Shop Voucher (Red Cert) Store Update Coming Soon. Should You Care?
UPDATE: new contents can be found here:
With the arrival of the [Maria Nearl Rerun] Event on CN, 30 day timers were added to the Potential Tokens. This indicates that these tokens will either be refreshed or rotated, though it is unknown which:
Ethan, Breeze, Chip Catalysts, and Module Data Blocks (for unlocking Operator Modules) are NOT affected, only the Rare, Epic, and Royal Tokens.
Should You Buy The Tokens Before The Update?
As a general rule, Potentials tend to have a very minimal impact on Operator gameplay. Potential increases typically reduce deployment cost by 1, give a small upgrade to stats, or give slight improvements to Talents. For example, here are the Potential upgrades for Angelina:
Operator potential is increased by either pulling a dupe of the Operator, or using 4 Class Tokens. Thus, all 4 of the class tokens in the Shop Voucher store must be purchased to increase the Operator potential. Buying less than 4 will result in unusable Tokens, and thus a waste of Red certs.
Red Certs are obtained from the "Tough Siege" Supplies Stages, and AP-5 will award ∼21 Vouchers per run. At 30 Sanity per run, this comes out to about .7 vouchers for 1 sanity spent.
Should You Buy: Rare Defender, Medic, Sniper, and Caster Tokens:
Rare tokens increase the potential of 4 Star Operators. Each Token costs 45 Vouchers, so 180 total vouchers are needed to buy all 4. 180 Vouchers would require about 257 sanity, about one day's worth.
NEVER recommended: 4 stars are just too common via recruit or headhunt, and won't be part of end-game rosters (other than myrtle or Gravel, who are easy to full pot via recruit) so potentials don't matter.
Should You Buy: Epic Specialist and Guard Tokens:
Epic tokens increase the potential of 5 Star Operators. Each Token costs 180 Vouchers, so 720 total vouchers are needed to buy all 4. 720 Vouchers would require about 1028 sanity, about 4 days worth.
ALMOST NEVER recommended:
The only 5 Star Guard that is end-game meta is Specter, and her strength comes primarily from the immortality of her S2, not her potentials. At Potential 4 her ATK increases and at Potential 5 her Max HP and HP regeneration increase, so if you use her a lot it might be worth considering if you will reach one of those potentials. However, for the vast majority of players the improvements will not be noticeable. Also keep in mind that there will be a free 5 Star Selector in the upcoming Under Tides Event, and Epic Guard Tokens will be added to the permanent CC Shop with the arrival of Season #6 [Operation Wild Scales], so those are alternative options.
The only 5 Star Specialists even remotely worth considering are the Fast-Redeploy Operators Kafka or Projekt Red. Their redeploy Costs are reduced at Potentials 2 and 6, which can be quite nice if re-deploying them often since redeploy costs can add up fast. The Potential 4 improvement reduces their redeploy time by 2 . This being said, both of these Operators are "generally" inferior to Phantom, and deploy costs are not an issue in most content, especially later in the stage, due to the DP generation power of Standard Bearer Vanguards, so most players will not find these Tokens to be worth it.
Royal Vanguard and Supporter Tokens:
Royal tokens increase the potential of 6 Star Operators. Each Token costs 720 Vouchers, so 2880 total vouchers are needed to buy all 4. 2880 Vouchers would require about 4114 sanity, about 17 days worth.
Probably NOT recommended:
The main 6 Star Vanguard to consider this for is Bagpipe, who is incredibly Meta in the DP generation game because of her second Talent, which gets an upgrade at Potential 5:
This gives other Vanguards and extra 2 SP (for a toal of 8 SP) on deploy, which enables Myrtle S1M3 and and Texas S2M3 to be used almost instantly after deployment for incredibly fast starts (of course it helps other Vanguards as well).
Players should keep the following in mind, though, before starting to save for this:
- 4k sanity is a HUGE opportunity cost that can slow down E2s or masteries on other Operators that will have a higher impact for most content.
- The gain is only at Potential 5, so if it doesn't get you there, then you are reliant on Bagpipe spooks to get you the rest of the way, since it seems her banner is unlikely to rerun since it came with a CC and not a story event. A set of Royal Vanguard Tokens are also available for purchase in the permanent CC Store. (also, once you pull the dupe to reach pot 6, the Token purchases were unnecessary at that point, and thus were wasted from then on)
- For most players, the only content this will be noticeable in is very high difficulty limited-DP situations like high/max Risk CC
So basically, players should only consider this if:
- They are veterans that don't have high impact E2s and M3s in the pipeline
- Can reasonably reach Pot 5
- Are interested in high/max Risk CC clears
For 6 Star Supporters, the main Potential benefit is the improvement to their Talents, which happens at Potential 5. The only Talent improvement worth considering would be Suzuran, who gains an extra 3% to her Fragile effect (an extra 6% when S3 is active). In very high risk CC situations, the Fragile effect quite useful, and a few percentage points might be enough to make the difference. Suzuran happens to be one of the best and most consistent sources of the Fragile effect. This being said, those extra few percentages are not likely to matter for the vast majority of players, so this should only be considered by players that are interested pushing high/max risk CC with Suzuran and can reach Potential 5. At this time, there are no other sources of Royal Supporter Tokens, though of course there could always be some added in the future. There will be a good chance to pull for Suzuran potentials in her Banner rerun which will be coming to global eventually.
One thing to note about the Royal Tokens is that they CAN be a pretty good deal for endgame players looking to increase potentials, as they are much cheaper than trying to actually pull these units given the premium price of pulls to begin with. To put some numbers to it, 4114 Sanity is ~30.47 OP with 135 sanity cap, typically only worth 9.14 pulls if you convert directly. Normally you'd expect that many pulls to only fetch 0.264 of a six star with some green/yellow cert change.
