Let’s talk about this current Ranking Dungeon – PAD Appreciation Fest. Cup 3. I normally wouldn’t make a post about Ranking Dungeons as a news post, but there are exceptions to everything!

For once we will discuss style bonus points and negative times, and clarify about it.

Featured art by Stella@PG aka good friend of mine~

Quick recap: Style bonus points

Introduced in Version 15.3 update was bonus clear style points, which is received for every activation of selected awakenings in ranking dungeon. Depending on the ranking dungeon, certain awakenings will get more bonus points than others.

What if time goes negative?

Now the real question is, what happens if time goes negative? On official pages all we see is this:

When i first translated this, my interpretation was that you get no style points after time = 0. Well, the current Ranking Dungeon proved me wrong!

It’s actually no bonus points in negative time will count, but  the bonuses from positive time will be accumulated still . Ironically the phrasing on North American server is ambiguous as well, so we weren’t sure till now.

Here’s screenshot by another famous Japanese PAD player Suu, to prove the point (literally):

Probably the stupidest ranking yet

I generally try to keep my personal opinions out of news section, but this one is too ridiculous. To start, I’m not here to discuss all crowning strategies (it’s only Day 1 and things can change fast, especially on JP server). I will focus only on the one system that many are abusing: The looping bicolor boards with 2 turn haste.

That includes the following cards:

Famous Japanese player Daks (who’s in numerous Top 3) used this to get 217,882 points in the ranking dungeon, on the first day. You read the score right, and this is with 0.3 seconds left, and majority of the scores coming from matching rows. See his video for amusement.

Time really isn’t a huge factor in this ranking.

Similarly, another video by Japanese player Kazuki:

And here’s our super awesome English player on Japanese server, Flandre‘s score.

More videos after Day 1

Daks made a… very NIAP build. Proves how ridiculous this ranking is. Team is the following, assist on bottom row (empty = no assists):

Thoughts

Many of us do feel that style points should only apply to fixed team rankings, and with how this ranking looks so far, I completely agree! Those who enjoy ranking dungeons a lot (such as Flandre) really hates Style Points, and I don’t blame them.

It’s unfortunate (or fortunate?) that Christmas REM isn’t back yet too.

But really, it’s only been 13 hours since this ranking is out, let’s see how broken this ranking will be in a couple of days!