Introduction

I have played and cleared an excessive amount of Arena 3 with Myr  since her release and have begun to branch out and experiment with other leaders. In all honesty, many leaders are capable of clearing Arena 3, but require ideal spawns and a certain degree of luck. My fully invested Myr team has probably around 95% clear rate and the losses are either caused by extreme RNG or human error (full team breakdown for Myr can be found HERE). By comparison, my Krishna  team has 70-75% win rate and I have around 10-12 clears presently.  For myself, I am not going for the one Hail-Mary clear as many things have to line up in order to work. Thus, my goal is always trying to improve my consistency and minimizing the losses when possible.

This article will share the team I use for Krishna, explain my inheritance set up, latents, composition choices, and Arena 3 specific strategies. If you wish to read my Krishna team building guide and full analysis, please refer to my previous post HERE.

Video introduction

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Why 70-75% win rate

There are many factors that contribute to a loss in Arena 3 and things you cannot control include poor skyfalls (think Sopdet) and unfavourable spawns. Unfavourable spawns can either kill you or leads to wasted actives and a death on a later floor. Bolstering your team with latents, inherits, and optimal sub choices can reduce the danger of certain floors, but certain teams will be unable to counter various Radar Dragons. If my Krishna team was fully invested like my Myr team, my win rate would probably go up by another 5%.

For Krishna, you are unable to kill Hera Dragon without severely compromising your team composition (running multiple shields) and some difficulty hitting 2 million damage as the scaling is a little awkward with all the enhanced orbs. I simply view Hera Dragon as a loss as I do not wish to undermine my chances against other encounters. Thus, you are able to only win 80% of the time if everything else goes perfectly.

The other 5-10% chance at losing comes from a combination of human error, lack of experience with the team, and the inability to deal with certain spawn combinations. These can all be remedied to a certain degree with more attempts and knowing Arena 3 inside-out will greatly improve your chances at victory.

Krishna teams

I am fortunate to own a Krishna on both Mantastic and Fantastic and have built their teams around coop as it allows me to to achieve Gaia Dragon HP thresholds, the lower dependancy on hard bind clearers, and skill delay protection when facing Hephaestus Dragon. If you are playing solo, you will need to address all of these issues if you wish to have a higher clear rate. My boxes do not have all of those resources readily available to make it feasibly work and a loss of 198 stamina makes for a boring day.

Both teams are full +297 and max skilled. Bringing a delay of some sorts is essential for success.

Mantastic’s Team
Card	Inherit	Latents	Comments
			Delay to overcome resolve floors
	–		Autoheal was all I had Combos with Sanada
	–		Combos with Urd for burst
	–
	–		Additional orb changer

 

Fantastic’s Team
Card	Inherit	Latents	Comments
			Upgraded active
	–		Autoheal was all I had
			Combos with Leilan Using as SDR protection
	–
			Combos with Yamato Upgrades her active

Inheritance choices

All of the chosen subs have powerful base actives and reasonably strong bodies. Thus, inheriting something new is not always needed as you do not wish to lose your original active. An exception to this is your Krishnas as they have a relatively low impact active. Furthermore, when playing coop, your leaders recharge twice as fast compared to your subs so you should choose to inherit your most powerful actives there.

You should always look for opportunities to upgrade a monster’s base active. In the case of Fantastic’s Leilan, her main usage is providing a full board changer along with having synergy with Yamato. Thus, inheriting Verdandi is an upgrade as you still have synergy with Yamato, but the generated heart orbs can be used to either heal or combo with Ares. Losing haste is well worth those benefits along with having the added protection against skill delay.

Latent recommendations

Krishna provides 2.25x HP and RCV for all your monsters. Thus, you ideally wish to stack either HP  or RCV  latents as they will have significantly larger benefit. Outside of these, you should have full rainbow resist on a single monster to resist 100% gravity attacks. If you have an exceptional amount of resources at your disposal, Skill Delay latents  are the most powerful.

Playstyle

Krishna is by nature a tank-oriented team. You also require 9 fire orbs to deal lethal damage to most floors and this causes a certain degree of stalling and slower gameplay. You cannot always use actives every turn and have to remain patient due to your orb hungry nature. Thankfully, you are able to easily stall on most floors and should try to hoard orbs in the bottom two rows/corners.

When going through Arena 3, I liberally use actives on the first 10 floors as I can easily stall on the Chinese Celestial. When stalling on the Celestial, it is best to match one giant clump of fire to safely remove them as you do not with to match multiple fire combos.

I rely on using Urd/Sanada to burst through the PreDRAs  and simply pray I do not encounter two water ones. After this floor, I try my best to conserve active and will ideally use my leaders going forward.

Noteworthy encounters

Due to the innate tankiness of Krishna, you are able to handle most of the spawns with relative ease. However, I highly recommend you bring a delay as it allows for an easier time when dealing with resolves or other dangerous encounters.

Hino and Zeus/Hera

Hino and Zeus/Hera tend to be troublesome spawns for many teams that do not have bind immune leaders and by bringing a delay, you can easily bypass their mechanics.

Vishnu

Outside of resolve bosses, I have found Vishnu to be of particular annoyance due to the sheer number of enhanced fire orbs and the inability to control that type of damage. Thus, I sometimes use orb changers and match a mixture of enhanced/non-enhanced fire orbs.

Thankfully, you are able to withstand two consecutive hits without healing in coop, but it still becomes an awkward race against time due to the 1/3 change of Vishnu removing heart orbs. Finally, the full team bind can be lethal depending on which HP percentage Vishnu is in.

The simplest way to deal with Vishnu is to delay him above 50% and then quickly kill him.

Ilsix

Ilsix is somewhat trivial for heart cross leaders in coop as you can survive his enrage execution hit. However, Krishna is unable to do so and will also be more vulnerable to the -99% gravity attacks as you will have to have a significant number of heart orbs to heal back above his regular attack thresholds. When pushing Ilsix under 30% and triggering the heart, water, and locked jammers orbs, you must kill him immediately. This can be done either through a water orb changer (ideal as you can heal), heart breaker (riskier if low HP and have DQ Hera next floor), or Ares who changes both.

Radar Dragons

The Radar Dragons are the true boss of Arena 3 and appear on floor 22 and are immediately followed by Kali. You will most likely need most of your actives to kill the Radar Dragons; however, you must also save some form of burst for the Kali as you cannot survive her enrage hit when above 65% HP. You must deal about 26 million damage on turn one to push her beyond the danger zone due to the 50% damage reduction shield.

Hephaestus Dragon

When facing Hephaestus Dragon and his 15 turn skill delay preemptive, it is paramount to have the correct player sweep floor 21 and absorb the delay. For my teams, I use Fantastic to kill floor 21 to keep Mantastic’s Sanadas intact to deal massive burst damage for both Hephaestus and Kali. The inherits on Yamato and Leilan for Fantastic help mitigate some of the delay and gives me the chance to almost use their actives again on Kali.

Noah Dragon

The simplest way to deal with Noah Dragon is to stall for the 99 turns and then burst. In addition, you will be unable to survive the 50% Third Judgement (even in coop) so you must never push him below 50% health. If you wish to kill without the 99 turns of stalling, you must clear all binds, pray there is no fire absorb, and deal under 10 million damage per card to avoid the damage void shield. The following video showcases this in action:
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Gaia Dragon

Gaia Dragon is the most straightforward encounter for Krishna as you deal double damage and this helps mitigate the 75% damage reduction shield. Thus, you must his under 12 million per card to prevent the 6 million damage void from occurring. The following video showcases a very fast clear from a recent One Shot Challenge (skip to 33:45):
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Zeus Dragon

Zeus Dragon is one of the most universally easy Radar Dragons as he has forgiving mechanics along with being very vulnerable to being killed in two hits. What I like to do is try to push him down to 60-70% HP on the first turn and then simply follow up with a large burst to avoid any further mechanics. This can be easily achieved with my Leilan/Yamato or Urd/Sanada boards depending on how much health is left after the first attack. I would have to get spectacularly lucky to hit over 20 million per card on even an Urd/Sanada board. The only video with sound was from my first Krishna clear and I was only able to upload the Zeus Dragon and Kali floor.
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Hera Dragon

Quit and mourn the loss of your stamina

Conclusion

Krishna is a powerful leader who is capable of clearing end game content. He may not have the same level of consistency as the strongest heart cross leaders, but he can still clear Arena 3 against the majority of the spawns.

I will try to upload a clear without copyrightable music in the near future.

Happy Puzzling!