Real Time Arena [RTA] Beginners Guide

Overview

This guide will cover the new World arena / RTA including observed numerical values for the battle frenzy stages, draft strategy and an overview of the cast, looking at individual heroes, teams as well as generic archetypes and their roles within the meta. The new World Arena requires that the player be of rank 60 and anyone attempting to compete should have a decent number of relevant heroes built to consistently be able to pick and counter pick effectively.

The guide will focus on strategy but for more generic information have a look at the patch notes post here: https://epic7x.com/12-26-patch-real-time-arena-rta-ml-romann-and-hero-buffs/

Battle Frenzy

The battle frenzy mechanic has been implemented in order to prevent overly long matches and stalls in world arena. To combat this, battle frenzy makes 3 changes to the stats of each hero after a certain number of turns have passed.

• Maximum HP% decreases as stages increase
• Damage increases as a proportion as stages increase
• Healing decreases as a proportion as stages increase

After doing some testing in RTA I have done some calculations and created a table listing the value changes with each battle frenzy stage.

I recorded values for up to battle frenzy stage 8 as the vast vast majority will end before that and I simply one shot my opponent. The frequency of battle frenzy increase has a very strange pattern.

From testing, I found that battle frenzy increased roughly every 8 turns (that being the strong modal average). However, I haven’t been able to concretely determine the pattern for battle frenzy stage increases.

Something to note with the healing decrease is that practically all heals are based upon either the maximum HP of the target or the caster, and so healing will decrease dramatically with the drop in maximum HP of all heroes multiplied by the drop in healing.

This means that late turn stalls are very weak but for the first 3 turns there is no penalty to healing at all therefore being able to decide matches early is essential for healing / stalling teams. Lifesteal set or Sigurd Scythe do however perform sufficiently well in the late game as although healing and maximum hp have tanked, damage dealt will have increased significantly.

The opposing team has too little damage and deals poorly with A. Coli’s stealth mechanic. Hence, the extremely highly damaging team on the left eliminates them as battle frenzy increases.

The Battle Frenzy values show how significantly damage increases as well as how healing and hp decreases as time passes. Taking a composition with too much healing or damage reduction, e.g. Angelica or Crimson Armin, without good enough bruisers / damage will lead to an inevitable loss.

For example, the RHS player has nowhere near enough damage compared to the LHS and as battle frenzy builds he inevitably loses.

Watch the whole video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTzsVqCs2I

KiaSoul is one of the top RTA players currently, and I would definitely recommend his channel.

Draft Strategy, Hero limitations and Game Theory

Drafting strategy is definitely the most impactful stage of a match of World Arena and in any individual draft there is a winner and a loser. The pick / ban system can be viewed as a generic zero sum game which can create complex ideas and situations in any given match which we will analyze later. 

Update: In the current system, you get 1 global ban and your enemy gets 1 as well.

When you queue for a match, you should have a strategy in mind which you want to try to execute in battle. This could be cleave, bruisers or ‘stall’ etc. You must consider what heroes are important to your strategy, what roles you have to fill in order to be successful and what heroes your opponent may try to counter you with.

The most clear cut example of this idea is with cleave setups. Cleave requires 2 fundamental roles to be filled in order to function, this being a CR pusher and a damage dealer.

In theory, you can cleave every match by picking 2 CR boosters and 2 damage dealers as your opponent can only ban a singular hero. Your opponent however can and will have draft counterplay and in order to try and win the draft, both you and your opponent have a few options.

Firstly, your opponent can only attempt to counter pick if they know what strategy you are attempting to execute. This gives us our first manner of protecting our strategy, and that is to deny our opponent of the certainty that we want to cleave, reserving our ability to turn into another strategy in later picks.

For example, picking BBK and Tywin clearly shows your intent to cleave as you lack the ability to switch to another viable strategy, unlike a more flexible pick such as ML Lots and Arbiter Vildred. Both of these heroes perform well individually and fit into archetypes other than cleave. This creates difficulty in our opponents ability to counter pick cleave, our intended strategy.

However, we need to consider our opponents picks and determine what that changes about our situation. These picks will fall into one of a few categories:

• Must ban
• Counter pick
• Proactive pick
• Chance pick

Must ban heroes are characters that you don’t have a hope to win against, whether that be because of heroes you already picked, the heroes you own / have built or Arbiter Vildred/s.

Counter picks can be one of 3 different types, being natural, hard and denial. Natural counters are picks that proactively further your strategy while countering your opponents.

Hard counters are direct picks targeting a specific strategy or hero and will almost always be disadvantaged against other strategies. These picks are vulnerable if we are able to switch our strategy mid draft and is why picking flexibly allows us to protect our strategy from hard counter picks.

Denial is the idea of picking a certain hero so that your opponent will not be able to. This applies both for recognised strategies and generally over tuned characters e.g. SSB or ML Vildred but also could be denying your opponent ML Lots.

Proactive picks solely further their strategy and have somewhat of a disregard for your opponents team and will tend to be high in utility and flexible e.g. Charles. Finally, chance picks are simply rng reliant ideas such as challenging the speed of your opponent for a win.

As each player picks heroes, their ability to change strategies will decrease exponentially and so the player who can understand and effectively counter their opponents strategy will be able to win the draft.

However, hero limitations will affect every player and this will limit the strategies that each player will be able to adopt, how effectively they are able to recover from denial picks and whether they can come up with a counter to their opponents strategy.

We have to play around our own boxes strengths and weaknesses and try not to lead our opponent to pick heroes we cannot counteract. However, we have to remember epic seven is not perfectly balanced and by considering the meta we can use and try to counteract the strongest theoretical strategies.

The ban is the final stage of the draft and both players 5 characters are locked in and revealed, at which point each player bans a singular hero from their opponent at the same time and then is displayed and the battle begins. At this point we have perfect information and becomes either a clear cut choice or we have to guess your opponents ban.

In the case that you or you opponent have a forced ban, the situation is very simple and that player will ban that hero and then their opponent will have ‘perfect’ information and can therefore pick optimally (note this can be offset by variation in hero stats / builds).

Although, depending on our opponents ban our optimal ban may change and so we enter a guessing game in hopes of attaining an advantage in team composition. Suppose a situation with each of player 1 and 2 having 2 possible bans and therefore 2 possible teams.

We will name these teams 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B. From this we can predict expected win rates for each team, just rough matchup expectations in our head and attempt to balance the odds. Here is a generic table for this simplified 2 ban situation:

This works as a good way to quantify which player has the advantage by the end of hero selection. Obviously, both players want a matchup where they expect their team to come out on top. Therefore, each player will logically tend to lean towards the team with the higher average win rate.

At this point, we can estimate a Nash equilibrium (this will almost always be mixed, even in rough predictions) and try to pick towards it. Here are a couple links exploring this idea further, although keep in mind these aren’t particularly related to epic seven:

• http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-8/nash.pdf (a short proof of the existence of a mixed Nash equilibrium for games meeting certain conditions, including world arena drafts)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium (generic information with some well explained examples)
• https://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/stra/ch6.pdf (overview of strictly competitive games with a section on zero sum games in specific)

This is a draft where the blue player is forced to ban Maid Chloe, and the red player knows this and bans Charles to make his team safe from random counters as ¾ of his team becomes vulnerable.

Sadly, not all epic seven players are perfectly rational strategic minds and it is up to each person to estimate the human aspects in their drafts and make decisions, similar in fashion to fighting games.

One more thing to add is that when picking a hero you can show your opponent a hero (in addition to you player portrait), displaying to them you own them, have them levelled and can pick them. It can fake your intent for a certain strategy and bait your opponent into poor denial picks and present threat by changing available information but if done on accident you can simply have your heroes taken away, I know for a fact this has happened to me.

RTA Tier List

Here is an ordered tier list including much of the hero pool in epic seven, with some exclusions either because they fulfill a role extremely similar in nature to another hero or simply aren’t relevant picks. Keep in mind that this is mostly speculation, only my opinion (which is subject to change) and the heroes on the list are all viable in some ways.

Each of these heroes are rated towards their ability to be useful picks in the right situations not necessarily blind picks, although the top tier heroes do fit this criteria.

The RTA meta has seemed to shape very similarly to regular arena defence with some additional options with the manual control of heroes. Expect to encounter a lot of SSB, Charles, Arbiter Vildred, Basar etc. in almost all of your matches.

These heroes will continue to dominate the meta until major changes come in as they are tough to punish and can close out games quickly. Picking and denying your opponent these heroes will tend to be the most optimal route as they are honestly very overtuned.

Currently, I believe the counter meta will persist as the strongest strategy as it does in regular arena, and these mid range ideas will make the majority of drafts. Seaside Bellona, Charles and ML Ken will make for the primary damage dealers you will find.

Cleave will definitely see play with how effective Basar is right now but does face trouble against assassins and teams with good recovery and damage reduction. The tools are definitely there to have this function well and will often be optimal strategy in a draft.

The ability to ban heroes makes set play difficult to and is why bringing lots of utility on a specific hero is especially valuable e.g. ML Lots.  Hence, for the majority of the player base playing solid heroes close to the meta will be the most effective strategy available.

The S tier heroes all have the strongest kits in the game and we need to look out for them and take as many of them as we can and we need to be able to counter them as you will be forced to fight them.

Arbiter Vildred

Arbiter Vildred is without a doubt one of the best heroes in the game but after his nerf, him alone is not enough to dish out enough damage to take down teams covered by tanks. The best way to deal with him is to simply tank the damage and not allow him his turn 1 so that he is only safe to attack once. The reason he takes the top spot over the other S tiers is how oppressive he is against squishy heroes, making them irrelevant if he is not banned and so is often a must ban.

ML Vildred will do too much damage and chip down the red player, especially paired with Cartuja, and we can assume the red side player planned to ban him which allowed the blue player to take Judge Kise for cleave as a last pick.

Seaside Bellona

Seaside Bellona is definitely the most overpowered hero in the game. You can’t really go wrong with her and she is incredibly difficult to counter. The best way to fight them is to ban them or pick them yourself, but if you do let her into the battle do your best to kill them asap.

Maid Chloe

Ruele of Light

While Maid Chloe would typically be a better pick than Ruele, but the fact that you can ban her makes picking her with a highly damaging squishy team vulnerable and so loses the ability to bring the same threat as otherwise. Countering the revivers will require you to either decide the match early, be able to hard cc them or tank the incoming damage.

Auxiliary Lots

Basar

Assassin Cidd

Aux Lots and Basar both will typically have the highest speed that player has and can be countered by both assassins, especially ML Cidd as he will take the souls from them. Assassins are often what they will ban and you can plan around that. Both of them are able to have very significant impact even after the first turn and are high priority to kill if possible.

Charles

Charles will randomly kill characters as he has incredible multipliers and S1 -> S2 proc rate with the exclusive equipment. He also brings attack buff, AoE damage, defence buffs himself and dispels. Dealing with him effectively needs hard cc, one shotting but all the fire bruisers duel him with ease.

Martial Artist Ken

ML Ken can solo teams, but tend to be built much more towards damage than HP now and so one shotting him, especially with battle frenzy, is much easier. Again, he is weak to hard cc but tend to have immunity so try to deal with the rest of his team before him as his turns aren’t particularly potent, then try to one shot him as battle frenzy builds.

Conclusion

The World Arena meta looks to be very similar to regular arena defence with the same heroes being the most dominant, with some additions with manual control e.g. A. Lots. Draft strategy will depend on your hero pool / ‘strategies’ and you should consider your opponents counter picks and make some of your own. Try to anticipate your opponent’s ban by considering proposed utility of each of the possible matchups and most importantly, have fun! (Ideally, by spamming the laughing Ras emote in a winning situation)