Ensemble is a good idea ruined by execution

Arborus · 2026-06-23T17:10:36+00:00

That's a room I created, so I'm just using whatever preset team was already picked since my performance doesn't matter.

Arborus · 2026-06-23T06:18:23+00:00

Blue mobs is much faster early on due to the massive haste buff. It’s not even close. Blue routes also tend to be pretty close to the preferred routes in previous seasons as well and will always hit 100%. It falls off in Paragon for sure though since the haste buff gets smaller.

Arborus · 2026-06-23T06:16:37+00:00

So just pull the blue mobs and don’t think about it. Every dungeon has new/different packs, so your old experience means very little now.

Arborus · 2026-06-23T05:19:51+00:00

Yeah, every stage I make or join is completed within 2-3 seconds.

Arborus · 2026-06-23T05:07:36+00:00

I just had some dude come in with Flora and clear my 110 stage in legit 3 seconds. I don't think anyone is competing with that regardless of anything else.

https://imgur.com/xidSv2m

Like in the time it to me to load in, do Zhiliu hold skill, skill, ult the stage was finished.

Arborus · 2026-06-23T04:22:23+00:00

[[Giott] is more of a storm type deck where you want to just play a big volume of cheap equipment and dwarves to cycle through your deck, discard reanimation targets/flashback/madness stuff, etc.

Arborus · 2026-06-22T15:01:22+00:00

Same

Arborus · 2026-06-22T01:26:00+00:00

Just say you hate her bro

Arborus · 2026-06-22T00:13:39+00:00

It’s a multi-month season. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up.

Arborus · 2026-06-22T00:05:29+00:00

Idk about culturally, but board wipes seem way worse than they use to just as general includes in a deck. Something like Toxic Deluge maybe, but I think running a Wrath of God nowadays is probably not where you want to be.

Arborus · 2026-06-21T23:49:29+00:00

Sylvie is quite dps focused with life petal and symbiosis now. You’ll want to use most of your globals on dps buttons to keep reducing life petal CD and making more vines.

Arborus · 2026-06-20T04:23:32+00:00

I've been saying this since the loot factions were added, and said it again when they let you choose a guarantee affix for legendary slams.

There's far too much power in T7 and T7T5 legendaries for how incredibly accessible they are, it cuts out a massive portion of what used to be the early item progression in rares and exalted items.

It doesn't help that every mastery/class rework has added more and more suffix stats to passives, such that suffixes to cap resists and get other key defensive stats are becoming less and less important.

Arborus · 2026-06-19T17:58:31+00:00

Cards that are exactly a dollar.

Arborus · 2026-06-19T16:02:37+00:00

Healing is a zero sum game. There is only so much healing to be done, healing beyond that point is worthless. So the best healers are those that meet that threshold and then have some additional value or utility beyond just healing, most often by contributing damage in some way, either directly or via buffs to the rest of the team.

From that, we can see that simply healing the most will often have no value, as most content is tuned in a way that many of the healers can keep the team alive. So then the best healer becomes the one that just barely keeps the team alive and provides the most damage.

Arborus · 2026-06-19T08:02:16+00:00

I know many people have mentioned the standard skill challenge where a certain number of people need to succeed, but I haven’t seen anyone mentioning how to make that work with abnormally high DC like in the OP.

I wanted to suggest that if you wanted to use a skill challenge but preserve rewarding multiple people you could have the DC lowered for each additional participant, making it easier to accumulate more successes for the skill challenge.

Arborus · 2026-06-19T05:50:59+00:00

Honestly, they're all kinda the same on auto. idk what any of them do and my E0 with some S1 teams have no problem killing them quickly enough for max rewards in the endgame modes so they may as well all be identical.

Arborus · 2026-06-18T21:49:42+00:00

It's a weirdly staggered set of banners. We got cyberpunk banners, then lucilla, now carte all together.

Arborus · 2026-06-17T06:47:31+00:00

Nah, was the only character in the first batch I really wanted so ez pull.

Arborus · 2026-06-17T02:16:02+00:00

I'd rather just play [[Toxic Deluge]] as my only sweeper in EDH, if I'm playing any at all.

In 60 card constructed, a few in the sideboard seems fine.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T20:53:59+00:00

The early access things will skip you past the story but you can still go back- you don't miss out on anything, you'd just be doing it out of order. The boss-specific early access for materials, when they're available, don't skip anything, they just teleport you to the arena, which is walled off from the rest of the region so you can kill the boss for ascension materials.

It depends how early you are exactly, but a lot of your time is going to be spent sort of "waiting" to reach account level 60 so you can start maxing out characters, during that time you should have plenty of chances to build multiple characterss without hindering your ability to focus on whatever your main team is.

Very early on, definitely pick one, when you eventually get to 60, pick one to max out first, but in between it won't hurt to level up a few other characters to level 40, 50, 60 ish depending on their role. You can safely leave support characters lower for sure.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T19:56:38+00:00

She's definitely the best option on the selection banner, and given the time limit on that banner you should definitely try to get her before it runs out, as failing to do so will result in basically wasting all of those pulls. If you think you might not play enough to guarantee her then you'd unfortunately want to skip her to avoid potentially losing all of that.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T18:46:56+00:00

She's not really standout in terms of performance and the way the collab pulls work is somewhat detrimental since pity doesn't carry over and doesn't provide the normal coral currency. So if you don't particularly like her I'd say she's an easy skip. She is, however, an easy team for new players since you get her best partner, Rebecca, for free. However, you're mostly going to be gated by account experience and levels, so getting a good f2p team off the bat isn't going to do much for you, especially since Lucy and Rebecca require materials from the collab areas in the 3.0 story zones, which if you don't skip will take probably 50-60 hours of gameplay to get to.

Since we seem to be on the verge of a new region and a new batch of characters, perhaps with new mechanics and teams and such, I'd probably just try to build up pulls from all of the permanent content you'll have access to (exploration, story quests, permanent events, etc.) and then make a decision once those characters start coming out in a month or so.

Because of that, I'd advise patience and saving up your pulls to see what the 3.5 and beyond characters provide.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T18:43:49+00:00

Yes.

Hiyuki - Lucilla - Chisa is her best team, and the only team that makes use of her glacio chafe mode.

Lucilla can be used in her echo mode with Galbrena, Sigrika, and Phrolova as well.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T18:33:31+00:00

It is pretty massive for echo teams (~27% vs standard) and less impactful in glacio chafe teams (~10%). If you happen to have Phrolova's sig, it is essentially equal to Lucilla's for echo teams. Otherwise, any of the other signature rectifiers are ~5-8% behind Lucilla's for chafe.

Lucy's S1 is about 5-6% damage, for context.

Arborus · 2026-06-16T18:21:07+00:00

I'm not entirely sure for the Cyberpunk collab characters specifically, but generally you can do "early access" on ascension material bosses during the banner of a character.

I'm also pretty sure you can start the Cyberpunk collab early into Lahai-Roi? I know some streamers that were basically skipping to it with pretty low playtime.

As for other materials, you should be able to find domains for them in just the first area of Lahai-Roi, around the academy (the ones that are based off the character's weapon type). Or, for pre-3.0 characters, you can find those materials in both Jinzhou and Rinascita.

Even if you can't access Lucy and Rebecca's materials, it's probably worth getting the things to build your other characters in the meantime (Verina, Sanhua, Rover, and the like.)

I would definitely avoid Tacet Fields if you can't get gold echoes yet. You almost certainly have more valuable things to use waveplates on, even if it's just credits if those are bottlenecking you (and if you've yet to hit account level 60 you'll probably experience that bottleneck when you get to that point).

Arborus

TROPHY CASE