What a featured unit actually costs, in every game we track

Every gacha game publishes a rate. Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle advertises 10% at an SSR on its featured banner; Honkai: Star Rail advertises 0.6% for a 5★. Read those two numbers side by side and Dokkan looks many times more generous.

It is not. On the question players actually care about — how many pulls until I have the unit on the banner — Dokkan needs about 200 and Star Rail about 90.

The advertised rate is the chance on one pull. What you spend is decided by pity: whether the game promises you anything for failing, and how quickly that promise arrives.

The same question, asked 31 ways

The table below asks one question of every game: starting from zero, with no carried-over pity, how many pulls until you have the banner’s featured unit? Not “a unit of the top rarity” — the specific one you are pulling for, which in many of these games means surviving a 50/50 as well.

Every figure comes from that game’s own published rates and pity rules, run through the same model that powers each game’s Pull Planner on this site. The table is regenerated from that model on every build, so it is current as of September 27, 2026.

“Typical” is the mean number of pulls. “Median” is the point where half of players are done. “Unlucky” is the 90th percentile — one player in ten spends at least this much. “Guaranteed by” is the pull at which the game owes you the specific unit, where it ever does. Several games run more than one pool; each row measures the one named on that game’s own Pull Planner, and where that choice changes the answer the game’s page says so.

Why the advertised rate misleads

Three things sit between the published rate and your wallet, and none of them appear on the banner.

1. Pity converts bad luck into a bounded cost

Reverse: 1999 has a 1.5% rate and a hard guarantee at 70 pulls. Dokkan has a 10% rate and no pity at all — every summon is independent, forever. That single difference reverses the ranking: Reverse: 1999 lands at 64 typical pulls and Dokkan at 200.

With no pity the distribution has no right-hand wall. Dokkan’s median is 139 pulls, but one player in ten needs 460 or more, and there is no number at which the game gives in. Reverse: 1999’s unluckiest tenth stops at 120. Rise of Kingdoms is the same design taken to its limit: a per-unit chance so small that the average chase runs to 2,488 pulls and the unlucky tenth past 5,727.

The median is the wrong statistic to plan with. By median, Dokkan (139) is not far from Blue Archive (99). By 90th percentile it is 460 against 200 — and Blue Archive’s number cannot grow, because its spark ends the chase there. When a game has no ceiling the tail is where the money goes, and the tail is exactly what a median hides. The unlucky tail works through that gap for every game here.

2. The 50/50 doubles the price of losing

Mecharashi, Path to Nowhere, Reverse: 1999, Punishing: Gray Raven, Wuthering Waves, Persona5: The Phantom X, Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact, Duet Night Abyss and Zenless Zone Zero all run a coin flip: when pity forces a top-rarity unit, it is only a 50/50 (55/45 in Genshin Impact) whether it is the featured one. Lose the flip and you start the climb again, with the consolation that the next top-rarity is guaranteed to be featured.

That is why Star Rail’s hard pity is 90 but its guarantee in the table above is 180. The first number is the guarantee for a 5★. The second is the guarantee for the 5★.

3. “Rate-up” is not the same promise as a 50/50

Arknights is the interesting case, and the one most often misread. It has soft pity from pull 51 and a hard pity at 99, which sounds strict — but there is no guarantee that the 6★ you get is the featured one. Roughly half of banner 6★ pulls are the rate-up unit; the rest are anything else in the pool. Worse, pity resets on any 6★, not just the one you wanted.

So the honest Arknights answer is not “35 pulls to a 6★” — a figure you will see quoted often. It is a chain of independent attempts, each roughly 35 pulls, each a coin flip. That is why its typical cost lands at 69 and why, despite having pity, its Guaranteed by cell reads no pull guarantee — scoped to the standard banner with one rate-up 6★, which is what that row measures. CookieRun: Kingdom carries the same asterisk for the same reason: its 100-pull pity promises the rarity, not the cookie — the one you are chasing is only a share of the Epics it hands you.

The spark games are the honest ones

Blue Archive and Limbus Company look expensive in the typical column, and they are — but they are also games where you can decide in advance exactly what the unit costs: 200 pulls and 200 pulls respectively, no ambiguity, no coin flip. thirteen of the 31 games here make that promise — Star Savior, Mobile Suit Gundam U.C. ENGAGE, Tower of Fantasy, Epic Seven, Azur Lane, hololive Dreams, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Limbus Company, Blue Archive, CookieRun: Crumble, Fate/Grand Order, DIGIMON UP and Seven Knights Idle Adventure — at ceilings from Tower of Fantasy’s 120 to Fate/Grand Order’s 330.

A spark can also be set so high that it is a formality rather than a promise. Seven Knights Idle Adventure’s sits at 1,000 pulls, which is why its typical cost of 704 lands beside the no-pity games rather than beside the other spark games.

There is a real argument that the spark is the better design even at a higher price, because it is the only structure a player can budget against. A game with a 90th percentile of 460 and no ceiling cannot be budgeted for; it can only be gambled on.

How to use these numbers

• Compare across games using the typical column, not the advertised rate. The rate is a per-pull probability and the games attach entirely different guarantees to it.
• Plan with the 90th percentile, not the median. If you can only afford the median outcome, you have a one-in-two chance of running out.
• Check whether pity carries over. Every figure here starts from zero. If you have accumulated pity on the banner type your real cost is lower — each game’s Pull Planner takes your current count as an input.
• Check whether you have already lost a 50/50. In the hoyo-style games that halves your remaining cost, because the next top-rarity is guaranteed to be featured.
• Remember these are pulls, not money. A pull costs a different amount in every game — see what a pull costs.

Scope and freshness

Each game’s rate, soft-pity start, ramp, hard pity and spark are exact and re-checked every patch. The model is the same one behind each game’s Pull Planner, and this page’s table is generated from it on every build, so a figure here and a figure there cannot disagree. The cross-game view lives on the meta page.

One exception, stated plainly. Honkai: Star Rail is the only game on this table whose rates we cannot verify independently, so we take the publisher’s stated 0.6% base and 1.6% combined rate at face value and fit the ramp to them. Every other row is verified. Treat the Star Rail figures as accurate-if-the-publisher-is-accurate rather than verified, and note that Zenless uses the same underlying pity shape with rates we can verify, which is a useful cross-check.

eight games are held out of this comparison entirely — AFK Arena, Echocalypse, Eternal Evolution, Heaven Burns Red, Idle Heroes, Langrisser, The Battle Cats and Top Heroes — because they cannot yet be asked the identical question. For Epic Seven and Star Savior the rate-up disclosure is not complete enough; Whiteout Survival sells hero shards rather than a chance at the hero, so a per-pull odds figure would misdescribe it. A game sits out until its numbers answer the same question the other rows answer; ranking it on a different question would read as a verdict on the game.