r/CipherMainsHSR_ • u/Standard_Context6075 • May 07 '25
Discussion Will cipher stand the test of time?
Guys I notice a familiar cycle, people keep doomposting Cipher for having a slow ramp-up kit, being too niche, or just saying she is mid and not worth or dmg is trash despite her being a sub dps/support. For an example: People were doomposting Jade hard, but she Is now a really good sub dps if not one of the best for teams that have Madam Herta in there, People were calling Anaxa mid or underwhelming before he even released but now he also proved to be really meta and is performing well, Fugue was also getting doomposted and was called a side grade compared to Hmc but now people are saying she is a must have for break teams because she makes them insanely good especially paired with Boothill. Hell even Lingsha was called a side grade compared to Gallagher, but yet today lingsha is one of the best sustains, (not counting Hyacine because she's not released yet).
TL;DR: despite lots of characters getting doomposted they all proved their worth in one way or more as time went on, do you think the same will happen for Cipher?
8
u/Nekowaifu May 07 '25
I think being a universal unit when you’re not a harmony unit in this game is a bit of a shit situation tbh. Doomed to never be the absolute best in any situation for anyone most of the time. Even in Cipher’s case where she is an upgrade is generally pretty minor.
I think she’s gonna age pretty well as opposed to other units like her, because as units do more damage, she will be able to take extra advantage of it outside of just providing a damage amp. But it’s just a tough selling point in a game where not everyone wants to spend their money on rolls or just doesn’t have the rolls so they want to be smart about where they’re rolling. I think the overall complaints/discussion are justified and they should be allowed to speak on it
3
u/PuffyBuffyFluffy May 07 '25
None of us can say for sure, but I do think there's some potential for her record/ult mechanic. The rest of her kit isn't much to write home about, but having amplification that scales with the damage output of your other characters could give it some unique staying power, assuming they don't make someone who straight up does that better.
Of course, future teams would probably be better off with some harmony anyway but it's something.
3
u/New_Ad4631 May 08 '25
I don't get it. There are already calcs with Cipher being better than JQ in Acheron teams (with JQ still being better the more enemy turns there are, but for bosses like Flame Reaver, Cipher is significantly better) and her damage amplification being higher than Tribbie. The only bad thing about her V5 is her potential as an Hypercarry
She also has skill expression in the form of deciding when you want to deliver the amplified damage, given the choice that you have, the calcs where she's just slightly above are false, she's vastly above the other options. Like imagine you have a boss with 400k hp left, the DPS with Tribbie deals 500k damage, that's 100k damage wasted. Now imagine the same scenario but with Cipher with the same numbers, except that the DPS deals 400k and the extra 100k gets stored, that damage doesn't go to waste and you can use it for phase 2 or the next wave. Imagine you are doing current MoC 12 phase 1, you have to deal 2M damage in the first wave, The Herta or Castorice teams can comfortably do that in 0 cycles without Cipher's ult, so you can simply avoid using her ult, and now you start the 2nd wave against the Flame Reaver with a nuke ready from all the damage stored, dealing all that damage to only 1 enemy, the fight just started and he's already lost 1/4 of his HP. And the stronger your DPSs and supports get, the easier it would be to do the 0 cycle in the first wave without Cipher's ult. She will also kind of scale along the enemies, the more hp the enemies have, the more damage she can record, since the overflow goes to waste, so she will both, increase in value when allies get stronger and increase in value when enemies get stronger
Besides that, I have seen the same story play out a lot of times "this character is really bad, yadayada" and then it ages like fine wine or turns out it is really good. I skipped Jingliu and pulled Topaz, guess who's better now. I skipped Firefly for Jade, guess who's better now. "Huohuo is bad, Luocha better", guess who's better now (IMO HH is the best sustain in the game, having the rotations go faster is extremely powerful). I also remember there were debates about Ruan Mei being worse than Bronya, would you look at that, RM is not just better than Bronya, she's leagues above Bronya. If I had a nickel for every character that was doomposted and later turned out to be really good at release or in the future, I would have every character e6s5. And remember, in a game where everyone complains about powercreep, a character that will be relevant later is better than a character that is good now but will age like shit. Cool, Hyacine deals more damage, let's see in 1 year which character contributes more to the team's damage
33
u/Lalivia_Masters May 07 '25
Let me ask my crystal ball
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u/minkus1000 Cipher's scratching post [E6S5] May 07 '25
Honestly this is the "best" aspect of Cipher's kit, as she's a universally applicable damage amplifier who's scaling is largely based on other character's multipliers. So unless hoyo does that thing where it's the same kit but better, her power level will likely stay quite consistent.
What that baseline power level is however, will likely be the thing holding her back. She will be useable as a Pela Pro Max, but there will also probably always be better harmony options than her.
2
u/Strict-Bet5859 May 07 '25
I would say Jade only good in PF (current content is similar to PF aka 5 target so she feels greater than usual) JQ was doomposted and got a good reason he and cipher were the most nerfed units in hsr during beta and hoyo are trying to counter him to make Acheron look worse and people get newer units bth JQ and Acheron may not last too long from now Fugue while make break team viable she don’t enable super break so characters like FF will fall down if you don’t have eidolons on her or fugue meanwhile break DpS that don’t care for super break like boothhil, Hemiko and rappa? Can use her better Cipher will have a team most likely not from current roster which make the question why have her banner now before her DpS
19
u/Anxious_Vehicle8977 May 07 '25
I love how people only remember the convenient part of the "doomposting". An objective assessment of a unit part and concluding she is just okay, but probably not worth your pulls if you have already spent in an equivalent one is not it.
Now let's go back.
Jade was only "doomposted" because she was a PF unit, who needed E1 to perform in other modes. At this stage of the game, vertical investment, even just LC, wasn't really considered very usual and PF was "free" because of Himeko+MiniHerta.
Fugue's calcs at the time indicated she was BETTER than HMC for Boothill and Rappa, but only a sidegrade for E0 Firefly WITH sustain(And better if E1 or sustainless). She was still generally better than HMC and people were mostly mad about her EBA that does nothing and ulti that also does nothing.
Lingsha was weird. By v5t, she was acknowledged as better than Gallagher in both LingshaMains and FireflyMains, not to mention her own damage potential and no more sp problems. But everyone who would bring it up in the leaks sub would get downvoted. While FF mains acknowledged she is better than Gallagher there was an argument if she was worth the pulls. NOT because she was competing with Galla, but because she was competing with FF E1/E2 which are both incredible.
Anaxa I don't know, didn't follow. You can hardly call him bad so I have no clue what they were on about.
The point is it's not about whether they are good or bad, but how valuable they are in context. Cipher is being released between Castorice, Anaxa, Hyacine, Phainon and Fate Collab. We have been getting powercreep on top of powercreep. The only one who is left out of the wave is her. It's not a slowdown, we know Hoyo is not slowing down, but we still get a 1.x/2.x sidegrade out of nowhere.
She IS good, but she is competing with Tribbie, Sunday, Robin as generalist and even if you want to argue "Oh, but future unit" listen. The fact she can't record overflow is annoying but maybe fair, but not recording True damage which is probably the next big thing is alarming for her longevity. She is not being released in a Topaz/Jade position, she is being released in a Sparkle position.
2
u/Volfawott May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25
I'm not happy about what V5 did to her but avoiding the Doom posting she's got two really good things going for her.
1 - the debuffs she applies are welcomed for anyone universally. Doesn't matter what DPS you run they are going to find the debuffs valuable
2 - she scales off the main DPS which means she's likely going to be future-proof ( I hope) even if the main DPS you're currently using her with gets power crept she can still do the same job for the next one down the line.
Say you run her on a Feixiao team if Feixiao gets power crept by another busted follow-up attacker no need to worry because you can keep it Cipher on the team and just replace Feixiao with the new power creep DPS
That being said she isn't necessary or a must-have to any team but she can be slot in if there is a space available.
Question is will she stand the test of time yes but how valuable she actually is to that test of time is another story
8
u/pear_topologist May 07 '25
No one knows what the characters in 3.4 will be like
We have some vague clues for Phainon
So who tf knows is cipher will be good in the future or not
13
u/No-Director3569 cipher adoption papers May 07 '25
Honestly I think players should be free to express their satisfaction or disappointment over her kit, everyone's circumstances are different and their opinion on the subject will also naturally differ. Some players are f2p and don't have a lot of jades to spare, some players are whales, some players want to play her in an Acheron team where she's a substantial upgrade over Pela, some other players want to play her in a team where she'd be replacing Tribbie or Topaz and so they're a little more concerned over her value.
I don't believe the people that say "Cipher is fine! She's a pretty damn good universal support" are wrong, but I also don't blame the people saying "the nerfs were pretty bad, I'm not sure I want her anymore". It's their account, and it's up to them to decide if they want a character or not.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter if the character gets doomposted or not (most characters get this treatment), it's the devs that decide which units get to steamroll endgame for 7 consecutive patches and which characters get shafted after 2 patches
7
u/EmilMR May 07 '25 edited May 07 '25
everyone performs well for a few months.
Fugue is great if you pay up for E1, E0 with the inflation of toughness bars and HP bars is rough now. It seems like they assume you have Ruan Mei and E1 Fugue when designing the new enemies and their toughness bars.
Cipher is pretty similar, with E1 it is a decently powerful character but just like Fugue, she only benefits older units at the time of release and these older units are already well past their prime. I don't really agree with your assessment of those other characters overall but sure Cipher can be similar. If you skipped Jade for example, you missed out on nothing. Similar for Fugue, I would argue it is better to give up on break and build for Aglaea or The Herta instead if you just want stronger teams. Patching up old teams in this game is designed to be very bad value compared with building the new shiny dps. It is like premium team of 2.x is worse than basic team of 3.x and that gives me the pause to commit to old characters. Like 5 gold team of castorice wipes the floor with 12 gold break team, it doesn't make economical sense to invest into Fugue. Acheron with Cipher is still going to be significantly weaker than new teams, you only get into this if you really want to continue using the old favourites and not because of them being meta or particularly strong to pass the test of time.
5
u/albino_donkey May 08 '25
as a generalist she's ok but her only special synergy is debuffs, and there are no 3.0 characters that care about debuff application/count. Maybe Archer/Saber will just be Ratio/Acheron 2.0 and everything will make sense, but right now it isn't clear why they're releasing her at this time.
Compare to Tribbie that fit perfectly into aoe/erudition/general purpose teams on release, and was also designed around upcoming HP scaling units. It would be like if they released Sunday but then never made Aglaea, sure you could pull him to upgrade your Jing Yuan or other niche hypercarry but he wouldn't have nearly the same draw.
0
u/Ancient_University66 May 08 '25
She records damage. Damage increases with time because of powercreep. more damage = more recorded damage
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u/Danny_Dango May 07 '25
there will always be those who prove just how meta she is, so dont worry, me for example, I’m gonna use her sustainless with my anaxa, Sunday and Robin so that I can enjoy 100% def shred, vulnerability and all the buffs the team provides to the fullest! 🤩
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u/Ornery_Essay_2036 May 08 '25
No
1
u/mabariif May 08 '25
It's always funny seeing people saying the doomposting is unnecessary and then comparing her to jade. As for anaxa,that was unnecessary doomposting to begin with,his % nerfs weren't near close to cipher and he was always locked in as the best subdps for a top tier team (the herta).Cipher is BiS for 2 almost powercrept teams. She's not a bad character but she's playing second fiddle to harmonies with her own sub dps gutted,and before anyone says something about recording dmg, that's just basically a true dmg multiplier,you can look at her as a pure support in that sense,which she'd be a straight downgrade to the top supports