The famed Tactical Tuna. Will do as well as OTs-12 if you're extremely hard up on resources and need another AR immediately for whatever reason. You won't likely need it since you get the AR team early but if you absolutely must have something or it must be 2 star...

The Right Arm of the Free World

There was a time she was good. That time was before we got grenadiers that shot as fast as she does. She does fire three grenades though, although they are weaker than everyone else's. Has the odd use here and there, but time and powercreep have not been kind to her.

Choco tabemase? You get her for free and she performs OK. Has a long history of suffering in the game and may suffer from PTSD. Damage bonuses are nice, and she's just strong enough to take down a Jupiter cannon by herself, provided you have some cannon fodder between her and the Jupiter (which is mostly why she has PTSD).

She used to perform really well, and she does perform OK for cost to raise, but a 5-star and 3-star AR cost the same to actually use, and the newer ARs are much, much shinier. She's still OK but don't get too attached, you'll have better soon enough. Maybe she'll get a mod someday.

Finally adjusted so she can stop being perpetually narcoleptic (sort of) through the power of energy drinks. She was already a decent AR whose weakness was that she couldn't hurt armor. Well, they solved the armor problem by doing percentage-based damage. Her damage is still affected by armor, but often she'll just do enough damage that you won't care anyway and can contribute to the fight regardless. She still has the issue of the poor uptime due to her long skill cooldown, but you should be smart enough to deal with that.

All the accuracy ever. There's not very much practical use for it still, but she converts excess accuracy to crit now. This does not push her damage up beyond the really good ARs, but some of you might get creative with it.

aka G17 ingame; Used to be decent when you actually needed evasion buffs, but who needs that in current year?

After the Lord Browning made the 1911, he decided he could do better still. This is that better pistol. Suck it, fudds.

She has good performance at night, making enemies take more damage as long as they're debuffed (has good synergies with units that debuff) and she herself will inflict debuffs on enemies. She works nicely with KSVK mod, due to how KSVK mod's target priority works.

Even if you don't have her active going, her passive keeps at least some damage up at all times as long as you can keep debuffs up.

The weirdo, mildly creepy sweet potato. Honestly one of Waterkuma's better designs too. All sorts of adorable and frankly, the best shields you can get. Full party, 42-point shields, with stat buffs if the shield survives. The big thing is she can shield the whole echelon unconditionally, which helps massively for certain attacks like Doppel missile swarms, and can even negate them entirely with a bit of luck, or if you're using FP debuffers. As a result, she's a vital component of many weird teams purpose-built to kill some cheese enemies.

Farm your damned boxes and get her.

AKA StG44

Before: The source of the name Assault Rifle

Now: A source of cores

Mod isn't worth it either, but has its own entry.

Aka StG44… Mod.

Behold, the power of a mod that tries to power her up but leaves her suffering from the exact same problems she did to begin with. Her firepower isn't boosted enough, even with the special equipment. Her skill's initial cooldown is still eight seconds, and you still don't get much bang for your buck.

Base version has a separate entry if you're not depressed enough yet.

The most German unit in the game, in that she is both exceptionally lazy and surprisingly good at her job whenever she can be bothered. The source of 90% of HK416's misfortune. Zombie movie afficionado, and owns all 26 seasons of The Flying Dead (Im not making this up.) Originally one of the most broken ARs in the game until digimind evolution and team DEFY showed up. First member of Club "MGs who pretend to be ARs." Max out her skill, point and laugh as she destroys everything. Skill has poor uptime which makes her worse than AN94 in 90% of situations (and arguably worse than STAR Mod3), but still pretty good.

Her skill is completely useless against armoured enemies, which will become an issue later, when more and more armoured enemies appear.

And then her mod comes and she is a fucking god because it solves basically everything.

Kind of fetishized and sort of jailbait, but she's still a very solid option if you have her special equipment. Outside of that, she's pretty mid. She used to be the standard ARs were judged by, but now she's pretty irrelevant.

Actually hits RoF cap at SL10 without external buffs, but she's a 3* and we're drowning in 4 and 5* RoF-selfbuffing ARs that do the same much better (AR-15 even unmodded and all the 5* ones) or just bypass RoF cap altogether (SAR-21, AUG).

FWIW, better than OTs-12 even if the latter has her unique equip, but we have so many RoF ARs that even nodupers shouldn't have to bother with either.

Catgirl nuns should be met with fire. Honestly has some use but.. you are likely better off with someone else, due to her aura shape forcing you to push her to the side to give your tanks evade and kind of unflattering aura in general compared to other 4*s. Probably better as cores but she does have her uses. For example, combined with Welrod and Makarov, the +evade/-acc combo does funny things to enemy hitrates (though its impossible to reduce hitchance to zero). Niche, but you may find some use for such things.

Like her real life counterpoint, ultimately disappointment despite being not quite entirely worse than many competitors.

She's not the worst grenadier out there, but in the end, both 416 and SOPMOD are better than her, and you don't need more than a few grenadiers. She DOES have a mod now. Shame that outside of a few very niche scenarios, the above statement still applies.