Skilling up refers to lowering the base cooldown of a monster’s skill. Unless otherwise specified, a monster will start at skill level 1, with each skill up increasing that level by one until the skill is maxed, or max skilled (MS) as it’s referred to. The max skill level is variable, with each skill having a different cap. For instance, most monsters from the Rare Egg Machines go up to level 6, while farmable monsters, such as Hexazeon
, have much higher caps due to their easier access to skill-up options.
Skilling up a monster is incredibly useful and worth the investment as skills become quicker to be ready for use immediately in dungeon, or faster to recharge and reuse the same skill later in dungeon.
How to Skill Up
These are all possible ways to perform a skill up:
Fusing monster with exact same skill (~10% base)
This is the most basic method, but does not guarantee a skill up. Fusing monsters with exact same skill name to the monster you want to skill up has a chance for a skill up. However, the base rate is only around 10%, though it gets boosted by events frequently, and as such it’s advised that one doesn’t fuse rare monsters together for the skill up possibility.
Example
The farmable card Yellow Chaser
shares the same skill with Metatron
. Fusing Yellow Chaser to Metatron may grant a skill level (not guaranteed).
Fusing King Tans + Monster with exact same skill (100%)
Fusing one Kingtan of the same attribute plus four monsters that have the same active skill (the names must be the same) as the desired card. You can guarantee up to four skill ups with this method.
Fusing Pys (100%)
The second option is to fuse 1 Py of the same attribute to a base card of the same attribute, which provide a single skill up to a monster of the same color. Fusing the rarer Rainbowpy
gives two skill ups.
Pys can be obtained from dungeons such as Ultimate Arena, monthly quests, gift dungeon (depending on event), or stream rewards.
Skill Level-Up from Dungeons (Solo only, ? ~ 100%)
When faced by a monster with an identical skill, there’s a small (around 10%) chance of your monster gaining a skill level. This only works in solo play and isn’t affected by the bonuses on fusion.
Skill up dungeons (100%)
Typically featured with Godfests, seasonal events, special events, or collabs, these dungeons possess rare monsters from the event and have the skill up rate increased to 100%, which allows you to skill up several monsters for 50 stamina per run.
Fusing the identical card, with max level (100%)
When fusing a fully awoken and max leveled copy to a card, it will ensure a skill up. However, this is long outdated by Pys, King Tans, and skill up dungeons, and not worth the loss of Monster Experience and Monster Points from fusion.
Tip: Not everything needs to be skilled
Skill Ups are not always beneficial. The general case where the lower cooldown is not desirable are assist forms that have the Awoken Assist awakening. The main appeal of these cards are solely for the additional awakenings they give to the base card when inherited. Regardless of how generally powerful the Active Skills of these assist cards are, the skill of the base card may be different enough and necessary to a specific situation while the skill of the assist is irrelevant and useless. Not maxing out the skill level of the assist will provide more turns to use the skill of the base before it becomes replaced by the assist.
There may be exceptions where the skill of an assist form is desired but these will be specific and NOT general situations. Even in those cases, there may be alternatives to charging the skill of the assist form instead of directly skilling it up, such as stalling, hasting, or applying more Skill Boosts to the team. While skilling up an assist form shouldn’t be completely disregarded (but rather can be considered as a last resort), it’s most flexible in general use to leave it not skilled up.
On the other hand, there can be situations where an unskilled assist isn’t enough to prevent it from fully charging and replacing the desired skill of the base. If this cannot be fixed by changing the team composition, a possible solution would be to also have the skill level of the base not maxed out, in which the longer cooldown of the base skill will further delay the charge of the inherited skill. This situation is very rare and likely only observed in very optimized team builds such as for farming or ranking.