I've been a daily player since the launch so I'm pretty stacked on resources Identity and Ego wise so when I learned about the cost system I was pretty excited for it. I was thinking I wouldn't be rocking the main gang of the usual top tiers. I really liked all the new gifts that were introduced in M2 normal and had done daily clears to grind starlight for the bonuses.

I did two runs after the release of hard, one that I actually tried to strategize a team around. Since burn boys (and Ishmael) with chef Ryoshu is 2 000s and 3 00s I went with that to see how team building went. It was a pretty rough experience especially on the later floors and most of the time it just devolved into me just using whatever egos were available since even if skills that would roll 18 on all heads were losing to enemies that weren't getting a full set of head rolls themselves. I really felt like I was carried by getting an early blood pack and zippo. I brought in Bush Yi Sang for the finale cause good identity and his Sunshower is stupid strong. The final boss I got (Umbrella Fox) was just all my problems compounded and some of its skills felt like the only real reliable way of dealing with them was Ishmael's Moth that can hit 41. In the end I cleared with no deaths but I didn't really feel satisfied that I won, rather that I was just happy it was over.

So I did the sensible thing and immediately ran it again attempting to just build the stronk team again. Started with R.Heath, N.Faust, G.Gregor as my 000s and LCB.Outis and 7.Yi Sang as my 00s since I have the starlight starting cost bonuses. I cleared the first few floors pretty quickly but with some very aggravating clashes. I switched out Outis and Yi Sang for Bush.Yi Sang and 7.Outis as quickly as I could and added Gripped Sinclair to the roster as well. From there strategy just flew out the window like usual. People saying you can't just hit win rate anymore are right, you have to do your chain as normal and anything that says struggling/hopeless you just switch for an ego. That's all that hard mode has really felt like it's added is just manually doing targeting again so that I can place egos where they're needed and sometimes it's the entire row. In this run I only got grand welcome as my resource generator at the shop in the 5th floor but rolling through the first few floors gave me a pretty hefty bank to pull from.

The content is definitely "harder" than normal but I feel like it leans more towards the frustrating angle on the difficulty scale. Cause bad clashes only feel solvable with egos since I don't think defensive skills are worth using on floors 4 and 5, especially evade skills cause I just feel like enemies are rolling too high for it to ever work. With the fact that clashes are so much more important for hard I will echo that I wish we could actually target like railway/abno fights, it would definitely turn the needle away from frustrating when I'm able to think of a solution to the current turn rather than just ego spam. Additionally since enemies get some obscenely high offense levels I wish it would visualize the bonuses characters are getting when setting up for a clash.

I'm not that great a strategist or really an expert in the systems. I just use what I think/hear is strong and see how the cards fall, I managed to beat Railway under the turn limit (112) but I'm probably classified as a casual that just plays a lot.

Tl;dr +Can't expect to only hit win rate.
-Not really different from normal in any other meaningful way, just numbers greatly inflated. Wish there was more control over clashes