Debuting alongside Katya - Dawnwing, Marian gets up close and personal as your water fight wingman, playing backup and tagging in for a tactical mag dump. The result is a fun character for casual play, but her unique gimmick unfortunately falls short more often than not when it really counts.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

This ability doesn’t do a whole lot, so I’m instead going to be talking about what the hell a Kraken Magazine is.

In essence, it’s another bonus ammo mechanic like the one you see on Fenny - Starshine. Despite that, it actually works more like the special bullets you get from Eatchel - The Cub’s standard skill, as shots fired with the ammo from the Kraken Magazine deal standard skill damage. You also get a rate of fire boost which is greatly appreciated, and her neuronics also boost the damage dealt based on how much ammo you load in. The damage is actually surprisingly chunky, and Marian can quickly put down some serious hurt with a full mag. Do note however that because it’s skill damage, you can’t crit so you don’t have to aim for weak spots, but you also don’t benefit from the bonus damage to HP shields that you get with ballistic damage.

Another thing her standard skill neuronics do is reduce the cooldown of this ability when she shoots enemies. But despite this, using Marian as a main DPS often ends up being a clunky experience at best, as the only thing this ability actually does is load in a single special bullet before going back on cooldown. The cooldown also doesn’t start until you empty out your Kraken Mag either. I’m sure you could cook up a skill haste setup to have almost full uptime on it, but at that point you might as well go play Yao - Winter Solstice.

Support Skill

While Marian flounders in the deep end as a main DPS, it’s a different story once  you put her on the bench for a while. While not active, Marian slowly builds up bonus ammo charges as she rummages through the water park storage shed for extra bullets. This process is also sped up by your main DPS using their standard skill, and you can see how much ammo Marian has via a display that pops up when she’s off-field. Once you collect a satisfactory amount of shots (up to four), you can cast Marian’s “assault” support skill, which swaps her in and loads that stored-up ammo into a Kraken Mag, alongside the one shot you get from her standard skill for a maximum of five shots. Once you empty out your Kraken Mag, kick her off the field and repeat the process. It’s a textbook sub-DPS rotation, allowing you to supplement your main DPS with occasional bursts of damage from Marian.

Ultimate Skill

On cast, Marian whips out a grenade and throws it at the enemy, exploding three times to deal damage. It also applies Stun to enemies hit, which, well… understandable.

Why did we let Marian bring grenades to a water park again?

It’s a pretty funny ability from an in-universe context, but it’s also not very noteworthy as far as gameplay goes. Instead, what we really care about is the passive effect that gives your entire team 12% resistance penetration on skill damage just by existing. It’s not flashy, but it is useful.

Deiwos Passive

Another “boring but useful” ability, Marian increases the standard skill damage of your entire team by 20% and scaling up with Alignment Index. This is notably much higher than the boost that Enya - Exuvia can provide (both in base value and AI scaling), but also comes with the restriction of only benefiting standard skill damage.

Assessment

Evaluating Marian is tough, because her usefulness will vary wildly depending on your account state and how seriously you take the game. If you’re just looking to get through event content and have a good time in game modes like Paradoxical Labyrinth, Marian is competent enough as a sub-DPS, and dare I say it, quite fun. If you’re reading this during Azure Paradise, you also got her for free, which is another point in her favour.

Unfortunately, players hoping to put her to more serious use will have to look this gift horse in the mouth. Marian isn’t the first time that the concept of a sub-DPS has seen use in Snowbreak, with people bringing Cherno - Enigma and Siris - Ksana to burst through boss phases to finish off kills in Neural Sim.

However, Marian differs from those operatives due to the fact that her damage is more sustained, being delivered through multiple shots as opposed to the singular massive instance of damage that Cherno and Siris deal. As a result, the main meta use for sub-DPS characters is one that Marian is simply incapable of performing. Attempting to use her in such a role results in her simply pushing bosses to the trigger, after which the rest of her rotation is rendered useless. This also means you’ll still have to sit through the boss invulnerability period that came with the trigger you were trying to skip. There isn’t really anything you (or Seasun) can do to fix this either without buffing Marian’s damage to absurd levels, giving her a game-breaking mechanic like invuln pierce, or majorly reworking her kit design. She can still pop in to finish off bosses if your main DPS’ rotation doesn’t quite finish them off, but in scenarios that get anywhere near ideal, Marian as a sub-DPS is fundamentally just not suited to meta use in the game’s current state.

Okay, so her sub-DPS gimmick might not be that great, but can you at least stick her in the backline as a passive buffer? Yes and no. With her logistics set and some manifest investment (and maybe even her gacha weapon), Marian manages to provide supporting utility that ranges from “decent enough” to “pretty good” depending on how generous you are with your rating. Read on for more details.

Manifests

While all five of Marian’s Manifests boost her sub-DPS potential, only one boosts her supporting power.

Manifest 1 is an appreciated %Final DMG bonus to her damage that isn’t the biggest, but also won’t be diluted from other buffs in her kit, meaning that its value holds on nicely.

Manifest 2 provides a 20% skill damage buff to the entire team when the number of special bullets Marian has changes (either up or down). It’s the one manifest that provides a support buff, but note that you’ll be on the clock to take advantage of this buff if you choose to never swap in Marian, as it’ll expire 8 seconds after she hits her bullet cap.

Manifest 3 speeds up Marian’s bullet generation rate, letting you switch her in faster and more often. Depending on how frequently you actually want to do that, you’ll probably want to stop here or at M2 unless you have the resources to push further.

Manifests 4 and 5 are the most expensive, and unsurprisingly the biggest bump up in damage, with Manifest 4 increasing the numbers on her bullets and Manifest 5 providing %DEF pen. They would be an easy recommendation if they weren’t so expensive, but we can’t always get what we want.

Logistics

I think it says a lot about how unremarkable Marian is that the most exciting part of her release for a lot of people was the fact that you could once equip her logistics set on anyone for a universal teamwide 30% skill damage buff. Unfortunately, it has since been patched out so Seasun could continue being the fun police.

Anyways, it’s obviously the best logistics set to put on Marian, buffing her own damage as well as providing a potent teamwide skill damage buff.

For Marian, Attack and Alignment Index are what you want, though you can instead tunnel on just AI if you only ever intend to use her as a passive buffer.

See the supplementary material for a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Weapons

Sometimes I feel really bad about being so slow to get these articles out, because there initially was a bit of buzz within the community about Opal Prism, the freebie shop gun, being a better choice than the premium gacha weapon Abyssal Nymph if you wanted to maximise Marian’s sub-DPS damage.

This is uh, not correct.

Opal Prism does provide a very chunky 80% skill damage buff when maxed out, much more than the 54% that Abyssal Nymph has at T1. But the power of buff mixing strikes again, and that 18% resistance penetration on Abyssal Nymph’s stat card is enough to make up the difference and then some. At T2, it’s as much of a gacha gap as you’d expect.

For support use, only Abyssal Nymph actually provides a useful effect, passively boosting the active operative’s skill damage while Marian’s sitting on the bench. That means that if you never plan on using Marian’s sub-DPS rotation, you could realistically give her any other Chaos shotgun in the game and it wouldn’t change her support performance. This also includes Lapis Lazuli. While it normally does provide your active operative with an attack boost when the equipped operative uses their support skill, Marian’s support skill being a full switch-in means that the buff instead goes onto her, which actually ends up being quite useful for boosting her sub-DPS rotation if you ever find that useful, to the point where it’s just a hair’s width away from the damage that Opal Prism can produce.

But yeah, if you want a team buff from the weapon you put on Marian, you’re stuck rolling the gacha.

Should You Pull?

No, you got her for free.

Jokes aside, Marian’s in a bit of a weird spot. In game modes where her sub-DPS potential can actually be of use, her weapon and manifests are solidly overkill. She does a hell of a lot of damage right out of the box, and if you’re struggling with general content, the better investment will almost always be in your main DPS operative who’s going to be taking up the bulk of the screen time while in combat.

On the other hand, Marian’s sub-DPS utility only exists as a finisher ability in challenge game modes like Neural Simulation - and something you’d prefer to never have to use to begin with. If she was released maybe a year or even eight months ago, she would have been a prime pick to help burst down bosses (likely proving very useful for fitting more damage into Njall’s down phases). But in the game’s current state, the higher burst and overall damage potential of top DPS picks as well as the prevalence of bosses with HP triggers means that Marian doesn’t end up doing a whole lot when she’s on the field, and more often than not just ends up stealing time from your main DPS who could be using it much better. Even against bosses without HP gates to ruin her fun, contemporary DPS picks are capable of outputting so much damage that the fight is often over before Marian even gets her turn on the field.

This results in Marian being essentially just a passive stat stick much like Eatchel - The Cub. But the difference here is that Eatchel is far more universal and only gets better as the battle goes on compared to the limited duration of Marian’s M2 buff, though Eatchel is also much more expensive to use in this manner, one of the few points in Marian’s favour.

On the topic of comparisons with other operatives, how does Marian compare to other skill damage supports in the buffing department? Well, let’s just say that she isn’t exactly a standout.

Handily losing to Enya - Exuvia and barely beating out the much-more-versatile Acacia - Kaguya in just one of three cases is not a good look, to say the least. Marian at least does prove to be an improvement over Chenxing - The Observer (more extensive comparisons can be found in the supplementary material), saving her from the immense embarrassment that would come from losing to a 4★ operative, though this doesn’t hold true if Chenxing had her own Aileron set, at which point she beats a gacha weapon-less Marian. In fact, giving every other operative in this comparison access to Aileron results in Marian losing almost every advantage she previously had, and widens the gaps where she was already lagging behind. No wonder Seasun patched out Aileron's universal usability.

Gee, it’s almost like character-locked logistics sets exist not so Seasun can have more creativity with game design, but so they can artificially prop up new character releases without having to worry about accidentally improving the performance of older characters because we can’t have that, now can we?

Anyways, Marian also has the benefit of providing all of her buffs with zero input required, which can be useful for absolute upper-limit Neural Sim runs where you don’t need the full buffing power of Enya and even the animation duration of her support skill cast would make up a major portion of the clear time. But for everyone else, there’s little reason to bring Marian along if you have other supports available. This is especially true when you consider that Marian is even more restrictive in her uses, being on a timer before her M2 buff runs out and primarily benefiting standard skill-based DPS operatives specifically while sharply dropping off in usefulness elsewhere. Furthermore, Marian also provides little in the way of unique value beyond her hands-off buff support. Compare this to Kaguya being universally useful even beyond just skill DPS characters, and Enya's support skill providing near-immunity to CC effects.

So at the end of the day, Marian does have one saving grace - the game’s character roster is currently small enough that being “dollar store Enya” still makes you pretty useful. Because in a game with a wider variety of support options, I doubt she would get such a generous appraisal, leaving her as not much more than a solution looking for a problem.

Marian has her uses, but a lot of it comes from her logistics set and M2, both freely obtainable (at least if you’re patient enough to farm it out). If you didn’t get her for free she’s worth the pulls to pick up, but for the average player, I can’t recommend anything more than that.

Supplementary Material

Link

Includes weapon calculations, manifest growth calculations, and a logistics optimization calculator.

Cheat Sheet