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Big Changes Coming to PAD in September

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Introduction

Puzzle and Dragons will have several big changes occurring during the month of September and this post will mostly be providing a brief overview of what is to come. The three major topics are Monthly Quest Dungeons, Time Attack Descends, and Trading.

Video commentary

–video coming soon–

Monthly Quests

Monthly quests can almost be viewed as time-limited achievements in that we have to complete various scenarios for specific rewards before the month is over. If you fail to collect your rewards on time you can lose them.

This has been something that I have wanted quite badly from Puzzle and Dragons as it will help provide some framework/guidance on what to do.

For the most part, PAD is a very independent game in that we have a very basic tutorial and then you are expected to find your way. This problem is further compounded by the fact that you are reliant on databases to find all information and this can be overwhelming for a newer player.

As such, Monthly Quests will provide some guidance as to what you should be trying to accomplish and is easily accessible/easy to find. They can be found under the Quests tab and will update/rotate monthly. You can find September’s dungeon line up HERE.

There are a total of 30 different dungeons to overcome with varying rewards:

  • Azazel Descended!… Snow Globe Dragon Vert Lv. Max
  • Khepri Descended!-Orb move time 4 sec… Snow Globe Dragon Bleu Lv. Max
  • Ras Descended!… Snow Globe Dragon Rouge Lv. Max
  • Mion Descended!… Grand PreDRA
  • Agni Descended!… Latent TAMADRA (Ext. Move Time+)
  • Seraphis Descended!… Latent TAMADRA (Imp. RCV+)
  • Gran Reverse Descended!-Dragon Enhanced… Latent TAMADRA (Imp. ATK+)
  • Journey to the West… Latent TAMADRA (Imp. HP+)
  • Surtr Descended!-All Att. Req… Latent TAMADRA (Skill Delay Resist.)
  • Jord Descended!… Woodpy
  • Indigo Descended!-7×6 Board… Bubpy
  • Aamir Descended!… Flampy
  • Sonia Gran Descended!… King Woodtan
  • Grimoires Descended!… King Bubtan
  • Kanetsugu!-All Att. Req… King Flamtan
  • Heracles Descended!… Woodsie (RCV +99)
  • Sandalphon Descended!-No Dupes… Flamie (ATK +99)
  • The Goddess Descended!… Bubblie (HP +99)
  • Zhang Fei!!-Physical & Attacker Enhanced… PreDRA
  • Hera Descended!… TAMADRA
  • Challenge Lv10-Water Enhanced… Extra Latent Slot TAMADRA (+297)
  • Challenge Lv9-No Dupes… Shynee (+297)
  • Challenge Lv8-No RCV… Latent TAMADRA (Devil Killer)
  • Challenge Lv7… Latent TAMADRA (Machine Killer)
  • Challenge Lv6… Badpy
  • Challenge Lv5… Shynpy
  • Challenge Lv4… King Badtan
  • Challenge Lv3-Tricolor… King Shyntan
  • Challenge Lv2-Tricolor… 5,000 Pal Points
  • Challenge Lv1-Tricolor… 5,000,000 Coins
This feels overwhelming!

While this may feel daunting, you have to remember that you have an entire month to complete them (480*30ish days worth of stamina) along with the option of playing these in coop. Furthermore, these dungeons can be replayed multiple times and will provide you the best medium for farming a specific descend boss.

Just be aware that you only receive 2 stones in total, but the prizes are well worth the stamina and you do receive an Ancient Tri-God Mask.

I also plan to release video recordings of the harder challenges found within the Monthly Quests.

Daily Time Attack Descends

Alongside the Monthly Quests, there will also be Daily Time Attack Dungeons that award +99 (33 to each stat) boss drop and Magic Stone.

However, you do have to work a bit for it as you must 0-stone the featured Descend in under 5 minutes. Furthermore, each Descend is only available once for 25 stamina for that respective day so you cannot wait/stack them up for later. The timing mechanism is akin to Ranking Dungeons so you cannot close/switch out of the app or you will forfeit your run. You can try as many times as you wish but must be done in solo mode.

Full schedule/list is as follows:

  • 1/9 (Fri), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Hera (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 2/9 (Sat), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Hero (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 3/9 (Sun), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Zeus (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 4/9 (Mon), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): The Goddess (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 5/9 (Tue), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): The Thief (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 6/9 (Wed), 12:00 AM – 9/7 (Thurs), 11:59 PM (UTC): Hera-Is (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 7/9 (Thu), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Satan (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 8/9 (Fri), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Zeus-Dios (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 9/9 (Sat), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Draggie (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 10/9 (Sun), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Hera-Ur (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 11/9 (Mon), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Great Tengu (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 12/9 (Tue), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Athena (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 13/9 (Wed), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Takeminakata (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 14/9 (Thu), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Beelzebub (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 15/9 (Fri), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Izanami (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 16/9 (Sat), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Heracles (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 17/9 (Sun), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Dragon Zombie (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 18/9 (Mon), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Hera-Beorc (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 19/9 (Tue), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Gaia (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 20/9 (Wed), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Sandalphon (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 21/9 (Thu), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Hera-Sowilo (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 22/9 (Fri), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Wadatsumi (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 23/9 (Sat), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Zeus Vulcan (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 24/9 (Sun), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Noah (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 25/9 (Mon), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Thoth & Sopdet (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 26/9 (Tue), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Zhang Fei (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)
  • 27/9 (Wed), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Mephisto (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 28/9 (Thu), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Kanetsugu (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 29/9 (Fri), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Zeus Mercury (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Mythical)
  • 30/9 (Sat), 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM (UTC): Guan Yinping (+99) Descended!-Time limit 5 mins (Legend)

Thankfully all of these are Descends with some being quite old which have been pushed down by Powercreep.

Hidden Daily Quest

The Time Attack Descends can essentially be viewed as your daily dungeon to play for the day and it offers incredible rewards. Even if we discredit the Magic Stone, 99 pluses for 25 stamina is impossible to beat from a pure value point of view (easily eclipses the +15 PEM). As such, you should do your very best to play this every day.

I also plan to upload each clear to my YT YouTube channel.

Trading

Trading will be coming to NA/EU this month (most likely next week) and will be one of the biggest changes to occur within Puzzle and Dragons. While I do not wish to go into all the specifics as I plan to cover this in an extensive post, I will share the key details.

Overview

You must be at least rank 110 and your trading partner must be your friend for at least 30 days. This means you will need to have had some forethought in planning out who to trade with and also gives merits to having a larger friend list.

You will then be able to either host a trade or look for one.

Hosting will enable you to specify cards you want to trade away as well as listing what you expect in return. Searching works in the opposite manner as you are essentially “browsing” the market for desirable cards and will require having those specific cards in your inventory in order to trade with a different host.

All Pluses and Latents are also transferred over with the card.

Restrictions

Cards that can be traded must be 99 Monster Points or below and have the same rarity. This means that no REM cards can be traded and certain rare drops.

How will this benefit the player base?

Trading will enable players to acquire common or challenging evolutions materials with relative ease. It also means you are able to trade Snow Globes, Pys, Kingtans, Latents, Orpharion parts, and +297s. This will also help even out poorly distributed colour Pys/Jewels/Tans etc.

As such, extra +297’s or sets of +99 of a particular stat will become tremendously valuable. However, +99 of a specific stat will have possibly more pull, especially if it is ATK.

Furthermore, rare/older Collab drops can be of tremendous value such as Monster Hunter parts of useful farmables such as Anji 3045.

Setting up baselines for trading

Stamina cost will be the currency used to measure efficient trading between players. Furthermore, most drops are quite easy to come by nowadays with only a few being challenging to acquire.

As such, let us establish a baseline for each popular trading currency. All stamina values are calculated in coop mode and assumes their most common medium for acquiring and ignores gifts/challenge dungeons. Thus, Arena 1 will be used to calculate the stamina for a Py.

If a drop does not have a viable way to acquire and thus stamina cost, it will either be estimated compared to the baseline of a +297. Obviously time will have to be taken into consideration for specific drops but this can be used as a loose template.

**These values are for their most commonly found places, specific events may result in better rates**
Trading Baselines
Item
Stamina
Points (stamina/5)
+297 500 100
Specific +99 35
Shynpy Py 50 10
 Kingtan 37.5 7.5
Generic Descend Boss
(unskilled/no evo)		 25 5
Spirit Jewels 16.7 3
Specific Ideal Killers
God Killer Dragon Killer Devil killer Machine Killer		 450 90
Skill delay resist SDR 400 80
Orpharion parts
1 specific		 100 20
Snowglobes Estimate 20-50
Tamadras Estimate 2.5
Adding value

The above chart is a good baseline for building appropriate trades, but you do not always have to follow it on a 1:1 ratio as it does not take into consideration the difficulty in acquiring the drop or how many players have it etc.

However, you are able to add value onto a generic card through evolutions or skill ups. For example, there are several highly desired farmable cards that only function well when max skilled.

Take for example Zeus Dios Ult Zeus Dios, he is perhaps one of the most desired cards in the game, but is very easy to actually acquire. However, he requires 15 Skill Ups in total. Thus, if we were to follow the above chart, it would cost 15 Zeus Dioses (base +14) and 4 Kingtans to max skill. This results in 105 points total but you did add significant value by going through the entire process. You could even throw in all the evolutions and Tamadras for good measure. All of this taken into consideration can lead you to charge more for as you added value which is why you may not always have to follow the chart 1:1.

Building upon this, you can also take the time to acquire rare/annoying drops for specific evolutions. For example, the Ripper Dragons are a frustrating experience to evolve and if you have some to spare, you can demand higher prices from players, especially if a popular evolution comes out that requires them.

Regardless, this is mostly an exert/teaser for the full Trading article which will come soon.

Conclusion

September has many exciting things in store for Puzzle and Dragons that will take some forethought/planning to take full advantage of. With the introduction of Monthly Quests and Time Limited Descends, players will be able to acquire countless rewards for minimal stamina along with having the option to trade with other players for desired cards.

Let me know what you think about all the changes coming to PAD in the comments below.

Happy Puzzling!

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10 thoughts on “Big Changes Coming to PAD in September”

  1. Being wary of wether or not I’ll manage to clear the Heretic dungeon in time I very much welcome another chance to get my hands on that Tri Mask. With Revo Athena coming our way eventually I know I absolutely need one eventually. Always happy to see the game expanding.

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  2. So many things to do!

    Do you know if the September quest disappears at the end of the month? (i.e. if you fail to collect the rewards, do you lose them?)

    For the longer time dungeons (hera), I think a system team could be effective. I started working on a Zuoh system a couple years ago when there was some chatter about it but never finished. Going to give that a spin today.

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    1. You have a bit longer than the month to collect the rewards, but only the month to play the respective dungeons. However, if you fail to collect the rewards from the quest tab, they expire and are lost forever

      As for the time descends, 5 minutes is a very long time considering we can blitz through ranking dungeons in well under 3 minutes.

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      1. Tried the zuoh system on hera. very easy. On alt just used dath. about the same clear time.

        expiration -> more box space needed. I am always running on the edge there.

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      2. I’d add that when you claim, the reward goes to mail, so you have a year to use it from that point. Really no reason not to claim everything. If you need to set a calendar alarm for the last day of the month so you don’t forget.

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  3. Stuck on challenge lvl 9 and I’m sure lvl 10 will be the same. I would love it if you would post some clears using several different teams/strategies to give people like me some ideas, since I never seem to have the exact team you use. Thanks,

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    1. As of yesterday I was stuck on just lvl 9 & 10 myself. In the end, Anubis/Diablos won me the day on both. Sorry I don’t have videos, but here’s what i did:

      Lvl 9 team was:
      Super Gunma
      Alt Evo Skuld(follow up attack)
      Raijin
      Awoken Nohime

      Nohime and Raijin were for some time extend and for full colour coverage so that Diablos could guard break Meimei. Other subs to meet rainbow requirements and time extends are possible.

      Floor 1: Super Gunma. 10 combo 2 prong.

      Floor 2: Gunma. Heal up matching combos(not so easy since you have lost your awoken skills but the increased skyfall from the previous level and his preemptive orb change should make it possible to kill him).

      Floor 3: If there are heals, heal up to waste a turn and get back your awoken skills. Now here you could start the arduous process of chipping him down and try to survive his binds and such. Or you could Follow up attack. For me, i did gunma, activated his resolve and took the grudge howl. Kill him next turn.

      Floor 4: Gunma, match all elements for guard break and 8 combo for damage.

      Floor 5: You will need to do Follow up Attack here. The trick is that you don’t have skills to board change due to grudge howl. However, as long as you don’t activate 8x combos, the only attack he does is increase cool downs of skills. So match large chunks of off colour orbs(ie light) and try to save some heals. When you have 6 heals, Follow up attack column of hearts and 8+ combo.

      Floor 6: Super Gunma. 10 combo with blue 2 prong. Burst through shield.

      Floor 7: Here’s where i was nervous and found that i didn’t actually research his attacks enough(but it worked out amazingly). I had 2 turns and tried to Follow up attack but only succeeded in 10 comboing without follow up attack and consequently activated his resolve. However, he doesn’t heal after hitting 1 HP. He just clouds the board(making 5 combos hard). So in the end, Super Gunmans ping damage was enough to finish him.

      MVP: Super Gunma. He got the kill and was in the end the only active skill used in the whole dungeon.

      Lvl 10 was:
      Super Gunma
      Alt Evo Skuld(follow up attack)
      Blonia
      Awoken Andromeda

      Floor 1: activate Super Gunma and get 8+ combos

      Floor 2: Her preemptive extends your time to move orbs so you have lots of time. Super Gunma then just combo as much as possible, trying to make sure you get some 2 prong blue in there. Skuld and Andromeda are your big attackers here. So 10 combos with a 2 prong or 2 is deadly.

      Floor 3: His preemptive locks the top row from being moved. Super Gunma. I would just tag 2 more orbs onto the bottom of each of the orbs that is locked for top row matches and then work on the bottom. Again, 2 prong blue if possible.

      Floor 4: I would not activate Gunma. Just try to combo without two prongs and try not to match too many combos of blue, green or black. Without 2 prongs and Gunma, you can usually 9-10 combo and knock him below his resolve but not into the danger zone. Next attack activate gunma and combo like crazy. You can also follow up attack for a one hit kill but i just hit him below his shield.

      Floor 5: Gunma and 10 combos with 2 prong blues in there. If you dont have much blue you might need to do Andromeda to burst through 75% shield.

      Floor 6: Gunma, 10 combos with 2 prong blues in there.

      Floor 7: Skuld. 2 prong and 10 combos

      Floor 8: Blonia, 2 prongs and 10 combos

      I took out Floor 4 in 2 turns(but is possible to follow up attack for just one). All of the other floors were 1 shots.

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