Short answer: a featured SSR card in Tears of Themis has a flat 1% chance per draw, with no soft-pity ramp and a hard guarantee at draw 100. Run the math on that single number and the expected cost to land the card you want works out to roughly $173, while the worst-case cost of grinding all the way to the guarantee is about $273. This piece walks through exactly where both figures come from, using only the rates HoYoverse has actually published, so you can decide whether a pull is worth the money before you spend it.
What Makes Tears of Themis’s Gacha Different From Genshin-Style Games
Tears of Themis is HoYoverse’s romance-and-detective visual novel, built around collecting cards for its four male leads, Luke, Artem, Vyn, and Marius. It uses the same publisher’s back-end gacha machinery as Genshin Impact, but the actual odds structure on its card banners, called Shadows of Themis, is built differently in one important way: there is no disclosed 50/50 coin flip.
In Genshin’s system, you have a 50% chance the five-star you pull is the featured character, and losing that coin flip guarantees your very next five-star is. Tears of Themis skips that mechanic entirely. The featured card has its own flat probability on every single draw, and the only backstop is a hard pull cap. That distinction matters for anyone trying to budget, because it changes how the expected-value math gets built from the ground up, and it means comparisons to other gacha systems need to account for a genuinely different shape of risk.
The Published Pull Rates: 1% Featured, 1.6% Total SSR, No Soft Pity
HoYoverse publishes a “Probability Explained” section directly inside its official Tears of Themis event notices, the same recurring four-banner format it has run since 2022 and continued through its 2023 reruns. Each Shadow of Themis event groups four banners, one per male lead, and each banner contains one event-limited SSR card plus three of that character’s other SSR cards. The disclosed numbers are consistent across every notice checked: the event-limited SSR card draws at a 1% rate, and the total probability of pulling any SSR from that Shadow (the featured card plus the three others) sits at 1.6%.
There is no officially stated soft-pity ramp. The rate simply stays flat at 1% until the guarantee kicks in. HoYoverse confirms the guarantee itself directly: an event-limited SSR is locked in within 100 draws, and that guarantee is shared across all four banners running in a given Shadow of Themis event, meaning pulls on any of the four count toward the same 100-pull counter. Some banner variants outside the core four-Shadow format use different numbers, including reported pity counts of 80 or 90 on birthday and anniversary banners, and at least one community-reported SSS-tier banner citing a 0.8% featured rate. This piece sticks to the main, most frequently run format and its officially disclosed 1% and 100-pull figures, since that is the version with a direct, repeated, on-the-record HoYoverse disclosure.
The Currency Chain: From Gems to S-Chips to a Single Draw
Tears of Themis runs on a two-step currency chain, and missing a step is the easiest way to misjudge a budget. Real money buys Gems. Gems convert into S-Chips at a fixed 1-to-10 rate, confirmed on the game’s currency and FAQ pages. S-Chips then buy the actual draw item, called a Tear of Themis, at a fixed rate of 180 S-Chips per single draw, or 1,800 S-Chips for a 10-draw.
Collapsing that chain: one draw costs 18 Gems. The official in-app Gem packages, sold through the Apple App Store listing, run as follows: 6 Gems for $0.99, 30 Gems for $4.99, 98 Gems for $14.99, 198 Gems for $29.99, 328 Gems for $49.99, and 648 Gems for $99.99. Dividing price by Gem count gives the real per-Gem rate for each tier, and that’s the number that actually determines what a pull costs you in practice, not the sticker price on the pack.
Worked Probability Table: Your Odds by Draw Number
Because the rate never ramps, the cumulative chance of landing the featured card by a given draw follows a plain geometric curve, right up until the hard guarantee overrides it at draw 100. Here’s what that curve looks like in practice.
| Draw number | Cumulative chance of the featured card | S-Chips spent |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.0% | 180 |
| 10 | 9.6% | 1,800 |
| 25 | 22.2% | 4,500 |
| 50 | 39.5% | 9,000 |
| 75 | 52.9% | 13,500 |
| 90 | 59.5% | 16,200 |
| 99 | 63.0% | 17,820 |
| 100 (hard pity) | 100% (guaranteed) | 18,000 |
Notice the gap at the bottom row. Pure RNG only gets you to about a 63% chance by draw 99. The jump to 100% at draw 100 isn’t luck, it’s the disclosed guarantee doing its job. That gap between what probability alone would predict and what the pity floor actually delivers is the entire reason pity systems exist, and it’s also why a worst-case budget has to assume you might need every one of those 100 draws.
The Pity-Cost Table: What It Costs to Guarantee the Card You Want
Pricing out the guarantee means converting 100 draws into S-Chips, into Gems, and finally into dollars, using the actual package rates above. The best real-money rate among the published tiers belongs to the 198-Gem pack at $29.99, which works out to roughly $0.1515 per Gem. The worst rate, somewhat counterintuitively, belongs to the 30-Gem pack at $4.99, at roughly $0.1663 per Gem, worse even than the smallest $0.99 tier.
| Target | Draws | S-Chips | Gems | Cost at best rate ($29.99 pack) | Cost at worst rate ($4.99 pack) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single pull | 1 | 180 | 18 | $2.73 | $2.99 |
| Expected cost (average luck) | ~63.4 | ~11,412 | ~1,141 | ~$173 | ~$190 |
| Hard pity (worst-case guarantee) | 100 | 18,000 | 1,800 | $273 | $299 |
That $273-to-$299 range is the real ceiling. No matter how unlucky a run gets, the guarantee means you will never pay more than that for one specific featured card, as long as you keep every draw inside the same Shadow of Themis event and don’t let the currency sit idle across a rotation.
Expected Value Calculation: The Full Step-by-Step Math
The expected number of draws needed isn’t simply “1 divided by 1%,” because the 100-draw cap cuts the tail off the distribution early. The correct formula for a geometric process capped at a guarantee is:
E[draws] = (1 - (1 - p)^N) / p
where p = 0.01 (featured card rate per draw)
N = 100 (hard pity cap)
(1 - 0.01)^100 = 0.99^100 ≈ 0.3660
E[draws] = (1 - 0.3660) / 0.01 = 0.6340 / 0.01 ≈ 63.4 drawsSixty-three point four draws is the long-run average across many players and many pulls, not a promise for any single run. From there, the dollar conversion is mechanical: 63.4 draws times 180 S-Chips equals roughly 11,412 S-Chips, which is roughly 1,141 Gems, which lands between $173 at the best package rate and $190 at the worst one. Plugging N = 100 into the same chain instead of the EV formula gives the guaranteed hard-pity price: 18,000 S-Chips, 1,800 Gems, $273 to $299 depending on which pack funded it.
Five Worked Examples With Real Numbers
- The early-luck pull. A player lands the featured card on draw 3, a roughly 3% combined chance. Cost: 3 × 180 = 540 S-Chips = 54 Gems ≈ $8.18 at the best package rate.
- The average-luck pull. Landing right at the 63.4-draw expected value costs roughly 11,412 S-Chips, or about $173 to $190 depending on which Gem pack funded the spend.
- The unlucky, full-pity pull. Nothing hits before draw 100, so the hard guarantee delivers the card at exactly 18,000 S-Chips, pricing out at $273 to $299.
- The half-banked player topping up. Someone sitting on 9,000 S-Chips (half of hard pity) needs another 9,000 to guarantee the card. One $99.99 pack (648 Gems = 6,480 S-Chips) isn’t quite enough; a second partial pack or a $29.99 pack (198 Gems = 1,980 S-Chips) closes the remaining gap with some S-Chips left over.
- The whale stacking packs for a safe guarantee. Buying the $99.99 tier three times gives 1,944 Gems, or 19,440 S-Chips, for $299.97. That comfortably clears the 18,000 S-Chip hard-pity requirement with 1,440 S-Chips (about 144 Gems) left over for the next banner.
Best Value vs Worst Value: Which Gem Package to Buy
Running price-per-Gem across all six published tiers turns up a genuinely counterintuitive result: the second-cheapest pack is the worst deal in the entire lineup.
| Package | Price | Gems | Cost per Gem | Cost per single draw |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Gems | $0.99 | 6 | $0.1650 | $2.97 |
| 30 Gems | $4.99 | 30 | $0.1663 | $2.99 |
| 98 Gems | $14.99 | 98 | $0.1530 | $2.75 |
| 198 Gems | $29.99 | 198 | $0.1515 | $2.73 |
| 328 Gems | $49.99 | 328 | $0.1524 | $2.74 |
| 648 Gems | $99.99 | 648 | $0.1543 | $2.78 |
The 198-Gem, $29.99 tier is the best raw per-Gem rate on the list, narrowly beating the 328-Gem and 648-Gem packs. The 30-Gem, $4.99 pack is the worst, even worse than the smallest $0.99 option. If a budget is going toward a specific guarantee rather than an impulse top-up, stacking the $29.99 tier (or the nearly-as-good $49.99 tier, which is easier to combine into round numbers) is the more efficient route than reaching for the mid-tier $4.99 or $14.99 packs. This ignores one-time first-purchase bonus S-Chips, which some tiers award on a player’s very first buy only and which skew the math more favorably but aren’t repeatable.
Does Pity Carry Over Between Banners?
Partially, and the scope matters. Within a single Shadow of Themis event, the 100-pull guarantee counter is shared across all four male-lead banners running at the same time, so pulls on Luke’s banner count toward the same cap as pulls on Marius’s. That part carries over cleanly.
What doesn’t carry over automatically is progress between separate, unrelated event series. HoYoverse’s own community guidance describes the pity counter resetting once a new, unrelated Shadow of Themis event begins, rather than banking indefinitely the way some other gacha systems let unused progress persist. That’s a real financial risk worth planning around: pulling partway into one event and stopping doesn’t guarantee that progress is waiting for you next time.
Myths vs Facts About Tears of Themis’s Odds
| Myth | Fact |
|---|---|
| Tears of Themis uses a 50/50 system like Genshin Impact. | No official notice describes a coin-flip mechanic. The featured card has its own flat 1% rate, and the backstop is the 100-pull guarantee, not a guarantee-after-losing-a-flip rule. |
| Your odds improve the longer you go without pulling the card (soft pity). | HoYoverse’s disclosed rate stays flat at 1% all the way to draw 100. No official source states a rising rate before that point. |
| Buying the biggest Gem pack always gets you the best rate. | The 198-Gem, $29.99 pack beats the 648-Gem, $99.99 pack on cost per Gem, though only by a fraction of a cent. |
| Unused draw progress is safe to sit on indefinitely. | Pity progress is shared across the four banners in one event, but community-documented guidance says it does not automatically persist into future, unrelated events. |
| A niche otome gacha must have friendlier odds than a blockbuster title. | At 1% per draw, Tears of Themis’s featured-card rate is lower than Genshin Impact’s widely cited 0.6% base five-star rate split across a 50/50, and its expected-cost outcome lands in a broadly similar dollar range. |
How Tears of Themis Compares to Genshin-Style Pity Systems
Genshin Impact’s widely published numbers put its base five-star rate at 0.6%, soft pity ramping sharply around wish 74, and hard pity locking in by wish 90, with a 50/50 split on which five-star you get and a guarantee if you lose that flip. That structure, priced out in a separate breakdown of Genshin’s own numbers, runs from roughly $178 in a lucky scenario to $356 in an unlucky one for a single guaranteed featured character.
Tears of Themis’s flat 1% rate with a 100-pull cap and no coin flip lands in a comparable, slightly cheaper dollar range at $173 to $299. The two systems arrive at similar real-world costs through very different mechanics: Genshin spreads risk across a two-stage process (landing any five-star, then winning a 50/50), while Tears of Themis concentrates all the risk into a single flat probability with a higher individual draw rate but a correspondingly lower overall ceiling. Neither approach is inherently more “generous.” They’re just different shapes of the same underlying math, something worth keeping in mind before assuming a lower headline percentage automatically means a worse deal.
Why These Numbers Are Public: Loot Box Disclosure Law Context
None of this math would be possible to verify if HoYoverse weren’t legally required to publish it in the first place. China’s loot box disclosure rule, in force since the Ministry of Culture’s regulation took effect on May 1, 2017, requires operators of randomized in-game item systems to disclose the names, properties, and probability of each item, either inside the game or on the game’s official website. HoYoverse, headquartered in Shanghai, falls squarely under that requirement, which is why a “Probability Explained” section sits inside its own event notices rather than being reverse-engineered by players.
South Korea runs a parallel but separately legislated version of the same idea. Under the amended Game Industry Promotion Act, effective March 22, 2024, game businesses operating in Korea must disclose probability-based item information in-game, on their official website, and in advertising, with noncompliance exposing a company to a corrective order and, for continued violations, criminal penalties of up to two years in prison or a fine of up to 20 million South Korean won. The United States and United Kingdom still have no comparable nationwide disclosure law as of 2026, which is part of why English-language odds information for many gacha titles has to be pieced together from community trackers rather than read straight off an official page.
Is a Tears of Themis Pull Ever Worth the Money?
The honest answer depends entirely on which number in this piece a reader is comparing against their own budget. At $2.73 to $2.99 for a single draw, a casual pull with no specific target in mind is a cheap, low-stakes purchase, closer to a mobile game cosmetic than a meaningful financial decision. Chasing the expected-value outcome of roughly $173 to $190 for one specific featured card is a real, deliberate purchase on the scale of a mid-tier video game, and chasing the worst-case $273 to $299 hard-pity guarantee is the price of knowing, with certainty, exactly what you’ll get and when.
What the math doesn’t do is tell anyone what a specific card is worth to them personally. It only removes the guesswork about what the game itself is charging, in real dollars, for different levels of certainty. From there, the decision about whether that price is fair sits entirely with the player holding the wallet.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the pity odds system in Tears of Themis?
Each draw on a Shadow of Themis banner has a flat 1% chance of producing the featured event-limited SSR card, with a 1.6% combined chance of any SSR from that banner. There is no disclosed rising rate before the cap; the 100th draw is guaranteed to be the featured card if it hasn’t landed already.
Does Tears of Themis have soft pity?
Not according to any official HoYoverse disclosure. The published rate stays flat at 1% from the first draw through draw 99, then the hard guarantee delivers the card on draw 100 regardless of rate.
How much does it cost to guarantee a featured SSR card in Tears of Themis?
The hard-pity price is 18,000 S-Chips, equal to 1,800 Gems, which costs between $273 and $299 depending on which real-money Gem package funded the purchase. The average, expected-value cost across many players is closer to $173 to $190.
Does pity carry over between Tears of Themis banners?
Within one Shadow of Themis event, yes, the 100-pull counter is shared across all four concurrent male-lead banners. Between separate, unrelated events, community-documented guidance indicates the counter does not automatically carry over.
Is Tears of Themis’s gacha better or worse odds than Genshin Impact?
Tears of Themis’s 1% featured-card rate is higher than Genshin’s 0.6% base five-star rate, but Genshin spreads that into a two-step 50/50 process with its own guarantee. Priced out in dollars, the two systems land in a broadly similar range, with Tears of Themis coming out slightly cheaper at both the expected-value and worst-case ends.
What is the best value Gem package to buy in Tears of Themis?
The 198-Gem package priced at $29.99 currently offers the lowest cost per Gem among all six published tiers, narrowly ahead of the $49.99 and $99.99 packs. The 30-Gem, $4.99 package is the worst value in the lineup.
