Thoughts on the Distribution of Girl Qualities

[Attirm]

Over the past month since Awakenings have been introduced there's something that's been bugging me quite a bit: dud blessings. A dud blessing is one that doesn't affect very many strong girls, so most of the girls you run on your team aren't blessed at all. This creates boring weeks where you run basically the same kind of team with the same list of girls. There might be one or two blessed girls in your lineup, but one dud week isn't much different from the next. The girls that do benefit from the blessing have too low stats to be strong enough to perform even with the boost. To some extent this was expected, dud blessings were always a thing even before awakenings were introduced, and now we can only level up some of the girls in our harem. My battle teams are already 150 levels above the rest of my harem, and soon some of them will be 200 levels above. Even the strongest blessings can't overcome such a big level difference.

As an example, this week on Nutaku is week of the Grey eyes (+30%) and week of the Jackhammer (+20%). One look at Zoopokemon's spreadsheet tells you all you need to know. Demi is the only blessed girl in the top 10 for this week, and in the top 50 of this week there are only 5 blessed girls. Even if you were awakening all the right girls, less than half of your battle team this week would be blessed. This is not an anomaly, this has been the norm since awakenings were released. There is something wrong with that in my view, a diverse team that is covering as many qualities as they can should be able to make good use of blessings on a regular basis. The problem isn't choosing the right girls to awaken, it's that some qualities are just so rare to begin with that you won't have them.

I wanted to quantify the problem in a way that isn't anecdotal and demonstrates how severe it really is and how the new awakening system is undermining the blessing system. So my first step is to develop an objective ranking system for the girls to categorize them from most useful in PVP to least useful. There are two factors: the cost to awaken, and how strong the girl is. The strength of the girl is the most important factor, but if the power level is similar but the costs very far apart it can justify tiering them separately.

The Tier 1 girls are the mythic girls, which are obviously the best girls. Tier 2 will be defined as girls who can become stronger than a mythic with a single average blessing (+30%), and that turns out to be all 5-star Legendary and Epic girls. Tier 3 and Tier 4 girls are those that can become stronger than a mythic with an average double-blessing (+69%) which is the 5-star Rares, 5-star Commons, 3-star Legendaries, and 3-star Epics. The costs to awaken these girls differs substantially (and you don't even get higher stats with the more expensive girls; the cheaper ones are as good or better), so I split these into two tiers with the Rares and Commons being Tier 3 and the Epics and Legendaries Tier 4. Everyone else goes into Tier 5. This creates a very simple tier list that correlates well with the actual PVP value of the girls in question, while being very easy to filter through:

Tier 1: Mythic girls
Tier 2: 5-star Legendary and Epic girls
Tier 3: 5-star Rare and Common Rare Girls
Tier 4: 3-star Epic and Legendary Girls
Tier 5: Everyone Else

In my opinion, the "strong" girls that are worth spending gems on are those who are tier 3 and above. Tier 4 girls are completely outclassed; tier 2 girls cost the same amount to awaken but are much stronger, while tier 3 girls are just as strong but much cheaper to awaken. With gems being as limited as the are, it is impractical to awaken tier 4 girls. Right now some people haven't done much awakening yet and the level gap between their awakened girls and their grandfathered girls isn't that big, but for players like me where the gap is 150 levels the tier 4 girls are pretty much useless by now. With an objective criteria, I could now filter and determine which girl qualities are under-represented among the strong girls. Most qualities have well over a dozen girls available. For instance there are 14 girls with the Leo sign, 18 girls with the Exhibitionist element, 13 girls with Bridge as favored positions, and more common qualities like Blond hair have 23. However, there were a number of qualities that were quite rare. A few rare qualities would be perfectly fine, but as you can see this list is disgustingly long:

Voyeur Element: 5 girls
Jackhammer Pose: 5 girls
Light Brown Hair: 5 girls
Black Hair: 5 girls
Dolphin Pose: 4 girls
White Hair: 4 girls
Dark Pink Hair: 4 girls
Dark Hair: 3 girls
Brown Hair: 3 girls
Green Hair: 3 girls
Libra Sign: 3 girls
Pisces Sign: 2 girls
Golden Hair: 2 girls
Orange Eyes: 2 girls
Epic Rarity: 2 girls
Dark Pink Eyes: 1 girl
Silver Eyes: 1 girl
Black Eyes: 1 girl
Grey Eyes: ZERO girls
Strawberry Blond Hair: ZERO girls

And remember, just because the girl exists doesn't mean she's in your harem, and just because she's in your harem doesn't mean she's one of the girls you're awakening, and even if she's one of the girls you're awakening the blessings on a given week might still might not be strong enough to put her on the battle team. Many of these girls are tier 3, and need double-blessings to be competitive, while even the tier 2's sometimes fall short if the blessings are weak (20% blessings are a thing). Even if the stars align, you will likely only end up with 1 or 2 blessed girls on your team roster. 

Many of these have no easy solution other than introducing new girls over time. Kinkoid isn't going to change any of the birthdays, so Pisces and Libra aren't going to be fixed any time soon. But I do think some of these have very easy and straightforward fixes. There's really no reason for Brown and Light Brown hair to be separated, or for Dark and Black hair to be separate. There just aren't enough girls with these hair colors to justify splitting them up into two categories, and even if they were combined they wouldn't even make the top 5 most common hair colors (those go to Blond, Red, Blue, Pink, and Purple in case you're wondering). Combining these categories would make perfect sense. Strawberry Blond hair color just isn't being used, and their girls can be folded into Orange hair instead (this was already done for Bronze eyes, which got folded into Golden eyes). Combining Grey and Silver eyes wouldn't fix their problem (even combined they're still super rare) but it would at least mean one fewer dud quality.

That's enough of a wall of text; it was a bit more than 2 cents, but I do think this needs to be addressed because it's a relatively easy way to fix some problems with the blessing system and it's obvious that a lot of these are hold-overs from before blessings were even conceived and should never have been made as separate categories to begin with.

Edited January 2, 2022 by Attirm

[Liliat]

My team is still very far from optimal (2 M6 girls, 3M5, 1 E5, and then a lot of L5/R5/C5). This means that single-blessed R5 easily find a place in my team. But in a few months (2 or 3, maybe 4), I'll have 7 M6 girls, and "Tier 3" girls will indeed be excluded from my teams most of the time (Just when I start getting more of them from the story ).

I've always wondered why there were only 2 E5 girls in the game. I thought Blessing and Awakening was a great opportunity to introduce more E5 (It wouldn't have made any sense before the new fight system, because they were already outmatched by L5, and even more so by M6 girls, and "everyone" already had the required 3 L5/M6 girls).

Adding more 5* girls of lower rarity would make a lot of sense (Today; not in 2 years), because they're cheaper to awaken and not much weaker than L5. However, once players reach max level with 7 Mythic girls, it's game over for lower-rarity girls again. As you said, Tier 3 girls need double-blessing to be competitive, so they'll slowly "disappear" from the game within a year or two.

I really don't understand why the devs think that "Awakening" and "Blessings" are not incompatible. For the short window of time when we only had Blessings, we had to include a lot more girls to our teams (All the way to Tier 4), and that was great. And then Awakening took a 180° turn and now only the strongest girls (Tier 1/2) actually make sense... Just like before. And nowadays, even new L5 girls are not really worth it, because they're so far behind and so expensive to awaken/level up.

[Attirm]

7 hours ago, Liliat said:

I've always wondered why there were only 2 E5 girls in the game. I thought Blessing and Awakening was a great opportunity to introduce more E5 (It wouldn't have made any sense before the new fight system, because they were already outmatched by L5, and even more so by M6 girls, and "everyone" already had the required 3 L5/M6 girls).

Yeah, the lack of E5 girls is noteworthy and probably an intentional decision which is why I didn't comment on it. 

There is an easy fix, but the optics of it look really bad even though it's actually a buff so a lot of players might complain. There are a total of 10 L5 girls who have stats that are unusually low, and are closer to the E5 girls than to their fellow L5 girls. These are Fabienne, Fanny & Fione, Shtupra, Levitya, Any, Norou, Golden Bunny, Taria the Champion, and Murane. All of these are very old girls, and Kinkoid hasn't released L5 girls with anywhere near stats that low in a long time indicating they are in a sense deprecated. Due to their low stats they could be changed to Epic rarity while leaving their current stat totals as-is. This would mean we'd have a total of 12 E5 girls (which would put it above R5 for number of girls), and those girls would be just as strong as they used to be, would be the strongest girls on Week of the Epic, and would be cheaper to awaken than they currently are. However, a lot of people would just have a knee-jerk reaction about Legendaries being downgraded to Epics and would complain about the buff they were just given so I can't see Kinkoid doing this.

7 hours ago, Liliat said:

Adding more 5* girls of lower rarity would make a lot of sense (Today; not in 2 years), because they're cheaper to awaken and not much weaker than L5. However, once players reach max level with 7 Mythic girls, it's game over for lower-rarity girls again. As you said, Tier 3 girls need double-blessing to be competitive, so they'll slowly "disappear" from the game within a year or two.

They won't disappear completely, as they are cheap to awaken and you need 100 girls at level 700 to get level 750 so I actually think it makes perfect sense to take all of them to level 700 (and if you take them that far... why not level 750 once you can afford to?) so even if they only are relevant on a double-blessing that still keeps them relevant. Still, T1 and T2 are where the real powerhouses are and those are the ones that see most use.

I do agree that adding some more 5-stars would be a good move. I think a C5 Voyeur needs to be added, preferably in a place where she's accessible to beginners, as right now the Voyeur element is the only one that doesn't have a 5-star girl who is readily accessible to beginners. 

7 hours ago, Liliat said:

I really don't understand why the devs think that "Awakening" and "Blessings" are not incompatible. For the short window of time when we only had Blessings, we had to include a lot more girls to our teams (All the way to Tier 4), and that was great. And then Awakening took a 180° turn and now only the strongest girls (Tier 1/2) actually make sense... Just like before. And nowadays, even new L5 girls are not really worth it, because they're so far behind and so expensive to awaken/level up.

I agree; Blessings and Awakenings aren't working well together. I think the big mistake was pricing awakenings based on rarity without considering stars. It makes perfect sense that a 5-star Legendary should be expensive to awaken since they're really good in this meta, second only to a Mythic. But this doesn't apply to 3-star Legendaries, which are weaker than 5-star Epics and Rares and only match 5-star Commons for power. The awakening cost is completely unjustified, since power correlates more strongly with number of stars than it does to rarity. If all 3-star girls costed as much as commons to awaken, then they'd at least be Tier 3 and we'd see them getting awakened. That would be a lot more interesting than the current strategy of using 3-star commons as fodder, which will never see PVP battle and in fact if they're 1-star they won't even see champion drafts.

[DvDivXXX]

@Attirm That's a lot of thought and work you've put into this, so I don't wanna poop on your parade. I gave you a Like for the effort, but I think you're missing the forest for the tree on a few major points that essentially make your post irrelevant slash inapplicable to the current game and, even more, meta game. Still, your posts are very good reads even when they're not really useful. So yeah, I would have gladly given you a "Hug" reaction instead if I could.

And now I'll give you a few cents of my own to explain what I mean.

21 hours ago, Attirm said:

Tier 1: Mythic girls
Tier 2: 5-star Legendary and Epic girls
Tier 3: 5-star Rare and Common Rare Girls
Tier 4: 3-star Epic and Legendary Girls
Tier 5: Everyone Else

I don't think so. This would be more accurate:

Without Blessings
God-tier: Mythics
S-tier: Recent (5.5 base main stat without any real penalty to their total stats) 5-star Legendary Girls
Tier 1: Older (5.4 base main stat without too much penalty to their total stats) 5-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

With One Blessing:
God-tier: Mythics
S-tier: Any 5-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

With TWO Blessings:
Beyond God-tier: Mythics
God-tier: Any 5-star Legendary Girls
S-tier: Other 5-star Girls; 3-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

Notice a pattern? Blessings or no Blessings, it's basically never relevant for your battle team to invest in anything other than Mythics, Mythics, and some of the best 5-star Legendary Girls (assuming you can afford that, which you only can if you're okay with fighting Level 700 Mythics with your Level 500-600 Mere Mortals for the next 6-12 months).

It was already largely this way before Awakenings. Awakenings just made the impact of Blessings much bigger on occasion, and almost negligible most of the time. Right now on HH (until tomorrow), Blessings are Element: White and Rarity: Rare. Well, there are a couple of White 5-star Legendaries worth running, and that is it. 5-star Rares don't make the cut even with one Blessing. Oh, and obviously, the two White Mythics are even stronger than usual.

21 hours ago, Attirm said:

With gems being as limited as the are, it is impractical to awaken[...

...ANYTHING BUT MYTHICS & COMMONS (if you want to be competitive this year) or MYTHICS, 5-star Legendaries & COMMONS (if you're okay staying somewhat competitive for a few more weeks, before getting crushed into oblivion by the upcoming wave of Level 750 Mythic Teams, until you catch up to them in a year or so). Even one Rare into your Awakening fodder takes the place (and the cost) of TWO Commons. Awakenings is not a walk in the park, it's a very fierce race, whether you chose the marathon or the sprint. You can't really afford to make it even slower and more expensive on the off-chance that a Garbage-Tier battler gets double-blessed once or twice in your lifetime. That's just not worth it.

EDIT: Almost forgot: forget about gems, the real bottleneck is millions of books you need along with them, and the million kobans (and post-nerf Ymens) they cost. Everybody runs out of those way before they run out of gems (unless they're doing it very wrong).

4 hours ago, Attirm said:

There is an easy fix, but the optics of it look really bad even though it's actually a buff so a lot of players might complain. There are a total of 10 L5 girls who have stats that are unusually low, and are closer to the E5 girls than to their fellow L5 girls. These are[...

...All the once top-notch 5-star Legendaries of years and years ago, before the powercreep took its toll. From 5.2 main stat with huge penalties to the total stats, to 5.3 with lesser penalties, to 5.4 and now 5.5 with basically wholesome total stats. So it's not unusual once you get why they're weaker, and that it's a direct indication of how the power curve has been gradually increasing over the years, and a hint at what is bound to happen sooner or later as well. Note that all existing Mythics so far have a 5.4 base main stat, and the current best 5-stars have 5.5 instead. And you can bet kobans to doughnuts that within a year or less, there will be next gen 5.5 Mythics and 5.6 Legendaries, and so on and on.

Also, because these near-obsolete 5-stars are pieces of the game's history, and many players who own them paid an arm and a leg to collect, upgrade and level them up (and, more recently, awaken them), no this would not be a buff. It would be a slap in the face unless Kinkoid gave a massive refund of the thousands of kobans, gifts, books and also gems that thousands of players have invested in those if they became cheap-ass Epics overnight. And we all know it ain't gonna happen. So I would strongly recommend to not even suggest that. Rosso might think it's cool and actually go for it. It's absolutely impossible to tell with him (he went on record in his latest Q&A claiming once more that he doesn't understand, well he used "think", that Awakenings completely doomed Blessings, so...). So please, please, don't suggest that. If anything, they should be actually buffed stats wise, but they should never be downgraded to a cheaper "rarity".

4 hours ago, Attirm said:

The awakening cost is completely unjustified, since power correlates more strongly with number of stars than it does to rarity.

This I can't possibly stress enough. I've been saying that since the first time they've been basing ANYTHING on "rarity" instead of number of stars (or "grades" as they like to call them sometimes). It made NO SENSE for Dating Tokens, it makes NO SENSE for Awakenings, and it's also a joke for the relevant PoV (on top of that, for PoV giving a girl her cheap 1st star or her expensive 6th star gives you the same measly amount of points). "Rarity" in this game might as well be called "Expensiveness" and that is it. And they went really overboard with Mythics, who are only worth anything once you give them their 6th star, but cost like ten times more than what they essentially are from 0 to 5 stars: less than top-notch Legendaries. Mythics should have had 5 stars like everybody else at this price, but much higher base stats. OR they could have introduced 6-star Legendaries. Instead, we got the worst (and most expensive) of both options.

TL;DR: Forget about Blessings, dude. It will join Dating Tokens, affordable events and The Dodo as a distant memory soon enough, no matter what.  Sorry.

[Attirm]

5 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Without Blessings
God-tier: Mythics
S-tier: Recent (5.5 base main stat without any real penalty to their total stats) 5-star Legendary Girls
Tier 1: Older (5.4 base main stat without too much penalty to their total stats) 5-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

With One Blessing:
God-tier: Mythics
S-tier: Any 5-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

With TWO Blessings:
Beyond God-tier: Mythics
God-tier: Any 5-star Legendary Girls
S-tier: Other 5-star Girls; 3-star Legendary Girls
Garbage-tier: Everyone else

If I'm understanding correctly, you are saying that a 5-star Legendary girl with one blessing is still not as good as a Mythic girl without a blessing, which is just not the case. A single blessing is all it takes to push 5-star Legendaries to Mythic level stats.

As I mentioned in my methodology in the original post, I based my rankings entirely on how many blessings a girl needs to beat a Mythic girl's stats, which I used Zoopokemon's spreadsheet to confirm. Almost all 5-star Legendaries need only a 20% blessing, the 5-star Epics plus the 10 weakest Legendaries need a 25% blessing (as I said, their stats really are closer to the Epics than they are to the other Legendaries), the 5-star Rares need at least a 35% blessing, while the 5-star Commons and 3-star Legendaries need at least +50% from blessings (so a double-blessing). The 3-star Epics have more variation in stats, and vary between needing 60%-70% (so still within the normal range of a double blessing).

No one is expecting to beat out a blessed mythic, and obviously nothing matches a double-blessed mythic, but aside from week of the Mythic (which should not exist) that's going to be two girls, three tops. On most weeks the majority of an "ideal" team should consider of lower-rarity girls who have strong blessings. This actually does happen when qualities with good distribution come up; Blond hair, Blue eyes, Playful element, all of these will lead to "optimal" teams comprised mostly of non-mythic girls. But because of all the "dud" qualities which just don't have any girls, most weeks are just "high base stats are all that matters" because no one of consequence benefits from the blessing.

Edit: as an example of how consolidating the qualities could help, imagine "Week of the Light Brown Hair +30%" and "Week of Aquarius +40%", which was one of our last blessings prior to awakenings coming on Nutaku. It was memorable for having a lot of Epic-rarity girls dominating all the teams, since Nike and Radka were the only blessed mythics. However, with the awakening system all those 3 stars that got to rock out on that week would be untenable. The best team lineup would be: Travel Gwaenelle, Nike, Radka, Avitaria, Neono, +2 unblessed Mythics. There's also Aquarius, the 2000 floor Pantheon girl, but for the time being she may as well not exist. If Brown and Light Brown hair were combined as qualities, then Ryoko and Blet would qualify for blessings that week and would be better than unblessed mythics which would shift the balance of the ideal lineup from mythic-focused to being more balanced with different rarities. 

5 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Notice a pattern? Blessings or no Blessings, it's basically never relevant for your battle team to invest in anything other than Mythics, Mythics, and some of the best 5-star Legendary Girls (assuming you can afford that, which you only can if you're okay with fighting Level 700 Mythics with your Level 500-600 Mere Mortals for the next 6-12 months).

You're underestimating the speed of the speed of the "slow" approach. My "mere mortals" are already on the verge of level 650. It's true that a couple whales have already reached level 700, but they're a very tiny minority. Based on how things are currently going, I will never fall more than 50 levels behind the highest-level players for more than a week or two and will match or exceed almost everyone in D3 for harem level. Most people are far from optimal progression, even the top 15 in D3 has a lot level 550's. My slow approach is keeping pace just fine.

Now, I do think that's a legitimate concern for people who are competing for 1st place in D3 over the next 6 months, since you will be competing with those who are rushing the highest-level team, but that's not me. I'm level 444, and I don't even have 7 mythics as it stands, and the all-mythic approach was never available to me in the first place. I, like many lower level F2P players who never got to even sample the kobon-printer that was the old league rewards, am locked into a legendary-focused strategy. And I'm outlining a big problem as to why it doesn't work as well as it should; I have a relatively large and diverse lineup of girls I'm awakening, and most weeks I have... like one blessed girl to use? I know I'm disadvantaged due to not having the mythics, you don't see me complaining about mythic base stats being too high (because they are, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here) but the advantage I'm supposed to get doesn't even work right due to the poor distribution of qualities. Too many weeks are just "no one gets blessed, base stats are all that matters"

5 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

...ANYTHING BUT MYTHICS & COMMONS (if you want to be competitive this year) or MYTHICS, 5-star Legendaries & COMMONS (if you're okay staying somewhat competitive for a few more weeks, before getting crushed into oblivion by the upcoming wave of Level 750 Mythic Teams, until you catch up to them in a year or so). Even one Rare into your Awakening fodder takes the place (and the cost) of TWO Commons. Awakenings is not a walk in the park, it's a very fierce race, whether you chose the marathon or the sprint. You can't really afford to make it even slower and more expensive on the off-chance that a Garbage-Tier battler gets double-blessed once or twice in your lifetime. That's just not worth it.

As already mentioned, the Epic 5-stars only need a single blessing of at least 25% to beat an unblessed Mythic, and are also the only relevant girls who can even make use of "Week of the Epic" blessing which gives them default dominance whenever that comes up. Moreover, there is no higher-rarity girl who shares any combination of two qualities with them, so if they are ever double-blessed then there is no mythic or 5-star legendary that is double-blessed. Summer Geekette is also important for my harem in particular since I only have 2 Eccentric Legendary girls (and no Eccentric mythics), so if I want to run an Eccentric team to counter-team someone running Exhibitionist it must include Geekette, so she sees regular use for me.

Rares are actually more likely to get double-blessings than you think due to Week of the Rare. Moreover, if the blessing is particularly potent (35% or above) a blessed Rare girls can beat out unblessed Mythics with only the one blessing. However, I consider that categorically worse than Epics that can do it with only a 25% blessing, which is much more common. While they certainly don't come up anywhere near as often as Geekette and Gwaenelle, the 5-star Rare girls will be relevant more than twice as often as a 5-star Common will be. And for people like me who don't even have full mythic teams, they will be relevant on a frequent basis since it only takes a +20% for them to beat out the strongest Legendaries.

5 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

EDIT: Almost forgot: forget about gems, the real bottleneck is millions of books you need along with them, and the million kobans (and post-nerf Ymens) they cost. Everybody runs out of those way before they run out of gems (unless they're doing it very wrong).

Yup, I'm doing the "slow" strategy with relatively little Common fodder, and I'm spending a significant amount on market refreshes. Books are the real bottleneck, they just don't feel that way since we have a cost-effective mechanic to get more books with kobons. 

5 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

If anything, they should be actually buffed stats wise, but they should never be downgraded to a cheaper "rarity".

Buffing their stats would also work just fine and I'd wholeheartedly support that. They need something because right now if Kinkoid were to introduce new 5-star Epic girls... that's the stat total that they should have.

Edited January 3, 2022 by Attirm

[DvDivXXX]

1 hour ago, Attirm said:

My "mere mortals" are already on the verge of level 650. It's true that a couple whales have already reached level 700, but they're a very tiny minority. Based on how things are currently going, I will never fall more than 50 levels behind the highest-level players for more than a week or two and will match or exceed almost everyone in D3 for harem level. Most people are far from optimal progression, even the top 15 in D3 has a lot level 550's. My slow approach is keeping pace just fine.

Except that every Awakening costs a ton more of every resource than the previous one. Your current approach will hit a reinforced-concrete wall very soon (as many already have, me included to an extent, as I had to make do with a hybrid approach and return to the drawing board and start awakening as much Common/Starter fodder as possible). Awakening just a couple of 5-stars from 550 to 600 helped me a lot in the short term, but at a very high cost for the mid to long term. I am competing for D3 now (well at least I have a realistic chance to grab a Top 4 here and there, #1 is still a bit of a pipe dream unless the stars align perfectly). And I'm not that far ahead of you, I'm even a bit behind as of this writing overall, based on what you've described. I'm working towards unlocking 601+ too, but I'm still pretty far away from it (and Player Level wise, I've just barely reached 452 now, compared to your 444, so just like you I also started with the huge handicap of an entire extra floor to unlock compared to those who were already 451+ before Awakenings arrived). And I technically have 7 Mythics, but really just 6 as investing in my recently-acquired 7th would set me back months for the rest of my team. I also don't have the best colors overall (including my recent Finalmecia who has one the worst in terms of active bonuses; another reason I'm reluctant to invest in her).

1 hour ago, Attirm said:

the 5-star Rares need at least a 35% blessing

That's precisely what they had this past week on HH. I own all of them. And yet... none of them made the cut at their current Level 550 (which they shouldn't even be at, it was a rookie mistake slash a byproduct of my initial hybrid/poor approach), versus my Level 600 Mythics. Awakening and leveling them up to Level 600 just for this past week and the vague hope of future weeks where Blessings make them relevant again would have set me back months for my evergreen team. And, on top of that, it's really a big stretch to say they're better than unblessed Mythics even with +35%:

Comically, the only one with a somewhat noticeable potential advantage even in this situation is the most recent one. Aka the one that would cost an arm and a leg to get up to speed at all. The others, well, at level 598 they would be on par with my Level 600 Mythics, so at Level 600 they would have had just a smidge of extra stats. For ONE week. Versus all of the weeks for my Mythics.

That's why and how Awakenings doomed Blessings. Before Awakenings, SURE, I would have had an almost full team of 5-star Rares during the Week of the Rare, including Alt. Lyrsa, who would have been pretty cheap to get to my own Player Level. But I can't afford to throw precious resources at any Garbage-tier girls just for one week every now and then.

Anyways, I'm not against your suggestion to make the hundreds of random "qualities" less numerous and more consistent, to be very clear. They've been fixing some of the most egregious mistakes since Blessings were introduced, but we still have a ton of ridiculous distinctions in the list, and even worse, visually, a lot of them still make ZERO SENSE. Like "Strawberry Blonde" which includes Kyoto & Virginia (100% Orange hair) and Malina & Jingle (Blonde hair with just a bit of Orange shading) and that's it. I'm absolutely in favor of removing this category and changing the former two girls to "Orange" and the latter two to "Blonde".

It's just that I don't think it will have anywhere near as big of an impact as you seem to hope. At least not for a year or more.

[Liliat]

Il y a 7 heures, DvDivXXX a dit :

Even one Rare into your Awakening fodder takes the place (and the cost) of TWO Commons.

Only gems-wise. In terms of XP, it's x1.2, and up to x1.6 for Legendaries.

The difference between all-in Mythic and hybrid with 20 strong girls and some E5/R5:

- 7 Mythic: x28 XP, x35 Gems

- 93 Commons: x93 XP, x93 Gems

Total cost multiplier for all-in: x121 XP, x128 Gems

- 7 Mythic: x28 XP, x35 Gems

- 13 Legendary: x20,8 XP, x52 Gems

- 2 Epic: x2.8 XP, x6 Gems

- 8 Rare: x9.6 XP, x16 Gems

- 70 Common: x70 XP, x70 Gems

Total cost multiplier for hybrid: x131,2 XP (+8.4%), x179 Gems (+39%)

So in terms of Gems, the difference is huge (+5 months for a year). But if books are the bottleneck, it's only an 8.4% difference. That's +1 month for a year. It's a really short-term sacrifice for a long-term buff. Is it worth it? I can't say. It depends a lot on your harem situation, diversity, level when awakening started, current ranking in leagues... Also, let's not forget that for a player who started with many lvl 401 L5 girls, and only 3 lvl 401 Mythics, the weight of Mythics in both strategies is even more important, because you need to awaken the new ones from lvl 350 (Assuming everyone kept their 6 free Mythic books for new Mythic girls). If you already had 7 lvl 401 or even 451 Mythics, then the all-in approach is a lot easier. With only 3 Mythics and many L5, it makes the hybrid approach more realistic.

So, while I agree that all-in makes a lot of sense to compete in D3 Top 4/Top 1 during the first year (And snowball the kobans), I don't think it applies to any other situation. And I also agree that with minor changes to Blessings, the hybrid approach would be more relevant. While not necessarily optimal right now, it's a safer approach (i.e. less likely to be hit super hard from a Blessing buff, or new game mechanics such as Contextual Leagues).

In any case, all-in or hybrid, you should always (try to) include 7 Mythic girls to your team. No question there And probably no more than 7 until you reach lvl 750 (But it still makes sense to collect more than 7 for long-term perspectives).

[DvDivXXX]

10 minutes ago, Liliat said:

So in terms of Gems, the difference is huge (+5 months for a year). But if books are the bottleneck, it's only an 8.4% difference. That's +1 month for a year. It's a really short-term sacrifice for a long-term buff.

Except that if you do awaken lots of non-Common girls, then you will MAKE gems your bottleneck. That's the reinforced-concrete wall I'm talking about.

[Attirm]

18 minutes ago, DvDivXXX said:

Except that every Awakening costs a ton more of every resource than the previous one. Your current approach will hit a reinforced-concrete wall very soon

My projections are that it will take me until some time in March to acquire enough gems to get 85 girls up to level 650 if I choose to approach it with 46 Common / 9 Rare / 2 Epic / 25 Legendary / 3 Mythic, and some time in April if I choose to do it with 31 Common / 9 Rare / 2 Epic / 40 Legendary / 3 Mythic. Either way it will take me longer to go from level 650->700 than it took me to go from level 450->650. I was aware of that that when I committed to the slow and steady approach.

59 minutes ago, DvDivXXX said:

That's precisely what they had this past week on HH. I own all of them. And yet... none of them made the cut at their current Level 550

And I, on the other hand, am keeping my Rare girls leveled up to my maximum level (600) so I can take advantage of Week of the Rare. We have one coming up next week on Nutaku, but it's only 25% so only the double-blessed girls are worth using. They'll be on my battle team.

The only Rare girls I'm not leveling up right now are Lyrsa (not grandfathered can't afford it) and Mavin (I over-committed to Playful gems, then their drop rate got cut precipitously when the villains were changed to drop other gem types, so I had to drop Mavin and Taria to compensate. Yes, I know Taria's stats are shit but I like her)

1 hour ago, DvDivXXX said:

It's just that I don't think it will have anywhere near as big of an impact as you seem to hope. At least not for a year or more.

It's not going to be Earth changing, but it will be noticeable. Every girl whose blessing allows her to surpass a mythic, even by a couple of percentages, is a big deal for someone like me who doesn't have an all-mythic team. 

21 minutes ago, DvDivXXX said:

Except that if you do awaken lots of non-Common girls, then you will MAKE gems your bottleneck. That's the reinforced-concrete wall I'm talking about.

As someone who has 2 Mythics, 23 Legendaries, 2 Epics, and 7 Rares at level 600, I can attest that I'm already spending a fair amount of kobons on market refreshes. 

[Liliat]

il y a 2 minutes, DvDivXXX a dit :

Except that if you do awaken lots of non-Common girls, then you will MAKE gems your bottleneck. That's the reinforced-concrete wall I'm talking about.

It depends I'm still using my baseline of +100 Gems/Day/Color and +400kXP/Week, and with this hybrid approach, I find I'll need 1 Year of gems and 21 Months of XP. At some point, I'll have to buy XP, but I would need to buy a lot before Gems become the bottleneck. Let's see:

- I'm currently at lvl 550, with lvl 351 fodder (Not exactly, but let's assume). That's 50 Awakened girls (550) and 50 additional fodder to awaken (351 -> 700). I also assume that I want all 50 girls to reach lvl 750, since I'm taking the hybrid approach, and C5 girls "might" make sense from time to time. In practice, I'll always prioritize M6 and then L5, but let's keep this assumption. It also makes the math easier

- Market refreshes provide XP at a rate of 300XP/Koban (Not quite sure; this might be a tiny bit optimistic, but I think it's really close) and 200¥/XP

- At lvl 550, I have 50 Girls (Hybrid), so I need to add 50 common girls for fodder (Currently at lvl 351)

- That's a x81.2 XP multiplier for the main batch, and x50 for the fodder. Gems-wise, it's x129 and x50

Base costs:

- 550 to 750: 278,799 XP and 1,325 gems

- 351 to 700: 229,392 XP and 1,200 gems

Total costs:

- 22,638,478 XP and 170,925 gems (Main team)

- 11,469,600 XP and 60,000 gems (Fodder)

That's 289 Days of gems and 597 Days of XP. So I need to buy 308 days of XP to make up the difference, which is 17,600,000 XP, or 59k Kobans and 3.5B¥. I don't think I can afford 5k Kobans per month for 12 months; so gems will probably not be my bottleneck anytime soon

Now, with an all-in approach, you can reduce the number of gems you need and maybe reach lvl 750 in 6 months instead of 9; but you need to invest even more Kobans and ¥. Again, same question: is it worth it?

Let's compare:

- Reaching lvl 750 3 months earlier means you need to buy another 3 months of XP, which is 4,800,000, or 16k Kobans and 960M¥.

If this is exactly what you need to make D3-Top4 instead of D3-Top15, you'll earn an extra 1878 Kobans per week for 3 months, or 22536 Kobans. That's +6k Kobans if everything goes well. If the all-in approach starts providing benefits from day 1, it's 9 months with an edge, so +67608 Kobans (for an initial cost of 16k Kobans). That's a total benefit of +51608 Kobans over 9 months (5700 Kobans per month). So that's a nice risk vs reward balance, I think. (Again, this is in the ideal case, where the +50/+100 levels on a full Mythic team allows you to always win Top 4, instead of Top 15 with an Hybrid approach. I don't think always winning Top 1 is a realistic case, but if you do, the Kobans benefit will be even greater).

Now, last point: at my lvl, is it even worth investing the initial 59K Kobans to reach lvl 750 in 12 Months instead of 20? I'm... Not even convinced. I think I'll do well enough in the leagues with my current pace, and a hybrid team should be enough to reach D3-Top 15 sometime in 2022. Then we'll see which player lvl I can reach by then, and how many girls I have for passive bonuses. If I'm doing well with Player XP and girls, I'll invest in Harem-XP; otherwise there is no point rushing (Yes, we mid-level players also have other bottlenecks to consider )

[DvDivXXX]

Sorry guys, I'm not as excited as you are by maths and long-term projections based on the current and ever-changing state of the game. To each their own. Time will tell what works best for each of us.

Good luck, have fun.