The fourth floor of the Red Athena challenge dungeon invalidates your leader skills! This means you can’t get any multiplier from leader skills and you can’t alter the size of the puzzle board. The dungeon is roughly analogous to Heroes Descended, but with boosted monster damage and a severe handicap.

So what can you do? Let’s investigate!

Dungeon Description and Tips

The lack of a leader skill means your multiplier needs to come from other damage sources. Heart Cross won’t function and Resist cheese teams are unreliable because the spawns aren’t fixed elements.

You still have access to awakenings! Every monster on your team should have synergistic damage-boosting awakenings and useful active skills. Use your leader slot for utility, since the skill doesn’t matter!

You will likely want to bring a damage boosting active skill. Wisedragons are 5x for one turn to their color which can help immensely. Other good options include Reincarnated Norse (2x for 3 turns) and gemstones (scaling multiplier based on awakenings for 2 turns).

Another good idea is bringing a delay. Since you are missing the leader skill multiplier it will almost certainly take you several turns to do the >1m damage on the boss floor. This is especially important if you have fire monsters, since Berserker will bind them for TEN TURNS on his first turn. If that happens you’re pretty screwed.

All teams will benefit from running relevant Killer awakenings (3x) and killer latents (1.5x). For the purposes of this dungeon, you will want Attacker Killer, as most floors have that typing. The devil floor also has Devil typing and you will benefit from Devil Killer on that floor. However, the boss floor is Balanced and Physical typing, invalidating those Attacker killers.

Never underestimate the power of Orb Enhance! You can get a lot of added potency for whatever type of team you make by ensuring you have 5 OE awakenings of your primary damage color.

Rows also help significantly with damage because the multiplier stacks for the entire team and is 10% extra damage per row. At 10 rows you’re doing 2x multiplier on a row.

There are no skill binds in the dungeon at all so SBR is unimportant.

Lastly, if you’re bringing a bindable card like Aten (who is susceptible to the 10 turn fire bind) which really carries the damage of the team, consider using him as a lead and have the unbindable leader badge on.

Now, what kind of team should you make?

Option 1: Rows

Row teams gain a team-wide 10% elemental damage bonus per awakening for each row they make. Teams like can easily hit over 20 row enhances, meaning a single row will multiply your damage by 3x. Making multiple rows adds to the multiplier in addition to adding more base damage from the extra orb matches.

If you go this route you will be doing damage to all targets with all monsters, which makes doing enough damage that much easier. However, these teams are orb hungry so you will need to bring monsters with strong board change active skills.

With this approach I recommend selecting the Team Attack Up badge, or a Time Extend badge if needed (row teams tend to have very poor move time).

Option 2: TPA and 7c

A quick primer on Two-Pronged Attack: this awakening works differently to other damage multipliers in that it increases the amount of orb power of a specific match instead of multiplying the final damage. For example, if you match a TPA and a 3-orb match of a specific color, it will not multiply the total damage, just the damage added by the TPA match.

Two-pronged attack increases the match power by 1.5x per awakening. For example, having 3 TPA awakenings means the damage of each match of 4 orbs (which are already worth 1.25x of a 3-orb match) is enhanced by 3.375x.

The newer 7c awakening is very potent, multiplying the damage by that monster by a flat 2x per awakening. Monsters with two 7c awakenings gain a 4x multiplier to their total damage, provided you match at least 7 combos.

The combination of 7c and TPA awakenings is especially potent. The reason why is so valuable on and teams (aside from Healer typing) is that she has two TPA awakenings and 7c. This means a dark TPA is worth 4.5x damage. Some newer monsters like have two 7c awakenings and two TPA awakenings, which makes their TPA matches worth 9x damage (the highest non-killer damage in the game from awakenings).

In PAD each combo past the first also increases your damage by 0.25x, so hitting 7 combos will already have enhanced your damage by 2.5x.

If you go this route I strongly recommend the Team Multiattack badge, as it will make your team deal damage to all targets.

Strategy:

You don’t want to get hit by anything in this dungeon if you can help it, as the regular attacks are in the 20k~30k range. Also, certain monsters bind so don’t give them that chance.

Floor 1:

Goblin Army!

You will be hit with a 6.7k preempt.

The three spawns on this floor have 237k ~ 384k HP. The Red and Green goblins do not have preempts so they may start with 1~3 and 2~4 turns respectively, but the blue one will always attack the first turn and hits hard so you should try to kill this floor immediately.

Floor 2:

Two random-color demons will spawn, and they have between 685k ~ 707k HP.  If you’re lucky, they will start with 2 turns attack timer but don’t expect that. They have a 30% chance to bind the color they are weak against for 2-4 turns, otherwise they will strike for up to 13k, or will guaranteed multihit for up to 23.2k at low health. They have a 40% chance of using the multihit at any HP range.

Their binds, fairly high HP and high damage output make them dangerous. You will want to try to kill them immediately if possible. If you can field monsters with both Attacker and Devil Killer awakenings, you can kill them much more easily.

Floor 3:

Two random-color Chimera will spawn with attack timers between 1~3 turns. These have between 649k~672k HP and hit hard, bind two random monsters for 2~4 turns, and are only Attacker type.

They should on average give you 2 turns to kill them. If needed you can use a delay to help deal with them, or if you have a multiple-turn damage spike you might consider using it here and it will carry over into the boss floor.

Floor 4:  

Berserk and Highlander, the classic duo. Berserk has 1.1m HP and Highlander has a much more manageable 372k. Berserk will start with an attack timer of 1~3 turns and Highlander 1~2 turns.

Highlander will blind the board on his first turn, and Berserk will bind all fire cards for 10 turns. Unless you’re packing an Amaterasu/Ceres you’re not coming back from that bind.

After that, Berserk attacks every 2 turns but hits for 21.1k (42,256 below 25% HP). Highlander hits every turn for 8,565 but is highly likely to use a multi-attack dealing up to 20.5k below 75% HP.

It is highly recommended to delay them immediately, as they deal very dangerous amounts of damage and their first-turn attacks are very annoying. You should deal as much damage as you can each turn. Pop your damage spike active, use board changers, and hit them with all you’ve got.

Killing Highlander will allow you to possibly survive Berserk’s attacks until he gets to low HP, so if you’re not using Multi-Attack badge or a Row team you should take him down first.

Here’s a sample clear using Fire attribute with a delay and Baldin spike for the boss:

Thanks for stopping by! When you have completed this challenge floor you should check out the next guide in this series!

Happy Puzzling~

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