If you’ve pulled on Arknights: Endfield’s headhunting banners and want a straight answer on whether it’s worth spending real money, here it is up front. The base rate for a top-rarity 6-star character sits at 0.8% per pull. Odds climb sharply after pull 65 (soft pity), and any 6-star is guaranteed by pull 80 (hard pity). But getting a 6-star isn’t the same as getting the one you actually want. That character sits behind a 50/50 coin flip, backed by a 120-pull guarantee that will cost roughly $240 at current cash-pack rates if you hit the worst case. This piece walks through the published rates, shows the full pity-cost table, and runs the expected-value math step by step so you can decide whether a pull is worth the money before you spend it.
Oroberyl, Origeometry, and What a Single Pull Actually Costs You
Hypergryph, the Shanghai-based studio behind the original Arknights, runs Endfield’s gacha, called Headhunting, on two currencies. Oroberyl is the direct pull currency, earned through gameplay or bought with real money. Origeometry is the premium currency you purchase with cash, and it converts to Oroberyl at a fixed rate of 1 Origeometry to 75 Oroberyl. A single Headhunting pull costs 500 Oroberyl, and a ten-pull costs 5,000 Oroberyl, figures confirmed across multiple gameplay guides and in-game shop breakdowns.
Do the conversion and one pull works out to roughly 6.7 Origeometry. Player-documented shop data puts a $15 Origeometry pack at 50 Origeometry (regular price, no first-time bonus), which equals 3,750 Oroberyl, or exactly 7.5 pulls. That comes out to $2.00 per pull at the best confirmed bulk rate. Smaller packs run less efficiently: a $1 pack (3 Origeometry) and a $5 pack (15 Origeometry) both land closer to $2.22 per pull. Endfield does offer first-time purchase bonuses that roughly double the Origeometry you get on your first buy of each tier, but those are one-time offers and shouldn’t be used to estimate ongoing spend. Every calculation in this piece uses the repeatable, regular-price rate of $2.00 per pull, since that’s the number a returning spender will actually pay.
The Published Base Rate: What 0.8% Really Means Over Time
A 0.8% base rate sounds small because it is. Taken at face value, a flat 0.8% chance would mean the average pull count to hit a 6-star is 1 divided by 0.008, or 125 pulls. Nobody actually experiences that number, because Endfield, like most modern gacha games, doesn’t let the base rate run forever. It caps the pain with a rising-odds mechanic once you go too long without a hit, which is the entire point of a pity system: it exists to stop the mathematically unlucky outcome from wrecking a player’s wallet or patience.
From pull 1 through pull 65, the rate holds flat at 0.8%. Run the math on that stretch alone and a player has roughly a 41% chance of hitting at least one 6-star somewhere in those first 65 pulls, purely from base-rate luck. The other 59% of players are still waiting when soft pity kicks in, and that’s where the real odds shift begins.
Soft Pity Explained: How the Odds Climb After Pull 65
Soft pity in Endfield starts at pull 65. From pull 66 onward, the 6-star rate rises by exactly 5 percentage points with every pull that doesn’t produce one, stacking on top of the 0.8% base. Pull 66 sits at 5.8%, pull 67 at 10.8%, and so on, climbing in a straight line until the rate hits 100% at pull 80. That’s a steep curve by gacha standards. Compare it to a game like Genshin Impact, where soft pity starts around pull 74 and climbs more gradually toward a pull-90 hard cap. Endfield compresses the same idea into a shorter, faster runway.
The practical effect is that most players who don’t get lucky early will get their first 6-star somewhere between pull 66 and pull 76. The table below shows the cumulative probability of landing at least one 6-star by a given pull count, calculated directly from the published per-pull rates.
| Pull number | 6-star rate on this pull | Cumulative chance of 1+ six-star by this pull |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 0.8% | 7.7% |
| 30 | 0.8% | 21.4% |
| 50 | 0.8% | 33.1% |
| 65 | 0.8% | 40.7% |
| 68 | 15.8% | 58.0% |
| 70 | 25.8% | 75.3% |
| 72 | 35.8% | 89.0% |
| 75 | 50.8% | 98.3% |
| 78 | 65.8% | 99.9% |
| 80 | 100% (hard pity) | 100% |
Averaging across every possible outcome (bad luck at the start, good luck, everything in between), the expected number of pulls to land any 6-star character in Endfield works out to 53.9 pulls. That’s the number you’d converge on if you tracked thousands of players and took the mean, and it’s meaningfully lower than the naive 125-pull estimate you’d get by ignoring pity entirely.
Hard Pity at 80: The Guarantee That Isn’t What You Think
Hard pity at pull 80 guarantees a 6-star character. It does not guarantee the specific character featured on the banner you’re pulling on. That distinction trips up a lot of new players, and Polygon’s breakdown of the system flags it as the single most important thing to understand before spending on Endfield’s Headhunting system. The 80-pull hard pity is a floor on rarity, not a floor on identity.
Once you hit that 6-star, whether it lands on pull 12 through pure luck or pull 80 through the guarantee, you’re handed off to a second gate entirely: the 50/50. This is the same two-step structure players of Genshin Impact’s 50/50 pity system will recognize, and it’s worth understanding both gates separately before you calculate what a pull is really worth.
The 50/50: Winning (or Losing) the Featured Character
On Endfield’s Chartered Headhunting banners, every 6-star pull is effectively a coin flip between the rate-up character advertised on that banner and the wider standard pool. Guides and community testing consistently describe it as a roughly 50% chance the 6-star you land is the featured unit, and a 50% chance it’s a random standard-pool character instead. Lose that flip and you walk away with a character you may not have wanted, while the banner’s separate featured-unit tracker keeps counting.
This is functionally the same trade already familiar from soft pity vs hard pity math in other games: getting a copy of the top rarity is one problem, getting the specific copy you want is a separate, harder problem layered on top of it.
The Real Ceiling: Endfield’s 120-Pull Featured Guarantee
Here’s the number that actually matters if you’re budgeting for a specific character. Endfield backs the 50/50 with a 120-pull guarantee. If you reach 120 total pulls on a Chartered banner without ever landing the featured character, that 120th pull is guaranteed to be the rate-up unit. This guarantee is separate from the 80-pull hard pity for “any” 6-star, and it counts total pulls spent on that banner, not pulls since your last 6-star.
One important wrinkle: the 120-pull guarantee is one-time per banner. Once you claim it, or once you win the 50/50 early, the counter resets. It doesn’t carry a partial balance into the next banner the way the underlying 6-star pity does. If you’re 90 pulls deep chasing a featured character and the banner ends before you hit 120, that progress toward the featured guarantee specifically is gone (more on what does and doesn’t carry over further down).
The Pity-Cost Table: Pulls, Oroberyl, Origeometry and USD to Guarantee the Unit
Here’s the table you actually came for: what it costs, in every currency, to guarantee the featured character outright, no luck involved, using the worst-case 120-pull path and the regular $2.00-per-pull cash rate.
| Guarantee tier | Pulls needed | Oroberyl cost | Origeometry cost | USD cost (regular rate) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Any 6-star (hard pity) | 80 pulls | 40,000 Oroberyl | ~533 Origeometry | ~$160.00 |
| Featured character, average case (expected value) | ~81.4 pulls | ~40,690 Oroberyl | ~542.5 Origeometry | ~$162.76 |
| Featured character, guaranteed worst case (hard pity) | 120 pulls | 60,000 Oroberyl | 800 Origeometry | $240.00 |
Read that middle row carefully, because it’s the one most players misunderstand. The 120-pull figure is the guaranteed ceiling, the absolute worst case a player can hit. The expected value, meaning the average cost across every possible outcome including good luck and bad, comes out lower, at roughly 81 pulls, because a meaningful share of players win the 50/50 well before pull 120. The next section shows exactly how that 81-pull figure gets calculated.
Step-by-Step: Calculating the Expected Value of a Pull
Expected value, or EV, answers a specific question: if you repeated this exact scenario thousands of times, what would the average cost look like? Here’s the calculation broken into steps, using only the published rates above.
- Step 1. Calculate the survival probability at each pull, meaning the chance of still not having a 6-star after n pulls. From pulls 1 to 65, that’s (1 minus 0.008) raised to the power of n. After pull 65, multiply by (1 minus the rising per-pull rate) at each step.
- Step 2. Sum those survival probabilities across all 80 possible pulls. This sum equals the expected number of pulls to the first 6-star. Running that sum against Endfield’s published rates gives 53.9 pulls.
- Step 3. Apply the 50/50. Half the time that 6-star is the featured character, and the process stops. Half the time it isn’t, and the pity counter for “any 6-star” resets to zero while the 120-pull featured tracker keeps running.
- Step 4. Repeat the cycle for players who lose the 50/50, but cap every outcome at 120 total pulls, since the featured guarantee fires there regardless of where the underlying pity counter sits.
- Step 5. Weight every outcome by its probability and sum the results. That calculation, run across all 120 possible pull counts, produces an expected value of 81.4 pulls to land the featured character.
- Step 6. Convert to money. 81.4 pulls times 500 Oroberyl equals roughly 40,690 Oroberyl. Divide by 75 to get Origeometry (about 542.5), then multiply by the $2.00 regular cash rate. The result: roughly $162.76 in expected spend to land the featured character, against a guaranteed worst case of $240.00.
The gap between those two numbers, $162.76 expected and $240.00 guaranteed, is the actual price of variance. A player with average luck saves roughly $77 compared to a player who has to spend all the way to hard pity. That’s the honest range to budget for, not a single fixed price.
Five Worked Examples, From Lucky to Worst-Case
Example 1: The early-luck pull. A player lands a 6-star on pull 20, which happens roughly 14.8% of the time based on the base-rate math. Cost so far: 20 x 500 Oroberyl = 10,000 Oroberyl, about 133 Origeometry, or roughly $40 at regular rates. That 6-star still has only a 50% chance of being the featured unit, so this player isn’t done yet, just ahead of schedule.
Example 2: The average outcome. A player lands their first 6-star right around pull 54, the expected value for “any” 6-star. Cost: 27,000 Oroberyl, about 360 Origeometry, roughly $108. If this player wins the 50/50 here, total spend on the featured character lands near $108. If not, the process continues toward the 120-pull ceiling.
Example 3: Loses the 50/50 once, then wins. A player hits a 6-star around pull 60, non-featured, resets pity, then hits another 6-star roughly 54 pulls later at pull 114, this time featured. Total spend: 114 x 500 = 57,000 Oroberyl, about 760 Origeometry, roughly $228, just under the 120-pull hard cap of $240.
Example 4: Worst-case, hard pity twice over. A player gets no 6-star until pull 80, it’s non-featured, and they grind to the full 120-pull mark for the guarantee. Total cost: 120 x 500 = 60,000 Oroberyl, 800 Origeometry, exactly $240.00, the guaranteed ceiling from the pity-cost table above.
Example 5: The breakeven decision. A player has already spent 70 pulls on a banner with no featured character yet, and the banner rotates out in two weeks. Continuing to pull toward the 120 guarantee costs, at most, 50 more pulls, 25,000 Oroberyl, about 333 Origeometry, roughly $89 on top of what’s already spent. Waiting for the character’s next rerun banner resets that partial progress toward the featured guarantee entirely, since the 120-pull tracker doesn’t carry between banners. For most players deep into soft pity territory already, finishing the current banner is the cheaper path, not restarting cold on a future one.
Does Pity Carry Over Between Banners?
Partially, and the distinction matters for budgeting. The underlying 6-star pity counter, the one that runs from 0.8% at pull 1 up to guaranteed at pull 80, does carry over between character banners as long as you haven’t hit a 6-star. A player sitting at 70 pulls without a hit on one banner starts the next banner already at pull 71 for that specific counter.
The 120-pull featured-character guarantee behaves differently. It resets the moment you obtain that banner’s rate-up character, and it does not transfer forward into a future banner featuring a different character. Functionally, switching banners never costs progress toward “a” 6-star, but it can cost progress toward “the” 6-star a player was actually chasing, which is worth remembering before jumping between limited banners mid-pity.
Weapon Banner Pity: A Separate, Cheaper System
Endfield also runs weapon banners on their own independent pity track. Any 6-star weapon is guaranteed every 40 pulls, half the pull count of the character hard pity, and the featured 6-star weapon on that banner is guaranteed at 80 pulls, matching the character system’s hard-pity number but applying it directly to the featured item rather than requiring a separate 50/50 layer. That makes weapon banners meaningfully cheaper to guarantee out than character banners, since players aren’t paying for two stacked probability gates.
At 80 pulls and 500 Oroberyl each, guaranteeing a featured weapon costs 40,000 Oroberyl, about 533 Origeometry, or roughly $160 at the regular cash rate, a full $80 cheaper than the guaranteed worst case for a featured character.
Myths vs Facts About Endfield’s Gacha
| Myth | Fact |
|---|---|
| Hitting pull 80 guarantees the character you want | Pull 80 guarantees only a 6-star of some kind. Getting the specific featured character still requires winning a 50/50 or reaching the separate 120-pull guarantee |
| Pity resets every time you switch banners | The underlying 6-star pity counter carries forward if unclaimed. Only the 120-pull featured guarantee resets, and only once claimed or once the banner ends |
| The base rate of 0.8% is what most players actually experience | Soft pity pulls the realistic average down to about 54 pulls for any 6-star, far below the 125-pull figure a flat 0.8% rate would imply |
| Buying the biggest currency pack always gets the best per-pull rate | The confirmed regular-price data shows the $15 tier delivering the best rate seen, about $2.00 per pull, while smaller $1 and $5 packs run closer to $2.22 per pull. First-time bonuses distort this further but only apply once per tier |
| Weapon and character pity work the same way | Weapon banners guarantee any 6-star weapon at 40 pulls and the featured weapon at 80, with no 50/50 layer, making them cheaper to guarantee outright than characters |
Is a Headhunting Pull Actually Worth the Money?
That depends entirely on what you’re chasing. If you just want a 6-star of any kind to fill out your roster, the math favors you: an expected 53.9 pulls, or roughly $108 at regular rates, gets there on average, and the 80-pull hard pity caps the downside at about $160. That’s a fairly bounded, predictable cost by gacha standards.
If you’re chasing one specific featured character, the range widens to $162.76 expected against a hard $240.00 ceiling. Neither number is small, but the ceiling is what makes Endfield’s system calculable rather than open-ended. Compare that to a loot box with no hard guarantee at all, where a player can theoretically spend far past $240 and still walk away empty-handed, the exact scenario regulators like Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency have scrutinized in other gacha titles. Endfield’s 120-pull backstop, whatever its downsides, puts a firm dollar figure on the absolute worst case, and that’s the number worth having in mind before opening the shop.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the base 6-star rate in Arknights: Endfield?
The base rate for a 6-star character on Headhunting banners is 0.8%, holding flat from pull 1 through pull 65 before soft pity begins increasing it.
When does soft pity start in Endfield?
Soft pity begins at pull 65. Starting with pull 66, the 6-star rate rises by 5 percentage points on every subsequent pull until it reaches 100% at pull 80.
What is Endfield’s hard pity for the featured character?
The featured character is guaranteed at 120 total pulls on that Chartered banner, separate from the 80-pull hard pity that only guarantees a random 6-star.
Does Arknights: Endfield have a 50/50 system?
Yes. Each 6-star pulled on a Chartered banner has roughly a 50% chance of being the featured character and a 50% chance of being a standard-pool character instead.
Do unused pity pulls carry over between banners in Endfield?
The general 6-star pity counter carries over if unclaimed. The 120-pull featured-character guarantee does not carry over and resets once claimed or once the banner ends.
How much does it cost to hard-pity the featured character in USD?
At the regular $2.00-per-pull cash rate, the guaranteed worst case for the featured character costs $240.00 across 120 pulls. The average expected cost, accounting for the 50/50, is closer to $162.76.
Can I lose pity progress if I get an off-banner 6-star?
No. Getting a non-featured 6-star resets the underlying “any 6-star” pity counter back to zero, but it does not remove progress on the separate 120-pull featured-character tracker for that banner.
