The Ronove Hivemind

Ronove is a high-tier heart cross lead capable of clearing up to and including Ultimate Arena 3. However, I see a lot of things that I consider misconceptions so this discussion aims to show you objective views on running “the best” Ronove team through Ultimate Arena 3. There will be no team-building discussion due to the length of this article as is. Team-building will be delegated to the Leader Guides article covering Ronove.

The reason I wrote this article was because I found too many people were blindly stating that people should not run Ronove if they did not have this exact team setup. In this article I will be focusing on Ragnarok Dragon and Rozuel while the leader guide will focus on completely alternative approaches and their overall effectiveness while replacing Kaede, Ragnarok, and Rozuel.

Let’s start with the “standard” team that everyone repeats.

    

Ronove Leader Skill: ATK x2.5 when attacking with 3 of following orb types: Fire, Water, Wood, Light & Dark. ATK x0.5 for each additional orb type, up to ATK x3 for all 4 matches. ATK x4, reduce damage taken by 35% after matching Heal orbs in a cross formation.

 

The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s only a requirement of 4/5 of the colors for the max multiplier (with cross of course). This contrasts to leaders like Ra Dragon which require 6/6. Ronove has the flexibility of still activating after losing 1-2 colors for 100x or more. This lets you run Kaedes and Rozuel while having little risk for activating.

Kaede and Rozuel have 3 TPA each and Ragnarok Dragon has God Killer and Dragon Killer which applies to most enemy bosses in the game. Though, depending on the situation, the damage is extremely unbalanced on the Kaedes or Ragnarok compared to the rest when damage control is needed.

In concept this is an amazing setup and outputs the highest damage. However, you’ll see why I’m not a fan of this setup for very specific reasons when running dungeons like Ultimate Arena 3.

There are several spawns where those specific cards will fail and heavily increase the difficulty or make the floor essentially impossible.

NOTE: All the damage values below are excluding enhanced orbs. Kaede brings 2 enhanced each which can add a significant amount of damage on-top of the damage values listed.

Parvati

Out of all the encounters that I’ll be listing, this is the least of the issues.

Rozuel’s Fire element will deal double damage to Parvati who has a >300K damage absorb.

Her attack Trishula is a 50% chance after her Calming Mountain Wind. The latter creates hearts and the general strategy is to save some hearts for the next turn for most leads and especially for heart cross leaders in this game. Assuming you crossed on the turn for Calming Mountain Wind, you’ll take 7758 damage for Trishula. 

Trishula also turns 3 rows into fires, creating a minimum of 15 fires on the board. Matching a heart cross from the saved orbs as well as all 15 in a blob produces 168640 damage (2 combos total) before element calculations which heals Parvati due to 2x damage for the element. The most fire orbs you can match in a 2 combo total is 13 fire orbs which will do just under 300K damage to Parvati. However, one skyfall would bring that to 354k and heal Parvati.

You could just not cross and take 18,361 damage. And risk taking 36,722 damage from Himalayan Anger if you hit her too low, guaranteeing a death if you didn’t cross.

So hopefully by now you’re starting to see how Rozuel will increase the time spent on Parvati but in general the fight is fairly safe so the team isn’t a big downside.

 

Sopdet

I don’t think anyone that runs arena will tell you they like her as a spawn. All the other spawns for the floor are very safe whether you’re stalling or strolling through. However, Sopdet has a >200K damage absorb. Hit 201K? She heals.

Now we mentioned the God Killer on Ragnarok Dragon earlier. Sopdet is God typing and therefore takes 3x more damage from Ragnarok Dragon. Your effective maximum damage that you can hit with Ragnarok Dragon is 66,667 damage now.

Crossing against Sopdet would be suicide in general since we know that even if you 2 combo (cross + wood), you won’t have many orbs for next turn and you still run the risk of skyfall. Getting 2 more colors in that combo guarantees a full heal for Sopdet. Since she doesn’t attack you until after her countdown, the general strategy is simply to just not make any heart crosses.

But what’s the limit if you just do 9x for Ragnarok Dragon?

If you match 3 wood total, you can match up to 10 other combos. That’s pretty safe in general. So let’s say you do 3 wood orbs and then 5 more combos of other colors to make the 9x Ronove multiplier. Oh no! 3 wood orbs skyfalled into another combo. Ragnarok Dragon heals Sopdet for 283,500 HP. When you need to get 3 good consecutive turns (without heavy healing) of damage against Sopdet during her 5 turn countdown, healing her towards the end hurts your chances of clearing.

If you fully activate 9x Ronove, any additional wood skyfall will over-damage with Ragnarok Dragon

However assuming Kaede is your highest attack wood-type at 2335 total when +297, you would have to make 2 wood combos of 3 orbs each AND 15 more combos of other colors before you over-damage.

Note: Remember I did not include enhanced in this calculation. You may have anywhere from 0 enhanced orbs to all 6 being enhanced.

So here you should start to see how Ragnarok damage lowers the effectiveness of the team in the Sopdet fight and increases risk.

 

Vishnu

Arguably the hardest possible spawn of Arena 2 and 3, Vishnu has one of the highest consecutive damage hits per turn and can consistently break down heart cross teams with consecutive heart break hits.

Why is Vishnu so bad?

Vishnu has a >1M damage absorb which is quite a bit higher than both Parvati and Sopdet, but, he comes with more than 3x more HP than Parvati, clocking in at 9.4M HP total. Even if you hit 800K exactly per main attribute, that would total to 4.8M damage, less than half of his total HP.

Here’s the kicker, Vishnu heals for 940K HP per turn.

If you are not hitting more than 160k per card total, you are not gaining any ground whatsoever. Realistically you want to be getting as many cards as possible to just under that 1M limit.

How does that work with Ragnarok Dragon and Rozuel, both of which have fixed advantages against Vishnu?

Ragnarok Dragon has a max damage of 333K now due to the God Killer awakening.

Due to the damage that Vishnu deals, we are assuming there will be heart cross used every turn. Vishnu can deal up to 48K per turn to you before any shields. So it’s fairly safe to assume anyone playing Ronove here will be heart crossing.

But now we have a big problem.

Without even factoring in any enhanced orbs, Ragnarok Dragon will always over-damage Vishnu with 3 grass orbs, heart cross 100x/144x.

Rozuel faces a similar issue except she can still hit under the limit if you simply 100x.

So what happens if you do a heart cross and 2 colors alone, no rainbow multiplier? This gives you 16x.

Doing 3 grass, 3 fire and heart cross, your team will deal less than the above mentioned 160K per card required to progress on Vishnu.

You could TPA both colors along with the heart cross and you would progress slightly but nothing significant. If you happen to skyfall any of the 3 other colors during this time, you will full heal Vishnu. It should be fairly obvious now that this floor is essentially impossible with Ragnarok and Rozuel.

Considering Vishnu is a 25% spawn for that floor (and very late in the run) it feels awful to see this guy spawn and essentially become an instantaneous quit.

 

And finally…

Hera Dragon

Hera Dragon is elegantly called Sopdet on Steroids for her relatively low damage absorb (>2M), extremely high HP (39M HP) and a countdown mechanic that increases steadily in damage hitting 130K damage by turn 6. Even with co-op HP and a Ronove heart cross shield, that’s 56K damage, more than Ronove can survive without additional active shields.

Note: Hera Dragon will one-shot a solo Ronove on turn 2 even with heart cross.

Here’s the real kicker about this fight. Since Hera Dragon is both God and Dragon typing, Ragnarok Dragon gets 9x damage giving him a hard limit of 222,222 damage after all orb enhances, combo damages, TPAs, leader skill and other are included. I mentioned earlier that it is impossible to damage control Ragnarok for Vishnu at 333,333 so needless to say the same applies here.

You could, in theory, match a wood TPA and do a heart cross to stay under that damage cap, but imagine the abysmal damage the rest of your team will do (about 120K for the Ronoves and 400k for the Kaedes).

I mentioned the countdown giving you 6 turns before a 130K hit as well as the HP of 39M. This gives us a minimum of 6.5M damage per turn for 6 turns across the team or over 1M per sub as an average.

For fun let’s say the second player on the team is not running Ragnarok Dragon. The player running Ragnarok decides to make no combos to avoid healing Hera Dragon. The second player now must hit 13M damage on each of his/her turns, averaging more than 2M per card which is above the damage absorb (theoretically possible if you count the 4 sub-attributes for the 4 subs, however realistically will never occur).

The calculations shown above for Ragnarok show how abysmal the fight would be and, like Vishnu, essentially an instantaneous quit for the Ragnarok inclusive co-op fight (even if this “second player” were to disconnect and try to solo, they would be faced with damage too high to survive even with heart cross). This is after 21 gruelling floors of Ultimate Arena 3 just for an instant quit. Between the possibility of Vishnu and Hera Dragon spawning (25% and 20% respectively), you will be instantly quitting out of 40% of your Ultimate Arena 3 runs while running Ragnarok Dragon.

A personal note: I started off running the “optimal” team in Arena 3 and quickly found that all god, devil and dragon killers essentially made these damage absorb monsters stupidly difficult. Even running non-killer Ronove teams and pairing with teams including Ragnarok Dragon or Sherias Roots, I found it nearly impossible to make-up for the lost damage of a team doing essentially nothing on their turns.

In the end I ended up quitting over 60% of my own runs to getting Vishnu and Hera Dragon spawns while running these killer-based teams. Since then I’ve refused to run Ronove co-op with users running any of those 3 killers and have helped people develop non-killer Ronove teams for them.