blah i've been grinding away for weeks and feel like i've lost all motiviation to battle or really just want to be on here :

[edit] Were getting a lot of activity on this chat. I added a spoiler to the first post to retain the fanciful box contents. Let me know if there's something else relevant you think we should add. If its an existing post - existing sCode is appreciated :p [/edit]

I've started saving Haneul's EXP, I'm not sure if I should use more of it on health at the moment, but I did just use a lot to get his health to where it is. I'm also hoarding Amulets and Tomes at the moment.

The content for the god boxes under the spoiler as well would be nice.

Oh! Yeah, that is going to be in the brand new section of the guide! It will have plenty of visual aids to show off each of those aspects. I plan on using more effective visual aids in hopes that it helps guide players rather than just reading a bunch of words. Thank you for the feedback! ^^

@ Ispahan Hi there! Those are some good thoughts (it can be hard for us to remember the beginning days of confusion haha) Tier 5 is a tier I remember though, because there are some very expensive new toys there that are nice to have in the later tiers, you can definitely end up spending a fortune xD

I'm kind of garbage at writing, but would this be the kind of thing you were thinking of?

Our first 2 turns in a battle are for set up - we first want our opponent frozen so they miss a turn, which allows us to use our setup items, which have no defense on them. So we use our Gorgun, along with our Rainbow Quill for some defense, or our Bauble Bomb if we'd rather do some big damage

Once they're frozen we can use our Recycle Blaster and Shrine of Apollonia, so they're missing a weapon, and we get 10 turns of extra defense (though it only blocks 10 Wind, Earth, and Dark icons! Maybel happens to use both Earth and Dark though, so it's nice)

Then we just use 2 of our weapons until they die, keeping an eye on our HP while doing so, if they hit us hard we can use our UltimaPlus Tag to recover

Hey, we did it. Though we were lucky in that she didn't freeze us - some battles can be lost purely to RNG. Once you battle a fair amount you can begin to tell if a loss was bad luck, or if the opponent is just out of your league for now ;)

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Decided to try for 5 wins to see how it felt - 8 losses and 2 ties along the way so it definitely takes persistence, and you're not necessarily doing something wrong if you lose 3 of these losses were from her landing critical hits (her speed is quite higher than Mr Flibble so crits are to be expected), and 2 more were from her freezing turn after turn until we died The wins came in when 1) She didn't freeze me turn 1, and 2) Didn't land large hits when her curse had disabled one of my weapons I started taking more risks for wins 4 and 5 - letting my hp get lower before I used my heals to get in more damage, and using the bomb rather than the Quill turn 1, then I just ground out the RNG :)

While a set of better weapons would have made these wins easier, it wouldn't be by much. The things I missed most were the phoenix quill, and a weapon with a heal The quill is quite cheap for what it does, and % based so it will ALWAYS be useful, while the wand was my pickup of choice back when Tarrant was T5, as I wanted to make the Reborn Icewand of Doom for T6 (which is really good for a good few tiers, some people don't replace it until T8 or 9) [/spoiler]

Hey, if the battle admins are lurking... As an aside, why doesn't Lukien drop tomes at win 10/15/25 like every other secret opponent? He's arguably one of the most difficult challengers around (behind maybe para RB), and he drops diddly squat past win 5.

For that matter why don't the Super challengers drop loot, have tomes past 10 (or earlier) or have achievements?

I remembered some other disappointments while I did a modest tome grind, these lower guys are missing goodies too :(

Waradorstiltskin Gingembromme Torroweep Insight Mother Mallarchy Rimeflare Hatchling Ancient Sphinx Xotl Prince

The MC challengers were excluded from tomes/amulets from the start. Not sure why that was done.

I saw that you were making improvements to your battling guide, thanks for that! Just a few suggestions if you are looking for feedback:

You talk about how to add weapons into your armory, but then jump into the advance section of battling to talk about scrolls. I would reorder this to talk about how to make a battle set right after you talk about how to move weapons into your armory, then talk about scrolls. For the weapon sets, you want to mention the different types of weapons (infinite use, single use, freezer, healer, etc) and how you can only equip one each of stealers, freezers and healers to your set.

You also might want to break up the guide into beginner, intermediate and advanced with headers for each so people know what to expect to find information on in each section. Intermediate battling I would say are things like getting battle tokens from quests and buying items from the battle shop (which items to buy, how to convert tokens, etc), the formulas for doing damage/defending icons with an example, what a typical battle set looks like, what farming means and why to do it, how critical hits work, and how to unlock more opponents/the different opponent tabs. I would also mention how tiers affect what weapons you could use. Linking the loot tracker sheet and opponent guide Jess has might be a good idea.

Types of scrolls and how to build scroll sets is good for the advance section. Things like pylonics, shards, and potions are good to mention in the advance section. In the crystal mod section, I would mention how each weapon has a different number of mod slots and list out what each mod does instead of linking another source. I think it will be less confusing that way.

Other things you can add in advance battling would maybe be the scroll guide sov put together, talking about endgame sets (this will depend on a person's budget but that they generally want to have various weapons that cover a range of different icons), and how some weapons do different things depending on stats and tier. Talking about build types can be a little tricky. I would talk about what a good strategy is for training your first pet. For example, I think most of us evenly trained pets up until x tier before we started to boost a single stat based on our results fighting different opponents and which stat we thought we needed more of. In general, high intel is always good because you can equip more scrolls to cover the gaps in your armory. High health means a high buffer to absorb damage for long battles and heal for more (until the healing cap). Most people choose higher health for their first pet for these reasons. "higher" could be anywhere from 1k+ higher than the other stats. Then maybe you can talk about training multiple pets and experimenting with different builds.

Maybe also mention having a goal in mind when battling to plan for your end build. Is your goal to have a pet that can beat all opponents? Beat all BQs? Participate in site events and do the most damage? Farm opponents and compete on the HST? Budget and build will look different depending on your goal for your pet.

oh and acronyms! We throw those around a lot and people get confused so it might be good to list or link all the commonly used ones.

Sorry for the wall of text!

We talked about it recently, but if this is more likely to be seen, lets say it again.

It be great if CSC challengers also fit the amulet and tome drop pattern of the Normal and Secret challengers.

I forgot about the battle shop completely! xD Goodness, that's an oversight i didn't consider at all. But yes, I will be relabeling the headers to beginner and advanced. I'm going to make it so that it flows from basic to advanced naturally.

I'm going to be trimming down the jargon list to very basic stuff and frequently mentioned terms.

@ colddragon Yes....I bought these opponents, now give me incentive to keep battling them past 10 wins.

Good luck!

I think the reasoning for that was similar to the reason why the Cash Shop challengers don't have extra loot drops either, because you have to pay for them I guess. Even though the MC challengers aren't super expensive.

Yeah, but I felt you had more of reason to get extra loot because you paid.

Originally CSC items couldn't be seen to generate Sp. Forj line of challengers didn't drop sp with exp for 10 wins because of that. That's been changed long ago so.....

Yeah I'm not saying I necessarily agree with it, just that that was part of the reasoning. It would be something to bring up with the admins I suppose (the BAs and I guess site admins in general).

pokes and casually

Can we have CS opponents drop stuff past 10 wins like amulets and tomes? Pretty please? puppy dog eyes

(I would of course be in favor of drops past 10 for CSC challengers, given they're essentially useless past 10 wins unless you have multiple pets. But at the very least, Lukien is a totally normal unlockable challenger. Give him loot.)