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Previous Thread

Apologies

It's finally here!

God this rerate has taken so much longer than it should’ve, and there’s not really a good reason for that - I just kinda fell into a motivational black hole and it got more and more dragged out. So I’m sorry all, but we’re finally here and can hopefully return to our regular weekly updates from now on.

Leader Skills

Let's start with the thing that prompted this whole debacle in the first place - how are we handling leader skills?

So, to start with, there wasn’t really a perfect answer - Giving units their best available leader skill generally requires very specific, often premium teammates, which just very much goes against the core point/philosophies of the wiki ratings of having units primarily under their own power, so we weren’t doing that. You can look at other DV/Clash oriented sheets designed for endgame players for that (I’m a fan of Sinzar’s one)

So then, if it’s under their own power, do the leader units themselves get their own buff like with regular AoE stat buffs on them? Well, that has the problem of all the leader units looking very overinflated on the damage comparison sheet, when in reality a lot of the other units they buff should be alongside them, and that’s not really a useful outcome.

So in the end, our solution is for everyone to have their damage calced with the very readily available 100% stat leader skills, even the leader units themselves, and then units with strong leader skills are getting a notable bonus to their final rating, similar to that for support functionality. While this feels a little weird to have leaders being calced without their own buff, I think it’s overall the most fair way to do it for both the damage sheet and the final ratings page, and said leaders should always still end up at the same or higher final rating that they would from their damage benchmark with their own LS applied to them.

The exact LS bonus varies with both the strength of their stat buffs and the coverage of their tag quality - So for example FA Rain gets the biggest bonus right now for good strength stats on the best coverage tag (FFBE). The classic element leaders like Dioxus & Zack land in the middle with good stats and average coverage, while at the bottom is Fina/Lasswell with bad stats and average coverage, and Ibara with meh stats and bad coverage. Duane and Nora end up just below the element leaders with their bonus from the combo of bad stats and good coverage. (We decided that clash coverage is just a little worse than FFBE coverage because in general there seems to be more strong non-clash FFBE units than there are non-ffbe clash units. I think lots of players having the nier units just creates some perception bias. Still, clash is easily the second best coverage.)

You can look at the full breakdown of point bonuses from these and the other changes below in the Benchmarks & Adjustments tab of the damage spreadsheet that’s linked at the top of this post.

Parameter Updates

So here’s the part that actually made everything take so long - a damage rerate means a modernization of our calculation parameters and a full equipment rebuild of every damage dealer above a certain threshold, which, also including the new units that’d been released in this period, is just shy of 80 different units.
For what’s actually changed - first of all the builds themselves are now allowed to include any 5* Base STMRs! I’ve been kind of holding out on this in the hope that the builder would add a way to automatically differentiate between 5* sourced items and NV-sourced ones, which… didn’t happen, so we finally made the swap of creating a fixed inventory account that we build with to add items to. This also hopefully is speeding up the builds a decent amount, but it does carry the risk of legal gear with unit-specific buffs being missed from builds, so feel free to double check things on the sheet and question things in these threads! (I know nobody will)

Next, on the calc sheet side, most of the external support amounts have been bumped up. As always, they’re still going to be a bit below optimal level to give advantage to those that provide for themselves, but with less of a heavy penalty to those completely missing a certain area.
Stat buffs remain at 300%
LB damage buff increases from 150% to 250% (it was lowballed before, now it’s highballed a bit)
Amps are up from 25% to 45%
Elemental Imperils are up from 120% to 130%
Weapon imperil of 20% has been introduced.

Lastly, the final adjustment points that’re added after their damage benchmark is set have been adjusted a bit. The main thing added is element-lock penalties: -0.5 if their main damage is a magic attack (non-imbueable), -0.25 if their main damage move has an innate element but can be mixed with an imbue, and 0.25 for no significant preference in kit (which generally is a helper for older/subpar units). Stuff like most newer GLEXs that’re properly imbueable but have a decent innate element preference (such as from a 150 amp) are just neutral.

Then there’s the leader skill adjustment mentioned above (the 100% ones don’t count for anything though) and the existing support bonuses have been basically redone just to kind of recalibrate them in comparison to each other, and to in general make the bonuses a little more generous and shift weightings a bit on what adds more value these days.

Again, you can see the full breakdown of all of this in Benchmarks & Adjustments on the sheet.

Support Bump & Non-damage Roundup

As is usual with these, a bump for all the non-damage units to re-align things as roles shift at different rates is necessary, especially when this time the damage dealers also saw some significant gains from the recalcs. This time, they’re getting all bumped up by two points, which leaves Abigail, Sylvie, Melissa (clash) and Rain (clash) as the four best girls sharing the top spot.

Now, I’m not doing a breakdown of every single release and upgrade released in the last two months because god this is already SO LONG, but you can have a quick one for all those who aren’t damage dealers. For the DDs, just check the updated lists.

Fina -Dark Lineage - She’s a great killer support but her stats/element stuff is a bit subpar compared to a lot of the other good JP buffers, and lots of stuff has gaps in its uptime. At base she’d score below them, but her leader skill is serviceable if you’re lacking a better one, so that boosts her back up to being on par with lots of the good 45% amper supports such as the last two premium finas at 32.5

Sakura -Dark Lineage- & Veritas of the Frost - Speaking of good JP 45% amper supports, here’s two more. They fit pretty comfortably alongside the top end of their peers, also at 32.5

Angeal - For breakers, we’ve had a lot of the previous 160% imperil breakers sitting at 32.0, with Lion being very borderline at the top end. To me, Angeal having his biggest break imperil on a CD with decent uptime instead of a single-use grandis is enough of an advantage to get him into 32.5.

Rufus Shinra Crowns - We almost missed this guy because he’s very underwhelming. Still, he does now have fairly serviceable breaks & imperils with a two stack mirage to spam, but mostly feels Ninja edge with small downgrades, so gets 31.0, half a point below him.

Yshe Crowns - Another 160% imperil breaker, but this one’s just slightly worse than Lion so she’s back down in 32.0

Blades of Black Flame Raegen - Right now his damage punches high enough to match his breaker rating, but for futureproofing through bumps, he’s getting the breaker one right now. Once again, similar to Lion & Co with having both 89% breaks, but trading one 160% imperil for two 150% imperils. It’s flexibility, but since you’re usually not making use of both at once, that’s a fairly even trade to me and he joins the 32.0 crowd.

Red-eyed Sage Sol - Similar to Raegen, except he also has a tasty ice/dark imperil field, which bumps him to 32.5 for his breaker rating.

A few other old units have also shifted from damage to non-damage ratings in this round such as Fryevia, but I’m not listing them all here. There will probably also still be a bit of cleanup to do on the ratings page around notes and roles and such, but I really just wanted to finally get this out.
If you’ve actually read all the way down this far, congratulations and thank you. See you next week, hopefully.