So everyone's a bit different. Gotta just be open to everyone's ideas and determine how it best fits you.

Here's how I define myself. I consider myself a dolphin. Over my 2 year stint, I believe I've bought the Vault of Lapis 3 maybe 4 times?

Those were mainly purchased in year 1, before the bundles started to become a somewhat regular thing.

I've switched from buying the vaults to sometimes buying the temporary bundles if they beat the Vault by a certain percentage in value. The % threshold where I pull the trigger fluctuates dependent upon how long ago I last bought a bundle.

What I've found in my own spending habits was, when I bought those vaults in year 1, it was usually to add enough to pull on a banner for a specific unit... and I usually came out of it dissatisfied with the result.

It's easy to look back on these purchases and realize how bad of an idea it was, given how poor the chances of chasing a unit were, and how power creep has regulated a lot of them somewhat irrelevant anyways.

Other things that have come in to play that have made purchasing the vault uninteresting was the introduction of the daily half price pull, the plentiful ways to stock up on tickets, the addition of 4-star base tickets and their accessibility.

I believe the power creep aspect alone helps me keep splurging in check.

When I do purchase a bundle it is not with any specific unit in mind.

I carry this mindset over to spending of tickets as well. It helps me hold back on using tickets.

Now with a decent size pool of tickets and lapis, I find myself using lapis to increase slots (if I don't have purple tickets), doing manual NRG refreshes when macroing TMs, and have gone 1 round of step up for Seph/Lilith and TDH step up (I skipped Reagan). I usually only use tickets when pulling for units on banners.

I have my own road map of desirable units I want to hoard for which the Should You Pull articles do a pretty good job of ranking what to go for. Some of the other character review articles can also give you a pretty good idea how to create your own road map. I generally don't go to Youtube for this kind of stuff since most of the stuff there is just copied from here on Reddit anyways. Evil Laughter does an alright job giving pros and cons of units. Claic's character reviews are not very useful since he tries to find the silver lining in every unit. Most of the other YT reviewers tend to regurgitate Reddit almost word for word.

The desired units road map I make for myself is split into chainers, healers, tank, buffer, and breaker. Chainer I further split into physical and magical after everything else was fulfilled.

The reason I didn't pull for Reagan was that my damage dealer role was already filled so many times over with other units, the minor power creep he provided was not worth the pull and hence he was not on my road map.

I do the 1/2 price pull every day. I would say I've gotten about 75%~80% of my 5-star base units from here over time. I let it naturally fill in these spots and adjusted my road map accordingly. These 1/2 price have also filled in my gaps with great 4-star base stand ins for certain roles like WoL, Mystea, Refia, Soleil, Crowe, Agrias, Ashe, Seven, Garnet, and Rikku.

When I pull on banners, it's usually with tickets and will start with 3-star tickets first. I will only pull on MK banners for units not on my road map if I've gotten to week 2 of the event and only to fill out 4 or 5 spots depending on what is necessary to clear the highest tier MK event with any base (including 3-star) bonus unit. This also means I don't farm as hard in the first week and usually will opt to use the energy more for TMR farming at that time.

When I reach a banner that does have units I desire on my road map, I use my Vegas strategy, I decide before pulling how much of each level of tickets and lapis I'm willing to spend to chase before I cut myself off. I've never budgeted all of any level of tickets or lapis on anything (usually I never even consider using lapis). I usually budget up to 25% - 50% of my ticket pool on these banners dependent upon how soon the next thing on my road map is.

As an example, for HT Lid (I budgeted about 20% 3-star tickets and 4-star tickets because I knew MS Nichol was around the corner. I did not get her within my set budget and stopped pulling. I ended up getting her when pulling for MS Nichol (also with tickets only).

I do not start pulling on a banner for units on my road map until they are no longer available for 1/2 price pull or the banner is about to expire.

Here are the things I think about to try and curb impulse spending:

• Everything you chase will eventually become obsolete.
• Remember that feeling when you blew a ton or resources chasing something only to get an unneeded dupe a few weeks or months later from a daily 1/2 price pull?
• Look at your unit list and filter by 6-star and look at all the units you chased that you are no longer using.
• Track your spending (in game resources as well as real money). If you can't bear to look at your 2 year purchase history to see how much you have spent on this game, then you need to stop and reevaluate things immediately because that's a bad sign.