Reva: New info, next steps.
February 3, 2023 5:09AM
edited February 2023
So a programmer who created a SWGOH sandbox mode (to be clear: CG is not offering SWGOH sims/sandboxes to anyone) ran some Reva mission sims with me and others from the 50Shards of KAM Discord server.
As a disclaimer,
Right, so what you want to know is, "How bad is this, and what should we do to give ourselves the best chance to win?" I will absolutely get to that, but please understand that since this wasn't run on unmodified CG code and since for all we know more changes may happen before the mission goes live next week, all recommendations here are tentative.
Simulation Info:
Best, but still Wild, Guess at the number of runs that will be extremely difficult to unwindable:
Key strategy points for Wave 1:
Strategy Summary:
1. Maximize stacks of purge on Nebit
2. Reach max stacks before GrandInq's first turn
3. Use Ready To Die
4. Use 5th Brother's AoE dispel The Kill Is Mine
5. Go all in on killing Scavenger
Modding notes:
Modding Summary:
1. Accuracy Arrow on 5B (required if even remotely possible, otherwise CritAvoid)
2. Critical Avoid Primaries on GI, 9S, and your supplementary attacker
3. NO Health sets or Health primaries. Not ever.
4. Sets: All Speed, Offense, CritChance, and Defense.
5. Primaries: except for the arrows, protection preferred over almost anything, though a single Offense or Crit Damage primary is reasonable as it will help burn down Scavenger more quickly.
Best turn order will need more investigation, but here are two variants to consider:
Variant A: Makes favourable openings into super-easy battles:
7S => GI => 5B => 8B => 9S
Variant B: Makes disfavour able but winnable openings a bit easier, but makes favourable openings slightly harder:
7S => 8B => 5B => GI => 9S
Why this turn order?
Okay, that's all I can think of for now. We will be doing more testing later and I will happily take your questions below.
Never forget that the simulation might not be fully accurate even if we think it is, that maxing out Ops missions will matter much more now than it did before, and that with more sims and especially with data from live missions next week all of the above is subject to change.
This is just the best I have to offer to the community at the moment. I hope you all can put it to good use.
As a disclaimer,
the simulation we are basing this info on may or may not be accurate. It did not use the original SWGOH apk because that doesn't have a sandbox mode. To the best of our knowledge and understanding it simulates the Reva mission perfectly, but... you never know.
Right, so what you want to know is, "How bad is this, and what should we do to give ourselves the best chance to win?" I will absolutely get to that, but please understand that since this wasn't run on unmodified CG code and since for all we know more changes may happen before the mission goes live next week, all recommendations here are tentative.
Simulation Info:
Further, while we simulated the mission with all possible Ops-bonus conditions (0-1 Ops missions complete, 2-3, 4-5, and all 6) for both planets whose Ops missions affect the Reva battle, we did not have time to do large scale analysis of every condition.
We focused our simulations on the two scenarios where 4 ops missions were filled in p2 and 2 or 4 Ops missions were filled in p3. It's very likely that the mission gets easier at 6/6, but we have no reason to believe that the all-important opening conditions will be different, thus I still expect to se some significant but reasonably small % of openings will be unwinnable without experienced coaching help or even at all.
We focused our simulations on the two scenarios where 4 ops missions were filled in p2 and 2 or 4 Ops missions were filled in p3. It's very likely that the mission gets easier at 6/6, but we have no reason to believe that the all-important opening conditions will be different, thus I still expect to se some significant but reasonably small % of openings will be unwinnable without experienced coaching help or even at all.
Best, but still Wild, Guess at the number of runs that will be extremely difficult to unwindable:
A reasonable wild guess at this point is that with best possible modding 5-12% of openings will be unwindable even with a great streaming coach and another 6% or more will be winnable ONLY by a great streaming coach. I expect the total number of very difficult to impossible runs to be about 15-18% of all runs. BUT this is still a guess. A guess informed by what data we've been able to collect, but still a guess.
Key strategy points for Wave 1:
The most important bit or work to accomplish in Wv1 is to get TenacityUP as early as possible to resist all the thermals. This is ONLY possible when Grand Inquisitor uses his Torture special on someone with 6 stacks of Purge. As a result, you are essentially required to wait for 6 stacks of purge to use Torture. This also means that you will not have the luxury of placing Torture on Jawa Scavenger. The goal will be to get to 6 stacks of Purge as quickly as possible on Nebit, then use Grand Inq's Ready To Die ability. Then you may use 5th Brother's AoE dispel to get rid of enemy taunt and stealth. Finally, go all in on Scavenger and hope to kill him before TenacityUP wears off.
Strategy Summary:
1. Maximize stacks of purge on Nebit
2. Reach max stacks before GrandInq's first turn
3. Use Ready To Die
4. Use 5th Brother's AoE dispel The Kill Is Mine
5. Go all in on killing Scavenger
Modding notes:
If 7th Sister takes a turn before Nebit uses taunt, it is much more difficult to reach 6 Purge stacks right away. (This is true because her first special converts enemy buffs into stacks of purge, and having that taunt up is one more buff to convert.) When she does this, it is because her unique processed. That unique ability has a 20% chance to give 7th Sister 100% TM but only when an Inquisitorious ally is critically hit. Therefore the only way to maintain our intended turn order with 7thSis acting after Nebit is to prevent critical hits on 7Sister's OTHER allies. The only viable mechanism for this is to give all other Inquisitorious allies CritAvoid arrows.
That said, Grand Inquisitor's unique causes AoE damage when an Inquisitorious ally is evaded. 7th Sister's first special is not evadable, but 5th Brother has 100% chance to counter-attack and this counter can be evaded. Thus 5B can pick up as many as 20 or 24 Thermal Detonators before you take your first turn (actual number will usually be lower because of an 80% chance to proc and a 15% chance to resist, but 24 is the max and 12 or less is much less likely as that requires only one dodge, not two). Now this would occur fairly rarely, but Jawa has +30% evasion in his unique, so while a double-evade is very rare, being evaded once when counterattacking Jawa after his AoE is much more common, leading to 7-11 Thermal detonators on 5B in approximately 24-27% of openings (sometimes he doesn't counterattack because he is stunned). Because of all this, it is much more important to place an Accuracy arrow on 5B than a critical avoid arrow, taking the risk of 7S attacking out of turn slightly more often in exchange for preventing a very common cause of 5B's death.
That said, Grand Inquisitor's unique causes AoE damage when an Inquisitorious ally is evaded. 7th Sister's first special is not evadable, but 5th Brother has 100% chance to counter-attack and this counter can be evaded. Thus 5B can pick up as many as 20 or 24 Thermal Detonators before you take your first turn (actual number will usually be lower because of an 80% chance to proc and a 15% chance to resist, but 24 is the max and 12 or less is much less likely as that requires only one dodge, not two). Now this would occur fairly rarely, but Jawa has +30% evasion in his unique, so while a double-evade is very rare, being evaded once when counterattacking Jawa after his AoE is much more common, leading to 7-11 Thermal detonators on 5B in approximately 24-27% of openings (sometimes he doesn't counterattack because he is stunned). Because of all this, it is much more important to place an Accuracy arrow on 5B than a critical avoid arrow, taking the risk of 7S attacking out of turn slightly more often in exchange for preventing a very common cause of 5B's death.
Modding Summary:
1. Accuracy Arrow on 5B (required if even remotely possible, otherwise CritAvoid)
2. Critical Avoid Primaries on GI, 9S, and your supplementary attacker
3. NO Health sets or Health primaries. Not ever.
4. Sets: All Speed, Offense, CritChance, and Defense.
5. Primaries: except for the arrows, protection preferred over almost anything, though a single Offense or Crit Damage primary is reasonable as it will help burn down Scavenger more quickly.
Best turn order will need more investigation, but here are two variants to consider:
Variant A: Makes favourable openings into super-easy battles:
7S => GI => 5B => 8B => 9S
Variant B: Makes disfavour able but winnable openings a bit easier, but makes favourable openings slightly harder:
7S => 8B => 5B => GI => 9S
Why this turn order?
Well, you want GI to go as soon as possible after you reach 6 purge stacks on Nebit -- but not before then -- so that you can drop torture there right away.
However, the Hero ability of GI is active during the Reva mission. This does AoE damage on his turn, meaning that if he basics on his turn because you've not reached 6 stacks of purge, he will Basic once or twice (twice if Nebit started at 5 stacks) then cause AoE damage to all 5 Jawas, then 7thSis will assist. This is 7-8 instances of damage for a maximum of 16 Thermals on each of GI and 7S, and 7S will already have a couple Thermals from her own turn.
If you get a favourable opening with Nebit taunting before 7S goes and an extra stack of purge from a 5B counterattack, you reach 6 Purge stacks instantly, GI grants everyone TenacityUP and you're off to the races in the best possible way -- and you didn't have to slow GI down, so he'll be running at good speed to access Cleanse and to fight JMK in Wave2.
If you get a disfavorable opening and GI goes 2nd, you have all those thermal and then GI waits until 6 stacks are reached at which point he takes his bonus turn and he might die at the beginning of that bonus turn from Thermal damage, depending on what has happened so far. That would be catastrophic. If he doesn't die, he places Torture and grants TenUP but may still die at the beginning of his next turn, before he can cleanse DoTs, this is also catastrophic.
To mitigate against these losing scenarios and to give yourself the greatest possible chance of being able to use the AoE on 5B's first turn, place GI after 8B and 5B, with 8B first. If 8B brings the stacks of trample up to 6 then GI gets a bonus turn and goes before 5B anyway, with 5B still able to AoE dispel on his first turn.
The downside of GI going 4th in turn order is that he's slower for the entire rest of the battle, including when you need him most against Kenobi.
Nonetheless, my personal preference is to mod for the worst case not the best case, and trust my skills to get me through a good opening with sub-optimal speed.
However, the Hero ability of GI is active during the Reva mission. This does AoE damage on his turn, meaning that if he basics on his turn because you've not reached 6 stacks of purge, he will Basic once or twice (twice if Nebit started at 5 stacks) then cause AoE damage to all 5 Jawas, then 7thSis will assist. This is 7-8 instances of damage for a maximum of 16 Thermals on each of GI and 7S, and 7S will already have a couple Thermals from her own turn.
If you get a favourable opening with Nebit taunting before 7S goes and an extra stack of purge from a 5B counterattack, you reach 6 Purge stacks instantly, GI grants everyone TenacityUP and you're off to the races in the best possible way -- and you didn't have to slow GI down, so he'll be running at good speed to access Cleanse and to fight JMK in Wave2.
If you get a disfavorable opening and GI goes 2nd, you have all those thermal and then GI waits until 6 stacks are reached at which point he takes his bonus turn and he might die at the beginning of that bonus turn from Thermal damage, depending on what has happened so far. That would be catastrophic. If he doesn't die, he places Torture and grants TenUP but may still die at the beginning of his next turn, before he can cleanse DoTs, this is also catastrophic.
To mitigate against these losing scenarios and to give yourself the greatest possible chance of being able to use the AoE on 5B's first turn, place GI after 8B and 5B, with 8B first. If 8B brings the stacks of trample up to 6 then GI gets a bonus turn and goes before 5B anyway, with 5B still able to AoE dispel on his first turn.
The downside of GI going 4th in turn order is that he's slower for the entire rest of the battle, including when you need him most against Kenobi.
Nonetheless, my personal preference is to mod for the worst case not the best case, and trust my skills to get me through a good opening with sub-optimal speed.
Okay, that's all I can think of for now. We will be doing more testing later and I will happily take your questions below.
Never forget that the simulation might not be fully accurate even if we think it is, that maxing out Ops missions will matter much more now than it did before, and that with more sims and especially with data from live missions next week all of the above is subject to change.
This is just the best I have to offer to the community at the moment. I hope you all can put it to good use.
Post edited by Ultra on
4
This discussion has been closed.
Replies
With these changes, 2ndSister is much worse than she was previously. Her hero ability will stack thermals on her and 7S ridiculously quickly even if she uses her basic or non-damaging special. There is no good reason to use 2ndSister right now.
As a result, my recommendation is that 8thB should always be your supplementary attacker to go with your core toons of GI, 5B, 7S, 9S.
If you already have 2S at r7 and you don't have the resources to take 8B to r7 before the mission, you can still attempt with 2S, but I wouldn't want to try it.
I assume if the operations can not be filled as you guys did, it will be nearly impossible?
Edit for clarification
So I think the fewer Ops you get filled, the more you need amazing mods to get through. You have to kill Scavenger quickly, but you can't afford not to mod for Protection and your attackers and 7thSister have the worst protection/health ratios on your squad. Which means, of course, that just where you need them most, you can't be dropping a lot of Offense and CritDmg primaries. Which means, of course, if you're at 0-Ops you're going to be assigning Protection primaries and trying to get 5%+ Off on the secondary with 20+ speed. There won't be too many folks who have those mods. It's a tough task.
But it's not at all unwindable with 0-Ops. It's just much more dependent on the opening RNG, and generally harder and more sensitive to good/bad strategy.
When they said that the changes would only make things "a little" harder, they are probably correct about 6-Op guilds. They are probably not correct about anyone else. The difficulty goes up substantially.
But these initial sims were not all 6-Ops. none of them were. We were trying to make our research valuable to the majority of guilds. My guild will 6-Op both p2 and p3, but preparing for worst case won't hurt us and will help lots of other people, so that's where we put most of our work.
But looking at the complexity of your description, it is in direct contradiction to what CG just updated in their Reva-mission change post.
Of course I have more faith in the community
Thank you again! This is very much appreciated! 🌹