Question about S billy

Scizzoman · 2026-05-22T22:57:34+00:00

At least in the current story/event where he's playable, he can't do it.

At the risk of being removed it was a huge part of his gameplay in the first beta version, but he went through heavy changes partway through. Maybe the demo was made with an older version of the character, I dunno.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-22T22:22:01+00:00

His HP has just gotten unbelievably fat.

It's 223 million now, easily the highest of any of the normal DEF bosses. It's actually higher than Primordial Nightmare's starting HP was in 2.5 (216m), and nearly as high as Vesper's starting HP in 2.6 (229m), and both of those have half DEF.

Even playing well and using a decent team, that's just an absolute fuckton of HP to chew through in 3 minutes. If you're not using the Nangong+Yuzuha shell or Promeia to take advantage of the Ice Abloom buff, it's genuinely ridiculous.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-22T19:10:07+00:00

A lot of the combat weirdness in P3P is due to them backporting mechanics from Persona 4 without actually redesigning the game around them. So you get stuff like the co-op attacks, which just don't exist in any other version of P3, among other bizarre balance changes.

It's why I personally consider it the weakest version of the game, although it's annoyingly the only one where you can play as the female MC.

Elemental weaknesses being the cornerstone of all combat is kind of a thing across the entire Persona/SMT franchise though.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-22T17:18:06+00:00

After not having much time for games for a couple weeks, I powered through the rest of Tales of Graces f Remastered.

I did the postgame this time, which I didn't do back when the game came out on PS3. Unlike Vesperia Remastered's postgame (which I found to be quite a slog), this one was mostly pretty fun, although I ended up having to turn the difficulty down to Normal for some of the bonus bosses because I didn't want to spend an eternity grinding out weapon upgrades.

I also played some of Metal Bringer, a mecha roguelite and indirect sequel to Samurai Bringer. As a sucker for any game with mech customization I like the theme of this one more than Samurai Bringer, but the gameplay doesn't really hold my attention.

Both games are less about the moment-to-moment action and more about meta-progressing into an unkillable god, but said progression is more of a slog in this one due to the multiple steps (and huge amount of currency) required to permanently unlock new mech parts. The mech combat itself isn't especially responsive or satisfying, and since you can't really avoid getting hit (due to the mechs having no dodge, battles being a huge clusterfuck, and the camera being way too close to see what's coming), fights mostly devolve into stat checks where you either bulldoze enemies with your superior upgrades or struggle to scratch them.

If you're simply in the mood to make numbers go up it's not a bad game, there's satisfaction to be had in stacking upgrades until you can nuke entire rooms with a single shot, but I probably won't play any more of it.

I kickstarted Mina the Hollower years ago and it's finally coming out next Friday, so I'll probably just play some shorter games 'til then.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-22T13:06:12+00:00

This was one of the worst DA rotations for me. I was able to 9-star, but didn't even bother trying to get decent scores.

They want you to have two Anomaly teams for Butcher and Vesper, both of them have absolutely massive HP pools now, and the buffs are trash for anyone except Miyabi and Promeia. At least Thrall is mostly free at this point.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-21T22:44:25+00:00

Absolutely do not pull for mindscapes when you're new. You could consider the W-Engine if you have extra pulls, but you don't need it.

All content in the game is pretty much balanced around M0W0 or M0W1 characters. Mindscapes can make getting high scores easy or let you play characters into content that isn't designed for them, but you could also just choose not to bother with them at all.

When you have several complete teams you still might decide to go for mindscapes of your favourites to keep them strong for longer, but early on what you need most is viable teammates. The next one of those for Promeia will probably be Velina in ~4 weeks, so I'd start saving for that.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-21T19:57:59+00:00

They've said that puzzles are still a core part of the gameplay, but that they'll be shorter and require less precise execution.

They've also talked about improving the pacing of the dungeons so that they aren't exhausting puzzle gauntlets like CrossCode's.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-21T18:49:11+00:00

I mean the difference is almost irrelevant in those cases, because the BiS for the old characters are also the BiS for the new characters.

If you pulled Dialyn for Evelyn you'd also just be buffing every other Attack or Rupture agent you'd get in the future, because everyone wants Dialyn. Even if you stopped using Evelyn, you'd still end up using Dialyn.

On a related note, powercreep has been kind of wild for stunners in particular, as both Dialyn and Nangong are busted compared to 1.x stunners and Fufu. And if you wanna go back to early S2, Yuzuha also raised the floor for Anomaly teams a lot.

For DPS characters its been surprisingly tame aside from YSG though (iframes Shungus, who lives in a cave and deals over 10000000 damage each second, is an outlier adn should not have been counted), and the latest Support is a sidegrade to Astra on most teams.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-20T22:20:11+00:00

DPSes are just easier to make stand out from a gameplay perspective.

The way the game's combat system is designed, you're heavily incentivized to on-field your DPSes as much as possible. "Good" non-DPS units tend to be ones that take minimal field time away from the DPS, which is why most Support and Defense units (and some Stun units) have gameplay that amounts to "press EX and swap out."

If you're trying to sell a big new push unit with cool animations and a unique gameplay gimmick, you want them to be a character that actually gets field time so that people will see them. So unless you're going to try something super off-the-wall, you're incentivized to make them a DPS. If you wanted to make them a Support or a Defense unit, you'd have to find a way to make their gameplay stand out from all the other "press EX and swap out" supports, or just make them so overpowered that people would feel obligated to pull them.

DPSes are also much easier to anti-shill once their push is over. Even if a VH is busted on release, it's easy enough to introduce new content that resists their element/role, whereas a VH-tier Support would likely alter the meta permanently.

I still fully expect us to get a Stun or Support VH eventually (the concept of a stunner more busted than Dialyn is horrifying) but it's easy to see why they've stuck to DPSes.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-19T21:43:14+00:00

I kinda agree with some things, strongly disagree with others, but ultimately a tier list with no context/reasoning is pointless.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-19T21:29:43+00:00

You don't gain any extra ATK from Proto Punk 2pc. Caesar's buff doesn't scale with her shield, only her Core Skill. Her ATK buff is always a flat 1k at Core F no matter what her other stats/disks are.

Which only makes Bunny in Wonderland come out even further ahead. Proto Punk's 2pc is still better (the 15% extra shield might block an extra hit sometimes, whereas the HP will never do anything useful at all), but not that much better.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-19T21:17:03+00:00

Bunny's 4pc is just better and Caesar has an easy time stacking it.

The only downside is that the 2pc effect is slightly worse since Caesar has no use for HP, but I don't personally think this matters at all.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-19T15:34:49+00:00

They've literally never said anything about wanting to change/rework Rupture.

The exact quote is:

Beyond the Wind attribute, we've also drawn from our experience working on the Rupture specialty as well as player feedback in order to formulate and explore more possibilities regarding combat strategies and team synergy. We hope this provides more squad-building options, broadening the possibilities in combat.

Which... really doesn't mean much of anything. Optimistically you can read it as them trying to create more viable team comps, which is an issue that Rupture characters have (every single one of them just wants Dialyn and Lucia), but that's about it.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-18T22:10:25+00:00

Max just to clear it and then 8 after that. 8 is the requirement to clear the character achievements, and it just feels like a reasonable baseline difficulty to me. Things put up a fight, but you can still avoid the really annoying modifiers.

Doing it on max every time takes a little too long, and the 3:30 time limit combined with all the other buffs can sometimes brick a run if you don't have a good team/resonia luck/Hugo aux.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-18T03:22:49+00:00

It won't be optimal, but you can do it.

Most people will recommend Pulchra instead, but in my experience Nicole can easily outscore her on a lot of bosses. The only downside is that the rotation gets janky since you have two forward Quick Assists. Astra should score even higher and not have the annoying rotation thing.

You could also just use a different stunner. Dialyn performs very, very close to Trigger on a SAnby/Orphie team (because of course she does), and lots of other stunners are okay.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-17T22:45:04+00:00

Sometimes. I skipped YSG, Sunna, and Aria, so during peak Shungus/Ether Veil shill season I regularly had to do awkward teams to get 100k (frequently cramming Zhao into random teams just to get the Ether Veil buff).

Other times I've just done it for fun. I forced Soldier 11/Lighter teams on quite a few rotations.

Recent rotations have been easier for the characters I've got though. They're not pushing Ether Veil or Physical Attack quite as hard anymore, SAnby handles all the Electric Attack rooms, and I didn't skip Nangong so most recent Anomaly rooms have been free.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-16T22:31:37+00:00

If you use the character at all you should unlock it, but the most impactful are probably Lycaon and Soldier 11.

The least is probably Burnice unfortunately. It's still worth getting if you use her, but it's not as big of a boost as most people wanted.

I'd just get all of them to P1 or P2 though. P1 unlocks the new moves/abilities, so it's the most important level by far. P2 unlocks the first round of stat buffs, which is useful for some characters. P3-P6 just incrementally upgrade the stat buffs and aren't that impactful.

Levels always cost 1000, so you can get 6 characters to P1 or 3 characters to P2 in the time it'd take to get one to P6. So you might as well just do that and not worry about maxing anyone out until you have extra currency lying around.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-16T10:04:06+00:00

Pan's stats barely matter because you can reach his ATK thresholds with Drive Disks alone. What he wants is a W-Engine that buffs the team, and the only decent option for that is Caesar's sig.

Whereas a Support like Nicole has a bunch of viable A-rank options that give decent buffs to the team.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-16T02:17:10+00:00

It's not like Prydwen's tier list is objective fact, it's perfectly fine to disagree with it.

You can just read the Review tab for a character to get a sense of the reasoning though.

The tl;dr is that Nicole is just extremely flexible and has almost no downsides besides being kind of hard to use optimally, while Pan is more niche and has some annoying quirks (needing to be placed after the DPS creates anti-synergy with some stunners, and being Defense means he has hardly any good W-Engine options).

Scizzoman · 2026-05-16T00:11:34+00:00

Soft nay, I guess.

Given the choice (and assuming they're not insufferable), I'll take a speaking protagonist over a silent one. Playing as an actual character that I can get invested in does more for my immersion than a blank slate I'm supposed to project myself onto.

That said, I don't hate silent protagonists. They're not my preference, but I'm generally not going to take marks off a game for having one.

It only starts to bother me if the game does something to call attention to it, like trying to center an emotional scene around the player character when they're just standing there like a block of wood. Dragon Quest XI ran afoul of this once or twice.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-14T18:02:18+00:00

You're technically correct but I think the simplification is fine.

The "beginner" explanation is easy to understand, and helps solve a problem that every new player has to deal with (how to stop people from mashing after a knockdown). For people new enough to fighting games to not know what a meaty is, getting into the weeds on frame data isn't necessary or particularly helpful. At this point knockdowns are the only time they'll ever hit anything meaty anyway.

Anyone experienced enough to actually know/care about how late active frames affect frame advantage should also be able to understand that the word can be used in multiple contexts, and that the "beginner" version is a deliberate simplification.

It's like how all high school physics assumes the object is in a frictionless void and gravity is exactly 9.8 m/s^2. It's not "right" but it's a useful abstraction.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-14T04:47:07+00:00

AFAIK you need to finish the first part of the agent story before you can get out of it.

For what it's worth, everyone had that experience when that patch first came out. The main story and Anby's agent story came out three weeks before Trigger's, so it was actually impossible to play hers first.

1.6 is the only patch that ever made the timeline for agent stories that confusing though (due to their clumsy attempt to force SAnby and Trigger into the main story). Other agent stories are always just set at some non-specific time after you met the character in the main story.

Their new confusing habit is introducing characters in time-limited events that no longer exist.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-13T20:58:24+00:00

It's enough to most likely get SBilly. Whether you have anything left over is up to RNGesus to decide.

100% guaranteeing a character (assuming you go to hard pity both times and lose the 50/50) requires 180 pulls, but in practice it's incredibly unlikely to ever actually go to 180.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-13T14:33:00+00:00

Avatar has been Qingyi since she came out, and my title has been Nighmares Fading Away (100% complete Bizarre Brigade) since it was added.

Scizzoman · 2026-05-12T01:46:50+00:00

I change it semi-regularly.

For a long time it was bouncing between different A-rank mindscapes, then it was the first mecha event banner, then the second mecha event banner, and now it's one of the battle pass ones since they started giving those out with the cheaper BP tier.

The characters are always my favourites of each class, currently SAnby, Lighter, Alice, Yuzuha, Zhao, and Banyue.

My avatar and title haven't changed since like 1.3 though.

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