What a featured unit actually costs, in nine games
The advertised rate tells you almost nothing about what you will spend. Here is the same question — how many pulls to land the unit on the banner — answered identically for every game we track.
Every gacha game publishes a rate. Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle advertises a 15% chance at an SSR; Honkai: Star Rail advertises 0.6% for a 5★. Read those two numbers side by side and Dokkan looks twenty-five 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 is the most expensive game we track, and Reverse: 1999, whose rate is a tenth of Dokkan's, is the cheapest.
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 nine 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 for half 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.
| Game | Rate | Typical | Median | Unlucky (90%) | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reverse: 1999 | 1.5% | 65 | 70 | 123 | 140 |
| Arknights | 2% | 69 | 57 | 142 | 654 |
| Wuthering Waves | 0.8% | 83 | 75 | 145 | 158 |
| Honkai: Star Rail | 0.6% | 94 | 81 | 156 | 171 |
| Zenless Zone Zero | 0.6% | 94 | 81 | 156 | 171 |
| Limbus Company | 2.9% | 106 | 96 | 200 | 200 |
| Blue Archive | 3% | 108 | 99 | 200 | 200 |
| Fate/Grand Order | 1% | 116 | 87 | 287 | 330 |
| Dokkan Battle | 15% | 117 | 81 | 268 | — |
“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. “Ceiling” is the hard guarantee, where one exists.
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 15% rate and no pity at all — every summon is independent, forever. That single difference reverses the ranking.
With no pity, the distribution has no right-hand wall. Dokkan's median is a comfortable 81 pulls, better than Blue Archive's 99 — but one player in ten needs 268 or more, and there is no number at which the game gives in. Reverse: 1999's unluckiest tenth stops at 123, because at 70 the game simply hands it over.
2. The 50/50 doubles the price of losing
Wuthering Waves, Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero all run the same shape: a soft-pity ramp, a hard pity, and a coin flip on whether the guaranteed unit is the one you wanted. Lose the flip and you start the whole climb again, with the consolation that the next top-rarity is guaranteed to be the featured one.
That is why Star Rail's hard pity is 90 but its ceiling in the table above is 171. Ninety is the guarantee for a 5★. One hundred and seventy-one 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 its unlucky-tenth figure (142) is respectable while its true worst case (654) is the second-worst on this list.
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 the two games where you can decide in advance exactly what the unit costs. Two hundred pulls, no ambiguity, no coin flip. Fate/Grand Order does the same at 330.
There is a real argument that this is the better design even at a higher price, because it is the only structure where a player can budget. A game with a 90th percentile of 268 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.
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.
One caveat: these are the costs of the character banner only. Weapon, cone and equipment banners run different rates and different pity, and in several of these games they are considerably worse. And none of this touches whether the unit is worth pulling — that is a judgment, and this page is arithmetic.