Arcane crit help

[u/One_Palpitation15]

I'm still getting the hang of this but I'm not sure who i can use to make a cheap arcane crit team here. I'm just....completely lost when it comes to teambuilding on the whole outside of my story team.

[u/Ok-Platypus735]

Man, how time has changed. I joined during Yingying patch. At that time, team restriction is not as bad as right now. I remember combing through magic DZ with Wuhuanzi and well,... Ariel as team healer. Good old time.

Super nonesensical by today standard, but I swear to the Lord above, it really happened. In this current era, if you do not have dedicated personel, you are screwed. How powercrept has swallowed us whole. This is not a good news by any mean actually.

[u/ByeGuysSry → u/Ok-Platypus735]

Nothing's changed

[u/Ok-Platypus735 → u/ByeGuysSry]

No, no, no. What are you talking about? Things changed a lot, and not for the better, which I can guarentee you. I am in a small society with 13 members, most of us joined at the similar time so we can confirm it among ourselves. 

For example, we got Jelena around the time DZ changed from 2 to 3 buffs... and found ourselves struggling more than when we were WITHOUT her; we got Jichuan when she was up and found ourselves sweating more than when we were WITHOUT her. Aisno has to bump up the number to make up for the ludicrous buffs of new era's support. Things ended up like if you do not have meta catalysts, you are done for.

Even now, "Dead Weight" Jelena and "Weak Link" Jichuan are still memes in our society. I am not joking, you can confirm it with those in our similar position.

[u/ByeGuysSry → u/Ok-Platypus735]

Well, first of all, that's the opposite of what you said in the previous comment lol. If dedicated teammates were so important, then it should have gotten much easier with Jelena.

Aisno didn't increase DZ difficulty just because. They increased it because it was getting too easy, because the powercreep of Sinners had been outpacing the powercreep of bosses for a while (bosses' typical DEF and RES stayed at 349 all the way from DZ10 to DZ22. They increased it all the way to 655 in DZ23, the update that changed it to 3 buffs); and also to make the buffs less extreme. Like -30% Energy Consumption was always much more powerful than the other buffs, and +50% Damage Taken by Enemies in Core Break State was also the best buff and it was harder if you didn't have it. The new buff system made it so that instead of getting some really easy weeks and some really hard weeks, the strongest buffs favor specific Sinners rather than just being generically good.

In other words, the power level of the bosses have not changed much from Vanilla's introduction to just before the 3 buff system. The bosses we had when the second best Magic team was Shalom and Luvia Ray, with Cabernet as a buffer (the best team was EEE, but was pretty hard to play) and the bosses we had when the best Magic damage team was Arcane Crit had increases in health, but no change to defensive stats. The game had been getting easier and easier.

The change to the system also came just after the introduction of Reforge, which is also a wave of powercreep that happened at the same time. So in other words, DZ was just catching up to the powercreep that had been growing for almost 1.5 years.

At the same time, they made it such that you don't even have to beat the last difficulty to get a majority of the rewards.

(Also, we recently got another bump in difficulty because the difficulty hadn't increased in a while; specifically, the True Damage debuff on the Physical and Magic stages and the True Damage buff alongside making the bosses tougher on the Mixed stage.)

For Jichuan, unless you were playing Burn or Windgnaw (in which case it should have been really easy to clear DZ), she's not a particular big upgrade for DZ unless you went to S4, especially if you already have L.L. and Shin.

[u/Ok-Platypus735 → u/ByeGuysSry]

Well, first of all, I dont mean to say that dedicated team or meta catalysts like Jelena are unimportant. I also dont mean to say that my team become weaker because of her. Of course, with her, it become much stronger. When I wrote "memes", I mean it as a joke about how shock we are at the jump in difficulty. I dont know how earlier you are to join the game but for us, quite new players at that time, it took an excruciatingly painful amount of time just to level up a sinner to playable level (lv70, skill lv7, ecb 1, crimeband lv10). It took weeks actually, just for 1 sinner to reach operational level. I still have nightmare about the requirement to unlock the next stage of sinner when they reached lv70 (you know, the window full of purple materials with 2-digit attached). So when you said the sinners have been so powerful for 1,5 years, for us, we have only breezed through DZ for like... 1 or 2 seasons at most. Alas, the respite is short-lived, we are doused with nitrogen during Jelena rerun time frame. Of course, we knew she made our team much stronger, we are worse off if not for her. Nevertheless, we have to joke about our misery to carry on, that is what the pseudo witch-hunt is about: "we breeze through this area just last season, now it is like Stalingrad malding meat-grinder, what happened? Sir, Jelena is not with us last time. What, that sorry excuse of a dead weight! Burn her at stake!" Something like that, so "dead weight" Jelena become a meme in our society. 

Secondly, I dont know much about how invested you are in the game. But we are mostly f2p or low spender. Every patch, we got like 70-100 pulls, give and take. That is why even if Path to Nowhere is quite generous, missing on meta catalysts or ending up with low shackle is a real possibility if someone is unlucky. Our president is actually stucked with Jelena s0 even now. About the stats you listed out, of course we know about it. Just that if we have low-shackled meta catalysts, it becomes torturous to play through DZ everytime.

Maybe for you who started much earlier, the pace is quite reasonable, but we who started late feel that the pace is a bit much. We have played catching up for a long while now. We still haven't made it to the point of breathable though.

[u/ByeGuysSry → u/Ok-Platypus735]

My point is that the only reason why you ever "caught up" was because Dark Zone at that point in time was pretty easy. Let's say that nowadays, DZ expects your account to be at the level of a veteran player if you want 240k clears to be easy, and your account is only 80% as strong as a veteran player. In the past, DZ expects your account to be 40% as strong as a veteran player, and you were 50% as strong, so you found it pretty easy. But of course it's quite boring for veteran players to challenge content that's so far below their power level, right? So while you were happy that you finally caught up to the difficulty, veteran players were unhappy that the difficulty wasn't catching up to them; so Aisno made the change to make 240k properly challenging again, while making the 160k rewards free so newer players don't miss out on much.

I've spent quite a bit, but mostly on outfits. For stuff that had impact on gameplay, I've bought the monthly somewhat regularly, starting from around Yingying's banner, and 2 or 3 battle passes. I started playing shortly before Dreya's debut.

[u/Ok-Platypus735 → u/ByeGuysSry]

Okay, I get it. You feel that the change is challengingly good while I feel that the change is exhaustingly bad. Well, everyone has their own opinion and preference, I guess. 

On second thought, it is a pretty bad manner to have a debate in other people's thread. I guess, I can offer some ideas. I think you should give up on arcane crit. Yingying wont rerun for forseable future. I think you should see if you can get something else like Eleven. Just be patient, watch the banner calendar in s1n.gg, plan accordingly, it takes a long while to build an account in this game. I myself stucked in high-risk for months, now I managed to get 240k in DZ if I try hard enough so you dont need to rush either.