Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Battle Decks Re-Vamped

Placement is just as important as skill


It's very important to remember that the order you place your cards within your decks is just as important as the skill it self! Through trial and error, I've discovered this is extremely important if you want to win and win often.

First off make sure you start a deck from scratch if this is first time. So remove any pre-existing decks you may have. This is how your deck will look once it's arranges. Slot 1 represents the first card you pick to go in your deck.

If you're unsure how to get to the [edit screen], take a look at the pic below



Skill Activation


In each deck that you create, you have to be conscious of card placement. Up to 3 skills can activate in a battle. Although activation is random, the order in which the skills activate is always the ascending order of when you placed the cards in your custom decks.

When forming a custom deck you must pay attention to the following:

First off, the skill has be one that actually can activate in your regular attack deck for those of you editing this one. For example, HW skills (big boost to wall damage) and Def skills (big hit to attack all or medium boost to def) will not work in your regular attack deck. So if you insist on using Principality or Wraith in your attack deck you have to place them in the last slot.

Reason being, whichever card you place in Slot 1 has a 100% chance of activating if the conditions I just spoke of are met. So Slot 1 skill no matter what, will always activate for you.


[Pic 1, 2 & 3] Notice whether its one, two or three skills that activate, whichever is slot 1, will always activate first. The pics above and below in this deck has ifrit in slot one.


[Pic 2 & 3]: When the max amount of possible skills activate (3), they still follow the ascending 'slot order' they were placed in the custom deck


[Pic 3:] Even when using the recommended attack deck, the skills will go off in the ascending order they were placed in your deck.

Skill Activation Probability


So I'm sure by now you've figured out by now that the deck in [Pics 1 & 2] not only has 2 cards with skills that can't be activated during regular attacks (Cybele -big boost to all def & Ares -Big Boost to Wall Damage), but it has Ares in slot 3. You want to use all cards that have skills that can be utilized during your battle. So in this case, Ares should be in slot 4. Since Silver Fox has a higher of chance of activating when in slot 3, than a card in slot 4 or 5 (Which shows Silver Fox in Slot 4)


The probability of skill activation is determined mainly by slot placement. Over the past couple weeks, I used the attack deck shown in Pic 4 to attack my high ranking god opponent's decks. I switched around the slot placement for each of the 5 cards. The following stats are based on a complete analysis of 125 attacks total. Rather than pursue a foolhardy attempt to attack with every possible combination of the 5 cards, I tried a simplified rotation approach. By cycling the cards through each of the 5 slots (25x) to gain a better understand when and what frequency are skills triggered?

These were my approximate findings:

  • Slot 1: 100% chance of activating

  • Slot 2: 50% chance of activating

  • Slot 3: 40% chance of activating

  • Slot 4: 30% chance of activating

  • Slot 5: 20% chance of activating
Side Note: In the decks featured in Pics 1 & 2, there's a skill that decreases a specific type of foe stats in slot 1 (Thor- Great hit to gods & Gilgamesh- Great hit to man). That skill will have the same activation probability as any other. For example, Thor in slot one will still trigger even if the opposition doesn't have a God in their deck.

After performing an additional 100 attacks on my feeder account (using either less than 5 cards or cards without a useable attack skill), I pretty amazed by how much thought is put in to battling. I found that the probability of skill activation decreases around 5% in probability for each slot 2 and higher listed above.

Again, these were based solely on my findings.



Skill Prioritizing:


So how do you know which skills to prioritize?

For that you need to do the math based on the following skill percentages:


Here's an example:

★ Regarding Comment 。。。
↦ bigpoppafluff said...
ok zuki, I need some help. Im the atk leader for our order. Should I go with the highest atk I can Or with the best skills I have? My highest atk is 81650. with my highest atk Im not a full god deck. (master sam)

My best skills are:
grt boost to god atk (valk)
big boost to god atk (ifrit)
big hit to def all (Maya)
big hit to man def (titan)
big boodt to hw points (Princi)

any advice would be nice.

Thanks
IGN-bigpoppafluff ↤★

Happy to help & sorry for the late reply. You ask a great question. However, there is no sure fire answer to this rule bc both can be equally important from an opinion stand point.

However, the math doesn't lie. Select the menu option in this blog titled: [Skill Boosting], there's a full chart there that explains every type of cards possible skill combo and what percent the boost output will be for those cards.

Skill level is another important component when deciding upon what cards to use in your deck. For each level (over level 1) up you increase, the card's boost percentage increases by 1%.

Another contributing factor cygames has led us to believe (in their FAQ section within the game) is the higher the skill level, the higher the potential of skill activation. Lastly, I'm sure every ragetrades subscriber knows that where you place your card within your deck is also equally important.

Not knowing your skill levels, I can provide an example with the cards you've listed above at skill level 1 & 4-6 Evos

★ Let's say worse comes to worse and only one attack skill goes off, which would always be your [slot 1] card.

Here's what you need to remember:

There isn't a one size fits all for battle decks! They give you up to 5 for a reason. Use this to your advantage.

Try and play the odds by going not only on how high you can attack, but also how much you can drain from your opponent before their def boosting skills take effect! In which case, any boost they will receive will be based off their lowered base defense.

If they were my cards, I would proceed with the following:

if using mobile, tilt to landscape view.

Hope this update helps! Be sure to check out the Skill Boosting Section to gain a better understanding of how skills are calculated and how the boosts work.

Important info about Def Decks


Be sure to place your customized deck at a higher priority than your "recommended" defense deck. Otherwise, the deck will always prioritize by highest base def amount instead of skill.

Skill Calculation w/Buffs:


It is now my understanding that you can calculate the total weight of a current battle in order of the appearance of buffs or debuffs in the battle animation. Starting with order and realm alignments, then going back and forth with the opponent. So if you have two boosters such as ifrit and Valkyrie. Which ever one shows up first is calculated off the base attack. Then as long as your opponent didn't set off an attack drainer, the following boost is calculated from the previous boost total. This can be a double edged sword Bc you might want to place your skills towards the end so they effect all of your cards, problem is they don't trigger at the same frequency as cards set to go off earlier.

drain fires before before their boost, they're boost will be calculated based off that reduced base, rather than their original number.

Make sure you do the math on your cards (include the skill level in math • 1% more than the chart graph shows above).

Also many people underestimate the power of a (realm or non realm) specific def drainer. When a def drainer skill (Gilgamesh(15%), Thor(15%), Sanada Yukimara(15%), Date Matsume(20%), Sephirot(15%), Ark Dragon(13%), triggers before an opponent's def booster, the percentage is taken from the actual base. Therefore, any boost they get on their def is given to the reduced value.

17 comments:

Vincent said...

Thanks so much for the clarification about the percentages for slots 2-5. I've always thought that 2 & 3 were the same and that 4 & 5 as well.

Unknown said...

One thing I've heard before and from my experience "seems" to be true: When attacking a stronger deck you get more skills to go off then when attacking weaker decks. Maybe its just a myth, but it does seem that when I attack decks weaker than mine I usually only get my 1st skill to activate. Sometimes I get a second skill. When attacking stronger decks it seems that I usually get two skills and often 3 skills getting activated.

Anybody ever notice this? Or is it truly random?

Unknown said...

Zuks,

Great Article!

I've got a couple of questions.

1) How do you put together a decent defense deck seeing as you don't know who realm wise will attack you? I assume there's no way to set up realm specific def decks.

2) Could you run through a step by step calculation that would illustrate the turn by turn sequence and the way boosts are calculated (off of base, stacked etc.) For example, could you run it for two players both in the God realm, both in an order, having the following decks atk: reshef, alluring angel, agni, kratos, gold fox; def: rhea, vayu, rhea, Rhea, lampetia assuming the first three cards listed for eacj all activate, their skill levels are 1, and they are all 6/10 max final forms?

Thank you so much in advance. I really appreciate it.

Regard
Connor

Anonymous said...

You've provided some interesting information here, and I appreciate you sharing your work and research with other gamers. However, I do believe you are mistaken on one point. Based on our order's testing, we've found that the animations really have nothing to do with the way in which boosts and hits are calculated.

We've found the pre-battle boosts such such as attack leader, realm match and order boosts are first applied. This creates the base ATK and DEF totals for the battle. The skills of the cards that are activated in the battle are resolved against THOSE totals and seem to do so concurrently, thus there is no actual stacking of buffs or debuffs.

We could be wrong, but we've gone over this in many different scenarios. Your thoughts?


IGN Wallshot

Unknown said...

Where did you get the info that your debuff hits them before their buffs? Because we have been testing this as well... and so far we havent been able to prove it works. If you have some kind of evidence, I would love to see it so we can combine our research efforts...

Incom said...

Hey Missy!

I just wanted to come in and clarify a mathematical issue again, please don't hate me. :)

It doesn't matter in which order a drain or a buff is executed. I will explain why, but it basically comes down to basic math. You surely remember the order in which you calculate different arithmetic expressions. Like 5+5*5 equates to 30 instead of 50 because you muliply before you add. But since this (draining and debuffin) is both about division/multiplication it doesn't matter in which order you calculate it.

Example 1:
100 K attack.
I have a 25% buffer.
Foe has a 20% debuffer.

100*1.25 = 125 K.
125 K *0.8 = 100K.

Example 2:
100K defence
I have a 25% buffer.
Foe has a 20 K debuffer.

100 K * 0.8 = 80 K.
80K * 1.25 = 100 K.

Have a nice day.

Unknown said...

Regarding the above post...

Your conclusion is inaccurate. Zuk's theory seems sound. In each example you have the same equation what Zuk had said is that there is a difference between their buffer activating on their base def and their buffer affecting their now already debuffed defence. You provided what would happen if you already hit them while they were debuffed.

What Zuk is trying to say is that when you affect a person's defense while you are attacking them it is more effective than when you are increasing your att.

Battle 1
you: 100k attack
add 20% att and you get 120k att

opp: 100k defense
adds 20% defense and they have 120k def

^^^^^DRAW

Battle 2
you: 100k att
hit opp defense 20% they lose 20k def

opp: 100k def(now have 80 after your hit)
Increases their 80k defense by 20% they are now are at 96k

^^^^^WIN!

It all comes down to the soundness of this theory though. But the fact of the matter is that the theory is not who's skills activate first it's the fact that if you use defense debuffers then you'll have an advantage. So YOU have a nice day! :)

Unknown said...

I've just realized that you, incom, is just the type of person that doesn't research nonetheless read because your comment on skill boosting is completly irrelevant as well. When you told Zuk'z that her math is usually offf and that there was obviously a problem with her ifrit giving a total of 34% att boosting power.. She specifically said that her ifrit gains 34% because of it's boost and all the other boosts such as order boost, att leader boost, realm allignment boost etc... Therefore her Ifrit WOULD have a 34% boost. Your comment about getting hired to do her mathematical endevours goes completly out the window once you realize YOU'RE the one missing stuff not anyone else LOL!

Unknown said...

sorry! ^ where it says is towards the beginning of that rant it is supposed to be are. as in "you are an ignorant person"

Dan Lim said...

Oo this is a good spot for info, I've visited often when I first started out (thanks!) so I'm surprised you don't know the way attack / defense is calculated.

It works like this:

1. Add 1 point to your total att/def for every card in your deck.
2. Multiply by order bonus (5%) and by att/def minister bonus if applicable (5%)
3. Add realm boost and all skill boosts and minus all debuffs

That's your exact total and exactly how it works. There'll be a bit of rounding of course as we don't have fractions in the game. Try it out on your own deck when you attack someone.

Eg. You have a deck of 5 4-6 Claymaids. For ease of calculation they are all skill 8 (which is 20% boost to man). You are also man realm and an attack leader, and the order has built all buildings.

Base attack = 87105.
Step 1. 5 cards in deck so 87105+5 = 87110.
Step 2a. Order building bonus: 87110 * 1.05 = 91465.5
Step 2b. Attack leader bonus: 91465.5 * 1.05 = 96038.78
Step 3. Realm boost 5% and assuming 3 Claymaids go off that's another 20% + 20% + 20% for a total of 65%. So 96038.78 * 1.65 giving you the final attack total of 158464.

If the defender had a 20% debuff then the total would have ended up being 5% + 20% + 20% + 20% - 20%, 45%. So 96038.78 * 1.45 = 139256.

Ta da!

Just do the exact same calculation for the defender.

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...
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shameless101 said...

Awesome article! Perhaps it's time for me to stock up on Gawains....(Baltraz is just stupid expensive...)

Unknown said...

Why exactly do they have pre designated defense decks labelled "anti-mortal," "anti-divine," and "anti-demonic" if the decks do not activate according to the opposing player's realm? What is the point if the deck that has highest priority will always activate?

Unknown said...

P.s. your blog has been extremely helpful. Thank you :)

ryandroeder said...

Hey Miz, great work! Just wanted to clarify the proc percentages you listed and explain what I found after collecting data from over 700 attacks! Your % are very close to accurate and they are based on a very simple formula:

Card 1 procs 100% of the time and after that it's a little different. The chance for a second card to proc is 50%, starting with the 2nd card of the deck. If it does not fire, the 3rd card has a 50% chance and etc. Thus, the chance of your top card firing alone is only 6.25% if you have 5 cards with skills in your deck. If a 2nd skill does fire, then the same process is used to determine whether a 3rd proc will fire but the percentage drops to 25%. So if the top 2 skills fire, the 3rd card will have a 25% chance to proc and if it fails it's off to the 4th card at 25%, etc.

Hope that wasn't too confusing. So the "real" percentages for a 5 skilled card deck is:

Card 1 = 100%
Card 2 = 50%
Card 3 = 37.5%
Card 4 = 28.13%
Card 5 = 21.09%

And just as a reference, here are some proc situations for a 5 skilled card deck:

Just Card 1 = 6.25%
Card 1 + Card 2 = 21.09%
Card 1 + Card 2 + Card 3 = 12.5%
Card 1 + Card 3 = 14.06%

Hope this helps!!!

peteypanpetey said...

I am interested to know how def point reduction works in battle (for example in a holy war where leader leaders are usually attacked multiple times in succession). And will lower cost decks automatically enable as points reduce if they are higher priority than the recommended deck?