The Sixth Floor of the Red Athena challenge dungeon features a No Skyfall Combos condition. It is filled with a selection of rather annoying monsters with things like absorb shields, awoken binds, resolve, orb locks, color absorbs, recovery reduction, and massive defense!

Quick Advice:

• Delays are a useful asset as no monsters in this dungeon have a status shield.
• 7×6 with a combo leader will help you do enough damage with the No Skyfall Matches modifier.
• Sopdet starts the dungeon, meaning your team’s damage must scale below 200k. Fujin won’t be up fast enough to bypass her.
• Awoken Bind clear is useful for Folklore.
• Locked  orb skyfall debuff can be mitigated by bringing an orb unlocker such as .
• A or Poison is advisable to deal with Volsung’s resolve.
• A full-board change or convert-poisons ability is important if you don’t kill Hamal immediately, or you will die.
• Light is the only color Hamal will not absorb.
• A defense break or strong spike are essential, as Metatron has both 20 million defense and 95 million HP.
  • Guard Break awakening can help but is not as reliable since it only applies to damage from one monster.

Analysis:

F1:  

Preemptive 999-turn >200k damage absorb shield.  1.53m HP.

You have four turns to damage control Sopdet before she retaliates with a 287,966 damage attack. Practice different solves with your team in Endless Corridors so you know exactly how much damage you can do. Sopdet has less HP than in Arena 3 and there’s no skyfalls to make you overdamage so this fight is actually way more fair than usual.

 

F2:  

Preemptive 9k attack inflicting a 3-turn awakening bind.

Above 20% HP, Folklore will randomly do one of the following:

• 15,564 multi-attack
• 18,158 multi-attack
• 99% Gravity
• 10,376 and convert one random orb into a jammer

Every 2nd, 5th, 8th turn above 20% he will always do a 25,940 damage multi-attack, full-board blind, and change attribute.

Below 50% HP he will debuff you once, reducing your move time by 2 second for 5 turns. Below 20% HP he will always multi-attack for 38,910 damage.

An awakening bind clear is highly recommended so you don’t have to risk stalling on this floor. If you choose to stall it off, your leader should have a strong RCV active not tied to their damage, and you should ensure you have enough HP going into the next floor.

 

 

F3:

Preemptive 14,701 damage attack converting the left two columns into fire orbs and the right two columns into poison; all skyfall orbs will generate as locked orbs for 10 turns.

Nobunaga hits quite hard (up to 27,932 each turn). He may create jammers or put up a 7c shield. Below half HP he will absorb  for 2 turns. On the sixth turn, he will hit you for 117,608 damage and will lock the entire board.

It is recommended that you use a board change immediately if needed so you can kill him right away. The skyfall locks and high damage make stalling risky.

 

F4:

Preemptive skyfall debuff increasing  rate by 20% and all  skyfalls will appear locked for 99 turns.

Volsung will do nasty things like:

• Guaranteed 3-turn skill delay above 90% HP
• Moderately high damage output each turn (~26.5k)
• One-time 3-turn  absorb below 65%
• One-time 99% gravity and 10-turn skill bind below 50%.

If you trigger his resolve he delays you 5 turns, binds your whole team for 5 turns, and hits you for a whopping 442,750 damage. You don’t want that to occur.

Volsung is much the same as in his descend. His skyfall debuffs are annoying but at least it overwrites the worse debuff from Nobunaga. You can overwrite the appearance rate debuff with a skyfall buff (colors or hearts), but there is no way to get rid of the lock debuff.

 

It is recommended that you kill him immediately, using a  or poison to bypass his resolve enrage; to get enough hearts for a FUA you may have to unlock the board, so poison may be a more reliable strategy. If you have multiple delays, that will also work, but delays are much better to save for Hamal or Metatron.

 

F5:

Hamal is much the same as in the recent One-Shot Challenge. He will preemptively absorb a random color except light for 3 turns, change attribute to the color weak against the absorb color, and will lock all heart orbs. Expect him to always pick the worst possible color absorb for your team.

Hamal has 23.8m HP so he’s fairly tanky, and you absolutely don’t want to leave him below 20% HP (e.g. healing him with your last subattribute) since he will do a 103,312 enrage attack that converts the whole board into poisons. If you don’t kill him on the first turn, he hits for 21,270 and converts the whole board into poison.

After that, he will attack for 21,270 damage and bind a random monster for 1 turn (which if it repeatedly hits the same monster will stack the bind). Every 3 turns he will instead attack for 22,791 and cloud-blind part of the board for 2 turns.

Below 50% HP he will convert his attribute to Dark, buff his attack power by 50% for 999 turns, and give you a 15% poison skyfall debuff for 5 turns (fortunately skyfall poisons won’t match due to the No Skyfalls modifier). His attacks will thereafter do 31.9k.

It is recommended to bring a delay, color absorb void skill, or light team to get past his absorb. Kill him as soon as possible as his mechanics are annoying.

 

F6:

This is the 3p Arena version of Light Metatron, complete with an insane 20 million defense and 95 million HP. Even Anublos has trouble doing that kind of output. She has a 999-turn 6-combo shield.

Defense void (ideally multiple turn) is practically mandatory here, since otherwise you have to hit extremely hard to even slightly damage her. A damage spike is also useful on top of that. A  may help if she’s still alive after your void wears off, but requires all attribute coverage on your team and should not be used instead of a defense void and spike.

On most teams you can’t afford to bring God Killer subs because you will hit Sopdet way too hard, but you can use Healer Killer awakenings and latents to push your damage further.

You will still have the orb lock debuffs from Volsung, so board refresh actives are not very good. An orb unlock skill may be required to create a strong enough board to tackle Metatron.

Assuming you use all 4 turns on Sopdet, delay and use 4 turns on Hamal, have not been skill delayed by Volsung, and immediately kill all other floors, you will have 11 turns of charge.

Max skilled utility:

• / = 11 turns
• = 15 turns
•  (Spike actives) = 12 ~ 15 turns
• (Board Changers) = 9 ~ 12 turns (usually)

 

How I Beat It:

I beat this floor with the following team (credit to u/jcapp1231):

		Unlocker	+2c

 

Floor 1:

•  cross and less than 7c would deal almost 50% of her health
• Clear all orbs for if possible
• -cross and combo works as well, keep the combo count low

Floor 2:

• The Odin Dragons autoheal for 21k each turn so you can stall forever here as long as you don’t hit him below 20%.
• Stall for 2 cross. I stalled for 1 -cross, 1 -cross and 1 combo to be safe (watch out if he switches to red attribute. MAthena op)

Floor 3:

• Use Mei Mei, and match 2 crosses.

Floor 4:

• Momiji, pray for 5 heart orbs and enough for 2 cross. If not, you can try clearing blue and red for more orbs but he will skill delay you. It’s kinda ok since you can stall for forever on floor 5 with Odin Dragon’s OP autorecovery.
• FUA and match two crosses.

Floor 5:

• Stall out Hamal’s absorb.
• He hits between 21k – 23k so with 21k autorecovery from Odin Dragons, you can stall forever.
• Clear for triple cross and go for the kill. You would want to wait for the cloud to have 1 turn left so you have a clear board on LMeta. She has a two-turn attack timer so you can stall one turn there.

Floor 6:

• Balboa, Orb Unlock, +2c, tricolor board, match triple cross.
• Make sure you match at least 6 COMBOS since she has a combo shield.

 

Other Ideas:

By no means is the Odin Dragon approach the only way to do it.

Anubis x Diablos is a popular choice. A skill pop and exactly 7c is sufficient to damage control Sopdet. On other floors, this pairing’s massive damage output and reliable activation permit you to tackle this dungeon. The survivability from the 1.5x RCV multiplier and Diablos’s 25% shield allow you to sustain against these hard-hitting monsters.

There’s plenty of other options with varying degrees of reliability. You just need to be sure to have all the utility this dungeon demands of your team.

GL1TCH3D for example cleared this challenge on stream using a Red Athena team:

---

Thanks for stopping by! When you have completed this dungeon, be sure to check out our next guide in this series!

 

Having trouble with Cloud City? Make sure to join the Puzzle and Kupo Discord server (read and follow the rules!) using the banner below if you haven’t done so already. We have a dedicated channel just for questions about Cloud City with access to help from end-game players!