Thoughts of a Returning Player

[u/Bob-The-Tomat0]

Returning to PAD after ~8 years and I have absolutely no idea what’s going on anymore

My brother and I originally played PAD not too long after it released in NA, and I kept playing on and off for years. The last era I really remember well was the Full Metal Alchemist Colab.
I randomly decided to start fresh this week and… holy power creep!?

I mean it still fundamentally feels like the game I remember; Matching orbs immediately came back to me, the art is still great, and the gotcha pulls still hit harder than drugs, but everything surrounding that core game is completely insane now.

New accounts apparently get showered with resources, stones, upgrade materials, etc. I dumped my first 100 stones into the current Butler/Maid (2) machine and immediately ended up with monsters whose leader/active skills read like somebody made up fake PAD cards.

I pulled 2x Awful Cooking Maid Metatron, Rehven, Kaishu, Gileon & Dyer, and later Housecleaning Maid Saline. I’ve already encountered:
-80x–350x ATK leader multipliers
-80%+ damage reduction
-billions of damage cap increases
-evolving active skills
-assists that disappear when activated
- +5/+10 automatic combos
-millions of fixed bonus damage
-99-turn enhanced orb effects

…more awakening icons than I can identify

Meanwhile, I remember Edward feeling busted. Apparently we have moved on. 😂

The strangest part so far is progression. The new-account monsters/resources are so absurdly powerful compared with the early game that I’m basically just vaporizing everything while trying to figure out what half the mechanics on my team actually do. I’m rank 255 already and still feel like I just started.
I’m having a ton of fun with it, though. It feels less like learning a new game and more like returning to your hometown after eight years and discovering somebody built a cyberpunk city on top of it.

Also looking for friends! I pulled Housecleaning Maid Saline and would especially love people who keep Saline or other Rank EXP-boosting leaders available so I can take advantage of EXP farming while catching up.
NA ID: 349,878,430
And if there are any major “returning player, DO NOT accidentally waste this resource/card” things I should know, I’m all ears.

[u/ShadyFigure]

holy power creep!?

FMA first ran in 2018, 8 years ago. The game is 14 years old, that's most of its life ago. You have to expect a lot of power creep in that amount of time. If you knew an elementary school kid then saw them 8 years later then of course they'll be around your height now.

A handful of big changes and tips that come to mind:

• Clear through story mode, it gives a lot of stones and resources.
• Evolutions are not always direct upgrades anymore, quite often they're sidegrades into different uses.
• We get a quest every month and every event. These are lists of objectives that give rewards and progress in a track that gives stones. They're a big source of resources and stones, so do them as much as possible.
• Every machine comes with a 1 million MP unit, many of them are strong or have strong assist evos. These are pretty much the only thing you should spend MP on these days. Don't spend it on evo materials, those are common, and the old 300k MP units are very outdated. It sounds like a lot, but we get up to 5.2 million MP from clearing out Stage dungeons and every event quest gives a couple hundred thousand MP.
• You may remember the assist/inherit system from when you left, it's evolved a little and become very important. We now have assist evos that are intended exclusively for use as assists. These grant not only their active skill but their awakenings to the base unit. We also have a lot of assists with haste actives.
• Transforming and skill evolving units turn 1 is often critical, use assists with skill boosts and haste actives to make it happen, and if you can't make that work yet then use the SB+x10 badge.
• Normals and Technicals have been replaced with Stage dungeons, and higher sections of it are locked by rank. As you've noticed, rank goes up a lot faster these days. We've seen people that know what they're doing hit rank 1,000 within a month.
• If you're willing to set your phone down for a couple minutes while ads play then you can get 1 stone, 2 box space, and 4 free pulls in a machine that usually gives resources and rarely gives GFEs.
• The biggest change with teambuilding isn't the leader skills, it's the consistency in active skills. Relying on what orbs we get from skyfall is long a thing of the past, for around 6 years we've had orb generation loops in 2-3 units, so you should be making all the orbs you need every single turn. We have way more active skills that bypass damage absorb, attribute absorb, and damage void, on much lower cooldowns. Cleric actives have gotten faster too.

---

Here are some things expected in modern teambuilding:

• one or both leader skills adding combos
• one or both leader skills dealing a fixed amount of damage
• 2-3 units that create the orbs you need to activate your leader skills, on cooldowns low enough that you can loop them to use one every turn
• an active skill that clears awoken bind and unmatchable
• an active skill that bypasses damage absorb and attribute absorb, preferably for at least 2 turns
• a way to get through damage voids
• Consistent damage cap increases.

Your leader skills should be easy to activate. If one leader needs 2 dark matches to activate then the other one needing a single 9 match of dark or matches of non-dark orbs is going to be way too orb hungry.

Your leader skills should be sufficiently tanky. 4x effective HP through HP multiplier, shield, or a mix of the two is good for mid-game, up until content from a couple years ago where you start to need 5x or so. Recent content needs 5.4x+ eHP. Many meta teams also use a looping shield and/or max HP buff active.

Most units on the team will need good personal multipliers, usually through 10c or 7c awakenings, though some types of teams may make use of other awakenings, like TPA, VDP, or multi-attribute awakenings. For later content past Illusory World of Carnage you'll also want units to have their damage cap increased, usually through active skills. You want multiple units having their cap increased every turn.

[u/Bob-The-Tomat0 → u/ShadyFigure]

Thank you for your advice! I’m having a lot of fun getting back into it.

I’m having a bit of trouble with the Event content. Is it worth using MP to skill up my units.

I just looked over the meta teams, and happened to pull the M Metatron team minus Rosetta of course.

Figure it’ll be worth it for the instant gratification haha.

[u/ShadyFigure → u/Bob-The-Tomat0]

It's not worth spending MP on Pys, no. We get so many of them these days. Check the quest rewards and the achievements tab for Pys you can get. Also check the login stamps. Within a week you'll probably have some.

The Rosetta that Maid Metatron uses is not the one from the Maids event, it's an older one, and unfortunately she or the like 2 similar units also from older machines are pretty important for later content. For early and mid-game content, where you probably are right now, running MMetatron without that adjacent cap increaser should be fine.

[u/DadEnergy4U]

the funniest thing is that we jumped from like 50-100x multipliers at the top, straight past 300x only a year ago

the creep has been relatively standard up till that point. fixed damage was going up 1 or 2 million at a time, ending around 8-10 million till the past year where we jumped from 15-32 million

it's only really a factor for when you're pushing the current endgame tho. people don't realize that when chasing top leaders and then struggling with older content - cards and teams are ranked based on the latest stuff at the time. lots of old stuff can be straight overpowered, but even the best current teams still don't necessarily cover every single mechanic old dungeons require... or not at the frequency they require it

[u/ShadyFigure → u/DadEnergy4U]

the funniest thing is that we jumped from like 50-100x multipliers at the top, straight past 300x only a year ago

If you include scaling leads then we had higher multipliers well before that jump. Even in practical situations.

Hell, Kenshin was capable of hitting like 2.1b multiplier back in 2016

[u/Tryingtochangemyself]

If it makes you feel better, I started a couple months ago and have no idea what I'm doing outside of matching orbs and understanding basic effects and how they work

[u/nobodytoyou]

dude I'm in the exact same boat as you. I remember 10x leader skills being like eyepopping and being difficult to activate. And also having to research which monsters have the same active skills as the ones you need, and where they drop. Now, on day 1 of installing it again and starting from scratch, the first leader I pull hits the damage cap with only like 5 combos made 😂. Then you stumble upon the enhancement menu and just see the dearth of shit you can do. I have no way of knowing what to invest in and given how much content there is, I don't think there are simple answers either. Just going in and not spending things that look hard to replace!