#playing nte

Chaos build while out of the active party, 57% crit:

When in active party but not yet in combat, you can see Street Boxer's first +14% crit has been applied (71% total):

After triggering Remora, second +14% applied (85% total):

I plan to run him with Hathor for her passive, so he'll get an additional 10% crit from her. It's when attacking Remora-affected enemies, so it probably won't show on the stat screen though. Still, the aim in Genshin and Wuwa was around 70% crit, so 85% should already be fine.

NTE is really nice in regard to the gear because there are no duplicate rolls into the same substat, unlike Genshin/HSR. Rather, you unlock a set of substats as you level up, like Wuwa, and you can see them when you get the module, like Genshin and HSR updated later to be.

But even better than Wuwa, there are no min/max rolls on substats. For example, Crit rate is always exactly 1% per square block on the gold pieces. So a Type II module (has two blocks) will always give 2% crit, a Type III will give 3%, etc.

Since Chaos can fill out all 20 of his grid, he can get a max of 30% crit rate (one of his type IIs doesn't have crit here, so he's only getting 18%). The console meanwhile can give 18% for the mainstat of 10% for the substat. These can double up (same main and sub stat), like in Wuwa, but this only applies for the console, not the modules.

So the total you can get on a character from console is 30+10+20=60% assuming they can fill their entire grid... though some characters can't, the requirements of the set make it impossible to maneuver the pieces to fully fit, like Hotori on Lost Radiance:

Those gaps are unavoidable from what I can see.

Chaos's sig gives 24% crit rate, while the BP arc on Hotori gives 22%.

So the total you'll get from console and arc will end up for 87-89%, counting the base 5% crit rate. But of course, this also means that character who don't have a crit arc or any other form of crit boost in their kit will end up with only 65%.

That said, my other DPS, Nanally who doesn't have a crit arc but does have the crit rate bonus from equipping specifically Type II pieces, up to 36%.

This means that for her and also Chaos, it's actually possible to overcap on Crit rate if they get it from every source they can. This is why Chaos should not run Crit rate console main stat (I'm trying to decide between Lakshana and cdmg for him), same for Nanally if you have her sig (though I don't).

For now, I'm kinda eh about it.

New banners: Zankou is a skip (what would I do with another DPS) and Linko is... probably a skip? I don't feel like replacing anyone in my Nanally team, and I don't think there's room for her in the Chaos team, since she can't replace Hathor (necessary for remora passive) or Fadia (sustain) or Hotori (necessary for remora passive). Plus, I can already feel that selecting someone for the follow up thing would get on my nerves. She's cute, but I need to be rational about my pulls.

Reruns: Nanally and Hotori are back, and I'm vaguely considering pulling something for them. The thing is that Hotori sig wouldn't work for how I'm using her (I don't use her skill to record anything), and Nanally's sig is iirc reliant on using both skill and ult every rotation while Nanally... doesn't always get her ult back? Plus, while I like her, she's the one more likely to get booted out of endgame, since I'm determined to use Chaos on the other side. I'm kind of thinking of fishing for an A1 on one or both of them, though I'd need to check how much improvement it would be. Regardless, I'll wait for news on the 1.4 banners first. It's looking like we'll probably get Nitsa and maybe she'll be an important support.

New area: Vaguely disappointing. It's huge, but that likely means it's also super empty. It seems very focused on racing (hate it) and the beach stuff (hate it also). Otherwise, it's more of stuff we already have anyway. I don't foresee any interesting exploration there, and it's vaguely annoying to just get a resort instead of urban stuff. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I'm not looking forward to the theme park in 1.4 either. It's a small area with a bunch of stuff that doesn't look interesting to climb or run around in. What are we going to do? Ride the rides? I can already picture the camera jank.

This one hurts a fair amount because it's really feeling like a drought of exploration in this open world exploration game.

Story: It'll be interesting to see how/if they can resolve the current storyline. I don't have any particular expectations, but we know it's one single quest (because 999 told us that), and I feel like at least one character is going to get the Thyme situation again: bizarre sudden focus despite barely appearing until the climax.

Skins: MASSIVE disappointment. I wanted another Chaos skin, but it's a swimsuit? The slop of skins, truly. Everything is swimsuits, extremely unappealing. Well aside from the Zankou skins, which are... unexpectedly rather meh, imo? I really liked Shinku's skins, they felt very cohesive, but Zankou's are just kind of all over the place. Also, Linko is seemingly getting a school uniform skin. Cool, the other slop skin type. But hey, this makes the vehicle blind box an immediate skip, since they stuffed three swimsuits in there.

Events: It's really hard to tell what they're actually going to be, so I don't have any particular impressions at the moment. I did glimpse a namecard among the rewards for one of the jetski events, hopefully it'll be water-themed, which would make a nice set with my icon border and (soon to be bought) title. There was also one that looked like a rogue-like buff selector, and those kinds of modes can be a bit fun, depending on the execution.

Minor note, but I'm unreasonably annoyed about the bagel points influx at the start, since I went through the trouble of grinding those for the achievement. Might as well have not bothered...

New house: It's cute, but I feel like the small size of the rooms and hallways will make it feel very bad to actually move around in. The camera is just not able to handle tight spaces (not even mentioning the furniture placement mode). Anyway, the actual house itself is pretty irrelevant if they don't add more interesting furniture to decorate with and also do something about the anomaly furniture situation. atm you still have to visit specific houses to pick up the anomaly furniture daily/weekly drops, so you're basically locked to those being your "main" homes purely for simplicity.

Minigame updates: I'm indifferent about adding more minigames. Generally, there's no reason to play them. They're co-op or jank or just not more interesting than fishing, my staple (still need that title). I'm also unimpressed by them expanding the ways to burn PPH budget (I actually enjoyed doing the base version and cleared it easily and quickly whenever it reset) or the increased city stamina burn rate. Those aren't bad updates, and maybe there will be a day when I appreciate the convenience, but they don't matter to me now.

QOL: Not much to say here. The outfit rotation is theoretically interesting? But I don't think any of my overworld party will ever have enough outfits to be worth rotating through, and I use other characters too rarely to get tired of individual skins.

I think that's it? Pretty whatever, but I guess I'll keep grinding my usual things and wait for... October. Because that's when 1.4 will be.

For the story, tbh I started skipping really quickly. Overall, the premise of characters doing DnD just doesn't interest me, and while Mint is cute enough, I didn't find the character interactions enough to carry it. It really didn't help that Iroi... felt kinda off-putting. Glad we could play her here (and that the meta is quite mild right now) so I know to skip her, since I was considering her previously. It also doesn't help that the story seems to be just filler that introduces Shinku, who seems to not have any plot relevance either.

But that's fine. Skip button exists for this reason.

The gameplay is a mixed bag. It's fine for an event, but it's pretty shallow and not terribly refined. I liked the Jump King platforming the best out of everything. It was also fun getting to play Mint (and MC) for a good while before I got to the real endgame builds(tm). (btw, here is the video I used as a guide for those.) That said, it does start to drag later on because it's just mobs that die to the special event dot effects and are too tanky for literally anything else.

Probably the worst part was this damn accomplishment:

There seem to be very few sources of equipment to appraise? I think it's just mythic weapons and accessories that are repeatable. I got those endgame builds just for this and have vastly overfarmed the buttons in the process.

I'm actually a bit unsure how to spend them. I got all the MC outfit stuff, but I only like one of Mint's outfits. I did end up getting all the base versions for her too because why not, and I got the namecard and phone decorations. But the Shinku icon, icon border, costume, those are useless to me, I'm not going to pull her. I'm thinking maybe getting one of Iroi's outfits just in case, but they're currently locked anyway. The other option is really just getting the daily refreshing enemy drop substitutes anyway...

From the comments:

1. Mihoyo 6891 (+214 hires) 2. Kuro Games 2368 (+363 hires) -> Wuwa, PRG 3. Hypergryph 2165 (+493 hires) -> Arknights, Endfield 4. Happy Elements 1036 (+429 hires) -> Ensemble Stars, Silver Palace 5. Manjuu 661 (+184 hires) -> Azur Lane, Azur Promilia 6. Yostar 657 (+96 hires) -> mostly a publisher, Stella Sora 7. Seasun 565 (+84 hires) -> Snowbreak 8. Yongshi 554 (+13 hires) -> Aether Gazer 9. Hotta (Perfect World) 516 (+125 hires) -> ToF, NTE 10. Bluepoch 509 (+55 hires) -> Reverse 1999

and

For the people curious about mihoyo specifically As of the beginning of 2025 hoyo had -about 1000 employees for the studio working on ZZZ and tears of thermes -about 1300 working on HSR -about 2600 working on Genshin And had 100 working on HI3 back at that time, though om sure thats been cut since.

Here is me on 89 of 90 for standard banner:

You cannot get this in other games. The highest I've ever gone in HSR is 84. Genshin was either 84 or 85 as well. That's the point where the soft pity escalation gets to be so high that you can't really go past that. But I'm not an exception for hitting 89 in NTE. I've seen comments and screenshots from other as well.

(Btw, for those curious, if you hit pull 90 and trigger the hard pity, you roll the die -> a backhole appears and your die is swallowed up, disregarding whatever number you rolled -> you get the character -> your position on the board does not change.)

Aside from the text box issues, it's also just kind of confusing about what is needed or how things are used.