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Just a few things I've observed as I try to push arena rates to 100%: As far as I can tell, the Arena Shield is always respected in your own castle provided you only have it on one person. To make it even more certain, putting it on two members of a couple will guarantee one of them shows up. Your Arena Shield is completely ignored when visitors come to your castle, as is any given character's support partner. If your goal is to have units that fight well for visitors, you cannot force one in and have to be mindful of that. At high levels and in later rounds, the enemy relentlessly cheats with its stats. Expect enemies with improbable Defense (Xander with capped Str runs up against GK with 50+ Def) and Speed (Onmyojis with 50+ Spd, etc.). For this reason, I think Wary Fighter and proc skills are the way to go in the arena: The enemy's overkill Spd is irrelevant if they cannot double, and you get proc skills while the enemy never does. Rend Heaven or Luna and Wary Fighter are huge boosts to survivability and damage output. The arena counts as initiated combat, meaning Blow skills are always active. I believe that the arena also always counts as My Castle for the purpose of Dwyer's personal. Warding Blow is -20 magical damage taken at effectively all times in the arena. Certain Blow can also be a huge help as enemy Avoid rates are often absurd. I haven't tested this but I've also been told that if Selena is the partner her personal will activate every time she attacks after her lead unit crits once. While partner units cannot activate skills, they can use damage boosting skills and Blow skills. Life and Death, Death Blow, and Certain Blow are really fantastic to have on the secondary unit. They can also serve as a Nohrian Trust bot, but I find the contribution of the partner is pretty important in terms of reliably beating arena enemies. You do not seem to get inventory boosts (stat-boosting weapons, Battle/Visitation Seal boosts, etc.) while in the arena, as your inventory is replaced by a Bronze (if E rank in your class's primary weapon) or Iron weapon corresponding to the origin of the class (i.e. Hoshidan classes get Katanas/Naginatas/Clubs/Shuriken/Yumi/Scrolls and the reverse for Nohrians). However, you do get your class boosts. Any class with innate Crit has a pretty significant advantage in the arena because a critical with a proc almost always allows for a kill on the opponent. The game seems to choose valid opponents -- that is, opponents who could engage the unit in regular combat at any particular range your unit could engage them -- with a bias toward having WTA against you. There seem to be two ways to exploit this: Bow units appear to only be matched against Hidden Weapons, other Bows, and Tomes; additionally, Stones are outside the weapon triangle. The arena generates units based on the main unit and its chosen partner, before you choose which unit to send in. Having a very high-level unit partnered with a very low-level one can allow for shenanigans. As far as I've been able to tell from experimentation, the best arena unit is probably a Sniper with Warding Blow and Bowbreaker (plus at least one activation like Aether, Luna, or Rend Heaven). You'll have WTA on Hidden Weapons, Breaker advantage on other Bows, and you'll take vastly less damage from Tomes which the game will select a lot as it's the only valid weapon that can get WTA on your arena lead. A partner with LaD / Certain Blow / Death Blow and a high-crit class like Berserker / Swordmaster / Master Ninja allows them to contribute significant damage through crits, which erases the damage penalty from support attacks; Berserker is one you'd have to be careful with as WTD could cause hit issues, so a Spear Master partner might be a better pick. The other option would be a Wolfssenger or Nine-Tails since they're off the weapon triangle and will always get their weapon rank bonus. My only concern there is they'd probably be matched up against units with extremely high Def, so you'll want Aether or Luna to break through that. I haven't experimented enough to see whether other beast units can appear as arena opponents; if they do, I'm not sure if they get Beastbane or not. If they don't, you're pretty much safe because only Iron weapons appear in the arena. Same logic applies for using armored or dragon classes, you won't see Hammers or Wyrmslayers. You will however see bows matched up against fliers, so I don't recommend that. If you're trying to make your castle's arena pretty reliable for visitors, you need to make sure every character who could show up in the arena is relatively self-sufficient. They don't get their partner so no support boosts (which sucks) and they can't use Nohrian Trust. Armored/Warding Blow and an activation skill are a big help; the arena seems to go a little easier on visitors but you still want to end fights fast because the enemy will tend to have a damage/hitrate advantage that skews victory odds in their favor. tl;dr: Use Wary Fighter, Blow skills, and at least one activated battle skill in the arena and you'll win even high-level third rounds fairly consistently. Also Bows seem to only get matched against other 2 range weapons. Has anyone else observed trends in the arena that might be exploited to help win it, even with very high-level units?