If you’ve played a gacha game before, you’ll know most of them have what’s called a “pity” system, which guarantees you some good pulls if you go long enough without getting lucky, and P5X is no different. If you’re pulling on the game’s banners, you’ll be slowly building up a pity count with every pull you make that isn’t a 4 or 5-star character.
We’ll explain exactly how these rates work on the game’s different banner types, so you can go into pulls armed with the knowledge of what to expect.
You’ll find yourself generally getting 4-star characters pretty regularly when pulling, but there is a pity system in place for them. If you go 9 pulls without finding a 4-star, then your 10th pull is a guaranteed 4-star, so if you like to pull 10 at a time, you’ll always get at least one 4-star character.
For 5-star characters, it’s far less generous, as you’ll see the counter on the banner screen showing that you’ll need 80 pulls before you’re guaranteed a 5-star character, which makes them quite costly to find unless you get lucky and pull them sooner. However, the standard banner does have a one-time bonus that’ll let you pick a 5-star character yourself after you’ve made 300 pulls on it.
Weapons are more generous in P5X, but only slightly. In this system, you’re guaranteed a 5-star pull after 70 pulls. When you reach this 70/70 point, you have a 50% chance of the 5-star weapon you pull being the featured limited-time weapon on the banner, with the other two weapons you select each having a 25% chance to appear instead, so you’re guaranteed to get at least something that you’re after, even if it isn’t the one you want most.
Limited-time banners are the most important pity-wise, in P5X, as they’re how you get the most sought-after characters in the game.
Each banner will have one limited-time featured character, which the game refers to as the “Most Wanted” character. For example, in the Phantom Magician banner, Joker is the Most Wanted character.
As indicated by the counter on the banner screen, if you go 79 pulls without a 5-star character, the 80th pull is guaranteed to be a 5-star. However, it’s not guaranteed to be the Most Wanted character. Instead, the first time you reach 80/80 on that counter, your odds of pulling the Most Wanted character are 50%.
If you get unlucky on this 50% pull and don’t get the Most Wanted character, then you’ll need to build up your pity counter for another 80 pulls. The second time the counter reaches 80/80, you are guaranteed to pull the Most Wanted character.
However, pulling any 5-star character in the meantime resets this count, so yes, that means if your 79th pull is a 5-star, you will have to build up the pity counter all over again – gacha games can be brutal sometimes to get as much money as they can out of you, be careful not to get lured into spending too much.
Which brings us to the question of cost. Each pull on a banner costs 150 gems, which means to get the 160 pulls you need to reach the guaranteed Most Wanted pull, it’ll cost you 24,000 gems – and that’s assuming no random 5-star pulls mess up the counter in the meantime. If you were to buy your way to this many gems, it would cost you roughly $400. Some of the platinum bundles in the shop can help you get there via a cheaper route, but only by a little.
It means that if you’re a purely free-to-play player – or even someone who only spends lightly in the game – you need to accept that there is simply no way you’re going to be able to get every character. Instead, you need to pick your battles and decide which characters you care about pulling the most, and save up all your resources for when they become available. You can check out our P5X upcoming banner schedule for more information on what characters are on the horizon, and you can plan out your pulls in advance.
