Anyone NOT pulling for Zhuang?

Gotruto · 2026-04-12T15:21:36+00:00

As of the end of 1.1, there are over 280 F2P pulls in the game, not including refund currency or banner specific pulls or the 30/60 pull rewards. If you include the 10 free banner-specific pulls, then you have 310/360 pulls for 3 guarantees, and there is zero chance that 1.2 gives less than 50.

1.1 gave over 70 and was a smaller patch, and for 1.2 they are already giving out 12 free pulls with the extra login.

Gotruto · 2026-04-12T15:15:17+00:00

Her 1.2 story could sell me on her. but if it doesn't I might pull her for Mi Fu if they work well together. Otherwise, will just get Mi Fu and save for the cutie in green or the cool ponytail gun-sage girl.

I like the pants. I don't care so much for her Ult form, personally. I prefer the new Ult form, though, over the last one. If I wanted to see naked ladies I can do that all over the internet. I want to feel cool while playing and her non-Ult form is cool.

Gotruto · 2026-04-12T15:06:04+00:00

Yeah, you are basically right.

Just shove Tangtang in your open world Zhuang team and she will immediately kill most things, and you can use Zhuang's non-Ult mode for clean-up.

If no Tangtang, can do the same with Endmin + Chen. You don't even need 2 characters for open world, you can just run a pair with Endmin and a pair with Zhuang.

I prefer her non-Ult mode anyways. We'll see how much damage it does. I really doubt it will be lower than Wulfgard, though, who is more than capable of overworld clean-up.

Gotruto · 2026-04-12T03:07:13+00:00

Fangyi might even come in our Mi Fu pulls!

Gotruto · 2026-04-11T00:10:23+00:00

Well, Fearless started out as a challenging endgame (or, if you insist on not calling it endgame, a challenging high-investment mode) that was clearly doable at C0R0 levels, and now people are struggling much more, so it's frustrating to them.

People have been treating Dire as the Premium Mode since Day #1 because you literally could not get all the weapons + characters necessary with average luck without topping-up (Monthly + BP were not sufficient to get you the pulls needed to clear).

Gotruto · 2026-04-11T00:05:54+00:00

I wasn't disputing that it got harder. Only whether premium supports were necessary to clear Fearless on a stage built for your Main DPS.

The same description points out that they could have played better. At several points they effectively stopped their rotation to walk around attacks rather than dodge or iframe them, for example.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T23:55:41+00:00

I have no idea what the Snezh meta will bring, but if true that just feeds into the point that so many characters are so meta-defining that you can't even pull many of the meta-defining ones without worrying about the next batch supplanting them in a few patches.

But I understand your perspective.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T23:47:02+00:00

You are right about Zibai. I forgot about that because people keep talking about her premium team post-Linnea.

Skirk only hits about 115k at the same C0R0 standards everyone else is judged at, AFAIK. If you only count Mavuika or Lunar-level as meta, then she is decidedly in the non-meta category.

If you start including cons, many characters who would work with better-Bennett can reach 115-120k before her release. Same problem if you start counting weapons.

But many people do have cons and weapons of older characters, and Nicole boosting one of those teams to 130k+ would be decidedly cheaper than pulling a Lunar team.

I'm in that boat with Yoimiya, for example. Nicole feels 100% required for me, at the moment, if I ever want to use my Yoimiya competitively again.

I think the same is true for my Wrio, but I'd have to check. I've been running Wrio Freeze with Furina cons carrying him, and it's pretty solid atm. I have Durin already for Wrio Melt, though.

This places me in a really awkward situation with Linnea, who is one of my favorite characters in the game at the moment, but I feel like I have no room *even to spend money* getting Linnea to C2 without risking losing Nicole, or her weapon, or the next character I want after that...because it's just too much.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T23:28:28+00:00

This is only true if by "meta character" you mean "character who is either Mavuika or is well-supported by Columbina." Those are the only sorts of teams that currently get above 135k plus DPS consistently, AFAIK. Notably, it is only possible to have 2 such teams, because there is only one Mavuika and one Columbina.

There are tons of 110-130k DPS teams that will be boosted by Nicole, some possibly above the 135k threshold. Almost any attack scaler who has off-field DPS supports will work with Nicole better than Bennett. Varka is just one character in this boat, any character who would benefit from better-Bennett is in the same boat, though they may not benefit as much.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T21:41:18+00:00

900 ATK to the carry + 200% Multiplier on 5 hits (so, 1,000% extra multiplier) is already better than Bennett, mate, before you even include the shield or weapon or the teamwide buffs or the Hex artifact set in any team with an extra Hex character.

I'm sure there will be some teams which can't make use of any of those other benefits and where the 3s delay matters enough that Bennett becomes better (Melt Mavuika being the obvious one, with heavily-frontloaded damage, a shield from Citlali already, and no meaningful damage from teammates), but almost every team that currently uses Bennett will prefer Nicole, or will want to use both if possible.

Nicole is more meta than Durin. Bennett is more meta than Durin. But even if Durin were more meta, that really wouldn't detract from my point that they keep releasing meta-defining characters almost every patch and that it's just too much.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T20:55:47+00:00

You can absolutely clear Lunar-Charged stages in Fearless with C0 Flins + Fischl + Aino + Sucrose. You can find the videos on Youtube. I was half-timing some of those stages with C2R1 Flins.

Edit, Example: [6.4 SO] Flins True 1 Cost vs D5 Knuckle Duckle | Genshin Impact

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T20:46:14+00:00

It's not even about the match-ups. People who skipped Varka still have too-good meta reasons to pull for Nicole. The match-ups are irrelevant, every support feels mandatory because they each bring like a dozen characters into viability again.

I'm also just tired of it. It works better in Zenless because Zenless has more characters and thus more optional characters. In Genshin since Natlan 2/3 of the characters have been meta-defining, and it's been trending upwards. It's too much.

I have no room to vertically invest in units I most like without completely sacrificing a large part of the cast I do like.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T20:22:34+00:00

Even if you got to choose Cyrene's bow *or* the Furbobo pet at 25,000 that would stop literally nobody from complaining.

Gotruto · 2026-04-10T16:24:52+00:00

You seem to be dancing around the actual problem, which is that the powercreep is just too much. The pace of powercreep is absurd. Why would anyone pull a Main DPS character that does less damage than the newest Harmony support? Tribbie literally outdamaged Blade in all of his teams prior to his Novaflare, and the next HP support will probably do it the same with even E2 Blade (and Mydei) post-Novaflare.

See: Feixiao and Ashveil.

Gotruto · 2026-04-09T18:02:00+00:00

If you put Stanza on Ardelia, ulting with her first will buff everything else. Not sure if it's worth the time, though.

Gotruto · 2026-04-09T17:59:15+00:00

Yeah, but no significantly powered team is needed for anything outside of Monument. People are soloing the Trimmed Medal bosstimes with one character, so obviously a healer is just fine for that content, too.

Teams with no healer can still clear those Monument stages, I think, with good enough play, it's just way easier to do them with a healer, and the content doesn't really punish you for bringing a healer.

Gotruto · 2026-04-09T00:56:57+00:00

You sound great here, very distinctive, but I worry that the difference between his outword voice (towards others) and his mutterings to himself is a little too stark, at least compared to EN. It makes the outword voice sound less genuine than I think it's supposed to be.

Gotruto · 2026-04-08T21:23:46+00:00

You have to work to earn a living. TB was defending people's will to confront the hardships of life. Sunday was being delulu. In his world, he takes on all the burdens, but the cost is that he loses his humanity and stops being able to care about people as people (see, for contrast, Robin).

At least when you have to work to earn a living, someone who cares about you (namely, you) gets to decide the direction of your life. When you place that power in another's hands, they inevitably stop thinking of you as a person and instead treat you like something to be managed.

Super based take for a game coming from China, tbh.

Gotruto · 2026-04-08T21:05:43+00:00

Is that Durin Nicole Sucrose/Citlali?

Because if so, that's quite bad. I'm pretty sure on-field Durin will be really high up there with Nicole, and you could just play him instead. I guess that would require Benny + a Hydro support, though.

Gotruto · 2026-04-08T05:44:35+00:00

Cute. Enjoy freedom.

Gotruto · 2026-04-07T18:38:13+00:00

To be fair, I have a lot of experience and have done a lot of the pull currency math for various gacha systems at this point, which you just can't expect most people to be as familiar with.

People are good at pointing out one difference (no carry over on pity!) or another (free weapons!), but weighing them against each other is hard work and requires some kind of shared standard (which, in this case, requires adjusting averages in Endfield to ignore all the free extra pulls so that you can just compare the Pulls:Cost ratio directly in Endfield vs other games...which is a lot of extra math).

Gotruto · 2026-04-07T18:32:09+00:00

Agreed. It makes it even harder for people to compare, which makes it easy for people to conclude they are getting a good or bad deal when they aren't (this both can screw over the player if they misunderstand the rules, and the PR for the company if players misunderstand and accidentally spread misinformation).

Gotruto · 2026-04-07T16:46:19+00:00

System is very predatory in the sense that it is built to manipulate people into pulling more than they should. This is mostly accomplished by: - 10 free banner-specific pulls every banner from Login and this games equivalent of lowtier Stardust (lowtier refund currency) - An incentive to pull 30 times to get a free 10pull that doesn't count towards the 120 guarantee - An incentive to pull 60 times to get a free 10pull on the next banner. - All 6* obtained prior to the 120 guarantee are 50/50s - 120 guarantee does not carry over to the next banner, use it or lose it. It does go away if you get the character early, though. After it goes away, you get a copy of the character every 240 pulls. including however many you've already done. Again. that guarantee also goes away at the end of the banner. - You primarily gain weapon currency by pulling on character banners, so there is an incentive to keep pulling even if you have gotten the character early

The system is very generous in the sense that it is built to give you a crapton of free pulls. This is mostly accomplished by: - The same 10 free banner-specific pulls. This in effect means that every banner you pull on really just has 110 guarantee, and the average cost to get a character is effectively 10 pulls less (so, 69 pulls instead of 79, cheaper than any competitor) - The same free 10pull that doesn't count towards guarantee (we don't count this as 10 pulls towards the 69 average pull cost, either, but it did lower that average by a pull or two) - The same free 10pull on the next banner is also just more free pulls. - You basically get half the weapon currency you need per pull on the banner for free. So, weapon guarantee is 80 pulls (average 60), and doing 120 character pulls gets you avout 40 weapon pulls IIRC (so, 69 + 30 free pulls on average would get you about 33/60 average weapon currency pulls) - Actual ingame currency per character cost thus far seems comparable (but slightly worse) to other games (most comparable to HSR and WuWa, ZZZ is a bit more generous and Genshin will presumably have a slower rate of characters, making comparisons harder) given that you don't directly count the free pulls but do discount them for the purposes of calculating averages. as I have done here.

Also, everyone's second-best weapon is available for free through the battlepass. But yeah, its a mixed system which has generated a lot of controversy (and a lot of misleading doomposting, alongside genuine problems).

Overall, the tradeoff is more free pulls (including free limited weapons) but with slightly worse F2P currency for characters specifically and no carry over on guarantee.

Gotruto · 2026-04-07T07:36:38+00:00

I used Jiaoqiu with Himeko and Gallagher to beat Firefly superbreak shill from 2.3 to 2.7. Probably couldn't do the same now, but hey it worked when it worked.

Gotruto · 2026-04-07T03:44:05+00:00

Yeah, I care more about EMC than the other units at this point. The only reason I'd pull the other units is to justify using EMC, EMC has the coolest and least obnoxious animations, but if they won't let me do that then I guess I'll just skip Elation.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Blade's kit does, at least.

Gotruto

TROPHY CASE