This is by no means a full team building guide (one may come in the future for ) and I simply wanted to showcase how I use Awoken Lucifer  to clear Arena 1 with reasonable consistency.  Arena  is a gruelling 21 floors and requires a high end team along with careful planning and a little luck to clear successfully.  Furthermore, the floor spawns are drawn randomly from several fixed monsters and no two Arena runs will be the same. This also means it is possible to get horrible (or amazing) luck as challenging bosses may repeatedly spawn.

 has the inherent advantage of producing a very durable team due to 1.82x HP/RCV along with 16.4x ATK to devil and god type monsters. This alleviates the need to bring any form of damage mitigation as you can survive the largest pre-emptive strike on floor 19 and the God Killer  awakening helps burst through the final floors. However, to tackle Arena,  teams require certain key subs/role fulfilment:

1. A way to remove poison orbs. This can be through board refreshes such as Haku  or Zuoh  . Conversely, actives that convert poison into dark orbs such as Castor  or Eschamali  also fill this important role. You need this for Grisar (floor 16)  and Beelzebub (floor 19)
2. Damage enhance. By far the best choice is Awoken Loki  as he allows you to deal 2x damage for 2 turns which means you can bypass floor 19 with less actives and still burst through the Kali on floor 20. Other notable mentions include Akechi  , Okuninushi  , Dark Metatron  , and Nephthys  . I tend to also use my damage enhance on tough floor 7’s, Meimei (15), and Grisar on floor 16.
   • Failing a suitable damage enhance, a farmable option is Zeus Stratios  with his 35% gravity. This instantly moves Kali out of her >65% danger zone. However, gravity is less useful throughout the rest of the dungeon and has a significantly longer cooldown even when max skilled. Therefore careful planning must be taken when used.
3. Yomi Dragon  . As much as it pains me to say it,  is almost essential to success as he is simply the best solution to binds as he is unbindable, can generate heart and dark orbs on demand, and can clear binds via a row of hearts through recover bind  awakening.

If you are able to cover these crucial roles, your consistency will increase as you are able to avoid some of the major pitfalls of this dungeon.

Latent Tamadras and awakenings is a common concern due to their new-found abundance  in PreDRA Infestation (for reading as to which difficulty to play and why you should be playing it, feel free to read my other post HERE). However,  do not need Latent Awakenings to succeed, it only makes your jobs a little bit easier. With that said, you should always full rainbow resist (1%  in every colour) one monster as to avoid the 100% gravity abilities and afterwards, either dark  or fire  resists are ideal. Dark  resists are always amazing as most of the scariest monsters (and pre-emptives) come from dark enemies and being able to reduce their output by any amount helps in the long run. The reason why I am mentioning Fire resist  latents is for Kali as she will most likely be knocked into her fire sub attribute and you will need to dance around with her for a prolonged period of time before your actives recharge. For myself, I simply rainbowed as many monsters on my team as I could with Awoken Pandora  having full fire resist  as I am so blessed with those instead of any other colour.

Again I wish to stress that latent awakenings are not mandatory; it only gives you a slight edge and it is still possible to clear without them.

My strategy is to reach floor 15 with all my actives ready and deal with them accordingly. Thankfully, you are able to easily control your damage through matching either a horizontal row of 6 dark orbs to trigger your numerous  awakenings or as a randomly shaped cluster to prevent the additional damage as some floors you need to control your damage output to prevent certain mechanics.

On floor 16 with the mortal poison spawning Grisar, I use all my actives if needed as I plan to stall on the Zeus floors to recharge them as all but the dark one (due to combo shield, jammer spawning, high health) are easy to handle and sweep without actives.

I try to not use any actives leading up to Kali with the exception of Loki  on floor 19 as his damage enhance carries forward to the final boss floor.  It is possible to push the Light Kali out of her >65% health danger zone without a damage enhance, but you will be hard pressed to do so with the Dark Kali.

 

 

Even with the perfect team/set up/strategy, Arena is still incredibly difficult and challenging to clear on a consistent basis. There is a certain amount of luck needed as certain floor spawn combinations can spell disaster for even the most veteran player. There are many teams that are capable of clearing Arena, but  provides me the most consistency and I should be playing it as much as possible before the inevitable change to the much harder Arena 2.

Happy Puzzling!