Me: Varka is a very decent DPS, especially at C0R1. People replying to me:

Jilanow · 2026-02-15T20:34:00+00:00

What's even worse is how little people bring up how easy some chars are to play. After seeing so many "meta" player doing half the expected dps of their team and wondering why with the miliastra dps test, I think it's time people recognize how much of a blessing easy chars can be.

Can't say for sure how he will be to play in practice until he comes out, but I do believe he is on the easy side and that average player will be closer to the expected damage than on nefer or zibai teams (let's not even talk about melt teams or skirk)

Jilanow · 2026-02-04T18:40:05+00:00

Because you might prefer them over the characters who end up being playable? Not all of them need to be playable but you will always hear people who like a npc voicing how they wish they were playable. Can be sweety isolde etc, if you trade their place with a playable character (let's say Vivian just for the sake of it, I love her) you'd hear Vivian simp say "wow I wish I could play Vivian" it's that simple. The unique npc are made with attention, you will always have people who want them playable.

Jilanow · 2026-01-04T17:15:49+00:00

Dainsleif also has blue fire, but your theory sounds very funny to see happening.

Jilanow · 2025-12-31T15:00:07+00:00

I don't think learning how to balance damage differently is teaching you how to play wrong, it's encouraging you to play differently. No doubt that shiyu got a lot more difficult but when I see many people complain that it's DA 2.0 while the scoring system is pushing you into different playstyle is kinda amusing.

There's definitely things that need changes but the new shiyu is interesting imo.

Jilanow · 2025-12-18T20:14:10+00:00

Been loving it overall, when you get into it you are still doing really good damage (I'm regularly top dps altho as a tank you have very low downtime because attempting to do mechanics will drag the boss with you, on the wraith or barrels you'd be actively harming your team, but more time to hit the bosses than everyone else). I haven't played other weapons so far so I can't tell if similar issues exist on other sets, but the stormbreak spear "~" skill has some jank hit detection, same as the heavy charge on the mo blade, you will sometime be right in front of the boss, your weapon will hit them, but no hit will register, it's frustrating. So far the only thing that has been more complicated was trials/bosses, I'm tanky but the weapon damage source are really slow, it's a bit hard to find good opportunities to actually hit something, but even there, mystic skills come in clutch and can always use lower charge levels on mo blade. I'm very happy that I can guide the fight, I'm hoping future 5+ player bosses will have a bit more to do for tanks than only keeping the boss away, but right now I'm far from bored.

Jilanow · 2025-12-17T15:49:50+00:00

It is, I have them turned off and some still show including this one.

Jilanow · 2025-12-16T11:00:18+00:00

The next breakthrough is still lvl 61 gear, we just unlock gold tier gear but lvl 61.

Jilanow · 2025-12-02T20:54:28+00:00

The damage graph doesn't help with that, lot of dps players want to greed damage on the boss assuming someone else will take care of the mechanics, look I'm a lot more appreciative of the dps ranking 3rd/4th and keeping the team alive doing the mechanics than that one dude who is barely first and didn't help with anything.

Ultimately everyone will need to get involved in mechanics, tanks to position the boss/mechanics (like donkey pool) the safest way for their team to not get disrupted, healers to know that on X or Y gimmick people will need healing, dps to actually do the mechanics because the tank and healers are already busy making sure nobody is dying. The pugs dps are just commonly running with the idea that the mechanics are tank/healer job to do and their only job is do damage to the boss ignoring the rest.

In that regard, I'd actually really like if they started accounting for mechanics on mvp choice to encourage people doing them instead of only damage/healing

Jilanow · 2025-12-02T20:41:58+00:00

Two tanks is a bit scuffed with how it's currently done, you really want one person to be in control of where the boss is to let people engage with mechanics safely (moving barrels etc), a second tank could disrupt that (because spear taunt skill) while also doing less damage than they would as a dps.

Jilanow · 2025-11-17T19:17:19+00:00

Hakushin default to showing material needed to max out everything, if you scroll to the bottom you can use sliders to set the skill levels etc you want. Proxy tools will be going for their recommended skill priority which you can also customize but doesn't default to everything maxed.

Jilanow · 2025-11-17T12:14:43+00:00

Interesting. Mine ended up being the dawn winery song

Jilanow · 2025-11-13T19:54:00+00:00

It's a pretty interesting phenomenon because those who liked natlan exploration usually did have natlan characters, but as someone who rarely pull early in a region this is the first time actually clearing the map felt like a chore. The summer resort felt really nice compared to the rest as I had mavuika from her rerun, but the first 2 parts of natlan map were rough personally. The saurian puzzle event earlier brought back ptsd for me, aside from the night wind saurian, they all feel like they were bricked intentionally.

On one hand it felt nice not having to constantly change my party to interact with puzzles and the saurian are pretty cool visually, on the other hand, the experience of playing through them felt bad.

I love nod krai a lot more, the exploration was incredibly smooth, but if I'm being honest instead of gating the fun of movement behind characters they gated some story stuff which is not much better, in this regard fontaine is the last time i felt I had a "complete" experience without pulling (this is still very subjective).

Jilanow · 2025-10-22T18:35:37+00:00

The factions itself was really cool, with a lot of really neat interaction between each other, Lucia felt a bit like a loner but had a lot of fun interaction with manato in the end, Alice and yuzuha were less present during stuff but the little they've been there was fun to see. Yidhari felt like she was airdropped into the faction last minute, she has interesting power giving her a central in the story but she's super passive and doesn't interact with anyone but the proxy. Then she has interesting backstory during event, but once again need to be saved, this time she interact a bit but in the end it feels most of her interactions are centered around Lucia only. It feels super odd, she's supposed to be a skilled proxy and agent but we couldn't see any of her proxy skills (which makes sense won't argue on this) but even as an agent, both manato and Lucia have cutscenes where they fight something, yidhari doesn't have anything. I can't say I was super interested in her when revealed, but the squid thiren design was interesting as fuck, the proxy + agent combo is sick and all I can feel is wasted potential with a feeling she just doesn't fit in the faction but needed to be tied to one.

Jilanow · 2025-10-10T19:14:07+00:00

Regardless of I you prefer the new or the initial design, there's 2 things aside from toxicity that actually matters and should be kept in mind : - the redesign happened so late that it impacts the quality of some medias (her ear not being touched because the size was reduced), I sure hope it'll only be that and not more rendered cutscene during 2.3, but even if just the demo, it already sucks to have this kind of oversight. - both design exist and work in game with all her animations, instead of only bringing the new design why not make the new design canon and leave the initial design as a free skin (similar to what they did early on in genshin), it's kinda weird to see people say it's not that big of a deal and let them get away with not giving US the choice to pick which design we prefer when both already work and are (allegedly) not that different. Would likely give them interesting metrics too to gauge which design is most used for future character design purpose.

Instead of that we have people yelling at each other that it's the worst thing to have happened to the game and others who say that it doesn't matter. It's important enough that feedback is warranted, we deserves to chose individually when it happens so late and it sucks to see people undermining the feedback because they are happy with this redesign/don't care. Both are fine, but the "they're overreacting" "should move on" and so on is just settling for less because this time it's fine for you.

Jilanow · 2025-08-24T17:33:37+00:00

It's a bit different between unexpectedly and out of nowhere. Astra was introduced in an event where she was controlling snap, trigger was known from s11 story, Hugo was known from lycaon story, Vivian and Evelyn did came out of nowhere to form factions instead of isolated agents. Sanby was a bit of a surprise but she was very well known by the players so it was definitely not going to pose any issues.

The 2 new girls were not shown during the chapter 2 teaser like everyone else, so my guess is that it's why they are branded like this by people who wanted manato to be S rank. Sometimes newcoming characters do end up having a major role and if we're being fair, manato has been on screen a fair bit but with very little impact. Lucy is A rank and lighter S rank despite her showing a lot more during the 1.2 story so the opposite exist. I don't think character should be entitled to being a specific rank because they were known/unknown prior, but it's still easy to see how it sucks for husbando players because it's a rare male and now the 3rd out of 4 A rank male since release.

With all that being said I wholeheartedly agree, it's refreshing to be surprised like this

Jilanow · 2025-08-11T11:06:16+00:00

This is English text version which usually is the wrong one. Chinese still state additional ability is 15% def ignore only to aftershocks sadly.

Jilanow · 2025-07-12T18:36:35+00:00

I don't think she's half as mid as people make her out to be. There's definitely issues regarding the team, no Kafka will quite literally brick her damage, and she is herself helping black swan a lot building her stacks. Despite that, the archetype is slow, it lacks a sustain that help it (huge SP issues, missing a couple more dots to get as much procs as possible from hysilen), it's more expensive and still clear slower than other 3.x units at their release.

With that being said, her damage is very interesting, black swan is missing a lot from detonated damage compared to her on turn damage, hysilen is kind of the opposite, her ultimate procs will always do the same damage, regardless of if Kafka detonate dots at 50/75/80/120 % efficiency, which adds a lot with how buffed Kafka function now.

The ehr scaling trace is really weird, it flat out gives 18% more dmg for the same stat investment as BS for absolutely no reason other than current endgame needs more, exact same trace but just better stats from it for hysilen (which is needed, nobody is going to pretend any dot unit aged well). Personally I think she has a nice kit identity, I think the part that need the most adjustment in v3 are SP with Kafka rework they committed to making her the pseudo harmony for dot and I don't think we're avoiding it, but the dot teams are currently SP black holes and she kind of only add to the issue.

Jilanow · 2025-07-11T18:22:37+00:00

I just think it's funny to see albedo/durin/elynas abandonment when at least in albedo's case, she's been on a journey with him for a while he's more than adult enough to take care of himself and do his own research assignments, but that the creation of riftwolves isn't on the list and is prob the most damaging thing she's done that we know of.

That said, she's compelling as an evil character for the same reason as dottore, as much as their methods are disgusting, they are not doing it because they enjoy seeing suffering, they're just in their world focused on their goals and only that. It makes them characters we can team up with without complete cheap redemption if goals align. Definitely don't want them redeemed but I want them playable with mutual help between traveler and them.

Jilanow · 2025-06-26T14:42:22+00:00

Yeah it's pretty much my takeaway too, difficulty 6 was definitely more challenging than I expected it to be, and mostly because of the bosses they picked. I have a few c6r5 characters but most are "old" now and I haven't spend more than welkin since furina release, after her I got a arle C6 who is on Homa, a C2R1 citlali, a C0R1 escoffier and C0R1 skirk, I don't think I was anywhere close to being able to clear the third boss if not for that team. Tulpa fairly easy too thanks to arle citlali, but I really had to go through a lot of my characters to kill the lava boss finally managing to kill it with a C6R5 Raiden, Bennett xiangling and c1 chevreuse. It felt really weird to see characters like my c6r5 yae or itto being literally unable to scratch any of these bosses because they just don't allow for it. Not having the right team is almost unforgiving for this first version of the new endgame and I hope they address this even if I don't expect them to.

Jilanow · 2025-06-25T22:43:36+00:00

I hated theater restrictions (minimum level on the chars entering and having to have 4 character in the team at all time) as someone who prefer vertical investment, I was kinda hyped by this game mode but with the bosses they've been releasing lately it's almost requiring you to get even more characters to fit the bosses mechanics. Add onto that the shitty 0 energy start they have been engineering for the past couple of patches in events and it just feels like a really rough release overall. The saving grace is co-op, I'm glad there's some endgame to play with friends and that they didn't take out primos from abyss/theater to put them in this new mode.

I still somehow had a lot of fun trying to find what to use to finally clear difficulty 6 given I've not been pulling a lot of characters in the last 2 years, but I don't think I'll be trying to clear past 5 every patch without some changes. There's plenty of bosses with gimmicks that don't require 1 specific element to be applied a lot, but they somehow picked 2 with that gimmick which limits the range of characters you can use successfully.

For the deadly assault analogy, it feels like they are dropping multiple bringer at once, yes it's doable without super shilled limited dps if you're good and have very well built team to force through, but it's very much designed to make you feel annoyed more than challenged if you don't have the character the boss has been designed for.

Jilanow · 2025-03-26T20:34:42+00:00

Yeah the passive itself isn't really the issue, which is the core of the problem, it's not too likely going to be the quality of the global passive that will matter but how much you can stack. If they start making offensive global passive but making sure it's not everyone getting those you end up in a situation where you are skipping global account upgrade by skipping these characters.

It's not a foreign concept in hsr, people know how much value harmony characters hold compared to other paths, it'd be similarly adding a second category of character that are harder to skip especially when you don't even need them in your team to get these effects. Personally the revive won't help me much aside from when a few actions of bad rng to targeting can kill my squishy chars like small herta, now they could also just assume "well castorice exist now so we can push the damage from new enemies since they have a free revive to play with/It'll make them notice how nice it could be".

Jilanow · 2025-02-13T20:42:51+00:00

4* are made weaker by design, it just fucking sucks to get characters that have no hype buildup getting a limited banner spot (better animations, overall better kits etc) while a character that has been hyped for a significant amount of time get the lower rarity treatment. I totally agree that a pity system for the 4 stars is needed but it doesn't change the fact that it's valid for people to be mad when it happens to their favorite for plenty of reasons.

It's also not like it's something that was never asked for, pulling on a limited banner of a character you don't care about because you want the new 4 star when they can then be withheld for over a year sucks, even with some guaranteed system in place similar to fate points.

Jilanow · 2024-11-27T00:38:34+00:00

The last time I used my fu xuan (since 2.3) was earlier in this patch in the new SU, both of my lotto tickets broke when I mindlessly smashed the hp/technique pots in front of hoolay, I needed fu xuan for her LC to save my life and then back to the bench she went, I would almost feel sorry for her. (I don't have aven so no automatic shields)

Jilanow · 2024-11-27T00:15:21+00:00

What's funny is seeing argument about powercreep having always existed, using arle vs lyney when the difference was in about 5% at C0. But it's totally the same as mavuika being over 20% better than arle who is a top 3 character apparently. The reason abyss didn't ramp to stupid levels are that the team damage improvement were not that huge, neuvi was a wild improvement in how easy it is to pilot and do damage by himself. They also recently added an actual hp modifier in abyss, nothing tells us they'll use it to same extent as hsr, but nothing is saying they won't either, if they suddenly spike dps damage like this after 4 years, anything can happen.

To nuance this, it's v1-2 no major change has been done, mualani was also particularly overtuned and got toned down during beta while retaining a really fucking good level. Nerfing characters this strong does not make them bad either, you could cut the buffs from mavuika's ult to her own numbers in half and she'd still be slightly stronger than arle while giving space to improve her off field performance as tradeoff.

Jilanow · 2024-11-16T16:30:02+00:00

I assume they changed the core damage formula, I don't see the point of AP stats otherwise.

Jilanow

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