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PvP 101

Types of PvP Teams

There are a few main types of pvp teams and countless variations with strategies to each. I will only be discussing the 2 most consider the best for pvp.

Old Passive Teams

These teams are made up of mobs with defense. Defense is only available with certain old passives, but it is a powerful tool. Defense reduces all damage incoming by a certain percent depending on the particular passive and passive level. This allows the team to withstand substantial damage and these mobs are often referred to as tanks. Most popular passives for this are crusader, warrior, guardian, paladin, defender, and barbarian. Each of those in addition to defense offer bonuses to 1 or more in the other stat catagories(attack, health, and recovery) of your mobs. Actives most used(coupled with passives listed above) are shield, invincible, and swap. Shield helps reduce all damage, while invincible is used to block all attacks. Swap is your primary weapon using gemming skills to kill your opponent. In the right hands these teams can be deadly but they are not for everyone. Even with Battle Camp adding these to event and featured spins it can be difficult to build a strong team. It also takes practice learning the timing to use invincibles and if you are unable to quickly and accurately make large attack combos off of swap rounds, you are still likely to lose because they have less damage than newer mobs that come with rogue and cavalry. That being said these teams are still, in my opinion, the most fun to use.

Sacrifice Teams

There are people that would say Sacrifice is the best active for PvP league because of the 4x health buff during the event. The reason that buff it is so advantageous for Sacrifice is because the damage dealt is based on the health of the monster casting it. These teams are built with high health mobs including at least 1 sacrifice. The best passives are bulwark, panzer, and protector because they add huge amounts of health to keep you alive until you reach your primary weapon(sacrifice). One of the most commonly used actives coupled with passives listed above and used on a sacrifice team is barrier. Barrier adds extra health, strengthening your primary attack and reduces a specific element's damage helping keep to you alive. Sacrifice takes part of the mob's health that is casting it, then deals a devastating attack to 3 mobs, often able to kill all 3 targets in one shot. Due to this attack active being based on health many consider sacrifice to be the event mob of pvp because of the health buffs applied. All you have to do with a team like this is non attack 3 gem combos to cycle turns as fast as you can and let the active do all of the work. These teams are pretty easy to build and are very easy to use making them a popular choice. Most experienced PvP players consider it an amateur active ability and with little a strategy, sacrifice can be easily taken down in a number of ways. Building a team to take out sacrifice isn't too difficult. Learning to recognize most sacrifice teams and out strategize the more experienced ones is the trick.

Recognizing Sacrifice Teams

Certain monsters are more likely to have the sacrifice ability. By far the most common Sacrifice monster is the Bouldoise and his evolutions, Mountoise and Amethoise.

They aren't the only mobs that come with sacrifice though, so you must always prepare for it.

Take a look at all the Sacrifice and Sacrifice+ monsters for trade on BCRank

Defeating Sacrifice Teams

One way to defeat a sacrifice team is by using Counter. If you can get 3 gem combinations in, the counter will activate and last 2 turns. The initial and regular cooldown are 2 turns, so the Counter ability will be active the rest of the round. When Sacrifice hits a mob with Counter cast upon it, it will basically kill itself or drastically weaken itself to the point that a good combo could easily take it down.

Another way is to have a strong enough team to survive a sacrifice round. If you survive, the sacrifice mob will have weakened itself significantly. Even without being countered, a carefully planned combination can easily take it down. Using invincible to block a round of sacrifice will also help in defeating a sacrifice mob.

PvP health buffs

Both types of PvP give health bonuses to your team during fights. Each has a special formula applied to determine your hp for a fight(both have been cracked by Rendragon and will be released soon along with a calculator!). Regular PvP ends up gives you a 2x health buff while league gives you a 4x health buff. Each mob's attack and recovery stay the same for both types of PvP and only count the base(which includes R-Boost) and the passive. This is extremely important because they both change your mobs attack effectiveness.

So what's best for pvp? Ultimately that's up to you to decide. Do you want a challenge to build and master old passives or just go for easy wins that sacrifice gives anyone? No matter what you choose, the point is to have fun. Happy camping and see you in the pvp arena.

Team Health Balance

When building an old passive pvp team most people focus only on getting the best actives and passives, then expect to just start winning. With old passives, having a good combination of actives and passives is very important, but there is another aspect of building your team that is often overlooked and can be the difference between being good and being great. This is team health balance.

First lets start by explaining the mechanics of different attacks.

Actives

Actives attack 1 or more mobs and will always attack the ones with the highest starting health. They will continue to hit these mobs until they are dead, even if over the course of the match they have less real time health.

Combos

Any combo with 5 attack gems or more will attack all targets. Combos only using 3 and 4 attack gems will cause you to hit just 1 target. In most cases that will be the mob with the lowest start health.

Knowing how the attack mechanics work lets look at one of my pvp lineups via actives and passives. The following are in order of highest HP to lowest HP:

So as you see 4 actives are defensive, designed to help keep my team alive and of them only counter is capable of actually hurting my opponent(only if they use actives that attack) and my only real weapon is swap. Without my swap I have to rely on lucky gem drops to do any attacks at all therefore it is the most important active on my team. It needs to live as long as possible to give me the best chance of winning. So how do I ensure it survives as long as possible? Most would say by making it have the highest health. More health means more damage it can take. In pvp this is the wrong answer. Since actives attack the highest HP mobs there are lots of times that the highest hp mob actually dies the fastest. There is also a chance that you will face a team with a crush that can render your top health mob useless. So I make sure my swap stays closer to the middle(2nd 3rd or 4th). This eliminates it taking snipe, bane, crush, or toxic and prevents taking combo attacks that only hit 1 mob. Same applies to my counter. It reduces damage from actives and reflects it, but it doesnt have defense so will die much faster than my others, especially if subjected to single target actives. So my highest HP mob is my most durable. In this case it is my invincible defender. Even taking single target active attacks it's still almost always the last one standing. So by carefully balancing my team via HP I get the most from my actives and all die at about the same time. This gives maximum efficiency and best chance to win.

Rendragon's Team Balance

I absolutely have to credit 1Walkingstick for helping me with this aspect. I did not realize the importance of team balance until I ruined a successful PvP team. When I first started getting into PvP, I got my hands on some nice wind mobs for it in my sign. When I evolved one of the monsters the whole team was thrown off. My swap went to the highest HP spot and was the target of all active attacks. This mob was a super and it was on a team with evoled ultras, so I would have had to do a lot of work to hopefully restore balance by doing second evolutions. At this point, I was so sick of it, I just scrapped the whole thing and started a fire team. Normally I am a fire user, but when I started building a team, there were hardly any fire PvP mobs. When they added R PvP mobs to the spins, I finally had my chance.

At first I could not figure out how I went from winning a majority of a the time to losing all the time by evolving my best monster. After discussing it with 1Walkingstick, he pointed out that my balance was not the most ideal. From the moment I began building the fire team, I kept this in the back of my mind, carefully planning the HP position for each mob. I now win a majority of the time and this started when I had all my mobs sorted the best way by HP.

My team health balance is very similar to 1Walkingstick's. I have one invincible crusader in the 1st position and my other invincible crusader in the 4th. My counter must stay out of 1st and 5th because it does not have an old passive defense bonus and his active ability is what makes sacrifice teams not too much of a challenge for me. Although the Element Swap+ Lethal in 5th does not have any defense nor does he gain any HP via passive, he is my least vital mob. His ability assists with big combos, but his role is to be taken down first. My swap warrior is my most powerful offense monster and he must survive at all costs. His higher passive level gives him more defense, but the passive does not give any HP. To keep him out of the 5th position I have R-Boosted him as much as possible and also equipped a healh collar and HP jewels.

The tricky thing about team health balance is that the calculation involving the 2x health buff during regular PvP and the 4x health buff during League is rather complicated. Without knowing how to do the calculations, the only way to view the health of each mob on your team is by clicking them individually during a PvP match during both types of PvP. That is the only place the actual PvP HP is displayed. I have cracked the algorithm for these calculations and Battle Camp Bible will be releasing the calculator for PvP HP very soon!

PvP Team Building

With Battle Camp Bible creator and rising PvP Pro Rendragon

Basics

Building a successful PvP team is very complicated. There are a many factors to consider and there are many different ways to arrange a team. It takes a lot of work, time, and dedication to put together a strong team. If you want to be a great PvPer, you have to start with carefully constructing and considering all the options to build the best team that you can. I will cover active abilities below and build upon what 1Walkingstick said about why old passives are advantageous.

New PvP Actives

Barrier

When activated, it provides a barrier that will reduce the damage taken of the element of the monster casting it and it will heal all the monsters on your team.

Counter

Counter will reduce damage taken and reflect back that damage. Damage reflected cannot exceed 50% of health and is cast on 2 monsters.

Regen

Regen is nice because once it is active, it stays active throughout the match because it lasts 3 turns and its cooldown is 3 turns. It is cast on 3 monsters and it will still remain active on those monsters, even if the monster who cast it has been defeated.

Swap+ and Element Swap+

With an old passive team, swap+ is not a good choice due to the fact that they typically come with a passive that lowers health or recovery and old passive teams are built to survive.

Sacrifice

See the information above for an intricate explanation of how sacrifice works and why it is so popular for PvP.

Toxic

Toxic's appeal is that it ignores defensive abilities. This offensive ability has the potential to tear through mobs with old passives that have the defense bonus.

Lacerate

When using an offensive team type, lacerate is great because it prevents the 3 enemies with the highest health from being able to heal for 4 turns.

Old PvP Actives

Invincible

Invincible is very helpful and can be a quite satisfying when activated. Often, automatically activated swaps go off the same round as invincible and the opponent will send a devastating combo attack at your team, only to be completely blocked by invincible.

Shield

Shield is a very desirable active for PvP because it grants a defense bonus against all elements, rather than just one like barrier.

Swap

If you have an old passive team, old actives that come with them typically do not attack, so swaps are where your damage will come from. See 1Walkingstick's description of old passive teams above for more detail.

Old Passives vs New Passives

To go into more detail about what 1Walkingstick was saying about old passives above, I have put together this chart so that people can better understand the power of the defense bonus. In my example I use one of the recently added reward PvP spin mobs, Scurvyjones. With this I hope to put a stop to the rerolling of these extremely great PvP mobs.

Scurvyjones

	Base Stats	Paladin	Crusader	Warrior	Bulwark	Protector
Attack	2,003	2,003	3,004	3,004(6,008)	1,802	2,003
Health	26,844	40,266	40,266	26,844	44,292	41,608
Recovery	2,080	4,160	2,080	2,080	2,080	2,080
Defense	0%	50%	50%	50%	0%	0%
Damage to Kill	26,844	80,532	80,532	53,688	44,292	41,608

When Mutants are Valuable

When people see a "mutant" monster, they often think that they are worthless. There are certain scenarios where they are actually very valuable. In PvP, if you have a fire team, it will be weak against water. Having a fire monster with an active that reduces water damage can give you the advantage that your team needs over water opponents.

Mirror

Mirror reflects 50% of the element type damage back at the attacker and it is similar to how counter works. The following example is one of PvP Warlord(and provider of the information above!) 1Walkingstick's. If he's using a mutant, that has to tell you something about their potential and value!

Debuff

All attacks of the particular element of the debuff will be reduced by 30% when activated. The following monster is beneficial for the same reason as the previous example.

Absorb

Absorb will absorb 40% of the element damage type for 2 turns. The following is an example of a mutant that does not take advantage over the element the fire team is weak to(water), but wind is one of the most popular elements for PvP, so this monster is still a great mutant for a PvP team. The paladin passive adds 50% health and 50% defense, so even in situations where the opposing team is not a wind team, it's old passive provides strength and defense to the team.