With the addition of my last (real) post that was about Warfarin (WFR), we now have enough details to fully take on the question people asked many moons ago and even now. Who is better at buffing their allies? And since it’s always depends, then when and why do each bested the other? In this post I will trying my best to justify all of the possible comparison and rig it in a way so that Sora win………what
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To read more about them, I have made dedicated post for each. You can read more about Warfarin and Sora there.
Anyway, first thing first. We can get the general stuff out of the way. Stats, and all of the miscellaneous sh…enanigans. And to do that, we need to lay out the assumptions.
For that assumption,
WFR’s stats would be: 1424 HP, 516 ATK, 109 DEF, 19 costs, 2.85s attack interval, and 0 RES.
Sora’s stats would be: 1141 HP, 349 ATK, 228 DEF, 7 costs, no interval, and 0 RES.
And if anyone get dragged in the example later on will probably just get calculated later.
Quick table for summaries
Now to the explanation.
- The class classification is not going to be important… most of the time, however, when we’re talking hard content options, Medics tends to get a worse treatment compare to Supporters. In CM or CC with different risks, Medics do get banned specifically when it’s due, whereas Supporters usually don’t (except for 2-2 CM, and some future CC maps). Maps that has a certain inhibition (ban, x3 costs…) to Medics are more often seen than map that inhibit Supporters, is what I’m saying.
- Their healing power is also drastically different. WFR is a single target medic (which does get higher ATK to compensate), whereas Sora, first of isn’t even a healer, second, she heals in an AoE. Even AoE medics can only heal 3 allies at once, but Sora? She sings away, restoring HP to up to 12 allies in her range, plus herself. That’s actually enough for a whole squad + support unit, when WFR can only fit 12 people in her range including herself. Although, good luck finding a map that does allow you to do that (and even in AF-8, you still face the deployment limit of 9). For a quick number comparison, WFR heals 516 HP every 2.85s to one ally, as in 181 HP/s (or HPS I guess) to only 1 person. Sora in comparison get 34.9 HPS but to all ally. The breakpoint then is 181/34.9 = 5.19 → 6 allies before WFR’s heals become worse than Sora’s. That’s actually pretty hard to do, which means Sora will lose to WFR when it comes to healing, hey wait a minute Sora isn’t even a medic though, so that’s pretty natural.
There is a silver lining, because Sora doesn’t necessary “heal”, she can restore HP to unhealable target. That means she can heal Hellagur, Vulcan, Utage, all summons, including Magellan’s Soaring Dragons, Mayer’s Meeboos, Deepcolor’s Tentacle, Nightingale’s Phantom, and of course any future addition of these type of units.
But wait, there’s more in chapter 6. With the appearance of chill and frozen debuff, the healing rate of WFR can get shafted. Sora healing rate does not get affected by attack rate reduction, or heck even stun or frozen, so for those case, Sora can have an easy time healing whereas WFR wouldn’t, even if Sora’s healing is bad. Except…
- Sora’s range is far worse than WFR’s. Even if Sora can heal while stunned/frozen, her reach to allies is worse. At most Sora can only heal allies 2 tiles away from her, whereas WFR can reach up to 4 tiles ahead of her (though she can’t reach 2 tiles from her side nor behind). This allows WFR to have a little bit more flexibility in deployment location.
- Their HP are also not that high, WFR’s 1424 HP vs Sora’s 1141. Sora's HP loses out by quite a lot, but Sora’s DEF doubled WFR’s, 228 vs 109. Considering both has 0 RES, that means Sora’s pretty good at surviving physical damage, whereas WFR is better at surviving magical damage. Though of course, none should be primarily used to tank ranged attack, unless the enemies’ ranged attacks are much weaker compare to the melee, so you can choose to alleviate some of the pressure off your melee operators, but then you have to divide your healing to more people, which actually is something that Sora needs to catch up to WFR’s HPS.
- Sora cost way less than WFR, to basically compensate for what she couldn’t compete against WFR. If you remember from my Sora post, her cost is the lowest in the game bar the robots (and Gravel full pot pfff).
- Their base skills fill different roles…I wouldn’t say much here since it’s not the focus of this post nor is there any real way to compare them. WFR trains other medics faster, Sora supports her fans and M O N E Y.
- Both of their skills can support their allies. If you haven’t noticed it yet though, both of Sora and WFR’s skills are similar. Their first skill causes a large heal, and their second skill increases ally’s ATK (Sora’s first skill has something else but shhhh). WFR then, win this comparison because she has her talent that grants SP to ally in her range whenever an enemy die in her range. More SP means faster skill charge rate, which lead to more damage overall from operators, and more SP also allows WFR to use her skills faster, which lead to more support than Sora.
That’s a bit too much for general comparison. Let’s go a little bit more into specific skills comparison.
I'm not going to full details of what each skill does again, but to summarize: WFR’s first skill heal an ally that is under 50% HP for an additional 19% of their max HP. So basically for WFR’s next heal, she heals for 516 + 19% of the healed ally’s max HP. Sora’s first skill on the other hand, expands her normal range and increase her regen much further. Sora’s new range is equal to Saria’s S2 healing range, and her regeneration is now 349 * 70% = 244.3 HPS (it’s going to be 349 if you decided to M3 this skill but what psycho actually do that itwasajokecalmdown).
Strictly for healing (and assuming WFR’s S1 activated constantly), these skills now change their respective HPS. WFR’s HPS is now (516 + 19% of the ally’s max HP) / 2.85 = (181 + 6.6666% of ally max HP) HP/s. The % number looks fishy, it’s like they intentionally let the 19% there :thonkang: Anyway, the new break point between them is now 244.3 = 181 + 6.6666% max HP, with that max HP is (oh god I spent 4 years studied engineer in university to do gaming math) 949.5 max HP. Very few operators have that low max HP to begin with, except for maybe Haze, 1-2* ops, some 3* ops, and CC risks. If you tiptoe the heal between 2 allies, that increase the max HP limit to 244.3 = (181 + 6.6666% maxHP)/2, which lead to the new needed max HP to…4614. That’s… really bad for WFR now. As soon as WFR needs to heal 2 allies or more, she loses to Sora’s. Wait a minute, there’s this small part in my WFR’s post (which was pointed out by a commenter actually) that WFR’s S1 reset her healing animation (it wouldn’t cause her healing to be continuous though) between 2 allies so WFR win out again. If you have a third ally (or more), however, Sora wins with her S1 active. When we hit 3 or more allies that need strong healing at once,you may as well go train your operators stronger before attempting it again, WFR will never be able to keep up, especially because she can only hold 3 charges which can run out faster than 7s from Sora’s S1. (But there’s a twist which will be present later)
The utility of Sora’s phase shifting all enemies in her range can also be important. In my old Sora’s post, I stated that this skill is perfect for reset when things go wrong. She can guarantee healing while stopping enemies from doing the thing that force your operators to need healing to begin with. It’s a bit hard to quantify in numbers but keep that in mind for general usage. HOWEVER, unlike WFR’s S1, a skill that is perfect to buy time for your allies with massive healing, Sora’s S1 completely phase them out, not allowing them to cause harm or be harmed. This is bad because WFR’s skill does not do that, which means you can eliminate this threat even before her 3 charges is used up. Where for Sora’s case, after her skill is over, she loses her massive healing rate, while the enemy that cause the need for a massive heal is still there because you couldn’t kill him when this skill is up. This is the thing I said back in her post, that this skill can be used to buy enough time for round 2, and one thing I only slightly implied was that, if your ops lose this round 2, there’s no comeback.
Which lead to another thing, because Sora isn’t a bona fide healer, in order to use Sora in the field, you’re basically forced to bring an actual medic first, which will cost you an additional deploy limit. Or, you can use Saria along with her (personally duped as the Soaria combo), who already more than enough filled the role of a medic. As in, Saria alone sometime couldn’t fulfill completely the entire role of a medic, but if you add Sora, they both would (unintentional Sora’s S2 showcase).
The change in Sora’s range can swing the comparison as well, but then, it’s apple and orange, as WFR has a long frontal reach, while Sora has large surrounding reach, which including behind her. It does allow Sora to reach her allies easier, but it’s something that WFR can already done most of the time.
One last thing is that Sora’s skill has a really terrible duration, with a terrible cooldown, even if her talent activated, when compare to WFR’s S1. 60SP to use for only 7 seconds is a huge downside, but for that strong effect, it may seem like a balanced(?) decision.
And with that comes the knock out attack from WFR, because Sora’s skill is a “use once, go recharge” type of skill, while WFR can hold 3 charges, it means that WFR’s can just use 1 or 2 charges and be fine. What that signify is that Sora need to fully commit her skill to perform whatever role she needs of that skill, while because WFR’s can store 3 charges(4 if you’re psychopath), she has no real need to commit. If another threat shows up within 60 seconds (or 30s if Sora managed her talent), Sora cannot do anything else for that. We did said earlier that if there’s a lot of allies need strong healing in range, Sora is stronger, but that won’t be like that most of the time. Heck, even if WFR use all 3 charges, she can still restore 1 more charge to use faster than Sora, needing only 4 healing intervals, which can also combine with WFR’s talent which cover half a charge each proc. (Fun fact: both talents recover half the SP required for their S1, that is all).
This has been pointed out many times before, but that just mean Sora isn’t meant to be a healer, which according to the game she already is not. But she could catch up in a few scenarios, one being hardcore AoE heal, the other being countering attack speed debuff (whether it’s an actual attack speed debuff, or just stunned or frozen, which results in attack rate become 0).
Well, now we’re at the section that is the reason why this post was made
The question has been asked many times.>! I also asked myself many times “Was it worth it to S2M3 both of their skills?” The answer is heck yea!<. But jokes aside, between the two, when will each do better? I will attempt to justify as most cases as possible, except for the few most specific lineups that mainly exists for memes. Now you may say we only buff allies when we do meme, but nobody made that the rule. Believe it or not, you can unironically use buffer (no plural though, because even that’s meme territory even for me) for normal run.
With how strong WFR’s normal healing is due to her high ATK, you can actually use her S2 for runs that never require a strong healing. WFR is perfect for adding just the minimum required healing while providing more to the team with her SP and ATK boost.
First off, WFR always beat Sora with her SP granting talent, so we’ll stop mention that for the rest of this post. WFR’s talent is more consistent (50% from Sora is still quite reliable, but as soon as it doesn’t work once, you’ll remember it), and it can also help allies.
Second off, ally operators who have high attack speed, multi hits, multi targets, AoE, and high skill multipliers all works really well with their buff. But since those thing works for both WFR and Sora’s skill, there’s no winning here. Just remember that those things work amazing with these attack buffs.
Third off, back to 3 points ago. Because WFR can heal and buff at the same, she can transcend from herboring important medic role to a supporter, whereas for Sora, she can’t really do vice-versa. But as I mentioned a while back, Medics tend to get ban more in harder contents, while Supporters have slightly less occasion where they would receive such treatment. In Contingency Contract, you can technically not pick the risks, but it’s there. I heard future CC does have risk that ban Supporters, but again the ban is still at a lower frequency than Medics.
Fourt…nvm I’m getting tired of this. Next, we’ll go further on how much each skill increases their allies’s ATK. There’s our main discrepancy between the 2 buffs, because one increases a flat number of ATK to allies, while the other increases a percentage of damage to an ally. Sora basically give an additional 349 ATK to everyone in her range, while WFR increases their ATK by an additional 90% of their base. This is also worth mentioning again because these ATK buffs only stack additively, not multiplicatively. Anyway, so the break-even point is pretty clear, any operators whose 349 is 90% of their ATK value. That is basically any operator at 387.(7) ATK, which is pretty low. Very few operators have lower damage, and those that do don’t do DPS role (Defenders, Robots, Medics…) except Ranger. Ranger with Sora buff will destroy enemies…or just drones idk.
The turnaround is of course not on 1 ally, but more. If Sora can only boost about 45% of her allies’ damage, then boosting 2 allies is enough to compromise using her instead of WFR who boost for 90% to one ally, 30% with 3, and so on. The more allies Sora boosts, the more she leaves WFR in the dusts. This is actually even better because of 2 reasons. First is again the total % boost of Sora’s buff for multiple allies, the more allies in her range, the better her buff becomes. Second is about the same setup but for healing, since Sora needs more allies to catch up with WFR's healing, and since WFR is mainly use as a healer, you’d need to put your allies in WFR’s range as well. If you do that, then her HPS reduced and the RNG start to affect your buff. The more allies need WFR’s heal, the less consistent her buff become while Sora gain many many chance to catch up.
But WFR won’t go down without a fight, I already devised a way to work around her RNGesus back in her highlights post. Essentially, you can work around the selection of the buff simply by having a win-win situation, instead of putting Cuora in her range, put a strong AoE guard instead, to the point where whoever it randomed to, it’s not a bad choice at all. An extreme form of that strat is to put only 1 person in WFR’s range, which is what most people would default to. That is not wrong, but that would also mean you’re removing her normal role, aka medic, and also because of how large WFR’s range is, in order to have only 1 person in her range, a large area need to be cleared out, OR, if you have WFR face a different angle, then her talent would start to not function properly. Regardless, controlling WFR’s buff can be easy, however it is limiting at time.
There’s also the fact that WFR actually buff 2 persons, not just 1. WFR always buff herself first and foremost. Sora for some reason doesn’t do that. Because the ATK buff is determined before her skill actually start and stay there for the whole duration, i.e. if Sora has an amount of ATK at the time she uses this skill and then getting more (or less) ATK while the skill is already running, the ATK buff wouldn’t change. With that condition in mind, I think Sora S2 could buff herself, effectively x2 her healing during the skill with nothing else change. Though it will still not be that good for healing, it’s still better. Anyway, WFR buffs herself during this skill, which means WFR heals for much stronger during it. That can mean you don’t necessarily need her first skill if you only need it for a certain strong and threatening enemy that only comes periodically. Again, the fact that WFR is a strong medic is helping massively in this buffing war, which has nothing to do with healing lel. But the buff does affect WFR herself, which means Sora need double the amount of ally needed to match up with WFR again. Strictly for buffing allies though, Sora can still easily outbuff WFR.
Sora does have a different approach to buffing comparing to WFR. When I said about making a formation that WFR wouldn’t buff any one that you don’t want, it’s kinda implied that all of them will be DPS because WFR’s buff only target one person and they should generally be DPS, which means that all that are in WFR’s range can deal strong damage. Remember an argument back in their healing skill? That Sora have to all in her skill to heal? Well joke’s on WFR now because she’s the one all in her buff. Sora can buff anything in her range, no discrimination. That means she can buff Defenders, Supporters, Specialists, Medics while also buffing any DPS in her range. That results in the fact that you can now have a stronger heal output as well as the fact that you don’t have to ignore any low DPS allies in her range like WFR would. AND, the fact that Sora’s buff works better the lower your ally’s attack are. As a result of all those little tidbits, what Sora can do is to boost the effectiveness of everyone in her range, regardless of their role. Whereas, for WFR, because of the all-in nature of her buff, you’d almost want to boost a strong DPS instead, like, would you want to use WFR’s buff on a medic? (just for funsies I once full buff Perfumer and when her S2M3 is active she got about 78 HPS regen globally) Yes I M3'd Perfumer's S2
As for how long these buffs last, WFR’s only lasts 15s, whereas Sora’s lasts for double that. This may matter when their respective cooldown is different, as well as the talent that is functionally different as well. Because WFR’s talent always affect herself, it’s more reliable than Sora’s talent who only works 50% of the time. Their respective recharge rate would probably be hard to quantify, as one requires the luck of the draw, and one require enemies’ death. So Sora’s buff lasts twice as long as WFR’s, which could work better for a longer fight period, but if it’s a long fight period, there’s also the chance for WFR’s to reset her skill again with her talent, which means it's kinda a draw.
Let’s see, what else do we have… The rest are just small little advantages. Sora has more DEF and lower cost, which means she’s good for early physical ranged unit bait (or if you’re a madman like me, AF-5 and AF-8, or against stun snipers in OF, she can hold her ground quite fine). The smaller tidbits like Sora constantly heal regardless of any attack rate affliction mentioned earlier, which is fine against attack speed debuff and stuns, BUT, it also works against attack speed buffs (Angelina, Silence, Aak…), so you win some, you lose some.
There’s something quite important to note though, is that no dumbass actually M3 any of these 2 abilities, at least before they have a strong roster normally (the classic “DPS over Enablers” argument). So, how about we assume just normal skill level 7 instead? The only argument that would change is the buff damage and the break-even point after all. Assuming E1 Lv50, we’ll have WFR with only 60% ATK buff, and Sora with 90% of her ATK. From just that, you can already see a huge jump from SL7 to M3 for WFR’s buff, but barely any improvement for Sora’s, the only other improvement for Sora’s M3 is an additional 10s to her skill, which is quite a lot, from 20s at Lv7 to 30s at M3. With that said, the priority to M3 Sora’s skill is mainly to increase duration, not for more buff power. However, Sora at this level has 308 ATK, which translates to 277.2 ATK to allies. The breakpoint with WFR however, becomes 462 ATK. That raises the ceiling to those that Sora can buff better than WFR could by quite a margin, AND, it’s still 5s longer than WFR’s, AND, that's just for one person. What to draw from that is, Sora is really strong for boosting in the early game, with only a little bit of investment for both her and your other operators, as she is better the lower your allies' ATK are, while WFR is slower in the early game (except for the healing, which carried the argument again), but a far better ceiling cap in later parts of the game. But then again, in the early game, Sora will find it harder to win the "just bring another DPS" argument, so even if her buffs are better, her heals are worse, and the resources to get her to at least skill level 7 with a decent level can be put for another DPS and do the job at least equally to her.
Anyway, how was this post? Hopefully nothing biased nor rigged…maybe. What's your takes/arguments on this, assuming only between them and not "just add another DPS"? I'll edit the post if it's a great argument that I glossed over or forgot about or just didn't knowand then act like I totally knew it already. There could be a lot more for this type of post as well (Shamare vs Pramanix, etc.) though not anytime soon I guess.
As for my other writing series, I’m still thinking about a candidate for the next one, maybe between Glaucus, Platinum, Cliffheart, Skyfire(?), or Shirayuki I guess (I'm still trying to find Swire smh). A bit effy with things now as I need to escape unemployment, but I also need actual motivation (okay maybe poverty is a good motivation I guess). Hope to see you guys next week.
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Horrendous photoshop skills confirmed
To read more about them, I have made dedicated post for each. You can read more about Warfarin and Sora there.
Anyway, first thing first. We can get the general stuff out of the way. Stats, and all of the miscellaneous sh…enanigans. And to do that, we need to lay out the assumptions.
Assumptions
For all numbers used for comparing purposes, we will be talking in E2 Lv30 with full trusts and pot 1 for all parties involved, since it’s a typical stopping range. WFR and Sora’s respective S1 will be compare at level 7. However, for their respective S2, we will be comparing them at M3 for most of the time, since the purpose of this post is to mainly compare buffs and shit, that and I don’t think anyone actually M3 their S1.For that assumption,
WFR’s stats would be: 1424 HP, 516 ATK, 109 DEF, 19 costs, 2.85s attack interval, and 0 RES.
Sora’s stats would be: 1141 HP, 349 ATK, 228 DEF, 7 costs, no interval, and 0 RES.
And if anyone get dragged in the example later on will probably just get calculated later.
Quick table for summaries
| WFR | Sora | |
|---|---|---|
| Profession | Medic | Supporter |
| Age | At least 100 | Ouch stop hitting okay fine sorry put the chair down |
| Healing power | - 100% of her ATK every 2.85s to 1 person in her range - Has the 2nd highest ATK stats among medics, 5th when counting supporters as well. | - 10% of her attack every second to everyone in her range, doesn’t affected by attack rate whatsoever - Has the 4th, 3rd, 2nd lowest ATK of the game at E0, 1, 2 respectively |
| Range | A 3x4 range with WFR on the middle of the 3-tiles-edge | 2 tiles away from Sora at any direction (Similar to Texas’ S2 area) |
| Survivability (HP, DEF, RES…) | Average HP and DEF, and no RES among medics and supporters | Below average HP, 0 RES, but highest DEF among all ranged operators in the game quality steel microphone confirmed |
| Cost to deploy | 19 | 7 |
| Base skills | Helps medic complete masteries faster | Restore morale for everyone in the room faster and Trade Post faster |
| Method to support allies (aside from healing) | 3 ways: Talent and 2 skills | Only 2: her 2 skills |
- The class classification is not going to be important… most of the time, however, when we’re talking hard content options, Medics tends to get a worse treatment compare to Supporters. In CM or CC with different risks, Medics do get banned specifically when it’s due, whereas Supporters usually don’t (except for 2-2 CM, and some future CC maps). Maps that has a certain inhibition (ban, x3 costs…) to Medics are more often seen than map that inhibit Supporters, is what I’m saying.
- Their healing power is also drastically different. WFR is a single target medic (which does get higher ATK to compensate), whereas Sora, first of isn’t even a healer, second, she heals in an AoE. Even AoE medics can only heal 3 allies at once, but Sora? She sings away, restoring HP to up to 12 allies in her range, plus herself. That’s actually enough for a whole squad + support unit, when WFR can only fit 12 people in her range including herself. Although, good luck finding a map that does allow you to do that (and even in AF-8, you still face the deployment limit of 9). For a quick number comparison, WFR heals 516 HP every 2.85s to one ally, as in 181 HP/s (or HPS I guess) to only 1 person. Sora in comparison get 34.9 HPS but to all ally. The breakpoint then is 181/34.9 = 5.19 → 6 allies before WFR’s heals become worse than Sora’s. That’s actually pretty hard to do, which means Sora will lose to WFR when it comes to healing, hey wait a minute Sora isn’t even a medic though, so that’s pretty natural.
There is a silver lining, because Sora doesn’t necessary “heal”, she can restore HP to unhealable target. That means she can heal Hellagur, Vulcan, Utage, all summons, including Magellan’s Soaring Dragons, Mayer’s Meeboos, Deepcolor’s Tentacle, Nightingale’s Phantom, and of course any future addition of these type of units.
But wait, there’s more in chapter 6. With the appearance of chill and frozen debuff, the healing rate of WFR can get shafted. Sora healing rate does not get affected by attack rate reduction, or heck even stun or frozen, so for those case, Sora can have an easy time healing whereas WFR wouldn’t, even if Sora’s healing is bad. Except…
- Sora’s range is far worse than WFR’s. Even if Sora can heal while stunned/frozen, her reach to allies is worse. At most Sora can only heal allies 2 tiles away from her, whereas WFR can reach up to 4 tiles ahead of her (though she can’t reach 2 tiles from her side nor behind). This allows WFR to have a little bit more flexibility in deployment location.
- Their HP are also not that high, WFR’s 1424 HP vs Sora’s 1141. Sora's HP loses out by quite a lot, but Sora’s DEF doubled WFR’s, 228 vs 109. Considering both has 0 RES, that means Sora’s pretty good at surviving physical damage, whereas WFR is better at surviving magical damage. Though of course, none should be primarily used to tank ranged attack, unless the enemies’ ranged attacks are much weaker compare to the melee, so you can choose to alleviate some of the pressure off your melee operators, but then you have to divide your healing to more people, which actually is something that Sora needs to catch up to WFR’s HPS.
- Sora cost way less than WFR, to basically compensate for what she couldn’t compete against WFR. If you remember from my Sora post, her cost is the lowest in the game bar the robots (and Gravel full pot pfff).
- Their base skills fill different roles…I wouldn’t say much here since it’s not the focus of this post nor is there any real way to compare them. WFR trains other medics faster, Sora supports her fans and M O N E Y.
- Both of their skills can support their allies. If you haven’t noticed it yet though, both of Sora and WFR’s skills are similar. Their first skill causes a large heal, and their second skill increases ally’s ATK (Sora’s first skill has something else but shhhh). WFR then, win this comparison because she has her talent that grants SP to ally in her range whenever an enemy die in her range. More SP means faster skill charge rate, which lead to more damage overall from operators, and more SP also allows WFR to use her skills faster, which lead to more support than Sora.
That’s a bit too much for general comparison. Let’s go a little bit more into specific skills comparison.
Showdown: First skill
Sick Microsoft Paint skillsI'm not going to full details of what each skill does again, but to summarize: WFR’s first skill heal an ally that is under 50% HP for an additional 19% of their max HP. So basically for WFR’s next heal, she heals for 516 + 19% of the healed ally’s max HP. Sora’s first skill on the other hand, expands her normal range and increase her regen much further. Sora’s new range is equal to Saria’s S2 healing range, and her regeneration is now 349 * 70% = 244.3 HPS (it’s going to be 349 if you decided to M3 this skill but what psycho actually do that itwasajokecalmdown).
Strictly for healing (and assuming WFR’s S1 activated constantly), these skills now change their respective HPS. WFR’s HPS is now (516 + 19% of the ally’s max HP) / 2.85 = (181 + 6.6666% of ally max HP) HP/s. The % number looks fishy, it’s like they intentionally let the 19% there :thonkang: Anyway, the new break point between them is now 244.3 = 181 + 6.6666% max HP, with that max HP is (oh god I spent 4 years studied engineer in university to do gaming math) 949.5 max HP. Very few operators have that low max HP to begin with, except for maybe Haze, 1-2* ops, some 3* ops, and CC risks. If you tiptoe the heal between 2 allies, that increase the max HP limit to 244.3 = (181 + 6.6666% maxHP)/2, which lead to the new needed max HP to…4614. That’s… really bad for WFR now. As soon as WFR needs to heal 2 allies or more, she loses to Sora’s. Wait a minute, there’s this small part in my WFR’s post (which was pointed out by a commenter actually) that WFR’s S1 reset her healing animation (it wouldn’t cause her healing to be continuous though) between 2 allies so WFR win out again. If you have a third ally (or more), however, Sora wins with her S1 active. When we hit 3 or more allies that need strong healing at once,
The utility of Sora’s phase shifting all enemies in her range can also be important. In my old Sora’s post, I stated that this skill is perfect for reset when things go wrong. She can guarantee healing while stopping enemies from doing the thing that force your operators to need healing to begin with. It’s a bit hard to quantify in numbers but keep that in mind for general usage. HOWEVER, unlike WFR’s S1, a skill that is perfect to buy time for your allies with massive healing, Sora’s S1 completely phase them out, not allowing them to cause harm or be harmed. This is bad because WFR’s skill does not do that, which means you can eliminate this threat even before her 3 charges is used up. Where for Sora’s case, after her skill is over, she loses her massive healing rate, while the enemy that cause the need for a massive heal is still there because you couldn’t kill him when this skill is up. This is the thing I said back in her post, that this skill can be used to buy enough time for round 2, and one thing I only slightly implied was that, if your ops lose this round 2, there’s no comeback.
Which lead to another thing, because Sora isn’t a bona fide healer, in order to use Sora in the field, you’re basically forced to bring an actual medic first, which will cost you an additional deploy limit. Or, you can use Saria along with her (personally duped as the Soaria combo), who already more than enough filled the role of a medic. As in, Saria alone sometime couldn’t fulfill completely the entire role of a medic, but if you add Sora, they both would (unintentional Sora’s S2 showcase).
The change in Sora’s range can swing the comparison as well, but then, it’s apple and orange, as WFR has a long frontal reach, while Sora has large surrounding reach, which including behind her. It does allow Sora to reach her allies easier, but it’s something that WFR can already done most of the time.
One last thing is that Sora’s skill has a really terrible duration, with a terrible cooldown, even if her talent activated, when compare to WFR’s S1. 60SP to use for only 7 seconds is a huge downside, but for that strong effect, it may seem like a balanced(?) decision.
And with that comes the knock out attack from WFR, because Sora’s skill is a “use once, go recharge” type of skill, while WFR can hold 3 charges, it means that WFR’s can just use 1 or 2 charges and be fine. What that signify is that Sora need to fully commit her skill to perform whatever role she needs of that skill, while because WFR’s can store 3 charges
This has been pointed out many times before, but that just mean Sora isn’t meant to be a healer, which according to the game she already is not. But she could catch up in a few scenarios, one being hardcore AoE heal, the other being countering attack speed debuff (whether it’s an actual attack speed debuff, or just stunned or frozen, which results in attack rate become 0).
Well, now we’re at the section that is the reason why this post was made
Showdown: Second skill
More sick Paint skillThe question has been asked many times.>! I also asked myself many times “Was it worth it to S2M3 both of their skills?” The answer is heck yea!<. But jokes aside, between the two, when will each do better? I will attempt to justify as most cases as possible, except for the few most specific lineups that mainly exists for memes. Now you may say we only buff allies when we do meme, but nobody made that the rule. Believe it or not, you can unironically use buffer (no plural though, because even that’s meme territory even for me) for normal run.
With how strong WFR’s normal healing is due to her high ATK, you can actually use her S2 for runs that never require a strong healing. WFR is perfect for adding just the minimum required healing while providing more to the team with her SP and ATK boost.
First off, WFR always beat Sora with her SP granting talent, so we’ll stop mention that for the rest of this post. WFR’s talent is more consistent (50% from Sora is still quite reliable, but as soon as it doesn’t work once, you’ll remember it), and it can also help allies.
Second off, ally operators who have high attack speed, multi hits, multi targets, AoE, and high skill multipliers all works really well with their buff. But since those thing works for both WFR and Sora’s skill, there’s no winning here. Just remember that those things work amazing with these attack buffs.
Third off, back to 3 points ago. Because WFR can heal and buff at the same, she can transcend from her
Fourt…nvm I’m getting tired of this. Next, we’ll go further on how much each skill increases their allies’s ATK. There’s our main discrepancy between the 2 buffs, because one increases a flat number of ATK to allies, while the other increases a percentage of damage to an ally. Sora basically give an additional 349 ATK to everyone in her range, while WFR increases their ATK by an additional 90% of their base. This is also worth mentioning again because these ATK buffs only stack additively, not multiplicatively. Anyway, so the break-even point is pretty clear, any operators whose 349 is 90% of their ATK value. That is basically any operator at 387.(7) ATK, which is pretty low. Very few operators have lower damage, and those that do don’t do DPS role (Defenders, Robots, Medics…) except Ranger. Ranger with Sora buff will destroy enemies…or just drones idk.
The turnaround is of course not on 1 ally, but more. If Sora can only boost about 45% of her allies’ damage, then boosting 2 allies is enough to compromise using her instead of WFR who boost for 90% to one ally, 30% with 3, and so on. The more allies Sora boosts, the more she leaves WFR in the dusts. This is actually even better because of 2 reasons. First is again the total % boost of Sora’s buff for multiple allies, the more allies in her range, the better her buff becomes. Second is about the same setup but for healing, since Sora needs more allies to catch up with WFR's healing, and since WFR is mainly use as a healer, you’d need to put your allies in WFR’s range as well. If you do that, then her HPS reduced and the RNG start to affect your buff. The more allies need WFR’s heal, the less consistent her buff become while Sora gain many many chance to catch up.
But WFR won’t go down without a fight, I already devised a way to work around her RNGesus back in her highlights post. Essentially, you can work around the selection of the buff simply by having a win-win situation, instead of putting Cuora in her range, put a strong AoE guard instead, to the point where whoever it randomed to, it’s not a bad choice at all. An extreme form of that strat is to put only 1 person in WFR’s range, which is what most people would default to. That is not wrong, but that would also mean you’re removing her normal role, aka medic, and also because of how large WFR’s range is, in order to have only 1 person in her range, a large area need to be cleared out, OR, if you have WFR face a different angle, then her talent would start to not function properly. Regardless, controlling WFR’s buff can be easy, however it is limiting at time.
There’s also the fact that WFR actually buff 2 persons, not just 1. WFR always buff herself first and foremost. Sora for some reason doesn’t do that. Because the ATK buff is determined before her skill actually start and stay there for the whole duration, i.e. if Sora has an amount of ATK at the time she uses this skill and then getting more (or less) ATK while the skill is already running, the ATK buff wouldn’t change. With that condition in mind, I think Sora S2 could buff herself, effectively x2 her healing during the skill with nothing else change. Though it will still not be that good for healing, it’s still better. Anyway, WFR buffs herself during this skill, which means WFR heals for much stronger during it. That can mean you don’t necessarily need her first skill if you only need it for a certain strong and threatening enemy that only comes periodically. Again, the fact that WFR is a strong medic is helping massively in this buffing war, which has nothing to do with healing lel. But the buff does affect WFR herself, which means Sora need double the amount of ally needed to match up with WFR again. Strictly for buffing allies though, Sora can still easily outbuff WFR.
Sora does have a different approach to buffing comparing to WFR. When I said about making a formation that WFR wouldn’t buff any one that you don’t want, it’s kinda implied that all of them will be DPS because WFR’s buff only target one person and they should generally be DPS, which means that all that are in WFR’s range can deal strong damage. Remember an argument back in their healing skill? That Sora have to all in her skill to heal? Well joke’s on WFR now because she’s the one all in her buff. Sora can buff anything in her range, no discrimination. That means she can buff Defenders, Supporters, Specialists, Medics while also buffing any DPS in her range. That results in the fact that you can now have a stronger heal output as well as the fact that you don’t have to ignore any low DPS allies in her range like WFR would. AND, the fact that Sora’s buff works better the lower your ally’s attack are. As a result of all those little tidbits, what Sora can do is to boost the effectiveness of everyone in her range, regardless of their role. Whereas, for WFR, because of the all-in nature of her buff, you’d almost want to boost a strong DPS instead, like, would you want to use WFR’s buff on a medic? (just for funsies I once full buff Perfumer and when her S2M3 is active she got about 78 HPS regen globally) Yes I M3'd Perfumer's S2
As for how long these buffs last, WFR’s only lasts 15s, whereas Sora’s lasts for double that. This may matter when their respective cooldown is different, as well as the talent that is functionally different as well. Because WFR’s talent always affect herself, it’s more reliable than Sora’s talent who only works 50% of the time. Their respective recharge rate would probably be hard to quantify, as one requires the luck of the draw, and one require enemies’ death. So Sora’s buff lasts twice as long as WFR’s, which could work better for a longer fight period, but if it’s a long fight period, there’s also the chance for WFR’s to reset her skill again with her talent, which means it's kinda a draw.
Let’s see, what else do we have… The rest are just small little advantages. Sora has more DEF and lower cost, which means she’s good for early physical ranged unit bait (or if you’re a madman like me, AF-5 and AF-8, or against stun snipers in OF, she can hold her ground quite fine). The smaller tidbits like Sora constantly heal regardless of any attack rate affliction mentioned earlier, which is fine against attack speed debuff and stuns, BUT, it also works against attack speed buffs (Angelina, Silence, Aak…), so you win some, you lose some.
There’s something quite important to note though, is that no dumbass actually M3 any of these 2 abilities, at least before they have a strong roster normally (the classic “DPS over Enablers” argument). So, how about we assume just normal skill level 7 instead? The only argument that would change is the buff damage and the break-even point after all. Assuming E1 Lv50, we’ll have WFR with only 60% ATK buff, and Sora with 90% of her ATK. From just that, you can already see a huge jump from SL7 to M3 for WFR’s buff, but barely any improvement for Sora’s, the only other improvement for Sora’s M3 is an additional 10s to her skill, which is quite a lot, from 20s at Lv7 to 30s at M3. With that said, the priority to M3 Sora’s skill is mainly to increase duration, not for more buff power. However, Sora at this level has 308 ATK, which translates to 277.2 ATK to allies. The breakpoint with WFR however, becomes 462 ATK. That raises the ceiling to those that Sora can buff better than WFR could by quite a margin, AND, it’s still 5s longer than WFR’s, AND, that's just for one person. What to draw from that is, Sora is really strong for boosting in the early game, with only a little bit of investment for both her and your other operators, as she is better the lower your allies' ATK are, while WFR is slower in the early game (except for the healing, which carried the argument again), but a far better ceiling cap in later parts of the game. But then again, in the early game, Sora will find it harder to win the "just bring another DPS" argument, so even if her buffs are better, her heals are worse, and the resources to get her to at least skill level 7 with a decent level can be put for another DPS and do the job at least equally to her.
Summary (?)
Anyway, here’s some conclusions. WFR wins the talent support, raw single target buff, stronger heal during buff, but all-in one-person buffing, and limited operators’ role in range. Sora has the stronger total buff the more people she buffs but the potency per person depends on their ATK value, less potent range, less utility outside of buff but no discriminating buff, work less effective than her counterpart when there’s more enemies you need to fight, or when RNGesus abandoned you. Sora can buff slightly better with lower investments (both herself and allies) but have lower ceiling cap. Again, it’s always important to note that the fact that WFR can fill 2 roles, Medic and Supporter, mainly carried her entire arguments against her opponent. Sora cannot solo heal any map, and therefore strictly limited her role to only Supporter, even if you use Sora’s S1, then she now has a strong heal, but with a terrible cooldown for a low duration, so it still can’t be used for solo healing. Her last usage of S1 is to stop the enemies, which WFR could never do. But then again, if Sora need her S1, then she can’t use her S2 to buff allies, while for WFR case, she can still use S2 and still have strong healing, as a result of how her skills works.
Anyway, how was this post? Hopefully nothing biased nor rigged…maybe. What's your takes/arguments on this, assuming only between them and not "just add another DPS"? I'll edit the post if it's a great argument that I glossed over or forgot about or just didn't know
As for my other writing series, I’m still thinking about a candidate for the next one, maybe between Glaucus, Platinum, Cliffheart, Skyfire(?), or Shirayuki I guess (I'm still trying to find Swire smh). A bit effy with things now as I need to escape unemployment, but I also need actual motivation (okay maybe poverty is a good motivation I guess). Hope to see you guys next week.
