Transcription
With Phoebe and Gyi getting her very first rerun very soon, a lot of people have been wondering who is the better Spectra DPS: is it Phoebe or is it Gyi? This is a very important question to have answered for a lot of people because they have limited pulls. If Gyi gets power crept literally the banner after her rerun, a lot of people are going to feel bad.
So that's why I'm going to be answering that question today. However, first I would like to give a disclaimer: Phoebe is currently still in beta. The reason I feel the need to mention this is because her being in beta means she can still change a lot. Given the current state of her kit, I do expect she will be changed a lot. So if there's any beta updates that you want to know about, be sure to check the pinned comment; any relevant changes will be there.
Now I want to talk about the categories I am going to be discussing when I compare Gyi and Phoebe because I think a DPS has a lot more to them than just damage. The first category is going to be damage. Obviously, when you are a DPS, your primary job is to do a lot of damage to kill the enemies as fast as possible. This makes sense; this is the most important and simple job for a DPS to do.
Next up, we have ease of use. If most people can't even get the optimal damage out of a character or not even good damage out of a character, why should I even bother recommending them to anyone? It's one thing to do a lot of damage, but it's a whole other thing to be simple to use while doing all that damage.
Finally, for team options, obviously you want to use your DPS in the very best team possible, but this will not always be the case. So what if you don't have the very best team? Well, you're going to need alternatives. If you don't have those, you're kind of cooked.
So on to category one: damage. Starting with Gyi, Gyi is currently the second highest DPS character in the game, only being behind Carla. The thing with Carla is the fact that she has next to no AOE, whereas Gyi does have very good AOE. So Gyi is already off to an incredible start. She has a lot of damage within her kit, but most of it is centered within her big nuke damage, AKA her Luminous Epiphany Solar Flare.
This is the big nuke, and this is the thing everyone will look at with screenshots. This is the single highest hit of damage within Withering Waves that I believe to be currently possible at S0 R1. It makes sense that this is a lot of Gyi's damage, but don't be fooled because it's definitely not all of it. She also has a very powerful ultimate, and we should not be underestimating her basics and her skill within her Incarnation state.
So she has a great mix of sustained damage but also very large nukes. Now moving on to Phoebe's damage, Phoebe as a main DPS is very interesting because if we look at these characters in a vacuum, allowing absolutely no damage buffs, Phoebe has some of the highest damage in the entire game. All she needs to do her damage is to just have Spectra Frazzle on the enemy.
But obviously, this is not a solo game; this is a team game. So it is obviously going to matter that your teammates are good because if you're not able to be buffed, then what are you really going to do? Let's be honest. And that's where Phoebe's issue lies. There's no effective damage buffers for Phoebe at the moment. Almost every single damage buffer has some sort of issue that makes it so Phoebe cannot properly utilize her, making it so her damage within a hyper carry setting is not that good.
But within dual carry teams, she will be stronger than Shang Lea if we replace a healer with the Spectra Rover on the Rejuvenating Glow set. This means that she does have a very nice place within dual carry teams, but even with that, I'm going to have to point for damage to Gyi.
Next up, usability. Starting with Gyi again, Gyi is an incredibly simple character to use at a baseline because it really is just as simple as: use her skill, do four basics, and then also her skill, and then you end it off with the nuke and you go into your next character. The thing is that a lot of her complications arise when you try to optimize her gameplay, be it through animation cancels or optimal rotations.
So not only is Gyi very easy to use, she also has a good damage ceiling and a lot of optimization for her abilities. So it's incredibly easy to get started with Gyi, and unlike most characters that are easy to use, she doesn't need to sacrifice optimization for this. Much like GN, but it's even better than GN because the low skill play style doesn't come with crippling energy requirements. So Gyi has just some of the best low skill gameplay in the entire game.
Moving on to Phoebe, it's a very similar story. Just like Gyi, Phoebe's game plan as a DPS is incredibly simple. All you want to do is just start out with the heavy attack to proc your Absolution mode, and then you want to just do three basic attacks and heavy attack three more times, and then that's just kind of all your damage right there.
Although this does come at the cost of Phoebe being a bit worse to optimize because the only thing you can really do to optimize your Phoebe gameplay is to cancel her third basic attack's animation because it is quite a long animation, and sitting through the whole thing is oftentimes not worth it. Instead, most of Phoebe's optimization is going to come from her team because currently her best teammates are dual carry, so that automatically requires a lot of swapping and a lot of micromanaging.
So who gets the point for usability here? I'm going to have to call it a tie. Gyi and Phoebe are both incredibly simple characters with incredibly simple game plans. It's honestly kind of surprising just how simple both of these characters are to use.
For the final category, I'm going to have to turn to team variety. Both of these characters feature a lot of characters that they can use within their teams to varying degrees of success. Starting yet again with Gyi, Gyi's best-in-slot team is obviously going to be WIA and then either Verina or Shke Keeper, both bringing their own advantages to the table. Shke Keeper with her superior buffs and then Verina with extra coordinate attacks and a faster rotation.
So Gyi has an incredibly solid core going on for her. But what happens when we take one of these characters away? Well, if you don't have Shke Keeper available, you can always turn to Verina. And if you don't have Verina available, you can turn to the Shke Keeper. But if you don't have either of them, it gets kind of tricky.
While Bit is an option that has coordinate attacks, this would conflict with the fact that Zesa is also a Glacio character, and because they're the same element, they're not able to work together in stacking Gyi's Forte bar. So if you don't have Verina or Shke Keeper available, you're not really able to use your Gyi, either, being a big damper.
Now, if XI is the character you don't have, which is very reasonable given Carla's prevalence in the meta right now, your options are limited, but they are still there. There is Yinlin, who is actually a pretty decent character to use with Gyi. The main thing she has going for her is her personal damage, and while I have talked at length about how much she needs String Master to really utilize this personal damage, the addition of the Imperian Anthem set has also given her some supportive quality.
So Yinlin is not bad at all. There's also UU with Rejuvenating Glow and then the Origin Type Three. This is a very low maintenance and low investment character to use, being incredibly good for any free-to-play accounts that don't have many resources to waste. Outside of Yuanwu, there is also more Tey, I guess, but I wouldn't pay much mind to this option.
There's also the fact that you can run Gyi as a dual carry. Obviously, the best option out of all the dual carries being Chang Lee. My main issue with Gyi dual carry teams is that Gyi's swap cancel windows are either unnecessary or easy to cancel. As a hyper carry, think about her longest attack animations: her fourth basic attack, her third basic attack, and then her skill.
In an optimal rotation, Gyi would want to cancel the third basic attack with her skill and then the fourth basic attack with her nuke, leaving only the skill as something you can truly swap cancel. So I don't think this is really that great of a usage for your Gyi if you're able to use a different option.
Now moving on to Phoebe, she has a lot of different options for her teammates, but that's more so because she doesn't really have a perfect synergy with any one character. Her best teams are going to be a dual carry setup, and obviously the best person to use here in this dual carry team would be Chang Lee.
Much like with Gyi, however, Phoebe does have some very cancelable attacks. For example, her third basic attack and her Forte heavy attack. These are both going to be used plenty of times within the rotation, so that makes it so that Phoebe is actually able to swap quite a lot. She's not just entirely linked to Chang Lee for dual carry teams because she's also capable of using Shang Lea to a pretty good extent as well as Brandt.
So she'll have no shortage of characters to swap cancel with. If you don't like swap canceling, you can also turn to hyper carry teams. While Phoebe's hyper carry teams are not as good as those of Gyi, they're still worth mentioning. She has really decent pairings with both Mori and Sonua, which especially for Mori, we love to see given the fact that Mori only has one real team currently being with GN.
So him getting another team is pretty nice, and a lot of people don't even have GN, so the Mori will find a real use case. But the main advantage that I feel Phoebe has is the fact that she doesn't even want to use Shke Keeper or Verina in her best teams, instead opting to use the Spectra Rover.
This is one of the biggest qualities that Phoebe has, in my opinion, because Verina and Shke Keeper are incredibly contested within Withering Waves's meta. So there finally being a DPS where it's optimal to not use them is really good to see.
While it is incredibly close, I'm going to have to give the versatility point to Phoebe. Now, who do I think is better overall? I'm going to be so real with you: it's Gyi. Phoebe is not competing with Gyi in the Spectra DPS niche anytime soon. Even in her swap cancel teams, which are more effort than Gyi's hyper carry teams, she is not able to really come close to Gyi.
And while she does have a lot of team options, a lot of people pull for Gyi specifically to support their Gyi. So it proves that a lot of people are willing to pull a character just to make a character's most optimal team. The fact that Gyi still has good alternatives beyond this makes it so that I can't really fault her for really liking her.
But yeah, that's just my take on things. If you disagree with me, be sure to let me know in the comments below. And while you're down there, like the video and subscribe to the channel. If you want to enter the discussion with me, be sure to join my Discord, in which I am pretty active. So if you send a message there, I'll be sure to respond.
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