Yeah, that's fair enough. Frankly it's just frustrating to have gotten so swept up in it. I have a somewhat bad understanding of higher level mechanics, particularly as I'm not at the point of actually running VH dungeons, so I'm already just pulling due to the vague comments people make about how great she is rather than personal attachment. This is really only my second gacha game after/alongside Dragalia, and for Dragalia I have been extremely particular about how I pull because from the start I specifically didn't want to give into temptation to keep going and then feel regret. Unfortunately, it's indeed way easier to apply that to a game where I have like 300+ pulls banked and am in a very very solid place (because I've had some amazing luck lately... and a pity system to help), vs one where you have to scrounge up currency for every 10 and even I can see some of the more obvious deficiencies in my lineup (seeing as my only full 5*s are both water element and only one has element AOE). It's really much easier to deal with "eh, should I do another 10 or not? I'll have 10+ 10 summons banked still... though it'll mostly just be eldwater" compared to "time to go desperately do various things to get 1/10 of a single pull at a time... but if I get a 5* it could be gamechanging".
Rather, you'd think the latter would have an obvious red flag of the amount of effort involved, alongside just the much higher risk of feeling burned, right? But it actually taps right into a key weakness for me: I fucking love crossing things off lists in games, and easily fall into making plans to do so as well (...both of which are things I very very much wish I was better at applying so effortlessly to everyday life, haha). So that's definitely a thing I need to be way more aware of if I want to keep playing this, I guess! Sorta indicates I should just finish the story sooner rather than later, and then figure out how to run ADs in a healthy/structured manner after that alongside casual farming for awards as wanted, rather than letting myself be distracted by such goals on a whim.
...all that rambling having been said, still also suddenly realized a little earlier this morning that just running some ADs and such, as I already intended to, would get me to another 100. Just doing a few more of the new episode AD, killing the Time Layers H horror I never got around to since it was easier to just do the episode AD last night to get the next pull (I still need to farm some Layers items so this wasn't out of the way), and quickly topping off 100 kills on 2 of the episode enemies. So I did go for that for the hell of it, but I did it throughout the morning and needed just a couple more minutes to finish the last in time. I went in expecting that though, so I just pulled for Nagi banner... got 3.5 Rufus, so there's that. From now on, it's saving for a bit, I guess.
and on that note, there's so many 3.5s that I guess I'll pick and choose from to upgrade once I have more items for that stocked; I know I'll want to upgrade Mariel to 5* ASAP once I can get her tome, and will otherwise mainly upgrade the chance characters for the time being, so I feel ok with giving extra murmur/prayer to some 4*s that are worth it...