KD's HP Boost guide

[Killerdog]

Contents:

• Post 2: Where to get ores of vitality
• Post 3: The strategy for optimising HP boost
• Post 4: Picking what to boost
• Post 5: Examples of good HP boost targets
• Post 6: Tier ranking the monsters for HP boost

There’s also a video for this guide which has the same information. Feel free to watch or read:

Neo Monsters - HP Boost guide (which monsters to pick)

[Killerdog]

Where to get ores of vitality

The Devs have said they're not planning to release them anywhere other than the two places below. The plan is to make HP boost a long-term benefit for consistently logging in to play and a bit of fun to boost your favourite monsters. Also, they've agreed to give option to recall ores if a boosted monster gets nerfed so people don't have to be too afraid of making the big investment on a strong monster.

1. Daily missions (1 per day)

2. Level 80 in SE MBQ (super epic bond quest)
   
   

Daily mission is some PvE stuff. They’re quick to complete, varying based on how you use your tickets. When you have high max tickets they require only a single login to do even the high ticket requirement missions. Here’s what the missions typically are:

• use X tickets
• win X monster bond quest battles
• win a youth fruit / silver mission (super versions count)
• collect the free daily friend chest
  
  

SE MBQ farming is a big investment of time and resources to do. You should not undertake it lightly! In the collapsed section below I dive very deep into how to approach it. Here’s a quick summary:

• Only do it when high HR (250+ or so), otherwise it’s too expensive. Do it on auto-play where it takes 2.5 - 3 hours per ore, because it takes too long to actually consider playing manually.

How to farm Super Epic MBQ for ores (click here)

The amount of tickets to take one SE from lvl 0-80 is 50 * 20 + 30 * 30 = 1900 tickets. Let’s run some maths on that…
Free tickets per day = 240. 1900/240 = roughly 8 days. That’s 800 days to get a single HP boost!

So, realistically you’ll need to refill tickets with gems to farm them. The gem cost is variable based on your max tickets. Also, bear in mind you get back some gems from the rewards.
Level 20, 40, 60 and 70 give you 8 gems total, plus 30 and 50 give you small nectar which together is the equivalent to 1 gem.

The calculation for cost is: 100 * 1900 / [max tickets] - 9 gems per HP boost

Note that battles are done using either 20 or 30 tickets at a time so only every 10 max tickets makes a difference to the cost. Also, it takes time to use up your tickets so you can be about 2 tickets below a round number and it’s fine (hence I use rough HR below).
At hero rank 50 (100 tickets) = 1000 gems
At hero rank 100 (120 tickets) = 683 gems
At hero rank 180 (140 tickets) = 457 gems
At hero rank 240 (160 tickets) = 288 gems
At hero rank 296+ (190 tickets) = 100 gems

As you can see, the cost drops dramatically at high hero rank. I really wouldn’t recommend farming in this way unless you’re high hero rank.

The time required to do the battles is also extreme. For a single HP boost it’s 8000 battles. You can manually complete battles in 1-2 minutes with something like a Purpie team (like my setup below), but in practice I think it’s better to do it with auto-play. This is something I’ve personally done, so here’s my timings and team.

Levels	1-10	11-20	21-30	31-40	41-50	51-60	61-70	71-80	Total
Average time (s)	32	43	57	71	119	134	157	196	2hrs 40mins

A few notes on those times:

• There’s 20 seconds between battles (loading screens and such), which in practice will be longer because while you’re doing auto-play you won’t be paying attention so won’t click things as soon as the battle is done. The total column includes the time between battles, but assumes no extra delays.
• Moving Bloomeluga into the front line for levels 1-40 would quite significantly speed up these battles.
• Beyond lvl 40 the battles have a large variance in length. Most battles are below the average shown, but the average is inflated by the occasional battle which took ages (e.g. a cloning enemy that isn’t being killed properly). If you’re able to step in to help, these longer battles can be avoided.
• In levels 60-80 I found I needed to intervene to help win the battle occasionally, (10% for 61-70 and 15% for 71-80). If your team is weaker this amount may be higher.

My Purpie setup for quick manual play:

Auto-play team (this was for reptiles):

Monsters that work well in auto-play are ones that frequently attack with high damage moves and are naturally tanky (stealth and shields count for a lot here). Some generic mythic examples are: Carmilla, Don Rilla and Hazuki. Cloning monsters are especially good, but not all of them (e.g. Doomengine is too slow to attack). Blitzdyr and Torrentide are the standouts from my experience. There are other aspects which play into it and ultimately the best idea is to try things out yourself to see which monsters work and which don’t.

Mortar monsters typically work well because they regularly shield themselves, their damage attacks are good enough for dealing with mildly buffed enemies and they don’t waste time on non-critical attacks because they don’t have any. @Unown has done auto-play for years and was the one to recognise mortar is great for it. He and I have worked together to build our auto teams for this SE MBQ farming.

So the team I played has mortar in the first half and then some good cloning monsters behind. Armadiator is especially good for killing enemies quickly in the lower levels. There’s some other small synergy like Blitzdyr is in the middle to support both mortar and Tenebris with purify (poison is a big problem). Blitzdyr is actually the strongest monster in this team, +9 and without the SS makes it quick enough to clone and attack well. Soral is there as something generically good which can easily be a win condition if I take over manually so if I noticed I was losing the battle I’d turn off auto and win with Soral, doing baby conversion on the SEs behind.

[Killerdog]

The strategy for optimising HP boost

In practice, with the 1 daily ore we get about 3.5 boosted monsters a year. In any team, you use roughly 14 strong monsters so that's 4 years to have them all boosted. Plus we're using different monsters in each team, getting new monsters, etc. Hence, the reality is probably just some of your team will be HP boosted (e.g. 5?).

For that reason, it’s essential to think of HP boost only in the long-term. The question is: What would you like to have HP boosted 2+ years from now? That can’t be something which is good in the specific PvP meta right now, it needs to be more generically strong. Also, the game is trending towards high defence monsters (especially important because things will be HP boosted too). Also, mythics are generally accessible over time due to the fortune shrine so we should assume the future meta is where we’re playing mostly with and against mythics.

Hence, monsters ideally need to be doing 6k+ damage to tanky mythics in order to kill HP boosted mythics as well as some other criteria we’re about to list in the section below.

However, first there’s a key concept I came to realise while considering what kind of advantage you can get from HP boost. I think this is probably the biggest advantage it gives you:

• If you pick tanky mythics to HP boost, you can create a team that many opponents will struggle to kill and that will make you win easily against those players.

We already see this with mythics vs other teams and it will be even more so if those mythics are tanky plus also have extra HP. People will have to be prepared to face teams like yours by using monsters that deal very high damage in order to stand a proper chance. If they are using some monsters which don’t do enough damage you can quite easily ignore those ones.

[Killerdog]

Picking what to boost

The criteria (in order of importance):

• Deal 6k+ damage to high defence monsters (or damage is not important because they are for support, disruption, etc.)
• Generically very strong
• Mythics
• High defence
• (Bonus) Large impact on the first turn, or benefit from surviving (extra HP helps get there)

Not many monsters meet all criteria, so the bonus can make up for some shortcomings in the others. It’s most important that the monster deals 6k+ damage than it being high defence itself, because if you’re facing a meta of high defence mythics and your monsters can’t kill them they’ll be too easily ignored while your monsters which do enough damage are targeted and killed.

[Killerdog]

Examples of good HP boost targets

Note: you can click on the images below to see them bigger.

Example 1

Momo has enormous defence, is stun protection so you want it to be hard to kill, deals 6k piercing damage any time it attacks and it can even heal itself when it switches between protector and stun counter so regains the extra HP. It’s a very strong mythic and a clear choice as one of the best for HP boost.

Example 2

Plumesilisk is a protector so will get in the way of more attacks with the boost. Also, the HP boost is passed onto the protector babies so they will become proportionately even more tanky. The damage output here is lacking, but it doesn’t matter because you can use it primarily for protection and support.

Example 3

Gremoris has high defence and on its first turn can begin putting the enemy team to sleep so making it harder to kill before that is useful. Dreamcrush deals well over 6k piercing damage and Gremoris wants to stay alive a long time to invoke and charge bloodbath (or invoke others too) so HP boost helps it stick around. The SS damage is poor, but you can just have that turned off.

Example 4

Elemphox (shadow) needs to be used with a holy monster then has very high defence and deals enough damage with flaming blaze and stone missile. The control with frozen punch and thundering strike is very powerful, regardless of the damage dealt. Hold ground and poison immunity make it hard to take out without piercing and a great target for healing.

Example 5

Bastia has enormous defence and doesn’t care about damage because it’s full support. Healing itself is stronger when it has boosted HP but it’s especially good to be healing other tanky HP boosted monsters on your team. Goddess’ protection on a fully HP boosted team is very hard to get through.

Example 6

Mantiferno has low defence and can easily be killed before it gets a turn so it’s definitely not the best choice. However, the accelerate on your team is guaranteed and powerful plus when it does get turns it can then rapidly do 6k+ damage piercing attacks (man eater is actually 68TU because of the acceleration and +9 bonus, raw mark is 33TU into 88TU raw cornered snipe then 88TU bloodfury). This example is to show that, while not ideal, there are some monsters like this which are strong and can do enough damage they may be worth HP boosting after the best ones and you should look for stuff like this rather than weaker monsters with high defence.

[Killerdog]

Tier ranking the monsters for HP boost

To see the tier list, check out the Neo Monsters tier list thread. The first posts include all the tier lists, including the HP boost tier lists.

Here was the video I made detailing all my initial rankings of mythics:

Neo Monsters - Best Mythics to HP boost (ranking all 90)

Here was the video I made detailing all my initial rankings of legendaries:

Top HP boost legendaries