YES, THE META IS CHANGING for any potential haters: i’m not putting any value judgement on what i’m going to write, just explaining the logic, it’s up to you to decide what you do with it. don’t shoot the messenger. early on, gacha games entice players to pull by establishing archetypes. every new toy is shiny and fun. over time, these archetypes get “completed” and everybody gets some bis partners, reaching their full potential. so you pull for strength. along the way, powercreep progresses. a 10% buff/debuff becomes 30%, and so on. at some point, the game hits a ceiling of diminishing returns. above a certain number, more crit, dmg%, or def shred simply stops doing much (or anything). so to make a team feel stronger, you must introduce a new variable or two. sounds familiar? it should, because that’s where we are in hsr right now. let’s take the fua archetype. in hsr 1.x, it was established; then in 2.x, completed with a fully synergistic team (the famous FART), one of the first of its kind in the game; and now in 4.x, it reached its numerical peak: ashblade and robin give a total of 110% def shred. in normal conditions, that’s OVER the max. and that’s all at e0. (that’s far from the only example, of course. robin sp gives thousands of ATK, so much that almost everybody you use her with prefers to wear speed boots, elemental orbs, and energy ropes. nova-welt has almost all the amp imaginable in his kit. and so on.) so, if, as a developer, you want to sell an even stronger team, what do you do when you literally can’t go beyond 100%? you introduce new levers to pull: a new mechanic or a new damage type with its own formula… or both. that’s elation with its aha, elation skills, elation%, punchlines, and bangers. since they’re new, they all start from 0! so you can once again keep pushing the value up over time. (there’s also a secondary factor, unrelated to powercreep. as the game ages and you add more and more characters to it, sometimes going into dozens or more, it also becomes more and more difficult to predict and contain the effects of any single new kit without excessive testing. so the new levers provide a layer of isolation and result in simplification for the devs.) this has a second-order effect, one that we’re starting to see right now: as the devs force their own hand to establish new niches, well, they must make content where these niches can excel, right? which predictably leads to an increase in shilled endgame stages. in hsr every endgame needs 3 teams now. of course, the new archetype has to have at least one good matchup everywhere so that only leaves 2 stages for EVERYONE ELSE IN THE GAME. i repeat: all the previous teams have to settle for these two remaining bosses. and one of them is more often than not going to favor the shilled niche of the last cycle (in our case, monorem.) and that’s on a good reset. because a bad reset can shill the new archetype in 2 fights, leaving everyone else with just 1. as if that’s not enough, here’s the last second-order effect: as all the new archetypes have their own isolated multipliers, buffs, and mechanics, you will see the exact same process when it comes to available blessings. if an endgame like apoc gives you 3 buffs to choose from and dedicates 1 to elation plus 1 to remembrance, everybody else needs to make do with that one last generic buff, which will NOT help all of them the same. conclusion: all of this put together contributes to a decrease in the ability of an average team to brute-force content. and so the optimal strategy that worked before - pull 2/3 strong teams and make them even stronger with vertical so that they can win against anything - becomes less effective as time goes on. this impacts pull value and strategies, too. horizontal investment has one big disadvantage: you build many teams, but all of them are relatively weak, so they will inevitably fall off. THE QUESTION BECOMES: how to build your account in a way that is, at once, just enough vertical and just enough horizontal? (last week, i learned that people call that “diagonal.”) ANSWER: you pull not for archetypes per se but for… bosses. you don’t need a “fua team.” you need a team that can win against hoolay or graphia. so if a team you already have is good enough to cover multiple bosses, you don’t need another archetype to do the same job. and when your old team becomes unable to carry, you look for an upgrade. in genshin, which i started last year as possibly the last new player ever, hexerei is a good example of an archetype that didn’t get any shilled matchups in stygian. as a result, it’s kinda pointless to pull for them bc every generic team can do their job just as well. (btw, i actually borrowed a lot of this philosophy from genshin’s meta CCs who spend A LOT of time talking about stygian matchups. play multiple games!) an intelligent reader may object: “but verlee, all of this requires knowing the bosses in advance!” well, true. that’s the difficult part. the easy answer is probably just to pull the anni team and ignore everyone else. if you’re fine with that, great. if not, you have to look for other solutions while still trying to conserve your resources and avoid pulling everyone. so for players who want to gamble, here’s one such solution: in hsr terms, this entire process has been well illustrated by break teams being able to cover early elation bosses on many accounts. i know many people who have saved all their pulls since 4.0 and simply blitzed through sparxicon and illwish with their novaflared e2 firefly and dahlia! but since that will soon become impossible with the new boss, an extremely efficient pull for a person like that may be… aven. get him, use him with tribbie and moze (who you may already have) in a cope team which will cover that boss, maybe add ashveil or mblade over time, idk. yes, aven, a character with “0 pull value” according to hsrtwt (and myself lmao), saving an account! this goes against the traditional hsr wisdom. a 2.x/3.x player would YELL at you for skipping the new meta support. but as a result, you have saved hundreds of pulls over the course of 4.x by getting the most out of your existing sunk-cost team and covering a shill gap with the smallest possible move. you pull when you have to.