The undeveloped potential of ZZZ's classes

I love RPGs with a strict class system. I've already elaborated on it in my article about Hyacine, and ZZZ is one of these games. There is some overlap between a few classes, but in the long term that's inevitable. It still gives us enough class and element combinations to avoid frequent power creep. Unfortunately, ZZZ developers don't see it that way.

Last week the ZZZ team announced two new characters coming in the next version. Seed will be an electric attacker, and Orphie will be a fire attacker.

Some people, myself included, are a bit confused. Not long ago we got a free character Harumasa, who is an electric attacker. A couple of updates later, we got S-rank Anby, who is also an electric attacker. And now, a few updates after her, there is Seed. The situation with the fire attackers is slightly better, because the interval between those characters was longer, but we still have two fire attackers already, with Evelyn being a quite recent one. At the same time, we haven't had a new ether attacker since Zhu Yuan, and we don't have an ether defender. There's no ice defender either. We have older characters like Rina, Lycaon, and Grace who have been around for a year and could use a direct replacement, so why are developers focusing on recent class and element combinations that are still performing well?

This is where the undeveloped potential comes in. There is no way for me to know for sure, but I have a feeling that the initial goal was to add the third dimension to classes in the form of factions and use bangboos to tie it all together. Many S-rank bangboos require at least two characters to be from the same faction to unlock their full potential. If utilized correctly, such an approach would allow the developers to release an infinite amount of electric attackers (or any other combination) and keep them all relevant.

Even if I'm utterly wrong and it wasn't their goal, I love this idea. If not ZZZ, someone else should do it! The only requirement for it to work is a strong incentive for such team compositions. The current bangboo approach doesn't work because there are plenty of alternatives to faction-specific bangboos and the bonus that they give is not that impressive. You might not even notice a difference if you don't have a bangboo on your team at all.

There are a few things I would like to see in ZZZ to incentivize the utilization of factions. The first one would be to make the bangboos way more capable if they are used in a specific faction or even allow them to be used only in that faction. If Agent Gulliver could shred 50% of the enemy's defense when used in a full HSO team, Soukaku would be the support queen at the moment. Nobody would even think about using anyone else with Miyabi.

The second option would be to add another passive skill to characters when used in a single-faction team. It wouldn't even need to be anything super impressive, just a significant bonus.

The third option would be to adjust the enemies to have resistance to everyone except for characters from a specific faction. Instead of resistance, it can also be another mechanic, but it has to make a difference so that players couldn't just use Miyabi against every boss and get away with it. I like this approach because it wouldn't create a rift between already released characters and bangboos and the new ones.

All of that being said, I don't really mind having multiple, recently released characters compete for the same role. I like having options and not being compelled to pull for a character only to fill a certain role in my teams. The reason I'm concerned is that Hoyoverse has become infamous for the power creep in its games. I truly believe it's not their intention in ZZZ, but the game would benefit from some sort of adjustments in this regard.