[2nd Anniversary Part 1] Race to World First - DAY 0

  Team Lyric eSports + vox de ultra Games

  23,857 viewers

  We’ll be back in…

  59:57

  52:36

  41:53

  20:18

  02:09

  00:03

  00:02

  00:01

  “Hello, hello? Testing, chat, can you hear me? Audio good? …Yeah, alright, looks like we’re good to go!”

  The intermission screen peeled back to reveal a bespectacled man in casual clothing sitting at a couch in a well-furnished living room, still shuffling a headset around his ears as he made himself comfortable.

  Banners and sponsored products littered the room, with cans of energy drinks stored in a central mini-fridge between two couches and large flags and logos being hung on the walls.

  “Hey everybody, welcome back to the Team Lyric broadcast, this time with the special surprise of costreaming with the official vox de ultra channel, and we have a very, very special broadcast lined up for all of you for the next few days. I’m Jak, one of your hosts for the day, and I will be joined very soon by a couple of friends, who seem to uh… be a bit late… taking their time with breakfast, it seems.”

  He swivelled around, hanging an arm over the couch as he looked behind himself.

  Directly behind the living room, a giant kitchen and dining room could be seen in the background of the broadcast, packed to the brim with men and women excitedly chatting to each other over plates of breakfast, piled with all sorts of food picked out from a buffet line.

  A woman with bleached hair in a loose hoodie could be vaguely seen trying to push her way through the crowd, hopping towards the couch with a pep in her step.

  Her voice slowly became audible as she picked up a headset and sat down on the couch across from her cohost.

  “...rry, sorry. My bad, my bad. Look, you know how it is, had to fly out for this event, got a bit jet-lagged, and it’s just so good to be back here, in this house, meeting everyone in person again, catching up.”

  The man just shook his head in amusement.

  “Nah, I get it. This house is wonderful, the staff is kind, the caterers are amazing, the food is good, you get to talk to everyone again, all the players, all the staff, the analysts. It’s so easy to just lose track of time, but… y’know, don’t sweat it. We’re still fairly early into the morning, we aren’t missing out on anything too important right now. All the viewers at home-”

  He gestured towards the camera.

  “Are also probably just getting ready for the day, or maybe if they’re in Europe or Australia, they got off of work or it’s late at night. We’re not too pressed for time or anything, we’re really just here to chill out and vibe.”

  The woman just chuckled, nodding gratefully for his understanding at her lack of punctuality.

  “Hey everyone… I’m Jumper, one of your other hosts for this event, we’re coming to you live from Team Lyric’s gaming house, and I hope I’m not too late in welcoming everyone to Day 0 of Part 1 of the 2nd Anniversary’s Race to World First!”

  From the kitchen, a round of applause and cheers could be heard.

  “I know some of you at home are probably a bit confused, we’ve never actually had a Day 0 broadcast before, and we’ve certainly never had the opportunity to stream alongside vdu… uh, vox de ultra’s official account, usually every team and guild hosts their own individual feed. This came up on pretty short notice, we were a bit surprised by this opportunity as well, Jak, do you want to explain to the viewers at home what’s going on?”

  The man clapped his hands together in time with his syllables.

  “Ab-so-lutely. For those who don’t know, the Race to World First is usually a community run event sponsored by various eSports teams that is held every time a new Lunatic+ raid is released in Seekers of Lost Sins, and that was going to be the plan this time as well, but over the past week, we’ve seen, well, a lot of hype being drummed up for the game at large because of the 2nd Anniversary.”

  “It is crazy,” Jumper added, “when I was getting on my flight, I saw giant billboards advertising it, when I got into the city, there were ads playing on the digital displays, when I was on the train, the kids across from me were watching OneTale’s stream, the game is just absolutely blowing up all across social media, all across YouTube, all across Twitch, it is just impossible to escape. I got asked for the first time ever just out randomly in public to sign something for someone who recognised me!”

  “Yep,” Jak nodded, “now there’s a lot of contributing factors, but the most obvious thing is that we’re finally hitting the climax of the first saga in Seekers of Lost Sin. And because of all of the attention the game is getting, because of all the buzz being generated, vox de ultra saw a big opportunity to really showcase everything their game had to offer, put some eyes on the big stage, give some love back to the community, shine the spotlight on some of the game’s best personalities and players, so they decided that they want to host and sponsor the World First race themselves.

  "But, uh, that still doesn’t really explain why we’re here on Day 0, does it? The Lunatic+ raid doesn’t even open until tomorrow, hell, the regular Mythic and Lunatic versions of it aren’t out, and we don’t actually even know what the raid is going to be! Seekers of Lost Sin still hasn’t reset yet, we haven’t gotten the final story update of Part 1 of the 2nd Anniversary… Jumper, what’s going on with that?”

  “Well one of the things that vox de ultra really wanted to do for this event was make it an opportunity to really celebrate every part of the game. Of course, that includes the hyper-competitive and prestigious Lunatic+ races, but there’s so much more to this community and the game than that!

  "All of the people here at Team Lyric love every part of the game, we love the story, we love the characters, the lore, we love the theorycrafting, the teambuilding, all the nitty-gritty analysis, little synergies, min-maxing and tiny gameplay interactions, everything. There's so much love that goes on behind the scenes for both the game of Seekers of Lost Sin itself, as well as this event. And we want to show some of that love off, there’s a lot to Seekers of Lost Sin to learn about, a little bit of something for everyone, whether you’re interested in the story, the characters, the gameplay, the teambuilding, or whatever else.”

  The two casters nodded together, a small silence emerging as production told them something through their headsets, inaudible to the viewers.

  “I believe now we can be finally introduced to our third host for today’s stream, no?” Jak asked to no-one in particular.

  The camera cut away from the busy living room to an upclose view from a webcam of a young man with messy hair and freckles underneath his eyes settling into a gaming chair as he fiddled with a drink bottle.

  “Come on, introduce yourself, tell us who you are, what you do, and what we’ll be doing today on stream.”

  “Uh, hey,” the young man gave a half-hearted wave to his webcam, “I’m Auguri, uh, I’m the Head Analyst at Team Lyric. My team does a massive amount of analysis and review of all of our runs, we advise them on specific strategies and tactics, go over exact positioning, callouts, give them gameplans, but also specifically within the analysis and coaching staff here, I’m the ‘metagame expert’. I do a really large amount of theorycrafting for very specific builds and setups, I’m usually the one making edits to the composition and gear to hit very specific thresholds and get specific results. If you’re an active player of the game, you’ve probably seen a lot of my teambuilding guides up on Youtube, if you’re a bit more casual, you still probably refer to my tier list, it’s the biggest one that’s properly maintained that the community uses.”

  He cleared his throat nervously, opening his bottle again and taking a sip from it to calm down.

  “And uh, today, I’m going to be the one taking all of you at home through the final story update of Part 1 of the 2nd Anniversary Event, ‘The Moon and the Stars’! Really, really cool event, the community has been waiting for this a long, long time, just like, everyone, from every part of the community is really excited. The raiders are excited over what will probably be the biggest, most complicated bosses we’ve ever seen, I have a lot of good lore expert friends who have just been talking non-stop over the past two years about Arden and the Void, and of course… there’s the big white elephant in the room, we’re all finally seeing Estelle for the first time, probably the most anticipated character in SoLS… uh, ever?”

  “Yeah, ever sounds about right,” Jumper chuckled.

  “So uh, yeah!” Auguri smiled and shrugged as he set aside his bottle, feeling a bit more comfortable, “Day 0 is going to be a bit more of a relaxed environment, we’re mainly going to be using the time to discuss all of the new content that’s coming up. It’s like, kind of soft confirmed that Estelle is going to be a welfare S-Rank at this point, we’re gonna go over her kit, talk about whether or not she has a place in the meta, potential builds and teams for her, etcetera. We’re gonna be live-reacting to all the story content, so get ready to pull those tissues out, might be a few tears coming out.

  "After that, we’re going to go into the Mythic and Lunatic versions of the upcoming raid with the rest of Team Lyric, sort of get a sneak peak at what Lunatic+ might have to offer, look at the new drops, new gear, new Oaths, discuss the story and lore reveals, all of that and more. But uh, that’s still a bit away, the reset time is still like one and a half hours away, so… we have a bit of free time, what do you guys wanna talk about?”

  “Well,” Jak sucked in a deep breath, “this seems about as good a time as any to talk about what you think the meta looks like right now, just lay everything out so we know what to expect tomorrow, what the mindset is going in blind to the Lunatic+ runs so we can sort of be on the same wavelength as the players before, well, presumably, everything gets thrown into chaos tomorrow when the raid starts, and we’re probably not gonna get the time to talk about all of the nuance and buildup since it’ll all change so, so rapidly.”

  “Sure, sounds good to me,” Auguri shrugged, “uh, wait, actually, I- I have an idea. How do you two feel about a little tier list action while we wait for the update? The one I have that everyone currently uses isn’t really taking Lunatic+ into consideration since I don’t think that’s really the best way to start approaching that difficulty of raid, and it’s usually best to take it on a specific raid-by-raid case-by-case basis when it comes to planning out characters to raise and build, but it seems like it’d be a bit of good fun here.”

  The two casters just laughed.

  “Oh that, yeah,” Jumper chortled, “you know how Twitch chat, Twitter, Reddit, just everyone really fiends over tier lists. What better way to immediately make everyone inflammatory and get them to shout at the screen than to make a tier list minute one into this stream. Yeah, sure, let’s go! Lunatic+ tier list time, I hope you’re all ready to get mad when Auguri places your favourite character in D tier!”

  “Alright, just gimme a second then to pull up the tier list maker on my site, but uh, where do you guys wanna start? Who do you think we should put up first?”

  The camera cut away, focusing on a stream of Auguri’s browser as he opened up a new tab, with smaller views of both the casting couch and analyst in the corners of the stream.

  Jak raised an eyebrow before looking towards his cohost.

  “Look, I don’t know about you two, but there’s definitely something that I’m interested in talking about. A lot of divisive opinions on this character, especially in the more dedicated, competitive circles in the community like this one. You’ve seen all the insane clips going around showing the absurd strategies, she’s all the hotness and rage right now, c’mon, let’s start this off right, let’s talk about the newest release, Belle Symphonia.”

  Auguri almost immediately sighed tiredly, chuckling in chagrin as he shook his head.

  “Oh, no, you really want to put me to work right away, huh?”

  Jumper giggled.

  “What, come on, you don’t want to talk about the super-secret 300IQ Antartican-superserver discombobulation wombo combo Twitter clip tech?”

  “Oh, god, the f-... stupid Ashvellum clip that’s been going around, please don't remind me,” Auguri put his face into his hand, bemoaning the situation he had inadvertently put himself in, “uh, production, can you pull this up real quick, I’m sure you know what we’re talking about… uh, yeah, that’s the one.”

  The stream then cut away to a separate monitor playing a video displaying chaotic gameplay.

  [LUNATIC+]

  ASHVELLUM, ENGINE OF APOCALYPSE

  At Era’s End

  4.9% HP > 0% HP

  It started at the end of a battle, leading into a cutscene transition between boss phases, with a giant demonic construct, molten rock pouring out of cracks along its body, roaring as it collapsed backwards into a volcano as the player characters leapt away from the edge of the active caldera spurting magma into the sky.

  A chaotic mass of voices from poor-to-medium quality microphones all shouted over each other, making the audio unbearable.

  “ALRIGHT, YEAH, P2 DOWN, P2 DOWN.”

  “C’MON GUYS, THIS IS THE RUN, WE’RE DOING IT!”

  “LOCK IN LOCK IN LOCK IN”

  “TIMERS TIMERS”

  “THIS IS OUR BEST CYCLE YET, COME ON COME ON.”

  “P3 SPEEDRUN WORLD RECORD! MOM I’M ON TV!!!!”

  The volcano shook and rumbled as an unholy scream emerged.

  Gargantuan claws of lava-lined ashen stone erupted from the volcano, gripping onto the caldera’s edge as the massive demonic golem burst from the pool of lava one more time.

  Its outer shell started to crumble, cracking and bursting at its seams, revealing the true form of the demon underneath – a skeleton of pure demonic energy with no physical form, an unnerving system of nerves and veins composed solely of mystical energy crawling across the decaying body.

  It bellowed one more time, letting out an otherworldly call, darkening the sky into a bloody, fiery red as the world trembled.

  Pillars of molten rock exploded from underneath. Meteors broke through the blackening clouds and slammed into the volcanic mountain. The demonic golem’s core fractured, containing such a pure, dense singularity of demonic energy that space started to destabilise, creating a hole through which countless demons tore through, almost creating a new Hellgate inside of its central furnace solely through the sheer impossible amount of energy stored inside its forge.

  “PUT THE TIMER UP! START THE CLOCK!”

  A small clock was overlaid on top of the game, holding at 00:00.000, waiting until the players regained control of their characters to start counting.

  An unbearable, scorching wave of heat physically burst outwards of its broken core as it slammed its fist down on the player characters, signalling a final, desperate rampage.

  [LUNATIC+]

  ASHVELLUM, ENGINE OF APOCALYPSE

  Horn of World’s Shattering

  100% HP

  The voice communications became a mess of unintelligible noise for the average listener as the boss battle properly resumed.

  The battlefield was cluttered with a mess of bright red visual effects and particles as an insane, intense dance between the players and the game started to take shape.

  Forty tiny characters ran across a battlefield that slowly became smaller and smaller as it was destroyed, narrowly dodging endless meteor storms and volcanic fissures, constantly scattering and regrouping as tanks dived in to take aggro and pull the boss’s attention to the sides.

  99.5% HP

  Specific characters were targeted by a special attack, indicated by a glowing insignia above their head, forcing them to separate from their clusters as they split to the far ends of the battleground as small pillars of volcanic eruption slowly broke out towards them, closing in on them and rendering more of the battlefield unpassable.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  98.7% HP

  “Alright, gogogo, we’re sacking now.”

  Select few players deliberately walked several of their characters towards the boss, manipulating its algorithms into performing specific actions that would certainly kill them.

  In a regular run of this raid, this would eventually result in the boss totally wiping all players and forcing a reset, but it would take time for the boss to reach that point. In this instance, however, the few seconds this deliberate sacrifice bought them would be more than enough to guarantee victory.

  98.3% HP

  “Buffs ready, three, two, one…”

  Transparent visual effects encircled the raiders and their characters, and the bosses health started to drain more rapidly.

  “Ignites in, Ignites in.”

  98.1% HP

  97.8% HP

  97.2% HP

  96.3% HP

  The boss’s health started to tick down faster and faster as a storm of fiery attacks were aimed at it.

  Underneath its health bar, a small icon of fire, representing the status effect of ‘Ignite’, was constantly applied and removed.

  Next to it, a second status effect, meant to loosely resemble an imploding star, with a small number at its bottom-right corner started to rapidly accumulate.

  96.2% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (64)

  95.9% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (135)

  94.7% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (217)

  “EVERYONE GET READY, WE’RE POPPING AT 90, GET READY TO CALL TIME!”

  93.2% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (376)

  The player, whose perspective the video was from, selected a specific character, a loosely-dressed witch in black hovering next to a strange hovering machine comprised of orbiting rings, and activated one of her skills.

  92.5% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (513)

  Because it was the character that the perspective player was controlling, the tiny character model performed a small animation and played a loud voiceline.

  The witch cracked her neck in annoyance, clicking her tongue as mana circled around her before converting into eldritch Null energy.

  ‘Alright, time’s up. I have daughters at home I need to make dinner for.’

  A dramatic visual effect signifying a tremendous buff glowed underneath her feet.

  91.8% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (650)

  90.9% HP

  Extraplanar Anomaly (812)

  The player activated the character’s primary skill.

  ‘Coordinates set. Qliphoth Bridge stable. Logos Reactor online. Energy readings, infinite. Say goodbye, fuckface.’

  The incomprehensible star-like machine by her side glowed, radiating with brilliant, blinding energy, as the space around the boss seemed to shimmer and distort, bending inwards into a tiny pinhole of pure black.

  And a supernova burst forth from the dimensional crack.

  90.9% HP > 0% HP

  “TIME, THAT’S TIME!”

  ‘00:27.633’

  The overlaid timer paused the moment the boss’s health was depleted.

  “TWENTY-SEVEN FUCKING SECONDS, YEAH BABY, WOOOORLLLDDD RECOOOORDDD!”

  “FUCK SUB TWO, FUCK SUB ONE, FUCK MINUTE BARRIERS, WE’RE GOING FOR SUB THIRTY SECONDS!”

  “HOLY SHIT ITS REAL! THE BELLE STRAT IS FUCKING REAL!”

  The call quickly devolved into an incomprehensible mess of complete screaming and chaos, as all of the players nearly broke their microphones with their incoherent screeching.

  Auguri sighed, the sound of his voice easily distinguishable by the much higher quality of his headset microphone.

  “This clip… this God damn clip… it has caused me so, so much grief in the past two days. People just can not stop mentioning it to me. People keep at-ing me on social media, asking me what I think, people keep getting banned in my stream chat for trying to post links, my text-to-speech donations are just constantly flooded by Belle hype and asking whether or not I saw it, people keep DMing me on Discord about it. I get a hundred questions every day asking where I think Belle goes on the tier list, I- I just… man, I’m so tired of this clip.”

  The two hosts on the casting couch couldn’t help but chortle at his grief.

  “Yeah, this stupid Antartican wombo combo that only the 4 digit IQ brain geniuses at Evergreen can pull off, I, ugh,” Auguri groaned, shaking his head and grimacing, resetting himself, “okay, let’s back up for a second. Let’s go over some of the context behind this clip, and… I-I think it will prove useful as a framework for talking about Belle and her potential in Lunatic+.”

  “Yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, Auguri, but,” Jumper raised an eyebrow, “I believe I was told that you actually have the inside scoop on this clip? Is that right?”

  “Ah, yes, that- that is right,” Auguri sighed, “Unfortunately, I know a lot more about this clip than I would like to. So, for context, this run was done by the guild Evergreen, if you guys remember, they notoriously almost ended the Howling Flame, Roaring Sky World First like four days early. They got Ashvellum down to like… 5.9% on the final phase on Day 4, I think? Way before anyone else, and everyone almost lost their minds over the upset, but they just couldn’t replicate that pull and then the race was won on Day 8 by none other than Team Nocturne.”

  He paused for a moment to wet his throat with his drink bottle before speaking again.

  “I need to remind you, Howling Flame Lunatic+ is easily still the hardest release ever. I’m pretty good friends with a couple people in the guild, and I can say this… pretty confidently. They might not be in contention to win the 2nd Anniversary race, or any other race in the future… but they are absolutely the single best team at specifically Ashvellum. They took their loss personally.

  “They are the only team that I know of, that to this day, clears Ashvellum on Lunatic+ in one attempt every week when they properly try. Evergreen is just not on the same level as everyone else for specifically this one boss. Like not even the entire raid, they sometimes mess up the other bosses, but never Ashvellum.”

  He played around with a couple of the portraits on his screen, pulling up the faces of a few characters and dragging them into the ‘S-tier’ for visual clarity.

  “They’ve cleared Ashvellum with basically every viable comp in the game. 12 Mage Triple Aleister, TenC, Double Artila, Rainbow Shuri, Setsuna Flex, like I can go on. They get suboptimal teams to do consistent runs as well like the Aleister-Galyx core, they’ve done Mono-Wind Shuri core, Mono-Water Shuri core, half the time their tank parties are just messing around, they’re running the Phenia-Lancea combo because they just think its funny instead of like… anything else.

  "If it can be physically brought into Ashvellum, they’ve cleared with it, and it took them one attempt to do it. They do all sorts of insane challenge runs as well. I’m pretty sure you can look up ‘8-man Ashvellum Lunatic+’, and you’ll see the most insane thing you’ll ever see in your life. Just like, anything you can think of, they’ve beaten Ashvellum with it or without it just out of pure spite.”

  He then sighed, dragging his mouse over to Belle’s portrait before holding down on it and spinning it across the screen.

  “Do you want to guess how long it took for them to get that run working with this character as their core?”

  Jak chortled again, getting a sense of where the conversation was headed.

  “Belle came out after the 2nd Anniversary Countdown stream on the 28th. Evergreen has a tradition to take every new character that comes out in their intended role as the primary… DPS, tank, healer, support, whatever, and do an initiation run with them against Ashvellum. It usually takes them one day to figure out a functional strat with them. To be clear, what that means is if, for example, a new character comes out and they’re a tank, the tank parties will be forced to run them as the primary tanks and can’t just shuffle them off to the side or whatever. If there’s a new DPS, they have to be the highest on the performance charts, can’t run characters that do more than them, if they’re a buffer for a specific archetype or damage type, they have to run with only the things they buff, etcetera.

  "On average, it takes them six hours to do their initiation run. For Belle? Their first clear took them three days. They basically had to relearn the entire fight to make Belle work.”

  Auguri sighed, running his hand across his face again.

  “And as funny and flashy as that clip is, it doesn’t tell the full story. If you look at the logs, or you watch the VOD, you will find that despite the record pace on both P1 and P3, their P2 was actually so slow, the run in its totality isn’t even actually as fast as their best pulls. They actually had better splits on their infamous 5.9% pull than with Belle. Now does this mean I’m saying she’s bad? No, but she is really, really weird to talk about. Let’s- let’s just start this off by tabbing back into the game… uh, which I have pulled up on the side, and lets pull up the training dummy to demonstrate how Belle teams work.”

  His monitor switched over to Seekers of Lost Sin, where an isometric camera panned over a simple training ground.

  “Let me just change the team real quick, uhh…”

  He opened up a menu, cycling through a huge roster of characters before finding four adequate Seekers to put onto his team.

  “Alright, that’ll do.”

  After a quick loading screen, four characters strolled out onto the training ground, each playing their unique entrance animations.

  Belle just yawned as she lazily walked out, cracking her neck and stretching her arms high above her head as she winced in annoyance, the Helios Engine floating around her.

  ‘Ugh, make this quick, yeah?’

  Auguri selected Belle with a hotkey, taking control of her and moving her across the training ground, commanding her to attack the stationary wooden dummy at the centre of the arena.

  “Okay, so, how does Belle work? The main thing you need to know about Belle is how she interacts with Ignite. Whenever any source of Ignite is applied onto an enemy, that means not just your party, but anyone else in the raid who is doing Fire damage as well, the game will calculate how much total damage that Ignite would have done if you waited out its full duration, and then stores a percent of that as Extradimensional Anomaly, which is a separate debuff on the enemy that stacks. Then, depending on where the Ignite came from, one of two things will happen. If you look at the dummy’s status effects…”

  He spun his cursor around the ‘Ignite’ status effect that was constantly flickering in and out of existence, being applied the moment Belle attacked and disappearing the next instant.

  “This Ignite is disappearing because it comes from within our own party. If the Ignite comes from your own party, Belle will actually store the Ignite damage twice, once in the Anomaly debuff, and then a second time for the Helios Engine. When its stored in the Helios Engine, it will then be recycled for her Auto skill, which spits it back out. Otherwise, if it came from any ally not in your party, it will just act as a regular Ignite.”

  If one paid attention and looked closely, they would see the tiny flame particles normally indicating the ‘Ignite’ status on enemies slowly drifting away from them as it was applied, being siphoned towards the Helios Engine.

  After a few seconds of attacking, the Helios Engine crackled with lightning, shooting out the stored value of Ignite damage as a blast of crackling plasma.

  “Now, why is this important? Ignite normally does not stack. Only a single instance of Ignite from a particular character can be active at a time. If you try to apply an Ignite that is weaker than the current Ignite from that character, it technically applies, but it doesn’t do damage until every source of Ignite stronger than it runs out and it becomes the strongest. Belle storing the Ignite damage every time it applies essentially enables every single Ignite to do a pretty decent percentage of its full damage regardless of the presence of conflicting sources of Ignite.

  "Now, the other thing about Belle that’s notable…”

  The cursor moved off to the side, scrolling down a dropdown menu filled with all sorts of configurations and settings exclusive to the practice arena.

  He clicked on another one of his characters, and selected an option to ‘Copy as Ally’, spawning a copy of the character that was treated as if it was controlled by another player in a separate party.

  “Contributing or interacting with other parties in multiplayer is really rare, and when it does pop up in a character’s kit, it’s usually much less important, is drastically less effective, or comes at really high power budget and opportunity cost. And usually, it's only on buffs, whether offensive or mitigation-based. You can actually see a normal version of this in Belle’s second passive, like, see here.”

  He momentarily paused the game, pulling up Belle’s character information screen and highlighting the text on her Passive 2.

  ‘Whenever Belle is targeted by or receives a buff from a party member, her cooldowns are reduced by 0.1 seconds. Whenever Belle is targeted by or receives a buff from an ally, she gains one stack of [Yearning for Starlight], which grants her 1% more ATK, stacking infinitely. Each stack lasts 10 seconds and decays individually.’

  “When she gets buffed by someone in her own party, she gets this insane cooldown reduction effect that can scale and loop with her Passive 1 and result in this endless positive feedback loop that ends up basically cutting her cooldowns in half. When anyone else in the raid tries to buff her, she… gets 1% more ATK. Extradimensional Anomaly runs directly counter to this, where Ignites are stored at full effectiveness no matter the source. The only difference is that other players can’t contribute to your Auto skills damage output, which… in a Raid setting, doesn’t matter, since her Active skill is like 90% of her damage output. Like, here, I’m gonna pop this Pyphorus’s Active, this is like another player using theirs…”

  The copy of his character – a shirtless brawler with fiery hair which had tips that seemed to glow and burn, drifting into the air – let out a massive roar, ripping off the shackles on his wrists, engulfing his hands in towers of fire that he drove into the ground, sundering the world around him.

  “We see Extradimensional Anomaly tick up, Pyphorus’s Nine Infernos does nine hits, so it has nine stacks here. Press Belle’s Active…”

  Belle snapped her fingers, creating an extradimensional rupture from which an artificial star imploded.

  “198K damage, not the greatest, ignore the numbers for now, my Pyphorus and Belle are currently configured for different things. Anyways, if we repeat this process with the Pyphorus that’s treated like its from my party,”

  The process repeated itself with the original Pyphorus.

  “Again, we see 198K damage, and then we wait a few seconds… one… two-”

  The Helios Engine lit up again, activating Belle’s Auto skill and shooting off a bolt of plasma.

  “An extra 70K. Remember, the Auto skill can’t crit, the Active can, we only did this off nine stacks of Anomaly so that’s not represented here. Anyways, this is the main thing that’s creating all of the ridiculous boss oneshot clips you see running around. Belle takes a non-stacking mechanic, lets it stack, albeit at reduced efficiency, though it still is overall more damage than before, then can apply separate multipliers onto that with her Passive 1 and Crit multi, and then in Raids, she can then make it even more exponential because she benefits fully from the presence of all six to ten players in the raid.

  "This all sounds super insane, super strong and broken… so why was Evergreen so slow on their overall Ashvellum time? Why did it take them so many days to clear a boss that they now basically do with their eyes closed?”

  Auguri sighed heavily, before tabbing out of the game and going back to his tier list maker.

  He dragged up the portrait of another character; a solemn, thin white-haired man with round glasses, his hair hanging over and covering one of his eyes.

  “Let’s talk about Trailblazer Seekers as a whole by comparing her to the current meta Trailblazer character, Aleister and his… really silly looking full Mage parties.”

  He dropped Aleister down into the S-tier, where his red eyes glared sharply at the viewer, daring them to challenge his knowledge.

  “Like Belle, Aleister really incentivises you to be building towards a certain archetype. Belle wants you to run Fire characters, Aleister wants you to be running as many spellcasters as possible. The difference is that playing only Fire characters closes options, while maximising on spellcasters, strangely, actually opens up teambuilding.”

  He started dragging up more and more mages in the game up into the A-tier below Aleister for demonstration.

  “Aleister, alongside being a lynchpin support for most Truth, Nature and Dominion, very crucially, also provides defensive mechanics. That is the single most important thing about him. He provides all these peeling and kiting tools and ways to manipulate aggro and divert damage that frees up slots on your team that would otherwise be wasted on sustain options like tanks and healers. If Aleister is on the team, you essentially open up one or two team slots for whatever flexible utility mages you need. And typically…”

  He hovered his mouse over the selected mages to emphasise his point.

  “Mages are the most desirable niche, utility and flex picks for a party. They are the most likely to just have random abilities that no other character has that can counter certain boss abilities. The ability, for example, in the 12M3A comp, for three whole players to just stack three other mages each in their party adds insane mechanical flexibility to your raid group. And it is okay if they have luckluster offenses or defences because Aleister’s kit supplements those weaknesses.”

  Then, he dragged up a couple Fire-specialty characters, placing them below the mages in the B-tier.

  “Belle’s problem is that she restricts the characters you can bring so heavily. When it comes to Lunatic+, you can’t really run just a ‘small Belle package’, and split a couple of Fire characters across all ten players. Belle is a bit of a clunky glass cannon, has pretty bad defensive and movement stats, and if you’re only running enough Fire characters to make their combined DPS contribution average out to just a bit higher than her contemporaries, she’s still kind of a liability that gets caught in mechanics super easily. And if she goes poof, all of those dedicated Ignite slots you brought immediately become worthless.

  "It just isn’t worth that like 20-30% increase in damage compared to other top-tier DPSes. If you want to make Belle worth it, you have to be dumping everything into her and planning on just skipping boss mechanics by just doing enough raw damage. And that’s the problem, look at the characters you run alongside her to get those ridiculous numbers.”

  Once again, he frantically swirled his mouse over a selection of Fire-based Seekers.

  “These are characters who really don’t do anything but make Belle have a bigger number. Unlike with Aleister, Belle’s teammates aren’t really opening up options in teambuilding. Fire is a pretty narrow, straightforward element. You aren’t giving yourself enough options to properly resolve mechanics, and that’s okay just about everywhere else because Belle does enough damage to blitz through everything without caring, but in Lunatic+? That’s a really massive hurdle to try and get over, and you can’t just jump over it with a large damage number.”

  “Uh, well,” Jak raised an eyebrow, amused by the tirade, “have you maybe considered… Belle’s number is really big? The biggest, even.”

  Auguri sighed tiredly, before shaking his head and chuckling, giving in.

  “Okay, look, I’m not saying Belle is bad. But she is really volatile and context dependent. You will absolutely see her everywhere in challenge runs, meme runs, and speedruns of existing Lunatic+ content. For regular gameplay, there is more than enough boss-focused content to farm that Belle’s damage output absolutely trivialises. If you’re in a Mythic pug, and you see someone with a blinged-out Belle, absolutely switch your team up for any Ignite sources or Crit buffers you can manage. But specifically for unexplored Lunatic+ attempts and the Race to World First? There just aren’t enough Seekers who can apply Ignite who are also equipped to deal with the gruelling onslaught of mechanics to make going down like eight to ten characters worth of utility worth it. That being said, I’m absolutely expecting a few groups to be trying oneshot cheese anyways, to see if they can just get a lucky enough run to claim first place.”

  He exhaled deeply, shuffling away all the characters he pulled up for demonstration, leaving Belle alone on the tier list, fiddling around with her portrait as he thought about her viability.

  “I think… overall, I’d probably place her in B-tier specifically if this list is for the race. I expect her to show up on a few lucky attempts, a few teams might play around with a strategy or two involving her for a couple of the easier bosses, but I don’t think she’ll be a part of any strategy that actually clears the entire raid, unless the upcoming Estelle release or the Setsuna or Kagura alts shore up her weaknesses or create a new style of team. Alright, who do we wanna talk about next?”

  There is a point to this, it’ll take a bit to pay off though.

  pug - This usually means ‘pick up group’. Refers to anything done with other players that is not preorganised, and usually done either randomly in a chat or through the game’s native group finder.

  pull - In the context of a raid, essentially just means ‘attempt’ or ‘reset’.

  alt - In gacha games, this is short for ‘alternate version’, referring to new obtainable characters who are alternate versions of already-existing characters, usually representing them at a further point in the story’s timeline, from an alternate universe or timeline, or sometimes just wearing holiday costumes or swimsuits.

  If there’s any other terms that are unfamiliar and don’t have to do with names (i.e TenC, Rainbow Shuri), let me know.