Here's How Zenless Zone Zero Is Making One of Its Most Popular Characters Much More Powerful

Power creep is a big problem in gacha games.

Here’s the issue the genre faces: fans spend liberally on the characters they like, investing time and money into assembling squads capable of clearing the most difficult content. Then new avatars come along, disrupting the meta and rendering those older heroes redundant.

It’s a big problem, because developers want to keep you spending – but the best way to do so is by making new characters just a little bit more valuable than the older ones. Before you know it, your squad has been rendered rubbish.

But Zenless Zone Zero is experimenting with an extremely interesting solution: it’s going back and rebalancing one of its most popular heroines, Ellen.

The shark-tailed maid was a launch character in the game, and is among the most popular avatars you can currently select. But her combat prowess isn’t up to snuff with the latest characters in the game, meaning there’s less of a reason to use her.

But in v2.0, which is due out on 6th June, an in-game event will enable existing owners of the character to “unlock” her potential. It’s unclear whether this buff will be available to new players when the heroine eventually gets a rerun, but we imagine it will.

With her potential unlocked, Ellen gains access to a couple of new moves which enhance her Ice damage output and give her invulnerability. She’s also able to trigger a 100% increase to CRIT DMG and when paired with the right Agents, she can benefit from 10 second 3% buffs to her Ice DMG.

In other words, the character is about to get really tasty, and if you already have a built version of her in your roster, all you need to do is activate her newfound potential to unlock access to all of the improvements.

We suspect Ellen is about to become one of the best characters in the game again – in fact, pair her with fellow Ice Agent Miyabi, and you’re going to be able to rip through a lot of content, especially when enemies are susceptible to the cold.