YMMV / Summoners War: Sky Arena

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The Twins, aka Boomerang Warrior and Chakram Dancer. They will always attack together whenever one of them attacks on her own turn, and also share their passive abilities with each other, making them very powerful when used together. The accepted strategies for a whole lot of endgame PvE content can be basically summed up as "just use the twins" and it is extremely rare to see any SSS-rated Rift of Worlds team that doesn't rely on them. Ultimately Downplayed though, because they're not useful everywhere and do still require a good team to support them.
  • Ever since the Martial Cat was added to the list of monsters with second-awaken forms, Miho (Dark Martial Cat) has become frustratingly common to see in the arena. This is because of Miho's incredibly powerful third skill, "Eye For an Eye" which prevents critical hits from reducing her below 1 HP and allows her to automatically counter-attack whenever struck by a critical hit. Since all players naturally try to get their damage dealers' critical rate as close to 100% as possible, this makes Miho a real Game-Breaker, especially when equipped with a set of Vampire runes to allow her to heal herself. Especially frustrating are the arena defense teams of just Miho, intended to trick newbie players into going for the "easy win" against a single defender and getting beaten.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Boomerang Warrior and Chakram Dancer are referred to unofficially as The Twins, due to being similar looking girls who are also designed to work in tandem with each other, attacking in unison, sharing passive skills, etc.
  • Feng Yan (Wind Panda Warrior) is often referred to as Unfair Bear, thanks to his high stats and powerful skills that make him a very good (some would say cheesy) all-purpose arena defender. In particular, his second skill gives him regeneration and counterattack ability, and his third skill is a passive that acts like a free (and better) Nemesis rune set, increasing his attack bar whenever he takes a hit.
  • Polar Queen is often called Elsa.
  • Some people refer to Belladeon (Light Inugami) as Bella, which can get a bit confusing because there already is another monster named Bella (Dark Cannon Girl).
  • Several of the dungeons and content have these too.
    • World Arena is a true direct Player Versus Player as opposed to the normal arena which is against an AI-controlled defense team. As such, World Arena is often referred to as Real-Time Arena, or RTA.
    • Trial of Ascension Normal and Hard mode are ToAN and ToAH.
    • The Cairos Dungeons are referred to by floor number as GB# (Giant's Keep ), DB# (Dragon's Lair), and NB# (Necropolis).
    • Rift Raid is usually referred to as R#, so if a player asks in chat for others to do "R5" they want to other players to help them do Rift Raid level 5. Some of the popular Rift Raid teams are often referred to by things like this too, such as QB5, BS5, BJ5, etc.
• Follow the Leader: This game has been noted to be very reminiscent of Brave Frontier.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Brownie Magicians are mostly well intentioned support troops. Hell, the special Dark ability is even called "Kindness Gone Wrong". But that's actually a pretty interesting not to the mythology it comes from. Brownies are spirits that aid people around the house in chores, which is why most of their moves are dedicated to Support roles. They're not meant to do work alone, they mostly buff the team and debuff opponents.
• Game-Breaker: Dohohohoho, where do we start.....
  • Chloe (Fire Epikion Priest) is staple in the PvP scene, for her ability to place Invincibility and Immunity for 1 and 2 turns, respectively. She's often built with high speed to move first, thus ensuring that your slower, heavy hitters would survive the enemy's Alpha Strike and crowd control attempts, and able to retaliate in the second round.
  • Zeratu (Dark Chimera) only has 2 active skills. The first one buffs his attack and grants him Immunity, and gives him an immediate turn, which is most likely his basic attack. The problem is his passive, Forbidden Power which grants him 2 extra attacks whenever he deals a Critical Hit, at 50% damage per hit. This means with 100% crit rate, a Zeratu will deal 200% damage per hit, and that's not counting Critical Damage bonus and the atk buff.
  • The Violent Rune is despised by many for the blasted thing's sheer potency. It's not unheard for your enemy monsters to move 3-4 times in a row, in a single turn, thanks to the rune's effect. If it's a nuker monster such as the Zeratu mentioned above and you have no Invincibility to protect yourself, the battle might have been lost. There have been many attempts to rebalance the rune, but there's nothing conclusive as of yet.
  • Lushen (Wind Joker) is infamous for his 3rd skill, Amputation Magic, as it is an AoE that ignores defense. High-end Lushens with an Attack buff can even inflict Total Party Kill with a single cast of this skill. A good yardstick to measure the strength of your PvP defense is to measure how Lushen-proof it is. Fire elements have less chance to be one-hitted (as the skill is a multi-hit), but sometimes the Lushen gets lucky...
  • Zaiross (Fire Dragon) is another infamous AoE king. Unlike Lushen, his doesn't ignore defense. On the other hand, he comes with 2 powerful AoEs, and his 2nd one puts your skills on cooldown effectively silencing your whole team. The best part of Zaiross is that he is incredibly versatile. Whether a bread-and-butter Violent, crowd control Despair, support Swift, dedicated nuker Rage, or just plain old Fatal, Zaiross has many different ways to ruin your day.
  • Chasun (Wind Sky Dancer) is generally considered one of the most powerful healer in the game, and an even better healer than Ariel (Water Archangel), a dedicated healer Olympus Mons, in some cases. She comes with a group heal based on her HP that also buffs attack (meaning you will lose the long game), a single heal that more often than not is a full heal (you need to kill your target in one turn or else it's moot), all at very low cooldown in comparison to other healers, and she has massive base HP to boot (meaning she's a beast to take down). She has her weaknesses, but it pales in comparison to her strengths.
  • Theomars (Water Ifrit) is currently considered one of the most powerful nuker at the moment due to his passive. It grants elemental advantage against all other elements, even against Light, Dark and Non-Elemental, making him the de facto Infinity +1 Element. To make things worse, it also grants him Endure effect, meaning he won't die the first time you bring his HP down to 0. Finally, his leader skill and constant elemental advantage means you only need to reach 61 base critical rate to reach the cap of 100 critical rate.
  • Woosa (Water Pioneer) is another excellent defender along the same lines as Chloe, thanks to his skill Wish of Immortality, which gives a very good shield (scaled to his own massive HP) plus effect immunity to the entire ally party for three turns. It reduces attacks that would be One Hit Total Party Kills to merely hurting a bit, and turns a lot of dangerous challenges into mere trivialities. Even better, when the skill is fully leveled, its cooltime becomes equal to the number of turns worth of protection it grants, meaning a smart player can keep it up nearly indefinitely.
  • Mav (Wind Penguin Knight) is a real game changer, not because of what he can do, but because of what he can allow other units to do. This is thanks to his third skill, Wings of Wind, which removes a harmful effect from all alies, increases their attack speed, and most importantly: if any of their skills are on cooldown, the timer is reduced by 1. There are a whole lot of mediocre monsters that become good monsters, good monsters that become great monsters, and great monsters that become flat-out broken monsters by having Mav on the team.
  • Miho (Dark Martial Cat)'s Second Awakened form upgrades her passive so that not only she will counterattack and get an atb boost for every crit she receives, she cannot be killed by a critical hit. Nowadays it's depressingly common to see Mihos in Arena defenses, as her existence utterly punishes the Critical Hit Class build of late-game players. Many videos show how a cleave team kill an entire team except for Miho, only for her to solo the cleave team and win.
• Junk Rare: Some monsters are a letdown, despite their rarity and coolness. Perhaps the biggest of this is Fermion (Dark Archangel). Massive defense, attacks that scale with his defense, a passive that makes him deal more damage as more of his allies die, and looking pretty damn cool◊. In practice, high defense Fermions would have a pittance of HP thus making them food for defense ignorers, and high hp Fermions would practically have low damage. He's not useless, you can still use him in PvE contents, but it's still a letdown considering how rare a Light/Dark NB5-star is.
• Memetic Loser: A minor example, thanks to the "War is My Fate" music video. Fans were quick to notice how, in comparison to certain monsters getting Adaptational Badass and performing impossible feats like Josephine (Water Paladin) soloing Rift Raid and Giana (Dark Oracle) soloing Trial of Ascension (Hard), it's a bit silly that Taranys (Wind Druid), considered one of the best PvP units in the game, is shown getting utterly dominated and apparently killed... by a devilmon.
• That One Boss:
  • The Artamiel (Light Archangel) boss in the Bonus Dungeon is considered the hardest floor, in addition to the dev's hobby of buffing it for whatever reason. The boss comes with 4 adds, but the kicker is that all of them have a chance to counter attack whenever you attack them.^note The boss has a guaranteed counter when it's a crit, 2 of the adds have 50% chance whenever you poke them, and the other 2 have 25% chance but can stun. To make matters worse, this counter works even when you are not actually hitting the one countering, just hitting any one of them is enough. Fights against this boss tend to boil down to sheer RNG; you can poke one of them and have all 5 of them hit you right back, especially if your cc fails to work.
  • The most deadly boss is by far the Dimension Predator. Among his insanely powerful move pool... his first skill ignores all damage reduction effects, his second skill gives permanent continuous damage to the entire ally party... he's immune to attack bar reduction and most status effects, he has an add that strips all beneficial effects from the ally team every turn, and another add that grants Oblivion state to negate your passive skills. And that's just his first phase. In phase 2, he gets a special skill that automatically hurts you every time you get a turn. In phase 3, he becomes a Time-Limit Boss thanks to his passive Curse of Rage which curses whatever character has the highest attack power and kills them after two turns, at which point it passes to your next highest attack monster until all of your monsters are dead. He also uses Soul Clone every time he switches phases, which creates a mirror clone of your highest attack monster and your highest defense monster to help the boss. Even worse than that, because he appears in the Dimension Hole, you're also forced to fight using whatever rules govern the dimension he's currently in, which restricts your options for building a good team. Even more than THAT, the base HP, ATK, and DEF of all monsters involved is multiplied by 10, but stat boosts from runes are not multiplied, meaning that the runes and artifacts you have equipped matter far less. Even perfect endgame accounts with years of playtime have trouble with the boss, and it's commonly agreed to be pretty much a Luck-Based Mission. Fortunately, the rewards you get from defeating him are more than worth the pain.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Naturally, a common reaction to any new update that nerfs an existing monster. One of the biggest offenders was the 5.0.8 update which altered Shaina (Fire Chakram Dancer) so that her Precision passive skill no longer reduced the enemy's ATK bar on top of its other powerful effects. The result was a significant portion of the fanbase screaming that she was ruined forever, no longer viable in any part of the game, nothing more than food for other monsters, etc. Never mind that she still breaks the enemy's defense with every attack, which was her most useful ability anyway.

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