3P is extremely frustrating
I think most end game players that have queued into the game’s auto-match function can echo this feeling.
It can be incredibly frustrating to have people that kill you (intentional or otherwise) when certain things could easily be avoided. I had a fun time brawling Nyar for 12 turns solo because my partners refused to stall and I got to the boss without my kill board available. And guess who died first? The ones that rushed straight through with no plan.
In this article I’ll be talking about how you should enter 3P UDR with randoms if you actually want to win.
Cosmic Trinity is not a Joke
The first thing you should do is check the dungeon out on PadGuide (Android or iOS) or PADX.
The first piece of advice I’m going to give you here is to 100% expect to die in auto-match 3P UDR.
If you’re reading this I hope that you have something you want to get better at when it comes to 3P UDR but unfortunately there are a lot of people that don’t care enough to contribute or who intentionally kill off their teammates.
So,
1) Expect to die in Auto-Match
That really gives us the option to either find people to queue with that know the dungeon decently well (especially if it’s your first time, having some guidance helps) or at least have people that are in the late to end game level.
Now, what does it mean to know the dungeon really well?
Well… you know how I linked the dungeon? It’s a good idea to know roughly how much HP each floor has, where the big prempts are, how to control on certain spawns like croco and how you plan to kill the lovecraft which is one of three possible. (My personal experience has shown Nyar and Cthulhu to be about 47.5% each and Azathoth to be 5%)
If you’ve taken a look at the dungeon, you should realize that the lovecrafts are not a joke for the majority of teams. The lowest HP is 200M and ranges up to 500M with Azathoth. A Dath team with a Loki 2x spike does about 20M, maybe a bit more if they Haku board too and combo it well. This leads to the next point:
2) Design a team that helps or can kill
I’ve been pleasantly pleased with a few Dark Athena players that I played with because they did a few key things:
They brought utility outside of their delays on leads.
They didn’t bring any mobs to enrage range.
They were able to combo 7c and get Haku’s activation off and kill the floor.
Dath doesn’t bring a high multiplier to the table. If you’ve looked through the floors you should know there are lots of spawns you have almost no chance of killing without a spike on Dath. Cosmo Crusader, Azazel, Agni, Surtr, basically everything on Floor 6. One big mistake a lot of Dath players make is that they don’t bring enough SBR or TE to activate and they think they can one-shot a floor with 40M HP and do peanuts. If you can’t hit the 7c consistently then think about replacing a Haku with Yomi so you can get the TE.
There are essentially 3 different key methods to designing a team for 3P UDR.
The first is to design one that carries the early floors.
The second is to design one that carries the late floors.
The third is to design a support / utility setup.
All of these methods are viable for contributing to a successful 3P run.
How to carry the early floors
You’ll need to be able to deal about 20M damage regularly as well as the ability to stall and tank the bigger prempts.
Important damage prempts:
Flr3 Dios: 38.9k
Flr4 Dios: 38.9k
Flr5 Dairy Queen Hera: 59k
Flr6 Goemon / Hel: 74k / 50k
Goemon is kind of a wash. Most teams can’t effectively tank him and he is brutal. But being able to at least tank and kill everything else is really useful when cooping.
Good leads for clearing the early floors:
Kush and Blue Hunter (BH)
Has HP to tank all of these prempts. Sufficient damage to kill all the earlier floors. Blue Hunter can bring Aten to be very strong against the majority of the spawns. 8 to 9c with Aten will kill the majority of floors and it offers a lot of tanking with BH. Kush doesn’t have such luck with strong killer cards outside of Mito which really only impacts a small percentage of pre-lovecraft spawns. However, all the lovecrafts are devils so you can still pull significant damage on them if you do bring a Mito with devil killer latents on her.
There are lots of good possible subs for Blue Hunter such as Gan Ning (unlocker, 2x TPA and 7c), Awoken Andromeda and tons more. You don’t have to limit yourself that much since there’s no color or type restriction.
How to carry the later floors
I assume you’ll be killing flr6/7 here. Some popular leads for this include:
Anubis for that fairly consistent 900x activation. My Anubis setup one shots Nyar consistently and clears Azathoth safely.
Yogg is tanky and can deal with Nyar, Cthulhu and Azathoth fairly well. However for Azathoth, you NEED the void void (the new box awakening released first in Final Fantasy that bypasses damage nulls) awakening otherwise Azathoth is basically impossible (too much damage when full HP, not enough damage below the threshold).
There’s the DMeta carry setup which involves Tsubakis (double dragon killer, all the lovecrafts are dragon and devil typing) and since it’s no skyfall it can be calculated relatively safely.
Like I mentioned, BH with killers can be quite effective here as well since his 182x damage stacked with killers and a spike can deal significantly with the spawns.
You’re really looking for something that can deal in the hundreds of millions but that’s also able to somewhat control to under 30M for Azathoth (and to below resolve for Cthulhu unless you have whale-up-attack).
Alternatively you can make a grav / support setup that basically runs 2x Van Crow, 2x Trailo all inherited on Blodins for that insane 16SB to start. A little bit of stalling early on and you will have everything up quickly. Run a lead like Grodin for some shielding and Amaterasu for some autohealing. You can grav all the lovecraft bosses to death with this. You can also inherit a shield to one of the leads like unawoken Susano for 5 turns of 50% shields (one of my favorite shields). Keep in mind that if you hit Azathoth you will have to stall 999 turns to be able to grav to death but the Grodin shield makes that a bit more trivial.
How to make a support setup
I wouldn’t run this setup outside of premade teams with people you know because people in randoms often don’t stall, might DC and there’s a good chance that they have absolutely no way of killing the final floor.
Supporting usually involves bringing straight utility or at least primarily utility. While maybe not immediately obvious given her strength in clearing other dungeons, Dath makes a good support lead for this dungeon. Her base tanking and 4x RCV can really make her suitable for supporting. Along with built-in delays for those pesky spawns like Takemikazuchi and 3SB for the awakenings, you should have some longer utilities up while you’re stalling floor 1. Dath is definitely not required for a lead for this, it’s very flexible as long as you survive. Radragon is also very solid as a support lead for the same reason. Tanky, brings 2SB and 2 turn haste per lead. Slightly stricter type restrictions can mean losing out on stats but doesn’t require colors to have the 2.25x RCV. Cards like Kanna, Zera, Susano or Indra are good here. Kanna spike should definitely be up going further in to boost a team. Zera has 3SB, farmable 45% gravity so that’s definitely a nice thing to have if your partners are willing to stall for it. Can make Cthulhu much easier if you have 2 gravs unless someone has a whale-up-attack.
Generally primarily unbindable with shields / gravs / combo adding abilities (Cthuga inherit is good for this now) / BOARD REFRESH / other utilities (Mel for guaranteed heart row, Raph to pass to a carrier that can have changers to work with Raph board).
Grav is optional and based on the carrier. If it’s someone that can control Cthulhu or has whale-up-attack, grav is unnecessary.
Best options for shields are Indra and Susano. Raph is decent and so is Ganesha but the length of the other 2 at least protects a full cycle of moves. Awoken Kush also is nice for +1c and 75% shield.
Board refresh is primarily Maeda Keiji as inheritable. There are some farmable ones too but they’re fairly bad for stats. There’s Shew as well if you have him (silver from FotNS). Without board refresh or a guaranteed specific board for Nyar, it can be pretty tough.
Most of the utilities are heavily dependent on what the carrier is running but shields in general are fairly useful. Carriers should be somewhat confident in their abilities to kill the lovecrafts without spikes but it’s possible they could need one which is where this comes in.
Some interesting techniques that I haven’t seen yet would be running a 4 match lead like Noctis and setting up a bunch of 3 match combos. Since they won’t match for Noctis he could literally setup a swipe board for a combo lead.
How to make an all around setup
Find out on the next article!
3) Know your damage output
This is honestly where most people kill me. They don’t know how much damage they can do and they end up hitting everything to 10%. A lot of mobs get very angry at this range and if the carrier is running DMeta or Anubis the conditions may be horribly unfavorable for them.
Floors have HP and attack based on how much HP / damage the mobs had in their original descended along with a multiplier based on which floor it is.
The follow values are very rough.
Floor 1 = 1.7x HP or about 10M
Floor 2 = 2x HP or about 12M
Floor 3 = 2.5x HP or about 15-20M
Floor 4 = 2.5x HP or about 20-25M
Floor 5 = 3x HP or about 30-40M
Floor 6 = 4.5x HP or about 40-60M
Different mobs will stray from this but this is generally how you have to see the floors. The floors generally progress from easier mobs to harder mobs making it significantly easier to stall earlier (less damage / easier enemies) however Gungho added some very annoying early mobs.
Floor 1: Azazel / Cosmo
Floor 2: Ras / Mionion
Since the multipliers are based on the HP of their respective descends, those 4 mobs which are much newer than the rest of the possible spawns on that floor are significantly stronger with about 25M HP each.
And just because I don’t list it here, it doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. (Hera-Ur does something like 37k first turn)
So again, be confident in your abilities, know the dungeon.
Harambe you may as well quit instantly… Unless your support brought a Fujin.
4) Stalling
Very few of the carrying setups will have all their required abilities up floor 1. And in 3 player coop, if each player kills their floors as soon as they start then each player would only get 2 turns of charge for their skills. So the general practice is to stall floors 1-2 when the enemies don’t do much. Or at least THE GENERAL PRACTICE SHOULD BE TO STALL JFC.
If you queue into a random, provided it’s not Sopdet or Satan, you should be relatively safe to stall. Just 1c until you’ve gone through a full rotation to at least see if people need stall. Even if you can kill the floor it doesn’t mean you should. This is where the other half of my random player deaths come from. As soon as I queue in P1 bumrushes the floors and I get to Nyar or Cthulhu without my refresh / shield ready (only takes like 4-5 turns of stall).
5) Pay attention to partner HP
This especially goes for the partner that’s following you. There’s a good chance you’ll have a situation where they have low HP. Do you save hearts or do you use them all to yourself while you’re already full HP and let them die? The only time the latter makes sense is if it’s life or death and you need the hearts to make combos for damage on Anubis / BH / Kush. But if that’s not the case there’s no reason to use them. I however have seen it all too many times where players use all the hearts for themselves when they don’t even need the healing.
5.5) Pay attention to partner teams
To add onto the last point… you really should know that leads like Yogg use light orbs so if a Yogg is the turn after you might want to consider saving the lights unless it is like the last description, a life or death of using them versus not.
5.5.5) Pay attention to orbs in general
A lot of people tend to run 3P with combo leads. IF 3 OR MORE JAMMERS / POISONS EXIST, YOU SHOULD REMOVE ALL OF THEM. I see a lot of people leaving 1-2 jammers and poisons which can’t be removed without some kind of board changing. This is awful for a lot of combo lead teams.
A standard board has 30 orbs. With 6 colors (including hearts) you can have a max of 12 wasted orbs (2 per color since 3 would be a combo at 0 wasted). 12 wasted orbs is a max of 18 combo orbs or 18/3 = 6 combos. So that means from standard boards / skyfall you will guarantee 6 combos up to 10 combos. However, add a single jammer and you drop the ends of the range to make a 5-9 board. So be very careful when leaving hazards. If you’re trying to setup, pay attention to orb types that have 4 / 7 orbs. If you make 1-2 combos while setting up there’s a good chance of getting 5 / 8 which means 2 wasted for that color.
6) Passing
Pay particular attention when someone is passing. Why are they passing?
The most obvious for the majority of cases is that they’ll die if they tank the next hit. Could be something like not having a board change for Beelze prempt, no shield / HP for Cthulhu turn 1 (big hit). But sometimes you know they have a kill setup and pass. Instead of instantly passing again, check what actives you have up. I always keep track of actives my partners have. You may have something like Revo Yomi for a full enhance + time that makes the hit safer, or Blue Hunter active for +1c to push that bicolor from 8c to 9c kill.
If someone is spamming Nice, think about the situation.
Nyar has a ton of random possible moves including a fire absorb for 5 turns. My kill setup as well as the DMeta kill setup both deal fire damage which would be completely ruined if someone took turn 1 and let Nyar cast the absorb.
On Cthulhu you might have people wanting the second turn which deals no damage. This is a good opportunity for glass cannon leads like Anubis to get a good hit in if they don’t have a shield because generally Anubis will get 1 shot by Cthulhu after this turn. I’ve had so many missed opportunities where a tanky player takes the turn and leaves me on the next turn poised to die and resolve still up.
Always figure out why they passed.
7) 7×6 leads
I intentionally saved this for the 7th point (you know, because 7 by 6). 7×6 is generally very strong and this dungeon has a direct trade-off for running Diablos (I’ll assume that basically everyone would be running this).
Diablos lowers your max damage output compared to running double standard combo leads. In exchange you get consistent activation and a shield. This makes runs safer in some ways since suddenly most teams can tank most of the hits. Along with some killers and paired with a combo lead you can deal significant damage per turn even to the lovecrafts. If you’re organizing a premade, this is definitely a solid option. You should however consider bringing at least a faster charging spike because the drop in damage when switching to Diablos can be fairly significant (I say fairly significant coming from Anubis x Anubis). To give perspective: I was running Anubis x Diablos. I have Ilmina, 2x Diao Chan and Aten. Aten gets 9x damage against all the lovecrafts (and against basically all spawns in the dungeon). With a perfect 14c bicolor from Ilmina, I could not one shot Nyar with Anubis x Diablos. When I make the 9c board (with a +1c active) I kill Nyar with Anubis x Anubis.
Have any other tips for 3P UDR? Post them below in the comments! And happy Azathoth farming!
(I have one hypered and evod outside of the image)
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