Most players are burning their Gluttony on the wrong upgrades. You pull a meta DPS Arcanist, slap a 6-star Psychube on them, and immediately push it to Amplification Level 5. It feels like the right move. The game conditions you to max out everything. It is not the right move.
Amplifying the wrong Psychube on the wrong Arcanist tanks your resource efficiency and yields negligible DPS gains. In Reverse: 1999, damage calculations heavily penalize players who blindly stack a single stat. If you want to clear Mane's Bulletin with triple S-ranks or full-star Artificial Somnambulism Limbo, you have to stop treating all percentages equally. We need to look at the raw math behind diminishing returns.
The Core Breakdown: Additive Multipliers and the Saturation Problem
To understand why a +20% Incantation Might buff doesn't actually increase your damage by 20%, you must understand how the game's engine calculates a hit.
In Reverse: 1999, damage multipliers that belong to the same category are additive with each other before they multiply your base damage. The three most common offensive statsÔÇöDamage Bonus, Incantation Might, and Ultimate MightÔÇöall dump into the exact same mathematical bucket.
Here is the simplified algebraic model for how these modifiers interact:
$$Final\ Multiplier = 1 + \sum (Damage\ Bonus) + \sum (Contextual\ Might)$$
Because these stats are additive, every new source of Damage Bonus or Might provides a mathematically smaller relative increase to your total DPS. This is the definition of diminishing returns.
We calculate the actual damage increase of a new Psychube or Amplification using this formula:
$$Relative\ DPS\ Gain = \frac{1 + Current\ Bonus + New\ Bonus}{1 + Current\ Bonus} - 1$$
A Mathematical Proof: 0% vs. 60% Base Bonus
Imagine your Arcanist has a base hit of 10,000 damage.
Scenario A: Zero Existing Modifiers
If your character has 0% innate Damage Bonus, and you equip a Psychube that gives +20% Incantation Might, your multiplier goes from 1.0 to 1.2.
Final Damage: 12,000.
Real DPS Increase: 20%.
Scenario B: High Existing Modifiers
Now take an Arcanist like Centurion. At Insight III, her passive gives her up to +60% Damage Bonus just for holding Moxie. If you apply that exact same +20% Incantation Might Psychube to Centurion, the math shifts aggressively against you.
Your existing multiplier is 1.6.
Your new multiplier is 1.8.
Final Damage: 18,000 (up from 16,000).
Real DPS Increase: $1.8 / 1.6 = 1.125$.
You invested resources for a 20% buff, but you only gained a 12.5% actual increase in damage. You lost nearly half the value of the stat because the multiplier bracket was already saturated.
Case Studies: When to Amp and When to Stop
Let's apply this to specific meta setups so you can see where players waste their resources.
1. Melania and "Brave New World"
Brave New World grants an innate +18% Ultimate Might at Level 60. Its Amplification effect boosts the Incantation Might of the next skill cast after an Ultimate by +20% (Amp 1) scaling to +40% (Amp 5).
Melania is built entirely around stacking her "Thief Master" passive, which gives her massive amounts of Ultimate Might. Because her kit already floods the Ultimate multiplier bucket, the base stat of Brave New World is highly diminished on her. However, because the Psychube's passive specifically buffs Incantation damage (a different attack type entirely), pushing this Psychube to Amp 5 provides an explosive, uncontested multiplier to her follow-up kick. This makes Brave New World an excellent Amp 5 candidate for her.
2. Jiu Niangzi and "Outside the City"
Jiu Niangzi is an absolute powerhouse, but her kit provides massive innate Damage Bonus and Critical Damage. If you equip her with Outside the City, you are dumping more stats into buckets that are already overflowing.
If you are running Jiu, you need to look at her Resonance board. Instead of stacking more ATK or DMG Bonus, you must balance the scales by investing in Penetration Rate. Penetration directly reduces the enemy's effective defense before the damage multiplier is even applied:
$$Effective\ DEF = Base\ DEF \times (1 - Penetration\ Rate)$$
Because Penetration operates in a completely separate multiplier bracket, it never suffers from the diminishing returns of her innate Damage Bonus.
Practical Application: Limbo and Mane's Bulletin
Understanding saturation changes how you approach endgame content.
In Artificial Somnambulism Limbo, enemy DEF values are relatively standard. You can usually brute-force your way through Stages 5 and 6 by heavily stacking raw ATK and Damage Bonus. The diminishing returns exist, but the enemy stat pools aren't deep enough to punish you for it.
Mane's Bulletin is a different beast entirely. Bosses in the Bulletin stack infinite scaling buffs, including massive defense and damage reduction modifiers as the fight goes on.
If you rely solely on high Incantation Might (like an Amp 5 Hopscotch), your damage will fall off a cliff around the S-rank threshold. The boss's damage reduction will negate your saturated modifiers.
To push into SS and SSS ranks, you must diversify your multiplier buckets. You need a source of Damage Taken Up (from a support like Bkornblume or Shamane), a source of Resist Reduction, and Defense Penetration.
If your DPS has high base ATK but low Penetration, their damage will hit a brick wall. Stop amplifying Psychubes that just give more raw "Might" and start tailoring your Resonance and Support Arcanists to attack the boss's mathematical baseline.
The Free-to-Play Perspective: Gluttony Economy
If you are a whale, you can ignore resource scarcity and Amp 5 everything. If you are Free-to-Play (F2P) or a low spender, Gluttony is your strictest bottleneck. You get roughly one per patch from the shop, plus a trickle from major events. You cannot afford to amplify a Psychube for a 4% real DPS gain.
Here is the objective priority list for F2P resource management based on mathematical efficiency:
Top Priority (Push to Amp 5):
Luxurious Leisure: The stacking Damage Dealt buff operates universally across all damage types. It is functionally mandatory to Amp 5 for Arcanists who spam Ultimates (like Shamane).
Blasphemer of Night: Grants a massive +24% Damage Dealt at Amp 5. Because it triggers on target status rather than action type, it is highly efficient on dedicated Poison or team-debuff compositions (Jessica).
Stop at Amp 1 (Do Not Upgrade):
Beyond Wonderland / That Inquisitive Dear: Healer Psychubes scale terribly with Amplification. Tooth Fairy and Medicine Pocket perform flawlessly at Amp 1. The minor increase in Healing Done or Crit Rate does not justify the 4 Gluttony cost.
His Bounden Duty: The HP recovery on kill is a neat gimmick for early story mode, but absolutely useless in boss fights where there are no mobs to kill. Never waste Gluttony here.
Final Verdict
The math doesn't lie. Stop letting the UI trick you into thinking a 20% buff is a 20% increase. Check your Arcanist's innate Insight passives. Check their Resonance board. Find out which multiplier bucket is empty, and use your Psychube to fill it. Anything else is just throwing stats into the void.
If you want to see exactly which Psychubes we recommend for every specific Arcanist to avoid the saturation trap, check out the updated tier lists and loadouts on the RewardPact homepage. Build smarter, not harder.