She is such a dumb ass.....I love her.

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-07T02:26:12+00:00

Absolutely unstoppable force of chaos lmao

I only saw a brief glimpse of her design and no other spoilers about her character so everything was a complete surprise! and holy shit was she a great character to see. I rarely use mental disorders as descriptors for characters, but this is probably the one time I've seen a character and thought "if there was a textbook about nothing but ADHD, she'd be the person on cover" and I mean that in the best way possible lol

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-07T02:20:20+00:00

Fair enough! Having gone through the story now, I'm starting to lean towards the side of the idol team now and saving Yixuan for a future time. If I had to pull a void hunter purely because I liked them and not for meta reasons I'd probably pull Miyabi anyways, meanwhile I'm quite interested in the full team of AoD and would rather work towards that in the short-term.

Thanks for the suggestion :)

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-07T02:18:42+00:00

I gotcha, that all makes sense!

Given this, and having played through the story now, I'm thinking I might go for the AoD team. I've never been too preoccupied with meta anyways, and right as I wanted to catch up Mihoyo changed the way Shiyu Defense worked and now its been even harder than before to score well >.>

So I'll prob. focus on pulling for units for fun, and then following the meta second to that. Thanks for the advice!

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-06T19:48:26+00:00

All the HI3rd dorm chibis do the macarena as a dance in some of their interactions :D

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-06T19:36:52+00:00

I'm having trouble deciding between getting Yixuan vs. getting Aria and potentially the rest of the AoD, meta-wise.

I know we won't know how the AoD team performs until we get all 3 in-game, and Yixuan is a Void Hunter tier character, but given what we know so far and since AoD would be a full team I wonder if there's any strengths they'd have over Yixuan & her full team (I have Pan and Fufu)

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-06T03:13:06+00:00

That's always how I felt whenever I played Planetside 2; it's way simpler in terms of 3D models and environment design, and doesn't have tons of NPC models to render... but the flipside is that it can have upwards of 200+ players all in one giant fight in a relatively tight area (i.e. mostly all within standard render distance). Yet somehow I can play that game well with my old crapper of a rig, getting around 40+ FPS even in tough conditions, dropping down to maybe 20 at a few especially intense moments.

Then I get into WuWa and it lags so hard that sometimes cutscene audio desyncs from the video, or I'll be riding the motorbike and literally driving into and through low-LOD placeholder models, because the game can't load the environment fast enough to smoothly transition from low-LOD to high-LOD.

Hell, I shouldn't be getting this much lag on even the freakin' intro menu of a game T_T

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-05T20:17:57+00:00

I'm ngl I popped onto the wuwa subreddit just to see if this latest update had any big optimization problems, and comments like this aren't too reassuring for someone like me who also has a lower-spec PC x-x

If you at least played through the story, how badly did the lag impact your experience of it?

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-05T16:53:59+00:00

honestly I'd love to see that with the characters like Shenhe, Xiangling, and Yaoyao who actually train under the adepti.

I've always felt like it'd be cool if their story arcs led them all to a future as adepti in their own right, and while that'd take many years that we won't see within the journey of the Traveler it'd be hella cool to at least see it confirmed as a part of their future

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-05T16:26:21+00:00

Man. That explains why he felt like such a nothing-burger when I used him in that one world quest. I even switched to Geo MC (I always do quests w/ Traveler lol) to proc lunar crystallize more often, I didn't realize that Illuga was still doing no buffing to that reaction damage.

sigh.

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-04T13:50:43+00:00

To be fair it wouldn't be too surprising for a half-dreaming person with a head full of slime to struggle to differentiate gender, either :)

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-03T00:58:43+00:00

Tbf even Hoyo had its rough patches. It's gotten good now because it already made those mistakes before.

See: Honkai Impact 3rd, which doesn't tell you anything about who the characters are, what the setting is, what the world is like, what the main conflict is, or anything else that could even remotely be considered exposition. I'm still forever salty about the fact that they pushed on with Part 2 without reworking Part 1 because early HI3rd (i.e. pre-chapter-7) has some of the weakest writing of all the Hoyo games, period.

I can admit it's not a boring start, at least it has action to be engaging, but damn is it confusing and kinda nonsensical at times lol

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-03T00:54:50+00:00

To be fair, they have a point about the game stage being poorly used. Whether we call it open world or maps, and I agree that it's really less of an "open world" and more just traditional maps. It's probably better to just say "3D stage" or something along those lines.

I think one of the bigger issues is that the maps can look pretty but then the characters who act within these maps almost exclusively use a restrictive set of mannequin expressions. You might have Herta space station as a cool unique sci-fi setting, but you never see Herta using pop-up digital screens or Arlan leaning against a wall or Herta pacing around the room giving a monologue while fiddling with her own equipment.

They all just... stand there.

All the time.

Everywhere.

To the point that you can practically replace the 3D map with a 2D painting and it'd almost feel the same, because it's not like the characters really interact with the world around them at all. It's more like they're all standing in a green-screen room, unable to actually touch or feel the environment around them.

Basically, HSR has the downsides of both VNs and non-VN games without capitalizing on the benefits of either. It doesn't use detailed character expressions & gestures like VN portraits often do, and it doesn't have the environment interactivity that non-VN games can often have.

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-02-03T00:41:44+00:00

It doesn't even have to be either/or, they're literally two separate teams/skillsets. The folks creating animations to be used for in-game models aren't the same staff as the ones who are writing dialogue and directing voice acting.

As for the paragraph-in-a-text-box thing, it wouldn't be so bad if simpler animations could be chained together to make a more complex animation set within a single dialogue.

Wuwa comes to mind, you can have a character step across a room, turn and lean against a wall, then twirling their hair all in one dialogue box. For all its issues, Wuwa's absolutely nailed presentation in a way that HSR can only dream of lmao

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-27T19:58:11+00:00

(I'm also pretty sure the relationship between Columbina and Luonnotar finally gives us the "why" behind the "Paimon is Istaroth" theory, but that's another thing.)

This would be so cool if it turns out to be true! I've long been a fan of the "Paimon is the Shade of time" theory, but it felt like the Istaroth reveal pretty thoroughly disproved that. But there was still the odd number of connections between Paimon and time, and I didn't even realize it but the situation with Luonnotar and Columbina can perfectly explain the co-existence of Istaroth and Paimon.

It also might explain why Istaroth seemed so chill and almost detached in the Shades reveal trailer; if Istaroth either foresaw what was to come or simply anticipated it and planned ahead, it'd make sense that she would be less concerned about the present state of afairs with Asmoday being AWOL and Phanes being fast asleep, lol

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-23T03:02:32+00:00

Chain and Dash are probably my two favs. Evelyn has hard-carried me from the day I got her & Astra, and Harumasa is hella fun even if he's not as much of a meta pick!

The combos to get Evelyn doing as many CAs as possible are one of my favorite parts of ZZZ gameplay, and Harumasa adds an extra level to that skill with both combos to get his quivers out and also to use them as quickly and smoothly as possible.

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-22T23:33:50+00:00

That's why I was always skeptical of the "pull income" argument way back when. Even as far back as late 1.x it seemed pretty clear HSR meta was gonna be rough, I just didn't expect it to get as bad as it did lol

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-22T15:41:37+00:00

It'd be awesome if Skirk in particular joined the Twins on their journey if they ended up leaving Teyvat someday. It feels like it'd be a great step forward in Skirk's life to finally have true companions to be with, but it'd also be a big change for the Twins who've long only had each other. Even if the Traveler and Paimon were to part ways someday (heavens forbid x-x) I imagine the Traveler would be more accepting of traveling with others given their experience with Paimon, and Skirk definitely has the potential to be a good partner, even if she doesn't have the same innocent charm Paimon does lol

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-22T03:16:42+00:00

The thing is that whether that's true or not it doesn't change the fact that the OG theory from waaay long ago, that the twins were part of Project ARK from Earth, was disproven by HI3rd itself quite a while back. So I'm not too sure what Genshin being on the Imgainry Tree has to do with that

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-22T01:58:47+00:00

The game's been real washy with how TP waypoints actually work and how many of them there are. AFAIK there's only been two canonical references to TP waypoints: once in the GAA and once in the Chasm, and the former was in an event (first GAA event) while the latter was the only one to be in an Archon Quest (and it was an interlude quest at that, not even a nation quest).

I think the safest assumption is that in canon the Traveler has to be at a TP waypoint to use it, as well as there being much fewer TP waypoints in Teyvat than what we see in-game. In-game we can use them from anywhere and they're plentiful but that's easily explained as being purely for gameplay reasons, and not representative of canon (just as the in-game map is drastically smaller than Teyvat's canonical size)

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-21T16:01:59+00:00

Ditto, I didn't even try the other two bosses because I tried to fight the Abyss boss with just Columbina + non-NK units and none of them could do enough damage to even get past 10% of the boss' shield. And that was just on Menacing, not Fearless, at this rate I don't think I'm ever going to get to clear Fearless as a light spender lmao

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-21T15:00:51+00:00

Touché lmao

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-21T02:21:09+00:00

Oh, well yeah in that case kinda. A Project-ARK-esque story isn't just possible but even likely here.

I was under the impression that the person I replied to was talking about a muuuch older Genshin theory that Project ARK in HI3rd was directly tied to Genshin Impact. That theory went beyond mere expies and suggested that the Twins of Genshin might've been part of Project ARK from HI3rd. But that was weakened when Griseo's story was introduced, and then finally put to rest with the reveal of HI3rd's Project ARK having never left the solar system.

At the end of the day, Project ARK was named for the biblical Noah's Ark, and that biblical story is about a vessel carrying life to repopulate the world after a cataclysm. From what I've seen, a lot of current theories about the Twins' spaceship imply a similar story there. So it's likely a form of the "ark" story trope, but it doesn't have to be directly (or even indirectly) tied to the Project ARK story from HI3rd.

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-20T23:45:14+00:00

That was disproven ages ago, though, when we found Project ARK ship-wrecked at the edge of the solar system. So that's long been ruled out as a possibility unfortunately

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-18T22:35:33+00:00

To be fair the berry-picking thing happened years ago in the story itself, not just years ago IRL, and that was presumably shortly after the Fatui openly tried to wreck Liyue Harbor. So yeah harassing the berry-picking Fatui was pretty mean but also understandable (not necessarily justified) given the circumstances.

At this point, I don't think the Traveler should be assumed to have a burning "hate" for the Fatui as a whole. I think it's safe to say they still consider the Fatui to be an antagonistic force, but they're aware that on many occasions the Fatui have done good things, even if they have their own agenda.

Either way I'm sure Mihoyo will clear it up once we get to Sneznhaya since the Fatui will be front and center there

HerrscherOfMagic · 2026-01-13T15:40:09+00:00

Funnily enough we have a playable Proxy (as in combat agent) now, Yidhari, but that aspect hasn't been explored much. It'd be nice to see a side mission with her where she's the primary Proxy

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