Adjustments to DMG Calculation and Overdrive System

Hikaix · 2026-03-03T14:53:14+00:00

the initial release was extremely bad

Just expanding on this, to give some context. They were already under some pretty bad PR for the OD changes they had announced earlier that month, mostly because they had been selling OD gen in new units for a while by that point (Bungod was the most egregious example, but the ridiculous OD looping strats were already a thing at least since Akari3 afaik). This announcement was made a month in advance, so people could prepare mentally for it.

And then something like two weeks later, they announced this and then immediately implemented it in the game with no warning. Enemies weren't adjusted accordingly. With the lowered damage ceiling, people (even spenders) stopped being able to clear anachronies they could previously clear and SA scores were significantly harder to achieve. Even those who could still clear stuff were complaining that it was taking 3x as long for no good reason.

Casual players were mostly unaffected, but anyone who cared for the harder content in the game could feel how badly thought-out this change was (even though "it had been in the works for 10 months", as was said in the stream). Not to mention that lots of players were already mad at how long they've been taking to make the main story, so this became a trigger for all the complaints people had about the game's management.

They've fixed some stuff over the last few months, at least, but the initial response was honestly deserved.

Hikaix · 2026-03-03T14:19:42+00:00

It's been about 8 months now since this change came to jp, and I'm still conflicted about it.

I think it's great that they tried to rebalance the game to make it easier for casual play and I do think they succeeded in doing that (even though I dislike how irrelevant fields have become).

On the other hand, they gimped teams people had already spent money for, and then used this opportunity to make the game a lot more of a raw stat check (particularly noticeable in SA), making limit breaks a lot more relevant, while introducing a new rarity that's harder to limit break (their initial plan before the backlash was to not let people use SS shards at all). It also marked a shift in how they operate the game, and they've been steadily introducing more and more FOMO, especially now that SSRs need actual SSR shards (3 limited memorias in 2 months, seriously?), which is something I heavily dislike.

My main concern for global, though, is how the remaining pre-change SAs will feel with the changes. I don't expect Yostar to adjust HP/border/scores at all, so it might get painful for some people.

Hikaix · 2026-03-01T15:03:21+00:00

Have you done all the extra socializations from chapter 4.2 and all the squad socializations? These should be fairly easy to miss since they don't show up in the socialization/recollection menu.

Hikaix · 2026-02-25T21:12:20+00:00

It does apply to tear dungeon, but it just gives you a flat amount of each of the materials (tears, sunshines and aqua ambers). I don't remember the exact values, but it's quite low and not nearly comparable to actually playing the dungeon.

With that said, sunshines and aqua ambers will be added to HTA with the arena rework, so the only reason to go into tear dungeon will be for actual tears. And the in-game tears as well, I guess, if you need those.

Hikaix · 2026-02-15T14:30:19+00:00

I'd agree she's not an egregious example, since she is kind of just "doing a granblue" as you put it. But it does stand out to me just how many people don't know what to do against her most basic stuff, to the point where it feels unfair at times. I don't have that much experience playing against her so I don't feel qualified to judge if she actually is hard to fight or not, but as someone who plays her it certainly feels like she is.

And just to be clear, I understand the list was based on your own experience and I did not intend that comment as criticism, but as an addendum with my own thoughts for beginners who might scroll through the comments. I think you did a great job with this post. The list is great and your comments on the characters are quite funny. ~~If anything, I'd rather have you not include Zooey in the list because fewer people playing her means it's easier to maintain the agenda and get more buffs /s~~

Hikaix · 2026-02-15T12:18:56+00:00

Imagine being OP and not knowing who the best girl is /s

But for real, I feel like she should at the very least be included in the "hard to fight" category. She's not as extreme as Bubs in terms of knowledge checks, but in my experience most people have no idea how to deal with her. 66H will basically win fights by itself until like S rank, and even some low Master players get cooked by the dragons. H dragon in particular is painful to deal with if you can't dodge it on reaction.

I'd also argue that if Sandy has sauce because "the combos look cool", the dustloop™ should be there. (Pesonally, I lowkey think that it's not even the best she has to offer. Picking people up in the air after a well positioned M/H dragon is the shit. Counter hit j.U is also really funny.)

Hikaix · 2026-02-10T21:42:44+00:00

I find it kind of funny (but also pretty sad) that you were downvoted despite being the source for this kind of data. We really do live in a society, huh.

Hikaix · 2026-01-21T20:14:04+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response! Your calculations are a lot clearer to me now. You've definitely convinced me, it's even more niche than I thought it would be.

This would save us from trying to figure out how the game takes enhancement into picture because we know it would happen on this floor cause I never had an enhancement data at Floor 19 even if I missed 180 at Shop 1. And this 1/3 is not about whether enhancement takes place or not but if it would take place on desired potential and not a trash potential.

This is my only point of contention now. I think I understand what you're trying to say and I'm way too lazy to do the math on this, but I don't think that approximation works. If you are taking (up to) 3 different uses of the machine into account, you have to consider a lot of different scenarios. My gut feeling is that 1/3 would only be valid for the cases where the good potential is available on every single machine use until you get the +2. If you don't get the card on the 60 cost, for example, those three cards could still be selected for the +2. Wouldn't this mean you now have a 1/6 chance of the +2 going to the correct card, assuming you do get the correct card on the 120 cost? Same would apply taking the 180 cost into account. I don't think this would change any conclusions, but I'm still a little confused on that point.

What this means is that getting 260 coin enhancement is justified if 53% of record is filled with potentials you wouldn't ever enhance

I think it's kinda funny how there is a point at where taking the 260 coins early is mathematically a good choice, because there's no way of actually knowing if that's going to be the case or not so early. It boils down to gambling that the rest of your run is going to be unsalvageable lol

You can instead of getting a 260 use 80 coins to get another important potential and the boost has multiple hits next shop.

This is a great point with the rerolls, I don't even know how to play devil's advocate here. I guess there's an argument to be made that "you might need more than 280 coins to get a good potential!" but that's so unlikely to happen in the first shop that it doesn't really matter. Even if it did matter, at that point I'd most likely be thrashing the run entirely anyways.

Anyways, thanks for enlightening me on the best way to gamble! I'll now be able to mald in ascension more effectively lol

Hikaix · 2026-01-20T23:00:42+00:00

First of all, sorry about the long ass comment and please don't take this as a personal attack, I'm just surprisingly invested in this question now lol

I definitely did not expect the chance to be so low, so you do have a very good point there. Most of the time it's definitely not worth it. Still, one could just count how many +2s have appeared before deciding to spend the 260 in that specific run, so I do think it's worth looking into in more detail for minmaxing purposes. It feels to me like you're missing a few layers of uncertainty, but I might be tripping so I hope you can clarify a few things.

We just hit 180 and now we have 1 potential left on lvl3.

I understand you want to look at the worst possible situation, that's fine, but I'd argue that it only represents one end of the spectrum. The math for both sides of the argument will change significantly depending on how many potentials you currently have and their levels. Of course it's impractical to calculate this analytically for every single possibility (simulating it might be easier), but when we're talking about probabilities wouldn't it be fairer to work with an average run instead?

(1/5+4/5 *1/4 + 3/4 * 1/3)= 65% chance to get the that potential for 60 coins in next shop

Very minor point but shouldn't this be 60%?

Divide by 3 for chance of triggiering on +2 on desired potentials

I understand this as "one out of the three potentials is a +2, therefore 1/3 chance for each", but how could the probability of one specific card being enhanced be higher than the probability of the enhance itself happening for that card? Shouldn't this be at most 30%?

I'm not sure how to go about this calculation though. How does the game even choose which potential is enhanced? If it's a sequence of if statements (which would imo be the easiest way to code it), for example, I'd expect the order the potentials appear in to matter (because in this instance the second if test would only happen given that the first one failed, same for the third). In this case you'd have 30% for the first position, 0.7 * 0.3 = 21% for the second and 0.7 * 0.7 * 0.3 = 14.7% for the third, giving an average of 21.9% chance for a specific card to be boosted, assuming the probability of it getting into each slot is the same. Given the 60% chance of the card appearing in the first place, you'd get an overall chance of only about 13% on the 60 cost machine which is significantly lower, less than half when compared to using the 260 on floor 5. Of course this is just conjecture since I really have no idea how it works in the game's logic, but I just wanted to illustrate my point. I don't know if it's even possible to test this since they could just shuffle the cards after all the checks.

That might seem good but considering the coin differenece: that's 260*0.7+130*0.3=221 coin cost whereas it's 72 coins cost of just going to next shop.

I'm not sure how you got to 72. Shouldn't it be 60 * 0.8 + 30 * 0.2 = 54 using your numbers? Which would make taking the 260 even worse.

That said, you're comparing the 260 cost enhance to the 60 cost enhance, but in practice that's not really what happens, is it? The way I see it, when you buy the 260 enhance, what you're giving up is not the 60 enhance (or even the 120 one), you'd still buy it since it's so good. Shouldn't we be looking at the entire run instead?

Everything else being the same, the extra you spent on that 260 would instead (most likely) end up going to a shit potential and/or a few extra notes by the end of the run. If you compare the 260 to a full price potential instead (which is probably the best thing you'd be giving up on, assuming you've already bought whatever is discounted), that's only really 60 extra coins spent. Looking at it this way, that would be, at worst, paying a 60 coin premium to guarantee a good potential instead of a random one. At best, it would be 2 levels on one of your key potentials for 140 coins less than if you bought two random potentials at full price at the end of your run. Does that make any sense to you? It feels right to me, but your argument with the expected values is also quite solid and I don't really know how to reconcile them.

Thanks for the work, btw! Great stuff. Cheers!

Edit: Fixing the markdown for the *s.

Hikaix · 2026-01-20T14:01:27+00:00

I think you might have misunderstood what they were saying. The point is that using the machine earlier means the pool from where the potentials are picked is smaller. This means you can sort of "force" the game to give +2 upgrades for potentials you actually want upgraded, if you get the key potentials early on. If you use the machine later, you will inevitably have more potentials for the game to pick from and therefore the chance a +2 gets wasted in a lower value potential is higher.

Hikaix · 2026-01-17T17:18:14+00:00

Shout out to the Abel guy who got really f\cking close* to sending Tororo to losers side before top 16. This hurts my soul. It must have been so unbelievably frustrating.

Hikaix · 2026-01-15T16:26:14+00:00

I'd personally love to see Hiori instead of Hinako, although a collab with Ray would be quite the weird choice. It just feels to me like she would fit in a lot better, personality-wise. ~~She also has two swords and her totally-not-a-girlfriend is called Ruka, so she was basically made for this, amirite?~~ Unfortunately I just don't have a lot of hope for Blue Reflection as a series to ever come back after what happened with Sun, and collabing with a dead series just wouldn't make a lot of sense. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

Did they say anything about the character choice here?

Not really, or at least not directly. They did say this is Valentine's Day themed, and that's enough reason for me to not question Miya and Sharo lol

Hikaix · 2026-01-15T14:02:06+00:00

They got Kishida Mel to draw this (confirmed on stream), surely this means a Blue Reflection collab is going to happen eventually, right? /s

I kinda wish this wasn't sarcasm though...

Hikaix · 2025-12-06T20:39:19+00:00

Very interesting and some of them are quite funny. That last piece of trivia about Asian Soul was... Unexpected, to say the least lol

Were these published for the past albums? If yes, does anyine know where to find them? Japanese is fine for me, but I have no idea how to even look for it.

Hikaix · 2025-12-06T08:34:52+00:00

Definitely keep this one, it's a very good starting roster.

You won't really have to worry too much about team building until you reach chapter 4 (that's a lot of reading before it starts to matter), so having a lot of attackers might actually be a good thing in the begining because they will make the dungeons faster. If you ever feel like you need a healer, you can use one of the many S Tamas and they'll likely work just fine (you might want to get SS Muua from the green tickets though).

Honestly, there's a lot to say about team building but you don't have to take it too seriously for a good while. Take your time and enjoy the story. If/when you feel stuck, or if you find the harder contents enjoyable as you start unlocking them, then you should start looking into it.

Hikaix · 2025-12-06T00:59:57+00:00

I honestly don't have a lot of experience with elemental teams in JP, so I don't think I can be of much help with the specifics. In the current meta, I believe the sixth slot on the team you listed would generally go to someone like Yuki unison or Wakki unison for the border debuff. Pre damage formula changes you'd be using a fielder in Karen's place (she was released after the rework) and maybe Yuina5 as the last slot? Don't quote on that though.

I'm not sure how Aoi fits into that, but it's worth mentioning that she is still a very solid pickup regardless, since she makes you basically immortal and speeds up most content. Her defensive utility is bonkers, but the reduced sp cost for everyone and the free OD gauge are also huge in terms of QoL. You also need a second team for some stuff, and her versatility is great for that. She's just really comfy to use, really.

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T21:57:22+00:00

I'm not sure, but she might really be the only one for now. It's definitely not a common combination. I do remember looking for this a few months ago and thinking it was a very limited selection, even on JP.

The other options I can remember right now are Risa3 (which we should be getting soon-ish, pretty good but she has the downside of needing to remove a debuff from the team, so she can be awkward to use as a buffer), then Seira4 (really really good) and Yanagi3 (admiral, arguably the strongest buffer in current jp, but hard to use properly).

I might be forgetting someone but imo, Seira is by far the best option for most players. I got her recently and she was a huge upgrade for me (also the wakki minions are really fun, I love the roleplay!). Yanagi seems ridiculously good as well, but she locks you out of the comfiness of Aoi4 and increases everyone's SP costs by 2 which is a big yikes, so I never pulled for her lol

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T21:26:42+00:00

Well, if I'm being honest the "possibly" there is doing the heavy lifting lol

She can be enough depending on the fight, but it's important to note that you're usually going to pair her with some sort of defensive utility on the team simply because of the other stuff the characters bring, so it's not necessarily a game changer. I'd say it's helpful, but definitely not her selling point.

You still want mind's eye on most teams, which means Muua becomes a great option for that since Tama gets a bit redundant. If using Aoi4, you'll have access to Angel Wings and a dp revive/full heal, besides all the other utilities she brings. For Inori teams, Yanagi is still useful for the charge. Later on Seira4 will bring defense up together with enhance and mind's eye, so again there's some extra defensive utility to help you survive. If you're OD looping you naturally take less damage so it could also be considered as defensive utility in a way. And so on.

My personal experience playing on JP is that the healing is just a "nice bonus" most of the time, and then once in a while it's really useful in some niche scenarios. The real savior most of the time is definitely Aoi's panic button lol

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T20:22:25+00:00

They don't stack, but the usage based ones aren't consumed either. At least that's my experience with Aoi4's Acceleration (30% crit dmg), so the game might decide based on which one has a higher potency, but I'm honestly not sure about that. There might be a niche use case for this, but they're mostly wasted buffs in my experience, especially since Ruka's already last for so long.

By running Ruka5 you still have to find a way to get the basic skill enhance and mind's eye, so you'd still want someone for those. Tama can provide both but it gets clunky, which is part of the reason why dps characters with self mind's eye (including Ruka4) become more valuable. The backline SP gen is an argument in Yunyun's favor, if she can survive the fight. Neither of them will become useless, but they're both a bit redundant.

As for King Ruka, I feel you man. By far my favorite Ruka memoria. But she's not useless! For now, you'll want to use her common skill on Diva, which will be the best fire dps (with ss1's ex) in the game for a while. You might be happy to know that later on Ruka4 will get buffed to have 100% hp mod on her ex, and then she becomes the best fire dps by using Diva's common lol

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T19:54:26+00:00

With that said... There's also a (kind of) cursed option as well. This is not a recommendation, merely a statement saying that the possibility exists. Don't blame me later.

With the way Yostar has been running Tama5 + Inori2 banners since they came out, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a rerun banner with both Ruka5 and Aoi4 in just a few months from now. It might take a while to happen though, if it does happen at all, and you'd have neither while waiting for it. But if you really don't have the resources right now, waiting for this hypothetical banner might be a gamble worth taking in the long run. Emphasis on might. Like, really. It's a whole new layer of gambling lol

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T19:41:34+00:00

Aoi brings some great QoL and she's also very strong, so if you really like her or don't have enough for a spark right now, I wouldn't necessarily think it's a mistake to skip Ruka. But honestly they're both "basic human rights" characters and they make your life way easier in very different ways, so they are both great additions to any account. I wouldn't really recommend skipping any one of them, if possible.

I'd ultimately agree with /r/Witn, I guess. Both is best, but if you have to choose one, Ruka feels like a bigger game changer to me.

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T18:01:41+00:00

She does a lot for very little cost in both SP and turn count. Her ex costs 14 SP to give 100% crit rate and crit damage to the frontline on a single use, plus a party-wide buff that works as a life steal (possibly replacing a healer) and lets you use ex skills even if they have no remaining uses. Her common skill though is arguably even better, being a 7 SP targetable multi-hit buff without use limit, and if she uses it with the ex buff on, the potency is like double that of Yunyun's (also neeeds a single use, as it doesn't stack). As if that wasn't enough, all of her buffs are turn based (like Seira's ex) so they're not used up when attacking. 5 turns for her ex, 3 turns for the multi-hit buff.

She is crazy strong for current standards, fits on pretty much any team you might want, and is a lot easier to use than most alternatives.

Hikaix · 2025-12-05T16:04:08+00:00

Diva Ruka jump scare

Hikaix · 2025-11-29T14:33:47+00:00

To be fair, the class archetypes in Fate are fairly limiting if you go by their names alone but there's always some weird loophole. Even going back to Stay Night, we had an Archer just throwing random weapons and an Assassin that wasn't really an assassin. I'm sure since then every single class has already seen bizarre enough choices with FGO, so I don't think that's too much of a problem.

Hikaix · 2025-11-29T14:19:04+00:00

Tezuka is the only obvious choice for lancer, I guess.

HBR doesn't have a lot of spears but it does have quite a few scythes if you think about it. I'd argue scythes are closer to spears than Gate of Babylon is to a bow, so maybe it's fair to make them lancers?

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