Dev Note # 77: Relation Effect Future Update Notice

MEME

Greetings Heirs, We are back with long-awaited notice about Relation Effect. The Relation Effect Improvement that we have been working on for around 3 months is expected arrive with next 3.6 Update. Issue with Relation Effect Majority of the feedbacks from the community included: "The Relation Effect is either preventing Heirs from utilizing servants they want to use or forcing Heirs to form certain team based on the Relation Effect. Therefore, if there is a certain servant that outperforms other servants, the meta revolves around forming a single standard team tailored toward the outperforming servant. Heirs need to be able to form various teams with different servants." When we first designed Relation Effect, we wanted to give more reasons for Heirs to invest on various servants rather than to invest on one servant per class by utilizing in-game story to give powerful synergy between certain servants. However, as the depth of servant development became deeper after multiple updates and as we added more systems like Awaken, Transcendence, and Potential that are bound to servants, we came to think that Relation Effect is only worsening the issue of standardization of team as the community suggested. Therefore, after lengthy consideration, we decided to improve Relation Effect. 2nd Relation Effect Added Since many Heirs have already been working hard to utilize current(1st) Relation Effect, we want to keep the 1st Relation Effect while adding 2nd Relation Effects that are more commonly utilized but slightly weaker than the 1st Relation Effects. Tank / DPS servants will receive effect when a certain class is in the ally team, while Healer / Support servants will receive effect based on who the enemy Boss is. Here are more details about 2nd Relation Effect: 1. 2nd Relation Effect will be added on top of current Relation Effect. 2. Tank Servants: "If an ally Healer servant is present, HP increase by n%" 3. DPS Servants: "If an ally Tank servant is present, ATK increase by n%" 4. Healer Servant: "Decrease ATK of Boss Raid A by n%" 5. Support Servant: "Increase damage dealt to Boss Raid A for all allies by n%" 6. Relation Effect will be added to Nat ★4 & Nat ★5 servants 7. Relation Effects for all Nat ★4 servants that don't have a Relation Effect yet will be added with 3.55 Update (Mid August) and 3.6 Update (Early September) 8. For DPS servants, the Relation Effect will increase DEF for DEF-based DPS servants while it will increase CRIT DMG for DPS servants that do damage based on enemy's MAX HP. ATK & SPD based DPS servants will receive increase in ATK from Relation Effect. We are considering around 60~ 80% increase of stat through 2nd Relation Effect for Tank / DPS servants. Since the 1st Relation Effect increases stat by 100%, we want to make sure that the 1st Relation Effect maintains its dominance over 2nd Relation Effect, while giving 2nd Relation Effect enough significance to form different teams. We are considering 20 ~ 30% numerical value for Healer / Support servants' Relation Effect based on the Boss of Boss Raid. We are open for any feedback about the numerical value of the 2nd Relation Effect. Please feel free to provide any feedbacks in our community. 1st Relation Effect of Healer / Support Class Servants Currently, many Healer / Support classes' 1st Relation Effects are focused on sniping certain strong servants. (Ex: If an enemy A is present, the target's passive skill effect will be blocked) Internally, we are going through heated discussion between two following opinions about 1st Relation Effect that snipes certain servants: "We need to get rid of servant sniping as we change the 1st Relation Effect. Currently, there are situations where all other elements of a servant is completely useless because of one certain element of the servant. For example, we can barely utilize Fire / Forest / Dark Heylel because of Relation Effect targeting Water Heylel." "Currently many Heirs are utilizing the Relation Effect for not only PvP but also for farming shards in Exploration to block passive of the stage boss. We should keep the current 1st Relation Effect because it is still meaningful and a lot of Heirs are utilizing it." We agree that removing sniping mechanic could improve PvP in the long run, especially because we have Co-Destruction and Potential. However, we believe that it is very dangerous to change all current 1st Relation Effect since it would be a direct nerf for Heirs that developed certain servants for the Relation Effects. Therefore, we are leaning more toward not making any change to the 1st Relation Effect while maintaining our direction of incorporating certain servant in the 1st Relation Effect for future servants. We have not finalized our decision on this issue yet. Please feel free to provide any feedbacks about this issue also. Thank you