The PVP Arena Gameflow

Each player can have a total of 8 units on the board. The cost of your units determines the damage you deal to the enemy player. The enemy player has a total of 1000 Hitpoints. Aside from damage, there are no penalties to losing. So lose strategically!

Naturally, both you and your opponent built a team to play with. After matching with an opponent, the first thing you do is review each other’s team. What strategies do you want to use against the opponent’s Illuvials, what augments counter your potential builds and what should you thus transition into? These are key questions you should ask yourself during this phase.

After the team viewing time, you are given the opportunity to choose from 4 augments that can heavily impact your build. Some augments may assign a specific affinity or class to an Illuvial, while others have more direct impacts, like three meteors.

In the process of choosing these augments, each player is granted 4 game-tokens. You can assign up to three of these tokens to a card, and if you have assigned more tokens to an augment than the other player, you gain the augment!

Since these augments can have a big impact on the potential of either team, you should think strategically when assigning tokens to the augments. Do you want to refuse the enemy an augment or do you want to increase the power of your team…?

After the legendary augments are auctioned off, you can start the first round of unit placement. You won’t be able to see the enemy moves, but based on their team composition, you should have certain expectations. Each round features three stages: Placement, Battle and Ending results.

During the first round, you get a total of 100 mastery points that you can use to place Illuvials, equip your Ranger with armaments or add augments to Illuvials. From past experience, it usually pays off to place multiple smaller units rather than a single big one if you want to win this first round (This can have effects on your later rounds). You can freely bond your Ranger with any one Illuvial to obtain their dominant affinity and class!

After placement, your Illuvials will battle the opponent automatically. Illuvials will target the closest diagonal enemy unit. Rogues jump to the back, while some units don’t even move or attack (like the Tiktaalik line). The battle wages on for an entire minute before the game places a clear boundary on the time you can fight. The Overload mechanic will start, and all units will gain increasing amounts of pure damage every second. This damage goes through shields so the healthiest unit tends to survive!

After the battle is concluded, you deal damage to the opponent equal to the surviving team’s mastery points cost on top of a certain base value. Currently, the base value is 40 plus the mastery points from surviving Illuvials. Armament cost and augment cost are also included in this equation. If your opponent has fallen all the way from 1000 to 0 hp, he is defeated!

Round two and three continue where you left off and are similar to the first round. All Illuvials, Ranger and augments respawn in the exact way you had placed them before. You now also see the previous placement of your opponent. Did you win the round? Good! Then you could just keep things exactly as they were. Did you lose? Then you may want to rethink your placement.

Your Ranger can always be placed somewhere else for free and can equip or unequip armaments whenever. Your Illuvials on the other hand have a certain cost tied to their replacement or displacement. If you want to move an Illuvial, you must pay 15% of its mastery point cost. If you want to remove an Illuvial off the board, you must pay 25% of its mastery point cost to put it back in your team.

You can afford some changes to your composition because each new round comes with new Mastery points. Both players gain 100 points for round two and 120 points for round three. This also means that each consecutive round can deal more damage to the enemy. The first round totals 100 MP + 40 base damage. The second round totals 200 MP + 40 Base and the third has another 120 MP more! So, you place units, fight and deal damage. You place more units again, fight and deal even more damage!

Round four features another round of Augment auctioning. You once again choose to assign value to 4 augments and get the ones that you value more than the opponent.

Round four works towards the end of the game. You gain 140 mastery points to increase the strength of your team, and you work towards the most powerful composition against your opponent’s team. You can place up to 8 Illuvials on the board, so you may have to transition towards more expensive units and armaments. Trade your Illuvials in at a small cost, and make your battle board the strongest it can be!

After reading through all of this and maybe watching a stream or YouTube video, you will have a thorough grasp of all PVP-related features. If you found this guide helpful, please don’t hesitate to share it with others! Illuvihub aims to be the go-to place for the most accurate information. We will work with anyone from the community, as long as they have the best intentions in mind for the Illuvium community!