Full analysis
THE BELOW IS KEPT FOR POSTERITY BUT NEEDS TO BE UPDATED
Flower Lock gives X95 several fantastic benefits:
- First, she is one of the rare Dolls with a Skill that directly impacts her targeting. Unlike AUG, who adopts a spray and pray method of shooting, or RFB who specifically targets the backlines, X95 takes aim at the enemies with the lowest HP.
- Second, X95 receives a scaling Damage Buff based on the amount of HP her current target has lost.
- Third, with a 4 second ICD, her Damage boost comes online early, and the 8 second Cooldown gives her high uptime alongside it.
It is important to note when Flower Lock refers to the enemy with the lowest raw HP, irrespective of percentage lost. She switches targets without regard to standard targeting rules, meaning that she will gladly target Jaegers hiding behind a wall of Guards, for example. Likewise, if the enemy no longer has the lowest HP, she will switch targets on the next shot to the enemy that does.
The final quirk in X95’s Skill comes from the Damage multiplier. The Skill text is somewhat ambiguous but it can be observed that X95’s Damage multiplier scales dynamically with the HP of her target. Thus, an enemy that has lost 10% of it’s HP will confer a 30% Damage bonus to X95 on the first shot, then, the second shot will calculate the multiplier again with the now-lower amount of remaining HP, increasing her DPS further. While this snowballing Damage is theoretically quite powerful, X95 will deal out considerable overkill on her final shots against general enemies, and she will be outdone by JS 9 or SR-3MP in raw Damage against bosses.
Generally speaking, X95 will perform best when she's shooting something that has already taken damage - either from AoE attacks or the damage output of other T-Dolls. If the Boss spawns trash, such as the FAIL battle in the recent DJMax collab, the Nytos from Continuum Turbulence, or the ELID Smashers that appear in Isomer, X95’s targeting will immediately shift her to the newly spawned enemies without any player input. She might have a hard time doing DPS early (as she gains no damage against full-health targets), the ramping DPS means X95 can still be a great cleanup SMG if she either gets help or is able to deal a lot of damage to the adds with an unbuffed shot.
Overall, X95 is a fantastic SMG, fitting into a wide variety of AR/SMG teams with little special consideration. While she is not the best DPS SMG or even the best offtank SMG, she provides powerful and unique utility in adaptive targeting and a scaling Damage Buff, complementary to her fantastic stats and Tile Buffs. Want to see her really steamroll some enemies? Try softening up your foes with AoE from either HOCs, Fairies, or even an early grenade like from Zas M21!