I was just agreeing with you that Tag is what I enjoy, and just wondering why people play something they find a terrible chore. It's a common complaint I see across the socials, less here, but it still pops up.

As far as making G4, let me know and I'll see what we can brainstorm. The first time making it there was tough, and I still have a hard time staying there with the common problem of being F2P in an empowered world, but I can float back and forth for CvCs. Anyways, perhaps I can help. I got some good suggestions that helped me the first time. :)

You mentioned in your previous post you're just trying to learn. I'm really trying to help you here. I'm just being straight with my advice.

Here's another:

"Bait teams" have always been a viable strategy and will continue to be so. It's switched as to what bait strats are used, but they will continue to evolve as more sets and champs show up.

And here's the reason people put in their best chances at winning, including trickery. An offensive player can rematch my defense over and over, so it is nice to 1) get an extra loss in the total matches they hit me, preventing me from losing as many points in total 2) challenge their answers and solutions for Stoneskin (or previously Immunity, which is what I used to run exclusively). 

Basically 2 is the important one, and means that someone that wants to deal with my Stoneskin speed team can no longer deal with my Stoneskin bomb/nuke team or no longer deal with my Mortu lockout Stoneskin team. It's about stretching the attackers roster so instead of every person just losing 2-1 to me then immediately 3-0ing me, what happens is I get a 2-1 win and a 1-2 loss. That really really saves me time fighting into green cause I'm much higher. Or in the best world, they don't even bother hitting me a second time cause they don't want to think and just want mindless wins.

Edit: Now we're conflating points and topics here. Whatever timesink
there is in the game right now has zero correlation with approach
towards Arena, whether it be time thinking about, building for it or
playing. 

How can 90 minutes in Tag-Team-Arena per day (if you do the 20 free matches, with 1:30 per fight) be not one part of the time sink problem?

I still have a thrill of learning. Today, I had Yumeko steal Candraphon's Veil, never knew that was possible....I thought it wasn't removable. Cool, learned something new. That is still exciting to me. I'm not here for Ws, my defense in Classic is an Apothecary, ffs. 

You guys know what everybody does, you had time to farm all the gear and build your champs, you actually compete with each other, going for Plat and Gold tag. I'm not, that's why I am where I am. I am in S3-S4, I have no issues staying there, but I'm not ready to push for Gold....I'm exactly where I fit....at least until I get enough gear and learn different comps and scenarios. 

You guys complain about not having enough space for gear, you know how much gear I have sitting there? 448 Pieces, 288 of them are 6*, many pieces probably need to be cleared out. I stopped spending money on champs because I don't have enough gear to equip many of the ones I already have....and Arena takes serious gearing. 

You care about winning, I just care about solving the puzzle. When I get baited into a trap team based on a gear set, I am denied the opportunity to make decisions based on what I see before me. I remember when I was tricked by a Seeker go-second team. I saw a Seeker, I thought "speed team"....turned out to be a go-second team based on Seeker's passive. Cool, got me, I learned something new. The information was there, I misread it, that's on me. But you bring a Stoneskin trap team in Silver 3? What does that accomplish? You think you're getting into Gold with that defense? Your team is not good enough to hold up to people actually pushing in Gold, so you're just there to troll. That's how I see it. 

We're talking about approach to Arena here.

Any sort of competitive Arena/PvP experience should require some time, effort, and at times having to think, plan out fights.

So no, that has no real bearing in the discussion. If you don't want to do those things in Arena that's fine, but Stone Skin meta or no Stone Skin meta, Tag fights - especially while pushing - are going to eat up time. 

I don't have a problem with that. If I would push into the highest possible tag arena stage (what I don't do), it may cost time.

But actually staying in my silver tag costs more time than it should because of solo stoneskin UDK, solo stoneskin Duchess, solo stoneskin Armiger (! wtf? Who does soemthing like this?) and all this. I win all these fights. But staying in silver tag with a 100% win ratio on offense shouldn't take an hour per day.

Stoneskin sets just used to troll the attacker should just vanish. A single champ defense with stoneskin and 0 victories at the end of ranking period (what is a strong indication that's not a trap, but just trolling, a trap would have won sometimes) -> Stoneskin set vanishes. Player may fight the Hydra to get a new one.

I don't complain about gear space. I use the gear cap to keep myself honest about dumping garbage, now I cut good gear to eventually raise my gear floor to "great".

And solving the puzzle = winning. Different comps and scenarios have always included the gear people are wearing... to include Immunity, Shield, Bolster, and now Stoneskin. As far as getting into Gold, already said I use a Stoneskin speed nuke team in Gold Tag, and we're not talking Gold 1 either. My teams aren't great compared to the competition up there, but it's nice to have months of wins with what you consider garbage.

A Stoneskin "trap team" does what I said above. People in Silver 3 want to win too, want to advance to Silver 4 and push up to Gold. When you lose to their Stoneskin team and 2-1 instead of 3-0ing them, you're doing them a solid in that endeavor.

When I was first pushing into Gold Tag, I switched to full Immunity nuke teams. Gosh my defense started wrecking, at least that team. I have to assume, had you fought that team, you would have wanted Immunity shown on the arena slates. It was a "trap team" for sure.

Before there were Stoneskin "trap teams" there were Immunity "trap teams".... Except they're not trap teams. They're just teams. They're just someone making the best options to win that they can.

I don't consider them garbage just because they use Stoneskin. A few times, I caught it early, took it off manual, used Ragash's A3 instead of A2. Half of them can't nuke my Arbiter through Strengthen. Had I not caught it and just ran it on Auto, they would have won because Ragash is set to use A2 in a basic speed team fashion. 

I don't know, when I decide to push for competitive play, I'll sit there manualing through all the teams, and I won't be bringing a speed team. I guess I'm just annoyed that I now have to approach what would be easy farm teams like I'm trying to place in Gold just because somebody takes Silver 3 so seriously. 

1) If you have to spend all/most of your tokens to stay in a tier towards weekend/reset time, seems to me you are close to the top of where you should be in that tier of Arena, whether that be because of champs, gearing, team choices, or a combination of the above.

2) It is possible a lot of these single Stone Skin defenses shouldn't be taking you that long. Just make presets with teams that make sense. I saw you mention a Stone Skin Duchess and bombs earlier and I'm not certain why you wouldn't just bring a bunch of DPS options there.

3) The main issue I have with your stance/approach and similar ones: none of us are entitled to free wins, easy matchups and fast fights regardless of tier. If someone decides to put up a random food champ to drop down and get easy medals/gold, that's fine. But if someone is also essentially giving you a free win that likely just requires a small bit of tinkering around to make painlessly easy...I dunno. 

The attacker has all of the advantages here whether it be champs, gear, choice of blessings, AI presets or manual. I can't and will never get behind judging or punishing anyone on defense who sets however they please. If what they're doing dissuades challenges, forces stalls or however that comp may present itself in terms of preventing losses then they did their job. It is not their job to make your experience easy.

That's cool, I can respect that. But please understand that it's not my thing. In our gym, we call it "playing possum", it's when a guy/girl asks to go light in sparring because he/she has an injury or is tired, so you restrain yourself. But as soon as an opportunity presents itself, they go full force to take advantage of your restraint. It is poor sportsmanship where I come from. 

I get it, we can act like Arena is this "kill or be killed" Coliseum, but let's be real: until Plat in Classic or Gold in Tag...it's just a game - college football, amateur boxing, not sure if any of these analogies stick, but my point is it's not that serious. My gauge? I can easily stay in Classic G5 and Tag S4, not even breaking a sweat......but I couldn't finish in Plat and Gold if I tried my hardest. That sounds like a cut-off line to me, it's where s*** gets real, so to speak. 

Until I'm ready to push there, I'm just exploring, learning the game, cruising by....and so are many others, from the looks of it. Until now, I was building my PVE champions (I think serious Arena is end-game stuff). I figured I'll work towards Hydra and DTH....help the clan, progress my account. But if some turds in Silver tag want to steal Ws by playing possum, then I guess I'm regearing my champs for Arena. 

P.S. There are few of y'all here that I admire (you, HQ, Trips, Krama, just to name a few). You know why? Because y'all know your s***, you play f2p (jury is still out for Trips, he gets awful lucky with shards), and I believe you got where you're at by your wits, experience, and hard work....none of which has d*** to do with Stoneskin. I believe that if Stoneskin never existed, you would still be up there; the garbage teams I have a problem with would not. I do appreciate y'all's "wax on, wax off" stuff. But trash team in Stoneskin? That's more of a John Kreese "sweep the leg" stuff...not my thing. 

@HQ: I don't have a problem with this team, per se. It wasn't trying to pass itself off as something it's not, so I am in no way calling the player who put this togeher a "possum player". 

But if this team loses to a basic-a** speed team....maybe it's not such a good team, that's all I'm saying. Now, if I didn't manual it, they probably would have won....and according to you guys, that makes them a better team. Doesn't change the fact that my speed team is squishy af, and they should have demolished me. To me, this looks a lot like "sets over stats" scenario.....or "meta over fundamentals". I humbly bow my head and say, "we ain't meta....we ain't ready for the meta....stop trying to 'fake it til you make it' and learn the damn game"....that's my problem. 

i

i

Stoneskin is only annoying when it's a free win but instead of 5 seconds it takes 1 min to win because you have to wait for the stoneskin that didn't get stripped to wear off after 2 turns. 

Just beat another Stoneskin team with my dinky speed team. All I'm saying is maybe where you guys are at, Stoneskin is "the meta" because you know how to use it, but down where I'm slumming, it's just people trying to get around learning the game. The guy had Stoneskin Nekhret, ffs, how do you f*** that up? 

Up there, it may be the vehicle to success; down here, it's a WalMart rascal scooter the lazy use to get around.  

First of all, the Stoneskin in arena is BS.. When i see a stone skined Duchess just think about, how pathetic that, and instantly killing those Go2nd stonekined teams easily.

Just like this: 

i

Because stoneskin is lifebelt of the smartless peoples. . .

llol did you even fight that team?

Yes, and ka-booom ;)

 ストーンスキンはひとつの戦略だと思います。耐性や防御力を上げるだけでは対抗できないチームがあるからです。 

そうでなければ、スピードが速いチームだけが勝ち抜く、つまらないゲームになってしまうと思います。  

Or vica versa, I think it will be a boring game where only you see just stone skined teams at  opponents, because they have no skill to build a good team. 

Many have Duchess,Nekhret or other Arena god but... LOL, they using Stone skin, because they cant use those champions fine. Stoneskin now main thing in 3v3.  I told almost 1 years ago, stone skin is very dangerous, because can reach everyone from hydra. Many players who dont have luck and didnt get real pvp characters, starting with disadvantage and the stone skin increase those gaps. So many times todays not the player skills win a battle now, just the stone skinned op heroes, because harder to find a good combo against them, without, Duschess, Shiphi,Rotos,Nekhret,Ursuga,Mortu,Hegemon,Kymar etc etc and many players dont have them after 3.5 years ago.