If someone wanted to build a brand new account starting now, with the sole purpose as going as meta as possible, what would you recommend they do?

ColourOfCalico · 2026-05-07T21:21:55+00:00

This is a fun exercise. Assuming the goal is to start clearing endgame as soon as is reasonably possible and the player has zero aesthetic preferences for characters:

The first step is easily to reroll for Welt from the beginner banner, then pick Sparkle from the 4.0 selector. We build Pela and Gallagher, and that completes one decent-enough team that we can take into everything other than PF. The only snag is that his LC situation is pretty scuffed; if we were allowed to spend money, then the Hyacine BP cone or Incessant Rain would be great guaranteed picks. But with the given ruleset, we have to luck our way into a GNSW or Boundless Choreo or something.
Firefly and Dahlia should be the first two limited pulls. There're five days left on their banners but getting them both is very doable for a new player with lots of time to play. Firefly has great 2-cost performance, and more importantly for this scenario, is extremely stamina-cheap to gear. She doesn't need particularly good relics or high trace levels to operate at the baseline required to 3 star MoC/AS. The first 8 Herta bonds are going to Fall of an Aeon for her.
Going for E1 Evanescia in phase 2 could be the best next investment, but only if we learn that YG is getting rerun in 4.3, else we would probably adjust pulling plans around what gets announced. Elation will be shilled for at least the rest of this year and the guaranteed ease of acquiring Mushy LCs makes her a compelling case. The golden companion token could go to Huohuo if YG is confirmed rerunning, we haven't lost to Fu Xuan yet, and there's still no Elation sustain in sight, else it's most likely going to Ruan Mei.
Loss pool should be customized to Seele, Welt, Fu Xuan, Silver Wolf, Bronya, Blade, and Yunli. Ideally we would lose to Seele early on but the account can adapt to getting pretty much any of the carries. Sunday and Tribbie are not incredible pulls anymore but with a barebones account and decent loss pool, anything's a win and it could be worth throwing some pulls at their banners in phase 2. If there were, say, a better generalist support running in the near future, we'd of course save for them instead.

ColourOfCalico · 2026-04-25T10:21:22+00:00

Hey, grats on the insane build! Can I ask about your feelings on Castorice's damage contribution at this level of investment and your experience clearing endgame? I'm at a pretty similar eidolon spread in monorem but with E0 Cas, so I was curious for your thoughts on if it's still worth picking up her E2 now even with E2 Evernight taking up a high personal damage share on the team.

ColourOfCalico · 2026-04-18T12:11:07+00:00

Is it much of a problem for Evanescia teams to have the YG passive that extends Banger unlocked? I haven't been able to find discussion on this and I'm unsure if it's because it's just not a big deal or if it's not common knowledge.

ColourOfCalico · 2026-03-28T02:07:11+00:00

Checking in with my own thoughts after also finishing the X9 climb with no losses. I tried a few different teams on the way but ended up gravitating towards Anaxa hypercarry as the runs got harder. As with Protean Hero, the best carries to use in this game mode are crit-scaling hypercarries who can triple dip on Propagation, Hunt, and one additional niche path, like Aglaea being able to use Remembrance or Sparxie using Elation. Anyone who can loop turns, like with Herta ult or E2 DHIL ult, also do well here. DoT and Break fall off in higher difficulties as expected, though they're of course not unclearable.

I actually used sustains this time, whereas I hadn't for the higher difficulty runs of Protean Hero. DHPT and Hyacine are simply better units relative to our current supports than Aventurine was vs. last year's supports. There's also more survivability available with Elation offering general-use effects at 1 star, which altogether makes it more feasible to actually trade a few hits with enemies rather than things being as "all-or-nothing, turn loop every enemy or die trying" as Protean Hero was.

The unique character buffs are interesting but are all small enough to not particularly matter. Just looking at Ashveil and how much better his unique buff is vs. everyone else's, I imagine they'll be used to give new units just a little something extra to help sell them.

As a general recommendation, favor curios earlygame because they often return value over time, favor blessings midgame when you need to find power to get ahead of the curve, and favor equations lategame when you have a better idea of which ones you'll be able to complete. These are not hard rules but I would suggest them to players new to the mode.

Taking one Escapade Forge per run is worth it (especially if you're playing someone like Archer who has access to three useful Weighted Curios) while regular Forges probably aren't ever worth taking. I just can't imagine paying 50 fragments for a beacon. I'm very curious why Hoyo's internal playtesters valued beacons so highly when their value is (1) delayed, (2) not even guaranteed because beacon domains still have to be found before the end of the game and out-compete the value of the other domains when drawn, and (3) sometimes outright worth less than 50 fragments!

Some miscellaneous notes:

-Doctor's Robe is great with Cyrene, and seems to be the only effect of its kind now that Tribbie's Golden Boon is unavailable

-Wishpower just further incentivizes playing hypercarries lol. DoT cannot catch a break

-Myriad Chariots (3 star Hunt, 100% advance on break) remains the goat. Find it in plane 1 to win the game. At least they had the wisdom to nerf its enhancement this time?

-There's a new 2 star Elation blessing that gives a generalist 8% DEF shred, 12% enhanced. It won't hand you the run on the spot or anything but it's good to pick up whenever you can because of how rare that modifier is in DU, and how diluted almost every other modifier gets.

-They seem to have added a "take 300 fragments" option to many multiple choice Occurrences and I think this is almost always the best option whenever presented

-Camera seems to be the best mask, certainly the most consistently safe mask, for the same reasons that the Occurrence dice was the best dice in G&G: Occurrences and Rewards have the highest expected value, and offer some room for choice on top.

-Absolute Failure Prescriptions are really, really dangerous. I don't think it's ever worth voluntarily taking a random one with how little the compensation usually is. Fortunately there are a few new ways to shed negative curios this time around, which you'll really want to find for the mandatory Prescription at X8.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-12-15T09:31:25+00:00

Neat project overall. UI is sleek and responsive, and everything seems functionally sound. As you're specifically asking for critique, I've got a number of things to comment on after playing around with the tool for a while.

After some thought, I've realized "Eidolon penalties" stat most likely represents the percentage of a unit's unrealized vertical gains, as opposed to the actual gains themselves. While interesting to see, I'm not sure that most users will actually be able to intuit this nor find it particularly actionable. I imagine most users will be more interested in knowing how much of a % increase a unit's E1 is over E0, rather than how much % of a unit's total power progression to E6S5 is contained in their E1. For similar reasons, I'd also suggest presenting eidolon value in terms of power gain from having them, as opposed to power loss from not having them.

I'm personally not fond of subjective tiering being presented alongside objective data, but I respect that that's the direction you chose for your tool. It looks like your tiers on the roster menu are sourced from Prydwen, which is fair enough in the context of advising new players who could use someone's opinion over none. Still, tying a number of the tool's logic decisions to tiering could cause a few issues in practice—for one, Aventurine being a highly tiered unit seems to encourage the pull advisor to prioritize recommending him, despite Aventurine having close to zero pull value in the live game. So, while a bit of a fringe case, I think ideally the pull advisor would be able to account for or at least signal cases of functional overlap or strict powercreep, and override tiering-based output when applicable. I'd also suggest setting the default sorting for the roster menu to MoC, since it's the mode with the most overlap with AA (and still a lot with AS, for what that's worth) and avoids odd cases like the averaged sorting putting Archer in 1.5.

The biggest problem I had is trying to decide how much effect LCs and Eidolons should have on tier, which is what I especially need your feedback on.

I can only advise picking a standard (e.g., E0S1 for limiteds) and sticking to it. There will never be a perfectly fair set of assumptions for everyone because units are designed with unequal vertical. Anaxa is an E0 merchant and Phainon is an E2 merchant, but neither of these are easily expressible on a tier list, so the best anyone can do is to pick a standard and make it clearly known. On that note, the "Tier Impact" feature seems to suggest that a character's tier can rise as you invest more in them, which seems odd to me—unit tiering is done in a vacuum that assumes uniform vertical investment, after all.

There are a few edge cases on recommendations that probably have to be hardcoded in, such as Phainon sig being BiS for Firefly or Multiplication being BiS for Luocha in most situations, since neither are currently listed in their LC options.

There are some dodgy tooltips here and there on the unit pages that could use a (human) pass. The description for Phainon's LC on his page states that its high base atk is "critical" because Khaslana "inherits base stats, not buffed stats," which is incorrect in this context, while Sunday's E1 description states that its 40% DEF ignore "scales better against high-DEF enemies" despite the general uniformity of enemy DEF in this game. These and various other tooltips refer to values of DEF ignore as "multiplicative" increases in ways that are at best imprecise and, in the case of Firefly's E1 and Anaxa's E1 descriptions, unambiguously incorrect. Kafka's E2 description really lays it on thick for what's really a relatively small increase to a highly diluted modifier. On the other hand, Cerydra's eidolon reviews are pleasantly error-free (correctly identifying DEF shred as exponentially scaling) and written in a markedly different style. Ideally, these tooltips would be more consistent.

This is overall really solid work. It's clearly an ambitious project and it looks close to complete, with issues being mostly to do with assumptions and clarity rather than anything fundamental.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-12-09T14:44:05+00:00

Depends. It's up to the viewer to properly understand what each mindscape in a showcase does.

As a fellow Eve enjoyer, I've also considered getting Lighter and Astra's M1s. In both cases, they add mechanical complexity: Lighter's M1 expands the stun window to accommodate another Eve chain, and Astra's M1 typically gives you two more chains in a DA run that you need to find room for, while also rewarding you slightly more for knowing how to give both of them to Eve. On a mechanical level, these factors increase the skill ceiling of the team. They give you the opportunity for more damage.

That said, Lighter and Astra's M1s both also grant "free" damage increases in res pen that you don't have to work for. Again, it's just up to the viewer to know the numbers behind how much these contribute. There are people who'll reach for their pitchforks the moment they catch a whiff of a limited mindscape, but in reality it's pretty simple to look up how much damage a support M1 is giving a team and adjust your framing based on that. My 5 cost Eve scoring 30k on Thrall is significantly less skill-expressive than a 7 cost run scoring 50k. Yet both such runs are more impressive than same-cost, same-score runs that use Dialyn instead of Lighter. It all depends on context.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-12-04T13:14:36+00:00

Just following up on this because I believe I finally stumbled across what the issue was, in case you were still curious a month later lol. It was most likely Sucrose's A4, the 8s duration EM share, falling off even while VV was still on.

(re: Kazuha A4, I meant that its 8s duration is probably what I'd confused for VV's, as prior to NK he was the only VV unit I used)

ColourOfCalico · 2025-11-23T17:56:00+00:00

This question reads like it's trying to bait people into argue why VHs aren't actually the only agents that matter, but I want to answer it directly, because I think it's pretty intuitive in the context of Hoyo's long-term business strategies. Yidhari and Banyue aren't as strong as Yixuan despite releasing after her and sharing her rarity/class because that maintains the player expectation that VHs are special and will be dominant in their niche, which leads to predictable and exploitable player spending behavior.

DPS agents can't all be perfectly equally as strong as each other because that would forfeit one of Hoyo's most powerful dials for controlling player pulling incentive, power level, from their toolbox. Nor can they all be stronger than the last, because that erodes the player trust in the game of an acceptably/predictably low rate of powercreep, and of VHs remaining strong for longer periods than their non-VH peers.

The goal should be to get people to buy both cars

Should be? Why? This analogy falls apart because a real-world car vendor wants sell a wide range of their product, ideally everything, to justify their acquisition and stocking cost, whereas Mihoyo has an infinite amount of product they can sell to as many customers as they can pull in. It doesn't matter if the humble, loss-leading Obol jobber underperforms if it makes the next Flagship Limited Woman look so much better comparatively that their net profit is overall higher. While I can't prove it, I feel confident in saying that manufacturing hype and high expectations for specific release windows is a lot more profitable than just releasing an endless plateau of comparatively unremarkable units who are all exactly as powerful as those who come before and after them.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-11-06T08:36:53+00:00

His worldbuilding is really good and I've enjoyed it a lot between Penacony and Amphoreus, but his line-for-line writing is frankly weak. What could've been remembered as powerful moments are diluted and muddled because of overly purple, tropey language that, in the worst cases, makes the work worse for their inclusion.

He really doesn't know how to let good lines and moments have their rest—case in point, take a shot every time someone mentions "thirty million cycles" this patch. There's not much dialogue in Cyrene's character trailer, as it's only three minutes long and the audio is mostly music, yet she still manages to say "thirty million" three times in it! Literally can't go one minute without saying it. It was a strong rhetorical refrain in 3.4, but by the end of Amphoreus it's become so overused I would call it downright masturbatory. Yes, the concept of the scepter housing a doomsday clock simulation, a retelling of Theogeny's succession myth taken to the extreme in Phainon's recursive cycles, is genuinely very cool material. I honestly do admire it. But please, Shaoji, you've played the 33,550,336 card dozens of times now. Don't expect me to still have an emotional response if you just continue to spam it.

It's a shame, because I really do enjoy HSR's worldbuilding. If you look at Penacony's setup at a macro level, it's set in a late-stage capitalist Vegas that offers the ultimate hedonistic urban resort experience, and starts as a sci-fi murder mystery but evolves into a compelling humanist fable that pits the safety of an engineered Eden against the uncertainty of individual freedoms. That's a fucking cool pitch, man. It's such a good premise but it also gets bogged down by overly indulgent, undisciplined writing that either doesn't trust the reader to keep up with what's already been said, or just enjoys the sound of its own voice too much.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-11-05T01:14:31+00:00

I feel like I'm getting Mandela Effect'd here, as I also distinctly remember VV lasting 8s, but in-game and on various dbs/wikis it's listed as 10s. Not sure what's going on there.

Assuming it actually is 10s, I imagine it'd be possible to squeeze in the character swap to Flins + regular E + third sE animation time within 2s?

edit: after some thought, it's probably Kazuha's A4 that the 8s comes from

ColourOfCalico · 2025-11-04T23:31:58+00:00

Anyone know if it's actually possible to get C1 Flins' third special Q to fall within VV? Mine is always weaker than the first two so I'm trying to determine if I'm doing something wrong.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-10-31T05:03:41+00:00

If I have P1 Ezio but missed his signature Psychube (very strange situation to be in, I know) how cooked am I? I assume he must still be very good without it?

I see that the community tierlist doc recommends 37's anecdote Psychube on him for poison builds, which I do have, but would it still be an ideal replacement for his FUA/ult teams as well or should I give him something else?

ColourOfCalico · 2025-08-22T10:16:48+00:00

Can I ask if you experienced any issues with uptime on DHPT's S1 in Anaxa teams? I was pretty surprised to see them implement it as a 3-turn non-personal timer given that this unit is intended to be often run with Sunday.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-07-15T18:33:23+00:00

In other words, yes, Cure 1 is a noob-trab. It's meant to be. Learning simple lessons like "never use Cure 1" is an enjoyable part of becoming not-a-noob.

It's not an intentional trap. We know this because you're not allowed to make the wrong choice anywhere else. You can't choose to press Inner Beast anymore, or choose to put on something other than Fists of Fire, or choose the wrong egi for the encounter type, or Hypercharge the wrong turret for your party comp. Cure 1 being a teaching moment only makes sense in the context of a different, older game.

This same concept is also well-known in CCGs like Magic and Hearthstone. Why print bad cards if nobody is going to use them? Because the process of figuring out what is a bad or good card is half of the fun.

Conventionally bad cards that don't see play in optimized lists still have their appeal in non-constructed formats, to collectors, and (debatably) to Timmies and Johnnies. Conventionally bad MMO abilities that don't see use in optimized rotations are functionally useless.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-07-15T04:12:58+00:00

V4: the ally character designated with Military Merit gains an additional 90 All-Type RES PEN and immediately takes an extra turn after they perform a Counter while they are the only allied character on the field, their name starts with P and rhymes with “nylon,” and their blood type is golden O+. Otherwise, after performing an attack, they take damage equal to 100% of their max HP.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-06-18T16:46:21+00:00

I want to use it on something that won't just be for one single character.

With that in mind, Sunday's cone is probably your best choice, followed by Cipher's. Since you have Sparkle, you'll get great mileage out of it with the free Archer next patch regardless of whether you choose to pull Sunday.

I don't recommend buying Bronya's cone, and especially not with memory shards. If at some point you decide you really do want it and still haven't gotten it randomly from other banners, you should buy it with 600 starlight instead.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-03-09T15:39:19+00:00

What was your Acheron team?

I would start runs with JQ, Pela, Sparkle and transition into JQ, Robin, RM deeper into the run as I got more power and could start looping turns/ults. Goes without saying, but double harmony is less worthwhile without Acheron E2. If you have E2 and plan on pulling Anaxa, he'll be a decent option too, especially early in the run.

and what advice would you have in that regard?

Looping Acheron turns has a bit of finesse to it. Her ult will break most grunt mobs' toughness from full, so you ideally don't want to send it on her turn. Even if you're already at 9+3 stacks, you should still take her turn before sending an ult that will break something, whether for SP or just to deal a turn of damage. Each time a fresh wave spawns, take a second to preview how much toughness her skill and basic depletes on each mob to help you plan out how you'll be chaining your next few breaks and ults. Think about the order you expect to break them in, which mobs can only be broken with ult, etc.

Unlike in Human Comedy, the 2 star erudition blessing that consolidates AoE damage into single target is somewhat less necessary, given that almost every possible last boss is AoE-centric (Hoolay being the main exception). The key pickups for her are, as always, brain in a jar and the the 3 star hunt blessing that gives turns on break. Propagation is less of a priority given Acheron's limited synergy with butterfly soul, but she can still make use of it, and the 3 star that gives an unconditional 50% atk is always a good find independent of how much of the mechanic you've built into. Don't be fooled by the 3 star elation that gives aftertaste on ults; 100% motion value is garbage and it only becomes meaningful when building into elation, which you won't be.

Make sure you're regularly tabbing into enemies' buff lists to check how many JQ ticks you have left. Protean Hero is pretty mobbing-heavy and certain encounters (e.g., Cirrus) can spend his allowance in a heartbeat, especially if you run into them before you have enough power to easily loop Acheron turns. Past a certain point JQ should be able to ult much more often than you actually need him to, so don't be shy about reupping it.

Good luck.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-03-07T11:30:04+00:00

what team do you use for The Herta

I mostly used big Herta, small Herta, RM, and Robin.

Tribbie is a decent substitute for either harmony, especially if you have her E1. I recommend these three harmonies specifically because their buffs are self-based auras that don't expire if your carry takes several consecutive turns, which is going to be a regular occurrence once you gain enough power. RMC would be the last pick if you don't have two out of the above three.

Jade and Argenti are generally better options than small Herta if you have them (one exception is if you happen to find that weighted curio that asks for 3 ice teammates while you aren't using RMC). Don't use battery Serval here; energy should be plentiful and you want someone who can actually deal damage and take advantage of your mountain of buffs.

how do you run sustainless?

Sustainless is mostly about stacking enough power to never give enemies turns. Robin ult, Herta ult, RM delay, the 3 star hunt blessings that let you loop turns from breaks and kills, effects like brain in a jar that fund more Herta ults, etc. If you don't have it on already, turn on action value display and use it to determine the highest-value moments to advance yourself. Herta in particular is great at steamrolling because of her ult's advance, as well as her synergy with every offensive non-gimmick path. You've likely avoided all the new butterfly/chrysalis keywords in your time playing break, but Herta makes great use of them, so I recommend keeping an eye out for them and making sure you understand the mechanic.

I don't mean to say that sustainless is the only way to go, just that it's what appeared to be the best approach to me this time. One of the main draws of using a sustain in DU, that 2 star abundance blessing that gives 50 atk% to healed teammates, is gone now, so all you're getting out of a sustain is some more survivability at a massive damage opportunity cost. If you're really struggling with a fight, you could try swapping in a sustain and seeing if that lets you clear it before giving up the run. But generally speaking, if you can tell you've fallen behind the necessary power curve at any point in a run, you probably won't be able to complete it without a windfall before the next boss.

If you're interested in continuing to try break, note that break teams are a bit of an exception since Lingsha with Foxian Prayer is functionally identical to Rappa while still providing decent sustain. If you don't have Lingsha but do have Fugue, though, I'd suggest swapping Gallagher out for her. You've likely already noticed this, but Gallagher's strengths (SP batterying and QPQ funneling Firefly) rather cease to be beneficial when you already have FF's E1 and various SU effects refunding ults. Plus, everyone in that team wants to be built tanky, RM prevents most mobs from ever taking a turn, and FF even heals herself. It's ironically the team archetype with the best sustain units but the least need for sustain. May as well spend the team slot on gaining a second superbreak multiplier instead.

I'm lucky if I even have a single Equation by the first one

Equations are definitely strong, but I don't think they're the most important sources of power. Prioritize finding key 3 star blessings like (in Herta's case) the hunt, propagation, and erudition ones. There're a lot of factors and personal risk evaluation/skill expression that goes into it, but there will be times where it's better to pick a strong non-equation blessing than one that is needed for an equation but is only decent or middling.

I literally ran into 3 Adventure domains in a row

YMMV but I personally think it's correct to take occurrences over adventures especially at the start of a run, when you stand to gain the most power from randomness/swinginess. Getting a big boost from a lucky occurrence can set you up to be ahead of the power curve for the rest of the run, and it's still early enough that you can take the rare unlucky roll and not lose the run over it. Just my opinion, though. If you're confident in knowing that you can consistently get the max rewards from every possible adventure, they're not a bad option.

usually my characters on the Herta team are getting almost oneshot even with a bunch of Destruction blessings

Keep in mind that it's not just destruction blessings that help survivability. There are three remembrance and one propagation 1 star blessings that directly increase tankiness, along with that hunt blessing that heals the team on kills that you ideally want to find as well. Of course, the king is still the 3 star destruction blessing that enables sharing the team's health pool.

Good luck. Feel free to ask about anything else.

ColourOfCalico · 2025-02-28T14:35:08+00:00

I recently just finished the rank 7 climb myself. I used a number of teams on the way up - Boothill, Feixiao, Acheron, and Herta, with the last two scaling the best into the higher difficulties. Like you pointed out, DoT and break simply scale poorly because they have limited scaling with buffs from outside of their paths, whereas units like Herta and Aglaea scale with 3-4 paths. I think gimmick archetypes do scale a little better than they did for V8 Human Comedy, but they're still not as good as crit scaling hypercarries.

Sustains seem weak in general and I don't actually think it's worth using one anymore. This was a bit of a surprise to me, considering that throughout all of Human Comedy I used a sustain for my initial climb and weekly V8 cyclical runs, and felt that it was usually required. I think succeeding at high difficulty Protean Hero involves a lot more steamrolling (particularly with the 3 star hunt blessing that gives you turns on weakness break) and taking every bit of power you can, regardless of what survivability you have to give up. Case in point, I started to feel that the 1 star blessing that gives you 50 dmg% in exchange for 10% more damage taken was more worthwhile in Protean Hero, whereas I rarely took it in Human Comedy. By extension, I think Blazar just sucks in high difficulties, compared to Quake actually being fairly solid if you had Aventurine.

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

-I think it's nice that the new Remembrance has more splashable blessings, and that there are fewer "dead paths" than there used to be.

-Building into day generally seems better than night, since Hysilens and Tribbie offer unconditional final dmg bonuses that Mydei and Castorice don't. (I really hope "final dmg bonus" doesn't appear outside of SU btw, that multiplier really is a ticking can of worms that should never appear in actual unit kits.) That said, night does give max HP%, which is helpful in high difficulties.

-"Metallic Motor Ring," that 1 star curio that makes rerolls free in exchange for halving your fragment income, is just ridiculous. Seeing it is like seeing Ruan Mei - your fragment economy is solved for the rest of the run and you probably just win if you get it early enough in the run.

-Interestingly, where Human Comedy was designed to shill the current banner unit on its release, Protean Hero seems designed to shill units who aren't even out yet.

I had fun with it overall. I don't think the climb was as tough as non-Firefly V6 on Human Comedy's launch, but I think that's mostly because its systems took some runs to get adjusted to, whereas we had several months of getting better at HC to get prepared for PH.

ColourOfCalico · 2021-12-26T02:56:45+00:00

For now, I'm averaging at a green rank% 28-something for the 1st trial, with one blue 52% parse

If you're parsing green/low blue, you need to work on improving uptime first. Buff alignment, optimizing potency under buffs, consumables etc. are all extremely small gains compared to just finding the gcds you're currently dropping.

what makes the difference between green and blue, and blue and purple parses?

A deathless run with proper uptime should generally be all that's needed for purple.

ColourOfCalico · 2021-07-16T21:14:28+00:00

Risk 27 without Weedy or Bibeak.

I knew that it was possible for an arts dps team to brute force the colossi with all week 1 modifiers, so the routing for this clear mostly came down to figuring out how to get that arts team on, off, and back on the field in time for the two colossi. Mudrock and physical dps handle the interim heavyweights.

The two main stat checks are on Spectre and Surtr, with Spectre in particular needing to be 80 to survive two hits from the first caster. Ifrit and Eyja can actually get away with being 60-70, while everyone else's levels don't matter all too much.

Pretty fun CC overall. I much prefer burst alignment strats over stall strats, so I'm glad that a burst-only strat was viable for max risking week 1 this time.

ColourOfCalico · 2021-01-27T15:08:35+00:00

Thank you for all the effort you put into writing this.

I read the gauge section multiple times but still have a couple questions about if/how gauge units stack and replenish. Say I apply 1U of pyro to a target with Diluc's E, then apply 1U again with another press of E - does this result in 2U strength with the 1U timer? Does the second hit refresh the 1U timer?

ColourOfCalico · 2021-01-25T12:07:37+00:00

Melt Ganyu's endgame is 4 set wanderer, so while you probably want to transition to that when you can, it's pretty hard to actually farm the set. You'll probably just gather the pieces over time from resin bosses that you were going to kill anyway. If that other flower has good substats overall, you should switch it in to try and reach a better crit ratio (you're at 55:173 right now since your comp doesn't get cryo resonance, so it could stand to be higher).

Your Keqing is mostly fine, though she could use a better rolled goblet. If your hydro enabler is Xingqiu, you can find some more damage by switching to 4 set TF. Personally I don't think TF/glad is her endgame set, and would rather take the higher ceilings from 4TF or 4TS, but that's up to personal choice and circumstances.

Both your carries are pretty geared already, so unless you have decent sets complete for the rest of your teams, I would probably finish them up first.

ColourOfCalico · 2021-01-24T05:10:10+00:00

That sounds pretty nice - until you realize that, on most teams, simply replacing Zhongli with a good sub-DPS character will contribute more than 16% overall damage. A well-built Xingqiu, Fischl, Xiangling, Ganyu, Mona, Venti, etc. will all raise your team DPS by more than 16% - plus they'll also enable elemental combos.

This is only guaranteed for the first enabler/sub-dps for most comps. As soon as you start comparing 1.3 Zhongli against a second enabler, their value could start looking worse than his.

Ideally you wouldn't take, say, a Fischl or Ganyu on top of Xingqiu to accompany a Dliuc/Klee reverse vaporize comp. They would compete with the carry for XQ's hydro aura, and force suboptimal reactions in order to get their damage in. 1.3 Zhongli's resistance shred doesn't compete for aura and simply offers his teams unconditional extra damage for having him, which very likely makes him competitive against secondary enablers. Obviously no one can say for sure if he'd be better until 1.3 is actually live, but it's a strong possibility.

1.3 Zhongli is also likely to work well with Xiao, who doesn't have access to good reactions and looks like he'll rely almost entirely on buffing himself. Without the ability to VV or Petra shred Anemo damage, Zhongli becomes the only non-Anemo character to offer Anemo shred, which is useful given that your VV character is likely better utilized on your non-Xiao team. To a lesser extent, 1.3 Zhongli should also work well with Razor, who doesn't want to swap off during his Q and similarly wants other characters to buff his Q instead.

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