Guild Wars (Unite & Fight)

Guild wars is the most controversial event in the game. However, its rewards are second-to-none, allowing you to buy sunstones, evolites, and gold bars, along with being required to recruit eternals, a set of useful and sometimes game-breaking characters. Even when the eternals aren’t best in slot, they are still a great character to have for players missing the best gacha characters.

Guild wars has multiple components to them, so we will break down each part in detail.

Token Boxing

Like the regular story events that occur at the end of the month, GW has a token box that you empty by acquiring tokens from various raids. Traditionally most token boxing is done quickly at EX+, which people generally aim to kill in OTK or preferably within 2-3 buttons. However newer players can box via raid joins at the cost of many berries.

Unlike regular events, the player is able to control which item is in the box. Until you have completed the eternals, you have to choose an eternal weapon. We will share guidance on choosing eternals elsewhere. After you finish that, you get the option of farming either summons for quartz or farming useless damascus dust (which you will never choose to do).

The token box part of GW is entirely solo, and doesn’t need to be done in a crew, but the other aspect of GW will get you your tokens naturally…

Our recommended minimum number of boxes is 8 for a very new player (although you can contemplate going as far as 44) to get two MLB eternals immediately. Less new players should always aim for at least 48 boxes (one FLB eternal and one MLB eternal). The price per box increases 3x after 44, so this is equivalent to 58-boxing at the original price. Eventually players should aim for at least 88 boxes per GW (two FLB eternals), but if your gold bars aren’t sufficient enough this is less important. Truly intense players may aim for 168 boxes (two FLB eternals + extra weapons for blue skin) especially if aiming for high ranking (top 100).

Competition (Honors)

In the competition part of GW, crews compete to earn valor badges which are spent on sunstones, gold bars, and evolites. Tier B and below get peanuts, so its very important to be in Tier A to reliably get a meaningful amount of valor badges. (Originally, Tier B and below didn’t even exist; they were added in place of a system that allowed you to get into Tier A on pity points every few GW)

In addition to tokens, each fight gives a set amount of honor, which is contributed to your crews score. GW has three phases:

• Preliminaries - The top 7000 crews advance to tier A, and then some amount advance to B and C. There is also seeding but it is going away soon so we will not cover it. Hosting nightmare raids in the battles costs meat, so people generally farm meat in this phase.
• Interlude - During this time crews that plan to actually win matches will farm meat. Some people will play for ranking (basically required for top 2k/top 100)
• Finals - D1/D2 at NM95, and D3/D4 at NM100. During this phase each crew is assigned an opponent and the crew with the highest score wins the match for some cool rewards. Each match is somehow based on previous matches in such a way that strong crews tend to get matched with strong crews; for this reason it is beneficial to keep scores low. There are also point minimums to for losses, the largest at 250M, to get extra rewards. Achieving 1 billion in either a win or a loss scores an extra 10 valor badges.

There is also an individual competition, but the maximum rewards are at top 50K which is not generally incredibly difficult (easily obtainable even in a sandbagging crew) besides a cool title for getting top 2K. Some people like to rank in the top 100 for epeen. Outside of maybe your first GW depending on timing, we recommend always obtaining top 50K due to the low effort required for high reward.

Types of Crews

We will only be covering tier A crews here, since other crews may not as well be doing anything at all. We can divide Tier A crews into various categories:

• Tier A and Slack - These crews tend to hit 250M and then stop or argue about fighting or whatever. This nets 40 badges for a loss or 60 badges when they happen to win because they got matched with another slack crew that slacked harder. Outside of maybe your first GW you don’t really want to be in one of these crews, because the next tier gets more rewards for basically no work. These often tend to have a lot of drama between members who can’t decide whether they want to be a slacker or a tryhard.
• Tier A and lose at 1 billion - These crews get 1 billion (to get 50 badges instead of 40) and may also try to end at a slightly higher ending rank (possibly top 2k). Like above tihs is very low effort, taking about 1 hour a day with strong magna setups, and will generally net you a few wins due to matchmaking.
• Competitive crews. These crews actually fight for wins. We can further subdivide these by what kinds of requirements they have ; many require players to be active in the first hour (or multiple hours). Japanese crews tend to have both a strong morning and evening rush. Some crews will fight all day; some will give up if they lose morning rush. Crews that slog over the day are slightly less likely to have a strong morning rush, but generally people who are competitive enough to play all day will also be on at the start. The variance in this category is pretty wild so even when these crews get matched with each other the match may end quickly because one crew is much faster than the other.

Contrary to popular opinion, GW matches are usually less about who plays more and more about which crew is faster - the vast majority of the time the faster crew wins and most of the time it is not contested, especially if crews are keeping their points low to avoid chance of matching against another strong crew. Just by all playing at the right time, these crews are able to put in a low amount of effort for a large amount of rewards. Still, maximum rewards will almost certainly require playing a long fight at some point in your career.

At the very minimum a player who can attend morning rush should always be in at least a crew that does morning rush to aim for wins even if they don’t fight long matches. However, it is less clear what the optimal place for someone who cannot morning rush is, as fighting matches will be much more difficult; they still should certainly never settle for anything less than top 2K crew and 4x 1bil matches, though. 1bil and lose crews tend to scrape a few wins anyway when they get matched against each other. Without morning rush, you also don’t want to be in a point control crew because you will never have opportunity to actually farm honors without going to pub raids.