Retrospective - Lorentz and Balance

Lorentz Butterfly, the new Lingering Glow-focused Support.

Good evening, Timekeepers. Today, Lorentz Butterfly made her debut on the CN server. If you follow the meta at all, you've definitely kept up, so there's no need for me to tell you that we've seen a lot of interesting thing from her so far.

In every post I make I put out the very same disclaimer: That we simply don't know how a character will truly function or rate until they are released and tested. Lorentz Butterfly (I will be just calling her Lorentz from here on out) is a prime example of this notion.

Now I never claimed that she was going to be bad, in fact, I remarked (with some amount of disdain) that she appeared to be solely and utterly designed for the purpose of solving Lingering Glow and pushing out Flutterpage. This is what ended up happening! What caught me more off-guard (and I think basically everyone) is that we started seeing Lorentz pop up in other teams: Namely, we have seen her flex into Cheng Heguang's spot on the Liang Yue team and be used to trade out Jessica in Poison. However, let me preface this with: she is by no means 'broken' in those teams, what you're seeing is recency bias. She is fairly balanced.

I'm glad to see that Lorentz isn't completely limited to usage in LG teams only, and this provides me with an opportunity to talk about my favourite subject: game design (big shocker).

My disdain for the way her kit is designed hasn't left, I stand by my point about the blandness and pointlessness of her kit because numbers don't suddenly improve that. However, we'll discuss that after I explain why Lorentz turned out the way she did. We'll go from top to bottom.

The value of her Insight remains unchanged. Her first one is designed to ensure that she is always casting at rank 3 in any buff/debuff oriented team. Her third one is almost exclusively limited to [Lingering Glow] allies, but the developers appeared to have made 2 small changes that increase her utility:

1. She now also make the Ultimates of [Lingering Glow] allies not count towards the Spelldock limit. This is genuinely great support (even if it, once again, falls in line with fixing minor issues in the archetype) and wasn't there in the original preview as far as I know.
2. This could just be a translation error that passed by several people on the preview, but it was revealed that the DMG Bonus/Incantation Might buffs can also apply to non-Lingering Glow allies (even if you need LG allies to properly stack the effect).

The value of her S1: "The Primer's Flutter" is a bit confusing. It has an absolutely massive 800% base scaling (mind you a Lilya Ult is 700%) that she is easily able to hit due to her rank ups. The extra Genesis DMG is mostly balanced, as far as I can tell.

Her S2: "Chaos Criteria" received no visible changes. The sole use for this seems to be smoothening out [Burn] application, as Lorentz raises the [Burn] cap on enemies by a massive +20 stacks.

Now for the big one. Her Ultimate: "The Unstable Dynamical System", this is now the core of her kit. The [Continuous Action I] is cool, but not the real kicker. With it she is able to copy and reprint a basic Incantation 3-5 times (depending on Portraits), drawing all copies on the next round. These Incantations cannot be merged and do not generate Moxie, but also don't cost any AP to cast.

Generating 3 copies of a card is useful in many places, and we've seen the utility that you can pull from it. Combined with the Moxie gained from her Insight 3 and merging she is able to cycle this about every other round. This allows her to take many unexpected flex slots, such as a Support slot in Poison now that Willow and Tuesday are less AP-greedy, and a Support slot in Upgrade to spam Marcus nukes.

There's caveats to this. Namely, at P0 it will be AP-hell. Her P1 stabilizes this by increasing the Moxie she grants to allies and herself for not casting their Ultimates, making it an easy cycle every other round. In addition, with her reliance on Lingering Glow and teammates of that same archetype, you will want to bring at least Marsha as your sustain (which is fine in most cases as she is the premier sustain unit anyway). Lastly, you'll have to deal with the fact that you're only using 40% of her kit at any given point (her Insight 1, a tiny part of her Insight 3, her S1 sometimes and primarily her Ultimate).

But it works, right? Yes*.

*Most if not all her showcases currently have Lorentz at P5, which evades a part of the caveats I described. Cheng Heguang, for example, can only be replaced by Lorentz at P1. Still it's funny to see him 'crept' within half a patch.

Now that I've described her kit, I can start talking about game design. I want to note right now, that what I am about to say is going to sound like doomposting. Spoilers: it is not. I am genuinely very happy that Lorentz can see play beyond Lingering Glow, and that her numbers are actually tuned (she is only a 30% increase over Flutterpage in Beryl's team, and Flutterpage is a tiny bit stronger than her if you have Portraits on Beryl).

Beyond the design of the kit, I'm genuinely impressed by how reasonable she is!

But a flawed design doesn't lie.

The novelty of her kit lies primarily in her Ultimate. There is no other character that can guarantee 3 casts of any basic Incantation in your hand, and it provides an ample increase in DPT for almost any Carry. From increasing [Poison] application by copying over Willow/Tuesday cards or increasing casting frequency for Liang Yue. Her viability in teams outside of LG hinges on two (maybe three) things:

1. Her Ultimate.
2. Marsha being present (if you want to have some form of stacking for her personal damage and buffs).
3. Portraits (if you want a somewhat stable rotation and to get more card copies from her Ultimate).

Assuming you wave away the 2nd and 3rd point, all that remains is her Ultimate. I don't think anyone expected just how good getting to draw 3 guaranteed cards is, we should've learned from Yu-Gi-Oh where an even lesser effect was banned from play forever (Pot of Greed enjoyers rise up).

I am glad that they didn't nail her to Lingering Glow as they appeared to do in her preview, but it's important to acknowledge that her Ultimate is hard carrying her here. Beyond that, she doesn't have much of a foot to stand on in archetypes outside of her own.

In essence, her usability in other teams requires those teams to have weak-link characters like Jessica (I'm so sorry) whose own value can be outshone by the ability to consistently copy a basic Incantation 3-5 times. However, she only has her Ultimate to rely on here, so her future-proofing outside of LG is incredibly flawed.

This is not a negative per se, but it's important to keep in mind in case you decide to pull for her.

She exploits Bluepoch's focus on only 2-3 archetype's at a time to find play in teams that don't get much attention. In essence, there'll be grace periods wherein Lorentz appears more flexible than she actually is, but she will be the first one to get pushed out of non-LG teams when Bluepoch's focus shifts.

It's not a bad thing, I'd rather have this than another Brume situation.

That's about the end of my talk about Lorentz Butterfly. I will be covering more general balance design takes of mine below, so if you were only here for her, there won't be much else interesting for you to read.

The question then becomes: What is good design? If not the character who is decently flexible, has a main team, and doesn't powercreep anyone in particular?

First, my problems with her kit aren't that, and they lie more the spirit of her design. But this is still an interesting question to explore. I am not going to claim to be the one true expert at this, balance is something that interests me as both a game design student and gacha veteran, so I've built some opinions on this over the course of playing these kinds of games.

Powercreep is synonymous with the genre. Take away that aspect of it, and your game is very likely to EOS within 2-3 years at most (depending on the strength of your community, ex. Hero Cantare, Dragalia Lost). Whales stop being interested in your progression, and even the small but loyal fanbase will end up bored if a meta stagnates for too long. All gacha games (and in the same way, most live service games) are incentivized to 'change up the meta'. Gachas do this through powercreep.

Powercreep is a phenomenon that occurs when something new releases that is, in some way, better than its predecessor. This can be in terms of numbers, but also gimmicks. I like to split this phenomenon into two kinds: number-creep and design-creep. This is also why in most gacha games, the early characters don't stay relevant in the meta for very long.

Then there's 'creep horizon', a self-coined term that describes the apex at which you can no longer create a character that is better in numbers NOR in gimmick. This is the moment at which a game enters an almost guaranteed 'bleeding out' phase. The meta stagnates around this singularity, and you end up in similar situations as "F2P Gachas". Your goal as a dev, then, is to carefully balance 'creep' against your required profit.

Number-creep cannot be overturned, it is the steady progression of better stats and damage/effect modifiers. You cannot change 'numbers' to be something else, so the more number-creep your game has, the quicker you hit the 'creep horizon'. Luckily, there's design-creep.

This is a mostly horizontal expansion of your game. In the spirit of Reverse: 1999, this is where you start expanding into archetypes. A lot of gachas do this for a reason, Wuthering Waves, Honkai Star Rail, Path to Nowhere, these are all examples of games who try this solution. However, spread yourself (and thus your playerbase) too thin (such as creating 15 different viable teams), and your characters won't sell at all. So to focus on 1-4 different teams is a good midway point between the different kinds of creep.

This is Bluepoch's first ever game, so the fact that they have sort of managed (irregularly) to keep this razor-thin balance is actually quite impressive. Especially in gachas, where you can't really 'erase' mistakes without getting sued into the ground, it is a very precarious endeavor.

The reason why I want to warn people about Lorentz Butterfly.

Bluepoch has a few issues with balancing number-creep and gimmick-creep. We saw this with Jiu Niangzi in 1.6, Windsong in 1.9, Fatutu in 2.4, Brume in 3.2, Marsha in 3.3 and those are just a few examples.

In Reverse: 1999, what separates top units from each other usually isn't anything inherent to their kit, it's either a flaw built into the archetype they belong to that they need other units to solve or it's a simple case of numbers. In order to have powercreep occur, you build characters with inherent flaws in their kit or numbers.

Most high-ranked units as you'll find, have very little flaws built into their kit. They are mostly self-sufficient in what they want, and the moment you start encountering inherent flaws or great disparities in numbers is when characters drop into S and later A+. Here's some examples:

• Lucy is a strong example of this. She has almost no flaws in her kit, but she is held back by mostly two things: Numbers, and her FUA requiring enemies to die. When enemy health scales, numbers become more important, and Lucy's FUA is (in this way) directly tied to her numbers (without numbers you can't kill anything).
• Mercuria is a more confusing example. She also has very little flaws in her kit, merely requiring allies to have a high frequency of attacks (which is very prevalent atp). Her flaw, then, is numbers. At P0, her buffs are great and applied AFK, but their numbers simply don't match up as well too monster Supports like Charon and Flutterpage.
• Jiu Niangzi faces both extreme number-creep and design-creep. She has an enormous flaw in her focus on [Liquor], limited ways to stack this properly, her numbers are low, her FUAs are consistent but vary in frequency. I think JNZ is the most egregious form of both types of creep along with Windsong, with JNZ dangling at the tail-end of A+ at the moment.

This creates a tight point of tension for Bluepoch. With their lack of experience in game development, mistakes occur. Case and point: Windsong, Brume.

The new metas have progressively less flaws and progressively higher numbers, which creates a problem. When you design a perfect in terms of design-creep, all you can do is limit it in other ways like numbers or archetypes. There's a very example of problematic progression here:

By all accounts, Kiperina is a pre-evolution of the perfect shielder. The only thing that allows her to follow 'within balance' is her inability to function perfectly outside of her Archetype and being unable to remove debuffs other than [Control].

Marsha then, evolves from that to create a near-perfect shielder. She is held back by nothing except for that she needs allies to get hit to trigger her shields, and that she can't also heal (plus requiring a tiny bit of AP sometimes).

The only way to build off of Marsha is to have a full auto shielder with bigger numbers that cleanses every round. Or a shielder that can heal at the same time. That then, creates another problem: How do you build from that? Bigger shields? More buffs? When you can only increase numbers, you've hit 'creep horizon'. You're designing yourself into a hole.

So, they finish Lingering Glow as soon as they can. Make a Lorentz to resolve the most pressing matters with the team, then leave it alone for the time being to focus on another archetype and thus 'delay' that issue. Case and point, Ramona (most likely). Everything points to Ramona to being part of the Poison Archetype, but that doesn't really matter in the end. The idea is simply to pivot to something less completed (Poison is BEGGING in this case, so a great contender), and try to provide competition for Marsha to create breathing room in the roster: Once Marsha becomes the norm, you can push back the 'creep horizon' even if you can't push the design-creep much further.

There are only so many perfect kits you can create before it becomes a numbers-only game, and as described before, number-creep is the fastest way to designing yourself into a slow death.

There are several ways to try and make the roster keep up. Novaflare (HSR), Modules (Arknights), Reforge (PtN) and Euphoria for Reverse: 1999. The other way, is to adjust your design philosophy, which is what maybe (MAYBE) happening with Igor, Cheng Heguang and Lorentz (we don't count Paper Heron because Limited). These units are good, but not overtly broken. They all have more pronounced flaws in their kits, with surprising flexibility (at less potency). Here's their most obvious examples (there are more):

• Igor doesn't necessarily need Lopera/Moldir, but he does become a lot better. He benefits from things like buffs, Moxie and [Bullet]s but cannot do everything on his own. However, he has very consistently high damage and can inflict a lot of debuffs on his own.
• Lorentz doesn't necessarily need Lingering Glow, but does become a lot better. Her buffs can't reach their maximum potential, and a lot of her effects are tied to Lingering Glow specifically. However has some upgrading and can reprint allied Incantations pretty steadily.

In that sense, I feel like these are more elegant and balanced designs, and something that the community wants to see more. My fear is that, if Bluepoch makes another mistake in their designs, they will knock all of these units permanently out of the general meta. This is a problem that has occurred in some gachas before:

When prior units are stronger than new ones (essentially reverse powercreep) you stagnate the meta and thus create 'creep horizon' but in the complete opposite direction.

Thus is the complexity of balance design, especially in gachas where every mistake is permanent and can only be solved through progression.

If you're curious about who I think is the best designed unit in terms of kit: Hissabeth.

But these are just my observations and deductions based on conjecture, I'm just a student after all, so in no way an expert with years of experience yet. I just like theory. That's all I can physically type about this topic, but as usual I am super stoked to have discussions in the comments!