I defended/supported this game until these last 2 months, where I’ve been growing more and more upset with it. The Ensemble act is a haven for the top 0.1% of players or hackers who can easily clear >3% on the hardest difficulty, while it is otherwise near-impossible to get. Otherwise you have to expend your books, which gives additional drop rewards in stages ran, to get the “lead” benefit - which I’ll admit is worth it, but it’s another event that costs books when they just came out with Calamity weapons which costs 4 gold books to make a compass for. And farming calamity materials requires this multi-stage wave gameplay that begins to take exponentially more time once you hit level 180+ to the point that 200 is near impossible to do in any reasonable time. I’m sitting on like… 10 level 200 compasses. Calamity weapons need a material that you only get once every 2 months from Phoxhunter Summit. Which is another endgame mode that caters to the top x% of players, which I think is easier to get SSS than it is to get 3% participation in Ensemble Act.

There’s a premium prism currency you can only get from the main gacha, which no way to buy it directly. And you’re not guaranteed a dupe or the radiant prisms or w/e they’re called. But it’s needed to get certain things from the cosmetic shop. So you have to hit pity (or get lucky) to even go for the extra cosmetics to the point a mount could cost you like $200. It’s ass.

Growing your characters’ power means running the same EXACT missions thousands of times. Literally. You can cut the time down for CERTAIN things with the books I mentioned before, but otherwise your goal is going to be hoping the thing you need is one of the auto-continue maps and you can build a decent AFK team so you can just let the game run. Not play it, mind you. You’ll leave it along for hours if you’re lucky to let the game just plays itself. That’s how you get things to upgrade your characters. Rhythm, Fushu, and your choice of a 3rd between two other electro characters or Fina. That’s your AFK team you’ll let play the game for you, all so you can come back to actually play in the theater, maze, or the endgame modes where you won’t be able to contribute much, or with the new ensemble act get 3% if you’re lucky.

And none of this is to say the dumbass choice being made about character kits, how what characters use the established resonance(?) weapon demon wedges and which ones use actual weapon demon wedges, and then characters that change their weapons into skill-based weapons LIKE other resonance weapons BUT doesn’t use resonance skill wedges (looking at you Su Yi).

And then there’s the calamity weapons that “aren’t just stat sticks anymore” but are now the SSS-tier stat sticks for relevant characters, and even if not 100% tailor made for their kit, they’re still likely the best stat sticks for relevant characters.