I love hunting for evolved umbrals with how rare and cool some of them are, it's way more interesting than prismanas for me.
My top 4 shown:
- Minespine
- Nighttime Gracewing
- Mountain Irisal (Turqoise umbral color)
- Sparkling Stellarys
If anyone have other cool ones you'd like to share please do as this is by far my biggest passion in the game!
Now it's been a while after Shinku's release and while I absolutely adore her visuals, the lack of consistency for her "combat role" is driving me up the walls as someone who's worked with game design. I'll primarily only comment on the kit designs themselves and the dmg distributions within said kit, whether a character is meta, broken or bad is secondary to me as the game is currently a walk in the park anyways.
- Defiant Spirit: Unique mechanic to Shinku, needs on-field hits to charge her ult.
- Menacing Gaze A0: Needs on-field non-hits to charge her trait.
- Menacing Gaze + A3: Wants off-field to charge her trait.
- Ultimate: Crimson Fury: low/mid personal damage over long duration, needs on-field.
- Passive: Lone Stride: extreme passive non-personal damage over long duration, forces on-field.
So we have a character with most of the damage being passive which is a common design for sub-dps playstyle but the kit forces on-field while also loving off-field with awakenings??
If we take Nanally for a combat design example, she's a main dps with her base kit consuming on-field time but she got a passive that buffs the team even when off-field (blossom petals shoot twice as fast), so the only thing she loses by swapping out is her personal damage that can be covered by whoever you swap to.
If we take Hotori as an example, she's a sub dps with both her kit and passive allowing her to have almost zero on-field time, promoting another character to be the main dps while she's recharging. So if you swap out Hotori after ult you lose nothing at all.
Lacrimosa as an example is a main dps where she requires on-field time to keep her nightmare stacks up, thus she's played in a quickswap team with others that have high off-field time so she can swap back fast instead of losing a lot of value while not on the field.
Generally character designs for combat leads them to be "universal" in order to take care of themselves, or they have issues that gets compensated / resolved by other characters. In my opinion both Nanally & Chaos are closer to "hybrid dps" as they can be played either as a main dps or a generic dmg boost to the team while Lacrimosa and her Nightmare stacks makes her a great greedy main dps.
And this is where Shinku's combat design just falls flat to me.
- If Shinku(A0) is active on-field she loses out on Menacing Gaze.
- if Shinku(A0) is inactive on-field she loses out on Defiant Spirit.
- If Shinku(A0) is off-field she loses out on Menacing Gaze and Lone Stride.
- If Shinku(A3) is off-field she loses out on Lone Stride.
While you can compensate a bit with proper gameplay and awakenings, the kit itself can never truly be optimized as it's gated behind its own design.
Even when you're on-field doing the full rotation, it just kinda feels off. Nanally and Chaos feel fine having a decent chunk of their damage be passive since they're flexible in terms of being on the field, but for Shinku who's kit wants you to play her as a big main dps, it's awkward watching her amazingly visual ult do so much less than the passive hits you barely register. It just feels like lazy / poor design choices which sucks as the character design and lore is fantastic.
And just to make sure I satisfy the people who dislike complaints without solutions, here's my two quick cents about what directions they could have taken instead.
Sub DPS Shinku:
- Ultimate: Shinku enters a timed, rage build-up mode where every allied hit for the next 15 seconds adds an additive 100% hit to the ultimate damage and every 5 hits add 1 extra use of Crimson Judgment (the ult button that makes you dash before the final beam), after 15 seconds you can swap back to Shinku and enter the ult version of her for a few seconds before ending with her nuke beam.
- Passive Lone Stride: Lone Stride works exactly like now but allows the damage to occur even when off-field.
Main DPS Shinku:
- Ultimate: Works exactly like now but Shinku cannot recharge ultimate energy again until she's reached max Menacing Gaze stacks. (let Menacing Gaze stack off-field by default to promote it and empower other stuff with awakenings instead)
- Passive Lone Stride: While on-field and Ultimate is active, Charge grants Ultimate a damage multiplier of (50% * charge procs during Shinku's ult). So her ult gets stronger and stronger towards the end + the big nuke finale.
Numbers aren't really important as this was just a quick random example for something I believe would have been a more cohesive design.
TLDR: As they've nailed a lot of the prior limited characters when it comes to their own combat design I won't go scorched earth unless this becomes a common problem, but since most gacha games rarely do permanent kit changes after release I'm just hoping we'll eventually get interchangable passives or something similar at re-runs to fix some of the combat design flaws, as of right now I believe her kit's just all over the place.
Not saying she isn't fun or playable since I play her myself, just that she could have felt much better to play instead of feeling half-baked.
First off I want to mention that whether something "is easy or hard" and whether it requires yourself to min-max it is completely subjective and up to you, I'm a masocore gamer (masochistic hardcore) so I know my view on difficulty is very very different from the average player.
But I just wanted to share my two cents about something I believe NTE has done amazingly well that keeps me exited to just play and have fun.
I've played a lot of gacha games and generally when it comes to end-game content it's been quite demanding on both levels, gear & teamcomps to fully min-max all your rewards, and while I wouldn't mind getting more & different content that's harder to complete, I truly love how the openeing act of NTE has been relaxing to the point you can experiment with your teams and get away with it.
Gacha communities have always been crazed when it comes to "optimal team/ best team / Tier 0 comps" etc which is understandable, but to me NTE is such a perfect ice-breaker to this standard that I hope more people are playing what they enjoy rather than whatever is "deemed to be BIS".
So my first team is what I simply call Flower Shotgun, and the sole purpose of it is to blow up groups of enemies by an overwhelming amount of AoE blossoms thanks to Mint (Team: Nanally, Mint, Jiuyuan, MC)
Not taking any character damage into consideration, I'm using MC with 354 cycle intensity which means my blossom petils hit for around 4000-5000 each (4000 * 10 hits * 6 flowers = a minimum total of 240.000 damage with blossom damage alone if you hit the cap of 6 flowers). Now if we include Mint's passive of turning the petal bullets into a shotgun AoE, while not every bullet will hit all the targets thanks to a grouper like Jiyuan you easily multiply the damage again like shown in the picture below.
My funny goal for the build is to eventually find a fight where I'll manage to deal +1 million damage with blossoms in one full cycle rotation.
This is ONE blossom cycle (two out of six flowers) shooting ONCE out of 10 times
For my second team, it's gone through some changes but the current iteration I call Disco Hotori. I fell in love with Hotori's timestop abilitiy so the goal of the build is to maximize her own damage with every possible buff available + good skill copies. (Old Team in 1.0: Hotori, Sakiri, Haniel + filler Hathor/Chiz. New team after 1.1: Hotori, Lacrimosa, Sakiri, Haniel)
Sources of buffs:
- Haniel with Speedy Hedgehog (15% ATK)
- Haniel Ultimate (20% of Haniel's 877 base ATK)
- Haniel Signature Arc T1 (18% ATK)
- Haniel A6 (12% Crit DMG)
- Sakiri Ultimate (30% of Sakiri's 956 base ATK)
- Sakiri Signature Arc T5 (26% ATK) I got 4 dupes of it when pulling for 3 limited arcs lol
In total this raises Hotori's ATK to +3000 while still focusing on Crit & Cosmos dmg for her and I believe it might be possible to reach +4000 with proper min-maxing and character dupes (Both Sakiri and Hotori have insane unused buffs)
And this team completely evolved when Lacrimosa's banner pulled up, I went from having a filler 4th slot to using Lacrimosa which gave insane team-value for me:
- Allows the use of discord cycle with Sakiri and Haniel thus the name "Disco Hotori".
- Has great on-field dps while Hotori's ult is re-charging
- Current best skill in the game to copy with Hotori (double Tomato Devil or Black Tome is sooo satisfying)
- Awakening 5 and 6 to guarantee discord every rotation & Reducing targets Max HP. (Not something I have but will absolutely get on re-run)
All in all I'm having such a blast building for a specific direction and then figuring out which character works the best for my own set goals, there's just so much flexibility and future potential if you wanna freshen things up. For example if my Shotgun Flower team is up against a boss where AoE is pointless, I can grab Iroi when she's released and swap out Mint for 50% increased blossom uptime. (AFAIK according to 1.2 livestream she renews 1 blossom once when the cycle expires which would mean 6 flowers provides 3 more after they end)
And for my Disco Hotori team, any time a good buffer or a character with a great skill comes out I'll be on the lookout for a potential swap and upgrade.
The game for sure has its pros and cons, but I've never felt so free and satisfied playing a game casually and building my teams for "current end-game content", and dear god I love it so much.
Like a lot of people I've been very exited for the upcoming Shinku character as I'm absolutely the targeted audience with her being draconic with horns, big tail etc etc.
I'm not at all bothered that's she's the 4th S-rank cosmos character that's available as in every single gatcha game rosters will eventually even out, which is why you always pull for waifus and fun gameplay over "what the account needs".
And here's where my problem arrives, while I don't mind we're getting multiple of the same element early on, I absolutely mind that specifically Shinku being cosmos for gameplay & thematic reasons (not lore as I know what the Esper types stand for).
From the very early clip of her fighting and the ""not guaranteed leaks"" of her using Fury as a mechanic, it breaks my mind to think about her being cosmos -> charge, which imo feels like "by the power of friendship we'll shoot flower petals to make everyone stronger" (teamwide ult recharge), instead of being Incantation or Chaos where she'd be able to Hex or Nova to straight up deal more damage to her enemies and more importantly Scorch which is literally a fire DoT for the dragon character. Like it's such an easy layup thematic wise I can't believe they fumbled / decided not to. (Incantation still allows reactions with Mint which would also be perfect lore wise)
And for those that say they're pushing her to be cosmos to take out Chiz, Chiz is literally a Charge buffer so I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually played together decently well.
Big TLDR:
I know a lot of information about her is still speculative and not set in stone which is why I'm coping that something might still change (very doubtful), but it's just a shame to see a really cool physical dragon character locked into the playstyle of "cosmos friendship" rather than any other esper types that to me would fit her better thematically & gameplay wise. (maybe not Psyche)
I'll still pull for her when she comes as I love her design.... It's just disappointing as she could have easily been a 10/10 in my eyes with very little effort.
In the end this is just my own personal opinion about the information we have available, if people have their own thoughts about which Element / Esper type would work for Shinku do post a comment about it even if it's Cosmos, as I'm curious to what people think or if I'm the odd one out.
