What is your preferred play style for Arena?

[Lemmy]

Casual player, I usually stay around 18 and I don’t bother with bonus units or elements. My defense team hasn’t changed in over a year.

For offense I use a mix of speedy special fighter armors and bold fighter armors.

[Hilda]

I just maintain tier 20 or 19 tier in Arena. I stoped caring for tier 21, because why bother? Equiping skills just for the sake of scoring is just dumb and BST will go higher and higher anyways, so unless you constantly invest in new units meh.

[Eltosian Kadath]

So many of the questions are so focused around builds that I find my answers kinda odd. I have maintained a policy of not using Merge of Skill Inheritance on my units, which forces me into the 17-19 range (depending on how I can work with the bonus heroes), and makes it a lot more about tactics, reading enemy teams from the score and displayed units, and building teams that synergize with the Bonus units (although the cancerousness of Legendary Azura is fairly standard, unless a bonus unit dancer seems like a good idea, as is Legendary Roy if the rest of the team works with Azura's Tactics, and his Human virtue)

[XRay]

1 hour ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

So many of the questions are so focused around builds that I find my answers kinda odd. I have maintained a policy of not using Merge of Skill Inheritance on my units, which forces me into the 17-19 range (depending on how I can work with the bonus heroes), and makes it a lot more about tactics, reading enemy teams from the score and displayed units, and building teams that synergize with the Bonus units (although the cancerousness of Legendary Azura is fairly standard, unless a bonus unit dancer seems like a good idea, as is Legendary Roy if the rest of the team works with Azura's Tactics, and his Human virtue)

Getting into Tier 19 with no Merges nor Skill Inheritance is still pretty impressive.

I consider builds to be almost synonymous with tactics. Dance/Sing-Reposition is the bread and butter tactical maneuver of Player Phase teams. Firesweep is a tactical option that counters the vast majority of problematic units.

[Ice Dragon]

@XRay

You missed my playstyle in question 2: Let Surtr handle it.

I've answered "out-of-combat damage" for all of the other questions since my Arena team isn't really player-, enemy-, or dual-phase. I just use Surtr + 2 point sticks (usually Idunn + 1 Legendary) + bonus unit, and whatever team composition that ends up with is the style I use.

[Eltosian Kadath]

6 minutes ago, XRay said:

I consider builds to be almost synonymous with tactics. Dance/Sing-Reposition is the bread and butter tactical maneuver of Player Phase teams. Firesweep is a tactical option that counters the vast majority of problematic units.

Sorry to get a little into semantics here, but I generally consider builds to be in the domain of strategy (more in the logistics portion of strategy), they give you more tactical options, but the tactics themselves are the decisions you make in combat. Having Firesweep is a strategic decision, what you use that firesweep weapon on is tactics.

[XRay]

2 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

@XRay

You missed my playstyle in question 2: Let Surtr handle it.

I've answered "out-of-combat damage" for all of the other questions since my Arena team isn't really player-, enemy-, or dual-phase. I just use Surtr + 2 point sticks (usually Idunn + 1 Legendary) + bonus unit, and whatever team composition that ends up with is the style I use.

Hm... Yeah, that is indeed hard to classify. I guess dual phase is the closest since Surtr can tank a lot of things on Enemy Phase and practically one shot anything near him during Player Phase?

4 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Sorry to get a little into semantics here, but I generally consider builds to be in the domain of strategy (more in the logistics portion of strategy), they give you more tactical options, but the tactics themselves are the decisions you make in combat. Having Firesweep is a strategic decision, what you use that firesweep weapon on is tactics.

Ah, I see.

[Ice Dragon]

29 minutes ago, XRay said:

Hm... Yeah, that is indeed hard to classify. I guess dual phase is the closest since Surtr can tank a lot of things on Enemy Phase and practically one shot anything near him during Player Phase?

The overall strategy isn't really combat-focused, which is what I think makes it hard to classify.

If you only classify based on the builds and the actual rounds of combat, it's definitely dual phase (Surtr is almost exclusively used on enemy phase, Idunn is dual-phase, and the remaining 2 units span the entire spectrum), but the strategy revolves more around positioning and luring enemies into Sinmara's Threaten range rather than how the actual rounds of combat are fought.

[silverserpent]

My main Arena team consists of Dimitri, Itsuki, Nagi, and a rotated bonus unit. It can be played Player Phase, but Nagi usually draws out the first combatant and everything goes from there. Dimitri and Itsuki are both capable of tanking at least one round of EP combat before annihilating their opponent with Aether/Dragon Fang.