Searching for a Better Tengu Team and the Future of +Egg Farming

With 1.5x drop Tengu Master likely being a thing of the past, we’re now stuck with Tengu Legend. With the advent of skill inheritance, the amount of teams capable of being full- or close to full-push button has drastically increased. Better yet, it looks like ROdin is no longer a strict requirement.

Be that as it may, all I’m really interested in is finding the fastest, most brainless team. At the same time, I’m not really interested in putting in the work to do so, but at least for today my curiosity wins out and I’ll do a quick overview of my findings.

The biggest hurdle in Tengu Legend is the first floor as it isn’t possible to sweep it with a single nuke active as the ogre has too much HP. This leaves us with two possible solutions: use two nukes or match orbs. While “matching” may as well be a swear word when it comes to button connoisseurs, it’s something we’ve long come to terms with as long as it’s swipeable; in other words, a full board change like Goemon or, at worst, a row/column/other formation spawner like Laila or Thuban. So the question comes down to whether the time spent pushing extra actives is faster than swiping the floor.

My main constraints when making the following teams were:

1. As much as possible, allow sequential left to right or right to left button pushing
2. Prefer skill inheritance targets that will see little use outside this team
3. Minimize the number of elements to save on attack animations
4. No latents required

Floor 1 Button Team

Tengu Legend Floor 1 Button Team
Team
Inherit

This is the floor 1 button team I came up with (will be referred to as the “button team” from here on out). Just a quick look at YouTube shows there are basically an endless number of team comps thanks to skill inheritance, but I think this is a fairly typical set up. If it wasn’t for constraint (1), the the team would have a few more options.

I believe there are two points that may not be obvious with this team:

• Perseus? I want to use Goemon + Vritra to clear floor 1, but Vritra doesn’t have enough ATK. The only solution is to inherit him on something with very high ATK (I don’t know the exact number), but I didn’t want to commit something like a Sephiroth or dark Ares just for this team. Luckily, I almost never use Perseus and by virtue of the 1.5x stat bonus to balanced types, he has enough ATK to get the job done. I’ll credit this one to the various JP videos I found on YouTube.
• Beelzebub? The sub-3k preemptive on floor 3 really isn’t much of an obstacle, but it becomes one after lowering your HP to 1 with Goemon. However, I can’t use just any healing active as I need to be under 20% HP for Goemon’s leader skill. Beelzebub happened to be the only healing active I had that fit the bill while also having two skill boosts. It’s entirely possible to avoid this constraint by leading with ROdin instead of Goemon, opening the door to use any type of healing active like LMeta or BOdin.

Floor 1 Swipe Team

Tengu Legend Floor 1 Swipe Team
Team
Inherit

The swipe team is pretty much unchanged from pre-skill inheritance. One positive is that we can now stick Ra on something with three or more skill boosts, making it easier to use Laila over Thuban. Laila is about a half second faster as she doesn’t have a haste animation to sit through. I was hoping to get other team comps out of YouTube, but it looks like JP favors the button team.

There Isn’t a Huge Difference… Probably

Run lengths are in seconds. The intervals are measured from the moment the board starts to become visible to right before the tip dialog appears. All runs have no skyfall combos. Times probably shouldn’t be compared to ones outside this post.

Tengu Legend Clear Times
Type	1	2	3	4	5	Avg.
Button	38.47	38.70	38.90	38.73	39.03	38.77
Swipe	37.73	37.87	38.17	38.33	38.00	38.02

I was lazy and could only bear to record five times for each team. Not much of a sample size, but I think it’s good enough to get a general idea. Manekimewdra dropping on floor 2 actually has a decent effect on the overall time as +eggs take longer to drop.

I’m a bit surprised that the swipe team came out ahead. Even though the button team has to push two more actives, I thought the extra swipe and resulting attack animation would make the swipe team slower.

However, the recorded runs were cherry picked to include no skyfall combos on any of the swipes. Sadly, I don’t even know where to start in order to factor the skyfall chance into the equation. Especially since the player has the ability to influence the outcome by manipulating the orbs exposed to the skyfall, but that in itself would come with its own time cost. Considering that a single skyfall combo will add about 1.4 seconds to the overall time, it’s quite possible that the button team will be faster in the long run, but I can’t say for sure. Either way, the two methods should be pretty close so if you only have access to one, there probably isn’t a huge need to gather the components for the other.

Of course, there is the possibility to improve both teams, but I just haven’t gotten around to see if other options are better (and I’m probably too lazy to ever do so). For example, on my button team, there seems to be a certain amount of lag between being able to press Beelzebub for the heal and NY Tengu for Ra. I’m assuming this is because the game is checking for any dark orbs to enhance (even though the board is all fire). I can’t say for sure, but most of the videos I see where something like LMeta is used (heal + bind clear), that lag doesn’t seem to be present. So there’s a good chance that a half second or so could be saved.

To many, it may not make sense to want to save time on this order, but over the course of tens of thousands of +eggs, all the small bonuses you can accumulate will add up. It’s kinda like how using evo Goemon to farm Goemon instead of uevo Goemon; the margins are small, but they do add up over time.

If anyone has any suggestions to improve the teams or has a better team comp, I’d definitely appreciate it if you chose to share.

The Future of +Egg Farming: Co-op

Co-op is the main non-laziness-related reason why I don’t want to invest more time into finding a better Tengu team. The stamina and MP rewards are the big reasons why co-op will be the preferred way to play in the future. The shared awakenings will also have a huge impact. Just in Tengu alone, you can avoid jumping through HP hoops by using a nuke like Zeromus instead:

Also of note, you only need one Ra and ROdin between two players, making it relatively accessible. It doesn’t seem to be a problem to make entirely farmable push button teams. I know Reddit came up with such a team for Kanetsugu, a dungeon which will become insanely stamina efficient. Then there’s also the opportunity to co-op the improved Thieves’ Den.

I guess it’s time to hop on the co-op bandwagon.