Attirm

They Always Come Back is an interesting contest in that different kinds of players will actually have very different bottlenecks. The 900 points per champion fight is way more generous than 200 points per villain fight or 50 points per energy spent, so it's really the only one that matters for scoring purposes. For free players, champion fights are limited by kobons. You can only take 7 free fights every 15 minutes at most, and few people can check in every 15 minutes over the course of several hours so in practice unless you are supernaturally active you will need to spend kobons to be competitive in this contest. Tickets are really not a limitation for free players, however, as they are handed out generously and the kobon cost to use them is the main limitation. On the other hand, gold cardholders get free x10 champion fights and free champion resets, which means the only limitation they face are tickets. They can throw huge numbers of tickets at every contest. Thanks to CBC it's entirely possible for someone to spend hundreds of tickets per week contesting contests, and you will very quickly exhaust your ticket stockpile if you do this. This results in completely different dynamics for these cardholders than for non-cardholders. And I think this is where the real moneymaker Kinkoid is probably eyeing up. Buying tickets is expensive and if they can get whales to shell out for a few hundred extra tickets to guarantee they get the girl on day 1 they can probably get them to spend a lot. For active players who plan ahead and make sure to keep resources lined up and aren't obsessive about getting the girl on day 1, however, I don't think this is a huge change. LC girls have always been essentially free for the taking and guaranteeing top 10 on 2/4 days of the contest is pretty trivial. It's very rare that I've actually had a LC go down to the last day, and I've never been at risk of not getting the girl. With that said, having the last day be a wildcard where you don't know what other event will be paired with it is a bit troubling, and I can see it being a bit more prone to upsets if you're on the edge.

While the decision is good, I'm baffled that the developers have completely misunderstood the problem with having mythic girls overlapping other event girls on the same villain. The problem is not about the effect on drop rate, it's about the Sandalwood Perfume! We don't want to waste charges on our mythic booster getting an extra shard for some random 3-star epic who has really common shard drops to begin with, we want to use it on getting that super-rare mythic shard drop. By having other girls on the same villain, we end up wasting huge amounts of expensive sandalwood booster!

So, while I do agree with you in principle, on this issue I actually don't think you need to bother with doing this. For most players, swapping out equipment and bulbs every week just doesn't make sense. Blessings are much, much weaker than girl skills, to the extent that you gain relatively little on most weeks by tweaking your team to take advantage of blessings. Maximizing the benefits you receive from blessings often means using suboptimal skill combinations, which means marginal returns or (in the case of weeks with particularly weak blessings) even a reduction in power versus a team that just maximizes girl skill power. I've been running the exact same team for almost 6 months now while completely ignoring blessings, and have consistently been able to hold top-15 in D3. In my experience it's not just viable, but optimal for most players to just have a single battle team and not bother rebuilding weekly. It costs around 1 billion ymens to fully reset a team (give or take depending on your mythic:legendary ratio), and for player below D3 you are literally better off putting your ymens into contests to earn kobons than you are rebuilding your team in the hopes of a higher league placement. Even for D3 players, the power differential within D3 is so enormous that tweaking your team might not actually be enough to change your league placement.

On the final boss fight on the final floor I can barely break through the barriers. Mythic Sifra on the labyrinth team always goes first, always has enough mana to activate her barrier immediately, and kills my team before I can break it most of the time. It's utterly obnoxious, I'm making on average about 1% progress on a single girl per fight. Even if this were doable for me - which it's not, I'd need to burn through stones at an ungodly rate, this just takes way too long. It's not worth it. Edit: finally made it through. I spent 1 stone getting through the floors, and then 3 stones just on the final fight alone. That was infuriating.

Equipment and bulbs already bog down the game and have terrible UI's. I'm expecting that it will be faster to look up a girl's role through zoopokemon's spreadsheet than through the official UI during champion drafts. I don't see this being impactful for villains, and potentially just confusing for beginners. Villain fights are free wins for anyone who understands the game mechanics and fields a competent team. The only villain that has ever won any battles against me was 3rd form Pandora, but she was power crept long ago and I doubt any player whose been around long enough to reach her will have trouble with her. Even worse, if these roles cause skill pop-ups in villain fights they could slow things down and make it an absolute pain. Active skills already work this way, and I maintain a separate team for villain fights just so I don't have active skills constantly popping up for me. Champion drafts are already irritating enough to get pose matches. Since roles are much weaker than the +100% damage bonus from a pose match, this really means that the only roles that matter are those that are useful on a non-match and the others are kinda irrelevant. You'll take the bonuses you get, but otherwise are just looking for matches. With that said, I think the healer and bard roles are potentially problematic. Against weak champions, healers can potentially go infinite and along with know-how class you could potentially out-heal a champion. Against strong champions, however, they are completely useless since the champion will almost certainly out-damage them and you just want to get some impression in. It's not a good design in my view. The other one that looks potentially problematic is Bard, since against really strong champions who have pose matches on their own girls (such as Visor) you often don't even reach the second row so the downside can be dodged entirely. Where this is most problematic, though, is for pantheon. The way pantheon works, the boss floors have absolutely massive defense and damage so you only really win with lucky crits. This makes the roles that eliminate crits into pure downside. Similarly the healing powers are completely worthless, as time is against you and drawing out the fight is a bad thing. This means that the majority of roles here aren't just useless, they are outright detrimental. This looks like an extremely frustrating system. And worse, this is asymmetric since the pantheon floors do benefit enormously from these things. So we'll end up with power creep where pantheon gets harder, while we have to deal with most girls being unsuitable for pantheon. This is potentially a really bad change. What needs to be done right now are UI improvements. Right now there are way too many page loads to set up a team. It takes around 20 page loads to assign equipment to all my girls, presuming the game doesn't crash from me constantly loading pages in the harem (it does that a lot) which will just mean more page loads.

Path of Glory is getting pretty close to just being on rotation, anyways. It's almost completely caught up with Legendary Contests, and will presumably just go back to the start of rotation. So it'll just be girls you've already seen anyways. As someone who has been around for a long time and already has all the girls PoG offers, I mostly ignore it anyways. It's just some nice bonus rewards that I remember to collect every so often.

Well... this is a pleasant surprise. Just beat floor 2000 without using mythic boosters. I was going with 4 Cordyceps booster setup today (a combo that's great for pantheon) and decided just to take a pantheon fight and see what happened. I won first try. I stunned them on the first round, got a crit on the second round, then on round 3 their reflect activated, round 4 I take a beating with the damage reflected back at me, but on round 5 I got a second crit and took the win.

I'm not so sure, because of the way the speed stat works it's usually going to be one team attacking 7 times followed by the other team attacking 7 times (or however many girls are left standing after the beating they took). Having a defense bonus is really important for ensuring your girls are still standing to hit back, and doubly so to benefit from bonuses that let them heal when they attack. I do agree with you on the defense skill activations, though. Battles are usually over by the time skills are activating and it's just cleanup.

While this may be a contributing factor, I doubt it is the reason. I am very, very powerful. I'm not the most powerful player by any means, but I am powerful enough that very few can defeat me. With the current blessings and my skills lined up I have 212k attack power, which is enough that I frequently win fights before my stun even runs out. Occasionally taking a loss because someone is deceptively strong and/or gets a lucky fight is one thing, but I'm taking like 7-8 losses out of a 10 battle auto-fight which just should not be happening.

I'm pretty sure opponents still get their skills even when you don't. I frequently auto-fight x10 in seasons when I just need to be quick about it. Prior to the girl skill update, I very rarely would lose a fight in this manner. 9/10 would be bad for me. After the girl skill change, my autofights started getting worse and worse. Now they're at the point where a x10 auto-fight will likely get me 2 or 3 wins. The only explanation is that opponents get their T5 skills and I do not, and now that pretty much all top players are running T5 skills auto-fight is basically non-functional in seasons.

I'm a player who has been around for a while, and even I am missing a lot of those girls! First of all, you should always be running the Sandalwood Perfume on Mythic days to ensure you get at least 2 shards every time you get a shard drop. You'll need at least 4, preferably 5 Sandalwoods stockpiled before trying to get a mythic girl. Secondly, you need to be prepared for a lot of fights, with enough kobons reserved to do at least 1000 fights. The drop rate on shards is very low, and you will have unlucky streaks where you don't get shards for a hundred or two hundred fights. The vast majority of mythic girls are going to have shards left over at the end of the event. It's not that people don't want the girl, it's that they can't afford the hundreds of fights it will take to get them.

Look at who those three girls are, and who they have synergy with, and what such a team lineup would actually look like. Legendary Stacy is a great part of a red-eyed team, but the other two leave much to be desired. Melisandre Raveneye only has synergy with at most two other red-eyed girls, Summoner Salem and Galaxy Ananke. But Ayame is far worse, she has no synergy with any red-eyed girl. That's six girls, I'm going to round it out by presuming we have Madame Ivanka (who has synergy with red-eyed girls and is readily available as a league girl) to give us this team: Legendary Stacy (red-eye synergy) Summoner Salem (red-eye synergy) Galaxy Ananke (red-eye synergy) Madame Ivanka (red-eye synergy) VR Neono (x3 synergy) (Stacy, Melisandre, Ayame) Melisandre Raveneye (x2 synergy) (Salem, Ananke) Ayame (x0 synergy) Far from being a strong addition, VR Neono is just filler, and in order to get her even to be that good we had to run an otherwise useless girl on the lineup. We'd be much better off dropping Ayame for anyone halfway decent. Fae Finalmecia or Itsuri would be ideal. And if you're missing even one of Stacy, Salem, or Ananke then I'd question whether a red-eyed lineup even makes sense for you, as you have so little synergy. There does come a point where so few blessed girls are getting synergy you're better off doing something else. VR Neono isn't bad, she's still a mythic girl with high base stats, but that's no longer enough to make a girl exceptional. Her element and her synergy skill are doing her no favors, and she's outclassed by many L5's. It's really just for purple hair that they would be on the same team. On a purple-haired team, Fae Neono is the better of the two thanks to having the ideal skill. On a red-eyed team, you'd need to contrive a pretty specific combination of girls in your harem to justify having both Neonos on your team at the same time. You'd need to have legendary Stacy, Galaxy Ananke, Itsuri, and Rina (an odd choice that is really questionable to awaken due to her low stats and poor synergy skill) in order to give enough synergies for the Neonos to be noteworthy. At the same time, you'd need to not have Summoner Salem or Fae Finalmecia as these would otherwise be better additions who would bump Fae Neono from your lineup. So theoretically possible, but I suspect hardly anyone is in a position to do so. Aquarius is irrelevant. There aren't enough girls with Aquarius skill released, and there isn't a viable team line up in the first place. You're literally better off ignoring the blessing. This may change in future, but that will be entirely contingent on which girls get released and there's no guarantee it will line up with red eyes and purple hair.

Skills are a very important consideration for PVP now, and VR Neono has an extremely unfavorable synergy in Indian Headstand pose. This means she isn't well positioned to make use of her Red eyes, Purple hair, or Aquarius sign when they are blessed since she has little to no synergy with the other girls you would want to run on those weeks. Just running through all the combinations by filtering on the HH Girl data spreadsheet, it looks like week of the Indian Headstand is the only situation where VR Neono actually shines, and even then we don't currently have enough girls released to run a full lineup (there's Baroque Rabbi, Healing Albane, Aquarius, Star Atina, Kyoko, and VR Neono). So if PVP is your main consideration, VR Neono is a very low priority girl

So it's reached the point where I am now ignoring blessings, and am just going to run the same team every week. My power level puts me in a bit of a valley, where so long as I'm on not completely careless (ie, auto-fighting all week) I can take top 15 in D3 pretty consistently but top 4 is out of my reach and every time I've gone for it in the past I've fallen just shy. This puts me in a situation where respeccing bulbs makes no sense for me, as it'd a longshot as to whether I could get higher rewards for the effort. Up until now I've been mostly ignoring bulbs in my teams, using only the active skills in the lead slots and otherwise picking girls for blessings. But the balance has flipped, it now makes more sense to use girls with maxed out bulbs and ignore blessings. So this is now the team I'm running now, with almost all of them being unblessed this week: I've got both Miley and Housemaid with their tier 5 active skills maxed out (so I have both Mythic Stun and Legendary Shield available by swapping the lead position) while everyone else has tier 4 skills maxed out. Metal Noemy is just temporary until I get enough bulbs to max out Eliana. This gives me 7/7 blue eyes and 6/7 blond hair line lineup, with every girl having blue eye or blond hair skills. Not sure if dropping Housemaid for a Legendary would make sense here, as her hair color doesn't trigger with the blond haired team, but it's not like I have enough bulbs right now to make that swap anyways. I've really been feeling the power of this team, and have been running it in pantheon with no items equipped for a few weeks now (since it has very high attack power, which is what you want in pantheon) where it broke through floor 1900 without needing mythic boosters. I'm looking forward to the next week of the blond or week of the blue eyes, where I might just take a serious stab at top 4 in D3.

The vast majority are from Kinky Cumpetitions, an event where it's trivial to get 40 shards but requires several hundred kobons of spending to actually get the girl so I often pass on that. And very, very few of them have ever reappeared in later events. In the ultra-long-term I more or less presume that every girl is going to get a second chance like Cumback Contest anyways. I will agree that 40 shards is not nothing, but it is negligible against 100 shards in 1 girl.

I would disagree with the notion that you only have to get the girls to 40 shards. I don't know about you, but I have 40 incomplete girls with between 40-70 shards right now, and I'm typically only getting a new girl every 2-3 Sultry Mystery events. At this rate it will take me over 10 years to clear my current backlog, so no adding more girls at 40 shards is rather worthless even in the long-haul.

Worst snipe ever 😭 I'd blown through all my orbs on CbC earlier (got myself a mythic bulb for my troubles!) and wasn't worried since LC is usually not that competitive. I thought I was safe with 1.3 million here, but I was wrong. This is by far the most competitive bracket I've ever seen.

Perhaps for unusually strong blessings, but it's very rare to see more than +50% average across the entire team. A full team with skills up to level 4 is going to be better than blessings most of the time. We have +40% mythic on Nutaku this week, so aside from Alluza in the lead slot (because Stun is that valuable, and I don't have enough bulbs to run T5 mythic skills yet) I'm running full mythic this week. I don't think this is worth it. Let's say it cost 1 billion ymens to win 1st place in a daily contest and walk away with 300 kobons (50 nubons). This is roughly the difference in winnings between the 2nd and 3rd bracket in D3. This means that if you made that 250 million expenditure 4 times, you would need it to at least deliver one week of higher league placement to break even with just spending those ymens on contests when they pop up (and if anything, I'm high-balling how many ymens you need to win). While I definitely respect the power increase of skills, I don't think two girls is enough to create that big of a difference in placement. And this is only going to get more extreme as teams get bigger and respeccing skill bulbs across an entire team more pricey. I think resetting bulbs only makes sense in cases where you're making a permanent change to the team lineup, for instance you got a girl who is just better than an existing girl. I've got 21 Mythic bulbs (would have had my 22nd, but I got sniped in yesterday's contest) and 50 Legendary bulbs (will be 54 in a few minutes, since I lucked into not one but two legendary bulb daily missions today). That'll get me two fully-upgraded legendaries (won't be doing T5 from now, on but having both Stun and Shield available is worth it for the first two). Tickets are... not a problem for me...

Yes, all three of those items have the matching Attack resonance. I didn't count the 5 other Eccentric resonance items I own that don't have a matching Attack resonance, because they are not considerations. Gems at least encouraged you to upgrade a roster of girls, and within 1 year of the system launching I had dozens of max-level girls available for use. But the skill bulbs? The drop rates are absolutely draconian. It's going to take me more than a year to get a single maxed out team. The cost to respec bulbs is so outrageous that we're more or less locked in week to week and can only change on rare occasions. Right now I'm still switching up my team weekly because I don't have enough bulbs yet, but a few dozen more and I'm going to have a single team that I always run, no exceptions...

Why wouldn't I get the full bonus? Let's set aside Housemaid for a moment (which I acknowledge does break the blond hair bonus) and just look at Miley, Alluza, Leona, Dayan, LanaLana, Eliana, and Mizuki. Miley, Dayan, LanaLana, Eliana, and Mizuki gets +0.8% attack power per girl with blond hair. There are 7 blond-haired girls giving +5.6% attack power each. Alluza and Leona get +0.8% attack power per girl with blue eyes. There are 7 blue-eyed girls giving +5.6% attack power each. Where am I losing power? Is there some weird way this stacks? Yeah, that's why I'm working on Housemaid even though her hair doesn't match the lineup. My options for Stun or Shield are Venus, Moe Bunny, Bunna, or Housemaid. I don't have the right Red-haired L5's to run Venus, there aren't enough L5 girls with the Column Pose skill or Grey hair skill to build around Bunny or Bunna, so that leaves Housemaid as my only option if I want one of the better skills. I could run a Green-eyed team with Radka, but that would mean running Execute as my level 5. Fine for Pantheon, but as was discussed at great detail over the last few pages definitely not the best choice in leagues. I acknowledge I'm losing out on a 3.2% power boost due to Housemaid lacking Blond hair, so the Blond hair skill girls will only be getting 6/7 boosts. However, the advantage here is that it leaves me in a position where I'm very close to running balance and I can adjust the team if needed to avoid unfavorable elemental matchups. I think the 3.2% power is an acceptable tradeoff for elemental flexibility. Now, I could run a pure Blue-eyed team with Housemaid, Alluza, Ellie, Leona, Lucia, Shegobora, and Felicitas (for the record, I don't have Bright Agate or Adventurous Bonny so your pure Dominatrix team is not an option for me). However, this would lock me into Black/Red which would mean I'd be countered by Blue and Purple, and Blue is a very popular color in leagues. Edit: I was going to add that I have 2 Balance theme resonances from my hero equipment, but checking my collected equipment I have three options for Eccentric theme resonance. So I guess that factor would actually weigh in favor of going for the pure Blue eyed build.

I'm still a long ways off on my team completion: Royal Housemaid (temporary) 19/31 Alluza (Stun) 27/27 Miley (Shield) 17/27 Leona 0/24 Dayan 0/24 LanaLana 0/24 Eliana 0/24 Mizuki (alternative) 0/24 Metal Noemy (temporary) 21/21 Noemy (temporary) 18/18 Solvieg (temporary) 18/18 Everyone has blue eyes, and aside from housemaid everyone has blond hair, and everyone has either blond hair or blue eyes skill. I do intend to replace Housemaid eventually since her hair doesn't match, but right now she's the best mythic for the team since she has blue eyes skill. I don't have LanaLana up to 750 yet, since she only just released, but I'll have her to level 750 long before I've got the bulbs lined up anyways.

The offers aren't even particularly good. Almost all of them are significantly worse value than just buying kobons. Just looking at the first weekly offer being presented to me, 800 gems and 22 million ymens for $10. So... half an equipment pachinko spin and 1/10th of the gems needed to upgrade a single girl? That's not even a noticeable amount of progress. Literally, you could give me that for free and I wouldn't even notice.

Well, I've been slowly meandering my way through the pantheon. I haven't used mythic boosters since floor 1500, so 1600, 1700, and 1800 were just breaking through with good blessings. However, 1900 is the first boss floor I've hit since the girl skill change. And, well, they have maxed out skills with shield in the lead spot. I didn't even leave a scratch. I guess I should have made a push to finish Pantheon months ago (because I was definitely strong enough), I just presumed that power creep would benefit players more than the pantheon...

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this exact solution. I think you can do a much softer touch. You don't need to hide all scores, just the top 4 during the last 8 hours of the contest. Letting people joust earlier in the day when everyone is going to have a chance to react to it is fine. Having 5th place visible would also be very tactical, as it would put a lower bound on the 4th place score, and 5th place and lower aren't particularly competitive anyways so there isn't a significant need to hide those scores. This would mean that 4th place could be sniped (since you'd know once you passed into the top 4) but it would be riskier since you really don't know how big the gap between 4th and 5th is. I've had a couple other ideas, but I don't think they'd work. Some kind of king of the hill system could work, in that if you ignore the contest until right before reset the winner might have already been declared. You'd have to compete at least two points in the day, and someone in a different time zone could win at an earlier hour. However, it doesn't sit right that a contest might effectively be closed hours before the actual close time. The idea of having staggered brackets, where you can choose which 8 hour period you want to compete in contests and be bracketed with other people who also want that period, has the same issue in that most of the day the contests are closed for you. Another possibility is that in the last 8 hours of the contest all earned points are reduced. In the last 10 hours before the contest closes points start to drop off, with a 5% penalty on all earned score that increases by 5% more every hour. So in the final hour all scoring is only 50% effective. It would still be possible to fight up to the end, but sniping in the last hour would be really inefficient and you'd want to get most of your points in earlier in the day. However, this could be really nasty for more casual players who only log in once per day and are always taking a big penalty in contests. Contests would last 23 hours under this suggestion. So over a 23 day period there would be 24 daily contests. CBC and LC would have a delayed start, and would begin at the next contest reset after the daily reset. Given that these are 3 and 4 day events each, the drift over the course of the event wouldn't be enough to have a significant impact. Doesn't really help those of us in large countries where there is a substantial time zone difference within the country (Canadian here)

Contests being so incredibly competitive at a specific time of the day is a problem in general, and the more rewards that get added to contests the bigger this balance issue becomes. In my time zone, the reset time is 4:00 AM, so I can basically only win by overkilling to the point at which nobody is willing to snipe me. Traditionally this wasn't a huge deal since it was just a handful of kobons, but contests have been getting increasingly important. I doubt it will ever happen, but I hope some change is made to contests to either make the last 15 minutes less critical, or to rotate the contest ending times so no time zone has a permanent advantage.