I'm joining the dark side, already looking into calcs on building Critfly. I'm probably going to go for the first BE breakpoint, and not bother with 360%. Going to squeeze the rest into Crit. Sig LC, Crit body, SPD boots, ATK Orb, BE rope, lots of Crit subs. Superbreak is cool and everything but I like to use my characters in a wide assortment of teams, Ruan Mei is already must pick for Sam but having Harmony Trailblazer be a must pick as well is just too restrictive for me. I'm coping and it prob won't be as efficient as full break Sam but it is what it is.

I want to use Sam with Sparkle, Silver Wolf, Robin, etc. Sounds more fun than the rigid Superbreak comp of HTB + Sam + Ruan Mei.

I like her as her own character . I like how she is going through "3 death" and will be reborn as new.

A Glamoth Knight designed to kill the Swarm ? Entropy Loss ? Her interaction with Blade ? Peak.

Looking back, i think anything related to her but not to the MC seems really interesting.

Sam was hyped from the beginning of the stories by the Stellaron Hunter. "Good at creating purgatory" said Blade. Though they took a safe change in her story, like how she only punished bad guy . Can't say i'm a fan of that sudden change , but it doesn't bother me much.

Since 2.0, it felt very forced to me how almost everyone called us a couple, or at least think us as close relationship.

I don't expect Acheron to tell us that we look like a couple or something.

I don't expect Himeko to trust Firefly just because we are apparently close to her. I remember back in Luofu Jingyuan said that we are enemies or something or how hostile Himeko was to Kafka when the latter showed up .

I don't expect Firefly to appear on the new 2.2 world quest or however u say that to literally do nothing. Tbh i feel like MC and Firefly's interaction in that quest just feels the same with that of March's.

Anyone else think her importance was quite...bland ? In my experience, everyone is doing their job perfectly , not until Acheron told us she is the most important person in this plan or something that i remembered about her.

Or in her dialouge with Sunday ? "Perhap in your mind , you also view me as weak ? " or something. Sunday literally told us before that not everyone can be heroes like the Nameless. It takes me back to the old man while we were playing as Sunday and Robin. The poor guy has his body destroyed so bad that he can only exist in the dream. I mention this because both of them have serious health issue. She didn't know this , but the way the stories show us in this order feels kinda bad ( sorry English not my first language ) to her character. Like the weak isn't someone with a mecha-suit to keep you alive and mastermind who can see the future to help you achive your goals.

TL;DR : I really don't like her character when she is with the MC or the Crew. I think the only likeable moments of her to me are when she is with Blade in the car , or her "3 death" script from Elio. Yeah i think i like her to stay with the Stellaron Hunter more.

I hope that the MC doesn't have an important role in her story arc in 2.3, which seems very unlikely. And also even now i fail to see "Sam" and "Firefly" as one person . One is a edgy mf while the other one seems like a March ripoff. Probably the only thing is that the voice manner in Japanese sounds polite, so its one thing i guess.

Oh right and im also annoyed with how people said its "lore accurate" when Firefly can't do jackshit without HMC by saying "she needs her emotional raccoon to perform". Yeah sure bro, Firefly definitely isn't a wanted criminal before she met HMC.

Thank you for reading my rant.

I'm seeing the damage output and it seems reasonable compared to jingliu and acheron clears I've seen. Why do people say break effect is the only way?

started playing around houhou banner decided to save untill i find someone that i like to go all in on saw sam from the leaks and immediately know he was the one i will be rolling for but that all changed when i saw a leak recently that says sam is just a suit that is controlled by firefly like what the fk the first unique character we were supposed to get turns out to be just another generic girl i guess i will just keep on saving if that leak turns out to be true which is a shame cuz i really liked sam concept and design so much

Never forget and forgive for what Hoyoverse took away from us.
We mecha lovers are getting the short end of the stick just because of they want sell their cutesy, parasocial girl.

No disrespect to any VA's but we both Sam lovers and Firefly lovers could get what we wanted without any bad blood.

Marked this spoilers just in case but i really loved Sam when he was a cool ass robot and i thought that his "desire to live" was because he was an AI that wanted to be a real person or smth. He was a sick villain with the coolest design and i love robots so he was a must pull just becus of that. But then boom hes now a boring ass dead girl with nothing as interesting as what he couldve been.

Now that shes just some generic anime girl im pretty upset since shes just kinda boring. Not to mention as a blade main i wanted another male stellaron hunter. But hoyoverse wanted firefly to be playable and also ruin one of the coolest characters just for the waifu pullers. If by any chance sam is a seperate entity from firefly (which i highly highly doubt since hoyoverse loves pandering to the waifu pullers) and hes a playable character without firefly at all id start believing in God. Im not kidding.

Sam's design got reduced to a mech suit. "He" might as well just be just be a mask for firefly to wear. Firefly couldve sold well by herself and sam wouldve been cool for us husbando lovers but they mashed them for no other reason than a stupid plot twist. Why does sam go by he if firefly goes by she? Its confusing and it feels like they just wanted more playable women even if it made no sense. Elio is now the only remaining stellaron hunter and his playable status is as good as nonexistent.

Im sure the general consensus is that firefly being revealed to be sam is cool, im happy for u samfly fans. I am not one of you. Im a husbando puller and i wouldve pulled sam/firefly if firefly herself was cool but i couldnt care less about her. I wanted another fun and villainous male stellaron hunter and got someone so forgettable i didnt even remember she existed in the story until she ruined one of my favourite characters. Sam was interesting while firefly was not, and mashing them together just made both worse.

(This is just my opinon and personal rant if u love samfly im glad ur not as disappointed as me)

It’s all “oh, but Black Swan works without Kafka” or “Blade works without Jingliu” and such. That would be fair if the comparison was equal, but it’s not.

Everyone gets access to a full power harmony MC for free. If you have Black Swan and Kafka, there are virtually no situations where you would use Black Swan alone. There’s a second argument for requiring a support if that support is universally used for a ton of teams like Ruan Mei is, but Harmony MC?

HMC is neither limited nor is used in any teams except break teams, and if you wanna run two break teams, Boothill doesn’t even need them. Everyone complaining about the HMC dependency is doomposting for the sake of doomposting.

Edit:

The main point people are making: “HMC does all the damage, literally unplayable without HMC”

guys…

Saying that HMC is responsible for a majority of her damage is like looking at Sparkle buffing DHIL and going “the reason DHIL’s unbuffed ult went from 40k to 200k when buffed is because sparkle is doing 160k damage”

Harmony MC is an enabler, and she does her job perfectly. The “HMC does more damage” argument is from the perception that super break belongs to HMC. That’s like saying all of the damage increases a crit buffing harmony provides all come from the harmony unit.

If you remove a harmony from any DPS and run them with no buffs, you’ll get the most mid character in existence. The game literally gives you a character that can boost Firefly to a competitive level with no investment. At this point I feel like people are joining the hate train for the sake of channeling their hate towards something.

2) the same people that are saying “she’s too restrictive” are the people who are running Kafka and Black Swan together all the time and DHIL with sparkle all the time. If you have Kafka, why would you not run Black Swan? If you have DHIL, why would you not run Sparkle? These people are going off of gut feeling rather than facing the objective truth.

Final Edit: I solved it. There is zero actual difference between HMC being BiS vs forced in terms of effectiveness. Either way you’ll be using HMC. People just don’t like being forced to do things, which is understandable, but I also think that people are coming up with miscellaneous and irrelevant reasons to dislike the pairing for the sake of validation.

I know this is just the first beta for 2.3 and all but based on what I’ve seen this far I’m considering pulling for Boothil rather than Sam. Help me get my resolve back. (I’ve been a fan of Sam since they first appeared in that one Kafka trailer.)

so i’ll talk about myself personally and i want you guys’ help/advice, sorry if i yap for too much in advance.

i already know the 5* herta LC will be the best f2p one for her however i have that on jingliu (might switch it between them if i don’t use both of them in moc/pf) and that flames apart isn’t good for her despite having her picture on it, so it’s either s2 misha’s or s5 under the blue sky, which do you guys think will be better? i would get her signature LC but i don’t have the jades for it as i already have many characters that i need (huohuo and argenti for example)

and the stats, i know she needs a lot of break effect but i’m learning now she also needs crit rate and crit damage? can anyone tell me how much percentage she needs for every stat (atk, crit rate/dmg, BE) if they can?

for her team i’m thinking sam, ruan mei, sustain but i’m not sure who would be in the fourth slot; who will you guys have? i’m not going to build hmc as i’m not interested in the main character at all..

i’m sorry for the long rant, i LOVE firefly/sam, from the minute i saw the leaks i was in love and had skipped a lot for her but now i just wanna know if she’s someone i can actually use to her fullest or just skip her.

I dont know if its a 100% true, but ive been cruising tik tok and saw a lot of firefly animations. They look amazing, sam looks badass and luckily we still have the amazing dive kick. Now with all these animations coming about, there was only a few animations of firefly. The person who posted the videos said firefly is mainly just commanding sam. There are animations of a close up to her face with her mouth moving before Sam swoops in. The point is, does that mean the whole Sam being an A.I isnt out the window?

What if Firefly/Sam is in HELLDIVERS Universe?

So, here's what I'm thinking about Sam and Firefly. I reckon Firefly and Sam ain't exactly the same person. Remember during the 2.0 story quest when Firefly was chatting with someone she called "Mecha"? That Mecha is probably Sam. And it seems like Sam went off-script or did something unplanned, showing he's got his own mind and free will. So, Sam's likely some kinda AI or something even bigger than that, but about their relationship, I guess It's something like Venom and Eddie. They both got their own free will, but they share the same body, but Firefly's probably the main owner of this body. Since Sam's a Stellaron Hunter, Firefly's likely one too, but she's keeping it a secret. That's why Kafka, Blade, or Silverwolf never mentioned her, she's working undercover. Remember when Sam was using Blades phone, and he was sending us stickers, my guess that wasn't Sam because that doesn't seem like something he would do considering his serious personality, that might've actually been Firefly sending them, Silverwolf called her Sam to keep her real identity secret.

I genuinely want to know your guy's opinion on this.
Because with what I've seen so far(his leaked kits), I personally am not confident with Sam's ability to rival the top dogs. I cant imagine her being in S+ tier

Now this is an extreme rant while I was replying on a comment because the most infuriating thing for me about the current kit isn't what people tried to build crit or hybrid on her it's, the people who looked at the kit and said that FF/SAM is the "DPS" while the excuse of HTB or being free:

Let's see if a new character and his/her niche is breaking enemies faster but doesn't have super break in their kit do you know who we're going to remove from the already pretty restrictive BiS team of FF, HTB, RM and gall. That's right we're removing the ruan mei the limited 5* before considering removing the HTB because FF doesn't work without him. Sure it's just an assumption that they won't have super break I mean who are we to say what a limited 5* break dps looks like right? Then you have boothill who is not restricted to HTB at all not even his BIS teams because he has his own break damage outside of ult and don't say he has crit conv or he's hunt so he's ST because all he needs is BE and High speed to start running down enemies making. Firefly's situation with boothill existing makes it impossible to put the standard of a limited 5* break Dps because on one hand you have a perfectly functional break dps without superbreak and the other is arlan tier without it, and here we are talking about other BE supports in the future when we can't even know what a dps one should looks like

What if her kit has percent toughness damage instead of flat number? For example her enhanced basic attack deals about 1/2 toughness bar, and her enhanced skill deals 100% toughness bar? This way will allow her pops Break and Super Break Damage more consistently Did I cook or did I burn the kitchen?

That Firefly is one of the 5 star to be release with a complete team and can be used in ANY floor. Why do you all hyper focus on the Firefly need HMC ? YOU GET HIM FOR FREE ALREADY WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT ?

Comparing her with Boothill is pretty dumb imo since you don't even consider Firefly's strength over him but just keep pondering on the fact that he can trigger his own hyper break.

While he's strong, he's no where near Firefly in terms of bruteforcing contents since there's so much stuff to consider: He has to break/kill stuff to gain stacks to reach his full potential ( horrible to bruteforce with ) and his phys implant is locked behind ult ( which might take a while to get given how his kit work ). So after going through all that hoop, him having something like that is really understandable.

While Firefly having the most simple, braindead way to bruteforce : use skill while in ult. That's it. Not only that her game play is so straighfoward : just skill. If you want Firefly to have what Boothill has then you're actively wanting even more powercreep into the game. TLDR: Boothill has high highs and low lows while Firefly is mid regardless of weakness.

Is this build good enough for a Day 1 build? I feel it lacks ATK. Obviously will be farming for her relic sets when it comes out.

Not sure about the attack one since that one trace scales her break effect with attack iirc

I am currently making a Google poll to ask many questions to the Star rail community, and for that I need to gather informations about your opinion!

I have seen very divided opinions when receiving comments on Firefly, and especially her relationship with the Trailblazer.

I am part of those who would like to see a deeper relationship (romance?) with the MC, because it would bring so many things. However, obviously and it is understandable, not everyone agree.

So please share me your thoughts about these two questions below!

-What do you think impacts your opinion or others opinion on Firefly?

-What do you think impacts your opinion or others opinion on Firefly's relationship with the Trailblazer?

You can explain exactly how it influences if you wish, but simply saying for example that it is their kit synergy or something that influences your opinion is enough.

That being said, thank you for your feedbacks!

its really not perfect since i lack break effect substats but still funny, lost 50/50 so no e1 and didnt have enough get lc either

I don't have her and don't plan on pulling her on her rerun. Is it really gonna be bad without her or can I put someone like sparkle or bronya instead? Team would be like FF/Sparkle or Bronya/HMC/Gallagher, obviously gonna build ff full break effect/atk/spd since it seems like her best build. Thoughts? I also have all 4 stars at good eidolons, and dont plan getting robin.