Bugs
First of all, here is a list of all currently known bugged characters. The arrow beside the name shows if the bug makes the character stronger (↑) or weaker (↓) than our current rating of her.
We won't be providing information on how to replicate the bugs, as bug abuse is against the TOS and you can't be sure if the developer won't suddenly decide to punish those who used the bugs on purpose. Hence why the bug description will be kept vague only to show where the problem lies and how it impacts the character.
Harran (↑) - the charge bug makes her do way more damage than she should (both on auto and manual, but on auto it happens rarely),
Exia (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Dolla (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Milk (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Frima (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Yulha (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Eunwha (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Yan (↑ ↓) - same charge bug as with Harran + her Burst sometimes moves enemies behind terrain or outside the map, forcing you to restart the stage,
Centi (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Anis (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Belorta (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran,
Helm (↑) - same charge bug as with Harran + her Burst skill description is wrong in-game (she only attacks one target),
Yuni (↑) - sometimes her skills may cause other characters to have unlimited magazines (only happens in manual play) + same charge bug as with Harran,
Liter (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni,
Privaty (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni,
Neon (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni,
N102 (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni,
Mica (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni,
Drake (↑) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni, but it only affects her not the team,
Sugar (↑ ↓) - same unlimited magazine bug as with Yuni + her ASPD buff doesn't work at all,
Snow White (↑) - in rare occasions she can use her Burst skill two or three times in a row (the bug is related to the magazine capacity bug),
Maxwell (↑) - in rare occasions she can use her Burst skill two or three times in a row (the bug is related to the magazine capacity bug) + the same charge bug as with Harran can further increase the Burst skill damage,
Rupee (↑) - she makes non-stackable buffs permanent basically, making her super strong in teams that use a lot of buffs,
Ludmilla (↓) - her Taunt doesn't work, making her useless,
Pepper (↓) - has issue stacking buffs which affects her healing output (but you can play her on manual to partially avoid this bug),
Vesti (↓) - she deals 1 damage with her burst, so she's even worse than she was on the test server,
Maiden (↓) - her S2 Crit Buff doesn't work,
Soline (↓) - when she bursts there's a low chance the aim reticle will vanish and when it does happen, a random character on your team can die.
Damage formula
Players from CN spend a lot of time testing the damage characters deal and they came up with a formula that tries to factor all things that influence the final damage number. I won't be posting the damage formula here, and I will only talk about the most important part of it.
Mainly that CRIT and CRIT DMG aren't as important as we were led to believe, while everything affecting ATK acts as an overall multiplier that has the biggest impact on the final damage number.
We are currently testing how valid the findings are, but if they are found to be true it means that characters that provide the ATK Buff are way better than those that provide Crit Rate and Crit DMG buffs.
Thank you CN players for your work on this!
Tier list
While all the other tier lists from JPN, KR, and CN are constantly evolving, our tier list remained roughly unchanged since the day of release. What is the reason behind it?
The amount of bugs is simply staggering and we feel that making any changes based on the current, bugged state of the game will bite us in our asses once the bugs are fixed. For example, if we would include the bugs into our tier list it would lead to players who rerolled for a bugged top-tier character cursing us when the bug gets fixed as they will be left with an underwhelming character that is a lot weaker than it was earlier.
Also, we can't do any proper tests (for example for the ATK vs CRIT issue mentioned above), because the majority of the characters are bugged in one way or another so everything we will find, will be tainted by them.
This is why we are putting a freeze on the tier list till next Thursday (that's when we expect the next big patch to hit, that hopefully will have some fixes inside). Instead, we already added warnings to bugged character profiles and the tier list that funnels people back to this blog post.
And yes, we are aware that freezing the tier list and waiting for the fixes might turn some players away from us, but we strive to provide our players with the correct information and avoid creating a 'bug tier list' like some other regions already did.
Also, once the bugs are resolved, we will be expanding our tier list by splitting it between various modes and stages of the game. For example, the Campaign rating will be split between:
early (chapters 1-5)
mid (chapters 6-11)
endgame (chapters 12-16).
Same with Interception mode, we will provide ratings per boss and so on.
And yes, we saw how Isabel performs against the S Interception boss, but you won't replicate the performance in Campaign simply because you won't have enough time to get her to max stacks, even with abusing Liter and Dolla cooldown reduction. The boss is the only place where Isabel can be considered a SS tier character, but everywhere else, she remains a D tier.
This is an example that will hopefully make the mode-based Tier List much better.
