In AI arena, of course, not Real-Time Arena. Smilegate actually scared me for a while when they announced a Lion Heart Cermia RTA skin, because the two Cermias are some of my favorite characters, but luckily they walked it back shortly afterwards. I like Briar Witch Isera too, but I don’t use her nearly enough to care about a skin, phew!

In the past I’ve repeatedly stated that my focus in Epic Seven is PVE, not PVP, but several factors occurred that made me broaden that focus just a little bit to encompass Guild Wars and then AI Arena.

1. I ran out of easy PVE content to do. I still need to do Rift, Nightmare Raid and Dagger Sicar achievements, but those are all serious endgame modes which I will chip away at little by little. Especially since I need to build a number of characters specifically for them, like Haste, Brieg (Elvira recall FTW), Surin, Ran, Mascot Hazel, Suthan, etc etc.

2. I joined a guild where Guild Wars was mandatory, and I liked it there, so I had to do GW. In the past I’ve mainly been in casual GW-optional guilds, which is nice and relaxing in its own way, but the rewards of a serious Guild are much better. And in the course of doing GW, I discovered that my characters’ builds weren’t bad at all, and I could actually compete against the average opponent. Plus the process forced me to learn which characters countered which ones (Fribbels GW Meta Tracker helps a ton), who had which passive and how to trigger/avoid it, etc. After that, AI Arena is just Guild Wars on steroids, so it was an easy scale-up.

3. I got two heroes that made climbing in Arena much, much easier. The first was Dark Corvus, who I got from the ML Headhunt event. I intended to use him in Guild Wars, and I do occasionally do that, but he does great in Arena as well when paired with Iseria, Destina and a flex character.

The second character was Elvira, who by shutting down Fighting Spirit made it much, much, much X1000 easier to deal with characters I had been fearing like Navy Captain Landy, Lionheart Cermia (she’s only cool when she’s on my side, otherwise she’s a menace), and Abyssal Yufine. The latter two especially become putty in my hands once Elvira is around, because their scariest weapons are sealed. In fact I run Corvus and Elvira together sometimes against them, and it is a sad, sad sight. For them, that is.

4. It was just time. A sense of growth and progression is important for me to keep playing and enjoying a gacha game, so after a couple of years in Challenger V, it was time to finally make the push. Does this mean I might push for Legend once I’ve been in Champion for a while? Never say never, but my first love is still PVE so right now I want to do the new Ancient Inheritance and start working seriously on Nightmare Raid teams this month.

Tips for making the journey to Champion V

So, Champion V in arena, YAY! Those 800 skystones a week are pretty sweet. Now I can unlock past events without making too much of a dent in my skystone stash, really looking forward to that. Epic Seven main stories are so-so and all over the place, but I enjoy most of the side stories. Eulogy for a Saint was great. I thought it would be overrated because of all the praise, but it was good stuff. I liked the Lord of Summer one too. And the Christmas post-Episode 3 story with Alencia, that was good closure.

If you want to make your own journey to Champion V but have been putting it off for whatever reason, here are four tips that helped me and that you might find helpful too.

1. Figure out what’s stopping you from climbing. For me it was intimidation/fear because everyone looked so much stronger than me and I hate losing. What I actually did last month before starting the journey was to give myself numbing therapy: a whole week where I challenged absolutely every party on the Challenger V list without exception, just to get used to losing and also try out different parties and counter strategies. It’s like how in judo you first learn how to fall correctly, in PVP you must first learn how to lose and be okay with that. Lose, lose and lose again until it’s like, yeah, aight, next!

If it’s gear stopping you from climbing, do a big re-gearing with the next Free Equip buff and give your best gear to your PVP heroes. I realized that PVE characters usually don’t need the top of the line gear. If the roadblock is learning who counters who, use resources like YouTube, Epic Seven RTA stats, Fribbels GW Meta, etc. and just fight, fight and fight again.

2. Focus on countering a few specific teams. For me, I built two Arena parties – one the Dark Corvus one I mentioned above, and another with Unbound Knight Arowell, Lionheart Cermia, Roana and a flex character (usually Elvira or Mediator Kawerik). With that team, I aimed for parties that dealt a lot of counter attacks, like Abyssal Yufine, Savior Adin (be careful with her tho) and Navy Captain Landy.

Elvira shut down their fighting spirit, LHC procced her S3 off their attacks, Roana’s passive healed like crazy, and Arowell mitigated damage and kept us all alive.  Once I had that engine going climbing through the ranks became a formality. Of course there were still a few surprises and losses here and there, e.g. Angel of Light Angelica can strip Elvira… in fact AOLA just sucks, but for the most part it was quite a smooth process. TL;DR study common defenses, see who you can beat, and build to counter them specifically.

Even in Champion V, you can seen from the screenshot above that the same characters appear again and again: Ocean Breeze Luluca, Abyssal Yufine, Belian, ae-Karina, etc etc. If you have a strategy for taking care of common Arena heroes both individually and as a team, you don’t have much to fear.

3. As for who to build specifically, a lot depends on the gear you have and how it rolls. More speed and attack, aim for cleavers. More def and HP, aim for bruisers, that kind of thing. IMO almost any character can work at the Challenger level if their gear is good enough. I always hate those gacha games where you have to build specific characters X or Y with no substitutes or else that content is closed off to you forever. In Epic Seven that usually isn’t the case. And that means you can’t underestimate any character because they could be on a wacky build with 300 speed and 5000 attack just lying in wait like Jaws.

This goes double and triple for any character who was formerly meta but now has “fallen off.” “Fallen off” does not mean “weak!” Don’t make that mistake for a second. It means they can be countered fairly easily with the right characters and right gear/artifacts, but that they can still destroy your team if you go in blind. Special mention goes to Apocalypse Ravi and Violet, brrr.

All that aside, here’s who I actually built and found useful in my climb: Lionheart Cermia (MVP), Roana (co-MVP), Unbound Knight Arowell (needs just a little more bulk), Shadow Knight Pyllis (needs switching to Counter set), Dark Corvus (needs more HP), Zahak, Iseria (PVE build), Briar Witch Iseria (squishy), Destina (needs bulk and speed), Mediator Kawerik (somewhat overrated IMO but most likely mine just sucks), Martial Artist Ken (run him with a cleanser or build Eff, or he’s hard to use), Elvira, Senya (also hard to use but when she works, phew!).

I also built/half-built the following characters but didn’t use them much in my climb (but I still use them in Guild Wars, which counts as PVP): Violet (my overall E7 MVP, hard-carried me from Episode 1, still carries today, Automaton Tower champion, occasionally 1v3s GVG, just haven’t found room for him in Arena), Conqueror Lilias (can’t get her fast enough), Straze, Mercedes, Choux, Seaside Bellona, Savior Adin (mine’s a bit squishy), Byblis (works fine but hard to find room for her).

I have many, many other characters besides, which I use for various purposes like farming hunts, but these are the ones I tried out specifically for PVP. If you have a good number of these, or any of the recent super powers like M’Landy or AYufine, you’ll be able to work something out quite nicely.

4. Don’t worry too much about your defense team. I mean, do your best to have a good team with solid gear and everything, but don’t expect much from them. I’ve tweaked and re-tweaked mine, tried different combinations, and still didn’t manage better than a 25% defense win rate once I started climbing past Challenger III. Some defenses are more annoying than others, but there are no unbeatatable defenses, so don’t stress it. You get more points for winning than you lose for being defeated, so if you keep using your arena flags strategically, a few dozen losses are not the end of the world.

Hope this helps someone! I could post my attacking teams, but honestly they aren’t anything special, and you would get more mileage out of checking the Fribbels Hero Library for top-tier builds. There’s even a Fribbels Gear Optimizer that helps you outfit characters in gear you currently have. I haven’t used it before because despite my issues with gearing, fumbling around with gear is still part of the fun for me, but maybe when it’s time to push for Legend I’ll give it a go.

Nothing else noteworthy to report for Epic Seven. I’m having a lot of fun lately, though I will force myself to take a 16-day break at some point this year so I can get this year’s returner bonuses as well (Smilegate wisely made it only once a year). But apart from that I’ve got a lot to keep me occupied, so I will be playing it for a while longer.

Other gachas I’m still playing: Love Nikki, Romancing Saga Re;Universe (version 3.50 with background farming just came out today, so awesome) and I recently started Atelier Resleriana. I’ll post about that one shortly, after I drop it. Until then!

Quick update, apparently you only need to win 5 times in Champion V to hit Champion IV:

Yay!

Update 2: February 28th:

All of a sudden there is a lot more variety in the defenses, so the “cherry-pick your way up” strategy won’t work any more.

I need to build more characters, especially those I’ve been neglecting like Zio, Moon Bunny Dominiel, Ran, Eda, Lua, Nakhwol, Last Rider Krau, Politis… the list is endless, but I’m going to need more variety to tackle different defenses. The important thing is GEAR! The grind never stops. I should also roll those 1,000 skystones to try and get mystics for the Custom Mystic banner coming up tomorrow. Epic Seven has got me good!