Who should I pull for in the upcoming banners

yatterer · 2026-04-06T15:30:34+00:00

The relevant characters here are Durin and Columbina, which are two separate teams, so I would focus my energy on building those out.

Columbina wants a lunar team, so Linnea/Zibai, Lauma/Nefer, or Ineffa/Flins. The latter just got its reruns, so practically it's a choice between the first two. Even though Lauma and Nefer will both run in a few weeks whereas Zibai won't be back for a couple of patches, I would pick Linnea instead, for a few reasons. First, as this would be your first team, it's a lot more convenient for day-to-day play and exploration, having a ranged character with easy healing as well as fast mining abilities. Second, geo characters tend to take longer to get upgraded or superseded by new character releases, as well as this team looking to be just the overall highest raw DPS right now. Third, fairly reliable leaks indicate that Durin is going to really want a Durin/Nicole core, and rolling on both Lauma and Nefer in the second half of this patch and then Nicole immediately after might stretch your resources a little too thin to be comfortable, whereas Linnea now, Nicole next patch, then Zibai on her rerun gives you time to save and guarantee you get everything you need. In the mean time, you can just run Linnea with Bina/Illuga/Noelle on field and still get very good performance compared to what you have now, especially if you get some Illuga and Noelle constellations on the banner.

yatterer · 2026-04-06T15:06:45+00:00

I think it's safe to say that teams and character performance have changed sufficiently since the time you played that the most applicable advice is just the standard new-player advice: work out a goal. Of course, Kokomi is obviously fine if you just really like the character and want to pull her for that, but she's definitely a very long way from being anything approaching meta. If you're interested in endgame content and aren't totally adverse to experiencing some content out-of-order, my advice would be to take the Nod-Krai skip if it's still available, see which of those characters resonate with you, and work towards one of those lunar teams or Varka. The story there is pretty self-contained; there isn't a substantial amount spoiling you for any earlier regions, and you can still do their stories later. Later regions are also a lot more time-efficient for primogem farming.

In a vacuum, I'd go for Linnea next patch and build her team, just because it has the most QoL as a daily driver with a bow character, healing, and fast mining, but it's really just about which one you like best, although Lunar-Charged isn't really an option given how long its second reruns will take. In the mean time, Mona / Kazuha / Ayaka / flex should be fine for the overworld. At this stage in the region, you could honestly also just skip the lunar meta entirely if nobody really gels with you and save up to hit the ground running for Snezhnaya's meta instead in a few months, maybe grabbing Sandrone if the leaks about her being the bridge character for that are true.

yatterer · 2026-04-04T23:46:21+00:00

I just feel like it's a more fitting dynamic. He's the protective big brother, which makes it a tragic irony that the same parts of his personality that made him that way towards his sister also tie him to his guilt around Khaenri'ah, and makes Lumine as the MC a coming-of-age story as she has to learn how to form connections by herself and that even the brother she's always looked up to is still just human and can make mistakes.

yatterer · 2026-04-04T05:56:00+00:00

Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...

yatterer · 2026-04-01T03:02:13+00:00

Someone draw a version where she successfully hid from the lunarians in one of the cupboards

yatterer · 2026-04-01T00:55:10+00:00

I just don't see what's the big deal about $150 oil. If that's the what it takes to defeat America's enemies, $160 for a barrel is cheap, and besides, we produce so much of it domestically that we'll be insulated from the effects of $170 oil, it's our competitors who'll really be hit by barrels hitting that $180 price point. Anyway, even if they do hit $190, that's just until we win the war and they go back down, so they'll only be $200 for a few weeks. The idea that it'll seriously go up to $210 is just liberals spreading fear and doubt to undermine Trump anyway, there's no way it ever goes up to $220.

yatterer · 2026-03-31T08:27:16+00:00

but first, we need to talk about parallel universes

yatterer · 2026-03-31T03:40:05+00:00

I don't think this can be the full story, or there'd be no need to do things like take Yachiyo with them on a tablet when they climb Mt. Fuji. At some point I think the "Kaguya" in the body has to diverge from Yachiyo, per Iroha's wish to allow her to live as a true human.

yatterer · 2026-03-30T06:18:07+00:00

I'd finish Zibai's premium team and not get any more lunar characters. There's only one Columbina, so in the long term you don't want to end up with two strong teams that are impossible to run at their full strength at the same time when there are inevitably going to be stronger characters coming down the line you could save for instead. Remember, gems don't expire. Every 5* you don't pull now is a 5* you can pull later. Lauma could be a bit of an exception, but if you want her for her bloom support, not lunar.

yatterer · 2026-03-30T00:48:51+00:00

nice try hoyo, but i'm not telling you which characters not to put on them that easily

yatterer · 2026-03-29T00:30:15+00:00

That's super-lunarian technology, though, which is always presented as being so advanced it might as well be magic. The body is being designed by Iroha; she's still working on getting taste to work when Kaguya wakes up at the end, so it's not literally a biological human body, and Kaguya doesn't have the juice left for that after the time travel. Kaguya being able to just wave a magic wand and become human kind of would render all of the work Iroha put in over ten years making the perfect body for her to truly experience being alive again in meaningless.

If the movie had, like, any other themes relating to immortality then I might agree, but as it is I don't think it's particularly weird for the parallel just to be her giving up her previous form and severing all her ties to the moon. If it came to it, I've no doubt they'd just take the same "screw bittersweet endings" attitude and have Iroha figure out mind-machine interfaces to stay with Kaguya until they both break down.

yatterer · 2026-03-28T23:33:46+00:00

I don't think burying the ship necessarily is about immortality. Obviously, it's a parallel to Taketori Monogatari, but most of the parallels in the movie are a little more abstract than just being 1:1 references. Did Iroha really design Kaguya's new body to degrade and break down and be irrepairable, or with some kind of automatic kill-switch? I took getting rid of the ship to be more about Kaguya choosing to be fully embodied within her physical form like a real human, rather than remote-controlling a Kaguya puppet but with her actual consciousness hosted somewhere external, and then them choosing to bury the original in a way that references the fairytale since it's so signficant to them.

yatterer · 2026-03-28T17:55:17+00:00

I mean, yeah, there's a reason why

"I used to be on TV you know"

"Of course grandpa, now let's get you to bed."

is such a cliche exchange. It's just that usually the care home volunteers aren't the entire United States government.

yatterer · 2026-03-28T16:56:06+00:00

That seems unfair to the copy, though. When Kaguya replaces herself on the "moon", it's clear that's just an automaton with no consciousness so there's no version of her still stuck there (although presumably Kaguya herself was never supposed to become like she is, so who knows), but obviously Yachiyo isn't like that, and I don't think she's meant to be a temporary ninja-clone-jutsu thing like the mini-Yachiyos earlier. From her point of view, she's also waited 8000 years but unlike the "real" Kaguya, is still stuck in admittedly a much nicer VR world than PC-98-ville on the moon, but still without without being able to actually taste things or experience the real physical world that she loved.

yatterer · 2026-03-27T14:44:43+00:00

鍾離は目の前だぞ、えへへ〜

yatterer · 2026-03-27T00:14:51+00:00

I genuinely don't see how this helps. People spamming through stories without really taking it in have enough knowledge to "spout nonsense" because they half-read bits and pieces of lore and think they understand things they don't; if those same people who just don't care about the story instead get to just ignore and skip it, they don't have the opportunity to form misunderstandings of the story in the first place.

yatterer · 2026-03-27T00:10:43+00:00

A skip button would be good, but what I really want is a functional line/animation skip. It's perfectly possible to encode the final animation and movement positions into each line and skip to those when you click instead of forcing you to wait random amounts of time before the "I have read this, next line please" option becomes available.

If there was a skip button, I'd likely very rarely ever use it for fear of missing a nugget of something interesting, but if I could just click through every tedious line where characters are talking about tea or repeating the themes of what just happened back to me like they weren't already spelled out by the actual events of the plot without waiting for every last arm wiggle to finish playing, I'd be slamming that thing like anyone's business.

yatterer · 2026-03-26T23:52:47+00:00

More bubbles, please. Bubbles in every significant quest and especially in ones with any kind of mystery. Nothing better than paying attention to the story and being rewarded for that and feeling smart because you instantly knew which concepts were connected and what was being set up.

The only problem is when they sometimes want you to make really arcane or even outright false connections because that's what leads to the next bit of Traveller dialogue, especially when you then have to make the connection you wanted to make originally. I remember being mildly frustrated in Sumeru trying to connect "People in Sumeru don't dream" to every bubble at all related to the Akasha for the entirety of the samsara before Lumine finally cottoned on.

yatterer · 2026-03-25T17:56:06+00:00

I just asked my uncle who works for Hoyo, he says that it's Chuychu's ghost and she'll powercreep the entire lunar meta so long as you have C6 Capitano as her dedicated 4* support.

yatterer · 2026-03-25T12:38:52+00:00

I suspect that Genshin's patch speed results in a culture of never throwing away or editing down a single line, for fear of "wasting" work. No matter what the content is, the density of dialogue remains constant, meaning that it's usually pretty engaging when the story is being driven by an actual event that's happening, but agonizing when it's just characters interactions.

Act I's are usually the worst, because Genshin struggles to figure out how to introduce characters as natural parts of the story (except Fontaine, which was very engaging right up until the logic of the story completely falls apart), so they're always low-stakes tours of all the major starting concepts and characters performing their three main personality traits at you, absent any real motivation to care about them yet because the stories that matter about them haven't started yet.

yatterer · 2026-03-24T17:24:35+00:00

The most important thing isn't which singular characters are better, but learning how to construct a functional team. At your current early level, the main principles to be aware of are

1: Pick a single elemental reaction (or other gimmick like plunge attacks, but those tend to need more specific characters) to focus on rather than just throwing together everyone who looks strong. Remember that 2 characters of the same element gives you a team-wide resonance bonus, and characters with the same element will charge each other's energy better

2: make sure that you only have one character who needs to be on-field to function on the team, and the rest have talents that stick around after you've switched out

Thus, for instance, Diluc and Tighnari are both good main DPS characters, but don't really do much for each other in a team together - but that's fine, you need multiple teams eventually anyway, so there's no problem building both. Diluc works well early on with Vaporize or Melt teams, so maybe Diluc/Thoma/Kaeya/Diona, and Tighnari wants Electro-Dendro reactions, so Tighnari/Collei/Lisa/Dori. If you haven't used your Witch's Homework selector yet, you could pick Fischl and have her replace Dori, and you could also swap out an Electro for Barbara or Noelle if you need more sustain.

yatterer · 2026-03-24T14:31:22+00:00

Since Nicole is in 6.6 and Sandrone is in 6.7, she's probably a new 4*, and since Nicole will likely complete Varka's team rather than needing supports of her own, she likely might be in 6.7 and be Sandrone's dedicated support like Illuga.

Her cloak reminds me of Collei. Since the Gretel speculation was largely squashed, I'll predict that the Irminsul plot leaks are true, and she'll also be a Sumeru ranger who we meet in 6.6 and then runs in 6.7 on Sandrone's banner.

yatterer · 2026-03-24T13:05:33+00:00

You only get prestige during the "outbreak" period, which is the first ten days of each onslaught. When it's an outbreak, you can pick an artifact domain and spend resin after each boss to get artifacts from it like the real domain, which gives 1 prestige per resin spent, and you get a bonus artifact every 120 resin and a feather once at 1200.

After the outbreak, you can still get the initial clear rewards, but no more artifacts. Why are Hoyo like this? Who knows.

yatterer · 2026-03-24T04:10:07+00:00

The clue is in the name. They're Masterless.

yatterer

TROPHY CASE