Snow Crane Analysis – Should You Pull?

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Overview

• B2 40s CD Water Defender SR Missilis Nikke
• A unit that can simultaneously heal and shield fairly frequently. Prefers to be off-burst unless you really need her big burst heal.
• Dislikes other team healers on the same team, since receiving enough heals will get rid of her regular team healing.
• While her shield is acceptable and the max HP is good, her regular heal is too low, even if it can have high frequency with charge speed.
• Lack of offensive buffs and other utility (namely, cooldown) ruin her potential.
• So beautiful, and yet, so bad…
• Right before anniversary, so even less reason to pull for her.

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Should You Pull?

No. Outside of waifu purposes, there is no particularly good reason to pull for Snow Crane. Her lack of offensive buffs already make her a very tough sell, but the fact that she can only heal and shield when other units can do similar things and more means she really struggles to stand out. She does not help the Missilis Tower climb if you already have the proper units, and her lack of offensive buffs make her a poor choice in most PvE content.

While she could have some potential in PvP, pulling for PvP only just feels bad, to be honest. Though even her PvP prospects are quite poor, since her team shield, while less problematic than other shields, could still be an issue if they’re timed wrong, and the fact that her burst generation is standard hurts her standing as a PvP unit.

Perhaps the biggest reason to not pull for her, half-anniversary is the event after hers! The resources one gets from her event and what one currently has are better served on the incoming rare and powerful units that anniversaries tend to release, especially if one lacks golden mileage.

While she could help accounts with few Nikkes survive early on in combats and boss battles with her heals and shields, as one gets more and more units, she becomes less useful over time. This alone is not a good enough reason to consider pulling for her on the banner, though. She is best obtained through happenstance when she is available in the normal banner, especially since anniversary is the event after hers.

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Newbie/Incomplete Box Section

Snow Crane is a B2 40s CD Water Defender SR Nikke from Missilis that primarily heals allies every few charge shots and shields allies whenever the team enters Full Burst. While she does have high burst cooldown, since she can be played off-burst, she can work as a tertiary support, providing teams with additional healing and shielding, with Burst only coming through when the party needs a big heal.

However, her complete lack of offensive buffs or other utility means that her kit is not particularly valuable for most players. There already exists units that can heal or shield and provide DPS buffs, or even do all three at once. Snow Crane’s regular healing is also not that good either, requiring 3 full charge shots for a very small heal. Its frequency can barely offset the low value, but in situations where the damage being received is heavy, it won’t help much at all.

While the shield is useful enough to make up for her low healing (or even no healing, if there is another healer in the squad), the lack of offensive buffs really does ruin her potential a ton. The reason why being purely defensive is bad will be explored later.

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Basic Information

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Skill 1: Exclusive Agreement

Activates only while not in Terminated Contract status. Affects all allies.
Exclusive Recovery Agreement: Max HP ▲ 10% of the caster’s max HP continuously.
Activates when recovery takes effect if the recovery is not coming from this unit. Affects self.
Proof of Violation: Potency of HP restored ▼ 10% continuously, up to 3 time(s).

At the start of combat, Snow Crane increases the HP of all allies by 10%. Nothing will threaten this max HP increase, as long as she doesn’t receive heals from other Nikkes in the squad. The moment she does, she will gain Proof of Violation stacks, which decrease the effectiveness of her heal from Skill 2. At 3 stacks, she will no longer increase the max HP of allies.

Unlike normal stacking effects, this effect can’t be cleansed whatsoever, so using two healers in the same squad actively punishes Snow Crane’s effectiveness; albeit, her regular heal is so small as is, and since all she really does is heal and shield, it’s honestly not the biggest deal, since her shield from S2 is left available even if Proof of Violation is maxed out.

Skill 2: Legal Effect

Activates after 3 Full Charge attack(s). Affects all allies in Exclusive Recovery Agremeent status.
Recovers 1.32% of the caster’s final max HP as HP.
Activates when entering Full Burst. Affects all allies.
Generates a shield with 9.5% of the caster’s final max HP for 10 sec.
Activates when Proof of Violation reaches max stacks. Affects self.
Terminated Contract: Gains immunity to Proof of Violation continuously.
Recovers 0.24% of caster’s final max HP as HP every 1 sec continuously.

Every 3 full charge attacks, Snow Crane will restore the HP of allies by a small amount, as long as they’re in Exclusive Recovery Agreement. The % seems small, but because she’s a defender, when base HP, gear and S1 effect are taken into account, it’s a lot more effective on Attackers and Supporters. Even so, it is still just too low of a value to support allies in high intensity situations, but works in situations where there’s downtime.

Whenever Full Burst is entered, Snow Crane provides a good shield. Since this occurs upon entering Full Burst, and not when Snow Crane uses Burst, this gives Snow Crane okay off-burst usability.

When Snow Crane is healed 3 times from heals that aren’t her own and reaches max stacks of Proof of Violation from S1, she will remove all its stacks to gain her Heal Potency back. However, she will also gain Terminated Contract, which removes Exclusive Recovery Agreement status, meaning that both her heal to the squad and the max HP up both disappear. Instead, they are replaced by a regeneration effect that only affects Snow Crane.

Due to the fact that the skill heal is honestly not that big, but Terminated Contract doesn’t affect the shield from occuring, nor does it affect her Burst, it’s not the biggest loss if it occurs.

Burst: Special Provisions

Cooldown: 40.0s

Affects all allies.
Recovers 44.68% of the caster’s final max HP.
Affects self.
Gains Pierce for 10 sec.

Snow Crane provides the whole party with a huge burst heal upon using Burst. Aside from that, she also grants herself Pierce for 10 seconds. However, since she has no offensive capability whatsoever, this doesn’t really do anything for her… it kind of feels like it’s just there.
It can’t even help with Burst gen, where it could be useful on a Defender with zero offensive power, because she needs to Burst to be able to Pierce with her weapon, and you can’t gain burst gen while already in Burst.

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Why is Offense almost always better than Defense?

While there is room for defense in a team setup, the issue with a purely defensive or healer unit is that they contribute little to defeating enemies, only to survival. The reason why offensive buffs to the DPS units trump defensive prowess in almost every situation is because with a timer of 90 seconds to defeat a regular map, or 180 seconds against a boss, there’s no situation where just purely outlasting the enemy is helpful.

If the timer reaches 0, it counts as a loss for the player. The same deal occurs in PvP, if one manages to time out the normal 5 minute match because both teams eventually ran out of offensive units from them getting defeated too fast, resulting in only defensive units remaining, it’s a loss for the attacker.

Due to the nature of buff stacking as well, and the damage formula, damage can quickly outpace an enemy’s HP value, given the deficit is not high enough. The mantra ‘offense is the best defense’ is especially true in Nikke, because rather than try to outsurvive a barrage of rapture attacks, if you can kill the enemies faster, they will have no opportunity to deal damage, resulting in HP saved that doesn’t have to be healed up, or protected through a shield.

Even against bosses, where there is more time to try to deal damage and survive a boss’ attacks, the problem with pure defense is that if focus on defensive play is the only thing that happens, it can result in lacking the damage to actually finish the boss. In such a situation, having a tertiary DPS unit or buffer would do far more in helping defeat a boss over just trying to survive them.

Even if a unit like Snow Crane could help a player survive enemies early on, when HP values and general stats are lower, it can be excusable to lack some offensive buffs at the time; however, as you progress further into the game, and HP values of raptures explode, while ATK values of non-Defender Nikkes rises faster than their HP, it is generally more valuable to buff up DPS to deal with the scaling HP with the DPS units’ scaling ATk a lot better.

All of these combine to the reason why a unit like Snow Crane is not good. Her complete lack of any utility or offensive buffing, just all healing and shielding, will generally not help you unless you already had the potential to defeat something, at which point, just having more offense could’ve helped defeat them faster. Units that can provide defensive utility AND still provide some form of DPS up to the team will perform much better.

TL;DR, hit things so hard, they cannot hit you at all.

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Campaign

For commanders lacking options, Snow Crane could be viable as a tertiary (never a secondary or primary) support, giving heals and shields to teams that need it. However, as one progresses through the game and expands their roster, the need for Snow Crane lessens when one obtains units that can do more than her. There is just little room in the current metagame for a pure healer and shielder that doesn’t do much else.

It should be noted that despite having a shield, she is not a replacement for Tia in Missilis Tower. Her shield activating when Full Burst is entered means that Naga’s Burst does not have the full caster ATK bonus that it normally gives when it’s cast when she already has a shield, since she won’t have Snow Crane’s shield when she casts it. Also unlike Snow Crane, Tia gives a valuable Attack Damage buff to the team semi-permanently when paired with Naga, resulting in improved DPS.

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Arena

Unlike most other shielders, since Snow Crane’s shields activate when Full Burst is entered, rather than using Burst, her shield is one of the least punishing ones to use in PvP. Similar to Rei Ayanami being a Burst III unit that has a shield, having a shield activate so late into a fight means that it can’t always be used by the opponent to generate burst, so it can do its job better at helping teams survive. The max HP increase provided from S1 is also pretty good.

Unlike Rei Ayanami, though, Snow Crane’s shield also doesn’t come with a strong burst damage that hits the entire enemy team. Also, since she’s just a regular sniper outside of using Burst, her burst gen is average. Her Burst heal is huge, but a single big heal may not necessarily help against a hyper offense team, instead of beating them before they beat you.

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Special Interception | Union Raid | Solo Raid

Snow Crane could help early accounts survive just a bit longer against bosses, especially accounts that lack options. However, she quickly falls off, even in Solo Raid, where five teams are needed to deal DPS to a boss. Accounts lacking Nikkes won’t even use all five parties to deal DPS since they just lack that many options, while accounts having a big roster don’t have a need for Snow Crane.

In situations where the sync level is too low, Snow Crane could help a team survive to possibly kill a boss, but more offensive buffs tend to be more effective at finishing off the boss through damage, over surviving longer to hopefully outlast and defeat the boss.

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Strengths

• Huge burst heal
• Good shield that can be performed off-burst
• Gives you lots of headpats

Weaknesses

• Regular heal is so weak
• 40s CD B2 means a second B2 unit is mandatory to use her in a team.
• Zero offensive buffs and no other utility besides healing and shielding.
• While the loss of the heal to the party isn’t too penalizing since the team heal is so weak, the loss of the max HP buff could actually matter if she receives too many foreign heals.
• Pierce within Burst is genuinely wasted, it could’ve been something else entirely…
• Similar to Sora, a waste of a wonderful design, with such a middling kit.

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Rating

Category	Rating
Overall	D
Story	D
Bosses	D
Arena	B

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Recommended Cubes

adjutant cube,resilience cube

Due to her lack of DPS potential, all she really wants is to shoot more often to activate more heals. Aside from that, Resilience to reload faster and minimize heal downtime is also good, but it’s somewhat wasted on her.

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Doll Priority

Due to her complete lack of offenses, her doll priority is Very Low.

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Expected Skill Priority

Nikke	Budget Skill Investments	Recommended Skill Investments	Skill Priority	Notes	Investment Priority
Snow Crane	Skill 1: 1 Skill 2: 4 Burst: 1	Skill 1: 1 Skill 2: 4 Burst: 4	S1 < S2	S1 provides a max HP increase, which isn’t necessarily effective at the lowest levels, where Snow Crane would see the most use. S2 is where her team heal and shield come from. While the heal has low value, the shield does not, making it her most immediately useful skill. Burst heal is big, and while it scales great, a pure heal is not worth leveling very much. The resources are best used elsewhere.	Lowest

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