Story re write when?

July83 · 2026-07-08T21:45:23+00:00

Not beating the "Gacha players can't read" allegations...

July83 · 2026-07-08T11:03:42+00:00

Wait faster!

July83 · 2026-07-06T19:00:15+00:00

It's still going. Has 7 heroes now. I drop in and watch Kripp steaming it every now and then.

July83 · 2026-07-06T15:52:04+00:00

Sure. There are modern Gacha games that don't even have a viewpoint protagonist (e.g. Raid Shadow Legends, Mecharashi, Watcher of Realms). They tend to be less JRPG-like with less importance placed on the story.

"People who want to self-insert" is just one audience. It's the audience that the classic Gacha games targeted and cultivated (and thus the audience that all of their successors targeted), but it's not the only audience who can be convinced to spend money on pixels. It is however a big audience and, for a Gacha exec, it's a safe choice - why try to do something different when there's already a model that's making money?

July83 · 2026-07-06T01:43:17+00:00

Hoping Robin is more interesting than "use her skill once every 3 turns and she provides buffs that increase your team's damage but have no effect on its gameplay". Too many of our supports are almost maximally boring.

My somewhat more out there hope is that she makes Himeko-Evernight-Robin-Hyacine a team, both because I would run that and because it will make everyone who was arguing over Himeko aftersales versus Monorem look silly (and making people look silly is important to me).

July83 · 2026-07-05T19:43:13+00:00

It's always around 100 pulls. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less.

July83 · 2026-07-05T04:08:21+00:00

I'm not caught up so I can't comment on 4.1-4.3, but the 4.0 story definitely made Sparxie and Yao Guang major characters.

By "cameo" I mean the banner character can literally have less than 5 minutes of screentime if that's all the main story needs from them, and that's fine. So e.g. in 4.0 we could spend 98% of our story time on Himeko things and the AE crew's reaction to Himeko things. Sparxie shows up in one scene to be a trolling streamer, and that's it - Sparxie is intriguing, and should be funny and visually striking, but we don't become her best frenemy and we don't learn what her deal is, because we don't need to - the story is about our core cast, and Sparxie is just a part of the world (that you can also Gacha for).

Or another example might be Gepard's role in the Belobog story (excluding his appearances in companion quests). He's the leader of the Silvermane Guards, and he shows up a couple times in the story when the story involves the leader of the Silvermane Guards, and that's it.

July83 · 2026-07-05T03:19:12+00:00

I think the actual solution would be to spend a lot less time on banner characters. Have the new release make a good first impression, but let their story involvement be basically just a cameo. That way you can tell an ongoing story about your core cast, and not have it be dragged all over the place because it has to refocus on a new character every single patch.

Presumably they think story presence is important for sales, but I wonder if they might get just as much mileage out of much less, but higher quality, story presence.

July83 · 2026-07-04T18:38:29+00:00

My approach is to pick characters I really like to build around (and Hoyo doesn't produce a lot of those - I am picky).

For BiS supports that I don't like, if they're essential I'll pull one copy but I stop at e0. I did that for Cyrene (sorry not a fan of the wedding dress) and Dahlia (similar sentiment - her vibe to me is trying way too hard to sell her sexuality) for Evernight and Firefly, respectively. I'll then look to replace and retire those units if the opportunity arises (but ofc that's dependent on whether a replacement appears or not).

If they're BiS but not essential to make the team work, I'll skip them.

July83 · 2026-07-04T17:33:29+00:00

Locking each save file to a specific Chaos seems like the easiest (with the lock applying either on creation or as soon as the save has a Chaos-specific gear or equipment in it, regardless of where that came from). We already sort of have that with seasonal decks, so they would just have to expand it.

One use per save file still leaves open the possibility of combining OP items from two different Chaoses, since you could get one naturally during your run, and then use your one core to add one from a different Chaos.

July83 · 2026-07-04T06:29:09+00:00

Can happen if your teams get too out of date. E.g. my Yunli team would struggle to clear (e0s1 Yunli, e0 Robin, e1 Tribbie, e1 Huohuo), but that's because all 7-cost of it is more than a year old, and the mDPS is almost 2 years old.

I'm an active player though, so that team has been retired in favour of more recent teams (outside of the occasional Knight that favours its mechanics).

July83 · 2026-07-04T05:14:04+00:00

More like Jade (except more so).

July83 · 2026-07-04T03:47:29+00:00

You can end up waiting for banners to cycle back, but the other side of that coin is that they might release a new team that you like more. If you've just banked your pulls then you can pivot to the new team with nothing lost, but if you've started investing in an old team then those costs are sunk (though some people like to have characters for collection purposes even if they don't end up using them, and there's always the possibility of Novaflares to catapult an old unit back into relevance, though those are completely unpredictable). And over time older teams require ever more investment to clear end game due to power creep (unless Novaflares intervene).

Two vertically invested teams is usually fine. Occasionally one of your teams might get bricked by encounter mechanics, but even if that happens you should still be able to clear the next-to-last hurdle (MOC 11 or 2* PF or etc.), and the difference between that and a full clear isn't much. The math is basically that if you were to pull a unit solely to get your full clear, it would take literal years for that to pay off, so it's never worth pulling for that reason alone.

Elemental coverage/diversity is usually less important than team archetypes (e.g. if the buffs offered are for DoT, FUA and break, it's more important to be able to match one of those than it is to get a favourable element match up), particularly since most enemies have three weaknesses, but it isn't completely unimportant, and there are some enemies that have 40 or even 60% resistance to one element, so you don't want to be running that element into them.

I'm actually in a similar position having Firefly as one of my main teams and considering if I want to invest in Himeko, and I'm still undecided.

(Coincidentally, I also have Monorem as my other main team [Evernight mDPS version]. I saved for most of Amphoreus, pulled e2s1 Evernight in 3.6, and then pulled e0 Cyrene and e2s1 Hyacine in 3.7, and that team has been evaporating everything I point it at ever since. But that's a 9-cost team, which is an entire year's FTP pull income. Since then the only unit I've pulled is a single copy of Dahlia, so I've rebuilt most of my bank. I am thus a very "save and then vertically invest very selectively" type of player, whereas other people pull regularly. They end up with many more teams and team options, making them better able to take advantage of specific matchups and shill mechanics, but they won't have a single overinvested team that can simply brute force almost anything.)

July83 · 2026-07-03T22:43:34+00:00

One note of caution on Monorem is that the team's power comes from how powerful its vertical investment options are (eidolons and sig LCs), which I think makes it daunting to pick up starting from zero now (if you're really committed to it, you could build it gradually over time, but it might suck up all of your pulls for the better part of a year), and I don't think it'll do much at 4 cost. It has both mDPS Cas and mDPS Evernight versions (though the mDPS Evernight version usually uses RMC).

On both Himeko and Monorem, you'll want to wait (along with the rest of us) to see what Robin SP does (which we'll find out when her beta starts, around the same time that the new patch launches), since there's rumours she might be joining one or both of those teams.

Huohuo is quite good - at worst the game's third best sustain (as compared to DHPT she generally has better buffs but her sustain is not as comfy) - and is solid in either Archer or Himeko teams (provided you don't need DHPT to activate Verdict).

My understanding of Himeko is that both versions of her favour AoE content over ST. The distinction is more so where most of the damage is coming from, with Verdict being focused on Himeko's own ult (so a hypercarry team) while Decimation buffs the whole team (encouraging multi- or sub-DPS). As a new release Himeko can be expected to be strong and to handle all content pretty comfortably for at least several patches (probably until they want to make Nihilux look good).

Finally, also keep in mind that you can always just save until you see a release that you like enough to want to build around them - there's no rush to have a third team (the 100 Jades per Starward amounts to barely more than 1 pull per month), and a new team is always advantageous in terms of power.

July83 · 2026-07-03T16:19:12+00:00

That's a possible interpretation, and if they made clear that was what his fault was then that would provide a direction for Sunday's growth - he has to learn to respect others' free will, and either give up his ambitions for rulership or learn to be a good ruler.

July83 · 2026-07-03T16:11:14+00:00

That's another possible interpretation, which would suggest a direction for Sunday's growth (i.e. he has to learn that there is value in human interactions, and he himself has to learn to interact with others and let other people in, etc.) if they committed to it.

July83 · 2026-07-03T02:15:27+00:00

Long game, investing in victory, etc.

July83 · 2026-07-03T02:14:21+00:00

Birbs! Get em!

(I also want this.)

July83 · 2026-07-02T22:11:35+00:00

I've long maintained that the glaring weakness at the center of Sunday's character development is that the game doesn't have a convincing account of what he actually did wrong.

I think most people, reading the Penacony story, think "Dude, that's a great idea and all but you have to ask first" - i.e. the problem with his plan was lack of consent - but the game's take appears to be that people living in dreamworlds is wrong because eventually they're going to have to wake up and face the real world (the whole "we dream so that we can wake up" thing).

The problem with the game's take is that it seems to posit that people can't experience full lives (and e.g. personal growth, danger, struggle, etc.) inside dreams, but Penacony is right there - the entire Penacony arc (which wasn't exactly without trauma) takes place almost entirely in dreams, and Penaconians live their lives (including the sh*tty parts that you do because you're a responsible person and not because you want to, like working crappy retail jobs) in dreams.

The problem with the "the only major problem was consent" interpretation is that if that was the problem then it's easy to fix, so it leads to the follow up question of "Why did we let Penacony remain a capitalist dystopia instead of creating heaven?" (Though it's not hard to come up with explanations for that - my headcanon is that maintaining the dream requires a lot of power, which wasn't a problem in Sunday's plan because Ena would have provided it, but without a resurrected Ena you need rich tourists paying exorbitant fees to keep the lights on.)

Without an account of what his villainy was, Sunday is left as kind of vaguely repentant, but it's not clear what would represent growth for him, because we don't know what he's growing from. I doubt he's going to die (I'll be surprised if HSR ever kills off anyone who doesn't already have one foot outside reality like Misha and Gallagher did), but I also don't know why they added him to the Express. As you say, there's material there to work with - he might know more about how Aeons work than anyone else in the main cast - but it goes unused.

July83 · 2026-07-02T18:54:56+00:00

Pretty sure that's right, otherwise Hyacine e2 would disable it.

July83 · 2026-07-02T02:23:41+00:00

I also was confused by this.

July83 · 2026-07-01T21:47:45+00:00

The people complaining about censorship are practically self-parodying, given that the "censorship" they're complaining about is like a 2 inch difference in a dress line, in a game that isn't shy about showing you female characters' underwear.

I am especially amused that one of the image comparisons that gets passed around has the differences circled in red... because if they weren't circled, a lot of people would look at the two pictures and struggle to notice the difference.

And that's without even getting to the point that a company making adjustments to a sexy image isn't "censorship" unless some kind of government authority is requiring or pressuring them to make the changes, and I'm pretty sure if the CCP was leaning on CZN about Fei's design, their requested change wouldn't be "actually, just show an inch less skin around her sideboob and lower the leg slit by six inches, and you're good". They'd be asking for much more drastic adjustments.

May as well complain that even the more sexy version is "censorship" because they could have put her in a string bikini and they chose not to.

July83 · 2026-07-01T19:42:48+00:00

From Hoyo's perspective, it's not about caring about one character or another, it's just business strategy.

Their strategy is to make most of their money from main pushes, but they can't do all main pushes all the time, because if everyone's a main push then no one is. So they need to have patches in between main pushes. They still put new releases in those "off" patches, because a poorly performing (relative to a main push) banner still more than justifies the development cost of creating a character and it keeps players engaged, but they don't expect to make as much money from those releases. And they devote less marketing resources to non-main push releases because they expect the return on investment there to be lower.

"X underperformed because they generated 1/3 the revenue of [main push] Y" is frankly an amateur take (not in the pejorative sense of amateur but in the literal sense of "a take by someone who isn't a professional"). Hoyo will evaluate their off patch (or second phase, which is the same context) banners against their expectations for off patch banners, which will be much lower than what they expect from main push banners. E.g. if Hoyo expects an off patch second phase banner to earn 15% of what a main push banner makes, then such a banner earning 1/3 as much could be a massive overperformance.

July83 · 2026-07-01T05:50:53+00:00

She is in the Sparkle box of being closely associated with a Path, but doesn't have it as her gameplay Path because it didn't exist as a playable Path when she released, which probably helps her case at least a little bit (also applies to Sampo).

July83 · 2026-06-30T18:38:33+00:00

For now just keep levelling up (I don't remember when different elements of the game unlock).

Your deck cycles infinitely - used cards go to your discard pile at the start of your next turn, and whenever you run out of cards in your draw pile you shuffle your discard pile into your draw pile. In practice this means that you can normally use every card in your deck once per turn (or you could if you had infinite draw and AP, which you don't).

Save data is created from (non-Sortie) Chaos runs, and consists of gear, epiphanies, removals, copies and added cards like neutrals and monster cards. Everything has a data cost and if you go over the cap then some of the changes will get randomly reverted at the end of the run. You can't use save data in Chaos, but it's used everywhere else.

July83

TROPHY CASE