With the lessons learned from Atapon, migrant mammals balloon final scores for the next event, Nation Blue.

This time I was inspired enough to do a quick and dirty spreadsheet on the max event score for someone playing the event leveraging all naturally-gained stamina only, with minimal waste. No stamina drinks or jewels are taken into account. The estimated max score is about 20000.

The main difference between NB and Atapon is first, the experience. Atapon was the first event and people were definitely apprehensive, but with NB the score jumped and exceeded the average Atapon score by the same time elapsed after the halfway point. People definitely waited for the 4x multiplier but in general did not really score a lot more. More, but not a lot more, means just better efficiency or more competition. Nana or Kaede? I don’t know.

The other difference between NB and atapon, is that Atapon ran about 2 whole days longer. Atapon ended just over 25000 which is within the natural gain range, but NB is well over 21000 (results out in another few hours, by midday 10/28 Japan time), which is definitely in jewel-spending range.

This particular whale wannabe only spent 600 jewels, which is less than what I spent to get a SSR Minami. It is also more than I wanted because 100 of it went to not sucking at Nation Blue. I actually didn’t fail Nation Blue until later on in the event. Once because I derped, twice because I derped on a 4x. I had a long streak of S-ranking from my first playthrough until that first derp, which made no sense to me. I guess NB is harder of a grind than Atapon, and as a chart I also didn’t like it as much, even if it might not have been that much harder.

I also have no more room in my inventory because I decided to just keep all the SR repeats I got, except I ended up experimenting on a few of the Vampire Syoko I had to see what happened when I lessoned them. Oh well.

My final score (with 1 Neirose left) is somewhere north of 23000 so I’m a lock for 100k by all indication. Thanks for making the event manageable, Bamco. Real Blue Whales, however, went bonkers for NB and you can see it in the chart at top comparing Atapon scores to NB scores on the same time elapsed scale.

Good luck everybody!

Personally I didn’t like this event much, because it is short and if you didn’t give up a good chunk of time to grind, you’re out of luck. The shorter the event period the more likely you’ll be busy through it the whole time. At the same time the rewards isn’t all that. I guess unless you are a KaedeP it doesn’t pay to play hard if it translates to paying for 10-roll for ranking into even the 20k tier. The whale aspect is worse than Atapon so the shorter time might have curbed some of that, but I can’t see it ease much.

On the other hand I am all ready for the eventual OraSapp event! I missed out on SSR Airi but I have most other passion cards… Plus it’s a hype song too.

PS. Thanks @southrop for the chart.

First of all, the wiki is still there but we’re like, why even bother when there’s this? Well we can always write :words: just like this blog post?

So this Caravan event is about random drops based on the following criteria:

• Score rank (C/B/A/S), higher rank the better chance
• Difficulty (Debut to M@ster), more difficult the better chance
• Color of the day, where a higher chance of dropping rotates daily
• Star Rank of your center idol in the team, every rank increases drop rate by some percentage.

Based on JP twitter, the SR drop rate at max of these (up to Star Rank 15) is about 15%. You can squeeze these four knobs however which way you can squeeze them, but there are some diminishing returns. For example I think 18 Stamina M@ster is about the same as 19 Stamina. A rank might be pretty close to S rank. You get what I’m saying.

What isn’t close is Star Level 5 (N) and Star Level 10 (R). Just on the fact that unless you have SSRs to carry your team, it’s just too hard to S rank with a N center consistently. And honestly an extra 5 Star Levels might not be worth the gap between B and S. That’s also to say, the gap between SL5 and SL10 is really big.

Numerically speaking based on a small sample size, Honoka drops much more often than Syoko. JP Twitter seems to say 2% for Syoko under optimal conditions and close to 13% for Honoka, but I doubt it. More off-the-cuff observational anecdotes: there is an inflection point in the numerical formula for drop rate that if you don’t get past it, your drop rate will be a straight, low, dire percentage. Once you do, it’s in the teens. Two people I know already have 10+ Honoka by the halfway point of the event. Pretty much everybody playing it with any kind of rigor has a Honoka already. I personally am at 7 Honoka and 5 Mushrooms.

The longer game here, for those of you more casual to the Deresute, is that getting these SRs can buff your support team, who are the 15 strongest idols beyond your team of 5, that are automatically selected, when you select a team to do a live. The other long game is that you want 3 high-star-ranked idols so you can farm events like these in the future. Or starting this one. The max rank for SR is 15, which is why you want 15 Honoka as soon as you can to start farming Syokos or whatever.

Anyway, that’s the strategy. The silly thing about it is that hardcore Ps already summoned armies of both idols on day one of the caravan due to the DereSute team screwing up the drop rate on low difficulty songs. And then today they screwed up the announcement for card drops with potentially what comes with the next event (heavily rumored to be Nation Blue).

Deresute has been full of treat, so the tricks can go as is. Also they extended the campaign for gems another 15 days so uh… Let those 10-draws fly guys?

アタシポンコツAndroid pic.twitter.com/5RuzdgDgOc

— よしの (@YOSINO0413) September 26, 2015

The event is over. I ranked somewhere in the 80000s. I also did the following:

• Spent total of 250 jewels to refill stamina
• Played Atapon on Debut twice, Regular once, Pro about 6 times, and a lot on M@ster. I didn’t keep count.
• I was only able to FC up to Pro, and I don’t think I even got beyond C in combo for M@ster.
• On average I was able to get S rank on M@STER, but occasionally I would not, and the first 5 times I got B or A ranks.
• I failed M@STER Atapon three times total, and that was it for failing this song. Once for lulz’ing first attempt, once because I used the wrong team, and once because I was experimenting.
• I used 2x feature only once and never 4x’d.
• I cleared Pro Atapon once while playing it with Android chromecast. It lags, but sure looks nice on the big screen?

In the crucible of an event, we learned a few things:

With the Nana SR cutoff at 100k rank, it’s not hard to get a Nana. I spent less time grinding this event than any LLSIF event. The longest I’ve played was maybe one full hour of it? Usually I just put in some time while commuting and at night after dinner, besides keeping the stamina down throughout the day. Key was just being vigilant at keeping the stamina low and timing when you’ll level, plus using Atapon to get bonus experience to further level.

The other key learn for me is how to build a high scoring setup. First of all you break down the point values to find which songs at what difficulty to play. Then you build your team to suit (or you can do this first then pick the song that matches your team). For Atapon I had the luxury of 2 cute SSRs, or rather, one of them is SSR Miku.

Most SSRs, as center, provide a boost to a specific ability (Vo/Da/Vi) by % for the same type of idol. It’s the same when you select another player as their idol assists your team. (Always select Rin/Miku/Anzu SSRs when Atapon’ing.) SSR Miku is notable because she greatly increases your team’s cute idols’ Da ability. It so happens that the Miho SR you get from playing the event normally is a SR with a high Da score. I suppose this is why both cards were readily available during the event (although one is from gasha). If you have other cute cards that has high Da, throw it in with Miku for a good time. Or even just normal level of Da.

As an aside, this is the real reason why it helps to match color in teams and songs. Playing Cu songs with Cu idols will give your idols a boost in ability, but it pales to what a SSR can do for the same type of idols.

The other big “secret” to a high score is having a full team of backup idols. This is kind of a strange mechanics but when you play a song, the game selects the 20(?) highest valued idols in your possession and you get a bonus based on it. In the most min-max case you will want to have 20 of each type (Cu/Co/Pa) besides the 5 idols in your team. Which is to say, I hope you didn’t star lesson your dupe SRs and SSRs (just yet). Instead, awaken them and train them to the level cap.

Other than that, the usual items apply: balance your team with health and scoring; and once you are good enough to aim for FC, balance your team between combo-based and ability-based scoring abilities depending on your play style and what R/SRs you have lying around. And obviously, don’t fail any song (especially at 4x) and combo as much as you can. It’s hard to do that when you grind so this is why it’s not always best to have the strongest scoring team if it means you might even fail once out of 50 or 100.

Basically, tweak your teams as you progress through the event.

At the same time, it’s okay to fail. I struggled with this briefly and realized if I put in the risk at M@ster the event would be way more fun to play. So I did, and tried and was able to conquer (somewhat) M@ster Atapon. Sure, it means I lost out on a max of 960 event points, than if I didn’t bother with M@ster but that wasn’t going to get me anywhere anyway in the larger scope of things. And that’s not even counting how many more points I “made” back (not enough actually) and how much time it saved overall (definitely).

This also means if all you can do is Pro, you can still rank just fine in Deresute. Back-of-napkin math suggests the loss in bonus point is like 80 event points per 5 Pro play or something ludicrous, versus 4 M@ster play. Maybe it adds up if you can’t do M@ster normal songs to farm up otomemori but that gap isn’t very large either, with each stamina adds just 3 more otomemori to ameliorate a base of 10-for-25. Well, it’s a notable gap but one that easily can be overcome by effort.

Big picture thoughts: Quality idol cards play a huge role. SR-only teams can be competitive but without at least one SSR card it will be hard to S rank the event song on M@STER; you basically have to almost FC them. The plus side is that Pro is competitive enough that free players can do just as well, except it might be more of a pain to do so. This is also very different from LLSIF…kind of.

This also means that you probably should do both rolling for SSRs and use jewels for stamina. Given the choice, roll to get a SSR if you don’t have one of the right color, and stamina if you do. I think I would have had a notably harder time in the Atapon event if I didn’t have 2 cute SSRs. If the next event is Nation Blue then maybe I will have to spend some more? The NewGene SSRs might prove useful in this case.