Sterling

Overview

Ah, the Sterling SMG. A true British classic, and like all Englishmen, she loves nothing more than to THROW GRENADES EVERYWHERE… Just kidding, we actually prefer to throw knives.

In essence, she is designed around throwing nades and boosting nades. A concept that should in theory be appreciated. However, Sterling’s core drawback sadly is one that renders her unable to properly do this job.

Sterling herself is not tricky to understand. She has her own grenade that, when thrown, boosts party wide grenade damage. Her grenade works on charges that regenerate over time, or you can boost the number of charges she starts with through having more SMGs in the team. Sounds great… Until you realize that she will ONLY boost hand grenade SMG damage. Yes, even though her skill blankly says “increases grenade damage”, this does not include incendiary grenades or the grenades launched by grenadier ARs. So much for buffing 416 Mod.

So to put it bluntly, any unit you would actually want Sterling to boost… She simply does not. Hand grenade SMGs are not good in the meta. The only one which can have some value is PP-19 who isn’t bad but is totally ignorable in the grand scheme of GFL. In essence, what could’ve been a cool grenade buffer is really not anything more than just a unit to use if you want to meme with a full hand grenade SMG echelon.

Strengths

Tiles are Pretty Good

Sterling gives 30% Damage and 10% Evasion to ARs and SMGs on her tile. Pretty nice and helps with her niche. Now if only those ARs could also benefit from her skill. 😞

Cute and Fun

She’s cute, must protect. Also there is something entertaining about watching several SMGs just rain hand grenades on a group of enemies.

Weaknesses

Ineffective Skill

Sterling’s skill has both an active and a passive component. Her active component is your typical GFL hand grenade, so where she differentiates herself is though her passive component.

Her grenades work on charges: As long as she has charges, she can throw grenades on a 2 second interval. She starts by default with 1 charge and caps at 3 charges. Both her starting charges and charge cap increases by one for every SMG in the team. Her grenade charges regenerate every 8 seconds.

Her problem comes from the buff she gives to grenades. When she throws her own grenade, she grants a 20% grenade damage teamwide buff for 6 seconds. If she has the charges available to activate the buff multiple times, this damage buff will stack with itself. The problem though is that it only buffs hand grenade SMGs and nothing else. So at the time of writing, besides herself, here is every doll she can support with this:

• M3
• PPSh-41
• PP-2000
• PPS-43
• Sten MKII
• EVO 3
• PP-19

Not a very impressive list, to put it simply. The only doll here one would ever consider using is PP-19, and even she isn’t that impressive. With her being unable to boost Grenade ARs or Incendiary SMGs, this skill is effectively useless in the current meta.

Note: PP-19’s Skill 2 should be buffed by Sterling’s skill. However, when testing this didn’t appear to be the case.

Team Options

PP-19

There really isn’t anything to say here. The only doll with value that Sterling can buff is PP-19 so if you really want to use Sterling, you may as well bring PP-19 as well. Beyond that you can either bring more SMGs to boost the amount of grenades Sterling can throw, or just bring some ARs so the team can do some notable damage.

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