Fully awake and recharged, so I wanted to do a quick battle map tutorial. This is just what worked for me, no professional opinions here. I realize I'm extremely late but that's because I love procrastination. My friend helped me compile this.
Contents:
Buddy points
Tile Priorities
Final Boss/Losing
Instructions under cut
Before anything...
Please remember to set your movement speed to fast. It's much less tedious when walking across the map after skipping tiles.
Team Formation
I might be stupid because I only found this out on level 7 of the Crowley tile event... But please, PLEASE use BUDDY POINTS. The game becomes so much easier that way. Instead of forming teams around who has the highest HP/ATK, try stringing together characters who all have matching HP buddy points.
Essentially, HP buddy points are like shields. when your team is attacked, the damage will take away from the bonus health points first for anyone who has HP buddy points active. The bonus health points won't slowly decrease either, it regenerates for every battle you participate in.
For new, newcomers: buddy points are leveled up through alchemy lessons or giving your characters tea (which can be gained most efficiently from alchemy lesson drops). You can also check it from the card menu when composing teams by scrolling below the spell section.
TL:DR picture explanation:
Form a team that synergizes with the buddy points. In this case, all 5 of the characters I chose give each other buddy point buffs, but I'm only using Silver as an explanation here.
A quick way to check all the buddy points that are currently active in your team is by clicking "buddy details." The number just tells you how many buddy points are active in total (in this case, 9). I always like to double-check instead of just looking at the number, since it includes power boost points too...
As you can see, they have "Bonus HP" listed above their regular HP bars. That HP bar will contain the same amount of health at the start of every battle, acting as a shield. The only way your real HP will be depleted (Riddle, Lilia, and Idia are damaged from previous battles here) is if the Bonus HP drops to zero. If your regular HP bar never takes damage, you will never need to heal.
No Buddy Points?
If you haven't built buddy points/you don't have good cards for buddy point synergy... Bring debuffers. You can make the enemy deal 0 damage if you have good debuff characters. The ONLY case I see healers as more useful is when:
You plan to defeat the enemy on round 3, where it is still possible to fully heal your health bar to ~100%
Your healer is a much better DPS than your debuffers, I.E. Halloween Silver
Healers are at their best performance when you plan to bring heavy DPS, doubly so when you have buddy points activated.
Other buffs like evasion/any form of defense up for your characters is alright, but not as efficient. Evasion being heavily reliant on RNG makes it not very optimal, either.
Tile Priorities
My first priority is always, always buff nodes. I tend to take paths that will avoid 4 star battle tiles if possible. The method really depends on if you want to clear all tiles for the achievement, only collect the loot boxes, or only get to the boss as quickly as possible.
My pattern for clearing all tiles:
Buffs
2★ and 3★ fights
Mini bosses
All other nodes
Crewel
I did NOT include healing tiles because the order for those are extremely volatile.
For example, this is how I would play the first few tiles. Usually, I will look at what buff is located in the buff tiles/mini boss fights to decide where I should go first. After collecting everything on the red and green arrow paths, I follow the yellow arrows last. Grim will have to do a lot of walking back and forth, but it saves health.
Afterwards, I would likely fight Azul. He was the last mini boss I fought since Jade/Floyd were ranked 3★, while Azul was ranked 4★.
Healing/Revive Tiles
Generally, you want to clear the levels surrounding the healing/revive tiles and save them for later. Try to reuse the same rotations of characters until they're all at ~50% health, then use your healing tiles.
As for revive tiles, it's pretty self-explanatory if your team has some dead members and you want to revive them.
If you've completed most of the tiles but have just... A few cards you really want to use, and they're on low health? I save revive tiles so I can purposely kill off my DPS, then revive them. Sometimes I'll do this before the final boss fight by taking them off of buddy points. If most of my good cards are near-death, I'll get them all killed in the final boss fight, then revive.
This is a good way to avoid the RNG on the healing tiles from completely screwing you over. I wouldn't recommend purposely killing off characters once you three of them are already dead, though.
Final Boss/Losing...
If you lose a battle, you can still continue from where you left off. That goes for any tile, not just the final boss.
I.E. you fight Crewel until he's at 1000 out of 4000 health—all 5 of the cards you used in that battle will die, but you can spend another move point to continue the fight. This time, instead of starting at 4000 health on round 1, he will start at 1000 health on round 1.
With this logic, I recommend trying to deal the highest damage you can if you're inevitably going to die. Don't try healing on your last moves if you think your chances are slim. Output high damage and make good use of duo magic.
The only time I would NOT recommend that is if you don't have any more cards. At all. And have no retry tickets (which revive a few characters of your choice).
Otherwise, I don't have much more to add besides the obvious.
Make sure your cards have high spell levels, the minimum being level 5 if you really have no one else.
Use cards with DUO magic. The good thing about them, their duo magic partner is also always one of their buddy point chatacters too.
Don't be afraid to use SR cards if your SSRs lack good synergy. Some SRs can be pretty cracked, especially event cards that let you increase their spell level with event items (don't have to waste books).
This was made on a whim, I will probably reblog for every tile event so it is not completely irrelevant. Good luck storming the castle.
