You know what? I take back what I said about Genshin balancing team being ass, not sure what I was thinking last night. There is definitely crazy powercreep present in HSR, even if hardly anyone is in objectively bad tier. Though I find a lot of the latest Genshin characters rather boring on a mechanical level compared to HSR team building.
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Getting Robin and getting the crazy idea to go Hypercarry Clara made all the difference.
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I have a friend that has been testing out HMC/Ruan Mei using full break builds for characters that aren't normally built for break.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH84lno9_7A
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCxukAV5Tn0
My friend is already thinking about testing Break Herta + Break Jade + RM + HMC once Jade is released. And considering how hard the devs have been pushing FuA and break effect lately, we're wondering if the natural conclusion to all of this is a potential new character before the next planet that is specifically built for both FuA AND Break at the same time, trying to cram in as many attacks as possible while RM/HMC's ultimates are up.
When you see things like this, I can fully understand why people are saying Firefly is underwhelming and will likely be powercrept very quickly in her current state. Characters that aren't normally built for break at all have the flexibility to achieve good results when pivoting to break relics and used in a break team alongside HMC/Ruan Mei. Seeing all of the showcase testing with Firefly, I get the impression that Firefly E0 could very well be the weakest 5* in the entire game, there's a reason the majority of showcases are E2. Her E1 and E2 might as well be currently
required, so a good first step towards fixing her would be to bake both of their effects into her base kit. Though that would make less money for what is probably the most hyped character in the Penacony patch cycle thus far.
As for Jade, she's clearly not meant to work with Topaz and Dr. Ratio at all. The way I currently see her, she's meant to be the cornerstone of AoE FuA teams, the same way Topaz is the cornerstone of single target FuA. Jade might look underwhelming now, but Topaz also looked underwhelming back when she was first released. Everyone who had the foresight to recognize that the devs were going to release more FuA characters and went for E1S1 Topaz back when she was first released won big time ever since, assuming they kept up with investing in the FuA teams.
The devs seem to be shifting towards designing a
second FuA team built around AoE, and so far it seems like you don't really need to invest in Jade nearly as much as Topaz (a lot of her showcases are E0/S1). Jade + Herta already seems pretty nuts, along with just hypercarry Jade since she's SP-positive. I suspect we're going to see another FuA Erudition fairly soon that's designed to work extremely well with Jade (most likely
Screwllum with a reworked kit at this point).