fly the gun and flag, death is after us

5. vector

Vector was my very first 5* doll in GFL1! I recommend her as a core echelon building staple to just about everybody.

In GFL1, echelon formations are very strict, both in terms of placement and composition. SMGs belong in the front line, and they protect ARs in the back line. There's room for variance, but not a ton of it. There are some very powerful and interesting SMG tanks out there (one of them is further down on this list!) but, especially in the game's early days, being a tank was just a matter of having good stats, mostly high HP and Evasion. Some SMGs had damage focus skills, but because of their weaker offensive stats and particularly their poor accuracy, they were generally sidelined compared to dedicated DPS weapons (ARs).

On launch, Vector was GFL1's only really stand-out "off-tank". Her defensive stats are good - particularly her above-average HP - but nothing to write home about, especially without a defensive skill improving her evasion chances or giving her some other kind of survivability; but really, Vector didn't need that, because she could just obliterate most enemies before they could even move.

The very short initial cooldown of Vector's Incendiary Grenade meant that, in most content, Vector could decimate an upcoming formation before it could even get set and start firing. In "earlygame" encounters, Vector can - and does - just win fights outright on the initial AOE, once she has her skill leveled and some decent equipment boosting her firepower. In lategame encounters, even in ranking maps, the massive DOT on the firefield means that Vector remains very powerful, contributing massive amounts of mobbing DPS to her echelon and often consistently MVPing over her back line when given the right matchups.

Vector's downsides are mostly only relevant at higher levels of optimization. Her 25% RoF formation buff, while very strong, only affects one AR, and only has niche applicability, limiting Vector's preferred teammates. Her lack of defensive utility means you're putting much more pressure on your echelon's main tank, which can be dangerous in ranking-tier content. And, of course, as an AOE DPS, she's pretty weak in most boss fights. But none of that is enough for me to feel like she's a poor investment even for newer players. If only she was slightly less rare!

In GFL2, Vector is the premier Burn support. Her ultimate is a cute "reference" to the power of her GFL1 counterpart but mostly serves as terrain control and damage amplifier for her teammates, rather than being a raw DPS skill for Vector herself. She absolutely still has damage potential, but most of it comes in the form of Overburn and Overheat Combustion, rather than personal on-hit effects. With her peak key she even provides a modest amount of healing support! Isn't that cute.

Vector gets some additional clout for being the Doll that got me to start writing GFL fanfiction, by asking the question "how would you treat depression in a T-Doll?" As for the answer, well... seems the jury's still out.

4. mosin-nagant

real longtime GFL1 followers will know how much I adored Mosin back in the day. Her niche doesn't really make much sense anymore; the raw burst damage she once boasted has been badly power crept by the likes of Task Force DEFY and Squad Daybreak. She used to hold a privileged position in GFL1's metagame: an archetype-defying variant of the "bamboo rifle", packing the immense raw damage potential of the "large" variants but the nimbler, shorter cooldowns characterized by the "small" variants, while also having greater mobility than any rifle is normally allowed to have.

This allowed her to dodge boss attack patterns relatively easily while waiting out their invulnerability timers or whatever other defensive mechanics they had access to, before dumping a staggering amount of burst damage in a single well-timed shot. Throughout the Arc 1 gauntlet of boss fights - Deep Dive, Singularity, CT, Isomer - Mosin was absolutely one of my top performers, and she continued to be a standout member of my anti-Paradeus corps even after bosses stopped really functioning the way she was designed to deal with.

With her new equipment effect, Mosin's skill can theoretically be used rapidly back-to-back against Elite enemies, dramatically improving her DPS; however, between the number of asterisks on this possibility and the fact that rifles in general have fallen out of favor in GFL1's modern metagame, it's been hard to find a suitable use for her for quite a while now. Oh well.

She's adorable in GFL2. She was my first Elite Doll here, and although she was sadly quite bad on launch, the Electric archetype has built up around her in such a way that she's actually quite a respectable sentinel, as long as she's got enough opportunities to refill her Confectance and keep her S2+Ultimate combo rolling every single turn. Unfortunately, I do not have the pieces to build that team just yet, so my Mosin is underinvested, but. We'll get there. Don't you worry.

3. k5

Gaze upon the visage of the Goddess of Fate.

K5 is my favorite handgun-imprinted Doll in the entire canon of Girls' Frontline, and there are a lot of reasons for this. Firstly, she's genuinely just beautiful to look at. My thing for silver-white hair has been well-documented by now, but have we really talked enough about silver eyes?

K5's skill Museum of War Philosophy is also one of the best stat-buff skills a handgun could have, back in the day when she was released (shortly before Isomer). The buffs themselves were top tier in terms of power, and the fact that they were tailored to the kind of Doll receiving them was highly underrated in my mind; there still are very few, if any, Dolls in the entire game who make your team both stronger offensively and more elusive defensively in the same skill cooldown, and virtually nobody is capable of casually handing out extra magazine size like she can. The 8 seconds up/4 seconds down combat rhythm was very forgiving, providing her with no downside at all in exchange for her power. You just had to be mindful about where she was standing when the skill was activated, that's all.

Then she got a mod 3. Astrological Divination is a gamebreaking skill that elevated K5 from "good Doll among a long roster of similarly good Dolls" to a much greater mythos, standing beside the likes of Calico/M950A and Px4 Storm, deserving of priority consideration in as many Echelons as you can fit her in.

+12% Rate of Fire and +50% movespeed are enormous bonuses, and they last for a very long time. These boosts make dodging incoming boss mechanics very forgiving, and make kiting elite enemies with powerful special attacks (Gladiators, etc) much easier. Bear in mind, these bonuses apply at the same time all of K5's other boosts, and RoF + Firepower buffs stack multiplicatively, so against elite enemies - especially ones where your ARs/RFs can just stand still - K5 functionally buffs your DPS by 40%, on top of giving herself and her cotank a whopping +50% evasion and movespeed to better control space and limit oncoming fire.

But that all pales in comparison to K5's 9999-point forcefield effect. In case it's not clear: that's the damage cap. In boss fights and against other high-threat enemies, K5 makes you immune to damage for 1 crucial second, up to once every 12 seconds. This completely trivializes some boss fights; it makes her the unequivocal best-in-slot support when fighting the likes of M16A1 and Gaia, for example, and allows her to serve as a very handy panic button for fighting dangerous enemies at a ranking level like Hydras or even Goliaths.

Handguns are a broad and diverse class of Doll with a lot of available niches, and that makes them hard to compare, but I'm pretty confident that K5 Mod III is absolutely the best handgun in the game.

"Luna" is K5's counterpart in Project Neural Cloud, and it's one of my great regrets about that game that I did not stick with it long enough to get her. She's a mystical Specialist DPS with a sword. She's so fucking cool. I want her so badly it makes me look stupid. Look at her.

2. SPAS-12 (...and her sister, SPAS-15)

Come on. You knew this was coming, right?

SPAS-12 was one of the earliest Shotguns available in GFL1. In their early stages, GFL1 shotguns were very... uninteresting. They had a lot of HP and a variable amount of armor, and armor was pretty much the only thing that mattered; if you could reduce incoming damage to 1 pretty consistently, then you were good, and if you couldn't then you were bad, and the increasing prevalence of enemy armor penetration and the general power creep of Paradeus and the KCCO made it harder and harder for shotguns to keep up. They still had their niches, but they relied heavily on shields to stick around for long shifts on ranking maps and the like. For general use, you were better off just using SMGs.

SPAS-12 was a bit unusual from the jump, though, because she had a pretty rare skill compared to other shotguns. She didn't give herself a shield, buff her armor/evasion, or apply knockback to enemies. She buffed her own damage.

Shotguns in GFL1 have bad offensive stats - half or so the Firepower and Rate of Fire of a half-decent assault rifle, and a quarter their accuracy or worse - plus they actually have a magazine and a long reload time when it's exhausted, unlike ARs and RFs who get to just stand there blasting out of infinite magazines for some reason. So dealing damage with a shotgun sounds like a fool's errand. They compensate for their poor stats slightly with the fact that they get to target three enemies per shot instead of only one, but that doesn't make up for their awful rate of fire, and only puts more pressure on their very poor accuracy.

For years I theorized and agonized over SPAS-12, whose Damage Focus skill theoretically should have given her one of the best DPS statlines of any four-stall Doll in the game, in addition to being a serviceable tank. It's not that simple; even after applying Damage Focus, her uptime is only 50/50, which is very poor compared to standard self-buffing ARs. Damage Focus also doesn't improve her accuracy, further limiting what kinds of foes she can actually deal damage to. Worse, even a mediocre DPS AR - like G36 - benefits massively from formation buffs from her allies; DPS-focused buffs from allied machine guns are rare and generally devalued, as Armor buffs are far more important to keeping your SGs alive for as long as possible. It seemed so tantalizingly close, and yet so permanently out of reach.

Then SPAS-15 came out...

There is a lot to unpack here, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just say that combining SPAS-12 and SPAS-15 is already enough to max out SPAS-15's Resonance effect. So as long as they're paired together, SPAS-12 gets 30% cooldown reduction (going from 8sec up/8sec down, to 8 sec up/3.2 sec down - a massive improvement in uptime), +9 movement speed (enough that they move more like ARs or Handguns), 100 points of armor (a good SG usually has something like 40 or 50), and a 200 point shield (a good shield support provides 40-50 HP of shield, depending on uptime). But! Only once, and only for 40 seconds. They do damage now! ...but it's silly and gimmicky, and isn't really enough to register against the massive amount of burst damage that the MGs they're protecting are generally putting out. But maybe that was all I could have ever really hoped for. Maybe that was-

--huh?

wait wait wait what do you mean +1% damage per point of armor. Wait why is her skill cooldown only 12 seconds now? What? What?! What do you mean increase damage by 100% of shield value???

Surprise. SPAS-12 is, once again, a story of a T-Doll ascended. With support from SPAS-15, she shoots far past the realm of "funny gimmicky off-DPS", even far beyond mere "viability". Very suddenly, SPAS-12 is a godslayer, dismantling what we in the ranking community call deathstacks, gigantic enemy formations with combat effectiveness ratings better measured in fractions of a million, far beyond what any Griffin echelon should ever be able to handle. Suddenly, SPAS-12 belongs in the same conversation as Dolls like Type-88, IWS2000, Alchemist, and the legendary M4A1 herself. And - unlike any of these - SPAS-12 has the additional distinction of being capable of destroying such powerful enemies, and emerging unscathed. Notice how LTLX and SPAS-15 both lost zero HP in this battle? She can, and will, do this all day. Mine isn't even in her final form - Makarov Mod III is capable of completely solving her accuracy problem. What will stop her then?

Sabrina, in GFL2, could never live up to her GFL1 counterpart's heights. It would be a bit foolish to expect her to do so. I still manage to find myself disappointed by how underwhelming she is in her new role as the game's F2P-accessible Bulwark; her counterattacks are very weak and her innate survivability is not very good. With sufficient investment and a good healer backing her, like Springfield, she's sturdy enough to hold a choke position and her counterattacks can bring enemies into more comfortable kill ranges for her allies; that makes her "serviceable". But as far as actually competing with the likes of Peri, Andoris, and Helen, well... it seems like we'll be waiting for another neural upgrade. That's okay.

I want to take a break to talk about some honorable mentions. M590 is obviously my favorite Doll design in the series, and my most personally adored Doll. 416 aka Klukai also feels like a conspicuous absence from this list, being one of my favorite characters, but she's simply not interesting enough as a Doll in GFL1 to compete against any of these other members - she's strong, sure, but you just kind of point her at things and they explode. Not the most exciting. I'm also a very big fan of QBZ-191 aka Qiongjiu, but I feel like I haven't really gotten enough time to get to know her - as a character, or in gameplay - to warrant a spot here.

There's a lot of Dolls also who are just really really good and deserve to be mentioned on that basis alone like P10C (not pictured), who is the only other HG to provide invulnerability like K5 and can do so more frequently, but has no offensive presence to compensate; so she's even more niche. M4A1 and IWS2000 are the original deathstack slayers, and M4A1 being the main character of GFL1 makes her, you know, pretty important? And I do love her? Also, RPK-16.png

But, it's hard to really say beyond that point. Outside of main story relevance, GFL1 struggled to give every Doll enough characterization to really make bold claims about them, but you'll notice that each of my favorite Dolls so far has a few costume stories, and Vector has had the honor of a great personal event and Covenant storyline in GFL2. Sabrina gets the honor of being one of my favorite characters, in both GFL1 and GFL2, and that does contribute to my placement of her on this list. Getting to spend more time with her and give her even more love is one of my highest motivators to get around to writing GFL2 fanfic someday.

That might make you wonder who managed to beat her to the #1 slot. But it really shouldn't.

1.. RO635

I've not had a lot to say about the characterization of most of these Dolls, because - as mentioned - GFL1 had so many characters that finding room to explore all of them was kind of difficult. That's not to say that it's not there or that I don't love what is there; Vector's depression inspired me to write about her, Mosin-Nagant's cheerful masking has me hungry to meet her in GFL2's main story, K5's cryptic nature haunts Ethereal Ionization in ways you only wish you knew about yet, and of course everybody loves miss Sabrina!

That is not why I am going to avoid talking about RO. I am going to avoid talking about RO in the story because if I did, we would be here for hours, and this post is already so long. If you are a newer convert to GFL2 reading this and want to know in a nutshell what makes her so special, just remember, every time she is on screen: she is the first third-gen Doll.

In GFL1 she was one of the best SMGs to come out in an era where SMGs were in dire need of consistency. Suomi was good, but only when her skill was active, and very vulnerable while it was on cooldown. (This isn't the case anymore; Suomi is the best tank SMG in the game bar none nowadays.) Thompson and G36C seemed good but were even more cooldown-dependent. We were lacking in Dolls with good enough Evasion stats that they didn't need their skill to be active to avoid getting scrapped, but still had an evasion skill that helped them live through oncoming volley fire, and that's what RO635 was when she was released: a huge buff to her own evasion, and a very meaningful nerf to enemy firepower and accuracy, on a three-second initial cooldown.

RO's very long downtime pattern unfortunately meant that she needed fights to be short or else her survivability would suffer; also, her formation buffs were - I won't sugarcoat it - very bad, meaning she was really only useful as a main tank, and in any situation where you didn't need her evasive ability, you'd prefer someone more offensively versatile like UMP45.

RO's neural upgrade, hilariously, just doubled down on the thing she was already good at, and to be fair, it had a pretty significant effect. RO is the best SMG at evading incoming attacks. Even now, with Suomi Mod I reigning supreme over every ARSMG echelon to exist, RO635 manages to stay somewhat competitive thanks to her special equipment set which gives her a much more favorable uptime pattern of 8/4 and gives her a 100HP shield every time she uses her skill, further improving her survivability.

But that's all she was in GFL1. A tank. A good tank... but just a tank. Well, that and a dork.

But then.

I want to say something like: Right now, Robella is probably the best DPS doll in the game, especially at v6. But Voymastina just came out, so who the fuck knows anymore. GFL2 isn't even trying to be "balanced" in the same way as GFL1 was--

-- YET. --

--but there's no denying that, however strong Voymastina and Klukai might be, Robella is absolutely a part of the conversation. Her Frigid Infiltrations have staggeringly high damage potential and can be applied to a theoretically unlimited number of enemy targets per turn, and while her personal offense on-turn is pretty solid - 170% ATK scaling on her basic attack and 210% ATK scaling on her AOE ultimate - I think her offensive support has gone under the radar in the few fandom resources I've been seeing. When she applies Unity to an ally, their attacks deal an amount of RO's ATK as bonus on-hit damage regardless of the attack's size or the target's location, meaning RO can deal meaningful AOE damage to enemies behind cover just by applying Unity to an ally who does that for her, like Dushevnaya S2 or Alva S2. It helps that this AOE Investigation application also comes back around to benefiting RO's own rotation, right?

The thing about Robella that I like the most, though, is the skill ceiling on her kit. It's not hard to use at 80% effectiveness or so: put Unity on a Freeze ally, have that ally go bonk a boss, make sure RO is in range to collect the Investigation stacks, and rinse and repeat. However, if you want to get fancy, there's a ton of nuance to optimizing the placement of Unity and, more specifically, the timing with which you move Unity from one ally to another.

I like as well that Robella's damage contribution might seem a little underwhelming in lower-difficulty content because enemies simply don't survive long enough for her to complete her Investigation loop on them. Like, okay, Enhanced Unity + Alva S2 applies a lot of potential AOE damage at the end of those enemies' next turn, but not only does that mean they need to survive the Alva S2 and RO's on-hit damage boost, they also need to survive Alva's interception. And RO's on-hit damage. Again. Only for RO to then do 150% ATK with Frigid Infiltration... God she does so much damage. Anyway, why am I saying I like that her potential gets wasted on weaker enemies? I dunno. I think it's because I like the interpretation that she's kinda holding back her true power. Maybe there's tactical reason for it. Maybe she's just watched a few too many tokusatsu shows in the missing decade. She is still very much a dork, after all.

I lied, though, I do think I have to talk very briefly about RO635's presence in the story. RO has this quality to her, and it's still present in GFL2, that sets her apart from other T-Dolls throughout the setting; a sort of muted self-awareness, like she's noticed something in the environment that nobody else quite seems to see. There are only a handful of other Dolls in the entire setting who exhibit this trait, or something like it; and each of them has met a terrible, gruesome fate. Except RO. Why?

GFL doesn't concern itself overmuch with the sentience of Dolls and whether or not they're "human" in any deep, meaningful sense; the writers understand that this is a fundamental question of their setting, but they prefer to keep that question in-setting, and let you come to your own loaded conclusions. With Paradeus as our foil, how could we consider our Dolls anything less but human in GFL1? And yet there's something decidedly inhuman about them, too, something a bit stilted in the way that they act out their humanity, knowingly or otherwise, like a painting of you that's accurate enough to be unnerving but stylized in a way you can't quite put your finger on, you just know it's not real.

That's the thing about RO that is so interesting. She doesn't have that quality. She is, at times, immature; she lies to her teammates and shoulders burdens she shouldn't. She is, at times, at a loss. Especially in the earlier beats of the story she struggles to wrap her head around the motives of her senior teammates, and frequently - if quietly - grapples with angst over the point of it all. She once harbored a deep anxiety about the source and nature of her "feelings", even as she repeatedly promised her teammates that they were genuine enough to matter; she didn't want for that promise to be a lie, she didn't want to look within herself and see something fake.

She's self-motivated. She's self-defined. She cares enough about who and what she is, that she would be heartbroken to learn that it was dictated to her by someone else (and she was elated, if perplexed, to learn that it wasn't!). Dolls around her act out their existences; they are given preset instructions, and although they don't think about those instructions consciously and are often uncomfortable to have them pointed out, they nevertheless obey. RO doesn't do that. She isn't built like that. She must decide what to do... by, and for, herself.

The thing that separates RO from the others who are like her, is that at no point has she ever allowed this difference to separate her from other Dolls. Whatever her origins, whatever her classification, whatever her "model", whatever aspirations Persica had or didn't have for her, she is just a Doll. She is the former leader of Squad Palette, and the current leader of Squad Antirain. She's proud of that. That's all she needs to be. She doesn't place herself on a pedestal above AR-15 or SOP-II, signifying her superiority over them; because she believes she isn't, and it wouldn't really matter to her if she was. She doesn't look for opportunities to martyr herself for the benefit of others; nor does she hunger for some alternative existence, desperate to validate the visions of her creator in some final, lasting, triumphant way. She is just a Doll, and is happy to just be a Doll. If anything, what she wants is to understand what that means. What it means to be a Doll. For herself. For her sisters. For the massive extended family she once cared for and protected, under Griffin.