Starlight Stage Week 6: Event Breakdown?

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— ??? (@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.