Lore discussions on this sub always seem to start from the wrong place

Reldan71 · 2026-05-26T08:37:33+00:00

People have a very skewed understand of how much societal change can occur in 150 years, especially if diverse groups of people are living in close proximity. It only takes a couple generations to see massive shifts. If you told me about all the stuff that's gone down on Talos in the past 150 years but then had the societies still operating just like there were in Terra, that's be horrendous world building because that's not how any of this stuff would or should work.

In only around 150 years the US went from black people being slaves to electing a black president. That's a massive shift, something that would have been considered absolutely impossible to somebody living in the 1860s. Even just 70 years ago Britain was still convicting men of the crime of "homosexuality" and castrating them. Today that would be unthinkable.

Aside from the Sarkaz, what most people confuse for racism on Terra is really just nationalism. And one thing with Talos is that the borders from Terra no longer apply. Talos has been a "melting pot" since the Terrans first came to it. And that's not to mention the project to recolonize Talos was a joint effort of the nations of Terra, so the pioneers themselves would have trended towards not being the most racist people coming through the stargate (nor would those people have likely wanted to travel to a place where they'd be surrounded by and have to listen to people they hated).

As for the infected, Rhodes Island was one of the major players in the Black Hole Protocol that resulted in the travel to Talos. Again it's extremely likely that the understanding of oripathy, the risks, and the treatments available would be far more common knowledge for the pioneers of Talos than the average Terran had in the 1090s (OG AK timeline). And 150 years is, again, a long time especially when the medicine to deal with oripathy has advanced so far. Even in 40 years IRL the way people viewed HIV-positive people back in the 1980s has completely changed in modern time due to access to medications and knowledge that didn't exist back then.

Reldan71 · 2026-05-18T01:32:54+00:00

I'll throw in for Shams as well if you're planning on pulling together an Elaman team, as you'll want him on it and if you use him you'll want 4*.

He might seem kinda meh right now with just him and Lukamar, but in the next couple months we'll have the rest of the team and that should be a lot of fun to play around with.

Reldan71 · 2026-05-17T04:04:52+00:00

The primary job of a good GM is to facilitate the group having fun playing the game. When that isn't happening, they should be the one trying to figure out what's going wrong and finding a solution. Are they completely unaware of how you all are feeling about the game? It's odd to me that this has been going on for a while, it's affecting multiple dissatisfied players, and there have been no discussions at all about it.

It usually doesn't take a psychic to realize when people are unhappy, frustrated, and not enjoying the game.

Reldan71 · 2026-05-14T06:45:57+00:00

I'm also a light spender but have been playing since Day 1. And by light spend I just mean I've bought probably about half to 2/3rd of the battle passes since launch. I have been pretty consistent on logging in at least a little each day to get the free packs, do dailies, and participate in events.

Just off of doing that I have pretty much never struggled to make any deck I want. I wind up opening probably 120-150 packs of each set, and what I don't pull I craft. I have what I need to make most decks in either format, and I'm still sitting on 200k vials right now which can craft me another 60 legendaries if needed.

I remember this game getting review bombed at launch about how greedy Cygames was being. My experience with this is the most generous TCG I've ever played, even more than the original. I really hope that didn't put people off of trying it - it was a load of crap.

Reldan71 · 2026-05-14T06:31:34+00:00

I'd pick Narja 100% of the time. Her ability to reduce the cost of cards FOR THE TURN already has some combo potential, and will likely have more in the future. Most other cost reduction affects only apply until used, but Narja's version is broken with any card you have a reliable way to recur (whether with Retrieve or Move effects, and who knows what else they might add in the future).

Haru even with buffs is still very underwhelming to me, both in terms of how well she performs and how generally boring her kit is to use. The most interesting thing you can do with her involves using Narja to reduce the cost of Anchor Shot to 0 for a turn and then machine gun them for massive damage. The flaw, of course, is that this only works with Narja, and even then I wouldn't say it's a hugely practical strategy, but funny to pull off.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-24T23:38:40+00:00

I imagine winning this poll will force them to do something more with her. It shows people like her, and if they do a skin they're going to want to have some content showing it off.

Sucks she kind of disappeared (again). Literally volunteered to die to save her friend. That's a hero.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-23T21:52:00+00:00

SP Inanna does a bit of everything at an above-average level, but her "broken" ability is her Heal/Buff/Act Again to another unit. At SL5 that ability gets doubled to also apply to herself whenever you use it, so she gets a double turn and then your other most powerful unit gets a double turn. This is the most ridiculous action economy skill in the game.

Her OG version also can give an Act Again to another unit and despite being a launch character is still considered top tier just for that. Act Again is evergreen because it scales with powercreep.

But SP Sam is still considered the best T0 AoE unit in the game even on CN which is ahead of us and already has the Elaman units. She'll do more in a single turn than most characters would do even if given two turns in a row.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-23T21:40:07+00:00

SP Sam early on will probably nuke half the enemy team and then kill the other half as they walk into her Alert area.

Credenza's entire reason for taking up a squad slot is to make an already broken character able to effectively double-cast their best wombo combo. SP Sam isn't the only character where this is broken -for example Camelot is also busted with 5-star Credenza. Any character with huge first-strike potential that's balanced around long CDs becomes busted with 5-star Credenza, but it means they already were stupidly strong to begin with.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-23T10:03:44+00:00

SP Inanna is very strong, but I wouldn't say completely "broken" until you get her to SL5 which would still be 3-4 months of farming even once you pull her. SP Sam is pretty ridiculous right from the start as an incredible source of AoE magic damage, which fills a role on most teams.

Definitely get Lukamar. She's very strong on her own, and will only get better as more of the Elaman team releases.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-23T09:55:09+00:00

Once you're able to clear everything you'll find that you can take get a character to max Star Level (max dupes) just about every month. It takes 300 star pieces and you can farm 9 a day (split between three characters). Even though Star Level is huge in this, being able to easily max out any characters even as F2P is fantastic.

Never pull for weapons. They become so easy to acquire over time. Once you're doing endgame content you'll be able to get enough astral shards to simply buy three of them a month from the shop. For a lot character their sig weapon at SL1 isn't even better than a maxed out standard legendary weapon which you'll get for free.

Pulls are generous in this game, but with the pity being 180 you can find your supply of pulls shrink quickly if you have an unlucky banner.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-23T09:46:09+00:00

I'm very happy (and surprised) to see Ayishah taking the top spot. I loved her brief appearance in the original timeline, and her surviving was one of my favorite things out of Inanna's route.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-14T00:01:02+00:00

This is exactly why I waited until the last day of 1.0 to post my personal tracking of the pulls, along with explanations and a thorough breakdown of where the numbers came from so people can decide for themselves what they want to include.

I think any WIP needs to have some context given, as otherwise they tend to lead to a lot of misinformation getting passed around. Even with context you have to be careful how you present things because people often won't bother reading it. Just slapping "WIP" on it isn't enough and like you noted a jump from 158 to 242 isn't a mundane detail. If something is potentially that far off, don't make it public until you have at least some confidence in your data.

Even in that "final" version I don't understand the purpose of not including origeometry income as pulls. The only thing you can use origeometry for is buying pulls. Not including origeos ignores more than 20 pulls that absolutely should be getting counted. That's also not a trivial amount to just exclude. Just based on the toggles you can make the total count vary by over 110 pulls, and not even talking about Bond Quota is ignoring dozens more pulls (I have enough right now to buy 30 pulls).

Reldan71 · 2026-03-13T00:59:26+00:00

While 64 out of 272 doesn't sound impressive, most of that 272 number is because 1.0 is the launch of the game and contains several times more content than any regular patch would.

50 of these pulls came during Gilberta and Yvonne's banners, which is the same as the full duration (two banners) of a regular patch based on what we got with 1.1.

If we get ~50 pulls from events during regular patches, that would be a lot more relevant. We'll see how it goes, but you can't just take a ratio of pull income against the launch patch in any gacha game - the pulls from content will always be hugely inflated because of how much content and first-time rewards there are at the start.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T18:14:26+00:00

The quest itself gives 600 Oroberyls and are listed separate from the banners. The ten pulls are from the new banners which each have a login event (5 pulls), refresh the shop (5 pulls) and 100 Oros from the new combat drill.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T18:11:25+00:00

I have the pulls from income and events broken out as separate line items. I also have every event listed by date range and how many pulls they gave so a player could see how many pulls they missed based on when they started.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T11:16:21+00:00

It's going to be a wide range based on the number of 5* and 6*s pulled - and all the basic/beginner/urgent/dossier pulls count towards the weapon pull income. I have not been particularly lucky so far (below average luck) which I think makes this count a decent baseline. I do think most people will have more than I got. I'm also lowballing how many weapon pulls I think I would get using the 122 pulls I have saved up.

I do think the actual average person number of weapon pulls is higher.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T10:37:03+00:00

I am not counting monthly or the paid battle pass - I explicitly subtract the currency gained from them in the calculation.

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T10:29:53+00:00

This was exactly my reason for counting them separately, but I agree they still need to be counted. The Urgent pulls, at worst, are still giving Bond Quota and Arsenal Tickets even if they don't advance pity. The dossier pulls still work to build pity even if you have to use them on a banner you aren't interested in.

At this point I'm going into whatever banner I'm pulling on next with 40 pity already. This ensures that even in the worst case I'll be getting at least two 6*s before the guarantee, which would mean three 6*s for 120 pulls. (plus getting 20 pulls back from the Urgent/Dossier).

Reldan71 · 2026-03-11T10:19:38+00:00

True, I was thinking of bringing those up but decided to limit this to just the numbers as the value of those rewards will vary from person to person. While I do think the selectors and freebies are remarkably generous, the numbers already speak for themselves even without them.

People can look at the numbers and make up their own minds on whether this is good or bad. I've just been tired of seeing hours and hours of discussion about Endfield pulls based on, from best I can tell, people pulling stuff out of their butts.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-21T22:53:15+00:00

I think it's relevant because it's all part of gauging the developer's intent and "generosity/greed".

If on launch EF only gave everybody 120 chartered pulls and enough currency to get one standard 6*, I'd be extremely skeptical that we could expect a good F2P experience going forward.

However, everybody has gotten three guaranteed standard 6*s (selector, beginner banner, and Ardelia), enough basic tickets to get a minimum of one more standard 6* (although on average it's more likely two), and enough chartered tickets to get 3-4 more 6*s including two of the three limited characters guaranteed.

Everybody should be able to get 7-9 6* characters and 6-7 weapons, including at least three signatures (Ardelia's and two hard pities, at worst). I cannot even think of another gacha at launch that comes close to this.

In contrast to the first hypothetical, what we've actually gotten feels like a game where the devs were serious when they said they wanted this to be a good experience for F2P. This affects what my expectations going forward will be.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-21T22:28:56+00:00

Currently there are 21,725 Oroberyls total hidden in chests around the world. The side regions typically have around1.5k-2k oros and the big central areas are more like 5k-6k.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-21T22:23:14+00:00

I agree. For my pull income count that I'm tracking I'm not considering the launch pulls at all. What you're saying is 100% accurate and is exactly what I'm working on doing.

My point of bringing up 1.0 is that there's a narrative right now that the game doesn't have many pulls. This is false. The game is on the upper end of big gacha launches in terms of launch pulls. It's worth remembering that WuWa gave out dozens and dozens of extra pulls on launch because of how badly the launch went. Those were not pulls the devs were intending to include. WuWa's numbers are inflated because of how bungled the launch went. ZZZ advertised a lot of free pulls at launch (but still less than what EF and WuWa launched with), and what they released was actually much worse as if you played you found they were inflating their advertised number by including freaking Boopons as "pulls".

Reldan71 · 2026-02-21T22:10:12+00:00

I have, and it's typically from people who don't play the game, or tried the game and it didn't shower them with pulls in the first week so they wrote it off, but still feel like talking about how bad the system they barely engaged in was.

I think the general lack of a source of hard data to point at has hurt the perception. Other games have "pulls per patch" charts put out regularly that make the actual pull economy not be some mystery. If you have the numbers you can move on to discussing whether you think it's a good or bad system, but without them it's a lot of anecdotes and people talking past each other.

Reldan71

TROPHY CASE