u/anon-npc

You can use her invisibility to steal anything without having to go through that theft minigame. I plan to clear out all the stores once I get her since a many of the items you can steal can be given as bond gifts. Much better passive than I originally thought!

I've watched some of Gateoo's stream of 1.3, and from his experience in beta server and live it seems like A0 Zankou is played most effectively as a scorchbot. Basically, she's kind of like a Jiuyuan where she greatly enhances scorch damage (where JY enhances blossom) just by existing, and you would only want to give her field time for her ultimate, and maybe skill? Otherwise, her basics just don't do enough damage to warrant using her over someone else like Lacrimosa. I'm assuming the devs made her onfield-potential weaker in order to balance the huge buff to scorch damage (200% increased damage due to 3 stacks that lasts infinitely).

This is kind of disappointing to me, but also not necessarily a bad thing. I wanted to onfield her like a main dps, but making her kit like this does seemingly give her more longevity? One other positive is that if you do intend to use her as a scorchbot, you don't need even need her signature and can just use Chiz's arc instead to focus on getting as much crit damage as possible (since scorch has a fixed 50% crit rate).

If you go for A1, you can unlock an awakening that gives instant break to an enemy after using her enhanced skill as well as boosting break damage by 300%, and you can play a very sweaty, quickswap-heavy team of Daff and Zankou, and should be able to kill most bosses in less than two breaks. I guess A3+ boosts Zankou's numbers enough that it becomes worth it to onfield her most of the time like a traditional mdps?

It's still early and maybe CN will discover other ways to play her, but this definitely was not what I was expecting. With such a complicated kit, I thought she was definitely going to be onfield most of the time, and would have a lot of tech, but apparently, so far, it's rather straightforward?

Does anyone have any more info about CN's thoughts so far on Zankou?

Is anybody using a cafe setup with Sakiri and Shinku? I'm not sure but it seems like it could produce the highest income?

Having played Shinku for a while now in 999 nights and in the regular game, the flashiness of her animations have just become more annoying than fun.

I'm specifically referring just to her ultimate. Her other animations are fine. But the ultimate form is too over the top, style over substance that you see all the time in other gacha games. She's just hectically flying all around the screen vomiting particle effects everywhere while the enemies get tossed around like coughing babies.

The biggest problem though is how long the ult animation is at the start and end. Everytime you ult you have to sit through the same 7 second animation, whereas most other characters only take 3 seconds. Then at the end you have to sit through another 4 second animation when she does the kamehameha attack. And on top of this, she's a charge character meaning you want to spam this ult as many times as you can. If you ulted 3 times in a fight, that's already more than 30 seconds of animation cutscenes, just from her. It completely breaks the flow of combat. There's a reason Genshin gets called "slide-show impact" because you are just constantly rotating through ult animations every 20 seconds, and this is starting to become a problem with charge teams that I was hoping wouldn't happen in NTE. If there was an option to skip the animation cutscenes or at least have much shortened ones like HSR does, that would be a decent solution.

I get why people may like it. It's your typical exaggerated anime-style combat that is super flashy. The first time you see it, it's peak. But after hundreds of times it's just exhausting. And yes, I know this is an anime style game, but there are other characters who deliver much better animations that don't interrupt the flow of combat so much. For example, Daffodil. Her animations are fluid, not overflowing with particle effects, and quick and to the point. I was hoping they would go more in that direction than this.

I'm sorry to add onto the already huge pile of Shinku complaints. I still pulled her because I like her, but I definitely can't say I love about everything about her.

I don't understand why we haven't synced up yet? The CN update already has all of the English voices available, and are they really still cooking up translations in that one week period? I highly doubt it, and they are most likely already finished and just focusing on the CN feedback of the new content during that week.

As it stands, we have so much avoidable drama and problems that naturally results from global being a week behind:

1. Character performance doomposting and feedback

Global does not get to give any feedback on character performance during the initial stages, which is the most important time. We can give feedback a week later, but by that time the character's kit is basically set in stone. Is it really fair if only CN gets the opportunity to potentially impact the direction of a character's kit?

Since Global cannot try the character, many players naturally are interested and can only rely on CN's opinion. That can result in the Shinku performance drama where doomposting on CN naturally carried over to Global. On the one hand, you have the people who see these opinions and are understandably concerned and want better for her. And on the other, you have the people saying not to judge until you can try her yourself. Both arguments have some merit, and ideally we wouldn't be in this situation at all if our servers were synced up.

2. Compensation doubt and controversy

Every time CN gets compensation for bug fixes, the question always comes up as to whether global will get it as well. If CN only gets it, it's a bad look of favoritism. If global gets it too, some CN players get mad thinking we didn't deserve it since we didn't "suffer" through the bugs. Again, sync up the servers, and this wouldn't be an issue anymore. And before anyone says that Global has always gotten the exact same compensation as CN, this isn't actually true. CN has gotten exclusive compensation, such as 5 limited pulls in the first week.

3. Spoilers, Meta-crafting, and other surprises

Unless you purposefully avoid everything NTE-related on the internet, there's nothing new under the sun by the time Global gets to start playing the new update. If anything significant happened in the story, you could easily have seen it on X, reddit, youtube, etc.

For example, there were youtube videos and X posts, criticizing the 1.1 story for "plagiarizing" Wuwa's Fractsidus scene or whatever day one of the update in CN (as well as other videos showing rushed, poor cutscene animations/transitions). If you use youtube at all, now you have to block all the CC's trying to profit off this manufactured drama, or just not use youtube at all to avoid any kind of spoilers. Similar to X and so forth. This is unreasonable.

Global also doesn't get to actively participate in formulating the meta for a new character. Unless CN somehow overlooks some crucial tech or something, the meta has already been established by the time Global gets the new update. And similarly, the "public opinion" for whether that new character is meta or mid has also already been established by CN, and it's unlikely to change after Global gets to experience it. If Global was able to play the character at the same time, who knows if the discourse and end result may have been significantly different?

Finally we have the miscellaneous surprises and easter eggs. Remember the secret Day-Off arc quest? The whole point of that quest was to crowdsource the locations of the Eclipse anamoly since she would transport to random places that would be extremely difficult to find on your own. However, it was already figured out in CN before Global could play, and again, all the CC's made guides about it day one of Global release. There was no way Global could have participated in the same crowdsourcing experience because we already knew the answers.

Basically any major easter egg or hidden experience won't be a surprise to Global players unless you intentionally go out of your way to avoid the internet and not engage in the community whatsoever.

4. It kills player hype

The Shinku "doomposting" has undoubtedly killed the hype for Shinku for a lot of players (myself included). I was originally going to pull for her, but after hearing all of the bad things about her kit and performance, unless she gets some significant buffs, all of my hype for her has completely died. Had we got her at the same time, I at least could have judged for myself, and perhaps I still would have come to the same conclusion, but at least I could have decided for myself while I was still hyped.

It also applies to the new game modes/events. A lot of people were hyped for Underground Circuit thinking it would be like Mario Kart, or the fighting event thinking it would be like Street Fighter. Before Global could even try them out, you already had tons of CN opinions and CC's talking about how mid or even bad the events were.

5. It's a bad look of favoritism

The longer this goes on, the more it starts to look like Hotta only cares about the CN players. Is it really that difficult to close up a one week gap? Is it going to take years, or is it just never going to happen? You have other gacha games that realize how bad it is and make efforts to close a year+ gap to sync global and CN servers. Yet NTE can't even do it for one week? It just makes you wonder how unimportant we are to them. Maybe global's lower revenue is just a self-fulfilled prophecy? Look at Wuwa. Global carried the sales in the latest patch over CN. It's possible to get a significant amount of revenue from Global, but not if you're going to not prioritize it at all.

Conclusion:

Anyways, those are just my thoughts as to why the one week gap is so bad for Global, and why it should synced up ASAP. And for Hotta, I hope you realize it also affects your bottom line as well. I'm convinced Shinku sales in Global will be much lower than they would have been had we got her the same time as CN. A LOT of people are going to skip her due to the CN doomposting. And for good reason. I guess at the very least, the one silver lining in all this is that we are well informed/influenced before pulling for her, whether we want to be or not.