Introduction

Skill Inheritance was introduced in May, 2016 and was one of the most game breaking aspects to come to Puzzle and Dragons. It provided players with an avenue to utilize duplicate monsters as well as lending customization to their favourite teams. Skill Inheritance would allow you to pick and choose what actives you wanted while providing the opportunity to use a stronger base card.

However, with the most recent patch, the Skill Inheritance system (renamed to Assist System) will be receiving an overhaul to make it easier to transfer skills around along with providing a stat bonus to same colour bases and inherits.

This article will only be focusing on the changes to Skill Inheritance along with how the actual process works and the other changes going live in the patch will be addressed separately. You can read more about King Tans HERE.

Video commentary

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What does Skill Inheritance do?

Skill Inheritance allows you to transfer an active skill from a 5+ star REM (or Collab REM) monster to a card of your choice. The receiving card is often referred to as the base while the donating monster is the assistant. While the assistant must be at least a 5+ star REM card, the base can be farmable or lower rarity. Furthermore, the assistant card must be max awakened (via Tamadras), but no longer needs to be max level.

In essence, Skill Inheritance allows you to customize your cards to your liking as you can utilize actives that come from normally non-synergistic monsters on a team. For example, you can inherit Meimei’s  board changer onto your dark team in order to take advantage of her board changer on a dark-based team.

The transfer process is 100% reversible outside of 1 million coin cost but the assistant monster cannot be used on any team while they are transferring their skill or be vendored. However, you are still able to power-up fusion them in order to try and skill them up.

Visualizing Skill Inheritance

Skill Inheritance may sound confusing at first and I wish to clarify how the process works once you have successfully inherited a skill. In the following example, we are using Reincarnated Venus  as the base and Saria  as the inherit. The following chart can be viewed as a sliding scale in that haste will advance the turn number upwards while skill delays in reverse:

Visualizing Skill Inheritance
Turn		4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
Active	–

As you can see, beginning on turn 4, you can use Venus’s active and this holds true all the way until turn 13. However, once you reach turn 14, the active skill now changes to Saria and will remain as Saria until using her active skill and thus resetting the turn timer. In fact, whenever you use an active skill, you reset the turn timer down to 0 and must begin recharging from the beginning.

This transfer process will allow you to use Saria’s superior active skill with a much stronger body as Venus easily eclipses Saria from a base stat and awakenings point of view. This results in a win-win situation all around as you gain the best of both worlds for the low price of 1 million coins and an extra 4 turns on the cooldown.

Changes that have been made to Skill Inheritance

Removal of Tans

Puzzle and Dragons is by nature a grind-oriented game. However, there is fun grinding and there is tedious grinding. As such, GungHo is doing their best to cut down on the more boring aspects so you can focus your stamina playing fun content.

Skill Inheritance has been a well received mechanic and it has given viability for cards that had lackluster bodies and powerful actives. Unfortunately, the process is somewhat costly to perform as each transfer costs 2 million coins and requires 4 tans. The coins were usually not too much of an issue, but collecting the right colour tans is mostly a stamina sink/loss as the dungeon is not fun to play and is more of a chore than pleasure.

As such, GungHo has revamped the transfer process to not require Tans and reducing the gold cost down to 1 million. This is wonderful as players will now be able to swap out inherits on a whim and your monster box will be less cluttered. By being able to break and transfer skills more easily, you will be able to build niche teams and tackle various mechanics without worrying about the collateral cost to be fully prepared.

The Tans are now to be used as part of a new Skill Up mechanic that will enable them to act as pseudo-Pys  through the King Tan process.

Stat bonus transfer

In addition to these changes, monsters will now receive a stat bonus when both the base and assistant monster are the same primary attribute. The bonus will come from the assistant card based on their stats:

• 10% HP
• 5% ATK
• 15% RCV

Thus, from the above image, your Dark Kali will be receiving a boost to her stats based on a percentage of Alraune’s stats.

While the bonuses are powerful and another way to add additional HP/ATK/RCV to a fully +297 team, you should only do so if the inherited skill is beneficial. For the most part, your priority should still be to inherit the correct active to counter the dungeon mechanics or to gain additional utility that would not be otherwise available.

Advanced strategies

Skill Inheritance is not only a powerful tool for bringing new actives to your team, but can be cleverly utilized to improve your team’s overall performance and functionality.

Upgrading actives

Many popular cards feature useful active skills; however, there are better options that cannot be successfully used on your particular team due to typing or colour restrictions. As such, you are able to upgrade your card’s active skill by inheriting the stronger skill. This can also act as a pseudo skill delay protection as any delay will hopefully still result in your base skill being charged up and ready.

If possible, you should also prioritize same colour attribute inherits to take advantage of the stat bonuses.

jjBasejj	jjjUpgradejjj	Notes
		Kanna has one of the best bodies in the game as she features high base stats along with 4 TPA awakenings. However, her active skill is relatively lackluster and can be significantly improved.
		Dark Kali remains the best sub for Ra Dragon , but by inheriting another board change, you protect yourself against delays while adding a new layer of utility.
		Dark Izanami is still the one of the best options for dark teams when it comes to shielding and you can improve her via inheriting other damage reduction abilities. This may seem excessive, but it does protect you against delays and I wanted to showcase that you can use a farmable monster as a base.

Making a hard bind clear

Generally speaking, most bind clearing cards are lacking in offensive awakenings and for the most part are heavily oriented towards utility. However, many challenges require you to have a way to remove binds, but you may not always want to bring what is otherwise a “dead weight” sub.

As such, you can transform bind immune cards into a hard bind clearer via Skill Inheritance. In addition to benefiting from more beneficial awakenings, you also retain the option of using your base active once the bind clear has been used.

For example, Awoken Cao Cao  acts as one of the more powerful mono fire subs/leaders who is also bind immune. By inheriting Ame no Uzume’s  active skill, you retain his more offensive body, additional stats, and the opportunity to use his orb change/delay after clearing binds. This is fantastic for longer dungeons as you will be able to utilize Cao Cao’s active later on.

Boosting base monster stats

Your main goal with Skill Inheritance should still be to gain a new active skill; however, you can also double dip in order to gain additional stats to your base monster. This may not always be practical when inheriting an off-colour board changer, but if at all possible, you should prioritize same-attribute cards.

The stat bonuses are beneficial on teams who are already +297 and you need a little extra HP to survive the next threshold of damage.

Skill delay protection

Even with the introduction of Skill Delay Resist Latent Tamadras , it may not always be practical for the average player to farm them from Special Descend Rush and you can feasibly use Skill Inheritance as a buffer instead. Since the inherited skill add additional turns to the total cooldown, you can use this as protection against delays if you inherit the same monster or an extremely long active.

Just be aware that this type of inherit will not provide protection if your base active was just charged up and only has merits once you partially through charging the inherited skill.

Same active skill

Using a duplicate monster as your assistant will naturally add stats to your base card, but also provide a large degree of skill delay protection. Thus, it would be wise to not vendor duplicates of powerful/popular monsters. If you choose to do this, you should not skill up the duplicate monster in order to further extend the cooldown of the inherited skill:

Using a duplicate Awoken DQXQ  will not only transfer additional stats, but provide up to 12 turns of skill delay protection if fully charged. Using a duplicate card is wonderful as you never run the risk of the wrong active being charged up as it is the same one at all times.

Excessively long random skill

There is probably a tidier name for this, but the general concept is to inherit an active skill that is excessively long in order to act as a buffer to skill delays. You never want the inherited skill to be fully charged as it is usually something that is not ideal but is simply chosen due to the long cooldown.

The longer the cooldown, the larger your window will be for using the desired base skill. One of the most popular choices is to use a non-skill up D/D Hades as he starts at 30 turns on his cooldown.

One notable card you should take advantage of is Ras  who is a farmable wood monster. She is currently the only farmable monster who can be used as an inherit and ranges from 21 to 6 turns based on the number of skill ups. This is wonderful for mono wood teams as you are able to gain additional stats along with gaining a long cooldown to act as a skill delay buffer.

Conclusion

It may take some time for people to transition over to calling it the Assist system, but the changes are wonderful overall. Removing the need to use Tans will significantly reduce the time spent grinding boring content and will allow you to customize your teams with ease. The additional stat boosts will dramatically improve your teams as you are able to add additional power through clever inherit choices.

Which part of the new system are you most excited about?

Happy Puzzling!