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2024-10-26 16:30