Guide to the Battledome: Training, Weapons, and more

So you’ve heard the talk about the upcoming plot in November that will include battling. New to the Battledome, or don’t know much about training, or weapons? Maybe you’ve traded for a BD pet, or you’re just looking to get some training done to get the avatars. Well, this series will aim to cover all the fundamental aspects of training and battling. I’ll also go over the best weapons on a budget. In the last installment, I’ll also cover some strategies to defeaat challengers who reward avatars, including the Space Faerie!

OVERVIEW OF PET STATS

Your pet has 5 statistics you can train at the school: Endurance (also known as Health or HP), Level (Lvl), Strength (Str), Defence (Def), Movement. The popular “HSD” refers to Health + Strength + Defence added together. Intelligence can’t be trained, but usually you can increase it by reading books. Only a few weapons are affected by intelligence, so it’s not a big deal if your pet isn’t well-read.

Currently, Movement has no benefit whatsoever, so I would never bother training it. Level has no direct effect on combat (except on Faerie Abilities, more on that later), but you still need to train it because it limits how much you can train your other stats (HSD). Health is how much damage you can take. Strength and Defence affect how much damage you deal and block. I recommend training Health, Strength, and Defence evenly. Defence is not as useful as strength, but if you ever go back and decide you want to train Defence, it’ll cost you a lot more. Plus, it looks better, and if you’re looking to ever trade your pet, people like having evenly trained pets.

Strength and Defence works as follows: An increase in damage dealt or blocked only occurs at 8, 13, 20, 35, 55, 85, 125, 200, 250, 300, and every 50 points up to 750. That means if you have a strength of 20 or 34, you’ll deal or block the same amount of damage. If your pet is at 349 strength, you’ll deal the same amount of damage as a pet at 300 strength, but once you go up to 350, you’ll deal a lot more damage. This also means that once you reach 750, it doesn’t matter if you have 2000 strength or 750, you’ll be doing the same amount of damage. This will only change if new strength boosts are added.

Strength and Defence boosts work as multipliers. At Str/Def -no tags here- 8, your multiplier is 0.5 per icon that you deal. For example: If you have a weapon that attacks with 10 “icons”, and if you have a strength of 4, then you’ll deal 5 damage with that weapon. The multipliers go up at every strength boost, all the way up to a multiplier of 16 at 750 Str/Def.

Your pet is the most important part of your battle set. A weak pet can’t do much even with the best weapons, but a strong pet can do a lot even with budget weapons.

NEW PET TRAINING (FOR PETS WITH HSD-no tags here-240)

If you’re just starting off with a pet that has no stats at all, then your most efficient way to train is at the Mystery Island Training School or the Krawk Island Swashbuckling Academy. The Island school is a lot faster, but Codestones are more expensive than dubloons. Krawk Island can only train you up to level 40, and the courses take longer, but are extremely cheap.

I recommend a mix of both when you’re just starting out. Train at the Mystery Island School when you’re just starting, check back every few hours to start and finish another course. If you’re going to be away from the computer a while, or will be sleeping, then do a course at the Swashbuckling Academy.

You can train your pet’s stats up to a maximum of 2x their level at the schools. The exception is Endurance for the Island Training School, where you can train up to 3x. For example, a pet at 70 HP, 50 Str, 50 Def, and level 30 will not be able to train anything except level at the Swashbuckling Academy. At the Island Training School, however, you will be able to train HP up to 90 (3x your level).

Because of this, a good trick is that if you’re right on the edge of moving up in Codestone costs (say your pet is at level 20, while HP, Str, Def at 40 each, then you can train your HP from 40 to 60 at the cost of only 1 Codestone. Once you hit HP of 60, then you can go back to using Codestones to train up to level 30, and then even out your strength and defence to match your HP. This way you’ll save a bit on Codestones.

SUMMARY: Level up to 40, Strength, Def, and HP up to 80 each. This should take you anywhere from 2-3 months depending on often you check the schools, and anywhere from 500k to 1.5mil, depending on current Codestone and dubloon costs, and what training method you decide on.

INTERMEDIATE TRAINING (FOR PETS WITH HSD BETWEEN 240 TO 600)

From here, you can only train at the Mystery Island School. I recommend training your pet up to an even 200 HP, 200 Str, and 200 Defence, with a level of 100. One thing to note is that the Strength boost from 125 to 200 is a change in multiplier from 3 to 4.5, one of the biggest increases you’ll see. It’s highly worth it to train up to here for 50% more damage.

It’s also at this time that I would also recommend supplementing your school training with other methods. These are: Kitchen Quest, Lab Ray, Scratchcards (for level only), and Training/Faerie Quest/Lab Ray Cookies (Neocash).

Kitchen Quest: You can do 10 of these per day, but it’s only worth doing if you have only 1 pet on your account because the stats can go to any pet. On average, I would expect out of 10 quests to get 3 useful stat gains, either Lvl, HP, Str, Def. It can also increase movement, which is useless. I would skip quests that cost over 10k. At +3 stats a day, if you spend 50k on 10 quests, then you’ll be spending ~16k for useful stats, which is right on par with Mystery Island Training School costs at 3 Codestones per course. These aren’t for everyone as they’re quite tedious and ideally you want to move your non-training pets to your side accounts.

Lab Ray: If you don’t care about the color/species of your pet, then the lab ray is a good way to increase stats. It will lower your level to 1 if your level is already too low, however, at level 50+, you should be safe. Lab Ray tends to increase HP a lot, increase Str, but decrease Lvl and Def. In the last 5 months, I’ve gained 77 HP and 23 Str, but lost 11 Def and 16 levels, for a total gain of 73 useful stats, which is right around +0.5 stats a day. If you do choose to use the lab ray, I recommend trying to keep everything even, by focusing on Lv and Defence.

There is a strong argument to use the lab ray even if you have a painted pet, unless you have a UC or a very expensive pet color (several million). For example, if you gain 0.5 stats a day from the ray, and a stat point costs you 40k, then even a month or two of zapping will make it worthwhile for a cheaply painted color. A Draik, for example, may cost only 150k to morph, so if you can zap for a week you’ll easily gain your Neopoints back in stats gained. You can always paint your pet back afterwards, while saving time.

Scratchcards: Terror Trove Scratchcards and Faeries Fortune Scratchcards are probably the most effective scratchcards. You can scratch 5 per day, and you won’t win every day, but in the end it’s probably worth it especially once you hit 8-24 hour training times. It will give levels to any pet, so I recommend having only 1 pet.

Faerie Quest Cookies (FQC): Probably my favorite of the three cookies. You usually get +3 to a particular stat depending on the Faerie (Air Faerie is useless as she gives movement). You get 9 days (or more accurately 216 hours) and you can get 1 quest per day. A good trick is to start a cookie in the middle of the day, so that the 216 hours actually covers 10 calendar days, giving you 10 quests instead of 9. You can also open a quest cookie immediately after your last one ends, further speeding up training time. Remember to have your training pet as an active pet. You can also get Fountain Faerie Quests from these! I recommend these, especially when they go on sale during February.

Training/Lab Ray Cookies: I personally don’t like these as much, because they don’t give extra stats (in the case of the training cookies) or as much stats as FQC (in the case of the lab ray cookies), but they can be useful. Training cookies will reduce the time of your training (useful when you hit 8 to 24 hour training times). Lab ray cookies will give you extra zaps (1 to 3 extra) for 7 days. Assuming my previous average of +0.5 stats per day from 1 zap a day, and assuming you get +2 zaps/day on average, then you’ll gain +1 stat per day for 7 days from the Lab Ray cookie, which is obviously less than the FQC gives (+2-3 stats per day for 10 days, depending on how many air Faerie quests you get)

SUMMARY: Level up to 100, Strength, Def, and HP up to 200 each. This will cost a few million and take a few months. Use Lab Ray, Kitchen Quest, NC cookies to supplement Codestone training.

In the next part of the series, I will cover the aspects of training your pet up to maximum boost (750 Str/Def), as well as Faerie abilities.