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Arena Infinite Streak Advice
DaywalkerX
Member Posts: 560 ★★★
Hi folks. I’m not the most ardent arena grinder in the world, and I’ve been using the same “technique” to get to infinite streak for quite some time (when I do decide to grind for a specific champ.)
Recently it seems as though the below method is becoming harder to do, so I was wondering if anyone has some more up-to-date advice on an easier way to reach the infinite streak.
Match 1-5: 5* Rank-3 champs
Match 6-10: 6* Rank-1 champs
Match 11-25: 6* Rank-3 & 5* Rank-5 champs
And from match 26 onwards I just keep my attackers above 10k PI.
What I’ve been finding recently is that:
- From +- match 9, I start facing defenders +- double my PI (this is not a major problem);
- From +- match 11 I face defenders +- triple my PI, and also start getting defenders like Maestro, Overseer, Onslaught etc who I don’t face at all in the early matches.
Any help and advice will be most appreciated.
Recently it seems as though the below method is becoming harder to do, so I was wondering if anyone has some more up-to-date advice on an easier way to reach the infinite streak.
Match 1-5: 5* Rank-3 champs
Match 6-10: 6* Rank-1 champs
Match 11-25: 6* Rank-3 & 5* Rank-5 champs
And from match 26 onwards I just keep my attackers above 10k PI.
What I’ve been finding recently is that:
- From +- match 9, I start facing defenders +- double my PI (this is not a major problem);
- From +- match 11 I face defenders +- triple my PI, and also start getting defenders like Maestro, Overseer, Onslaught etc who I don’t face at all in the early matches.
Any help and advice will be most appreciated.
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then start from my highest champs ( 7* r3s ) down
don't even use 6*s after that as I don't grind above the unit milestones
So where you get to a team differential that would calculate out to an opponent that is higher than what real player's rosters have, that's when you get the Thanos/Kang (max rank, but no mastery) opponent.
So realize that as new “highest ranks” become available for players, that point keeps allowing higher opponents over time.
If your previous teams are not able to matchup against highest real teams (from like 11 thru 14), then you need to be increasing your own teams there.
Also once at Streak 15+, the “minimum to maintain streak” will similarly be increasing in “minimum” over time as real players have higher and higher ranked teams.
So need to occasionally adjust your “minimums” during streak.
(*note, initial streak range at 15 thru maybe 18, and up to potentially 20 or 21, need higher teams to maintain streak initially, versus once you get beyond that for the rest of the way)
Fights 1-7 3-6* R1
Fight 8 2-6* R1, 1-5* R1
Fight 9 2-6* R1, 1-4* R1
Fight 10-14 6* R5
After I get to 15 I can use what I want to keep it going.
Match 1-11: 6* Rank 1
Match 12-14: 7* Rank 1
Match 15-18: 6* Rank 3
Match 19-22: 6* Rank 2
Match 23-25: 5* Rank 5
Then in Match 28 I got the match-ups in the picture. Is it possibly because my attackers' PI were too low? How do I avoid matches like this after win streak 25?
@SummonerNR | @Furrymoosen | @Wolf911
The mathematically precise answer is this. Every few arena cycles, the game picks a random subset of all players that do arena, and looks for your match ups based on the teams they use. This random subset is different for each arena player. It does this because it would be impractical for the game to search all of the thousands of players who play arena to find your matches. With some exceptions (I.e. the Kang and Thanos match ups) matches come from the teams those other players actually use.
The game looks for match up that meet a specific criteria. There is an invisible difficulty multiplier in the arena, that goes from 0.8 to 4.0. The higher your streak counter, the higher the multiplier goes. It maxes out around streak 19 or so. Beyond that point the multiplier remains capped at 4.0.
The arena looks for match up teams that are the multiplier higher than your team’s PI. So if your team has total PI of 30k, the game looks for a team with 120k total PI. But there’s a very complicated catch. The game doesn’t actually look at PI. It looks at something sometimes referred to as “naked PI.” Naked PI is the PI of your champion without masteries, synergies, or sig levels. More or less, it’s the PI listed in auntm.ai. So your 30k PI team might actually only have a naked PI of 25k or even 20k. The game looks for a match up with a 100k or 80k naked PI.
If the game cannot find such a match, it defaults to a standby match that is about 1.0x your own team’s PI. In effect, the arena match maker is “broken” and defaults to a low match up to find a match. So if you can build streak high enough, and make that invisible multiplier high enough, and then use teams that are high enough, no team that anyone uses will be high enough, you will break the match finder, and default to low matches. This is what players call “infinite streak.”
But if you keep using lower and lower teams, eventually the game will be able to find a 4x match (remember, it’s using naked PI). When that happens, it uses that match, and you get what you show in your picture.
So how do you avoid this? Just don’t use a team that is too low. What’s “too low?” That’s trickery. Too low is, for the specific subset of players you’re currently being matched against, find the strongest team those players ever use, calculate their naked PI, then only use teams whose naked PI is more than 25% of that naked PI.
Unfortunately, for every player that max PI is going to be slightly different, because they are matching against different players than you, and facing different teams than you. And this is a moving target, because the maximum PI that your opponents use increases over time.
Absent doing a lot of complex calculations, the best rule of thumb is to use trial and error. Go as low as you dare, but if streak ever breaks, don’t go that low ever again. And be wary when new ranks come out. When 7* Rank 4 becomes a possibility, be prepared for the lowest safe team to jump upward as a result.
If you have no idea where the floor is at all, then an extremely rough rule of thumb is that it’s about one third the PI of the highest team you can match against, if you are running recoil. Notice your team is slightly less than one third of the visible PI of the team you got matched against. If you run the naked PI calculations, you’ll probably find that the opponent team is about 4x your team’s naked PI, and that’s why the arena was able to find a proper multiplier match of about 4x, generating what people commonly refer to as a deathmatch.
Similarly, I have issues attaining streaks with high PI 5*s, but not with equally rated 6*s.
I can’t test any of this anymore to verify it’s still how things work because I can’t achieve Infinite to save my life. My latest formula has failed and I haven’t found a new one. Regardless, when I could streak, this is one of the issues I faced.
Anyway, I can't lay claim to being an expert and having game PTSD fighting GM.
My roster is kind of weak and I try to figure out whether with it, can I have an unbroken arena run till hitting the last milestone of the featured arena?
I did try with Suicides mastery and Boosts but can't figure out whether these contributes to ending my run.
I see you are experimenting with these and I gave up testing.
Now, I am running basically this.
Rd 1 to Rd 5 - 3x 6-Star R1.
Rd 6 to Rd 12 - 2x 6-Star R1 and 1x 4-Star R1
Rd 13 --> I used my strongest champs which are still 6-Stars. Except for 1 my 7-Stars are only at R1.
Rd 14 --> 20 I try to avoid using any lower than 6-Star R2 (I found out a few arena runs earlier, 6-Star R1 hits death match)
Rd 21 --> Min 6-Star R2 and 5-Star max rank (but the points scored for 5-Star is much much lower; hence just wait for refresh)
With the above, I managed to complete last week's arena on Yelena, completed all milestones with an unbroken run.
It is still entirely possible to hit death matches due to RNG or difficult matches with poor match-ups.
Hope this helps.
This is not the case when I use a roster of 6* r4, I always end up getting opponents with 7* r4 or r3 and I'd end up losing my streak. Just curious how sandbagging with a 4* r1 champ and a total base rating of about 20k was able to get past the death match and the multiplier.
6* arenas are done in about 30 streak and trials about 90-100 streak but I have over 120 maxed 4* so that helps too
Match 6-7: 6* r4 ascended
Match 8-10: my 3rd highest, then 2nd highest, top highest PI in thst order so that my 10th match is my strongest team
Match 11-20: I keep using my next strongest nonstop and it usually breaks the system into an infinite streak. It’s a combo of my 7* r3/r4 and 6* maxed champs
After 25 or so, I just use my 7* R1’s.
But as for “sandbagging”. (Sort of an incorrect term, but really is just sacrificing 1 of the 3 fights in order to have a better chance in the other/main 2 fights needed to keep advancing in buildup to streak).
Bringing 2 strong champs, while bringing one of the very weakest allowed for the 3rd champ.
That causes the overall average of your 3-champ team to be lower than just those top-2 strong ones.
So opponent match is made based on that lower overall average team rating.
**at some point that overall average strength may still cross over into the “no team available” and may give you the Thanos/Kang game default opponent teams.
(which may be either good or bad, depending if you can still handle them because they don’t have masteries, or bad because your's are too far away from those “theoretical max” teams that actual people don't even have yet, but that is normally when 7* were in their early days, a real 7* r1/2 vs a Thanos/Kang 7* rank Max) vs now people have actual champs much closer to theoretical max.
It's not rocket science
Sandbagging is a way to solve a specific problem. As the poster above says, if your roster is big enough you don’t have to think real hard. Just use weak ones until about round 5 or 6, when the multiplier is at or above 1.5x, then switch to your strongest. If your strongest are high enough, the arena won’t be able to find matches, and you’ll be in infinite streak. Now, almost no one has huge numbers of R4s, say, but you don’t need a lot. As you do more and more rounds, the difficulty multiplier rises, and the minimum team necessary to overload the arena drops. Your roster only needs to be strong enough so that as you run out of top PI champs, the multiplier keeeps rising faster than your roster depletes. If by the time you run out of R3s the multiplier is above 2x, your R2 will be good enough. If by the time you run out of those the multiplier is above 3x, even your R1s will be good enough. In that sense, it is a sort of race: your roster vs the arena difficulty. And weirdly, you want the arena to win.
But what if your roster isn’t strong enough and big enough? If only you could skip a few arena rounds, give the arena a head start to ramp up difficulty faster. Sandbagging is one way to do that. Instead of switching from low to high in round 5, what if you could switch in round 8 or 10 or 12? You’d need less roster strength. But if you delay that long, the matches you get will continue to go higher and higher. When the difficulty multiplier is 2x, you’ll be seeing teams twice as strong. You might lose.
Sandbagging helps there, because the arena doesn’t look for individual matches for your champs. It looks for comparable teams. It’s actually recording the teams other players use in the arena, and picking from those. So the arena doesn’t look for three individual matches, it looks for a team whose overall PI is some multiple of yours. Since it is looking for a team of similar overall PI, using a team with two strong and one weak champ means your average PI drops. Imagine you use a team with champs whose PI is 20k, 20k, 2k. Your overall PI is 42k. The arena is going to look for a team some multiple of 42 k. Let’s say your current difficulty multiplier is 2x. It will be looking for a team of about 84k. But that’s most likely going to be three champs of about 28k each (28k x 3 = 84k). So instead of seeing 40k champs vs your 20k, you see two 28k champs against your 20k champs, and one lopsided 2k vs 28k. Since you only need to win two out of three to keep your streak alive, this is way better.
Surviving a few more rounds using sandbag teams rather than your strongest means you can save your strongest for later rounds, hoping to eventually reach the peak difficulty, when more of your roster becomes safe to use. And once your in infinite streak, the difficulty multiplier stays high,and you can use more of your rooster permanently, and you don’t have to worry about this for the rest of that arena.