Re:Monster Game:Great War

General
Great War (GW) is a recurrent event that lasts a week in Re:Monster in which you spend Great War Tickets to battle other players armies, composed of 6 to 20 units, in order to gain several rewards according to your battle performance. Players can access the GW interface through the GW icon in the top center of cave (Home tab).

By clicking the GW icon, if there is no GW going on, the first image you will see displays the date of the upcoming GW. Unlike updates, GW starts at 12:00 JST on Thursday and end on the following Thursday at 0:00 JST.

Great War Tickets
Tickets are the main resource for participating in the GW. By spending 1 ticket, you can enter 1 battle. They are a finite resource and are the most important factor in how well you end up performing, player can acquired up to 125 tickets. There are 2 ways a player can acquire tickets, from Daily Rewards and Daily Missions. However, GW “days” are an obtuse concept. They are divided into the following:

In each of the 6 days, a player passively receives 10 tickets to go war with. Also, in the limited tab of the missions (Home > Mission > Time Limited) there are 2 types of missions the player can accomplish, the hunting missions and the waring missions (see table below). Also, there is a special period of time where an extra mission appears that gives you extra tickets, we call that period of time the Final Rush Hours, the mission appears only on last day.

IMPORTANT!!! If you don't finish or redeem the missions, you lose those tickets forever!!! Also, you can't hoard tickets from one GW to the next, unused tickets disappear at the end of the GW!!!

At 25th Great War (24th - 31st May 2018 JST), Great War Tickets can be dropped from Limited Time Event Stages by defeating an enemy called Kobold Ashigaru. Because of this, the amount of tickets that can be acquired practically limitless.

Setup Armies
To fully participate in a GW you need a minimum of 3 armies (more info the battle section), each army consist at least 6 units and maximum allowed is 20 units. So, for setting up 5 armies you need a minimum of 18 units and maximum 100 units. Moreover, you have to set up one of those 3 armies as your flag army (the default is the 1st army), which is the army that other users will ALWAYS fight against.

In order to set up an army, you need to go to the edit troops tab (Home > GW Icon > Edit Troops). There you must press the edit button. Firstly, you must choose a formation by clicking on the Formation Selection button. You can choose one of the following:

*it is unknown whether its action speed, movement speed or both

The bonus stats acquired from formation choosen also affect player stats. For example when you used mainly Attack oriented skill then it's better to use formation that boost ATK/DEX stats, like Golden Arrow or Windmill.

Threat Level
Threat Level was introduced at version 3.0.7 (full changelog can be seen at 15 February 2018 update log). Threat level indicate how strong a team composition is. It's represented by star symbol in player profile, maximum is 4 stars. The stronger the units in the team composition, the higher the threat level. It's unconfirmed whether it's determined by units rarity or units stats. Player own threat level can be shown at GW unit composition, but only for leader team.

Tips
It is recommended to build one defensive army and two offensive ones (read battle in order to learn why). If you were to put it in numbers, a defensive army would have 30% attack power and 70% survivability, thus having a focus on survivability. While the offensive army should be as offensive as possible without having your units take too much damage, often ending up with 50-60% offensive power and the rest for survivability.

Also, ALWAYS equip all of your units, a well equipped SSR unit can compete on equal footing with a LE unit without equipment. Also, never forget to level up your units, especially LE and LE+, those units evasion and dexterity are linked to their level unlike others.

'''What adds to survivability you ask? '''
 * The first layer of survivability is obviously the units health, defense, magic (since it works both as an offensive and defensive stat), and evasion, health being the most important one; since the formation you choose can bolster those, it's also a part of the first layer.
 * The second layer are the healing units you add into the mix, the healing prowess of the unit depends on the healing skill strength, healed unit HP (the more the better), healer magic (in some cases) and healed unit magic (in some cases), and healing unit action speed (how fast it can heal), since formation can bolster magic, it can also help here.
 * The third layer consists of buffing units, if it boosts any of the stats mentioned above, along with elemental resist or status resist, again buff boosting formations help here along with those that boost the stats you buff.
 * The fourth layer are the debuff and status effects applied by your units. Mostly enhancers deal debuff, but starting at the SSR rarity units can apply status effects and debuffs. Useful status effects are confusion (it makes enemies hit themselves during the duration) and stun (the old game translation usually says faint). Only the round shield formation helps here.
 * Finally, position your units sensibly. This means don't group the units with the same elemental weakness all together, make a meatwall in the vanguard, spread your healers and if you are feeling tricky, position units whose elemental resistance is the same element as the weakness of the unit next to it. IE: place an wind unit next to a lightning unit so that if they want to focus your lightning unit with earth attacks, the damage that the nearby units take is mitigated.

What adds to your offensive ability?
 * First layer are the offensive stats: magic, attack, and dex.
 * Second layer are the buff towards those stats and action speed.
 * Finally, debuffs on the enemy work wonders. Here the best statuses are confusion, health denial, silence (on their healers), and elemental weaknesses.

Why its is recommended to build one defensive army and two defensive ones? Well you will learn once you reach the battle section. Add most of your resources into building the defensive army and make it your flag army. Also, consider the importance of the layers in an ascending manner, the first being the most important and the last being the least, albeit, their difference isn't that huge.

Since threat level was introduced, now it's rather easy to predict the outcome of battle. By checking threat level before battling, player can get a rough picture how strong/weak their target is. Using star number at enemy profile, player can avoid strong team and also trap team (team that consist of solely weak units, they died quickly so player that attacked it can't get maximum score).

Kingdoms
Once the GW starts you will be placed in one of the 5 following kingdoms:

This only affects two aspects of the GW. Firstly, you can't attack players from the same kingdom, and secondly, kingdoms compete for total points won in the GW, depending on their rank, you get rewards according to your kingdom's position.

Skill, item, and MC Evo variant
What makes the GW special apart from the armies, is that your Main Character (MC) can use his skills while not appearing in the battle, thus, you don't need to split skills and items on boosting the MC survivability (see tip section on setting up your armies). Thus you can usually take one of 2 character types that make the most impact on the battlefield: DPS or Support. In both cases it's recommended using 5-6 passives and 4-5 actives when it comes to skills. And also, it's strongly recommended to leave a separate skill page for the GW.

DPS
The role of the DPS is quite simple, nuke the enemy army with skills until nothing remains. For that, you will take into account the skills you managed to get until this point and choose if you wanna be a physical attacker (Attack stat based) or a magical attacker (Magic stat based). Taking into account that it's more easy to find a unit with higher magic in comparison to defense, it's recommended being a physical attacker, and also because it's easier for newer players to get physical based skills.

MC Variant
Some player might not know this, but the MC is able to switch between unlocked evolution variants at a low cost of food and coins (14,000 gold and 10,000 food), while retaining that specific variant level. Its virtually free to switch between variants, so take advantage of it.

What we are looking for in a DPS focused MC are 3 things:
 * High mana pool
 * High dexterity
 * High offensive stat (attack or magic as explained)

Taking that into consideration there are 2 variants that excel at this role:

With the introduction of SR rarity MC evolutions, it's recommended to use those evolution. Higher rarity means more stats, moreover they have special equipments that boost their stats further. But those evolution need special requirement to unlock, not only that their special equipments can only obtained from limited time Tower event. You can still unlock the evolution by buying items from Tower shop, but the problem is the equipments. Once you miss the event you can't obtain the equipments anymore.

Here is the recommended SR rarity MC with their special equipments:

Items
Looking into what items to use is even easier, use one that raises both your offensive stat and dex. Currently the best non-event-limited items for this role are (strongly discourage use of dex reducing items): Note: Use a limited event weapon if its better than those used here, for a full list of the in game equipment check: Equipment List

Skillset
There are a huge variety of skills in the game, so listing all the skills here is a whole guide in its entirety, but there are some that stand from the rest while others serve as a baseline:

There is alse one more thing to take into account, there is one type of sabotage ability that recommended to bring, silence inducing ones (higher level players have better alternatives). If you silence enemy armies healers, they can no longer heal, making their second layer of survivability useless. Also, take into account the units most players use. At the moment there is a huge abundance of water units, whose weakness is lightning. There is also a huge amount of units whose weakness is light (most demihumans) and most healers weakness is darkness. You usually can't go wrong with those elements.

Support
To play this role you need an army with high rarity units (minimum all being SSR with equipment). You should use the MC variant with the highest mana and magic possible (Spell Lord). Gearing yourself with both buffing and sabotage skills, while making most of your passives debuffs and unit boosts. Now, the bread and butter of the support unit are its sabotage skills and healing skills. You should bring hard CC sabotage skills (confusion/stun), stats debuffs (more you can stack together the better), and MC stat buffs (same as debuffs). Also mana operation, shortening spells, and at least one silence does wonders. You should use 1-2 offensive skill to deal with high risk enemies (healers/glass cannons).

Battle
You've made your armies and prepared your skills. Now, if you have tickets, you can select one of the four enemy kingdoms to attack. There you can select between 6 enemy players, in total you can choose 1 player out of 24 since there are 4 kingdoms. Once you chose the player you wanna fight and selected your masterfully crafted skill page, you will enter battle.

The first thing you will see here is that an elemental roulette wheel starts spinning, and ends up selecting 1 element to “bless”, the blessing only affect YOUR units. Blessing will give unit 100 HP, 50 ATK/MAG/DEF, and 20 all round elemental resistance buff IF your unit have the same blessing color of the element (you can see it in your units GW tab).

When battle starts, you have no control of your army, however, you should be spamming your skills like a madman while using them strategically. Kill units hidden behind tanks, silence or kill enemy healers and enhancers. If both armies have the same powers yours should win 100% of the time, since your units unlike the opposing army have the aid of your MC skills and passives on top of the elemental blessing.

At the end of the battle you are provided with a core along with a timer showing how much time you have left over (in seconds) and a good amount of mercenary group xp (for player level, not units). The most important aspect here are the points gained. You can win in between 10 and 250 points per battle. 10 points is for a defeat while 250 for a perfect performance.

How do you achieve 250 points? There are two aspects you should focus on. First and most importantly, the leftover time and damage sustained, which can give up to 200 points according to this table, taking into account you took low amounts of damage:

If you take lots of damage or lost several units, even if you finish the battle fast you will not gain maximum score.

The other factor is ability points. Ability points are given due to usage of abilities and damage dealt, that's why mana operation, shortening spells, and high mana are useful. Spamming skills sensibly actually helps you get a better score!

By now the people who pay attention should notice the added Time-out to the table. Running out of time doesn't give you a lose instantly, what it does is check the Morale Bar to determine the winner. What's that? That's the green red bar at the bottom of the screen, the higher your morale (green) and lower your enemies (red) the better chances you have of winning when the time runs out. The things that modify morale are: the amount of units left, their HP, and their rarity (?), the higher the more morale you will have.

However, there is a catch, once you send out an army, it has 2 battles of cooldown before it can be used again or you need to wait until the day resets, but that will be a loss of tickets since you can't actually complete your waring daily missions nor use all your tickets. That's why you need 3 armies, that's the minimum required so that you can spend all your tickets and fight the maximum amount of battles as shown here: Army 1 battles -> Army 2 battles -> Army 3 battles (resetting Army 1’s cooldown) -> Army 1 battles -> etc.

Rewards
There are 3 main rewards at a GW:

 Player experience With an average of 100 experience per successful battle, with 125 battles (if you did all your missions) you end up leveling several times per GW until you start hitting lvl 70. It's a great boost for lower level players. Medals Next are the medals, medals are the currency used to buy things at the Great War Shop, which includes Equipments, Items, and Units. Medals won depends on 3 factors:  Title Finally, we have the titles, huge stats boosts for the player. Depending on your leaderboard ranking, you gain bonus stats until the next GW starts (they are lost the second the next GW starts and are not carried over, but can be won several times in a row). Here is a table with the ranks and bonuses:
 * Total points acquired
 * Your kingdom's overall point ranking
 * Your leaderboard ranking

Taking all of this into account, you want to place as high as possible in the leaderboard. For this, you have to maximize the amount of points you win (see battle and all the preparations) and reduce the amount of points your competitors get. How do you ask? By making the strongest flag army possible. The reason why it's recommended to built a defensive army is that taking into account once your flag army fights another player they will have to fight against an enemy MC, victory is often not an option, but you can stall for time, reducing a huge amount of points earned. Only when your army is vastly more powerful than the opponents you can reduce their earnings via killed units.  

Great War Shop
You remember that medals are the GW alternate currency? Well, here is where you spend them. You can access the shop in the shop tab of the GW (Home > GW Icon > Shop). Thankfully you can access the GW shop even when the GW ends, but some items have limited quantities per player, and you will need to wait till next GW.

Here you can buy 3 types of thing (one for each shop tab): Units, Equipments, and Materials.

Units

Here you can buy units ranging from SR quality all the way up to LE! Some SSR and especially the LE units appear in rotation, there is no pattern known at the moment to predict the next unit.

Equipment

At the moment the equipment here are a bit dated, HOWEVER, they have secondary effects, all costing 150 medals.

Note: the secondary effects are chance based, they dont occur 100% of the time

Materials

Here you can buy boss drops, construction materials, coins, tomes, and one material exclusive to this shop, all for medals. Some items here can be bought only once per GW shop rotation while others are infinite.

Note: If you must only buy construction mats, and even then, it doesnt seem worth it to spend your medals here considering you can buy Legendaries with the same curreny.

Note:
 * Each purchase here gives you 5 of each material bought.
 * The ability acquisition values are per 1 material consumed

Credits
Roblos the Skeleton King from Re:Monster Discord