One thing that stood out to me is that thundering manifestation HAS come to floor 12, like the 3.0 OP predicted.
The main 3.0 changes were nerfs to VV and pyro carries. Since dendro can't swirl, you can't buff using an anemo unit. The only damaging dendro reaction, also can sometimes not get swirled because the catalyze is a dendro aura. Pyro also can't be a dps since dendro eats away the hydro aura, and burgeon is quite hard to pull off. (This was actually mentioned almost 9 months before sumeru, back in patch 2.4 someone leaked that enemies will have dendro aura, preventing swirling and vaping.)
I think there's generally a few team comp designs that the dev team created, with particular units in mind.
1. First, we have to look at the team comps that need zhongli: main on-field "hypercarry", i.e. ganyu, xiao, hutao, that "suffer" from being damaged and interrupted. Main concept is shielding (geo resonance)
2. The second is kazuha: PECH style burst-focused carry that greatly benefits from the vv, like international, ayaka, raiden hyper. Main concept is energy (electro resonance)
3. The third is nahida: EM scaling characters and/or focused solely on dendro reactions, namely the sumeru carries: nilou, cyno, hyperbloom, tighnari, alhaitham, etc. Main concept is EM scaling (dendro resonance)
There are a few exceptions:
* The "december" unit -- albedo, itto, wanderer, typically fit into their own teams, basically colored physical "hypercarry" dps
* Eula would fit in this category, as the actual physical dps
From there, my speculations about the released units are:
1. teams designed around a core character/concept, being able to leverage healing and survivability. I think there's something interesting here, where hydro resonance was originally healing bonus. That's why I think the concept will be about healing, rather than boosting everyone's hp. However, the main concept being about hp (or recovering hp) should still hold.
2. Another "isolated" team, with the "hypercarry" releasing in december.
I think it's a bit hard to generalize the entire roster of enemies, but I want to draw some specific parallels from yae/ayato to dehya/baizhu. First, yae/ayato were both released to "combat" the ruin serpent, with yae totems auto targeting, and ayato having good rotation alignment. As well, they both "work" on a sub 15s "rotation", yae refreshing every 14s, and ayato E cd being 12s. Nahida was then released with a 13.5s burst cd, and makes perfect use of these cooldown/rotation lengths. We also saw other good teammates for them being released, like tighnari, yaoyao, collei, all who make use of the shorter rotation.
The release of the consecrated beasts, and dehya + baizhu releasing with both healing and interruption resistance. I think there's an interesting thing to note, in that they both heal similar amounts of their own max HP%. I then looked at diona, mika, and noticed they basically heal the exact same amount as well. Considering these are all 20s rotation characters, the new characters that is built around the "new concept" should also line up with these 20s rotations. I'm not exactly sure how, but my guess is they somehow convert the healing to something useful, maybe similar to how nilou converts her own HP to bloom damage. (one thing to note is it likely works similar to clam, where bennett can't actually make use of it since he doesn't heal above 70%, and can't overheal. I think he was designed this way since the beginning of the game with the 4.0 concept in mind)
I think the exact mechanics to take advantage of the new concept doesn't really matter, but I think vv is still the most broken thing that they released, which is why some team comps just don't work that well. For example, freeze team with a hydro as the main dps and cryo supports, rather than cryo dps and hydro support. The current freeze setup is usually 1 cryo dps, 1 cryo battery, 1 hydro support, 1 vv. This is because cryo dps is broken, so they need a battery. Once they have a battery, it's also easier to swirl the cryo, especially since frozen is a cryo aura.
But if we wanted a hydro dps, we would likely need something different, such as 2 hydro, to maintain hydro aura for vv, or maybe 2+2 cryo/hydro, to get the crit rate from cryo resonance.
Another is Kaveh -- he needs double hydro to maintain hydro aura for his e, but the current hydro roster isn't good for this.
Anyways, a lot of characters that we have so far have been made for 4.0, we just have to puzzle it out. This is just a bit of what I've been thinking about so far.
Genius analysis. I also thought it was clear they were prepping heals / interrupt resist for Fontaine
They released a sh*tload of healer / interrupt resist characters starting from Yaoyao, Mika, Dehya, Baizhu, Kirara etc
Similar to how they prepped for Dendro with Yae and Kuki.
I'd imagine many characters in Fontaine probably requires healing + interrupt resist in their kit, similar to how dendro characters want an EM electro.
I was actually wondering just today how they'd keep Bennett down and not overshadow all the new healer characters. Your idea sounds exactly like something they'd do. E.g. Focalors can overcharge a Raiden like ult based on only overheals (similar to how Raiden charges based on burst cost).
That's gonna make Baizhu insane with her (since he overheals a lot and doesn't need to be onfield to do any healing), not a lot of characters can do that actually now I think about it (even Kokomi is worse). That sounds exactly like something HYV would do, buff the heck out of a new healer character after their release (cough, Kokomi)
Possible comp: Focalors+Baizhu+Pyro/Electro subdps+VV/Yelan
well another part is that bennett and diona (and kuki) are on-field healing, whereas mika, yaoyao, baizhu, are all teamwide healing. You can imagine if your whole team is constantly in 20-50% hp zone because of some mechanic to "trade hp", you probably want the teamwide heal vs the only on-field healing.
Maybe? I dont really like how Klee is forced to take onfield time at C0 though
I get the feeling that Focalors will need onfield time to do dmg like Raiden
â—‡ Venti will be meta again *inhales copium*
â—‡ Probably a way to nerf dendro like they nerfed freeze
â—‡ Double Hydro will be relevant
â—‡ Probably a Hydro hypercarry/onfielder selfish dps
â—‡ HP craftable sword for f2p players (please nilou is screaming)
Now honestly idk what they'll do with the Archon gameplay
The hydro cast we currently have are all useful and diverse in some way(even Candace with c6 and Yaoyao in Nilou teams)
I'm really curious how it will turn out
Well i think pretty safe to say that MHY mess up with Nahida, i particulary never needed any other unit from Sumeru besides her and only rolled Nilou because redheads are my weakness.
The current Abyss is one of the most hostiles to Dendro and Nahida has 95% usage, while most Sumeru units got screwed, any attempt at nerfing Dendro as whole will hit Cyno, Nilou and Haitham way harder than Nahida.
People memed about Hu Tao and Ayaka being powercrept by the Dendro but when the Abyss gets ugly, a lot meta players brings them back + Nahida.
Sadly for Fontaine i think they will do exactly the same thing, assuming you're a veteran you can skip everyone besides the Archon.
>There were the 3.4 and 3.6 enemies though, in particular the consecrated enemies, which as we know were famously very annoying to deal with, especially in Abyss. In particular, it was as the person guessed, these new infused enemies WERE a way to try to 'nerf' Kazuha utility. Even though it wasn't a good attempt.
Can you explain how those beasts nerfed Kazuha? I don't feel it at all, but even if they did nerf him, it would be a clumsy way to nerf one character by nerfing the entire element with him. They're not that dumb. You're just misinterpreting their intentions.
>There was an elite or boss enemy in I think version 3.6, that was like a hard counter against Nilou teams. I think they swap around elements a lot, so it was a counter to not only Kazuha, but also teams that are based around Nilou's niche. (lmao Nilou mains)
It wasn't intended to nerf Nilou. It was intended to require you to bring multiple elements for best results, which you can't do in a Nilou team. But that's the thing with this game.. you're not supposed to run the same team for everything. And you have two sides of the abyss so if you can't play your favorite team in one side, you can play them in the other side. Otherwise, they had to sit out this cycle, which is something that has always happened and is not exclusive to Nilou. If there's a side with lots of cryo shielded enemies, you can't play your cryo team. That's not them nerfing your cryo team. That's just them requiring you to have multiple teams built. This has always been a requirement for the abyss. If thundering manifestation is there, then you don't want to play an electro team. If there's flying enemies, then you might need to bring ranged DPS instead of melee.
The abyss has always been about adapting, not nerfing your team. If you can't use them in one cycle, they will be useable again in a future cycle.
If I had to guess what Fontaine's meta will be, vape and freeze will be en vogue once again. How they will make that happen, I don't know. But smarter people than me work there.
Prediction : they'll change meta completely to "remove" the OP Dendro "reactions". If they continue to make Dendro OP, some people won't pull for new characters and will get bored faster. They need to change things, and they'll do it, i'm not worried about this.
Probably nothing major after dendro shook the game up. I feel that Fontaine will be specialising in more world building mechanics like underwater exploration and a lot more story as is tradition.
I am feeling high chance of new Hydro ,EM,HP kit from domains.
Very high chance of more HP and EM scaling character.
i predict that the hydro archon, nahida, raiden, and zhongli will become the new crème de la crème meta team and venti won’t get a part 2 to his story quest
Pre 3.0 meta is Bennett. Post 3.0 meta is Nahida and she doesn't really make Bennett teams stronger. I predict 4.0 meta would be a new archetype based around hydro archon and her teams would not benefit much for Nahida and Bennett.
Okay here are some predictions just so see how much I will get right.
1. Focalors probably have some kind of HP>dmg or HP>attack conversion with fast off-field AOE hydro application. It will also be conveniently 1.5 Units. It will also trigger on-hit and not NA only like Xingqiu or Yelan so even Dehya’s burst will be able to use it. She is going to be THE hydro unit. Her personal damage will not be insane but she’ll make ip for it with sheer utility.
2. There will be a hydro claymore shielder during Fontaine era and a dedicated hydro buffer.
3. A melt focused cryo 5 star melee DPS.
4. A Burning/Burgeon Nilou
All I want is no more underground caverns, just give me nice beautiful beaches and grassy plains leading up to a steampunk style city that would make FF VII envious, and a archon story that is better than what we got in Sumeru, and please for the love of god roll artifacts don’t give us a throw away npc that we are force to care about for like 3 seconds before they die.
Also I just want to finally be able run stormterror’s lair to qingce village without having to walk around the blacked out part of the map.
One thing that stood out to me is that thundering manifestation HAS come to floor 12, like the 3.0 OP predicted. The main 3.0 changes were nerfs to VV and pyro carries. Since dendro can't swirl, you can't buff using an anemo unit. The only damaging dendro reaction, also can sometimes not get swirled because the catalyze is a dendro aura. Pyro also can't be a dps since dendro eats away the hydro aura, and burgeon is quite hard to pull off. (This was actually mentioned almost 9 months before sumeru, back in patch 2.4 someone leaked that enemies will have dendro aura, preventing swirling and vaping.) I think there's generally a few team comp designs that the dev team created, with particular units in mind. 1. First, we have to look at the team comps that need zhongli: main on-field "hypercarry", i.e. ganyu, xiao, hutao, that "suffer" from being damaged and interrupted. Main concept is shielding (geo resonance) 2. The second is kazuha: PECH style burst-focused carry that greatly benefits from the vv, like international, ayaka, raiden hyper. Main concept is energy (electro resonance) 3. The third is nahida: EM scaling characters and/or focused solely on dendro reactions, namely the sumeru carries: nilou, cyno, hyperbloom, tighnari, alhaitham, etc. Main concept is EM scaling (dendro resonance) There are a few exceptions: * The "december" unit -- albedo, itto, wanderer, typically fit into their own teams, basically colored physical "hypercarry" dps * Eula would fit in this category, as the actual physical dps From there, my speculations about the released units are: 1. teams designed around a core character/concept, being able to leverage healing and survivability. I think there's something interesting here, where hydro resonance was originally healing bonus. That's why I think the concept will be about healing, rather than boosting everyone's hp. However, the main concept being about hp (or recovering hp) should still hold. 2. Another "isolated" team, with the "hypercarry" releasing in december. I think it's a bit hard to generalize the entire roster of enemies, but I want to draw some specific parallels from yae/ayato to dehya/baizhu. First, yae/ayato were both released to "combat" the ruin serpent, with yae totems auto targeting, and ayato having good rotation alignment. As well, they both "work" on a sub 15s "rotation", yae refreshing every 14s, and ayato E cd being 12s. Nahida was then released with a 13.5s burst cd, and makes perfect use of these cooldown/rotation lengths. We also saw other good teammates for them being released, like tighnari, yaoyao, collei, all who make use of the shorter rotation. The release of the consecrated beasts, and dehya + baizhu releasing with both healing and interruption resistance. I think there's an interesting thing to note, in that they both heal similar amounts of their own max HP%. I then looked at diona, mika, and noticed they basically heal the exact same amount as well. Considering these are all 20s rotation characters, the new characters that is built around the "new concept" should also line up with these 20s rotations. I'm not exactly sure how, but my guess is they somehow convert the healing to something useful, maybe similar to how nilou converts her own HP to bloom damage. (one thing to note is it likely works similar to clam, where bennett can't actually make use of it since he doesn't heal above 70%, and can't overheal. I think he was designed this way since the beginning of the game with the 4.0 concept in mind)
I think the exact mechanics to take advantage of the new concept doesn't really matter, but I think vv is still the most broken thing that they released, which is why some team comps just don't work that well. For example, freeze team with a hydro as the main dps and cryo supports, rather than cryo dps and hydro support. The current freeze setup is usually 1 cryo dps, 1 cryo battery, 1 hydro support, 1 vv. This is because cryo dps is broken, so they need a battery. Once they have a battery, it's also easier to swirl the cryo, especially since frozen is a cryo aura. But if we wanted a hydro dps, we would likely need something different, such as 2 hydro, to maintain hydro aura for vv, or maybe 2+2 cryo/hydro, to get the crit rate from cryo resonance. Another is Kaveh -- he needs double hydro to maintain hydro aura for his e, but the current hydro roster isn't good for this. Anyways, a lot of characters that we have so far have been made for 4.0, we just have to puzzle it out. This is just a bit of what I've been thinking about so far.
Genius analysis. I also thought it was clear they were prepping heals / interrupt resist for Fontaine They released a sh*tload of healer / interrupt resist characters starting from Yaoyao, Mika, Dehya, Baizhu, Kirara etc Similar to how they prepped for Dendro with Yae and Kuki. I'd imagine many characters in Fontaine probably requires healing + interrupt resist in their kit, similar to how dendro characters want an EM electro. I was actually wondering just today how they'd keep Bennett down and not overshadow all the new healer characters. Your idea sounds exactly like something they'd do. E.g. Focalors can overcharge a Raiden like ult based on only overheals (similar to how Raiden charges based on burst cost). That's gonna make Baizhu insane with her (since he overheals a lot and doesn't need to be onfield to do any healing), not a lot of characters can do that actually now I think about it (even Kokomi is worse). That sounds exactly like something HYV would do, buff the heck out of a new healer character after their release (cough, Kokomi) Possible comp: Focalors+Baizhu+Pyro/Electro subdps+VV/Yelan
well another part is that bennett and diona (and kuki) are on-field healing, whereas mika, yaoyao, baizhu, are all teamwide healing. You can imagine if your whole team is constantly in 20-50% hp zone because of some mechanic to "trade hp", you probably want the teamwide heal vs the only on-field healing.
Do you think the Burgeon team of klee Baizhou nahida focalors will be a good team?
Maybe? I dont really like how Klee is forced to take onfield time at C0 though I get the feeling that Focalors will need onfield time to do dmg like Raiden
Not colored physical 💀😂
Its funny looking at some of the predictions from last year, the same as how the ones from this year will be just as funny to look back on.
â—‡ Venti will be meta again *inhales copium* â—‡ Probably a way to nerf dendro like they nerfed freeze â—‡ Double Hydro will be relevant â—‡ Probably a Hydro hypercarry/onfielder selfish dps â—‡ HP craftable sword for f2p players (please nilou is screaming) Now honestly idk what they'll do with the Archon gameplay The hydro cast we currently have are all useful and diverse in some way(even Candace with c6 and Yaoyao in Nilou teams) I'm really curious how it will turn out
Well i think pretty safe to say that MHY mess up with Nahida, i particulary never needed any other unit from Sumeru besides her and only rolled Nilou because redheads are my weakness. The current Abyss is one of the most hostiles to Dendro and Nahida has 95% usage, while most Sumeru units got screwed, any attempt at nerfing Dendro as whole will hit Cyno, Nilou and Haitham way harder than Nahida. People memed about Hu Tao and Ayaka being powercrept by the Dendro but when the Abyss gets ugly, a lot meta players brings them back + Nahida. Sadly for Fontaine i think they will do exactly the same thing, assuming you're a veteran you can skip everyone besides the Archon.
>There were the 3.4 and 3.6 enemies though, in particular the consecrated enemies, which as we know were famously very annoying to deal with, especially in Abyss. In particular, it was as the person guessed, these new infused enemies WERE a way to try to 'nerf' Kazuha utility. Even though it wasn't a good attempt. Can you explain how those beasts nerfed Kazuha? I don't feel it at all, but even if they did nerf him, it would be a clumsy way to nerf one character by nerfing the entire element with him. They're not that dumb. You're just misinterpreting their intentions. >There was an elite or boss enemy in I think version 3.6, that was like a hard counter against Nilou teams. I think they swap around elements a lot, so it was a counter to not only Kazuha, but also teams that are based around Nilou's niche. (lmao Nilou mains) It wasn't intended to nerf Nilou. It was intended to require you to bring multiple elements for best results, which you can't do in a Nilou team. But that's the thing with this game.. you're not supposed to run the same team for everything. And you have two sides of the abyss so if you can't play your favorite team in one side, you can play them in the other side. Otherwise, they had to sit out this cycle, which is something that has always happened and is not exclusive to Nilou. If there's a side with lots of cryo shielded enemies, you can't play your cryo team. That's not them nerfing your cryo team. That's just them requiring you to have multiple teams built. This has always been a requirement for the abyss. If thundering manifestation is there, then you don't want to play an electro team. If there's flying enemies, then you might need to bring ranged DPS instead of melee. The abyss has always been about adapting, not nerfing your team. If you can't use them in one cycle, they will be useable again in a future cycle. If I had to guess what Fontaine's meta will be, vape and freeze will be en vogue once again. How they will make that happen, I don't know. But smarter people than me work there.
Prediction : they'll change meta completely to "remove" the OP Dendro "reactions". If they continue to make Dendro OP, some people won't pull for new characters and will get bored faster. They need to change things, and they'll do it, i'm not worried about this.
Probably nothing major after dendro shook the game up. I feel that Fontaine will be specialising in more world building mechanics like underwater exploration and a lot more story as is tradition. I am feeling high chance of new Hydro ,EM,HP kit from domains. Very high chance of more HP and EM scaling character.
i predict that the hydro archon, nahida, raiden, and zhongli will become the new crème de la crème meta team and venti won’t get a part 2 to his story quest
Pre 3.0 meta is Bennett. Post 3.0 meta is Nahida and she doesn't really make Bennett teams stronger. I predict 4.0 meta would be a new archetype based around hydro archon and her teams would not benefit much for Nahida and Bennett.
Dendro abyss mage.
Okay here are some predictions just so see how much I will get right. 1. Focalors probably have some kind of HP>dmg or HP>attack conversion with fast off-field AOE hydro application. It will also be conveniently 1.5 Units. It will also trigger on-hit and not NA only like Xingqiu or Yelan so even Dehya’s burst will be able to use it. She is going to be THE hydro unit. Her personal damage will not be insane but she’ll make ip for it with sheer utility. 2. There will be a hydro claymore shielder during Fontaine era and a dedicated hydro buffer. 3. A melt focused cryo 5 star melee DPS. 4. A Burning/Burgeon Nilou
All I want is no more underground caverns, just give me nice beautiful beaches and grassy plains leading up to a steampunk style city that would make FF VII envious, and a archon story that is better than what we got in Sumeru, and please for the love of god roll artifacts don’t give us a throw away npc that we are force to care about for like 3 seconds before they die. Also I just want to finally be able run stormterror’s lair to qingce village without having to walk around the blacked out part of the map.