GFVerse.info - Defender

Tiles and aura

Affects MG, SG

Increases damage by 10%
Increases armor by 10%

Fang Blossom

ICD: CD:

[Passive]: Every attack expends the entire magazine and causes 8 instances of damage to the nearest target (only counts as 1 attack for calculating knockback. Does not stack with slug rounds.) Does less damage the further away the target, does more damage the closer the target, to a maximum of ($dam_value)x damage. Reload time is reduced to a fixed ($reload) seconds. [EQ Passive]: When equipped with "20GA Custom Slugs", obtains an active skill with the following effect on skill activation: Next attack will have perfect accuracy.

Skill level: 1

Doll review

Overview

Defender is a hyper-specialized offensive SG that drops from chapter 13, and is the ultimate endpoint of offensive SGs.

With pathetically low armor, low health, low knockbacks, and tiles that buff other SGs’ armor, she should never do any serious tanking from high damage sources. Instead, she packs her entire clip’s damage into 1 shot that scales the closer the enemy is, making her very good at deleting melee range enemies.

Applications for Defender’s damage can include deleting tanks, goliaths, and data simulation dummies. But it doesn’t stop there. She deals so much damage that even without her close-range buff, she can still do far more damage to enemies at a distance than other offensive SGs.

Defender’s role seems to be mostly as a tank-killer. While she leaves tanking high-pressure enemies to others, she uses her insane DPH to eliminate the enemy’s frontline so that the backline can cleanup enemies, although she has issues with highly evasive and/or armored enemies.

Pros

The Second Coming of the Railgun

By unloading all 8 shots at once, Defender can deal up to 20 times the damage of 1 shot to enemies close to her. This blows out basically all other offensive SGs in the raw DPS department by miles. Her damage per hit can rival even monsters like M4A1’s skill 2. And she does it every 2 seconds.

Armorbuffing Tiles

Defender has a tile above her, and the ability to buff for 10% armor, assisting any allied SG in tanking damage.

Surehit With Special Equipment

With her 20GA Custom Slugs, Defender can ignore evasion every 8 seconds, which can come in handy.

High Evasion

Defender has a very high base evasion for SGs, helping her effective HP if the enemies cannot pierce her low armor.

Passive Skill

Since Defender’s skill is passive, the start of the fight is already affected by her crazy damage, letting her avoid the issue that plagues many SGs of cooldown timers.

Biceps That Can Snap Your Neck

Damn look at those pecs. She can snap my neck anytime.

Cons

Insanely Low Base Armor

Defender has 18 armor at max level. That’s ridiculously low for SGs. At 20 armor, SGs like Six12 and Super-Shorty are known to have incredibly low armor, and Defender is 2 points under that.

Low Base HP

At 1235 HP, Defender hardly lives up to her name. While not among the lowest, it is still a very low healthpool for SGs.

Prone to Overkilling

Because she deals so much damage, Defender can often waste her damage on each enemy, which can be problematic since she only shoots one enemy at a time instead of 3.

Weak Knockback Capability

Every shot of Defender’s only targets one enemy, only occurs every two seconds, and only counts for one knockback instance, making it almost impossible for her to get to knockback an enemy.

Doesn’t Scale With Rate of Fire

Since Defender dumps her whole clip with each shot and has a set reload time, there is no way to get her to shoot faster.

Highly Armored Enemies

Since each of Defender’s attacks counts as a separate instance, armor penalties apply to Defender 8 times as much. Highly armored enemies are basically immune to her nuke shots.

Evasive Enemies

Defender has accuracy typical for a SG, so her damage against evasive enemies falls off hard as well. With her special equipment’s surehit and an ITI, this issue is mitigated somewhat, but the surehit still only applies every 8 seconds.

Full analysis

All bow down to the new queen of offensive shotguns. Kind of.

Defender is an offensive SG. Very clearly so. Her defensive stats are depressingly low even when compared to other weak SGs. While she can perform the most basic armor tanking reasonably well due to her higher than average evasion similar to Super-Shorty, her low base health still holds her back, and her 18 base armor narrows the list of what she can reasonably tank by quite a lot.

Defender’s use-case lies in deleting the enemy’s frontline tanks, provided they aren’t too heavily armored. Her damage output can also assist the DPS once the tanks are down. Her tile buffs let her buff other SGs so that she can leave the role of tanking and bearing the brunt of the damage to another doll while she pumps lead.

She also is often used in data simulation to get the top score by instantly killing the target dummy in 1 shot with sufficient buffs.

Now let’s go on to discuss what her skill actually does.

Her skill is a passive that forces her to dump all 8 shots in her clip at once on one target in one shot, then she has an unchangeable two-second reload time. The closer her target is, the higher the damage, scaling to 2.5x at maximum.

This attack can normally be evaded unless she has her special equipment and its skill is off cooldown.

It can critically hit.

It counts as 8 different attacks for all cases except knockback, where it counts as 1.

From this information, we can draw a couple of conclusions. Critical hits and accuracy are important. If the enemy’s evasion is significant, Defender should ditch buckshot in favor of her special equipment for the sure hit attacks. VFL for no evasion, ITI for a lot, and PEQ at night.

Since she only shoots once and one enemy per reload and has a set reload timer, her rate of fire stat has no effect on her actual attack speed, nor does anything else besides physically moving her, so there’s no point in increasing it. This also means she does not deal with swarms of enemies well, as she deals massive overkill to almost anything.

Enemy armor cripples her damage significantly since it applies at 8 times its base value to Defender. Highly armored enemies are hardly scratched by her.

The same applies to evasive enemies somewhat, due to the inherent low base accuracy SGs possess, although this is mitigated somewhat by her special equipment.

Accounting for those factors, if the conditions are right, Defender can beat out almost any doll, SG or not, in DPS output, making her a situational but very strong pick.