#myon falls into idol hell part 2

[myonmukyuu]

SIFAS mini guide: countering stamina drain for songs that aren’t easy-mode

or how not to die in early game SIFAS

Edited 2/28/20. After playing tons in JP I’ve ascended.

Hello friends, I’ve noticed than a lot of people have been having issues with SIFAS - namely y’all keep getting hardstuck early because you keep running out of stamina during tougher live shows. Believe it or not, you’re NOT forced to grinding out easy mode for macarons until you’re tough enough! With the power of team building and a galaxy brain, you too, can take down intermediate songs with weak baby teams!

I’m no expert, (after all I can’t read Japanese) but I’ve taken the time to write up a quick run-down on what you need to know to not die. If there’s misinformation, let me know bc I’m still learning too!

This guide covers:

Benefits of being Alive

How Stamina works

Live Show Appeals (this is why people keep failing btw)

Dealing with Appeals and not getting DESTROYED

Blade Subunit Switching

I’m going to assume that you guys know how to team build and set subunits. (If you don’t I’m happy to explain but this post is MEGA long).

Benefits of Being Alive

Before I get into the nitty gritty of things, I want to point out why you should try for this kind of approach for liveshows. When your team is weak and you’re challenging songs that are tougher than recommended, any mistake could cost you the liveshow. Personally I find this makes the game more thrilling but if you don’t there’s also another good reason! 

Basically, the drops (macarons and stuff) from S-ranking an Easy song is complete garbage. However, surviving an Intermediate song with even a C or B-rank is A LOT better. It really helps you farm drops a lot faster, allowing you to unlock that new costume even faster! Also the beat maps aren’t boring.

Of course this approach doesn’t let you automatically challenge every difficulty at the very beginning, but it does help you push your team’s ceiling!

How Stamina Works

In a live show there is a passive stamina drain. It doesn’t matter if you completely nail the song as each note will deal some stamina damage by default. If it doesn’t make sense, think of it as the Idols becoming worn out over the course of the song. 

So if they perform while their stamina is in shambles this happens:

To mitigate the constant drain of stamina you need to start applying strategy, and you have a number of options:

Level up your idols’ stamina stat to increase your team’s maximum (definitely helps but won’t cure your tendency to get obliterated)

Use Gd (Guard) type Idols for the passive stamina reduction (viable!!!)

Use Idols with defensive skills: Heal; Damage reduction; Shield. (also viable!!) Edit: Heal, and Shield are the most valuable of the three

On top of this, your Voltage output is drastically cut when your stamina becomes orange (smol debuff)  or red (you die irl).

So basically focus on using defensive Idols to increase your survivability?

Nope! That’s not all there is to it. Even if you stick to a subunit entirely made of healers, you likely won’t make it through a tougher song. Why? well I’m glad you asked!

Live Show Appeals

During a live show, you’ll given multiple chances to do Appeals. If you’ve been playing blind, and are also illiterate in Japanese you might’ve not noticed Appeals at all. Basically, they’re like time sensitive challenges that reward or punish you for failing. 

If you succeed an Appeal? Bonus score! Bonus notes that don’t drain stamina!

If you fail? You take a massive hit to stamina.This is the live show killer that most new players are intimidated by. On a more difficult song, failing to succeed an Appeal can easily chunk a third of your stamina (or more!!), usually immediately failing the show if your stamina is low. You could try healing this damage off, but more often or not your defensive subunit won’t be able to break even. So to avoid failing? Just succeed the appeals!

While playing through a song you might find some weird notes that glow purple. They’re denoted with a START and an END. This is an Appeal and the Start-end indicate the time frame that you must complete the Appeal’s challenge in.

Also at the topmost bar on the live show screen, you’ll notice streaks of pink among blue. This bar represents the song’s progression. The pink represents the parts of the song that an appeal will be active in, and for how long. 

The objective for an individual appeal can be a range of things including:

- Getting X amount of Voltage 

- Getting X amount of Voltage using your Special

- Getting X amount of Y notes (hitting Great or above for example)

- Hitting notes with X different members (basically alternate between subunits to achieve this.)

The best thing about it is that Appeals are always the same for a particular song (though story songs might differ). Here’s Kach's resource of all songs and their translated Appeals for reference. You can also check a song’s Appeals by clicking song info and scrolling to the bottom.

Appeals in Psychic Fire as found in the song info.

Dealing with Appeals

The first thing you’ll probably notice about Appeals is that they’re very time sensitive, and sometimes your subunit is too weak to complete the challenge in time (so you get eliminated). 

The easiest way to deal with most Appeals is to whip out your Special skill. Consider saving your SP if you notice that an Appeal is about to begin. Not only do some Appeals require your SP skill to succeed, but the raw Voltage gain will more often or not be the make or break for higher Voltage requirements. Also, the earlier you complete the Appeal, the better as remaining notes become bonus notes which do not drain stamina (yay).

Some Appeals have SP-boosting notes that help you recharge faster - it’s good to remember if these are available to take advantage of.

Again, make sure you’re prepared for the upcoming Appeals or you may receive nasty surprises!

Sub-unit Switching

Cool, so now we know that in order to avoid our dooms we must succeed the Appeals of a song. But is doing that so simple?

You might find that completely using a Voltage-based sub-unit (or one that isn’t specialised at all) to clear Appeals will result in your complete and utter destruction because the passive stamina drain combined with the orange/red stamina bar debuffs will render your team so weak that they will fail all upcoming Appeals (which effectively erases your existence from the universe).

So we gotta Sub-unit switch smart!

The easiest thing to do is to set up a sub-unit that focuses on Guard or other defensive skills outlined earlier and swap them with your Voltage/Skill/Special-oriented sub-units when it’s time for Appeals. Typically a Guard-oriented idol doesn’t have high voltage output and it’s very difficult to recover from Appeal stamina drain even with a team of healers.

EDIT: The way you organise your subunits really do depend on the song. Sometimes you’ll need SP focused ones, or even Sk focused. Gd is always good to have just in case something goes wrong. However I wouldn’t say to only bust out your Vo during Appeal times. Experiment with how long you can use Vo until you need to switch and utilise it to the best that you can! If you have UR Initial Ruby, it’s very likely stamina won’t be a problem for you until later in the game.

Things to Keep in mind:

It’s up to you to find the perfect balance between high Stamina and high Voltage. Sometimes you survive very well, but your safe-playing nets you a pathetic score. On the flip side, sometimes your Voltage greed results into you dipping in Red stamina. Sure you don’t die, but your Voltage output gets nerfed greatly.

Guard Idols passively increase Damage reduction, but at the cost of decreasing Special recharge-rate which can be pretty bad if you’re relying on your SP skill to win you the appeal. So swap mindfully.

Personally I find Damage reduction and Shield more useful than Healers as Healers can’t usually outheal the stamina drain I receive this early in the game.

EDIT: myon u dumb b, damage reduction isn’t very useful!!! just because you watanabe let you down with the heals that one time...Healing is useful and Shield is the best! (especially when Ruby is involved)

Wow this ended up a ton longer than I expected. Hit me up if anyone has any questions or if I said something completely wrong!!

[myonmukyuu]

game of the year

[myonmukyuu]

So I finally unlocked her costume 

[myonmukyuu]

LLAS might be consistently crashing on main story DL, effectively blocking me from the rest of the game but

I’ve been idling and just chilling to the bgm and Maki’s voice for the past 30 minutes and it’s REALLY GOOD CONTENT

[myonmukyuu]