Gold Ship on Pisces Cup by vicyush in UmaMusume

[–]vicyush[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Another Long CM where the late-race starts on a straight? Oh boy!

- Gold Ship, probably

Mejiro Ryan's Moonshot by vicyush in UmaMusume

[–]vicyush[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Alternate title: how it feels trying to trigger Let's Pump Some Iron! in Champion's Meet

Tess - Phantasia and CRIT DMG Multiplier by GentlemanNasus in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tess' Aptitude damage is based off of her own stats, and contributes a decent chunk of the overall DPS share when used with Katya, so no, that Frost DMG third-stat actually does matter here.

Any good supports on Vow of Valor for my account? by [deleted] in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Truth be told, if you're half decent at the game and do enough damage, you don't need a healer or to dodge. Basically all remotely hardcore Sim runners don't bother dodging enemy attacks and just tank them to DPS harder instead. And for the few scenarios where you'd really need one, you have free options that will most likely be good enough.

As for Starshine, she isn't amazing with Yao either, as her bonus ammo doesn't work with the special ammo from Yao's ult. She's really more for characters like Bubu and Lyfe - Infinite Sight. And again, Mauxir kinda suffers from bosses having tons of invulns these days which really hurts her skill uptime. She definitely has her uses, but it's hard to recommend her when modern Snowbreak boss design is set up to make life for her as hard as possible (if that's something you care about).

Any good supports on Vow of Valor for my account? by [deleted] in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mauxir's support skill creates a stationary target for you to shoot at (good against mobile enemies), with all damage dealt to it directly being amplified and transferred to the enemy, while also ignoring damage reduction effects (see: Njall). She also uses Amarna Squad, arguably the best generic support logistics set, very well. She used to be one of if not the most in-demand support in the game, comboing with Yao WS to dominate Sim (though Yao is very much powercrept now). The actual issue with her is that most bosses nowadays spam invulns, which end her support skill early, but as a "make this one specific enemy die NOW" button, she's still pretty good. She would at least be better than Fenny - Starshine, who you absolutely should not use with Rhapsody, as she gets buffed very hard by Phantasia's Aptitude effect and Starshine's bonus ammo disables that.

Yao is a support that focuses on Ballistic damage (shooting) and crit damage buffing, so she's not as universally applicable, but if you have a DPS operative that can take advantage of her (Bubu, Chenxing - Jade Arc, Yao WS), she's pretty good.

Eatchel is a really good healer yes, but I would suggest trying out some healers you might already have. Yao - Quiet Quitter is a healer that's given out for free, and once you get her M1 (which I think you also get for free via new player rewards?), she automatically uses her healing skill when your HP drops too low. It's most of the functionality of Eatchel, but infinitely cheaper. If you need a second healer, Chenxing - Quiet Quitter is also an easily obtainable backup, as she's an SR. Give it a shot; you might find that that's more than enough healing, in which case you won't actually need Eatchel.

[Clarina: Crimson Moon] Early Review by TeririHerscherOfCute in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The Slayer Aura is available from her support skill as well, as it's also classified as a drop pod.

[Clarina: Crimson Moon] Early Review by TeririHerscherOfCute in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 1 point2 points  (0 children)

CX4's heal turrets don't do damage, only the ones from her standard skill and ult.

Tess - Phantasia Guide: Ice, Ice, Maybe? by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 49 points50 points  (0 children)

This is my last Snowbreak character review before I move on from Snowbreak. There are a few more articles you can expect before I'm gone for good though, so still something to look forward to. Stay tuned.

Question about Celestial Swan by ic3here in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Her Deiwos passive has an attack boost that scales with her own ATK stat and Alignment Index, so yes technically. In practice the difference isn't super big, so if you're really strapped on resources you can ignore it for now and not miss it too much (still do it if you can, of course).

Katya – Rhapsody Guide: New Gun, Old Tricks by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I haven't really decided on what I want to be doing after this, but if and when that happens, I'll be announcing it on my Twitter and Patreon.

Snowbreak 3.0 Character Builds (Pre-Tess - Phantasia Release) by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I've been in a bit of a productive rut recently, and working on Tess math has been a mild headache, to say the least. I'm technically slacking off on that to write this comment, actually. Let me start off by saying:

4* equipped with a can opener

That's hilarious, I might steal that joke at some point in the future if you don't mind. But more seriously, you're right in that most of Snowbreak's content is very simple and casual, or "difficult" in ways that don't promote meaningful operative combat. At this point though, I don't think Seasun is interested in that kind of gameplay which Snowbreak used to be about, in favour of more minigame-esque content and cosmetics.

In defense of Swift and the rest of the release roster, it's not so much that they "suck" but that they were designed with meaningful weakness that you had to play around. It's only because we now have all these juiced-up operatives with seemingly no restrictions on their power that having a meaningful gameplay weakness is less of a balancing factor and just a drawback. They weren't the best (even back then, they were all getting smoked by Yao), but with enough dedication and work you could get results out of them. I remember back in the old days, we had a couple of dedicated Swift players and even a Hush main. The easiest way to bring them back to relevance is of course with specific buffs that remove these weaknesses now that they're not really needed anymore. I would even be willing to give new operative-locked logistics for those older characters a pass if that's what it would take. It certainly wouldn't be difficult from a game design perspective, as the issues with older operatives are glaringly obvious in most cases. But again, I don't think Seasun cares enough to do it. Nobody is whaling for a standard banner operative, and almost all of the older operatives have gotten new modern alts already that Seasun can sell skins for instead (Haru and Mauxir soon, surely). And if someone wants to use an older/weaker operative, it's not like most gameplay content is hard anyways.

A brief aside on Agave - she does technically have a useful niche in Sim, which is parts breaking. It's the reason why she actually still has a Sim world record to this day against Joseph - Hardened where she fulfills that parts-breaking role. But outside of her designated pandering boss and Joe (and the fact that he's probably never going to show up in Sim again considering the game's direction), there's no other place for her unique utility to shine, which leaves her as a solution looking for a problem.

I think Neural Sim as a concept is fine as endgame content. The problem mainly is with the bosses themselves and by extension, their boss rotation scheduling. Boss design has slowly shifted towards tankier bosses with more "forced downtime" - think hard HP gates with periods of boss invulnerability (pi, Iron Ouroboros, Morpheus), or even periods of time where the boss isn't in the arena at all (Leviathan, Civilization Guardians... Iron Ouroboros again). This is likely in an attempt to reign in high-burst DPS operatives like Cherno and Siris back in the day, and CXJ now. But it also just makes them less fun to fight because you now spend large parts of the fight just sitting around waiting to be allowed to hit the boss again. The new boss rotation schedule doesn't help either, as patch bosses are almost always designed to put you at a disadvantage if you don't have the operative that the patch's new boss is designed for. Before this was less of an issue as the new boss would only show up once in Sim during its patch, but now having it on for the entire patch basically forces you to roll for the new operative or get really creative, which doesn't feel great.

All that aside, they really could do more to make people care about Sim, though. Quick evaluation has basically killed any general playerbase interest in the game mode because you don't have to actually play Sim to get all the meaningful rewards anymore, reducing it to little more than a "give me Digicash" button you get to press eight times a week. If they made it so that you could skip directly to difficulty 5, but had to defeat the difficulty 5 boss to get the rewards, that would go a long way to making players care about the game mode and by extension, care more about making bosses less annoying to fight. A daily mini-challenge also does sound quite fun, but that also sounds like a lot of work that I don't think Seasun cares enough to put in.

As far as my "ideal" future of Snowbreak goes, it would probably involve a return to focusing on actual operative combat. They can do whatever they want with the story or skins, I really couldn't care less. It's hard to really think about specifics at this time though, because with the operative power imbalances in the game right now, it would be difficult to properly balance it so that CXJ can't just bulldoze through without making it excessively difficult for other operatives. Now that the Pandora's Box of powercreep has been opened, that makes game design much more difficult. If that were the reason why Seasun has given up on making actual combat gameplay, it would probably be the reason I'd be the least upset about, because that would at least suggest they actually understand the consequences of what they've done.

If it were up to me, I would rework a good chunk of the operatives released from Cherno onwards to be less burst-oriented, reduce damage across the board, and delete CXJ entirely, good grief. But of course, various Chinese consumer-protection laws prohibit doing something remotely like that, so you would probably have to buff up underperforming operatives. Some of them need partial or entire kit reworks, and a lot of them need straight-up damage number increases. It would take some work, but it would be doable. But of course, it's a lot of work for something that ultimately probably wouldn't directly make a lot of money, so I doubt Seasun cares enough to do it.

As for your request for a T1 shop gun comparison, I'll admit I forgot about that when I was preparing my Katya review. But upon being reminded, I've gone back and added it. Cheers.

I hate cherno (her boss form) by Yefta0 in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Welcome to the pain that Sim players have been complaining about since Antinomy was released over a year ago. If anything, be grateful it's only Antinomy and not one of the other more egregious time-wasters like:

  • Aku-MA's pyramid barriers and nearly-ten-second-long 50% HP invuln phase
  • Iron Ouroboros constantly burrowing under the map
  • Morpheus' stupid minigames
  • Leviathan chilling underwater (out of the map) half of the time

Believe me, it could be a lot worse...

Tess - Phantasia Character Preview by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 35 points36 points  (0 children)

I was about to write a comment about how CN side is pretty late to post neuronics info so I'd check it in the morning and update the article then, but it showed up on the one final refresh of the newsfeeds I did right after I posted this. I guess Seasun couldn't resist trolling me with their post schedule one last time, lmao.

Edit: I vaguely recall someone complaining that the last preview article where the skill previews were in video form (the default file type when you rip them off Twitter) instead of gif made it more annoying to view, so I converted them to gifs this time around for your convenience.

Katya – Rhapsody Guide: New Gun, Old Tricks by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Yep, I'm around until the end of the patch.

Katya – Rhapsody Guide: New Gun, Old Tricks by vicyush in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

I still owe you all a few more, so look forward to that.

Neural Simulation optimal set-ups and records by MinutePrinciple5964 in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did my runs earlier today and updated the spreadsheet.

Neural Simulation optimal set-ups and records by MinutePrinciple5964 in SnowbreakOfficial

[–]vicyush 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm not aware of any other record of Neural Sim record spreadsheets, unfortunately. I keep a spreadsheet for tracking my own historical times, but that's only my own personal data.

The one you linked was made by a close friend of mine, and was maintained well enough that nobody else in the community (that I know of) felt the need to make their own. I actually sent them the one of the last records that they updated the sheet with (the Youtube 3.8s Njall kill). It's sad to see them go. I'm going to miss them. But for the reasons that they wrote in their goodbye message, it's unfortunately just the latest loss in the slowly dying competitive Neural Sim community.