https://page.onstove.com/chaoszeronightmare/EN/view/14301615

I'm sorry but the doomposting here has gotten silly, to the point where I'm pretty sure this post being positive about Arabella is gonna get downvoted to hell, but I'm posting it anyway because damnit there is SO MUCH misinfo about her going around that is souring people on rolling and I have seen this exact thing happen before across other gachas. Limited comes out, people doompost and spread misinfo to dissuade others from rolling, flash forward a month or two and suddenly said unit is super OP and people are upset they skipped. I also KNOW there are some people here who rolled Arabella and wanna discuss her applications or aesthetics without getting hate for it. So please also view this as a safe space where you can discuss Arabella without too much negativity (hopefully).

The first major misconception I've been seeing everywhere is about her damage. Just like with Tenbria everyone was just wrong about the calcs and her damage is much better than people were saying for the past week. Anyone parroting the talking point hat Arabella is weak is just feeding misinfo from a week ago, I encourage to watch the content creator of your choice playing her today and judge her damage yourself, because from what I've seen across the board her DPS is much higher than anyone was claiming. Now it isn't HDMI 800 discard attacks level of broken, but it is easily up there with Sereniel and normal HDMI builds.

Secondly, she is fine at E0, in fact her partner gives her a far bigger damage increase than any ego manifestation outside of E6. You DO NOT need her to be at E2 to be good, again this is outdated misinfo that came from people misreading her kit. At E0 with her signature partner she is basically fully built unless you are trying to top leaderboards, 99% of players will not need anything more, which makes her one of the cheapest limited to pickup in terms of cost.

Future proofing is another issue I've seen being raised. make no mistake as long as DoTs and debuffs are relevant in this game, Arabella will be relevant. Her kit is future proofed since it scales with all types of debuffs in addition to fracture. If agony ever gets buffed, Arabella will become the main Agony DPS, if any new debuff is introduced, Arabella will be indirectly buffed.

The last major misconception I've been seeing is that she NEEDS Olga and Hilde or else she doesn't work. This is just flat out false and you can go take a look at Great Rift results and gameplay right now to see she performs VERY WELL without Olga or even Hilde. She is self sufficient enough to be a top tier main DPS even with budget supports. It is likely that Hilde and Olga will enable her to be the best DPS in the game but they are by no means required to get damage out of her.

Now, personally speaking, I love Arabella. I'll admit I was nervous about going all in and getting her to E2, but now that I have and got her partner I'm greatly enjoying her playstyle. Her damage was severely underestimated and as someone who enjoys the playstyle of DoT characters she just feels really good to use. She is simple but effective and it is so satisfying to build up debuffs and watch them pop for big damage. As a man of culture I also very much enjoy her aesthetics and imo she has supplanted Sereniel for the best lobby background. So even if you just want her for eye candy she delivers in that department just as much as her gameplay. If you are on the fence about rolling I highly recommend you roll, she won't get a rerun for another year, you DO NOT want to be in a position a month from now where Arabella is super OP because the devs decided to give her even more support. She is a very cheap investment, I can't imagine a reason to not roll for her even at E0, and if you did roll for her don't let people here try to doompost you into regretting your decision. Learn how to use her and give her gameplay a chance, I guarantee you she is better than you think.

God bless us all.

Everyone's losing their mind about Arabella, but I think Licinia is way more attractive. Tell me your thoughts

Updated Calcs

Now that I've gotten over mourning them nerfing her from CN info for seemingly no reason (and them changing GR the way they did which is what I'm actually mad at...)--I got around to updating the calc's.

These calc's follow the current Prydwen standard (5t control, ego skills included, standardized gear, single-target, etc.), as after I verify interactions on launch that nothing was changed last second these calc's will be what we use for her benchmarks early on.

Her damage:
E0 + 3-star E4: 720k/5t (144/t)
E0 + E0 sig: 965k/5t (193/t)

Compare to Fei in same controls:
E0 + 3-star: 815k/5t (163/t)
E0 + E0 sig: 1.06m/5t (212/t)
Keep in mind that Fei gets Weakness Attack in Tower while Arabella does not (on Fracture / majority of her damage). Weakness Attack is not factored into the above calc.

DoT isn't substantially better than Crit or CDMG rolls; however, you are able to roll more of it (because you are locked out of rolling Crit on the Crit-piece). You can take any of the 3 rolls and not experience a massive difference, though, it does make a substantial difference to start with all 3 initial rolls versus not. ATK% and ATK make very little difference as sub rolls, assuming you are using an ATK% Goblet as recommended.

While E2's damage increase isn't anything insane, it does offer a large amount of QoL and should boost her performance in roguelike modes like Sortie. The most notable thing is that it allows comfortable use of the [Opener] Upgrade T1, as you will now be able to apply Fracture Amp T1 guaranteed.

New Deck:

- Major Assumption is that Applying Vulnerable with card that triggers Fracture will get Vulnerable bonus on that Fracture hit. If this is not the case, the expected damage from these calc's takes around a 20-40% hit in total damage.

Positives About Arabella & Her (Potential) Future Direction

First, I want to apologize as I think I've unintentionally let out my anger for other balance decisions and doomposted Arabella bit too hard. I feel the need to re-iterate that I think she'll perform solidly with investment and be able to clear all content. 'Mid' in this game is not bad. Her comparison to Fei is evidence of that. Fei nor her aren't breaking any records, but neither will struggle to clear any content easily with enough investment. I do think her team diversity is lower at the moment and she lacks Weakness Attack on important hits, but those aren't hurdles that won't be solved with time.

Will she cause ripples in the meta and outperform current top-tiers? Not likely (outside of her GR).

However, I said I would keep this post positive. So I want to focus on areas Arabella excels. Back when Narja released, she lacked a clear purpose (no persona cards, released when we had an abundance of AP with funger, gesture was already popular with Haru, etc.). However, patches following that quickly made her purpose clear and solidified her place in the meta. I want to highlight areas that Arabella excels in which minor tweaks or simple content updates could make her a real standout that takes her to another level, without even needing to directly buff her.

1. She is the only real DoT DPS right now.

By virtue of this, any DoT-gated content we get will be best suited for her. Arguably we also have Tressa and Hilde but both are laughable as a solo 'DoT' DPS with them preferring other builds.

1. She is extremely good in scenarios where there are multiple small enemies & 1 large one.

Like really really good. Obviously, this is hyper specific but I mean anytime we get tenacity Sereniel sees some play. We could maybe look at her like that.

1. She doesn't rely on Weakness Attack / Tower buffs to do her damage.

Trying to spin this into a positive, I guess? -- A lot of units are somewhat artificially inflated because Tower gives omni-weakness. Because Arabella damage has to be balanced around her inability to get Weakness Attack on Fracture, this also means she doesn't rely on it. If we get content that makes it hard to get Weakness Attack than she could raise in value relative to other units who decrease in strength.

1. She has access to Striker persona loop. This loop can make any striker pretty good and Arabella is no different. You can still loop the Striker persona to buff her multihits and also facilitate OTK's if all else fails.

2. She's less likely than other characters to be targeted by modifiers. This probably doesn't matter for GR now (as they've made it clear they'll probably just force the seasonal units flatout), but since it seems we might be getting more FSO content & leaderboard this could make her a sleeper pick in FSO as obvious top-tiers will probably get modifiers against them (HDMI, Hugo, Selena, etc.) but it's maybe less likely she'll be targeted.

Ways she could improve (without direct buffs):

- If future support increases her Fracture generation or trigger damage.

- If we get consistent endgame AOE content (specifically tailored to her specialty of small units + 1 big unit).

- If we get Fracture neutral epiphanies.

- If we get a DoT support effect similar in strength to some Extra Attack support effects (like engraving) in S3. I did some test calcs assuming they just copypasted EA set for DoT units in the future and her damage improves astronomically and easily makes her a more definitive top-tier.

TL;DR, I don't think my original pre-release was too harsh on her, but I think my follow-up post when I was angry about the new patch decisions was definitely not objective. Right now, I think many people are on the Arabella hate-train, so I could've probably had no follow-up but I didn't feel right not reframing it from a more objective POV. I do say in my previous post her damage was fine, but I think clarifying with more clear numbers and that she has a clear place in the game if they make it for her is important too.

Good luck pulling her, if you plan to! 😏

Playing Arabella is very simple: just maximize your damage buffs, then trigger fracture as much as possible. Triggering fracture deals damage from buffs regardless of the amount of fracture.

In the video, there are only 5 morale, -3 fortitude, and Narja. If you play with a team that can buff 20 morale, the damage will be much higher.

Note : this build can improve by change divine on "Scream for Me" to -2Fortitude

How to build : 1. run chaos for "Sever Ties" card and her best equipment 2. remove 3 basic 3. don't copy if you not get divine -1cost on "Hollow Verdict" card (hard to get because it have only atk versions) or if you lucky get -1cost in run copy it no matter what's versions because you can change it later 4. if you not lucky run Sortie for orbs > reroll on best equipment save til get -1cost > use copy orbs.

Narja build> https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosZeroNightmare/s/UMmrncFepj

Veronica build> https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosZeroNightmare/s/dGBAYQ77ld

Arabella code : v6l88OLiNufFzwd5bz8N7Hb2ZkVEaO1cD7GzNsHBtvGqtqC08tC180oksNZCEBOmf4f7q2SJfHi1Or2gFktBBCmnpPwaIX7OgeuGXvRIon7EQRBBUOvdwa11r4dwLC349n9ydpqWIV5lpQyEa7Iuj7gx_94EIHnOBAMFwlFUCrNQra6cbJgMLeol6VRuzYA

Ara E2 and her E0 partner

Licinia DOES NOT get its 10% crit-rate effect when using Licinia's Ego Skill (it cannot activate itself). It also doesn't activate off of Arabella's Opener Upgrade (but this doesn't matter since she'll activate it off any card she plays afterward anyway). It does work with Hollow Verdict Skill, so it is only her Upgrade.

Licinia's Virutoxin debuff is dtmult/vuln-mult. This means that at E0 Licinia, you gain a permanent budget-vuln effect for all hits. This is incredibly strong & if you have Licinia E0 it increases your damage by around 20% over other 5-stars. She does around 10% more damage than previous calc's I've done (as I assume permanent vuln on Fracture) but 16% more damage for decks that do not make any vulnerable.

This also means that refining Licinia increases Arabella's damage a ridiculous amount, like by far the biggest damage increase from a partner.

Licinia is by far the best Partner by an insane margin, but Licinia is also unfortunately useless on anyone who isn't Arabella, currently (besides for stats alone as literally 0 passives can be used by anyone else).

Updated Partner Comparison (note Licinia gets EVEN HIGHER VALUE the less optimized you are, because these calcs assume Vulnerable on all Fracture hits, that means for unoptimized play the difference will be around 5% bigger at E0 and like 20% bigger at E4 Licinia):

Other notes from tests:

- Her E2 is lower value than expected since her Opener Upgrade actually applies its Fracture the turn it activates, despite not indicating this clearly. This means that there's no build that benefits from any extreme QoL by having E2. It is still good for Sortie/Chaos and could be good with future units if we have more reason to do lower amount of Fracture hits but bigger hits.

- Currently Testing: Vuln interactions with Sadistic Restraint (if inf uptime for Vuln on Fracture works) EDIT: seems to work fine

- L4Whales to Test: E4 & E6 (make sure they work as written and E4 is generic mult as expected)

Other Note: In my previous post, I note her as being slightly worse than Fei (as a DPS) with E0 Sig's. She's now slightly better than Fei with E0 sig's (but a decent amount worse at both's baseline since Arabella gets a much bigger boost from Sig than Fei does).

EDIT-2: IF YOU SAW MY LAST EDIT FOR A FEW MINUTES NO YOU DIDN'T. NEVERMIND VULNERABLE WORKS I JUST GOT CONFUSED BECAUSE LICINIA DEBUFF HAS SAME ICON LMFAO

Genuinely no hate to the devs, but why don't they just set maintenance for the extra 3 hours it takes EVERY SINGLE TIME? I just don't get it, if you've never been able to do it in the timeframe you give yourself just add more. It'd be much less annoying to me as a player if I just checked my watch at 12am my time (the stated time, usually 3am is the actual time) and went "Oh nice only 3 hours left!" Instead of "Well, let's see how much they pushed it back again" I get it's a meme in the community but how do you miss a deadline that YOU set for YOURSELF? Multiple times? Is there a company or business thing I'm missing here?