DehNutCase

Camp: Map:

The numbers seem to be assuming your 5*s are NP1 vs. NP5 3*s, a high NP 5* should still dumpster lower rarity units in NP damage. If we napkin math 400 quarts = 1 specific 5* then high NP 5*s should roll in faster than 2000/2000 gold fous, which is something to keep in mind when making the assumption that all 5*s are NP1. NP 2.5 seems to be the point where Okita matches Caesar in terms of NP damage if they're both level 100, so NP2 would do a little less than Caesar, and NP3 a little more. If both are ungrailed then NP2 Okita beats Caesar since a rare servant gets about 25% extra stats going to level 100, while SSRs only gain around 10%. That said, I was pretty okay with Caesar since he deals decent damage if you only bring him into advantaged matchups (which gives him performance similar to a 5*'s neutral performance), and he's pretty good at making his teammates do more damage, which helps mitigate the issue of a lower rarity's worse face card damage, so this makes a usable servant a bit better. Rarely use him, though, since my box is pretty stacked. Fully invested he's probably comparable to a NP2 (or NP1 with Interlude) 5* after you consider his worse face card damage, which is good enough to bring into pretty much everything.

Valentines CQ was probably one of the easiest we've seen so far, but it was a interesting fight. (lul at Jaguar having 2 HP bars and my default damage dealer being Archuria, though.)

Last year's Valentines CEs are surprisingly useful, since they're a low cost way to improve the upgrade potion (whatever it's called) drops, even if they're not as slot efficient as the shop CE. I'm being lazy about things and running Kaleidoscope anyway, so it's not like slot efficiency matters right now.

Chapter 11, Part 3: Academy: Map:

I expected it, but man 200 floors is a giant ass slog. I think I average like 100 quests or so for the typical event, and those are 2 weeks long. 200 (+ some spare change for the CQ and occasional failure) in a week is basically lottery tier in terms of grind. Was very slightly tempted to see if running a hilariously low damage stall team would let me farm the two respawning CQ mooks for spinal fluids, but it's not like I actually need a lot of them at the moment + I'm not insane.

Don't play on JAP, so this is just theory craft: If you're running double Skadi Black Grail will probably end up the best CE for raw damage, but that's assuming you have it MLB'd and high leveled. Traces of Christmas is probably the best overall if you take into account how often it'll be useful (just about always thanks to the 50% starting NP) and how easy it is to MLB (not completely trivial, since you still need to farm up a drop, but it's a CE drop from a lottery event). 2030s on supports feel redundant to me if your main damage dealer likes to click Quick cards, but I don't use it much in general since Prisma Cosmos tend to be better for plans that rely on high turn counts and stuff like Golden Carp or Ox-Demon King* tend to be better if you're trying to finish things quick. That's a personal opinion, though, apparently other people like it a lot. *Pity Wandering Tales of Shana-oh is only 1 turn, and on death at that. For Skadi teams Poster Girl should be one of the best support CEs since Skadi doesn't really mitigate damage very well, so you might as well just let one of them die after they pressed their skills. That said, if you don't have survivability issues then it ends up being... not very useful. I haven't ran into a CQ that made me go 'man, I wish I had a 3 turn taunt' yet, but maybe I'll see some once we see more of JAP's CQs. I'll probably pick up a few copies if we get another Poster Girl banner, but I don't expect Poster Girl teams to perform better than just abusing RNG to let you use death trigger and entrance trigger CEs reliably. (Stuff like putting Ox-Demon King on Bunyan and just RNGing your way into having her die instantly for a free card shuffle and order change.)

Later years seem to give out way more grails than the years so far, so while grail resets are unlikely you'll have a bit more grails to play around with even if you wasted some before. Mind, I personally don't feel too stretched for grails, but I mostly grail SSRs---which take the least amount of grails to max anyway. Regarding Medea, my issue with her is that her NP has AoE NP numbers, which drags down the rest of her kit and makes grailing her a lot less useful than it otherwise might've been. (At level 90 she'd have slightly below 4* stats, which would've made her quite nice as a damage dealer if it wasn't for the fact her NP has such awful damage multipliers.) At least give her Vlad III numbers---AoE NP number before interlude, non-interlude single target NP numbers afterward. Ah well, at least Circe exists.

Chapter 11, Part 2: Ignatz and Raphael's Paralogue: Rare Monster Sighting:

The worst part about Circe is that to get 100% NP with her 1st skill I have to use stakes on her. On the plus side, Eresh only needs 3 more Stakes before 10/10/10 so I should have have Circe more or less ready to go pretty quick. If I manage to farm 18 stakes before Setsubun I'll even be able to take advantage of the half AP ember quests to farm caster embers for her. I had enough leftover embers to get her to level 68 from the lottery, but not enough to level 80 her unless I dip into my 2nd archive stash of embers and fous---that stash is for SSRs or SRs I really care about, though, so I'm not touching it. Setsubun is slightly worrying since the way my free time works* means that I'd much rather play a long time in one sitting than a short time in multiple sittings, but my box should be deep enough that I can clear a ton of floors in a single sitting despite fatigue. *And also the fact that I don't play on a phone.

Personally I like spending a bit of FP to MLB new years CEs whenever they show up, but that's because they give a tiny bit of QP if you have the CE slots for them. It helps that new years tends to come with 2x or 3x exp chance, so I can use the CEs I roll but aren't looking for for CE exp. No idea when the next bonus exp chance event's going to happen, though. (Should be able to look it up, but I don't know a quick way to sift through events to find which ones give bonus exp chance.)

That feeling when you farm and farm but your apple count only goes up. Mostly because I'm doing 5-8 turn clears, though---I've optimized slightly by bringing in Eresh and Nero rather than a bunch of Avengers or whatever, but I'd need to sacrifice too much bond and Mystic Code exp gain if I wanted to 3-4 turn it, especially with a macro. Bones and Fangs are great, but I have plenty of everything else and it's not like they're in the same lottery (if they were I'd consider farming this like crazy).

Chapter 11, Part 1: Planned to do 2 Paralogues + a Rare Monster Sighting this update, but Serenes Forest ate the Shamir Paralogue + the Academy Phase so I'm just going to redo that and post it as Part 1. Academy: Alois and Shamir's Paralogue:

Just about every role I care about is already covered by 5*s, with the exception of Beserkers, so I'm probably going to NP2 Beserker Lancelot unless I already have 2 copies of him in my box. (I tend to sit on extra copies of 4* Servants in case I'd rather burn them for rare prisms---I'll wait for the Bond 11+ unlocking items to be in the rare prism shop before I start burning people, though.) A brand new servant would be nice, but I can't think of anyone off the top of my head that I care about, meaning I probably don't care about any of the 4*s in particular. Oh, actually, there's Circe---although I had to look up the unit list to remember her. I've been brute forcing solo Assassins with Nero just punching them to death, but she was pretty nice when I used her in Salem. Pity about her third skill, though---she didn't have it in Salem, but it's not going to make too much of a difference for her whether or not she has it. (Pretty sure Nero out-damages her even against single targets, especially considering the NP level difference, but eh.) Well, I guess it'll be Circe, although she'll put me in Stake hell for even longer... (Eresh isn't even 10/10/10 yet herself.) Not feeling any need to specifically prep my box for Skadi since she's good enough that I'll find good partners for her without effort.

Turns out double waver kind of trivializes the challenge quest, but I guess that was kind of expected since you need to do a lot of weird things to a multi-target quest for Waver's NP not to buy you an obscene amount of turns while providing a constant stream of defense downs for more damage. (Brynd KOs a Servant every turn with just her face cards, though, which was interesting---but my team had 3 damage dealers in the lineup so losing 2 damage dealers + both my Wavers didn't matter.)

Easiest way to remember about the starter bonus is probably just to remember it's basically a really weird Card Type Up buff, it falls under the same multiplier as Card Type Buff like how Damage Up, Crit Up, and NP Up are fall under the same multiplier (and are therefore additive) when you're calculating damage. All of the fist card bonuses stack additively with what a Type Up buff does for you, rather than multiplicatively like you'd expect. Re: Super Orion, he's someone who does one thing really well and has a bunch of holes in other places, but he does happen to be very self-sufficient in his core role (click red card and win), so I'm not quite sure how to evaluate him yet. He's obviously very good at his core role, but I'd have to do some number crunch about how much not having a damaging NP costs him as a damage dealer if I actually wanted to evaluate him properly, and that would take a lot of looking into possible teammates for him, which is way too much effort. His self-sufficiency does mean I'd probably rate him as the best crit servant overall, though, even if comps with him on the team top out at a little less than someone who needs to jump through a bunch of hoops to function. He's kind of like Saber Lancelot in that department. Re: Quick Cards. The reason quick cards needs such high generation numbers to be good is actually pretty simple in my opinion. Quick cards need 25% extra damage to match an Arts (1/.8), and 87.5% extra damage to match a Buster (1.5/.8). If a regular Arts card and Quick card crit generates the same NP then the quick card better be giving me around 7.5 (30 * 25%---that is, 25% chance to crit on all my cards, and that's assuming I have perfect star control) stars* or something because otherwise why the hell am I clicking the Quick card, I'm getting dumpstered in face card damage for the exact same NP gain. *Even at 160%, which is 3rd slot Quick, you'd need 4.7 hits for that many stars, although if you have a lot of Quick cards you can assume, say, a 50% Quick Up more or less constantly active and napkin math it to around 3 hits. And if the Quick card gave bad NP gain then it better god damn rain stars since Buster cards with Buster leads exist, so you need some insanely high Quick specific damage buffs before it's worth clicking Quick cards for the damage.

A lot of servants with Quick NPs have some real shitty quick cards, is pretty much what I mean. Astolfo has a 1.32% 2 hit quick and 3 quick cards, but fortunately he's pretty much as bad as it gets. (Unless we count Artoria Rider Alter, who actually has anti-synergy between her kit and having Quick cards in her deck---she'd want one, but 1 Quick Card every three turns is all she wants or needs. 1.68% 3 hit Quick is actually pretty good if we're talking about people with crappy Quick cards, but god damn.) OG Scathach is a more typical example with 1.42% 2 hit quick and 2 quick cards, while having amazing numbers on her Buster and Arts---and because of how she works even if you nerf her NP gain per hit in exchange for going to a 1/2/2 (Quick/Arts/Buster) Saber Deck it'd still be an improvement overall, since more Arts means she can get more NP uses from thanks to being able to join more Arts Chains and Arts cards crit harder than Quick cards. Her ideal deck would be triple buster and getting to keep her NP generation numbers or maybe even getting better numbers, since she only has 2 cards that gain NP with a triple buster deck---let's just ignore the fact that her Busters generate as much NP as her Quick cards when there's an Arts lead. God her numbers are stupid. You trade maybe 3-6% NP every 3 turns for losing a crappy quick card and get a buster card in return, and that's assuming you wanted to click her Quick card at all. There's people like Okita, Kintoki Rider, and Jack who don't mind having lots of Quick cards, but you have to wade through a lot of people like Rider Ishtar with her 2 hit 1.36% Quick card to find them. If you have a Quick NP and lots of Quick cards the vast majority of your damage will come from NPs, since Quick Performance Up does very little for face-card damage (having a Buster lead is about as good as 50% Quick Performance Up, and these two effects don't stack multiplicatively---they'll both add damage, but 50% Quick Up and Buster Lead gets you about 200% damage on your Quick cards rather than the 225% you'd expect from multiplicative stacking) but it's pretty great for resource generation. Yet, for some god damn reason, a lot of Quick NP Servants have awful Quick cards for generation stats, whether for crit stars or NP, so they might as well give up and just rely on batteries and Arts Chains and just add more damage to their face cards by dropping quick cards from the deck. Skadi makes it so Quick cards actually do damage, but her existence means people with a kit like Astolfo Rider but huge Atk* simply can't exist without unbalancing the game. She's a band-aid fix that severely limits future design of Quick servants just by existing. *So their Quicks are worth clicking for damage---imagine Astolfo with JAlter stats, it won't even matter that the Quick card doesn't generate stars for shit and Quick Cards suck for damage, you get stars with quick chains and your Quick cards melt people. Mind, the deck would still probably be better if you dropped some Quick cards for Buster or Arts, but that's the price for having Quick cards that don't have generation stats, and in exchange it gets more synergy with Quick Performance Up. Which is why it'd be completely stupid with Skadi's 50% Quick Up and 100% Quick Card Crit, since the synergy would push it beyond 'weird but fair and balanced' and into 'basically Quick Super Orion with extra steps.'

At least Astolfo is in the SR Rider pool, lul. (I've been using him in place of Drake since Drake's been Bond 10 for ages---he's like 50% of a Drake but that's plenty for Caster nodes.) It's a pity that most quick servants can be improved significantly if they used only 1 Quick card in their deck, and Astolfo has 3...

Chapter 10, Part 2: Map:

I'm running an entire team of Avenger/Shielder/Alter-ego/Rulers just so I can save 1 CE slot, why am I like this LUL. On the plus side, double JAlter is pretty good at face carding things until they die.

Ch. 10, Part 1: Academy: Felix's Paralogue: Quest Maps: Academy:

Jack popped in to say 'hi' in the Hokusai banner, which was interesting--- she has a weaker than usual interlude, so NP2 is nice. I got MLB 4* CE and a single copy of the 5* CE, so I'm not going to roll on the banner any more. Hokusai's pretty great, but this year has a lot of great servants. GSSR ended up the same as the last time I did the GSSR---I got the 5* I cared about the most (Melt this time, Jeanne Alter last time) and 9 3*s. [Edit: Actually, this is wrong, I think I got a 4* CE, so it's not all 3*s.] My luck seems to be very... precise.

Chapter 9, Part 3: Academy: The Map:

Chapter 9, part 2: Ashe and Catherine's Paralogue:

Ended up a bit short of 97 boxes total. Took a few hours to pick everything up out of the lottery, but that's all done now. The 750k QP I ended up with is slightly concerning, though, considering hitting the QP cap apparently has unpleasant consequences. I actually considered not exchanging the Crystal Wreaths for QP, but that's too much of an big brain play for me. On a different topic, not really that fond of time gated story quests, although I guess it is nice to have a bit of time to recover from grinding.