I ended up trying Master, which was a huge fucking mistake because after spending maybe 15 minutes on it, I had a bad start and quit after round 1. After I confirmed the quit... I saw the rare print drop I'd just given up. So of course in my regret/anger at myself for having fucking wasted that luck, I spent another 40+ minutes trying over and over before I got another print (also from the first round). (and then wasted extra time typing this... ugh)
I probably would have wasted that time tomorrow anyway so there is that, and I got the boss to 40% HP once, but now I'm just even more pissed about the difficulty. I got Ryozen 0->38 mana nodes and replacing Malka with him did jack shit; I'm pretty sure they both have a deal with the enemy to just casually fucking bite it 2 rounds in. When I do somehow get everyone (or everyone minus Ryozen) to the last round Amane tends to die out of nowhere and whoops I cannot actually kill him with just Fritz/Vixel/Ryozen maybe.
The problem with this challenge battle is I don't feel like there's any strategy to it. All the prior ones felt like there were set actions I did every round; you could see that as repetitive, but I felt like I had a goal to execute and it felt great when it went off flawlessly. Here it's just a chaotic mess on either difficulty, but it's a joke to deal with on Expert and its existence is a joke on Master. On Expert I can just do whatever and kill the boss with like 1:50 left; I know this is to some extent due to my dojos surging up in levels, but I was still pretty strong last time and still planned my skill use well even if it was tapping a button to murder everything. Doesn't matter one bit this time.
Now, over on Master, if I don't play as Fritz he's worthless, so I have to use him and constantly try to kill with force strikes to get skill attack buffs, which is completely impossible when my AI suddenly decide the one thing they should do while not being suicidal is stealing all my kills. Which they're able to do because it's impossible to tell if I'm going to kill them or not, and also it's actually hard to produce force strikes on command when it's easier to do a hit or two first and whoops dead, or whoops he stood in place for two whole seconds before actually charging the strike and whoops it didn't kill them but Amane's hit did. So I'm just constantly spinning around trying to clean things up well and at most I'll have 16% or 24% skill buffed out of the possible 40%. At least his stuns help at the end but that's a fun game of rng too.
Also, all I have is 3 0UB Lindworms and MUB Unicorn, and boy does Lindworm ever feel pathetic to use like this. At most the long skill lets you dodge the boss attacks better... once... but I feel like I'm barely doing anything. I wish they'd not done that bizarre crit buff on Shishimai so I'd at least have a decent Pele-like strength dragon.
Like I said, I would have gladly welcomed a more difficult version. But this just doesn't feel difficult. I don't feel like I can use strategy when the boss has so much HP that my actions barely matter in comparison to whether or not the AI decides to live or die. I'm not sure if this is just bad luck regarding what characters I have access to, or what, but it sucks. And it's practically worthless beyond the print, which you can at least tell you got, because for everything else you're just rolling the dice on getting anything worthwhile. And it's highly impractical to use the farming prints there, and you'll lose bonuses for getting hit and taking so long to kill, so... what's the actual point of it? I feel like getting to wave 5, hell, maybe even wave 4, should at least give me as much points as clearing Expert flawlessly does given how much less work that is.
and so there went my night, and I still need 2 more HMS kills in the next 26 hours... fuck
