Hello Adapters! I’m Spacy and I’m going to guide you through the Time Travel in ALICE event, so let’s begin!
Disclaimer: this guide is made based on both personal opinion and by checking what the Discord thinks.I highly suggest you to remove the check on View>Print Layout in the right upper corner if you are on PC to better enjoy the flow of the guide
The Hatcher
So, there’s a lot to unpack here, as the hatcher contains all the units from the past Time Travel events and then some. The hatcher has a discounted 250 polygons 10x pull for the first one and a guaranteed Time Travel unit from the new batch on step 4 and 8 (The TT versions of Mobius, Turing, Hempel and Green Trebla).
The rates are 10% for a featuRed unit, but the pool is diluted with 50 and 53 cost units; even then, as a new player, this could be a decent opportunity to add a lot of variety to the box.
I’ll quickly address all the units, to give a general sense of what they do and how useful they could be, but if you want a full review of the cost 55 units and above, at the end of the guide, you will find the links to the full Unit Reviews that the peeps at Discord wrote (if you can’t find some of the new units like Mobius and Turing, it means that they are in the works). So:
- Genesis Trail Mobius: A cost 55 Yellow that gives Red-Green-Blue panel Multichain to the whole team and stops Hearts from falling for 1 turn. This makes her combo with almost everything, as it essentially treats the board as a single color, which lets you create large chains every tap. Remarkably, the Hearts will drop again the turn after, so it’s not very risky to use
- Electric Praise Turing: A cost 55 Yellow that sets up a board full of Heart bombs and makes Green panels drop as Heart Bombs for 2 turns. Nothing much to say, it’s likely that for the duration you won’t die, as she also sports a High HP Recovery on her CP
- Instigating Wizard Merlin: A cost 58 Blue unit that makes Green panels drop as Ally CP and Blues, adds 2 taps and give immense easy CP spawn. Now, the unit itself is good, but there’s a problem: Suyang is one of the strongest F2P units and is used everywhere, and their skills overlap with each other, so Merlin kind of gets the boot here
- Rough Flowers MordRed and Percival: A cost 55 Blue that sets up the board to be cleaRed, makes Yellow drop as Blue Bombs and stops Hearts from dropping for 1 turn. On a 6 turn cooldown, the skill is not the worst and the CP hits fairly hard, but sh-They’re on the weaker side
- SacRed Lone Fighter Izanagi: A cost 55 Blue that boosts Blue units Attack and CP Spawn, adds 1 tap and makes Red panels drop as Blue for 3 turns. On a 6 turn cooldown, this skill is pretty damn good, as all these buff last for a considerable amount of time on a low cooldown, with essentially a 50% uptime on them, and as a bonus, his CP hits fairly hard.
- Rekindled Flame Kagutsuchi: A cost 55 Red that makes Red Bomb drop on a low chance, removes Green and Heart Panels and gives Red units Red Panel Multichain. From personal experience, Kagutsuchi is amazing, since this skill is on a 4 turn cooldown, making it extremely fast and extremely flexible, as it can be used both for combo enhancing and emergency healing.
- True Conclusion Trebla: A cost 55 Blue that makes a bunch of Blue Panels and CPs, deploys a 2000 self-barrier and gives handshake to the units on the left and on the right. Trebla is particular: she absolutely requires another unit’s skill to make use of the handshake and she doesn’t excel at neither offer nor recovery, but when paiRed with a bomb dropper, she really shines. Notably, her 10 bug skills gives 1 turn skill accell to both side units every new floor, which allows for impressive sinergies, but sinergies require units that… you know… synergize, so a weak Blue box may not be able to make her shine.
- Eyes of Time Trebla: A cost 53 Green, that is, well, Trebla! On a different sauce and fairly weaker. She maintains the general use of Blue Trebla, but instead of skill hasting the side units every floor, it does only at the beginning of the Quest. Even then, the same applies: she requires a box that supports her, even more since she doesn’t speed up the units as much.
- Extreme Dream Hempel: a cost 53 Yellow that transforms Red and Hearts in CP, Blue Panels to Yellow Panels and does an High CP enhance. Hempel is not the most remarkable unit ever, but the fact that he deals Immense damage on all enemies with his CP, has a 10 bug ability that strengthens the CP damage and has a very high attack stat, makes him a decent unit for starting boxes that cannot go for insane combos, but overall, yeah, not the greatest.
- Competing Beasts Gareth and Lionel: A cost 53 Blue that sets up the board to be cleaRed, boost Blue units attack by 2000 and gives them Immense CP spawn for 3 turns. The unit is, for the lack of a better term, fair. The cooldown is 8 turns, but the 3 turn duration of the skill makes up for it, but again, it’s just fair, nothing too exceptional.
- Secret Love Isolde and Tristan: A cost 53 Red that Does decent damage to all enemies, creates 4 L SCPs and removes Hearts. I was about to not include this unit, because i think that she’s tremendously weak, but i thought “Eh, 4 Large SCPs, they clear the board pretty efficiently, the damage may be useful if you don’t have a good combo, sure whatever”
Should you pull this hatcher?
I’m going to cheat here and tell you what the Discord hatcher section says, which is No in general and Maybe the first discounted pull if you really want the units.
Personally, i agree, but i would consider the first pull as a new player since, as i stated before, a good pull can really give your box a lot of variety.
Now then, let’s ta- “B-BUT THERE ARE OTHER UNITS IN THE HATCHER, NO?”
That is true, however, i decided to omit those units because not only they are cost 50, but also because their overall strength is pretty low. This won’t be a trend, but this time around, the hatcher offers an enormous pull to cover; i did consider not putting the C53 here, but i decided that they did deserve a small spotlight.
The Quests
So, the Quests in this event are all the ones that appeaRed in the past Time Travel events, with the added spice of the final chapter of the storyline, “Risking existence”.
Note: all the units unlock their bug abilities at 20,40 and 60 bugs.
Let’s analyze the Quests and their related units:
-The First-
This was one of the first attempts that WP came out with to push the “Hacking” gimmick, and as such, this Quest really really wants you to bring hacking immune units. Back then we didn’t have much choice, and… we still kind of don’t. Blue hacking immune units are not common at all, the options that we have (namely Urd, Trebla, Leviathan, Akutagawa, H Cerberus, Satou but not everyone has him, and some others) are not the strongest units out there, but luckily, TT Belial kinda sucks as a unit, as i will show you in a second. (I didn’t mention off color units because while they are very usable, Belial himself hits like a truck). What you should do is clear the Quest Once for every difficulty and the story bits for the first time rewards.
Time Travel Belial
(I shamelessly stole the screen from the Unit Index in the Discord because i sold him for box space)
As you can see by the fact that the skill is 1 and a half line long, the unit is pretty bad. Jokes aside, the time that you would invest into this unit is not really well spent, the only thing that he does is create 8 L CPs. He counters virtually no gimmicks (no. blast Reduction is not a real gimmick), god only knows why the CD on his skill is 7, and sports some demon tribe sinergy. Admittedly, we do have quite the number of Demons in the Reds (Troy, Perchta, Rose), but the cons outweigh the pros.
-The Second-
WP realized that Hacking kinda sucks and that if they released other Hacking countering units, considering the lack of Hacking-centeRed Quests, people may skip the hatcher. The gimmick should be virus, but it’s laughable at how low the damage of it is; the main problem of the Quest is something called “Panel gain”: in a nutshell, the boss heals when you tap a panel of a certain color, which is Red in this case. In the later stages of the Quest this becomes hard to deal with since Kagutsuchi himself heals a LOT off this panels, so a comp that can obliterate a bar in one fell swoop is suggested.
Time Travel Kagutsuchi
This Kagutsuchi does resemble the one from the hatcher (heck, they are the same person), but it’s weaker compaRed to him all around, hence why you can bugmax this one by grinding. As of now, Kagutsuchi is the only F2P unit that sports a skill with Multichain, and as such, WP decided to make his HP very low to compensate for it, which makes the team overall kind of squishy if you don’t bring a stamina unit along. What i said about C55 Kagutsuchi applies here, it’s still pretty flexible skill-wise, but it has to be noted that his CP is hella bad, since boss units tend to have virus immunity (Azathoth aside). Overall, the unit is worth farming, and has a very very high droprate, if not 100%, which means that it will take just a few multiplayer runs with a full bugmax team to be done with. Or, well, just be a madman and farm it by yourself… like me for 99% of the Quests. You make your own choices.
-The Third-
Remember the TT 2 Quest? This is the exact inverse: the virus hurts, like, insta death level of hurts, but the Panel Gain is nothing to worry about. The Quest does hit very hard, but every enemy has a 2 turn cooldown on every move, so it’s manageable. On a side note, virus immune Blue units are kind of uncommon depending on when you started playing; F2P options include School Hanbei, Office Gilgamesh, Charon, H Laplace, etc.
Time Travel Knights of the Round
For a farmable unit, the Knights are pretty good. 6 turn cooldown, board clear, some amount of board manipulation, panel enhance, minor train value… so where’s the kicker?
It counters only Hacking, and the only Green hacking Quest as of right now is Persephone. This means that bringing him anywhere else will force you to juggle with the gimmicks and timing your burst turns, but don’t get me wrong, by any means, farm him. If you’re box is not very good, you need all the help that you can get, and if your box is good, you may want to be prepared for future hacking Quests, because unless you’re going to grind for farmable Trebla (which you should, by the way), what are your other options? Tokugawa?
-The Final-
Here’s the thing: this Quests gimmicks are Protect and Hacking, and both are major. The Ultimate version shouldn’t be too hard to put on the farming list, as the Quest is manageable and we have some amount of farmable units that have Anti Hacking, like Kevin and Nikita, H Cerberus and C45 Xmas Pluto. However, in Spectre, the difficulty ramps up considerably.
Luckily, in our DIscord we have people who are willing enough to post step-by-step guide for farming this unit in Spectre, but the units that can pull this off are very restricted, and the main ones are Pascal and Suyang, but depending on the guide also Satou, Summer Damdeok or Nightgaunt. In a nutshell, if you want to attempt the Quest with your own strategy, you absolutely need some mean of skill hasting and some very bursty combos. If you’re thinking of stalling, consider that the hits that Trebla dishes out are extremely damaging (for reference, in the first turn she strikes for 25k~ damage and in the third she strikes for 23k~ damage); even then, consider the fact that the Quest doesn’t apply permanent Hacking: it’s instead applied for 2 turns every now and then, which means that, with the correct timing, you can totally bring non-Hacking immune units, like the ones mentioned for the Ultimate difficulty.
Time Travel Trebla, the mean version
Hey look! Yet another Trebla! Unsurprisingly it’s almost the same as the other ones, but it’s for the most part a copy paste of the Green version, aside from the 4th ability. Unit is absolutely worth farming, it is extremely strong for a F2P unit. I’m not going to go through her skillset again, just read what i said about the Green version, but notably she is pretty good when put in a train, as all team will get a -2 skill haste at the start of the Quest, every unit will always have -4 panels required for a CP, and their CP will boost each others attack stats for days. All those positives though cannot omit the fact that she suffers from the same problem as the TT Knights: she only counters hacking, and using her skill to wipe gimmicks off the board can beautifully fail if the RNG is not on your side so watch out when using her. (Note: her CP deals fixed damage, so it won’t scale off her attack stat).
Golly! We’re done!
So, before we go, i’ll give you some priorities for the event:
- Get a copy of every unit and do every Quest at least once (ask for lends if needed)
- Get every unit to 60 bugs except TT Belial, since it will unlock all their abilities
- Bugmax, in order: Trebla>Kagutsuchi>Knights of the round (Order depends on what you need the most/what you already farmed/the unit that you like the most)
- At this point you can consider going for TT Belial, as in the end, it’s one more Maxbug unit for your box
- Get 3 60 bug copies of TT Trebla and TT Knights, since they do work pretty well in a train; it may seem impossible to achieve, but the event will last for 18 days or something, so you do have the time if you want to do it
