@maxxmatt But if you are grinding C26/10, in about fifteen minutes you can earn enough to get 2000 mastery points for all birds. Snoutlings are irrelevant. Once I figured that out, my birds got to M100 darned quickly. (And as an interesting aside, once you are left with one bird only to mastery level up, you can go with the 15 LC buy and it is a bit cheaper, so that the same fifteen minutes of grinding gets you 5,000 master points.)
Back to the teams, especially GftT, I swap out Bard for Samurai, not Bard for Seadog. The logic is that without Bard/Nightmare, the double stun from Samurai is mostly useless anyway (see below). The extra damage done by Nightmare over the course of the level is approximately equal to two full turns (assuming you get stuns over about half the turns, and it takes 20 turns, that means that Nightmare deals about 70,000 extra damage, and the flock on average deals around 35,000 per turn). Samurai/Grand Slam doesn’t stun often enough, and even with the 150% damage, it’s not worth giving up the Nightmare effect.
There were also “phasing” effects with the 150% damage from Samurai Challenger that if he stunned you lost an attack for the extra damage. My initial tests demonstrated to me that the 150% damage while Snor was stunned was not enough to overcome the higher constant damage from the other elite Samurai classes (I think I use the one that heals a little, I forget what he is called). But perhaps I should revisit that since using Lightning Bird changes the fraction of time Snor gets stunned. (Also, Samurai Challenger in combination with Frost Savage might be useful for the initial stages, where Snor will get frozen and Samurai Challenger deals 150% damage.)
Overall, this exchange has been interesting since it’s given me a lot to play with in terms of options. The GftT team, whether you use Bard or some version of Samurai, is fun. Really nice work there coming up with it.
