The play through with my alt account.

The new ranking dungeon was scheduled to be available a few days earlier; however, due to our over eagerness to play at midnight, we crashed the server. Oops. We had to wait (im)patiently for Gung-Ho to correct the issues and theory craft strategies for obtaining a higher score. I managed to enter on my Mantastic account and had one successful completion before the emergency server maintenance.

 

During the down time, I came to the conclusion that the dungeon is largely time based, I decided to change up my team and opt for an unconditional multiplier through Dark Metatron  . I used the 9 skill boost  awakening strategy to have Lilith  ready to poison floor 2 and cleared off my non damaging colours as well as a small heal to survive the subsequent preemptive attacks. Poison will not trigger the Skill Only Defeat mechanic and you just combo as usual to maintain a higher score as well as killing the 10 million defence monsters. I have a max-skilled Durga  to reset my health to 1 on the first floor in order to have an unconditional multiplier through  .

I used Persephone  on the 4th floor to generate plenty of purple orbs and only used 6 to make a row to kill the floor. The remaining purple was used to sweep the 5th floor even through the dark attack preemptive. I used Haku’s  full board refresh on the boss floor to ensure I had an easily combo-able board that can make a row of dark orbs along with 5+ combos. I was more focused on taking as little time as possible, but may need to add a few more combos to increase my score just a bit further.

2 other slower runs with higher combos resulting in less points still:

Also, remember to turn off the skill confirmation animations through Others -> Options -> Dungeon -> Skills Off to save a couple extra seconds!

My first attempt was made with Light Kali as a leader because of the 2 skill boost awakenings. My goal was to have 9 in total to ensure my Lilith would be ready to poison the second floor. Zaerog Infinity  will most likely be dropped from subsequent attempts as I mainly picked him for the time extend and 2 awakenings. I will replace him with Izanagi  as he also has 2 and the damage enhancing active to help boost the Max Damage category. However, I felt this would prove ineffective and time consuming to complete and opted for my  team discussed above.

For Fantastic, I plan to use the above team as it should burn through the floors quickly, and still have enough damage to kill the boss. The team uses the same strategy of using poison on floor 2 on a team with 9 awakenings. I was not able to go as quickly through the dungeon compared to Mantastic, but had significantly higher average combos and that helped compensate for the slower time.

By this point, the rankings should stabilize and only fluctuate by a small margin as most of the Gung-Ho players will have already submitted their scores. If you are on the cusp of a new ranking bracket, it would be worthwhile to play more on the last day in hopes of securing the next tier of rewards.

Happy Puzzling!