The Current Obsession with Partner Skins

So the “Spring in the Capitol” dress that is currently available during second part of the LNY event kind of got me thinking about this. I’ve found the current trend of spending loads of event points for a minimum return kind of strange.

It was first introduced at an event in December for Zhen Huan, and since I was currently hoarding for a Dom drop and she is one of top 8 partners, l was like “sure, what the heck? 10% boost to each of her attributes should be a nice power boost.” I spent some more of my ingot reserve, got the maximum amount of “brocades” for her outfit and the title, and waited for the chance to activate them.

So I’ll be the first to admit, I can’t do LOP math to save my life. 😅(More on that in another post.) But to keep it brief, I was way off in projecting the power boost I was going to receive upon activating and then upgrading Zhen Huan’s outfit. First thing, I will point out is that it’s two 5% boosts that yields a 10% total increase. For some reason I frequently misinterpret this to mean something else, like it’s a 15% total increase after everything is activated. (Cause that’s usually how off my math is.) Having said that, if the partner your purchasing the skin for does not have high attribute totals to begin with, I’m not sure if it’s worth getting the skin. At least m from a power boost stand point.

Now if there’s one partner skin I should purchase it’s Prince Yi’s, because I would see a very decent power increase from that. So what’s my issue? I don’t like the skin. (I’m actually trying to get Prince Gong’s cause it seems less wasteful as far as my game resources go, and I don’t know, seems like a fine pay out for $7. And he’s my second strongest Prince.) I feel like all the Prince skins look like weird circus costumes. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It’s also why I didn’t get Shi Lian’s or Wei Yingluo’s. Didn’t like them enough to spend the ingots on them.

But what’s stranger yet, at least to me, is regarding the Zhen Huan and more specifically the Wei Yingluo events. If you’re a F2P, you don’t have the partner, so why do you care about the event? Especially if the partner skin is the main selling point, like it was for Yingluo. (I was half convinced they did her event just to see if the partner skin releases were a viable event point spending option going forward.) Which then probably also means, the partner skins really are more of a ploy to get VIPs to spend more money on the game. 🤭

Now if you genuinely like dressing up your partners, and don’t really care about the power bonus, then I praise your non-competitive approach to this game and all the more power to you. At minimum it throws your opponents off in debates and guild wars. I know when I see a dressed up partner my first thought is, “oh no, that partner is crazy strong, they’re gonna take me out.” May not be the case for people who come to challenge me, but you live and learn. Especially, in LOP.