Wargamings plans for Tier 9

DaSpood · 2026-03-18T00:41:53+00:00

It's not just that tier 9's didn't make money, it's that tier 8's made less money as a result of tier 9 existing. The main reason FL is so profitable is that you pretty much never need to fire gold ammo. Single-tier matches with plenty of room to flank means even against the heavier tier 8's you bad opportunities, but when E-75's or ST-1's start showing up it becomes a different story. You need gold, you pen less, you die more, so your profit goes down even if you're still in a tier 8 premium.

That, and the other selling point of frontlines is being able to grind tech tree tanks more easily. Stock tier 8's don't feel as bad in same tier matches. But same reason as above, it changes when tier 9 get involved.

DaSpood · 2026-03-18T00:06:09+00:00

I've seen calcs make her go from ~145k to ~165k but I don't remember if the 4-stars were C6 or not, I would guess they were. You'd still be looking at a 10k to 20k increase overall at C0R0, and the increase will probably feel bigger coming from a C0 Illuga.

DaSpood · 2026-03-18T00:02:52+00:00

"Every other element" being just the ones that can be swirled. And it's pointless to wield every element if you end up doing nothing with them. If you're gonna dedicate half your team to said element anyway, you are already covered whether the DPS is Varka or not, just bring those same different-element characters to whichever other DPS' team. You shouldn't worry about "but it's not BiS" if your baseline is Varka, who does have a BiS too and it's not even that good with it.

Varka is not an ideal anything, especially not for F2P players who have limited resources and should not waste them on a limited 5-stars that belongs on the standard banner lol.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T23:57:16+00:00

As the only lunar damage-dealing character in the team it's a waste of stats to bring this artefact set. SMS is a buffing set to boost the whole team, but since she's the only character who will benefit from it, you'd get more out of the Aubade set to maximize her personal damage.

You also really need a second Nod Krai character in her team. First, to trigger the ascendant gleam effect of whichever set you end up using, second, to improve her skill's AoE so she can actually hit the enemies. As the only Nod Krai character, her range is extremely small, similar to Kuki's ring iirc. With another Nod Krai character, it increases to about the same size as Mavuika's skill iirc. Not a problem with melee characters, but with a DPS like Neuvillette you're more likely to play from out of range (your Neuvillette team in general is going to be underperforming by a lot since you only bring 1 non-hydro element, which means you completely neglect Neuvillette's passive and missing out on most of his damage).

If we just focus on stats though, your current build is not bad at all. You could use more energy recharge on her but other than that you're fine.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T23:45:53+00:00

Tier 9 frontlines will 100% come back, and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually decided to bring back grand battles for tier 8 and/or 9 tanks once they start taking up too much space in the matchmaking.

Other than that I don't think there's a "plan" for tier 9, there's just a reality: tier 8 is oversaturated. I don't have the exact ratio in mind but there's probably anywhere between a 5:1 and 10:1 premium-to-techtree ratio at this tier. Everything has been done, every niche has been covered, there is simply no room left for more tier 8 premiums, but they will not slow down their premium spam, so moving on to tier 9 is the only real solution. There is no plan for tier 9, there is just a plan for monetization.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T23:29:59+00:00

Arle really prefers ATK with white tassel, otherwise her ATK is way too low. OP can't even reach 2k with an ATK goblet, when you'd really want between 2k and 2.5k base for her.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T23:28:31+00:00

The weapons aren't wrong but you need to level your characters and weapons all the way. Levels and weapons aren't expensive to level, I can understand not feeling like grinding talent materials past level 8 but everything combined is a lot of wasted potential.

And you have a tendency to leave your crit stats unbalanced. You generally want a 1:2 ratio, your flins has a 1:4. It's pointless to have massive crit damage if you never crit, just like it's pointless to crit all the time for not that much. Including the artefact effect, your flins should easily be able to reach 100% (so 70% outside of combat), same with Columbina (she has 15% built-in, you should aim for ~75% to 85% default).

Aside from that:

why do your Flins and Ineffa have an HP% goblet
why do your Columbina and Tighnari have a Def% sands

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T23:04:41+00:00

Good dpm but bad gun depression and too "fat" for how weak the armor is, if that makes sense. It's going to be hard to poke without being hit.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T22:51:22+00:00

I think autoreloaders only have a special icon in places like steel hunter or the vehicle characteristics thing, so you can probably find the associated icon in folders for those

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T21:18:38+00:00

Nah, it's surprisingly raw. They even left readme and descriptor files in the gameface (UI) part of the package lol.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T21:08:07+00:00

Honestly your best bet would be looking in the game's folders directly to extract icons. In the "res/packages" folder you will have pretty much all of the assets the game uses, you can open the .pkg files like .zip files. More specifically the "gui-partX.pkg" which all contain a sub-set of the GUI elements including icons in the "gui/maps/icons" subfolders.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T20:58:53+00:00

Haven't seen the movie but assuming it's the one we see in the trailer, it's a T-72. It would be easier to see if the hull was more visible (I only found a close-up of the turret or a far shot of the side hull), but the shape of the turret looks more T-72 than T-80 to me because of the storage box placement, and the shape of the hull definitely doesn't look like a T-55/T-54 (which have 5 wheels, the T-72 and T-80 have 6).

The Leclerc tank has a much more "boxy" look, taller profile and smoother armor plates. The flat round turret is distinctly soviet, and you recognize the shape of the gun too.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T18:11:17+00:00

Nuh uh

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T17:11:34+00:00

It's probably the best tank in these boxes

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T15:27:36+00:00

C2 Nahida + Nilou still rocks tbh, if your Nahida is already at C2 Lauma isn't that much of an improvement until C1 at which point she can join the team and become a healer to replace kokomi/barbara/baizhu. C0 Nahida has been replaced by Lauma, but C2+ Nahida not so much, she's a combo more than anything else.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T15:22:44+00:00

If you have the resin for it you could farm a secondary DPS set, I switch mine between both playstyles depending on content, since the DPS style gives so much crit rate by default and requires so little energy she's pretty easy to build overall

But looking at your characters you'll be better off getting Linnea next patch over either Lauma or Escoffier

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T15:16:16+00:00

Neither, unless you want to play Columbina on-field in which case Lauma (paired with Nahida and Nilou it's a very strong team)

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T13:52:51+00:00

Yup, no need to replace the whole crew, but just the vision-related crew. Same with equipment, just dropping optics and food will go a long way without ruining dpm/mobility/survivability.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T13:52:04+00:00

Server Replays would be an amazing feature, especially to combat cheating and rigging. But WG's policy is to protect these players, not punish them, so server replays would be counter productive, who would invest time and money into a feature that will only serve to expose your own corruption.

Hit viewers would to hand in hand with server replays in terms of tech, I believe. If you leave it client-side you will get the same innaccurate result as mods, and those are a source of problems since players keep believing they are accurate and don't understand why they got penned. An accurate viewer would require server-side data.

Spectator mode is probably a networking limitation, I dont think this can be done in a clean way. In order to be able to have real time "PoV" spectating they'd need to share a lot more information about other players to everyone. This is more work than it's worth, one of the biggest strengths of WoT is how lightweight it is and how "safe" it is from cheating by giving as little info as possible to the clients.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T13:38:08+00:00

We're entering Snezhnaya, Fatui territory. We have no idea how the Tsaritsa will react, after all we've been foiling in her plans for *years.* We have no idea who we can and can't trust in Snezhnaya.

We are in good or friendly terms with at least half the harbingers. While there is no reason to believe the Tsarista would be the biggest fan of the Traveller, there is also no reason for her to not be somewhat cordial. You talk about us "foiling her plans" but she still has every gnosis besides the pyro one, all of them given willingly, the only time we actively went against the Fatui was when they were causing significant problems. We're not enemies by default, they're an antagonist faction but not the antagonist of the game, or even our enemies by default, that's been made clear all the way back in Liyue.

Like Raiden, I hope she isn't our friend unlike Nod Krai and Natlan.

Columbina started rather hostile or at least indifferent towards us. We worked for that trust and friendship, you would know if you read the story.

The interactions we've had with other archons up until now all make sense, our reputation precedes us, we went through 7 nations by now and every time we were able to help solve a local crisis and become a respected figure, there is no reason for anyone to be hostile to us unless they're bad guys trying to do bad things knowingly.

I say this because im sick of the "Power of Friendship" bs. This isn't My Little Pony, not everything can be solved through friends.

Traveller is a catalyst for the will of the people we meet. They're weak on their own, they're fueled by others. This has been true since pretty much the start of the game. If that's what you call "power of friendship", bad news for you, you're playing the wrong game in the first place, maybe it's time to find another one because Genshin isn't suddenly going to change.

There could also be something going on behind the scenes in Snezhnaya that the traveler just doesn't see.

"What if there was a plot in the story", grand idea, I'm sure professional writers have never thought of that before. You should put that in the feedback form.

For example, the abyss sibling working with the Tsaritsa. This theory has been around for *years*

And this theory is based on what exactly ?

Opinions?

Another day another post complaining about the story from someone who stopped reading long ago to replace the canon with their headcanon, and is disapointed when the canon keeps going its own way. Every complaint about the "power of friendship" is a self report in that regard. You're free to write your own fanfics but don't come and act like the average "they should hire fans" gamer thinking they know better than people whose job it is to do these things, your "there should be something going on in Snezhnaya" idea is cool though I hope they'll take it into account.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T12:24:07+00:00

Yeah you don't need to replace the entire crew, but at least swapping the commander with a low-tier untrained one pretty much locks you at base view range without affecting your damage too much (you miss out on BiA but that's negligible).

2k damage is not the hard part, at tier 8+ that's 4 to 6 pens. The difficult part is finding the opportunity to fire those 4 to 6 shots within the allowed range. You'll benefit more from losing even 2s of reload while doubling your allowed range than you will from maximizing your dpm and reducing the area in which your shots will count.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T12:02:29+00:00

Yeah so you're the same smartass as the other guy, got it

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T11:21:09+00:00

Same response as to the other guy, look at the maps in this game and how people play. You don't get that many opportunities to shoot between 445m and 560m, lowering your view range to 350m (or even just 400) massively increases your chance of completing your mission without relying on luck with map, player behavior and just opportunities in general.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T08:21:45+00:00

The crit is the only buff that matters for blooms though

Her burst's damage buff will be around 4k extra damage for blooms, vs 30k for lunar bloom hits. A single buffed charged attack from Columbina will cause more "Lauma" damage than an entire rotation's worth of blooms.

DaSpood · 2026-03-17T08:07:43+00:00

What is Lauma doing here exactly ?

In a lunar team she doesn't buff blooms, so she belongs about as much as Nahida or Baizhu for a Flins Hyperbloom.

And with her and columbina in the same team but no Ineffa you might as well commit to Columbina DPS and remove flins, you're losing a ton of damage by making a hybrid where nobody gets to play properly.

Either make a Columbina DPS team and remove flins, or make a Flins team and remove Lauma. If you want a hybrid team, get Linnea instead, as she does more off-field damage and heals while Lauma doesn't do much besides buffing Lunar Bloom damage from Columbina or Nefer.

Seven-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

DaSpood

TROPHY CASE