General overview

Shirayuki is an excellent 4 star that fills a unique niche within her archetype. Her skill 2 comes with AOE Arts damage, crowd control, and great uptime. The only downside is inherent to her archetype — she attacks slowly and is expensive compared to some other DPS options.

E2? Like all members of her archetype, she gains a range extension to 3x5 at E2. She also gets an additional ATK buff from her talent and even more buffs from her module. She’s not a priority for early game players, but if you use her, you should E2 her once you have the resources.

Talents

Shirayuki’s talent only comes into play at E2. It increases her attack interval by 0.2 seconds and gives her a +20% ATK buff. Her base attack interval is 2.8 seconds, so that’s a 7% increase in her attack interval in exchange for a 20% ATK increase. Since DEF reduces Physical damage taken by a flat amount, this change makes her much better at carving through high-DEF enemies because she gets more damage out of each hit.

Skills

S2 is the skill you will basically always use because it has all the good stuff. It reduces the movement speed and deals Arts damage per second to enemies that it hits. The flavor text refers to “giant spinning shurikens,” and this isn’t just for effect. The shurikens she throws will deal damage to all enemies in their path, then spin in place for a short time before she throws another one. It’s a very strong skill that can make quick work of high-DEF mobs, and it’s pretty spammable to boot.

Masteries

Masteries on skill 2 are optional because the multiplier increases aren’t that significant. If you do masteries, you need to go all the way to M3 because she doesn’t get an increase in DPS until then. M3 also reduces the SP cost to 25, down from 29 at level 7.

Modules

Module Y gives Shirayuki the ability to ignore 100 DEF when attacking, so she basically gets 100 free damage against enemies with 100 or more DEF (which is most of them). While her skill doesn’t benefit from this because she deals Arts damage, the module will improve her DPS while she’s waiting for it to charge again. Speaking of that, the upgrades give her a new talent that improves her SP recovery after she kills enemies, so she gets even better uptime than she already had. If you use her, you should max out her module because it’s cheap and gives her a pretty noticeable upgrade.