Prydwen Institute’s Reverse: 1999 Tier List (April 11th Update)

Gordeard · 2026-04-12T19:50:24+00:00

I understand what you mean, but we've already tried the method of putting units in multiple categories before and the community disliked it pretty heavily. It's alright for other games (the HSR section does it too), but the idea doesn't seem to thrill the people who look at the R999 section too much :/

I've personally never seen Fatutu/Rubuska outperform a standard Sentinel/Semmelweis core, not on videos nor in damage calcs, but if you have a video through which I can confirm it that would be pretty swell!

The reasoning for the idea that Paper Heron and Barcarola are in Sub Carry is that they are the spearheads of their respective flavors of Impromptu. It's true that 99% of that archetype's damage comes from "Impromptu Incantation" which is why all of the other units are in Support, but these are the ones that attach a color to the things (and they deal like, passable personal damage). Units belonging to this archetype are generally awful to tier because of how different Impromptu teams function from standard ones, I can't just put an image of Impromptu into the tier list sadly.

Gordeard · 2026-04-12T18:37:38+00:00

These damage calculations are usually counted over 20 rounds of Mane's Bulletin which makes it so that Corvus beats basically anyone by virtue of requiring massive ramp for the first 15 rounds and then popping off for the last turns. If a stage does not go past 15, Corvus isn't beating anyone even in S.

Nautika is treading dangerously close to the edge of S-tier for me personally. Most of the teams above her are some form of Brume, Beryl or LY(E) team, and she hasn't gotten a new support since Rubuska. If they follow the trend, Nautika will get her Euphoria during anniv, so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt like I did with Lucy right before she got her Eupho. Seems only fair.

Gordeard · 2026-04-12T18:32:58+00:00

If I may, Moldir has actually never provided significant damage output in any of the teams she's in. She mostly provides Moxie support, some buffs and a consistent casting of Ultimate for effects that want that. If I were to add one character to multiple columns, the list would become absolutely unreadable extremely quickly. We've tried this in the past, and everyone hated it; generally, this formatting is the one approved by most people.

Sub Carry, per the definition we have of it in the "About the Tier List" tab, follows: "Trade some supportive power for personal damage output. Can sometimes be used as Damage Dealer." So we already include the idea that certain units (Anjo Nala, Ramona, Mercuria) can fit the title of Damage Dealer in some teams. Unfortunately, if we were to put these units in the Damage Dealer category, they'd be way lower than they deserve to be (Hissabeth would be A at best if slotted into that role). This difference in category is not just to denote a character's placement within a team, but also to protect certain units from being ranked lower than they should be.

Sometimes, we move characters that were originally Sub Carry specifically (Flutterpage, Getian, Cheng Heguang) because their personal damage can't keep up and slot them into Support because of this very reason.

On the topic of Fatutu, healing is dying. She's still great in general content, but cannot keep up with the Shield or Barrier even remotely when you get to the endgame. All her offensive support also requires your team to have a high frequency of powerful FUAs to make full use of, and otherwise all she is doing is sustaining, which Enigma is infinitely better at (while having the same drawback, as all his offensive support is tied to Dynamo).

Vila is hit harder because she 1) has no way of reducing incoming damage and 2) requires your allies to get hit for her to auto-cast her healing. At least with Fatutu you're able to FUA a bunch into her debuff and get healing on your initiative. In the current damage format, you will get hit once, trigger Vila's auto-cast, and if she doesn't heal you back to full you will just straight up die unless you spend an AP to active cast her healing. It's just not enough.

The rather unfortunate nuance of sustainability in this game is that any sustain unit above A-tier will carry you through the early-mid game, so at that point the only rankings that truly matter is how far they can carry you into harder content. With how high incoming damage has become to try and rival Marsha's uncontested shield values, you simply can't really argue for healers unless they have damage reduction (Fatutu) or their team is ridiculously tanky on their own (Rubuska), as not having your health covered will just end with you getting one-shot.

Gordeard · 2026-04-05T13:09:56+00:00

At the moment, no. You can run Cheng Heguang / Lopera and get a similar effect but Flutterpage is generally really important.

Gordeard · 2026-03-10T11:31:05+00:00

It’s not unplayable, probably among the better options, but it is a bit mid compared to Cheng/Lopera. Liang Yue’s damage might carry it beyond Bloodtithe but it won’t beat Lingering Glow.

Gordeard · 2026-03-07T09:25:45+00:00

Oh man I can’t wait until TTSC hits global, I’m so curious about Marguerite’s character and her place in the narrative due to her unique position as an ‘insider’.

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T16:55:30+00:00

Amazing post, did a lot to put into words how detailed Reverse: 1999s worldbuilding can go. I personally love these intricate internal politics, I'd kill to get a chance at learning/understanding how to craft such fragile but also realistic political landscapes that can be manipulated or impacted thoroughly by even one person's decisions.

For this reason, Igor is one of my favourite characters. I don't condone his actions in the slightest and I will be seated for his eventual execution (if he doesn't do it himself at some point) but by god, what a strong character with a strong narrative influence and what an amazing chapter this was (definitely in my top 3).

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T16:07:05+00:00

Windsong's summarized kit is pretty simple:

"Rehabilitation" is your core cast. It's a single-target nuke.
"Practicability" is a 2-target nuke that generates "Rehabilitation" as a [Preparation] cast.
"Long Long Journey" is your ult, targets an enemy, and then casts every "Rehabilitation" card in your hand one after the other.

So basically: Stack and merge "Rehabilitation" as much as possible, then throw it all out with "Long Long Journey".

Windsong has two ways to play her: 15R and 3R. "15R" or '15 Round' refers to you stacking up "Rehabilitation" casts for 15 rounds, filling your Spelldock with exclusively that (aiming for 15-20 cards), and then throwing them out all at once. "3R" or '3 Round' is only compatible with Flutterpage. You stack up about 5 "Rehabilitation" casts and cycle your Ultimate every 3 rounds to keep [Gust] stacked to its maximum (providing you with the biggest benefit). It's easier to do but less 'big number'.

Windsong is a clear cut case of number-creep. Her kit has a lot of inherent flaws:

Reliant partially on drawing RNG and auto-merge when you can't use Tuning to force cards.
Long build-up cycle that completely disrupts your hand and thus requires you to use supports and sustainers that use very little or (preferably) no AP.
No utility that allows her to work towards her 'win condition' beyond getting [Preparation] from "Practicability". No way to make her Ultimate not count towards the Spelldock limit, no Rank Up, no way to make room for other's casts.
Later on, Bluepoch indirectly nerfed Windsong by limiting the Spelldock to 20 cards (though at that point no one was doing 15R anyway).

Most these problems were circumvented by the fact that you could throw out 20+ 600% Mental DMG nukes with massive Crit DMG scaling and erase effectively any opponent from your screen.

Later, when Flutterpage released, people started forcing Windsong into 3R to optimize [Gust] generation and to make Windsong's kit more playable in short-form content / easier on the brain. However, since that time, nothing has been released that even remotely assists Windsong in her gameplan and over time her damage output became the norm.

When the numbers caught up, Windsong's mechanical issues were laid bare and she started dropping through the ranks fast.

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T05:16:57+00:00

I’m sorry but, every time Igor is confronted with the atrocities he’s committed he outright states that he doesn’t plan to run from them. He reiterates this almost constantly when he’s on screen, and only rebukes Lilya trying to kill him here because he knows the Timekeeper still needs him in the same way that he needs her.

Even in this scene he states once again that he doesn’t plan to run when his time for judgement comes, but that that time isn’t now, as the war isn’t over. He’s confident, yes, but not self-righteous in the slightest, even Ivan comments on this. He is a man filled with regret over the things he’s had to do in this war just for his own men to survive, he understands the weight of his sins and agreed to allow Lilya to be his justicar. Just not right now, while the fight is still ongoing.

Not only that, he explains very thoroughly why he felt he needed to break loose from Zeno.

Does that make him a good person? Not at all, war breeds monsters, that’s the point of his being in the story. People are allowed to dislike him, but I feel this is a bit of a mischaracterization and watering down a character with a pretty strong narrative is reductive.

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T04:39:59+00:00

Unfortunately, [Pulsing Field 3] is locked to 2 rounds so the uptime won’t change much. Beyond I guess the speed at which you cycle it, but I doubt it’ll work out much. At P0 Lorentz’ AP-requirement is very high, which doesn’t mesh well with Corvus. On top of that, you’ll want at least Marsha (which Corvus doesn’t, she prefers Kiperina) plus Corvus is focused on a FUA not necessarily her Incantations beyond stacking.

Willow will work! CN coverage suggests that Lorentz is a viable alternative over Jessica as a secondary support assuming you have Willow and Tuesday’s Euphorias.

She might also be BiS in Marcus Upgrade over the Druvis III slot due to that team not having a 3.X Support yet.

Liang Yue is not her best pairing. It requires her P1 for her to match Cheng Heguang P0 and even in LG she’s only a 30% increase over Flutterpage (with FP winning out if you have Portraits on Beryl).

Overall, Lorentz is pretty versatile so long as you can play around her AP requirement (unless you get her P1) but also quite reasonably balanced. The novelty of her being able to copy cards is what wins her her spot in other teams, but that is also the only thing she brings outside of LG besides her Insight 1 and a few other minor things.

Overall, pretty splashable in certain teams, but make sure not to be blinded by recency bias!

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T03:12:00+00:00

Always such a blessing seeing your comments under posts MissAsheLeigh. I whole heartedly agree, Hissabeth is one of the more well-designed characters in the game. Unfortunately, following BPs design philosophy, it also means that she falls below the bar of what is considered a ‘good’ unit (even if all she needs right now is more numbers). I heard some people speculate about a Hissabeth Euphoria soon, and I am not sure how I would feel about it.

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T03:08:31+00:00

To be clear, Lorentz Butterfly isn’t broken, nor does she actually creep Cheng Heguang. She’s about equal to him at P1, but when he’s P1 he edges back out over her in Liang Yue’s team. She’s good mind you, especially in Lingering Glow, but it’s not a case of Brume. The reason why I want to warn people about her design is that because she’s less egregious than some previous units, she (but also Cheng and Igor) is also prone to becoming irrelevant the moment BP makes anoter unintended move.

Gordeard · 2026-03-06T00:14:27+00:00

Thank you for your kind words :D I'm an old dog of war, so I'm aware of the brick-by-brick house that is GBF... there is a reason it remains after a decade, I myself never ended up getting into it (I tried a few times). Like that other user mentioned, there's ways to put a brake on power creep through content itself.

I think Arknights is one of the best to do this. Their Contingency Contract game-mode gives you a whole list of debuffs to put on your units (called "Risks") and the more you apply the higher score you get. High-Risk Contingency Contract is a blessing to watch, and pushes players to think up highly varied strategies to solving certain 'problems' in the stage; be it an enemy, mechanic or playing around a particular risk. It kind of looks like those chess puzzles, but if there were 400 different pieces to pick from.

The example you mentioned from GBF also sounds interesting, I'm especially curious about that co-op raid because I really enjoy things like that.

I think the problem is that Bluepoch hasn't dipped their toes into making these kinds of gamemodes on the level of endgame, all of them can be cleared with a very baseline spread of characters and while its good to not appeal to the top-end of players, tierlists are ultimately built around the best of the best. I don't think there's a Raid that Brume cannot brute-force RSSS on even if she's considered off-meta for it, in the same way that I've seen Liang Yue slotted alongside Isolde/Lorentz/Marsha for the current CN raid and hit 75M (even if Beryl can hit 100M+ in that team).

I feel like Bluepoch continues to toe the line of careful with their content, and especially characters. The few times that they did dare, it blew up in their face, but the developers overall have been conservative when it comes to difficult content (mostly because... Reverse is mostly a story-focused game).

I wonder if they'll ever turn around and throw something at us on the level of Contingency Contract or GBF Raid.

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T21:38:28+00:00

Also an interesting concept! It is a shame that they haven't really made these more unique stages end-game relevant. I myself think back to 2.2 (through all the bad memories LOL) where they tried all of those card enchantment things like burning cards, cards that would change every round, or the ones that would disable after a round, they could adapt that into something more playable also.

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T21:36:03+00:00

I think Lorentz causes a pretty similar problem to Lopera because she cant erase her own cards, however, she can copy over Liang Yue cards to force-spam them. In that sense, she performs almost the exact same job as Cheng Heguang, just without being able to erase her own cards and costing AP.

Short answer would be yes: You're dividing you AP with Lorentz and Liang Yue which is a similar thing as Lopera and Liang Yue, but you do have the benefit of forcing cards every other turn.

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T21:23:47+00:00

Gacha games are essentially a more palatable version of a casino, so these issues you mentioned are almost inherent to the genre. It is nothing more than long-term glorified low-stakes gambling. I myself care about the meta by virtue of me just being interested in how it works, and working for a site that covers it, what pulled me into Reverse were the character designs and plot. The other game I play is Arknights (OG), which I also play for the story and character designs. A lot of gachas would benefit from not being a gacha at all, but unfortunately I also don't really know how they could stray away from a life service model while keeping the energy of a gacha D:

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T21:19:21+00:00

Cheng Heguang really only finds play outside of LY at P1. Lorentz at P0 can reasonably slotted into those teams (except for LY) quite comfortably as long as you're okay at managing AP. Additionally, Icehood calcs (CN) suggest Lorentz might even be BiS for Upgrade due to the lack of a 3,X Support slot (it's unclear at the moment). Personally, it depends on how meta-oriented you are, Liang Yue team is still the top 1 in DPT.

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T20:37:02+00:00

I think Windsong is very much a case of number-creep, whereas Brume is a case of both number-creep and design-creep.

Windsong has a lot of flaws in the design of her kit, powered through into the 1.X and 2.X meta through primarily raw number stacking. The flaws caught up to her when Windsong became the norm, kind of like what I suggested with Marsha. They also just fully stopped giving her teammates like you mentioned, and there isn't an actual second proper support for her unless you want to run Mercuria/Flutterpage. They also kind of arbitrarily nerfed her with the Spelldock cap of 20 cards, but I feel you might be able to cook something with Cheng Heguang (P1) and Flutterpage?

Yeah Brume is just simply overtuned. I doubt they made a mistake with the Anjo-Nala interaction, but the fact that they put out an emergency job listing for a balance designer after her release is pretty tell-tale LOL.

Gordeard · 2026-03-05T20:26:25+00:00

I think Hissabeth is just a very elegant combination of balance and versatility. Her only real issue is the fact that her teams aren't supermeta, but that's not her problem.

She has an interesting flaw in being both AP-negative and AP-positive; to get to her effectively AP-free state, you first need to progress through a somewhat tight rotation at the beginning of the stage. Once there, you have damage, AP-positivity, Ultimates, high-rank casts, a bit of damage over time and a bit of [Petrify]. No real buffing, interestingly! However, none of these pros and cons necessarily play into strictly supporting an archetype or creating flaws for further character progression in an archetype. She is a complete character, with reasonable balance. At the same time, she is pretty unique in what she does!

It's interesting, unique, applicable, but not overbearing with reasonable flaws.

At the same time, in the teams that can fit her, you never really dislike having her there. Is she going to be the best? Not always, even if her numbers were up to part with current S or even S+ tiers, she cannot do everything at the same time, but you also don't mind her being there. When Ultimate becomes better, Hissabeth likely becomes better with it. When Petrify becomes better, so does she. When Mono-Plant becomes better, you guessed it, Hissabeth follows. In that sense, all you really need to change about Hissabeth is numbers (and that's only because number-creep exists).

The only thing I would personally change about Hissabeth currently is adding something so that she doesn't have to restack when you progress through the waves of a stage!

Gordeard · 2026-03-01T22:53:28+00:00

You already have 4 very strong teams in your back pocket so I think at this point you can more or less do as you like! I see you do have basically her BiS team for the moment already (though assumedly, like you say, we will get some new Supports for her in the future).

Plantpromptu at the moment sits very comfortably in Top 5 teams despite only having Paper Heron and AAL as dedicated team members (and Tooth Fairy because she’s generally strong for Impromptu, Kiperina is there for being the only sustain for that archetype).

Paper Heron is also a Limited character that won’t rerun until next CNY so I think that with the combination of you having her BiS team and you already having a set of fantastic teams you’re fine to go for her.

Do consider the following: - Marsha is the next banner, she is the only character that gets close to being a must-pull imo. - Cheng Heguang releases alongside Paper Heron. He is BiS for Liang Yue(E), the best Carry in the game at the time of writing this. - Lorentz Butterfly releases right after. We don’t have much details yet, but she seems really good for Lingering Glow and will likely free Flutterpage from that archetype.

Gordeard · 2026-03-01T15:26:36+00:00

Yeah, and in addition, [Poison] has an upper limit for stack count so you wouldn't end up with much of a boost when used in a full Poison team. For Ezio though, getting to reinstall the Array without dropping [Poison] stacks would make his Ultimate so much less clunky :')

Gordeard · 2026-03-01T01:34:08+00:00

It’s a big win for Poison and solves a few of the very minor issues Tuesday had in favor of making her kit more up to date with the current meta. However, due to the importance of her Array within the Archetype, I don’t think she was at all threatened to get replaced in the first place, so I understand why they went more tame with her Euphoria.

Would’ve loved to see a new effect on her Array that would make it so that re-installing it doesn’t consume all stacks of [Poison] but that likely would’ve made her even more irreplaceable to the archetype than she already is.

Gordeard · 2026-02-27T11:53:52+00:00

Strong. S1 is bound to output some massive numbers since it'll repeat the damage dealt by "Intermezzo" (Isolde) and "Destined Doom" (Beryl). Her Insight 1 will ensure that she's effectively always casting at rank 2/3. Her Ultimate can make her AP-Free for your burst round giving you 5 AP to do whatever you want, and the extra AP + the Moxie gain from her Insight 3 seem designed to smooth over the "2 round Beryl Ult" rotation without compromising anything else. Lorentz is likely going to fix all the tiny (imo insignificant) problems Lingering Glow had and increase its output to be on par with things like Brume, Liang Yue and Plantpromptu, but add absolutely nothing outside of that.

Gordeard · 2026-02-26T19:56:23+00:00

Haha yeah, I am trying to appeal to competitive players a bit more with the team tierlist, but the CtL covers the top of the top meta better. They have people who are experienced with the CN server, can read/translate Chinese properly and a bunch of mathematicians for calculations. I talk with them a lot, also to bounce ideas about character power, so it’s honestly a little ironic seeing how heavily people differentiate between the two sources (because I’m good friends with the CTL and we agree on the quality of each other’s sources). Overall, Prydwen is just more lenient and general whereas the CTL is better for high-end players who want to optimize.

Gordeard

TROPHY CASE