#at least we're getting like seven free tenfolds on the Ilia banner lol

[murasaki-murasame]

On the one hand, we’re getting Ilia in the next banner as part of a prize showcase that’d be worth summoning on just for the extra rewards alone, but on the OTHER hand, I didn’t manage to get Gala Zena from any of the free summons, and then the worms in my brain went brrr and I think we all know what happened next :)

Also now that I’ve had time to experience the 2.0 update for a week or so, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on that to talk about too

First of all, I got absolutely no 5-stars of any kind from my free summons on the gala banner we got before the Zena banner, so that sucked, lol. I was genuinely tempted to at least go for a pity-break, but I decided against it, since that banner in general was so unappealing to me.

Then for the Zena banner I at least managed to sit back and see how the free summons went, and I got Meene and Midgard Zero off of them, which was nice. But of course that meant that I didn’t get Gala Zena, and I just couldn’t hold myself back from chasing her, lol.

Thankfully I managed to get her after an extra 70-ish summons, so I didn’t have to spend THAT much to get her, but I almost immediately got a dupe Meene from my ticket summons so that kinda hurt, lmao. I also got a dupe Andromeda [who’s now at 3UB], and I think those are the only 5-stars that I’ve gotten from these last two banners. The 5-star dragon ticket from the log-in bonus gave me a dupe Gilgamesh [who’s at 1UB now], though.

In general my summons were a bit more barren than I’d like, but I can’t really complain since most of them were free summons, and I managed to clear out the whole Zena banner, lol.

If I remember right, I had about 270 summons before this, and now I’m at around 200. We’ve still got some anniversary related wyrmite coming in the near future, though, on top of the free summons, so I might still be able to spark on the mid-month gala remix banner if I want to. But I’d probably only do that if Gala Alex is featured and I don’t get her from my free summons. She’s now the only gala unit I’m missing, so she’s a pretty high-priority spark target.

Which is also a big part of why I’m not really that interested in summoning on the Ilia banner, and by extension why I decided to go ahead and chase Zena now. I mean, that was still a dumb decision since if I ended up needing to spark her, that would have drained my entire stash, but still, lol. Ilia’s non-limited, and she seems to be the only new unit on the next banner, so if anything I’d mainly just be summoning for the extra rewards. Also I don’t really have any high-priority dream summon candidates anymore, since I got I-Nefaria and S-Mikoto a little while ago, and I got Meene from this banner, so I could just dream summon Ilia later on anyway.

But mainly I’m just kinda salty about how she’s basically a direct improvement over the new Joe alt, lol. I was hoping she’d at least be flame or wind or something, or even have a different mode type, but she’s literally just Joe but better, which is lame, since I really like Joe, and even if I got Ilia I dunno if I’d want to replace him on my light team. So that on it’s own kinda deflated a lot of the hype I had about Ilia.

Anyway, at this point my main priorities are to be able to get Gala Alex whenever she’s available again, and to hopefully get any new gala dragons when they come out. I’d also really like to go into the New Years banner with a spark saved up, just in case. Even though that’d probably require skipping Christmas. So we’ll just see how that pans out, lol.

All that aside, the 2.0 update has been out for a while now, and boy has that sure changed how the game feels, lmao. I think it’s an almost entirely good update, but there’s a lot of awkward growing pains going on as we have to adjust to all these new and changed systems.

I know that the new wyrmprint system gives us more flexbility than the old one, and that it at least gives a reason to want to use a lot of the 4-star prints, but I really hope they implement some sort of preset option soon, because having to keep setting up 4-5 wyrmprints on every single character is really awful. I’m also not a huge fan of how expensive it is to get extra copies of prints, but I get the logic behind it, and thankfully event prints are extremely cheap to get extra copies of. Which at least means that new players can pretty easily get four copies of Plunder Pals before eventually getting specialized skill damage prints, but I feel kinda bad for anyone who didn’t get all the Megaman event prints, since they cover basically every single important wyrmprint ability, lol. 

Also it’s kinda awkward how the change to having every print just give one ability means that a lot of prints got indirectly nerfed, like Fires of Hate and Resounding Rendition, or Chocolatiers now just being 50% skill prep. Not to mention how so many prints are almost identical, down to the fact that even the affinity bonuses for a lot of similar prints aren’t even different either. So that’s kinda weird. But ultimately I do think this was a good change for the game. I’m also thinking now that one type of new endgame progression they might add eventually is 6-star wyrmprints, since it seems really noteworthy to me that the new wyrmprint UI is a 2x3 grid with only five slots taken up, and the other just being empty space. So they might introduce 6-star wyrmprints to fill in that extra slot later to add even more flexibility to the system.

Then there’s all the changes they made to the weapon system, which I think are gonna take a fair while for me to feel truly familiar with. There’s a whole lot to take in, and even though I think it’s more streamlined and easy to understand at the end of the day, it’s such a huge change from what i was used to that it just feels kinda overwhelming and strange. But I think the only part of it that genuinely feels bad is how it’s now WAY more expensive to fully unbind Agito weapons than it was before, since you have to now buy all of the last four unbind levels, like with HDT weapons, instead of it just being a one-time upgrade cost that gives you an automatically MUB tier 2 weapon if you had a MUB tier 1 weapon. So that really sucks, and I think it really screws over anyone who was holding off on upgrading their flame and shadow Agito weapons until this update hit, since now it’s extremely expensive compared to before. But apparently it’s an intentional design choice and not just an oversight, so I guess we’ll just have to deal with it. I'm also kinda annoyed at myself for dismantling all my 5t3s before this update hit, since now they’re actually worth getting for the weapon bonus system, but that’s not as big of a deal.

And on that note, I know lots of people don’t like how expensive the weapon bonus system is, but I’m just viewing it as a super long-term, end-game grind that intentionally gives relatively minor stat upgrades that nothing in the game is actually balanced around. It’s basically just an extension of the weapon dojo system for people who want to have something to keep grinding for once they hit the end-game.

I do really like how they condensed all the niche void weapons into just one weapon per element/type combo, though, and how their unique weapon abilities are now passively applied to all similar weapons once you unlock them. It gives you a reason to care about getting them, and grinding void battles in general, without forcing you to use super weak weapons if you need their unique ability. I dunno how much I’ll actually grind Void Agni after this, but it feels really nice to just have the scorching air res ability on my Agito/HDT weapons, lol. It’s also really nice that they let you do the same thing with the HDT Bane abilities, since that makes it way easier to grind them, and this update gives us a whole lot of reasons to want to get back into grinding HDTs again.

HDTs are just way easier now than they used to be, which is great. I think Cygames has accepted that they just weren’t very fun or well-designed as endgame co-op raid type content, and that people just want to be able to farm them solo for their drops. And this whole update makes it way easier to do that. On top of the earlier change to nerfing their opening blasts and reducing the damage that AI characters take, it feels like they only slightly raised their stats to compensate for the huge balance patch update, which makes them feel way easier to beat than they used to be. And they also reworked the fights a bit so that they actually have purple indicators for [most] of their attacks, and some mechanics like HBH’s volcanoes now actually work properly in solo, so that’s neat.

The introduction of solo versions of endgame fights is really nice. I think at this point it means that you can go through the entire game’s progression system without touching co-op [outside of events, I guess], which is nice, since I know it’s always been off-putting to a lot of people that co-op is basically mandatory for endgame content.

We also now have PVP [kind of], which is something I never expected, and I ALSO never expected that it’d actually be . . . really fun and well-balanced? It’s genuinely shocking to me that they actually managed to pull off PVP properly in this type of game, lol. This has always felt like the most anti-PVP gacha game out there, if that makes sense, so I never thought PVP would work, but the whole battle royale set-up actually works really well. Mainly because everyone works off of the same blank slate, and your account progress outside of the battle royale mode has absolutely no impact on how strong you are in PVP. It’s more of a skill-based thing, where you’d have an edge over newer players just because you’re more familiar with how to move around in the game and do stuff. There’s also the fact that there’s barely any difference in the points you get between first and last place, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out on much if you keep losing. And most of the stuff you spend points on are just cosmetic skins for the character you play as, but there’s also some genuinely good rewards like sunstones and testaments that you can fairly easily get even if you just grind for it by dying as fast as possible every round. I really hope they keep the rewards the same for each season, since having a fairly consistent supply of 2 sunstones and 4 of each testament every five weeks or so would be really good.

The whole balance patch also happened, and that ended up being a lot more of a big deal than I thought it might be. Even though they only tweaked everyone’s damage mods and not any of their abilities or anything, basically all of the buffs feel like what you’d expect from a mana spiral. A pretty huge amount of characters got their damage mods doubled or even tripled, and then there’s cases like Gala Euden who effectively had both of his skill’s damage mods quadrupled, lol. I was wondering if they might use this as a chance to effectively give mana spirals to old gala units without actually giving them mana spirals, and that’s basically how this went. On top of Gala Euden now being even stronger than before, Gala Mym got basically all of her damage mods doubled, along with a new strength buff on her S1. Gala Sarisse also got her S2 improved so that it always gives a team strength buff instead of alternating effects. And Gala Ranzal got what seems to be a really big improvement to his damage in general, along with his gauges now being easier to fill, so now I think he might at least be on the same level as Leif, if not stronger, which he really deserved.

They even buffed a lot of the weaker shadow units, which I wasn’t expecting, but I’m glad about it. Obviously Norwin was one of the first units whose changes I looked into, and I’m glad that he’s better than he used to be, but it’s kinda awkward to me that he has poison punisher effects on his skills now, when they didn’t change the fact that he has a blind punisher ability, and another ability based around inflicting blind. I think he still needs a proper spiral to fully morph him into actually being about poison, but he’s a lot better than he was before. They also buffed S-Norwin’s S2 for some reason, even though he was really good before this update, lol.

Vice also now has the honor of being the first unit to get straight up nerfed in the game’s history, but even with the nerf, I think he’s still one of the strongest 3-stars in the whole game, and he’s still worth investing in as a low-budget DPS option. I also actually like the fact that he inflicts poison on his S1 now, since it makes him a more consistent source of poison, but it also means he’ll be constantly afflicting poison, which might not always be good. I think it’s a good balance change, though. At the very least I’m able to easily solo eHJP in like one and a half minutes while still using him as my main DPS unit, while also having everyone equipped with gold fafnirs. So he definitely still does his job just fine.

Anyway, we’ve also got the whole second anniversary event going on, and it sure is a doozy. I think I liked Fractured Futures more, but this is still a good event in it’s own way. It’s not as intense or depressing, but I like the focus on lore and world-building, and it’s also just really refreshing to get an entire event where Zethia’s the protagonist for once.

A lot of what the event’s gone over has felt sort of predictable, but it’s still nice to get all this stuff explicitly spelled out, and it also means we get to see Ilia as a socially inept punk biker with a giant rifle, so that alone makes the entire event worth it, lmao. I figured we were gonna get something like this from all the increasing glimpses at how ancient civilization used to be technologically advanced, but seeing it play out like this is still really fun.

It’s also interesting to get the origin story for Morsayati. It’s not quite as interesting as I would have hoped, since it turns out that the Other is just Mordecai’s disembodied hatred, but still. Mordecai’s a surprisingly adorable character, and for a free unit he also feels surprisingly strong, which is nice. Although it does suck that he just straight up outclasses Hanabusa, lol.

One of the more surprising things about this event is that we’re also getting new world-building about the fairy kingdom, which seems to be setting up for how they teased at the main story moving over there soon. It’s pretty clear that sometime after chapter 18 they’re going to release Notte as a playable character [either as a welfare unit or as a gala unit], and I think Meene is kinda like the template for how they’ll handle Notte as a playable character.

We also now know that we’re getting a free character from chapter 16, and like most people I think it’s probably going to be Leonidas as a flame gun unit going by the preview from the digest, but it’s possible that he’ll be the next gala adventurer instead. I also think they might do something with Chelle soon, since I think they teased her showing up in chapter 17, and we also know that she’s apparently the one who introduced manacasters to the world.

The latest This Month post also talked about how we’re getting a new Halloween event for the middle of the month, which is kinda surprising. I think we’re still getting a Halloween event at the end of the month, so I wonder how this upcoming one will go. My current guess is that, since they didn’t say anything about the banner that’ll be run along with it, they’ll just be rerunning the old Halloween banner for it, and the event itself will just be based around the second year Halloween units, since they didn’t get their own event last year. At least that way we’d get two new Halloween events without having to deal with the stress of getting two differently entirely new Halloween banners in one month. I’m also hoping that they make the old Halloween units non-limited like they did with the Valentines ones.

They’re also apparently going another rerun of Accursed Archives [plus the Akasha event], which is kinda surprising, since I thought they’d just add it to the compendium. But at least this means we’ll get an extra set of rewards once they add it to the compendium later, lol.

We didn’t hear anything about a new Halloween event/banner at the end of the month, but we’re probably getting one, and unless Gala Alex gets featured before it, that’ll probably be what I save my next spark for. I’m not sure exactly how they’ll work it now, but I’m hoping that they’ll bundle the new Halloween units into a gala banner that also introduces a new gala dragon, since that’s also something I want to get, so it’d be nice to knock out two birds with one stone.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #at least we're getting like seven free tenfolds on the Ilia banner lol