This post is a summary of the mastery discussion that occurred in the snoutlings thread. It is heavily edited, and the order of some posts have been changed. I hope I gave credit to everyone appropriately, and didn’t distort what you said.
@partshade: Asked if there might another castle that gives more mastery than SRC if your primary objective was mastery rather than snoutlings.
@graugeist and @toothgnasher pointed out that King Pig Castle and Desert Pig Castle, which have Prince Porky at the end can’t be won on autoplay.
@greatleo: 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.
@toothgnasher: 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.
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.
@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. Hopefully they have a similar event to this later on, but they changed things so you can’t restart events now.
@greatleo: 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 re-measured 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 to @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).
@dr_ishmael to @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.
@dr_ishmael to @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.
[MV Edit]: In the table
Mastery Points
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 ignored the boss waves because 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. If it takes more than 4 rounds for the last wave with Wizpig in SCR or Prince Porky in the others, I’d suggest restarting when you reach the last wave (unless you need the snoutlings) – it should improve your mastery/time ratio.
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.
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.
@toothgnasher to @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*!
@greatleo to @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.
[MV edit]: Additionally, the final waves of KPC and others with Porky don’t lend themselves to automatic play.
[In my experience] SRC has proven day in and day out to be the best performer. 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.
@greatleo to @dr_ishmael @toothgnasher If it is the case that all (or perhaps most) pigs have the potential to give the same # of mastery points (perhaps with the exception of bosses?), it seems then that a simple strategy would be to do as @toothgnasher managed to figure out: wipe out a bunch of pigs in a small amount of time, and play the odds for mastery.
In less than a half hour I got 882 mastery points for my Knight, Priestess and Berserker in Cobalt Pig Castle.
The first wave has a Big Boss, a Bird Catcher, and 4 Stick Pigs. For the first several tries, I took out the entire wave. Bomb’s Explode took out the weaker 4 pigs, but Big Boss always needed two or three more hits before losing. At that point I had to wait for the next wave to load.
It then occurred to me that since it’s more or less an issue of probabilities, then quickly restarting after the Explode might give faster mastery increase. This seems to bear it out.
Again, thanks Ishmael for your patience.
@dr_ishmael to
@greatleo Most pigs drop the same amount that increases with pig level (7 at level 41). Some pigs drop double that amount. I haven’t compiled a complete listing yet, but I’m fairly certain that all variants of these pigs are included.
Brute
Knight
Mustache
Shaman
Wizard (white mustache)
“Big” versions of basic pig types also drop double mastery, including Corporal and Banshee, as well as all “boss” pigs like Porky and Wizpig. (I haven’t done much research outside of the castles.)
As for your new farming strategy, good job! If you’ve got the time and the patience to sit there repeatedly restarting that wave, it’s definitely the most efficient for just farming mastery. I usually just let my birds loose on auto-play while I do other stuff and restart whenever I notice that they’re on the final wave
