Valkyrie Crusade EH guide

Valkyrie Crusade Elemental Hall guide by /jp/ version 1.1
17/9/2015
Written by Toshinou(Yuder)
Edits by Anonymous
Thanks to everyone for giving input.

Table of Contents:

00. Introduction
01. Encounter types
01a. Team choices
02. Good cards and bad cards
03. Teambuilding
05. Winning/Overkilling
06. Outro

00. Intro:
Elemental Hall or EH is right now the primary -thing to do- in VC. So it is extremely important that you understand how to do this right and at the highest level possible. You get keys to enter the EH by either completing the event map, getting rewards from progress points or similar during the event or completing witch gates/killing limited enemies inside witch gates. The EH is based on an element, which changes every day at midnight JST. This elemental will give the AWs found in the EH an AoE ability with that element. Which means if you enter EH on a light day, all the AWs will have an AoE ability that hits all units for a huge chunk of damage, but this damage is greatly reduced if your unit is also light. So you prefer teams of the same element as the daily EH element. Preferably you want to be able to do every element, so that you aren't relying on having the right element. The rotation of the elements is Passion->Cool->Light->Dark. With this information you can plan ahead if you only have teams for some of the elements.

Why is EH important and why advanced?
EH is important because this is the best way for you to gain ranking points, rare medals, slimes, metal slimes, awakening materials, swords and shoes. So as you can quickly sum up, it gives you almost everything you need in the game. Because of this you also want to maximize your profits from the EH. Since you can only enter EH a limited amount of times, based on how many keys you have, you obviously want to be able to do advanced. Advanced does from my experience give you around 30% more ranking points per BP spent than intermediate and about double rewards from the panel rewards, these numbers are not accurate, it is simply assumptions based on my experience. In short, to get the most out of each key, you want to do advanced.

01. Encounter types:
In the EH there are 5 different encounter types:

Type 1: FAW with no servants
[FAW: ~3,000,000HP]

Type 2: FAW with 1 servant
[FAW: ~2,000,000HP] + 1x [Servant: ~625,000HP]

Type 3: FAW with 2 servants
[FAW: ~2,000,000HP] + 2x [Servant: ~625,000HP]

Type 4: FAW with 3 servants
[FAW: ~1,500,000HP] + 3x [Servant: ~500,000HP]

Type 5: FAW with 4 servants.
[FAW: ~1,000,000HP] + 4x [Servant: ~435,000HP]

The FAWs health will vary a little depending on when in the EH you encounter them. The hardest encounter will always be the last, this is important to keep in mind.

01a. Team choices:
It is very obvious, but also important that you pick the right team for every encounter, and also that you have teams that are good against every different encounter. This means that you can not make 4 teams that are really good at AoEing down enemies, because you will get crushed by the encounters of 1 FAW with 3,5m health. It is also important that you pick the best team for each encounter. So if the first encounter you get is type 5, then you want to pick a team you have that is good at bringing down multiple opponents. You should always consider what team you think would be the best for each encounter and use that one. The encounters are random, you can have 4 fights where there are 3+ servants and you can have 4 fights with 1 or less servants, this comes down to luck. This also means that you need to have teams that have a chance against each type of encounter, but is exceptional at a specific type.

Right now, if you are new to EH you might think this is a bit much to be thinking about and where do I even start with all of this? The main thing you need to take from this is, the teams you build need to be versatile to some extent, but at the same time be very good at a specific thing, I will go in to more detail about how this works in the following chapters. It is just important that you always keep these things in mind when you are building teams or doing EH.


02. Good cards and bad cards:
It is very difficult to say precisely what cards are good and what cards are bad in EH, it is not as simple as making a FAW team. Most of the time your cards will be useful in some way or another if they are of the right element. There are a few things that can give you a good indication though, so here is a list of what you should be looking for in your cards when picking what cards to use.
1. G/H/URs, basically any card that is UR or better can be used in a EH team with the right setup, these cards are generally very durable and if you choose to max them they might even be usable in off element teams.

2. HSRs, you are looking for turn-skippers and other defensive mechanics when looking at HSR cards. The problem with these cards is that their attack is too low if they aren't maxed and even if you max them a GUR without any arcana will still hit harder and have twice the unit count. Some HSR attackers will be worth using because of their infinite procs, if you do not have enough UR+ attackers you should look up if you have any infinite proc HSR attackers, since these are the second best.

3. GSRs, looking at GSRs you can use these again with defensive mechanics, but also critters or AoE attackers. These cards are more durable than HSRs and if you max them they also get decent damage. Generally their skills are also up to par with GUR skills.

4. Any type of buffer that is SR or better. These will be useful in teams of their own element, if you have GUR buffers they can also be used in off elements, but this is a little risky.

5. Any type of unleasher. Unleashers are currently the meta game for almost every team and player. These are extremely powerful cards because they are essentially "duplicates" of the other cards you have in your team. These can be used even if they are only R cards. I do recommend maxing them if they are R though, since they will die very fast if you don't.

The cards that you will generally not be able to use are: Debuffers, exp gain, debuff def, buff def and healers. Most SR cards are also too weak to be of use, there are a few exceptions to this as mentioned above, but in general these cards will die before doing anything.
It is extremely difficult to point at specific card types and say that they are bad, since you can make almost everything work in EH. If you are in doubt if any card is good or if it is possible to use a certain card in any type of setup, you should ask in the thread. There is often discussion about how to build teams in EH and from experience most people have their own way of doing things.

03. Teambuilding:
You have at this point most likely ventured into EH before on either easy or intermediate, you probably did well there and decided to try out advanced only to get your shit kicked in. Advanced EH teambuilding is much more difficult that building a team for easy or intermediate. For intermediate you simply need a team that is capable of beating a lv. 200 AW. When looking at advanced the encounters are more comparable to FAW fights, the health is a little bit lower, but the witches have the elemental wave skill. The fighting in EH is very different than when you fight a FAW so, unfortunately the only good way of testing your teams is doing EH and hoping for the best. Be prepared to spend tons of BP on this!

Whenever you are building a team you need to keep a very basic thing in mind, you will see this in almost every card game (Magic, Hearthstone etc. etc). Your team needs to have a win-condition. Some teams win-condition will be waiting for procs on all cards and then wombo combo the FAW down. Other teams will have mass amounts of turn-skippers and rely on them proccing. Whenever you are building your team you need to consider "how do I win with this" and also "how do I lose with this team". If you don't know these 2 things, your team will most likely be a failure. When you have established a win-condition for your team you need to assess how safe the win-condition is and whether or not you have multiple win conditions. What needs to happen for your win-condition to be lost? How likely is this to happen? If you build a team and the win-condition is a HSR self-buffers proc, then the team is most likely not going to work, simply because the odds of the self-buffer dying before it gets a proc and can start tapping is too big. The team would also be prone to getting cleared after the buff is applied.
So now what? How do I know whether or not my win-condition(s) is(are) good? How do I know that I will be able to win with this team?
Now you can start your journey into building your teams, all you need for this is a good understanding of win-conditions. When it comes to understanding win-conditions, this will often come with a lot of play time. What you need to do after putting together a team is look at it and think: What needs to happen for me to win? How likely is it that this happens? How can the FAW or servants counter this? After you have done this and reasoned that the team should have a good chance of winning, it's time to test it. Testing is the best way for you to know if your team is reliable or not. Asking in the thread is not always a good solution, since people build very different teams, depending on their play style and what kind of cards they have. Testing your teams and finding out if they are reliable will costs you a lot of BP, so you need to prepare your swords and get ready for gut-wrecking losses.
When you are first starting out, you can try a slightly different approach. Simply build a team that you know is going to be way better than it needs to be and then "take away" from it until it is at a reasonable level. I build a lot of my teams by putting together my best cards and then swapping out cards until I felt like the team was at a good level. Then rinse and repeat for team 2, 3 and 4.
A more planned way of doing things is by making a game-plan. Simply plan out how you want the encounter to happen. An example of this is my team 2 in every element; what I planned was "what happens if the FAW never gets a turn?". So I put in as much turn-skipping as I could, this team was originally build only for passion, but it turned out to work in every element. This method requires you to have a decent amount of knowledge about the game, since you need to understand the limitations of cards and skills. It is probably the best way for you to build teams though, since it will also help you understand what kind of card can do what. You will also end up with the strongest teams, since you have a set game-plan you are following, whether it is a defensive, aggressive or wombo-combo game-plan.

To sum up what you need to keep in mind when building your team:
You need good win-conditions.
You need good odds of winning.
You need a good game-plan.
Most importantly, you need strong cards.

If you are struggling with what type of decks to put together here is a list of my teams and some other examples coming from /jp/:
http://pastebin.com/secTmNUH

04. Winning/overkilling:
The first thing you should be thinking about is how to win your encounters. Once you understand how to win and what kind of team can win in EH you can start thinking about overkilling. Overkill teams are much better and if you want to rank they are essential. You can almost double your ranking points by getting good overkill teams. In general what you will see is that teams that win reliably often also overkills, since to win reliably you need a really strong team. There are some teams that have good winrates, but are unable to do good overkill damage reliably. An example of this is my passion team 3, this team rarely does any overkill, but it has a very good winrate. The teams you will be making when you first start doing EH should be focused primarily on winning, if you happen to get teams that also do good at overkilling, that's just a plus.
I do recommend aiming for a full set of teams that can do overkills, since this will be your ticket to top 300 ranking. Even if you aren't interested in ranking, getting teams that are capable of overkilling often means that the team is also extremely reliable. I personally rank around 1000 every event playing for about 1-2 hours a day on average. Ranking is currently all about doing well in the EH, before EH was a thing I was rank 2000+ every event.

05. Outro:
If you have made it this far, it means that you should be ready to start doing advanced EH. I have been over the basics you need to know and I touched on some of the more advanced topics, all you need to do now is put together teams and hope for the best. Once you start doing more and more EH, you will get a better understanding of how things work and why what setups are good. The only way for you to fully understand everything is to play the game. So it's time for you to put together the strongest teams you can muster and go do EH. Don't feel down if you lose a lot in the beginning. Just remember to think about why you lost and how you can prevent losses like that in the future, what do you need to change in order to win more consistently? Most EH setups can be improved in some way, shape or form.

Good luck Onee-san!