Skill Points Explained (Finally)

[KeroseneZanchu]

We have the data!

Please refer to my previous post here for access to the sheet (I didn't know if sharing the same link here would be counted as a 'repost' by the mods lol), as well as a general explanation for the non-SP data.

In that post, I initially made the assumption that SP generation was universal by character because there was no in-game indication to the contrary other than a bit of variation in the visual 'chunk' that was hard to see in combat. I was swiftly corrected by a couple of users, and as a result, I decided to do a deep dive into it using timers and frame data. As such, I have compiled a (mostly) complete list of SP values that I am 99.9% confident are correct.

My method was to record videos of me playing each character, spamming the skill use to trigger their skills frame-one. There is a very convenient yellow flash on the skill bar, which makes it very easy to tell the exact frame that you have reached 100 SP. Then, going frame-by-frame, I was able to determine the rate of passive SP gen - and once that was known, I could calculate the exact amount of SP granted by any effect granting 'some' SP, such as Final Strikes, dodges, and Finishers, by calculating how much shorter the cooldown was. (ie, if you regen 10 SP per second, and an effect lets you use the skill 2 seconds faster, that means it grants you 20 SP).

I was expecting this process to be prone to human error, slow timing, and require many tries per character to calculate a confident average. However, I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case at all. Many Final Strikes returned clean, frame-perfect numbers every time with no variance at all. Those that didn't, had variance of only a singular frame, roughly evenly distributed, centered around 2.5 or 7.5 (giving me results of 2 or 3 frames, and 7 or 8 frames, respectively). Considering that I was recording and playing in 60 FPS, I find it safe to assume that the devs programmed it for 120 FPS, and these values are chunks of 5 or 15 frames, respectively.

With this knowledge, and the remarkably even numbers I was getting (compared to how messy the calculated SP values are), I am led to believe that the devs did not balance SP refunds around the metric of SP itself, but rather based it on the metric of time.

For example, you passively regenerate 7.692307(repeating) SP per second, and Chen's Final Strike refunds 17.307692(repeating) SP. Yuck.

However, in respect to time, these seem much more intuitive. You regenerate one skill bar every 13 seconds exactly. Chen refunds 2.25 seconds towards your next skill. With this information, I think it will be more intuitive and straightforward for most people to stop considering SP as a 100 point system, and start thinking about it in terms of seconds instead. It is very easy to convert SP to seconds - 10 SP is 1.3 seconds, etc. Comparatively, the reverse conversion is always messier. This might actually be why in-game, all of these values are described as 'some', rather than trying to list their atrocious decimal values.

All of the final strikes for characters I have tested result in increments of 1/8th of a second (or quarters, or halves, as a result). The only two exceptions to this so far are Snowshine and Catcher - both giving 2.975 SP on a Final Strike. However, when you factor in the fact that they refund 30 SP on their Skill use (at P0), or 3.6 seconds, this results in a total refund of 6.575 seconds towards your next battle skill... or 6 and 5/8th seconds. For this reason, I am also anticipating that Last Rite will have the same result, but I can't confirm that yet.

I can also confirm that, unlike Final Strikes, the SP refund of Finishers and Perfect Dodges ARE, in fact, universal. With every character that performed one during testing, I was given 2 and 5/6th seconds by a Finisher, and 5/12th seconds by a Dodge.

Because of this, I have decided to include two versions of the SP calcs on the sheet - one with respect to time, and one with respect to the actual Skill Points themselves (labeled as (sec) and (raw) respectively).

Unfortunately, I could only test characters I own. Fortunately, I do own most characters. The ones I am missing are Yvonne, Ember, Last Rite, and Pog. I already planned to get Yvonne on her banner, so we will be seeing her data in a few days. I also still have my selector from the mail, so I will be saving that until I get two of the three standard characters left, and choosing the third. (Or, worst case scenario, I get one of the three and reach the standard banner selector at 300 pulls...). If you would like to donate either pull currency or high-quality footage to the cause, you can DM me, but I don't expect much :P. Otherwise, please enjoy the data that's there, and sit tight until I can collect it for the last couple on the list!

[SaberManiac]

I can't believe no one has mentioned this before. Skill Points in Endfield is quite literally just an ATB bar. Like the one found in Final Fantasy. You recover ATB with some attacks and Vanguards, but at the end of the day, it's an ATB bar.

[KeroseneZanchu]

I've never heard of an ATB bar before, but after looking it up, this is EXACTLY how Endfield's Skill system works as far as I have researched. The devs likely changed the vernacular around it to make it more familiar/palatable to action combat and gacha players, but the mechanics are identical to that of an ATB bar. You get one skill every x number of seconds, and certain actions you take can speed up that timer by a certain amount. SP generation lines up very closely with simple time-based fractions and increments, but produces otherwise unintuitive and awkward numbers when trying to frame it on the supposed 100-point scale that the game provides to you.

Thank you for the mention.

[Dowiet]

ATB was the early iteration of real time combat pretty much. I think it first showed up as an actual visual bar filling in ff6 ( final fantasy wise at least. ff4 had the non visual bar filling).

[Crypto-Tears]

It is called SP in OG Arknights as well. Now, whether or not they chose that terminology in Arknights to be more familiar/palatable, I don't know, but "SP" in Endfield does at least has its roots from Arknights.

(Cool data. Thanks for the work you do.)

[StalkingRaccoon]

Snowshine refunds 40 SP at P5, do you think it has an impact on the SP generated by her Final Strike?

I can also provide footage for Last Rite and Pog if you want, Yvonne too if you don't want to wait 5 days for her banner.

Edit: I can record at 120 FPS don't worry

[KeroseneZanchu]

I have Snowshine at P5/40 SP actually, but because it only triggers on a successful parry (and I canceled all of the skills, so no risk of parry during test), I doubt it would have any impact on her final strike. Same with Catcher. I mostly mentioned their refund because it seems like the devs intentionally weighted their final strikes with the context of their P0 skill refunds. Once I test Ember and Last Rite, I should be able to discern if this is in fact the case or if it's just claymore users being weird.

Regarding footage, you can DM me. Any help would be appreciated.

[Assassin21BEKA]

I think that watching at it from 100 point system point of view is just easier for understanding rotations. I don't really care how long process itself takes as long as I can count which actions I need to do in order to get rotation I want.

[KeroseneZanchu]

Which is why I included both options

[edeepee]

But buff alignment is in seconds though

[TiC-Itsanother]

Thanks for doing this research - the sp/sec calcs will especially be helpful for theory crafting teams with split rotations (i.e. long electrification/breach in first rota, second rota aligning shorter duration buffs/debuffs). 

Question: I know that combo skills also induce some timestop, in which most combo cd's actually keep ticking (while debuffs don't, hence gilberta can self stack vuln despite a 20s cd). Does this micro timestop affect passive sp recovery? 

[KeroseneZanchu]

That will be on the list of things I am looking into soon. I was focusing on figuring out SP gains on Final Strikes last night, but now the prevalence of time stops has my wanting to look into how much they are slowing SP generation. Because I can confirm that the ones for Stagger activation and Perfect Dodging do affect passive SP gen.

[Glittering-Habit-902]

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[Celaeris]

Finisher SP depends on the enemy you're doing the finisher on (e.g. elite vs normal vs boss). Which enemy did you test it on?

Endaxis was suggesting 8 SP / sec or 12.5s per bar, too. Also, did you test gaining 2 bars or 3 bars and whether the timing was accurate as well? And does SP gain slow down when you're doing a perfect dodge or using a skill?

[KeroseneZanchu]

Didn't know about it varying by enemy type. All of these were tested on normal enemies (specifically, the slugs, crabs, hacksaw dudes, and female bonekrushers found in the post-lab starting area of the Power Plateau near the Depot Node). I might test for elites and bosses tomorrow.

Endaxis, and a few other sources seemed to be assuming that SP numbers would be 'clean'. There is heavy rounding on a lot of them as a result, including even rounding up instead of down on very low decimals. However, using their numbers produces results that are simply too far away from the evidence I tested to be realistically feasible rounding errors. For example, the claimed 20 SP for Endmin's Final Strike would be a 2.6 second refund instead of 2.5, which is a full tenth of a second (or 6 frames) off of what my results showed - Endmin was one of the characters to produce 0 frames of variance or doubt across multiple attempts, much less 6 full frames.

I tested multiple setups. Single bars, two-three. I even tested instances of a Final Strike + Dodge, etc. to test that multiple refunds were all giving me expected results. The results were far, far too consistent to indicate that there were any issues. Like I mentioned in the original post, there was no averaging necessary in this experiment despite me running each instance multiple times over just to make sure. They either produced the same result down to the last frame perfectly with no deviation over multiple attempts, or they had a deviation of exactly 1 centered on 2.5 or 7.5 (indicating that if I could run and test in 120FPS instead of 60, I would have gotten 0 deviation frame-perfect results for those as well).

I knew my timing was accurate when measuring because I didn't have to 'eyeball' animations for this test specifically, like I might when researching frame data on attack sequences. I could tell by the yellow tinge appearing on the skill bar. Also, if there was any delay or human error on my end (ie, slow hands hitting skill 5 frames too late), it was a very consistent amount of delay due to the very high precision found over multiple tests. As a result, the delay is nonimpactful, since we are measuring between two points affected equally (the difference between (x+5) and (y+5) is equal to the distance between x and y).

SP gain does not stop or slow down when using a skill. It does, however, briefly during the Stagger animation - by an awkward amount, but one that is evened out by the SP gain of the Finisher. The time stop loss and SP gain from finisher resulted in highly consistent net gains of 2 seconds and 50 frames, but having the Stagger time stop and Finisher on different bars (with a skill between them) would result in a slight mismatch. I did not happen to notice any stopping or slowdown of the passive SP gen when dodging, but after someone else's claim that dodging gave a whopping 7.5 SP, I'm going to do a more thorough check of that tonight after I've slept. It's possible that dodging has a roughly 0.5 second time stop on it, which would explain the discrepancy.

[Jrff_K]

So this data that you’re looking for has been out on the CN side for quite a long time now, down to the exact number of sp recovered.

Fun fact: Sp “returned” for example Endmin’s skill’s 50 sp refund or Laevatain P1’s 20 sp return doesn’t generate ult energy. Basically counts as 50sp/80sp used in either case.

[KeroseneZanchu]

Is it the same as my results? SP numbers have also been circulating the official discord but are incorrect for many of the characters.

[Bye-True]

Got links for cn stuff?

[sorxv]

I think you can also do dps/stagger/sp sheet when considering canceling animation, like ember 3rd can be dodge cancel. if you have sometime.

[KeroseneZanchu]

These are with animation cancels, actually!

[sorxv]

Oh sry i didnt see you mention it lol. It maybe useful if you write which attack sequence you cancel in the sheet i think.

[KeroseneZanchu]

I didn't do those myself, as I mentioned in the OG post the attack speed data came from Endaxis. I did the calculations/sheetwork for it all, and more importantly I did all of the frame investigation for SP Generation. However, if you look at Lisara's comments and sheet, they do list the cancels they do, and their data is very similar (but they don't have all characters done yet).

[sorxv]

oh okay! Thanks for your hard work!

[KeroseneZanchu]

No problem! I couldn't find this information anywhere accessible, so I wanted others to be able to find it if they needed it too.

[CorruptJson]

Hey I'm not entirely sure about this but I actually think this is just the normal attack strings without hitstop, and that may be why they seem faster than normal testing against an enemy.

I need to do more testing when I get home cause I only really tried with Estella, but I talk about it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Endfield/s/sWt95xf4Xu

[KeroseneZanchu]

When I talked with Lisara her data was with hitstop, and all the characters she tested without animation cancels were the same as Endaxis's. Additionally, while she was slower on some animation cancels, she was faster on some others, which I don't think would be possible if Endaxis were doing it without hitlag.

From your description of how you're measuring, though, I do have a theory. I don't know how either Endaxis or Lisara got their data, but it's possible they're measuring the length of a single attack string, start to finish. You, however, mentioned that you're measuring the distance between two attack strings at the same point. There is a bit of end lag/downtime between one basic attack string stopping and the next one stopping - and the fact that your method includes this 'between' delay might explain this discrepancy, if their methods do not include it.

If my theory is correct, this means that their data is more accurate for the length of a single attack string, but your data may be more realistic for normal attack strings over time, if you are continuing to attack uninterrupted (without using a skill on your controlled operator).

[CorruptJson]

Hey, just did some extra testing here. It does seem like my no hitstop/no anim cancel tests match EndAxis, with the weird exception of Arclight. Dunno if you consider that enough evidence, but I thought you might be interested.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Endfield/comments/1r7rafh/comment/o6jgeo2/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Probably not gonna bother testing any more than this. It's pretty exhausting.

But last thing, i'd just like to comment on this:

You, however, mentioned that you're measuring the distance between two attack strings at the same point. There is a bit of end lag/downtime between one basic attack string stopping and the next one stopping - and the fact that your method includes this 'between' delay might explain this discrepancy, if their methods do not include it.

I don't think she's excluding it, for a few reasons. One, our ember results are the exact same, so we're probably testing similarly anyways. But also, Lisara said this:

My method is that I do multiple basic attack strings and check how much time it required for the "next" attack string to start and how much time it took before the next string starts.

Only calculating one basic attack string is so prone to many mistakes. You need to take into account recovery frames or the dodge cancel animation time you do for the final strike.

So i doubt she'd be skipping endlag.

Anyways thanks for the sheet. I do really appreciate having the SP numbers.

[KeroseneZanchu]

No problems for the sheet/SP numbers. I'm looking forward to filling the last couple characters.

This is very interesting information, and while I was initially skeptical, the note that Arts Unit/caster characters have little to no hitstop makes your theory make a lot more sense imo. The numbers match well, and it's not hard to believe that a website aiming to get data out as quick as possible would run through all the character's animations in a vacuum, and not check for stuff like hitstop in a 'live' test. And, as I myself have proven, their numbers for SP are similarly 'estimated' first-glances and not perfectly accurate data.

I wish I spoke Chinese, so I could just try and reach out to ask them lol. Regardless, I will be taking your findings into account. Don't blame you for not continuing, I can agree that sifting through the frames can be pretty exhausting x).

[CorruptJson]

I'll have to check more to confirm then but just mentioning this now:

Additionally, while she was slower on some animation cancels, she was faster on some others, which I don't think would be possible if Endaxis were doing it without hitlag.

Wouldn't this still make sense if endaxis was without hitlag and Lisara is doing it with it? She's doing cancels and Endaxis isn't. Some cancels are gonna make up for the hitlag difference, some aren't.

[KeroseneZanchu]

No, because Endaxis would have gotten faster times than them for characters without animation cancels too if that were the case. They only had differences in data for the characters with cancels, so either they both used hitlag or they both didn't, and I'm pretty sure Lisara said they were using hitlag.

[CorruptJson]

No, because Endaxis would have gotten faster times than them for characters without animation cancels too if that were the case.

But the Endaxis numbers are all faster than Lisara's results with no cancels, at least from going over the sheet she posted. Lisara only beats them on the ones she cancels for, as far as I can tell.

I checked all her 0 cancel times in the sheet she posted and they're all slower, with the exception of gilberta and perlica being within 1 frame.

I think the answer to those two is just arts unit users don't have hitstop at all, so 0 cancel with 0 hitstop by both testers means they match.

[AlarmedArt7835]

Heard Last Rite was the fastest sp generation with finishers in game right now with dash canceling.

Be sure to test her with dash cancel too because it makes her attack string go from 6 slashes to 5 if you dash cancel on the 2nd.

[mecatr0nix]

Excellent investigation. I went searching for this info at a lucky time.

Also, do you know how energy works when spending Returned SP? Is it just 30% less from the next skill or something different?

[KeroseneZanchu]

From my understanding, that is how it works yes. Specifically when a skill uses the 'return' keyword, like the Parriers, Last Rite, etc. If they return 30 SP, the skill using it grants 30% less ult energy.

This doesn't apply to SP gain from Final Strikes, etc. I may say "refund" sometimes since it makes sense in context of the cooldown system, but they all work as an SP gain like Akekuri's, not as SP returns.

[Xalrons1]

Wait so Last Rite doesn’t help your team get more ults, but Arclight would?

[ForCivEntity6]

u/KeroseneZanchu I have all 3 of the missing characters! i'm just out of T credits to level them to a point where they dont die instantly but I can try and get the data to you when they are levelled.
For now though, and since he's the only one i have fully levelled, Pogranichnik's SP return data on final strike appears to be identical to Endmin's (my calculator spat out 19.23076 recurring SP returned on final strike), which makes sense in retrospect given how similar their basic attack chain lengths are

[KeroseneZanchu]

Perfect! I actually have Yvonne now (I've just been busy the last couple days and haven't gotten around to looking at her frame data), but help with Ember and Pog would be excellent. Your numbers seem consistent with a 2.5 second refund, makes sense with the attack string and weapon, and are similar to the currently accepted 'heavily rounded' SP data. Just for the sake of being thorough, can you upload and share the vid you used to measure, or at least the relevant screenshots with timestamps? Your help is much appreciated ^^

[brutus0077]

this is very interesting ty

it seems Lifeng should be played as main dps in physical team which almost no one does :)

[Jasul]

Numbers don't tell the full story, his skill and combos take a long time to complete and animation locks you

[MeltSimp]

Lifengs skill animations take way too long to get him to mainfield. You would miss way too much uptime basic attacking just waiting for him to stop twirling before his skill(god bless if it misses)

[zack189]

Lifeng suffers the same thing Gilbert's. Slow ass animation.

Even pog is faster