I have just finished the regular one and some 5 hours later the challenge version of it. I’ve also completed all the previous challenges. My collection has 1123 pets and I have a reasonable amount of them at max level, including the most popular choices. I don’t keep a double of any pet at all, I rather sell them. I don’t really go around to catch all rare quality ones or feel the need to level them all for no good reason.
The early stages feel reasonably challenging but not too hard and there’s a wide enough variety of compositions you could counter the enemy teams with.
The mid stages feel a little too random and the choice of pets that works is drastically limited. Very manageable with some experimentation.
Second to last one and the one before can be very annoying, mainly because they have the ability to deal random crits, which can completely ruin your progress and planned timeline of an individual battle.
No doubt that a lot of brainpower and theory-crafting went into making these but there is really no need to design the battles around three specific pets in the the whole game. The variety of viable counters needs to be greater.
Last fight is straight up boring and can be done with a single pet, I won’t spoil it for you by saying what I used. One fight in the middle of progress I prolonged to 175 rounds almost because of how inconsistent it was. I couldn’t get a proper alternate team that could reliably beat it.
First proper attempt on the challenge I failed miserably and decided to restart as I could go on forever and nothing was happening. Second time bad RNG messed me up on the penultimate battle by hitting me for 135 instead of 120, completely screwing me up after a two hour long attempt. Third time around I was close to failing, even puked in my mouth a little and started shaking, but I somehow got it, and the last one was a guaranteed victory with no chance of messing up a sequence, but it took forever.
Please, next time if you were to continue making these, don’t make them so hard, frustrating and remove the RNG enemy crits.
Without reading a guide beforehand a reasonable player without backup epic lvl 25 boost stones should not attempt this. Your first pet might often die sooner than expected and mess up your plans. You’ll then have a choice between staying inside and trying out with an alternate pet or starting all over. A single run can easily last anywhere between half an hour and a full hour, even with the popular Rematch addon.
All in all, great conclusion to the meta achievement, I really liked that it was a small arena this time around rather than having to walk large distances as in Wailing or Gnomer.
