Strategic Awakenings Management

[grizzled pumice]

Introduction

Awakenings are an integral part of turning your teams from good to great. Awakenings enhance the existing talents of characters with additional special abilities. As you progress through the game, awakenings become more and more important in order for your team to progress further. At a certain stage (Nightmare raids, Arena/Tournaments where your teams have over 180k CP, etc) awakenings become absolutely necessary in order to succeed. In this guide we’ll cover

• Basics of awakenings - what, how to get, etc
• How to know what the right awakenings per team are
• How to strategically deploy your awakenings as needed

Awakenings basics

Awakenings are available on certain characters, primarily on Meta teams. They become visible once your character hits level 70, equipment level 10, and has the maximum “regular” skill points in a particular talent. Most Meta teams - Cloud Wanderers (CW), Assassins Guild (AG), Knights of the Council (KOTC), Vans, Guardians of Order (GOO), Chaos Spawn (CS), Crimson Order) as well as all newly introduced characters all have skills that can be awakened. Each awakening costs 200 Chaos Prisms. Chaos Prisms can be obtained in several ways:

1. Most common - 1500 difficult raid tokens buys you 10 chaos prisms. Difficult raid tokens are obtained daily from R5 raids, with more difficult tokens rewarded as you progress further in raids
2. Rewards from Cradle of Chaos - usually the second and third stages
3. Enchanted Supplies events from opening arcane chests - depending on how far you clear anywhere from 20 to 50 per Cradle day
4. Hero/Magic Passes
5. Individual Hero Pass events
6. Level 7 of the Sharpshooters challenge

A realistic assumption is that, without purchases, by the time you reach R5D5, you can expect to accumulate enough prisms for 1 awakening every 4-6 weeks, depending on how far you get in Cradle of Chaos, purchases, or progress in enchanted supplies.

Once your teams develop, you will quickly realize that, even with a substantial amount of purchases, you will never have enough awakenings and there will constantly be a need for more.

Understanding your roster targets helps guide awakening needs

Once you advance far enough in Age of Magic, you realize that there is no single team that can do everything in every situation all the time. Some teams come very close (Cloud Wanderers, GOO, Assassins Guild with Blade and The new Renegades teams are teams that can do it all, to a degree). Understanding this, you need to have a reasonable expectation of what you want to accomplish. If you want to do Nightmare Raids, Clear the 3rd level of Cradle of Chaos, or get a lot of Tournament bonuses, you will need at least 5 very capable teams, which at some point means many teams will need many awakenings.

If however, your first goal is to get to R5D5 (when you can accumulate a lot of difficult tokens to get more awakenings), you can do this with one strong team - GOO, Blade Assassins, new Renegades team, or Cloud Wanderers (ideally with Rhiannon). Moreover, you can accomplish R5D5 with little to no awakenings. Below I’ll list the meta teams that can get through R5D5 with 3 awakenings or less:

• GOO: 2 awakenings (Omphis leadership, Siri basic)
• Blade AG : Blade Leader, Yuki passive (Capn’ John passive also useful)
• CW + Rhiannon (Roxy, Ram,Ever, Cap, Rhia) - Roxy 2nd, Ever passive (maybe Cap passive)

Once you wrap up that main strong team for R5D5, you’re going to want to figure out your prioritization and what matters to you. Note that this is different for every player. After R5D5 your ultimate goal falls into one of the following categories:

• Nightmare Raiding

• Arena/Tournament
• Cradle of Chaos
• Clan Battles

These goals are "NOT mutually exclusive, HOWEVER focusing on one can slow the progression of others*. For instance, If you wanted to focus solely on Tournament, you could Advance Chaos Squad (CS) with many awakenings as they are clearly the most consistent team in Tournament and Arena. However, they aren’t usable in Nightmare raids, and they aren’t nearly as strong in Cradle of Chaos and Clan Battles. Conversely, GOO are fantastic everywhere, especially raids and Cradle of Chaos. However, they can struggle in tournament against other meta teams - CW, GOO, CS and AG in tournaments.

For the easiest example possible, we’re going to spotlight the most important awakenings, in Order of importance for each Meta team.

1)  CW - the Top 2-3 are needed for R5D5, Top 5 are all needed for effective Nightmare raids

a.  Roxy 1st special (Ode to Heavens) - Increases speed, prevents debuffs for 2 turns

a. Ever Passive (Shadow Healer) - turns the entire team into healers using flying skills

a. Capfei 2nd (First Steps) - increases initiative faster

a. Capfei Passive (Young Mage) - increases number of debuffs removed from flying skills

.a Ramfort 2nd special (Cloud Singer) - increases the slow percentage to enemies and increases damage reduction buffs

a. Ramfort Passive (Celestial Protector) - increases his own defense at the start of the first and gives him 50% chance to counter

a. Ever 1st special (light Cyclones) - adds more DOTs and healing buffs

2)  GOO - Top 2 are needed for everything (no particular order since both are necessary). Top 3 for nightmare raids

a.  Omphis Leader (reduces team damage once Canopic jars appear)

a. Siri Basic (Dissection) - Turns Siri into a self healer, massively increases survivability

a. Sekhmun Passive (Riddle Master) -increases his damage reduction every time he falls below an HP threshold. Important to hold the team together

a. From here on, remaining awakenings are mainly based on what goals you are trying to achieve. Also, its best to wait for Nefera and the next hero to decide on additional GOO awakenings.

3)  AG - Top 3 are necessary for Nightmare raids (#4 is also very useful). With Top 3, AG is probably the best Nightmare raid team. Even at late stages, I can run AG on auto in Nightmare raids even though they are less powerful for me than GOO or CW

a.  Yuki Passive (Garden of Illusions) - increases her damage reduction

a. Blade Leader (Guild Leader) - ensures that once an enemy off the Hit List dies, another enemy is put on it.

a. Captain John passive (Cursed Pirate)- multiple benefits, increased passive healing when dealing damage, semi ressurection (first time ally is supposed to die they restore with 40% HP instead), as well as other benefits

a. Captain John basic - increases damage and makes damage critical against Hit List. Given that he deals passive healing based on damage output, this is very useful.

a. Willow (if you have her) - everything is useful for Willow as she deals massive damage to hit list foes. Start with passive which increases her damage while hidden.

4.  Vans
   

   Note: Vans are a very tricky meta team to focus on. They are generally much weaker than other meta teams at most tasks. In nightmare, their stage is shared with AG, who is a FAR FAR better raid team. They struggle against other meta teams except CW in any PVP situation, and even against CW they are aren’t guaranteed to win.

   a. Their main utility is CoC and Mid/Late stages in Fire gates, and Reimund/Gerda in Ishtar node in Nightmare raid.

   a. If you do focus on Vans, the main awakenings you need are:

   a. Gerda passive (Frozen Heart) - slows enemies at start of every raid wave. this is critical for raiding

a. Everything else can be skipped unless Vans are your priority team, in which case review the Vans team Guide

5)  Witches & the top 4 are all needed for Nightmare raids

a.  Witches are similar to Vans, will massively struggle in PVP against any other Meta team. Unlike Vans, their nightmare node is only shared with the weaker Defense Orb squad. So they are necessary for Nightmare raids

a.  Lilith Leader (Head Witch) - increases her own damage reduction and makes Witches not miss targets with any debuffs

a. Diana - 1st special (Guarding Orb) - casts a 20% shield and increases damage reflected off shields

a. Norah - 1st special (Icy Mist) - casts more damage reduction buffs

a. Belladonna - Passive - keeps her alive longer

a.  Diana - Leader (Guardian of Chaos) - this one is mandatory for Clan Battles if you use Defense Orb squad) - Increases Defense Orb initiative, Reduces damage to shields, among other benefits

6. Chaos Squad. I personally have less experience with this team so I can’t speak to which ones are “necessary” for Arena and Tournament. The Top 3 are considered somewhat mandatory. The generally best accepted ones are. :

   a. Sid Passive - Whole and Undivided

a. Aked 2nd Passive - Sloth

a. Sid 2nd Special - Black Hole

a.  Aked 1st Special - Salvation in Pain

a. Aked 1st Passive - Passive Aggression

7. Corvus Renegades

   a. Corvus Leader - increases other Renegades damage output and adds support attacks

a. Voidgunner passive (Dark Sentinel) - makes him an automatic support attacker.

Deciding which path to go

Above we laid out the most important awakenings for Meta teams. We also discussed what the general paths of development you can focus on. So finally, how do you decide what to focus on? Here’s my opinion on your best approach of thinking about development:

1)  Ensure you are doing R5D5 comfortably without using lots of healing. Aka, build 1-2 strong teams (I would recommend CW or GOO because they are also very effective in arena)
2)  Build 2 tournament teams - I would advise CW and GOO as we’ll discuss below.
3)  While doing the above, try to keep your top 5 characters below 200k (or 220k) CP. This will allow you to continue to fare reasonably well in tournament using 3 or 4 members from either CW or GOO, coupled with 1-2 other random characters to maximize your bonuses.
4)  For your 1-2 tourney team, get the main necessary awakenings, this will be roughly 6-8 total awakenings at this point. 
5)  From there, I would advise you save your awakenings until you can get at least your 3rd Nightmare capable team (ideally AG) 3-4 awakenings.
6)  At this point, build your last team (most likely Witches) to be nightmare raid capable
7)  **The reason I focus on raiding is because Nightmare raids will significantly increase your daily payout of “difficult tokens” which should only be used to buy chaos stones for even more awakenings.**
8)  Build your Meta tournament team (at this point you will be over 250k CP for your top 5 characters, which means you won’t be able to do the CW/GOO plus randoms in tournament anymore) - this will probably be Chaos Squad. 
9)  Build your Cradle of Chaos squads (this will be 1 more squad after CW, GOO, AG, Witches - probably your Chaos Squad team). 
10) Build up your Clan Battle squad

Using this approach will mean that you only utilize 2-3 awakenings at first, and then 6-8 by your second goal. This should take you a little while, but as you’re doing it you won’t risk getting too far ahead in your rankings to make tournament impossible.