The third ranking dungeon, Cauchemar Tournament, will debut after the Wednesday maintenance and will provide players another chance to test their puzzling skills for various rewards. However, what is perhaps the most appealing the top 1% of players will receive a crown beside their names. I have varied from top 1.2-2.3% for Zeus and Izanami without investing many runs as I was satisfied with the top 10% rewards. However, I want to achieve top 1% and wish to share my tentative strategies and pre-release thoughts.
In addition, this dungeon will impose the no awoken skills restriction which will hopefully level the playing field as push button teams cannot be used. Furthermore, this also prevents the primary type of teams I took for the previous dungeons of Dark Metatron 
and Yomi Dragon 
as I cannot reset my health through actives nor will I have any enhanced dark 
orbs to proc my leader skill. A lack of time extends and access to board refreshes also places constraints on rainbow teams. However, we should revisit how we are scored for each ranking dungeon.
Time remaining provides the bulk of your score and rewards players who are able to visualize and match quickly. However, in order to push yourself into the elusive 1% bracket, you need to look at average combos and perhaps more importantly, maximum damage dealt.
Maximum damage caps at 40 million to reward 10,000 points and is affected by damage reduction/amplification of the boss’s elemental typing. As such, you can have 5-turn orb changers ready by the boss floor as a means to nuke him down quickly. In terms of colour preferences, red based teams have 2 floors they deal double damage to and water based teams will struggle the most due to the final boss having 2.4 million health and the green element.
Looking at the top 10 teams used on the Japanese server, their overall strategy was to use Ra Dragon 
(who can achieve 144x with only 6 combos) and their highest attack based subs either emphasizing light (for floor 5) or red subs (boss floor). In addition, can sweep most of the floors with 5/6 elements matched.
Now not everyone (including myself) has a and we need to come up with either slight variations or a new team composition. For Mantastic, I may default to my Awoken Sakuya 
and highest attack light subs (and the inclusion of Light Valkyrie 
to break hearts to light) and attempt to burst the 5th floor who is dark typing. can be used either on the boss or the 5th floor if I had to take an extra turn due to orb troll. Furthermore, I may elect to make a 1-combo match on floor 5 to have fully charged as the boss will be spawning on a 2-4 turn timer and thus not lose too much precious time.
The above team features my strongest light attribute subs while fulfilling my colour requirements. However, I have found more success in using leads with unconditional multipliers as they can quickly sweep the floors and simply combo hard for the final boss. Unfortunately, it may be challenging to do so as most are active/awakening reliant to do so. Awoken Shiva 
may be too weak without access to two prong attacks 
, actives, and reaching 6 combos. Furthermore, the third floor with the blue Siren 
and effectively 880k health may prove hard to burst through on a single turn.
However, the fun farmable side of me has a different team that may actually work. Everyone loves their Dark Izanami 
for her amazing shielding potential and stellar sub usage. But looking at her leader skill, a new opportunity arises:
This can now be paired with a friend’s Shiva Dragon 
who unconditionally buffs fire god’s damage by 5x. The health reduction from is meaningless as you are never getting hit anyway. Thus, all you need to bring is red gods and have an unconditional 20x multiplier! Just bring your highest base attack fire gods along with ideally Red Valkyrie 
(or any other 5-turn orb changer).
I will still have to experiment and may even consider using my Athena 
team paired with Kanna 
for a 10.5x multiplier on Mantastic as I cannot create a feasible team.
Granted even the best thought out teams are subject to RNG and will take a perfect run to achieve a high score as everything has to line up in order to quickly pass each floor.
Also, remember to turn off the skill confirmation animations through Others -> Options -> Dungeon -> Skills Off to save a couple extra seconds!
If you have a better team composition or strategy, please leave a comment and lend me your insight and I can update this post accordingly =)
Happy Puzzling!
Mantastic Puzzle and Dragons 
I tried the DIZA team with a shiva dragon friend, Urd, Leilian, and a Rodin. It had trouble bursting through siren floor, just like A. Shiva.I only hit two combos, but still. If you can bring 2 5 turn orb changers, it might be better then bringing high atk gods.
LikeLike
You can bring a green/red god such as verdandi to take care of Siren. Or you can pair with a friend’s DIza to bring any green god of your choosing. There is going to be a lot of trial and error along with RNG luck to get a score you are happy with. Let me know if you have any further progress =)
LikeLike
Kinda wanted to know how you did in the very end… 🙂
LikeLike
Sitting sad at 2.5% I average 2% across all 3 ranking dungeons so I am doing okay…..not happy but it is hard to compete when your teams are not fully optimized. Fantastic averages 7% for the 3 I believe. Maybe I’ll do a follow up post, but no crown so lower motivation =(
LikeLike
I used a Dark Metatron team to clear it. My DMeta team was still in the works so about 3 of the cards were not max leveled. My score wasn’t great, as I messed up combos on Cauchemar.
LikeLike
Which floor did you use to drop your health into the appropriate percentage for maximum multiplier? And what subs did you use?
LikeLike
I actually kinda winged it haha. If I remember, I used the 1st floor to drop me to about 75% hp, and swept that floor. I allowed 2nd floor to drop me below 50%, which I then swept. Floor 3 dropped me way down so swept that easily. I spent some time on Floor 4 to get him to hit me to less than 75%, and combo-ed enough to kill. Took one hit from Floor 5 then swept. On Cauchemar, I blew skills to kill him. But took me a couple of tries as my combo-ing skills are not that great, healing him instead of killing him haha.
I used ult Hanzo (lvl 83), evo-ed but not ulted Pandora (lvl 94), D/D Haku (max lvl), and Dragon Caller Satsuki (lvl 96). Friend D/Meta was +297, I think. I had about +69 on my D/Meta.
LikeLike
Thats great you were able to complete the dungeon as well as navigate through the various health modifying pre-emptive abilities. I used Dtron for the first ranking dungeon as I was able to use Durga to drop my health to 1 on the first turn.
Just keep practising your matching skills and you will start breezing through dungeons in no time =)
LikeLike
Haha thanks for your encouragement! I might try DTron team with the new ult luci, since luci is the only dark card I have that I can use to drop my hp.
Since I am only just starting to use D/Meta, I don’t have many friends that use D/Meta yet. Could I add you, if you have space, and if you want? :p
LikeLike
I never actually use my Dmeta outside of super niche situations and I am always out of space =( But there are plenty of other uses out there, just need to ask nicely!
LikeLike
Haha fair enough. No problem lol. Yea, I posted a request on the FB page. Not many responses though. I’ll keep trying haha.
Dark Meta has been helping clear dungeons I had trouble clearing with my Ronia and Gronia teams. She seems very powerful at the moment. Only difficult thing is managing the HP and making sure I don’t die to pre-emptives haha.
I want to try my hand at color-based leader skill teams like Sakuya. I have a few color leaders but I never used them. I need to get my orb management skills up there first before I seriously develop a color leader team, I think haha.
Keep up the good work with the blog! I find it easy to read and very informative. =)
LikeLike
Thank you for your kind words =D
I feel the main problem is she requires too much thinking XD People like to be more mindless when trying to breeze through content if using Dmeta as a farming lead. She is fun to use in descends or higher level content as she offers a nice change of pace as you have to manage your health so carefully. I actually wrote an article about her viability (just imagine I added in the SBR as it did not exist at the time of posting)
I have used her for the first ranking dungeon and got top 1.5% or so along with 5×4 descends for latent resist farming so those are the main niche uses along with speed farming something if I have a BFF showing her.
Just practice in endless with your rainbow leads, they are lots of fun and most of my team building guides are rainbow based (Sakuya, U&Y, Light Kali) so take a look there too =)
LikeLike