Arena (Original)

The arena is an automated combat of your 3 character team against another player’s 3 character team- you can choose which team you go up against. You can also choose to skip the animation of the combat once it loads and it will just tell you who won or lost.

You should do the arena at least 3 times a day for the daily. Additionally you can obtain gems and other rewards from the arena. You must be level 15 to access the arena.

When you fight someone in the arena, if you win you swap spots with them in the arena rankings. If you lose when attacking your ranking is not affected. If someone fights you in the arena and wins, they swap spots with you, and if you win on defense your ranking is not affected.

Battle Points
You get 5 battle points per day- each arena match consumes one and they refill with the daily reset.

Per Game Rewards
Each arena game you play rewards you with 150 arena coins.

Daily Rewards
You get a goodie bag once a day of rewards based on your current arena ranking. For example, if your ranking is between 10001 and 15000, you receive 10 Gems, 10,000 Zeni, 50 Arena Coins, Crystal Apple x 2, Gold Alchemia Pot x 2 and Adamantine Ore x 2. The daily rewards are calculated each day at 00:01 World Time (this was recently changed without notice, it is unclear if it will change back to the original time).

New High Ranking Rewards
In addition to the daily rewards, whenever your arena ranking goes up to a new high you get a small amount of gems for it. At lower arena ranks this amount of gems is a flat 5 gems no matter how many ranks you go up. This means it’s somewhat to your advantage to increase your ranking slowly so you will get more gems than if you skip over too many ranks at once. Once you get to 1k ranking you get 1 gem per rank you increase for a new high (the amount increases at the top ranks). For example, if you rise from a previous high ranking of 740 to a new high ranking of 700, you would receive 40 gems.

Arena Coins
From the daily arena rewards one of the rewards you receive is arena coins you can spend in the Arena Coin Exchange shop. In addition to a variety of other rewards, you can purchase shards for units that can only be obtained with arena coins (Lotiyah and Yuan). Lotiyah is a strong unit and likely the best use of your arena coins.

Arena Teams
Sometimes the arena has a bonus for specific types of attacks. When possible you’ll want to optimize your teams around those bonuses and/or your leader bonus. The arena map also changes regularly and some team compositions work better on some maps than others.

You can set up both an attack and defense team in the arena. The attack team is used when you challenge a team. The defense team is used when another player challenges your team. Usually you will want them to be the same, but there may be reasons to configure your defense team to be different. For example, since you can pick which team to go up against when attacking a mono element team may do well there, but on defense your opponent is picking you, so it might be better to go with a team that is more mixed. Initial positions are also different for attack and defense, so you may want to reorder your teams for each with that in mind.

Note: Your defense team will default to their first job, so make sure that when you configure the team you adjust their jobs if needed. To do this you can go to the team setup window for your defense team, then hold down on the team member. At the top right you will be able to select which job the team member will use in arena.

Selecting an Opponent
When picking a team to fight, you will want to take into account the rank of the other team, their composition and how the position of their units will match up with yours. Ideally you’ll want to pick teams which are weak against either the current arena bonus or against your particular team configuration. You can also inspect the members of the team by holding down on the team leader to see all members of the team and their positions. In that window you can also hold down on any opposing team member to see their stats and skill configuration. This may help you evaluate your chances of winning. It's especially useful to compare the agility of the opposing team members to yours so you can see who will go first. On some arena maps going first can be an advantage, and on others it can be a disadvantage.

More advanced arena players will want to use the current map information and the opposing team information to customize a team that can counter them. In addition to understanding the behavior and skills of the opposing units, you will also want to be aware of their movement and jump information. You can find the base move and jump of any job in the Job Quick Reference and a list of movement and jump related skills in the Movement Skills list.

Strategy and Mechanics Guides

 * Arena Guide by Gagging (GoogleDoc)
 * AI Priority List (GoogleDoc)

Arena Maps
List of all arena map layouts with starting positions and height data