#as an Asterios main I will literally never fucking forgive how they've gutted debuff as a meta

[300iqprower]

I can't help but feel a bit bitter over the way Arjuna Alter got screwed in terms of marketing. They delay the release of Lostbelt 4 for an obscenely long time, then release his first banner right before a summer event and anniversary so of course no one wanted to roll, then hold off giving him a second rateup for 3 years and then relegate his second rateup to a CBC event. (Skadi wasn't properly released with LB2, instead she was the anni Servant for that year plus a milestone plus a few events she'd featured in; they made Ibuki the milestone Servant when she'd been available less than a year, then don't put Junao on the Karnamas banner despite there not being any other limited 5*s in the event other than him. I feel like a lot of it was intentional and not just "Oh he just doesn't sell well")

I mean you totally should feel bitter. I would. ...Maybe that's a sign you shouldn't, actually...

It was definitely sexism in terms of pre-release, funny how Skadi and Castoria got that treatment of releasing ahead of schedule, but post-release it's the "men don't sell" mentality + because they realized they fucked up. Castoria overshadows it nowadays, but Alterjuna was borderline to DPS what Castoria is to support. He's the reason debuff meta is garbage now, with bosses consistently being slapped with Debuff Immunity and heavy debuff resistance, because he nukes anything with a debuff placed on it, the same way before him mental debuffs were useless because every boss (specifically male ones) got slapped with Mental Debuff Immunity for no reason other than to stop Eurayle from being an easy F2P option for tough encounters like Surt or Xiang Yu. He trivialized several gilfest level CQs. And if you had Merlin or Waver, let alone both? You've won the game forever. So just like with Eurayle, they nerfed him indirectly in a way that nerfs an entire archetype of servants even harder than it does that one servant. From what I know starting with Olympus there are also significantly less multi-enemy bosses. And this was all DEFINITELY by design; as I've said before LB4's release lines up just after Delightworks suffered a massive profit drop due entirely to their own shitty business practices. I'd be surprised if he ever even got the "increase the scaling and nothing else" NP rank up, because they clearly want to make absolutely sure they restrict his damage ceiling as much as possible.

But there was also a key difference: Eurayle is free to play, Alterjuna is SSR EX. So while they couldn't stop you from using Eurayle, they could artificially limit how many people would have to borrow Alterjuna to get ahold of him by just.....not re-running him at all. Of course with Castoria they aren't even hesitating to rerun her and there's obvious reason for that: She is waifu. She is mascot. And they aren't afraid anymore to powercreep for the sake of proft; it's pretty much their entire MO ever since Castoria dropped. They hadn't realized they were taking the plunge with Alterjuna so they had that kneejerk reaction but it made them go "fuck it" as soon as it was done when it came time to do it again.

TLDR, as OP as Castoria is, Alterjuna was when they crossed that point of no return with powercreep, and so it's no wonder they've done everything they can to bury him every since, even though it was completely intentional because what these kind of hacks think they can do is shove out a whalebait powercreeper for a spike in profits and then just damage control it into non-existence. Either that, or no one leading the dev team is qualified to even hold a position in the entire industry with how little they understand game design.

#as an Asterios main I will literally never fucking forgive how they've gutted debuff as a meta #fgo #fgo arjuna #arjuna alter #fgo meta #never thought i'd get an ask