Arena Discussion Thread (inc. Assault)

[mampfoid]

10 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

Just randomly thought about something, I think IS should give us more information on our defensive prowess, starting with the number of faced teams, not just the amount of successful defenses; an additional tab with more info would also be welcome, but the news about people not getting any matches and therefore - obviously - getting no wins must have made some people crazy as to why they were not having any success.

At this moment, the AI has become quite weird (I know they follow a certain algorithm, but it still baffles me sometimes why they act how they act; guess I'm just not as informed) and it would be really helpful to have some hints at what might be improved to make a team not do some suicide moves (like pulling away crucial units from teammates, so that they get slaughtered).

Another awesome addition would be a simulation, like a "FIGHT YOUR TEAM" option, where you face against the set team in the current arena rotation. Nothing shows your prowess better than testing it, right?

My aplogies if those have been mentioned in the past or even in this thread, since I don't think those ideas are really far-fetched, but I really hope they give us something like that in the future.

More information about defense battles would be nice, i'm always curious what happens with my guys. 

The only way to try out your defense team is using auto-mode on some maps of the current rotation. At least you can see if they do something stupid with their movement skills. 

[MonkeyCheez3K]

23 minutes ago, mampfoid said:

More information about defense battles would be nice, i'm always curious what happens with my guys. 

The only way to try out your defense team is using auto-mode on some maps of the current rotation. At least you can see if they do something stupid with their movement skills. 

Auto-battle against other CPUs is kinda misleading, though, and it also starts them on the other side, possibly screwing up with some movement patterns and starting positions (it's mirrored I believe (1234 becomes 4321 if you swap sides, and that does actually matter on some maps who aren't always perfectly mirrored themselves). So the only true testing would be a match on an arena map the conventional way, where your cpu team starts where it normally starts in actual Arena matches. May IS bring us glorious updates!

[Ice Dragon]

24 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

Auto-battle against other CPUs is kinda misleading, though, and it also starts them on the other side, possibly screwing up with some movement patterns and starting positions (it's mirrored I believe (1234 becomes 4321 if you swap sides, and that does actually matter on some maps who aren't always perfectly mirrored themselves). So the only true testing would be a match on an arena map the conventional way, where your cpu team starts where it normally starts in actual Arena matches. May IS bring us glorious updates!

The point isn't to see the exact moves your units are making but to notice patterns in their movement order and when they choose to use assist skills. Starting positions (order isn't mirrored, by the way) and map symmetry don't matter for those purposes.

Drop your team into Arena Assault on the low or medium setting and see what they do.

[MonkeyCheez3K]

9 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

The point isn't to see the exact moves your units are making but to notice patterns in their movement order and when they choose to use assist skills. Starting positions (order isn't mirrored, by the way) and map symmetry don't matter for those purposes.

Drop your team into Arena Assault on the low or medium setting and see what they do.

True, you can get that information out of it, but it still matters if you want to see reach combined with assist/attack order; e.g. in rotation 1, first map (forest map) on the wiki (and do correct me if I'm wrong; Arena Rotation 1) you start off at the bottom with 1234 and the enemies order is 4321 if you turn it around to make it seem like it's the bottom (It's not even perfectly symmetrical, but that's what I called mirrored) or am I misinterpreting the numbers provided by the wiki? In this example, a defending Brave Lyn would reach the bottom row on position 4 without dancing/repositioning, while as an attacker position 4 could not reach the enemies without dancing/repositioning. Obviously, that doesn't always matter as a human player thinks about positioning a lot more and has the starting turn, but it does make a difference if I want my defending Lyn to immediately attack the front row or have more synergy with the team by being unable to mindlessly attack into the first enemy and get slaughtered.

At the very least, it would be a nice QoL addition to make things more accessible, imo.

[mampfoid]

@MonkeyCheez3K Perhaps they will make some overall renovation to the defense mechanism. As I see it, there is no gain from building 600+ score defense teams. 

[Hawk King]

So apparently the only defense wins I get lately are against people with Xander as their lead. I finally got one late in this past season with like 1 day left.

I swapped in Sharena for Amelia when the Arena was closed and I already have an Arena win this morning against someone with a Xander lead again.

When Sharena is on my team the defense wins flood in. It has to be because I have Wings of Mercy on her.

[Ice Dragon]

59 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

True, you can get that information out of it, but it still matters if you want to see reach combined with assist/attack order; e.g. in rotation 1, first map (forest map) on the wiki (and do correct me if I'm wrong; Arena Rotation 1) you start off at the bottom with 1234 and the enemies order is 4321 if you turn it around to make it seem like it's the bottom (It's not even perfectly symmetrical, but that's what I called mirrored) or am I misinterpreting the numbers provided by the wiki? In this example, a defending Brave Lyn would reach the bottom row on position 4 without dancing/repositioning, while as an attacker position 4 could not reach the enemies without dancing/repositioning. Obviously, that doesn't always matter as a human player thinks about positioning a lot more and has the starting turn, but it does make a difference if I want my defending Lyn to immediately attack the front row or have more synergy with the team by being unable to mindlessly attack into the first enemy and get slaughtered.

At the very least, it would be a nice QoL addition to make things more accessible, imo.

You can check reach and positioning by simply looking at the map. You can check how units use assists by running auto-battle a half dozen times anywhere. Putting them together isn't difficult.

There's literally no need to run the simulation on the exact map with the exact positions.

[MonkeyCheez3K]

1 minute ago, Ice Dragon said:

You can check reach and positioning by simply looking at the map. You can check how units use assists by running auto-battle a half dozen times anywhere. Putting them together isn't difficult.

There's literally no need to run the simulation on the exact map with the exact positions.

Since when is QoL needed (I mean yeah, if said quality is atrocious or "unliveable" beforehand, but most of the time it's just to improve the overall experience)? I'm just suggesting a better accessibility for everyone, not that I need it to enjoy FEH; also how would it be a bad thing? My suggestion gives the information to everyone, while keeping it as is now requires from the players to know the rotation beforehand (look it up otherwise or play some arena to remember the maps), the starting positions, the clunky testing on other maps and deducing from them when you could have it directly with the addition of said testing. I also don't think it's a lot of effort to put it in. So while not a priority, I do think improving accessibility is a good reason to consider it.

[XRay]

2 hours ago, Hawk King said:

So apparently the only defense wins I get lately are against people with Xander as their lead. I finally got one late in this past season with like 1 day left.

I swapped in Sharena for Amelia when the Arena was closed and I already have an Arena win this morning against someone with a Xander lead again.

When Sharena is on my team the defense wins flood in. It has to be because I have Wings of Mercy on her.

Yeah, those skills are a huge pain in the ass to deal with if you forget to check the opponent's skills.

I do not have a problem with Wings of Mercy since my units usually kill everything in one hit, but I do have a problem with SF!Camilla with Gronnraven and Triangle Adept. Whenever I see flier teams, I get all excited since my BB!Cordelia is going to have an awesome day. Sometimes, I got too confident and I forgot to check SF!Camilla's skills, and I ended up paying the price by having my BB!Cordelia getting killed on the counter attack.

[Rafiel's Aria]

So...I ended up with 3 defense wins overnight and decided that I didn't want to contribute to the horse emblem cancer for the rest of the season. XD I got what I needed from you people. So I switched my team to Brave Roy, Ephraim, Nino, and Matthew. I recently finished building a 5 star Matthew just for fun, so why not show him off a little? Sure, he's not great, and I'll be surprised if I get any wins from that team, but at least the poor guy is getting some love.

[Vaximillian]

Horse Emblem gave me my defence win in the very first day:

Who would’ve thunk.

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

4 hours ago, Vaximillian said:

Horse Emblem gave me my defence win in the very first day:

Who would’ve thunk.

You dont use Camus so i would've thunk

;thinking;

[MonkeyCheez3K]

Sooo, with the upcoming season we will get defense wins in AA..... which means ill just go concede all the time and give all those teams free wins? Not sure if that's intended, but oh well, why not.

[mampfoid]

12 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

Sooo, with the upcoming season we will get defense wins in AA..... which means ill just go concede all the time and give all those teams free wins? Not sure if that's intended, but oh well, why not.

If everybody will have a blue defense team, the 4th or 5th will get the win, because the attacking party will run out of greens. 

[ignis_z]

4840 Going to tier 20

8 defenses. Brave Lyn, Ike, azura, Nino

Edited September 6, 2017 by ignis_z

[Apples]

Having bounced between the highest tiers for a couple months and since the Brave units are worth a lot of scoring points, I tried to play with the intent of staying in Tier 20 for once. Much frustration and many crests later, I've broken my previous records and scored 4890 which is rank 2352 as of now. Score range was between 694 and 700. From what I've seen of past weeks, it might be just enough to stay above the cutoff though if I was able to do it, it's likely that many others could do better.

Also going to say that this week's map rotations plus Brave units and horses don't make me very eager to do it again. Highlights of the run included getting lucky with the placement of mages on the lava map and Nowi taking hits from bladetome Leo and Brave Roy on the same turn on the bridge map. 

My team (for those interested and for future reference):

Spoiler

Brave Ike (+Def/-Res)

Urvan, Swap, Aether
Steady Breath, Beorc Guard, Threaten Def 3, Hp +3

Nowi+3 (+Spd/-Res)

Lightning Breath+, Swap, Bonfire
Def +3, Quick Riposte 3, Hone Atk 3, Quickened Pulse

Lucina (+Hp/-Spd)

Falchion, Reciprocal Aid, Aether
Defiant Spd 3, Renewal 3, Spur Atk 3, Spd +1

Brave Lyn (Neutral)

Mulagir, Reposition, Draconic Aura
Swift Sparrow 2, Sacae's Blessing, Atk Smoke 3, Atk +1
 

Since my last run, I've inherited Triangle Adept 3 on to Nowi from my last Roy and swapped Lucina and Lyn's seals. I also have the summoner supporting Ike (though Lyn would probably be wiser), Ike supporting Nowi, and Lucina supporting Lyn. They were all C rank so pretty negligible all-in-all. The sets here are what I put together with the idea of maximizing score via expensive skills and high stat totals given my available resources. I'm not sure how much difference it made score-wise, but I had to switch out my Y!Tiki+1 for Lyn because playing without any ranged option was not going to happen this week. 

 

[Rafiel's Aria]

Hm...I thought putting Matthew on my defense team would be a problem. (It was just a fun little experiment). He's got the attack power of a pesky mosquito even if Ignis does some damage. (I guess he ends up kind of functioning like Henry. However Henry has more fire power with his tome...but way less speed.)  I suppose he can be rather tricky to kill, especially if he gets his buffs/debuffs going. But he must be doing something right because my Matthew, Ephraim, Nino, Brave Roy team got two more defense wins. Maybe the latter three have really good synergy, and Matthew's completely useless...but I choose to believe he's doing something good. XD

[wizzard of soz]

doing Arena to grind up supports, and i guess my T-Adept Raven Bowbreaker Boey was finished up just in time because 90% of matches have merged Reinhardts and Brave Lyns, sometimes backed by more Horse Emblem. Boey takes care of both of them...except that awkward time Lyn had Cancel Affinity..thankfully he lived because Bowbreaker and still won the match. 
hate going against Horse Emblem though, it's a pain and gives almost no points for the trouble.

i also have seen two Firs, one was +6 merged and the other +7. suddenly Fir fad? i respect it but not enough to pity surrender :P

[Infinite Dreams]

I am having the toughest time getting a deathless Arena Assault run this week!  I might have to lower the points to the 690s for AA because my other guys just can't handle these fights like my regular arena team can.  I'm ready to pull my hair out.  

The 700-712 range feels like it's mostly Horse Emblem on steroids.  CYL Lyn is more of a pain in the butt than Reinhardt now cause she can't be safely baited my anyone on my team.

[Roflolxp54]

Already got a deathless run though it wouldn't be good enough to stay in tier 20. Only seen Brave Lyn once and she was with a Horse Emblem team though she easily got dispatched - her low HP stat made her Res stat meaningless to Reinhardt (provided that Reinhardt initiates on her) if Brave Lyn is not on defensive terrain. And defensive terrain may not protect Brave Lyn at all if it's a QP+Memebow Reinhardt initiating on her.

2 defense wins so far with the highest score being 580.

[Korath88]

I'm currently experimenting with an antimeta TA Raven+Bowbreaker Cecilia build on horse emblem (just promoted her to 5* yesterday)

On a defensive tile, she can kill both Reinhardt and B!Lyn on one enemy phase with full horse buffs.

My defense team of Delthea, Camus, B!Lyn and Ninian has already picked up a defence win.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Korath88

[mampfoid]

Since the Update to 1.7, Arena Assault remembers your last selected Items even after an app-restart, @Ice Dragon

[Korath88]

Just ran into an arena assault team of one Ike and 3 Bikes. Zephiel soloed the map.

I also had Ephraim solo a Lucina emblem team with dancer support (TA Lancebreaker set). That was oddly satisfying.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Korath88

[ignis_z]

Tier 20 and 14 defenses 

[Rezzy]

@Astolfo! @Legion!

Someone really likes Laslow.