Quick Thoughts on the JP Stream 6/30/16

It’s been a while since I’ve done a quick thoughts post, but it’s also been a while since a JP stream has truly been newsworthy; it just so happens that the first in a long time was one of the few I didn’t watch live. This post kinda rambles on so I’m going to hide it behind the break. As with all quick thought posts, there’s minimal editing and I might say wrong/stupid things, so please correct me if that’s the case.

• Re-entering co-op rooms and co-op in general – This is the biggest news of the day for me. As someone that wasn’t enthusiastic about co-op when it was first introduced, I have to admit they’ve done a lot to make it attractive. Some of it feels forced — like half stamina to everything, shared awakenings, HP bonus, and giving MP and PAL rewards — but they obviously had to give some incentive to make the mode attractive and they’ve certainly succeeded there. I also think they’ve succeeded in fostering a community as I’ve come into contact with more players in the past couple months than the entire 600 days before that. There are still a few QoL issues, but major ones have been resolved through co-op rooms and reconnects. The ability to re-enter co-op rooms might not be important from a functional standpoint, but it fixes so many small problems with PAD’s co-op that it really makes it more attractive to me. As a hardcore farmer, one of the biggest issues outside finding a partner in the first place was all the overhead incurred in setting up a new room — mainly the time and effort wasted pushing the extra buttons and waiting for your friend — and this effectively eliminates that. If the final implementation is as demonstrated, this will actually save time compared to single player since you don’t have to reselect the dungeon (on top of already not having to fumble around looking for an unused friend).
• Ramifications of the re-entering feature – The biggest is that people that don’t have to worry about room snipers anymore; once the first dungeon is made, you don’t have to deal with the room system anymore. As someone that has enjoyed public rooms for urgent dungeons, this is both good and bad, but overall more good. What’s good is that if you’re hosting a public room, you now have the option of clearing consecutive runs with the same partner. One of the most annoying things about sniping public rooms is that your host, well, gets sniped by other people, meaning you can’t have any reliable amount of runs. On the other side, as a host, I always feel bad when I’m running with the same person for a quite a few consecutive runs and they get out-sniped. Now, if you choose, you can run with the same person as long as both of you decide to run (any maybe find a permanent partner in the process if things go well). On the flipside, this could be bad for people who just want a couple of runs as there will probably be less public rooms to snipe.
• Shinrabansho 8 – Meh. Although any updates to one of the few collabs we are almost guaranteed to get are a good thing. I actually haven’t found a translation for the new cards so I won’t speculate on them.
• Quest/badge system – Once again, I don’t know the full details of the system nor is my Japanese very good so it’s hard to speculate. It doesn’t look particularly difficult for veterans to obtain these badges, but it looks like newer players will have a nice diversion with some great rewards (especially the +100 team cost badge). I’m a bit worried about the bind resistance badge, though, as it really devalues leaders that already have it. Maybe something like Sherias Roots is actually better than Ra Dragon now nad something like Kaede loses one of her few vulnerabilities. I’d be more excited for the skill boost badge if co-op hadn’t made them irrelevant for the most part, but I can see it being valuable for things like MZeus farming teams for people that don’t have access to all the subs. I could see the 50% SBR being useful for Liu Bei-Dios teams, alleviating the necessity of running things like Chester and Perseus to hit 100% (I’m assuming 2x SBR badges in co-op gives you immunity?). Then, of course, my best friend the time extend might actually be my most used badge–when I’m not using bind immunity, I guess.
• New leader skill (stacking 3x for each light- or fire-cross made) – A 26244x multiplier was demonstrated on stream. Welp. Can’t wait to see what Reco and other wizards can do with it, though.
• Various buffs – Meh. I use Haku as a lead on my fledgling JP account, so the upgrade to 4x is quite nice.
• Uuevo Sarasvati – Maybe a little better than what I’d expect from a uuevo these days. 100x with rows is obviously insane damage and she’ll probably make a lot of NA players question whether they really want to buy You Yu tomorrow. He almost always has the raw damage advantage, but is it enough to justify a 300k MP purchase? I don’t really want to get into a detailed comparison — I’m sure someone that cares will do it eventually; I personally have no interest in You Yu — but I’d probably be smart to hang on to your MP. Now that she has two rows and an extra one of those time extends I covet on top of that sweet active, she really increased her appeal as a sub, too. This is a great precedent for Krishna as fire could really use another quality leader. Let’s just hope their time in the spotlight lasts longer than their uevos’ did.
• Awoken Cao Cao – Pretty much the fire version of Liu Bei. In other words, fairly disappointing and far from the savior fire needed. Liu Bei gets a pass since Dios increases his co-op value so much, but the same cannot be said about Goemon/Surtr/whatever for Cao Cao. If there’s a co-op team to be had, I’ll leave finding that to the co-op masters.
• Uevo Constellations – I’m both surprised and pleased that they went with the Three Kingdoms route and gave them simultaneous split uevos. However, similar to the Three Kingdoms, their leader forms are pretty much worthless and it seems bizarre that they’d remove their resist clauses which were their defining traits. Their sub forms, however, look amazing, shoring up their biggest shortcoming with 2x skill boosts and adding an extremely powerful god killer on top of that. All the art is amazing; Castor is cute in both forms so I’m really looking forward to what they did with Alrescha and Spica.
• Uevo snubs – Indian 2 is probably the pantheon that needed new uevos the most, but I’m surprised that Constellation 1 came before Egypt 2. I also would’ve liked to see Sengoku before them. Hopefully Japanese 2 gets some awoken love soon.
• Machine Athena – To be honest, I’d have a hard time identifying that was Athena just from the art. Like, that would be the best guess to due various visual cues, but it doesn’t immediately strike me as an Athena card, mostly because her pose isn’t as imposing as it is on all her others. GungHo already got me excited for co-op with Liu Bei and Dios; hopefully Athena can add to that.
• More Cross uuevos – I don’t think this was mentioned on stream, but it looks like there are more PAD X uuevos in the pipeline. There’s really not too much to say about this until we get the details, but if Ace was any indicator, they should be quite good. The point I wanted to make, though, is that there’s increasing pressure to hold on to dupes nowadays. Skill inheritance is a major factor, encouraging dupes for both assists and targets, but if this PAD X uuevo thing becomes a trend — probably a batch for all the major characters in the anime? — I’m going to be forced to hold on to even more. You might be asking yourself “since the PAD X uuevos are overwhelmingly better, can’t you just evolve your current card and be done with it?”. Well, for the cards these uuevos affect so far, there’s not much reason to keep their base forms, but let’s say they do this for something like Haku in the future. All of her current three forms are useful in their own way, so we’ll be forced to either abandon one of them or, short of having a spare dupe, hope there’s enough overlap so you won’t be sacrificing much either way. I’m sure some of this pressure to keep and/or (re)acquire dupes is intentional on GungHo’s part. Luckily, the current MP cards aren’t all that great relative to what else is available so at least there isn’t much pressure to sell dupes for MP.
• Streaming on YouTube – From a high level standpoint, the trend towards streaming on YouTube is a great choice. As a fan of Twitch, I’d rather they’d use that platform, but YouTube is such a huge upgrade over NicoNico that it’s hard to complain. I’ve never watched one of their streams directly on NicoNico — said site’s premium “feature” usually preventing us plebs from watching — but it just seems like the video quality on YouTube was better. I’m not sure if they’re abandoning NicoNico entirely, but the more streams that go up on YouTube, the better.