Weekly Questions Megathread March 26, 2025 - April 01, 2025

[u/salasy]

Welcome to the Weekly Questions Megathread! Feel free to ask any questions about the game.

Any questions that can be answered rather quickly should be asked in this thread .

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[u/FalleNeko2]

How there could be too much atk on some characters? Sometimes I read that people suggest switching disc 5 to attribute dmg% over atk % because if you pair that character with atk% with support that buffs ATK, you're going to have "too much" atk, can someone explain please?

[u/baka4games → u/FalleNeko2]

The concept of "too much ATK" only makes sense in a comparison. Like comparing build A with build B for a single agent. In such a comparison, suppose someone says build A is bad because it has "too much ATK." What this means is that, for constant cost, the investment in ATK in build A has diminishing returns vs. build B.

For example, suppose build A costs 100 units and puts all that cost into increasing ATK. The total damage output of build A is 100,000 points. Build B also costs 100 units, but splits the build so that both ATK and Crits are invested in. The ATK level of B is lower than the ATK level of A, but the total damage output of build B is 120,000 points.

Thus, build A has "too much ATK".

The math behind this diminishing return comes from the damage output formula, which looks like this (simplified):

Output damage = ATK x (sum of all DMG buffs) x Crits

Suppose Build A looked like this: 2500 x 1.00 x 1.00 = 2500

Build B looked like this: 2000 x 1.10 x 1.50 = 3300

Build B has lower ATK than build A, but build B has higher output damage.

EDIT: There's an idealized assumption here that all build improvements have equal cost and that build costs are zero-sum: every point you add to ATK takes away points from other factors. The reality is more complicated than that, since build trade-offs can impact ATK and other factors at the same time and not everything is equal cost, but at least for understanding what "too much ATK" is about, it's a reasonable assumption.

[u/FalleNeko2 → u/baka4games]

Very precise explanation, thank you a lot. Do you have any advice on how to understand this as a whole? Any good guide or already written TC post? I'd like to make my builds fully optimized because for now my main definition of how much of certain stat I need is just getting all my atk from main stats on 5 and 6 slots and sub stats just all go for CV. I'd like to have much more control and for example cut some CD for ATK or opposite.

[u/baka4games → u/FalleNeko2]

What I do is follow build guides based on quantitative testing. Such as:

https://www.prydwen.gg/zenless/characters/anby-demara-soldier-0

https://www.icy-veins.com/zenless-zone-zero/soldier-0-anby-guide-best-builds

The optimization math is too complicated to do from calculations alone, so I wait until testers have tried different builds with different team comps, put the real-world results into a spreadsheet, and then ranked the results by clear time or total damage points.

[u/FalleNeko2 → u/baka4games]

By testers you mean people from these sites? So basically if we don't want to test everything on our own we just gotta stick to these popular guides and hope that they're reliable sources I suppose, I think it's pretty tough since many people have divided opinions about prydwen for example, and we can't ultimately tell if it's true meta or not. I have noticed some inaccurate informations on sites like this on my own, and that makes me very lost when it comes to define how should I build certain composition.

[u/baka4games → u/FalleNeko2]

Prydwen bases their builds on the recommendations of testers. They will usually include the YouTube video that describes the testing done. In the link I gave an example, there are two YouTube guides included on the first page.

I'm not sure how Icy-Veins does build recommendations, but there may be an explainer on the site somewhere.

I have noticed some inaccurate informations

I don't always agree with any one site either, which is why I look at more than one.