Arena Discussion Thread (inc. Assault)

[MaskedAmpharos]

@Nathair Oh hey we have the exact same score :D

I don't actually know what score you need to break top 1k after the update, but I'd hazard a guess at about 4940 or so?

I say this because my score was exactly 4.9k last season, but I ended up with a rank of 1.2k or so.

[Ice Dragon]

On 4/20/2017 at 5:48 AM, Ice Dragon said:

Score: 4,902
Rank: 246
Defense: 303

Score: 4,902
Rank: 337
Defense: 304

It looks like I'm averaging about 1 or 2 defense wins a day. A far cry from when I consistently got 3 to 10, but I'll take it.

 

11 minutes ago, MaskedAmpharos said:

@Nathair Oh hey we have the exact same score :D

I don't actually know what score you need to break top 1k after the update, but I'd hazard a guess at about 4940 or so?

I say this because my score was exactly 4.9k last season, but I ended up with a rank of 1.2k or so.

This week seems to have lower scores than last week, probably due to the weaker bonus hero line-up. 4,880 might be enough to break 1,000 this week.

[Tybrosion]

After completing a deathless streak with a team of Lukas, Eldigan (+1), 5* Nino, and my newly promoted 5* Zephiel I have an offensive score of 4,780 (Rank 3,548) and a defensive score of 287 (2 wins). I'll just be happy if I still rank within the top 5k at the end of the season.

[Nathair]

33 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

 

This week seems to have lower scores than last week, probably due to the weaker bonus hero line-up. 4,880 might be enough to break 1,000 this week.

Thank you. 

Hmm, that might acctually be doable. Guess if i fill the remaining skill slots for cherche and reinhardt and reset some battles I might make it.

Also, I have to beat @MaskedAmpharos now, so i gonna try for a higher score anyway

[Xaos Steel Wing]

Finally, this week I can run my true A team now that Sharena is a bonus unit again!

5* Sharena, Eirika, Jeorge, Takumi.

I do have a question: What B skill should I give Sharena?

I currently have Spd+3 and Moonbow on her.

With Eirika's speed buff, which she will often have, she has 39 speed. I can give her the Spd +1 seal so she'll effectively have 40 speed a lot of the time.

I thought about Swordbreaker, Lancebreaker, or Quick Riposte, but with the Eirika buff she doubles all but the fastest units (a few reds and Azura come to mind, and a few mages but those are taken care of by my archers) and doesn't get doubled by anyone. So those skills don't add much value as she won't get doubled and would double most enemies most of the time anyway.

Vantage or Desperation might be good; although I do not have a Vantage and am hesitant to sacrifice my Navarre. Desperation 3 might be real good as at 40 speed she'll be doubling a ton. Desperation works on player phase, Vantage on enemy phase...

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

There's some key enemies who can get into the 36+ Spd range with or without buffs. Quick Riposte would cover that. Otherwise, you could always go with Renewal (mine has rank 2 and it's helped a fair bit). Sharena has enough tank that I don't think Desperation would help as much as any of the other choices. Maybe if you were running her with Life and Death, but I don't really see a reason to go for a build like that.

 

Score of 4701:

• Apr 21 9AM PST - #13 301
• Apr 21 3PM PST - #13 830

[Okigen]

The most interesting build I see recently. Jagen with Distant Counter xD

 

 

[Ice Dragon]

5 minutes ago, OKigen said:

The most interesting build I see recently. Jagen with Distant Counter xD

Standard Wall of Ice and Sharp Things on a Horse shenanigans.

[Okigen]

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Standard Wall of Ice and Sharp Things on a Horse shenanigans.

The wall is not that great, with only 36 hp.

The res is quite respectable though  

[LordFrigid]

4864 update:

9pm PDT 4/19: 341

7pm PDT 4/20: 462

7pm PDT 4/21 (or at least before the 8 pm update =P ): 553

If that rank drop keeps being low, that score might actually stay top 1k O.o .

[Shiro]

My current rank hope I can stay top 1k :)

[Vaximillian]

Too many fast mages for my taste. Still stuck at 4,713 which is rank 12,979 right now. I wonder whether I actually manage a deathless streak this week.

Still no defences, reshuffled my team yet again from Sharena/Eirika/Nino/Ninian to Ninian/Nowi/F!Corrin/Lilina. Lose to me, I beg of you!

[eclipse]

Current arena team: Virion/Ephraim/Ryoma/Spring Camilla

Current score: 4,672

Current rank: 17,774

Still need to do a deathless run.  If I do, I think I'll break 4,700. Regardless, this team is hilarious - if Ryoma/Ephraim can't blow it up, Camilla will.  Virion's job is to soften up sword users after Ephraim is out of Swordbreaker range.

[DehNutCase]

1 hour ago, eclipse said:

Current arena team: Virion/Ephraim/Ryoma/Spring Camilla

Current score: 4,672

Current rank: 17,774

Still need to do a deathless run.  If I do, I think I'll break 4,700. Regardless, this team is hilarious - if Ryoma/Ephraim can't blow it up, Camilla will.  Virion's job is to soften up sword users after Ephraim is out of Swordbreaker range.

Your team has officially graduated from F2P random stuff to full on whale-mode.

 

Off-topic: One of these days I need to pick a couple people I like and start stacking Merges for more Arena points, or maybe I should just run Donnel and Nowi etc. because BST.

[eclipse]

9 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Your team has officially graduated from F2P random stuff to full on whale-mode.

Still F2P.  I pulled every last one of those!  But perhaps I'll do a 4* run featuring Virion and Olivia, since it's still plenty viable.  Skill inheritance is a big boon for F2P.

[KinoSei]

8 hours ago, XaosLogos said:

Finally, this week I can run my true A team now that Sharena is a bonus unit again!

5* Sharena, Eirika, Jeorge, Takumi.

I do have a question: What B skill should I give Sharena?

I'm not going to consider speed as a major factor here due to the number of variable merged units you will be facing. It's also difficult to account for units who are just barely doubled at 31-35 speed in vanilla form, but run Fury or Life and Death and spoil your fun; not to mention that your opponent could potentially have a speed buffer as well. Desperation isn't quite so useful anymore imo. Don't consider Vantage an option until you actually have a backup unit to skill inheret from.

Based on your team comp, since you have Eirika, you can have Eirikia handle Swordbreaker. Though not unplausible, running double Swordbreaker on your team might be a bit overkill. Which leaves Lancebreaker, and Quick Riposte. 

Pros of running Lancebreaker:

- Speed against Lance users is no longer a factor as you will automatically double them; therefore you can opt to run more offensive skills like Death Blow and Atk +1 seal for KOs against notable units like Azura and Sharena herself.

-Brave Lance users are guaranteed to be unable to quad attack letting you KO them in return, ie. Flier Emblem +Spd Life and Death Cordelia with Hone and Goad Fliers buff will hit 48 speed. Cordelia will be unable to kill because she misses out on her quad attack and will be KO'd instead.

-Allows you to break Wary Fighter Effie.

Cons of running Lancebreaker:

- Useless against any other unit besides Lancers

- Overlaps against lance users who already get doubled by Sharena such as Ephraim, unless they run Lancebreaker

Pros of running Quick Riposte:

- Is applicable in combat against every 1 ranged unit

- Will get you a guaranteed counter double attack even against units who are able to double Sharena

- Good synergy with Passive A and SS which boost Sharena's speed to prevent being doubled and acts as a pseudo-breaker skill for all 1 range units

Cons of running Quick Riposte:

- Stricter HP margins to keep active

- Can only automatically double on defense

- Doesn't guarantee prevention from enemies doubling you

Edited April 22, 2017 by KinoSei

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

19 minutes ago, eclipse said:

Still F2P.  I pulled every last one of those!  But perhaps I'll do a 4* run featuring Virion and Olivia, since it's still plenty viable.  Skill inheritance is a big boon for F2P.

 

I wish people stopped complaining about how P2W it is and realize this lol

SI allows me to make use of 7 Subakis and 5 Selenas for maximum profit although i havent been able to break 4700 Arena score

[DehNutCase]

1 minute ago, JSND said:

I wish people stopped complaining about how P2W it is and realize this lol

SI allows me to make use of 7 Subakis and 5 Selenas for maximum profit although i havent been able to break 4700 Arena score

Luck is more or less the same thing as being a full-on whale. A lot of the rarest characters (Hector, Ryoma, Azura etc.) also happen to be the best characters.

A few days of rerolling's worth of luck (or just good luck in general), is worth hundreds, if not thousands of USD in orbs.

 

I was mostly joking about her team (a person might not get every good but rare character, but it takes atrocious luck to never get any rare but good character, given---ironically---how many rare but good characters there are), but Takumi and Ryoma are more or less the banner children of logistics beating strategy. (Logistics, in this case, being the ability to obtain the characters in question.) Takumi is literally the best archer for almost every 'good' archer set---the best offenses, a great bulk despite that, and, of course, Close Counter to take advantage of both. (Not that he needs it, mind, a brave bow+ Takumi beats every other brave bow user out of the water.) Ryoma is Ryoma, somehow manage to have similar offenses to Lucina while keeping 27 defense and an HP stat on top of a Distant Counter stapled onto his weapon. He would've been the Takumi of swords if 'sword-lord' wasn't such a diverse and strong group of units.

Takumi starts better than every archer save Klein (who outdoes Takumi in the raw offenses department), and stays better through inheritance, because of his amazing stat spread. Ryoma is the same way, except having an A-slot free makes him even more flexible after inheritance compared to other sword-units who want distant-counter. (Lucina---and Hana, though she lacks L & R's bulk---still out-does him in full-out offense, but his sword and stat-spread means that he's quite possibly the best 'all-around' sword unit.)

[Roflolxp54]

New personal best Arena Offense score: 4688

No defenses so far this week. :/

[Korath88]

4,780 is now rank 3,644

5 successful defences so far.

While I didn't have much problems getting a perfect run on day 1, I've noticed a sharp spike in the number of Dancer+Reinhardt teams I've been facing on subsequent days of this week. I hope this doesn't continue, for my sake.

[eclipse]

1 hour ago, DehNutCase said:

Luck is more or less the same thing as being a full-on whale. A lot of the rarest characters (Hector, Ryoma, Azura etc.) also happen to be the best characters.

A few days of rerolling's worth of luck (or just good luck in general), is worth hundreds, if not thousands of USD in orbs.

This attitude is wrong.

Let's start with the most amazing hypothetical - you have unlimited characters/orbs/resources.  Now what?

But we're not independently wealthy, so we'll have to bump it down, and ask a more relevant question - is it possible to beat everything using the resources we're given for free.  If that one 3* YouTuber has anything to say about it, yes.  The challenge posted by @Ice Dragon has been beaten in many different ways.

So that leaves the arena, the only place where min/maxing matters - and if that's the case, then what you're actually rerolling for is feathers, since that's what the rewards consist of.

In other words, take a good hard look at what you're REALLY obtaining with rerolls.  It's not worth it.

[DehNutCase]

43 minutes ago, eclipse said:

But we're not independently wealthy, so we'll have to bump it down, and ask a more relevant question - is it possible to beat everything using the resources we're given for free.  If that one 3* YouTuber has anything to say about it, yes.  The challenge posted by @Ice Dragon has been beaten in many different ways.

Oh, I'm well aware that the in game content are very reasonably completed with minimal resources. (I do all the GHBs without problem on all 3 of my accounts, and all of them have relatively limited character pools---I think my main has like 10 Edit: Exactly 11 level 40 units, the other 2 in single digits.)

But I obviously have an easier time of it on the 'blessed' account, simply because of the logistics factor. For a lot of the niches, the 'blessed' account simply has the best possible unit for it---whether because the unit is flat out the best at it, or because the unit is very good at it while still being a good unit in general. Because of that, I always use that account to lead my GHB attempts, and it often completes them in one try. (I had the hardest time this GHB on my main, ironically, since my best mage was a level 37 Olwen, who couldn't kill anything on the counter.)

43 minutes ago, eclipse said:

So that leaves the arena, the only place where min/maxing matters - and if that's the case, then what you're actually rerolling for is feathers, since that's what the rewards consist of.

In other words, take a good hard look at what you're REALLY obtaining with rerolls.  It's not worth it.

Some things can be bought with feathers. Close Counter, Distant Counter, Rajinto, Naga, Mystletainn etc. can't.

The thing about re-rolls is that rolling 2 ultra-rare units isn't actually all that less common than rolling 1 single ultra-rare. It's just a weird quirk of math, I suppose, that a huge amount of the 'average-odds' of pulling a unit is stored behind the times when you pull multiple copies versus the times when you pull only one.

 

Unless I'm misunderstand your argument, and what you actually meant was: "The only reward from arena is feathers, and thus anything that helps you in the arena only gives you feathers."

A team that's whale enough to score in the tip-top of the arena only gets around 1k or 2k more feathers a season compared to the vast majority of teams (I think this because a theoretical 'cheap-knockoff' team of Virion, Olivia, Hana, and bonus unit should have very comparable performance to my standard arena team, requiring at most 3 more swords a week to achieve an identical score), so that part's right. You simply don't get very many feathers for rerolling---though the feather to time ratio is actually very good for rerolling. You pay all the cost up-front, but you also save more time fighting (easier runs since your units are more forgiving of mistakes, allowing you to take less time planning each team and planning each team).

But... no one at the tip-top of the arena does it for the feathers. You had to spend a lot of the potential feather rewards just to get up there in the first place (every 5* +10 is 11k feathers that could've been obtained just from sending them all home, one of the least efficient ways to use 5*s). To put it another way, people care about rank for more reasons than just the in-game reward. (I personally don't care all that much, given that I try not to even use swords while doing my weekly run. A nice rank is nice, but anything about 4k is 'good enough,' and I can do that easily.)

43 minutes ago, eclipse said:

In other words, take a good hard look at what you're REALLY obtaining with rerolls.  It's not worth it.

Rerolls, like basically everything else in life, is trading time for time. The reroller pays a certain up-front cost in time to roll up a couple of high-tier, but very rare units, (high-tier, but relatively common units don't need to be rerolled for, everyone will get a couple over the course of playing), in exchange for saving a lot of time later during team construction for various events (arena, GHB, etc), and a lot of effort---a high tier box of units is not only very forgiving during team construction, they're also very forgiving during battles.

Yeah, everything can be done with just F2P stuff, but that's not exactly the same thing as saying everything is just as easily done with a limited box. (For example, the 3* guy had to grind every single F2P character to level 40, I don't even do that for every single one of my 5*s)

Edited April 22, 2017 by DehNutCase

[eclipse]

6 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Oh, I'm well aware that the in game content are very reasonably completed with minimal resources. (I do all the GHBs without problem on all 3 of my accounts, and all of them have relatively limited character pools---I think my main has like 10 level 40 units, the other 2 in single digits.)

But I obviously have an easier time of it on the 'blessed' account, simply because of the logistics factor. For a lot of the niches, the 'blessed' account simply has the best possible unit for it---whether because the unit is flat out the best at it, or because the unit is very good at it while still being a good unit in general. Because of that, I always use that account to lead my GHB attempts, and it often completes them in one try. (I had the hardest time this GHB on my main, ironically, since my best mage was a level 37 Olwen, who couldn't kill anything on the counter.)

But you haven't answered the actual question: For the sake of what?  Did it really matter that one account had better pulls (source: tier list) than the other?  In this case, no, because you beat the map, regardless.

6 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Some things can be bought with feathers. Close Counter, Distant Counter, Rajinto, Naga, Mystletainn etc. can't.

The thing about re-rolls is that rolling 2 ultra-rare units isn't actually all that less common than rolling 1 single ultra-rare. It's just a weird quirk of math, I suppose, that a huge amount of the 'average-odds' of pulling a unit is stored behind the times when you pull multiple copies versus the times when you pull only one.

There's something else that can't be bought with feathers - learning how to play the game.

Gaining power for the sake of power is something that I see across multiple gacha games - and those same people are the ones who ask for help, because they replaced mechanical knowledge with what they thought was an easy solution.  Theory/tier lists are only as effective as the player behind the account.  All the calculations in the world are meaningless until they're put into action.  It's a balance, and it's surprisingly easy to achieve.

6 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Unless I'm misunderstand your argument, and what you actually meant was: "The only reward from arena is feathers, and thus anything that helps you in the arena only gives you feathers."

A team that's whale enough to score in the tip-top of the arena only gets around 1k or 2k more feathers a season compared to the vast majority of teams (I think this because a theoretical 'cheap-knockoff' team of Virion, Olivia, Hana, and bonus unit should have very comparable performance to my standard arena team, requiring at most 3 more swords a week to achieve an identical score), so that part's right. You simply don't get very many feathers for rerolling---though the feather to time ratio is actually very good for rerolling. You pay all the cost up-front, but you also save more time fighting (easier runs since your units are more forgiving of mistakes, allowing you to take less time planning each turn and planning each team).

But... no one at the tip-top of the arena does it for the feathers. You had to spend a lot of the potential feather rewards just to get up there in the first place (every 5* +10 is 11k feathers that could've been obtained just from sending them all home, one of the least efficient ways to use 5*s). To put it another way, people care about rank for more reasons than just the in-game reward. (I personally don't care all that much, given that I try not to even use swords while doing my weekly run. A nice rank is nice, but anything about 4k is 'good enough,' and I can do that easily.)

Then rerolling is for even less than feathers in the arena rank - it's for some misplaced pride.  Of all things, getting lucky with the rolls in a gacha game isn't something to brag about.  Nor is "I rerolled fifty times for this!"  Skill is something that's acquired, while luck is there, or it isn't.

20 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Rerolls, like basically everything else in life, is trading time for time. The reroller pays a certain up-front cost in time to roll up a couple of high-tier, but very rare units, (high-tier, but relatively common units don't need to be rerolled for, everyone will get a couple over the course of playing), in exchange for saving a lot of time later during team construction for various events (arena, GHB, etc), and a lot of effort---a high tier box of units is not only very forgiving during team construction, they're also very forgiving during battles.

Yeah, everything can be done with just F2P stuff, but that's not exactly the same thing as saying everything is just as easily done with a limited box.

You're sacrificing a lot more than time.  Every account will play differently, and it's those early experiences that teach a new player how the game works.  I can't say that my first 5* pull was very forgiving, and my second wasn't used that often (if you read backwards, you'll notice that I only ran Tiki for the longest time, with Jakob nowhere in sight).  Rather than rely on power, I went with improvisation and creativity, and I think what I learned is far more valuable than any 5*.

I'll need more feathers than the person who starts off with multiple S/S+ units. But that's okay, because I will get those feathers one day.  And when I do, I will make that -Atk Spring Lucina shine in the arena.

[Okigen]

I have an extra Eirika which I would like to merge asap to get some sp. Which one will be better to keep: +res -atk or +spd -res?

Her main business outside of buff is just to tank highly merged Julia/Nino. I'm leaned more to the +spd one but that -res throws me off a bit. Alternative I'm gonna stick g tomebreaker on the -atk +res Eirika. What do you think?

[Nathair]

 

 

So...

14 more points make me reach rank 1264. I estimate the 1000 threshold to be at 4830.

 

Edited May 15, 2017 by Nathair
Deleted the pic