Best skills for formation

Hi!

With all the skills, I'm wondering what would be the best skills to have in a formation.

I was thinking maybe health up, imp down, psy down, ipa, ded.

What do you guys think?

I think it depends upon what you want your form to do. The way I'd rank them:

For attack forms:
1. Guild Down
2. IPA / DED
4. HUP
5. PAP

For defense forms:
1. HUP
2. DEA / IPD
4. PHP
5. PDP

Hybrid (if you only want 1 form):
1. HUP
2. IPA / DED
4. Guild down
5. DEA / IPD

I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

FrankF wrote:I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

I agree, and when I lose to someone with a demon down 20, I wish I could tell them, "Don't you realize your skill mix is lousy??"

ryesteve wrote:

FrankF wrote:I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

I agree, and when I lose to someone with a demon down 20, I wish I could tell them, "Don't you realize your skill mix is lousy??"

I'd never use a species down, but I guess if you were to have to pick one single species, Demon seems the most logical due to Ateam's love for demons.

I tend to switch up my defense with species down, ill set a demon down 20 and go attacking to bait them into getting revenge, then tomorrow ill use an undead down 20...doesnt always work but its fun

ryesteve wrote:

FrankF wrote:I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

I agree, and when I lose to someone with a demon down 20, I wish I could tell them, "Don't you realize your skill mix is lousy??"

i run demon down, but then again i built the team specifically for killing demons lol

FrankF wrote:I think it depends upon what you want your form to do. The way I'd rank them:

For attack forms:
1. Guild Down
2. IPA / DED
4. HUP
5. PAP

For defense forms:
1. HUP
2. DEA / IPD
4. PHP
5. PDP

Hybrid (if you only want 1 form):
1. HUP
2. IPA / DED
4. Guild down
5. DEA / IPD

I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

I wouldn't include PAP, PDP as "good skills" for any formation... unless you're talking some sort of ultra specialized low bp form (like if they bring back 15bp tourney; skillchanging your guys to have pap/pdp WILL be superior to traditional ipd/ipa for monsters that low bp/skill total). the fact is that 2k linear increase to stats is a waste of a skill slot unless you're dealing with monsters with very low skill total; indiv stats <8k. because; 25% of 8k is 2k; so anything with 8k+ will benefit more from your traditional ipa/ipd.




everything else (also what everyone else said) is pretty much how I see it too. However; if you aren't interested or can't afford to make multiple specialized anti-guild anti-species formations; the general consensus for the "balanced" jack of all trades, master of none single formation is healthup/ipd/dea/ded/ipa (that's the order in which I personally prioritize them; it may vary from person to person); which basically does pretty well against anything except a specialist form oriented against it.

Re: PAP, has it been confirmed that no other bonuses or multipliers can get applied to it?
And if you plan on hitting first, might not stacking it with ipa be better than using ipa/ipd?

ryesteve wrote:Re: PAP, has it been confirmed that no other bonuses or multipliers can get applied to it?
And if you plan on hitting first, might not stacking it with ipa be better than using ipa/ipd?

I don't know how the ipa/pap interaction works.

However; planning to hit first and actually hitting first are two seperate things. There is always the issue of misses; which on average are not an issue until you run into a battle where your team misses 9 times and ends up losing to something that isnt even a real formation. (Happened to me with my A wyrm form with 20 agi,ipd,dea and i lost to a covert brute team with all <10 skill). And now theres the whole bait form issue. A fair number of people on the rankings have AA forms as main and aa/a agi hybrid teams on def which are actually pretty serious teams (psy winged brutes with wwe, cov wingwyrms with lind) that can absolutely destroy offense-oriented teams on account of first strike. And... now relica with agi modifiers.

If you DO hit first; great, but i think defensive contingency is a must because there is no first strike guarantee unless you random-souled 5 prestrike monsters or something equally absurd

So pap isnt bad per se, but i am hard pressed to think of any scenario where pap is the "optimal" choice.

Heck my ggd has pap. Random skill soul. Might buy some more to try for healthup later but im relatively content using it with pap for the moment; it's better than no skill, or bad skills like crit/heal/etc...

[quote="larry378"]

ryesteve wrote:A fair number of people on the rankings have AA forms as main and aa/a agi hybrid teams on def which are actually pretty serious teams (psy winged brutes with wwe, cov wingwyrms with lind) that can absolutely destroy offense-oriented teams on account of first strike.

I was always wondering why people had the agility monster in their defense forms ruining their combos...I've never lost once to one. I haven't run into the psycho winged brute version though, mostly wyrms.

echoside wrote:

larry378 wrote:

ryesteve wrote:A fair number of people on the rankings have AA forms as main and aa/a agi hybrid teams on def which are actually pretty serious teams (psy winged brutes with wwe, cov wingwyrms with lind) that can absolutely destroy offense-oriented teams on account of first strike.

I was always wondering why people had the agility monster in their defense forms ruining their combos...I've never lost once to one. I haven't run into the psycho winged brute version though, mostly wyrms.

TLDR version at bottom

depends on which permutation of the hybrid team you run into. the old "cheap" cov hybrid wingwyrm team with wingarm/terra/demo/sky/lind isn't very threatening... the full moon/vanity/scales/wingarm(skillchanged)/lind one is pretty tough.

This is also highly contingent on what formation you yourself are running. if you are running an "offensively oriented" formation like winged wyrms yourself; agi defense teams can ruin your day.

i.e. my winged wyrm form with raminas/banish/moonc(dea)/gorger(pap)/kanna has stats of 105/85/78; and in a 5AA v 5AA fight beat (with exception of bizzare rng situations [consecutive misses, or recieving consecutive criticals]) just about anything it attacks first against so long as the opponent formation does not have Health Up, Impulse Down, AND Decrease Enemy Attack; any 2 of the former can be handled in a close fight, but all 3 on a sufficiently high bp formation (say 160 bp) and I'm toast.

Basically; they can output enough damage on account of wings and generally attack-skewed stat orientation for wyrms when they attack first to penetrate most defensive skills and knock enough enemy members out in round 1 to take a loss or two in the counterattack and finish the fight in a later round by retaining
A. more fielded monsters than the opponent, and
B. relatively high per-monster attack.

on the other hand; due to the paper thin hp wyrms have 78k hp for an AA form is decidedly LOW; they are very vulnerable to being attacked first. I mean sure, I win some of my defensive battles, but that's against low bp AA teams (<150) or non-maxed skill AA teams, or low combo (only rarity and level). but against another ~160 team with 4-5(20)s, I'll lose when defending.

That being said; AA wyrms, much like sin winged A demons are an offensive formation; which can beat "better" balanced teams in terms of bp, skill distribution when attacking first, but will lose to equivalent and/or lesser balanced teams when defending.

for example; when I am attacking.
5AA psycho winged brute team WITHOUT SKILL CHANGES: I can beat (Amiyla, Nagi, Tlon, Ast, Gala),
but slap DEA on Tlon, Ast, or Gala, and I'm toast.
Psycho winged brute AA/A hybrid team WITHOUT SKILL CHANGES: will beat me (Amiyla, Nagi, Ast, Tlon, WWE) will beat me

I certainly do NOT recommend wyrms as an AA formation if you're looking for good battle formation. they don't even fit what I personally consider to be the optimal balanced skillset of hpup/ipd/dea/ded/ipa on account of lacking hpup (which I'm *working on* with random skill souls on my ggd, but that's a long term plan that could realistically cost dozens of random souls, and hundreds if not thousands of ep); I've prioritized Ash/ipa as a final purchase because adding him is a nominal gain to already high attack and I doubt that'll make a major functional difference and have rather been focusing on trying to best mitigate the defensive shortcomings of the formation (e.g. dea on MoonC which was a noticeable improvement, and distinctly expanded the number of formations I could beat which I formerly had trouble with).
They're just aesthetically my favorite AA formation; I think the wyrms look cool. I mean they're dragons, dragons are imo the quintessential fantasy creature; and I think as a comprehensive formation, there are more wyrms than demons or beasts or whatever that I think look good together rather than maybe 1 or 2 demons I like or hmmm this beast is pretty neat, etc...


TLDR
So basically; AA/A agi formations. Not really a threat unless you are using offensive oriented formations that are contingent on first strike; but if you ARE using an attack skewed low def/hp form, an AA/A agi hybrid can be quite dangerous

Ah, a flaw to glass cannon forms. Take that you silly 5x Combo teams with no Health Up...

faithnomorex wrote:Ah, a flaw to glass cannon forms. Take that you silly 5x Combo teams with no Health Up...

funny thing actually, I got the idea to get into AA wyrms mainly because I really enjoyed using A wyrms which were a particularly defensive oriented A formation lol (A form with ipd, dea, no ded or ipa like most other A forms, defensive stat skew (relative to other A forms)). imagine my surprise when I didn't really stat calculator my intended form, and completed it and realized it was kind of the opposite of what I expected lol

larry378 wrote:

faithnomorex wrote:Ah, a flaw to glass cannon forms. Take that you silly 5x Combo teams with no Health Up...

funny thing actually, I got the idea to get into AA wyrms mainly because I really enjoyed using A wyrms which were a particularly defensive oriented A formation lol (A form with ipd, dea, no ded or ipa like most other A forms, defensive stat skew (relative to other A forms)). imagine my surprise when I didn't really stat calculator my intended form, and completed it and realized it was kind of the opposite of what I expected lol

Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite with my jump from A to AA. I used the demon killer A cov wyrm team (60k atk vs. 37k def/40k hp ), and ended up with with a tanky covert AA demon team (Health Up, IPD, DEA, Psy down, Imp down).

There are no "best skill" in formation because all formation has weakness. However I can tell you majority of the player will use IPA/DEA/DED/HP/IPD in their form as mainstream form.
Guild / species are more the specialize form if you intend to make revenge upon them to feel ur wrath. However if u are non-Impulse guild...usually Impulse Dwn is very useful to substitute IPD since there are alot of Impulse player and they tend to be agressive.

sel wrote:There are no "best skill" in formation because all formation has weakness. However I can tell you majority of the player will use IPA/DEA/DED/HP/IPD in their form as mainstream form.
Guild / species are more the specialize form if you intend to make revenge upon them to feel ur wrath. However if u are non-Impulse guild...usually Impulse Dwn is very useful to substitute IPD since there are alot of Impulse player and they tend to be agressive.

I'm only a little above level 80, so maybe things are different at level 120+... but if I'm attacking, I'd rather have guild down's 20% decrease in enemy attack and defense than DEA/DED's 25% reduction in only one. Of course, this assumes that bait forms of a different guild than the defense form are uncommon, that multi-guild forms are uncommon, and that you generally attack more than you defend. Are any of these assumptions violated at higher levels?

nope it does not violate at higher level. Eveyone plays differently no matter what level.

sel wrote:There are no "best skill" in formation because all formation has weakness. However I can tell you majority of the player will use IPA/DEA/DED/HP/IPD in their form as mainstream form.
Guild / species are more the specialize form if you intend to make revenge upon them to feel ur wrath. However if u are non-Impulse guild...usually Impulse Dwn is very useful to substitute IPD since there are alot of Impulse player and they tend to be agressive.

hmmm if you had the official statistics on every single player and formation I guess there would have to be a "best skill" and "best skill set"... I mean it would be one hell of a number crunch, but there have to be skills which statistically have greater impact on average than others...

Like if we could figure out the absolute average formation's attack/defense it would be possible to see if ipa/dea or ipd/ded have the greater modifier to party and opponent stats... kind of like it is widely accepted that impulse down>psycho down>covert down because imp down will actually be relevant more often than psycho, and psycho more often than covert purely on account of a greater impulse population, and smallest covert population of players. And similar with species down... demon>brute>beast>others because of prevalence and popularity of the species types relative to each other.


I mean it won't really matter if you just choose your battle very specifically... like if you have covert down, and ONLY fight covert people, everything will probably work out very well for you in general; same with a anti species/guild formation but i think if you could compare every single formation that every single player has against each other, I'm pretty sure by definition there must be an optimal skill set which might beat the 2nd best skillset by a fraction of a percentage, but I'm pretty sure by definition there has to be a best overall possible combination even if it's not significantly noticeably better than the runner ups

I am Tyranny and lv 105. I believe all the tyranny players will face similar battle history (assuming you battle randomly as much as possible - I try to battle AA+ team more than A+ team). The sample base on 58 battles that I started.

73% (sin players with sin monsters)
13% (covert players with covert monsters)
14% (mix sin n covert that uses out of guild monsters)

To break down more
26% sin demon (both A+/AA+ team)
15% sin brute (AA+ team - most likely due to cheap sin aa brutes like jill, kaya)
13% covert mystic (AA+ team)
13% sin wyrm (both A+/AA+ team)
7% sin undead (mix A+/AA+ team)
7% sin beast (mix A+/AA+ team)
The rest is too mix to break down. I did not see a single covert wyrm or beast team (a+ or aa+)- so not sure what happen there. I was assuming that they are popular formation. Possible that they are not popular team for player around my level.

Base on above data, and even with small data size, I must say imp down is the most important skill for me.


Update:
I should mention how I pick my opponent. I started out picking the highest bp or AA+ leader form out of top 3 on my battle screen. Then I changed my requirement to min of 100bp sometime later (don't remember when). I did not keep track of how many of main formations do not match the defense formations but most of the time main is the same as defense.

Agility. ipa ipd ded dea

only 13% of coverts use covert monsters ? that cant be right. not debating if your sample is correct but id guess that number is much much higher ..

zeethee wrote:only 13% of coverts use covert monsters ? that cant be right. not debating if your sample is correct but id guess that number is much much higher ..

It is, because that's not what he was saying

FrankF wrote:I think it depends upon what you want your form to do. The way I'd rank them:

For attack forms:
1. Guild Down
2. IPA / DED
4. HUP
5. PAP

For defense forms:
1. HUP
2. DEA / IPD
4. PHP
5. PDP

Hybrid (if you only want 1 form):
1. HUP
2. IPA / DED
4. Guild down
5. DEA / IPD

I'm heavily discounting species down because it's very specific. YMMV.

1,2,4,5 sry no offence, just want to remind u to learn to count lol

Personally, I find that I fight 80% Sin players, no joke. The 20% remaining are Rancor.
Of that 80% Sin, I can say for sure that more than 50% of them utilise Demon formations, which is why I include Tlon+M(20) in my formation, to give them a surprise when they attack.
The other cookie-cutter skills are what I'm aiming for after that, IPA, DEA, DED and stuff like that.
But IMO, there is no true "best" formation skills, it has to be individualised. If you're being beat on by plenty of Sin players, then get Impulse Down. If you're getting beaten by Tyranny players, get Psycho Down. Pretty simple.