Friday Afternoon will mark the debut of Sea Dragon King – Legend Plus that awards the coveted boss drop of Giant Arched Sea Dragon King, Volsung  . The dungeon will be rogue style in nature in that all your monsters will start at level 1 and progressively level up as you clear each floor. The amount of experience and thus ending level of your monsters will be determined by their team cost; the lower the cost, the higher their ending level will be. This automatically awards teams that have heavy plus egg investment because the pluses will not be affected reduced monster levels and instead provide their full benefit. But dungeon aside (will cover in a subsequent post when I actually get to play it), I want to take this opportunity in exploring the power  offers along with his viability and whether he is worth the investment.

First off,  requires 6 million experience to reach level 99 (most monsters only require 4 million) and his active requires 10 successful skill ups to go from 16 to a 6-turn cooldown. Do note that his 8 awakenings can be done via feeding his base form to another one of his base forms (aka dungeon drop) to receive a free awakening. Even though you will only see 3 awakenings in his base form, doing 8 successful feeds will have the remaining 5 unlocked once you do ultimately evolve  . His awakenings offer a nice mixture of utility with some offensive capacities sprinkled in. The single two prong attack  along with 2 enhanced water orb awakenings  provide nice passive damage for mono blue teams and his skill lock resist  and 2 enhanced heal orb  provide defensive utility.

When used as a sub,  ‘s primary asset will be his 6 turn full board change to red, blue, green, light, and dark orbs for rainbow and possibly mono blue teams. This is faster than Light Kali  ‘s 7 turn active, but  does reduce dragon and attacker type monster damage by 50% for 1 turn. This can be circumnavigated by restricting your dragon type monsters to only  , but this could become problematic for Awoken Sakuya  teams as your 2 leaders are both dragon types. Granted if the board change will be saving you and your other subs are non-dragon based, you should still be able to deal enough damage to sweep the floor. However, please test this out repeatedly in endless corridors to be certain. Another team worth mentioning is Awoken Isis  because  fulfils the near impossible blue / red slot along with providing a beneficial board. Overall,  is a wonderfully farmable solution to high end rainbow teams if you can compensate for his low base recovery and minimizing dragon and attacker usage.

With all that being said,  has powerful leadership potential as he reaches up to 36x damage at 7 combos when matching any 4 of red, blue, green, light, and dark orbs. This flexibility does reduce orb troll, but may make stalling harder as you may accidentally activate your multiplier. In addition, his naturally low base recovery will place constraints on healing along with his active nerfing both your leader’s damage output. Truth be told,  is a powerful lead, but the sheer effort required to beat his dungeon means you probably have a much stronger team already. In addition, the rainbow lead playstyle is somewhat “old” and not exciting to invest in with only a 36x multiplier. My bias is comparing  to Zaerog Infinity  , Scarlet  , or Hel  as other farmable leads who have much more interesting and unique playstyles.

Lastly,  ‘s debuff can be overwritten with a buff from another monster. This includes cards such as I&I  or the nearly forgotten Weapon Series of Claymore  who can be max skilled to 3-turn cooldown. Granted bringing these type of subs can waste a team slot, so you need to use your judgement on whether it is worth a sub slot to circumnavigate the damage debuff.

If you feel I have overlooked anything, or have your own opinions on  , leave a comment below and let the discussion begin!

Happy Puzzling!