Congrats on another win! You guys impressed me with your flavor as well as thoroughly taking out the bosses even when that wasn't the main goal! (Though you did spend quite a bit on it.)
I have a few announcements to make as usual for the retrospective. Be sure to read all of them!
1. With Diyem rescued, the resonance the team holds to darkness has increased. Diyem may be weakened, but mid-tier Shadows have been unlocked! They have the same restrictions as Shining moves, and come with the prefix Umbral.
2. After some deliberations with the balance team, and seeing its... impressive performance in the past few fights, we have decided to nerf Assist. It still draws from Support units at any time, but instead of behaving like Copycat, it behaves like Mimic. It still costs the same due to the fact that the pool and opportunity cost of drawing from anything from Support at any time.
3. Mimic and the nerfed Assist have been buffed such that it now chains into the move it copied, similar to Copycat. The only difference is that the move then permanently becomes that normal move, when Copycat continues to have the extra cost in exchange for copying any move actively used in battle.
4. The team's bodies continue to destabilize, and that heightened exposure to the Radiant Machine isn't doing them any favors. Blinding Meltdown has become even more volatile. It now pierces evasion, destroys barriers, and also double-KOs if the user has a Reviver Seed.
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A word on group-scene etiquette.
There have been some concerns brought up during group scenes that sometimes players go 'too far ahead' of me or other players when a scene is happening. And as a result, when that player returns, they must either make up for what was missed somehow, or must do a lot of bad-chronology quote blocks to reply to everything that happened, which can come off as awkward or clunky.
I think those that have had this concern can bring it up themselves to further elaborate, but in general, this is partly a result of some players being newer to group roleplays than others, and especially so because of how large and hectic some scenes can become. This goes triple because of the differing time zones we all have, myself included. I'm open to seeing a discussion for this on how that can be rectified or better coordinated for longer plot/large group scenes that span multiple days. This isn't a huge problem, but it is worth bringing up and talking about for the sake of awareness and possible remedies.
That's all for now! The next boss is a Big Boss, and as such, the Front Line count has been upped to 15. Get ready for a big fight! I'm pretty sure everybody who wants to and is able to be FL, will be for this one. I'll edit this post with the formal lineup later.
For round 9, there are no mandatory plot scenes. However, there are scenes with certain characters that I want to prioritize. In this order...
1. Maple and Millijoule
2. Diyem
3. The rest of God Squad
4. Arceus
5. Shield and Karat
And of course, there is still room for other characters as well! These are just the characters that I have particular interest in showing more of, and/or are characters that I feel need more limelight from the roster.
(cough also Owen scenes maybe cough)
That's all for the announcements this round. Thanks for reading, and have those Umbral attacks on their way! If you had one pre-approved already, remind me so I can log it down.
