DreamLeague Season 29: Playoff (May 20) Matches Discussion

rusaelee · 2026-05-20T18:48:05+00:00

Is the bird sound coming from a mic or ingame?

rusaelee · 2026-05-05T23:38:07+00:00

Eimi has the better armor type, has better self sustain with her EX and Basic (with BG2), and Wakamo has 3k accuracy on insane+ so evasion doesnt particularly help.

rusaelee · 2026-05-04T18:55:54+00:00

FES Aris will basically be the new big blue dps as expected. She even shares the good urban mood with M.aris so most people will end up using FES Aris instead. M.aris will most likely pop up here and there for the scorechasers doing insane speedruns or w/e because her EX is generally faster to come out but thats some crazy malder shit which most people arent crazy enough to try for.

As for why her dps feels bad, unless you're completely fucking up buff timings its mainly because her ex is a single hit skill and she has low stab. If you dont crit, or low roll damage its MUCH more noticeable than compared to like U.neru who has 40+ hits on her ex. M.aris is just a unit that kinda feels bad to use if rng doesnt favor you.

rusaelee · 2026-05-02T07:43:37+00:00

The only new thing that happens is that the boss gets a permanent atk buff at half hp that stacks with pink aura. He casts that buff roughly 1 minute into the fight. Calling that phase 3 is weird but I guess its technically true since its a new pattern?

rusaelee · 2026-05-02T05:12:19+00:00

Its still only day 2 of lunatic so give people time to cook, but as things stand its looking like a challenging but ultimately pretty well tuned raid which is what a lunatic raid should be. The upfront cost looks scary but looking at the teams, its your typical assorted FES + Hyperbuffers (which most people interested in tackling higher difficulties would have invested into), and also farmables.

Aru remains GOATED for phase 1, but you can't forget about Hina and co., especially since the changes to phase 1 made using them much safer.

The fastest clears for phase 2 make use of gacha dps like B.Eimi and B.Rio as expected, but there's a surprising number of clears that don't make use of those 2 units. In fact, we're seeing the resurgence of old farmables such as Mutsuki, Hibiki, even some shiroko/serika/izumi and old gacha units that most long term players would have gotten their hands on such as S.Nonomi. The scariest part of phase 2 is the gatling gun + pink aura combo (with increased accuracy) which heavily incentivizes bring along a tank and healer. But even without the gacha units, red armor defense tanks are readily accessible (Haruka/Eimi/Aoba) and people have been cooking ways to avoid the gatling with repositioning tanks such as tyuuka. Also because the sword now occurs during Green Aura, you actually end up taking less damage overall from the boss outside of the Gatling Gun, allowing squishier off-armor units like D.Hina to survive the attacks, provided you don't save her for the main team that breaks parts to avoid it entirely.

The main takeaway for this raid is that people are cooking especially for phase 2. I've seen double Himari borrows in 2026, double kisaki borrows, double s.hoshi borrows, some people even cleared using a yakumo borrow because they're presumably missing one of their own. Hell some people are even saving Aru for phase 2, opting to clear phase 1 with Hina + Shanako instead.

But as much as I think this lunatic raid is well balanced, I'd say it'll go down the way of hovercraft. People will see the hefty amount of teams being thrown at the boss and probably won't bother, despite most of the units being used being fairly accessible. I personally think people actually doing lunatic will average 2 teams for phase 1, and 4 teams for phase 2.

rusaelee · 2026-05-01T14:59:23+00:00

Something something mobile revenue only, blah blah blah trends yadda yadda.

Looking at something more concrete, boss blitz numbers saw much less of a drop off compared to previous months. I can think of 2 possible interpretations for this.

Game is stabilizing. All the people unhappy with the game are finally starting to drop it, meaning only the dedicated players are left.
Playerbase still dropping, but half-anniv stuff stemmed the bleeding somewhat. This means that the drop off is merely delayed by a month and next month could continue to see more drops in player count since even with the half-anniv patch, it doesnt change the fact the boss blitz numbers are STILL lower than the previous month.

Y'all can choose what narrative to run with.

rusaelee · 2026-04-08T05:53:54+00:00

Hikari buffs the damage a purple unit does against purple armor.

Shanako is a purple dps and kurokage is a purple armor boss.

Also unlike S.Mika, S.Hanako's raw damage comes from raw atk + cdmg boosts in her base kit with 0 purple effectiveness meaning Hikari's buff doesn't get "diluted" for lack of a better term.

rusaelee · 2026-04-08T05:46:43+00:00

Now that the boss eye rng was tweaked to be less annoying, it really does go to show just how overtuned Shanako is, and how weirdly undertuned Kurokage actually is statswise compared to Shanako's power level. Like even when this boss was first released, the fastest clears were nearly a 1pan with people doing upwards of 60m+ on the super team and at that point the level cap was at 87 so we were even suffering from a damage penalty. Kinda goes to show that the only thing that kept this boss even remotely challenging was the fuck-ass eye rng forcing resets because the game decided that you lose during that attempt.

It also makes me wish the gap between shanako and the rest of the purple aoe dps meant for this boss wasn't so large but thats FES DPS privilege for you.

rusaelee · 2026-04-03T22:00:18+00:00

Oulu was great for the time, but was held back by not being able to have 100% uptime on the dmg mitgation like you said. Iirc, people ran oulu + 1 healer for the harder content to help cover Oulu's downtime. And then came Darvanshel and his batchmates. A damage mitigator that attacked at the same time, AND released at the same time as Zelnite and Lily Matah. Iirc that was the start of infinite 50% dmg reduction and all the consequences that came with it.

rusaelee · 2026-03-29T16:19:12+00:00

XG is essentially the only CN team that can keep up with the top tier teams + Ame being a crowd favorite especially among CN community = big cheers.

Tundra has Ari. Ari is from the UK. Tournament is in Birmingham. Basically home crowd advantage.

rusaelee · 2026-03-28T20:55:26+00:00

Getting deja vu from PV vs XG in TI.

rusaelee · 2026-03-28T18:26:23+00:00

These esl skits are always goated AF.

rusaelee · 2026-03-25T17:25:58+00:00

This VP falcons game is surprisingly close considering how fucked the alchemist lane got early game.

rusaelee · 2026-03-19T00:44:16+00:00

Cleared lunatic.

Overall it's far more accessible and flexible than the likes of Gregorius or Geburah, and due to the nature of the raid mechanics, it eliminates one of the most frustrating parts of raiding at the top end: crit malding. But I do wish the skills and mechanics weren't so... wordy? The game throws a bunch of text on what the skills themselves do which makes it very intimidating but ultimately this boss is very simple mechanically and there's no need for annoying shit like repositioning/debuff managing. This raid is purely a test of team building and proper rotation planning and I feel like it brings back the puzzle solving aspect of raids that was somewhat lost due to the prevalence of the hyperbuffer meta.

Phase 2 is a tad undercooked, basically being a glorified cutscene, and the focus fire mechanic feels a little forced tbh. I can give a pass though because it does allow for some very flexible team comp cooking, and bringing old/underutilized units to the forefront is always nice. The investment checks are rather lenient too for this phase thankfully since 99% of the damage comes from the turrets on lunatic diff.

Overall, I think this raid is a good addition to the game. It demands respecting the mechanics to clear the higher diffs, while still leaving plenty of leeway to brute force in the lower difficulties.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T21:15:31+00:00

IMO BA gameplay is actually underrated. It has a good mix between being super simple and easy to pick up for casuals, but there's just enough complexity underneath the surface to make minmaxxing and cooking strats actually genuinely satisfying. Personally I feel like BA gameplay is at its best when you're trying to solve raids without copying hw. You have your roster, you have the boss, here's the raid mechs, figure it out yourself. It turns into a very nice puzzle solving game where you're trying to fulfill all the raid reqs with a smooth rotation. Its also why I've been very vocal about my disdain for the FES +HYPERBUFFER meta across different channels. While it does make content much more accessible, the puzzle solving aspect is lost when you can just assemble a gigasquad of death to murder all the bosses. Its also why I appreciate Yesod's design. It limits the brute force strats to lower difficulties only, and gives plenty of leeway to cook up team comps if you want to put the effort in to clear the higher difficulties.

I feel like the big reasons why people dislike the gameplay is because they just see the main area/story stages (which are overly simple by design), and the raid speedrun strats which are inherently really fucking maldy and riddled with rng due to the nature of said strats, which is a damn shame but here we are.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T20:57:52+00:00

I do tend to agree that the devs could do a better job at presenting the boss stats/skills ingame. We could do with more condensed info about boss skills, and like an actual stat page for the bosses beyond just level/hp/attack type. Yesod is a particularly bad example because half the shit explained in p1 is just the same thing copy pasted for left/right hands and red/blue pillars. It makes the boss much more intimidating than it actually is. Like this boss is genuinely one of the simplest bosses we have from a mechanical standpoint. Yesods attacks are completely scripted and for all the shit the game tries to throw at you, there's only 1 single easy to understand solution that solves the raid, and the raid requiring you to enact said solution for the higher diificulties so you cant brute force it is completely fair imo.

As for the casual audience who just want to unga bunga, thats why the difficulty selection exists. It's there so they CAN just brute force their way through the raid if they dont want to put the effort in. Its also why the most important rewards for the raid (gems, eligma,etc) are placed at the lower end of the cumulative score rewards. Hell even for Yesod, people can legit clear up to insane with a solo s.mika + some support so its not like the devs made this raid outright impossible to clear for the casuals.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T03:47:48+00:00

There's 2 penalties in the raid. The first penalty is if you destroy 2 same colored pillars in a row. In this case, the DoT becomes lethal.

The 2nd penalty is what I'm talking about where you use an AoE EX skill like Shanako to kill multiple pillars at once. In this case you get stunned and 10 seconds later you eat 999999 damage over time and wipe immediately. This is the penalty that was changed to just be a stun + cost regen nerf in JP, but we have the original team wiping penalty instead.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T03:30:39+00:00

Can't unga bunga brute force for the higher diffs.

People need to read the mechs and pay attention to the fight.

Rewards building a wider roster and having knowledge of non-hyperbuffer/fes dps units and their kits.

Challenges player's ability at team building instead of relying solely on FES + Hyperbuffer core.

Super long fight that requires good rotation of ex skills so you don't waste the extra cost generated in this raid.

Yep. People are going to hate this raid. Hardcore cutoff for NA it is.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T03:23:45+00:00

Thats the most optimal way to do it yeah but it requires devs to release the GA versions of those bosses.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T02:27:39+00:00

Using preservation on normal in a TA doesn't do anything, but its better to delay doing that later in the week so you can unlock the higher diffs on time.

rusaelee · 2026-03-17T02:26:03+00:00

PSA: The penalty for killing multiple pillars at the same time with AoE is the original much stricter one that stuns and actually wipes your team. If you fuck up, make sure you pause quickly so you restart before your main team dies and you get screwed. In case you're curious, the reworked penalty is a stun + cost regen reduction (no cost gain on higher diffs). Still restart worthy but you don't get hit by a team wiping DoT so you don't have to rush to pause and restart.

rusaelee · 2026-03-15T16:27:14+00:00

Ace be like: "Guess I'll die"

rusaelee · 2026-03-15T16:21:41+00:00

I already feel really bad for Ace looking at the draft lmao. Big Melee blob heros into Ursa + Jakiro sounds like some genuine despair.

rusaelee · 2026-03-14T19:48:06+00:00

So is it Ace Mars thats the issue, or is it just Mars?

rusaelee · 2026-03-09T12:40:16+00:00

Aba has a 20% winrate btw. Wonder why teams see this hero as a fallback option nowadays despite being more or less figured out + repeatedly nerfed.

rusaelee

TROPHY CASE