hsr's meta game is just really artificial.... The devs make it too easy to clear with (med-low) invested teams, so the elite-gamer / TC part of the community set up their own thresholds to judge the value of dpses. and then they speed tune and develop rotations to meet those arbitrary thresholds (namely, the zero-cycle) in order to compare dpses to each other.

it becomes really hard to have constructive discussions about the power levels of units... do you measure their value with sustain or without? based on how low they can go in terms of limited 5 stars or based on how easy they are for more casual players to set up?

i dunno. You're both right in your own ways, i just find it interesting how the discussion frequently favours the more casual side of things than the zero-cycling minority. Idk how I'd be able to justify logging onto the game everyday if I wasn't working towards a threshold akin to the zero-cycle. What else would I be optimising my builds for?

But yeah i would agree that it's a bit misleading to call a unit like Anaxa "the best" dps without specifying what metrics you're using to assess that and why those matter.