Arbiter of Judgement, Metatron, aka Dark Metatron or dtron is one of the oldest Godfest Exclusive (GFE) gods in PAD along with the Odin pantheon. She rose to hyper-luxury REM status when awakenings were first introduced as she was unbindable and had two dark row enhances  . However, she quickly lost popularity as team building restricted you to using only dark attacker subs. Eventually,  was given her current Dark-Blue evolution and updated active skill to provide a shield along with dark orb enhancement. The evolution was nice because it opened up sub pools to gods as well, but still could not viably build a team as the introduction of preemptive abilities made it near impossible to stay below 80% health as there was no health boost from her leader skill.

Flash forward to the November 25th buffs, and   ‘s active has been buffed to a 5-turn cooldown, and her leader spell augments health and attack for all dark monsters by 1.35x along with a scaling multiplier for lower health percentages.

Pros:

• Health pool is very high and benefits all dark monsters
• Damage multiplier caps at 29x when below 50% health
• Leaders are unbindable
• 6 skill boost  awakenings from the 2 leaders; no stalling needed
• Any dark monster is now a sub option
• Exciting to play!

Cons:

• Playstyle is very unique and challenging to master
• Preemptive strikes or heals can be fatal
• It is sometimes hard to manage your health safely
• Vulnerable to skill binds as she has no skill bind resist  awakenings

Her leader skill now grants the following:

• 50-80% health provides 3x damage (16.4x with all bonuses included)
• <50% health grants 4x damage (29.16x)
• 1.8x HP multiplier for dark monsters

This is a significant buff to damage as the old leader skill only provided 16x damage when below 80% health. Now we gain 1.8x health along with nearly 30x damage, and we can stack dark orb enhance  ,  , and two-prong attacks  . My tentative  team has over 40k health; I feel somewhat invincible being able to take gigantic hits, and I can augment my tanking capabilities even further with the 35% damage reduction shield. The active being on a 5-turn cooldown provides a shield at least 40% of the time (more if you are able to sweep the floor and carry it forward to the next), and uptime can be increased via haste. This frees up a sub slot from Dark Izanami  because that many shields would be redundant.

The one major pitfall that plagues Light  and Dark  Metatron is their outdated awakenings. Neither have a skill bind resist  awakening and when used as a leader, this makes it very difficult to achieve 100% resistance through 4 subs. This can be a deal breaker in certain dungeons where it is critical to resist skill binds.  will still be vulnerable to preemptive attacks or heals, but the augmented health pool helps combat this issue. The team pictured above can only achieve 60% resistance, and I feel rather helpless when my actives become bound as I cannot take advantage of the shielding offered.

I spent over an hour grinding through Extreme Endless Corridors to test the limits and capabilities of my  team and after quick deaths, managed to get into the groove of managing my health along with dark orbs. I am still afraid of large preemptives such as that of the beloved Divine Queen Hera (pictured above), full health heals, or floors that do not allow you to take a hit safely even at max health. I used to bring Durga  on my  team to provide a health reset, but now I no longer feel the need as the giant health pool combined with higher multiplier pushes out the need for a damage boost too.

I still have not decided whether  or  is more effective. My current team has a total of 5  and 8  awakenings. Creating dark rows  is challenging from a matching and orb management perspective. A full horizontal row of 6 orbs takes up an awkward amount of space and heavily restricts the numbers of combos that can be made if not matched at the top or bottom. There is also very little time extend  available, and this further hurts row-based matches. On the other hand,  is far easier to manipulate and requires less space to match. The augmented skyfall mechanic from Zaerog Infinity  felt powerful along with every orb being enhanced through the numerous  awakenings.

What I felt worked best for the majority of floors was utilizing  with a high number of combos. Each combo adds an additional 25% damage, so reaching 7 combos would create more damage overall than a  row with fewer combos. I would strive to match  rows when dark orbs were in excess (and thus less orb acrobatics to create a row) or after flooding the board with an active. Persephone’s   double orb change active is perfect for row-based teams as ideally you want to make at least 2 unique rows (12 orbs total) and changing both light and heal to dark makes this task much easier.

That being said, it is still a challenge to balance your health and damage output. I found I had to plan things out a bit more in advance as I sometimes had to forgo healing in order to stay in my damaging health percentage as the next floors would not allow stalling or I had to burn  ‘s active and remove hearts . This led to many heart attack moments from preemptive strikes, but it also added to the excitement.

Health management is the critical to playing a  team effectively and staying in your zone. First off, you must understand that  is not a faceroll team when played in higher level content. You must research the descend ahead of time and take mental notes of where the dangerous hits are, as well as finding safe places to drop your health. Naturally, preemptive strikes and heals can ruin your day and a health reset, such as  might be needed. Preemptive strikes can be partially countered by  ‘s 35% damage reduction active. Prior to entering a descend, please test your team in Endless Corridors to find your base heal value. Your base heal value is the amount of healing received when you match 3 heart orbs. For example, if your base heal is 2,500; a five combo match including those 3 heal orbs will restore 5,000 health (every subsequent combo increases your healing and damage by 25% of the base). You can use this information to plan out how much health can be restored to ensure the subsequent hit still places you into your damage zone. Subs with higher base recovery stats will allow you to ping-pong your health faster and provides safer stalling. However, there will also be times where you elect to match every heal on the board in hopes of having very few / none for the next two turns as being full health then could get you killed. It takes practice and experience to know when it is safe to take a hit, and when it is best to kill and move onward.

Furthermore, you should always try to conserve dark orbs near the bottom of the board. When storing orbs near the bottom of the board, it is much harder to accidentally trigger a match through skyfalls and will also be more conveniently arranged to form a row  . After matching the row at the bottom, you can combo your way up towards the top as you will not have to worry about breaking up the row at the bottom.

The furthest I was able to reach in Extreme Endless Corridors  was floor 24, when I received the full board of poison orbs and my Haku  was still on cooldown. I should have actually died on the previous floor when Belial healed me to full health, but because my Pandora  was swapped into my leader position, I was able to go under 80% when she swapped back with my  . Kind of a one-time thing, but it is interesting to know that health is not restored when the leader is swapped back.

Overall, I enjoy the buffs to  as allowing any dark monster to be used as a sub gave her a massive sub pool to draw from. She once again feels like a rare 6-star Godfest Exclusive monster who brings a strong active as well as powerful stats, and awakenings to the team. The quality of life adjustments to the health buff and the higher multiplier allow her to compete with other top-tier leaders for damage output. If she were to gain a  awakening, it would make comboing and matching easier, and her personal damage output would be amazingly high due to one of the highest base attack stats in the game. However, the biggest flaw I can see right now is a lack of  , and this makes team building more challenging and increases your the chances of failing the dungeon.

Happy Puzzling!