Summoners War – Ultimate Beginners Guide to PVP

Beginner PVP Guide

By Diliskar.

This is a guide on how to get into PvP once you’re done with PvE progression in this game. In a sense it is a continuation of Beginner playthrough.

What is PVP?

At this point in the game there is a ton of different PvP content out there. It’s really easy to get lost. But the great part about it is that you don’t have to do all of it, and just focus on what is fun for you. It is important though to know what’s out there, as investment priorities, teambuilding, and runes could potentially be very different.

Whenever you ask a PvP question, make sure you include the specific PvP area that you are interested in. For example, “how do I rune Julie” is a horrible question. “How do I rune Julie for arena” is a bit better but still not good. “How do I rune Julie to use with Bernard Megan Lushen on AO, and is this Julie also useable for siege offense?” Now you’re talking…

There’s roughly 3 broad spheres of PvP content in this game. Arena, Siege, and RTA (Real Time Arena). A lot of people come into this game thinking they are not interested in PvP, but really out of those 3 areas, only RTA is what a lot of people are truly afraid of. RTA is the only “live” content where you are playing against another real person in real time. Everything else – Arena, Siege, Guild Battles – is done asynchronously, which means you set up some defense team for other people to hit at a time of their choosing, and you hit other people’s defenses which is controlled by the AI at a time of your choosing. There’s much less anxiety here and oftentimes the defending player is not even aware that you attacked them (and therefore NOT pointing and laughing at you if you lose).

Besides, there’s lots of rewards tied to arena and siege, so everyone should do the content even if they don’t plan on playing it competitively. Thus the focus of this series will be on arena and siege, although eventually I will get into RTA as well.

The following is a brief overview of all the different PvP areas:

Arena

Arena is the oldest PvP content out there. Because it’s the oldest, it does carry some prestige, and when people talk about PvP level or rank they generally are referring to your best Arena finish. The “finish” is the important part here – it resets every week on Sunday night, and the last hour (or really, last 10-20 minutes) is what’s known as “rush hour” and basically what determines your rank. If rush hour is in the middle of the night for you – sucks, but there’s not much you can do about it.

Arena can be broken down to AO (Arena offense) and AD (Arena defense).

Since rush hour is all about doing a lot of attacks in a short amount of time, the speed at which you can beat defs is just as critical as being able to beat the def itself. For the most part, all good AOs will be some sort of cleave or nuke team. The term “cleave” as a generic term in video games refers to an attack that hits multiple enemies – specifically in SW, it’s used a bit more loosely as just a team that kills the entire enemy def quickly and within only a few moves.

Even outside of rush hour, if you just consider doing your arena wings throughout the week to farm glory points – it makes sense that any farming team should be fast, just like any speed dungeon team.

When it comes to AD, this is probably the only area in the entire game where the monsters matter a lot more than their runes. The primary goal of AD is to simply discourage other players from choosing to attack you, and the only information a player has when deciding whether or not to attack you is the 4 monster team itself. An AD that wins 30% of the time and gets hit 10 times is worse than an AD that has a 0% win rate but only gets hit 3 times.

The rewards for arena itself are pretty bad. It’s only 1-2 hundred crystals a week for most people at the conq ranks. There’s also an LD 3* reward for guardian ranks and an LD 4* for legend… but practically everyone capable of reaching guardian already has all the LD nat 3’s anyway. However, as mentioned before, you still want to build a decent AO regardless in order to farm for glory points throughout the week. Previously while still doing PvE it was recommended to set up a 1 monster farming def to trade wins, but if you set up a real AD and stay in conq ranks throughout the week, you can earn more glory points per win (6 per win at conq, versus only 4 per win at challenger).

But more importantly, success in arena gets you placed into Interserver Arena (ISA)… where the rewards are actually quite good. You can check in game for yourself to see what they look like, but basically it’s equivalent to a ton of scrolls each week, and even reapps as part of season rewards.

To qualify for ISA and to be eligible for the season rewards which includes reapps, you must place in top 10k arena on the qualifying week (each season lasts 8 weeks). If you’re not in the top 10k and you don’t qualify for ISA, you’ll still get 25 attacks each week which you can do for a few scroll rewards, but you won’t get the season reapp rewards.

While ISA shares the same format as regular arena (teams of 4 monsters), it actually does not play out like regular arena. There is no time factor in ISA (no rush hour), and also you cannot skip any ADs. You’re given 25 ADs to hit each week of ISA and you can’t just choose not to hit them and refresh your list like you can in regular arena. This means that if you want to do your best, you may not want to use the same cleave teams you have for regular arena (although you certainly can especially if you don’t care and want to save time). Many people end up using slower but safer bruiser style teams in ISA.

Siege and World Guild Battle

Siege is the most rewarding and easiest of the PvP content to get into. At higher levels there are frustrations with the content being boring and tedious, since serious guilds tend to coordinate their defenses to all be the same – forcing you to hit the same defs over and over again. This is why it is common to build lots of dupes of the same monsters for offense, which is also very boring. But at lower levels this doesn’t really happen, and everyone should invest in a few siege teams so they can at least reliably get those easy crystals and guild points each week, even if they don’t care to be competitive in this content.

Siege happens twice a week and you are matched with 2 other guilds on your server in a 1v1v1 format. You are allowed to use 30 different monsters in each siege, so that usually means 10 attacks of 3 monster teams. Siege offense is not as simple as building 10 different teams though, as you generally want to tailor specific teams to the exact defense you’re hitting. Some generic offense teams that can be used into many different things do exist, but the higher up you go the less you’ll find this to be true. Ideally you want a large collection of different options to deal with whatever different defs the opposing guild may have on defense.

For siege defense, you can create up to 10 different defs, but since they are limited to being placed in towers on the map, realistically the average player should aim to only set 2-4 defs. It’s much better to have a few strong defs than a lot of weaker ones.

World Guild Battle (otherwise known as GW or ISGW – “interserver guild war”) has the exact same 3v3 format as siege and is played out pretty much the same way. It’s also twice a week and you match up with 1 guild from any server. In each GW you get to hit 2 different opposing players who each have 5 defenses, for a total of also 10 attacks per GW.

GW gives you a decent amount of summoning stones as rewards.

RTA (World Arena)

RTA (real time arena). otherwise known as World Arena, is the most hardcore end-game PvP content in this game. It’s a 1v1 in real time against a real player from any server in the game. For some people, this is the only content that matters, and rightly so – there are official tournaments with cash prizes held for this game mode.

RTA is frustrating for a lot of people. It can be hard to get into especially as a newer player since there are so many out there who have been collecting runes and rare monsters for years (or spending heavily for them). There’s lots of luck and RNG involved that can heavily sway each battle. And also at the end of the day just the nature of RTA being a real time 1v1 means there’s a loser for every winner. SW players are generally used to winning 100% of their PvE dungeon runs and 90%+ of their battles in arena and siege. But all of a sudden in RTA, the average player must face the reality of having a 50% win rate.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of strategy involved in terms of building your monsters, drafting teams against opponents, and fast decision making during battles. For the competitive-minded player, RTA can be very fun and rewarding.

The actual in game rewards from RTA are not great though. They are mostly centered around cosmetics, with the opportunity to get some scrolls too.

Everyone gets 30 RTA battles each day, there is no way to get more and you can’t save them. It doesn’t hurt to try it at any point since it doesn’t even cost energy to play. Also, your runes are completely separate for RTA, meaning you can have a rune go on one monster for PvE and siege, but a different monster for RTA.

There’s 2 other mini-modes for RTA which are 2v2 and Special League, but they are less popular and not available all the time so I won’t really spend time on them. I’m sure if you’re read everything so far you want me to stop rambling and get on with the meat of the guide… so here we go.

Lushen

The first and most important PvP monster in this game … is Lushen.

Unchanged for practically the entirety of the game’s history (he did get a nerf immediately after initial release), he has always been and continues to be a dominant factor in both Arena and Siege/GW, as well as occasionally RTA. One of the first questions you ask yourself anytime you work on an arena or siege def is “is this def lushenable?”

Common pushbacks I see regarding Lushen:

Is lushen still relevant in whatever year it is now – Yes. He’s still being used in G3/Legend Arena and Siege.

My lushen sucks, I don’t have good runes for him – Rune quality is never an issue when it comes to PvP. In PvP you should always be measuring yourself against players of the same level as you. If your runes are bad, so are the runes of the opponents you are fighting. The real issue is a matter of priority. Lushen should get your absolute best damage dealer set (barring breaking any PvE teams of course). If you prioritize Lushen to have your best runes, then you will be able to get great use out of him in PvP. And you should – no one else, including any ld nat 5 you could possibly summon, is more important than him.

I can’t lushen any of these defs I see – This is just how PvP works and it applies to anything. There is no one monster or team that can beat everything. It is true that most defs will be built to be anti-lushen. But even at the highest levels, it’s more likely than not that at least 1 def on every arena list, siege, or gw you’re in, will be lushenable.

I don’t have a lushen – ok now that is a real problem. There’s no substitute for him. He should be your #1 target with summoning stones. In the meantime of course you can still keep going with the rest of this guide and come back to building Lushen when you finally get him.

TL;DR – The first monster everyone should build and prioritize for PvP is Lushen.

Why Lushen

Why is Lushen so important? The main reason is that he does AoE def ignore damage. Def ignore is extremely strong in this game, because it drastically reduces the set up you need to output good damage. For any regular non-def ignore attack, you almost always need a def break for it to deal good damage. And then in order to apply def break, the enemy can’t have immunity, so you may have to remove that as well. Each of those setup pieces can be resisted (removing immunity, applying def break).

Lushen is unique in that he has the only unconditional 100% ignore def aoe nuke in the game, and this gives you a consistent and easy to set up nuke.

There are many builds for Lushen, and specifically the variant I recommend for your first and main Lushen is the so-called “fat Lushen.” A fat Lushen is simply one that is all damage and no speed, and relies on a fast full attack bar filler (Kona, Teon, or Dova) to give him attack buff and an immediate turn to nuke.

The ability to take first first turn and nuke the enemy is super important for not just clear speed (with respect to AO), but also reliability as well. One of the biggest frustrations in PvP is enemy vio procs, and the best counter to vio procs is to kill them before they get a turn to proc.

A fat Lushen team should be your first AO team, and can also be used in every siege and GW you do.

Building Fat Lushen

Fat Lushen is super straightforward to rune. He literally only needs 3 stats: CR, CD, and Atk. There’s not any specific sets that he needs, so most likely he’ll end up on some combination of Fatal, Rage, Blade, and/or broken. No speed or extra tankiness is required, he can literally be +0 speed. Requiring only 3 stats also means that if you want to optimize his build, you’ll likely be gemming out substats that normally would be desirable (spd, hp, def) for flat attack.

The CR requirement is 100. This is non-negotiable. Having anything less than 100 is an even bigger deal for multihitters than it is for single target nukers, because with the fairly balanced arms race of runing damage on Lushen versus runing HP on def units to survive Lushen, missing a single crit can mean not having enough damage to 1 shot something. So having 98 CR means you actually have a 94% chance of missing at least 1 crit which can greatly increase the chance of a failure.

Once you get 100 CR, then you want to roughly balance out additional Atk and CD. That means if you have 200 CD, you should have about +1800 atk (200% of his base atk of 900). If you have 200 CD and +2000 atk, then trading out 10% atk for 10% CD would increase your damage. If you don’t want to bother with this by hand – feel free to use SWOP.

For artifacts, there are 3 primary substats that you’re looking for: atk up effect, S3 CD, and add dmg by atk. Atk up effect is technically the best, but it’s still pretty close with the other 2 that a high roll of S3 CD will be better than a mid roll of atk up effect. As an example, a max roll of atk up effect is 5%, a max roll of add dmg by atk is 4%. 5% atk up effect is better than 4% add dmg by atk, but 4% add dmg by atk is better than 4% atk up effect. Other substats like CD when enemy HP is more/less help a little, but are considerably worse than the above 3. Again, you can always use SWOP or a lushen calculator to check for sure, but it’s good to keep this in mind as you farm artifacts.

If you know exactly what you’re hitting (i.e. in siege), then using the appropriate +element on the left side is even better than the generic atk up effect or add dmg by atk substats. For example if you really need to lushen a def with Triana, you should swap out your left side arti with your best +wind damage.

Lastly, a flat atk main substat is worth very roughly 2-3% +elemental damage, or a max roll of atk up effect. For example, a +HP main stat arti with 15% atk up effect is better than an +Atk main stat arti with 8% atk up effect.

My Beginner Lushen:

Some various comments:

• This Lushen currently hits about 10.5k per card in arena (no atk lead)
• I gave him the best possible runes without stealing from any of my PvE units… which means it’s currently pretty bad. My water twins, Verde, and Bale all have better DD runes, but I don’t want to break any of my PvE teams. However, I also don’t care much for improving my PvE teams either, so any future damage dealer rune upgrades will definitely go on this Lushen. Eventually my Lushen will naturally get better runes than my Verde or Bale.
• While the rune quality is very low (3 blue runes, 3 purple runes), the artifacts are decent. It’s a pair of solid purple quality artis with good secondary subs too. Also note that almost everything is grinded, including with flat atk gems where possible (could still use 1 more on the slot 4). I find that most newer players always error on the side of not farming enough raids. Getting grinds and using them is such an easy way to quickly improve your rune quality, and it’s really not a waste at all to grind weaker/blue runes.
• Yes, the atk/CD ratio is currently extremely imbalanced. But this is just the best I can do for now.
• I expect this Lushen to get me C1 in arena and a reliable easy win every G1 siege.

Arena Offense Teambuilding: Fat Lushen

Now on to the rest of the Lushen team. The single most useful fat Lushen AO is Psama, Kabilla, Kona, Lushen. This is the team to use against other speed ADs, where you are competing for first turn, outspeeding, and then quickly cleaving the entire enemy AD. For example a popular AD you’d use this type of AO to hit is something like Psama, Clara, Sav, Rica. The parts of this team are as follows:

1. Speed lead. This monster also needs to deal damage to clean up, so something like Oliver or Vanessa (who also have the 33 spd lead) is no where near as good as Psama because their damage output is much lower. If you don’t have Psama, Shimitae or Susano are decent nat 4 alternatives. You may be worried about the loss in spd lead with those nat 4 options, but note that if you are racing a 33 spd lead + Clara, assuming you have the same rune quality, a 24 spd lead + Bernard will still outspeed it due to Bernard’s much higher base speed. If you have a Kabilla or Eshir, then you can even outspeed players who are much faster than you (your 24 lead + Kabilla versus enemy 33 lead + Clara).
2. First turn atb booster. This is a monster with high base spd and an atb boost. Kabilla is the best since she is the highest base spd booster in the game. If you don’t have her, Bernard is always an option. Orion is a water booster if you are using Susano as your spd lead.
3. Resurger. This is a secondary boost, used to boost your Lushen and give him attack buff. The only options in the game here are Kona, Teon, or Dova. Personally I prefer Kona over Teon in most cases because Kona has a cleanse and Teon doesn’t. Teon has slightly higher base spd and does have a revive though which could come in handy. This is up to personal preference. Dova is rarer but can open up some other team options, which I’ll discuss later.

See the chart below for a lot of other ideas. I won’t be going through all of them in detail but feel free to ask me about them.

My F2P Beginner Lushen team

My recommendation for the most F2P friendly and economical fat lushen team is Susano, Orion, Kona, Lushen. Susano is fusable. Orion is not farmable but can be substituted with Wayne.

Why Susano? 30% spd lead is the best you can do without a nat 5 spd lead. 30% spd lead + Orion is comparable to 24% spd lead + Bernard. Susano is also water and has a nice passive making him excellent for cleaning up revived Psama + leftover fire units.

Why Orion? Since we are using Susano as the lead, we have to use a water booster, and Orion is just one of the highest base spd water boosters there is. Wayne (water bounty hunter) actually has a faster base speed than Orion, but Orion’s kit makes him much more overall useful. On top of that, Orion is a top tier defense monster for siege, so it’s an economical choice to invest good runes (i.e. your fastest swift set) on a monster that you can use for arena/siege offense as well as defense.

Orion simply gets your fastest swift set you can put together. Acc and tankiness are secondary stats to aim for, but it’s not worth losing any speed for them.

Kona gets a secondary swift set, it doesn’t have to be super fast. You can add a fight set here if you can manage it. Use a speed tuning calculator to find out how exactly how fast he needs to be. Mine is way over the necessary speed because I’m also using him as a sole atb booster for siege.

Will is important on Susano because you will be using this AO into a lot of Psama ADs, and Psama is often on despair and can stun you after Lushen kills him. Vamp is nice to be able to solo cleanup leftover mons without dying. I also build him 100 CR so I can guarantee finishing off a revived Psama with him. I even get -water artifact on him to help deal with that Psama death revenge. Beyond that, he just needs any sort of regular Spd/CD/Atk DD build. He does not need to be speed tuned to your Orion.

Both Orion and Kona can be 5* at first.

Fat Lushen for Siege/GW

One of the main reasons why I’ve recommended Lushen as the first PvP monster/team to work on is that it’s very important for siege/GW offense as well. The leads for siege are different for arena, and obviously you have to omit your support monster, but beyond that there’s not really any differences to how siege fat Lushen plays out from arena fat Lushen teams. The biggest thing to note is probably just that it’s harder to outspeed enemies in siege than it is in arena, since you don’t have that extra 4th slot. Unless you have Dova, it can be tough challenging a 24 spd lead + Clara/Orion with your Kona/Teon. I wouldn’t really recommend doing so unless you are confident in your speed, or you have a Dova.

For myself, I’ll probably be split between using Bale Kona 50% of the time (when I need more damage to ensure I kill the tankier/bruiser stuff), and Susano Kona the other half of the time (when I need the extra speed to outspeed something like an Orion). Your BJ5 Bale works fine as is – as your rune quality improves, you can even consider adding more CR to your Bale to make him more reliable for siege purposes.

What About Speed Lushens? Can I Use My Giants Lushen for PvP?

One unfortunate part about fat Lushen is that it most likely will be too slow to use for your GB12 team. A GB12 Lushen needs to go first and needs to outspeed waves so the speed requirement for that is 169, which is generally too difficult to achieve on a fat Lushen. If you want a PvE Lushen you’ll want to build a dupe.

Now what about speed Lushens? Speed Lushens are still viable, for both arena and siege, it’s just that if I had to pick only one I felt that the fat Lushen was overall a bit more useful. A good speed Lushen can be used for GB12; however, it won’t be ideal and if you’re looking to 1 shot waves with said Lushen, it probably won’t work. This is because for Giants your Lushen only needs 169 speed, but a typical PvP speed Lushen is well over 200 speed in order to be speed tuned correctly to common teams. And getting enough damage to 1 shot GB12 waves with a 200+ spd Lushen is very very difficult.

So basically you have 2 options here:

1. Prioritize PvP on a spd Lushen, you’ll be able to use it for GB12 but it’ll be a bit slower as you’ll need an atk buffer to go before it (Hraes) or a fluffer (Julie).
2. Build a PvE-only Lushen. It won’t be good for PvP.

I will discuss PvP speed Lushen teams later.

Beginner Arena Defense

At lower ranks, AD is not important. Just the nature of how AO versus AD work makes creating a “good” AD impossibly hard. The attacker gets to see the exact AD team, and gets to pick their team against it. Meanwhile the AD is controlled by a dumb AI. Attackers are always going to hit defenses they know they can beat (making it hard to have high AD success rate), and you can’t make 1 single AD that’s good against all possible AOs out there (making it hard to avoid getting hit). Thus my recommendation is that until you are competing for guardian ranks, it’s best to not invest in AD at all. You will make little gains from it and it won’t be worth it. You’ll get much farther by focusing your efforts on AO instead.

Not investing in AD doesn’t mean to not put up an AD at all. It simply means that you should not build a monster strictly for AD, and you shouldn’t prioritize runes for monsters on AD if they’re not being used anywhere else. By all means you still should try to create the best AD possible with what you have.

AD is extremely monster box dependent so it’s hard to give generic advice – but assuming that you are just starting out PvP and don’t have a lot of options, your best approach is to go for some sort of speed def. This utilizes a lot of stuff that you probably have runed for offense purposes as well, and at least it allows you to challenge or discourage attackers who are also using spd teams. Specifically, you can use whatever spd lead + booster you’re using for AO, and then add 2 bruisers that have some combination of heal + CC. For example, my current AD is Susano, Orion, Vigor, Vero. If you want to see the Vigor and Vero runes you can check out their section in my Beginner playthrough… but if you’ve been following this section at all you’d understand that how monsters are runed for AD at this point isn’t even important.

Tips for Arena Rush

• Set a real AD for the entire week. Try to stay on top of doing your arena wings throughout the week so that you start high and near where you want to finish. Don’t just wait until the day of rush itself to try to make a big climb.
• Be liberal with what you hit during the week and try to hit different ADs. Don’t be afraid of losing mid-week, use it as a learning opportunity to understand your limits and what kinds of ADs you can hit and win against.
• Rush hour isn’t actually a full hour for most people. Figure out how many crystal refreshes you want to do ahead of time. Give yourself roughly 1 minute per wing and then you can calculate what time you should start rushing. For example, if you plan to do 1 crystal refresh, you should be planning to do 23 attacks for rush, and start at around 37 minutes past the hour. Why 23? 10 saved up wings + 10 from refresh + 3 from daily missions (save those for rush!)
• Most people do anywhere from 0-2 refreshes per rush. Just try it and you can make your own adjustments in terms of how many crystal refreshes you want to do to get the rank you want, as well as how much time on average you need for each wing.
• It’s normal to be able to only hit 1-2 defs on each list. Be more conservative and take less risks during your rush. If you are able to hit a lot though, start from the bottom (higher rating). Use the free refresh (every 2 minutes) whenever you can, it’s better to refresh to find more high rating ADs for more points even if there are still defs left on your list that you can hit, and even if it means breaking your streak buffs.
• Avoid revenging. Revenging only gives more chances for you to get hit from someone who has been confirmed to be able to beat your def. However at lower levels this really isn’t that big of a deal, if you have nothing you can hit from your regular list and you still have some time until the next free refresh, it’s ok to pick someone from your revenge list.

How Attack Bar Works

Before venturing further into more PvP teams, I’d like to spend some time to go over the attack bar mechanic in this game. Knowing how ATB (attack bar) works will help you understand other things such as speed tuning, atb ticks, and why sometimes things get cut and other times they don’t.

Every monster on the field increases their attack bar every “tick,” according to how much speed they have. The more speed the monster has, the more attack bar they get every tick. When a monster on the field reaches 100% ATB, then a monster gets a turn to make their move. This is pretty obvious. The not obvious part is that attack bar values are stored and calculated even past 100% (known as ATB overflow). There can be multiple monsters on the field with over 100% ATB at a time, but only the monster with the highest ATB gets to move. Only 1 monster can move per tick – the ATB of the monster that moves resets to 0, but all other monsters, on both sides of the field and including the monster that just moved – will still gain the regular ATB amount per tick.

ATB Example: Resurge

Now as an example and to apply this to something real – let’s look specifically at a skill which is can be confusing for people who don’t understand attack bar – the S2 of Kona/Teon – Resurge. The skill description of Resurge reads as “Fills up an ally target’s Attack Bar.” Mechanically what it actually does is increase the target’s ATB by 100. It does not instantly give that monster a turn. It does not fill up the monster’s attack bar to 100. It simply adds 100 ATB.

In the charts below, you’ll see 2 scenarios that show the attack bars of monsters at each tick. The green highlighted cell means that that monster moves since it’s over 100 ATB and it’s the highest ATB on the field.

Scenario 1: is it possible for a resurged monster to get cut, assuming your Kona is first to move? The answer: no. Even if your Kona is super fast (let’s say 320 spd), and you are trying to resurge a fat Lushen who has no spd at all (let’s say 100 spd), and the fastest enemy monster is just under your Kona at 319 spd, it will not be able to cut your Lushen. Looking at the chart, at tick 8, the +100 ATB from resurge pushes your Lushen to 142 ATB, which is greater than the enemy 134 ATB. This demonstrates that a fat Lushen truly does not need any speed at all to never get cut.

Scenario 2: is it possible then in any situation for an enemy monster to cut in after you resurge a monster? The answer: yes. One common strategy people think of with resurge is to try to give a monster 2 turns in a row. For example, let’s say you have a Coco who uses S3 to create orbs, and then you want to use a Kona to immediately give Coco another turn to nuke an enemy with those orbs. Unfortunately you cannot try to move first and guarantee this 2 turns in a row with resurge. Let’s say you get both your Coco and Kona to be 300 spd, and the fastest enemy is 290 spd. Your Coco and Kona will move first but the enemy will immediately cut in after the resurge before Coco can move a second time

Speed Tuning

As opposed to resurge which grants 1 unit 100 ATB, most aoe atb booster skills in the game grant your entire team somewhere between 15% to 50% ATB. Since this is a much smaller ATB boost, the monsters being boosted will need to have some speed in order to move immediately after your booster without getting cut by the enemy. Making sure your team has enough speed to not get cut following an atb booster is what we call speed tuning. Luckily this isn’t something you have to calculate by hand, there are online tools available for this.

For example, if you have a typical Tiana AO of Tiana + Galleon + 2 damage dealers, and your Tiana is 270 speed, you can enter your Tiana’s speed into the calculator and see exactly how much speed your Galleon and 2 DD need to be to be properly speed tuned. They’ll need to be approximately 220ish spd.

In the example below, the red circle is where you input in your Tiana’s speed. The green circles are the calculated results – the minimum speed required for your other team members.

Speed Ticks

Each tick, monsters gain 7% of their speed as ATB. When we talk about speed ticks we’re referring to the breakpoints in a monster’s speed where it’ll take you 1 less tick to reach 100 ATB. The speed tick breakpoints are as follows:

• 477 spd = 3 Ticks to reach 100 ATB
• 358 spd = 4 Ticks
• 286 spd = 5 Ticks
• 239 spd = 6 Ticks
• 205 spd = 7 Ticks
• 179 spd = 8 Ticks
• 159 spd = 9 Ticks
• 143 spd = 10 Ticks
• 130 spd = 11 Ticks

Generally speaking, you should try to rune your monsters to be close to each of those spd breakpoints (hitting the exact spd for a breakpoint, or just a bit over). A 239 spd monster will take the same number of ticks as a 285 spd monster to reach 100 ATB and get a turn. Both a 239 spd monster and a 285 spd monster would effectively take the same number of turns over the course of a battle, so the 285 spd monster is pretty much very inefficient and wasting a lot of speed.

That being said, there are still some other factors to consider and trying to rune all your monsters to be exactly “on tick” may not always be the best move.

Even if 2 monsters are at the same tick breakpoint, the faster one is still going to get their turn before the slower one even if both monsters get the same number of turns over the course of the battle. Moving first can be a big advantage.

Spd buff, slow debuff, and any sort of ATB manipulation (skills that increase or decrease ATB) will influence ticks and alter this greatly. Given how common these skills and effects are in many PvP scenarios, having higher spd without reaching the next breakpoint could still make a difference in many situations (due to these ATB manipulations).

There are skills that scale off spd, so even if you’re not getting more turns with higher spd you could still be doing more dmg.

Also note that ticks work differently in RTA. In RTA, monsters only gain 1.5% of their speed as ATB. That means there are a lot more RTA tick breakpoints and they are much narrower.

Galleon AO

Besides Lushen, Galleon based teams will be your second type of main AO. Between Lushen and Galleon, that’s pretty much 95% of all AOs out there from F1 to Legend rank. There are lots of variations in terms of different supporting members and tunings you can do to tackle various different ADs, but their core is all the same.

So why Galleon? As mentioned in the Lushen section, we use Lushen because he he as an aoe def ignore nuke which requires very little setup. If you want to deal big aoe damage any other way, a defense break is required in addition to atk buff. Galleon is unique in that he’s the only monster that does both of those set up pieces – aoe def break and aoe atk buff. There are some situations where Galleon is replaceable with a monster that just does aoe def break (for example, Gemini or Luer), and then you have some other monster that provides the atk buff (for example, Aquila/Jeogun who can strip + atk buff, or Kahli/Hraes who can atk buff + nuke), or you’re using a team that doesn’t scale on attack and doesn’t need atk buff (for example, def based with Verad, or HP based with Zerath). But those teams are a lot more niche or require specific rare monsters. In other words, if you don’t have Galleon – stop reading and summon him first.

The advantages of Galleon over Lushen is a bit more deceptive. It has nothing to do with damage output. The difference is that since applying def break requires you to remove immunity from will runes, that is an opportunity to use monsters with secondary effects such as CD reset, attack bar reduction, anti-revive, and more. Since Lushen teams don’t strip will, they also can’t utilize supporting monsters that can do these effects. And given how a lot of AD is full of nemesis healers, stuff that can revive, or skills that block/reduce damage, it quickly becomes apparent how much these secondary effects can help.

Your standard Galleon AO team will be turn 1 Galleon, Tiana, + 2 DD.

Galleon AO Teams

Unfortunately almost all the best monsters to use with Galleon AO are nat 5’s. See the chart below for the most popular options and the annoying stuff on AD that they are used to counter. Most importantly though the piece most crucial to a Galleon AO is Tiana. Without Tiana your options are greatly limited and you may not want to prioritize Galleon AOs that highly. Tiana is so good because she does 3 things all at once – she is an atb booster, aoe stripper that cannot be resisted, and an additional damage dealer all in one.

Tiana should be runed with a fast Spd/CD/Atk swift set. She does not need your absolutely fastest swift set, since a Tiana team is not really competing against spd ADs. Even if you gave your Tiana your fastest set, because of her low base speed you still won’t be able to contest speed against for example 33 lead + Triton. You are using Galleon Tiana AO mostly against bruiser ADs. Her damage potential with her S2 is too great to not build damage on her. You don’t even need crit rate on her since it’s a guaranteed crit.

Damage dealers need the following:

• 100 crit rate. Just like Lushen, you want 100 crit rate to be reliable.
• Enough speed to be speed tuned to your Tiana’s speed. Use a calculator.
• Max acc (85) or as close to it as possible (non-Kaki). You can use S3 Acc artifact to help you get there. It is very common for a lot of the stuff on AD where you need your debuffs and cc to land to have 100 res.
• A Despair set is nice if you can manage it, otherwise you’ll use some combination of Swift, Fatal, Rage, Blade, Focus, or broken. Spd/CD/Atk or even Spd/CR/Atk. Yes even slot 4 CR can be ok because between your 2 DD and Tiana, having enough damage is rarely an issue.

Galleon builds will be discussed in the next section.

Will is not required on anything.

Sorry I don’t have examples to show – this account doesn’t have Tiana or these monsters at this time. I’ll update later when I do build a similar monster.

Galleon Teams without Tiana

Without Tiana, you should probably go for a turn 2 team with Galleon. This severely limits the ADs you can hit with Galleon, since being turn 2 means you have to avoid ADs with strippers and any good AD will have a stripper. But it’s still something. As a replacement for Tiana, you have 2 options – either go with a Triana which will help you survive some sort of big damage so you get your turn 2 nuke, or go with an aoe stripper against defs with immunity (monsters that actually give immunity like Woosa or Betta, you’re not worried about will runes if you are planning to be slow and take turn 2).

I built the following team: Aquila/Triana, Galleon, Julie, Bale. The Bale is just the one I use for BJ5.

Julie Runes:

Galleon Runes:

Aquila Runes:

Triana Runes:

Notes on runing the team overall:

• For 2nd turn teams, I would aim for around 150-180 spd. You want to be slower than the enemy so you don’t have to deal with will runes, but you also need some speed so you don’t get lapped by really fast monsters.+
• You need will on everything.
• On a turn 2 team, you ideally want to get a few shield sets. They can be placed on any of your support monsters. I have not farmed DB12 much yet so I simply did not have any good shield runes, otherwise I would definitely put more shield runes across all my monsters here.
• Galleon can be runed a ton of different ways. I like to rune him as a bruiser (rather than pure tank), which means giving him some crit and atk as well. This allows him to help a lot in terms of cleanup. Specifically for a turn 2 team, Galleon is best on double shield/will, but for other purposes, I even like to have him on Vio. You’ll see Galleons commonly with slot 2 Spd, Atk, or HP; Slot 4 Cr or CD; and slot 6 Acc, Atk, or HP.

Note this is a new edit/entry that wasn’t here the first time I wrote this post.

After doing a lot of testing, at this point I do not recommend any sort of Galleon team for AO without nat 5’s. Galleon + Tiana is still the best, and any alternative to Tiana is still going to involve nat 5’s. For example, Chiwu as an alternative stripper, or maybe a Leo to make turn 2 teams safer. If you want to discuss your options feel free to start a new post, tag me, and make sure you show your box.

I’m going to leave my previous post up regarding Julie Galleon Bale Aquila/Triana, but again I do NOT recommend it at all.

If you don’t have nat 5 options, keep in mind that there are still people using only lushen offenses even in G3. You can also consider slower bruiser type offenses which I will discuss later.

Non-nat 5 Galleon teams for Siege/Guild Battles are still perfectly fine.

Siege Offense: Basics of Bruisering – How AI Targeting Works

Now that you have a few cleave teams for siege, it’s time to work on some bruiser options. Unlike cleave teams which are generally fixed 3 man preset teams, you’ll often want to tailor your bruiser counters to the specific defense you’re hitting. It should be very common to mix and match different options you have in your box to cover specific roles needed in the correct elements in order to safely tackle a def.

Having monsters that cover certain roles in specific elements is important because bruisering is all about manipulating the enemy AI so that you can plan for exactly which of your monsters will take the big hits, and allow yourself to safely use squishier monsters of a different element that you know won’t ever be targeted.

If you want to manipulate the enemy AI you first have to understand how AI targeting works. See the info graph below: it’s a bit more complicated than most people are aware. If you understand this, it explains some “weird” cases a lot of players don’t understand such as how an enemy Perna can target your water monster. Also note that this isn’t 100% accurate in terms of the exact numbers. This info was acquired through empirical testing, and not through some any inspection of the actual code. Nevertheless, it’s still super important to know all the different factors that affect targeting and their rough weights.

Siege Offense: Bruisering Example

Knowing this, when you come across any def that you want to bruiser, the first thing to do is to identify the main enemy threats, which elements they are capable of hitting, and whether or not they can def break or brand things to change the targeting. Let’s take a look at a real example from my battle log – a siege def of Xing Zhe, Molly, Tesa.

First we identify the enemy threats – Molly is a support that doesn’t do much damage, we can ignore her. But both Xing (wind) and Tesa (fire) can do a lot of single target damage. So maybe if we use a tanky water monster to tank Xing and then a tanky wind monster to tank Tesa, then we are free to use a squishier fire damage dealer since we know it can’t get hit by either Xing or Tesa.

We also have to take into consideration def breaks. Both Xing and Tesa have def breaks, does that change anything? If Tesa lands a def break on your wind monster, now Xing will switch his targeting to the wind monster as well instead of the water monster. Hmm. Maybe it’s better to just use a single wind monster tank for both Xing and Tesa? Then, if you use 2 fire monsters next to that wind monster, we can guarantee that Xing and Tesa will always hit the wind monster anyway regardless of if it’s def broken or not. Wind tank + 2 fire seems a bit better than 1 water tank, 1 wind tank, and 1 fire, since now you have more flexibility in picking 2 squishy monsters that won’t get hit, and you can focus on using a wind monster that’s super tanky.

So now you need to find a super tank wind monster, and 2 fire monsters that have some combination of damage and heal/sustain/support for your wind tank between them. When I hit this def, I barely had any PvP monsters built so my options were greatly limited. I ended up using Triana, Raoq, and Verde for the win. If I had more options built a safer team would probably be something like Skogul/Malite + Racuni + Khmun.

See the chart below for some of my favorite farmable options to build for bruisering in siege offenses. Despite most of these being 3* or 4* monsters, you can definitely still use them in 5* towers. They’re good enough that players that focus on siege will end up building many dupes of these monsters, and still choose to use them over many 5* options. A quick description of my categories and roughly how they are runed:

Damage dealers: these are usually built for damage with a little bit of tankiness so they survive a stray weak AoE (think Mo S2 or Kinki S2), or just a bunch of procs from a random support monster like Molly. I like to go for 205 tick or 239 tick speed on these, about +10k or so HP, and the rest into damage. If they have important debuffs you should aim to get some accuracy on them too (30-50 is good, for example on Carc for his def break). Unlike nukers on cleave teams that want a reliable 100 CR, it’s ok if you end up with somewhere around 70-90 CR as you’re not relying on them to 1 shot anything. Vio/Destroy is almost always your optimal sets, but destroy isn’t always needed, and if you’re just starting out then any Fatal/Rage/Blade/broken set is workable until you get better runes.

Bruisers: these are built tanky to be able to take damage from a real damage threat, but aren’t full tanks that you’d expect to survive forever without significant support. They’re also able to output some damage themselves, which in a lot of cases may be all the damage you need on a team especially if you have destroy. Most often bruisers are HP scaling monsters (but not always – sometimes they have passives that increase their tankiness, such as Tesa). The HP scaling skills are what allows them to be built tanky but still output some damage. As an example, I’d expect a bruiser like Skogul to be able to safely tank an enemy Perna – but only if nothing else could def break that monster. Expecting to continuously tank a Perna while def broken is something I’d save for a monster with a dedicated tank role.

Bruisers are usually runed Spd/HP/HP or even HP/HP/HP (or def, if it’s a def scaling monster like Tractor). If it’s an atk scaling monster like Tesa, you’d see a build like Spd/CD/HP. Again Vio/Destroy is ideal for most of these, but broken sets are always ok when you’re first starting out.

Support: these are also built to be just as tanky as your bruisers, and thus they follow the same expectation of being able to tank a big threat like Perna, but not damage from multiple threats especially if there’s def breaks too. The obvious difference is that supports have heals and cleanses in their kits and are expected to support and keep your team alive rather than deal damage. They’re oftentimes built a bit faster than most damage dealers or bruisers as well – usually you want to hit that 239 spd tick on them.

Support monsters are also runed Spd/HP/HP or Spd/HP/Def. For many supports since you’re not building damage on them, you have room to consider resistance as well. For me, resistance is an all or nothing stat, and it’s something that’s just another layer of defense – not something you absolutely are relying on. That means nothing needs 100 res, but 100 res is a good option for any support if you can manage it. If you can’t get 100 res, don’t bother with any at all. There is no middle ground due to how acc/res functions and scales.

And just like anything else, supports also want Vio. Will, Nem, and Rev (particularly on monsters with good S1’s like 2A howls) are all good offsets depending on the specific monster and situation.

Tanks: now these guys are expected to be able to take damage from multiple threats even while def broken. They almost always have some sort of passive that helps them achieve this. The classic example is Rina, who creates a shield when she gets hit with a crit, making it possible for her to tank some monsters infinitely no matter how many times they proc.

Tanks are runed HP/HP/HP (or with some def in there). Since you’re usually not building damage or high speed on them, you have lots of room for extra stats so 100 res is almost always heavily recommended on tanks.

Tanks are the one type of monsters where Vio may not be ideal. Procing extra turns may actively hurt you for many monsters in this role – for example, Rina procing can make her lose her shield, or Malite procing means he cannot cycle his S2 continuously, as he needs to get hit while in stone form in order to reduce its cooldown. Besides, mostly you just want to stack tanks with as much tanky stats as possible, regardless of set. A will set can be helpful though as it may help you survive the first turn before your tanking ability activates (for example, Malite needs a turn to go into stone form, Rina will need to get hit before she starts getting shields, etc.).

Last thing to note is that while tanks need less speed than other types of monsters, it’s still good to have at least some. Taking turns can help you cycle away harmful debuffs, and a lot of tanks still have useful skills (like Rina has a heal and can be a legit support with some speed built on her).

How Fast Does X Monster Need to Be?

One of the most common and worst questions I see is “how fast does my bernard need to be to reach C1 arena?” It’s a bad question because it implies that speed is all that matters, or a big part of what matters, for progression in this game. This is simply not true. It’s kind of like asking, “how tall do I need to be to reach the 2nd round of the NBA (basketball) playoffs?” Yes, your height is important, but so are a number of other factors. Your shooting, ball handling, how good your teammates and coach are, etc. etc. Likewise, how much damage your lushen or nuker does, how well runed your secondary DD is, what supports you’re using, etc. are all very important.

Most of the time, you’re also not competing on even grounds in terms of speed. For example, if you have a 33 spd lead and a kabilla, you should feel comfortable challenging a 33 spd lead and triton on AD, as you have a 5 base spd advantage. Even if you had a slightly slower swift set than the enemy Triton, you’d still outspeed it. You get to pick which ADs to hit so you simply limit yourself to speed races where you have a spd advantage one way or another and skip the rest.

And then lastly, it’s a question that has no impact at all on how you play or any runing decisions you make. Your main atb booster should be runed with your fastest set, regardless of how fast it is. You wouldn’t purposely rune your booster slower than you could. Of course everyone is constantly farming for faster runes, but that is largely out of your control and what you have is what you have to work with.

Swift Set Prioritization

So what is a good question to ask then regarding speed on boosters? The key is that you shouldn’t worry about any specific numbers or targets. There are no thresholds or breakpoints, unlike other bruisers or supports there is no sense in worrying about atb tick breakpoints here. The question you should be asking is a matter of priority. Who gets your fastest swift set, who gets your 2nd fastest swift set, who gets your 3rd, and so on. The exact speeds of what that fastest or 2nd fastest set is doesn’t matter. It is what it is.

Additionally, despite speed being the most important factor on a swift set for a booster, other stats like atk/crit, or accuracy, or hp/def, can still be important depending on what the specific monster and team is. So this prioritization may be broken down even further into X monster gets my absolute fastest swift set (maybe a Kabilla for AO), Y monster gets my fastest tanky swift set (maybe an Imesety for siege, where you need that Imesety to tank and ensure you win the 3v2 or 3v1 after your initial nukes), Z monster gets my fastest DD swift set (i.e. a Tiana), etc.

For example, if next up on your priority is that Imesety that wants a tanky swift set and you had a slot 6 HP% main stat rune with 25 spd and a slot 6 flat atk main stat rune with 27 spd, you may consider giving the hp% main stat rune with 25 spd to the Imesety because even though a higher spd rune is available, you are still valuing the extra hp.

Currently on my account I have the following monsters runed with a fast swift and they have the following priority order:

1. Orion – fastest absolute set (+195 spd)
2. Kona – second fastest absolute set (+181 spd)
3. Imesety – third fastest tanky set (+174 spd)
4. Bernard – fourth fastest absolute set (+178 spd)

Note that fast swift sets aren’t just limited to boosters, for example you may have a stripper like Triton for AD or Clara for siege def somewhere up there.

Siege Offense: Cleaves

Time to go back to cleave teams – sometimes the best way to deal with a def is to outspeed and cleave it. Dead monsters can’t vio proc. We use the term “cleave” pretty loosely here – as mentioned before, cleave in a classic gaming sense refers to any aoe attack, but in summoners war people often just refer to it as any sort of team that takes first turn and quickly kills the enemy (and not even in an aoe fashion – could be multiple single target nukes).

Building/runing cleave teams is super straightforward. A fast swift set goes onto the atb booster. Then your nukers just need 100 CR, enough speed to be speed tuned to that booster, and the rest split into atk/CD. They will generally be runed on some combination of Fatal/Rage/Blade/Swift/broken. This is practically the same for all the various teams.

One of the main parts of cleaving is being faster than the enemy. At higher levels of play, if players are cleaving multiple times in a single siege, they often swap their fastest swift set to different ATB boosters. For most people that’s not really expected though, which is why players need to think hard about the previous section on where to allocate and prioritize their swift sets.

Here’s a list of the most popular cleaves, and I’ll briefly discuss the pros and cons of each one. Please note that I only named them for the sake of my own categorization, they’re not actually known by those names in the community. When discussing these offenses, it’s always best to refer to them by the specific 3 monsters used in that offense. For example, don’t call it “fat snipe comp” call it “Khmun Racuni Cov”.

Siege Offense: Julie

Julie cleave team in siege is kinda unique in that it’s one of the only galleon-based teams where you don’t need a stripper. What about will then? There’s 2 factors that make this work:

1. Julie has the highest unconditional aoe nuke in the game (well, technically it is still conditional on you being full HP, but that’s “guaranteed” by outspeeding). It’s a 720% multiplier. On top of that, she gets a bonus 50% per enemy buff, meaning she essentially has a 1080% multiplier against enemies with will runes. On top of that, her nuke being 6 multihits allows it to scale very well with additional damage artifacts, which don’t care about def break or will runes. So even against enemies that you can’t land a def break on… she’s still doing a shit ton of damage.
2. Will runes are not really super standard on everything on siege def. It is common to use this offense into certain siege def monsters that are very unlikely to be on will, the most notable of which is Iris (who is 99% of the time runed Despair/Revenge).

One of the biggest misconceptions about cleave teams is that they need to completely wipe the enemy in 1 turn, so you focus everything on just that first turn. Well there are some RNG elements that are unavoidable such as acc/res checks on landing def break. If you land everything, then it’s usually an easy win for you. But building siege offense teams is all about consistency, so it’s important to build Galleon and Bernard in such a way so that you maximize your chances of pulling out the win even if you get unlucky and say, miss a bunch of def breaks.

In general how these battles play out is that you land 1-2 def breaks, immediately kill 1-2 units with the Julie nuke, and then leave 1-2 units at low HP that can be cleaned up by Galleon + Bernard.

As a result, the ideal way to build Galleon is a vio bruiser build on top of 85 acc. That means usually slot 2 spd, slot 4 CR or CD, and slot 6 Acc, Atk, or HP. The offset does not matter that much so most commonly you’ll see Blade, Focus, or broken to help give him more stats. If you can manage it, Revenge would be the ideal offset. For artifacts, you can use S1/S3 acc to help you hit max acc. Atk increasing effect for both left and right side artis help the most in terms of increasing his damage. Any sort of -wind, -water, +fire, +water element artis for left side is good too.

I unfortunately don’t have a Galleon built up to these standards yet on my account, but to just show you something in the meantime here is a Galleon on my main.

Speed is obviously most important for Bernard, as you can use this comp to race any spd def given your 24 lead + Bernard’s high base speed. For example you can use this against enemy Galleon + Clara defs. If you can manage it though, adding atk + crit to make him a bruiser is even better. In other words, if you have slot 6 HP and slot 6 Atk with similar speeds, or slot 4 HP and slot 4 CR/CD with similar speeds, give him the Atk/CR/CD runes. Use S2 acc arti, and any sort of appropriate +/- element on left side. If you are building crit on him, then any crit-related arti substat is good too.

Julie is super standard 100 CR all damage build, just make sure she has enough speed to be tuned appropriately. Additional damage on attack artis are amazing for her due to her 6 hits. Remember that for Lushen who does 3 hits, add dmg by atk is already on par with S3 CD. So for Julie, add dmg by atk is literally twice as good as S3 CD when comparing similar rolls.

Final note about where to use this team – you’re hunting speed defs with relatively squishy monsters like Carc, Kaki, Iris, etc. Triana is safe to hit since you have multihits. For example, Carc Vigor Triana, or Gal Clara Kaki.

Siege Offense: Ninja Booster

Water and fire ninjas are amazing offense units because they have superior speed leads (30%) to help you outspeed, do good damage due to spd scaling, and have passives that give them bruiserish powers without having to invest into HP/Def. These types of teams make it easy for you to outspeed, instantly nuke 1 target, then safely bruiser out the remaining 3v2.

For the fire variant, Draco is used as the booster since he’s the fastest base spd fire booster in the game. Atk buff is not guaranteed with him (it’s 50/50 between atk buff and def buff), but it’s not really needed as even if you get double def buff, you still should be able to take out 1 target. On top of that, he gives 2 turn immunity, which makes this team an excellent choice into things like Seara Orion or Orion Sav. You nuke the +1 and then you have full team immunity to help protect against the debuffs of those monsters.

Kahli is the most common +1 here as she is a fire ignore def nuker.

In terms of tuning, have Kahli go before Garo. This is because Kahli has a good but not guaranteed chance at 1 shotting something, so if you do 1 shot something with her then Garo can get a head start on a 2nd target. If Garo goes first there is no way he is 1 shotting anything so his dmg would be wasted if Kahli ends up being able to 1 shot something.

For the water variant, you can do almost the exact same thing as Garo Draco Kahli with Susano Orion Covenant. However, another variant which is a bit different is Susano Megan Stella. The benefit of this comp is in Stella’s 7 multihits, allowing you to hit into Triana. This offense is useable into things like Herteit Vigor Triana, or the classic Martina Shaina Triana (note that it wouldn’t be my first choice against MST, but it’s still a decent option). For tuning this comp, have Susano go before Stella since you need to finish with Stella’s multihits. If hitting 5*, Bastet is an upgrade over Megan.

The ninja in this comp should be on Vamp to help him clean up. The offset doesn’t matter, although there are some specific niche cases where you may want destroy. For example, you can use Garo Draco Kahli into Odin Riley Tesa, and in this case you need destroy on Garo. The idea is that Odin cannot kill Garo, but without destroy it is possible for Riley to outsustain Garo’s damage. A draw is a loss in siege, so destroy makes sure that Garo can eventually kill Riley.

Your booster (Draco, Orion, or Megan) is on any fast swift set, damage doesn’t really help them so just make them tankier if possible.

The +1 damage dealer is on a standard swift/fatal/rage/blade/broken 100 CR spd tuned nuke set.

Use the correct +ele arti on left side depending on what you’re hitting. For the fire variant, 90% of the time you want +fire. On the right side, any appropriate CD related arti is fine (for example, Kahli would want S2 CD or CD when enemy HP is more). For Garo Draco Kahli, remember that atk buff is not guaranteed so I would avoid atk increasing arti on this team.

Runes of Garo:

Runes of Draco:

Runes of Kahli:

Siege Offense: Fat Snipe

The way this offense works is that you outspeed and snipe the main threat on the enemy def, and then you can expect your remaining team to 2v2 what’s left. I say 2v2 instead of 3v2 because most of the time it’s just assumed that once your fat nuker kills that enemy threat, he just dies but it doesn’t matter anymore, he’s done his job. The most common form of this team is Khmun Racuni Covenant, some notes about it:

1. It may be surprising that there is no atk buff on this team – but Covenant is extremely OP and along with runing him on a fat nuke build (no speed, so you invest everything into dmg), you can realistically 1 shot practically any monster in this game without even needing the atk buff, and without crazy runes either. You’re not limited to just Cov though, you can of course use any single target ignore def nuker. Cov just has the highest dmg out of anything.
2. The advantage of Racuni over Teon/Kona is two fold – first, his base speed is much higher. You are typically going to use this team into defs with a fast stripper like Clara or Orion, so you need to be able to contest speed. Second, Racuni is a much better support (better continuous healing/cleanse), allowing you to safely 2v2 against even high threat targets like Sav.
3. We use Khmun because he is an excellent bruiser that can solo a lot of things, and also because he has a speed lead to help you outspeed.

For example, if you see a def like Woosa Sav Orion/Clara/any stripper, this offense is great into it because you outspeed and snipe that stripper, and Khmun + Racuni can safely 2v2 the Woosa/Sav.

There are of course many variants of this team. Imesety + Copper/Dozer is a good def based version of this. And you don’t always have to use Khmun, especially if you don’t need the speed lead. An example is against Odin Riley Tesa, you can use Garo/Laika + Kona + Cov where you snipe the Tesa with Cov, and Garo/Laika can solo the Odin + Riley.

Sorry I don’t have this team built yet. Leaving this as a placeholder and I’ll add example runes in the future

Siege Offense: Verde Team-Up

This is a fun team. You use a team-up monster (most of the time it’s Raoq as his overall kit is the best for this, but this type of team is also possible with Tarq, Icaru, Lisa, etc. as they have 2+ monster teamup attacks too) on swift to take first turn, and he’ll pull Verde who boosts the team. This lets you use Verde as a team ATB booster without having to rune him on swift – and thus you can rune him as a DD. The last monster is another damage dealer with a speed lead, Garo is great when you’re spd contesting, otherwise Tien Qin (Light Drunken Master) is another good option when you don’t need as much speed as possible but more damage instead. Drunken master S1 is ignore def so he’s capable of much higher damage output than Garo.

As mentioned this is a great team for speed contesting – so for example you can use this against Galleon Clara +1. You have a huge speed advantage here between speed lead (30 on Garo vs 24 on Galleon) and base spd (108 on Raoq versus 103 on Clara). The Tien Qin variant is an excellent Martina Shaina Triana counter (kill Shaina first).

For runing this offense, both your DD and Verde should be on spd DD builds. That means 100 crit, and speed tuned to your Raoq. Raoq should be given damage as well on top of being fast – he’s a candidate for one of your fastest DD swift sets (for example, Spd/Cr/Atk). To speed tune this team in SWOP note that you can edit Raoq’s ATB boost from the default 0 to 40%, as shown in the screenshot below:

Another placeholder where I’ll add runes later. Yes you’ll have to build a second Raoq/Verde that’s different from your PvE Raoq/Verde for this.

How to Decide What to Build Next

It can be daunting looking at all the dozens of different units and teams I’ve listed out and wondering what to work on first or what to work on next. Other than setting up your Lushen team first, I purposely didn’t list out any sort of order of building PvP or siege units. Since nat 5’s are in play here and even nat 4’s can be elusive for awhile, not everyone is going to have the same box and it’s impossible to recommend any sort of set order.

My advice would simply be to decide what to build next based on your own need. For example, when you are in a siege and look through the enemy defs and see something you have no idea how to beat, ask for counters/suggestions, then build those monsters next. A lot of people may initially not like this approach since they think they just want to build 10 siege offense teams and be done with it, and may think that building a specific counter to a specific def is too niche and wasteful. But this isn’t how siege works at all. Siege is more like building a toolbox of different options. As you improve, your toolbox gets bigger and you can handle more and more different defs, and handle them more reliably. The higher up you go, the less you should be relying on your presets/siege decks, and the more you should be putting together a “custom” offense against each def you hit. This becomes even more true when you factor in balance patches that occur every 2 months which can and will change the meta.

When anyone competent recommends you a specific counter to a specific def, you can trust that the specific monsters they are recommending will be versatile ones that will always be useful in various other teams. Even if you never see that specific def again, you will be able to use those monsters to counter something else relevant in each siege.

Building Dupes

If you want to focus on siege then building dupes is unavoidable. Some people may see this as boring, and if you don’t want to and don’t care about competing in siege, that’s perfectly fine. You can definitely farm siege at lower levels without building any dupes, and focus your efforts on other areas of the game. There is nothing wrong with that. And personally, I love trying to figure out different counters to the same def rather than just building multiple copies of the same counter 10 times.

But assuming that you are willing to build dupes, a common question I see is “how many dupes of X monster should I make/keep?” When it comes to siege, there really isn’t any limit (well, technically 10 copies of any monster would be the limit) and it doesn’t make sense to spitball some arbitrary number like “3 dupes of this monster is enough.” If a monster is useful in siege, then dupes of it are always useful. And how many dupes to build is a matter of priority and need. If you go through a siege and think to yourself, “hmm I wish I had another X monster to use” then maybe you can consider building a dupe of it for next time.

When it comes to saving copies for dupes/skilling up nat 4s, I follow this simple rule for practically everything: keep 1 extra copy of any useful monster, and any additional copies can be used immediately as skillups. For example if I had 1 built Lushen that was partially skilled up, I should save a 2nd one in storage, and then if I summon a 3rd Lushen I should immediately use that as a skillup. But don’t people build 3-4 Lushens? Shouldn’t I keep that 3rd one? Well if you’re still working on your first one, then it will be a long time before you need a 3rd. Nat 4s are not super rare and you will eventually summon it again, and you can even target them with SS. It’s better to make use of your current resources (valuable skillup now) rather than have them be wasted in storage.

Swarfarm

https://swarfarm.com/profile/summoner1722

I hesitated in doing this earlier because one of the key points of this guide is to snapshot monster builds at specific points in progression. As this account progresses, the rune quality across all my monsters naturally improves so that initial useable/lower rune quality is lost on swarfarm. So just keep that in mind that even if you are not able to hit the same stats as some of my monsters on this profile, it doesn’t mean that that monster is not viable or worth building.

Additionally, we always focus on building teams rather than individual monsters. So keep that in mind too that most times monsters are runed in a way to work best with a specific team and shouldn’t just be blindly copied.

Siege Offense Review

I’ve finally built enough siege offense monsters now so that for the most part, I’m able to do 10 swords each siege with real teams rather than leftover PvE monsters. Of course, a lot of the later attacks are still a struggle and several of those later teams may still use some PvE monsters, but at least I don’t have to use teams like “Kro Sig Shannon.” Anyway I’m happy with it and I will start working on some monsters specifically for defense now.

I’ve snapshotted my presets and runes on all these teams as an overview. Enjoy.

Also despite these being non-overlapping presets, it is very common for me to mix and match monsters as necessary. I never use all 10 preset teams as is.

Bomb Teams

Some additional commentary on bomb teams since I did show one above in my siege team list:

For arena offense, the classic bomb team is Seara Tiana Bastet/Megan second bomber (any of Sian Malaka Liebli Dover Taurus works). However I would not recommend this team at all as a main AO because there’s too much RNG with bombs missing, making it just really inconsistent. There is a time and place for specialized AOs involving bombers against specific ADs, but that’s outside the scope of this guide.

For siege offense though, bombers can be great. You get around needing to strip will runes simply by making them a 2nd turn team, and only hitting defs that don’t have immunity or aoe cleanse (single target cleanse like a molly can still be bombed). Additionally, you can increase consistency by either double bombing (with the assumption that a single bomb + fluff from a support is enough to kill most things, so you double your chances of landing the bomb), or you can add 2 supports which give you sustain so that you can survive to bomb multiple times. My favorite is the latter – bomber Triana Fran, but double bomber Fran or bomber Skogul Fran are somewhat common and viable.

Just like how I don’t recommend Seara bomber AO, I do NOT recommend Seara stripper (Tiana/Jeogun/Aquila being the most common) bomber teams for siege offense either. The best bomb teams don’t use Seara. Seara is still great on her own, just not on a dedicated bomb team.

As for the differences between the bombers – with the exception of Jojo who just plainly sucks, all the other main bombers (Malaka, Sian, Taurus, Liebli, Dover) are viable and you shouldn’t be picking them based on their bomb damage as that difference is really negligible. You should be picking a bomber to use based on its element and kit.

For example, specifically against Seara Orion Perna, water bombers are good to use because if it gets def broken, only Seara will target it and not Perna. Any other bomber can get targeted by both Perna and Seara making it more likely to die. And as for Malaka vs Sian, I like Malaka better with the double support (Triana Fran) comp because you have 2 supports keeping the bomber alive, and Malaka’s S3 is actually quite nice for when things go wrong and you miss bombs. Meanwhile if Sian misses bombs, he is completely useless for the next 3 turns until he can get his bomb back up. Sian’s strength is that he gets that extra life, so if you’re doing a bomber Fran Skogul comp, then I would use Sian for the survivability.

Liebli is particularly good into Molly and other light supports, since he’ll always get targeted which lowers his bomb CD and allows him to easily stack bombs. Dover is similar to Malaka in that he has a very useful S3 for when things go wrong, but he has the downside of being LD and thus squishier.

The more dupes I have of something the more important it probably is. I can however reemphasize my 2 favorite pieces of general siege advice, 1 regarding siege offense and 1 regarding siege defense:

How to decide what to build next for offense – do not try to make more preset 3 monster siege offense teams. I like to think of siege offenses as counters rather than teams. The mindset should always be that you’re countering a specific def with your team, not that you’re using a generic good offense. So when prioritizing what to work on for offense, play sieges and simply look at the real life defs you have to hit. If you don’t know how to hit it safely, ask. If you don’t have what’s recommended, well now you know what to work on next.

People often think that they’re too low level to have to worry about countering specific niche defs, or that if they build some offense unit for a specific def then the def might go out of meta and their investment is now wasted. None of this is anything to worry about, because all good counters (that I or any other experienced siege player will recommend) are still going to be combinations of the same versatile units that will be always be good. Maybe you’ll have to use a different combination against a different def, and maybe in some metas you’ll use a good monster less than others. But regardless I promise you that nothing recommended to you will ever be a wasted investment past the usage against the specific def you were asking about in the first place.

Then as for defense – less is more. Quality over quantity. Every def should have some of your best runes, otherwise it’s not worth running. 2-3 strong siege defs is a good number to aim for. If you are fielding considerably more than that and they are getting wins, it means you need to move up to a stronger guild (if you actually want to play siege for the competition that is. if you’re just farming, you probably aren’t reading this anyway). I understand that WGB requires you to set up 5 defs – that’s fine, just prioritize 2-3 with your best runes and then the last 2 can be more leftover.

Vio goes on everything. You can have an exception for your best despair set to go on something, and then your best swift set to go on something else. Nothing else is acceptable. And then as for offsets – stats over sets is only a PvE mantra. It’s worth it to lose stats in PvP to gain a valuable offset. Try to get will, nem, rev, shield, or destroy on everything. The specific offset you use obviously varies from monster or monster, but in general there’s usually multiple good options. Just use at least some offset rather than broken.

Regarding stats, tankiness > speed > damage on defense. Even damage dealers should be prioritizing tankiness, glass cannon builds don’t work on def. Resistance is all or nothing, and going for max res on practically any monster on def is always a valid option to consider. Don’t neglect accuracy on any monster that has an important debuff, with def break being probably the most important debuffs of all since it has a huge impact on AI targeting. 0 acc all damage Theo is the classic example of runing a def monster completely wrong.

Siege Defense

While on the topic of siege def, here’s an example of a first “real” siege def everyone should aim for: Carc Vigor Triana.

Some assorted tips:

• If you don’t have Carc yet, then you can use Khmun, Tesa, or Kaki as the fire bruiser.
• If you don’t have Triana yet, you can try Skogul or Hraes as a wind bruiser. But Triana is the single best unit in the game for siege so you should really prioritize getting her from summoning stones.
• Triana should always go last. Carc or Vigor going first doesn’t matter.
• My Carc is on a Spd/CR/HP build. Slot 4 CR is a great option for attack based bruisers when you are struggling to get enough stats with slot 4 CD. It’s not specifically just for Carc.
• I’d like to re-emphasize the points I made in the previous post – vio on everything, tankiness > spd > dmg, make sure everything has some offset. Which specific one doesn’t matter as much as just that you have a real offset. Don’t neglect acc especially on def breakers (Carc + Vigor).
• There are multiple good ways to build this def. Part of what makes a def strong is the potential for it to be runed in different ways, so there’s never only 1 “right” way to do it. Rune things according to where your best runes are. For example, Triana can either be tanky like mine, or on damage. Carc can also be runed on a much tankier build (for example Spd/HP/HP) to try to survive offenses that attempt to nuke him first.

Arena Defense

I’ve also updated my arena def by this point to something slightly better: Garo Clara Vigor Triana. This AD comfortably keeps me in the conq range during the week, and easy C1 finishes. I’ll be using this AD to try to get C3-G1 finishes eventually as well.

Here is my Clara: (runes for other monsters are same as what was just shown in the previous post). Some of you may be surprised that it’s not on swift. The reason is pretty simple, Clara doesn’t have really have good base spd so 99% of the time anyone who wants to outspeed this def even if I put my fastest swift on her will be able to. I might as well make her stronger against other/bruiser offenses.

And while this is a super f2p AD, the overall template is a solid one to use as you get more premium options: Spd lead, stripper, bruiser, nem healer. Common more premium options:

• Speed Lead: Vanessa, Psama, Halphas, Moore
• Stripper: Triton, Nora, Juno, Praha
• Nem Healer: Abellio, Molly, Ariel, Praha
• Bruiser: Karnal, Sav, Rakan, Nana, Perna

RTA

I finally got around to trying some RTA on this account. I’m not going to spend too much time on it here because it’ll quickly get outside the realm of “beginner” PvP, but I do highly recommend everyone at least play a few games each season just for the easy and quick medals from the seasonal achievements. I played less than a day’s worth of wings and earned a total of 1400 RTA medals from it. If you use it to only buy MS that’s 70 MS for under 2 hours of work – pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

If you want to learn more about RTA, I suggest you watch some videos or streams to get an idea of what kinds of teams people use, and then simply just play. Don’t worry about trying to set up all your monsters, builds, and ideal drafts perfectly, as chances are once you start playing you’ll want to adjust everything all over again to your own personal preference. Rune up some monsters and just go.

I highly recommend cleave teams for people who don’t care too much about RTA and just want to farm some easy medals, or for people who aren’t sure yet and just want something easy to use to try it out. Cleave teams are fast and very simple to play. However, bear in mind that they are definitely not strong, at least relative to the rune quality required for them.

I do NOT recommend cleave teams for people who are more serious about competing in RTA. The higher you go up in the ladder, the less you’ll see people trying to cleave. In the guardian ranks I’d estimate only maybe 2% of players or matches are damage based cleaves. Against good players it’s just really hard to pull off and requires insane runes, since there are just so many counters available.

But anyway as you can see the basic format for this team is 2 boosters and 3 DD. At least 1 of the DD needs to have a speed lead.

• Popular speed lead DD: Garo, Susano, Shimitae, Fei, Psama
• Popular boosters: Draco, Bastet, Megan, Vela, Hongyeon
• Popular non-spd lead DD: Julie, Lushen, Kaki, Kahli, Odin

Some notes about runing them:

• Boosters: obviously you just give them your fastest swift set. Give the faster set to the one that’s usually banned less. For example with me using Draco/Hongyeon, if my opponent banned a booster they always banned Draco. So I opted to give my faster set to Hongyeon.
• DD: these are all just regular speed nuker sets. I have mine on will, which actually does come into play at higher levels a lot (for example, you may still get a chance if you get outsped, or against things like Antares). But in retrospect at lower levels it was completely not needed. You can skip will and just go for stats. Garo or Susano like Vamp/Nem for cleanup/solo things that survive.

With all the basics in each area covered by now, moving forward I think I’ll just give general updates once a month or so on FRR for this account. But first, 2 points I want to discuss based on feedback and questions I’ve gotten so far from people reading this guide:

• This guide seems like it’s just for F2P monsters, how do I use my nat 5s?

While it’s true that this guide does focus on F2P options, a lot of times the F2P options are still the best in the game. Even when we’re dealing with PvP. This is especially true for siege offense. If you look at battle logs on my main account (not f2p, playing highest level of siege), I’m still using a ton of nat 4 monsters to beat nat 5 towers – simply because they are the absolute best possible options. The monsters and comps I recommend in this guide would be recommendations to every player, regardless of how much they spend or what nat 5 options they have.

Specifically when it comes to arena offense, I did include a lot of nat 5 options in this guide already. And then when it comes to siege offense – once you’ve built all the basics discussed here, then we can start talking about nat 5s.

• My runes suck. I don’t have good vio runes, and I never get speed rolls on my swift runes.

Your standards are still too high. Just because you’re done with PvE doesn’t mean it’s time to start auto-selling all blue runes. You can still do a lot with blue vio and swift runes.

I find that most people don’t raid enough for grinds/gems. If you look through my swarfarm, you’ll notice that even on a “beginner” account, practically every single rune on a pvp monster is gemmed and grinded. You shouldn’t be using any ungrinded runes for PvP. Build a SR5 team if you don’t have one already.

When it comes to artis, the blocker for most people is that they still don’t understand artis. Don’t be lazy, take the time to learn. Then farm.

The biggest weakness, or rather opportunity for improvement, that I see beginners making in siege is that they don’t cleave enough. Taking first turn and nuking the enemy before they get to move is the best way to deal with RNG. Dead units cant proc.

I currently have 7 outspeed and nuke comps runed, and they all have their own sets. I don’t do any rune swapping.

• Bale/Khmun Kona Lushen
• Gal Bernard Julie
• Dozer/Khmun Imesety Copper
• Garo Draco Kahli
• Cov Hongyeon Taru
• Susano Orion/Megan Stella
• Chloe water twins

But my swift runes suck, I can’t do this!

As mentioned earlier – roll your blue swift runes. Farm R5 for grinds. You can get plenty fast enough simply with grinded blue swift + 2 broken triple spd roll runes of any set. And then understand that target selection is important – never try to race the enemy on even grounds. Target defs that don’t have a speed threat, or if they do, make sure you have the speed advantage. Use a speed lead when enemies don’t (i.e. Khmun Kona vs no spd lead). Use higher spd lead and boosters with higher base spds against enemies who do (i.e. Susano Orion vs Gal Clara).

How do you get your DDs to be fast enough to be speed tuned and still do enough damage?

People generally overestimate the damage required for these DD to be usable. Speed and 100 CR are your main goals. So when rolling for runes, you’re mostly just looking for rolls into Spd and CR. Runes with high rolls of Atk or CD may deceptively look good for DDs (and they are for fat DDs), but they don’t work for speed DDs. If you look through my swarfarm and at my speed DD runes, you’ll notice that a lot of them don’t have any additional rolls of Atk or CD beyond the base roll. A lot of times it’s just gemmed/grinded in too.

Several people have asked about ISA, this upcoming month I’ll spend the time to do ISA on this account and give some more specific suggestions. Basically if you want to try to win as much as you can, you treat ISA like siege and not arena. I’ll log my hits and show examples soon.

As for regular arena though, I’ve built a second speed lushen offense to use (while keeping my existing fat lushen comp): Bernard Megan Julie Lushen.

As a reminder, this speed lushen comp is used for slower tankier defs. For contesting speed ADs, I still use the fat Lushen comp. Note that this speed lushen comp also cannot deal with Abellio defs, you’ll need to bruiser or Tiana those. There’s just no way to guarantee any sort of reliability against Abellio – you can try to purposely reduce damage on Julie all you want but you still may proc Abellio passive on super squishy units, or just not do enough dmg and fail to kill with both Julie + Lushen moving on tankier units.

Two things to point out regarding the boosters:

• 2A Bernard with a bruiser/dmg rune set is pretty important for cleanup. Again I am not racing any speed defs, Bernard is not runed to be as fast as possible. Spd/CR/Atk is ideal for him. If you find yourself enjoying Bernard, I highly recommend you devil him. He is worth the skillups not just for the higher boost on his S3, but for the additional dmg and bonuses on S1/S2 that make him a strong bruiser (and not just a booster).
• Megan is on a squishy double will/nem for use against Leo Luci ADs. Don’t waste your time 6*ing or 2Aing her. Bastet would eventually replace her anyway.

As another note, I’ve improved my fat lushen comp (Susano Orion Kona Lushen) by 6*ing the Orion and Kona. This just helps a lot for cleaning up when you have to deal with revived Psama and dismounted Sav.

ISA Teams Update

I’m on Team 145 and will be going over a few examples from matches against EU.

1. Some teams are still cleavable with your standard lushen teams. Fat Lushen vs Psama + stripper + bruisers is pretty common.
2. As mentioned before, if you have the time and energy to try and do your best to win each match, you should treat ISA like siege and pick a bruiser style team based on each specific defense you’re facing. One of the most common templates I’ve been using since a lot of anti-lushen fire (Vanessa, Juno, Perna, Nora, etc.) is popular on AD is to run Skogul + 3 fire (Racuni, Lala, Tesa, Khmun, etc.)
3. Another siege-style bruiser team that is a bit more generic and can use into anything you’re unsure about is Tractor Lulu Windy +1. This offense is also good into most Martina Shaina defs.
4. A good compromise between cleaving and bruisering is to use Copper Dozer as an offense, where you snipe 2 monsters at the start, then bruiser out the rest (or sustain until your cooldowns come back to nuke again). Khmun is an excellent +1 for this due to his speed lead and cleanup potential. You’ll find a lot of defs are susceptible to copper dozer, including ones with Abellio. You just have to make sure it’s not too fast and only has 1 stripper so that you can outspeed and snipe the stripper first. Note that most likely you’ll want to get both Copper and Dozer on will for this so you have some flexibility (i.e. having Copper on will means you can boost dozer first to snipe a fire stripper like Nora/Juno).
5. And lastly – sometimes if the def is super tanky but has little damage, I just auto them. You know, those defs with Vanessa Triana Abellio Praha Ariel Juno Nora Karnal Molly Kinki etc. It’ll take awhile but at least you can go do something else for 5 minutes and then come back to a win. Khmun Vigor Triana is an excellent base for autoing, then you can add a Tetra or Vero for safety vs Nora/Karnal/Rica/Jeanne.

Siege Def Theory and Update

It’s been awhile since an update… but I’m still somewhat playing this account and trying out some different things. I’ve already discussed siege defs a bit earlier in this guide but I’d like to expand on the topic a bit as well as show some more examples past the first Carc Vigor Triana that was suggested. First, here are the defs I’m currently running (still mid-G1 guild) and all runes/artis on them.

Don’t try to glean too much meaning out of the win rates, it doesn’t mean much at all since it’s still relatively few hits and what is considered a “good” defense win rate varies greatly depending on what level you’re playing at and what your goals are. Keep in mind that G1 siege isn’t competitive and there’s a huge range of players – from 1 month old beginners still working on PvE, all the way to ex-legend accounts that are retired or farming. The ranks in this game are wildly different between the different PvP areas, even if you go up to G3 siege that’s still only roughly equivalent to C2 arena. This isn’t me trying to gatekeep any content, it’s just an objective comparison of the ranks by the number of players they actually represent. G3 siege is top 50 guilds, with 30 players per guild that’s top 1500 players. Top 1500 players in arena is C2.

Also note that I still stick to my recommendation of aiming for 2-3 solid siege defs for players who are trying to improve in siege. You don’t need more. If you are able to make more than 3 defs that do well, you should consider finding a better guild to join. For WGB which needs 5 defs, you can certainly try to make 5 defs – just make sure that you prioritize them so that you’re making 3 strong defs and 2 leftover defs, rather than 5 mediocre defs.

To build a basic siege def, you can try following these very very general guidelines for picking the right monsters to use:

• Have at least 2 different sources of damage/threat. If your def only has 1 damage dealer and 2 supports, it’s too easy to just tank that 1 threat or eliminate it quickly.
• Don’t stack multiple monsters of the the same element. This also helps make sure the offense can’t bring a single unit to tank most of your threat, or that the majority of your def is weak to a single element.
• Try to include a monster that stops or deters cleaves. This could be a speed threat that can outspeed a cleave attempt and cc (ex. Orion, Clara), a monster that can outspeed and put up some sort of anti-cleave buff (ex. Vigor), or a monster with a passive that blocks damage (ex. Triana, Molly). Alternatively you can also run multiple monsters that are difficult to cleave or 1 shot. Examples of these would be monsters with damage reduction passives (ex. Tesa, Kinki), or monsters with a self-revive or some other second life mechanic (ex. Sav, Theo, Iunu).
• Make sure you have def breaks somewhere. Best would be multiple, aoe, and/or random (ex. Orion, Theo) def breaks. Def breaks are important not just for the damage output, but also for changing AI targeting. Defenses are easy to hit when you know exactly how the AI will behave and choose its targets. They become much harder when randomness is introduced. Along the same lines of def breaks, keep an eye out for brand debuff. It’s great for doing the same thing as a def break in terms of changing AI targeting, and can even stack with def breaks. It’s just much rarer.
• In order to apply def break, you need strippers to make sure the offense can’t just bring immunity to avoid def breaks. This is much more important on 5* towers and a bit less important on 4* towers, due to a lot more premium immunity options being available only for 5* (think Woosa, Amelia, Vela, etc.)

After you’ve settled on the 3 monsters to use in a def, you get to the more important part – how to rune it.

• Siege def is hard. On top of your def being AI controlled against a real player, that real player also gets to choose a custom-tailored 3 monster offense to specifically counter the exact def you’ve laid out. Don’t handicap your def even further by giving it leftover runes. Anything you put on siege def should have some of the very best runes on your account.
• Vio is king. I don’t have to tell you that vio is the best set in the game, especially for PvP, and especially for this type of content where practically the only way for a lot of defs to win is to get lucky through procs. If you don’t put vio on your monsters then you’re basically not even giving them a chance to win. There are a few monsters that are ok on despair (for example, aoe strippers like Clara or Liu Mei), but other than that, the only other exception is that you can have 1 monster on your absolute best and fastest swift set. The only purpose of swift is to outspeed someone trying to outspeed your def. A leftover or even second best swift set is useless. Out of all 15 monsters across my 5 defs, 13 are on vio, 1 is on despair (Clara), and 1 is on a 300+ swift set (Orion).
• Just like how vio is the important main set, real offsets are important too. Stats over sets is only a PvE mantra, in PvP it is worth losing stats to gain a valuable offset. The exact offset used between Will, Nem, Destroy, Rev, and Shield doesn’t always matter that much, as different offsets counter different types of offenses. You just need at least something. Out of my 15 monsters, only 2 are missing a real offset – 1 is the Orion which I’m just speed chasing on, and the other is Iunu which I also was trying to hit a specific spd for tuning purposes and couldn’t manage a real offset.
• Pay attention to the turn order of your team. Strippers should move first, followed by defense breakers, followed lastly by damage dealers. Khmun should almost always move last, not only is he a damage dealer, but also because you don’t want him to give a shield to someone who then immediately moves after him and then procs the shield away. Triana is another common monster that people mistakenly have move first, but should really move last as well. Not only can she be a damage dealer, but also it’s very useful to have her go last and use S2 so that your entire team has immunity when it’s your opponent’s turn.
• Minimize speed gaps. There shouldn’t be much speed at all between each of your 3 monsters. A great example is my Clara Theo Iunu def – most people think Clara as a first turn stripper should just be runed as fast as possible. If you rune on swift (which is valid), then yes, as fast as possible is good. But if you rune her on despair or vio, then you should have her only 1-2 speed faster than your damage dealers, so that your enemy doesn’t have some fast cleanser like Lulu that moves between your Clara and damage dealers. A lot of people give their fastest despair set to Clara and that is a mistake. I can make my Clara 15 speed faster on despair, but this would just make her worse. The extra speed still isn’t going to make her faster than any cleave team on swift that tries to outspeed, but then leaves an opening for bruiser teams to cut in and cleanse.
• Know your ATB tick thresholds. While I wouldn’t say it’s absolutely critical to always be on tick (and there’s never just 1 ideal tick that you should always aim for on a particular def), you should be cognizant of them and keep them in mind when trying to improve the overall efficiency of your monsters. What I mean is that if you’re close to the next tick, try harder to get to it. If you’re right in the middle between 2 ticks, drop some speed for other stats.
• While every monster on def can always be runed in different ways to counter different offenses, in general I find that when in doubt, overall the best way to prioritize stats on any siege def monster is tankiness (HP/Def) > speed > damage. Even damage dealers should follow this priority. As an example, you can see that my Theo and Kaki are runed much tankier than what most people would normally expect. Especially the Kaki which is on a Hp/Hp/Hp build. Damage dealers do 0 damage when they’re dead. Again I’m not saying this is always the best way, there are certainly more yolo-runed Theos on very successful defs. It’s just a good option.
• Acc and Res. Don’t neglect Acc on damage dealers with important debuffs. Def break is an extremely important debuff, so make sure that you have at least some acc on damage dealers like Carc and Theo. 20-40 is a good range to shoot for, and you can get even more with acc artifact. Resist is all or nothing, but it’s a very valid option to consider the “all” route for practically any monster. It’s not limited to just supports like Triana. For example, I use the Tesa res lead on my Tesa Riley Elsha def to give Elsha max res.
• Slot 4 CR is underrated. It’s not just a tool for your low-damage supports that have skills that require crit to function, like Verde or Praha. It can be used on damage dealers too, when you need to make sure you hit other requirements in other areas such as tankiness, speed, acc, and/or res, and you simply can’t get high enough CR on a slot 4 CD build. I have multiple monsters on slot 4 CR – Tesa, Elsha, Carc, even a traditional yolo-nuker like Iunu.

For the most part, this guide is done and as you can see with the lack of updates there probably won’t be any more. I’ve covered all the topics I wanted to cover and everything past this isn’t really “beginner” level anymore. I’ll still try to comment on any major game updates though. So as such:

• Recently world guild battle was buffed with better rewards. And the rewards are HUGE. WGB is now just as rewarding if not more than siege, depending on how you value certain things such as LD scrolls, devilmon, and reapps compared to crystals. WGB teams are the same as siege offense teams, so effectively this makes learning and investing in siege offense even more important than before.
• Siege rewards at lower levels (aka “G1 farming”) were nerfed. This along with WGB buffs makes it so that you really should strive to be in as strong of a guild as you can, the rewards do increase significantly more at higher levels. Especially in WGB if you’re in G3 you can now expect to get an additional devilmon, 3 reapps, 3 LDs, and tons of other regular scrolls every MONTH. And remember that G3 in guild content is not the same as guardian level in arena, G3 in guild content is comparable to conqueror ranks in regular arena and if you’ve finished this guide you should be fully capable of competing in a G3 guild.
• Monster wise, beginner PvP meta has not really changed. The only 2 notable additions since this guide is now 1+ year old are Praline (wind choco knight/madeline cookie) who is an amazing buffer for the double snipe siege offense team (gives attack buff, crit buff, AND has a speed lead), and Liesel, who is a good f2p dd to use with Tiana if you don’t have the more premium options like CP and Poseidon.

Update on 4* Skillups

In Beginner playthrough, I discussed using devilmons on 4* monsters. I’d like to re-emphasize that here as well as provide a specific list of my 4 skillup recommendations as of this time and meta (middle of 2024).

Worth deviling:

• Carc (S2 is required but S1 skillups are very important too as he deals dmg)
• Galleon (S3 and S1, S2 is not important)
• Mihyang (S2 and S3, S1 eventually)

Main fusion skillup targets. While 5* fusions are not worth it, 4* fusions are worth it when you start working on PvP:

• Harps for Triana
• Jokers for Lushen

Worth buying 20 almighty scrolls every time you collect 30 pieces from guild shop:

• Pierrets (until Julie and Clara are skilled)
• Vampires (until Eirgar and Verde are skilled)

Also note that in terms of devils, if you get certain 4* LDs that don’t have farmable skillups, they are absolutely worth deviling too. Vritra is a great example, but there are others. Ask if you’re not sure.

I hope this was helpful to you!