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High-Level Arena Tips


Renall
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This reminds me. There was someone a while back saying that your shouldn't raise your levels too high when facing an enemy in the arena. I wonder if the levels themselves play a part in the stat increases of the enemies faced in arena.

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This reminds me. There was someone a while back saying that your shouldn't raise your levels too high when facing an enemy in the arena. I wonder if the levels themselves play a part in the stat increases of the enemies faced in arena.

I'd say that's probable.

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Certain Blow, which I find is effectively required for all arena units because you can't really pass up a free Hit+40.

Sadly, it and Death Blow are the only useful ones, because the arena will just ramp up the enemy's stats to get around Duelist/Armored/Darting/Warding Blow. Since you can't expect to reliably dodge in there, it's simply a matter of hoping for a critkill before you take too much damage.

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tumblr_o68ebrsGB81s05qs8o1_400.jpg

Just going to leave this here, lol

I warned you about Tomes. I told you bro!

(He'd survive this with Wary Fighter + Warding Blow and might even have a good shot at winning though...)

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tumblr_o68ebrsGB81s05qs8o1_400.jpg

Just going to leave this here, lol

In all seriousness, much of the arena boils down to hoping your skill setup is enough to beat out the RNG. Proc stacking is good, but you also have to think about which skills you want to proc and if you can make room for support skills. You almost assuredly want Certain Blow + Death Blow on your S class units because it will almost guarantee that they'll hit. Two or Sol/Luna/Aether is also good for survivability purposes. Wary Fighter is too much of a double edged sword for my taste, as it's inevitable that you'll run into an enemy that outdamages you and has a higher crit rate.

It's unfortunate that you can't have a 100% win rate because it's just too random, but stacking as many things in your favor is always a good thing.

I dunno about Sol - depending on what ever you're facing, you might not heal enough to make it worth it. Also, the crit thing is why I recommended Veteran Intuition.

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Rear units (besides Nohrian Trust bots): skill set should boost hit rate > damage/crit rate (if they work from the rear)

Certain Blow and Death Blow are certainly good (provided that they work from the rear). Aggressor, Weaponfaire, and Quick Draw are likely to be usable. Not sure if Life and Death would work for the support unit. Air Superiority can perhaps be stacked with Weaponbreaker if savescumming even works for Arena. Golembane would also require savescumming if a Mechanist shows up in Arena since it's so situational.

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You know, that screenshot almost makes me with there was an option to have the enemy count as the initiator, because Magic Counter would be utterly hilarious.

With regards to statues, even if they cause enemy stats to go up too, because of the nature of how good procs are in arena matches, I'd say stacking as much of that as possible would still be worth it. If we're looking to explode the enemy with a proc stack on the first (or, at worst, second) turn, what would you guys think of running:

-Spear Master Kana lead; Life and Death, Death Blow, Nohrian Trust, Quixotic, Hoshidan Unity

-Whatever support (probably Corrin); Rend Heaven, Lethality, Astra, Luna, Aegis

With 13 Skl shrines and assuming the lead has a +Skl Corrin parent whose Bane doesn't drop Skl, who then marries Orochi!Asugi, Kana's Skl will be 33 + 13 + 4 + 1 + 5 = 56. What this gives is a 39% chance of Lethality, 53% chance of Astra, 81% chance of Luna, then 100% Rend Heaven. Life and Death synergizes with Astra (but I'm not sure if this is enough of a damage boost?). Death Blow synergizes with Astra, Luna and Rend Heaven, because we'll probably need a crit to make them work. The crit chance with this build is 56/2 - 2 + 10 + 20 = 56. Enemies will probably gain enough hacked Luk to negate the Skl's bonus, though. One thing I'm pretty uncertain about is Aegis, which I'd initially considered to protect against magic damage, toting an 81% proc rate, but with Life and Death, this might not be enough, especially if the enemy is doubling. Thankfully, being a Spear Master should make mages show up quite rarely. Instead, the slow, bulky Oni Chieftan, Blacksmith and maybe Berserker, should show up quite often. The Spear Master's innate +10 Dodge should help protect against crit rates from everything other than the Berserker.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I cut out Certain Blow because +70 Hit seems like it'd be overkill, especially if Kana's mainly facing Oni Chieftans and Blacksmiths. Quixotic pulls double duty by giving Kana both +Hit and +proc rate. Also, with WTA and hacked stats, the enemies should be generally assumed to be landing all their blows; assuming the enemy even gets to attack, anyway—this build does aim to insta-gib them, which should make their hit rate irrelevant.

Anyway, if we assume that the enemy is going to pick up enough Luk to push crit rates down to 25% against them. So we have the 39% Lethality that might just plain end the battle right there. Then Astra, which can expect at least one crit, resulting in a minimum of 3.5x damage, then a crit Luna has a 20.1% chance of happening, and a 25% of a Rend Heaven crit. Assuming that Astra with one hit can kill, the chances of failure are 0.61 * (0.47 + 0.2373*0.53) * 0.799 * 0.75 = 0.1827. Hmm, 18.27% is not especially super, but feel like the proc stack is pretty close to tapped out. I guess I could go all-in and dump Aegis for Dragon Fang, which would have a 67% chance of proccing. With the 25% assumed crit chance, that's another 16.75% chance to crit gib the enemy, bringing the new chance of failure down to 15.21%.

I guess the main thing holding this back from pushing to 90%+ reliability is Kana's Crit. There's just no really good crit skills other than Death Blow. I suppose if the Attack Stance bonuses from support levels apply, it might be possible to push it a bit higher. Corrin's only gonna give +3 crit for an A, though, so Kana would have to find a good S partner in the second gen (preferably someone who picks up Effie or Leo's +6 crit at S? I'm not really sure how inheritance works on those bonuses...). Berserker could maybe be a thing, but then that's slightly less skill and then facing speedy enemies where Quixotic might not be enough of a Hit boost.

Edited by Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi
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The main issue with crit reliance in my experience is that you will run into 50+ Def/Res enemies who almost completely negate (or do completely negate) your damage, which shuts down all procs except Luna, Aether, and Rend Heaven/Dragon Fang. Though it depends in the case of RH/DF; a Dark Knight with 50+ Def vs. your physical lead with Rend Heaven probably doesn't get hit hard because the enemy min-maxes its Str/Mag like crazy, but in a physical-on-physical or magical-on-magical matchup Rend Heaven crits tend to be one-shots or nearly so because the enemy stacks its offense so high it ends up shooting itself in the foot. I had tremendous success with Xander as a Swordmaster using just Rend Heaven as his only proc and Berserker Charlotte backing him up; if he procced on other physical units he'd kill them in 2 rounds at worst, and if he ran into an Onmyoji he didn't need Rend Heaven to damage them (to say nothing of Charlotte's easy crits on most high-Res units).

I have found that the most reliable build is one that guarantees victory in two rounds (with Wary Fighter active), i.e. two lead and two partner attacks with the ability to survive one enemy attack. In the unlikely event of a cascade failure to hit proc or crit rolls this usually allows you to Yield and keep your current winnings. The problem with an all-in win-first-round-every-time strategy is you're risking failure if your gamble doesn't pay off and then your character gets exploded like a blood piñata.

I don't have a +Skl Avatar but I do have Orochi!Asugi!Kana I've been setting up for 100% proc rates as a Ninja Master. Haven't swapped him in for Takumi/Elise yet as the two of them have been doing pretty well as it is, but it may be worth a try.

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Hmm, what kind of stats are you guys toting when you posts these screenshots and stuff, anyway?

I'm just thinking back to my arena Shiro from Birthright, who was just kind of thrown together. He was level 23 Arms Master with nominally high stats, but nothing crazy (I don't think he even maxed anything out). I had statues for almost everyone, but nothing upgraded beyond level 1. He was usually looking at ~10 damage with lances against WTD. He usually needed a couple crits on Astra to one-round or one on Rend Heaven to one-round, so that's why I was considering Life and Death (so that an Astra with a single crit would do 70 total).

Considering this and that the enemy stats seems to scale to match raw stats, perhaps it's preferable to have less than super Str? Aside from preventing those crazy levels of Def, if it scales to lower Str, then that makes stuff like Life and Death even more valuable. That actually gets me thinking even more... would perhaps some of the most reliable arena fighters be a couple unpromoted kids who were passed Certain Blow and Life and Death?

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My characters are running the arena at 50+ (so their internal level is 70ish or higher).

The best arena fighter in theory is a never-leveled Gunter brought to max stats by stat boosters, as Gunter's lower internal level appears to put him up against unpromoted enemies until he levels up somewhat and he has access to promoted caps all the while. I believe unpromoted kids would also basically stomp the arena every time. It's a well-known exploit/trick that you can give the Arena Shield to an unpromoted character whose partner is high-level and then select the high-leveled partner as the lead, so the arena does seem to generate its enemies on the basis of the units you send into it. It also seems to generate harder enemies when paired units enter the arena.

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I warned you about Tomes. I told you bro!

(He'd survive this with Wary Fighter + Warding Blow and might even have a good shot at winning though...)

I still won thanks to a crit, but I had a good chance of one-rounding the strategist anyway thanks to her low HP.

Strictly speaking, I don't think Wary Fighter is a good idea for high-speed units you send in, like Swordmasters and Berserkers. There's no reason to gimp yourself if you reliably double in the first two rounds, and the third round is always a huge luckfest anyway. Of course you'll get a few units that will double you, but generally there's a trend in which units will do so.

Or, at least, until the game throws these assholes at you:

tumblr_o80wah2FK41s05qs8o1_400.jpg

Seriously, a sorcerer doubling a 43 Speed unit? Talk about capbusting!

Edited by Sol Hiryu
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My rationale for Wary Fighter is that I don't need to worry about having a speedy unit and I'm confident I will do more damage with one attack + one partner attack than my opponent is likely to do with theirs because I have procs and have optimized my partner with skills. You may miss a double but as you've demonstrated the AI is completely capable of generating 48+ Speed Sorcerers and 55+ Speed Onmyojis and seriously screw that. The AI doesn't get to hyper-inflate its offense and defense while also doubling me if I have anything to say about it.

Plus I'd argue the third round is the most important one and the first two give the most margin for error. Build yourself to win the third round and your odds of getting there are fairly decent unless you just get trashed so bad that the auto-heal isn't enough to survive one set of attacks (and even then with procs and crits you might win regardless).

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How about giving an Arena Shield to a lv. 1 Mozu and statue-capped MU and then having Mozu do all the fighting, MU OHKOing everything with Attack Stance? Would that not be 100% success rate?

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What about stone users in the castle? When visiting other castles with maxed stat units I have noticed the second gen stone users (with multiple blow and proc skills) tend to be highly effective while facing seemingly random opponents My only stone user Keaton however doesn't perform all that well though that is mostly because he lacks any initiation or proc skills

Edited by Dragrath
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Stone users can't be WTD'd so my guess is you'll see more random selections of enemies against them but none will take away their weapon rank bonuses or gain bonuses of their own. Effective weapons do not exist in the arena so unless there are other stone users generated as enemies (which I have never seen), and unless those units get Beastbane (and I've seen no evidence arena enemies have skills), they should be quite effective. I'll try it out with Velouria once I get around to it.

EDIT: A quick update, Velouria seems to face 0% critrates from enemies which is pretty nice, but still needs Wary Fighter to avoid doubling and isn't always the tankiest even with Armored/Warding Blow. But unless up against Berserkers she can be pretty good. Also I think Dwyer's ability does indeed work in the arena but need to test it more. Also interested if Lucky Seven works in the arena or not.

Edited by Renall
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