Overview
Ballista is another doll that got the short end of MICA’s experimental skill stick. Her stat distribution is average, but her skill is slightly janky in its application. She is technically viable in more dragged out fights, but it is usually better off to use a generalist self-buffer and having Ballista as an option when you’re out of self-buffers.
Cons
Long initial cooldown
At the insufferably long 8 seconds initial cooldown, Ballista’s skill will often kick in long after it would make a difference for what is essentially a self-buffer.
Limited doll
As a doll limited to Singularity crates, Ballista will be hard to obtain or get dupes of to lower raising costs
Full analysis
Her passive builds up stacks every 1.5 seconds and during her skill active each attack will consume a stack to fire a second shot. However, it has an incredibly long initial cooldown of 8 seconds. This is really a big issue for Ballista, as her skill will often take too long to matter in fights.
Ballista can actually stack during her active skill with its impressive 6 second uptime, so as long as she doesn’t run out of stacks by the end of the 14 total seconds, Ballista can get off 9 extra shots. However, to achieve this Ballista can only have a maximum rate of fire of about 88. Past that and she will run out of stacks before her skill ends and not be able to make the most out of her skill.
Because of this, Ballista can run into the issue of overkilling and not having enough rate of fire to deal with larger swarms of enemies. While it is essentially a double damage self-buff, the long initial cooldown and limit on rate of fire to make the most out of her skill makes Ballista unfortunately a worse option than typical generalist RFs.