GFVerse.info - IWS 2000

Overview

IWS 2000 is an RF who leans towards a specialist role, but still ends up performing like a self-buffer. Her Skill massively increases her own Damage by 180% at the cost of a 35% RoF penalty. This amounts to around an 82% DPS increase on paper, though in reality it doesn't quite add up that way. Additionally, IWS has real-time furthest targeting during Skill uptime.

IWS pretty much attempts to do so much damage with each hit that she can one-shot enemy links. However, due to Link Protection (any single Link can only take damage up to its max HP, read more here) and some additional problems building on that topic, this isn't really consistent:

Her Accuracy at 78 may seem fine for most RFs, but she is attempting to entirely one-tap enemies, which makes the Acc being only middling for RFs end up being an actual problem. For example, against an enemy with only 20 Eva, she ends up having around 80% chance to hit. This then leads to her chance of succesfully hitting with all 5 links only ~32%, which thus is very unlikely to one-tap the enemy. Most DMG self-buffers will usually kill an enemy in 2-3 volleys, while IWS ends up averaging around 2 volleys. With IWS dumping her RoF into the gutter, this ends up meaning she performs no better than generic self-buffers.
With newer enemies having significantly higher health, IWS also ends up needing to Crit to actually kill links in one hit, and she still only has the normal RF Crit Rate of 88% without further buffs. This means that the chance of her critting with all 5 links in a single volley is merely ~53%. Combine this with her Accuracy problems and using the same example as above (20 Eva enemy), she ends up having a measly ~17% chance of one-tapping all 5 links.

Combining these problems together and going back to that her DPS increase on paper is only ~82%, simply using a generic self-buffing RF like Lee (75% DMG self-buff, lower ICD, same uptime fraction) is simply more attractive. In addition, a generic self-buffing RF is far more useful against weaker enemies where IWS will overkill significantly. As such, IWS isn't really recommended to raise.