Prolouge

So I generally don't like playing games on my phone, and I dislike the whole free to play game with time mechanics, but about five months ago Puzzle and Dragons proved to be the exception to the rule. I spent a little over four months playing the game off and on, and without spending a dime or assailing friends on Facebook with requests for "stuff" was able to build a pretty strong team together. My "monster box" was filled with things which were just pulled from the rare egg machine which could build some teams capable of even clearing some of the harder "descended" dungeons which looks to be part of the game's endgame. (Among those were a Loki, Karin, Sakuya, both a Love and Chaos Venus and Hera.) When my phone's contract was up I transferred data to the new phone, and began playing again when something happened to the sim card reader in my phone. No problem I thought, I'll just get another transfer code when my new phone comes in and move that data across. The transfer wasn't hard, so it shouldn't be a problem.

So before factory resetting my broken phone for my new one, I went to get a transfer code and found out you can only get one every 30 days. Then my phone was factory reset. I could probably go and request my data be transferred through customer service, (I haven't spent a dime, but my team was over rank 100 so I would be eligible), but I've heard the wait time on that can be almost a week. Left with the option of waiting for my team to be transferred and starting over, I chose the second option.

Day 1

Having played the game to a decent rank before, there were things I was looking for in the early levels to boost my progress back to where I was before. Going through the initial dungeons I began trying to choose carefully what friend monsters I was pulling, although the decisions were making themselves. An Echinda? An Isis? All I'd need is a good pull out of the starter dungeons, where the last part of the tutorial is you spending the five stones you've received from clearing levels on a rare egg pull, put that in the leader to show some reciprocal usefulness, and I'd be on my way.

And then I pull a Vampire. A lot of people complain about some of the "bad" pulls you can get from the rare egg machine but this is possibly the worst "rare" monster you can pull for your initial rare egg. It has no leader skills, middle to lower end stats, and is going to force you into using the default monster as your leader for the foreseeable future. For people who haven't started playing Puzzle and Dragons, a hint, you should never use your starter monster as your leader. It gives potential "friends" the impression you just went through the tutorial and stopped playing and since access to those leaders are based on you logging in, it means you're a "dead friend". The vampire's not going to inspire anything, and it's going to cripple me in the early game. I'm left with the decision to wipe my data and start again, or try to tough it out.

So I wipe my data and try again. I'm not going to do this over and over until I get an Isis, Odin, Karin, or other monster that will make the early part of the game a cakewalk, but I want at least something I can work with. I say goodbye to the friends I hadn't made yet, and push through the early part of the dungeon again. After clearing the tutorial stages again, I get a Basilisk (1.5x ATK for Dark Monsters). This isn't a great start, but it's workable, All the more workable because a Midnight Gala (which increases rare egg machine drop rates for dark monsters) just started, and a Godfest (which increases rare egg machine drop rates for specific gods, in this case Norse and Egyptian gods which includes Isis, Loki, Anubis, and Ra) starts the next day. My goal for day one, collect as many stones as possible and once both are active, dump them into the machine, and hope for the best.

I log out and log back in, since the "Hearts a Flutter" event is on right now, I end up getting a TAMADRA from it. TAMADRA is useful in the late game because it can be used to "Awaken" your monsters, giving them extra skills such as damage reduction, auto-heal, bind resistance, or reducing the amount of turns required to use skills when you start a dungeon. TAMADRA are also extremely hard to come by, and my old team would have gone through 20 of them without blinking an eye, so picking up some now for future usage is a great boost. I even throw it into my team's roster because it's more powerful than any of my starter light monsters, and it's healing allows me to focus more on hp and damage with my other slots at this stage.

In forming my team, most of my slots are taken up with dark monsters. Baddie and the Black Fighter that I received out of the tutorial stages come onto the team, and my Tyrra and TAMADRA fill out the rest. This leaves me with no wood or water attack, but now with three monsters getting Basilisk's effect. I begin pushing Tyrra to Tyran because it's evo material comes quickly, and push my way up to the first Dark dungeon "The Dungeon of Darkness". Here's the problem, for every dark monster I pull to fuse or possibly replace the two I have, I'm getting three or four red, blue, and green monsters. I decide that I'm strong enough to push to the second dark dungeon, Pluto Valley. And by the end of the day make it there and inch just before the next level when I decide to call it a day. I've dealt as well as possible with a severe shortage of money, thanks to aggressive fusion which in the end even gets Tyrra fused into Tyrannos, giving me a fire ally that's becoming equivalent to the Basilisk. I'm also able to evolve Baddie into Big Baddie where his special ability (turn heal orbs into dark orbs) becomes essential for making sure that damage can be consistently churned out, especially in boss battles. There's a part of me thinking that I'm going to have to start farming Baddies (?) so I can try to get his skill level up (which reduces the amount of turns it takes to use his skill). Farming skills is something I wish I did more the last time I played through, so doing so from the onset, especially with something which can manipulate the color or orbs, is going to be handy.

As the day goes on, some friend requests are allowed, and I get access to some pretty powerful friend monsters. The friends are going to become more important depending on the Godfest/Gala drops which should further hone which monsters will be most important to have on that friends list. Two Isis (3x attack when 3 colors attack), two Naga (delay opponents for 3 turns), an Andromeda (4x attack when 8 blue orbs chain together), and an Anubis (10x attack for a 10+ combo) is a good start, although those lists will constantly be in flux as new gods come in. It allows me to be aggressive in the early stages, which I was. The Isis are key, as they're easy to trigger, and I might use the Anubis in the weekend dungeon because it's limited to three colors and he can actually hit often there, although some luck is involved.

At the end of the first day, I'm already back up to rank 17, with 3 xp left to my next level. I figure this allows me to take a flyer on a more dangerous dungeon, and if I fail I'll be able to just level back up in 20 minutes (if there's a stamina reduction low level dungeon available) but I don't think I have a strong enough team to take on an expert level dungeon yet, so I might just run a weekend dungeon and collect some coins since being aggressive with my fusion means I'm generally low on coins to fuse monsters. A few good runs in the weekend dungeon can solve that, and being close to the next level, it allows me to try to be aggressive and possibly try an expert level while still having an intermediate dungeon to fall back on.

Team 1 (normal team): Basilisk (lvl 30), Big Baddie (lvl 8), Black Fighter (lvl 10), TAMADRA, Tyrannos (lvl 11)

Team 2 (Isis team): Basilisk (lvl 30), Black Fighter (lvl 10), TAMADRA, Tyrannos (lvl 11), Hobgoblin (lvl 1)