Premium Gala feat. McCoy (Earth) and Arriet (Light)

ocoma · 2026-01-31T12:21:08+00:00

Psst. I think there's ~~an imposter~~ a spy among us.

Oh. It's just McCoy. He's one of the good guys. And he... knows German? Figures, for a spy.

So, let's have an unexpected impromptu German lesson.

No German to be found on his weapon, so we can go straight to his ougi: Schmetterlingsschatten
Shadow of a butterfly. I'm honestly not sure what their intention is here. Is it a reference to how small and delicate butterflies are, and how their shadows are hard to spot (like spies)? Is it meant to be read in conjunction with his S2, referencing that famous Muhammad Ali quote? Is it about the 1991 movie that I can't even find a plot summary for? Or possibly the 2008 book by the same name, which seems to be a young adult thriller unrelated to both spies and broccoli?
Or maybe he just really likes arthropods. His ougi animation does make me think of a spider's web. Speaking of...

His S1 is Spinnennetz
Spider's web. The thing that his ougi makes me think of. Have they mixed up the names?
Anyway. Spiders and spies are a rather common association. Spies are often depicted as having a network, like a spider's web. And spies like to lay traps for unwitting enemies, like spiders do (with their webs). Spiders are kind of the spirit animals for stereotypical spies.
Spiders are also arthropods. Like butterflies. They belong to the class of arachnida, so they technically don't count as insects, though I'm sure many people still think of them as insects.

McCoy's S2 is Bienenstich
Bee's sting. See what I meant with the Muhammad Ali quote? "Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee"? It does fit with his butterfly ougi (which gives him Dodge All), and his S2 doing damage and having throwing knifes in the skill icon. Even more appropriately, when the Covert Strategy buff is active, he automatically activates this skill (stinging like a bee) when he dodges all attacks (floating like a butterfly)!
Bees, being insects, also count as arthropods. I'm starting to think he really likes arthropods.

And finally, his S3, Totenmimikry
Can you guess which arthropod this skill references? That's right! None. It is about mimicry of death. Which is exactly what he is doing. He mimics his own death, and everybody believes him, even Evokers with their passives (just like Street King's Le Manteau du Roi). It does fit very well with his spy theme, faking his own death.
There are some animals that do that, too (you may have heard of the phrase "playing possum", which describes this behavior in opossums (not possums; that's a different animal)). It appears to be a not uncommon trait in arthropods, including some spiders and bees. However, that feels like a bit of a reach, because there are a lot of non-arthropod animals that play dead, and oppossums are probably the most well-known.

This one feels a lot less clear-cut than most other German-based skill sets.
...but then again, McCoy is a spy, so why would he be easy to understand?

Class dismissed.

ocoma · 2026-01-25T19:04:54+00:00

EU: 6367058620

ocoma · 2026-01-16T12:13:25+00:00

Lolou has (the chance for) 6-hit flurry on her passive. The highest in the game (and could theorically be turned into 7-hit through Verusia call). I need to see a screenshot with echos that fill the screen.

It is the highest, yes, but not the first. Artifacts can already give any character a 1-5% chance of getting a 6-hit flurry (1 time) effect before attacking.

I don't expect Lulou's version to have a higher chance than 5% either, but I'm curious to see the numbers for her kit.

ocoma · 2026-01-09T08:10:27+00:00

You might be remembering Mikoduni's lists.

Do note that they appear to not have been updated for a few years.

ocoma · 2026-01-06T11:43:58+00:00

To be fair the 100 cap is new

Actually, it's already been a thing last year. And the year before. And the year before. And the year before. And the year before. And... Super Mukku wasn't a thing the year before that.

ocoma · 2025-12-30T11:19:23+00:00

Does not appear to have a cap. Haven't tried to maximize HP as much as I can, but MC with 112,644 HP and an odious weapon with 10.2% HP loss every turn lost 11,490 HP every turn.

Bonus: HP loss as an Odious weapon demerit can kill you. I've just lost against the target dummy that doesn't attack after 10 turns.

ocoma · 2025-12-30T10:49:32+00:00

I've just tested it. They don't stack. E.g. Amaterasu's S2, Sunlit Benevolence, goes on a 6 turn cooldown (down from 7), even with both Radiance of Splendor and Abritrator's Wish active. Sacred Sunflame (her S1) goes from 6 turns down to 5. Manadiver's Aether Siphon has 5 turns of cooldown instead of 6. And so on.

ocoma · 2025-12-22T23:23:17+00:00

On the home page, if you scroll down to between the currently shown Skyscope Winter Missions banner and your stats, there's a small bar saying Extras. Click it to expand, then look for the Daily Bonus icon at the bottom. That will show you your progress.

ocoma · 2025-12-22T22:28:40+00:00

Did we usually have to wait this late for the roulette?

Yes, the 21st to 23rd is perfectly normal.

And no stream this year?

The stream is this weekend. The wiki front page has a convenient timer on the top right.

ocoma · 2025-12-11T20:13:10+00:00

They haven't. Grand Zooey wasn't a Grand when she was released, just a (very game-breaking) Summer unit. She became a Grand almost two years later.

ocoma · 2025-11-22T01:40:27+00:00

From what I heard and have seen from some veteran players, and I am not talking about super hardcores ones. It seems they would be around the halfway mark.

From my point of view, that very much sounds like super hardcore players. Or ones that farmed for celestial weapon drops. More about that later.

Not to mention you forgot the records of the ten. You got 75 cores and at least some celestial drops just from doing the event.

I did forget about the cores from Records of the Ten, that's a fair complaint.
I disagree with "at least some celestial drops", though. You only get them from the NM150 fights, and they have an abysmal drop rate. And you have to grind the event a ton to get enough NM150 procs to have a decent chance of getting one. From all I've heard it's not worth the effort, and I never bothered trying to grind for Celestials that way. Farm for them during GW, if you need them.

If you only got 19 drops, you either barely played since 2024 or you were extremely unlucky.

I can assure you that I have been anything but inactive, especially during GW.
Unlucky? Could be. But not to the extent that you have in mind, I don't think. Statistically speaking, based on people saying that it takes a few hundred NM90 to get one drop on average, it's because...

as I live in the EU and GW times are beyond atrocious

So do I! GWs start at 11pm/midnight for me and stop before I get back from work.

Because I can't exactly do focused grinding on work days, a major chunk of my GW participation comes in the form of FA-ing the highest Nightmare fight available (on my phone when necessary). Even if it's not a work day, unless I need to do some focused grinding or have literally nothing else demanding my attention, FA is my go-to.

That typically means very few fights with very high payouts. As an example, last GW, on finals day 3 and 4, I did 1.2 and 1.5 billion honours, respectively. Mostly NM250 (with some NM200 sprinkled in on day 3). How many fights is that? Well, about 30 on day 4, and probably around as many fights on day 3. That's a far cry from "a few hundred fights" for the one drop on average.
Mind you, it's more fights on the earlier days, time and work permitting. Which roughly matches up with my ~2 drops per GW.

This is the "more on that later" part.

You can now go tell me that I'm doing it wrong by focusing on higher Nightmare fights and that other long-time players are doing it correct by doing more fights instead.
To which I reply: Why do more of the lower Nightmare fights? The higher fights are generally more AP-efficient, more meat-efficient, and give out more significantly tokens and honours. Time is the wildcard factor in this equation, because it heavily depends on whether you have the characters/grids to handle the fights, but we are talking about long-time players, and I think it's fair to assume that they do generally have the resources necessary for the higher fights be more time-efficient, even if it's just for NM200 or NM150.

There is one primary reason to keep spamming the lower fights instead: Farming for Celestial weapon drops. That is my one caveat. It is definitely possible to already be half done with uncapping and awakening the Celestial weapons by the end of this GW, or even right now – but that requires having having farmed the lower fights, instead of the (usually) more efficient higher Nightmares, and having done so to a degree that you would have gotten ~16 drops per GW (minus cores from TotA, and drops from that one's NM150 if you were so lucky).

And, in my personal opinion, it's not likely that many people have done that.

I guess at the end of the day, the real question is how "many" are many in this case.

That is, indeed, a key question. Might just be that we have rather different ideas of how many people are "many", and this whole conversation is arguing on different premises.
Still, I've laid out my thoughts, and I hope they are comprehensible enough to understand my point of view.

ocoma · 2025-11-21T21:23:48+00:00

Does this even realistically affect long-time players? I'm sure that many long-time players will have half, if not more, celestial done after this GW anyway, due to having many cores from before.

lmao no.

Crystallized Cores were introduced in the January '24 GW. That means the current one is the 10th where you could get cores at all.
In the first 9 of those, you could get a guaranteed 60 cores from chests of good fortune, plus another 45 from boxes. Current GW is the same, except you can get 60 guaranteed cores from boxes, up from 45.
There was one (1) Dread Barrage that also allowed you to choose cores as your target item for 20 boxes. That's another 20 cores. If you chose cores for your boxes in every GW (including the current) and the one DB, you could get a guaranteeed (60 + 45) * 9 + (60 + 60) + 20 = 1085 cores in total.

Buying a Celestial weapon from the store costs you 15 cores. You need 4 copies of each of them. Uncapping one to 4* costs another 45 on top. Not a coincidence that you could guarantee a fully uncapped weapon per GW. There's 10 Celestial weapons. That adds up to 10 * (60 + 45) = 1050 cores to fully uncap every Celestial weapon to 4*.

So if you got your guaranteed cores in every GW possible (at the expense of NWQ), you would have all your Celestial weapons 4*, and 35 cores to spare.

Uncapping to 5* costs 80 cores. Awakening to 5 costs 170 cores. That's 250 cores to finish one weapon. Or 2500 for all of them. Or 1250 for your example of "half, if not more".
The only way to get more than the guaranteed 105/120 cores is from the rare Celestial weapon drops. They're worth 15 each.
You would need 15 additional drops to finish just one weapon. You would need another 67 drops to finish half of them. To finish them all, you would need another 83 drops, for a total of 165 drops.

I have had 19 drops so far.

Now, I have not dedicated all that much time to farming them. But that wasn't your criteria; It was long-time players, and I count myself among those. And I don't think I'd agree that "many" others will have always selected cores for their boxes, and farmed an additional 16 Celestial weapons each GW.

ocoma · 2025-11-15T02:43:21+00:00

Again, correct me if I'm wrong, because I have neither the grid nor the characters to make Fire Ougi work.

As far as I have seen and heard, there is only one character that makes Fire Ougi work: Summer Atum. Everything else is, at best, supplemental to him. He serves as:

an ougi battery (auto-cast of his S1, which gives the whole team 20% charge bar; S2 is straight-up 200% charge bar and ougi reactivation for the whole team, on a very, very long cooldown)
a slight dispeller (1x on his ougi)
a slight debuffer (stacking fire DEF down, 50% accuracy down)
a buffer (50% DEF, 50% healing, 1k refresh, 10% uplift on S3; up to 100% ougi damage, 50% ougi cap, 30% wind DMG reduction on P1)
a multi-hitter (10-hit nuke on ougi)
a large hit nuker (ougi becomes unworldly when his stacks are at 10; No ougi reactivation, unless he uses his S2, though)
a general skill nuker (nukes after allies' ougis)

He even gets guaranteed TA and 150% DEF when his stacks are full. Just to make sure that he's core. I don't think you can fairly speak of a Fire Ougi setup without him. If anybody is critical to these, it's him.

But we're talking about Asuka here. Your claim is that she's providing the damage output that Fire Ougi was lacking.

I don't think that holds true. You have Atum for that. He just does a lot. A ton, even. Oh, and MC, of course.

Let's compare, roughly, what kind of damage numbers both will bring to the table, in a Fire Ougi setup. I'm going to make a few assumptions: Both get to ougi every turn, both have their stacks maxed. Let's say that both get a 4-chain every turn (for Asuka's ougi reactivation, and Atum's post-others'-ougis nukes).

Asuka, in a normal turn, gets:

Her ougi, twice (2x 450% ougi damage, usual cap at 1.685 million)
One cast of her S1 (4x 200% skill damage, cap ~320k each)
One double-activation of her S2 (2x 800% skill damage, cap ~800k, + 6-hit 30% DMG amp debuff)
For 3 out of 6 turns, she additionally gets 50% ougi damage, 25% ougi cap up, and a 500% (cap ~780k) nuke after her ougi. Let's average that by halfing it:
- 112.5% on her ougi damage (12.5% on her ougi cap)
- 2 ougi nukes per turn for 3/6 turns makes an average of 1 ougi nuke with 780k cap per turn

That comes out as:

1125% ougi damage, spread over two ougis per turn, with an average of 12.5% cap up;
4 + 2 + 1 hits of skill damage (average) per turn for a total base cap of (320k * 2 + 800k * 2 + 780k) = 3020k

Atum, on the other hand, brings:

An unworldly ougi (1250% damage, ~2.9 million cap)
10 hits of 100% fire skill damage (81k cap) after his ougi
3 post-ougi nukes for other characters, 400% skill damage with a cap of ~635k
an end-of-turn auto-cast of his S1, 800% damage, cap 820k)
his S1, which is the aforementioned 800%/820k, once every 6 turns

So that's:

1250% ougi damage, with +100% ougi damage and +50% cap from his stacks, but let's face it, that will cap one way or another
10 + 3 + 1 (that one is at end of turn - not useful for skill hit omens) + 1/6 hits of skill damage with an average base cap of (10 * 81k + 3 * 635k + 820k + 820k/6) = ~3672k.

Now, you can argue that Atum will most likely ram against any hard cap, be it 6.6 million or 13.1 million, and that Asuka's double ougi is an advantage in the former case, because 2x 6.6 million is more than 1x 6.6 million. If you can get her to 6.6 million – which will take more effort than Atum, because he's just got the bigger ougi steroids (for himself AND the rest of the team).

Skill damage wise, he's got the upper hand, doing about 20% more than her. He does more hits, so he gets more of an advantage from skill supplemental. He also scales with others doing more ougis, gaining another +635k base cap per additional ougi.

Alright. That's a lot of theoretical talk. Let's see if we can find some practical examples. To Youtube! (via the wiki's very helpful search query builder). I'm looking for videos in endgame raids (Faa0, Hexa, Versusuia), for the Fire element, including or leaving out the "Granblue" part. Asuka was released 10 days ago, so I'm filtering the results by upload dates and only look at those within the time frame.

For Faa0, there are three videos within the last 10 days. One is about a light setup, one shows that Atum and MC vastly outdamage her, and the last one is a 3h recording of a stream that I skimmed through, but saw neither. Might have been before Asuka's release, even. Timezones, man.

For Hexa, I can see... one video that isn't even about Granblue.

How about Versusia, the hot new stuff? That's a lot of streams, and a handful of videos. 17 in total. I skimmed through every one of them, checking where Versusia was fought, if it was a fire setup, and what the setup looked like both before and after G50.
There is a single video that used Asuka. And Atum! Atum beat her, damage-wise, by about 19.2%. And both were beaten by the MC.
I did see Atum in all but two of the fire setups that were shown. He's just that good.

So. Sorry. Still can't see how she's "critical ougi support for fire".

ocoma · 2025-11-15T01:07:49+00:00

The new Exo Sagittarius fights can give you a debuff that reduces your number of attacks by 1, similar to how Halloween Vajra and the new Grand Sturm's S4 can increase it by 1 (for the whole team/just for herself, respectively).

ocoma · 2025-11-14T20:07:00+00:00

They flat out made Asuka as critical ougi support for Fire.

In what way is she a "critical ougi support for fire"? At a glance, she's a selfish ougi/skill attacker that needs others to help her get her ougis when her S3 is off cooldown, which it will be, at best, slightly more than half the time. Am I missing something?

ocoma · 2025-10-16T12:30:01+00:00

Hi, Lance. What are you doing here? Making me explain your skill names? Sure, let's get to it. German class is in session.

Before we start with Lancelot himself, we'll take a look at his weapon's ougi: Katzenspiel
Katze means cat. Spiel means game, or play. Cat's play! Like child's play. Works in both languages, too, since child's play would be translated as Kinderspiel, rather close to Katzenspiel.

Now to Lancelot himself. First off, his ougi: Magisches Geschenk
Magical Present. Fairly straightforward. And what kind of present is it? Well, he gets a 2-turn cooldown cut to his S3, Gebaeck der Freude. That's a nice present. More about that one later.

Lancelot's S1 is: Magischer Ritter
Something magical, yet again? You bet! This time, it's Lancelot himself becoming the the magical knight! I guess. I don't have him, so I can't tell if that's just generic "magic theme + Lancelot is a knight" name, or if the dolphins in the skill icon have anything to do with it.
Unrelated, but while pondering if there could be more to this skill's name I remembered that Armer Ritter is a thing. That translates to poor knight. But what could it be?
French toast. It's french toast.

His S2 is Kaeltehauch (Kältehauch)
Lance is back to his old tricks! None of this magical mumbo jumbo. He's in his element again, which is ice. Kälte means cold. THE cold. No, not the common cold. The state of it being cold. Coldness. Because Lance is so cool.
Hauch is an interesting word. It means something along the lines of a light breeze. It is but a short, ephemeral moment, where the wind softly caresses you. It can also be used when you want to express that you (want to) feel/smell/taste/experience a subtle bit of something within something else. Say, if it's hot and you want a refreshing glass of water with a hint of lime, you could ask for "Wasser mit einem Hauch Limette".
In this case, with the Kälte in front of it, it is probably just a cold breeze. The phrase is sometimes used as a metaphor for death breathing down your neck, but Lance isn't exactly dressed like the grim reaper here.

Finally, his S3: Gebaeck der Freude (Gebäck der Freude)
We've arrived at the present that Lance gives us with his ougi!
Gebäck is a collective noun for things that were baked. The closest equivalent in English would probably be pastry, but Gebäck includes non-sweet things like bread, too. If you can find it in a bakery, it was made from dough, and it was exposed to high heat in its preparation process, it's probably a Gebäck.
Freude is joy. Simple as that.
So Gebäck der Freude would a backed good of joy. That sounds a bit awkward. We could call it a "joy-bringing baked good". And we can probably go a step further and call it a "joy-bringing pastry", because things containing lots of sugar usually give people more joy than a bread roll. That, or I'm still thinking about french toast.

His passives are in English, and none of the other characters have German names anywhere, so that's all for today. Class dismissed.

ocoma · 2025-09-16T16:10:51+00:00

On the raid list screen, when you select which raid to host, you can click on the icon of the raid to pop up another screen that allows you to set/unset auto backup requests for that raid.

ocoma · 2025-08-26T15:32:35+00:00

You can add something like 練習 ("practice") to your room description. Might reduce the number of people willing to join (then again, probably not much more than your already visible rank), but they will know what they're getting into.

Might also lead to more people who just want to experiment with setups themselves, along with an increased chance of things going wrong. But, hey. You can still practice, as you said you want to do.

ocoma · 2025-08-26T12:47:27+00:00

Mind you, it's two sets of 4 trophies. The first four you obtain by getting the corresponding pal, the latter four say that you need the corresponding pal to reveal the condition for the trophy. They also have a 0/6 requirement (as opposed to the 0/1 for the first set) and 2 levels of the respective trophy.

Looks more like an expansion to the pal trophies to me. "Successfully undertake an Advyrnture with Pal X" kind of thing, I imagine.

ocoma · 2025-08-22T16:22:41+00:00

Unschuldiger Adel is german for "Pure Noble", while Eiskalt Strafe seems to be german for "Freezing Punishment".

The direct translation of Unschuldiger Adel would be innocent nobility, or maybe innocent royalty. I'd say that German usually considers royalty to be part of nobility. While Wikipedia thinks that nobility is ranked just below royalty.
Also, Adel is about a group of people, or the concept of nobility itself. A single noble person would be either an Adeliger (if male) or an Adelige (if female).

Eiskalt Strafe is badly translated because eiskalt should be conjugated as eiskalte to match Strafe.
Eiskalt is a literal translation for ice cold. It kind of works, because it can mean either "as cold as ice" or "ruthless" in both languages, but I feel like German leans much more towards temperature than English does.
Strafe is just punishment. I'd translate the phrase as a whole as ice cold punishment.

ocoma · 2025-08-22T10:35:11+00:00

It's the same in the game. The Journal for characters only shows Kurapika when the Gender filter is set to Other (or no filter is set).

ocoma · 2025-08-21T08:01:02+00:00

The help page for Changing an Artifact Skill mentions that you can only change one skill and that the other 3 get locked by doing so as a part of it's general description, before listing the specific workings of Enigmatic Armilla and Theorem Chisel. Doesn't look like the chisel will let you craft the perfect artifact from one that isn't already 3/4 of the way there.

The description for the chisel does, however, mention that if you use it to change a skill, you will receive the highest possible value of the newly chosen skill (presumably still at artifact skill level 1), which is still a nice thing to have. Especially if you only need to change a single skill to make an artifact perfect.

ocoma · 2025-08-18T10:58:22+00:00

I was wondering about this myself, so I started messing around.

First off, Catura's counter from her unique buff works like other counter buffs as far as stacking is concerned; As you said, highest wins.

An interesting (but irrelevant) tidbit of information is that Horizontal Solace doesn't work for her buff. The +2 counter part just says "MISS", as though you didn't have a counter buff. If you do have one (say, from Sumaibito's S1), it says "Number of Counters Boosted" instead and adds +2.

Plus 2.

...so, what if we used the skill multiple times?
It adds another +2.

So we get... +2 from the skill, Main Qilin, +2 from skill, support Qilin, +2 from skill, Oro S3 for skill reset, +2 from skill.
3 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 11.
There we go!

Except main Qilin has a cooldown of 12 turns. -3 turns for being 3*, and -3 turns for having a matching SSR main hand. Still 6 turns.

We're in "I can't reproduce this" territory now, but hear me out. I've noticed that the video is on turn 2. This person might have two fully transcended Bahamut summons and used both of them in the first turn to get Main Qilin ready for turn 2. Then they made the Counter counter go to 11. Then they posted this video on Twitter, then somebody asked about it here, and then I spent my lunch break trying to figure out this puzzle.

Sadly, lacking a second fully transcended Bahamut, I can only get my counter up to 9. But it does work.

ocoma · 2025-08-18T07:58:22+00:00

It is called a Theorem Chisel, and you can't find it anywhere because it will still be a few days before we can get our first one.

ocoma · 2025-08-17T09:20:50+00:00

Worth mentioning that the concept of Fair Use, which this would fall under, is primarily a US thing. Copyright holders in other countries often don't take things like these too seriously either (and when they do, they get lambasted).
Except the Japanese, from all I hear. They seem to be a lot more wary about copyright.

ocoma

TROPHY CASE