Gathering snoutlings in AB EPIC?

[ToothGnasher]

There is a downside to the Mouth Pool and Caves – you can only get mastery points for two birds at once. It seems to me Rovio has been tweaking SRC and DPC so they are now harder.

[McDeathUK]

Star Reef Castle (ideally this is for 20+ level chars)

Druid White Bird, Captain Bomb Bird, Spy Blues

Stick it on auto play and let them play themselves whilst you do other things, after about 5-8 mins 150 snoutlings.. rinse and repeat.

[CrumpledStories]

My current SRC build is as follows:

Samurai (for shielding)
Princess (healing + effect removal)
Lightning bird (for dispelling)

I can finally beat Wizpig with this build, but I am still having problems with the second last wave, so I usually just manually do that wave. I have tried many other builds, but I find that a dispeller and a shielder is vital, without birds that do that I cannot beat Wizpig.

I am still keeping an eye on this thread though, looking for alternative builds and hoping to soon be able to beat the whole level on autoplay

[ToothGnasher]

One weeks worth of measurements… Starting from when my account was nerfed, building it back up over Thanksgiving Holiday. You can do better manually, but this was automated play.

Bottom line, SRC – Star Reef Castle is still the best place to accrue snoutlings. DPC – Desert Pig Castle is a good place to get mastery, too.

Note that “SRC-1” or “SRC1” means playing the first wave only, then restarting the battle. The “%” indicates a 10% battle boost.

[MadMike]

Paladin-pirate-tricksters works excellent on SRC (autoplay). No unnecessary buffs except paladin few times. +40% att all for 3 turns + cleansing and paladin healing is unbeatable

[marioandsonic]

Personally I use Paladin-Thunderbird-SeaDog on SRC. It helps even more that my SeaDog has the Pickpocket set bonus.

(I haven’t tried auto-play with it, because I don’t really trust the AI…)

EDIT: Didn’t work. The Paladin-Wizard-Captain combo works much better, though

[Anonymous]

I’ve been thinking about SRC and realized that it is a pretty good place to get mastery but has anybody tried any OTHER castles? I mean like King Pigs Castle. I just have a feeling in my stomach that it would be a good place to get mastery. Because think about it. It’s got some of the bigger enemies in it. SRC got brought up because someone ( Me ) reported that it gave a ton of Snoutlings. When they added mastery they only went there and DPC because they thought it was the best. It is for Snoutlings but we don’t know for sure about mastery points. There could be a secret powerhouse castle that give way more mastery that SRC and DPC. Which could be Cobalt Pig Castle, Moutain Pig Castle or King Pigs Castle. Someone needs to run some tests on those expecially King Pigs Castle because I just feel like it has high potential.

[marioandsonic]

@partshade

I haven’t really played KPC after they nerfed how many Snoutlings you can get from it.

[Anonymous]

@marioandsonic Me either but I’m talking about Mastery not Snoutlings.

[GrauGeist]

Dodge on Porky is the issue with some of the other Castles. SRC doesn’t have any Dodge monsters, so you can take any bird and do fine.

[ToothGnasher]

@partshade If you don’t autoplay to the end King Pig Castle may work, but the combination of Porky who ignores high damage and the other characters who take high damage means the end is unwinable on autoplay because autoplay isn’t smart enough to know whom to attack with what. This is also true of Desert Pig Castle with Porky at the end.

By the way there is a separate thread talking about Mastery rather than Snoutlings.

Ultimately, however to maximize Mastery (or Snoutlings) you want three things to be true:
1. You can autoplay it so there is less effort on your part. Obviously the longer it can run by itself, the less you have to intervene.
2. You must have a combination that will reliably survive at least to some specific wave.
3. It autoplays quickly. Things that prevent quick autoplay include: lots of piggies who each take a turn, pigs that summon or regenerate, and pigs that heal heavily or shield themselves. KPC and DPC do not have regeneration or summoning, but there are pigs that shield and heal (and reduce the birds damage).

One of the advantages of only playing a few waves (or only the first wave) before restarting is that you don’t have to have a healer in the group – but you may have to restart every 30 seconds. See my “Automated Mastery and Snoutlings” that I posted earlier.

Finally, the advantages of the dungeons are that they level up as you do, and you can take three of your birds. These both result in more mastery per piggy slain. The disadvantage is that dungeon pigs are tougher to defeat.

IMHO the single most useful power up is the Golden Chili. The autoplay is not smart enough to use the Golden Chili until the second attack, however.

[CDRGuy]

I’ve found that Cleric + Capt’n + ? works pretty reliably on autoplay. This is nice, as you can choose any Red/Blue/Chuck class you like. If you want to work on a bomb class, replace Capt’n with Tricksters. Working on Matilda’s classes is a bit rougher, as the AI for cleric is pretty good (attack often, debuff before Wizpig attacks).

[KillerKea]

The best place to gain mastery was the 9 wave Into the Void event because almost every wave had 6-7 enemies and most of them didn’t do much damage. When you got to the Dragon at wave 9 you could restart and auto play the previous 8 levels again. I gained tons of experience and mastery this way. Since the BEEP set wasn’t nerfed at the time, I breezed through those 8 waves with ease. Hopefully they have a similar event to this later on, but they changed things so you can’t restart events now.

[Zack Voyager]

Another way to have more and more snoutlings: find a dungeon with a wealthy rogue and replay it when reaching the 5th wave. I’ve done this on a dungeon w/ 2 wealthy guys and gained 50 snoutlings per one killed. But this ****** necromancer managed to kill me w/ his ************** HP stealing.

[Chris]

@zackvoyager: a waelthy rogue always gives 50 snoutlings. You don’t need to find him in a dungeon.

[greatleo]

@toothgnasher good points about the limitations of King Pig Castle and Desert Pig Castle. In addition, because of the combinations of ignoring high damage and low damage, you’re limited both on the character classes you can use, but also on which weapon sets they carry.

@partshade

On Dec. 1st I measured the mastery increases for Desert Pig Castle and Star Reef Castle in back-to-back attacks using the same characters, and got a surprising result: SRC is much better. I expected them to be the same.

Here’s the data, showing before and after “Mastery to Next Rank”:

Desert Pig Castle
Samurai (Mastery 9): 30636 – 30594 = 42
Capt’n (Mastery 8): 10249 – 10207 = 42
Marksmen (Mastery 9): 47980 – 47938 = 42

Star Reef Castle
Samurai (Mastery 9): 30587 – 30531 = 56
Capt’n (Mastery 8): 10200 – 10144 = 56
Marksmen (Mastery 9): 47931 – 47875 = 56

I remeasured SRC just now, since it almost seemed to good to be true, and it’s even better than before:

Samurai (Mastery 9): 29010 – 28947 = 63
Capt’n (Mastery 8): 8605 – 8542 = 63
Marksmen (Mastery 9): 46875 – 46812 = 63

[burbman]

@greatleo – interesting observation! I wonder if this is a case of small sample size affecting the results. Looks like you only got 6 mastery drops in DPC while SRC gave you 8 and 9 in the two runs respectively (mastery in castles seems to drop in multiples of 7).

[Nytmair]

@crumpledstories- In case you are still struggling (prob not since I assume you’re past lvl30 by now), I am finally starting to get some auto-play full passes on SRC.

Level 27
Rainbird-5
Druid-6
Tricksters-5

[dr_ishmael]

@greatleo Mastery is random. You always get the same number of points from each drop, but pigs don’t always drop mastery. When a pig dies and the XP stars and snoutlings pop out, you’ll sometimes see a mastery ribbon above them. That means you earned mastery points from that pig.

“Big” pigs drop double mastery – mustache, wizard, armored, brute, Porky/Wizpig – but it’s still a fixed amount per pig.

@burbman Yep, Leo’s 3 runs aren’t enough to draw any firm conclusions. However, his experiences match my statistical projections – Desert and Mountain are the worst castles for farming mastery. (I posted this in the mastery thread, but since it got hijacked into a DPS discussion, might as well hijack this one into a mastery discussion.)

King Pig is statistically the best when considering the full 4 waves before the boss, but the first wave of Cobalt has the highest potential. If you factor in actual time to clear the waves, then Cobalt is probably the best since none of the pigs have any healing, protection, or summoning effects. Star Reef is the clear favorite when you want to farm snoutlings and mastery together.

[Anonymous]

See everybody. @dr_ishmael has proven that SRC is not the BEST place to gain mastery but is still good.

[ToothGnasher]

@dr_ishmael: I’m setting up a CPC run for an hour, first wave only and I’ll publish the results. Interestingly, I played it three times with different birds each time. The first time I played CPC to the end and got 56 mastery per bird. The second I played to wave 4 and got 35. The third time I played ONLY wave one and got *35*!

Funny how this thread is now about Mastery :-)

[dr_ishmael]

@partshade I never claimed to prove anything, these are just predictions – but that’s what we have @toothgnasher around for!

[greatleo]

@dr_ishmael I don’t care for places like King Pig’s Castle, where I have to fight a combination of pigs that ignore greater than X damage, like Prince Porky, and pigs that ignore less than Y damage, like a Guard Captain or Royal Guard. In 3 out of 5 waves, there are birds that can only successfully attack certain pigs. Samurai is the most useable Red character, and Cannoneer is the most useable Bomb character, and even then I have to re-arm them with weak weapons to make them effective across all waves.

Additionally, the final waves don’t lend themselves to automatic play.

I don’t quite get your concept of “potential mastery points per wave”. One reason is that I’ve never gotten anywhere near to your potential numbers on any castle. Right now, I’m getting 42 mastery points total, for all 5 waves, from King Pig’s Castle. That’s less than 30% of the potential. Meanwhile, SRC is also giving 42, with the advantage of 120 snoutlings per trip through. Every 3 trips through I can buy 5 more Rage Chilis, with 60 snoutlings left over. I have a degree in Math, so I understand the concept of randomness, but SRC has proven day in and day out to be the best performer.

On top of that, the final wave of King Pig’s doesn’t lend itself to automatic play.

In Star Reef Castle, any bird I pick, with any weapon set, is usable against any pig in every wave. And a lot of combinations lend themselves to automatic play. In my book that’s a huge bonus over King Pig’s Castle.

Recently I’ve been working to raise my Knight, Cleric and Berserker from level 8 to level 9. Together they are a particularly weak combination since their secondary abilities don’t support each other very well. Despite that, I’m able to easily win wave after wave of SRC (albeit by hand), and finally got my Cleric to level 9. They all deliver damage that Prince Porky would ignore.

[ToothGnasher]

I just ran for 1/2 an hour in Cobalt Pig Castle with:

Thunderbird9, Pirate9 (Golden Gun/Bullet Set), Spies9 (Robot Beep) only running the first wave for 22 cycles and got… gulp… 4706 mastery per hour (1570 each per hour) equivalent. I can drive that higher, too, because it was fully automated and twice it floundered into waves 2 and 3. Nice thing about CPC is that I’ve seen the wealthy rogue show up a few times here.

Now the next experiment. Fully automated “manual” battle (no autoplay). I’ll use Lightning9, Skulkers9 and Pirate9. Skulkers on himself to increase everyone’s damage, rage chili on Pirate, and Lightning on Pirate to kill the strongest pig left then restart. I let it run for nearly an hour and it racked up 1540 mph per bird! Yowza. It also gained a quite respectable 710 snoutlings per hour.

[dr_ishmael]

@greatleo The potential is the total mastery points you would get for that wave if every pig in the wave dropped mastery. As I said, pigs don’t drop mastery all the time, so you’ll usually see something less than that number. However, if my assumption that all pigs have the same drop rate is correct, then the amount you actually receive will average out over time to be some percentage of the potential total. Thus, I made the comparisons and projections based on the potential totals since I haven’t taken time to figure out the drop rate yet.

I already stated that I ignored the boss waves for exactly the reasons you stated – not all teams can beat them all the time. Porky appears in every castle except SRC, which is why SRC has the lowest threshold – you just have to deal more damage than Wizpig can heal.

I’ve also repeatedly clarified that these are only statistical projections – obviously different teams will find some castles easier than other teams. Where I’m at (XP level 41 / all classes rank 8+ / level 41 weapon for each bird), only Rainbird and Druid deal less damage than the Ironclad threshold (247) which means I don’t have any trouble with KPC.

How long does it take you to kill Wizpig with that team? If it’s longer than 4 rounds, that’s pretty inefficient considering he only drops 14 mastery (IF he drops it!). Unless you need the snoutlings, I’d suggest restarting when you reach Wizpig – it should improve your mastery/time ratio.