Act! Addict! Actors! — Building a Character Meta List
Which character is the best for teambuilding? Bear with me as I try to find out!
Minion the Anime Spreadsheet Nerd’s Meta List (Version 2.0)
Abstract
Hello! In this part of my A3! x Data series, we’ll be taking a closer look at gameplay and how to strategise especially if you want to build strong teams as quickly as possible in preparation for the next game event. If you’re not familiar with the A3! game, do check out this series’ prologue for a quick explanation as well as the first part of the series, which goes through the less intimidating task of compiling and analysing all of the characters’ basic information. This article will assume that you are slightly familiar with the video game concept of building a “meta” (most effective tactic available) team.
Welcome to my second attempt to make a meta list! The numbers here take all Japanese server (JP) events into account, amounting to 4 years of game data. Please note that this attempt directly builds on Minion’s Meta List 1.0, Spreadsheet Sankaku’s attempt to count every card in A3 and the rest of my A3! x Data project. As usual, the full spreadsheet will show everything in greater detail, but beware of spoilers! I’m just going to write this like a terrible research paper because… why not? Now on with the show!
Assumptions
- Yaycupcake’s teams are the best possible builds. (A3’s Discord arguably has better builds but they’re a bit more complicated, so for my sanity’s sake I stuck to Yaycupcake, and I think the difference shouldn’t be too significant!)
- The number of times a character is useful in another character’s team (I call it “appearances” here) is directly correlated to meta rank.
- A character/attribute combination’s appearance is counted if the character is needed to build one of the optimal teams recommended by Yaycupcake (I’ve linked the EN skills here, but do note that Act 2 skills are only fully reflected in the JP version but look out for spoilers!) for a team that is centered around the gacha support. For example, in Die by the Sword, the Comedy team would’ve been centered around Guy’s SSR gacha card, hence Tsuzuru, Muku, Kazunari, Sakyo and Tasuku would have an appearance counted to their comedy totals, since using them with Guy would give you the best possible Comedy link skill boost recommended by Yaycupcake as shown in Figure 2.
Methodology
Actually really similar to the first meta list, but I’ll repeat it here for those of you who haven’t checked out the first list.
- Filter out non-event boost cards from the sheet that counts all of A3’s gacha cards.
- Make a table version of Yaycupcake’s recommended skills so I can just CTRL-F for the next step.
- For every character/attribute combination, search the table in step 2 for the number of times the character is useful in another character’s optimal team. For example, Drama Azuma is useful in the optimal Drama teams for every other character (except himself), so to get the number of times Azuma’s useful for a drama team, I just need to sum up all of the Drama gacha cards except for Azuma’s. Conversely, Drama Tenma and Yuki aren’t needed for any of the optimal Drama builds, so their number of appearances would be zero each. (Of course, you might end up using Drama Tenma/Yuki for team optimisation based on your inventory cards, but I’m only considering the best link skill boosts here!)
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for Part 2, because I’m an idiot who forgot about accounting for evolving link skills in the first meta list.
- Crunch the numbers by summing everything up and calculating averages, considering the maximum number of appearances per attribute (Is 100+ appearances really that impressive? Yep.) and giving the usual conditional formatting treatment so I can easily see if there are any other points of interest.
- Compare V2.0 with V1.0, as well as with u/Nocsos’ Meta Tier List which focuses more on Link Skill strength rather than accounting for gacha supports (it’s a super good list and I continue to swear by it).
- Make everything look less scary with pretty charts and tier lists.
- Write this story and announce that my lonely braincell is well and truly fried.
Results and Analysis
For all of the meta tier lists: Meta rank decreases from left to right within a tier, so Kazunari is overall the most meta while Kumon is the least meta (sorry, small mistake in the last tier of Figure 1 which swapped Guy and Kumon). Since the number of appearances vary across attributes, I decided that instead of using absolute numbers as a fixed tier-cutoff, a character will be demoted a tier if the chart reflects a relatively large drop in the number of appearances for a particular attribute/all the attributes. Characters only end up in the “Actually Useless” tier if and only if their total number of appearances for that particular attribute is equal to zero. Do note that any card of a particular character, regardless of attribute, can be used in your event teams (unless they’re the team leader for the first 3 team slots), but for best results matching attributes should give you higher stats since that’s what the card specialises in.
What changed between Minion’s Meta List V1.0 and V2.0?
While both lists take gacha supports and optimal team builds into account, V2.0 acknowledges the fact that the optimal teams drastically changed with the introduction of the rookies and Part 2 Link Skills from One Day Princess onwards. V2.0 also takes when the skills were introduced into account by not counting a character until the event which introduces new skills for them shows up. Looking at the Meta List Comparison between Parts 1 and 2 (Figure 4.1), we can see gaps where the Rookies are since they did not appear in Part 1, and we can see that some of the characters had dramatically different meta ranks after Part 2 kicked in (Tenma and Itaru were very much nerfed while Azuma shot up in rank and Kazunari managed to keep his crown). Part of the reason why the ranking changed so dramatically was due to the decrease in usefulness of the full-troupe skills. In Part 1, the 5-people Summer Troupe skill could be stacked up to a whopping 84% boost, but once the full-troupe skills changed to require 6 people including the rookies, stacking opportunities plummeted, and now the full-troupe skills can only give a 60% boost. The rookies being introduced a year later would also decrease their number of appearances compared to the rest of the cast, which could help to explain their worse meta rank on average. While most of the Part 1 skills still can be used (in fact some of them got boosted when Part 2 arrived), unfortunately the old full-troupe skills are no longer valid, which would explain the drastic change in rank for some characters (Itaru used to be really helpful for Action and Drama, but not anymore).
Overall Meta Tier Lists
Interestingly enough, the “God-tier” characters in terms of meta are the same for both the overall meta tier list (Figure 4.2) as well as Drama’s meta tier list (Figure 4.7). Other than their stellar Drama link skills, these five characters (Mahjong Club + Adult Onigiri Club) also have relatively strong Comedy skills, which boost their overall rank. The “Really Good” tier gives you some of the best characters for Comedy and Action, which make use of the St. Flora and Leaders skills respectively. The next two tiers show characters which are capable of building strong teams, although these strong teams tend to be considered as B-teams compared to the most-frequently used A-team. To illustrate, Drama’s Mahjong Club + Adult Onigiri Club build reign supreme for most characters’ optimal teams, even though the Alone in the World skill can stack with others to hit that coveted 72% skill boost too. Another example would be comparing the St.Flora + Artistes/Troublemakers build to the Postcard Sweepstakes Society build for Comedy and Leaders + Ouka High build with the Soccer Club for Action. Finally, the “Not Great” tier is really just that: Characters who simply don’t appear very often in the most powerful builds. When they do appear, it’s usually only for rare optimisations. (Oh, the irony at Itaru the Hardcore Gamer being at the last meta tier…)
The “A-team, B-team” theory would explain why the Soccer Club, Chikage (Alone in the World) and Guy (Postcard Sweepstakes Society) have rather low meta tiers even though they are able to form relatively strong teams since these teams aren’t used that frequently. Additionally, characters in the lower tiers tend to have strong skills in only one attribute, and relatively weaker skills in the other attributes. A notable exception to this is Azami, who can form strong teams for both Comedy and Action, and this would be a good time to point out that the rookies are in the bottom two tiers. Lastly, the Overall Meta Rank Chart (second picture) also shows which attribute a character is biased towards. For example, Muku is very clearly biased towards Comedy, while Kazunari is very strong in both Comedy and Drama but very weak in Action.
Attribute-specific Meta Tier Lists
The attribute-specific lists (Figures 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7) would reflect actual gameplay more closely, although the overall list serves as a quick way to decide which character you should gun for next to strengthen your inventory. The individual lists address the overall list’s issue with splitting up certain strong teams (Tenma is a tier lower than the rest of the leaders, but they won’t be much use without him). Looking at the lists would reveal some of the most useful team builds for each attribute, and how balanced the tier list is would show if the attribute has a bias towards certain builds.
For example, Drama places 13 out of 24 characters in the weaker tiers (bottom 3 tiers), indicating that the majority of optimal teams for Drama heavily rely on a relatively small number of characters, and on the Mahjong Club + Adult Onigiri Club build in particular. This is also reflected in the chart’s shape (Figure 4.8), which shows very sharp drops in the number of appearances at the border of each tier, as well as a long tail of small bars which reflect how many of the characters are relatively weaker in Drama compared to the strongest characters. Comedy follows a similar pattern, albeit less dramatic since the split between stronger and weaker tiers isn’t as obvious (Figure 4.9). However, the sharp gradient amongst the most meta characters in Comedy’s chart does show how Comedy isn’t quite as reliant on a singular build but rather a combination of builds, with St. Flora as the anchor for many of the builds. Muku’s ability to stack with the Shoujo Manga Club and occasionally Summer Troupe makes him the undisputed champion of Comedy.
Action’s chart (Figure 4.10) is perhaps the most interesting, as the chart doesn’t have a distinctive tail and the drop between tiers is the least distinguishable amongst the attributes. This reflects how Action has the most flexibility in team-building, with the ability to swap between 2-people and 3-people link skills to complement the dominant link skill (usually Leaders or the Soccer Club). As a result, there are no truly useless characters for Action builds (although Homare made a really close call there), and you would need quite a lot of Action cards to own a truly versatile arsenal of Action builds. Luckily, Action cards happen to be some of the most common gacha cards in the permanent pool, so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue over time. Gacha distribution also becomes quite an interesting factor to consider especially in the case of Action Sakuya. Comparing his 102 appearances to the rest of the troupe leaders (Tenma’s stackable skills in particular give him 148 appearances and the Action meta crown) struck me as very strange, since Sakuya is very much needed to form the most commonly used Action build. After factoring in the number of appearances due to non-Leader skills, I felt that Sakuya was still missing a few appearances until I checked the table which accounted for the total number of gacha cards. However, Action Sakuya doesn’t have a particular huge number of gacha cards, so I can’t account for the lower number of teambuilding appearances with a higher number of gacha appearances. This probably means that Sakuya’s action skills are much more limited compared to the other leaders, and his appearances are roughly equal to the number of times the Leaders skill might come in handy. Do note that the number of appearances sum up all possibilities, which explains the high numbers compared to the total number of events in A3 so far.
Something odd that I observed in Figures 4.11 and 4.12: If a character has a high meta rank for Action, it is actually quite likely that they would be weak in meta for the other attributes. Perhaps this is Liber’s way of balancing out the meta ranking, so that we would have no choice but to collect everyone in the end?
Quality Control: Comparing V2.0 with V1.0 and u/Nocsos’ Meta List
Clarification: The yellow line you see in Figure 4.13 is my processed version of u/Nocsos’ list, which attempted to merge all 3 lists into an overall meta list. (I suppose that was my actual first attempt at playing with A3’s meta…) Unfortunately, my processing was frankly a bit messy even though it seemed to follow what Nocsos’ lists suggested. To make matters worse, the scales which our lists operate at are very different (24 vs 10 places). Attempts to adapt 10 places to 24 didn’t work out so well, so I just left the data as it was for the comparison. Comparing relative positions, we can see that Nocsos and I agree on the extreme ends of the ranking, at least. However, my list’s accounting for usage frequency mean that characters which formed strong but less commonly-used link skills would see a worse ranking compared to Nocsos’ ranking (Azami), while characters who were strong in only 1 attribute but frequently used (Homare) would see their ranking improve in my list. Comparing V1.0 and V2.0 of my list also produced some interesting results, such as Azami getting nerfed (sorry, Azami), and Sakuya receiving a very substantial boost in rankings to account for his usefulness in Action and his consistent performance even after Part 2 kicked in. An indicator of V1.0’s accuracy can be seen in how the top 5 and last place remain completely unchanged between V1.0 and V2.0, while many of the rank changes happened within a decently small margin of +/- 2 places.
Conclusion
Hurray, Minion’s almost done with this lecture! In conclusion, new players should seriously consider setting their eyes on a SSR Kazunari card if they wish to effectively use the strongest link skills. For each attribute, Comedy Muku, Action Tenma and Drama Azuma are the respective anchors for the strongest skills. We’ve also seen that the shift between Part 1 and 2 has changed the meta rank by quite a bit, and this is definitely something to take note in future teambuilding! For now, the Mahjong Club + Adult Onigiri Club members reign supreme, with Kazunari showing no signs of letting go of his meta crown! Perhaps being outgoing gives more opportunities for link skills? That’s something to look at another day… other sources of future work would include incorporating Part 3 skills as Yaycupcake hasn’t updated their recommendations yet. Further analysis on what makes the meta tick, as well as a deeper dive into the A3 Discord’s Teambuilding Documents would definitely be interesting too!
References
EN Version Link Skills. (2021, April 14). A3! Wiki, . Retrieved 19:09, July 8, 2021 from https://yaycupcake.com/a3/index.php?title=EN_Version_Link_Skills&oldid=50860.
Link Skills. (2021, April 14). A3! Wiki, . Retrieved 19:10, July 8, 2021 from https://yaycupcake.com/a3/index.php?title=Link_Skills&oldid=50861.
Nocsos. (2021). A3! Meta Tier List v2.0. Retrieved 8 July 2021, from https://www.reddit.com/r/A3ActorsInTraining/comments/n8dgd0/a3_meta_tier_list_v20/
Scouting Events. (2021, July 6). A3! Wiki, . Retrieved 19:10, July 8, 2021 from https://yaycupcake.com/a3/index.php?title=Scouting_Events&oldid=53646.
Team Building. (2020, July 24). A3! Wiki, . Retrieved 19:09, July 8, 2021 from https://yaycupcake.com/a3/index.php?title=Team_Building&oldid=43721.
Twilight, O. (2021). A3! Information. Retrieved 8 July 2021, from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10u7yHRtTEzVC8FVRe1_pcAZYaAlmjX8kyJrSR2JP6Vg/view#gid=49098659
Twilight, O. (2021). Minion’s Meta List 1.0. Retrieved 8 July 2021, from https://www.reddit.com/r/A3ActorsInTraining/comments/oae6lb/minions_meta_list_10/
Twilight, O. (2021). Spreadsheet Sankaku-kun tried to count every card in A3… Retrieved 8 July 2021, from https://www.reddit.com/r/A3ActorsInTraining/comments/o2zb1c/spreadsheet_sankakukun_tried_to_count_every_card/
Author’s Note
The entire format of this story was so that I could finally use the hilarious “Cite this Page” function on Yaycupcake… jokes aside, I really do hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this and that it was helpful in your quest to get the cards you want! More resources can be found here and on my Carrd, and I really appreciate any sort of feedback/suggestions about any of the stuff I share here! The next part of the series which analyses past event results can be found here!
As thanks for sticking with me to the end, here’s an early preview for the fifth and seventh parts of my Sankaku! Spreadsheet! Saturdays! series on Instagram, which covers my A3! x Data in an easily digestible and reasonably aesthetically-pleasing manner!
The fifth part explains the Link Skill concept in greater detail, as well as the steps I took to process Nocsos’ list as an initial draft of the Overall Meta List.
This snippet of the seventh part goes through the steps I took to create V1.0 of my Meta Tier List.
With that, this part of the A3! x Data series is finally over, and I’ll see you again for future parts! All the best in building the best teams for your cards!
