Guild Battle Strategies

This is a thread for strategies about guild battles and discussion of those strategies.

The beginning

Proper Guild Formation

the front rank of your guild battle formation needs to be filled with the players who have the most aggressive, hard-hitting team with the fastest speed and the most potions and wild tonics(event items that work like potions but don't have a limit to number of uses) backing them up. Anyone with an event unit needs to consider switching to full attack. Each person in this part of the formation should not have ANY units set to defense. In the event that a unit or two or three is defeated, ideally there will be others to jump in to fill that role. An example:
Reinhard
Phileas
Patear
Morticia
Sarah
Edwin
Diane
Diane
Alraune

If there are no characters on this team set to defense, Reinhard is the tank and when he dies, he will be replaced by edwin, whose fast speed and slow will help slow down the blood loss from the loss of the tank. phileas would take over tanking duties but edwin would continue to pressure with slow, and as phileas dies, diane would jump in. then edwin (being melee and front rank unlike the others) would be replaced by another diane, and eventually you'd just end up with a jumbled disorganized mess, but that's ok because ideally by that time you'd be doing more damage than you're taking. This team only has 4 six-stars, and no seven stars, and looks competent.

The middle rank of your formation does not get the front rank's bonus to attack strength, but attack and defense are about 105% of normal stats. Speed is increased, and proc rate of skills is lessened. In a pinch, however, you can switch from offense to defense to support your team's defense as your defenders accumulate points to heal. In some guilds this is the best place to put your rooks, in others they belong in the back. If you value speed and you want to eliminate targets before they get a chance to fight back, this is your turf. Good team builds can place enemy targets into the graveyard before they get a shot in, and that means that if you're fast and your team is hitting hard, you can clear the way for the offensive line at the beginning of the fighting phase, putting hundreds of thousands of points on the board in those crucial first moments of the game. It is vitally important that you maintain contact with your defenders. If they need you to, you can switch your offensive team to defensive mode to cover them while they wait for a rally-heal.

The rear rank of your formation does not get the speed boost everyone else gets but they get a bonus to the proc rate of skills, meaning iron wall is the best thing ever. love it with all your heart. The first person in your formation should be Reinhard (if you're poor), Vertex (currently it's unknown what her hp are), or Bajardo. The second character in your formation should be another of those three tanks, or Aksana. Aksana has iron wall, but she doesn't have the hp of those three. Aragon is strictly superior to Reinhard in every way but she costs more than a house and that's just stupid. Save your money. In an extended fight, it won't matter which one hits first. they both proc skills just as often.


When determining which players (and their teams) go in which slot, determine who is the best tank first. That player goes in the top right slot, and they are maintank. this person has a very special role.

over the course of the fighting, the maintank will be expected to monitor the health of the team, checking regularly to see what the health levels are of the various characters. a very well built defense can handle multiple attacks before needing a heal - sometimes dozens, and by intelligently swapping out one bajardo for another or one aksana for another, you can extend the life of your defense, getting even more out of those precious heals. There may even come a time when the enemy is just completely broken and they give up, in which case it's perfectly fair for the tank to switch their defense to join in the fighting, especially when they can hit the rival base for bonus points. But most of the time, their goal is to form an impenetrable wall to stop the enemy forces. Why? Because a team with an event six-star can gain 60,000 points for hitting the rival base, but can be stuck earning 3,000 per attempt if they are stopped by the tank. That's 57,000 points earned for your team per attack, roughly 228,000 points per potion spent by the enemy player. if you can handle getting attacked 4 times before needing a heal, you have "generated" 228,000 points for your team off of those 150 action points, far more efficient than the 60,000 points that your team's attackers generate by hitting the rival base. THAT is how you win this event.

Note, however, that you can't form a good defense by just slapping a bunch of heavy hitters in and sticking them in the back row. there's a huge speed penalty that goes with that increased proc rate of skills. That means that your tank, and all your units are going slow enough that they will not go first! the enemy will get hits in, unless iron wall procs. having one iron wall unit is nice, but you NEED BACKUPS.

Here's a sample defense list:
Bajardo - set to Defend
Bajardo
Aksana - set to Defend
Aksana
Lana - set to Defend
Ethelred - set to Defend
Delfina - set to Defend

Note that this team is 200 points but only seven units.
while the player who is set to maintank checks his/her defense every so often, they will have to swap one Bajardo out for the other, or one Aksana for another, depending on how badly their team has been beaten up. with two characters on the front rank with iron wall, it's even less likely that area attack will hurt your formation, and Since it's a given that you're going to be slower than your opponent, it won't matter so much if you go with Ethelred, because she'll get her hit in and slap the silly out of someone. If you have Alondra or Spica, here's their time to shine, and if you're itching to use someone with speed order, hint hint: it's more effective when your team is slower than theirs.

More info to follow.

Everyone's telling us "Reinhard is a great tank because he's fast" or "Units that die need to be replaced" But no one is giving me enough "Why" answers. Everyone does not own a reinhard. In that event, who would I use to tank. In fact, how do I decide if I'm better on offense or defense? I don't know because no one is giving me the mechanical background to the Guild event. Here are some questions I think need to be addressed for any tips to be useful:

1. How is unit HP calculated in arena. Not who has the most, but how did you figure it out.
2. Impotant bullet points to consider when creating an attack/defense line-up
3. If a unit is "killed" why do I need another to replace it, and how long is it considered killed.
4. How long does an actual "war" last? until a certain goal is reached or only for a set amount of time.
5. I know potions are important, and from the current events page i Sorta know what they do. But
5a) If I'm a spender where are my potions best spent.
5b) if I don't have a good arena team are my potions still useful?
5c) Are there any situations where even though I can spend potions, I shouldn't/should spend them elsewhere
5d) There's a limit to how many potions I can use? what is it?
6) I have 10 units, but they're not good for offense or defense in particular, where do I go from here?
7) Is there ever a time where I'd want an offense and defense team?
If my guild is dominating/being dominated, should/can I switch roles on the fly and how effective would that be
9) A breakdown of arena skills, and their proc rate if you have them. There's still some confusion about Iron Wall, we don't know what Nerve Strike is & I have no idea what speed order does.
10) since units die, is it possible to use more that 200DC during a war?

I have a small suggestion on your post, if possible can you organise it with sub-titles? It's a bit difficult to read .3.'

I like Guild Battles, probably one of the most intense and fun event up to date. But thing is, if someone worked on a guide for it, everyone would follow it like a zombie S:
Kind of like a company secret type of thing, wouldn't want to share your own tactics to other competing guilds right?

Where have you been hiding? lol... you would have known most of the answers to those questions if you played in the first guild arena event but I will see if i can answer some.
1. I believe the unit HP in GA is the same as in BA, and as for how they figured it out i'm not totally sure but I think its by keeping track of how much damage a unit takes before it dies.
2. This has been discussed in the events section but for the most part there are 3 positions to choose from to place your team in before the battle begins. They are front, middle and rear, each providing a bonus to either attack or defense. As I said before GA is almost exactly like BA so whatever team you would use for BA will work in GA.
3. If 1 unit is killed its not a big deal because you have others as backup, but once all your units are killed you won't be able to attack or defend until you heal them. You cannot heal just 1 unit when you use heal it heals all of your units, and units do not recover life on their own you have to heal them.
4. The actual war lasts for a full hour, so you will have to pretty much be present the whole time.
5. Potions work the same as the event items you get with one exception, you can only use 10 per battle whereas you can use unlimited event items. Pots and EI are of course to heal your team and even if you don't have a good team you can still play defense to prevent the other team from hitting your castle while your teammates attack.
6. You can place your team in the middle spot I was referring to earlier in (2) its like the average placement not strong on attack or defense.
7. When you pick your 10 units for a battle and the battle starts you can't switch out those 10 units, while the battle is going on you can you can switch which units you want on defense and offense between your 10 units as much as you want. Keep in mind you can only have a max of 5 units on defense at a time.
8. If your team is dominating you can switch your offensive team to your biggest hitters to maximize your teams event points, if your team is getting dominated you can play spoiler and just go 2 man defense to limit the other team from racking up too many event points.
9. As I said the skills are the same as in BA, I believe speed order works almost like slow and noone really knows what nerve strike does yet since its new.
10. No its not possible to use more than 200DC during the war.

Unit health is tracked by poison damage taken. If you check the sites encyclopedia section you'll see some data tracked by Colaleon with unit health info.

People say lead Reinhard as a tank because he's quite affordable (30-40TE) but also has a high hp as far as known units goes.

Not to mention his low range of 130 which makes him a sure front-liner.

Rotarywhiz, long time no see! & Yes I quit around the first BA because I didn't really like it, and just came back at the beginning of The Color of Vengeance, so I missed the first GW and most BA.

Still, my own personal history aside, I like to think that if you're gonna make a guide to doing something, you should assume nothing is known to the reader, and outlining basic info before going into the complex stuff. It just makes the guide more professional & helpful.

But then again, SnowTempest has a good point. We are all competing here, so maybe it would be better to not have a guild strategy thread. But if that's what Tentacle wants to do, that's his/her buisness!

Reinhard and Aragon have nearly 1 million hp, calculated by determining it by how much poison damage they take when poisoned, and attacking. there are calculations in this thread:

http://www.fantasicaunofficial.com/t6865-unit-hp-in-battle-arena

There you'll see that we still don't know the hit point totals for most units.

Note that Aragon/Reinhard have 965,650-965,652 HP @ level 140
and Bajardo: 695,268-695,272 HP @ level 140 but he has iron wall, which will proc more often if he's on a player's team and that player is set to the rear of the formation. Aksana's hit points aren't that much lower, but every single one of them counts!
Incidentally, Aksana attacks faster, which means if she gets poisoned, she'll actually tank less damage than bajardo, who will likely end up attacking less often over the course of the fight. Because she hits faster and more often, she'll take more poison damage, and she'll take it sooner.

2. Impotant bullet points to consider when creating an attack/defense line-up

for a defense line up, you want iron wall x2 on your main team, and you want backups. after that, you want to acknowledge that your units are going to be slower than normal, so focus on units that are already slow but hit hard, like delfina or any area attackers, and make use of speed order because it compensates for what your team will be lacking.

For a midrange team, you want to take advantage of that speed boost you get, to hit hard and fast. no sense focusing on knockback or slow when you can remove your enemies from the turn order by just killing them. multiattack abilities are best here.

For an offense team, you want event units if you've got them, or you want to let a teammate with an event unit take one of the front rank slots. you want slow and knockback over anything else, because you want to hit more often by denying your opponent their actions. if nerve strike/ "stan smash" works as suspected, it'll be nicest here because it'll deny someone their turn.


3. If a unit is "killed" why do I need another to replace it, and how long is it considered killed.

killed units stay dead until you use a heal action, which uses the same amount of points as attacking. if you lose two units but have backups, you don't have to heal immediately and can hammer away at someone else's defense. If you're wasting half of your action points healing instead of attacking, then you're missing out on generating points for your team. Healing doesn't give your team any points if you're not choking your opponent's attackers on your defense team.


4. How long does an actual "war" last? until a certain goal is reached or only for a set amount of time.

1 hour is all you have to fight the rival team. it begins at the turn of the hour and if any of the opposing team hasn't yet set themselves to a formation location, they're simply not there. you might end up hitting one player and then the rival base in the first few seconds, getting a hundred thousand points or so before they realize that the battle has started, and if the hour is one big long standoff, well, congratulations. at the end of the hour, the guild with more points wins. that means that every attack did something, even if you got crushed. it means every defense was important, even if you got slaughtered.

It does, however, mean that if your best defender is in the backline, the enemy will get about 3000 when attempting and failing to get through them, and they might get about 13,000 points for killing off the defense of someone on the front rank. it's going to be very important to stay in contact with your team so they can inform you if you need to turn your defense off, so that the back ranks can do their thing most effectively. Don't cripple your team by setting a weak defense and getting owned repeatedly.

5. I know potions are important, and from the current events page i Sorta know what they do. But
5a) If I'm a spender where are my potions best spent.

wait until you have 0/700 action points and use them there

5b) if I don't have a good arena team are my potions still useful?

yeah, spending potions means points, and if your team sucks you can rally a teammate, spending 250 points to give them 150.

5c) Are there any situations where even though I can spend potions, I shouldn't/should spend them elsewhere

you should probably pace yourself. unless you're aiming for the total gp point unit (which I don't recommend for anyone), a win is a win.

5d) There's a limit to how many potions I can use? what is it?

you can use a maximum of ten potions per battle, but you're not limited in the number of wild tonics you can use, and those only come with packs. Keep in mind that you will only have one hour, so even if you had infinity wild tonics, there's a limit to how many you can use in battle and you can spend and spend away but if your opponent is THAT much better, you really are just throwing money at a brick wall.

6) I have 10 units, but they're not good for offense or defense in particular, where do I go from here?

head to the middle rank, where you could switch from offense to defense role mid-battle (but note: you can't change the ten units in your team, you can only set up to 5 to be on defense)

7) Is there ever a time where I'd want an offense and defense team?

sure, if you think you can manage it, but be warned that the point cost limit really hampers your ability to do this. even if you have Charles, he's a front rank unit and he tends to get slaughtered if he can't punch through with sheer firepower. you're limited to 5 units at a time, and Charles really isn't used to environments where 5 of him tops go up against the likes of 5 seven star units, or worse, a bajardo iron walling all his attacks and then charles getting slaughtered by area attack. unlike other team-forming events, specialization REALLY REALLY helps here, and it's best to get with your guild before the event and organize your formations before the beginning of the battle. running 7 units with 200 cost tends to be more hard-hitting, tough, AND fast than 10 units that are well balanced.

Cool If my guild is dominating/being dominated, should/can I switch roles on the fly and how effective would that be

Not very. most you'd be expected to do is to switch to a "controlled loss" scenario, where you attempt to guard your lead from the rival team burning potions, by setting two units to defend so that the enemy has to waste 150 action points punching through a speedbump, before they can hit your base. It's called a controlled loss because you're giving the enemy 13,000 points tops instead of the 30,000 they'd get from hitting your base. it's nowhere near as effective as the defense that can shut them down, but combined with the points you gain from attacking, it slows the point bleed, and the opponent might run out of potions before they overcome your point total.

9) A breakdown of arena skills, and their proc rate if you have them. There's still some confusion about Iron Wall, we don't know what Nerve Strike is & I have no idea what speed order does.

speed order speeds up your units, much like the speed demon skill that you can purchase with ally points. it has a more pronounced effect on slower units. because it is a proc, it is best used if the unit with speed order is faster than the units it is speeding up (because: instant gratification, they will get to attack right after you speed them up!). Slow works much the same way, but slow has a more pronounced effect on units that are fast, and no matter what your team looks like, someone will always find a way to be faster than you (or faster than you want them to be) and thus, slow is awesome.

The proc rate of these skills varies by the star rating of the skill, (slow 7 procs more often than slow 6) as well as the rank your units are in in the formation. the rear rank has a boost to the proc rate of skills, the middle rank has a penalty to the proc rate of skills, and the front rank has a less severe penalty to the proc rate of skills. A unit with iron wall procs it more often in the rear rank than that same unit would in the other ranks, and no study has been done to determine the percentage chance of a proc anywhere.

Nobody knows what Nerve Strike does yet. Nor do we know if units like Sofia will get it like she did in Japan. I don't know if Sheryl ever got Critical hit like she did in Japan. In any event, I don't see it.

Certain players have said that critical shot does 150% damage and goes through iron wall, but that hasn't been confirmed as far as I can tell, and I don't know that it could even be proven.

10) since units die, is it possible to use more that 200DC during a war?

Nope. your formation has 10 people, if one dies, the next time you fight, if you're attacking, it will use the first 5 people in the formation that it can find that are not set to defend. Thus, replacement attackers. if you have 5 people set to defend, and you have lost a defender, and one attacker, you will then have 4 people set to attack and 4 set to defend, and you may find yourself forced to use 150 action points to heal, rather than attack.

You are limited to 5 units attacking or defending at once. It is currently impossible to add a goddess to your formation (who would be over 200 points), nor is it possible to set more than 150 points total otherwise to a single attack or defense formation. Thus, that's your limit. in theory, you could have 5 bajardos on defense and 5 charles on attack, for a total of 150 points on defense and 50 points on attack. If you did this, you would be ridiculous.

Tank units and why they're tanks:

Reinhard is estimated to be current trade value of 40 TE, so he's cheap. He's a B speed slow unit with almost 1 million hp. This means he is your budget go-to guy for tanking. Everybody likes that!

Aragon is reinhard but faster. she's also worth like a thousand dollars. sell her, buy a reinhard, and a house, maybe a yacht, and rejoice.

Bajardo doesn't have as many hp, not nearly as many, but he's got iron wall! hooray! He is your favorite tank.

Vertex has much in common with Bajardo but we don't know her actual hp yet. if it's better, then she's the better tank because she doesn't have anything speeding her up or slowing her down. (either of which could work against her)

Aksana is a fast speed tank with almost as many hp as bajardo, she's 25 cost, and she -might- be better or worse, but that depends on the other team's formation. if she were to get poisoned (shame on her, she should have iron walled that!) then she'll take more damage over the course of the fight than bajardo would have. (this also applies to aragon versus reinhard, but they're both already fast attackers, it won't be that much of a difference!)

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If you don't have any six star units, you don't want to be the tank. Sorry. This is me being honest here, you'll need to find a friend that has a six star unit to to do some form of tanking. I don't think Patrick or Bernhard have it in them to protect the team from the firepower you'll be facing.
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Now if you don't have one of those, you can try some other units out.

Eurydike: 888,398-888,402 HP @ level 140

Eurydike has slow like Reinhard and Aragon, but she's got a slower speed... which might work out in your favor. The point is she has decent hp for the role, so you can make it work!

If you check out the list:
http://www.fantasicaunofficial.com/t6865-unit-hp-in-battle-arena
You can see what we know and how we know it. Feel free to add to this list as you go along, even if you get owned pretty hardcore, we'd love to learn as much as possible! Who knows, you might discover that there's a 5 star unit out there with 30 billion hp! (this is unlikely)

There are also a LOT of new six and seven star units in the game and we don't know their hp at all.
I'd love to see if liz has the highest hp total, or if Edea is the new queen of tanking. Until we have that data though, I can't recommend them. and incidentally, it's probably better to have bajardo tank and to let them be dps.

I have a question. Is it better to deploy higher ranked units with no arena skills or is better to use lower ranked units with arena skills?

For example, would it better to deploy mlb Ixtrab versus a lb Ronja?

Ixtab's 5 stars, d speed magic user with poison.

Ronja's 4 stars, c speed melee user with drain attack.

Ixtab wins out for the star rating alone, but I'll break it down a bit further.
drain attack is really only going to be useful on a character taking damage, and ...that should only happen on the unit that's tanking... and virtually none of the known units with drain attack should be tanking. For future reference, just assume that drain attack is bad for guild battle. there might be situations where it works out, but in those situations you probably outclass your opponent by so much that the drain doesn't do much. If you had a 6 star with drain attack as your tank and you were going up against 5 star teams, they'd probably still do enough damage to your tank to kill him or her. (Reimund, or Arana)

Now, poison's not a bad ability, as long as you realize it's just a little extra damage done, so long as the unit that's poisoned gets a swing in before getting obliterated. When poison does proc though, it always looks like the unit proccing the skill does a little extra damage. not sure if that's due to the skill itself, or the fact that a skill procced (I can never really tell if my units do extra damage on every skill proc, because it's hard to gauge).

Now, if your entire team is B speed or faster and you notice that you just HAPPEN to be one hit short of killing one of your opponent's units when they go, you might make an adjustment, but in that case it would be the corner case scenario where you want speed over anything else.
for example you might have chevalier go, nearly killing one of your opponent's units, followed by that opposing unit killing one of your guys. had you switched to a c speed over a d speed (and in any realistic the-battle-is-on-the-line scenario, you'd have better choices available), you might get two swings in and take out the opposing unit before it attacks, saving one of yours... who might then be taken out by the next person in line, but you'd get the satisfaction of contributing to your team. after all, you don't have to land the killing blow on everything to help one of your teammates break through to the rival base. if you take out a target of opportunity, and then a teammate attacks in synch, then the teammate fights against what's left of that defense.

tl;dr: pick the unit that's one star higher. the exceptions to that rule are so few and far between that you shouldn't bother trying to find them.

HP can be summed up in a glance.

30 DC > 25 > 20 > 15 > 10.

Furthermore as a rule of thumb, melee have more hp than archers and mages.

Those two general rules aside,  when two units have the same DC, the amount of HP a unit has is ARBITRARILY DECIDED.  There is no formula for HP atm.  In addition, when looking at units at the same DC level, it does seem that the higher the attack power of the unit, the LESS HP they have (General rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, as noted prior Georgios has an insane amount of HP, could be accounted for via his D speed rating).

Tentacle Love wrote:

Ixtab's 5 stars, d speed magic user with poison.

Ronja's 4 stars, c speed melee user with drain attack.

Ixtab wins out for the star rating alone, but I'll break it down a bit further.
drain attack is really only going to be useful on a character taking damage, and ...that should only happen on the unit that's tanking... and virtually none of the known units with drain attack should be tanking. For future reference, just assume that drain attack is bad for guild battle. there might be situations where it works out, but in those situations you probably outclass your opponent by so much that the drain doesn't do much.  If you had a 6 star with drain attack as your tank and you were going up against 5 star teams, they'd probably still do enough damage to your tank to kill him or her. (Reimund, or Arana)

Now, poison's not a bad ability, as long as you realize it's just a little extra damage done, so long as the unit that's poisoned gets a swing in before getting obliterated. When poison does proc though, it always looks like the unit proccing the skill does a little extra damage. not sure if that's due to the skill itself, or the fact that a skill procced (I can never really tell if my units do extra damage on every skill proc, because it's hard to gauge).

Now, if your entire team is B speed or faster and you notice that you just HAPPEN to be one hit short of killing one of your opponent's units when they go, you might make an adjustment, but in that case it would be the corner case scenario where you want speed over anything else.
for example you might have chevalier go, nearly killing one of your opponent's units, followed by that opposing unit killing one of your guys. had you switched to a c speed over a d speed (and in any realistic the-battle-is-on-the-line scenario, you'd have better choices available), you might get two swings in and take out the opposing unit before it attacks, saving one of yours... who might then be taken out by the next person in line, but you'd get the satisfaction of contributing to your team. after all, you don't have to land the killing blow on everything to help one of your teammates break through to the rival base. if you take out a target of opportunity, and then a teammate attacks in synch, then the teammate fights against what's left of that defense.

tl;dr: pick the unit that's one star higher. the exceptions to that rule are so few and far between that you shouldn't bother trying to find them.

Thank you very much for the information.

Just noticed they changed some serious things for this guild battle.

front rank (attack formation) gets:
120% attack stats
85% defense stats
110% speed
80% chance to proc skills

Mid rank (atk/def formation) gets:
105% attack stats
105% defense stats
90% speed
100% chance to proc skills (normal rate)

rear rank (defense formation) gets:
95% attack stats
110% defense stats
80% speed
110% chance to proc skills


This is different from how I remember mid rank and attack rank previously, where mid rank was speed and attack rank was offensive power and skill at the cost of speed (which, now that I think about it, doesn't make much sense)

So I amend my previous recommendations.

In the front rank, you want units that have a chance to speed up a rank and have very high stats. If in your skills pane, you have speed demon only up to rank 5 and you see a unit's speed change when it's set to your leader, then you know it'll speed up a rank here. There are a few units that speed up a rank as lead, and those units MIGHT speed up a rank in the front row (you only get half the bonus speed demon gives), but even if not it's worth the shot.

*we should start attempting to find units that match that description*

In the middle rank, you should have teams that make the most of their cost and deploy ten units. maybe those teams will be heavier on defense than offense, or maybe not, but they don't lose much at all from being deployed here. These teams should choose to turn off their defense at the start of the match and focus on attacking, and if the defense team (the tanks) need it, the mid rank should be able to turn on defense to help them out if the other team starts burning potions.

In the back rank, not much changes. iron wall's still king of the world. Nerve strike is temporarily disabled and replaced with critical shot (which bypasses iron wall and deals 150% damage, according to various sources, use this information at your own peril) which doesn't seem to be intimidating enough to warrant looking at anything other than iron wall. The question is not whether you'll have an iron wall heavy team, it's how much iron wall you need to use. two tanks should be fine, then you have to make the difficult decision of what to use for the rest of your team because you need to be able to take out attackers as they hit you. I chose Chevalier because she's fast and will proc quad attack often, meaning she'll tear up offense teams (and especially those middle rank teams), forcing well-coordinated guilds to hit the defenders with their offense, instead of clearing the way with their midrankers to start raking in points with their attack spenders.

Just to amend this and address a few misconceptions:

* Unit speed modifier (ex Alhena from C -> B as lead) does not apply to Guild Battle.

* The new skills available force a reformulation of tactics. Stone Breath, Defense Order, and now Blink all challenge the previous strategy suggestions.

* The new offensive skills to-date introduce new tactics as well. Critical Shot, Snipe, Backstab, Incinerate, Nerve Strike, and (Multi-) Attack all affect the previous strategies.

* A wall of 7*'s, deployed as efficiently as possible to maximize unit count, is ALWAYS the best strategy. MANY of these tactics are somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things if 2 teams of 7*-rostered pot/tonic burners are going head-to-head. If your team is little more than full mlb 6* lists that isn't spamming tonics/pots at the maximum rate, all the tactics in the world won't prevent you from being anything other than an obstacle. You simply cannot out-score full-burn ranker teams with ultimate lineups. And in the case of going head-to-head, most spammed pots/tonics and roster wins.

* Communicate thoroughly with your team. Make sure everyone knows their most effective actions in the role that they fill. Unless the other team has given up (and you're just GP farming) attacking from the back row is INCREDIBLY inefficient.

* There have been many challenges to popular convention that a good offense is the best defense. Many successful guilds load the front row up with high rarity, high damage, high HP units and heal consistently as a way to disarm attackers though damage. A team of Colbert+Baldomero+Charles (x3) deployed to the front row and set to defense will prove to be a tough nut to crack for non-optimized 6* and below teams. Not only do they blunt your attack, they disable your attackers while also disabling your defenders through their own attack. They essentially got 2 attacks to your 1. Additionally, you now have to heal.

* BkWiz compiled a really good guide about pairing/matching. There's a lot of misinformation and rumor regarding how teams are paired. Especially once the GP ranking/matching was introduced and described, there seemed to be a false belief that winning without earning more GP than absolutely necessary would somehow allow you to escape the high-ranking teams. This is simply not true. I read the compiled information and found it to hold true in GB2 as a non-ranking, non-optimal guild and in GB3 as a member of a final r13 guild.

Yeah just as a heads up, this thread was created prior to GB 2 and is now obsolete.

You can find a few pointers here but they'll only be effective at squeezing the last few points out of your team that you can get.

In the end, it doesn't matter because the only effective way to win is to throw as many seven star units and dollars as you can at the enemy.

The fact that the top guilds are probably not even seven players filling all nine slots only makes things even worse. (and after all, why would you let some random rookies have over twelve thousand dollars worth of free shoot!) There's virtually no way to compete any more, which is why my team has been going after premium tickets and nothing else for this and the last guild battles.

In the very first one, and ONLY in the very first one, we gave teams a run for their money until we were forced to quit because we ran out of spendable money and potions. We managed to save quite a bit of money but didn't even get the six star - what we did get though was we had a lot of fun.

That's gone. And it will never return. There's no way in hell that I'm going to participate in this many battles a day, grinding out souls inbetween battles, and spending money on something like this. The cost of entry into a guild battle is now in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Do. Not. Play. In. These. Events.