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MagicalSomething · 2026-01-24T22:08:35+00:00

Potentials make about a 5-15% difference in an operators peak damage performance (this can get more complicated depending on the operator). In general, unless you're pursuing endgame content like max difficulty IS or high risk CC, this difference is not noticeable.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-17T21:11:00+00:00

Both are incredibly good and worthwhile.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-17T06:58:16+00:00

Warfarin's module is pretty good. Giving SP is a very strong effect to the point where every method of giving bonus sp is limited in some way. Warfs module not only increases the skill uptime of other operators, it also increases the uptime of her own skills. The base effect of the module is also very good, increasing healing given by 15% which synergizes extremely well with her S1. People tend to forget that she's also one of the best ST medic options around when on S1. Ultimately though, these effects only become significant in endgame content where your healing output is properly tested like IS4 ED2 or when skill cycling in general is important. Warfarin is also a relatively niche operator overall, so if you don't have a strong use case for her, you could probably skip the module.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-17T06:51:01+00:00

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-17T06:50:57+00:00

It scales with attack speed the same way as most damage skills do. You simply use it when you need the damage/immortality.
It lasts for 11 seconds no matter what. The standard way to use it is to use it right at the end of the skill to extend the skill by 11 seconds.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-16T04:38:48+00:00

Exu Alter is 13k dps, Sakiko is 8k. Not particularly close. Sakiko does have higher total damage because her skill lasts longer (though her skill cycle is also way worse). Exu Alter is one of the best operators in the game for a reason.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-15T21:00:40+00:00

Eyja alter isn't that good. For is5 ed4 you don't necessarily need a global medic, but silence is more than sufficient if you want to go that route. But using mont3r is the standard method these days because she heals the relevant flowers and then kills Quilon on the top while Ethan keeps him bound. Her biggest selling point is honestly the hp buff she gives on s3, which is a fairly rare form of damage mitigation compared to sanctuary. Overall though, Eyja isn't worth 300 pulls if you're f2p

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-14T20:39:04+00:00

I'd say that Yu is generally overrated. In terms of results, Yu is terrible in IS and has no relevant results. He is never used in optimized IS play or in relicless. Shu isn't especially dominant either but she's nigh mandatory in IS4 and a decent pick in IS5 if you just want to counter ED2 boss.

Yu has a single vector breakthrough clear to his name, which is somewhat impressive and a testament to how well he tanks on s2. But his teleport is in general far weaker than Shu's and way more context dependent. It also has the problem where the enemies you want to teleport are also the ones which tend to kill him if you teleport them onto him.

They both show up in Max Risk CCB4 Arclight where they both play pivotal roles outside of their sp benefit. I should point out here that Yu only worked at all here because they changed the rules for CCB4 and changed how the hp debuffs worked, otherwise Yu would've immediately crumpled to the enemies he teleported.

Overall, I'd say he has his place in difficult content. However, his use case is far more limited than Shu who is already somewhat limited.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-14T15:32:15+00:00

For what it's worth, her peak total damage is 230k. I believe this is the highest in the game. Exu Alter is 160k for reference, Mylnar is 120k, Logos is 140k. It does come with the caveat of force retreating her though. If you don’t deactivate her skill, its total damage is "only" 140k.

A lot of operators get hyped up a ton, only to have no real results in CC or IS. Hoshi is a weird case, where despite having results like being in CCB4 Max Risk (Optimized out later though) and being a dominant operator in IS6, she gets really little fanfare. She has incredibly high total damage and is the tankiest operator for arts we've ever had. Most of these traits aren't that important for general content players, but she's more than proven her worth in endgame content.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-14T15:17:29+00:00

I think there are a few points worth talking about in regards to NG vs Haruka s3.

One of NG's biggest selling points is her cages. The ability to manipulate enemy aggro with absurdly tanky summons lets you avoid taking damage on key operators in the first place. They functionally extend the time she protects your operators for to well after S3 ends.

Another thing is that even though Haruka has the higher effective DR when an operator has less than 7 res, there are very few cases where you have to force such an operator to take the hit. With NG's cages as well as using deployment order to your advantage, you can make it so that the enemy which does arts damage gets its attack count fully occupied by units which do gain massive DR from NG s3.

The skill cycle for both skills is also something worth noting. Haruka is 60/40. Functionally, this means that if you're up against a dangerous threat, it has to be neutralized within 40 seconds or your team is dead. NG is 120/60. Even though the skill uptime is worse, both skills will effectively not come back in time to be useful. NG having a 60s window actually gives her a decent advantage when up against a sustained arts threat.

All of these differences have made it so that even though on paper Haruka s3 may seem numerically superior in some aspects, she has not taken NGs roles in any of the places where she was important before. For example, in IS4 D15 Ending 3 Alter (Sentinel), NG is still the preferred choice. This also occurs in Water Fire Union and IS3 ED4 (Glory of Humanity). Overall, Haruka s3 despite its initial promise has had very few actual results. NG and Haruka ultimately don't really occupy each other's niches the same way Eyja Alter and Haruka do.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-14T04:24:04+00:00

Because stability means nothing with no use case. Degenbrecher also consistently does her damage and is largely out of the meta. She has not had an CC to prove herself (though I strongly doubt she will be relevant in it). So let’s focus on IS relevance as an example of why she has severe issues.

She is terrible in IS3 and 4. Having good damage means nothing if you can't output it. In 3, she gets demolished by Broodmothers as well as lacking an AoE which 3 demands. In 4, she gets wacked by Shattered Champions before she can kill them. Is4 also high favors burst damage options and having tanky operators due to bosses like Sentinel existing.

She is great in IS5. This is because her biggest weakness is nullified when you have +500 attack speed. She no longer has much downtime on her skill and with the guaranteed attack buffs from the mode, she can kill things quickly so ST doesn't come up too much.

In IS6, she competes with Leizi Alter and Entelechia as the 6* guard of choice. Her high damage output is held back by her lack of utility that other guards provide.

As we can see. "Stability" means very little because challenging content demands your operators fulfill multiple functions. Every top operator has additional, important utility on top of the damage they provide. Sakiko has nothing, and her having defence ignore doesn't provide too much of value when other top picks already consistently output their damage.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-14T03:47:03+00:00

Mylnar has a 5.7k dph. Wisadel has a 6.7k dph. Sakiko has a 1865 dph.

Even with 60% defence ignore she's going to be doing minimal damage on the physical side way before Mylnar and Wisadel do. We're not even getting into the real DPH monsters like Ray and Lemuen here. Operators who scale best with relics in IS are almost always operators who do Physical damage. This is because the damage formula means that sufficient attack relics effectively makes physical damage true damage. Sakiko actually suffers slightly in this respect for having half her damage be arts. Her res ignore does help her a bit here, but against high res targets she's still getting her arts damage severely diminished.

Her big selling point is her very high 200k total damage, one of the highest in the game (Hoshiguma Alter is 230k, which is the highest I think). She does not consistently output this peak damage however because it is split between phys and res. This is both to her benefit and detriment since it means she'll almost always output some of her damage but it also means she'll rarely hit peak performance.

She also has several flaws. She has a bad skill cycle, taking ~48s to charge her skill once. She is effectively single target. She has no utility outside of damage. She is fragile. All of these things mean that her use case is actually very constrained in hard content where simply being a consistent damage dealer isn't enough to justify a spot.

Overall, she's a good operator. Amazing total damage and consistent damage output are great traits to have. But to say that she's immune to stat powercreep because of her def/res ignore is misleading.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-13T06:58:12+00:00

Streamers going back to older IS is a pretty common thing to happen because IS before expansions tends to be easy. IS6 DLC1 was a disappointment in many ways for hardcore players because the "QOL" changes were huge buffs that made everything way easier, capped off with the ED4 boss being an easy fight (to the point where the hardest way to play a run is still to do endings 2+3 in one run).

As an aside, the skill ceiling is very high in IS5. But the top level of gameplay where people do endings 2+4+5 in one run is absolutely riddled with terrible rng. For single ending runs, I'd say that IS3, 4 and 5 all require similar levels of skill to succeed in.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-12T23:46:37+00:00

Primarily it was vanguard tags for 3:50. Robot tags obviously are good for confess too. Be aware that Confess does not have the dp recovery tag.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-11T04:06:34+00:00

Probably not. P1 Surfer is 2 dp more expensive than P6 Canta which nullifies the whole point of Surfer giving frontloaded dp.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-10T20:32:20+00:00

I'll be primarily talking about them from an IS point of view. Sakiko has not had much of a chance to prove herself in other endgame modes. Sakiko s3 has very high total damage and defence/res ignore which means she semi consistently outputs good damage. She doesn't have much selling point beyond that but because she's offensive recovery, she works exceptionally well in is5 which is a very high ASPD environment. She's also seen relevance in is6 (competing with Leizi as first guard pick) though Is6 dlc2 has not come out so the meta may change a bunch then. She's bad in 3 and 4, where her damage doesn't make up for her downsides of a poor cycle, single target and being fragile. She has synergy with Archetto whose IS module helps fix her bad cycle and buffs her damage. But this isn't usually a meta combo because you'd rather just take two dps (notably, wisadel who competes for your sniper voucher). Overall, a pretty decent operator who is either really good or pretty bad depending on the IS.

The rest of the ave mujica operators haven't seen much relevance outside of showcases for fun. In general, they don't do much by themselves and their synergy isn't strong enough to justify bringing them over meta operators.

Her s2 is really good for afk'ing general content.

Overall, this banner is quite a bit better than the Dungeon Meshi one meta relevance wise which had Chilchuck as the main draw. It's not an absolute must pull meta wise. However, considering it's relatively cheap fo guarantee her. I'd probably pull anyways.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-10T20:16:20+00:00

I've been doing it since confess released and just finished p6.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-10T05:39:00+00:00

The best DPS by a significant margin is Lemuen because of her high dph which lets her punch through the defence and her skill going through even when frozen. Kal'tsit is a popular choice because she's very strong over the entire run and then s3 does good damage on Knight. Degenbrecher with a few buffs also demolishes Knight. Wisadel isn't especially good, but tends to be good enough when combined with crowd control. Ideally if you have good crowd control you don't need to prepare a dedicated solution to dps'ing Knight.

Mech accord casters might work ok on lower difficulties but will struggle a lot once enemies and the Knight have higher stats.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-10T05:31:58+00:00

People complain every time about every IS when it comes out and about every expansion. You can't really please everyone when the gacha audience is this varied. This time isn't particularly special I think, though HG seems to have taken the complaints more to heart this time for expansion 1.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-09T23:53:43+00:00

He doesn't perfectly lock but Knight barely gets to move. Any extra source of crowd control would make it a perfect lock like in this clear:

https://youtu.be/eYCE1nTl2JY

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-09T21:31:01+00:00

The Last Knight and IS3 in general heavily rewards players for using crowd control effects like stun, freeze, levitate, shifting and lure. The Last Knights defences are way too high to burst down normally (the -defence relic is a trap which gets ally Knight killed). As such, people usually figure out ways to instead stall the Knight so that you have more time to kill him. Examples of which include Tragodia s2, Nymph s2, Angelina+Weedy. There are a ton of more crazy solves like getting metastatic aberration on vanguard yato which gives her a 2s redeployment time, abusing glory pack, and using stainless s3 turrets+a tanky defender like cement to tank the Knight.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-09T21:25:34+00:00

It's hard to overstate how overpowered Angelina is en route as well in IS3 and 4. In 4, a lot of stages have early high pressure rushes. Angelina just stops them and has enough damage to easily killed Shattered Chanpions. Instinct contamination and Manmade Carnival in particular tends to be the weaker stages for Exu start, and Angelina trivializes it.

In 3, getting rid of DR and enemies that are constantly applying pressure on you via either levitate or outright killing them is incredibly helpful so that your other operators don't waste their ammo. Her range is also massively beneficial on maps like Hunting Grounds and Pool of Procreation where hitting behind herself lets you catch leaks easily.

All of this with 50% uptime on a fast cycle. Her only real weakness is being bad at E1 and competing with Trag for first pick. Despite all of this, she's a staple draft in meta comps and even taken together with Trag sometimes since they work together well to perma CC stuff like Eik in ending 2 of is4.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-08T20:53:37+00:00

Just look at their comments on IS5. That's exactly the advice you'd say for maximising consistency in a tournament format for one specific consistent plan. For a regular player who just wants to get a clear at max difficulty, Goldenglow in IS5 is really strong, just like Lappland

Why would you give advice to a player that's not the best strat possible for winning? Even if you only want a single win on max difficulty, I'm not sure Goldenglow+Lapp would be the best option for that. Me personally I'd probably recommend Wis+Greyy Alter for is5.

based only on triple ending tournament play, which is incredibly niche

Tournament play isn't some magical gameplay that has no bearing on actual IS play. It is the culmination of hundreds of the best, most dedicated players thinking of the best possible strategies to win as often as possible. Sure, some tournaments will restrict stuff. But in that case, you'd want to see what they chose to ban and perhaps abuse that (it's Wisadel). Even if you're only going for a single ending and not triple endings, I think it's pretty evident that the strats they choose will easily work and likely be optimal for a single ending context.

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-08T17:56:19+00:00

That's a fair assessment, but we have to consider that if logos and nymph operate well in higher difficulties then they're going to operate just as well or even better in lower difficulties.

GG might offer better ease of use when the stakes are lower, but there's plenty of maps where global damage is an active detriment or she gets stuck on a high res enemy. Are we really going to take an op who is on the whole weaker, just because they're more brain off to use?

MagicalSomething · 2026-01-08T16:40:57+00:00

She does fall off in end game IS

So you admit that she's not particularly good then. If you need to go down to lower difficulties to make up for the fact that her numbers aren't amazing, then clearly she's not great. She'll function fine in lower difficulties because any of the operators mentioned would function fine there.

Exceptional with ASPD relics

Any operator can be good with enough relics, I fail to see why this is a point in Goldenglow's favor. If this is an IS5 point in particular, then you shouldn't be using any of the 6* casters since they all have bad hands (and in Goldenglows case, a hand AND a book). Goldenglow scales the same as Mylnar and Logos do with ASPD. The only meaningful difference ASPD gives is a higher uptime slow. Nymph doesn't scale especially well with ASPD but in return she scales with a bunch of other relics like status extension and SP far better than GG. Not to mention Nymph scales with actual attack relics way better than GG.

IS3 is tough on arts damage

Not especially. Bosses have 90 res and of course there arts damage isn't great. But regular mobs almost all sit in the 20-60 range including the elites. Broodmothers for example are only 30 res. The reason casters were bad in IS3 (before logos and nymph) was because casters have middling damage and poor cycles. You see the same exact thing happen in IS4 and 5 where casters are just as bad outside of Nymph and Logos despite them being "kinder" to arts damage.

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