Vertical Investiment - Elation SW lv 999 team (my opinion)

I was talking with a friend of mine since Sparxie's rerun is ending and leaks are pointing to Yao Guang getting a rerun next patch.

He was asking me how to invest into the Elation path because he decided to invest in Ashveil and only pulled SW 999, leaving her benched until he could complete her team.

We ended up discussing Elation light cones in particular, because people heavily underestimate them for being "only a small % damage increase", while to me they're extremely strong because they provide way more than damage... they allow the team to function smoothly.

Right now the team is SW 999 as DPS, Sparxie as sub-DPS, and Yao Guang as buffer/enabler.
People use Huo Huo for the energy buff (I use Fu Xuan e2s1 because I'm not pulling a character I don't like just to replace her later).

Basic investment - all e0s0.

Vertical investment - in this order:

s1 Yao Guang

e1 Yao Guang

s1 or e1 SW 999

s1 or e1 SW 999

s1 Sparxie

e1 Sparxie

e2 Sparxie

e2 SW

e2 Yao Guang

About eidolons: the biggest team damage increase is Yao Guang e1, which turns the extra Aha Moment into a 40-joke count, which thanks to SW's passive allows her to ult with a single Yao ult.

However, without Yao's signature cone, she can't reach 200 speed nor enough energy regeneration, especially to ult before the first Aha.

On top of that, with e1 she makes Elation damage ignore defense.

So the first vertical investment for the team should be e1s1 Yao Guang.

The second investment is SW 999 e1, which allows her to keep 20% of her stacks when her ult/field ends.

Normally she finishes with around 200 stacks and drops to 0 when the duration expires.

Until she gets back to 60 and can ult again is the biggest DPS loss window in the entire kit.

SW's cone lets her reach the 200 speed breakpoint, which is her BiS breakpoint, and as a bonus whenever she ults she immediately gains 30 jokes, which means damage/crit rate stacks.

As you can see, none of these investments are raw damage.

Now comes Sparxie s1.

The cone lets you increase the damage of all Elation characters (the 4-star cone does this too but slightly worse) and increases the team's maximum skill points by 1 for each Elation character, up to 3.

So instead of a maximum of 5 skill points, you go up to 8.

The thing is, she's a character that keeps spending skill points, and every point spent generates (at minimum) one joke.

The catch is that she's basically a lottery.

Every skill point spent has a chance to grant a joke.

An average chance to gain jokes and recover 1 skill point.

A lower chance to gain jokes and recover 2 skill points.

And SW 999 has a mechanic where every skill point spent has a chance (the chance decreases every time it succeeds and resets on her next turn, so a maximum of 3 gifts at a time) to generate a gift.

Each gift has a 33% chance of being:

1 - Sword

2 - Pac-Man - generates 3 jokes

3 - Bomb - restores 3 skill points

Because of that, in her team you're usually always capped on skill points, because she's very fast and doesn't spend SP herself, and Yao only spends SP every 3 turns, so only Sparxie is actually spending them.

But Sparxie can only buff herself around 8 to 15 times per turn (with a lot of luck) through this lottery mechanic.

If she had 3 extra skill points available, that's 3 more chances for that to happen, potentially reaching the cap of 20 per round.

In my mind that's a priority investment and a quality of life upgrade that goes against most theorycrafting, because it's not an increase in capacity. It's NOT just QoL, and it's also an increase in useful overflow before resources get wasted.

Because most of the time, without the cone, skill points stay capped.

With the extra 3 skill points, you're preventing resource shortages and also preventing waste when you receive skill points while already capped.

This is the kind of optimization that's usually worth more than direct DPS.

Then comes Sparxie e1, mainly to unlock her e2.

Now we get the strongest damage eidolon in the team: Sparxie e2.

Every time an Aha Moment happens, Sparxie gains crit damage and gets an extra turn where she can act, allowing her to generate a huge amount of joke points.

She'll trigger this many times because there's the natural Aha Moment plus the ones generated by Yao Guang, meaning around two or three extra-turn procs per cycle.

It's worth remembering that Sparxie is the only "slow" unit in the team, which makes her action count much closer to SW 999.

Most importantly, it allows SW 999 to actually use her own e2, which can simultaneously be the weakest or strongest eidolon in the team because she can't really utilize it by herself without the previous investments.

Basically, when Silver Wolf reaches 120/240 MMR, she gains an extra turn without ending the field, allowing her ult state to stay active for a total of 5 turns.

The problem is that she almost never reaches 240 MMR with everyone at e0s1, or she reaches it only once during the entire fight (with Yao Guang e1).

With Sparxie e2, she can reach it every turn, or at worst from the second ult onward.

Anyway, after all these months playing the team (my team is all of them at e0s1), that's the conclusion I came to.

And I got Yao's e1 in only 10 pulls after Blade, so I'm pretty happy right now.