New Feature: The Labyrinth - Started December 6th 2023 at live

[EpicBacon]

4 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Purple: MANA STEAL Steal (_%) of the current Mana from all opponents

White, Dark, Purple, Blue and Red all look very good to me.

On top of that, it's unclear where the stolen mana from a Purple skill activation goes (from the description, at least). If it's distributed equally among your whole team, that's nice. But if the Purple girl who stole it keeps it all for herself, then it basically means that once it goes off, your opponents no longer have skills for the rest of the fight. Which would be pretty huge.

My experience with Purple skil is that its more or less useless.
I have a legendary purple girl with maxed level 5 skill, Boatswain Eugenie.
I stopped having her in the battle team, as her skill removed a whopping 6 mana from the opponent team.
Sure, in some cases it might make them activate the skill one round later, but I'd rather just throw on another Spank
and hit them for 180.000 damage and killing them. If this is against a boss team, they get battle initiative anyhow, and will use their mana before you can remove it.

My team setup usually uses 1 white girl (sake) for her healing ability, and the rest of the mid and backrow is black for Spank. The frontrow is irrelevant as all my mages and or tank characters have less speed, and usually end up as 6 and 7, or 13 and 14 in the battle order (if the enemy starts first) 
I've never had any frontline girl do a mana skill, either because the enemy team is dead, or my frontline is dead.

[Horsting]

Jep, the mana steal skill would need to remove more than 20 mana to have a chance for a significant difference, since this is the current default mana regeneration and often starting mana. Then it would delay the skill of slower opponent girls for one round in most cases. Still now awesome at this late stage of the battle, but at least something.

The stolen mana all goes to the casting girl. This is useless since I never saw a fight where any girl casts her skill a second time (and this little additional mana would not change anything about it), and even if: After two rounds of skills, the battle is guaranteed to be almost over, so that any other skill than slap (mostly instant kill) or heal is irrelevant.

In case the class <> stats get fixed, it could be a little different for CH "Mage" girls, since they are supposed to have higher starting mana as well as higher mana regeneration. If mana regeneration scales similarly than starting mana (currently faulty on KH attribute), then one can expect 30/30 or more from CH girls, i.e. they would cast their first spell after 2 or 3 rounds. Then the mana steal could allow a second cast in longer battles. If the mana steal would be increased to >20, then of course it would lead to another cast just next or over next round, preventing opponent girls from ever casting another skill at best. This could actually make it compatible to slap or heal IMO.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Horsting

[EpicBacon]

I can confirm that double attack relic does work... somewhat.
Sake got 2 attacks in a row, but the second attack did not generate any mana for her.

Edit: Got it to trigger again, housemaid this time, it looked like she hit 2 different targets, but I am not 100% sure, as she also did her mana attack afterwards, for a total of 3 hits.
Cannot confirm if it gave mana, as she was full after the first attack.   

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by EpicBacon
Housemaid

[EpicBacon]

8 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

On top of that, it's unclear where the stolen mana from a Purple skill activation goes (from the description, at least). If it's distributed equally among your whole team, that's nice. But if the Purple girl who stole it keeps it all for herself, then it basically means that once it goes off, your opponents no longer have skills for the rest of the fight. Which would be pretty huge.

When a girl I had used it, she removed the mana only, it did not get transferred to any of my girls, atleast not that i could see. and even if it does, its only 6% from each girl, so a whopping 42%.

The green skills looks better then, you have it listed as giving 24%, but I've seen the opponent use it, and it gave around 44% to two girls. Again this is somewhat useless, if it gives mana to a girl that has allready used her skill, yay! she now has 24-44% more mana, with not enough turns to use it.
And if its used on someone who has not used it, this late in the fight they would allready have gained a bunch of mana, and would be sitting at 85% to 95% and would get to use it with the natural regain anyhow... :c

[Horsting]

The "Protection Assist" relics work as well: Had two this run and could see of of my tanks "block" the first attack in two battles. Same as with the blue/protection skill, it absorbs the first attack completely, regardless whether the damage is actually larger, which makes lower rarities/levels of these relics/skills mostly as valuable as higher ones.

[EpicBacon]

10 minutes ago, Horsting said:

The "Protection Assist" relics work as well: Had two this run and could see of of my tanks "block" the first attack in two battles. Same as with the blue/protection skill, it absorbs the first attack completely, regardless whether the damage is actually larger, which makes lower rarities/levels of these relics/skills mostly as valuable as higher ones.

Nice, I assume that there is no indication what girl gets the free block, and the only way to see it is if someone got damaged
Meaning that it has a 2/7 or 28.5% chance to hit any relevant girls in the frontrow, or against a boss or difficult battle where the frontrow gets compromised, you'll have a 5/7 or 71.4% chance for it to hit a relevant girl.

Interesting, this is useful information, Thanks

[Horsting]

1 hour ago, EpicBacon said:

Nice, I assume that there is no indication what girl gets the free block, and the only way to see it is if someone got damaged

Right. I wonder why there is no 2nd shield bar like with the blue/shield skill. Generally indicators for all those individual girl buffs/curses would be highly welcome.

[EpicBacon]

37 minutes ago, Horsting said:

Right. I wonder why there is no 2nd shield bar like with the blue/shield skill. Generally indicators for all those individual girl buffs/curses would be highly welcome.

Indeed, any indication that relics are working would be nice.
Now that we've found out that "Protection assist" "Finish move" and "Double attack" does work, I won't be surprised if "Curse" also works, but that one is going to be a lot more difficult to confirm.

[Master-17]

In general, it would be logical and correct from the point of view of passing successive battles, so that not only health is transferred to the next battle, but also the accumulated mana.

[Horsting]

That would open a new tactical element: Rotating skilled girls and let them accumulate mana close to 100% against easy opponents, then swap them in against hard opponents to let them cast their spells early.

[DvDivXXX]

 

Thanks for all the information, guys!

In yesterday's run, I wasn't able to pay as much attention as I planned to, and due to the Blessings rotation for PvP (and my being ridiculously short-stacked on resources and taking hours to set my new team up) I only had Orange and Purple girls with a GS5.

Purple activated a few times and it did so little I honestly suspected either a bug or my interpretation of the description being so optimistic compared to the reality that this goes from what I expected to be a super strong skill to a completely useless one. It's great to have confirmation that it's the latter, so I can write this one off. (I was probably biased as I've played and still play a ton of roguelikes and a fair number of them have a similar skill, which is usually very strong).

Orange, conversely, fared a lot better than I anticipated from the description. There were several fights where it activated and basically saved my tanks from dying to the next round of attacks. In boss and even in a few non-boss red-difficulty battles (when opponents have the initiative no matter what) it even gave extra sustain to the whole team, and 4 rounds turns out to be a much better duration than I gave it credit for on paper. Indeed, most fights don't last long enough for the skill to expire once it's activated. Between this and the fact that it just applies to the entire team every time, it's probably more reliable than Blue, even if it's a smaller buff.

I didn't get to test either of them, but basically it sounds that at the end of the day, the two über skills would be Dark (as many as possible) and White (one is enough), just as Bacon described here:

21 hours ago, EpicBacon said:

My team setup usually uses 1 white girl (sake) for her healing ability, and the rest of the mid and backrow is black for Spank.

From all the above, I'm guessing that most of the other skills that sounded very good to me on paper actually don't do all that much either, due to the time it takes for a skill to activate and the comparatively short duration of battles. As Horsting puts it:

21 hours ago, Horsting said:

The stolen mana all goes to the casting girl. This is useless since I never saw a fight where any girl casts her skill a second time [...] After two rounds of skills, the battle is guaranteed to be almost over, so that any other skill than slap (mostly instant kill) or heal is irrelevant.

This also confirms the DOT (damage over time) from Red isn't worth it either, when the Dark skill exists and can simply one-shot an opponent almost guaranteed when it activates.

18 hours ago, EpicBacon said:

The green skills looks better then, you have it listed as giving 24%, but I've seen the opponent use it, and it gave around 44% to two girls.

No, the in-game description doesn't say 24%, but simply "24". It's not a typo on my part, and I'm assuming from what you're saying above that it's not a typo at all. They mean 24 Mana points, as in a fixed amount, not a percentage-based value. So of course if a girl has like 72 points of Mana, +24 to that is +33%; but if a girl has like 2 points, +24 is... over +1000%? ^^

[Der DinX]

 

I'd say this would make the Cards rather useless for this purpose.

[DvDivXXX]

Thanks DDinx. That's pretty unexpected and disappointing indeed.

---

About the Green skill:

It's the same description for all rarities, from Common girls all the way to Mythics (at least at level 1):

Okay, since I have a lot of Epic light bulbs lying around and Travel Gwen is permanently skilled anyways (but I had never considered giving her points in her GS5 before today), here goes:

Level-uh-t'suh (we've been rewatching The Law of Ueki lately ^^ always cracks me up all the extra syllables they add to English words, like "Rober-uh-toh" for "Robert", but especially how they pronounce "Level two" ^^)

EDIT: Ah, shit, something went wrong with my copy-paste and I haven't saved the temporary screenshot. Anyway, at Level 2 it's 30. (It increases in +6 increments per level).

And Level 3:

(I can only extrapolate that an L5 would go up to +42 and an M6 to +48).

Edited December 19, 2023 by DvDivXXX
updated

[bohammettuz]

39 minutes ago, Der DinX said:

[On using the laby 2-day cards to gain missed past (season) rewards]

I'd say this would make the Cards rather useless for this purpose.

Thanks for the report.

I guess this also nixes the idea mentioned earlier to leave the XP rewards on the previous PoV unclaimed and then use the 2-day card to re-gain them during LC day 1. That's actually a somewhat relaxing/reassuring bit of knowledge for today/tomorrow.

[Yamiray]

New thing I noticed today in the shop, it can have the same girl in more then one slot. This may only be with the labyrinth girl but may be possible with others after you get her.

[Horsting]

Jep, happened to me as well on HH: 

Would be a good idea to exclude the Labyrinth girl from the random 5* slot.

[EpicBacon]

On 12/18/2023 at 6:43 PM, Horsting said:

The "Protection Assist" relics work as well: Had two this run and could see of of my tanks "block" the first attack in two battles. Same as with the blue/protection skill, it absorbs the first attack completely, regardless whether the damage is actually larger, which makes lower rarities/levels of these relics/skills mostly as valuable as higher ones.

I am doing a Laby run right now, and I picked up a "protection assist" as the other relics on offer was not anything special.
In the next battle, one of the tanks of the enemy team blocked my attacks.
My frontrow and midrow (after tanks fell) did not block any attacks.
I will see if this happens again, but since the opponent does not have any special skills affecting them from the start of the battle (as far is I know) it could be that the relic affects any random girl.

Edit: Triggered again, this time on one of the opponent midrow girls on the first boss.
I will keep checking and update when the laby is complete

Edited December 20, 2023 by EpicBacon
More data aquired

[Horsting]

58 minutes ago, EpicBacon said:

but since the opponent does not have any special skills affecting them from the start of the battle (as far is I know) it could be that the relic affects any random girl.

Are we sure that opponent teams have no special skills? At least they have girl skills. But I would not wonder at all if those relics were buggy to apply randomly in both directions, e.g. the curses also on our own girls. That there is no visual indicator, makes it hard to recognise.

I'm also starting my run now. I would love to test the curses, but I am too tired to write down all stats of all girls and all effective relics, then do screenshots, to calculate expected and compare with actual damage done/taken.

EDIT: Just saw it as well: Middle opponent girl blocking an attack right after I got the relic. What I recognised as well is that she still got defeated with the same attack, so I probably interpreted it wrong earlier, or it got fixed, that the whole attack gets blocked despite doing more damage than the size of the shield. I think we can be quite sure than that all buff/curse relics are bugged this way and hence have in average zero benefit.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Horsting

[EpicBacon]

Okay, Labyrinth run is done, Now I was trying to test three relics this run, found out that is a bad idea, its just too much.
Anyhow, for the "protective assist", I recorded 12 instances of it triggering. 4 for me and 8 for the opponent.
The instances it did not trigger, my assumption is that my backline and midline were shieled, but was not hit.

All my instances were against my frontline, mainly because in normal fights its only they who are going to get hurt, and only in some hard fights and bossfights is my midline going to be exposed.
The opponent had 3 Frontline girls, 3 Midline and 2 backline girls shielded

I had the common version of this, and it says 6%, but this does not seem to be accurate, sometimes I would take a small amount of damage, some other times more. For example is against a boss when one of my frontrow girls were shielded, the shield said 25k protect, but after shield was done, normal attacks against the same girl hit in the 50k range.

It would be nice to get some more testing done on this relic, but for me it seems like it hits any random girl, I've added a picture with the "updated" text for this relic.

The second relic I was testing was "double attack" I did get 2 "double attack" the last laby run I did, but the mana ability did not seem to trigger, and since I was offered a Mythic version for Sake, It sounded like a good idea.

I only got it to trigger twice, because once the game figured I was having fun, it did its utmost to remove said fun.
I had Sake in the middle of my midline, and the game went full critical damage, decimated my frontline, and delivered 3x150.000 critical hits against Sake in a row; fun ended.

Anyhow, the first time it triggered, the second attack seemed to do no damage, with no extra mana.
The second time it triggered, the girl in question died on the first attack, but was still hit by the second attack, again no mana for the second attack. I am 95% sure the second attack does no damage, but as I said, fun ended before I was able to confirm it, I will try to revisit this relic if I get a chance.

The 3rd thing I was testing out this run was "Finish Move" I was able to pick up 2 "finish move" relics this run, a legendary for +8% and a common one for 3%. I got them pretty early, but abandoned testing on it due to checking both "double attack" and "protection assist" but once game decided to surgically remove Sake from the equation, "Finish move" was back on.

I only got 2 data points that were interesting:

Total Ego	8.00%	11.00%	Final Ego
283,315	22,665	31,465	21,000
271,000	21,680	29,810	28,000

The first instance, I got the girl down to 21.000 ego, It relics stacks it should have triggered, as 21k is less then 31.4k.
Interestingly enough, its also low enough that it should have triggered the 8% from the legendary relic, and it did not.

The second example here is also interesting, the final ego at 28k is above the 8%, meaning the single relic does not trigger, but it is below the 11% of the combined ones, and if they work additive should have killed the girl.

Edited December 20, 2023 by EpicBacon
grammar

[DvDivXXX]

Thanks, guys. This more or less confirms my suspicions and I'd say this boils down to "avoid any random single-target relic". The Bubble, the Assist, the Curse, etc.

Fixed single-target relics work as intended (eg "Lotti gets +6 damage" or "MD Bianca heals for _% of her max HP when she attacks"). They're rarely a great pick, but better than something that doesn't help at all or even actively tries to kill you.

Global and local buffs work as listed. Still not completely clear on how they stack, though. As per Horsting, the Medication one is broken and heals for 100% no matter what the card actually says, so a single one of any rarity is OP and there's no benefit from grabbing dupes. Most damage, defense and HP buffs stack additively, which seems reasonable enough (eg if I take a +4% damage to all girls and then a +6% damage to all girls, I'll get +10% damage to all girls).

And the one that seems to stack multiplicatively (also as per Horsting) is the "girls above/below 50% HP deal _% more damage". While "above 50% HP" would be one of the top relics even if it stacked additively, and hence is ridiculously broken stacking multiplicatively, the "below 50% HP" one is unlikely to ever proc, and if it does you're already neck-deep in shit. So I still wouldn't recommend picking "below" even if it stacks multiplicatively (0x0 and 0+0 both amount to 0 after all ^^). But "above" is clearly the GOAT of DPS relics for now.

I'm still not clear on what Harmony does (or is supposed to do). Increase Speed? Accelerate mana generation? I fairly often get relics like "Midline girls get +16% Harmony" and I politely decline them if I can because I'm afraid they won't do anything (good).

[EpicBacon]

Interesting, I did not know that "above 50%" damage stacked that way, that is interesting, It does not change anything, because I allways pick up those relics either way, 9/10 times it reads as increase damage.

I think its worth picking up a "finish move" if its legendary or mythic, dependent on the relics offered of cource,
I am not going to pick it up over increased damage, but If I get some sub-optimal ones, for sure.
Getting a girl to 8-10% hp left comes up quite a bit for me, especially in early fights.

Duck master; this one does work, but I would probably not get it for a frontline tank, 40% (legendary) dodge seems like a lot, but when your girl could be hit by 7 girls in round one, 5-6 in round two, and 3-5 in round 3, eventually she is going to fall. Now if you were to stack two of them (is that even possible?) for like 70-80% dodge, then sure, I could be interested.
I did get a run, where my entire midline has 40% dodge each, that was very helpful against the final boss, 1 girl did not dodge at all, was hit by all 3 attacks, another girl dodged all 4, while the last one dodged 2/3 or 2/4

Healing as stated above, works, "Rejuvenation" works, and seems at eyeshot to give the % adverticed.
"Defeat Medication" as mentioned above, works overtime, I wish my girls would take more advantage of it, when I am able to setup a situation where damaged girls can finish off one girl each and heal, but instead decides to hit the one undamaged girl, leading to them both tireing out next turn, good work girl...

I have not looked into the numbers if "give x ego/harmony" actually work, I just assumed they did. I have picked up a bunch of them as they seemed to be good value, harmony is supposed to give speed after all. Next run I will screenshot my girls stats and then compare when/if I do get relics with increase stats on. There are some description of how the stats are supposed to work, but we can't really rely on this one, since we know they messed up here, like Charm getting the defence bonus, and know-how getting mana.

[Horsting]

2 hours ago, EpicBacon said:

I did get a run, where my entire midline has 40% dodge each, that was very helpful against the final boss, 1 girl did not dodge at all, was hit by all 3 attacks, another girl dodged all 4, while the last one dodged 2/3 or 2/4

Now imagine to have those three 40% dodge on the front line, where it would have been effective as fast as you got the relic, instead of only on the last boss (where you can anyway just burn all remaining girls). IMO without doubt, this is a very helpful relic, but ONLY on the front line when you have some healing relics already, so that you can expect those girls to heal, or explicitly swap them to the back for easy fights to let them heal for harder battles.

The ego buffs work, the harmony buffs are AFAIK impossible to test, although ... if it is enough, the order in which girls attack can change, since harmony affects speed. I'll have a look at this next run. That KH increases speed and AP is btw true. And since it increases mana as well, KH girls are best DDs as well as best mages (if one has even a choice for GS5 buffed girls).

Edited December 21, 2023 by Horsting

[EpicBacon]

1 minute ago, Horsting said:

Now imagine to have those three 40% dodge on the front line, where it would have been effective as fast as you got the relic, instead of only on the last boss (where you can anyway just burn all remaining girls). IMO without doubt, this is a very helpful relic, but ONLY on the front line when you have some healing relics already, so that you can expect those girls to heal, or explicitly swap them to the back for easy fights to let them heal for harder battles.

Indeed, the problem with tanks is that the currently lack damage mitigation, they don't feel tanky at all.
I think a combination of Dodge and Protective bubble will be really nice when they get them to work.
It just seems strange that so many relics are single girl only, especially when the whole system is designed around losing girls, and that makes sense; they would not give you 70 girls if they want you to use 1 team only.

So yes, dodge is really good, but it feels like a waste to grab something that might(or might not) help you the next battle, and then is lost. Then again you could say the same thing about me having dodge for my entire middleline, in my defense tho; 40% dodge on a girl that will most certainly get hit against the final boss seems a lot better then "protection bubble" and "curse" I don't know exactly what my choices were, but it had to be bad, since I hardskip most single girl bonuses, unless its damage on someone in the back/midline.

I don't know if the harmony will affect speed that much, but as I have never checked it at all, it makes sense to at least look at the numbers, and see if they change.

@Horsting Thank you for your hard work, I am not great with math, but I can at least collect some data

[EpicBacon]

21 minutes ago, Horsting said:

Now imagine to have those three 40% dodge on the front line, where it would have been effective as fast as you got the relic, instead of only on the last boss (where you can anyway just burn all remaining girls). IMO without doubt, this is a very helpful relic, but ONLY on the front line when you have some healing relics already, so that you can expect those girls to heal, or explicitly swap them to the back for easy fights to let them heal for harder battles.

I didn't even consider that; if they survive a hard battle, then throwing them in the backrow for the next battle, and get Sake (or anyone else with healing skill) to heal them up. The only problem is that i can usually only heal in hard battles and boss fights. Taking 4 rounds to use a mana skill is a long time.

[Horsting]

Indeed, with all the bugs it is currently hard to reasonably rely on single tank girls, and the question whether this will and is even wanted to be possible in higher difficulties is another question. CH girls IMO do feel quite more tanky than others, although indeed more against easier opponents, where it does not play such a role anyway, while against bosses the difference between classes is not so large anymore. If stats got corrected, and HC girls have both, more defence and more ego, and if then protective bubble got fixed as well, there would be quite a good chance to have tanks surviving throughout the 3 floors, when getting some dodge and/or life steal relic on top.

A way you can see a benefit in those relics now already: Tanks with this relic will survive at least longer, means you loose less girls until then. So the benefit for the last boss fight is then not that you have a stronger team, as the relic was lost with the girl, but that you lost less girls on the way and have hence more to burn and in case defeat the last boss in more attempts.

59 minutes ago, EpicBacon said:

if they survive a hard battle, then throwing them in the backrow for the next battle, and get Sake (or anyone else with healing skill) to heal them up. The only problem is that i can usually only heal in hard battles and boss fights. Taking 4 rounds to use a mana skill is a long time.

The currently OP defeat medication and rejuvenation relics can do as well. If stats got fixed, there would be also more chances to heal the team with a submissive CH girl, like Daemon Queen Mala, since they would have higher starting mana and higher mana regeneration. This is the most important reason I am hoping for fixed stats, since it opens up nice tactical elements, while currently the skills happen usually too late to play a significant role, especially some types of skills.