Originally Posted by Drip

They are lackluster, but at the same time, they are noticable. I'm lvl 150 now, and the Solar Blast wipes out lvl 45 pests, making it comparable to the AOE of a lvl 70 Rainbow girl.
For the first squad in my Whaleship, I use my trigger-squad, in an attempt to kill as many of the pests on the first round as I can. Last time, they were just a bit short, but a solarblast would get rid of 1 or 2 of the three. The downside of my triggersquad is, that I never really invested in their defence, other than by giving them jewelry, so if I don't use Solar Blasts, they tend to loose a couple of units along the way. If it's Cymbidium or Fritillaria who's lost, then that really cripples the performance of the entire squad. Which is why I keep investing quite heavily in the offense of that squad. For glass cannons, offense is the best defense.

My debuff squad would probably last longer without the Solar Blasts, but it deals less damage per combat round, which means fights take longer, making it more suitable against bosses.

Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, I'm not saying solar blasts are useless; only that they'll get better in the future, so don't necessarily discount girls that modify the SB/shines drop rates.

Everyone's situation is different which is why I offered my alternative opinion on using Solar Blast on whaleship maps: in contrasting with your squad my main squad (consisting of Dendrobium, Saffron, Acacia, Iberis and Alpinia) rarely loses any of its members (Acacia and Iberis are typically the first to die since I've not put any ampies or blooms into them while the other three are maxed on ampies with full skillblooms and one dressbloom away from 4/4 and almost maxed jewelry). My squad though is pretty much all about brute force since I swap out Acacia and Iberis for Sakura and Cherry for RB events and I've been too lazy to cook up a more fine-tuned squad; Scotch Broom will probably take Iberis' place in the near future. In my case, I have the luxury of not needing the SB for the small pests so I looked for a way to boost the survivability of the whaleship since the final outcome is way too dependent on the overall RNG for the whaleship special attacks (if the first two encounters were mostly just the side cannons, then the final encounter would leave the whaleship dangerously low on health).

I guess this should be a separate discussion, but in short Drip, I absolutely agree with your assessments as they relate to certain scenarios; I only wanted to illustrate that usage of the SB on whaleship missions isn't necessarily one-size-fits all.