[Dandragoon]

Welcome to a new weekly format i am starting today - Dans thoughts!

In those threads i want to share some of my thoughts on different topics regarding monster mmorpg.
While some of you might agree or not on those thoughts, i considered some of them to be helpful for people not playing the game for too long and interested in mechanical or strategical things.

The first threads topic will be wall natures - but first off, i'll explain what a wall is and does in my opinion.


What is a wall, and what does it do?

Walls are monsters with high defensive stats that can take quite some punishment. Naturally you want them to be very durable and have high defensive stats, focusing on Hitpoints, Defense and Special Defense. Many of them have abilitys that compliment the role of a wall (like shield / guard abilitys or regenerating of some means), along with status moves or buffs to bring them into a position where they can be a thread to your enemys monsters. Having few weaknesses helps with surviving against a bigger variety of monsters as well.

Wall natures - which are good, and why?

I will point out the most common used, and in my opinion best wall natures here. I will divide them into two tiers - the A natures and the B natures.
While the A natures almost always will be good, the B natures might have little drawbacks or apply only to very few specific monsters with certain movesets.
Rating a Nature B in this category does not mean it is a bad nature - just not the best nature for a wall maybe.

Tier A: ( Attack / Defense / Special Attack / Special Defense / Speed / HP)

Blockhead: -6 / +6 / -6 / +6 / 0 / 0

Debonair: -4 / +3 / -4 / +3 / -2 / +4

Discreet: -3 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -4 / +4

Endurable: -2 / +3 / -4 / +3 / -3 / +3

Tier B: ( Attack / Defense / Special Attack / Special Defense / Speed / HP)

Delicate: -2 / +2 / -1 / +2 / -2 / +1

Guarded: -2 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -1 / 0

Mirage: +4 / +1 / -6 / +1 / 0 / 0

Sedate: -1 / +2 / -3 / +2 / -2 / +2

Sentinel: -2 / +2 / -2 / +2 / 0 / 0

Wise: -3 / +3 / -3 / +3 / -3 / +3


Now, as you may or may not have noticed, i did not include natures like Momentum or Quantum which can act as a more specialized wall against 1 type of attack, since i wanted to go through general wall natures, not the very specific ones. For anyone wondering why Mirage is a B nature in my list - while it is a great overall physical attack nature,
it hardly makes for a wall with just +1 in Defense / special Defense and no HP boost.

On to the explanation!
Out of tier A, Discreet and Debonair are very similar in the stat buffs they give. Discreet is a tad more usefull if you go with a monster that has some sort of offensive buff ( knife dance, clear mind) as the malus to offensive stats is a little smaller. Debonair on the other hand has a much smaller malus to speed, which, in most cases, won't help anyways, except you'd have a monster with drake dance or any other form of speed buff. If you really want to go with a physical attacker that has knife dance or something alike though, endurable might be your best choice since it has the least ammount of negative effect on your attack stat. always keep in mind buffs increase a percentage of your base stat - so every bit more there helps ending up with a high buffed endstat!
Blockhead does not provide any health bonus, but has really high defensive values and no speed drawback - you can compete there with Mirages, Verves, Quantums and a lot of other common natures to go first.

In the B tier, we have natures with generally less of a defensive boost that can fill for special roles. Delicate and Sentinel e.g. are the only really applicable natures for a wall that wants to end up with a good special Attack after buffing. Sedate is much like Endurable with a little more offensive focus, and Wise is a good all around nature that is just a tad worse then Debonair or Discreet.

Why prefer certain stats over others?


One of the most discussed topics is Defense vs. HP. While Defense and Special Defense decrease the ammount of damage you take for a specific type of attack, Health is functioning is a universal defensive stat. One of the most common ways to fight a wall is inflicting damaging status effects on them, namely Poison, Bleeding and Burning.
all of those effects lower some of your monsters stats - including Defense and Special Defense - and damage you for a certain percentage of your Hitpoints at the end of each round.
Now, while the ongoing damage will always be a percentage and therefor does not matter that much - the decrease in defensive stats does!

That basically means: The higher your defensive stats are, the higher the ammount that will lost (like the 10% from poison). If you do only count those defensive values to protect you without having sufficient hitpoints, you will end up dead quite fast (or at least faster then with having some good hp on top).
Also, purely based on math, when comparing Debonair or Discreet with Blockhead:

Blockhead has a total of 60% statbonus (every +1 in the nature description stands for a 10% increase in that stat) versus each Physical and Special Attacks.
Debonair / Discreet on the other Hand, while having +30% in Defense / Special Defense, boost Health as universal stat by 40% as well.
So you end up with a 70% statbonus against both types of attacks, giving you more total percentage of defensive value.

I hope you enjoyed the first week of "Dans thoughts" and will tune in next week as well - the topic will be competitive drake dancers!

If you want to comment or share your own thoughts, i will soon create a separate thread where you can post.

sincerely, Dan

[Dandragoon]

Welcome to the second week of Dans Thoughts!

This weeks topic is "Competitive Drake Dancers", evolving around the buff move drake dance, one of the best buffs in the game to date!
I want to check for you guys which monster that is able to learn the move drake dance can incorporate it well into a viable pvp build, and
will go through different possible builds to compare.

After filtering out some of the less useful ones, here are your top 5 contenders!

1. Alaclipse (Legendary, 725 statpoints)
2. Solord (Legendary, 723 statpoints)
3. Dragur (Emissary, 593 statpoints)
4. Dracloud (Emissary, 590 statpoints)
5. Dragrove (Emissary, 575 statpoints)


Those are not all of the monster that can learn drake dance, but the ones that will hold their ground in high end pvp.
The runner ups that did not make it into the top 5, but still fit with the move itself are:

Quensea (Zenith, 609 statpoints)
Draceon (Superior, 479 statpoints)
Chirane (Superior, 478 statpoints)

The reason why they didn't make it are either moveset (Quensea does not have a single attack move to really make perfect use of drake dance),
or having just to low basestats to survive against legends (Chirana has a great moveset but will die with 1 hit even from non-sweeper legends).

Why drake dance, and how to use it?

As mentioned before, drake dance is one of the most powerful offensive buffs in the game. It will add 2 stages of Attack as well as Speed when you use it,
making it a knife dance on steroids. Even if the monster using this move was not a sweeper before (sweepers are monster that can take out opponents in 1 hit mostly,
prefferably Trembling or Hallucination nature to hit first and hard) - after 1 or 2 uses of drake dance, it will become one.

So, when looking at what drake dance does, a few natures come to mind that would work well with it.

Trembling - Having the highest Bonus in Attack and Speed, Trembling seems like the to-go nature for this buff move.
Mirage - Having a good Attack bonus, decent defensive bonus and at least no negative influence on Speed, it is a great nature to use here.
Endurable / Sedate - While decreasing your base attack as well as Speed, those natures offer great survivability to buy you the time to buff up.

When going any deeper into the Wall natures, like Discreet or Debonair, you will experience that the decreae in either speed or attack (or both) will be just to much
to turn your monster into a thread, even when fully buffed, so i do not recommend using those natures for what we are doing here.

The Breakdown - who's the King of drake dancing?

Let's take a closer look at the 5 monster i picked out of all the possible drake dancers. First of, the base stats!


Stat: HP / Att. / Def. / SpAt. / SpDef. / Speed

Alaclipse 105 / 131 / 130 / 132 / 133 / 94

Solord 134 / 125 / 129 / 114 / 128 / 93

Dragur 128 / 94 / 96 / 92 / 93 / 90

Dracloud 102 / 91 / 98 / 92 / 99 / 108

Dragrove 112 / 94 / 88 / 92 / 89 / 100


The highest stat for each category is underlined, and just as one would have thought, the legends have the upper hand on most of those base stats compared to the emissaries.
That will result in different natures beeing prefferable on each of the monsters to benefit from inherent strenghts.


On to the abilitys! Luckily all of those 5 do have at least 1 useful ability to compliment a physical attacker, or are just useful in general.

Alaclipse: Defense Decreaser. Decreases enemy's Defense stat by 15%.
Solord: Attack Master. Increases the monster's Attack stat by 30%.
Dragur: Frosty. when using a damage move, 15% chance to freeze the enemy.
Dracloud: Maximum Attack: Prevents the monster's attack stat from beeing reduced by enemy moves. Bonus Damage: increases same -type damage bonus from 1,5x to 2,0x.
Dragrove: Frosty. when using a damage move, 15% chance to freeze the enemy.


When looking through those abilitys, Dracloud seems to be the big winner with 2 very nice ones.
That leaves us with 1 more very important point: the moveset! Because even if everythign else looks good, the moves a monster can learn will determin if it works or not in the end.

I will do a quick breakdown with the most important factos here:

Alaclipse

Same element moves: check, for both element types. 1000 accuracy moves: check, 1 off element. Support moves: check, Heal to get hp up after buffing.

Solord

Same element moves: check, for both element types. 1000 accuracy moves: check, 1 off element. Support moves: check, Heal to get hp up after buffing.


Dragur

Same element moves: check, for both element types. 1000 accuracy moves: check, 1 off element. Support moves: none especially useful.


Dracloud

Same element moves: check, for both element types. 1000 accuracy moves: check, 1 same element, 1 off element. Support moves: check, Heal to get up hp after buffing, shock to prevent monster from doing harm by a chance.


Dragrove

Same element moves: check, for both element types. 1000 accuracy moves: check, 1 off element. Support moves: none especially useful.


The breakdown shows that there are a lot of things these monsters do have in common.
Dracloud is the only one of them standing out with more or better moves supporting the drake dance build.
When deciding about useful support moves, i did not factor in generel buffs / debuffs that might be helpful, but only moves specifically related to getting those drake dance stacks up
and survive while doing so.

1 more point to check before we decide which of those 5 monsters really are worth going for: elemental weaknesses and resistances!

Alaclipse: 1 weakness of 2x (Fighting), 1 immunity (Psych), no resistances

Solord: 3 weaknesses of 2x (Ice, Ghost, Dark), no immunitys, 5 resistances of 1/2 (Fire, Water, Electric, Grass, Bug)

Dragur: 4 weaknesses of 2x (Ice, Ghost, Dragon, Dark), no immunitys, 6 resistances of 1/2 (Fire, Water, Electric, Grass, Fighting, Psych)

Dracloud: 1 weakness of 4x (Ice), 3 weaknesses of 2x (Rock, Dragon, Light), 1 immunity (Ground), 2 resistances of 1/4 (Grass, Bug), 3 Resistances of 1/2 (Fire, Water, Fighting)

Dragrove: 1 weakness of 4x (Ice), 4 weaknesses of 2x (Poison, Flying, Dragon, Light), no immunitys, 3 resistances of 1/4 (Water, Electric, Grass), 1 resistance of 1/2 (Ground)

Alaclipse seems to be the clear winner in this category, having next to no weaknesses and one immunity, with Solord comming in as a close 2nd and many restistances to make up.


Final verdict and recommendations


So, after checking all of the aspects for a competitive drake dancer, these are my conclusions and recommended builds:


1. Alaclipse

With exceptionally high base stats, an all around good moveset and almost no weaknesses, he's the allrounder among the drake dancers.
Almost any of the earlier mentioned natures benefit him, and he can be a really mean sweeper after buffing just once.
Recommended Movesets:
Mirage / Trembling: Light Slash, Shadow Slash, Sky Slash, Drake Dance.
Endurable / Sedate: Light OR Shadow Slash, Sky Slash, Heal, Drake Dance

2. Solord

Although having a couple more weaknesses, having some good resistances and very high base Hitpoints will make him survive for quite some time. Attack Master helps with hitting hard even when choosing a more wall oriented nature.
Recommended Movesets:
Mirage / Trembling: Light Slash, Drake Claw OR Dragon Blitz, Sky Slash, Drake Dance. Endurable / Sedate: Light Slash, Sky Slash, Drake Dance, Light Restore

3. Dracloud

He's the one really standing out of the emissary drake dancers. Great abilitys and a moveset fitting in with abilitys and elemental types make him a very deadly pvp monster.
Only his weaknesses might be a drawback, and the lack of hp can give you trouble when trying to buff up while beeing hit when using any offensive nature like Trembling or Mirage.
If you have a monster that can disable the enemy though (Sleep / Freeze), and you have time to get 1 or 2 drake dances off, Dracloud will be the best trembling drake dancers to go thanks to his high base speed.
Recommended Movesets:
For any Nature: Drake Claw, Sky Slash, Drake Dance, Round Strike OR Perch OR Shock


4. Dragur

Beeing pretty average in every aspect besides his high Hitpoints, Dragur can bring some interesting elemental variety to your team with his high damage physical psyche moves, and there is always a chance to freeze your enemy for a great chance to recover from sticky situations. He can work great with mirage and the more wall oriented natures, trembling is not recommended due to relatively low base speed.
Recommended Moveset:
For all but Trembling: Drake Claw, Mega Slam, Sky Slash, Drake Dance

5. Dragrove

While having the lowest stats and most weaknesses, and beeing pretty average in all other aspects, Dragrove still has a higher base speed then the legendary drake dancers, as well as the probably best all - around, even though not drake dance specific moveset with great coverage of different elements and status effects. He also brings the possibilty of having a sweeper with grass moves, which are very rare in high end pvp, and can kill famous pvp monsters like zonench.
Recommended Movesets:
Mirage / Trembling: Leaf Claw, Dragon Blitz, Sky Slash, Drake Dance. Endurable / Sedate: Chomp and Bleed Cut as an alternative to any of the attack moves.


And the Winner is... well, there really are 3 Winners. Alaclipse and Solord just bring the raw power of a Legendary that will make them shine, while Dracloud is outstanding among the emissaries.
Dragur and Dragrove both are excellent monster, but need a more specific team to work properly, or are more specific counters to certain monster, incorporating their relatively rare elements of Grass and Psych.
Always Make sure that your drake dancer is either a) durable enough to take a hit and survive while buffing, or b) have another monster in your team to disable enemys
and buy you the time to buff up.

That's it for this week, i hope you enjoyed the read. Next weeks topic will be "decisionmaking on building a pvp monster" where i will cover all the aspects to take into consideration when choosing natures, moves and tp for a competitive pvp monster.

Until then, have a good time!

[Dandragoon]

Welcome to the third installment of Dans Thoughts!

Since V2 finally arrived and has been around for a good bit now, i decided to try and give my opinion on how the new version affected (or rather will affect) PvP.


First off, i want to list a few major changes that will have a large impact on what's hot and not:

- No more 1000 accuracy damage moves

- Evasion moves are wider available, but with less impact

- Accuracy of strong moves is very low in general

- Ancients are now a common thing (or soon will be)


So, there you have it. Those changes will lead to certain trends in V2 PvP, that are quite different to V1.

Monster tend to be build up a lot tougher in general, Sweeper (The Trembling / Hallucinating Glasscannons that 1-shot most stuff) are almost non existing with few exceptions. And IF someone decided to build such a Glasscannon, it should better hit very hard and fast.
I'm talking high-end Legendary minimum hard. And that is for 1 simple fact - Ancients. You cannot expect to go and 1 or 2 shot Ancients with base stats so ridiculously high with your everyday Trembling zenith. 
Even a Mirage natured ancient with average stats can easily survive 2 hits from a zenith sweeper, and in return 1-hit it. So, that's not an option anymore (unless you sweep with another Ancient, or, as stated above, high-end Legends)

Out of the 3 very general Monster categories, namely Sweeper, Mixed and Wall, the Mixed natures and Walls have seen a lot of play recently. 
Reason beeing, especially for Walls: status moves.
Those are still 1000 accuracy and are reliable in pvp. That is what it all comes down to - reliability.

Although evasion is, as i said, not as overwhelmingly strong as in v1 (no more priority evasion buff up to 300% on turn 1), almost every monster has some kind of move to buff evasion. It may be capped at 200% now, which is fine, but the lack of reliable damage moves, and the trend to all-over low acc. moves in the power 9-10 category still make running a pure damage move using monster a risk.

Also, with high base stat Ancients more common now, status moves scale better then damage moves. Poison will do 10% of the total hp every round regardles of the hp beeing 300 or 900. Also, Poison (or Burn) won't care for those super high defensive values.

Mixed attackers, Mirage beeing a very popular nature in that regard ever since, can be very useful with the right moveset. Some utility, some damaging moves to finish the opponent off. Maybe buff up attack or special attack values, lower defenses, and start hurting, while the slight defensive boosts help to survive that extra round of buffing / debuffing.


So for now, status moves and walls are the name of the game, until enough ancients are available to maybe start a counter-trend.
Abilitys like Expert Regenerator, Perfect Body and Radiation are stronger then ever, and the few Sweepers would love some Maximum Accuracy or Maximum guard so they won't be debuffed into uselessness.


For the next week i will continue with what i announced in V1, and it will be even more exciting under the new light of V2 - "Decisionmaking on building PvP monsters". 
Stay tuned!

[fjkulit]

Well, after v2 came out, pvp becomes another universe in every battle due to abilities..

When the v2 updated people (or maybe me only) were surprised on how pvp became less dull and anticipated because of the different movesets and strategy that we make usjng the randomized abilities, meaning it had a really strong impact on how our pvp system was made.

Another thing that made pvp better were the nerfs that was received to some items and moves

[Dandragoon]

Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of Dans thoughts!

This time i will shed some light onto the process of building a good PvP monster, especially under the aspects of the new V2 of the game.

To give this whole articel a structure, i will divide it into several sections. For people not very familiar with building a monster concept from scratch, or players that are still unexperienced and confused about all the stats that define a monster, i strongly recommend reading through all of these sections.

A little overview for the different sections:


1. The basics - what do all those stats mean and do?


2. Where to start - defining the role of your monster


3. Natures in Detail


4. Abilities in Detail


5. Movepools and Movesets



Alright then, let's start with the explanation of terms you will read throughout the whole thread!


1. The basics - what do all those stats mean and do?


There are quite a few numbers you encounter when looking at the profile of a monster. All of them influence how your monster performs and decide if it is just a mediocre or a good PvP Monster.

Basestats

The numbers you will see to the right of the monsterpicture when looking at the monsterdex are the basestats. Every monster of the same kind (meaning, every Alaclipse for example) will have identical Basestats that will tell you what the monster is good at in general.
A high value in attack means that physical attacks performed by the monster will hit hard, while a high speed value wil tell you will hit first in combat versus slower monsters.
Those basestats are later modified by nature, UV, TP and eventually abilities.

Natures

A nature will modify the basestats of a monster by a certain percentage. it can be seen when hovering over the question mark next to the name of the nature. Maximum increase or decrease in one single stat is 60%. Out of all the possible modifiers to stats, natures have the highest impact.

UV - Unique Values

UVs will simply add to the basestats of the monster, each 1 point in a certain UV will increase the corresponding basestat by 1. Highest value can be 50, lowest 0. To get the full bonus a UV provides (for a UV of 40 e.g. to get the full 40 bonus statpoints) your monster needs to reach the maximum level, 100.

TP - Training Points

TP are gained either by fighting wild monsters and NPC, or by using a Nutrition that can be bought in the shop. The maximum of TP a monster can have in total is 799, and every 4 TP will add 1 point to the corresponding stat. 40 TP in attack would raise the total attack by 40 as an example. The maximum of TP that can be assigned to a single stat are 400, meaning a 100 point boost to that stat. They can either be used to further enhance the strengths of your monster (which makes the most sense in almost all cases) or to balance out weaknesses.

Weaknesses and Resistances

Beneath the picture and the basestats of a monster, you can see a little chart showing weaknesses and resistances of a monster when looking at the monsterdex. These determine how much damage you will take from certain elemental types. Most of these are quite logical, and you will get used to them after a while.
0% for a certain element means the monster is immune to it - it does not take damage from those types. If it has neither a weakness nor a resistance, it will take 100% damage. If the monster is very vulnerable to a certain type, it can suffer up to 400% of the original damage of the opponents attack!

Abilities

Every monster gets assigned 3 random abilities out of a pool that can be seen at the bottom of the monsterdex page when you catch it. Abilities often further enhance certain basestats or do other beneficial things that can make or break a good monster.



2. Where to start - defining the role of your monster


After understanding how things influence the stats of a monster, you now know there are many factors we have to take into consideration.

The whole process of choosing and planning out what monster to look for, what natures and abilities would benefit it and finding a suiting moveset will take quite some time at first. After you've done it a few times, it will start to come naturally and you will get a better understanding of what works best.

Now let's talk about where to start with the whole thought process - defining the role of your monster!

PvP monsters can be categorized as one of the following in most cases  ( although there are exceptions or monster that are kind of in between):

Sweeper

If the purpose of the monster is to hit first and hit hard, and is all-out offense with pretty much no defense, it commonly reffered to as a sweeper, or in some cases glasscannon. The idea behind them is to kill the opponent before they have an opportunity to hit you back, with the ultimate goal of 1-hit killing the opposing monster in the first round of combat. The most famous natures in this category are Trembling (boosting speed and attack) as well as Hallucination (boosting speed and special attack), since they offer the highest possible boost for each speed and the corresponding offensive stat.

Wall

A Wall is pretty much the exact opposite of Sweeper. It is build to survive and outlast opponents through the means of high health, defensive stats and healing. While some walls are build just to debuff opponents (lowering their stats) without actual killing potential, most walls come with moves that can inflict status effects, mainly bleeding, poison and burn, that can kill an opponent slowly. Since these status effects will always do percent damage, it doesn't matter that walls lack good offensive stats in that case, they will still be a threat.
Popular Wall natures are Blockhead, Debonair or Discreet among a few others, boosting defensive stats at the cost of decreasing the offensive ones.

Mixed

Many monsters are neither a pure sweeper, nor a pure wall, but somewhere in between. Some defensive capabilities but still able to dish out damage. Those monsters often use moves to buff up their stats before they try to inflict damage since they lack the sheer offensive power of a sweeper, other try to up their defenses through moves but are build more offensive statwise. Mixed monsters come in a lot of different ways and shapes, and make for some very interesting specialised PvP monsters if build correct.
Mixed natures can range anywhere from more offensive oriented (Mirage, Verve, Quantum, Mystic) to more defense oriented (Sedate, Delicate).

Now that we have covered the most common roles seen in PvP, the point where you have to think for yourself has come. What type of monster suits my style best? How do i want to compose my team?

Once you have decided what type of monster you want to build, it is time to move on to the actual decisionmaking in how to build it.



3. Natures in Detail


I will try to cover all natures that are agreed on beeing usefull in a certain way with short explanations. Also note that some natures just "do the job better" for certain roles, even though they might be good in another role. I will categorize those natures you can almost never go wrong with as A natures, while more specialized natures that might not always cover all general needs for a role as B natures.


- to be continued during the next day -

[CeFurkan]

please post all of these things to the our wiki

https://www.ign.com/wikis/monster-mmorpg

actually we can compose a team for this thing

Dandragoon if you have a skype add me : monstermmorpg

[TimeTraveler]

Excellent work! I almost subscribed to this thread!

[orboknown]

Stickied

[DarkVoid]

Needs to be updated there's new natures