PvP Guide

Basic Info
There are currently 3 different PvP Modes in the Game. Each mode of PvP is slightly different, but they follow three basic rules:


 * Elemental Advantage gives a 25% modifier instead of the 50% modifier like in PvE
 * Arena Skill is used instead of Active Skill.
 * Once a battle is started, the fight is fully automated and all you can do is watch.

One of the main things that helps the most in PvP is character placement. This is one of the main reasons you will lose your battles.

PvP Modes Overview
Here is a basic overview of the three different PvP modes.


 * Tower (Unlocked at Player Rank 30) - In Tower you have to defeat 12 stages with a total of 12 Characters (Each character can only fight 5 times). The stages are populated from players of all servers. The teams you fight against are those Player's Arena Defense Teams. As you go up the Tower the stages are supposed to increase in difficulty. If you defend against someone in Tower, it does not affect anything if you lose.


 * Arena (Unlocked after you complete Story Stage 2-10) - In Arena you will fight Bots and Players on your Server in order to gain points. Your points dictate your Arena Rank and your rewards. Your Defense team is also your Tower's Defense team.


 * Grand Arena (Unlocked at Player Rank 55) - In Grand Arena you fight Bots and Players in order to gain rank. Unlike Normal Arena, this is Cross Server. Meaning it's your Server plus at least 1 other. Also, Grand Arena requires you to have Three Teams in order to fight. Thing to Note: You only have to win 2 out of 3 battles to win the overall fight.

Basic Info
Tower will be at its most difficult right after you unlock it. You more than likely won't have enough Characters to finish it and if you do have enough they will probably be under-leveled and lacking in Promotions. Don't despair though, get as far as you can so you can get as much rewards as possible. As you get more Characters, higher levels, and Promotions; Tower will become easier to handle and eventually you will be able to fully complete all 12 Floors. Things to Note:
 * Tower can be reset once daily (Exception: If you are VIP 8+, you can reset twice)
 * Tower doesn't reset Automatically. You have to manually reset it. If you do not reset and forgot to do Tower the day before, but did reset it that day, you will have 2 chances at tower

General Strategy
When you first unlock Tower it's not a bad idea to wait until you have 12 Characters to use. Each Character can only fight 5 times in the Tower. With a full Roster of Characters in the Tower, this means you can only lose a maximum of 3 times in order to get all rewards. After 3 Losses you won't be able to reach the higher floors. That being said, if you have less than 12 Characters, you can still advance, just get as far you can get. One good thing to remember, especially in the beginning of your Tower Experience, you have to resist the temptation of always sending 4 Characters out to fight. Only send the Characters that you expect to win and only as many as needed. Should you lose a fight, the enemy will not regenerate health. So, it's often enough to even send a single weak Character out to finish the job! This saves a lot of attempts on other Characters for later use.

Generic Team Builds
When you have the luxury of using 12 Characters in Tower you can start building good teams. When you have more than 12 Characters, you can start choosing Characters with better stats and skills. Here's a basic guideline to follow:
 * 1) 3x Sports.pngs Characters - Usually the ones with the Highest HPIcon.png
 * 2) 6x to 9x Art.png Character - Try to choose the ones with the Highest AttackIcon.pngk
 * 3) Science.pngce Character - Choose one with the Highest Evolution (Stars), then AttackIcon.pngk, then HPIcon.png.
 * 4) Then finally a Literature.pngature or Sports.png

Fighting Literature Teams
When fighting a full Literature team (i.e. Alice, Venus, Caroline, Crystal) one of the best strategies to do, especially if you can't do a full 12 Character Roster, is to send one Art Character against the team. Yes, you will die fairly quick, but it helps prevent the Heal Machine from starting. Not only will you damage them before their heals get off, but when you do the battle again the enemies health will be right where you left it.

Arena
Arena is the first PvP Mode you will unlock and is one of the best ways to get the Premium Currency of the game: Gems. The Characters you choose to fight in the Arena (Offense and Defense) should become your top priority for Leveling and Promoting.

Arena Basics
In the Arena you fight for Ranking Points by fighting against other Players or Bots. With each Win (on Offense) you gain points depending on your Ranking (D, C, B, A, or S Ranking). On Defense you gain or lose points (depending on if you won or lost) depending on the Attackers Ranking (D, C, B, A, or S Ranking).
 * Ranking Points
 * S Ranking: +/- 3 to 6 Points
 * A Ranking: +/- 8 to 12 Points
 * B Ranking: +/- 13 to 18 Points
 * C Ranking: +/- 18 to 23 Points
 * D Ranking: +/- 21 to 29 Points
 * Bots
 * They can not attack you in Arena
 * Bots are there to fill in the gaps between Players and can usually be identified by their names. Their names are usually two names stuck together (i.e. StreamScarlet or FrostPhilo).
 * Early on in your Arena career they will consist of different Characters and varying Promotions/Levels depending on your expected strength. At a certain point they will stop scaling. At this point their teams will be of levels of 80 to 90, Max Promotion Level of 8, and using VenusFrag.png, ElvaFrag.png, AlbertaFrag.pngta, AmyFrag.png.

Maximize Gems in Arena
If you're Free to Play (F2P) and thus below VIP Level 3 you can only do three things to get as far as possible:


 * Save your 5 Challenges on the last day of an Arena Season and use them in the new Arena Season between Monday 2400 and 0500 AM EST/EDT. This essentially gives you a head start in the new Arena season.
 * Have a strong Defense Team. This will server two purposes:
 * Deter people from attacking you.
 * Maximize your chance at winning a Defensive battle.
 * Only fight Battles you're pretty sure to win in the Arena. This means you might have to Refresh your opponents. If you can at least get 3 fights in daily, you can get the Daily Quest for the 3 Arena Battles. If you have to lose a fight, fight against the Opponent with the highest Rank in order to lose as few points as possible.

If you're VIP Level 3+, you get one other method to earn more Gems in Arena:


 * At the beginning of an Arena Season it is the most beneficial to reset your Arena Challenges. This allows more then 5 Challenges per day. More fights almost always means a higher Ranking too. In fact if you can get enough of a lead to the other players they won't be able to attack you and you only have to fight against Bots. This makes it easy to increase and keep your Ranking Points. Be careful though, if you spend more Gems resetting your Challenges you can reach a certain point where you will reach a net loss of Gems during the whole season. How much is too much spending depends on the other players in the Arena and how easily you can be defeated. If you reset until you reach S Rank and can keep S Rank, it should always give a net profit. Resetting to reach and keep a certain Rank for the weekly rewards is a more difficult thing to judge.

Grand Arena
In the Grand Arena(=GA) you need to build 3 teams of 4 girls each for your Defence and fight other Players for their position on the Ranking. The fights are three continous fights using three different teams and the winner of two of them wins the overall fight. As such you basically only need two teams that no one else can beat to win in the Grand Arena and that's what you should do: trying to build two strong teams and use whatever is left for the third.

Now when you reach the Grand Arena you will already have a rather strong Arena team and it is only natural to use that team in GA too on Defense, but that isn't the wisest move. You should use all the members of your Arena team, but build two more or less equally as strong teams out of them and 4 other girls. Reason for this is that a potential attacker can always choose one team of yours he wants to lose to, without it diminishing his chances of losing the overall fight. So by using a really strong team you make that choice which team of yours to basically ignore, really easy for him and the job of your second strong team all the more harder.

Now besides choosing which girls to use in GA and which team-constellations to make out of them, there is one more thing to take note of: and that is which team to put in which position. Ordinarily it shouldn't make a difference where you put which team, but GA has a final quirk that makes this important: After the attacker wins a battle, he will be counted as defender in the next one! And being on the attack is always going to be a bit of an advantage.

You should use this quirk to make sure that the Attacker has to fight at least one of your two strong teams as Defender. There are two different orders that will achieve that result: strongest, weakest, second strongest team, or weakest, second strongest, strongest team.

Both make sure that your second strongest team will most likely be on the attack when fighting, hopefully giving it the edge it needs to win against whatever the attacker throws against it. Now you may wonder why we have a strongest and a second strongest team, when we aimed for equally strong teams? That's because while our goal is two equally strong teams, the reality is that most likely one team will be more or less clearly stronger then the other.

How to build a Team
Now we talked a lot about what overboarding strategy you should use in the different PvP Modes, but not about the most important thing: How to actually make a team out of your available girls that is able to beat other Players or Bots in those modes.

General remarks:

 * there are currently 62 different girls in the game, which of those are available to you and which of them you can get, as well as how fast you can evolve them, will hugely differ between different players. Players that invest money into the game will have a wider and often times stronger selection of girls available to them, compared to someone who doesn't invest at all. This guide tries to be a general guide, so the girls mentioned here are either strong Meta choices, or widely available from the beginning. If a girl you want to use isn't mentioned, it's either because it's relatively weak, only useful in rather specific situations or is usually only later in the life of an Account available, when it's to be expected to be overshadowed by stronger alternatives that you should have unlocked then. Prime example of this would be Cecilia vs Erica, the first being the superior choice in all Metrics. But most players will have Erica much higher evolved and thus stronger then Cecilia, while also changing away from Y2 Arts in favour of strong Y3 Arts, before Cecilia can get on the same evolution as Erica and thus begin being more useful than her.
 * there is no strongest or unbeatable team in the game. Even if their was, as long as it isn't a stalling team, an attacker with the same team will have the advantage
 * some girls are more luck based then others, meaning while their use can be highly beneficial and will usually work in your favour, that isn't guaranteed and thus you can lose fights you expected to win. They are usually ranked according to the expected value their skills bring to the table, if you value consistency, you may want to go for nominal weaker girls, that don't make each fight into a lottery.
 * we will mostly talk about the general usefulness of girls and rank them accordingly, without going into detail why and how that ranking came to be. If you're interested in an in depth analysis of the girls, go to character reviews.
 * It's not important to have all four elements in a team, but try to avoid having more then two of the same element in a team you use for defence. Also try to avoid having all your Art girls be of the same element in a defence team.
 * Most of the guide here is for building a good defence team, as if you are the attacker you can tailor the attacking team to the weaknesses of the defending team, so it's often much harder to build a team that has no (big) flaws to exploit.

Building a standard Team
The basic idea behind a standard team is to reduce the opponents hp to zero, before it does the same to you. It usually consists of 1 Sport, 2 or 3 Art and 1 Science².

Assuming all have awakening, or none have awakening, you can use the following ranking as a Guideline about how strong each girl is, relative to the others in the same Club. If a girl has an Awakening, while the others don't, the increase in stats will usually catapult it to or near the top of the list.


 * Art: Gis > Mina > Summer LadiesL/Iris/Cam/Luna/Violet > Elva/Julianna >> Erica > all other Y2 Arts > Fanny
 * Sports: Winni¹ >> Grace > Amy, Christmas Devils > Zoey/Haley > Chris > Bonnie/Ingrid/Hazel > all other Y2 Sports > Phyllis
 * Science: Geneva > Lucy > Alberta > Freya on defence and Alberta > Lucy/Geneva > Freya on offence
 * Literature: Christina³ > (Flora only against Literature Teams)

¹Only at 4 stars or more

²Science Characters are usually used for their Skill, so at 3 stars or more, before that another Art Character is usually more useful.

³ Only at 5 stars

At the beginning you may have to choose between quite a few of the not named Alternatives, so here is a handy rule of thumb, what you want out of the Characters:


 * Art: The higher the attack, the better. If one of the candidates has a cooldown of 6 on his Arena Skill, it should get Priority for that, if you have no other girl with cooldown 6 already in your team.
 * Sport: The more hp, the better.
 * Science: With low stars they are substitute Arts, so the higher Attack should be prioritised.

Building a Literature Team
The basic idea of a Literature team is to heal all the damage the other team did to you, to either go for an autowin after 40 rounds in the fight, or kill the opponent, while he is unable to whittle your hp down fast enough. It is usually 2-3 Literature and either 1 sport, 1 sport and 1 science, or even 2 science.

They can be really strong in the beginning of the game for players who invested money and got themselves strong Literature girls before other players got strong Art girls, or can be a big hurdle in GA, needing more resources in form of strong Arts to beat them, than an Attacker can expend while still expecting to win another fight.


 * Sports: Winni¹ >> Grace > Amy
 * Literature: Venus/Caroline > Alice/Babydoll Giselle > Crystall/Taylor
 * Science: Halloween Witches > Geneva > Lucy

Positioning in a Team
Now you know which girls to choose for a team, this part will tell you what you have to take into account to get the most out of your chosen girls:

Each girl has a certain cooldown for it's skill, and you usually want that skill to be cast as soon as possible. In pvp one round is an attack of one girl from each team and the girl in position one will attack in Round 1, then the girl in position two in Round two and so on, with the girl in position one attacking in Round 5 again. The cooldown of the skills tells you how many rounds need to have passed until it can be cast, so a skill with cd5 can first be used in Round 6! That's why in position 2 you want a girl with cd5, in position 3 you want one with cd6, in position 4 you want one with cd7. In position one you want a girl who's skill you either don't mind delaying, want delayed or who's skill has the least impact if it is delayed.

As you will use two or even three Arts and most Arts have a cooldown of 7, you will most likely use a order like this:

Weaker Art with cd7, Sportschar as Tank, Science or Art with cd6, Stronger Art with cd7.

Notable exception:

Winni, Weaker Art with cd7, Science or Art with cd6, Stronger Art with cd7. Because you want to delay Winnis skill until after the enemy team has used their skills, as she only dodges normal attacks.