For general information, check the overview.
Name | Starting Rarity | Useful? | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Scarecrow |
★★★ | She's free. Also she's kinda insane utility wise for what you get. | You get her just for unlocking SF Capture, which is good because you need a ringleader to make an effective SF echelon. Also makes her the only one you can get off her normal season. This is still good, because she's actually fuckin good for utility + has good combat stats, and because Executioner fucking sucks. Far from the strongest ringleader for combat, but she's serviceable enough to handle most enemies. Overall: Surprisingly really good for general use. Synergizes well with chips that drive her into enemy territory and lets her capture areas there with Shadow Predator without having to bring a second echelon. Overall super good utility if you can get creative. |
Executioner |
★★★ | Not awful but easily outshined by later SF releases | Strictly speaking she isnt completely awful, but you should be glad Scarecrow is the free SF Ringleader. Her skills are oriented towards damage, damage, and more damage, and dealing it in different ways. Unfortunately she gets the short end of the stick by being a melee unit with a -range skill, meaning it is entirely possible for some enemies to walk past her and she can't do anything about it (hope you have a good backline I guess). Her real problem is Alchemist exists, and when she comes out, basically does her job but better, mostly by tanking almost anything (she can solo Yegor without player input just by outlasting him, which Executioner cant do). Also Hunter comes right after her, and hunter is legitimately a very good unit, which discourages rolling for her on her last weeks. There's a joke her role is to run in and die, and.... yeah it's not entirely innaccurate. She will deal damage before she explodes though. Probably. As long as enemies dont walk around her instead. |
Hunter |
★★★ | Boss Killer Extraordinaire. Weak on fights with many enemies. | The strongest single-enemy killer in SF, get her if you can. If you want a boss dead, she can probably AFK solo it. Yes, she can 1v1 Yegor while you're jacking off to something else entirely. For this reason, her best buddies are Manticores - both for taking down pesky minor mobs with their powerful AoE attacks, and because of their skill synergy with her - their debuff works for her skills. |
Manticore |
★★ | Insanely good for what you pay | Probably the closest to a top-end all-rounder. It has armor. It has good stats. It withstands AoEs really well due to being a single unit, and it has two very nice skills. Now the big thing that is unlike enemy Hydras, your Manticores only have 30 armor. However, they pack the same short range explosive blast hydras do (And they have 500+ base attack power so it'll hurt masses of light enemies when they do it), and uniquely, a pushback skill with a 10 second cooldown that reduces enemy movement speed and rate of fire. Not always the best solution, but it's the true waifu of the game. |
Intruder |
★★★ | Crazy Dog Lady. YMMV. Niche uses vs. some specific encounters. | AKA Dogmom. The Crazy Dinergate lady. The weirdo. The Ringleader who gets her head blown off in the mango version of the game before she actually gets to do anything. Her skills are focused on throwing wave after wave after wave of dinergates at people and somehow making it stick. Good for mass warfare, or overwhelming things that cant shoot very much and have no AoE attacks. TBH I'm not convinced she is really worth the effort to train, but there's a certain boss in Mirror Stage EX that she trivializes, so if you're into raising an entire unit just to kill one specific enemy... |
Destroyer |
★★★ | Anti-Area Specialist. Please don't expect her to do well vs. bosses. | SF's AoE specialist. Her skillset is simple: Shit explodes. Because explosions ignore armor, she does well vs clustered enemies, whether or not they're armored. What matters is if they're clustered together and don't move fast enough to get out of her attack range and smack her face before she can fire. Because of how explosions work, with each link tanking damage from a blast, she has immense firepower vs. anything with more than one link. Pairs well with Manticores and Nemeums. You can argue Jaguars too, but YMMV. Do note that she also has a use as a dragging unit if you use her via friend echelon due to her HOC mode. |
Ouroboros |
★★★ | Combat buffer with some map utility | She has map utility and can buff allies, rather than simply being overwhelmingly strong on her own. However, unlike the map utility things used by Agent or Scarecrow, she isn't so much going to let you control a map as much as let you buy time in case of nasties you can't deal with or something needs to be delayed (perhaps on a ranking map). |
Alchemist |
★★★ | Can basically AFK most real bosses | Kind of a meme. A melee unit who, unlike executioner, is actually good at it. Basically, she has infinite shield that keeps stacking as long as she attacks. Most bosses are not meant to fight this sort of thing, so she basically can destroy Yegor with no player input outside of telling her to go attack him. She isn't invincible or invulnerable, and is particularly vulnerable to burst damage enemies (Hydras come to mind, or SWAP Jaegers), but basic enemy fire wont even phase her. Another issue is that friendly SF aren't invulnerable to stun, and some enemies can stun her. When that happens, she goes down pretty hard because she can't replenish her defenses. Otherwise, her overwhelming defensive ability lets you faceroll most encounters. |
Architect |
★★★ | Literally your only choice to break distortion barriers without a Heavy Helipad | If we had to capture her, who the fuck have we had in our holding cell all this time? Anyway, she's an alright boss whose big thing is being a HOC that can defend itself. Unlike Destroyer, she can actually break distortion barriers, and she lets you do it without needing to capture a Heavy Helipad. Not the best choice compared to an ATW, but better than nothing and she's actually usable at the role. She also has decent buffs for units that use explosives, but isn't really your first choice as a normal front-line combatant ringleader. |
Agent |
★★★ | At long last, the maid is here. She can stick to serving you tea. | Agent is going to have some use for your team just because she's a para drop unit. She uses movement instead of fairy points, but for SF-only type missions she's basically going to be your only choice. For mixed-faction missions, she can supplement a lack of parachute fairies or be used if you have more free AP than fairy commands for some reason or other. Her passives also help out allies, and the numbers look quite good when you plot it out on paper. She seems great, but unfortunately she has a lot of problems that reduce her combat effectiveness. First, while SF units have higher stats than G&K dolls, they rely more heavily on these stats, so a massive stat reduction hurts them a lot if they have to fight more than token resistance. Unlike G&K dolls, they don't have a lot of things that let them offset this, and it's especially problematic for things like accuracy. She's good for taking down helipads and then bringing in more combat-capable units after, but if you need her to fight directly, this really limits your unit options to things that can work despite the huge debuffs like SWAP Rippers and Manticores. As of this writing, there was an issue with her attack animation being janky because skills are part of all her attacks and she has wonky coding that means she attacks slower than she should (it's basically 22 frames, rather than what her RoF says it should be). This is most noticeable when you see her clones that SHOULD be attacking slower than her, but both take 0.667sec to finish their attack animations. This kills her DPS a lot, but at least this also affects enemies with equally janky animations. Enemy dragoons, for example, also attack slower than their RoF stat would indicate (weirdly, player Dragoons do NOT suffer from this). |