As of v1.1 the endgame in Duet Night Abyss is still Theatre, specifically Immortal Repertoire. This post goes through what is Theatre, how important it is, and how to approach it. It's about perspective and planning because if you're not careful, you can end up blindly grinding without a real plan and waste a lot of time.
What is Immersive Theatre
The obvious overview:
- In this game mode, a mix of bonuses and penalties that change from season to season determine which elements (and therefore which characters) are favored.
- Obviously the game mode is meant to give players a reason to grind for power creep and develop multiple characters. Otherwise the game is generally so easy and devoid of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that you don't have to grind at all.
But let's get into what it REALLY means by examining it more closely.
How Important is Theatre
From the time Duet Night Abyss launched, it basically removed a lot of FOMO assuming you can be patient.
The only real FOMO is the featured character skin which is strictly cosmetic, and you pull get it from a gacha banner that lasts about two months (during which they give you opportunities to earn free pulls with a 7-day calendar login that lasts about one month).
Yum-Yum Milk
This is currently the most important part of Theatre as the Ticket Stub store is the only source of this geniemon ascension material. You can only buy one each Theatre Season. Compared to everything else you can get from Theatre and the game in general, this is basically the most limited resource and there is for now literally only one way to get it.
Therefore, it is the most important part of Immersive Theatre.
For new players, this is a way to maximize your materials farming early.
- You get two guaranteed copies of Bro Boxie and they are very rare otherwise. (It's almost like they want you to use it to ease your materials farming...)
- You can use Yum-Yum Milk to help you ascend them to maximum potential. Even an Ardent or Miraculous Bro Boxie is fine because the Shiny one just gives you one extra Trait slot but its abilities (such as the bonus drop rate) are capped at the same power as non-Shiny ones.
- Add a gold Frugal trait and you have the best possible loot drop rate.
After this, Yum-Yum Milk is still very important especially for players who buy the Battle Pass. The special Elf geniemon is only available through the battle pass, so if you want to ascend them you either need to buy the same copy once a month through the battle pass, or you use Yum-Yum Milk. They start with all Trait slots unlocked but some have decent abilities and ascension options are very limited.
Just completing some Featured Repertoire (three Acts, Level 60, Level 70, and Level 80 respectively and not considered endgame) gets you enough tickets to buy Yum-Yum Milk each season as long as you don't use your Ticket Stubs frivolously, especially on items you can farm or craft through regular channels.
Featured Character and Weapon
The newest character is gated behind Featured Repertoire and the Theatre store where you can buy Secret Letters for the featured weapon using the Ticket Stubs you earn. In this debut season for the new character and weapon, you can get them free from Theatre or you can pay for them in the game store.
The Featured Character can be extremely useful (such as Fushu in Season 3) but realistically they are useful only for getting deeper into Immortal Repertoire as the rest of the game is easy enough.
- So the Featured Character and Weapon in Immersive Theatre is really for the possibility of doing more Theatre.
This is not Honkai Star Rail where the new content is so irritating you "need" the newest SSR banner pull or you will have a rough time. Immersive Theatre being what it is means some characters naturally have an easier time but the main rewards are concentrated in the first 12 Acts of Immortal Repertoire.
(Sometimes the Featured Character also has a special skin as the gacha banner but typically that lasts longer than their Theatre Season).
So what Theatre really gets you is just early free access to the newest character and weapon. After the Theatre season ends (it typically lasts 4 weeks), the character and weapon are rotated into Nocturnal Echoes where, if you focus on getting their Secret Letters, you can get approximately one copy of the character or two blueprints of the weapon each week.
(This also means there is no bad time to start Duet Night Abyss -- You missed nothing if you missed the previous Theatre seasons).
Eventually, the character and weapon will be rotated out of Nocturnal Echoes and the Secret Letters put in the regular Covert Commission shop where you can buy them with Secret Letter Clues that can drop from any game mode where enemies drop loot.
So if you can wait a month or more, you don't really have to care about doing a lot of Theatre. Just get your Yum-Yum Milk and you're done.
As of Season 4 (Kezhou) completing just Featured Repertoire Act 1 gets you 20 Secret Letters for the Featured Character. This generally (but not always) will get you one copy of the character. In my opinion they are basically signaling that endgame grind is not necessary by setting the bar so low.
Secret Letters for the Featured Weapon are trickier as players have reported not getting the required Tier II component even after 20 Secret Letters, so they are much more of a gamble for the expense in Ticket Stubs. And even supposing you buy up all 30 Secret Letters and can make three copies / Smelt level 2, the weapon may still be inferior to weapons you have already Smelted to maximum level.
Set Your Goal for Theatre
If you just chase after what influencers promote each season you will probably go crazy and feel overwhelmed by the required grind in gold wedges as you spread your effort out over whichever character they try to get you excited about.
Instead, first set your goal for Theatre. How much do you care, and how far do you want to go?
Play the game. Don't let the game play you.
Goal: Nothing
Maybe you are a newer player and haven't even unlocked the Immersive Theatre mode. That's fine. Even Yum-Yum Milk is not supremely important because the game is generally so easy anyway that you are unlikely to need your Battle Pass Elf geniemon upgraded. And in the worst case you can wait for Bro Boxie to show up in the overland and collect a copy for Ascension.
You are not missing anything by ignoring endgame.
Unlike many gacha games, endgame in Duet Night Abyss won't give you any cash shop currency or free pulls on the banners.
You really are NOT MISSING OUT by not doing Immersive Theatre.
Goal: Yum-Yum Milk
Required: Featured Repertoire Act 2
Highly recommended you set this to be your minimum goal. Assuming you started with zero Ticket Stubs, you need to clear Featured Repertoire Act 2, four stages, for a total of 14 points and 1050 Ticket Stubs (Yum-Yum Milk costs 1000 Ticket Stubs).
I recommend always being stingy with your Ticket Stubs and prioritize buying Yum-Yum Milk. Be careful buying anything you can get some other way, such as Projectiles which you can craft with some grind and don't cost Ticket Stubs which are arguably the hardest currency to get in the game.
Good builds will be useful and I recommend the Pinned Posts in the theory crafting channels of the official Discord for build suggestions. Featured Repertoire, no gold wedges are probably not needed, just have a sensible build. Your Trial Rank is also important as that can give you global boosts to stats. But all of this will come naturally as you play the game, without excessive grind.
Goal: Featured Character
Required: Featured Repertoire Act 1
Possibly Required: Immortal Repertoire Act 2
Maximum Copies: Immortal Repertoire Act 12
This is probably the best target to aim for as the Featured Weapon is typically niche and you can continue to rely on base game weapons that give a large bonus to a single stat and which you can Smelt to maximum rank because their Secret Letters are in the regular Covert Commission shop.
20 Secret Letters should be enough to get a copy of the Featured Character but it's definitely not guaranteed: Sometimes you end up slightly short, sometimes you end up a lot short. To get more than 20 tickets will require you to clear Immortal Repertoire Act 2+ -- which is a pretty big jump from just Featured Repertoire Act 1.
There was a convoluted Twitter post (see below, slide 23) which sounded like they were adding additional tickets to Featured Repertoire Act 1, but in fact they just put all 20 tickets in Featured Repertoire into Act 1 despite complaints that 20 tickets was often not enough to get one character. And to have additional tickets all the way in Immortal Repertoire is really quite useless for players who aren't at endgame (level 80). Hopefully this will be further adjusted into the future to make Featured Repertoire more reliably let players acquire a character.
There are 65 Secret Letters in total for the Featured Character and the last ones are from Immortal Repertoire Act 12. There are no copies to buy in the Theatre Store.
When your Trial Level goes up you get global boosts to all character stats. Combined with a strong build for your team, you can even clear Immortal Stage 12 while completely idle on the main character.
Goal: Featured Weapon
Required: Featured Repertoire Act 3 Trial 4
Possibly Required: Immortal Repertoire
Maximum Copies: Immortal Repertoire Act 36
Special: Use Banked Tickets
The first 10 Secret Letters for the Weapon are 75 Ticket Stubs each, so you need 1000 for Yum-Yum Milk plus 750 for 10 Secret Letters = 1750 Ticket Stubs total.
If you can clear Featured Repertoire Act 3 Trial 4, you will get 1900 Ticket Stubs total.
To get every Secret Letter for the Featured Weapon requires 1000 Ticket Stubs reserved for Yum-Yum Milk + 750 Ticket Stubs for the first ten Secret Letters + 3000 Ticket Stubs for the last twenty Secret Letters = 4750 Ticket Stubs. To do this you will need to clear Act 36 of Immortal Repertoire, and that can be pretty daunting especially if this is your first Theatre Season. Be prepared for some grind although full sets of Amplified Gold Wedges might not yet be necessary. Introns for characters and Smelting for Weapons will also be useful.
The devs probably intended that getting every Secret Letter for the Featured Weapon would be a stretch goal. Previously, after Act 12, players would get only 10 Ticket Stubs per 2 stages cleared (or 50 per 2 Acts cleared) but they increased it to 20 per 2 stages up till around Act 36.
Since every Secret Letter for the Featured Weapon is in the Theatre Store, you can use tickets you have banked from previous seasons.
Goal: Banking Ticket Stubs (or "Don't live paycheck to paycheck")
The only reward for going really deep into Immortal Repertoire is more Ticket Stubs. If you can get deep enough that the enemies are level 180. Depending on whether they adjust the levels again, this around the time the rewards for clearing two stages drops from 20 Ticket Stubs to just 10. At that point, the bosses continue to rotate but the difficulty no longer increases. From there you can just repeat Immortal Repertoire until you are burnt out.
Other than Secret Letters and Yum-Yum Milk, all the Memento Store items can be gotten elsewhere in the game at any time and certainly without the comparatively huge grind investment in characters. It's probable that the devs didn't expect anyone to get much further than Act 12, and Act 36 was meant to be a stretch goal (especially for a miserable reward, basically the possibility of a third copy of the Featured Weapon if luck allows).
The tiny amount of reward (10 Ticket Stubs) in deep Acts of Theatre reveals the design intent: You can do more, and there's a bit more for you to buy in the store, but you shouldn't really be wasting your time.
The amount of Ticket Stubs you get does feel very small for your effort, BUT actually it is insanely good. You want to bank "some" when you can. How much "some" is depends on how confident you feel about future Seasons of Immersive Theatre and how you want to play Duet Night Abyss:
- If you can build one really good team that can clear level 180 enemies and bosses, then whenever their element rotates into Theatre, you can farm as many tickets as you can tolerate (because it does get really boring really fast).
- You focus all your resources on one team instead of spreading it out to many teams.
- So far we have seen two elements favored in each Season: One element that repeats and one element that rotates. Theoretically you have multiple seasons back-to-back to work on a team revolving around one element instead of flip-flopping to the element-of-the-month.
- An extremely strong team can clear even some early Acts of Immortal Theatre when their element is not featured (example).
- With a reserve of a few thousand tickets, you can just buy the most critical items in the Theatre Store in the following seasons even if you don't have a team ready for any element in a particular Season.
Ultimately however, the goal of banking tickets is to "Stop" Playing Theatre.
Goal: "Stop" Playing Theatre
This sounds really strange, but once you have some Ticket Stubs banked, you need to decide when to stop grinding.
Duet Night Abyss game modes let you grind without being limited by "energy" systems of other gacha games. But with that comes a type of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out):
- The time-limited Season structure can make it feel like "now or never".
- Especially once you can advance very deep into Theatre, it feels like you're "leaving money on the table" if you don't keep going.
- If you don't grind today, you might regret in the future not making that extra effort now.
- This is a much stronger FOMO feeling in Immersive Theatre because at any time they could spike up the difficulty or tailor it to a specific character (already so few characters are really viable). And then you'd end up scrambling to make a decent team.
But there are drawbacks to thinking this way and spending all your time grinding Immortal Repertoire:
- That potential future of "Theatre got suddenly a lot harder" might never come.
- Time spent in Theatre is time not spent elsewhere on other grinds you need to do.
- Deep stages of Theatre give ONLY Ticket Stubs. No Secret Letters from enemies defeated for example, which you do get from doing other Commissions.
- Commissions are where you actually prepare to do well in Theatre: Demon Wedges and Secret Letters to get Blueprints, Character Introns, and Weapon Smelts. Too might time in Theatre actually means you're standing still instead of making steady progress toward getting stronger.
- There's only so much you can buy, and except for Yum-Yum Milk and Secret Letters for the Featured Weapon, you are probably better off spending your time elsewhere to get the other items.
Play the game. Don't let the game play you.
Slides
1-15: Immersive Theatre Season 3 (Fushu) recap and the Psyche team I used. I voluntarily stopped at Act 100 in part because it had already become extremely boring starting way back at Act 40, and by that time I had already accumulated a large bank of Ticket Stubs across Season 1-3.
16-22: Immersive Theatre Season 4 (Kezhou) showing the new reward structure.
23: Excerpt from the convoluted Twitter post which sounded like they were going to give a lot more tickets for Featured Repertoire to ensure players could get the Featured Character without having to do Immortal Repertoire ("ALL other rewards remain unchanged") but a later passage clarifies their intention to do basically nothing particularly useful.
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