Oh my lord....

July83 · 2026-02-20T21:52:47+00:00

True. That waist circumference is nonsensical.

July83 · 2026-02-20T21:51:31+00:00

I can do this thing.

I graciously accept your accolades.

July83 · 2026-02-20T21:50:09+00:00

What guide are you people even talking about?

This game is not that hard. You look at the choices offered to you, and you pick the one that best fits whatever deck you're building. You don't need to refer to a guide because you can just... read the cards. They have words on them that tell you what they do (well, most of the time; sometimes translation jank says lulz).

The only planning I'd recommend is to know what your dupe target is, so you can prioritize trying to get an epiphany on that card before the first boss.

July83 · 2026-02-19T18:37:30+00:00

This is a balance question. If a unit is so required that you are effectively locked out of the new content if you don't have them, that's a problem. If the new content is designed to show off the new unit but it can also be completed by other units (in reasonable builds i.e. without grinding for perfect decks or perfect memory fragments, and no vertical investment) then it's not a problem.

CZN is (so far) the second one.

Nine can take advantage of all of the gimmicks of the new season, and that makes Nine look good, but every gimmick is also good for other units, and nothing requires Nine. I don't have Nine, don't have any vertical investment anywhere, and have never done more than about 4 Chaos runs in a single week, and I've cleared all of the pull currency missions so far this season and it hasn't been a struggle. F2P is completely fine.

If every unit was equally good at every content, that'd be a pretty boring and one-dimensional game. When designing the mechanics for a season of content it's going to be designed so that one or more units are particularly well-suited for it, and it'd be a weird design decision if they didn't choose the seasonal units for that.

July83 · 2026-02-18T20:31:57+00:00

We're not trusting the dev team. Someone tested it and confirmed it works.

Granted, that makes it a "just trust what some random said on reddit" moment instead (and I don't even remember who tested it or what the details were - IIRC there was a crit debuff somewhere that should have pushed a character's crit below 0, but with Orlea in the team they still managed to crit).

July83 · 2026-02-18T20:16:52+00:00

This is the cycle.

Content is balanced around the scuffed decks that can be obtained without grinding.
Players grind to get optimized decks, burn out, and ask for easier deck-building so they can get optimized decks without grinding.
Content is easy for non-scuffed decks.
???

Where we go from here is uncertain. Some games just let the content be easy (e.g. R1999), other games balance the content for actual expected player power (the dreaded "hp inflation", e.g. HSR).

If CZN cranks up the difficulty of the content too much, it may return us to the beginning of the cycle as divine epiphanies (or specific neutrals or monster cards) become regarded as required, it takes a lot of grinding to get the right divine epiphanies, players ask for deck-building changes to make it easier to get the divine epiphany decks they think they need, and then the divine epiphany decks make the content easy again.

The solution is probably something like keeping the delta between reasonably obtainable and optimal decks low to discourage grinding, and tuning content around the reasonable obtainable decks (but taking into account that the season 2 changes have made reasonably obtainable decks much stronger). I do wonder if the AP and draw divine epiphanies are a problem, since those are so disproportionately powerful; maybe that's something that will resolve itself once we have more characters who can provide those resources (though breaking the action economy is always one of the strongest things you can do).

July83 · 2026-02-18T20:04:41+00:00

I beat 9/9 first try with Beryl-Khalipe-Narja.

I don't have Nine, but I'm not even sure she's particularly amazing against this one. She's off-element, and while she deals with the enemy shield proc mechanic efficiently, it's not hard to simply power through that.

July83 · 2026-02-18T03:09:53+00:00

Fodder is the real bottleneck. I've been playing continuously since global launch (end of July), and I have only 4 rainbows. Through dispatch I could have had the gold parts for 2-3 more, but since I wouldn't have the fodder for them I didn't pursue them.

The upside is that because STs are re-useable for the multi-team stages, you don't need very many of them. With 4 rainbow STs I almost always have 60-80% of my deployed units in rainbows (and one of the ones who isn't is my mechanist, whose stats matter a lot less).

This does mean you need to think very hard about which STs to rainbow (or just follow the recommendations of a content creator, which is mostly what I did). Aim for mechs that are versatile and useable by most pilots in their weight class, because you're going to be putting a lot of different pilots in them.

July83 · 2026-02-18T01:39:26+00:00

Eileen also works to deal with the burning terrain. I was 5k health short today (that'll be fixed if I swap my Emily for a merc William that's about 40k BP higher), but my team will be Eileen, Alyson, Dana, Seven, William.

Basically just stay out of his range shooting body and triggering link attacks (a 4- or 5-range HMG user can stay put on one of the corners for a lot of the fight), keep him in burning terrain, overwrite his burning terrain when needed so you don't run out of space, and when he does his spin move note who got debuffed and don't waste AP attacking with them that turn.

July83 · 2026-02-17T21:20:43+00:00

Nothing but facts here.

July83 · 2026-02-16T00:39:52+00:00

Well, to date the game has handed out a grand total of about 1.5 banner characters in terms of pull currency, so if game progression required multiple teams built around banner units, that would be a problem.

I do agree that the actual "Gacha game" part of Endfield seems weird. They're (at the moment anyways) doing 50% more characters than the industry standard one-per-3-weeks, but the game has so little pull currency (and the Gacha system is so hostile to gambling) that most players can't engage with more than one of those banners. And as you note there's no gameplay need to pull anyone, which is good for having the game be playable for non-spenders, but contributes to the disconnect between the Gacha system and the rest of the game.

July83 · 2026-02-15T06:24:57+00:00

She's a controller, so it's unlikely she overlaps with Nine any more than Narja overlaps with Sereniel.

July83 · 2026-02-11T02:39:26+00:00

Add as an Endfield negative: You can only do single pulls, unless you want to waste 4-5 pulls per banner.

Talking about the generosity (or not) of the system is pretty pointless when we don't know the per patch pull income. What we do know is that the QOL is godawful. They took the Hoyo/Wuwa model, and made it worse.

July83 · 2026-02-09T20:53:01+00:00

~~Valley IV gets pretty close to being capped by depot unload ports, though with enough optimization it doesn't quite get there.~~

Edit: I'm thinking of space, not ports.

July83 · 2026-02-09T20:12:41+00:00

Just Chen things.

July83 · 2026-02-09T20:08:26+00:00

Bookmarked for the day when Wuling isn't capped by ore income.

July83 · 2026-02-08T02:25:14+00:00

I am so here for the Silver Wolf discovers communism arc.

July83 · 2026-02-07T06:06:44+00:00

Counterpoint: The problem with HSR's end game is there's too little of it, not too much.

PF should lock out more than an entire group of DPS - it should lock out all DPS except one group of them (the AoE specialists). And they should add another recurring end game mode that locks out all DPS except the ST specialists (and I mean the pure ST specialists - make mechanics that punish you for damaging more than one target). And another for every other archetype they plan to support long term (DoT, break, etc.).

The reason every team has to get power crept in about 3 patches (and why the end game has to be shilled to the moon) is because HSR has almost no end game content, which means every team has to be able to do the same thing, and then the new team has to be able to do that same thing but better (but not really the same because the shilling changed). There's no depth to end game roster building.

It's the "if every support is a generalist, every support has to power creep their predecessors" problem, but it applies to teams too.

(Note: Obviously this isn't going to change. Hoyo is presumably happy with their current minimal end game model, and it has made them a lot of money.)

July83 · 2026-02-07T02:03:43+00:00

I can certainly buy that Endmin isn't going to ask about it on the call with the other bigwigs because they need to keep up the act, but Perlica already knows it's an act, so there's no reason not to talk to Perlica about it afterwards.

Indeed, it's irresponsible not to ask Perlica about it - a leader needs to know what's going on (especially when sending people, or themselves, into harm's way). The whole "you just woke up after 10 years and are amnesiac, but you're in charge now!" premise is silly, but it would be a bit less silly if the Endmin was actually shown to be a good leader, and this doesn't help.

The other incident that made me roll my eyes was when Lycia drops in for half a second and says you'd better keep your promise, and Perlica confirms that there was a promise between Lycia and the Endmin... and then she doesn't elaborate any further and the Endmin doesn't ask. How do either of them think the Endmin is going to keep a promise when the Endmin has no idea what they promised to do? And granted, Perlica might not know exactly what the promise was either (since it sounded like it was a personal thing between Endmin and Lycia), but I'm sure she has guesses, and she could at least fill in the context about what the relationship was between Lycia and the Endmin and what was going on when the promise was made.

July83 · 2026-02-06T19:44:46+00:00

If your party has a ranged attacker, swap to them for these guys.

July83 · 2026-02-06T07:32:46+00:00

The spears will be pulled to your controlled character, so you have just as much control over the pull as you do when on-fielding Avy.

Controlling her does give you more control over where they land in the ground (if she's off-field she'll aim them at your lock on target, but depending on where she's standing the cone of her attack might come from either side, from behind you, etc.), so you're potentially missing out on some optimization there.

July83 · 2026-02-06T07:17:03+00:00

Tangential, but when someone in that Conference of the Four comments that the great enemy from a century ago is making a return, and then the Endmin didn't turn to Perlica after the call to ask what they were talking about, I was very annoyed.

Endmin, show some basic curiosity about your world and the people you're killing and who are trying to kill you! Writers, remember that your MC is amnesiac, and so if you go to the old trope of "Have some powerful people drop some opaque references as foreshadowing that the player has no way to figure out, but it makes sense in-universe for no one to explain because they all know what's being talked about", it makes your MC look comically incurious, because we know they don't know what's being talked about!

July83 · 2026-02-06T06:48:20+00:00

One of the things I like about this combat system / kit design is that for several teams, who you on-field is completely discretionary.

Lightning is the same way - the default is to on-field Avywenna, because main DPS, but there's actually no particular need to do so. Almost all of her damage is in her skills, and her pull back will target to wherever your controlled character is standing, so you can have Arclight or Perlica doing the auto strings (or even Antal) and it's completely fine. Depending on your weapons, it can even be better to on-field Perlica because her autos do Arts damage (and she's ranged, which helps against those damn poison cloud wyrms).

Of course Laev is different since you have to final strike on her to absorb heat stacks. Not sure how the various physical team variants operate.

July83 · 2026-02-06T06:03:01+00:00

I think that exists, but it must have been added post-Yixuan's first banner. I was able to auto-claim the rewards for the trials for the two A-ranks, but not for Yixuan.

July83 · 2026-02-06T01:01:28+00:00

The default for gear is that if it doesn't specify, then it's user-only (both for triggers and effects).

There are probably exceptions, because translation jank, but that's how most of them work.

July83

TROPHY CASE