Class Wars strategy

Tomorrow is Class Wars, so I would like to share some thoughts on Class Wars - from a mage's view, of course, but maybe some advices work for other classes as well.

Testing. It is very important that you decide in advance what skills, astrals, sylph you will use, and make some testings. Find someone of your class with similar BR who is willing to do some practice with you. Go to altar of enoblement, you can duel there unlimited time without losing HP potions. Try out different strategies, see what works best for you. But make sure you do not go in the direction of just trying to beat the specific setup your friend is using! This practice is good for something else too. CW is some stress (at least for me), and any mistake can be fatal. So you must have a good routine at knowing what to do, what skill to use. You hands should not shake :)

Preparation. This is a good time to use all the sepulcrum you saved up (waiting for a sepu spender event), upgrading your astral, refining/identifying your last cloth. Make sure you have all the lvl 5 potions (do not buy it for balens! Just roll guild wheel each day 30 times, you will have enough), and scrolls (you can get them from guild wheel too, or buy them for crypt tokens). 5 minutes before CW, double-check skills, astrals, sylph, your PVP medallion, then drink the potions, and use the scrolls (2 of each since scroll last only for 30 minutes).

The swiss system. People complain about pairing all the time, even though it works fine. Each round, you get paired with someone with the same number of wins. BR has nothing to do here. Earlier, this system was exploitable, since the first rounds were less points than the later ones, so it was a good strat to lose the first 4 match. Not anymore. Just try your best. If you lose, no worries, your next opponent will be weaker probably.

Astrals. Some astrals work better than others. If I were you, I wouldn't use Illusion, for example. Guardian angel is great, on the other hand. It's a reason why I don't recommend a mage use crit setup: even if you like it for emotional reasons, guardian angel will ruin it during cw.
Deflection is a funny gamble astral. It's main strength is, if it triggers when your opponent would kill you and you kill him as well, you will win. If it wins you one match you would otherwise lose, it served its purpose.
If you think between HP and block, I would go for HP.

Slyph. A slyph does 3 things during cw: it determines the elemental form of your attacks, it deals some damage based on its stats in passive state, and it deals massive damage in awakened form, based on your atk and the mahra and sepulcrum you spent on the sylph.
If you have a sylph where the quality/sepu is much, much more than your other sylphs, use that - it will deal more damage, regardless of other considerations. If you have several similarly powerful sylphs, consider what others use in your category, and what works best against that (I mean here the resist / elemental type).
My personal opinion is that for mages, Hades is the best choice, for others, Gaia. Unfortunately, not everyone had 400 bucks (me included) to have a Hades.



The duel itself. Chaos rune is widely used now, so you have to be prepared for that. For a mage, it does not make much difference - troops die in 2 rounds anyway, and then you start sylph phase at max hp, but for other classes where it is a damage race, it can be lethal. It's best to wait a little at the beginning to see what your opponent is going to do, before eating/using a chaos. Besides chaos, my other favorite is still bleed rune.

The duel is decided by awakened sylphs. Before that, we just toy around: kill troops, heal up, purify each other's bleed - but the sylph delphic is usually a finisher, whoever can cast it first AFTER the 50% damage increase wins. Therefore, you must time your awaken well. If you awaken too early, eat a bleed and use sylph skills before 50%, your opp heals up and then finish you off. If you fumble too long with purify and healing, the Hades big nuke kills you. BR, ATK is not as important as timing. Practice it with someone a lot in advance.

Good luck all!