This had to be one of the most frustrating challenge 9‘s of late due to the no awoken skills restriction. I guess as compensation, we get to play on a 7×6 board, but without the lovely time extends, it is difficult to take full advantage. Thus I was left with a bit of a conundrum as how to safely approach and clear this dungeon. My usual Sakuya  team may struggle to make sufficient combos along with not having access to my actives for many turns and the final 2 floors reducing light damage by 50%. As such, I decided to take a different approach and dusted off my Awoken Leilan  .

 can reach 12.25x damage when matching fire, wood, and light orbs. This may not seem like much; however, she also reduces damage taken by ~50% from fire, wood, and light enemies. Thankfully, in this challenge dungeon, every floor is those 3 elements except for the 4th floor who is blue to start, but transitions into red at 50%. This allows your team to be very durable as you can slowly grind down each floor in relative safety.

My team building included a shield (Awoken Susano  ) and a gravity (Awoken Sakuya  ) to try and push the 4th floor into the 50% red zone faster. Otherwise, I prioritized my highest recovery subs (and also +297s) to fill the remainder of the team. The dungeon was very slow and the playstyle simply focused on surviving and grinding down each floor.

On floor 4, I used my gravity, popped my shield, and used  ‘s board refresh to maximize my damage output. It took a few turns to push him below 50%, but once I did, I was able to restall for actives as I was once again safe with my leader skills blocking most of the damage. Just to note, floor 5 requires a larger burst at the end as to avoid the chance of your leaders bound being bound at <30% health.

On the boss itself, it was simply a matter of grinding him down and using  as needed to smooth out the damage. Do note that you cannot leave him at <20% HP as Nordis will simply execute you. Therefore, I slowly grinded him to ~30%, used  followed by  and made beautiful combos.

I know there are other strategies that utilize time extend leaders paired with Awoken Anubis  or Ra Dragon  to deal large amounts of burst damage every turn, but I wanted to try something a bit different and enjoy the feeling of “old school” tank teams with no awakenings and playing extra safe.

Let me know what you used to clear this challenging level 9 and Happy Puzzling!