To HoH or Not to HoH: Wind Neostone Agent

As with every Hall of Heros (HOH), the question on everyone’s lips is always “is it worth it?” 

A loaded question at best, every HOH is arguably “worth it” if not for the addition of a shiny new, 4 star for your team, then in the potential for free skill ups (saving those pesky Devilmon for rarer things that need them); and at the very worst, you have free 4 star fodder for your six-starring pleasure.

So is it worth it for game play? Yes.

Is it worth sacrificing a sizable amount of sleep and a good portion of your weekend to do so? Well, depends entirely on you. Hot date or weekend vacation? Not really worth missing out on. Binging Netflix in your jammies---arguably worth missing out on.

So for those of you who are Neostone Agent challenged; what makes Olivia worth obtaining as a monster?

Her Stats Are Pretty Good

Well, her stats for one. Once awakened, Olivia has surprisingly well balanced stats, boasting one of the highest base HP for support types at 10,380 at level 40, and a base Defense nearly as high as some Defense types at 604. Her attack and speed aren’t bad either at 681 and 104 respectively. This gives her sizable flexibility in terms of builds and utility, though it doesn’t make her a star for any particular role.

Link: http://www.summoners.info/summons/wind-neostone-agent-olivia/

Her Skills Are Really Good

Her skills also translate well for multiple strategies. Her first skill boasts a multi-hit and glancing debuff with 50% chances each hit at max skill. This makes her viable for most PVE boss-facing situations and some PVP situations where facing deadly nukers such as Theomars. Of course, if you have Chasun or swear by Shannon; this might not mean much to you.

If that hasn’t peaked your interest, her second and third skills are far more promising. With 2 turn Cooldowns at max skill, her second skill “Briefing”, promises to cleanse negative effects from allies and, more importantly, completely fill their Attack Bar (ATB), making her an excellent pair for units such as Verdehile, Basalt, Hwa, Bernard, Spectra, Chasun, or any other healer or support type that can either boost your team or halt your enemies. On violent, this has the promise of creating a very annoying, very effective chain of ATB boosts that can paralyze your foes.

Lock down, has more niche potential, but given the complete change in trends due to Rift Raids; promises to pair beautifully with defensive nukers you’ll probably already have such as Copper, Tractor, or Glinodon who can benefit from the defense buff and her Guild War centric 33%  universal defense lead skill. It’s 25% per hit ATB decrease also makes it well suited to any situation that requires an ATB decrease such as running ToA hard (can you imagine how well she pairs with Basalt yet?).

Overall, Olivia looks like a welcome addition to any starting team, and a solid one for specialized teams. Though her utility looks better suited to Guild War and ToA and ToA Hard; her skill set and stats are varied enough to make her viable in places such as lower level Raids, Necro Auto, limited Dragons, and Giants B10 teams.

For more of an overview of where she could stack up, see below.

Recommended Build: Violent Revenge; any combination Speed, HP and Def (attack also possible but not suggested).

Link: http://summonerswar.co/wind-neostone-agent-olivia/

She's Great Lots of Places (especially in ToA Hard)

Guild War- High Utility

With a 33% universal, defense buff in GW, an ATB Fill , glancing, and ATB Decrease, Olivia has great potential for pairing with defensive nukers and even common nukers in Guild War. Given sufficient speed (or a speedy team mate such as Bernard), she promises to pave the way for your team’s nuking needs. Or if you want to be slow and tanky, pairing with units such as Tractor has a lot of potential as these units are liable to survive hits from everyone but Lushen or Katarina.

ToA Hard – Moderate to High Utility

As anyone whose attempted TOA Hard knows, ATB fills, ATB decrease, and glancing debuffs can be the fine line between success and failure. As with any unit capable of producing those effects, Olivia is a solid addition, though her unique combination of all three makes her especially well-suited to pairing up with units like Spectra or Basalt, especially if max skilled and on Violent.

Arena –Moderate Utility

While her lead skill won’t work here, her ATB Fill, Glancing, ATB Decrease, and Defense buff make her a very valuable team member for any AO; though her use in AD  has the potential to be great; it is limited due to poor AI. Olivia  and Verdehile combinations are expected to work well, as are Olivia Theomars combinations. But really, she can work anywhere you can use an instant ATB fill and don’t want to bring a squishy Teon or Konamiya.

Giants – Moderate Utility

Being a wind element and capable of glancing hits, Olivia is just about as well suited for Giants B10 teams as anyone else. Her multi-hits actually will hurt your team in most cases, but her defense buff and ally ATB fill has good potential provided the AI chooses the right person to buff.

Dragons – Low Utility

Wind elements have a high disadvantage in B10 and unless packed with resist, Olivia is likely to get her Defense Broken and killed. However, her ATB fill could still make her viable for those that don’t have Verdehile or Megan to draw on.

Necropolis – Low Utility

With two multi-hit attacks (skill 1 and skill 3 strike twice), she’s a viable necro option, though unlikely to help much in auto teams above B8 due to lack of suitable debuffs and buffs. Her attack bar fills, also don’t work, and there are few negative effects to cleanse.

Farming

Despite having fairly high attack, Olivia is not recommended to use as a farmer. Highly supportive skill sets mean even though you probably can find a way to farm Hydeni or Aiden Hell, you probably shouldn’t bother.

For more you can check the web; Youtube especially has a few videos of Olivia doing amazing things like beating several ToA Hard floors. 

Now good farming all!

Serefina's Summoner War Research: De-Mystified

Alright, so a lot of you who know me in game and out tend to ask me, "what do you research anyway?". So to explain that, I've put together a quick little presentation that explains how Summoner War summoning works on a very basic level, and what my research aims to do.

I originally wanted to update this deck (as it was made prior to the 2015 full year analysis), but my PC is still out of commission and I'm stuck with what data exists in my old laptop. That said, keep in mind the graphs and charts aren't fully reflective of current summon trends, though much of the conceptual implications remain true. I'll be updating these after I fix my PC once and for all.

How Probabilities Work and What That Means for Random-Chance Based Games

That means that the odds of getting a specific monster or star grade in Summoner's War should not be impacted by what you summoned before, the number of scrolls you used, or what monsters you have. There should be fixed odds that distribute themselves in a random fashion that follows a normally probabilistic distribution over time (Guassian curve anyone?).

Of course that doesn't mean outliners, or unusual occurrences such as high levels of duplication can't occur; it just means it's really unlikely. Kind of like winning the lottery---or getting pooped on by pigeons three times in a year.

WOW! 0.000095%? So why the hell did I just get five water harpies in a row when I summoned? Shouldn't that rate be stupid low? That's bonkers!

Well, yes. That's assuming the RNG is truly random, rates aren't weighed, and there are no controlling factors programmed in, but do you really think a game company isn't going to add some controls for challenging game play if not profit?

The RNG isn't Truly Random

 Now cosmic noise methods and those like them are really, really expensive. So you can bet Com2us isn't shelling out dollars for it. However, not being truly random might not be a bad thing. Adding weights or controls can keep you form getting extreme situations such as everyone getting Camilla or no one getting Camilla ever. Extreme situations are bad for profit. They're also demoralizing; but with real life and things like clicking banner ads or dying by falling air conditioner (or pianos), these sorts of situations can and do happen.

What Summoner Rates Would Look Like with No Weight

Well gee, doesn't that look strange? Shouldn't I, you know, have like, 20 5* by now because I've used like, 1000 scrolls if not more? Yes. Yes you should if the rates weren't weighed. But rates are in fact weighed. That means, Com2us is essentially saying hey "people are going to get a 4* ten times more often than a 5* and a 3 * 20 times more often".

To go back to the marbles example; it's like being handed a bag of marbles that can contain red, green, or blue marbles, but Com2us is filling 10 bags with evenly distributed marbles, 20 bags with mostly green marbles, 30 bags with mostly blue marbles, and 40 bags with mostly red marbles, and you get handed a bag at random. The odds of getting a bag of mostly red marbles is much higher, and within that bag you have a 50% change of getting a red marble.

So...if its based off an algorithm with weights, does that mean we can figure out the algorithm?

While predicting the algorithm would be nice; it would require way too much data and some serious hacking skills to do it. Much better to just make broad estimates, play for enjoyment, and most importantly, make the best of what you got. Summoner's War does a pretty good job of providing "free" monsters that can do almost everything needed when combined correctly. It just takes a lot of skill and strategy.

Besides, getting everything you ever wanted would get boring anyway.

What Serefina's Analysis Does

What Summoner's War Summon Rates Really Look Like

When I say lightning, I mean getting those sparks from an uncommon or mystical scroll. Using a combination of survey data (thanks everyone who fills out my questionnaires), Youtube Data (it's a pain in the neck to log all those 100 scroll summons but it helps a lot!), and uncommon scroll tests (which is why I never have any); there have been distinct patterns for when you get lightning.

It's not so much a, lets use 100 scrolls thing, more of a "after this content update, I'm getting  lightning within my first 20 scrolls". Which means spamming really doesn't help after you pass this threshold. However what that frequency will be seems to change every time they add more monsters as you'll see later on.

Elements Like to Reoccur on Certain Days

Though lightning frequencies might be hard to log unless you're as crazy as I am; predicting day of week skews takes little more than observation once you know to look for it. After a major update, you'll notice that certain monsters (like wind hell lady's on Monday's) occur a lot more often on Monday than Sunday. The same seems to hold true for Ifrit, suggesting there might be some sort of implication day of week has. Or it might be something to do with how date affects CPU Clock.

This is actually only from 12/1/2014 through 6/10/2015, so it's a bit outdated, but I'll get you guys similar charts when I finish my analysis. You can also copy and paste the database data into excel and create this chart yourself if you are data-savvy.

Time Affects Summoning

Now this is where things get dicey. When looking at individual days and individual hours, we see a lot of skews; especially weekend skews. However as with the days when LD and Mystic scrolls are given as rewards, or the first three days when ToA resets, there can be a large influx of 5* due to everyone and their mother summoning at the same time.

That suggest that there are distinct player behavior factors that influence dates in the sample, but it doesn't completely discount the hypothesis that date or day or week may also be controlled in the game's coding.

As with the previous observation; we can see that content addition seems to spike 5 Star Summon volumes likely due to player behavior. While the code may or may not be "jacked up" to increase odds, players are more likely to summon when new content is added as it provides immediate incentive, which may explain the trends you see in the abridged graphs.

However, on a week over week basis we see a lot of these trends continue, suggesting that there is some sort of basic population control based off total volume of summons or number of summoners that keeps everyone feeling like they have a chance to get their very own Dark Oracle.

That means most weeks will see roughly the same volume of 5 Star summoned, and that weeks that start off high will taper, while weeks that start off low will see more towards the end of the week.

Of course, behavioral factors cannot be discounted, and can be argued to be the true underlying cause.

Summary of Findings