The Tango of the Whales
The Bumping of Packs
Tears Saltier than the Dead Sea
That’s what we’re faced with entering the latest ranking dungeon in North America. This marks the first one that we’ve had in a long time so naturally, the competition is fiercer as a lot of newer players go for the 10% range and even the 1% as their first chance at a crown in their entire careers.
BREAKING NEWS!!!
The ranking dungeons are pretty RNG heavy.
Given that this is not fixed team you have the RNG of actually having a good team for this from the REM. You also have the RNG on board changers. RNG on skyfall.
That’s a lot of RNG.
Fortunately I’ll assume that most people have a few bicolors or tricolors. Sonias, especially red Sonia, is quite common. Avalon Drake is not all that rare either. Bicolors make for generally easier full combo solves. If you’re not particularly skilled, you can also just swipe the bicolors.
Yes, you read that correctly.
You can actually just swipe through the dungeon.
You get 500 points per second of remaining time and 5000 points for each point of average combo.
So if your runs are significantly faster, you can make up loss of combos with time. 10s = 1c average.
I see most players finishing at around 150 to 155s. So I used 152s for the following example.
To get 152k, you’d need 13.2c combo with 152s remaining if you were going to go for full combos. Alternatively, you’d need 8c average with 204s remaining (it’s worth noting that if I get an 8c average I usually end with more than that).
The chances of swiping through completely with bicolors and ending with an average of 8c OR BETTER is 6.6%.
Thanks to Jason for running the numbers / simulation.
See the notes at the end of the article for the data from the simulation (not that single digit data means that the probability is pretty small and not accurate).
That means that you have a pretty good chance at getting a 152k+ run within 2 stones (and I actually got both an 8c average and 8.3c average in 2 stones worth of runs).
Conclusion
Once again, ranking has proven to be less skill based (skill can get you to higher ranks more consistently, don’t get me wrong) and can be completely RNGed through.
It’s a shame that we don’t have a different ranking system. I do like the Gachadra crowns that they gave out in JP. I enjoyed the Love Live system where you played from a random selection of songs and you would receive a score for the performance at the end. Your rank for the tournament was based on the AGGREGATE score of all your individual performances which meant that even if you didn’t have the absolute best cards in the game you could still actually place in the top brackets for rewards.
I’m sure lots of games have different ways of balancing out the various capabilities of RNG stone spamming / whale teams but PAD is definitely not one of them.
Jason’s Data:
8.0c: 182524
8.1c: 137484
8.3c: 101869
8.5c: 73962
8.6c: 52490
8.8c: 36557
9.0c: 25303
9.1c: 16913
9.3c: 11219
9.5c: 7419
9.6c: 4677
9.8c: 3018
10.0c: 1818
10.1c: 1179
10.3c: 724
10.5c: 413
10.6c: 239
10.8c: 143
11.0c: 87
11.1c: 51
11.3c: 26
11.5c: 12
11.6c: 8
11.8c: 7
12.0c: 2
12.3c: 2
12.5c: 1
Left (Combo average for a 6 floor dungeon): Right (Occurances in 10M simulations)
And 1 occurrence in 10M runs of 12.5c isn’t exactly exact since it could have just been a fluke (although it does fit well with the rest of the data.
That means if you were incredibly lucky (because let’s face it you wouldn’t be running 10M times) you could get a score of roughly… 167,500 from just swiping. I’m sure that would land you in the top 10!