Here’s a build guide for my Minion Life Stacking SRS Guardian. This is not a zoom build, but can clear all contents comfortably.

Our main map clearing skill is the Summon Sentinel of Radiance, the RF 2.0 minion. Though it lacks in mobility, its fire aura is nothing to scoff at. 

For single target, we use our Summon Raging Spirits with Minion Instability to boost our DPS.

Ascendancies

For the ascendancies, allocating Radiant Crusade is a priority as it is a very powerful skill when clearing the campaign.

The Sentinel combined with Convocation and the increased cooldown of Convocation can carry you to early yellow maps with little to no investment. It’s so powerful that I recommend getting this, even if you’re playing other Templar ascendancies and just change to your needed ascendency afterwards.

It takes 20% of the hit damage you get. Only downside is that it’s very slow moving and it has a 20s-base duration, so you need to keep resummoning it once in a while.

Next one we get is Bastion of Hope as it can greatly help us in maxing out our attack and spell block. We trigger the attack block using Shield Charge and the spell block using any of our spells.

Allocating Radiant Faith next gives us a lot of Armour and Energy Shield.

Last, take Time of Need to help us with Curses and Elemental Ailments and regenerate one 100% of our life every 4 seconds.

Also Read: How To Climb The Ranks In POE 3.22 TOTA? - 8 Tips

Passives

For the passives, focus on pathing to the minion damage and minion life nodes on the left side of the tree.

When you get the Sentinel, allocate Convocation Cooldown Recovery Rate in the Minion Defense Mastery and the Minion AoE in the Minion Offense Mastery.

Next, we get the Reservation Efficiency nodes so that we can fit our defensive auras and path to Eldrich Battery to help with our Mana costs, all the while allocating Life, Minion Life and Minion Damage nodes along the way.

After that, we focus on maxing out our block chance by allocating shield nodes and using a Rumi’s Concoction Granite Flask. For the low-budget version, we can take Death Attunement. If you still can’t reach level 25, take Raise Spectre and Whispers of Doom for the double cures.

The next big upgrade would be getting an Elegant Hubris Timeless Jewel with two minion notable (Axiom Warden), either for minion life or minion damage. 

Amanamu’s Gaze is a big boost to our DPS, but it is quite expensive. 

Equipment

For our equipment, Tavukai is a required unique that damages our SRS to trigger Minion Instability.

Remember to get one with a negative Chaos Resistance to speed up the death of our SRS.

You can also use Noxious Catalysts to further speed up the process if you’re using an uncorrupted amulet. We use a Replica Siegebreaker so that any minion that dies leaves a burning ground for 20% of their life.

You can resummon the Sentinel to trigger this effect and since it’s our minion with the highest life, this would be a big boost to our damage.

Weapons

For our wand, we use the Rapture Edge Convoking Wand with plus one to all minion skill gems and a free suffix to craft our trigger mod.

For our shield, we use a shaper influenced shield (Havoc Sanctuary Archon Kite Shield) with the recovery percent life when you block. This is one of the most important mod for our defense because of our max block. You can push getting a Fossilised Spirit Shield with plus one to all minion skill gems and other minion modifiers if you have the POE Currency to spare.

The helm (Carrion Veil Hubris Circlet), gloves (Rune Grip Crusader Gloves), boots (Ambush Hoof Crusader Boots), and body armor (Gale Suit Saintly Chainmail), are pretty standard rares with the reservation and block chance mods, only required for the high budget version.

Rings

For our rings, we use bone rings (Mind Eye) and prioritize getting minion life and damage mods. Don’t forget to max out your resistances, reach your attribute requirements, and try to get as much chaos resistance as you can fit in.

Flasks

For our flasks, Progenesis is a great addition to our defenses but is not required. You can replace it with a Rumi’s Concoction for the low-budget version and an Amethyst Flask or a Bottled Faith for the high-budget flasks version.

A quartz flask (e.g. Masochist’s Quartz Flask of the Lynx) is a must, since we’re always diving in the center of packs. Try to get immunity to bleeding and corrupted blood in your life flask (Chemist’s Divine Life Flask of Assuaging). For the last two flasks, we use a basalt flask (Transgressor’s Basalt Flask of the Tortoise) and a quicksilver flask (Masochist’s Quicksilver Flask of the Bear).

For the animated Guardians equipment, we use Dying Breath to increase our minions DPS, Legacy of Fury to scorch nearby enemies, Eye of Malice to further decrease the enemy’s resistances.

Try to get a helmet with a life region corrupted mod: Gravebind in combination with a Crusader armor (Saintly Chainmail) with explode mod to further improve our clear speed.

The specters we use are Pale Seraphim for its increased damage taken to buff, Xoph’s Loyal to cover enemies in ash, and Tukohama’s Vanguard for the 25% fire exposure.

Gem Links

For our gem links, we use SRS, Awakened Burning Damage, Unleash, Minion Life, Predator, and Empower.

We put Flammability and Elemental Weakness in our trigger wand (Rapture Edge Convoking Wand). 

Remember to put your Animate Guardian linked with minion life in the shield so we can easily swap it out when our AG is in danger.

We link our specters in Stone Golem with Feeding Frenzy and Combustion.

For our auras, we use Malevolence, Summon Skitterbots, Tempest Shield, Determination, and Defiance Banner. We use Flame Dash and Shield Charge for our movement skills. We use Molten Shell to boost our defenses and Convocation to recall our Sentinel. We have an extra slot in our trigger weapon, which you can use with a minion or spell of your choice.

For the low-budget version, you can swap out Burning Damage and Empower with a concentrated effect in Hypothermia and link Malevolence with Divine Blessing.

Conclusion

This build’s standard gameplay is popping our flasks, then summoning the Sentinel. Use Shield Charge to place yourself in the center of a pack and Convocation to recall your Sentinel and watch everything around you die use your SRS and Signal Prey for tanky rares and bosses.

Remember to resummon your Sentinel every 20 seconds or you could end up dying when you dive in a pack and your Sentinel is not up. Also remember to Shield Charge once every 4 seconds to keep your block chance maxed.

Starfield’s massive open world has a lot going on with vast numbers of systems and mechanics constantly working together in the background, which in typical Bethesda Game Studios’ fashion, allows for an excellent sandbox playground that emphasizes freedom above all else.

From exploring uncharted planets and surveying alien flora and fauna to building outposts and more, there are numerous sandbox activities to dive into that let you have fun of your own making and at your own pace beyond the Frameworks of the game’s plethora of handcrafted content.

Space Piracy Intro

But out of all of those activities, the one that’s probably the most enjoyable is space piracy.

Being a pirate tends to be a blast in games more often than not, obviously. And stormfield puts very little restrictions on you if you aspire to be a ruthless pirate in space, leaving chaos in your wake as you fly out of a system with your cargo bay full of valuable Starfield Items that you’ve just acquired through less than legal means.

There are, of course, plenty of ways to be a rogue in the settled systems. But if a space pirate is specifically what you want to be, there are several things the game lets you do to that end.

Different Ways to be a Space Piracy

*The most obvious one and one that you’re likely going to end up doing anyway if you intend to do the faction quest lines is to join the Crimson Fleet, which is literally a faction of space pirates.

You do have to jump through some hoops before you’re formally inducted into the fleet. But once you do become a member and gain access to the full facilities on offer in the key, the Crimson Fleet’s headquarters, a lot of avenues open up for your space piracy goals.

Like smuggling Contraband for instance, that’s something that you’re going to want to do a lot of because of how profitable it tends to be. You can, as an example, head to Neon and buy large quantities of Aurora, a substance that’s illegal to possess in every place throughout the settled systems, except Neon itself. It can, however, also be sold for hefty amounts of Starfield Credits, especially if you sell in large quantities.

You always run the risk of getting caught by the authorities, of course, but the risk is often worth the reward. And if you do plan on hauling large amounts of illegal cargo to sell for large payouts, you should also be investing in the payload skill in the tech skill tree to increase your ship’s cargo capacity.

And this is where having access to the key comes in handy, because it allows you to evade the law much better. Anytime you enter a star system that’s in United Colonies or Freestar Collective territory, your ship will be scanned for Contraband and you can’t land your ship on a planet until you’ve cleared that scan.

Those scans are, of course, mighty effective and scarily efficient, which means you need to equip your vessel with certain shady equipment to help you evade those scans.

Installing a Shielded Cargo hold, for instance, will automatically boost your chances of evading scans. Meanwhile, you can also install Scan Blockers. Each of which gives you a further 10 boost. Both Shielded Cargo and Scan Blockers can be purchased and installed only at the key.

Also Read: Starfield: How to Quickly Obtain Razorleaf & Mantis Armor Set Early in the Game?

*Something else that you’ll want to invest in for your ship if you’re committed to a life of crime of piracy is a good grab drive.

If you’re hopping from system to system, even if you don’t intend to land on a planet in a system that’s just a stopover, you’re still going to be scanned as soon as you enter, which means that you’re going to need to initiate your next grab jump as quickly as you can.

Before you have a chance to fail the scan and turn the authority’s attention, a better grab drive that you can pump more power into lets you initiate a jump much quicker. So, definitely make sure you install one of those.

*And if you’re looking for opportunities to engage in some good old space piracy fun, there’s plenty of that to be found in Starfield.

For starters, you can pick missions from the Mission Board in the key, all of which are procedurally generated quests that task you with less than legal objectives, whether that’s destroying United Colony ships or stealing from civilian vessels.

Beyond that, you can just do that stuff yourself. Anytime you encounter a ship while flying out in space, you can inhale it to initiate a conversation, after which you get the option to demand them to empty their cargo hold. How things go from that point will depend entirely on how you handle the conversation that follows.

Though, by investing in the deception skill in the social tree, we'll make enemies much more pliable to your piracy demands. Additionally, this skill also makes Contraband scans less effective. So, it's definitely worth spending skill points on for all would-be space pirates.

Of course, it also goes without saying that as a space pirate, you'll be engaging in your fair share of dogfights from time to time. And beyond the obvious stuff, like installing better Shields or more Firepower, you can also invest in plenty of skills to give yourself the edge in ship combat, all of which are found in the tech tree.

There is the Targeting Control System for instance, which unlocks the ability to target and lock on enemy ships, making your missiles deadlier and more effective, while the Shield System skill increases your ship's shield capacity and at the highest rank occasionally also lets you resist 100 of all damage taken from an attack.

The Ballistic Weapon Systems and Energy Weapon System skills are also useful skills that you can unlock early on, while on the steeper end by which point you'll probably be much deeper into the game. You can also upgrade your Automated Weapon Systems, Electromagnetic Weapon Systems, and Missile Weapon Systems.

*If you're just looking to engage in some light space piracy, then you're going to be able to get by without spending skill points in most of these. But if a life of crime is something that you intend to dive headfirst into, you're probably going to be locking horns with plenty of beefy heavily armed vessels, in which case these upgrades are going to be massively useful.

Ultimately, one thing that cannot be stressed enough is that Starfield works overtime to let you live out your space fantasy. And if your space fantasy is to be a ruthless thieving law violating pirate, there are plenty of tools at your disposal here to do just that.

The Aeromancer is a DPS sub-class of the Specialist. Depending on your Class Engraving, she can be a melee-type or caster-type damage dealer.

Skills

The Aeromancer only has two types of skills. For melee combat, she uses Umbrella Skills. For casting and meter generation, she uses Weather Skills.

Typically, Umbrella Skills have all the utility: Stagger, Weak Point or Party Synergy. Although Weather Skills have utility options, they’re less preferred compared to Umbrella Skills, so Weather Skills are mainly used for damage.

Identity

As for her identity, Sun Shower, you can activate it once you fill up the Raindrop meter. Sun Shower does AOE damage to nearby enemies until the gauge runs out.

While inside Sun Shower, all enemies, including raid bosses, receive an attack damage reduction, which can help mitigate some damage every time it’s up.

Two Class Engravings - Wind Fury & Drizzle

Aeromancer has two Class Engravings. The first one is called Wind Fury, which primarily uses Umbrella Skills. The Wind Fury Aeromancer is very flexible in terms of raid mechanics, such as Stagger Check or Weak Point Check.

The other one is called Drizzle. Drizzle increases your Sun Shower duration by 100% and also increases your Weather Skills damage up to 30% when Sun Shower is active.

So, Drizzle is recommended if you would like to play the Range Caster style of Aeromancer or use Weather Skills as your main damaging abilities.

Let’s start with Wind Fury.

Instead of attack damage reduction to enemies, your Sun Shower will give bonus attack speed and movement speed to your party members inside the AOE circle. On top of the identity changes, you gain bonus Crit chance based on your movement speed and Crit damage based on attack speed.

If you choose this Class Engraving, you would want to have at least a little of Swiftness in general. On the other hand, you don’t want to go Mass Increase, because it would reduce the Crit damage provided by your Class Engraving.

The Wind Fury Aeromancer uses Swiftness and Crit as their main combat stats with a lot of play style variations. This Class Engraving mainly uses Umbrella Skills. They can also use a few Weather Skills as DPS or to generate identity gauge.

However, Umbrella Skills are your primary abilities. The core gameplay pattern of the Wind Fury Aeromancer is to use your preparation skills with the Current Occurrence tripod, then use spender skills with the Reversal tripod. Her preparation skills with the Current Occurrence tripod will give you a very special shield called Current Shield when you successfully land a hit with them.

The majority of the Wind Fury Aeromancer’s damage comes from the Reversal tripod. You need to make sure you always have a Current Shield from the Current Occurrence tripod before you use your spender skills.

Only if you have the shield from the Current Occurrence tripod, do you have a chance to trigger Reversal tripods? This shield is classified separately from any other shields, so you can’t trigger the Reversal tripod with a Protection Rune or shield effects from your support.

Looking a little deeper, you can’t use the Barricade Engraving, because the Reversal tripod consumes the Current Shield before it does damage. But Barricade needs you to be shielded for it to apply.

As for the Engravings, she typically uses Wind Fury, Grudge, Raid Captain, Adrenaline and Hit Master. None of her primary damage skills are positional, so it’s ideal to use Hit Master.

Relic Set

When it comes to the Relic set, the Wind Fury Aeromancer has multiple options depending on your playstyle. Of course, you need to prepare a lot of Lost Ark Gold, so that you can choose the Relic set you want.

Usually, Hallucination with high Swiftness is recommended, since it’s very agile and performs well in almost every situation.

Option two is the Dominion Set. You can go six Dominions or mix with two Nightmares for less mana consumption. The Dominion Set technically does more damage than the Hallucination Set. But it’s not always preferred since it’s a hassle to maintain the set buff.

The final option is the Nightmare Set. Crit will become your primary stat to cover the lack of Crit chance. This option is going to make you slower than the other two options. However, it does the most damage in a shorter damage window.

Gems

As for gems, all you need is to make sure you have Attack and Cooldown gems on your Reversal spender skills.

Then, it varies based on whether you use three spenders or four spenders, one Weather or two Weather Skills.

There are only minor differences among the variations, so the best way to figure out what to use is for you to try it yourself.

Also Read: A Summary Of Recent Lost Ark Updates And Improvements On KR Server- New Contents & Class

Wind Fury Aeromancer

The Wind Fury Aeromancer doesn't rely on many Runes unless you're looking to run a Dominion Set, which will require you to proc Conviction and Judgment before you cast your Awakening.

Since the Aeromancer is a very mana-hungry class, Conviction, Judgment and a few Focus Runes are great for her regardless of the Relic set.

Drizzle Aeromancer

Moving on to Drizzle, if you're looking for a more skill-shot-based and less spammy class so you can focus on your positioning and decision making, then Drizzle is the path you'll want to follow.

Unlike Wind Fury, Drizzle relies on Weather Skills to do damage, while Umbrella Skills take care of utility, like Party Synergy or Counter.

As an Engraving, Drizzle increases your Weather Skills up to 30% while your identity, Sun Shower, is active.

So, your goal as a Drizzle Aeromancer is simple. All you need to do is build the Raindrop meter as fast as you can without using your primary Weather Skills, which are Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun.

When Sun Shower is active, you want to use everything on cooldown.

Standard Stat Distribution

As for the Drizzle Aeromancer's combat stats distribution, she uses Specialization as her primary stat, because her weather skills scale with Specialization and it helps with Raindrop meter gain.

She doesn't have any sort of Crit modifier outside of her Awakening and Party Synergy, so Crit is recommended for her secondary combat stats.

Most of her damage comes from two skills, Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun, during the Sun Shower state. You can squeeze them in two times each in a single Sun Shower once you achieve a certain amount of cooldown reduction.

Gem Setup

As for the gem setup, the Drizzle Aeromancer needs damage and cooldown gems on both Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun. Unless you can cast these two skills twice in one Sun Shower, otherwise you should give priority to the Cooldown gems of these two skills.

Then, all you need to do is place a damage and cooldown gem again for Whirlpool and Rainstorm.

Similar to the Wind Fury Aeromancer, Drizzle also uses Conviction, Judgment and Focus Runes. It's easy to proc Conviction and Judgment with Weather Skills for extra cooldown reduction and mana regen.

However, they're not necessary and the heavy mana consumption can be covered with multiple Focus Runes instead. It's best to have at least two Wealth Runes for optimal gameplay since Drizzle relies on filling the identity meter.

Engravings

Drizzle Aeromancers typically use Grudge, Keen Blunt Weapon, Drizzle, Adrenaline and Hit Master.

Same as Wind Fury, none of her primary damage skills are positional, so it's ideal to use Hit Master.

Relic Set Options

The Drizzle Aeromancer uses Hallucination for her Relic set. She doesn't use Salvation since the bonus attack speed from Salvation isn't that beneficial for Drizzle.

You don't use Nightmare since the damage from her Sun Shower is a good chunk of your overall damage, but it isn't affected by the Nightmare Set, because the identity doesn't consume mana.

Hallucination is the best option here as she has a fairly low Crit rate.

A Rule To Follow As A Drizzle Aeromancer

There's a simple rule you need to follow as a Drizzle Aeromancer: hold.

You need to hold damage skills when you don't have Sun Shower active and you need to hold the meter generator when Sun Shower is about to run out. So, you can fill up the meter as soon as possible.

Usually, you should be able to fill up the whole meter with these two skills, but if anything, you can always use Whirlpool, which is another great meter generator that also does really high damage.

So, this is your emergency button if you have just a little more meter to fill up. Otherwise, you want to squeeze this skill in your Sun Shower rotation for extra damage from the Drizzle Engraving.

Drizzle's damage is heavily back-loaded. Wiping Wind and Whirlpool do more damage on their later ticks and Scorching Sun takes more than two seconds to land all the hits. So, you need to be patient and look carefully for a damage window. In other words, the better you know the fight, the more rewarding Drizzle is.

Conclusion

In closing, both Aeromancer Class Engravings can be as fun as you make it. Whether it is an unstoppable blade to slice and dice your enemy with Wind Fury or calling upon nature's power to strike your enemy with Drizzle, the Aeromancer has a little something for everyone.

Kafka has brought some of the biggest twists into the meta.

In this guide, I am going to talk about things that you need to know about her, whether you have her or not, as well as cover important questions like how game-changing some of the build decisions are. And most importantly, I will showcase the most insane teams you can build with her. Believe me, these teams are amazing and it’s not something you want to miss out on.

1. New Teams

I honestly didn’t think Kafka would be this good because there were a lot of rumors going around that she would end up inferior.

But I am happy to tell you that the woman who gave life to our character is pretty amazing if not broken. So, if you are still struggling to add Kafka to your Honkai Star Rail Account, my answer is yes.

So, let’s take a look at some of the teams that are currently dominating Memory of Chaos.

*First of all, we’ve got an interesting comp made up of Sampo, Bronya, Kafka and a healer.

Now, what’s amazing about this team is the synergy with Kafka and Bronya. Basically, Kafka can trigger DoTs immediately upon using her skill and the Ultimate can also trigger Shock state on the enemies as well. So, Bronya gives Kafka an extra turn and with the massive ATK buff in addition to sometimes having Bronya ATK boost from Ultimate, Kafka will shred enemies to pieces.

And let’s not forget Sampo is also doing a lot of good damage from his DoTs, which will get triggered by Kafka’s skill.

However, there is a big drawback to using this team as well as a few others and that mainly has to do with an extremely high skill point usage. Activating Kafka’s and Bronya’s skill each turn puts a huge pressure on the skill point economy, especially if you’re not using Luocha. Because any other healer might need these skill points to keep the team alive. So, in this case, you will most often use Sampo’s basic attack and this team becomes kind of a single target killer.

But don’t get me wrong, this is probably the most fun team I’ve played with so far and the synergy is really good here.

Also, the pressure on SP becomes lower if you have E1 Bronya since then she has a chance to refund the 1 SP from her skill.

*Now, the next team is a pretty unique. Silver Wolf is yet again showing up here because it’s made up of her, Kafka, Tingyun and Bailu. This Mono Lightning team is amazing when the enemy has Quantum Weakness.

First of all, Silver Wolf can then consistently apply Lightning Weakness on them. But in addition, Tingyun’s ATK boost coming from both skill and ultimate as well as her restoring so much energy to Kafka, means that Kafka can dish out her Ultimate really often.

Although, this team won’t have that many DoTs going on, since Kafka will be the only one here doing the DoT damage. But regardless, it’s a unique comp that you can build if you have Silver Wolf.

Also, one important thing I wanted to mention here is that normally, Kafka’s best in slot relic set is Sizzling Thunder. But with this comp and against Quantum weak enemy, Genius of Brilliant Stars is way better for her. And I am talking about actual personal damage increase you wouldn’t see otherwise in other teams.

Still, keep in mind, this relic set has an extremely niche use-case. But if you do have it, it’s going to be amazing for Kafka in this team.

*Now currently, I am seeing a lot of player reports coming that Sampo, Kafka, Silver Wolf and Luocha is one of her best teams right now, which makes sense since you’re getting a massive DEF shred and RES reduction from Silver Wolf, while Luocha keeps the skill point economy happy and thriving and Sampo is the best or should I say top-tier team mate you can pair with Kafka. So, this team can easily clear the hardest content you’ll go up against.

*But what about Luka? Well, he is also really good with Kafka. You’ve probably seen a team made up of him, Sampo, Kafka and a Healer in other content creator videos. And what I really like about Luka is that the Bleed he applies from his skill scales super well with the enemy’s health, although it does have its limit that’s tied to his ATK.

So, as you can imagine, since Kafka can trigger the DoTs immediately with her skill, this bleed becomes amazing, especially since you don’t actually reduce the remaining turns on the DoTs triggered. So, the enemy will keep bleeding and Kafka will keep smiling.

Still, keep in mind this team is also extremely SP hungry. So, the best healer, unfortunately, is the limited Luocha here. But you can make it work yet again by sometimes not using Sampo’s skill if you have another healer built. And also, Luka’s skill only needs to be triggered seldom, since Bleed lingers around for 3 turns.

I mean, however you look at it, the fact that you can trigger DoT damage that ranges from 30 to 80k is insane and this team is super fun to play. And of course, you could replace Luka with Serval here who, by the way, can have her Shock exist along with Kafka’s.

However, one of the best things about triple DoT team that has Luka is that he can equip on himself Pearls of Sweat Light Cone, which helps him reduce enemies DEF further with his ultimate, while Serval is an Erudition unit, so she can’t even equip this great DEF shred cone.

In fact, if you’re running this triple DoT team, using Before the Tutorial Mission Starts light cone on Kafka, can help her regain energy so fast. Most of the times you will be able to trigger her ultimate every 2 turns, since Luka will be shredding Enemy’s DEF with his ultimate and the Pearls of Sweat light cone.

*Finally, one of the more quirky team comps that is a bit experimental at this point. But it’s made up of Himeko, Asta, Kafka and, of course, a healer.

I’ve been mentioning healers all the time. But you can use a Preservation unit, provided that they can keep the team alive. But I digress. So, this team is pretty funny because both Asta and Himeko can produce Fire DoT on enemies. Of course, Kafka can trigger them with her skill. But in addition, Asta can boost her ATK and increase her SPD, which are both important when building Kafka.

So, these are the teams that have had the most success with her. And there’s definitely a lot of variations you could go for. For example, instead of Silver Wolf, you could use Pela in a team with Sampo and Healer. So, keep in mind these teams are not set in stone.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail 1.2: The Newest 5-Star Lightning Nihility Unit Is Coming! - Kafka Pre-Release Analysis & Builds

2. Build Considerations

Now, when it comes to Kafka’s build considerations, they aren’t that super complex, but there are some major things you need to be aware of.

Basically, you want to build her with ATK Body and either ATK or SPD boots. If you have her signature light cone, going with ATK boots is fine, but for the most part, there are certain breakpoints that allow her to take more turns as you can see here:

• 121 SPD Extra Turn Every 2ND Cycle of New Enemy Wave
• 134 SPD Extra Turn Every 1ST and 4TH Cycle of New Enemy Wave
• 161 SPD Extra Turn Every 1ST, 2ND and 4TH Cycle of New Enemy Wave

So, you can aim for these thresholds as long as you can hit them.

Just keep in mind that if you play her with Sampo or other DoT character, make sure she has at least 1 less speed than them, so they can take their turn first and then she can trigger their DoTs with her skill.

Now, as for the main relic set, obviously, Sizzling Thunder 4-set is amazing for her. But if you don’t have it, you can go with two pieces Hacker/Sizzling or Sizzling and Musketeer.

As for Planar Ornaments, it’s super simple. You can choose Lightning DMG Sphere and ATK% Rope. You can go with Break Effect instead, but it’s not always easy to guarantee Kafka will be the one breaking the enemy toughness. So, ATK% remains far more reliable.

And honestly, there’s not much to the sets themselves. Space Sealing Station is by far her best in the slot, although again if you want to go with that Break Effect build, then Talia: Kingdom of Banditry is a good choice.

And as for the overall build, you can see the overview here:

SPD> ATK%> EHR Substats

Just focus on SPD, then ATK% substats, while picking up some Effect Hit Rate won’t hurt you along the way.

Now luckily, even if she applies status conditions on enemies, you don’t need much Effect Hit Rate. In fact, you only need 10% from substats because the other 18% comes from her traces, which is perfectly enough to land her Shock DoTs consistently.

But here’s where a bit of complexity comes in. So, there’s a lot of good light cones for our mommy character. But which one you should go for?

Well, truth be told, if you haven’t got the signature cone or Good Night Sleep Well 4-star gacha cone, then her best choice is going to be Fermata, which you can easily obtain from the Forgotten Hall shop.

In fact, I would argue Fermata is really strong on her because at max superimposition, she will consistently deal 32% more damage and even when she breaks enemies, she will have 32% more Break Effect.

Although, Good Night Sleep Well does outperform it when using her in a team with other Nihility debuff characters. But I wouldn’t sweat it too much. Because the only sweat you do need to care about has to do with the Pearls and that usually goes on to Sampo or Luka.

But everything else shown here would be her best and recommended cones:

• Patience Is All You Need
• Good Night Sleep Well
• Fermata
• Eyes Of The Prey
• In The Name Of The World
• Incessant Rain
• Resolution Shines As The Pearls Of Sweat
• Before The Tutorial Mission Starts

But keep in mind, only the signature light cone comes out on top. But even then, I would say her selection of light cones is super flexible. So, you don’t have to worry which one is best for her because the selection process is pretty easy.

3. Eidolons & Opinion

So, I think in terms of the so-called Meta that’s honestly kinda similar to Genshin Impact’s, I would say Kafka is a pretty strong unit. But the biggest thing about her has to be her ability to enable multiple new teams, which in my opinion, is the most exciting aspect of any new character.

She deals good damage. I often would see her ultimate ranging from 70 to 110 thousand. And then afterwards, enemies would take 30 to 50 thousand DoT damage depending on the team comp, which in my opinion is pretty impressive, not to mention the fact it’s funny to watch my foes die before they can take their turn.

And what’s amazing here is that I have some of the worst relics equipped on her. So, imagine how much better she would be with proper stats.

Still, if I had one minor complaint, then it would be the Skill Point problems that you’ll run into unless you’re using Luocha. I will admit it. Initially, I thought Luocha was only good because of the enemy lineups we had when he first came out. But now it’s pretty clear that the best-selling point about him is the auto-healing that doesn’t require that many skill points.

With any other healer, you will quickly notice how you will run out of SP pretty fast, especially in the triple DoT team with Sampo and Luka or the Bronya comp I showcased earlier. So, you need to resort to things like Sampo only using his basic attack, to preserve some of that SP.

And I am not sure if Kafka’s at fault here. Maybe once we get a new DoT character who isn’t skill point hungry, then we can see teams that are more flexible with healers other than Luocha. Or maybe we get a healer who is similar to the coffin guy and can heal without using that much SP.

Also, when it comes to her Eidolons, her 1st one is seriously busted. It’s a bit specific and requires more Effect Hit Rate than usual to make it work all the time. But she gets about 19% DMG increase, which you won’t see happen again until E6.

And her second eidolon is literally made for DoT teams. But that would be pushing too hard if you’re F2P and if you still enjoy her using, maybe on her rerun you can go for E2.

But overall, I think Kafka is a great character that has a fun new playstyle, enables fun new teams, and I can finally have her look at me like I am not worthy of her.

It’s official that Fontaine is finally the next destination in Genshin Impact. And these are the top 5 new features coming with the 4.0 update.

Feature 1: New Region

I am sure a lot of you are anxious about the whole water exploration mechanic. And honestly, it looks pretty decent.

First of all, you can use any character to swim around, not just the Traveler. And there is no annoying Oxygen bar to worry about. So, you can take your sweet time exploring the depths, although there is a stamina bar for sprinting. But you won’t die or anything if it runs out. And there are even these currents that you can swim to and increase the speed.

But when it comes to the actual Fontaine region, it looks amazing. The devs were clear that you will barely see any empty spaces when going underwater. There’s chock full of stuff to explore, many different and cute water creatures living here and some you can even utilize for various things, like gaining a shield and there are tons of different areas to explore on the ground. So, you won’t be just swimming underwater all the time.

Now, when it comes to new enemies, we saw some cool designs of these Clockwork Meka. But there’s also two new bosses that got introduced.

The first one is called Icewind Suite. And this boss fight is going to be really unique because you’ll need to do adapt to different mechanics that you’re not used to seeing. And the other boss is going to be the big Mr Crab with a volcano on its back called the Emperor of Fire and Iron.

However, probably the biggest change we are going to see in the game is going to be this system called Arkhe. But vision users from Fontaine have this unique attribute and the Arkhe is made up of two opposing energies - Ousia and Pneuma.

But basically, characters from Fontaine will yield this power and you will be able to use against enemies of Fontaine or other various objects.

For example, the Clockwork Meka who holds a shield can be removed from it if you use one of the Fontaine characters. Or, in other example, if Ousia and Pneuma energies are aligned, the Annihliation reaction is triggered, and it generates energy.

As far as I understand, it’s not as intricate as the elemental system. But it will be the unique aspect of any Fontaine character that you pull for. Like to me, all of these sound superabstract as now and we’ll need to see how these mechanics work when the update is live.

Finally, in order to reach Fontaine, you will be able to either take a boat from Sumeru or if you have completed the Archon quest in Mondtstadt, you will be able to quickly teleport to Fontaine instead.

I guess Hoyo finally realized a lot of new players have a massive backlog of quests before they can reach a new region. So, it’s really nice to see there’s some help to fast forward this process.

On a final note, the Archon’s quest will persist from 4.0 to 4.2 update, which is great to hear this. Because the Archon quests of each nation are really exciting when playing through without filler content in between.

Feature 2: New Events

With the new 4.0 version, we’re getting a bunch of events.

Now, the major event that will be happening is going to be called Mega Meka Melee, which consists of a few activities, including some underwater timed challenges, a combat game mode and a rhythm mini-game called Dance Dance Resolution. And your reward for completing these mini-games is going to be good-old Benny boy, along with tons of materials shown here.

The next event called Relic Records will require you to collect different types of mats and defeat the monsters in the Fontaine region. To me, this looks like an introductory event to help us get better acquainted with the new region.

Then, there’s also going to be a Photo event. It’s pretty simple. Take some photos of Fontaine region, learn more about its locations and get some rewards.

There’s also a dedicated combat event called Verdict of Blades. It seems like it will be using few unique mechanics to make the combat feel a bit more different, so that’s kinda nice.

Finally, we can see all the events condensed into one place and from the looks of it. There’s also going to be a Leyline Overflow event some time later.

However, in my opinion, the biggest surprise here is the free Lynette that everyone will be able to obtain as long as they have reached Adventure Rank 25. And if that’s not all, there’s more love coming from Hoyo for the beginner players and you’ll also get enough materials to get Lynette to first ascension.

Feature 3: New Characters

Finally, we will take a closer look at the 4.0 characters.

Lyney

Starting with Lyney, he’s a 5-star Pyro Bow user. And it seems like he will have a similar playstyle to Ganyu.

His charged shot has two levels. The first charging level is just a regular charged shot while the 2nd one can become a Prop arrow and after unleashing, it will deal increased damage and summon a Grin-malkin hat. But I prefer calling it the cat in a hat. This little buddy of his will taunt the enemies and have some health. But when it expires or gets destroyed, it will deal Pyro damage to enemies.

Finally, his burst turns him into the cat in the hat. You can move around with him, damage the enemies and then, afterwards, explode to deal damage once more and create a new cat in the hat. So, it looks like his burst feels very similar to Fischl’s and I feel like his entire kit is like a mix between of Ganyu and Fischl.

Lynette

Now, the other one of the two performers is Lynette.

At first, I honestly thought she is going to be a dedicated support for Lyney. But it seems like she is more of a support that you can use with many characters.

Basically, her skill has a similar feeling to Yelan’s. You can either tap it to deal damage or hold down the button and enter this shadowy state where she runs around and has an ability to mark an enemy. And then afterwards, when the skill ends, she deals damage to the marked enemy.

I am not sure how useful it is going to be in combat, besides applying Anemo. But having more characters who have an increased run speed is great. Because Genshin’s exploration is getting bigger by almost every update.

And as for her burst, it’s really cute. Just like Lyney, she summons a cat in a hat and it will periodically deal Anemo damage in an AoE. In addition, this burst has elemental absorption. And what’s cool about it is that the element it absorbs, it will shoot out the same element attacks to enemies.

This will be really interesting to see if it applies enough of the elemental gauge, so that some characters who utilize Vape or Melt can perform it more consistently.

Also, I am not sure if Lynette has an ability to group the enemies, like other Anemo characters. But maybe this will be possible with constellations.

Also Read: The Best Guide To Wanderer In Genshin Impact! - Best Artifacts, Weapons, Teams, Playstyle & More

Freminet

And then, we finally have the last sibling, Freminet.

He is a 4-star Cryo Claymore user who has a cute penguin Pers that helps him in combat.

By activating his skill called a Pers timer, his normal attacks will increase Pers Pressure Level and unleash waves of frost damage and other varying attacks that will combo on top of each other. These attacks will vary on the Pressure Level and honestly, he seems way too interesting for a 4-star, so here’s hoping we can have some fun with his playstyle.

Also, if you use him in your party, he will reduce the underwater sprinting stamina bar by 35%. So, right now, he is the most OP character when it comes to underwater swimming.

But let’s not forget that we also got a sneak peek at the banners and the first phase will have Lyney and Yelan with Lynettte while the 2nd phase will have Zhongli and Childe as well as Freminet.

By the way, the 2nd phase banner is a nice nostalgic callback to 1.1 if anyone remembers. And the 5-star bow for Lyney will also be featured.

Feature 4: New Equipment

If it’s a new major update, you know we’re getting some new equipment. And in this case, we’re gonna be able to farm 2 new artifact sets.

However, Hoyo seems to be playing sneaky here and I cannot talk about these artifacts officially. Because nothing has been revealed about them. But on the brighter side, we’re getting 5 new craftable weapons and 5 new Battle Pass weapons as well. If you find it difficult to obtain or craft these weapons, you can directly purchase a Genshin Impact Account. This will save you a lot of time and energy.

What’s cool about the Battle Pass is that these new weapons will be added alongside the existing ones. So, if you’re still not done refining some of them, you can still take your time or start collecting new ones.

Also, for those who you who have powered through fishing quest to obtain The Catch, a new 4-star sword will be available if you’re ready to go on another fisherman’s phase.

Feature 5: Quality Of Life

Couple of a few more things I want to mention come from the developer’s discussion.

First of all, 8 of these artifact sets are going into the strongbox. And I cannot tell you how happy I am to see Emblem and Tenacity in here. Because as much as I love Shimenawa’s set, I was mostly in that domain trying to obtain godlike Emblem pieces. And I don’t even have to tell you how salty I would feel after trying to farm the Tenacity set and all I am getting are Pale Flame HP Drops.

Also, we will be able to destroy 4-star artifacts more quickly with the new button added, although I am not sure who’s crazy enough to waste that precious artifact experience here but more power to you, I guess.

And for those 5 people who are still playing Genshin TCG, you’ll be able to now observe duels, which in all honesty, it’s a cool feature to have.

Then, there’s a really cool party system update. Not only will characters enter with unique animations and stand in awesome poses, but the party screen will also have different backgrounds.

Finally, I am not sure about you, but this is one of the top anticipated quality of life changes that I needed. We’re actually getting a multi-layered map.

Part of a reason why I stopped exploring Sumeru’s desert regions is because it just became too overwhelming to navigate the areas without a proper map system. So, now that we have this, I might actually just go back and see what’s hiding in the desert.

All in all, we’re getting a new region of Fontaine that features underwater mechanics, a bunch of events that give out free rewards, including the new 4-star Lynette. While when it comes to the banners, phase 1 will have Lyney and Yelan with Lynette, and phase 2 will feature Zhongli with Childe and Freminet.

Finally, two new artifact sets, 5 new craftable weapons and Battle Pass are also coming with the new update. And there’s the new fishing sword. But that’s basically 4.0 in a nutshell.

Blade is probably one of the biggest surprises when it comes to the meta. So, here, I am going to talk about his place in the meta, things that you need to know about him, whether you have him or not, as well as cover some important questions, like how game-changing some of the build decisions are. And most importantly, I will showcase the most insane teams you can build him.

New Teams

Let’s first talk about some amazing teams you can build with Blade and how unique some of them are.

Now initially, you might think that Blade has access to limited amount of team mates he can utilize. But surprisingly enough, quite a few characters work well with him.

*So, the first team that’s really strong is made up of Welt, Dan Heng, Blade and one of the healers. What’s great about this comp is that Welt boosts Dan Heng’s damage by consistently applying Speed debuff. Dan Heng can do that himself by using his skill, but it might not land due to the enemy’s effect resistance. So, it’s easier to apply Speed debuff with Welt since you build him with Effect Hit Rate.

But not only this, Welt can also equip on himself Pearls of Sweat and reduce the enemy’s defense in addition to increasing the damage they take by 12% thanks to his Ultimate’s trace. So, both Dan Heng and Blade can dish out some nice damage.

And what’s even better, you only need to use Blade’s skill every 3 turns. You literally cannot use it until the buff runs out. So, it’s easy to manage the skill points in this team.

*Now, the next team is an F2P variation. Pela, Natasha and Fire Trailblazer or any damage dealer is the way to go here. Pela works as an excellent DEF debuffer, so Blade can hit for big damage, while Natasha puts in the work as a freeby unit to keep Bladie alive.

But you might be wondering: Why use Fire Trailblazer? Isn’t he a shielder and that works directly against Blade’s whole purpose of losing HP against enemy attacks and building up his talent to deal damage?

The thing is, Trailblazer’s shields are paper thin, so even if Blade gets hit, he will very likely get damaged as well. So, someadditional damage mitigation won’t hurt him, since you do need to consistently keep an eye on his health.

But either way, you can just replace the main character with any other damage dealer or even support. The purpose here is to utilize an F2P team. However, we did get the final Eidolon for the fire version and it gives a nice 30% DEF boost, which works both for shielding and damage.

*Next, let’s talk about his top meta team, which is made up of Luocha, Silver Wolf and Bronya. Obviously, Luocha is the best healer for him due to how the auto heal works if Blade drops below 50%, which is convenient when he uses his ultimate.

But the character I wanna talk about here is Bronya. No joke, this team is disgusting when it comes to clearing hardest challenges and Bronya helps here big time. By himself and using my build, which I’ll talk about in a moment, Blade hits for 62k damage with his ultimate, 67k with follow-up from the talent and 30k with Enhanced Basic Attack. Really amazing numbers considering he is unbuffed. But when you plug in Bronya, his damage increases from 40% to all the way to 70%. That’s insane if you think about it.

But the irony here is that Bronya is Blade’s best Harmony support because the majority of his damage scales with HP. So, Bronya’s DMG boost works super well for him, unlike other damage boosters.

For example, if I use Tingyun instead of Bronya, she is nowhere close to the Guardian of Belobog. Bronya ends up as a better booster than Tingyun by almost 25% on average. In fact, Tingyun’s skill boost is really weak on Blade. Unless I am missing something here, it boosts by like 10%.

But the number is kinda inflated because all of my damage comparisons so far have been tested against 3 targets, which is the ideal amount for Blade. And it only gets worse with a single target. However, her Ultimate boost is great for him but it’s not consistent compared to Bronya’s skill.

So, while Bronya is the best Harmony buffer for Blade, Tingyun kinda works, same for Yukong, who can boost Blade’s Crit values.

And as for Asta, she’s just not worth it for him, unless you have no other better option. But, this meta team with limited 5-star units is insane although we’re obviously looking at a premium comp here.

However, the thing that I love most about Blade, aside from his edgy approach to life, would be the fact that he works as an amazing sub-damage dealer for any team. If you have no idea who could fill the last slot when building a team, you can just add Blade and put him to work.

I think that’s the best-selling point about him. He has a pretty self-contained playstyle. He doesn’t ask for too many skill points and he delivers amazing AoE damage.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail: Everything You Need To Know About E0 Blade - Relics, Planar Ornaments, Light Cones & More

Meta Analysis

So, Blade is a strong and versatile damage dealer. What about his place in the meta?

First of all, we have to look at the upcoming Memory of Turbulence changes. The first one that’s coming up will make Blade pretty tanky and after each cycle he will unload damage. The stacks he gains here will require him to get hit or consume HP. So, without a doubt, this next Memory of Chaos cycle is going to be tailor made for him.

Afterwards, later in August, when using follow-up attacks, all resistance of the hit enemies will be reduced by 30%, which is huge and Blade’s damage will increase significantly, helping you end the fights with more cycles left.

Now another cool thing that was added in 1.2 update is the new Forgotten Hall made up of 6 stages. Two most prominent bosses here are Yanqing, who has a weakness to Wind and summons a lot of these annoying but squishy swords.

So, Blade can easily take care of them while in the last stage, Kafka who is also weak to Wind, has 2 of these enemies that keep respawing. But 3 targets total, the most perfect amount for Blade to unload all of his damage.

Basically, the new Forgotten Hall is going to be super easy with Blade, while the next two upcoming Turbulence changes are going to help him big time in clearing Memory of Chaos.

Right now, if you care about his pull value and you are still in the process of building a 2nd team, he is perfect for clearing the hardest content.

Build Considerations

Now, one more thing I wanna talk about would be Blade’s build considerations. I won’t delve deep here and instead.

Maybe you’ve noticed that he has dual scales with both ATK and Health. The thing is ATK is much more inferior compared to HP. And so, when it comes to picking a Rope, hands down HP mainstat is his best option.

And as for the rest of the relics, there’s a lot of talks going on whether it’s better to go for HP or SPD boots. And the truth is, if you have SPD boots, use them, and try to aim for 134 Speed, which is the breakpoint against the current highest level enemies in Memory of Chaos. And this allows Blade to act twice quite often, assuming he doesn’t get debuffed or frozen.

However, HP boot isn’t that far off from SPD boots. They provide a sizeable damage increase. So, if you don’t have SPD, then definitely go for HP.

And as for the rest of the stats, you can see them here:

• Body: Crit Rate / DMG
• Boots: SPD / HP
• Sphere: Ele DMG
• Rope: HP

Substats: Crit Value > SPD > HP% > ATK%

However, what I really wanna talk about would be the new relic set. I honestly didn’t expect it to be so good for him because essentially Blade can easily maintain the 16% Critical Rate from the new set and it’s literally achievable on turn 1. It’s by far his best relic set and everything else wane’s in comparison.

However, you still need to farm for it. In the meantime, Musketeer or the Wind sets, whether 4-sets or double 2-sets are good substitutes. Like, I have a pretty mediocre build here due to how much unluck loves me and it still works out super well for him.

Still, not everything is sunshine and rainbows with this guy. Unfortunately, Blade has some of the worst Light Cone options. I mean, it’s not that they are bad, but only a few are worth mentioning. Mutual Demise, a 3-star cone is a great option if you need a ton of Critical Rate, although he needs to stay below 80%, which isn’t always easy to utilize.

Then, there’s Herta’s shop 5-star cone. But since ATK isn’t that valuable to him and weakness break takes time to inflict, it’s a good but not an outstanding option.

But here’s where things get interesting. His best 4-star light cone has to be A Secret Vow, already at Superimposition 1. It catches up to S5 Herta’s shop light cone, assuming the enemy has more HP than Blade. But at S5, this light cone is by far the strongest thing you can equip on him. That is, until you get his signature cone, which outperforms S5 Secret Vow, although by not that much. So, if you have the 4-star Secret Vow, you’re good to go with just that, since eventually at some point you will get more copies of it.

But don’t take my word for it. I’ve heard some people haven’t managed to get a 2nd copy of Sacrificial Sword since Genshin’s launch. Still, these are basically the standout light cones. Everything else falls either below or somewhere close to these. But keep in mind, Secret Vow and the signature light cone are basically the best options to have.

Initial Thoughts

So, what do I think about Blade?

He is hands down the strongest damage dealer when it comes to 3-targets scenario. He easily outdamages Jing Yuan, which makes me feel kinda sad since I didn’t expect the power creep to show up so soon. And the fact that with 1.2, he also got an insanely good relic set is just a cherry on top.

Now, while he does have a simple playstyle, he only consumes a skill point every 3 turns, which is a godsend when it comes to managing them. And so, he becomes a really good sub-damage dealer whenever you need to fill out that last spot for any team.

Still, he does suck at early game because keeping him alive is a burden that will befall one of the healers and his best team is really limited. Like literally, you need 2 limited 5-stars and Bronya. It also doesn’t help he has a weak selection of Light Cone options.

Also, I mentioned that he only consumes 1 Skill Point. But at the same time, his enhanced basic attack does not recover SP, which was a bit of a surprise to me. But it’s not the end of the world, truth be told.

All in all, Blade is an exciting damage dealer to say the least. If you have a character like him on your Honkai Star Rail Account, that’s great! I am actually surprised that a big amount of his damage comes from the follow-up attack, which is his talent. So more than anything, make sure not to use tanks like Gepard and March 7th with him, since you want this guy to lose health and use that talent as often as possible.

But otherwise, I am satisfied the way he turned out, although I kinda wish he can get another damage booster similar to Bronya because she does improve his damage massively.

Recently, we saw many videos talking about why people quit playing Lost Ark. We heard many complaints about Lost Ark users since it was released. But nowadays, they’re a lot more serious than we think.

Population is massively reduced in global and there are not enough users inside the game. There was a region emerge with various updates, but still Lost Ark does not seem to improve in ways players want. That’s why we thought of some solutions.

1. One Chaos Dungeon & One Guardian Raid Per Character

Normally, we run two Chaos Dungeons and two Guardian Raids per character. It takes almost 30 minutes to finish it. If you only have one or two characters, there is no problem.

However, Lost Ark users are recommended to raise 5 more alts instead of the main. It means that three hours are needed for daily homework. That’s a lot for dailies. So, it must be reduced at least half.

Plus, it’s better if players can choose between Chaos Dungeon and Guardian Raid. Chaos Dungeon is a solo content and Guardian Raid is a co-op. Solo content is fine, but new players can easily get rejected finding a party for the Guardian Raid. If it’s allowed to earn all rewards only by running Chaos Dungeon, it will be less stress-consuming for new players who need to spend time finding a party.

2. Adding Roster Bound Rest Gauge

Roster Bound Rest Gauge is a same concept of Rest Gauge that can be shared between characters.

Let’s pretend that you only do dailies for your main character and have several alts. Then, you can get additional bound rest gauge for not playing your alts.

When you have enough roster bound rest gauge, you can decide to apply all at one character. As a result? Plenty of honing materials for your main. This is important because adding a roster bound rest gauge can provide players a chance to focus on their main.

3. Light Of Salvation Rental Service (18 Awakening)

What is the most problematic component for gatekeeping in Lost Ark? Absolutely, cards.

DPS classes need a lot of Light of Salvation to enter higher end contents, but new players need to spend a lot of time to get them. If they don’t want to spend their time, they need to spend lots of money. But that’s pay to win.

Some can say there are new player’s cards, but nobody wants new player’s cards. Players want Light of Salvation, so why not rent them?

Let’s make players spend Lost Ark Gold and rent Light of Salvation (18 awakening) weekly. Then, new players can buy their time until they collect Light of Salvation for themselves.

4. Selectable Legendary Card Packs For Clearing End Contents

This one is also for lowering the difficulty of collecting cards. Lost Ark legion raids are really well made, but rewards are not satisfying.

To make players challenge more, motivation is a must. When they clear the raid for the first time, why not give them selectable legendary card packs? In this way, players can be motivated as they can get legendary cards they need.

5. Change Of Pheons

Pheon system is very complicated because it’s related to monetization of Lost Ark.

So, I want to compare the needs of users and corporations to find an adjustment. In the aspect of Lost Ark users, Pheons are nothing but a taxation of the company. The best way is to get rid of Pheons.

However, in the aspect of Smilegate, Pheons are their monetization model. Players can exchange gold to blue crystals, but it’s more efficient to just buy the blue crystal package they sell. It’s also important for them to make a profit.

As an adjustment, I suggest one solution. Pheons should not be applied on stones and tripods. Unlike accessories, Pheons that can be spent are Limitless. We only need to buy five accessories for our setting, but we don’t know how many Pheons will be spent on stones and tripods.

6. Adding Mechanics That Can Recovery Mistakes

In Lost Ark legion raid, one player’s mistake can kill everyone, and the raid becomes more difficult as they move on to the next legion commanders.

However, we think that’s not a great solution. We don’t want to spend 20 minutes per gate again and again until no one makes a mistake. We think it’s better to add some mechanics that can recover mistakes.

For example, let’s pretend that we are in Brelshaza gate 6. Players get killed when over four floors are destroyed. When someone made a mistake and accidentally destroyed one more floor than it should be, the stagger bar appears below the boss for once. Then, they should stagger the boss and the floor resurrects as soon as the boss gets staggered.

In this way, every try will be more meaningful.

7. No More Meaningless Grinding

In Lost Ark, there are lots of collectibles we need to farm: Island Souls, Mokoko Seeds, Masterpieces, Giant Hearts, Skill Points and more.

We personally think collectibles in Lost Ark are very well designed compared to other games. However, there is a worthless grinding content in Lost Ark. It is the Tower.

Tower is a grinding content, which you need to clear every single floor until you reach the top. It’s not fun at all. Survival mission gives so much stress to players. Then, do rewards worth it?

No. Rewards are not enough to replace our time. And can we ignore them? Of course, no. There are skill points are runes we need as a reward. To sum up, Tower is not enough meaningful content we must do.

Fortunately, Smilegate changed the number of floors of towers. Now, the Tower of Shadow and Tower of Fate (tier 1&2) only have 20 floors. It is a great change.

However, the Tower of Destiny, which is tier 3, still has 50 floors. Some of the floors in the tier-3 tower have difficult missions to solve. But they are not rewarding enough.

Therefore, we believe the tier-3 tower must be changed to 20 floors, giving all previous rewards.

Also Read: Lost Ark: Fastest Way To Get 20 Island Souls In 2023

8. Livestream Communication

Since we played Lost Ark in both KR and Global, we noticed that Lost Ark Global does not communicate with users often.

For better communication, Amazon should create a team, which can deliver important notices or discussions they had with Smilegates. Then, Global users can know what’s going on between Amazon and Smilegate.

9. Additional Honing Support For Global Server

Between Lost Ark KR & Global, content gab is one of the big complaints.

To solve the problem, Amazon released so many main contents in less than a year. And we all know, when there’s a new legion raid, we need time to progress our gear to reach the given item level.

However, the time was too short. People had to do dailies again and again and create several alts to catch up. In other words, there was no support of Amazon to provide additional ways to help them catch up main contents in a short period.

We think there should be an increase of honing chance and more horizontal contents, such as islands and summer events for extra hunting materials. Maybe secret merchants can sell honing materials, too. There are plenty of ways that can back up the speed of content release. Don’t make Chaos Dungeon and Guardian Raid the only method to obtain honing materials.

That’s all we wanted to talk about Lost Ark Global. We just want to see the game changing positive ways so that more gamers can jump in.

We are taking a look at WoW Dragonflight patch 10.1.5, which we’ll be launching on the 11th of July for NA servers and the 12th of July for EU. The new patch is bringing with it lots of new endgame content, new features, additional systems, and quality of life updates.

New Spec: Augmentation Evoker

Let’s dive straight in with probably the most highly anticipated new arrival Augmentation Evoker.

In Patch 10.1.5, Evokers will gain access to a third spec called Augmentation, which is an entirely new style of spec that focuses more on support.

Augmentation Evokers still count as DPS. But a lot of their damage will come indirectly from buffing the damage of other players. Addons like details that can track DPS will soon have new hooks integrated into them to allow for more accurate recordings of augmentation of Okra damage based on this unique play style.

The new spec makes use of mostly black and bronze magic. But they still share a few similarities with the other two Evoker specs. In that, they also use Mana and Essences as resources. They have empowered abilities and they have strong mobility, too.

A couple of their new abilities that make up part of their core rotation are Ebon Might, which buffs up to four players to increase their primary stat by a percentage of their own and buffing their damage for a short time.

There are also then a handful of abilities that can be used to extend the duration of Ebon Might without the need to recast it:

• Eruption is the only new Essence spender augmentation will see, which deals volcanic damage to enemies within its radius and extends the duration of Ebon Might.
• Upheaval. This is an empowered ability that also deals AOE damage and extends Ebon Might.
• Fire Breath. This is the regular Evoker Fire Breath. But it will also extend Ebon Might’s duration when used in augmentation spec.
• Shifting Sands. In terms of buffs, Augmentation of Evokers can make use of Shifting Sands to grant a strong versatility buff to a player, preferring damage dealers whenever they use an empowered ability.
• Prescience. They can also grant Prescience to multiple allies at once, which gives them a quick buff for a short time.

New Mega-Dungeon: Dawn of the Infinite

The next addition to patch 10.1.5 is the new eight-boss Mega-Dungeon called Dawn of the Infinite.

Players will work with the Bronze Dragonflight to fight an array of bosses, including a Iridikon, Mochi, the Infinite, or evil version of Chromie and Chrono-Lord Deios who players also fight in Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr. Each boss is very unique in design and the environment and art of the dungeon are visually stunning, too.

Blizzard have said that there won’t be a hard mode version of this dungeon. Unlike Mechagon from BFA or Tazavesh from Shadowlands as they have tuned it to be in line with hard mode on Mythic difficulty, anyway. And for an easier time, the heroic version of the dungeon will be released in patch 10.1.7. They have also confirmed that the Dawn of the Infinite will inevitably be split into two halves for the sake of entering them into the Mythic + Dungeon pool.

Reins Of The Quantum Courser

Players will also have a chance to loot a new item called the Reins of the Quantum Courser from the new Mega-Dungeon, which when used will give the user a random mount from the game.

As of the time, we don't yet have a confirmed list of all the mounts that could drop from the Quantum Courser. But recent data mining has suggested a list of possible mounts, which include both dungeon and raid mounts from previous expansions.

• Deathchargers's Reins
• Reins of the Raven Lord
• Swift White Hawstrider
• Reins of the Blue Proto-Drake
• Reins of the Drake of the North Wind
• Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake
• Armored Razzashi Raptor
• Swift Zulian Panther
• Reins of the Infinite Timereaver
• Midnight's Eternal Reins
• Sharkbait's Favorite Crackers
• Mummified Raptor Skull
• Underrot Crawg Harness
• Mechagon Peacekeeper
• Marrowfang's Reins
• Cartel Master Gearglider
• Mimiron's Head
• Flametalon of Alysrazor
• Experiment 12-B
• Reins of the Blazing Drake
• Life Binder's Handmaiden

Note that this list is completely speculative and nothing is confirmed just yet. We also don't know yet what the drop chance is of the Quantum Courser or if it is possible to give you a mount that you already have on your account. But nonetheless, it's a nice addition for mount collectors and may potentially eliminate the need for mount farming in old content in some rare cases.

Infinite Dragonflight Drake Customisation Manuscripts

Speaking of mounts, the Dawn of the Infinite will also allow players a chance to loot new customization manuscripts for their dragon riding mounts, adding a new Infinite Dragonflight skin color to each of the dragons, including the Winding Slitherdrake from patch 10.1.

Quantum Gear

The last cool thing you can get from the Mega-Dungeon are Quantum Gear items that are similar to the Quantum Courser will give the user a random appearance in that slot from a previous expansion.

Much like the mount version, we don't yet know about which items will be eligible in the loot table and which ones won't. But we can confidently assume the transmog items will drop much more often than the Quantum Courser. So, it's a good day to be a transmog collecto.r

New World Event: Time Rifts

Another new addition to patch 10.1.5 are the Time Rift world events. These events spawn at the top of every hour and they can be accessed by heading to the Tyrhold Reservoir in Thal dresses.

Once there, report to Soridormi to get started. You'll be given objectives to complete within a time limit. And the more you complete, the better your reward will be, similar to how the Researchers Under Fire weekly event works in the Zaralek Cavern.

Once the timer is up, a portal will spawn in the Tyrhold Reservoir that will take you to the final boss of the event. I tested a couple of these Time Rifts on the PTR and each one is dedicated to a specific expansion and some bosses are currently much more difficult than others.

For example, I managed to solo Freya in my first Time Rift but during the second, I had to fight the Lich King and I barely lasted 10 seconds. These events are designed for large groups to work on together, again much like the Zaralek Cavern weekly or the Primal Storms from patch 10.0.5.

Completing a Time Rift will grant you a bunch of rewards, including:

• A rep token for reputation with Sorodormi (which is new to the game).
• A Dilated Time Capsule and 1,000 Paracausal Flakes (which are two new currencies and can be exchanged at the vendors in the Tyrhold Reservoir for item level 402 catch-up gear and a ton of cosmetic rewards, including mounts, pets, and transmog)
• You can also loot an item called Encapsulated Destiny (which guarantees loot from completing a Time Rift independently of the reward cash you earn).

Once I had the Encapsulated Destiny active and completed a Time Rift I was given the Reins of the Scourgebound Vanquisher, a new mount that is otherwise available for Paracausal Flakes.

If you want more of these guaranteed loot tokens, you can complete a daily quest with Chromie in Temporal Conflux. Her daily is super simple to complete and rewards another Encapsulated Destiny along with Sorodomi rep and some more Paracausal Flakes.

New Gear Upgrade Track: Myth

Patch 10.1.5 is also introducing another track for the gear upgrade system we were introduced to in patch 10.1, allowing players to now increase the item level of gear pieces up to 447 as long as the gear piece falls in the Myth level upgrade track.

You can get Myth level gear from Mythic raid, Mythic + dungeons at a level 16 or higher. And the very rare loot drops from the raid on Heroic Difficulty will also fall into the new Myth track, allowing you to fully upgrade these items to 447. The Myth track upgrades will cost you Flightstones and Aspect's Shadowflame Crests, which are the highest quality crests you can get from higher-level endgame content.

Also Read: Things Blizzard Can Do to Make WOW Dragonflight Better

Warlocks for All Races

Moving on, Warlocks are getting a lot of love in patch 10.1.5, starting with the class itself becoming available to every race in the game. This means that Night Elves, Draenei, Lightforce Draenei, Pandaren, Kul Tiran, Tauren, Highmountain Tauren, Mag'har Orc and Zandalari trolls will all be able to be Warlocks when patch 10.1.5 launches.

In terms of law, there is some controversy among the player base about certain races becoming Warlocks, namely, Lightforge Draenei and Mag'har Orc. But at least in terms of gameplay, Warlock mains will now have full reign over which racials they prefer for a given spec and the content they like to play.

Warlock Demon Customisation Options

Warlocks are also going to be able to customize the various demons they can summon after completing a new Warlock specific questline in patch 10.1.5.

You can gather more customization options for each of your minions by collecting Grimoires from various types of content. Some Grimoires are simply replacing the old glyph versions and offer the same skin for their corresponding demons. But others may come from a drop from a vendor, from time walking, from an event, or from a quest. And there's lots to choose from.

Kalimdor Dragonriding

The rest of the new features in patch 10.1.5 are mostly quality of life improvements. But I did want to give an honorable mention to the Kalimdor Grand Prix, which will unlock dragonriding races throughout Kalimdor zones.

These will only be available during the Grand Prix event and players can earn exclusive rewards by farming the Grand Prix for the new currency called Riders of Azeroth Badges.

UI Changes & Quality Of Life Updates

Finally, patch 10.1.5 is introducing a whole host of UI changes and quality of life updates, starting off with the new in-game micro menu now being in color rather than the previously grayscale menu.

There's also an updated graphic for the Rested buff. Players get when inside a Rest area shown in the corner of their unit frame.

During combat your abilities on your action bar show new graphics for cast time and will also glow differently when the game is prompting you to press them, such as when you get a proc.

Personally, I found this feature a little distracting. But hopefully it's helpful for new players or players learning a new spec.

We will also be getting a "sell all junk" button in the default vendor window. This feature will automatically sell any poor quality items in your inventory, which are the gray items. You'll earn a sum of WoW Dragonflight Gold for it. But anything that is uncommon or higher will be kept.

Hopefully, this feature will eventually have some player-based configuration involved to let each player specify what constitutes junk and what doesn't.

Seasons is of course the next big thing on the horizon for Diablo 4. And we previously knew that Season 1 is coming in mid to late July. That was announced in a recent Developer Campfire Livestream.

However, we now have more specifics, including when Season 1 will be starting, which was revealed by Rod Fergusson on Twitter. A user asked when the announcement will be so that they can start planning their vacation leave. And Rod Fergusson, the Franchise General Manager of Diablo, replied announcing next week.

This is further backed up by Adam Fletcher, the Global Community Developer Director, replying to another user on Twitter, asking them when they can expect the next Dev update or Camp livestream. And Adam replied more news on that later this week.

New Dev Update - Next Week

So, it’s really looking like another Campfire Livestream will probably be happening next week, which will offer us the release date for Season 1.

We also have a bunch of details on the changes and tweaks and new things coming in the next big patch and the seasons as well as some juicy behind-the-scenes details.

That will give us a better understanding of how things work in the game, where different quality of loot and gear comes from, and just general things that you’ll want to know if you plan to play Diablo 4 Seasons.

Season 1 Details

So, if you want to know these juicy details, then let’s get started with what will be included in Season 1 in Diablo 4. Here’s a rundown of what you can expect.

Each Season Makes New Characters Starting Level 1

In Seasons, you’re going to create a new character starting from level 1. So, your Eternal Realm characters will not go into the season servers.

That’s because a seasonal character will basically be on a standalone version of the game with other seasonal characters with their own standalone bank stash, which is separate from eternal.

Seasonal Theme & Loot

There will be a season-specific theme that will be announced probably in this next update and within the season, we can expect to get new loot that will be powerful and probably build defining.

Hopefully, this will give us some good variety and freshness to the gameplay and our classes.

Season Duration - 3 Months

Seasons are expected to last roughly three months long. So, that’s how long you have to level up and get the gear.

Once this period ends, the seasonal characters will become Eternal Realm characters. So, you’re not going to lose your characters that you already have and you’re not going to lose the characters you make in Seasons.

But you might be wondering what exactly carries over in case you haven’t been keeping up to speed.

Also Read: Diablo 4 Tornado Druid Build: Fastest Druid Leveling Build (Level 1-50)

What Carries Over?

If you’ve already finished the campaign, then you will be able to skip the campaign on your seasonal characters.

In terms of your Renown, the maps Fog of War and your Shrines of Lilith will carry over. That means you will get the stats from those Shrines of Lilith. So, that’ll be a good early game boost.

If you’ve completed all the map Fog of War and got every Shrine of Lilith, you can expect to have around the first two renowned reward levels per zone.

Other tasks like side quests, strongholds, and dungeons will need to be redone, and that’s where you’ll make up the rest of the renowned levels.

Season Journey

Along with Seasons, the Season Journey, which has chapters in it, will also come. That will basically act as our guide to track seasonal objectives that give us various rewards, including legendary aspects and caches.

So, think of this like a journal with different quests and tasks that you’re going to want to complete in the season.

Battle Pass

On top of this, the Battle Pass will come with seasons. It’s estimated that it will take around 80 hours to complete and this is actually more than other games, such as Warzone and Overwatch, which take around 50 hours.

The good news is there’s meant to be no pay to win aspects on the Battle Pass and there is a free version. This will be leveled up by gaining favor, which you get by completing various objectives. That apparently includes things like strongholds, dungeons, and side quests.

Smoldering Ashes System

But along with this will come the Smoldering Ashes system that’s tied to the Battle Pass. This system is a new currency that we will gain by completing levels in the free part of the Battle Pass.

This currency of Smoldering Ashes can then be used to trade for Blessings that will boost our XP gain from monster kills, our gold earned from vendor sale amount, get more materials when salvaging gear, and increase the duration of our Elixirs.

Overall, this is meant to be a system that will ease the grind relating to getting more XP, materials, and Diablo 4 Gold.

If you’ve already leveled up a few characters, the idea of leveling up another one from Level 1 in Seasons might be a bit overwhelming. But systems like this are here to basically smooth that over for us.

Increased Mob Density

Outside of this, we also know from the last patch that the next one will come with an increased amount of mob density and Elite mob density. This is what a lot of players have been wanting since experiencing those dungeons that had tons of Elite groups in them, which gave loads of drops on XP.

Of course, they have since been hot fixed. But having enemies spread out in a dungeon just isn’t as fun as wiping out waves of dense mobs. And the XP and loot are more efficient in that as well.

So, we can expect this change to come in early Season 1 and that’s something to look out for and that they’re aware of.

Balance Changes

Also, after the recent class buffs, many people have been feeling a little lackluster. Because these buffs didn’t really make meaningful big changes for our classes and the issues that people have with them. It’s good to know that the developers are aware of these issues, such as build parity. And in their own words, they’re heavily monitoring discussion based on this topic.

So, hopefully, the next set of balance changes will address these issues with certain classes and their build diversity being very limited in higher-level content.

World Tier 4 Loot

Another upcoming interesting change is the type of loot you get in World Tier 4.

As you may know, upgrading to World Tier 4 allows ancestrals to start dropping that offer a big bump in item power, which levels up your sub stats quite a bit.

In World Tier 4, Sacreds are still dropping abundantly while Ancestrals are more uncommon or rare in comparison.

A user asked Adam Fletcher about this on Twitter and now basically we have confirmation that they are going to adjust this by Season 1. So, it’s not too long to wait. And if you’re yet to get to World Tier 4 to farm ancestrals, this will make your life so much easier as being fully kitted out in ancestrals is a big power bump.

Good Insights Into Farming Cellars

On a slightly different note, I just wanted to highlight a really awesome Reddit post that offers some really good insights into farming cellars in the game.

User MrFrodoBeggins tested 1270 cellars over a three-day period and recorded all of their findings and what’s an absolute MVP.

From their testing, which included between 230 to 290 cellars across the Fractured Peaks, the Dry Steppes, Scosglen, Keanjistan and Howezar, they counted their Obols, XP, gold, legendaries, uniques, and even Treasure Goblins and Butcher encounters. And it’s actually quite interesting seeing all of the stats.

But the overall conclusion is that cellars just kind of suck to farm specifically. They don’t yield as much XP or loot as more efficient activities compared to the time spent doing the cellars. But he does say they are good for getting materials since you are running from cellar to cellar, anyway.

However, I would be very interested to see the results of doing cellars by resetting instances instead of running from one to another. In the early game, farming cellars next to World Events was a very efficient farm to run between the two back to back. But it seems safe to say that at high levels, it’s not worth targeting cellars specifically.

Here is a guide on Luocha, the newest 5-star in Honkai: Star Rail. He is a 5-star imaginary abundance unit, and has really shown us what a limited abundance can do. He easily outheals his competition and has incredible utility.

Just to preface, multiple enemies hit won’t heal multiple times. They removed it due to the new AoE heal he provides. Nevertheless, this doesn’t change his synergies, and I have some new information and takes on Luocha, including number and eidolon reviews.

He is very versatile and an awesome unit to have, an amazing pick up for any Honkai Star Rail Account, even better if you lack Bailu and Gepard.

I will discuss his stats, abilities and how they work, traces and eidolons, and then his pros and cons. We will then discuss his best relics and light cones, as well as his best rotations where we will discuss how to have perfect talent uptime, and then team synergies and compositions.

Stats & Comparisons

Luocha is a 5* imaginary unit, and part of the limited banner 5 stars. He follows the abundance path, a dedicated healer class, but he provides more than just heals as we will see.

At level 80, he has a high base HP of 1280, a very high base attack of 756, and a low base def of 363.

His base speed is 101, and he has an energy cost of 100.

As an abundance unit, he has a taunt value of 100, equal to 23% chance of being hit in a standard team.

His health is thus the 5th highest in the game.

He shares the highest attack in the game alongside Himeko, but he has the third lowest defense in the game to compensate.

His speed is average but his energy cost is a nice low 100.

Basic Attack

Let’s review his abilities and how they function.

Thorns of the Abyss is his basic attack, doing a standard amount of imaginary damage to a single enemy, dealing 30 toughness damage, regenerating 20 energy for Luocha, and 1 skill point for the team.

How Does His Talent Function?

Let’s talk about his talent first, as his skill and ultimate will activate it.

Cycle of Life will activate after reaching 2 stacks of Abyss Flower, deploying his healing field. When any enemy in the field is attacked by an ally, they will restore a percentage of Luocha’s attack alongside a flat bonus as health. It will last for 2 of Luocha’s turns, so any ally that spams turns before him can heal more. But it doesn’t mean you should build him no speed, it’s just a bonus.

At great investment, this will heal 1k health to the attacker per attack, which is pretty insane for an off field heal. This talent will not gain stacks when it is active. So, any skill or ultimate when the field is up will not contribute stacks for the next field.

Luocha's OP Skill

His skill, Prayer of Abyss Flower, is a restore skill. It will immediately restore an ally’s hp by a percentage of his attack plus a flat bonus. Then, he will gain a stack of abyss flower. This will regenerate 30 energy, and consume 1 skill point.

When an ally hp drops past 50% of the health, from anything including damage over time during their turn, Luocha will cut in and heal them with the skill, an emergency skill use. This emergency skill consumes no skill point, but still regenerates the 30 energy and gains the stack of abyss flower.

At great investment, this can heal 4000 HP, which is more healing than you’ll need right now.

Ultimate

His ultimate is Death Wish, and has an energy cost of 100.

It will remove 1 buff from all enemies, and deal imaginary damage to all enemies, and gain a stack of Abyss Flower. This will deal 60 toughness damage to all enemies, and refund 5 energy.

Technique

Finally, his technique is Mercy of a Fool, and is a buffing technique. So, you can stack buffs and use attacking techniques afterwards.

After using it, his talent will be activated instantly at the start of the next battle. So, you get a free two turns of his off field healing and prepare for the next rotation.

Game Changing Traces

Let’s see his traces, which completely buff his kit.

Cleansing Revival is his A2, and when the skill is triggered, emergency or manual use, it will cleanse 1 debuff from a target ally. It’s already insane to have cleanse and even off field cleansing.

Sanctified is his second section passive. And when any enemy in his talent field is attacked by an ally, all allies apart from the healer will restore 7% of Luocha’s ATK plus 93. This is actually a great amount of healing, about 400 per ally. So, now every attack will heal 1k for themself, and 400 for each ally.

His final section is Through the Valley, and will give a 70% chance to resist CC (Crowd Control) debuffs. This is different to eff res.

Just like enemies at max level have 40% effect resistance, enemies have 32% effect hit rate. This against Luocha’s 70% cc debuff is a 40% chance of being cc’d by an enemy at 100% base chance. It’s a very strong trace.

The only way to get a 0% chance is 100 eff res, which we aren’t building.

Trace Bonuses & Level Priority

His trace bonuses are in attack%, perfect, and hp and def%, which are also really nice to further boost his tankiness as a support.

For trace priority, level his skill and talent, and his basics and ultimate don’t need investment. He doesn’t do much damage, even with investment.

Eidolons

Now, let’s see his eidolons, which completely shift his character identity.

His E1 will give all allies a 20% attack boost when his talent is up. This is about half a main stat for all allies, and is a decent boost. It’s a good starting eidolon, but nothing amazing to go for if you’re a low spender. This does turn him into a pseudo harmony unit now.

His E2 will give his skill two effects depending on the target ally’s HP%. Under half HP, he gets a 30% healing boost, which is unneeded due to his already high healing, but maybe good on super high HP units. Over half HP, he gives the ally a shield equal to 18% of his attack plus 240, hitting nearly 1k of a shield at good investment, which is really not bad. The thing with this eidolon is you don’t manually use skill often in his rotation. So, you won’t see the shield much, and the healing% is overwhelming.

It’s a nice buff for when you do though, for example cleansing, or if an ally goes under 50% and somehow heals up before Luocha emergency skills.

Also, a big note is that this is anti synergy with Blade, who he normally has amazing synergy with. If he ever heals Blade when above 50% HP, which can happen if Blade’s Counter happens before Luocha’s emergency heal, then Blade will get a shield and lose DPS output if we follow his pre release kit where he needs to take damage.

Anyway, at E2, Luocha becomes a pseudo preservation unit.

At E4, enemies have a weakened multiplier that only Sampo and Natasha could apply until now. They will deal 12% less damage to you, which is awesome for more survivability.

Finally, at E6, when his ultimate is used, all enemies type res will be reduced by 20% for 2 turns. At E6, you’re probably geared towards a 2 turn rotation. So, this is kind of a 20% permanent res reduction. It’s about a 1.2x to 1.33x damage increase for the whole team. It’s an OP buff but requires 7 Luocha’s to get to. And remember, Silver Wolf pretty much has this at E0.

Anyway, Luocha becomes a pseudo nihility unit with this and E4. So, at E6, he gets a harmony buff, a preservation shield, a weakened debuff, and a nihility all res type debuff.

Luocha’s Pros & Cons

So, let’s talk about his pros and cons.

First, we have the best healing output in the game. If you’ve played with him or even attempted healing calculations, his healing beats Natasha and Bailu.

Next, we have immense utility. Cleansing allies on and off field is already crazy, and then you insert an aoe buff removal that beats Pela’s secondary role by far.

Next, we have the easiest build requirements in the game in my opinion. You only need to invest in his healing, as his damage is subpar, and even then, experience has shown that his healing doesn’t even need maxing.

To follow with easy build requirements, we also have great versatility on top of F2P Friendly light cone options. We will discuss this later in the light cone section, but he can run a ton of different ones.

Amazing base stats are another one. He’s somewhat tanky and having the highest base attack in the game is another reason why his healing is so damn good.

Next, we have imaginary type, now we are at 3 imaginary type units and he provides a decent amount of toughness damage due to his skill point positive playstyle and low energy cost, which are also pros.

He can also be a solo sustain as predicted, meaning you don’t need a preservation unit and can bring pure damage.

Finally, we don’t need to pull his signature. It is not as OP of an increase as Seele and Jing Yuan’s cones.

For cons, we unironically have too much healing. He provides so much healing that it’s difficult to decide where his stats should go into.

We also have restrictive and clunky rotations. If done right, his rotation is clean and juicy. But if you desync and have an emergency skill, go off during his talent uptime, you’d need to skill outside of his talent alongside his ultimate.

This means that using his skill and ultimate during his talent uptime is usually a bad idea. But if you really need that heal or cleanse or buff removal, it’s allowed.

Finally, we have a weird speed problem. We want him to be fast for SP Generation, but not too fast that his downtime affects our allies. We want him to be fast for emergency skills, but not too fast that he does no heals. But healing power shouldn’t be a problem, anyway.

Luocha’s Best Relics

As for his best relics, it’s difficult. But all of these sets work, and they are 4-piece musketeer, 4-piece healer, and a 2 pc combo of both.

In my opinion, when well built, he doesn’t need the 10% healing from the healer set, and the 4 piece bonus is a drop in the ocean for skill points, which he will generate a ton of. The 4-piece musketeer boosts his speed to 107, and provides him with some extra damage, though negligible. We’d run it for the speed, and the attack% benefits his heals.

For planar ornaments, you’ll want to go to the Fleet of the Ageless set.

Space Sealing Station also works for more heals and damage.

Sprightly Vonquack can allow a very quick talent activation, but is not needed for the energy part.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail: Ranking Of Playable Imaginary Characters - Yukong, Welt & Luocha

Main Stats And Substats

For main stats, outgoing healing% or attack% for the chest. It depends if you care about the extra healing or extra damage, as healing% will always be better for healing.

For boots, I recommend going speed.

For planar sphere, attack% or a DEF% piece.

For rope, energy rope is recommended, but attack% rope can be used with certain rotations and light cones.

For subs, attack%, speed, defense% and effect resistance are all great.

I don’t recommend going crit on his stats, as they’ll provide barely any damage increase for a loss of any defensive stats or healing, and we will start getting chunkier characters with the appearance of Blade and endgame health pools.

Without any crit, and only versus at least 3 enemies, his damage over 13 turns is equal to 1.5 Seele skills.

Luocha’s Light Cone Paths

For light cones, we have multiple paths he can go.

First, you decide between energy for himself, healing, and team utility. If you choose energy for himself, you’ll want to grab his signature or post op conversation.

At S4, post op becomes equal to his signature for the energy generation, but pales in comparison to the rest of the benefits. Though this means you don’t need to pull his signature. These two light cones can promote a 2 turn rotation if lucky, and we’ll go over that in a bit.

If you choose healing, you’ll need an energy rope. Perfect Timing is great for him and promotes eff res substats to further decrease the chance of being cc’d and debuffed.

If you choose team utility, you choose between team energy and team skill points. And team utility light cones will require an energy rope. So, for team energy, you’d go for Quid Pro Quo.

And with good speed, he’d be generating a lot of free energy for the squad, nearly 2 ultimates worth. Shared Feeling is bad for him. His emergency skills won’t trigger the energy from its passive, but maybe this gets fixed.

For team skill points, you’d go Multiplication, which I’ve been quietly shilling since the start of the game. It is a 3 star light cone, and will advance you forward by 20% each basic, which he will be doing a ton of.

The 3-star stats are not much to worry about due to his high base character stats, but he might need some more defensive substats. This light cone is very underrated, and in a basic spamming playstyle is very strong.

For Luocha, in a two basic 1 skill rotation, multiplication is equivalent to a speed boost of 16, and at 120 speed, will grant him 2 more turns and thus 2 more skill points for the team.

Optimal Luocha Rotations

For rotations, you want to minimize your talent downtime.

If you want to have near perfect uptime, S4 Post op Conversation or S1 Echoes and an energy rope are required. You can do two basics, and skill outside of the talent duration, into an ultimate to get it back up. If you can get an emergency skill off outside of your field’s duration, even better.

Echoes only need one target to work, as if Hoyoverse calculated it perfectly.

Apart from that, 3 turn rotations will be the way, and work on any light cone provided you have an energy rope.

If you get an emergency skill, which is incredibly easy as a solo sustain unit, you can do two basics during your talent, and then basic again and you’ll have your ultimate up.

If you get the emergency skill during your talent, you will skill instead after your talent is finished, and this requires no energy rope. But for reliability, we go energy rope.

Some Synergies

For synergies, we have anyone that can cheat turns and attack multiple times.

Seele’s Resurgence, Yanqing’s follow ups, Clara’s counters, Jing Yuan’s Lightning Lord, Sushang’s ultimate push up. Let’s just say Luocha might be a bit too good.

Note its per attack instance, and not per hit, that you’ll get heals.

Team Composition Discussion

For team compositions, he will provide an insane solo sustain role. You plop him down, and you build your desired team. So, you can go for risky hypercarry teams without worrying about sustain.

This, for example, can be a Hunt with two harmony. Two teams I’ve been loving are mono imaginary and a jing yuan hypercarry setup. Mono Imaginary performs so nicely due to Yukong and Luocha just coming out, and the damage from Welt carry is pretty decent, and all the tools to deal damage in general alongside Silver Wolf can perform well in the high tier Memory of Chaos.

The second team is Jing Yuan Hypercarry. Now, the problem he had is the lack of Luocha pretty much. His major problem is cc, and the problem he used to have with this team was the current solo sustain units.

Gepard or Bailu can sustain, but what happens when Jing Yuan gets cc’d? Natasha can cleanse, of course, but it requires a skill point and you have to wait for her turn.

Luocha can cleanse and fully heal Jing Yuan if he faces tanks a strong cc hit like from the Sanction Robot. Using Asta and putting Jing Yuan at about 117 speed, allows him to run attack% boots, increasing his damage over the normal 141 speed Jing Yuan when not running Bronya or Asta.

With Tingyun on a 3 turn ult rotation, Jing Yuan can easily get tons of Lightning Lord attacks, with high damage buffs from the team. This team is very fast with Asta’s ultimate, the musketeer sets, and potentially an Echoes Light Cone on Luocha. You’ll be spamming attacks and Lightning lords like crazy and not be dying, even Tingyun won’t.

The latest character in Honkai Star Rail is the 1.1 version of Silver Wolf. But the game has actually revealed a lot of new characters. Today, we are going to list all 15 currently known new characters that are likely to be playable in the near future.

It should be noted that all of the characters listed in the article have officially appeared in the game, with the exception of the Dragon form Dan Heng.

1. Luocha

Everyone knows him from the second half of 1.1.

He can heal, cleanse, and deal damage at the same time without consuming skill points, and can be fully functional at E0. And he is a super OP must-have unit. If you want to experience Luocha as a character as soon as it goes live, you might as well just buy a Honkai Star Rail Account with Luocha.

2. Yu Kong

Yu Kong is a 4-star imaginary harmony support.

She comes with the event banner of Luocha, who can buff ally’s ATK, Crit Rate and Crit Damage. You can also get her free at the 1.2 event.

3. Kafka

Kafka is a 5-star Lightning Nihilist. She is also the leader of the Stellaron Hunters who push the Stellaron Core into your chest, affectionately called “Mom” by all the Trailblazers.

Everyone tried Kafka in the tutorial, and her skill animations were just too good to be ignored. Kafka is the synergy core of a continuous damage team and works well with Serval and Sampo.

4. Blade

Blade is a 5-star wind destruction damage dealer.

He has an immortal body in the story, a terrifying Stellaron Hunter. His skills are all blood related. By burning it and healing it back, he can not only tank damage, destroy the enemies but also support more skill points to the team.

5. Luka

He is the handsome guy on the popular Light Cone Resolution Shines as Pearls of Sweat.

As the underground king of the fighters in Boulder Town, Luca is a 4-star physical nihility carry, more suitable for an F2P team.

6. Fu Xuan

She is the head of the Xianzhou Alliance’s Divination Commission, who is good at fortune telling.

She always wanted to be the general of Luofu, but Jing Yuan does not give it up easily. Based on the information we have, Fu Xuan will be a five-star quantum preserver.

7. Yin Yue

Yin Yue, who is the dragonborn of Dan Heng, is a 5-star imaginary DPS.

Dan Heng’s past is probably the most mysterious plot in the game, and HoYoverse is doing its best not to spoil it, even though his animation has already been leaked for a long time. So, we will not talk too much about him, but we know he will be with us soon.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail: A Complete Guide To Arlan! - Builds & Skills & Teams

8. Jing Liu

Jing Liu was the former general of Xianzhou, Jing Yuan’s master, but lost herself in the cursed body.

In the animated film, Jing Yuan killed her in tears with his ultimate. However, in the promotion video for 1.1, she came back again and fought Yanqing, who is the disciple of Jing Yuan.

From the scene, we can guess that she is an ice-type damage dealer, most likely a 5-star. But her path is unknown. Some people speculate that the body in Luocha’s coffin was Jing Liu, and Luocha managed to help her resurrect, leading to the scene in the PV.

9. Gui Nai Fen

She is the pretty girl on the Light Cone Subscribe for More! That also says like before you leave!

She’s Sushang’s best friend, with an optimistic and positive character, possibly a fire type. She likes to fool around, like live streaming crushing rocks on Sushang’s chest.

Although the light cone is for the hunt, we cannot tell her path yet because Sushang is also on it.

10. Lynx

Lynx is the other girl on the Light Cone Warmth Shortens Cold Nights.

She’s the younger sister of Serval and Gepard, who is very thoughtful and caring for others. To match the light cone’s type, she should be on the path of Abundance.

11. Screwllum

Screwllum is the new character who debuted in the 1.1 event and is an important figure at the space station.

He fought Sliver Wolf both on the Light Cone We Will Meet Again and in the 1.1 event. So, he might as well be a nihility character.

12. Ruan Mei

There are 3 characters on the Light Cone Geniuses’ Repose: Herta, Screwllum, and Ruan Mei, who together built the Simulated Universe.

From her appearance, her path is more likely to be either harmony or abundance.

13 & 14. Xueyi And Hanya

Xueyi and Hanya are the sisters on two light cones: Under the Blue Sky and Return to Darkness.

Xueyi is older, and Hanya is younger. Xue Yi has been transformed into a puppet lying in Hanya’s arms. We can assume that one is the Hunt, most likely Hanya, and one is destruction based on the types of their light cones.

15. Topaz

She is the character on the Light Cone Trend of the Universal Market, who is the manager of the Pan-Galactic Commercial Enterprise.

Even though the light cone is for preservation, there are rumors that Topaz has been designed to be a damage dealer. So, let’s wait and see.

The Other Three

In addition to that, there are three characters that have not yet appeared in the game, but are already of great interest to the community.

The first is Black Swan. She showed up in one of the official trailers, but we know nothing about her identity. She looks like a nihilist to me, but we will have to wait for more information.

Finally, people are hyped about the possibility that two of the most popular swords women in Honkai Impact, Raiden Mei and Yae Sakura. They may both join the Honkai Star Rail as 5-star carries of the hunt. There are no visuals yet for their models, but we hope to see them soon.

I’m going to share with you 10 productive ways you can spend your time in FFXIV while waiting for the queue to pop. And these suggestions are very valuable because they will either save you time in the future or they have worthwhile rewards.

1. Island Sanctuary Gathering

My first suggestion is to gather materials on Island Sanctuary, such as Island Laver or Island Sap.

Island Laver seems to be a popular ingredient needed every single week. And I can sit all of my granaries on it all week long and still never have enough. It’s irritating to have to gather them myself, but what else can I do?

It’s a great idea to gather any materials you are low on on the island during queue. This way, you don’t have to waste your time on it later.

2. Crafting & Gathering

Talking about gathering on the island gave me another brilliant idea: gathering and crafting in general. Both of these can bring you some cash or materials you need to craft things that you want for yourself.

If you’re unsure about what to gather or craft, I would suggest doing a little market research by using websites like Universalis or Saddlebag Exchange. The latter even has a search function that can show you the best-selling furnishing items. For gathering, you can filter your search by materials even down to the material type.

Another reason to gather while you queue is to fill out your logs. This way, if you have a retainer that is a gatherer, you’ll have a wider variety of Ventures you can assign to them. You can actually make a solid income by just sending your retainer out for materials and then selling them on the market board. But if you have not gathered something, then your retainer can’t get it either. So, it’s definitely worthwhile to spend your queue time completing those logs.

3. Shadowbringers & Endwalker Fates

My next suggestion is doing Fates, specifically those in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Because completion of them rewards you with Bicolor Gemstones.

The Bicolor Gemstones are the main reason to do this as they can be used for a variety of desirable items, such as crafting materials, Orchestrion Rolls, Furnishings, Glamours, and even Minions. Some items also don’t become available until you have capped your shared Fates for a particular region. So, that’s just one more reason to farm this during queue.

Fates will also provide XP for any jobs you’re leveling. And if you do enough of them, you’ll also get an XP bonus through the weekly challenges log. So, be sure to do your 5th and 10th fates on the jobs you want XP on the most.

4. Beast Tribes

Speaking of leveling, Beast Tribe quests are a fantastic way to do so as they often give a pretty sizable chunk of XP upon completion.

Another reason to complete Beast Tribe quests is because they offer cool rewards, like Materia, Dyes, Glamours, Housing Items, Mounts, and Emotes.

Pre-shadowbringers, maxing out each tribe, also allows you to do an Allied Tribal Quest for even more rewards, like the Gratuity Emote, for example.

You can do up to 12 Beast Tribe quests per day and it typically takes 10 minutes or fewer to complete three quests from a tribe. It’s so worthwhile and a great way to spend your time while waiting for the queue to pop.

Also Read: Final Fantasy 14 Dungeon Guide

5. Levequests

Going along with the leveling theme still, let’s talk about levequests.

Levequests are an easy way to level battle, crafter, and gatherer jobs. For the latter two, you can often just buy stuff on the market board to turn in. So, if you hate crafting as much as I do, you can level up without having to actually do that much crafting at all.

Levequests can also be used to make FFXIV Gil. Once upon a time, you could just make coffee biscuits and turn them in. Now, it takes a bit more effort on your part. You will need to do the math yourself. Find something that is being sold for cheap on the market board, especially if it’s high quality, and then turn it in and reap the profit.

6. Hunt Marks

Sitting there constantly clicking is pretty boring, but what else do you have to do while you queue?

My sixth suggestion is hunting marks. you guys know how much I love hunt trains, but unfortunately you can’t really do trains while you queue as hunt trains require you to be in a party. However, you can do Overworld hunt marks.

There are different types of seals you can get depending on what expansion you’re hunting in. And, of course, different types of rewards, such as minions, mounts, furnishings, and more.

I would suggest checking out the rewards for each expansion and seeing what you want. Lots of people like to hunt for Centurio Seals because with them you can buy Aetheryte Tickets and save a lot of money on teleportation.

7. Blue Mage Spells

Speaking of hunting mobs, if you’re interested in playing Blue Mage, there are a number of mobs in the Overworld that drop Blue Mage spells.

So, if you don’t have them all, you can farm them while waiting for queue. There are lots of guides online for where to get each spell.

8. Gold Saucer

My next idea is to hit up the Gold Saucer.

Unfortunately, you can’t do any of the gates or your queue will stop. But you can do the mini cact pot or any of the other mini games. If you’re farming MGP, you’re going to want to complete as much of the weekly log as you can, and doing mini-games is part of that.

9. Triple Triad

Speaking of the Gold Saucer, collecting all the Triple Triad cards up to I think Shadowbringers will get you a cute little flying card mount, so you can play Triple Triad with the NPCs in the Gold Saucer or in the Overworld to work on your collection while you wait for queue.

10. Practice Your Rotation

Finally, my 10th and last idea is to practice your rotation.

Lots of players are interested in doing higher difficulty content like Extremes or even Savages. But they often feel hesitant for many reasons. And one of them is often a lack of experience and skill level.

Therefore, you can take that extra time waiting for queue to visit resources (like the Balance or YouTube), figure out what your rotation should be, and test it out on a Training Dummy.

You can start to build muscle memory for this rotation so that once you’re in encounters that require you to dodge mechanics, it’ll be a lot less overwhelming since you’ve built up that memory of where your buttons are and what to hit next.

We’ll be going over the various things that Honkai Star Rail does better than Genshin Impact. I’m not trying to figure out which game is better or make comparisons. Both games have their pros and cons and this article is supposed to be fun and educational.

Many of the things I point out can be implemented Genshin. So, this can also be a way to encourage HoYoverse to make positive changes. A lot of these differences range from small quality of life changes to substantial overhauls in certain mechanical aspects of the game.

To start things off, one of the most convenient changes in Honkai Star Rail is the streamlining of the many different daily activities players have to complete. Daily missions in Honkai Star Rail are much easier to complete as they consist of various tasks that you could do while farming for relics or materials.

Honkai Star Rail still has quests like commissions. But these quests are usually much easier and most only require you to talk to NPCs. My favorite change personally is that I don’t have to walk to Catherine every single time I finish my dailies to collect my rewards.

Assignments, which are equivalent to Genshin Expeditions, also can be pulled out via the menu instead of talking to Catherine. Another way they also made the daily logins much more bearable was by allowing you to teleport directly to farming locations. This saves you so much time compared to teleporting to a nearby waypoint and then walking over to the location, which could sometimes take a minute or more.

On top of that, you save even more time and energy with the Auto Battle and two times speed in Honkai Star Rail. Farming your Honkai Star Rail dailies is mindless. Because you could just click the Auto Battle and literally do anything else: eat food, watch anime, talk to your friends to make the process even faster. You can farm Calyxes in multiple ways instead of doing them one at a time. This extra convenience is great. And you’ll suffer less burnout as opposed to playing Genshin Impact.

Not only that, the Relic farming process specifically is also shortered by a significant amount. In Genshin Impact, you have to walk to the center of the stage and activate the domain. Once you’re done killing the monsters, you have to walk all the way up the stairs, and then talk to the tree for your artifacts. However, in Honkai Star Rail, all of those things are cut out. All you do is start the fight, kill the enemies, and rewards pop up on your screen. No more pointless walking is required for your daily equipment grinding in Honkai Star Rail. How wonderful is that!

In addition, you don’t have to teleport to a certain statue to change your main character’s element. All you have to do is pull up the menu and click the Switch button. For those of us with terrible luck, HonKai Star Rail lets us pick any standard band character we want after 300 pulls. So, even if you pull to your heart content and still didn’t get that Bronya you wanted, you could forcibly bring her home with the guaranteed select.

Even if we’re free to play, this edition is very beneficial. You might think 300 summons is a lot. But I think you could achieve this easily after half a year or so. The game has only been out for a couple of weeks and now I already have 92 pulls and 68 of them were given to me completely for free.

Continuing on with the gacha system, the weapon banner for Honkai Star Rail is significantly improved. First of all, the exclusive light cone for the current character only features one light cone instead of two weapons, like in Genshin Impact. This greatly increases the odds of getting your ideal light cone and encourages more player to roll on the light cone banner.

Spenders also require less currency if they are pulling for an S6 light cone. Overall, this change was well needed, considering how frustrating Genshin’s weapon banner was. Additionally, Honkai Star Rail is way more generous with the amount of light cones you can get.

Unlike Genshin Impact, you can unlock 5-star light cones from the Starglight Exchange. The Genshin’s equivalent to this is the Starglitter Exchange, which only sells 4-star weapons. This change is amazing for free to play players who rarely spend on weapons and often never get the ones they want for their main characters.

The weekly bosses in HonKai Star Rail also drop entire 4-star light cones compared to Genshin bosses only dropping Prototypes for craftable weapons. Herta’s Store also has three 5-star light cones that you can farm and they even have currency for you to superimpose the light cones to level 5.

Switching between various quests is also much easier in HonKai Star Rail because characters aren’t locked to quests like they were in Genshin. Usually, Genshin quests would keep certain NPCs locked into that quest until you finish them. This prevents you from completing another quest that uses the same NPC. Because they can’t be in two places at the same time. In Honkai Star Rail, they made it so that NPC’s moved to whichever quest you have currently active, which allows you to complete quests in any order you want.

Loading times in HonKai Star Rail are also significantly better. This is because of how each area is separated into several maps as opposed to Genshin loading in entire worlds. Device performance has also improved because of this. And Honkai Star Rail is also a much smaller download compared to when Genshin first came out.

Trailblaze Power is capped out at 180 and regenerates every 6 minutes compared to Genshin’s Resin capping at 160 and regenerating every 8 minutes. Therefore, it will take you only 18 hours to fully regenerate your energy in Honkai Star Rail compared to 21 hours and 20 minutes for Genshin.

Lastly, my favorite change is the increased importance of a character’s element in Honkai Star Rail. In Genshin Impact, elements were only necessary for breaking Shields from mobs, such as the Abyss Mage. Other than that, elements do not matter and you can run the same team for pretty much any boss. In Honkai Star Rail, enemies have Weaknesses in certain elements and attacking an enemy with their Weakness would reduce their Toughness. Without breaking their Toughness, you would deal very low damage.

This makes the character’s element much more important in gameplay. Because of the importance of elemental coverage on teams, this encourages players to use more diverse team comps and makes use of the giant character roster in Honkai Star Rail. As a result, collecting characters becomes much more rewarding and fun for the player base.

Whether you like Honkai Star Rail or Genshin Impact, you will always encounter 5-star characters or weapons that are very difficult to pull. If you want to save time and effort, you can directly purchase a Honkai Star Rail Account or a Genshin Impact Account with the character or weapon you want.

No doubt you guys have heard of Elder Scrolls Online at some point. Maybe you gave it a try back in the day and you’re probably sitting there wondering why is this game still so popular even to this day? 

If you haven’t tried it, maybe you’re sitting there thinking: what makes this game special? Why do people play this instead of playing World of WarCraft, Final Fantasy, Guild Wars or another MMO? Let’s go over the several points that differentiate ESO as an MMO and what makes the game just so good.

1. Rich Lore

If you’ve ever played an Elder Scrolls game, whether it’s Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, it doesn’t matter. You know that the Elder Scrolls Universe has a massive amount of lore going on for it. Each race, location, deity and hero has these extensive backstories behind them and Elder Scrolls Online is no different.

This game has a massive amount of rich and extensive lore. That’s been built up over the course of the game’s lifetime and of course this lore draws from the previous Elder Scrolls games, taking inspiration, but it also has introduced a ton of new stories, characters, and locations to the Elder Scrolls Universe.

One of the main reasons why people play this game so much is because it is so story driven because of the lore of Elder Scrolls Online. And if you’ve never given gaming lore a chance, Elder Scrolls is a great place to start, whether it’s this game or the single player games.

2. Level Scaling 

This is something that’s either you love it or you hate it when it comes to MMORPGs. But Elder Scrolls Online uses a level scaling system instead of a traditional MMO, where you level up a character, you ultimately out level zones and you sort of end up at the end of things in a select couple of zones that are the max level areas.

Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t do this. Instead, they have a level scaling system that allows their players to explore any part of the game world regardless of their level and it keeps every corner of the game relevant. This means that you can always find a challenge regardless of where you are in the game. 

If you’re a completionist or an explorer or whatever, this game is definitely right up your alley because it keeps things interesting with its scaling technology. Not everybody is a fan of horizontal progression, but in regard to the world, ESO does it very well.

3. Massive World

If you’ve ever played a previous Elder Scrolls title, you know that this is the kind of game that goes out of its way to be big and detailed and Elder Scrolls Online is no different.

The game world of ESO is massive, and players are free to explore it at their own pace. There are no level requirements for the zones either because of the scaling, so players can explore wherever they want. If you’re somebody that you want to quest and level up in Morrowind because that was your favorite game in the Elder Scrolls series, go over there and explore it or go to some of these regions where Bethesda hasn’t made a single player version of The Elder Scrolls at yet.

It’s completely up to you wherever you go. Across these zones, you’ll find everything from dragons attacking some areas to Oblivion Gates opening in others...... There're tons of stuff to find in each zone. Each zone has its own unique personality. It’s a world worth exploring. 

4. Player Choice 

Elder Scrolls is not a game where you just choose a class, level up the class and you’re stuck in that particular play style.

When it comes to ESO, you can play this game however you want. In Elder Scrolls Online, if you want to be an Argonian Thief, who wears heavy armor or who runs around healing people while also poisoning them with your daggers, you can do that. If you want to be a Necromancer who uses a bow and poisoned arrows, you can do that, too. 

You really can create whatever character you want in Elder Scrolls Online, which can lead to a little of a learning curve. But as you go through the game and as you gather points from leveling up or discovering Skyshards, you can spend them however you want in your skill trees that you unlock as you play the game. It makes the replayability of this game really good.

It also is cool because you’ll probably get to max before even exploring a fourth of all the zones in this game. So, going and checking out new zones and trying out new builds and new styles of playing your character. It’s awesome. 

5. Player Housing 

Player housing is a thing in Elder Scrolls Online and it is very expansive and it is very immersive. In this game, you can purchase tiny houses. You can purchase massive homes and with whatever your creativity desires. 

I’ve been in player homes that are completely vampire themed homes that are all like hunting with animal heads and stuff everywhere to even homes that are pretty much like entire castles that players have made within the giant landmass that you can purchase to customize your home on. It’s pretty wild how in-depth the player housing system is within ESO and I feel like I only scratched the surface of it despite my hundreds of hours in this game. 

6. No Subscription Required 

Unlike a lot of other MMOs, ESO does not require a monthly subscription, and the game is in no way paid to win.

When it comes to this game, if you play it, you can play it as much as you want or as little as you want without having to worry about any sort of recurring fee. 

The only thing really that you get from subscribing monthly to Elder Scrolls Online is you get points to spend in the Cosmetic Shop. You get an infinitely deep crafting bag, which some people would say it’s a little unfair. But it’s just a crafting bag. If you don’t care about crafting, it’s not a big deal. You also get access to all the content and all the expansions up to whatever the current expansion is whatever that might be. 

My first 100 hours in this game or so, I played completely for free with no subscription and I loved the game so much that I did ultimately subscribe to it. But it’s a hundred percent not necessary to progress in this game and to have a good time.

7. World PVP 

If you ever played Elder Scrolls Oblivion, you might remember Cyrodiil, a big landmass with the city in the center. 

In Elder Scrolls Online, the three factions are all fighting for control of that city. The massive scale world versus world combat in ESO, the moment that you try it, you’re going to get hooked to it: catapults and battering rams in all manner of fire and magic and fortresses...... It is wild that all of the this fortress besieging and stealing and whatever to claim the capital city right in the center of Cyrodiil and to claim an emperor for your faction.

Imagine a Classic World of WarCraft High Warlord or Grand Marshal. Because the emperor gets their own unique skill tree and abilities that they can use to dominate on the PVP Battlefield. It’s great. The world PVP in this game is so much fun.

8. Living World 

Something that I think a lot of RPG or immersive MMO gamer enthusiasts will enjoy about ESO is how interactable the world is and how immersive it can be.

In Elder Scrolls Online, if you’re walking along and you see a sword on the ground, you can pick it up. You see a potato, you can pick it. NPCs will lock the doors of their homes and you can break in. You can murder NPCs in this game. You can and get a bounty put on your head where guards will kill you on site unless you pay the fine.

If you are particular classes like a Necromancer and you were to use a Necromancer ability in the middle of town, people will freak out and try to attack you because you’re a freaking Necromancer. You’re raising the dead in the middle of the Town Square. 

So many people love this about ESO just how interactable the world is and how you can really play out whatever sort of fantasy that you want. Whether you’re a warrior, that’s going around and killing dragons to being some cutthroat rogue, who breaks into people’s homes and steals ESO Gold out of their treasure boxes, whoever you want to be, you can be that person.

Also Read: Elder Scrolls Online: The Unique Mechanics Of Arcanist Class Will Have A Big Impact On Game’s Resource System

9. Rewarding Exploration

Exploration is rewarded tremendously because Elder Scrolls Online is not a linear MMO. You can just kind of go wherever you want.

This is one of my favorite ways to play Elder Scrolls Online: just abandoning the quest that’s right in front of you and just wandering out into the world to see what you find.

As you explore, you’ll find more quests to take part in. You will find world bosses scattered throughout the world that you can fight. You can find delves, which are like these single player dungeons that you can go into. Fight the boss at the end and get an awesome piece of gear, possibly even a set piece of gear. There’s a ton of sets in Elder Scrolls Online that can all do unique things, like making your abilities poisonous, or you can summon like a Daedra. There are lots of stuff in this game in regard to sets.

You can find Skyshards out in the world, which you can collect to get more skill points. You can meet different guilds and factions. There’s a lot in Elder Scrolls Online in terms of exploration. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game.

10. Constant Updates 

Maybe a lot of you reading this article right now play World of WarCraft or Final Fantasy, which are some really large MMO today. And when you hear the term Elder Scrolls Online, you just think: it’s a dead game. It probably gets no content. Nobody really plays it...... 

You would be surprised to discover that a lot of people play this game. No matter where you go in the world, you’re going to be running into players. 

And in regard to the company behind the scenes making the content for this game, they are constantly pumping out updates whether they are new story chapters, dungeons, delves, zones, expansions, new ways to play the game like getting a follower introducing dragons and elsewhere. Whatever you want, these guys are just constantly pumping out new content into this world.

So, there’s always something to look forward to. Even right now in June, the newest Elder Scrolls Online expansion is coming out Necrom with a brand new class. Because the game has this constant steady stream of content, it does not get boring. And even when it does and you decide I’m going to take a break for a couple of months, when you come back, there’s always plenty more to do and plenty more to explore.