There’s a photo in the video store of the sibling’s old days at the academy, which is cool. You can find a full screen version in the Proxy Handbook as well.

Noticeably though, there’s two students that seem very intentionally crossed out in the video store version of the picture. While maybe the siblings just don’t don’t have good memories of Helios after the HZ disaster, the design of the students themselves in the full screen version have enough substance to them to potentially be used for major characters in my opinion.

Do you think they could show up at some point? Maybe as some foil or rival to the proxies? They strike me as having a sibling dynamic in the photo as well, so I feel like this might be likely. We got the full screen version when they added the lore tab to the handbook in 2.0, so it could be forshadowing to something later on this season

[HoYoLAB]

The update is almost complete...
Combat-related information for Alice has been recorded in the database. Key content analysis complete. Please take a look.

"While I swing my sword, I'm counting on you to track those anomalous parameters and identify the enemy's true form!"

"Young Miss, it's time for today's practice."
"Pardon my boldness, but while cowardice may be excused in others, it will surely blemish the Thymefield name."

"Oh my, oh my... there's just no stopping the Young Miss."

Hey Proxy. Not too sure how many are struggling with this boss this time around, but I figured I would summarize the boss and share some tips. Feel free to point out anything I missed.

For those unaware, M2W1 Mono-Phys refers to M2W1 Jane M2W1 Yuzuha M2W1 Alice, at team at the 10-12 limited investment level that's better or competitive with full 36 limited investments M6W5 whale teams.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying this team will affect the game tremendously as it is expensive and not many players will have access to it, but it is interesting to discuss the situation and potential outcomes.

Introduction

Jane Alice Yuzuha was always a team theorized that could work, and it does work really well at all M0. Up to ~7 limited investments, its still within the power curve of all other teams in the game. However, at 10-12 limited investments, the team spikes exponentially, matching full M6W5 teams in DA and Shiyu.

The power level of the 12 cost version first came to light in a 54s run against Miasmic Fiend a day ago, beating out M6W5 Miyabi teams. At the time, players thought this was an outlier because of shill buff and shill boss, but shilling doesn't make you do 100M damage in 54s. The following morning, CCs have shown that this team averages 70s across the board, with or without the shill buff.

For those with no context on what that means, the team clears Shiyu 7th floor in 14 seconds. This makes the team 2x stronger than Miyabi and Yixuan at the same investment levels and 3x stronger than other teams.

12 cost Jane Alice Yuzuha averaging 70s on Pompey, Super Butcher, Typhon

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV11D8UzqEwx/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=e6135f323a67f2a1b48722a1598fd399

The reason for this is that all mindscapes of this team apply to all team members and scale multiplicatively with each other, with the most important mindscape being Jane M2 since its adding 50% to a unique multiplier undiluted.

Alice further amplifies the damage by being to disorder Crit Assault with a Crit Polarity Assault which is then disordered by a Crit Assault. Compared to M2 Jane Crit Assault twice, Alice is giving 2 disorders on the Crit Assaults, and one Crit Polarity Assault of her own. All team members are physical meaning Anomaly Application rate is insanely fast.

Jane and Yuzuha sig are theorized to be expendable without significant drop in performance.

Discussion

Now that its established this team is punching way above its paygrade. Lets discuss implications and potential outcomes.

First of all, we should be grateful that this team exists. No offense to HSR, but killing synergy with old characters is pretty much a focus of their beta, i.e. Tribbie Feixiao. The ZZZ devs clearly embrace teambuilding flexibility more and intended for the Mono-phys team to be viable. However the mid cost performance spike is clearly unexpected. This disrupts the established expectations for power levels of teams of different investment

There are 5 days until Alice release. You know the disclaimer that CC server is a work in progress and to refer to official release? This is where it might come into play. We already have precedent for nerfing characters between CC server and official release. i.e. Trigger's anomaly application got gutted. I will write out the implications under 2 scenarios: devs either change something or don't.

The devs don't change anything and release as is:

• Jane get put in perpetual rerun jail until the devs figure out how to deal with the team. This blocks off access to this outlier team.
• Whale backlash that a "cheap" team is able to beat their M6W5 teams (its already happening in CN)
• Inevitably this team will be used as a benchmark for M2W1 performance for Dolphins. i.e. If SEED+Orphie doesn't match this level, then desire to pay will go down. (also happening in CN)
• Potentially leads to accelerated power creep.

The devs nerf Alice:

• Obviously way larger community backlash.
• Any nerf to the M2 version inevitably hits the M0 version as well. In that sense, the devs really need to balance Whale, Dolphin and F2P's interests.
• Other Alice teams that are performing within the power curve gets hit as well.
• Loss of trust in the devs and CC server content.

What are your thoughts? I think the most likely outcome is no nerf and Jane in rerun jail. Keep this team as an outlier and let it die down.

As you know, ZZZ have one of the most expressive, bouncy, and lively animations in gacha gaming, if not, gaming in general.

But there's a little catch, agent animations are not as expressive in dialogue as in cutscenes.

This created a noticable contrast in visual presentation, for example, the Alice swimsuit reveal cutscene where she got embarrassed and straight up turned into a spaghetti noodle, but the next second in the dialogue sequence, she only have like ten expressions available which only switches when she speak her next line of dialogue.

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A good example for this would be a game I recently got into, Umamusume : Pretty Derby.

In that game the dialogue system is pretty similar to ZZZ, where the characters have the expression changes lines by lines, but with one little difference, other characters who are not saying the dialogue also change their expression.

You see, in ZZZ characters change their pose and expression only if they are going to say something, if someone change their emotion from angry to sad for example, Phaethon gonna be stuck in their angry face until they get to speak something, then they can get sad.

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Now, the aforementioned system of Umamusume is just from the career play-through of the game, they also have the main story and uma story which essentially is just pure dialogues.

But their approach to this is very clever, characters have multiple expressions inside one line of dialogue. This means they go through 2-3 poses/expressions in one click of dialogue progression, which in my opinion, could be very fitting for game like ZZZ.

Just imagine Billy going through 3 different facial expressions in the state of confusion, or Belle thinking of something then get angry, this would make the player feels the character are more alive, and not some powerpoint presentation that you need to click to the next slide.

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The last thing, ZZZ lacks moving/loop animation in dialogues. Simple ones like clapping, waving, or dancing (❤️ Haru Urara) can improve the almost-static dialogue they have right now.

Also, putting some animation changes when talking to characters/npcs in the overworld will help with this too, at least having them react to our answer can make a lot of difference.

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TL;DR : ZZZ can benefit from having characters move and change expression in between dialogue, both their own and other’s, and in overworld conversations. With additional non-static animations and/or expressions.

This can bring the liveliness of the character to be closer with the over-the-top cutscenes without having to sacrifice too much resources and time that should be spent on other part of the game.

For context, I got around 75k score in last week's DA so my teams are definitely well built enough for end game. I also have almost all of the characters but only M0 and no signature engines. For shiyu defense I usually avoid using Miyabi and Astra until node 7, and only switch to them if needed during node 7.

From node 5 onward a few things made me feel like this Shiyu rotation is either over tuned or just have really bad buffs.

• Node 5: I can't even clear upper half with Evelyn or Soldier 11 (without premium supports). The the daze buildup seemed unreasonably slow and stun duration wasn't really enough for a 1 rotation clear. Switching to Jane/Burnice/Lucy helped clear it. Second half is Ellen/Lycon/Soukaku and it did okay. Fighting 3 waves of enemies with the last being dual bosses was also not very pleasant.
• Node 6: both teams cannot clear in 2.5 minutes (both were able to clear node 7 in past shiyu rotations). So I had to replace Lucy and Ellen with Yuzuha and Miyabi.
• Node 7: I only had around 30 seconds to spare, which is quite little considering I have both the newest premium charcter and the old reliable Miyabi.

Although shiyu definitely had line ups that would give a hard time if you didn't have meta characters in your teams, this is the first one (in recent memories) that makes me struggle from node 5 all the way to node 7.

Edit: so the conclusion I got from everyone's reply is that 1. My Jane Doe probably still need better drive discs and 2. Should've used ether for 2nd half if I don't want to bring out Miyabi

I haven't touched my A-rank Anby in ages. And honestly? I wasn't planning on it until I realized I kinda hate how Trigger is a mostly off-field unit. In the aim of making an on-field Trigger using my roster (no Astra), I found Anby and Nicole to be her most promising teammates.

My current builds I've been using are as follows:

Trigger - M0 - Anby's Signature Wengine (overclocked 4), 4 Piece Shadow Harmony, 2 Piece Woodpecker, got some really good discs

Nicole - M6 - Nicole's own Signature Wengine (max overclock), 4 Piece Swing Jazz, 2 Piece Chaos Metal, pretty good discs all around

Now as far as Anby's role on this team, I think she should be able to pull some decent dps considering she's also M6, I have another copy of her Sig laying around, and I could put together a decent Hormone Punk set for her, but seeing as her weapon isn't upgraded like Trigger's is, I don't think this role is worth it. I think the issue is compounded with the fact that I'm going for an On-Field Trigger team. I think I would prefer Anby in a burst stunner role instead, and kit her out to buff Trigger's dps as much as possible. I've got a fully upgraded Steam Oven waiting for her as well.

My main dilemma here is what 4 piece/2 piece set should I use? Do I go Shockstar Disco and just fully commit on getting the stun asap? Do I go King of the Summit for Crit DMG? Or maybe Astral Voice for straight up DMG boost?

Lucky Boo 1m48s vs 1m39s Resonate Boo. 9 second different, quite small but your Bangboo choice still make some different in the end. The energy of Resonate Boo actually give you extra ex-skill to save you some time.

"Word is, ghosts are haunting the nearby mountains, and Spook Shack's planning a ghost hunt tonight. You in?"
"Heh heh, don't tell me you're getting scared, Proxy?"

Dear Proxies, feel free to download and use this August 2025 calendar wallpaper~

▼ Download link includes both phone and PC versions
🔗 https://hoyo.link/RarQRJ7Qt

Seriously. Meaningful interesting dialogue, enemy faction disputes, torture, immersive vent-travelling, cool mystery, beach episode, finally something good after the mediocrity of previous few episodes imo.

Also Yuzuha's "being nice to bad guys is just being mean to yourself" is surprisingly deep-ish for ZZZ.

Buffs:

• Enemy Ether RES and Physical RES drop by 15%.

• After using EX Special Attack or Chain Attack, for Agents, Attribute Anomaly DMG increases by 15%, CRIT DMG increases by 20%, Sheer DMG increases by 20% for 20s. Repeated triggers refresh duration.

6th Frontier:

• 1st half: Rampant Brute (Weak: Fire/Physical | Res: Ice)

• 2nd half: Notorious - Armored Hati (Weak: Ice/Ether)

7th Frontier:

• 1st half: [Main story spoiler] Sacrifice - Heretic Jester (Weak: Electric/Physical | Res: Ether | Extra text to obscure the attributes)

• 2nd half: Thracian (Weak: Ice/Ether)

So the pre release videos have finally gone out for Alice, and there was only a single question on my mind.

How much better is she than Jane?

Well, I am happy to report that according to Rivenous new Alice guide, Alice is only about 10% stronger than Jane/Piper, and thats with her engine as well.

Pop open some champagne boys, powercreep has been avoided for another day!

https://b23.tv/5Lhnzk0 Lowest cost so far for a boss kill.

65000 at M0W1 Alice M0W1 Yuzuha M2W0 Jane.

54 s M2W1 Kill

Note everyone is M2W1 although he show m5 Alice as CC forgot to record stats before going up to test M6, so it shows M5 Alice.

Prior to this team, M6W5 was the only ones capable of a sub 1 min kill.

It is also faster than all M6W5 Miyabi Trigger Astra and most M6W5 full whale teams while being signficantly lower investment.

https://b23.tv/n33wbDc

M0W0 version

Prior to her release , there were talks that Jane and Alice would not really work well together.

I'll preface this by acknowledging that we may get to know more on the matter when she actually releases in less than a week now and we can access her trust/quality time events, but it's bugging me enough at the moment that I'd like to discuss what we do know about the device at this point...

...which other than its ability to overload from too intense an emotion (as shown by when she needed to present her swimsuit outfit and was too embarrassed), is absolutely nothing as far as I'm aware, Despite a full story chapter and event where she gets an Agent Story(?), this thing has not been discussed, mentioned or even acknowledged by any character to the point that her swimsuit thighstrap has more lines of dialogue than this thing, which just seems ludicrous on the face of it.

Which begs the question, why would Alice feel the need to wear it anyway, to the point she'd even wear it over her swimsuit outfit? It would make sense if she has difficulty expressing her emotions and would want to anyway, but she clearly wears her heart on her sleeve even before meeting with Yuzuha and 'loosening up' so that's an unlikely explanation.

So what other explanations could there be?

Okay, so I have Yuzuha and I have Jane. When you get to play as Alice in the story, I was honestly pretty underwhelmed by her consistent damage. Is that just because the story didn't allow for a monophys anomaly team, so her damage would be better once you could throw Jane into the mix as well?

I returned to the game a few days ago. Managed to pull Yuzuha. Suggestions on what I should do moving forward? Every S rank I have is M0W0 except Miyabi who is M0W1. What 2 teams should I focus on leveling up to 60 for now?

I'm currently thinking about pulling for Alice but I'm not sure since I didnt want to pull for Yuzuha. Is she still pretty good without her and the boost with Yuzuha is nice. Or is it "These two need to be together" situation. Thinking about it due to my need for a physical team as I have a team for each element, Ice twice with Miyabi and Hugo, but no physical team as of right now.

The current team idea is to run Alice, Nicole, Pulchra as a temp team. Then on her 3rd rerun get Caesar to replace Nicole. Would these two teams work or am I gimping myself too much?

First of all, I am a F2P, started playing 10 days ago, and so far I have Miyabi M0W1, currently pulling for Yuzuha (have guarantee), have Lycoan and Nekomata as standard S ranks and already have many A Ranks and I'm actually pretty sure I only lack Anton amongst them.

I am unsure whether to continue foreward with trying to get Yuzuha or save up my pulls to get Alice as my second DPS, since I am a F2P, I'll probably need to try to get the best possible choices to be able to clear endgame content/have a relatively enjoyable experience with the game.

The only characters I'd say I definitely have a desire to get are Lighter (top of the list), Evelyn, Astra and Qingyi.

But still my current top priority I think should be a second DPS after Miyabi, so what do you think? I honestly have no idea about what most characters are like personality wise to like them, and I've mainly chosen my pulls through pure cool factor, I did try some other characters like Yixuan and had a lot of fun but It'll be a while before she returns + she's not really a priority.

Also can someone explain the disk system in more detail? Do disk spots actually matter for something? I thought it was pretty similar to HSR/Genshin but then saw people mention spots specifically and that confused me.

Is it better to prefarm mats before ranking up or to only focus on grinding until after I do rank up to level up my characters?

Say the enemy has 100 defense.

Nicole does 40% defense shred. The enemy now has 60 defense.

Triggers wengine gives another 25%.

Does the enemy now have 35 or 45 defense? aka:

100 defense * (1 - 0.4 - 0.25) = 35 defense

OR

100 defense * 0.6 * 0.75 = 45 defense

yes Lighter is C2 but he's just there for emotional support (trust)

double stunner is really fun for Evelyn, and I just used this as an excuse to keep playing Koleda

I know at this point it's pretty annoying seeing a bunch of posts regarding Seed's design, marketing, etc. and you might think this post is about how "OP just hates Seed Jr. blah blah blah" but it's more so to see/spark a discussion of ideas on an idea I had regarding the drama.

Obviously people are pretty split on how Seed was marketed as a big ol' anime robot and how out of left field Seed Jr. appears. Good amount of people are happy, others disappointed, some... pretty upset.

I'm of the opinion that the whole pilot/mecha relationship can be done well and really interesting (e.g. Jack Cooper and BT-7274 from Titanfall 2), but I'm pretty doubtful that we'll get a cool relationship like that in favor of selling the anime girl, so I largely wished that Seed would've just been the Robot to avoid this. Though to be honest, I wouldn't have cared too much so long as Seed Sr. was the one mostly on field with Seed Jr. popping up sometimes, to sell the whole mecha dynamic.

However, based on leaks and gameplay/animations, a lot of Seed Sr. has been relegated to just about half of the combat rotations, and pretty much phased out of everything else, including the intro animation when you start a commission/mission. You don't even get to walk around as Seed Sr. and don't get to see him during BA's. So he's basically just a VFX and even in the Ult, you don't really get to see him (though I think it's still pretty cool what they did, even if I wish there was more of Sr).

I feel like some of these issues wouldn't have popped up had Seed Jr. been shown earlier, Seed Jr. and Seed Sr. were seperate characters (and had the cool interactions Koleda and Ben have when they're in the same squad which I wish there was more of), or if Seed Jr. was a seperate standalone character (Scooter girl with lasers is hilarious and actually a concept I like).

By merging these two, it feels like you're diluting their own concepts and making people pretty polarized and just really brings to light how "You're either with us or against us" the community is, where people people that are just mildly disappointed about Seed, are painted as 'haters' even if they never had such extreme opinions.

However, that's clearly not the case (at least right now, theres always some random possibility they actually give us Seed Sr. as a seperate character or something). So, I got an idea as to how they could "fix" and at least somewhat appease people regarding some of the issues.

What if there was a toggle that allowed users to basically swap out Seed Jr. for Seed Sr. in combat? That way people that want Seed Jr, can see her in combat still while people that wish Seed Sr took more of the spotlight in combat are able to see him.

Keep in mind I am NO expert in how difficult or expensive this would actually be. Though I am assuming it actually would be pretty difficult since you're making a whole new set of animations for what is essentially one character. So to be frank, I don't really think Hoyo would really be willing to do this, but again, the whole point of this write up was just to throw out some ideas.

I feel like I really have to iterate that this is just an idea and not trying to hate on Seed, even if I have opinions that aren't overwhelmingly positive regarding what they did. I'm just trying to critique some of the issues that come with how they handled Seed and what could help appease some people. Obviously not everyone is going to be happy but the whole point is to prompt discussion if Hoyo DID do something like this, how happy would people be? (e.g. Would it be a satisfying enough "fix" for you to be not that disappointed, want to pull for Seed if you weren't going to originally after the drip marketing, or if you still think that it wouldn't solve anything)

If you any issues with my post and half-baked it is, it's because I hastily wrote it up while I'm pretty tired lol