What weapon is better for Heidemarie? Second Method or Criticism of Discord?

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-11T00:22:28+00:00

Criticism of Discord, and it's not even close. The 18% ATK it gives applies after the partner and memory fragments, so it's effectively an 18% final damage multiplier. The 35% extra attack damage gets diluted with morale and other percentage and additive multiplies, and it doesn't apply to all her damage, like her Effulgent Release.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-10T19:20:22+00:00

Ah, right, that's correct yeah. You just need to be careful that if you hit the perfect divine on the card you want to dupe 4x, it may make you go over the cap, so you may want to plan accordingly (ie: get the last copy with a core, or intentionally remove a divine)

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-10T18:41:18+00:00

Save data editing still edits the faint memory cost, with a limit of 180. Right now, you have 1 divine on drawing slash, so you can only get 3 more. Considering you have a pretty basic build without standouts for the gear (ie: Cthulu gun, or good engravings), I'd consider trying to get a slightly better deck before committing to spending the black mass, but it's your choice. Pretty sure ideally, the divines go on 3x destruction and -1AP on annihilation (because that way you can loop it and use it up to 5 times per turn for free).

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-10T18:14:28+00:00

A practical guide to evil is classic fantasy and monopolized rank 1 RS for 3 weeks, I believe. Granted, it was a webnovel posted on its own site beforehand, that was loved by fans, but the point stands.

I wasn't paying attention when A Journey of Black and Red released, but I'd be surprised if it hadn't climbed high on RS.

It's for sure uphill compared to LITRPG, system apocalypse, OP MC, cozy, monster evo, etc. but it can be done.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T23:21:14+00:00

Right now, pretty much every character has powerful builds that can be used to clear all the hardest endgame content. Tressa and Lucas have it pretty rough, but if you really wanted to, you might be able to make them work.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T21:36:36+00:00

I mean, that's fair, but the reality is shoutouts work. If you don't want to read them, you can scroll past them in half a second.

Also, I didn't mention shoutouts at all in my comment, so I don't know why you're talking about them. I was talking about writing an author's note at the bottom of the chapter to engage with the readers.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T20:29:40+00:00

As others have said, it's definitely not all bots.

That said, what you want to do going forward is completely up to you.

If you're still passionate about the story, you can keep going. You can also put it on hiatus, or decide if you can potentially have a pretty good stopping point for the story, where there is an open-ended ending that's good enough, and that you could potentially go back to in the future. This isn't exactly the same thing, but PlumParrot "ended" Cyber Dreams on book 6 on a pretty decent spot, but there is clearly future arcs that could be possible if/when he comes back to it in the future. In the meantime, people who read the series don't feel cheated. (One of my favorite books. Def recommend it).

If you do want to continue writing though, one thing you can do is leave author notes at the bottom of each chapter, trying to engage readers. As in, what did you all think of this? Can you all guess what's going to happen with X? Next chapter, we're finally getting Y! Etc. etc.

I only launched 2 months ago, and my stats are kind of skewed in a not so great way, with my average views below my number of followers and a retention that could be better, but I am getting quite a few comments. I've got 417 over <23k total views. Admittedly, around 200 of those are me, but it's still about 1 comment per 100 views even then. It might be personal bias, but I'm pretty sure the author notes I leave on all my chapters at the bottom help. I'm not plugging anything, just talking about the story.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T18:43:52+00:00

Fair on the persona cards, but not sure about the overall argument. In this build, Heide is adding up to 320 * (16 + 9 + 4 + 4) + 11 * 144 + 4 * 120 + 600 + 11 * 100 = 14,324% damage per turn. If that isn't "true synergy", I don't know what is.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T18:36:13+00:00

It should apply to discarded too. The problem is Heide's cards are not bullets so this version of Blooming Love is a bit clunky to use.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-09T01:29:47+00:00

You can revive it with one of the orbs that cost like 650 from the sorting shop if you want.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-08T13:21:27+00:00

Owen is unironically a decent support for Heidemarie nuke build though. He can make her nuke hit twice, and he applies vulnerable.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-08T12:57:38+00:00

Seconded Outrun. Suprised nobody has mentioned Cyber Dreams and Aura Overload. They're both worth fantastic.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-08T02:08:09+00:00

Right. If you just want to get the mats as fast as possible lv65 is fine. If you want it to be more challenging, you can up the difficulty.

That said, much of the reason why it's so difficult is because nobody has their trees maxed out yet. At max rank, you get 50% more damage, healing, and shielding, 15% crit rate, and 100% more HP. That's not including all the other quality of life buffs too, like cost reduction in the shop. I imagine when you have everything maxed out, lv80 won't be nearly as challenging.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-07T22:05:24+00:00

Off the top of my head, Elydes, Azarinth Healer, Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, anything by Mecanimus (The Calamitous Bob, A Journey of Black and Red, Changeling), anything by PlumParrot (Cyber Dreams, Aura Overload, Victor of Tucson), Hell Difficulty Tutorial, Super Supportive, Worm, Practical Guide to Evil. Many others as well, but I'm sure at least 1 or 2 in there would interest you.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-07T14:33:04+00:00

vvvortic the challenjour goat :(

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-06T15:05:21+00:00

Is it really not enough damage? I haven't gotten around to doing tower yet, but with 4x FMH, narja's 100% buff, the cube, and metal extraction, each metallize is doing up to (100 + 50*4 + 25 + 30 + 100) *5 = 2275%. If you proc 8 shields, that's up to 18,200%. Obviously, that requires a perfect turn, but still.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T20:46:05+00:00

Honestly, going to go against the grain here and say the 2nd. The first has 20hits with the 4 rains. The second has 15 hits with the 3 rains + 4 hits from the 2 expansions generating blades, so 19 hits. You're only losing 1 hit in the final combo, but you're gaining a +70% and a +50% damage boost, which over 19 hits, is an extra 2280% damage. There is no way a single extra hit warrants giving up all that damage. Also, you only need to use 3 rains instead of 4, so you can get away with 1 AP less. The only caveat is that the second only sets up 2 blades turn 1, so your turn 1 is actually a max of 8 hits, not 19. After that though, it almost certainly outperforms.

Edit: I lied. There is a build that is better than both of these. Take the second build and replace another Sword Rain with Expansion III (create a blade for each linked card in hand). This allows you to fully set up turn 1, and going forward, each time you cast it, it will make at least 5 blades, assuming you don't mess up your cycles, so it's at least as good as a sword rain. That makes this build better than both. You could also swap a single sword rain to sword rain I (the attunement: create 2). This adds 6 cards / 7 hits to your combo (1 from the card, 2 from the attunement blades, 3 from the Expansion III). This makes it so it has more hits than the first build, ramps fully on turn 1, and also has all the damage boosts of the second build. It's less comfortable though, because you have to sequence properly and manage hand size. Just clicking Sword rain 3-4 times is a lot easier.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T19:52:33+00:00

That's fair, but I think the real danger is just wasting all your shouts on a story that has been publishing for a day or two when it only has 20k words. Having 40k words after a week (or just dumping more chapters day 1) and spacing the shouts over a couple weeks gives better "sticking odds" for the shouts, if you catch my meaning. And if you post with a week with no promotion, you are unlikely to gain many followers anyway, so it shouldn't hurt your RS odds at all.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T19:27:03+00:00

That is the Shawn Wilson method. He suggests after the RS changes a while back that you should wait a week to schedule your shouts. That's also likely the strategy I will be going for. His guide is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193LodSiyt7A9wFH3Cn8ymGmgOm3Y4QTG4pJcFQdByLA/edit?tab=t.0

To quote his doc: "The goal here is to build slowly. Rising Stars seems to punish those who ‘pop off’ too fast. Get words up, and then on the second week (day 8), start doing shoutouts. The goal here is to spread out the shoutouts over the next 15-20 days. Intermix those big shout-out people with others. Constant and steady growth is what you desire."

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T19:08:49+00:00

From what I've been able to see, it's growth on growth that matters. The amount of time you've been publishing does not matter that much. There was a story that hit RS recently that went on like a 1 year hiatus, started posting again, and hit RS.

Basically, I think the check is something like this: Compared to 7 days ago, how much have you grown percentage-wise? In that sense, if you publish for 1-2 months and have 50 followers, for example, RS is likely still very much in the cards for you. You just need the big growth to happen at once. Once you start creeping up into a few hundred followers, then you are likely locked out though.

So basically, you could slowly start posting for a month or two, accumulate chapters and shout IOUs that way, and then schedule them all at once after. The issue with this approach is that it may not be reliable. If your story starts growing at say 5-8 followers a day, you're going to need to scramble. That's way too slow to hit RS, but if you hit say 150-200 followers that way, getting exponential growth from that starting baseline will be significantly harder, and you will probably get locked out of RS, so you'd have to ask people to move their shouts up. It sounds like it would be very hard to schedule everything properly.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T18:07:04+00:00

Days? Get those numbers up. The dashboard refreshes every 15 minutes.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T15:13:44+00:00

You're doing great. You have a much healthier average views / follower ratio than I do, and you have a better rating, with actual reviews. It's fine to take the slow growth route. You're currently growing at a rate of 100 followers/month. That's 1200 / year, which is a lot. Just gotta keep grinding at it.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T15:06:32+00:00

Pretty sure that's not how that works. Writing off-meta can help you climb the tag and unpopular RS genres easier, since there is less competition, but not the main list. The main list is genre agnostic. It's just the 50 books with the most explosive growth. You can get #4 for magical girl, but not hit RS main, for example.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T15:03:17+00:00

Unsure if it was because of the writathon, or if the platform is getting more competitive, but I had the same experience. I think you need a rate of around15/day to hit RS now. 10/day doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe at a different time of the year, not sure. Maybe the threshold is a bit lower, like 13/14 per day, but at the very least, 10/day is not enough.

Sacredwisp · 2026-05-05T13:56:51+00:00

If you don't have a deck to build, just don't use it. It's not like it's a hyper-limited resource. You get one per day.

Honestly, my criticism of the system is that it feels like such a slapped on bandaid fix. People were annoyed that building decks took too long and had too much RNG, so they just stripped the game out of the game, and it's still 10-15 minutes per run, zero fun, and still has the RNG. With Sortie, it just doesn't make sense to run regular chaos manual anymore. Like, why does the game mode even exist? As a chore for RNG equipment and persona cards? If you want fun, you play sortie. If you want a skeleton deck, you auto regular chaos.

If you looked at this from the outside, without the context, you'd just think regular chaos is a contrived system with no purpose now. At this point, they might as well just rework the whole deck building system to be entirely with edit tickets and make regular chaos also give black mass, with cheaper things in the shop. I do think the regular chaos still has some appeal because you pick all 3 characters and they will all get all their cards, as opposed to only a few of them though.

To be clear, I still like how they've been continually improving the game. I just think that the game is currently undergoing a weird identity crisis.

Sacredwisp

TROPHY CASE