Athena Tournament is the next instalment in the ranking dungeon series and offers players a chance to farm 10,000 MP and various coloured py. The goal of these tournaments is to test player’s skill by imposing a scoring system to determine your percentile ranking.

In these ranking dungeons, we are scored based on 3 criteria:

1. Average combos made: 5,000 points per combo
2. Time Remaining: 500 points per second remaining
3. Maximum damage: up to 10,000 points if you hit 40 million.

Dungeon overview

Floor	monster	hp / Defence	comments
1	x3	76,350	Random colour spawns of same HP
2		357,358 215,025	1,497 preemptive Blind attack preemptive
3		565,673 580,923
4	x2	45 / 10,000,000	10 million defence means you must bring a poison or true damage monster
5		1,608,819	4 combo shield. FIre teams may wish to bring a wood sub for this floor.
6		31,618 32,635 35,685	Possible floor to poison/true damage or kill via sub colours due to very low health
7		820,415	9,172 preemptive
8		280,544 / 188,889	188,889 defence along with half damage from light and dark monsters greatly favours wood teams.
9		772,137	Blind attack preemptive
10		2,226,875	5 combo shield. God typing means your  god killer  awakening monsters will shine

Dungeon summary

• 10 floors favour speed oriented teams (aka less combos)
• With 10 floors you can use certain actives multiple times
• No restrictions opens up team compositions that were not allowed before (aka Dark Metatron  )
• Wood based teams have a significantly easier time on floor 5 & 8
• Fire based teams may wish to bring a single wood sub for floor 5 & 8
• Dark teams have a favourable place to pad their damage on floor 9 & 10
• Floor 4 requires poison or true damage to bypass the  . However, with 10 floors, our overall scores will be lower (due to more time elapsed) and true damage -5,000 penalty will be more detrimental.
  • (Active skill CD) – (3) =  awakenings to be ready in time. Eg. 10 turn CD requires 7  awakenings

JP Top 10 Scores

With the dungeon heavily favouring speed in clearing each floor, it is no surprise that Shiva Dragon  dominates the leader board.

What can I use in lieu of Shiva Dragon?

If you are like me (and perhaps the majority of PAD players) you may not be fortunate enough to own a Shiva Dragon  and will need to exercise some creativity in team building to score well in each ranking dungeon. With Athena Tournament, we want to find leaders with unconditional multipliers and teams who are ideally TPA  oriented as they require fewer orbs to sweep floors (can also use their sub colour on the lower HP floors to conserve actives and primary colour orbs).

Dark Izanami 

Diza offers an unconditional 4x multiplier to Physical and God type monsters. You can pair her with another  or a Shiva Dragon  friend provided you have fire based gods. This is a great solution as DIza is farmable and you simply need to load up on orb changer subs and use as needed.

Dark Metatron 

Dark Metatron was my go-to team for Izanami Tournament as she provides 29.16x ATK for dark monsters when under 50% HP. You must bring an HP resetting sub such as Durga  or Lu Bu  to use on the first turn. Thankfully, dual  leads provide 6  awakenings to ensure both your HP reset and poison/true damage is ready in time. Do note you must heal on the first floor to avoid death from the second floor preemptive (and 7th floor). Heart breakers are your friend after surviving preemptives.

Claire 

Claire is the prettiest of all the Valkyries and received a leader skill buff a while ago that went relatively unnoticed. Dual leaders provide 9x ATK for God and Healer type monsters. However, when you clear 6+ connected dark orbs, you spike up to 20.25x damage along with benefiting from the numerous  awakenings. This is fantastic as you can sweep the easier floors with fewer actives and burst as needed on the harder ones.

Awoken Amaterasu 

Awoken Amaterasu provides a flat 16x ATK for healer types when HP is full (you may wish to heal with her active on floor 7 if concerned about damage). This 16x coupled with TPA  potential subs  such as Valkyrie   and DQXQ  can allow for easy sweeping with minimal combos (do note you can use the wood attribute to clear the first and sixth floor). However, you will be at a disadvantage for Neptune and have no where to pad your damage.

Verdandi 

Verdandi is perhaps the best option for wood teams as her deep pool of TPA  subs combined with 10.89x ATK allow for easy sweeping and sub colour usage on the easier floors. You may require extra effort on Giga’s floor (7) as you will no long be full HP and will not be at your full multiplier. You can pad your damage on floor 5 .

Elize 

Elize is the green counterpart to Claire and follows the same strategies of using the 9x multiplier to deal with the easier floors and forming a  match to trigger the 20.25x damage. One distinct advantage she has over  is a significantly higher multiplier and with the advent of more subs possessing  awakenings, your team building is not as restricted. Hardest part would be finding friends.

Awoken Shiva 

Shiva is one of the hottest fire leads and has historically been a reasonable candidate for ranking dungeons. However, with 10 floors and a greater emphasis being placed on speed, he may falter more than before.

Athena 

Using Athena to kill Athena….an interesting proposition.  is another farmable option, albeit weaker than  due to lower multiplier and less favourable colours. However, with the incredible base attack value and 2  awakenings, you can spike very high with only a few matches.

Yomi Dragon 

Yomi Dragon has the best chance of any 5o1e (5 orbs, 1 enhanced) teams due to an orb generating active and favourable colour for this dungeon. She will be slower than  reliant teams due to the extra time spent matching 5 orbs along with being more orb hungry and requiring more active usage (which slows down your time). Regardless, she is worth mentioning as  is one of the most widely owned MP Dragon.

Noteworthy awakenings to have:

While Takeminakata Tournament had a modest dependency on jammer resist  awakenings, Athena has 2 preemptive blind attacks. These can be counteracted by  awakenings (sunglasses prevent blindness?) as each one provides 20% resistance. However, these are not mandatory, but more of a luxury. You can decrease your need for these awakenings with a better memory and the mindset to minimize combos and only do what is necessary. Ideally you should not go out of your way to accommodate these subs. Full list can be found HERE with notable mentions listed below.

• Droid Dragon  (3)
• Awoken Hades  (2)
• Chiyome  (2)
• Hanzo  (2)

Poison options

The staple farmable poison is Lilith  who can be max skilled to 10 turns. This means you only require 7 skill boost  awakenings to have ready in time for the 4th floor. This can be a daunting task as most teams may find it challenging to have enough skill boosts. Conversely, you can also use the lesser seen Swallowtail  who can be acquired in the Dark Insect Dragon  as the evolved form of the boss drop.  is superior to  in that he starts at 10 turns and can be max skilled to 6 as well as coming with a single  awakening. This may alleviate stress in team building and is another option to consider. I would suggest you do not use true damage as it will hurt your score more than poison. Simply match 0-1 combos after using poison and advance to the next floor.

Final thoughts

For players who are not chasing the top 1% (not owning Shiva Dragon), there are plenty of options you can use to speed through the dungeon. Remember to only use actives when absolutely necessary as it does cost a small amount of precious time to do so.

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

Let me know what you plan to use for this ranking dungeon and I will do a follow up post with my results some time after it goes live on Monday.

Happy Puzzling!