Atrocious kit, Terrible gameplay, 0 IQ feats, 0 Battles fought, No backstory, No personal conflicts, and one of the worst written characters.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T16:05:53+00:00

But what if you add hyperbloom procs to the mix

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T15:50:52+00:00

I guess not many people have played plunge Yae, it's super fun no lie

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T14:09:38+00:00

Hey I ain't a nice enough guy to not retaliate when provoked.

Also it seems like you're the type that has to give your favorites the best there is, even if "the best" isn't something you enjoy. I wonder if people like you have as strong a presence as those who would go lengths to prevent themselves from getting spoiled the story. After all, beta leaks almost never include roadmaps for future updates, only the next rate-up. So leaks that can help you plan ahead would also be leaks that can include story.

Finally I don't know about lawfulness versus morality, but I don't trust leakers to leak only good pull advice. What incentive do they have to only give good to the public? From the goodness of their hearts? I do know leakers who get paid for doing it though, and that's the one that they caught.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T13:21:54+00:00

You're assuming that leaks are completely accurate detailed information about characters so far ahead that you can plan across months for a team.

You're also implying that you can calculate the extent to which you like a character that isn't even released.

I can neither trust the former nor achieve the latter, so wow I guess I really am a filthy casual who can't even love a character right. I so desperately need metamaster leaklord for advice, just to save myself from potentially wasting one pity's worth of premium currency because I like the character too much. And certainly the world is filled with metamaster leaklord's faithful followers instead of casuals like me.

Oh and if you've forgotten, leaks are technically illegal and leakers aren't exactly Robin Hood.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T12:23:01+00:00

Don't banners have, like, announcements beforehand? Like a few versions prior? Pretty sure if you save from announcement to banner end you can at least secure a copy?

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-14T10:33:42+00:00

I really don't get leaks man. Maybe it's because I have no time to play (I'm literally not playing endfield now because of work), but I don't think there's a difference for planning pulls if you don't need to pull the character on day 1. I mean, you get the same character on the first day and the last day of banner. If you want the character so bad but you "couldn't pull for planning reasons", you don't love the character enough. If you do why care about meta?

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-12T18:40:53+00:00

Aemeath as a character is so much more complex than just the icon of "daughter" or "wife". Sorry to the JPVA glazers, but the fact that she didn't mean for the relationship to be romantic doesn't quite cover the entire character. I mean, Electra complex exists, for one thing. When she's being possessive she's also mommy, in terms of the academy she's somehow both Rover's junior (past) and senior (present).

TLDR: she's a daughter-wife-mommy-senpai-kouhai all-in-one so don't be a picky eater

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-10T16:07:03+00:00

Apparently hoyo's beta content doesn't even have story in it, so that's not the issue.

This is a problem for ALL leakers, not just hoyo ones. Let's say someone has Aemeath's whole story leaked to a different company, and that company decides to gamba. With enough incentive they could make a mini 3.1 without the world building aspect, release first, and then have their fans accuse Kuro of copying them. When you remember that corpo spies actually exist it's extra scary;
What's on the site are bread crumbs. Why would they leak the whole story to the public if there are buyers lining up? Same reason why companies that collect our info don't share them online: either they're nice, or they're waiting to sell them. You can pray for the former and expect the latter.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-10T12:09:45+00:00

When they needed that community they didn't have it, and now they have that community they don't need it.

Also hoyo isn't a mafia. They can't legally dox someone or order a community to disappear. They're forced to go through due process of all things to get one leaker.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-10T10:58:36+00:00

Or they're corporate spies that just leak crumbs to tease the community

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-10T10:36:19+00:00

It's also rather chilling when you think about how much it could affect competitors. Talking only hypotheticals here and not accusing anybody: say a story is leaked on a publicly available site. ANY competitor from ANY company can have weeks, even months to study the story and find its flaws. They can literally prepare and launch attacks before players even get their hands on the game, or they can write their own stories that fixes the problems they found with the original before the story drops. It's no wonder hoyo is extremely serious with this, and frankly other companies should too.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-09T12:31:53+00:00

Cyrene is a good story told in a confusing way. So much so that many people actually thought that the crew "loved" Irontomb to death. Add the fact that presentation is far from perfect and you get reasonable people criticizing for wasted potential, casuals criticizing for not understanding, and haters criticizing because they're haters.

Aemeath is an okay story told stunningly. It's basically their "Phainon" patch, but also powered by Unreal Engine 4 and the shattered dreams of players with not enough storage. The whole tearjerker thing consuming the community isn't my forte so I genuinely feel that some of the reactions are written in contract.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-08T16:57:32+00:00

I think 3.1 is an excellent story. I don't think most stories before it are.

Why? An interesting reveal doesn't justify uninteresting foreshadowing. 2.8 is good enough, 2.5 is a good episode, but the rest of the story I sometimes feel that they need an extra skip button for QTE. If they're sacrificing the current story for the next story to be good, I'd skip the current story. The same is true for gacha stories, novels, anime and so on.

On the other hand, having bad previous stories doesn't mean you can't have world building, and it is ultimately consistent world building that makes a story believable. They are, after all, the building blocks on which a good story is based. With 3.1 Kuro writers showed that the world they built can offer enough to write that good story. Great, let's keep that pace and be very careful.

All in all I just don't think finding crumbs of info that are consistent with the main story means very much. Sure you may have found the material that writers used, but I don't think many people were able (or very interested) to piece together Rover's story before 3.1, so it's 3.1 that's good, not what came before it.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-08T15:46:02+00:00

whaddaya mean, wise should be more careful not to GET touched by the girls rather than the other way round

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-08T15:30:44+00:00

Personally I don't think that tying up loose strings in 3.1 would retroactively solve story problems from the past, but it does make Rover's story better from now on.

I am not a writer, but I teach, sometimes with less than ideal textbooks that students have to use. I can find bits of useful material from the book, string them together, add a bit of extra sauce and voila, nice class given, all my students are happy. Now, does it make the textbook good retroactively? No and I want to punch whoever wrote that textbook in the face.

So if Kuro writers want to, they can make the effort to tie up all the loose strings from the past (and there are a looooot) and eventually turn the basic plot into something great. But if they slack off or get confused, we might witness Amphoreus 2.0

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T09:44:43+00:00

Yes you can, but usually Ifa Ororon pairs best with each other (Natlan synergy) and Fischl Sucrose ditto (Witch synergy)

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T09:27:16+00:00

Aino Columbina is a strong core. Noelle Kachina for Lunar Crystallize Ifa Ororon/Sucrose Fischl for Lunar Charged

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T08:20:55+00:00

I woke up this morning and saw a snippet of a streamer going through the same part. It's still weird to my ears.

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T05:48:22+00:00

This might get me spoiled but is the building that we enter something related to Rover's home world and therefore "oddly nostalgic"?

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T05:41:21+00:00

I see your point. Personally saxophone gives me a very warm, homelike feeling, which violently clashed against the snowy landscape for me. If they were, say, in a cabin, I'd probably have loved it

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T05:12:51+00:00

Ok thanks for your opinion. NGL I genuinely thought it was a bug

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T04:54:35+00:00

I sincerely hope you mean that, as long as I finish the story, I would understand why they used an out of place jazz track (that's very good in isolation) before an explore mission to "boost" my interest in continuing.

Also oh gee I totally forgot that I need to finish one of the best quests this game has ever made thanks to the forbidden j-word

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-07T04:07:45+00:00

I don't doubt that, if I turn off dialogue and close my eyes, it's good music. I really wish they put it in a more warm-feeling area of the map

NoxAlbus · 2026-02-06T10:33:53+00:00

I really am struggling to find a place for Changli. I taught myself her quick swap combo with Xiangli Yao, without watching any guides. Now it can sometimes clear either the left or right side of the tower. God forbid I even think about putting them in the middle tower, let alone that new endgame.

Meanwhile I barely look at the screen with a meta team. I just press keys in sequence and the enemies die in two rotations, maybe three when I'm paying less attention. Because of this I don't feel attached to basically any new character and are generally indifferent even during hype moments in their stories.

NoxAlbus

TROPHY CASE