Alright, just to be clear: I wasn’t originally going to bother writing a review on Fritia before she got buffed. It’s all but guaranteed as the devs had publicly stated that they would be “collecting feedback,” which is Seasun-ese for “yeah we’re going to buff her but we’re not sure how yet.” This was announced just a few days after her release, so I had figured that they’d be done and shipped out pretty soon after. But it’s been almost three weeks with radio silence as far as upcoming Fritter buffs are concerned. So I caved and here we are. You win this round of chicken, Seasun.

Once she gets buffed I’ll have a followup article which will probably get linked somewhere around here. But in the meantime, let’s talk Turbo.

Abilities

Standard Skill

To understand where Fritia gets her “turbo,” we have to start here. This ability’s passive lets Fritia go into a high-speed "Celestial Turbo" sprinting state whenever she dodges. While zooming around in this state, she also generates up to 120 stacks of Supercharge. For simplicity’s sake you can really just think of it as three “charges” that her other abilities can consume. And yes, you do run pretty darn fast.

You can use the active part of this ability when Fritia has at least one charge ready. While the skill is active, she can’t move (but does take less damage) and buffs up her rate of fire, crit damage, and rigs her weapon compatibility stat, which is basically a skill multiplier but for gun damage, to a set value. Oh and of course, Fritia pulls up an overlay that’ll automatically aimbot to anything inside of it, which basically means you can look in the general direction of an enemy and hit it. What a cheater. There are a few quirks with the auto-aim in practice as it’ll sometimes need a bit of encouragement to actually go for weak spots, but it mostly works as it says it does. Each shot fired with your skill up consumes 40 Supercharge stacks, which means that you can fire up to three aimbot shots before you’re forced to skedaddle. See what I mean about it really just being three charges?

The neuronics for this ability really show how important they can be to making a character function, as well as how they can be utterly useless outside of increasing the skill’s base specs and levelling up the Deiwos passive. The first neuronic restores 15 stamina per shot hit while in Fritia’s skill, which is vital to not running out of stamina after like two rotations as you run around to generate charges. The second one… halves the skill’s two-second cooldown and negates the five S-Energy that it costs. Yeah, it’s pretty useless, but you still want it for the reasons mentioned before.

Support Skill

Continuing on with the whole speedster concept, Fritia’s support skill launches her in a target direction. Once she’s in range of an enemy or runs out of gas (after just three seconds…), she does an AoE burst of Chaos damage and hops back to avoid getting caught in the explosion. This skill is mostly filler as expected from a DPS character, but it can be useful in open world game modes to get around quickly. Your mileage may vary.

Ultimate Skill

This ability also uses those charges that you get from Fritia’s standard skill, but this time directly shoots out an explosive blast that deals area-of-effect damage to enemies. It requires at least one charge to cast, but also incentivises you to give it a bit more juice as both the damage and range increase with each extra charge consumed. It’s mostly just useful as a magic eraser for groups of trash mobs and it’s as spammable as you’d think, helpfully also refunding 30 stamina on cast. Seasun anticipated this as well, and made it so you’ll only have to sit through the skill animation cutscene once per mission. Thank goodness.

Deiwos Passive

Wrapping up Fritia’s kit is her Deiwos Passive, which to make a long story short, makes you do more damage based on the magazine size of the weapon she’s using. The more bullets it can hold, the harder she shoots things. How does this work? Your guess is as good as mine. Future technology magic is not my area of specialty.

Interestingly, the buff maxes out for a hypothetical sniper that can hold 20 rounds of ammo. This weapon doesn’t exist. You’ll have to go to Paradoxical Labyrinth and stack up buffs if you want to hit that kind of ammo capacity. Do note that the special magazine that Fenny - Starshine provides counts as having its own ammo capacity, though. This means that it’ll also provide just a bit of extra oomph from your Deiwos, which is always nice.

Assessment

On a basic level, Frita - Turbo works. You dodge to enter your sprinting state, run around a bit, and then deal a big burst of damage with either your standard or ultimate skill. And the damage is nothing to write off, either - even without optimal setups, she can hit shots with damage numbers that rival Yao - Winter Solstice with her ult up. And with the auto-aim guiding your shots to where they’ll hurt, it’s almost too easy.

But all of this does have a downside. Because you can only fire three shots per skill cast, you’re going to be running around. A lot. Don’t be surprised if the majority of your time spent playing Fritia ends up being running around in circles as you just wait until you’re allowed to actually do damage. If that’s enough to turn you off from picking up this sand speedster, I wouldn’t blame you.

Having her damage backloaded behind a relatively long charge-up time doesn’t do her any favour in the Neural Simulation department, either. While Fritia might be the one with the super speed, it’s other top DPS characters that often end up running circles around her as they do comparable or more damage, but even faster.

And regardless of whether you’re a casual player or a Neural sim sweater, Fritia runs into the problem of eventually finding herself all out of stamina and no longer able to charge up her skills. This is slightly suboptimal, to say the least. Or at least, this happens if you don’t buy into the solution that Seasun is oh-so-happy to sell you. More on this later.

Weapons

The weapon discussion is a bit more interesting this time around as people have been looking forward to skipping both the shop gun Dream Weaver and gacha weapon Sonic Flash to instead try her out with Chocolate Filling, an SSR Chaos sniper that can be obtained for free by grinding out progression levels in Paradoxical Labyrinth. So does it hold up to even the freebie shop gun?

Well, yes and no. In terms of damage, the sizable attack boost and bonus damage (that unfortunately is only available for one shot per damage rotation due to its cooldown) that Choco offers brings the damage per rotation to just a smidge more than what Dream Weaver can output. Though Dream Weaver can run into diminishing returns once supports get factored in thanks to its chunky %DMG skill, you might not notice the difference. But what you will notice, however, is that your stamina bar runs on empty pretty quickly, while Dream Weaver lets you continue charging up shots for longer. This is because its weapon skill decreases the stamina cost of dodging by 25%, extending the amount of time you can spend zooming around before exhaustion sets in.

This is taken to the next level with her premium gacha weapon.

Sonic Flash triples the dodge stamina cost reduction to 75%, which means that you can now infinitely sustain Fritia’s damage rotation. And while it might not look like it, the power of buff mixing once again steps in to ensure that it maintains a notable advantage over free alternatives in the damage department. No, seriously. Sonic Flash has three damage-buffing weapon skills:

1. Increase Chaos DMG by 18/30%.
2. Gain up to three stacks of Speed Pulse on dodge or while sprinting. When any stacks are present, ballistic DMG increases by 30/50%.
3. When stationary, shots consume Speed Pulse to increase its ballistic DMG by 18/30%.

These all look like %DMG buffs, right? Wrong. The last weapon effect is actually a %DMG Taken buff, though you wouldn’t be able to tell by reading it considering that it has the exact same wording as the other two effects. If it actually was %DMG, T1 Sonic Flash would barely be a 20% damage increase over Dream Weaver! Seasun, please get your act together.

I didn’t do the full suite of wildcard weapon testing since Fritia’s going to be getting buffs soon, but rest assured that you'll get comparisons across the whole range of extra-cope options when that happens.

Manifests

Looking at Turbo's manifests (it still feels a little weird to call her that, to be honest), we find ourselves with the same situation that Seasun had going for their last DPS release, Katya - Dawnwing. That is to say, all of Fritia's manifests make her damage numbers bigger and do nothing else. This wasn't something that I particularly liked when they did it to Katya, and I don't like it here either. While Fritia thankfully does enough damage out of the box to not feel too much like a brick until she gets some manifest investment, she instead has quality-of-life upgrades locked behind her shop gun and gacha weapon, which is arguably even worse. Manifests can be farmed for free given enough patience, but you have no choice but to spend Digicash in the gacha to pull for Sonic Flash if you don't want Fritia running out of stamina in combat.

But as far as stopping points go for manifest investment, the same advice as with Katya applies: stop when you feel that her damage numbers are big enough or when you find the cost to be too much.

Logistics

Fritia's logistics set, Insight Squad, is about as boring as every other logistics release since Seasun started character-locking them. With it equipped, you do more damage when you use her skills, and you also crit for more damage when equipping a semi-automatic sniper (to encourage you to use her event and gacha weapon). That's all you really need to know about how it works.

As for substats, attack is the top priority just like basically every other DPS in this game. Considering that Fritia does her damage by actually shooting enemies for once, its recommended pairing is unsurprisingly crit damage, taking full advantage of your auto-aim's ability to lock onto heads and other weak spots. Alignment Index will do in a pinch, but it's not the preferred choice as the %DMG buff from Fritia's Deiwos does get diluted pretty heavily.

This is normally where I point out that I have a logistics calculator you can use, but again, Fritia will be getting buffed soon. I wouldn't bother trying to minmax her logistics until then, because who knows what they're going to change?

Teams

Being a ballistic DPS, Fritia’s natural best pairing is with Fenny - Starshine and her juiced-up ammo. Despite this, Fritia doesn’t get as much value from her as, say. Chenxing - Ethereal Cloud or Lyfe - Infinite Sight. That’s because the big problem that Starshine solves for most ballistic damage characters - not having to reload - is one that Fritia doesn’t really have to begin with. She’s ultimately gated more by her skill charges than ammo count, and being able to reload while you’re doing your mandatory sprints only furthers the point. But you’re still going to pair the two together when you can, because having bigger damage numbers per shot is still good at the end of the day.

If you feel like having aim assist for your aim assist, Mauxir - Shadow Ka is also a great choice, providing a stationary target that amps damage dealt while also being a guaranteed crit target after M1. Being a Chaos operative, she can also take a rare break from equipping the Amarna Squad logistics set to apply Chaos resist shred from Twilight Squad instead.  And of course, the universal supports Acacia - Kaguya and Eatchel - The Cub will work just fine.

For more budget-minded players, Fritia finds a friend in her other self. Fritia - Little Sunshine’s ability to effectively use Amarna makes her a cheap, easy-to-use ballistic support. Acacia - Redacted can also be of use applying Slows to enemies while increasing Fritia’s damage with either Navigator or Twilight Squad logistics sets.

Should you pull?

The short answer: Probably not.

The long answer, of course, is that it depends on your preferences and what you want out of a character, as it always does. If this kind of stop-and-go speedster gameplay is your cup of Shuozhou sand, then there’s nothing wrong with pulling for what you find fun.

But not everyone likes dealing with the kind of downtime between damage rotations that Fritia has, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most people aren’t huge fans of having to choose between pulling for her gacha weapon or running out of stamina after a few damage rotations. While the trend of modern DPS characters being able to infinitely loop their combo is not something that I’m the biggest fan of, establishing this expected level of functionality and then locking it behind a gacha weapon is simply unacceptable. I would go as far as to call it a disgusting cash grab.

Ironically enough, Fritia’s stamina problems actually become a relative non-issue from a competitive perspective. That is to say, the stamina consumption reduction that both her event and gacha weapon provide are actually unnecessary because of the few bosses she ends up being competitive against, the big one is Iron Ouroboros, which was specifically designed to pander to her. The sheer amount of downtime that you have while fighting the snake as it dives into the ground and otherwise spends in an invulnerable state gives Fritia enough time to catch her breath that you can get a competent enough run in even with non-developer-endorsed weapons like Chocolate Filling.

Outside of her pandering playground, Fritia finds stiff competition as modern DPS options benefit from faster DPS rotations, ones that hit substantially harder, or even both. She can occasionally steal bosses here and there, but by that point you’ll need Sonic Flash more for the damage increase than the stamina conservation quality-of-life. But overall, Fritia often ends up choking on desert dust as a character that competitive players will rarely if ever reach for in their Neural Sim toolbox.

So for a competitive player, why invest in a weapon for a relative one-trick-pony when said snake-fighting trick still works about the same without it? And when you consider that DPS operatives like Katya - Dawnwing and Lyfe - Infinite Sight can also put up competitive times on the snake while actually being viable against other bosses, the value proposition for adding Turbo to your lineup at all unfortunately runs out of gas.

Okay, how do we fix this?

So is all hope lost for everyone’s favourite Heimdall Force professor? Once again, the answer isn’t really a simple yes or no. From a fundamental level, I don’t think Fritia will ever be properly balanced. The extended periods of time between each damage combo means that her actual “DPS” comes down more to how many run-and-shoot drills she has to do before hitting an important damage threshold. With the ever-increasing damage of characters in this game relative to the enemies they fight, this often means that killing a boss or hitting an HP trigger in one or two damage rotations would make her downright broken, but having to do just one more rotation would slow her down to the point of irrelevance.

Is this a problem unique to Fritia? I wouldn’t say so. You could argue that other modern DPS characters also suffer from this issue, but those characters are also allowed to have more flexibility in their damage rotations. Cherno - Enigma can pop her orbs early, Siris - Ksana can ult with fewer Resilience stacks, and Katya - Dawnwing can set up fewer Crystals before firing her lasers. With Fritia - Turbo, there isn’t this flexibility because by the time you have one charge ready to go, you might as well commit to it and generate the other two. Lyfe - Infinite Sight actually has a similar problem, but she also has more levers to pull if you wanted to buff or (gasp) nerf her performance. From reduced normal shooting damage to lower her DPS while charging up dodge-shots to being able to better fine-tune said DPS output due to her quicker rotations, she offers points of adjustment that Fritia just doesn’t have. Short of a major rework, this is a problem that Fritia’s always going to suffer from.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t anything that can be done to smooth out her DPS curve and generally make her more fun and effective. I was actually approached by Seasun recently to provide feedback on her, and for potential changes that could be made. I proposed four main modifications:

Increase the amount of time that her Celestial Turbo state lasts

I mean come on, she’s supposed to be a speedster. Let her run around a bit more.

Rework her event and gacha weapons, and re-balance her base kit so that she isn't reliant on having either the event or gacha weapon to sustain her combo

Locking character functionality behind gear like this is simply unacceptable, and should never be a thing. Instead, reworking her second standard skill neuronic to provide the stamina cost-reduction effect from her event and gacha weapons would be the preferred solution, since its current effect is basically useless. So what do we give her event and gacha weapons instead? How about having them increase stamina recovery rate? This wouldn't affect Fritia's ability to sustain her damage rotation due to her new second neuronic, but it would allow her to generate skill charges faster since the generation rate is affected by her stamina recovery rate, which there is no way of buffing currently. This means that her event and gacha weapons still provide a unique, meaningful benefit, but doesn’t strictly lock you to them.

Increase her overall Supercharge generation rate

This can be done in two ways:

• Dodging instantly generates a skill charge. This lets players use her skills more quickly, but also allows for skill expression by repeatedly dodging to rapidly generate Supercharge at the cost of stamina consumption.
• Shooting and hitting enemies while in her enhanced sprinting state instantly provides a portion of a skill charge, with it being on a short cooldown. This rewards skilled play by providing an incentive for players to still aim normally rather than only relying on her auto-aim.

Both options would increase Fritia’s potential skill ceiling, but importantly also wouldn’t increase the base skill floor required to use her, being completely optional mechanics that casual players can ignore. Doing this would also potentially allow for one more change:

Increase the Supercharge limit to 160, from 120

This could replace her current Manifestation 1 effect, which would be combined with her Manifestation 2 effect to make space. This allows Fritia to make one more shot per rotation to increase her DPS uptime, further rewards players for generating skill faster through skilled play, and also makes her first two manifestation levels much more valuable.

There were some other smaller details that I won’t get into as this article is already dragging on for way longer than I expected, but I think you get the idea. Let’s hope that Fritia’s buffs end up having a bit more oomph than what Agave got, because the desert is unforgiving, and so is the meta.