Best Of

As I said in my thread pretty sure incursions is the grinding ground. 285 incursions match and you're done.

Except it isn’t, the 1k points are room rewards not repeatable

Not sure where you get "claim rewards from a zone from saga sector" from complete a zone.



I wouldn't make assumptions about how it works before it is live. Also there is going to be a way to be able to grind points because some people are going to be going for that Bastion title.

It’s not an assumption, on the incursions info page on the MCoc website it lists out the rewards for each zone.

I guess I owe you an apology. I hoped that we would be able to grind out the event, but seems the only grinding you can do is via webstore.

I have same issues, it definitely makes you start to not even care or want to even try anymore. Get so disgusted an aggravated. My luck with titans has been terrible since they entered the game!! EVERY rotation, i end up puliing all the older champs entered into the crystal. Then dupe them a few times. Very few times i end up pulling a new champ i want, they have already been in the game for months. Only time i pull a top tier champ is from a nexus.

Then i really lose interest in playing when i try to go into BGs an get matched up against players that have all the newest champs ranked up. Open more an more titans with same bad results an fall further an further behind. End up where i am now. Dont care anymore, dont spend, dont chase and dont play as much. After spending my hard earned money an time to stay competitive an feel like it was for nothing. Just a waste.

TL;DR:

- Ascension helps a lot in the trials arena
- Recoil masteries also help but with downsides
- Express mode is generally faster (for me) than trying to hit the biggest match in the trials arena.
- Total units available to moderate grinders in the game is about 96,000.
- It is possible to grind out all the milestones in the trials arena in about two hours, and all the milestones in all three arenas in less than four hours. Even without recoil masteries, its doable in about five hours.


This is a follow up to my article from last year: I'm Probably Ascending the Wrong Champs as an Arena Grinder. The basic thought was: instead of Ascending 5* champs with my tier 1 dust, I should be ascending 4* champs because that could directly improve my grinding speed in the Summoner's trials arena. In fact it was the only real way to improve my performance in that arena. Arena speed gets faster with stronger and higher PI champs, so the grind speed in the two higher arenas gets faster all the time as higher rank champs become available. But since the Trials arena is limited to 4* champs, we're basically capped. Once you have a decent amount of rank five 4* champs you can't go any higher. Except of course for Ascension. The question was: how much of an impact does it have. Is it actually worth the effort? I finally decided to find out.

In fact, there's three big variables to consider in the Trials arena specifically, besides the obvious of having max rank 4* champs. There is the question of Ascension, there's the question of using arena express, and there's the question of masteries: specifically using the recoil masteries. I decided to look at each of these options to see what impact they had on my grinding. There are eight different combinations of using and not using these options:

Ascension / Arena Express / No recoil
Ascension / Arena Express / Recoil
Ascension / No Express / No Recoil
Ascension / No Express / Recoil
No Ascension / Arena Express / No recoil
No Ascension / Arena Express / Recoil
No Ascension / No Arena Express / No recoil
No Ascension/ No Arena Express / Recoil

I basically tested them all. Specifically, I recorded and measured grind times and points earned when using Ascended vs not Ascended champs, when using arena express and with express off and picking the top match instead, and when using 1/3/3 recoil verses having recoil, liquid courage, and double edge zeroed out. I currently have 27 Ascended 4* champs, good for nine arena rounds. I could compare nine rounds with those champs against nine rounds with the 27 highest non-ascended champs. To ensure that this was as close as possible to an apples to apples comparison, the net overall average PI of the ascended champs before ascension was reasonably close to the average PI of the unascended champs: in this case the average PI of the unascended champs was 6302 and the pre-ascension PI of the ascended champs was 6401. So comparing the ascended champ's performance to the unascended champs performance would be reasonably close to a hypothetical comparison between the ascended champs and their own performance if they were not ascended.

I'll skip the details of factoring out ramp up and averaging across multiple runs across multiple trial arenas and jump straight to the tabulated results:


The first four rows are without recoil masteries, the bottom four rows are with recoil masteries. The data shows that the impact of using ascended champs is both beneficial and significant. It takes on average about 4.21 hours to complete all the milestones in the trials arena using non-ascended champs. It takes only 2.85 hours using ascended champs, which is a 48% improvement in speed. However, that speed doesn't come primarily from increasing the PI of the champs to increase the amount of points you get (which is what I was originally thinking when I thought about doing this): using ascended champs increased the average amount of points per round by about 14%, but it also decreased the time per round by over 23%, which was an even bigger factor.

4* Ascension boosts both health and attack by 30% (ascension affects different rarities differently). It also increases PI by about 30%. But increasing the PI of your attackers by 30% only increases the points per fight by something closer to 15% because attacker PI is usually only half the total score: the defender PI also contributes, and increasing your own PI through ascension doesn't increase defender PI by a similar amount. But 30% higher attack directly speeds up fights by just straight up dealing more damage. The combination of the two ultimately has a huge impact on grind speed.

I will also note as an aside that if there are match ups that give you problems in the arena, having 30% more attack *and* 30% more health does wonders for turning tricky match ups into cake walks.

Similarly, using the recoil masteries also improves grind speed, also by on the order of 25% or so, and for similar reasons: it improves points per round a bit, and speed of the fights even more. The one thing that did not seem to improve my speed was switching from arena express to non-express and choosing the top match for the most points per round. This did improve my points per round, but reduced my speed per round by an amount higher than the points benefit, erasing that benefit except for the fastest combination of options: Ascended and Recoil masteries. With and without arena express generated about the same total speed: 2.17 vs 2.22 hours which is essentially a tie, with arena express taking 95 rounds and top match taking 91 rounds.

In past testing, I've noticed there's some variations in which settings generate the fastest grind times between different players. Some report turning express off and going with the top match improves overall speed, others don't. This may be affected by playstyle - how aggressive they play in the arena, say. All I can say is for me, arena express is basically as fast or faster, and definitely much safer. There's a lot more margin for error grinding through easier fights faster than harder fights for more points per fight. The clear winner for me is using ascended champs and arena express. Recoil masteries also help, but I don't like running them all the time and there's a cost to switching them off and on, so that's not a free choice for arena grinding. The bottom line is: Ascension helps, and it helps a lot.

Just for fun, I put together a table showing how fast my arena grind would be on average if I decided to use recoil masteries all the time verses now where I don't, not just in the Trials arena but also in the featured and basic arenas, aiming to reach the top milestone in each arena:


This table compares doing the arena like I currently do, but assuming I always stop in the trials after exhausting my ascended champs (when actually griding, I will often go farther than that and use unascended champs when I have the time) to get the best performance, compared to what my performance would be if I used recoil masteries all the time. The total time to complete all the milestones in all three arenas is 5.15 hours normally, and 3.93 hours if I ran recoil masteries all the time. The fastest arena by far is the basic arena and the slowest is the Trials arena, although at the moment using nothing but ascended champs it is pretty close in speed to the featured arena.

And just for giggles, I project those numbers into annualized figures assuming I did this consistently for a calendar year. Without recoil masteries I would spend 535 hours in the arena (about ten hours a week) and generate 83657 units. With recoil masteries I would spend only 408 hours in the arena (about eight hours per week) and generate 79375 units. The recoil number is smaller because you end up doing fewer rounds, and this figure includes the statistical average units from battlechips. Doing fewer rounds means getting slightly fewer battlechips overall. As an addendum to my https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/385738/how-to-get-units-in-mcoc-in-2025-its-like-2024-but-with-fewer-typos article, I mentioned the total units possible from "moderate grinding" (which included getting all the arena milestones) did not include units from battlechips. Based on this analysis, depending on how you grind arena you'd expect to get about another 25k units from battlechips from that activity, which increases the total annual units available to about 96,000 units total, plus or minus.

The bottom line:

- Ascension helps a lot. I would recommend ascending 4* champs for anyone grinding the Trials arena a lot
- Recoil masteries also help a lot, but whether you choose to use them depends on your circumstances. I don't like running them all the time.
- Arena express is faster for me, and safer, than the alternative (not using it and picking the top match to compensate). YMMV.
- The arena keeps getting faster, and even the Trials arena has an avenue to improve performance using ascension, assuming you can get the T1 dust.



... ironically, after all this testing I might need to take a break from the arena now.