#give me more content of them cygames

[cantobear]

my beloveds

[valeriefauxnom]

Dev's (C)Leo Biases,

Or,

A Comprehensive History of How Leonidas Became Nearly Everyone's Object of Thirst

So, among the Dragalia Lost team, it was rather well known that they admitted to a strong Cleo bias.

It's pretty easy to see, in anything from Cleo's early spate of alts, like Dragonyule and Summer in quick succession, to the utterly random unique outfits they flaunted in ch.9 that you can just tell they drew for funsies but really liked them and wanted to put them in the game despite it serving no real purpose...

The dev team just really, really loved Cleo and drawing her. But after they apparently used up their Cleo allowance to make Gala Cleo probably the single strongest character in the game at the time, they cooled it down a bit.

However, as much as they were apparently thirsting over Cleo, I would joke that somewhere along the way, some part of the dev team, feeling desperate now that the yearly Cleo Allowance was running dry as they prepared to release Gala Cleo, decided to find a new fixation to quench their addiction.

And since Cleo was off-limits, they turned to the next best thing: crossing out the C in Cleo to find their newest substitute Dev Thirst character.

That's right, we're talking about the one and only Leonidas.

Leonidas had kinda just melded into the background with the rest of the siblings at this point to my observations. Sure, he was a campaign antagonist. People weren't particularly clamoring for him in particular over the other siblings, though. Honestly, I'd wager Emile was more popular at this stage, even in a 'love to hate' sense, just because we'd already seen him so much.

But then, it started. Whether it was art like this being posted on their twitter just a few scant months before G!Cleo's debut...

...They just seemed to have a certain edge in artworks featuring Mr. Curry in a way to make one squint and tilt your head sideways.

For instance:

It's one of those cases where you just kinda get a feeling the artist(s) found x attractive in a way that simultaneously still can give you a moment of self-doubt if that's not just you projecting because there's no blatantly obvious signs, you know? Whether it's something about the posing, or angles, whatever it is, I got this air increasingly whenever they put out any Leonidas art.

Thankfully, they decided to put me out of my misery and just flat out make what's likely the single most suggestive wyrmprint (or honestly art piece in general since Dragalia was thankfully very very very tame) starring none other than, you guessed it, Leonidas.

(Secret Cygames/Nintendo conversation, probably: "As you can see, it's vitally important that we draw this character in a speedo with sparkles around him." Nintendo: "...I'll allow it. This time.")

Even if he puts on some more clothes in the refined version, we're still back to that air I mentioned, as the shot focuses almost entirely on him instead of the wildly popular Chelle or his pet panther (which, yes, seemed to be an actual pet of his):

Even the Ilia-damned funny chibi comics got in on this thirst train as it went on and made quite possibly the raunchiest joke in the entire 400+ comic run featuring Leonidas, even if the exact same joke didn't make the translation overseas, however they tried. You can see a brief breakdown of that in THIS post.

Not content to restrict it to art and comics, Leonidas also dropped this line that is permanently engraved into my mind with just how shocking it was to see anything of this caliber in Dragalia, in his baby brother's story to boot!

At this point, I could no longer deny it: the devs and artists had collectively acquired a new fixation to satiate their once insatiable Cleo appetite in the form of Mr. Currymeister. (Don't worry about Emile there, he's just drowning, he does that all the time in waist-high water)

And this attitude even extends to in-universe, too! People increasingly fawned over the first prince, who very much was filling in the role of 'this prince you know vs. his hotter and more competent elder brother', as virtually represented by my expert skills in Microsoft Paint artistry as such:

Naturally, there was only so much time before the people IRL could succumb to Leonidas Fever (and no, this time we're not talking about all the people who were so devoted to this dude to effectively set themselves into a fatal, firey, steroid-filled death!) at this unrelenting onslaught.

It was hard not to see comments such as these that started pouring in (and yes, all of these were just about Leonidas exclusively):

(I'll attribute the misspelling to being overcome with Leonidas Fever, a grave illness indeed!)

(Another serious symptom: the decline of any self-preservation instinct around Leonidas, who is indeed Very Dangerous and Will Kill You!)

Ahem. You get the picture. Thus concludes the slow, insidious buildup from just another sibling for Euden to probably commit a whoopsie-daisy fratricide in the future to one of the fandom's favorite menaces, all carefully plotted-out by the collective efforts of devs who were the first to succumb to the sickness...Right?

This concludes my professional historical report on this very serious issue that I suspect lingers to this day. The Fever has but been put into remission; it has not faded yet.

Extra:

So a long time ago I commented that some of the royal family seemed to have pointier teeth than normal, which I speculated because they deliberated giving a bit more 'draconic' traits to define dragonblood, and I didn't realize how pervasive this was until I saw Emile's model there. Look at his fang!

...

...How did I forget the weapon skin of Leo's gun is additionally named "Royal Dominator"?

[icharchivist]

I heard people are yellin on EOS instead cause the devs said i have pland only for a year or two more (they said it a few streams back and now it's catching up) but since they are embarking on the platform systems i doubt they are gonna stop now, like RoB was given dead years ago but they are still supporting it, world flipper was kind of a flop as an international project and dragalia had issues with the nintendo side so uh yeah i hope it's gonna carry on for long

aaah the EOS scare every gacha always happen to have when they tase some closure. This anxiety never ends </3

as far as granblue is concerned i think it can't be compared to the others cygames game, because of reasons you mentioned there to start with, and because like... it's been 10 years, it's one of the biggest Cygames game, and also, this year they are entering major mainstream scenes with Rising and Relink. I think more than ever there will be a spotlight on Granblue.

i believe much more in them closing the current 10 year long arc in order for new players to get into a brand new arc without having to read 10 years of content -- than them closing the game right before they get a major spotlight.

I guess there's still way to believe in that scare, like them fully dedicating to Relink and Rising since there will be added contents and all, and Relink especially will ask for the game to grow bigger....

but i think it's not going to be the case.

At least i wouldn't buy into this scare.

and i won't believe Granblue is in trouble unless they release playable Belial, aka mister "will bring them a lot of money one last time in emergency". So..... yeah.

i get the scare but i don't want to let it get to me. Also i'm playing other gacha that gives people EOS scare every single year and at this point i'm in full EOS panic fatigue. like. why bother panicking at this point.

EOS breaks my heart when it happens, it happened to one of my gacha and i never recovered -- but ultimately, when there's too many scares like this, it's like crying wolf, and now i extend it to all gacha.

i think we need to calm down personally but yaknow dkjfhdklfj

[tainbocuailnge]

Apparently a few people on twitter and reddit are saying they'd rather trust FGO being handled with Cygames. Since you're more familiar with their track record than I am, what do you think about this?

I fucking hate the direction cygames has taken with both granblue and dragalia recently, the only clear benefit I can see coming out of fgo joining cygames’ ranks is a) the inhouse translation team means the game will be translated by people who actually play it working in close relation with the writers b) we’d definitely get a console port of fgo arcade because cygames blatantly wanted to be a console game developer anyway. much as people love to bitch about dw (and boy is everyone jumping at the chance to bitch about dw now that sakura wars is dead) I will continue to insist that they’re making noticable efforts to listen to user complaints, if nothing else they’ve been listening to MY complaints. granblue on the other hand is doing nothing but steadily getting worse the past two years, even setting aside my gripes with the writing and only focusing on the gameplay, and I’m still convinced it’s because they’ve put all the competent people to work on the console games.

it’s part of what I said in my previous post which i’ll link for when this ineviably gets reblogged out of context about respecting the player’s time and games that use autobattle as substitute for actually being fun to play. granblue USED to be a game that respects its players’ time but the past roughly two years it’s grown steadily worse and worse on that front. in the granblue I signed up for you could ignore it for weeks and then sit down for an afternoon and grind for a bit and make tangible process, but nowadays the game has shifted to demanding you sit down and clear these specific raids every day if you want a chance in hell to get the new endgame weapon with marginal power increases, and to compensate for how unfun the game has become to play they introduced the ability to make the game play itself which only made farming it worse because now you’re actively encouraged to... play the game so that you can get strong enough to not have to play it anymore. dragalia is even worse because they just hand you buckets of tickets that let you skip having to play the game instead of like..... not making it awful to play the game. i used to joke that “real granblue players don’t play granblue” as a way to convey how the game was perfectly fine with you putting it down for a while if you don’t feel like grinding but apparently cygames took me too literally and now you can literally play granblue without playing it, except we’re in hell so if you want the stuff that makes the game good at playing itself you actually have to sit down and play it every day.

like i said in the other post that’s something that fgo actively tries to avoid and that i want them to keep avoiding, and I think it’s thanks to the stubbornness of someone at either delightworks or type moon that they refuse to let you autobattle. the problem with fgo isn’t that it won’t play itself, in fact its great strength is that it doesn’t need to play itself because mechanically it doesn’t give a shit how slow you are to clear the quest, the problem is that it only has a limited amount of content available at any given time so you’re forced to play the content it tells you to play instead of really being able to go at your own pace. that’s not something that cygames will solve, they’re just going to make the game play itself.

I honestly think the people saying cygames will be a better developer for fgo are just blinded by cygames’ reputation of giving away loads of free rolls all the time, but just because you get to roll a lot doesn’t mean granblue gacha is actually any good. it has its spark system sure but the rates are so dilluted that without those 300 rolls you don’t have a chance in hell of rolling a specific rateup character. people regularly go whole sparks without rolling any of the five characters put on “rateup” at the same time. the reason cygames can get away with giving away all those free rolls in the first place is that rolling the strong characters actually doesn’t make you all that much stronger in granblue unless you roll them multiple times for their weapon, except if theyre a new seasonal limited i guess because then all the new raids will be centered around you having that specific fucking seasonal limited because we’re in hell. fgo gacha feels bad because it’s hard to get stuff but granblue gacha feels bad even if you do get stuff because it’s all so fucking meaningless.

so yeah no i don’t think cygames would be a good developer for fgo i think delightworks should just get its shit together

[cinnbar-bun]

Undead Chaos (Vampire!Beelzebub x Reader)

Vampire! Au

Summary: Beelzebub had escaped from Pandemonium, but found that he can’t properly sustain himself as he once could in the dark hellhole. Needing a new way to continue existing with his new powers, he decides to test some theories. How unfortunate you were one of the pests he decided to choose. 

Warning: Contains possible spoilers, as well as lots of things based off on theories since cygames never really talked about Bubs did. Possible triggering content such as kidnapping and stalking. Please take caution before reading. Slightly spicy stuff happens. Reader is also GN

Note: this is a short one tbh. It’s not much. It’s not that romantic. It’s just you for you bubs fans who get off to being called worthless humans. I respect your dedication.

He licked his lips as he peered out of the dark alleyway. His red eyes flickered from person to person. Unlike a certain fallen angel, he knew to stay hidden. He hated to admit it, but he wasn’t at full strength yet. He had much to do before he could fully showcase himself as king to these worthless insects. 

A young woman. Cute, he supposed. However, he stopped when he saw she embraced a young man and laughed with him. They were together, he assumed. She was not an optimal victim. 

A large man. He was bulky and ripped, and Beelzebub wondered just how much blood was in his body. If he could just- 

He spat. He was losing control. He needed relief soon. The man was carrying a young kid on his shoulders and Beelzebub felt himself growing more faint and impatient. 

There had to be someone. 

Someone alone. 

Someone who others wouldn’t notice would be missing. He bit his nail and watched as a person he hadn’t seen before in his stay on this island. They did not talk to anyone. They did not do anything but walk quietly, a bouquet of flowers in their hands. 

No one said anything to this person. Their eyes were sullen and they looked as if they had not slept in days. It wasn’t the most ripe of meals, but he supposed it was better than nothing. He smirked and slunk back into the alley, following them in the deeper parts of the island until they made their way to a graveyard. 

Ah... so they are grieving a lost relative. 

He refrained from laughing at how pathetic they were. How unlucky they were to look so helpless in front of him at such a time. 

Truly, they were the most cursed being here to be seen like this when he was starving. 

He scoured the entrance to the graveyard. No one else seemed to be there, minus his next victim. They walked far into it, so he followed behind closely, careful to not make a sound and reveal his presence. 

At last, they stopped in front of two graves, placing the flowers in the middle of them. 

He was too far away to read the names on the graves, and he wondered about their relationship to his meal. 

“Father, mother...I am here.” They quietly spoke, their voice rasping, as if it hadn’t been used in a while. 

Their parents. He mused. He inched closer. 

“I...I uh...I brought your favorite flowers. I know you two liked when I grew them.” 

Pointless. They die anyways. Humans waste time on the dumbest tasks. 

“Ah...how long has it been since you two have been gone? I kinda lost track of time.” 

He could smell them now. 

Closer, closer, closer. 

“I forget to take care of myself. I can hardly eat or sleep.” 

Closer, closer, closer. 

“I...I wish I was taken too...I can’t handle this loneliness...”

Closer, closer, closer. 

“I hate existing! It’s unfair! I hate this!” They cried. He couldn’t control his ragged breaths. The crying, the screaming, the hunger. It all blended in his mind until he leaned over and extended his claws towards them. 

I’ll eat you alive, pathetic human. 

With a simple swipe he had covered the mouth of his victim and watched as they struggled helplessly in his arms. 

“Sh. You said you wanted to cease existing. Allow me to grant you your wish.” He smirked as they looked at him with fearful eyes. It only spurred him on further. They were shaking, frozen as he revealed his fangs at them. “I like when my meals are afraid. I think you’ll taste good enough.” 

Their face paled before they passed out in his arms. 

“Tch.” He sneered. “Pathetic.”

He leaned down and examined their neck, feeling the hunger in him rise to its peak as he barred his fangs to finally get the chance for a meal. As his fangs grazed the surface of their skin, he smelled another presence nearby.

“Hey! What are you doing?” A man yelled. Beelzebub glared and quickly huddled the person under his cape, before he dramatically swiped it and used his magic to teleport.

It would drain a lot, but since he had a guaranteed meal, it wasn’t so bad. He couldn’t risk causing much of a scene yet with the village. He needed to lay low.

The figure in his arms was still passed out, sleeping peacefully as he eyed their face. They were tired, and if what they said was true, they hadn’t done much to care for themselves.

As much as he hated doing so, he was going to have to freshen his meal up.

~

You awoke in a dark and musty room, one that smelled of mold and rotting wood. You coughed at the dust surrounding you as you attempted to look at where you were.

This wasn’t home. In fact, what happened before you-

Before you could think about your day, you stared back into glowing red eyes. Those eyes... those were the last things you remember seeing before you passed out.

Your heart raced as you backed up to the furthest corner of the bed.

“S-stand back! Stay back! Don’t touch me!” You yelled.

He let out a sound of disgust and stepped closer.

“Don’t be full of yourself. I’m not here to touch a worthless roach like you right now.” He snapped. “Know your place, mortal.”

“M-mortal? What do you mean?”

“Do you not have a brain? It means you are beneath me.” He replied sharply. He tossed an apple at you. “Go. Eat.”

“W-what, I-“

“I said eat.” You nervously took a bite of the apple and he watched you with an intense frown.

You awkwardly chewed the fruit and tried to eat it as fast as you could for fear of how he’d react. He tapped his foot impatiently and watched you, and you felt yourself shaking under his gaze.

You finished the apple and within an instant he slammed a glass of water in front of you.

“Drink. I need you to be hydrated.” Due to the anxiety and nervousness, you chugged the class of water. Despite the situation you were in, you exhaled in relief as your body felt rejuvenated.

“Thank you.” You quietly said.

“Should you really be thanking me?” He sneered. “I’m not doing this out of kindness.”

You knew that. And yet, despite all that, you couldn’t care.

“So, are you gonna kill me now?” You said.

“So ready to die? Do you accept your fate so easily.”

“It’s just like you said earlier. I can’t fight you. I can’t possibly escape from you.”

“You’re not gonna even struggle?” He chuckled. “Giving is so easily?”

“I guess.” You sighed.

“Enough chatter. I’ve wasted enough time.” He said.

“What are you-“

You couldn’t speak before he quickly pinned you down with one hand, and the reality of it all rushed over you. He bared his fangs at you, the sharp canines glistening and his mouth practically drooling.

You knew what you said before.

But why did you suddenly care now?

You bit your lip and whimpered pathetically as he grinned maniacally at your now panicked expression.

“Do you now understand the situation you’re in? Do you truly get what I’m about to do to you?” He cackled.

“W-Wait-“

“I’ve waited long enough.”

“But! Wait! Why me?” You yelled. At the very least, if you were to die here and now, you would at least know why you were the one chosen.

“‘Why me’, you ask? Why you? Easy. Because you’re nobody.” His words cut deep into you like a knife. “You’re a nobody. You have no one. You’re pathetic, you’re all alone and no one cares for your existence.”

“But I know someone will! Someone will-“

“Who’s going to come for you? You were practically catatonic before I decided to take you. Do you think a waste of life like that is useful? Do you think you’re special? Do you think you offered me something of value besides being my next meal? Don’t think too highly of yourself, fool. You are nothing more than a blood bag. You are nothing to me.” He stated.

You could only stare back at him. What was there to say? He was right. You weren’t special. Moments ago you had professed you didn’t care about your own life. You closed your eyes and leaned your head to the side, giving him more access to your neck.

“Oh? What’s this? Have you already lost your will to live?”

“No. I’m afraid. I’m... really afraid. So I... I wanna offer you a deal.”

“A deal? Do you really think now you should be bargaining?”

“I got nothing else to lose.”

“Hmph, go on.” He raised an eyebrow. “You have a few moments.”

“How many other people have you done this to?”

“You’re supposed to make a deal, not ask a question.”

“I want to know.”

“Fine. I can entertain your dumb thoughts for a bit. I have done this to about... seven other people.”

“And what happened to them all?”

“I drained them of life. They’re all dead, probably feeding the termites below.”

“Then allow me to remain as your sole blood donor.”

“And why should I agree to that? What makes you so special that I should keep you alive?”

“People are going to get suspicious after a while. You killed seven people already. And I’ll be a constant meal for you, so you have me whenever you wish. It should be simple for you to get.” You don’t know where that last sentence came from, but you were determined to not roll over and die.

“Hmph. And you’re willing to remain here on the offhand chance I don’t drain you?” He asked.

“Yes. And I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t wanna die by your hands like this so... I’ll do what it takes to live.” You stated. The newfound acceptance for life made you want to clench to that feeling forever. “So, do you accept my deal? You don’t kill me, and I’ll stay here for you to feed on.”

He hated the fact you were right. It was an obvious choice, really. He couldn’t continue snatching more people up. Having a constant supply versus hunting at the last minute would perhaps heal him faster. He pursed his lips.

“Fine. But don’t think I’ll go gentle on you.” He leaned down and you felt him press his fangs into the flesh of your neck. The teeth broke your skin, and you covered your mouth with your hands to refrain from crying in pain.

He hissed as he tasted the blood from the wound he punctured on you. It’s been so long. And he was so damn hungry.

He placed his lips around the mark and sucked the blood inside. You bit your lip at the odd sensation. The pain had melted away and was quickly replaced with a euphoric pleasure, one that you were incapable of describing.

You’ve never felt this relieved, scared, enthusiastic, and excited as you did now. All your emotions swirled in you as he continued to lap at your blood with his tongue. You couldn’t think straight, merely acknowledging the feeling of him on top of you and the desire for more.

More of what? You couldn’t tell. Only that you wanted more of this euphoria, this pleasure, and this feeling that was so much more special than anything you had ever experienced in your entire life.

You dug your nails into his shoulder blades, and he didn’t seem to feel it as he continued drinking from you.

“Please-“ you struggled out. Your breath was uneven as you threw your head back, giving him more space for him to access.

“Shh... you make too much noise...” he mumbled before he continued.

It was quiet, all except for your ragged breaths and the sound of his mouth on your neck. You felt the high of this new feeling before he pulled back and left you struggling to catch your breath on the mattress. You almost missed when he was sucking your blood, funnily enough.

Beelzebub seemed to have a hard containing himself too, given his heavy breathing as he wiped his mouth of whatever excess blood there was.

“Is that... what it’s supposed to feel like?” You stammered.

“Apparently so. My victims had all responded positively to the bite. I guess it has a sort of euphoric reaction to you humans. I should test that more with you soon.”

You nodded yet flustered at how embarrassing that was. This man kidnapped you yet you were lying helplessly asking, begging, craving more.

Foolish. This was absolutely foolish.

You placed a hand where he bit you and winced at the slight burn you felt. It would probably take a while to heal.

“Now, mortal-“

“I have a name.” You cut him off. He glared.

“Don’t get cocky with me. You’re lucky I spared your life.”

“I’m just saying, since we’re gonna do this for a while, the least you could do is call me by my name.”

“Insolent... then what is your name?”

“It’s (Y/n). And what is yours?”

“Beelzebub. Beelzebub of the Astral High Council.” He stated.

“Huh? An astral? I thought you guys were gone...” your eyes widened in shock.

“Did you really think you pathetic humans could rid of us so easily? How amusing.”

He stood up and walked over to the door, his massive back facing you as he paused when he gripped the handle.

“Night is upon us. Rest now. I will have you in the morning before I sleep. You are not allowed to leave unless you have my express permission. And if you dare reveal the truth about me or our deal, I will kill you and everyone else on this pathetic island. Don’t test me. I don’t have the patience to deal with a good-for-nothing pest.” He threatened. He opened the door and slammed it behind him as he walked away.

You processed his words and were reminded that once again, you were not in your old home. This was your new home, one where you would be under his command. You feared the future, yet strangely were looking forward to a visit from him. Perhaps your once dreadful life could have some use and purpose again.

The thought relaxed you as you closed your eyes and huddled closer to yourself in the bed. Whatever you were getting into, it wasn’t going to be easy.

[murasaki-murasame]

I honestly wasn’t planning to summon for Gala Thor at first, since I want to focus on saving for stuff like the end of year holiday banners, but he ended up looking really strong and also I want to make Tartarus less of a miserable slog to get through with my light units in any way possible, without resorting to ‘haha dark characters go brr :)’, so here we are, lol.

Results under the cut [plus some of my thoughts about the new Tartarus fight]

I started with about 260 summons saved up [which is part of why I wanted to skip it, since I prefer to have at least 300 summons before pulling on a banner], but in just 60 summons I got:

-Ramona dupe [one day I’ll get Gala Elly . . . ]

-Dupe Liger [now at either 1UB or 2UB, I can’t remember which]

-Dupe Pazuzu and Simurgh [they’re both now MUB so that’s nice, even though I don’t use them, lol]

-Ramiel x2 [I don’t really care much about him one way or another since I have other good shadow dragons but it’s nice to have him]

-Gala Thor

At first I was a bit disappointed by Gala Thor, since he gives a base 50% strength and an additional 45% bonus strength based on your energy stacks, which seemed kinda lame compared to Mars, but it turns out that having just one energy stack gives you a bonus 25% strength, with the other stacks giving an extra 5% each, so basically you almost always have 75% strength, which is really nice, and I think at least puts him at par with Daikokuten.

Also apparently his damage mods when shapeshifted, including his dragon skill, are super high, so he works really nicely with someone like Gala Euden, who I’ve basically ended up maining against Tartarus. 

It’ll be a while before the DPS sim updates, but I think Thor’s probably gonna have a pretty big impact on how strong the light roster is, so that’s neat.

Though tbh I think a lot of people are still gonna end up just using shadow units against Tartarus, even if Thor helps bridge the gap between light and shadow units a bit. Which is it’s own whole problem with the game’s balance, lol. I think if they just gave Tartarus poison immunity, that’d probably be enough to actually make everyone use light units in the fight, but I still feel like they need to give endgame bosses way higher off-element damage resistance.

I haven’t managed to get many clears of Tartarus yet, but I have a lot of mixed feelings about the fight. I’m happy to finally have a relevant piece of content to use my light units in, and I like most of the mechanics in the fight, but a lot of it doesn’t really work well in practice, and there’s some really annoying parts of the fight too. Mainly the fact that they decided to keep the enervation mechanic from Void Nidhogg, lol. I quit doing that fight as soon as the shadow Chimera came out specifically because it makes that fight such a goddamn slog, and it continues to be just as awful in Tartarus. And they somehow made it even worse by deciding to give it to you unavoidably at least once in the fight. At least in Void Nidhogg you could dodge everything and never get enervated, but you have to deal with it at least once in this fight.

Also, the whole portal mechanic is extremely cool, and I hope they experiment with more stuff like this in the future, but I feel like every time I go back to the main arena, I have like I have to immediately try and figure out which part of the fight I walked back in on, and usually I have like two seconds to react before one of the screen-wide attacks happens and kills me. It’s really disorienting, lol.

The prison mechanic in general is also kinda hard to wrap my head around, and I feel like it requires maybe a bit more team coordination than is reasonable to expect from a game like this, but really I think it’s just my punishment for never doing High Zodiark, since I think it’s one of the many parts of this fight that are really similar to that fight, and I have absolutely no experience with any of them.

Anyway, now that Tartarus is out it’s making me think back on the Agito bosses as a whole, before we move into the 2nd anniversary where we’ll probably at least get a hint at the next phase of endgame content, and in spite of the various issues I have with them, I think the Agito fights are a huge improvement over the High Dragon fights. You can really tell how Cygames [for better or worse] was trying to shake things up and figure out how to make engaging endgame fights, and for the most part I think it worked out.

The difficulty balance between all the fights [especially counting the Master fights] is kinda all of the place, like how eKai is extremely easy while eAO and eTart are kinda obnoxiously long and difficult if you do them in the intended ways, but I think that at least shows how they kept trying new things. mKai’s also apparently a lot harder than eKai [though I haven’t tried it], so they clearly learnt from the feedback they got from that.

I think Volk and Ciella are probably my favourite of the Agito fights at the moment, for different reasons. Volk feels really well-balanced for the current state of the flame roster, and has mechanics that require a degree of cooperation and coordination without being overly punishing like Tartarus kinda feels at the moment. And on the other hand, I really like Ciella’s fight because it feels like it’s just at the right level of difficulty for me to be able to reliably do by myself. At least on manual. I’ve never really managed to get auto solo to work, but I enjoy doing it manually. Either way, it’s nice to have endgame fights like this that can be comfortably soloed if you have a strong enough team, and I really like how for Ciella you have to build a really tanky, defense-oriented team in order to be able to solo it. I feel like 90% of the game basically punishes you for trying to do anything other than raw damage-dealing, so I really appreciate that Ciella is designed in a way that rewards you for making tanky team comps. It also lets Sylas be genuinely meta for something, which I’m grateful for, and it gave Templar Hope some redemption after he was initially deemed as being kinda worthless after he came out.

I also like how status effects are integrated into the fight mechanics, and [for the most part] both status resistances for each element feel like they have a purpose in their Agito fight. Compared to HDTs where it feels like every element roster is split between ‘units that are good for the fight’ and ‘units that are immediately handicapped’. This is actually one part where I think Tartarus works really well as a boss fight, since unless you can kill him before the poison portals happen, you really need a poison-res character to deal with them.

We still have three more of the Master fights to come out, but either way I really like the Agito fights, and I’m optimistic for whatever the next set of endgame content will be. Personally, I’m still hoping for them to build upon the Imperial Onslaught mode, since that feels like an almost obsolete part of the game, but that sort of wave-based content would be nice to have for endgame co-op.

Also, I still really hope that the Agito bosses end up being DL’s version of the Eternals/Evokers from GBF, where we can eventually get the ability to recruit them as playable characters by doing lots of grinding. They might just get released as gala units instead, but I’d prefer it if they were obtainable through grinding.

On the one hand they’re basically all villains, but on the other hand the recent story chapter made it pretty obvious that they’re probably all being warped and twisted by the masks Nedrick gave them, so it’d be pretty easy to explain how they could eventually be recruited. Also GBF has it’s own share of characters who probably shouldn’t be recruitable for moral reasons but they still are, lol.

Also when you fight them in-game it already looks like they have the same sorts of character model rigs as normal adventurers, and their attack animations all seem at least roughly based on regular weapon types [Volk being a lance unit, Kai Yan being an axe unit, Ciella being a bow unit, Ayaha/Otoha being dagger units, and Tartarus being a blade unit], so I feel like it wouldn’t be hard to make them playable. Ayaha/Otoha would probably be the hardest one to make work unless they get released as two separate characters, but it’s possible that they’d be a unique case where you use them both in combat at the same time, and switch between which one you’re actively controlling. 

It’s probably a bit too early for any of this to happen since the Agito have basically only just gotten introduced in the main story, so it probably won’t be touched upon for the 2nd anniversary, but I still think it’ll happen eventually.

Anyway, all that aside, at the moment I’m basically just gonna keep saving my summons for either a rerun of Gala Elly/Alex, or the holiday banners. In particular I really want to do lots of summons on the New Years banner. I know we’re gonna have Gala Zena or something next month for the anniversary, but if it’s anything like last year we’ll get lots of free summons during her banner, so I’ll at least wait and see how that works out before I spend any resources chasing her.

I also don’t really care much for Nevin and Pinon so even though I didn’t get them, I’m just gonna quit on this banner while I’m ahead, lol

[fiannalover]

OTP Tag Game

Share 5 OTP’s from five fandoms and tag people!

1. Fate - Diarmuid/Arthuria: These two are where my entire fic writing life began, and I beyond adore them, reallty. Double Knight Love is amazing and sacred and holy and so much Potential, just two knights kicking ass and Diarmuid canonly is In Love with her and she can be the King he never got to serve under again and just so much fricking Poetic Cinema, Good Fucking Lord

2. Fire Emblem - Eliwood/Lyn: points this is how it began. This is my first Fire Emblem Ship, way back when I first played FE7, and, honestly? I still love it. It feels warm, nostalgic, and remains my go-to whenever I replay FE7 (and boy, I do that often). It just. feels nice.

3. Dragalia Lost - Prometheuden: Aaaaaaand, another Important Ship Point. DL was just kind of a turning point in how I approached ships, because I gravitate to canon ships with ease, and CyGames just gives a LOT of freedom for you to go ‘YOLO’. I’ve loved these since Valentine’s came out, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of doing more for them (even if it’s a one-man ship helmed by myself). Just. Dragon BF. Good Boy BF. Good.

4. Pokémon - Hop/Victor: I actually haven’t finished SwSh so this is where I start lying They’re good boys, good kids, and they made me start writing Pokémon, and I’m so glad because I have, like, this entire mine worth of Pokémon Anime Powerlevel Awesomeness Headcanons, and they’re just very good and soft too, so, thank u, baby gays, thank u for opening this entire door and a half for me.

5. Dragon Quest - Luminerik: I lie even more rn because I haven’t watched anything DQ11 in any meaningful shape way or form, a friend of mine just rambled about them to me because I found Erik cute and it kept going. Also, I ended up finding a bunch of artists for them on Twitter, and I’m in heaven with these cuties. My only DQ Content is the Your Story Movie, but I’m dead-set on fixing this the moment I finish my current Let’s Play thing, hopefully sooner than later.

And, for tag, I tag @thelegendofmatthew, @mountainashfae, if interested

[ftpbtw-gbf]

Drawless gbf alt rules

(will edit and update this as necessary)

Obviously the primary condition is not to draw from the premium gacha.

Summary of other notes:

Rupie Draw

Main Account Assistance

Cygames Freebies

Event resources

Draw boxes

Rupie Draw

There is a secondary gacha pool called the ‘rupie draw’ that uses a much more abundant in-game resource to pull common weapons and summons, most of which are useless, but there is a small chance that the rupie draw can pull characters and summons even up to the ssr (highest) rarity, so I’ve been debating whether I should allow myself to pull on it. I’ve so far done a few daily free pulls from it out of habit, however have been waffling on whether to continue or not because of that small chance of gacha luck. Whether I open up the use of it or not may also depend on how far I intend to take the account, as the plus marks that come from the rupie draw (randomly) would be useful to help compensate for my char’s low stats.

verdict on rupie draw: disallowed for now

Main Account Assistance

I’ve also been vacillating a bit on what extent I should let myself use my high rank alts to help out. For my own sake, and because my average play time per day already probably skews from the norm, I’m now leaning towards letting my other accounts blast magna (omega in-game in the NA translation) raids which new players would normally have to pub(lish) to the community for help in clearing in the early stages anyway. The one point against this method is that by doing it myself, I give my drawless alt easier access to vice mvp chests that they are less likely to get in pubbed raids. That said though, I think I will allow myself to blow up my own raids, mostly because the time component that I might be saving myself compared to a true new player is already wildly varied and once again, handicapping myself further probably won’t serve as any better of an example for new players to follow. Me doing it for myself is just a simulation of the community blowing up the raid for someone else. The same ultimately applies to co-op, but co-op can be even harder to find a carry.

verdict on using main and/or alt to help with publicized content: allowed

If anyone who reads this happens to want similar help, I’m more than happy to punch stuff for you if I’m available.

Cygames Freebies

In the time since I started this account, cygames has generously handed out some additional freebies, namely - a tiamat omega (0*) summon along with a tia gauntlet and a tia bolt, and, more recently, a colossus omega (0*) summon and two colo canes, all at mlb sl10. When starting out, I’d considered not using these since they would not be available to newer players who start later on, however, I ultimately reversed my opinion on the basis that, like using my main accounts to help speed up farming, the goal of this account documentary is less about progression speed and more about progression steps. Since every player will experience their own drop luck, the speed at which they fill out their first base grids will vary whether they have access to these freebies or not and there’s no way to make my own drop luck usefully representative of any kind of expected average. Therefore, using these freebies is merely a fast forward simulation of grinding out omega raids for the respective drops.

Verdict on using Cygames’ spontaneous limited hand outs of omega summons and weapons: allowed

Event Resources

While the reward pool is fairly homogeneous from event to event, there are a few noteworthy differences:

Event Characters

Event Summons

Event Weapons

Event Characters: Some events offer an SR character in the element advantageous to the event enemies. These characters can vary widely in their usefulness but new players should take advantage of them as much as they can. In general, more characters = more options.

For the purposes of my account, I started during the event “Many Lives of Cats,” which turns out to be a bit of an enigma. Instead of having an SR character, this event granted an R character, but with a twist - Young Cat (whom I named “Sky” in this account), changes his element based on what element MC is. Purely by virtue of having a variable element, Young Cat was immensely useful to me and while I don’t think he enabled any strategies for me that an SSR of the same element couldn’t replicate in some capacity, I do admit I probably used him more in the first few days than I should have. Unfortunately, I can’t go back and correct that but moving forward I intend to continue using Young Cat for one key reason: R only quests. If I remove Young Cat, the only R character I would have left is Walder, who, while a decent R char, is static to earth element. When/if I get to the point where I need to challenge R only quests, I will attempt them with just walder, but if they prove difficult, I will not hesitate to slot in Young Cat. My reasoning in this is that for the purposes of these quests, virtually any R char would do, so Young Cat, regardless of kit, becomes a place holder for whatever R chars a reader following the guide may have in that element. Is Young Cat better than some of the gacha R chars? Yes. Will it make a difference in trying to follow my steps? Probably not.

With respect to other event characters however, since I cannot know when certain readers may have what event characters, I will refrain from using any event characters that do not come from side stories (since those are statically available to everyone).

Event Summons: While “Many Lives of Cats” had an Earth summon “Cat Parade,” this summon is largely underwhelming, even for a new player. It’s base elemental boost of 60 (70 mlb) is solid, the fact that it decays every turn down to 20(30mlb) makes it unreliable, especially early on when anything that can be killed quickly can be cleared regardless of your team’s power and everything else will take long enough that the summon aura will decay to uselessness (and often near the end when you really want to make that final push).

So this Cat Parade is not a useful event summon and is basically a non-factor for the purposes of this account. However, later this month Cygames will be rerunning “What Makes the Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost.” If Paradise Lost is not added to side stories shortly after its rerun (like WMTSB1, did), then I will not be using the SSR summon and SSR character that the event gives (despite them both being really good T-T). Will update this if there’s a new development.

Like with characters, since transient events may not be available to future players, I will refrain from using event summons that may similarly not be accessible to future players, though most event summons are pretty underwhelming to begin with, especially with side stories giving out mlb 50% elemental summons

Event Weapons: “Many Lives of Cats’s” event ssr weapon was an earth staff with an ex attack modifier. While there are a number of readily available ex weapons in side stories, there is not an earth one among them. The only non-event linked earth ex at the moment are the two rose queen weapons which require HL. So until that changes, I will refrain from using this event weapon.

Verdict:

Characters: Young Cat allowed, others disallowed.

Summons: disallowed (and not generally worth using anyway outside of a few exceptions

Weapons: disallowed (unless there’s a side story equivalent)

Draw boxes

There are other draw boxes other than the premium gacha, namely story event draw boxes and guild wars draw boxes. Since everything in both of these types of boxes are entirely ftp friendly, both boxes will be fair game to draw from. They both contain useful resources but mostly stuff that can ultimately be grinded for else where.

Verdict: allowed

[pagedesignhub-blog]

E3’s Laptop Gaming Show returns for a 3rd 12 months in 2017

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/e3s-laptop-gaming-show-returns-for-a-3rd-12-months-in-2017/

E3’s Laptop Gaming Show returns for a 3rd 12 months in 2017

The Computer Gaming Show, an event targeted at a software program and hardware for gaming computers, will go back for its 1/3 consecutive yr at E3 2017, organizer Computer Gamer introduced nowadays.

This year’s Pc Gaming Display will take place Monday, June 12, at 10 a.M. PT in the Theatre at Ace Hotel in La. With that scheduling, Pc Gamer is taking the timeslot that has traditionally been held via the Xbox E3 press briefing. Microsoft vacated its Monday morning slot — at the least for 2017 — in favor of a niche on the afternoon of Sunday, June 11.

Yet again, the Pc Gaming Show can be hosted via the affable Sean “Day9” Plott. But in preference to AMD, which got pinnacle billing for the Show’s first two years, the presenting sponsor of the 2017 event is its major competitor within the CPU market: Intel.

“The Computer Gaming Display gives a great voice to the Laptop gaming network and Intel is worked up to work alongside our industry companions to show off the energy of the platform,” stated Gregory Bryant, company vice chairman of the consumer computing group at Intel, in an information release.

Other sponsors consist of Bohemia Interactive, Cygames, Nexon, and Tripwire Interactive. This 12 months’ Laptop Gaming Show “will reflect innovations throughout the industry with expanded VR and sports content material,” in line with Laptop Gamer. Anticipate the same old onstage presentations from makers of Laptop video games and hardware.

The 2017 Laptop Gaming Display is open to the public; tickets are unfastened, and you can reserve them right now. Computer Gamer may even live stream the event on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube.

Exquisite Mario Bros Game For The Conventional NES You may think speedy and pass even faster to complete this Classic quest! The Mushroom Princess is being held captive by way of the evil Koopa tribe of turtles. It is up to you to rescue her from the clutches of the Koopa King earlier than time runs out. But it may not be smooth. To get to the princess, You’ll need to climb mountains, pass seas, keep away from bottomless pits, fight off turtle infantrymen and a bunch of nasty traps that handiest a Koopa King can devise. It is another adventure from the Superb MARIO BROS.!

Exquisite Mario Bros became the primary Recreation ever to be released for the NES in 1985. It turned into the first Sport to supply powerful smooth scrolling ranges with a properly made map. Amazing Mario Brothers is currently the first-class selling online game of all time. you can play it on the NES, Famicom, SNES, GBA, and these days the Wii. Believe me all people, this Game is a real blast from the past and nevertheless, entertains these days. Mario became the first true video gaming person and he’s going to rise up and fireball away any others that try and take his region. he will constantly be large inside the video game industry due to this games massive effect.

The games Tale:

Many say the Tale of this Sport is horrible and It’s far a large downfall of the sport. I imply It is just like each Other Recreation in which a princess receives captured and also you want to shop her. The real fundamental plot of the game is that Bowser has unleashed a wicked spell over Mushroom Nation. The most effective ones who can keep the Princess and wreck this evil spell are Mario and Luigi.

well, this Recreation changed into pretty lots the primary Recreation to start the ones normal plots. However sincerely, what’s there no longer to love approximately the Classic Mario saving Princess Peach from Bowser Tale? Nothing, it is simple and a compelling Story. I am certain the Tale does now not deserve an excessive rank due to the fact on the time while the game came out the Story changed into very surprising and probably sounded a bit corny. But today, we all recognize of our pleasant plumber hero, MARIO.

Gameplay:

This Game is unbelievably a laugh to play. The objective of the game is whole every degree by going for walks to the end of the level and leaping has high as possible in the direction of the flag. You may encounter many well-known enemies such as Goombas, Koopas, Piranha Flora and lots of extras. There are coins spread in the course of the sport in random areas and hidden in blocks which you ought to bust. After you get 100 coins you get an extra life.

You get a rating for how many enemies you kill, how many coins you grasp, and for Other diverse motives. every level is precise and has exceptional barriers in each and is a blast to play. There are 8 worlds with typically 4 levels in every world. the game is top notch because it has more than one hidden secrets at some point of the sport that continues the amusing coming. There are even secret minus worlds and deform pipes that supply the game a great twist.

the sport also mixes in a few mazes to offer it a bit challenge. you could also play 2 games in which you can play as Mario and Luigi and defeat the evil Koopa King. The few downfalls are that the sport isn’t very long, screen scrolling, and it receives irritating. If you play it short enough you could beat each level in around 30 minutes.

You can not backtrack After you circulate ahead in a level. the game is frustrating due to the fact you can not even shop and there are no continues (you can use a code to start from the world you lost on). the game display screen simplest scrolls in the right path. I’d easily supply the gameplay of Outstanding Mario Bros a 10/10 if there have been at least more stages according to the world.

Of course, you cannot simply take on the one’s stages as simply you and yourself, so that you have were given a few things that you could find out there to help you. Initially, there are the powerups you can locate in blocks throughout the sport. the first one You may get is the High-quality Mushroom, and by using getting this Mario will develop to double length (Amazing Mario!) and be capable of taking one more hit from an enemy (and revert to everyday Mario) before losing a life.

As Top notch Mario, you furthermore might get the potential to interrupt regular brick blocks you stumble upon this will prove to be extraordinarily useful in numerous ways, be it locating a mystery block or just taking a secure path. If you uncover a powerup whilst being Tremendous Mario, it is going to be a fire flower, which may not let you take any extra hits But grants you the extraordinarily useful energy of fireball throwing. Fireballs can kill enemies in a single hit, and even as the same may be completed by using jumping on maximum enemies heads, It’s just tons less difficult to release a fireball from a distance and knock out the enemies from a safe distance. As long as you could control to hold the fire ability, you’ll be quite overpowered.

In addition to that, you may additionally pick up 1Up mushrooms, if you want to provide you a further lifestyle, and coins. The cash is collectibles with a view to come up with an extra life whilst gathering one hundred of them, then the counter will revert so that you can gather an additional one hundred, and so on. All matters in the game; cash, powerups, completing a stage, defeating an enemy are introduced to a points rating.

This rating is a leftover from arcade video games, and might not certainly be used for something for the reason that high score is deleted when you turn off your console there may not be any competition about it. no longer having a keep function might sound awful, But as stated the degrees may be finished quite quick and there is constantly someone around who will understand approximately the secret warp zones.

[icharchivist]

It's funny, I looked at the new Dante art and went "Halloween Dante? Huh, that's weird, nobody really cares about him" and then I look at your blog and just go "oh nvm" lmao. My funds are safe but looks like Cygames targeted you with this one

DMFKLDFKMDL this is so funny.

meanwhile me and my bestfriend were both actually crying tears of joy about the unit while crying over our funds. Others members of our crew rejoiced. We're legion.

But for the actual reasoning, aside from the underground fan following, is probably more that

1) Dante's VA is a Granblue Veteran, he's here at every fest, and Granblue does tend to reward VAs who genuinely love the game by giving them more content, to have something to chew on and everything.

2) Granblue do love their cats. Cats content actually do bring them a lot of money and a lot of appreciation from fans. As a matter of fact, Ewiyar, Dante, Sen and Young Cat were listed in "characters people most put in their house" (on the Island option) because people do love seeing cats roaming around

(i'm inflating those numbers myself since it's also my home's set up: )

Either way even if i didn't care that much about Dante (which i do!! i love him!!!) I think it's really a good thing Granblue doesn't just do units for popularity reasons and sometimes do just indulge in more niche characters. It makes it very worthwhile when you're rooting for some underdogs.

And honestly i think it goes double for making a Dante unit bc esp for limited units it can be easy to play it safe with the traditional ikemen and sexy girls, but it's neat instead to go with the middle aged man, not the type people usually thirst on, who had a whole arc about learning to enjoy himself on Halloween just embracing it all.

I for one am very happy about it. Thank you Granblue for not playing it safe and rewarding Me In Particular. And My Bestie. We're crying together on this one. winning.

[murasaki-murasame]

On the one hand, we’re getting Ilia in the next banner as part of a prize showcase that’d be worth summoning on just for the extra rewards alone, but on the OTHER hand, I didn’t manage to get Gala Zena from any of the free summons, and then the worms in my brain went brrr and I think we all know what happened next :)

Also now that I’ve had time to experience the 2.0 update for a week or so, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on that to talk about too

First of all, I got absolutely no 5-stars of any kind from my free summons on the gala banner we got before the Zena banner, so that sucked, lol. I was genuinely tempted to at least go for a pity-break, but I decided against it, since that banner in general was so unappealing to me.

Then for the Zena banner I at least managed to sit back and see how the free summons went, and I got Meene and Midgard Zero off of them, which was nice. But of course that meant that I didn’t get Gala Zena, and I just couldn’t hold myself back from chasing her, lol.

Thankfully I managed to get her after an extra 70-ish summons, so I didn’t have to spend THAT much to get her, but I almost immediately got a dupe Meene from my ticket summons so that kinda hurt, lmao. I also got a dupe Andromeda [who’s now at 3UB], and I think those are the only 5-stars that I’ve gotten from these last two banners. The 5-star dragon ticket from the log-in bonus gave me a dupe Gilgamesh [who’s at 1UB now], though.

In general my summons were a bit more barren than I’d like, but I can’t really complain since most of them were free summons, and I managed to clear out the whole Zena banner, lol.

If I remember right, I had about 270 summons before this, and now I’m at around 200. We’ve still got some anniversary related wyrmite coming in the near future, though, on top of the free summons, so I might still be able to spark on the mid-month gala remix banner if I want to. But I’d probably only do that if Gala Alex is featured and I don’t get her from my free summons. She’s now the only gala unit I’m missing, so she’s a pretty high-priority spark target.

Which is also a big part of why I’m not really that interested in summoning on the Ilia banner, and by extension why I decided to go ahead and chase Zena now. I mean, that was still a dumb decision since if I ended up needing to spark her, that would have drained my entire stash, but still, lol. Ilia’s non-limited, and she seems to be the only new unit on the next banner, so if anything I’d mainly just be summoning for the extra rewards. Also I don’t really have any high-priority dream summon candidates anymore, since I got I-Nefaria and S-Mikoto a little while ago, and I got Meene from this banner, so I could just dream summon Ilia later on anyway.

But mainly I’m just kinda salty about how she’s basically a direct improvement over the new Joe alt, lol. I was hoping she’d at least be flame or wind or something, or even have a different mode type, but she’s literally just Joe but better, which is lame, since I really like Joe, and even if I got Ilia I dunno if I’d want to replace him on my light team. So that on it’s own kinda deflated a lot of the hype I had about Ilia.

Anyway, at this point my main priorities are to be able to get Gala Alex whenever she’s available again, and to hopefully get any new gala dragons when they come out. I’d also really like to go into the New Years banner with a spark saved up, just in case. Even though that’d probably require skipping Christmas. So we’ll just see how that pans out, lol.

All that aside, the 2.0 update has been out for a while now, and boy has that sure changed how the game feels, lmao. I think it’s an almost entirely good update, but there’s a lot of awkward growing pains going on as we have to adjust to all these new and changed systems.

I know that the new wyrmprint system gives us more flexbility than the old one, and that it at least gives a reason to want to use a lot of the 4-star prints, but I really hope they implement some sort of preset option soon, because having to keep setting up 4-5 wyrmprints on every single character is really awful. I’m also not a huge fan of how expensive it is to get extra copies of prints, but I get the logic behind it, and thankfully event prints are extremely cheap to get extra copies of. Which at least means that new players can pretty easily get four copies of Plunder Pals before eventually getting specialized skill damage prints, but I feel kinda bad for anyone who didn’t get all the Megaman event prints, since they cover basically every single important wyrmprint ability, lol. 

Also it’s kinda awkward how the change to having every print just give one ability means that a lot of prints got indirectly nerfed, like Fires of Hate and Resounding Rendition, or Chocolatiers now just being 50% skill prep. Not to mention how so many prints are almost identical, down to the fact that even the affinity bonuses for a lot of similar prints aren’t even different either. So that’s kinda weird. But ultimately I do think this was a good change for the game. I’m also thinking now that one type of new endgame progression they might add eventually is 6-star wyrmprints, since it seems really noteworthy to me that the new wyrmprint UI is a 2x3 grid with only five slots taken up, and the other just being empty space. So they might introduce 6-star wyrmprints to fill in that extra slot later to add even more flexibility to the system.

Then there’s all the changes they made to the weapon system, which I think are gonna take a fair while for me to feel truly familiar with. There’s a whole lot to take in, and even though I think it’s more streamlined and easy to understand at the end of the day, it’s such a huge change from what i was used to that it just feels kinda overwhelming and strange. But I think the only part of it that genuinely feels bad is how it’s now WAY more expensive to fully unbind Agito weapons than it was before, since you have to now buy all of the last four unbind levels, like with HDT weapons, instead of it just being a one-time upgrade cost that gives you an automatically MUB tier 2 weapon if you had a MUB tier 1 weapon. So that really sucks, and I think it really screws over anyone who was holding off on upgrading their flame and shadow Agito weapons until this update hit, since now it’s extremely expensive compared to before. But apparently it’s an intentional design choice and not just an oversight, so I guess we’ll just have to deal with it. I'm also kinda annoyed at myself for dismantling all my 5t3s before this update hit, since now they’re actually worth getting for the weapon bonus system, but that’s not as big of a deal.

And on that note, I know lots of people don’t like how expensive the weapon bonus system is, but I’m just viewing it as a super long-term, end-game grind that intentionally gives relatively minor stat upgrades that nothing in the game is actually balanced around. It’s basically just an extension of the weapon dojo system for people who want to have something to keep grinding for once they hit the end-game.

I do really like how they condensed all the niche void weapons into just one weapon per element/type combo, though, and how their unique weapon abilities are now passively applied to all similar weapons once you unlock them. It gives you a reason to care about getting them, and grinding void battles in general, without forcing you to use super weak weapons if you need their unique ability. I dunno how much I’ll actually grind Void Agni after this, but it feels really nice to just have the scorching air res ability on my Agito/HDT weapons, lol. It’s also really nice that they let you do the same thing with the HDT Bane abilities, since that makes it way easier to grind them, and this update gives us a whole lot of reasons to want to get back into grinding HDTs again.

HDTs are just way easier now than they used to be, which is great. I think Cygames has accepted that they just weren’t very fun or well-designed as endgame co-op raid type content, and that people just want to be able to farm them solo for their drops. And this whole update makes it way easier to do that. On top of the earlier change to nerfing their opening blasts and reducing the damage that AI characters take, it feels like they only slightly raised their stats to compensate for the huge balance patch update, which makes them feel way easier to beat than they used to be. And they also reworked the fights a bit so that they actually have purple indicators for [most] of their attacks, and some mechanics like HBH’s volcanoes now actually work properly in solo, so that’s neat.

The introduction of solo versions of endgame fights is really nice. I think at this point it means that you can go through the entire game’s progression system without touching co-op [outside of events, I guess], which is nice, since I know it’s always been off-putting to a lot of people that co-op is basically mandatory for endgame content.

We also now have PVP [kind of], which is something I never expected, and I ALSO never expected that it’d actually be . . . really fun and well-balanced? It’s genuinely shocking to me that they actually managed to pull off PVP properly in this type of game, lol. This has always felt like the most anti-PVP gacha game out there, if that makes sense, so I never thought PVP would work, but the whole battle royale set-up actually works really well. Mainly because everyone works off of the same blank slate, and your account progress outside of the battle royale mode has absolutely no impact on how strong you are in PVP. It’s more of a skill-based thing, where you’d have an edge over newer players just because you’re more familiar with how to move around in the game and do stuff. There’s also the fact that there’s barely any difference in the points you get between first and last place, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out on much if you keep losing. And most of the stuff you spend points on are just cosmetic skins for the character you play as, but there’s also some genuinely good rewards like sunstones and testaments that you can fairly easily get even if you just grind for it by dying as fast as possible every round. I really hope they keep the rewards the same for each season, since having a fairly consistent supply of 2 sunstones and 4 of each testament every five weeks or so would be really good.

The whole balance patch also happened, and that ended up being a lot more of a big deal than I thought it might be. Even though they only tweaked everyone’s damage mods and not any of their abilities or anything, basically all of the buffs feel like what you’d expect from a mana spiral. A pretty huge amount of characters got their damage mods doubled or even tripled, and then there’s cases like Gala Euden who effectively had both of his skill’s damage mods quadrupled, lol. I was wondering if they might use this as a chance to effectively give mana spirals to old gala units without actually giving them mana spirals, and that’s basically how this went. On top of Gala Euden now being even stronger than before, Gala Mym got basically all of her damage mods doubled, along with a new strength buff on her S1. Gala Sarisse also got her S2 improved so that it always gives a team strength buff instead of alternating effects. And Gala Ranzal got what seems to be a really big improvement to his damage in general, along with his gauges now being easier to fill, so now I think he might at least be on the same level as Leif, if not stronger, which he really deserved.

They even buffed a lot of the weaker shadow units, which I wasn’t expecting, but I’m glad about it. Obviously Norwin was one of the first units whose changes I looked into, and I’m glad that he’s better than he used to be, but it’s kinda awkward to me that he has poison punisher effects on his skills now, when they didn’t change the fact that he has a blind punisher ability, and another ability based around inflicting blind. I think he still needs a proper spiral to fully morph him into actually being about poison, but he’s a lot better than he was before. They also buffed S-Norwin’s S2 for some reason, even though he was really good before this update, lol.

Vice also now has the honor of being the first unit to get straight up nerfed in the game’s history, but even with the nerf, I think he’s still one of the strongest 3-stars in the whole game, and he’s still worth investing in as a low-budget DPS option. I also actually like the fact that he inflicts poison on his S1 now, since it makes him a more consistent source of poison, but it also means he’ll be constantly afflicting poison, which might not always be good. I think it’s a good balance change, though. At the very least I’m able to easily solo eHJP in like one and a half minutes while still using him as my main DPS unit, while also having everyone equipped with gold fafnirs. So he definitely still does his job just fine.

Anyway, we’ve also got the whole second anniversary event going on, and it sure is a doozy. I think I liked Fractured Futures more, but this is still a good event in it’s own way. It’s not as intense or depressing, but I like the focus on lore and world-building, and it’s also just really refreshing to get an entire event where Zethia’s the protagonist for once.

A lot of what the event’s gone over has felt sort of predictable, but it’s still nice to get all this stuff explicitly spelled out, and it also means we get to see Ilia as a socially inept punk biker with a giant rifle, so that alone makes the entire event worth it, lmao. I figured we were gonna get something like this from all the increasing glimpses at how ancient civilization used to be technologically advanced, but seeing it play out like this is still really fun.

It’s also interesting to get the origin story for Morsayati. It’s not quite as interesting as I would have hoped, since it turns out that the Other is just Mordecai’s disembodied hatred, but still. Mordecai’s a surprisingly adorable character, and for a free unit he also feels surprisingly strong, which is nice. Although it does suck that he just straight up outclasses Hanabusa, lol.

One of the more surprising things about this event is that we’re also getting new world-building about the fairy kingdom, which seems to be setting up for how they teased at the main story moving over there soon. It’s pretty clear that sometime after chapter 18 they’re going to release Notte as a playable character [either as a welfare unit or as a gala unit], and I think Meene is kinda like the template for how they’ll handle Notte as a playable character.

We also now know that we’re getting a free character from chapter 16, and like most people I think it’s probably going to be Leonidas as a flame gun unit going by the preview from the digest, but it’s possible that he’ll be the next gala adventurer instead. I also think they might do something with Chelle soon, since I think they teased her showing up in chapter 17, and we also know that she’s apparently the one who introduced manacasters to the world.

The latest This Month post also talked about how we’re getting a new Halloween event for the middle of the month, which is kinda surprising. I think we’re still getting a Halloween event at the end of the month, so I wonder how this upcoming one will go. My current guess is that, since they didn’t say anything about the banner that’ll be run along with it, they’ll just be rerunning the old Halloween banner for it, and the event itself will just be based around the second year Halloween units, since they didn’t get their own event last year. At least that way we’d get two new Halloween events without having to deal with the stress of getting two differently entirely new Halloween banners in one month. I’m also hoping that they make the old Halloween units non-limited like they did with the Valentines ones.

They’re also apparently going another rerun of Accursed Archives [plus the Akasha event], which is kinda surprising, since I thought they’d just add it to the compendium. But at least this means we’ll get an extra set of rewards once they add it to the compendium later, lol.

We didn’t hear anything about a new Halloween event/banner at the end of the month, but we’re probably getting one, and unless Gala Alex gets featured before it, that’ll probably be what I save my next spark for. I’m not sure exactly how they’ll work it now, but I’m hoping that they’ll bundle the new Halloween units into a gala banner that also introduces a new gala dragon, since that’s also something I want to get, so it’d be nice to knock out two birds with one stone.

[murasaki-murasame]

I was planning to make my own post about how I think the wind mana spirals will go, and then Cygames went ahead and laid it out for us way earlier than I expected, lmao.

But anyway there’s some interesting stuff going on here that I have some thoughts on.

Basically all three of these characters went in slightly different directions than I expected. Mostly Hawk and Lin You, but still.

I thought that they’d give Hawk the exact same buff as Nefaria, maybe minus the buff dispel, but even though they still stuck poison on him, his S2 is at least slightly different to hers, since it’s now a skill shift thing where the first round lets him inflict stun and poison via his next two force strikes, and then the second round is a damaging skill with poison punisher. He also gets loses the Full HP condition on his A1, whereas Nefaria still has hers, so that’s interesting.

I’m very curious to see how much this helps him, since Nefaria got a MASSIVE boost to her DPS through her mana spiral upgrade. Though she also got some unique utility with her buff dispel that gives her a meta position in Kai Yan even if you ignore her high damage. Hawk doesn’t really get any sort of unique utility like that, but maybe wind Agito won’t really require anything like that. And tbh I’m glad that it means he probably won’t serve the exact same role in wind Agito as Nefaria does in Kai Yan.

It’s kinda hard to tell if the skill shift on his S2 is going to raise or lower his overall DPS, if you compare him to Nefaria. Her altered force strike is apparently extremely powerful, so Hawk might be held back by having his S2 only change his force strikes half the time. Although Nefaria’s S2 powers up her next single force strike, while Hawk’s powers up his next two force strikes, so that also might influence things.

He might still be very good as a poison enabler in wind Agito when that comes out, but I’m not sure if he’d be good enough to break into the HMC meta. The poison meta has had a very hard time catching on in HMC, and we already have Joachim as a poison-enabling wind bow, and he at least has the appropriate status resistance. It’s possible that there’s cheese strats you can do with Hawk’s stun, though. I feel like that’d only be relevant in mHMC though, not eHMC.

I probably won’t build him up, since that’d take a lot of resources that I don’t have, but I’m glad he’s getting the buff.

I had a feeling Lin You was gonna be the mystery third mana spiral unit, but I’m still kinda salty that Sylas continues to be on the back-burner, lol. He desperately needs any sort of buff. Maybe we’ll get another round of wind mana spirals next month, if they release wind Agito next.

I wasn’t really sure what they would do with her kit, since she’s already a pretty solid unit all around. I honestly thought they might make her S2′s heal effect the entire team to help her sub in for Wedding Elly in HMC, but it looks like they decided to make her more like Ezelith. Which makes a lot of sense, honestly. She has a crit rate passive, her themed wyrmprint gives crit rate, and the dragon that’s basically paired with her gives crit damage. She’s not exactly the same as Ezelith, though, since her buffs are more about her building up to a 50% or so crit rate for most of the fight, compared to Ezelith getting 100% crit rate in short bursts. I think it fits the axe play-style nicely, though.

I was kinda worried at first that it might be really hard for her to keep up her combo count, since axes are kinda slow in general, but then I saw that they’re also giving her a combo time ability like Valerio and Mitsuba, lol. That’s one way to make it more feasible to maintain high combo counts on slower units.

The change in her abilities is probably the biggest deal out of her mana spiral, but I’m curious to see the full details on how her S1 changes her next three force strikes. It’d be nice if the cyclones are multi-hit attacks that help her rack up her combo count quickly.

I’m not entirely sure how much this will help her break back into HMC, since her buffs are purely about her personal DPS, and she still doesn’t have the team utility that Wedding Elly does, but it at least makes her an even better unit for general content. Maybe she’ll suffer a bit from also not having anything related to poison in her kit, but honestly we need more DPS units who aren’t wrapped up in status afflictions to achieve their full potential.

I think she has a lot of potential to be a great DPS unit for wind Agito when that comes out, though, for basically the same reason as why Ezelith is a core DPS unit against Volk.

I don’t think I’m very interested in investing in her mana spiral since I have like no testaments at the moment and I already main Noelle in HMC, but at the very least it looks like she’ll probably benefit most from using Long Long now, which is nice for me since he’s my only strength-based 5-star wind dragon that I have max unbound, lol.

If there’s any unit out of these three that I might actually invest in, it’s probably Su Fang, and that’s mostly just because I really like him as a character. In the long run I should probably save my resources for other 70MC characters, but at least on paper I think his mana spiral might make him a really strong unit.

I was kinda hoping they’d give him more of a crit-based kit, but I can see why they didn’t, since they chose to do that with Lin You instead. It’s still a little bit lame to see him get the poison treatment, but realistically I think he’ll benefit a lot from it.

I had a feeling they’d give him poison punisher on his S1, if they went this route, but I didn’t expect them to basically give him the Delphi treatment by having his S2 give a poison effect to his next force strike. I imagine that unlike Delphi his poison mods are going to be normal, though, since he’s a normal DPS unit outside of that.

In general his S2 got a pretty big buff, which I’m glad to see. They bumped the strength buff from 25% to 30%, while also increasing the duration from 10 seconds to 15 seconds, which I think is a fairly sizeable increase to his damage across the board. Though some of that time will probably be spent by you using a force strike to inflict poison. But it still seems like a pretty big improvement.

I’m curious to see if they’re gonna buff the damage mods on his S1, since they’re pretty low, or if they’ll be kept the same, and the poison punisher damage mods will be the main buff.

Since he’s just a welfare 4-star unit his abilities didn’t get changed much, but there’s a lot to be said for his skill damage passive going from 20% to 35%. I mean, that ended up being one of the core reasons why Xania became a meta flame unit. So I think he might end up being the dark horse of this batch.

I’m not sure if this will help him break into the HMC meta because of the recurring issue of raw DPS units not having the utility that Wedding Elly brings, but he might end up being a really good poison enabler for poison comps. Hopefully.

I think he also has a lot of potential in wind Agito, for basically the same reasons as Lin You. It’s a long shot, but I really hope that the phase 2 form of the wind Agito boss is classified as a Therion, like Volk, so Su Fang can take advantage of his Therion’s Bane ability getting buffed to 35%. That might really swing things in his favour, but even if it ends up being a dead ability, I think he might still be good for that fight. At the very least, his crit rate coability would probably sync nicely with Lin You’s new play-style.

There’s a pretty high chance that I’ll 70MC him as soon as I have the materials for it, but I at least want to wait and see how his mana spiral compares to Hawk and Lin You, in the long run. It might just not be worth the investment. I really want him to be good, though.

Even though I mostly just want Sylas to finally get a buff, it’d also be a shame if they skip over Ku Hai, since he got introduced along with Lin You and Su Fang, and he also has a pretty lopsided kit. If he got more reliable sources of crit rate I think he could be really good. This event also introduced Xiao Lei but she’s from a different element altogether so it’s not a surprise that they’re skipping her for now.

But on a related note, since we’re getting mana spirals for Su Fang and Lin You to go along with this event rerun that’s coming up, I have a feeling that instead of us getting a new wind banner, they might just rerun the Lin You banner and put Hawk on rate-up along with it. It’d be a nice way to showcase their new mana spiral upgrades. And tbh we don’t really need an entirely new wind banner at the moment, since we got the Kirsty and Joachim one really recently. Maybe we’ll get an additional new banner for a different element along with a banner rerun, though.

Also, I think we’re still expecting mana spirals for 3-star shadow units at the end of this month. I’m curious to see how that goes, but I feel like it’s going to be too little too late. They already gave mana spirals to just about every shadow 5-star, and the meta for both HJP and Kai Yan have had time to solidify, so 3-star units aren’t really going to have much of a chance to meaningfully compete against that. I feel like they’re basically all just going to be budget options for existing 5-star units, and they’ll only be worth investing in if you either don’t have those 5-stars, or you really like some of the 3-stars as characters.

I still hope they’re planning to give mana spirals to 4-star shadow units like Norwin, though. At this point he’s probably never gonna be as good as Nefaria, but I just want him to be viable in endgame content, lol.

[murasaki-murasame]

Ieyasu came for my saving-for-Gala-Luca throat and I still managed to get him with 100 of my 250-ish saved up sommons >:3c

Now to go back into saving-for-Gala-Luca mode. After the absolute nightmare that was the Gala Elly banner, I’m not taking any risks this time.

Anyway, more about my summons under the cut [TL;DR: I got more than I even wanted, and also if anyone’s feeling iffy on this banner I just wanna let you know that Chitose is basically Light!Emma and he’s probably the best new unit on the entire banner lmao]

The last few weeks of events were really generous and got me all the way up to 250 or so saved summons, and after seeing that Ieyasu was gonna be featured on this banner along with like four other units I was terrified that it wouldn’t be enough to get him, and that I’d be left with no real chance of getting Gala Luca afterward, but then I got Ieyasu after 100 summons so we’re all good, lol. Let’s just say that once I saw that rainbow blade every single muscle in my body was clenched as I faced the imminent coin toss between getting Ieyasu and Nobunaga. And thankfully I got what I wanted in the end.

I also got two copies of Mitsuhide, who I didn’t really care one way or another about, but now I have her, lmao. I honestly don’t even think she’s worth pulling for since she only seems somewhat better than Fleur, but I’m happy to have her.

The most surprising part of this banner was that I randomly got my first copy of Yaten, which I’m EXTREMELY happy about. His banner was one of the first times [along with Ieyasu, ironically] where I really felt bad about not managing to pull him while he was featured, so I’m happy he finally came home. I was seriously considering dream summoning him in the future, and now I don’t have to. I’ll probably still be dream summoning Delphi soon, though, since Cygames is doing everything in their power to make me regret initially thinking he was a bad character, lol. So yeah this banner gave me the two 5-star shadow unit dudes who I’d missed out on previously so that’s pretty nifty. I think the only shadow 5-stars I’m missing now are Summer Verica, Delphi, and I guess Veronica but I’m not really counting limited units. And out of those three I only really care about Delphi since I already have Heinwald and Gala Cleo.

I got Chitose really early in my summons, and it almost made me contemplate stopping there, but I decided to keep going until I got Ieyasu. Which thankfully happened without me using all of my summons. I do think that Chitose is the real gem of this banner, but Ieyasu’s new mana spiral upgrade also makes him noteworthy again.

I thought that maybe at most Chitose would be a light version of DY-Xanfried, but nope he’s literally a light version of Emma, lol. I thought Cygames wouldn’t put such a powerful unit behind a limited banner, but here we are. Light continues to suffer from having most of their good units being limited. At least this whole banner makes me feel a bit better about not having gotten DY-Malora.

I was kinda worried about the idea of Chitose being a curse-res light wand, since I feel like endgame curse-res light content is kinda punishing toward ranged units, but they pretty much specifically designed his kit to make him super tanky, with his +20% defense passive and his 30% Max HP shield on his S2, lmao. At least if you use Chocolatiers or something on him, using those two together is probably enough to get past HZD’s HP check, so he might actually become a really good, accessible meta unit for that fight. But in general as a strength buffbot he’s pretty much automatically one of the best light units already.

On the other hand I think Hanabusa is probably going to be inferior to Yachiyo until he hopefully gets a mana spiral upgrade that fixes his partial curse res and gives his kit some new elements to make him shine. But I think if he can get that upgrade later [or if he can manage to get by with a curse res print in HZD], he might be really good. It’s hard to tell how good his kit as a whole is at the moment, but I like that he has team strength buffs built into his kit, and some pretty high buff time increases based on his S1 skill shift.

We’ll see how it shakes out, but I feel like Mitsuhide probably isn’t going to completely erase Fleur from the meta. It’s not quite like the Thaniel-Jiang Ziya situation, since Fleur is still super strong on her own, and I feel like Mitsuhide doesn’t provide much more aside from higher stats as a 5-star.

I’m basically forcing myself to not care about Nobunaga so that i can resist the completionist urge to keep pulling for her to have her in my collection just because she exists, so I’m just going to think of her as a unit that I can live without, for my own sanity, lmao. But honestly she doesn’t stand out a whole lot, at least not after all the massive buffs the flame roster just got. Her buff dispels don’t seem very special now that Euden and Naveed can do that too, and the unique debuff on her S1 kinda seems like . . . a worse version of bleed, lol.

Daikokuten seems like a good dragon, but I’m not gonna bother chasing after him since I got Cupid a while ago and I’m working on unbinding him. He seems like he provides more raw strength than Cupid if you can maintain a high combo count, but Cupid’s heal and crit rate buff pretty much ensure that he’s still going to be a highly valued dragon in the long run, so I’m fine if I don’t get the new one.

I honestly might have done the platinum dragon summon once if it was a thing where you got a guaranteed copy of Daikokuten each time, but it’s literally just ‘you get one of the 5-star dragons and Daikokuten has the exact same appearance rate as the rest of them’, which is basically useless to me. Same with the adventurer one, but I wasn’t going to pull on that anyway since i don’t care for the two new 5-stars. I can tell that they’re trying to give people a bit more incentive to spend money on this game, but I think it’s only worth it if you’re a super new player who barely has any 5-stars at all. Some people will probably do the adventurer one because they really like the new banner units, I guess, but it’s a horrible deal.

Also on the note of Nobunaga, I’m kinda disappointed that she’s just the Year of the Horse character, lol. I would have liked it way more if she was an unofficial Year of the Cat clan leader, with Ebisu as her pact dragon, but then that would have made me want to pull for her more because I’m weak for anything that I can twist into a Fruits Basket reference, so maybe it’s a good thing that they didn’t go down that route. Either way it feels kinda weird to not have her be about the Year of the Cat when she’s being bundled with the Rat clan leader, and Ebisu is already based on that whole myth anyway. It seems like a vaguely uncomfortable and off-putting message of ‘yeah this game isn’t going to last long enough for us to actually get to the Year of the Horse so we’re giving her out early :)’. If they were gonna do it this way in order to get all of the clan leader characters released within 6-7 years rather than 12, I kinda wish they could have done that from the start so it didn’t come as a surprise now. Oh well.

Anyway, even though I’m not a fan of Nobunaga at all [and even after the event story I still don’t have any interest in her lol], I really like the rest of the new units. I could take or leave Mitsuhide in terms of her being a 5-star light dagger, but the event story actually made me like her a fair bit. Plus, her 3D model helped sell me on her design.

But mostly Chitose is my absolute son boy and I adore him. I get the feeling he’s going to be very . . . polarizing, but I love him. He’s absolutely perfect, and to top it all off he’s exactly the character that the light roster has been waiting for. As soon as he came into my summons being like ‘here comes a slice of cutie pie <3′ it was over for me.

Hanabusa’s also fun, in a surprisingly Danganronpa character writing kinda way. I think his facial expressions really gave me that sorta comparison, since it’s kinda rare for characters in this game to be that cartoon-y. But I also really love him. The fact that purple’s my favourite colour may or may not be making me extremely biased in his favour, though.

Also, Ebisu seems to be a 40% HP shadow dragon, which I think shadow’s been lacking. He’s probably not as good as a MUB NIdhogg/HZD, but I don’t have either of those so he’s nice to have. Even though I use Heinwald as my shadow healer and he prefers mixed dragons.

The new event wyrmprints also all seem pretty good. The Wyrmclan Duo basically seems to be Resounding Rendition but with crit damage instead of crit rate, and I’ll have to see how the math on that one turns out. I think most characters benefit more from crit rate than crit damage, but I’m not sure. A New Year’s Battle seems like a pretty solid print for daggers, and probably other units that can get high combo counts.

And then A Game of Cat and Boar seems like it’s gonna be the best wyrmprint for light buffers like Chitose and maybe Hanabusa. It actually has the highest buff time percentage for a wyrmprint in the game, at 25% compared to the current main ones being 20%, but it’s locked to light units. The 10% shadow res also works nicely with Chitose’s innate focus on defense, to make it easier for him to pass HP checks and whatnot. It’s a potent enough buff time increase that you can pretty easily just run something like the HZD print in his second slot without losing out on much, but outside of HZD he might just use a second buff time print anyway since there’s no real reason to bother buffing his offensive stats.

Anyway, in short, this banner was extremely gracious to me, Chitose is Best Boy, and I’m going to skip everything between now and the next gala in the hopes that we’ll finally get Gala Luca.

On that note, I thought Gala Luca might be a light dagger, but that seems a lot less likely now that Mitsuhide exists. I think he’ll probably be a light blade, or maybe a light spear, instead. I think him being a light blade would be great. We really need more of those [especially since Hanabusa’s stuck with a welfare unit kit], and it’d be great to see Luca get the vindication he deserves by getting a really strong gala alt. So until then I’m just gonna try and keep hoarding my resources until I can pull for him. I think I have a little over 150 summons worth of resources saved up, and I hope that’ll get a lot bigger over the next month.

[murasaki-murasame]

I decided to ignore the rational part of my brain saying ‘wait until the last day of the Gala Euden rate-up period to see what you get from your free tenfolds before spending any resources on this gala’ and go all in because I’ve been waiting way too long for this gala to wait any longer, and lmao I have the weirdest luck with this game.

I guess this is gonna turn into another gacha liveblog post since I also wanna mention the datamines for the next raid event and I may as well put that under a cut if people want to avoid spoilers.

OK so basically my experience with the gala right off the bat was that I was planning to stop once I got Gala Euden, but then I ended up getting him as my first 5-star unit from the banner. Then I decided to keep going until I got at least one off-banner 5-star unit, and then I immediately got a dupe Gala Euden. Then I went and did the platinum gala summon since I had some diamantum stored up for a dream summon that we ended up not getting, and I got Gala Mym, which was cool, since she was the only other gala unit i had any real interest in. Then I decided to try my luck at the gala again, and immediately got Gala Sarisse. Then I switched to single vouchers, and on my tenth one I got a dupe Long Long. So really Cygames is just telling me to stop while I’m ahead and start saving for the Delphi banner, lmao.

On the one hand it’s one big first-world gacha problem, but I was specifically hoping to get some off-banner 5-star units from this gala since there’s a fair few I still don’t have, so getting exclusively new gala units and dupe 5-star dragons is . . . not what i expected :v

But I’m happy about getting Gala Euden since I’m in desperate need of more light DPS units [especially curse res ones], and getting Gala Mym and Sarisse is gonna help flesh out my flame team even more. I guess Gala Ranzal’s the only gala unit I don’t have now, but he’s also the one that I’m least interested in, so that’s fine. Even in the second part of the gala I wouldn’t bother chasing after him. I’ll just save up for Delphi. Not that I really need any more shadow units, but he looks neat.

Anyway, we got some datamines for the raid event starting soon, and I guess I was sort of right about it. It looks like it’ll be about time travel magic happening to give Euden a chance to try and save his dad, and the welfare unit definitely seems to be young Aurelius, with the welfare dragon probably being young Zodiark. I hoped he might be Alberius instead, but this probably makes more sense.

Also, it looks like one way or another he’s going to be a shadow sword unit. I was a bit worried he might be a light sword unit [and then get immediately outclassed by Gala Euden], but this is cool. At the very least it’s a nice consolation prize for me still not having Yaten, lmao. If he at least has a nice kit I might promote him, since I have a whole lot of eldwater now.

There’s speculation the welfare unit might be future Euden, but that seems unlikely. The event story sounds like it’s about Euden reminiscing about his dad’s death and meeting a dragon who lets him go back in time to try and stop it. But maybe it could tie into the whole future Zethia plot point in an interesting way.

Either way, I’m curious about how this event feels a lot more ‘plot important’ than previous ones, so to say. But maybe they’re gonna be more willing to do event stories with more significance to the main story now that they’re planning an event archive feature to let people revisit them. So future content might be written with the assumption that you’ve played events like this.

I’m still slightly annoyed that there’s gonna be a few event-less days before this starts. I guess they wanted to focus on the anniversary itself first for a few days before starting a new event, but now I just feel impatient lmao.

In non-DL gacha news, I decided to get an emulator so I can play King’s Raid on my computer since it’s started running really badly on my phone, and it was taking up way too much battery life anyway. Either way this will make it convenient to get into other mobile games, like Tales of Crestoria when it eventually comes out.

I know that there’s a lot of mixed feelings about King’s Raid in general but since I don’t really care about end-game PVP min-maxing in stuff like this I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m mostly playing it as a husbando collector and tbh it’s really good at being one, especially since there’s basically no RNG element to getting new units so you can plan out a pretty reliable schedule for which ones you want to get, and how long it’ll take to get them.

Also they decided to replace literally half of the English voice cast for some reason or another, but unlike most people I think the changes I’ve heard thus far are totally fine. But there’s a lot of units that I don’t even have yet so I don’t even really know what their new or old voices sound like. Either way I was never exactly a big fan of the English voice-acting as it was.

I also got into The Alchemist Code recently, and I think I’ll stick with it for the time being. Moving KR over to my computer’s freed up a lot of my phone battery life so now I have time for other mobile games. It’s not the best gacha game ever, but I like the tactical gameplay and the 3D chibi character models. More gacha games need 3D chibi models like this and Dragalia Lost, lol

Maybe one of these days I’ll get back into Epic 7 now that I have an emulator which would make the whole experience a lot smoother, but I didn’t really enjoy my time with it, so eh.

[murasaki-murasame]

Since the Christmas event/banner should get announced any day now, I might as well post my predictions for what we might get out of the new Christmas units [and from the New Years units afterward].

I’m in a bit of a weird position with the Christmas banner where I want to skip it in order to save for the New Years banner, since that’ll probably be better to summon on, so I’m caught between wanting units I like to get Christmas alts, and wanting them to instead go to units I don’t care about so it’s easier to skip them, lol.

Either way, that one leak/rumour that’s pretty much been proven correct after the official reveal of The Agito Uprising said that we’d get a Christmas alt for Phoenix, so I’m just gonna assume that’ll be the new dragon on the banner, but I think that’s the only thing the leak said about the banner, so I can only guess about the new adventurers. But going by how regular Phoenix works, I have a feeling that she might be a light element skill haste/HP dragon, like Halloween Maritimus. Which would kinda suck because with how good Freyja and H-Maritimus are, that’d be a really tempting dragon to get, but I specifically want to skip the Christmas banner. Welp.

In terms of the new adventurer alts, I’m gonna guess that it’ll be like the Halloween banner we got a little while ago, and that there’ll be one 5-star, two 4-stars, and that all of them plus the dragon will be a different element to the old units on the banner. So I don’t think any of the new units will be water element, like how none of the new Halloween units were light element. We haven’t really gotten many light or wind units in the last few months, so I think we might get two light units and two wind units. I can’t really tell if Christmas Phoenix would make more sense as a light or wind unit, but I’d probably prefer it if she’s a light unit since then the 5-star adventurer would probably be a wind unit, and since wind is my most fleshed out roster at the moment it’d probably make them less tempting to pull for, which would work out better for me. But it could be the other way around.

I’m gonna just go ahead and assume that the 5-star adventurer is probably gonna be another 5-star alt of one of the main female characters, since we get one for basically every new banner like this, lol. I’m guessing it’ll probably be Alex or Sarisse. I could see Alex working pretty nicely with a 5-star light dagger alt, or something like that. But I feel like Cygames might keep ignoring her for a while longer. Who knows, maybe we’ll get Christmas Ranzal as a 5-star instead, lol. I don’t think we’ll get a Christmas Luca one way or another, though, if only since we’ll probably get Gala Luca in January.

For the 4-star adventurers I think there’ll be one wind one and one light one, and I think it’ll be like Halloween where they’re both alts of regular characters from the summoning pool. I think we’ll get one female and one male 4-star alt, and I have a few guesses/hopes for male characters, I’m at a loss as to what female characters might get alts here. But anyway, for male characters, Xanfried still needs an alt and I think a Christmas one would be really fitting for him, but it’d kinda suck to see him get a 4-star alt. I also think that Waike could work really nicely in a Santa get-up since he’s already basically Robin Hood. But realistically I think that the most likely male character to get a Christmas alt would probably be Elias. Summer Celery opened up the doors to us getting alts of event units, and Elias as a Christmas caroler is just too perfect to not happen, lol. Also he just desperately needs a good alt.

I’m at a loss as to what female characters might get alts, but for some reason Sinoa keeps coming to mind as an option. I don’t really have any specific reason why, though. I think we also got an illustration of Sarisse and Hildegarde in Christmas outfits last year, but I don’t know if Hildegarde would get another seasonal alt this soon. If they give Elias an alt, though, it might be nice if they also gave Pia one, since they’d go really well together, and she’s also a bit of a meme unit who needs a good alt.

In terms of their kits and stuff, as I said, I think Alex could get a 5-star light dagger alt here, if she gets one at all. If it’s Sarisse, she’d probably be a 5-star light/wind bow. And I could see Christmas Phoenix basically being the light version of Freyja.

If we get Christmas Elias, I could see him being a light wand. But I wouldn’t want him to have a kit like Noelle’s, since that’d be too important to lock behind a limited banner. If Xanfried gets a Christmas alt, I think he’d be a light/wind lance, with a similar kit to his OG version, but maybe with some energy mechanics thrown in if he’s a light unit. And then Waike could maybe get a light/wind bow or dagger alt.

I could also see Sinoa still being a wand if she gets a Christmas alt, but we probably wouldn’t get both that and Christmas Elias as a wand unit at the same time.

If we get Christmas Pia, she could maybe be a light lance, or if she stays as a wind unit, maybe she could be a sword or dagger or something. No weapon types except for wand and staff really make sense for her, but she’s already a lance unit as it is, so anything’s possible.

Also part of why I’d be on board with Elias and Pia getting alts is because they’d be easy for me to skip, lol. But I do feel like they’d make a lot of sense in general.

As for the New Years banner, it’s a fair bit further away, but I still have some hopes and predictions for it. I’m trying to hoard my resources for it at the moment, so I’m a lot more invested in having it turn out nice, lol.

Like with the Christmas banner, I think the New Years banner will be either light or wind element [with maybe one wildcard off-element unit]. Personally I’d want it to be light-based, just because my light roster’s weaker and that’d make for a more exciting and tempting banner. But either would be fine.

If it’s a light-based event/banner, then I think the datamined Tsukuyomi dragon might be the equivalent to Shishimai, which could work since, like with most event dragons, Shishimai was the opposite element to the old New Years units, so having a shadow event dragon with light units would make sense. I could also just see her design working nicely as a raid boss in addition to a playable dragon. And since she was datamined around December last year it’d make sense if she ends up being related to the upcoming New Years event. She might be the banner dragon like Marishiten, but that’d imply it’d be a shadow banner/event like the last one which would be kinda lame. Also her design doesn’t really seem inspired by the year of the rat, unlike how Marishiten had boar familiars floating around her and stuff.

Like the Ieyasu banner, I think the new zodiac banner will have one 5-star adventurer, one 5-star dragon, two 4-star adventuers, and then an event welfare adventurer and dragon. I think they might also put Ieyasu and co back on rate-up during the banner but who knows.

If they’re light units, I’d want the new 5-star to be a blade or a wand unit. We really need some more good light units of those weapon types. B-Zardin, Lucretia, and Amane are all kinda meh and don’t really have a place in end-game content, and from what I know Yachiyo is the weak link of the HZD meta group who just doesn’t have a better alternative to replace her with. So we really need something new there, though it’d also kinda suck in it’s own way to lock a good light unit behind a limited banner. Personally I’d lean towards wanting a light wand rather than a light blade, since they’d probably end up being less ‘essential’ in the long run than a light blade, and also I have B-Zardin but I don’t have Lucretia so I want a light wand more, lol.

If they’re wind units, I’d probably want the 5-star to be a dagger or lance since those are probably the weakest parts of the wind roster at the moment.

I dunno what to expect from the new banner dragon, mostly because I don’t know very much about the Japanese mythology they’re drawing from with them, but from some quick wikipedia searching, maybe we could get Benzaiten as the new one. Either way, regardless of the element it is, I think they’ll be a strength dragon like Marishiten was.

For the 4-stars, if they’re light units, I could see us getting a wand and/or a lance. I don’t think we’d get a 4-star light dagger or bow out of the banner, though, since we’ve got several options for those already. Same with staffs. We also only currently have one [non-limited] 4-star option for light blades, swords, and axes.

If they’re wind units, then I doubt we’d get a 4-star blade, lance, or staff, since those options are pretty fleshed out already. In particular i doubt we’d get another 4-star wind blade when we got Addis in the last New Years banner. So I’d prefer to get a sword, axe, dagger, or bow instead.

And in terms of the event welfare adventurer, If they’re light then I at least wouldn’t want them to be a bow, sword, or staff, so they don’t overlap too much with past event units we’ve had . I think a light blade event unit could make sense, but we’ll see. If it’s a wind unit, then we’ve only really had Su Fang so far so anything other than a wind dagger would be fine, but if you want to count Ranzal then it might be best if they avoid having it be a wind axe either. And same as the stuff I said above, I’d prefer it if they avoided having them be a wind blade/lance/staff unit either. So I’d prefer a sword, bow, or wand.

If we get a wild-card unit like Addis then anything’s possible, but we still haven’t gotten a 4-star flame blade at all yet so that’s an option.

On top of my personal bias, one reason why I’d like it to be light-based is so that we can get more light units with energy mechanics. There’s nothing stopping them from making a wind banner with energy mechanics, but I feel like it’d work better to have an energy-themed light banner, since light has way more in the way of existing units who also have energy mechanics in their kits. If we just got a set of wind units with energy built into their kits then I fear it’d end up like the Valentines/Christmas units, or Pia, and they’d have too little energy support from the rest of their element’s roster to really work well.

Also the new banner will be based around the Year of the Rat, and since we’ve already had one light unit with a lightning theme, I can’t help but think of Pikachu, so it’d be kinda fun to get a lightning rat dragon and stuff, lol. I also feel like a lightning-themed light wand unit could also make sense.

So yeah my best case scenario hope would be if the New Years banner ended up with a 5-star light wand, a 5-star strength HP dragon, a 4-star light lance, a 4-star flame blade, a 4-star event welfare light blade, and Tsukuyomi as an event welfare shadow dragon. But who even knows.

I’m fully prepared to be proven totally wrong with both of these banners, but we’ll see how it goes. I mostly just want the New Years banner to be worth hoarding for, lol. But it’d be worth it even if they just bring Ieyasu back since I still don’t have him.

Also I’m hoping that we’ll get some free daily tenfold summons during both the Christmas banner and the New Years banner. And maybe even some log-in bonuses. Anything to make it easier to hoard my resources would be nice at this point after how much I pulled on the gala, lol. [And on that note I did in fact end up caving in and summoning more on the last day of the gala, and even though I didn’t get Gala Elly I did get Cupid, so that’s nice]