Pejo
Ya if you’re teams are already doing well on SP, Hanya isn’t going to add much beyond her attack and spd buff from from her Ultimate. I find her nice for the extra SP so everyone can use a skill every turn if needed. Makes fights a little more comfy SP wise but that’s it. Her Ult and the dmg reduction (or rather increases damage enemies take which I think is a separate multiplier in the damage formula) from the burden effect off her skill is what she brings to the table.
For me that’s enough, because I like her design, as a physical support she’s fine in my book
But Gwen also has a damage reduction mechanic tied to one of her moves as well + she’s brining an extra dot that’s going to be up way more often then Hanyas bleed. So that’s an extra dot for Kafka to blow up.
I think either route works, and gearing up Hanya is very easy since she doesn’t need much to play her role. I have her with nothing but speed (151 I think) and tons of defensive stats. I may re work her slightly to raise her effect rez, but that’s on the back burner for now.
Yea. I'll try them both out but in farming stages Gui really adds a ton of damage comparatively. I still gotta get Black Swann built out proper, but then I'm going to try this team on a tough encounter instead of just calyxes and artifact elites. I'd imagine Hanya is more useful in longer fights, but I dunno if her lack of damage is making the fights unnecessarily longer to begin with. Huo² is a fantastic solo sustain that also has a really big damage buff and energy charge on her Ult that helps the DoT team. I'd rather have a Fire or Physical tank that could solo sustain, but she does her job well (so far at least). I still think Fu Xuan is the best solo sustainer in the game. I saw leaks of Adventurine's gameplay today though, he looks like an amazing tank too. Kinda like an IMG element Gepard combined with Clara. (thicc shields + counters).
Gwen, I did get a copy of recently but I never built her already having Sampo and Luka fully built. And now with Swan… so I likely never will. I’m also not the biggest fan of Gwen, don’t hate her or anything but didn’t care for her streamer/influencer background.
She adds a lot of Burn stacks and the Firekiss thing can give up to like 25% extra damage taken to enemies, which is nutty in a DoT team. I don't think I would use her outside of one though.
My big problem though is what other teams I can use Hanya in...
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Anyways, in other news. WW day 2, put a few more hours in tonight. I think I'm mostly done playing the beta for now. I finished the main story that's available in the beta, and towards the end, half of the text on the screen was either error codes or stuff like "Oh so [he=male, she=female] arrived" and "NPC_01_229818". about 75% of the text boxes were just completely blank and unfinished. It just needs a lot of work in both the story and localization stuff. The story fights were suitably fun and epic though, and the cutscenes were good. I caused a camera bug somehow during the last story boss I fought which fucked pretty much everything up and it kept focusing on random rocks and the sky and shit when I would do special moves, luckily it was almost dead when I triggered it.
They probably should have just made a proper demo with a scaled back explorable area and quests, because the longer you play, the more unfinished and glitchy stuff you run into. I believe that this game is probably further off from release than a lot of people expected. I think there will be a CBT3 for sure, and probably a 4th or 1-2 Open Betas after that before we start talking about release dates.
Anyways, after finishing the story, I explored around a bit, found a jumping puzzle which just felt awful to do on a KB/M. I think on a controller I'd have nailed it in 1-2 tries, but damn, took me like 50. Hope they have controller support added for the next Beta. Fought each of the world bosses (equivalent of Genshin's material bosses like the regisvines and cubes), and they were all unique from each other and a lot of fun. There was one flaming dude on motorcycle that was my favorite to fight. Most of the bosses have a Bloodborne-like "grab" move when they're incapacitated that you can go up and hit a button to do a cinematic move that does big damage.
I also managed to finish out the 50 rolls on the 'beginner' banner which guarantees a 5* character, and I got a Wind element monk girl. She was so ridiculously overpowered in my opinion. Like if Genshin mixed Venti and C6 Zhongli and gave her Beidou's counter. She could heal, create a beefy as fuck shield that also did decent AoE damage while it was being created, counter, and then her Ultimate was like Venti's succ that could pull in even larger enemies and group them before doing a big AoE blast at the end.
I haven't gotten a character yet that's not fun to use, even the healer. She's a pet class and you mostly attack with her dragon. Being able to equip the pokemon for extra attacks to make up for shortcomings in a kit, or to add synergy, is a great system. For instance, I gave the healer a robot that shoots a big ice beam about 20 feet ahead and creates a wall to prevent enemies from escaping and kinda pushes them towards you. It works well with her kit specifically because it puts the enemies at just about the perfect distance so that you can do her full combos without worrying about getting hit.
There were some really beautiful areas the more I explored, and the indoor stuff was great. The first area is this game's Liyue or "not China", so the Chinese aesthetics are thick, along with the character names being almost all Chinese. Hopefully like Genshin, other areas will have different themes and naming schemes and stuff. There's only so many Jings and Zhous and Qichis I can handle. One thing I was really impressed with was the weather effects for rain, and specifically the thunderstorms. They actually change all of the ground textures to different variants during a rain, so dirt looks like mud etc. The skyboxes for the game are gorgeous too. More than the the landscapes like Genshin, i spent a lot of time looking up at the night skies, stormy skys, and clouds.
I gave a lot of feedback in the surveys, so hopefully they take some of it to heart. I'd like to see this game grow and succeed, but it's obvious to me now that it's got a LOT of dev time left before it releases (at least I hope, it'd be a disaster to release it like this). The combat is the core of the enjoyment, everything else is "ok" but a clear step down from Genshin, and they were merciless with the copy/paste of systems, ideas, and content. The pokemon gear system is the 2nd best part, and I'm excited to see it fleshed out too. There's a surprisingly high variety of enemies even in the starter area, so hopefully they keep that trajectory and introduce lots of fun stuff to mix and match.
