Hey I’ve been playing neo monsters now for about 4 months, playing it as efficiently as possible with the online content. It appeals to me in the same way Magic the Gathering (card game) does in the strategy of making a team and then the tactical gameplay in a match.
I like to really go hardcore in learning how good various strategies are, not just learning the combos (which 80% are blindingly obvious) but to know work out how good they are in relation to each other. I’ve looked at stun, poison, sleep, etc. teams and got a lot of good ideas from facing others in PvP but two skills I can’t get my head around… unwelcome friend and knock back.
Unwelcome friend
= adds useless monsters to the enemy team which can screw up their combos (?) and be used for easily charging your blood-related skills. You could also leave a couple of useless monsters out in their party and just focus on killing the big ones. My question is… in reality how good is this for PvE (facing hugely stat boosted enemies) and PvP?
Knock back
= gets rid of any particular enemy that has a blood-related skill powered up (very common on legendaries i.e. PvP). Otherwise can screw up protect monsters, combos or support a team working around unwelcome friend. The huge “cooldown” from knock back really puts me off it and makes me feel like in reality it has minor use…?
I’ve read in some other threads that people love these skills but I can’t picture them as a solid strategy. It’s after seeing this new Lunartic legendary that I’m trying to put a value on this all in my head.
P.S. To give you a better idea of what I’ve been doing with monsters I’ve attached the image of my team. I’m trying to best utilise my 3 legendaries as well as all other monsters in my team. It’s proved me well, getting me up to 200th in PvP at best.
There are low cost fast monsters such as Dracomander, Parasardon and Remus that have knockback. Not only can it knockback a charged sweeper or a protector, in general it can save your own sweeper once you learn the AI and you know what it will do next. You can avoid a dangerous sleep, a stun immune that would GT immediately after your stun (after your knockback), knockback TTs, or just knockback valuable stuff so people stop throwing (only works 50% of the time, if you knockback my Godfeather, I will still throw with Kong).
Unwanted friend monsters were my MVPs when I first did the story (and only had ultimadragon as a legendary). You can put three useless bronzeshells in their line up, and then sweep away the rest of their line up. Knock back is great if you have your stunners coming in and you want to get rid of any stun immunes / absorbers.
I used to run them at roughly 7 and 9 to put 6 bronzeshells in the enemy line, which you can stun and leave, or kill to power up one of your sweepers (e.g. TT, timestrike / bloodcraver, etc.)
In PVP, the speed of the unwanted friend monsters makes them much less useful (very rare to get it off), but the monsters with passives are still very useful (steam hawk, motordragon, lunartic).
Thanks for the comments. But what a lot of you are talking about are the USES of these skills, when I want the VALUE. I’m sorry to be picky but I can see the uses already I’m just not sure how good a setup utilising these skills would be in practice. That said, if you could tell me which uses you found best then it would point me in the right direction for how to think about these skills.
Thanks Jain for saying about unwelcome friend being not terribly effective in PvP. In my first PvP experience I had someone successfully sweep my team after they gave me a load of “friends” but I haven’t had anyone do it since despite me seeing quite a lot of enemy monsters that spawn them.
Steamhawk is a good example of a monster with these kind of skills. It was one of my first super epics but I threw it away almost instantly because in most cases it was stuck doing Ultra Bolt to power its blood crave which left it useless. I couldn’t use it reliably as a support monster because life flip all is… situational and repulse is one-time use then it is left with terrible defence and health.
Motordragon is far better but I’m still unconvinced. To me neither knock back or unwelcome entrance come into any solid strategy so I’ll stick to just having a couple of knock back creatures in my team to use if the situation arises.
Unwanted friend gives around 3 bronzeshells to your enemy team. Meaning that their combos getting screwed up (almost useless against grenaders). Its also can be used to charge your blood related moves.
For knock back, it sends enemy flying into the end of the enemy team lineup. It can be used to avoid survivor, blood related moves, and i found out that some enemy will use knock back at desperate doubler.
Combine these moves so you can get higher blood related moves before getting knock back.
Side note: lunartic’s BFE combined with knock back, it kinda feels op. But with slayerbane from prismaryx, i found out it can be negated