If you think about it, aptitude is kind of a funny word. In regular use, it refers to a general competency or ability. Given this definition, any high-performing operative in Snowbreak could be considered as possessing aptitude. And yet despite this, the word takes on a very different, very specific meaning in Snowbreak. Here, it refers to a type of buff that applies a bonus instance of damage when a gunshot hits an enemy, increasing the overall damage output. It’s then therefore possible for an operative to have aptitude, but not “Aptitude.” Words really do only have as much meaning as we choose to give them, eh?

But as far as capital-A Aptitude goes, it’s not exactly a mechanic that’s had a lot of lower-case-A aptitude in Snowbreak so far. Outside of some buff sources in a select few game modes, it only really exists on a few operatives, and even then it’s hardly amazing. Fritia - Little Sunshine’s Aptitude buff from her support skill is more useful for its ability to proc the effects of the Amarna Squad logistics set than for the damage it actually does, and the Aptitude from Siris - The Goldfish’s support skill can’t even do that (on top of being a random chance as well). It certainly hasn’t had the best track record, and the introduction of Fenny - Starshine, whose bonus ammo mechanic disabled the effects of Aptitude buffs entirely, certainly didn’t help.

Looking to change that is Tess - Phantasia, a Ballistic support in name who in practice wants to also serve a sub-DPS role. In addition to buffing up the main DPS, she also directly contributes with Aptitude hits and who knows, they might actually do a relevant amount of damage this time? She’s got one heck of an uphill battle ahead of her if she wants to make something like this work, so let’s see how things turned out.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Like with Tess’ original Magician alt, her standard skill has a variety of different party tricks for you to choose from. Tapping the skill will toggle the colour of the skill indicator, and holding the skill once you have the colour you want will activate that colour’s effect. Each of the three options does something different:

• The green apple restores Tess’ S-Energy over time while also providing her and nearby allies with a movement speed boost. For obvious reasons, the usual S-Energy cost of this skill is negated here.
• The gold apple deals a hit of AoE damage to enemies, knocking them up and also marking them for five seconds. When Tess then shoots a marked enemy, all other marked enemies take Frost damage as well, making this kind of a diet version of Chenxing - Ethereal Cloud’s standard skill.
• The red apple provides Tess with a Frost Aptitude buff, making her shots deal bonus Frost damage while the buff is in effect.

For most support operatives, I usually say something about their standard skill being just good enough to not make them an active liability as a main DPS. But I’d say that Tess deserves a bit more than that here. This skill (mainly the Aptitude buff) actually gives her surprisingly decent DPS output for a support. If I were to make a support DPS tier list, she’d probably be at or near the top thanks to this.

Support Skill

Of course, Tess is still a support at the end of the day, and her off-field capabilities are really what you care about. Tess’ support skill provides the active operative with the Glimmerburst effect. Fancy name, essentially just Frost Aptitude. That’s more or less all it does, really. I mean, it is technically a damage buff, as directly doing the damage still boosts your overall DPS. With Neuronics, Tess’ ATK is boosted while the buff is active, which is important because the damage of the Aptitude scales off of her stats, not that of the main DPS.

This skill also comes with an excessively long animation when you use it, completely shifting the camera away from the enemy you’re actually targeting. Look Tess, you’re great, but please get off the screen, I’m trying to shoot things here. Unlike Vidya - Celestial Swan’s similarly-long skill animation, Tess’ doesn’t even stop the mission timer… much like her original alt, actually. I guess some things never change. Sigh.

Oh right, there is one other thing. After Glimmerburst generates 100 Aptitude hits, Tess applies a debuff to the enemy hit called Frostbite, which does two hits of damage over two seconds. The damage dealt is basically negligible though, and the actual utility of this debuff comes from her ultimate skill.

Ultimate Skill

Tess’ ult generates a large area of effect, in which all ally Ballistic DMG is increased, as well as boosting the damage of her Glimmerburst Aptitude too. This lasts for twelve seconds, but also not really since one of her ult neuronics makes it last indefinitely until you choose to turn it off for some reason. The other neuronic makes the area of effect slowly follow you around, which is nice quality of life.

The other big thing that this ability does is that every time an enemy has Frostbite applied to them, the duration of Glimmerburst is increased by three seconds. This means that if you’re able to keep applying Frostbite often enough, you can have the Glimmerburst buff up indefinitely (spoiler alert: you can). If you want to be pedantic, I guess her ult has one more contribution, which is generating a huge amount of visual clutter, which is admittedly annoying at times.

I swear this has caused frame drops for me when playing Snowbreak on at least a few occasions, but I guess that’s the price of increasing your DPS.

Deiwos Passive

Like most supports these days, Tess’ Deiwos Passive is a passive teamwide DMG boost that scales with Alignment Index. In Tess’ case, it boosts all types of damage, and it has a fun bonus for Frost operatives (including herself!) in that the damage boost is doubled.

…There isn’t really much else to say about it, did you expect me to pad out the word count or something?

Assessment

Using Tess in combat is pretty straightforward. Pop her ult, cast her support skill, and more or less forget about her until (if) you have to cast her support skill again. It really doesn’t get much simpler than that. Do make sure to use her ult first though, for reasons that I’ll explain later.

As for her capabilities, Tess presents a rather unique approach to supportive utility, considering that she’s not a pure support, but also not quite a sub-DPS in the traditional sense, either. She doesn’t buff as hard as, say, Vidya - Celestial Swan, but she’s also not asking for on-field time to do damage like Marian - Riptide. Instead, she relies on the main DPS of the team to enable her own damage contribution, piggybacking on their gunshots to deliver a followup punch of her own. This naturally comes with the upside of her taking less screen time away from your main DPS like a traditional support (long skill animation aside), but it also comes with the drawback of limiting the number of operatives who can use her effectively. This applies both in terms of actually having the proper mechanical synergy with Tess (you can’t apply Aptitude if you don’t shoot, after all), and as well as some other teambuilding considerations, as the consequences of past design choices rear their head.

Weapons

Predictably enough, Tess’ signature weapon Valiant Heart is a solid upgrade over the freely farmable alternate, Confetti Chroma. However, it might not be for the reasons you’d expect.

As far as main DPS buffing potential, Confetti Chroma offers an ATK and %Ballistic DMG buff, the former of which being something that Valiant Heart notably does not provide. Instead, it provides a teamwide %Ballistic DMG boost, %Ballistic DEF pen, and… another %Ballistic DMG boost. Yep, that’s right. In the weapon skill text where it says

…full squad’s Ballistic DMG and Frost aptitude DMG dealt to the target increases by 18/30%...

That’s actually just a garden-variety damage buff, and not the %DMG Taken buff that you’d normally expect from a signature weapon. This is also despite Seasun using the exact same wording in the past (with Enya - Exuvia’s signature weapon Abyssal Light) to refer to a %DMG Taken buff. Fun.

Grumbling about skill text aside, this means that it stacks additively instead of multiplicatively with the other %DMG buff that Valiant Heart provides, making the overall buff strength lower. The result of this is that the actual buffing power of Valiant Heart isn’t that much higher than Confetti Chroma. The difference is around 12% when comparing T2 Valiant Heart to T5 Confetti Chroma, and at T1, the buffing gap is down to just 1-2%!

However, Valiant Heart has two other tricks up its sleeve that thankfully don’t underdeliver. The first is that what Valiant Heart “lacks” in main DPS buffing power, it makes up for by juicing up Tess’ Aptitude damage, offering %DMG and %DEF pen buffs on top of a stronger statline to make her Aptitude hit for much harder than is possible with Confetti Chroma.

As well, Valiant Heart makes it so that whenever an Aptitude effect hits an enemy, that enemy has Frostbite applied to it. Yes, that same Frostbite effect from Tess’ support skill, and the same effect that extends the duration of said support skill whenever it’s applied. This means that Valiant Heart allows for a theoretically infinite support skill duration, which is about as good as it sounds. Confetti Chroma can also apply Frostbite, but only once every 200 Aptitude hits, which is obviously nowhere near as good. The net effect of this is that while Valiant Heart doesn’t provide a large buffing advantage, the boost to Tess’ personal damage and skill uptime is enough to make it a solid pickup.

It’s admittedly an unorthodox approach, but I guess you can’t argue with results.

Manifests

Tess’ Manifests largely focus on boosting her own personal Aptitude damage, though there are some actual supportive buffs in the mix as well. Notably, Manifest 2 applies a(n actual) %DMG Taken effect to enemies hit by her Aptitude effect, which means that it increases the damage output of both Tess and the main DPS. This makes it a particular standout among her Manifest levels, and is where I’d recommend parking her for most players.

Of course, the rest of her Manifests will still provide number-go-up utility for those that want to chase even more damage.

Logistics

Surprising nobody, Tess’ designated logistics set, Arcane Squad, is very good and would probably get poached by almost every other support in the game if it weren’t character-locked to her. It features a personal damage buff for Tess, further increasing her Aptitude damage, as well as a teamwide %Ballistic DMG buff that’s stacked up by landing Aptitude hits for some actual supportive utility. While her ult is active, it also provides a teamwide %ATK buff, which acts as a cherry on top and effectively makes it a better version of Amarna Squad.

Now regarding that last %ATK buff, it’s the reason why I told you to use Tess’ ult before her support skill. For whatever reason, if you use her support skill first, this %ATK buff doesn’t get applied to Tess even after she uses her ult. I don’t know what kind of code spaghetti Seasun cooked up to make that happen, but it’s a pretty easy pitfall to avoid as long as you keep it in mind.

As far as substats go, let’s see… Tess doesn’t shoot, doesn’t need defensive stats, has no U-Energy or S-Energy issues, and has basically negligible cooldowns even outside of the fact that you can theoretically never have her abilities end to begin with. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like an ATK + Alignment Index angle to me.

See the supplementary material for more in-depth weapons and logistics set comparisons, as well as a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Team Building

Being the other half of a double-operative release, Tess naturally has excellent synergy with the other operative, Katya. Which one? Yes.

Now of course, Tess is designed to be good with Katya - Rhapsody, as her ludicrous fire rate means that you can fit in a whole lot of Aptitude hits in not a lot of time, maximizing the value that Tess can provide. This train of thought also means that the older Katya - Blue Bolt benefits similarly. But what might come as a surprise is that the “middle child” Katya, Dawnwing, works surprisingly well with Tess too. Despite being a Skill DPS, Dawnwing still has to shoot a decent amount to pop her Crystal Vanes to do that damage, providing a window for Tess’ Aptitude to do damage. I don’t think many people still play her these days, but this also applies to Lyfe - Wild Hunt, making it so that Tess at least has one non-Katya DPS pairing to work with.

The result is a pretty competitive performance bump, but it does come with the caveat that the actual Crystal Vane pop damage isn’t boosted nearly as much, since much of the uplift comes from Tess’ damage. This means that in shorter fights where you don’t shoot as much thanks to Dawnwing’s ult providing an instant Crystal Vane pop, Tess will be of significantly less value. But for general gameplay and longer fights like Supreme Battleground, it’s not a half bad pairing.

This is unfortunately where the good news ends, however. Because Tess is heavily reliant on the main DPS of the team actually shooting, she doesn’t synergize well with skill caster-type DPS operatives. This naturally includes other Skill DPS operatives, but also Chenxing - Jade Arc, who primarily only really shoots to stack arrows into enemies to be used with her ult. In most cases, you won’t need more than a handful of arrows stacked up to kill an enemy, and in general content, just the single arrow embedded via her standard skill is often enough after the damage from said standard skill softens up any enemies it hits. Her weak synergy with Chenxing as a top-tier DPS is unfortunately a mark against her.

Looking at support pairings, Tess also has two other very big issues. The first is that she cannot exist on the same team as Fenny - Starshine, since the bonus ammo that Starshine provides disables Aptitude effects while it exists. This wouldn’t be an issue if Tess provides a larger DPS increase, as you could then just drop Starshine for her. However, a certain detective stands in the way of that. Vidya - Celestial Swan, regarded as the single best general-use support in the game, only performs at her best in mono-element teams. This isn’t an issue with Starshine, as she doesn’t directly deal any damage, but Tess’ Frost Aptitude means that if you’re using her with non-Frost DPS operatives, the benefit you can get with Vidya sharply decreases.

Tess doesn't stand a chance here, as the Aptitude buff (her main value) she provides does a very small overall percentage of the damage share due to Bubu's high per-shot damage.

Lyfe - Infinite Sight, being an operative with a high rate of fire but relatively low per-shot damage, is an ideal DPS for Tess to support, and even proves to be superior to Vidya - Celestial Swan + Fenny - Starshine compositions at the lowest investment level. However, once some investment is considered and signature weapons are obtained, this advantage disappears as the raw buffing power of Vidya kicks in.

Also, not having Starshine means that you now have to actually reload with Lyfe, which is never fun (and time loss, for Sim runners).

As it turns out, having the best support in the game drop in effectiveness when used in a mixed-element team makes it hard to team build with sub-DPS-esque operatives. Who would have guessed? Of course, if Vidya is taken on a different team or you just don’t have her, these issues don’t exist, and Tess is then roughly competitive with other supports. But for those that do have access to Vidya, the combination of the two aforementioned issues means that, at the time of writing, Tess only really exists to be used with Katya if you look at the modern DPS roster. Good thing there are three of them, I guess.

Should You Pull?

Tess really exists in a weird spot. On one hand, she only works with a specific type of DPS operative, and when you consider the ever-looming presence of Vidya - Celestial Swan, ideally only with one element type as well. She’s definitely not an operative you can just slap into any team and expect it to work.

But on the other hand, when she does work, she works incredibly well. The damage boost she provides Katya - Rhapsody is enough to elevate Katya to top-tier DPS status at the time of writing, making it so that for the time being, Tess is relevant at the highest levels of competitive play. The fact that Tess provides much of her damage boost directly rather than through buffs also means that DPS pairings that can make use of her suffer much less from the effects of diminishing returns, potentially “future-proofing” their compatibility with future support releases.

But at the same time, Tess’ dependence on her DPS, rather than DPS operatives traditionally being dependent on their supports, makes her more of an “accessory,” to put it nicely. She’s by far one of if not the most specialized support release to date, and at the same time offers no unique utility like Mauxir - Shadow Ka’s target access, Fenny - Starshine’s bonus ammo mechanic, or even the U-Energy battery that her original Magician exosuit provides. Tess is therefore highly dependent on having a compatible DPS to support, and hopefully having that DPS be meta-relevant.

For casual players, a lot of these considerations don’t matter as much, and Tess is a great set-it-and-forget-it support for you to play with. As long as shooting enemies in the face is a viable tactic in Snowbreak, she’ll inevitably find some use. For those looking to maximize their DPS output and push their limits in Neural Simulation though, it’s better to think of her as an add-on for an existing DPS that they already have or plan to obtain. And even at T1, her signature weapon Valiant Heart is still strongly recommended just for the skill uptime boost that it provides, so it might be wise to think of that as part of the package deal.

At the end of the day, maybe Aptitude is a flawed mechanic. I know this is a funny thing to say in the patch that released Katya - Rhapsody, but the amount of actual shooting going on in Snowbreak has been steadily going down over time. Skill damage operatives have become properly meta-relevant, and at the same time have moved towards purely ability-based damage rotations. Some operatives now finish entire missions without ever firing a single shot from the gun that they hold.

Even among Ballistic DPS operatives, the current top pick with a death grip over the meta is Chenxing - Jade Arc, an operative who finishes most Sim battles without having fired enough shots to even fully stack up the %Ballistic DMG buff from Tess’ logistics set. In most other content, she often just coasts off of her standard skill instead. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Snowbreak is moving away from the third-person-shooter roots it once had.

Given this context, I think Tess puts out a solid effort. Short of breaking the game, she does about all you could reasonably ask of a competent Aptitude support. She’s not a gamechanger like some supports in the past, but she chooses a niche to specialize in and does what you expect from her. And for the DPS operatives that she does work well with, she thrives in her role and delivers a properly impressive performance. You could even say that she has an aptitude for it.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

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

Cheat Sheet