Quote Originally Posted by Unregistered View Post
I'm glad someone brought this up. Rainbow is a term players throw around a lot but there seem to be several meanings to it. And many will claim monogrids are "superior" to rainbow because they don't understand the design or the goals of a rainbow grid.

The first point of this article is to illustrate what a "good" rainbow grid looks like. Note the kamihime are all expected to be of the same element.

This article assumes your endgame goal is to have all 6 grids filled with maxed out SSR weapons. If you plan to only build one grid and ignore all other elements, stop reading this thread. 6 grids have several advantages over 1. You get advantage in every battle. Many event missions also require a specific element so building all 6 allows you to complete those missions.

SSR take a while to acquire so the 2 choices are to fill the remaining slots with SR weapons or SSR from another element. The former grants extra weapon skill buffs but less raw stats and requires you to spend resources. The latter gives higher stats and is completely free since the placeholder weapons are just weapons you use in another grid.
The way you describe the philosophy/approach strikes me as boiling down to:
Work on all the SSRs you can. Regardless of monogrid or rainbow, the grid for X element team will have corresponding X element SSR weapons. That is the base level of investment present in either approach.
The difference between rainbow and a monogrid for a given element is replacing the off-element SSR with an on element SR with assault.

So, in more generic form, it basically looks like this:
For an investment cost of 34,953 experience points and the equivalent of 190 R's (to max out a new SR),
you lose the difference in atk between the incoming new SR and the outgoing off-element SSR (usually in the 300-400 range?), while gaining 13% to assault.
The question is whether or not you the player finds that additional investment to be worth it, as (eventually) an SR gets replaced with an on-element SSR.

Of course, there's always different levels of investments for these temp weapons. Exp-wise, for an SR, it's 4,123 exp to get to lv 40, 10,168 exp to get to lv 55, and 20,778 exp to get to lv 70.
6 R's will get an SR to skill lv 4 (+5% assault), or 31 R's for skill lv 8 (+7% assault), or 91 R's for skill lv 14 (+10%) assault.

So the question evolves into figuring how much additional investment is needed before you start making gains, and then the followup to that would be to evaluate the investment:gain ratio and decide on what you're happy with.