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Summoners War: Sky Arena is a RPG Mon game developed by Com2Us. It's on both iOS and Android.
In the past, great wars over magical mana crystals have left devastation all over the world. And thus, a new rule was put in practice: from hereon, proxy wars will decide everything in the Summoner's Arena, and winners will be granted anything their heart desires.
You are one of the titular Summoners, who has been granted control over a plot of land in the sky and power to, well, summon monsters to do your biddings. Fortunately, Ellia was there to help you through the basics. Unfortunately, something sinister is soon afoot, and the Summoner Council sent you to investigate...
Not to be confused with the Tabletop Game, Summoner Wars.
Summoners War: Sky Arena contains examples of:
- Action Initiative: Every monster has an Attack Bar (ATB) that fills accordingly to their Speed, and whoever fills their ATB first gets the first move. Some monster skills buffs Speed and/or increase ATB, while others might debuff Speed and/or decrease ATB, allowing manipulation of the turn order, and can even be utilized to interrupt an enemy's combo.
- Alpha Strike:
- A common PvP tactic simulates the trope in the following manner: Start with a mon with high speed that buffs your team's atk. Then follow up with a mon that reduces enemy def. Now watch your nukers kill the enemy in one hit.
- A straighter example, however, are mons possessing skills that cause multiple other mons on the same team (typically randomly chosen) to simultaneously attack with them against a single target.
- Armor-Piercing Attack:
- Some monsters have attacks that ignore the target's defense. They are staple in the PvP scene, and are major threats against monsters with high defense and low hp.
- Samurais have a chance to enable use of their Limit Break, Sword of the Supreme Sky Wolf. This attack hits all enemies but more importantly bypasses all shields and invincibility effects.
- Artificial Stupidity: Courtesy of A.I. Roulette. It's infuriating how your mons would waste their big cooldown on enemies who will die from a poke next turn, just for starters.
- Barrier Warrior/Deflector Shields:
- Some monsters could create shield that absorb a certain amount of damage. Some of these shields take it up to eleven into outright invincibility, negating any amount of damage while it lasts.
- The Ancient Lich King boss from the Necropolis dungeon starts every turn with multiple layers of Barrier that blocks any attack and debuffs while it is active. Fortunately each layer only blocks a single attack regardless of damage, so bring monsters with multiple attacks to quickly strip it down.
- Big Bad: Yes, there's an actual Big Bad in this game, his name is Elheil. His surname is... well, there's a reason the trope Excuse Plot is listed on this page...
- Bishōnen Line: The Elemental "family" of mons. Low Elementals are just small orb with Floating Limbs. Elementals are vaguely humanoid-shaped creature. High Elementals have defined humanoid female shape and Fog Feet. Sylph and Sylphid (assuming they are Elemental Embodiments) are completely humanoid and indistinguishable from normal humans.
- Bonus Dungeon: The Trial of Ascension, where you climb up 100-floor tower with increasing difficulty, with bosses every 10 levels. At the 100th floor you get to fight Ath'Taros or Lilith, depending on the season.
- Boring, but Practical: Konamiya (Water Garuda) is a simple 2-star monster valued for her debuff-cleansing ability. While there are monsters that do her job better, she will be your mainstay as cleanser before you get those monsters. Notably, her AI was improved that she can be relied to use her cleanse when your team is debuffed, averting A.I. Roulette to a certain degree.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: It's a smartphone game, so it's a given. However, while spending real cash can give you more chance to redo summonings, don't expect to get that elusive 5-star summons unless Random Number God smiles on you.
- Brought Down to Normal: Tesarion (Fire Ifrit) has a truly unique ability to apply a debuff that disables passives. Quite a number of monsters are valuable for their passives, and thus extremely vulnerable against Tesarion.
- Color-Coded Elements: Red for fire, blue for water and yellow for wind, light and dark have typical colors.
- Com Mons: 1-star and 2-star mons are often seen as these. While 1-star mons are good only as food or evolution material, some 2-star mons are actually viable into the very late endgame. See Simple, yet Awesome below.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Zig-Zagged. Your typical bosses will be immune to Stuns, but they won't be immune to, notably, Continuous Damage, which can make very quick work of them. Played straight in the Trial of Ascension though, they don't let you kill the bosses using Continuous Damage, although most other debuffs still work.
- Cooldown Manipulation: Some monsters have abilities that puts the enemy's skills on cooldown, effectively silencing them. Alternatively, some monster (although right now exclusive to Jamire, Wind Dragon) can reset their allies' cooldowns.
- Critical Hit Class: Some monsters are built with high Critical Rate due to powerful effects whenever they deal a Critical Hit. More generally, high-end nuker mons are built with high Critical Damage and Critical Rate as priority stat, while Attack becomes a secondary stat.
- Cycle of Hurting: Some monsters are infamous for their crowd control ability, and Despair runes can also give 25% chance to stun enemies with every attack. A well built control team with high speed can often kill your team without ever giving you a chance to move at all. Notably, due to the massively souped up stats of monsters in Trial of Ascension, this is the preferred tactic to survive it, with Continuous Damage as the preferred dps method.
- Damage-Increasing Debuff: Defense Break reduces defense, massively increasing damage taken by the target. There's also the Branded debuff which makes the target receive 25% extra damage, but in practice it's often overshadowed by Defense Break.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: The Water Hall Guardian has 500% increased health, reaching to more than a million in a game where 20k damage is already considered huge endgame damage. Fortunately, there's Continuous Damage to take him down quickly.
- Deader than Dead: Some monsters have an ability that prevents resurrection on targets killed by it.
- Elemental Powers: There are five elemental attributes that a monster could possess. They are Fire, Water, Wind, Light, and Dark.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
- The standard rule for elemental effectiveness goes in the following manner: Fire over Wind, Wind over Water, Water over Fire, and Light and Darkness are mutually effective against each other.
- If a monster has the elemental advantage, it gains a chance for its attack to land as a "Crushing Hit" (inflicting 30% more damage) as well as an increased chance of landing Critical Hits; conversely, if the enemy has the elemental advantage, the attacker will suffer a penalty to their critical hit chance, and gain a chance for their attack to land as a "Glancing Hit" (reduces damage by 30% and prevents debuffs from being inflicted).
- There also monsters with skills that mess with the balance in various ways, such as Water-elemental Ifrit's attacks being always treated as if they had elemental superiority regardless of the enemy's actual element, or Wind-elemental Serpent halving damage from Fire-elemental monsters (which have elemental advantage).
- Elite Tweak: Speed-tuning your monsters so they move in succession to each other, especially when you use an attack bar booster. Without speed-tuning, there's a chance the faster enemy could move in-between your monsters and interrupt your combo. When done properly, your monsters will move one after another without any chance for the enemy to move in-between.
- Enemy Summoner: The Fire Beast's unique mechanic. It will summon a horde of tiny explosive minions that will, shortly after, pull a Suicide Attack on your monsters. They can be quite punishing, so taking on the Fire Beast necessitates putting a lot of powerful area-of-effect attacks on your monsters in order to wipe out the minions.
- Excuse Plot: There's a plot in the game, but it's fairly generic, can be completed easily, and the fact that it's non-repeatable means most players will forget it once they're through with it. Updates continue to extend the plot, but these are rare.
- Eyepatch of Power: The pirate captain has one of these as to be expected for a pirate.
- Fragile Speedster: Speed Teams are built to move first, prevent the enemy from moving at all, and unload the pain while the enemy is helpless. However, if they cannot take down the enemy team within a few turns, they would run out of steam and fall before the enemy's counterattacks.
- Gameplay Automation: You can automate combat, which is really useful for the farming and grinding aspects of the game. Problem is, A.I. Roulette and Artificial Stupidity is in full force, so it's best done with over-leveled monsters for routine farmings.
- Glass Cannon: The Phoenix family. 4 of them fill the top 4 highest base attack stat, but they're typically fragile. Teshar, the Wind Phoenix, has the highest attack and lowest hp stat in the game for a natural 5-star.
- Healing Factor: Some monsters passively regenerate their hp every turn, with Chow (Water Dragon Knight) and Camilla (Water Valkyrie) perhaps being the most iconic. Some others have powerful self-heal instead of recovering hp every turn.
- Hot as Hell: The Succubus (naturally), Hell Lady and Rakshasa (assuming she's a demon). Buxom, comes with skimpy outfit, and for the latter two, might as well be dominatrices.
- Hu Mons: Some mons such as Epikion Priests and Oracles are indistinguishable from normal humans.
- Immortal Breaker: Some monsters can bypass passives or other buffs that prevent death. Raki (Fire Hell Lady)'s Soul Crusher notably has a Deader than Dead attached to it, so if she reduces a monster hp to 0 with it, that monster will die and it's not coming back.
- Infinity +1 Element: Light and Dark monsters are rare, and not subject to the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors of Fire-Water-Wind. In a subversion however, they take extra damage from each other and are neither resistant nor strong against the Fire Water Wind elements.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Theomars (Water Ifrit) has the Elemental King passive, which de facto turns him into this. The passive grants elemental advantage (meaning increased critical rate, and never a Glancing Hit) whenever he attacks. This includes against Wind, Light & Dark, and even Non-Elemental.
- Jiggle Physics: Noticeable in close-ups of some of the creature models. Like in the monster info screens.
- Magic Eater: Veromos' (Dark Ifrit) passive, Conversion of Magic removes 1 debuff from all allied monsters (excluding stuns and sleep) and heals himself based on amount of debuffs removed. Similarly, Ath'Taros also cleanses debuffs on his self and gains stacking status buff as he cleanses more.
- Magikarp Power: Evolving your monster would increase their star rating and consequently, their base stats. Even the lowly 2-star mon can be a threat in later stages of the game if raised properly, and some 2-star are viable to the very late endgame. Later on the game adds 2nd Awakening, where 2-star and 3-star monsters can be further awakened, which improves one of their skills and brings their stats to roughly equal to a natural 5-star. These 2nd Awakened mons can actually threaten natural 5-star in pvp battle.
- Maximum HP Reduction:
- Destroy rune causes the enemy to lose max hp based on your damage and how many runes you equip, from 4% up to 12% hp per turn. You can reduce up to 60% of enemy maximum hp this way.
- Some time after the introduction of the Destroy rune, an update introduced mons with skills that have the same basic effect of said rune, and updated some existing ones to have the same.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The Onimusha family of mons is the only one so far who cannot deal critical hits whatsoever. Critical rate and damage stats become Dump Stat, unlike all other bruiser / attack type monsters introduced so far.
- Monster Clown: The Joker family of mons. The most in/famous of them is the Lushen (Wind Joker) with a powerful defense-ignoring Herd-Hitting Attack. Sufficiently runed, he can inflict Total Party Kill in one shot, and is a staple in the PvP scene.
- Mutual Disadvantage: Light and Dark elements are weak to each other, while just being effective against all other. On a more specific note, Theomars (Water Ifrit) gains elemental advantage on attacks against all elements, meaning a Theomars against any Wind monster will gain elemental advantage against each other.
- Nigh-Invulnerable: The Light Hall Guardian has 500% increased defense and often buffs his defense even more, making most attacks deal less than 100 damage. While Continuous Damage still works, fortunately he only has a pittance of hp and can easily be taken out using Armor-Piercing Attack. Indeed, a sufficiently runed Taru (Light Imp) could kill him in one hit.
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Nintendo Hard: The higher (well, deeper) level of the Dungeons really ramps up the difficulty, to the point of requiring specialized team to effectively farm it. Giant requires dealing with his constant defense break and attack buff, Dragon requires dealing with the constant Damage Over Time as his attacks deal increasing damage if you are under said effect, Necropolis requires multihitting and fine-tuning your move orders, Raid requires high defense frontline with the necessity to dump as much debuffs on the boss as possible. And then there's Trial of Ascension where you are expected to switch your roster around to deal with the various elements and abilities the monsters have. And then there's Trial of Ascension Hard mode... - Non-Elemental: Some NPC enemies and bosses are this, making them bypass the usual Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. However, see Infinity +1 Sword above.
- No-Sell: Akroma's (Light Valkyrie) passive, God's Shield grants her immunity against any kind of debuffs. It can't even be disabled by Tesarion (Fire Ifrit) on account of it being a debuff, and she's immune to it.
- One Curse Limit: Seven and ten, actually; you can have up to 7 buffs and 10 debuffs at once.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: Speed determines how quick your Attack Bar fills up, and consequently, who moves first and how often you get a turn. A high-speed team emphasizes in boosting their Speed or Attack Bar even further in order to move before and more often than the enemy, ensuring a barrage of attacks to disable and kill the enemy before they even get a turn.
- Olympus Mons:
- The elusive 5-star summons. Summoning one would broadcast the event to everyone in the chat channel, and they do have higher stats growth compared to other monsters.
- Exaggerated when you manage to summon the Light or Dark 5-star monsters. You will be the center of attention of your chat channel when you manage to get one.
- Percent Damage Attack: Continuous Damage (also counts as Universal Poison) deals 5% of the target's max hp per turn. Very useful to take down high hp or high def enemies, and most bosses are not immune to it.
- Power Creep: Zigzagged all over the place. Many of the original Natural 5-star monsters still reign supreme, and most new mons (including the Natural 5-star ones!) in each major update are viewed as simply diluting the summon pool, but there's usually at least one 'must-have' newcomer. From a more overarching viewpoint, the newer 'progression' units like the Dark Ifrit massively increased the average player's power upon release.
- Power Limiter: Leo (Wind Dragon Knight) has Eye of the Storm passive, which limits the speed of every monster in the battle (aside from bosses) to his own maximum speed, and he always gets the first turn, effectively throwing a wrench in the well-tuned machine that is Speed Teams. On one side, buffing his own speed also raise the speed limit, thus making it moot. But if you use Attack Bar buffers or Speed debuffer on the enemy...
- Power Parasite: Herteit (Dark Lightning Emperor) ability allows him to steal both attack and defense of the target, based on accumulated Knowledge. At maximum stack, that would mean -250% stats on the target and +250% stats on the Herteit, meaning a 500% stat difference. You don't want to leave him alive for too long.
- Random Number God: From drop rate and upgrade rate, to rune stats generations and upgrade, to what kind of monster you're summoning, there's so much randomness going on it borders on Scrappy Mechanic. This includes inflicting and resisting debuffs and multiple-attack mechanics (in the form of abilities to attack consecutively or attacking with more than one monster).
- Scissors Cuts Rock: Theomars (Water Ifrit)'s passive, Elemental King grants advantage against any element, including Wind. This despite Wind element being Water's weakness.
- Simple, yet Awesome:
- Some 2-star monsters such as Wind Pixie and Wind Warbear are viable even in the lategame.
- Buffs and Debuffs can truly shift the tide of battle. Among them, Speed buff and Defense debuff are arguably the most important; higher Spd means more turns and thus more damage or control, and Defense debuff makes your monsters so squishy it's in your best interest to remove it as fast as possible.
- Sinister Scythe: The Grim Reapers and Hell Ladies carry these as their primary weapon.
- Status-Buff Dispel: Some skills dispel status buffs, and are excellent counter against enemy buffers, especially Chloe (Fire Epikion Priest). A few monsters have an interesting version that actually steals enemy buffs every time they attack.
- Status Effects: There's the usual Stun, Freeze, Poison (Continuous Damage here), Atk debuff, etc, so we will try to list the more unusual ones.
- Continuous Damage is basically poison, but the unusual thing is that it's a Percent Damage Attack that works on bosses. Stack 20 of them (due to One Curse Limit, 10 of 2-turn Cont. Dmg will have to do) and without heals or dispels it's an instant death on bosses.
- Glancing Hit turns approx 50% of your attacks into Glancing Hit, as if you are hitting an element strong against you. Notably, Glancing Hits deal less damage and cannot crit nor apply debuffs.
- Beneficial Effect Block prevents you from receiving any buffs while it's in effect.
- Recovery Block prevents you from gaining hp while it's in effect. Some heals also come with a Cleanse before the heal proper, thus making it moot.
- Increase Cooldown puts your skills on cooldown. It's more effective than Silence, as Silence is often a debuff that can be cleansed and its application is dependent on non-Glancing Hit attacks.
- Attack Bar Reduction reduces your attack bar, preventing you from getting your turn. It's most effective against monsters with low speed, which can easily turn into a Cycle of Hurting.
- Bombs explode after a few turns, dealing massive damage that ignores defense and element as well as stunning the target.
- Oblivious disables passive effects, and is currently available to only a handful of monsters.
- Stone Wall: Some monsters have high endurance but are not good at dishing out damage. They are commonly used in stall teams to frustrate and deter enemies from attacking, or at least get a Draw out of the battle.
- Temporary Online Content: Fami (Special Light Magical Archer) and Fran (Special Light Fairy) are unique monsters which are available only at certain periods. Said periods are long over, and no more can be obtained.
- Time-Limit Boss: The Water Guardian and Ancient Lich King's attack would get stronger over time, so you need to finish the fight before their attacks become unmanageable.
- Unskilled, but Strong: The infamous Zeratu (Dark Chimera) effectively only has his basic attack as his sole attack skill (the other is a self-buff that also grants him immediate turn). However, that's all he needs.
- Why Am I Ticking?: The bomb debuff explodes after a few turns, dealing massive defense-ignoring damage and stunning the target. Notably, certain monsters can detonate the debuff immediately, and the Fire Hall Guardian has a massively powerful version that deals more than 100k damage when it goes off. A few monsters, such as Seara (Wind Oracle) has special skills that detonates Bombs and Continuous Damage, removing them but also making them deal their potential damage immediately.
- World of Buxom: You better believe it. All female humanoid monsters have noticeable bust, though some are bigger than others.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: So you summoned a monster using a rare scroll and see the telltale sign of summoning 4-star or 5-star monster. Your heart is racing with anticipation... and realized you summoned an awakened version of 3-star or 4-star monster instead. This was slightly improved with the removal of lightning for Awakened Natural 3-star summoning... although the odds of summoning an Awakened Natural 3-star are still the same.
- Your Soul Is Mine!: The Ancient Lich King would periodically instantly kill one of your monsters (specifically the one that has dealt most damage to him) and make it his own. You can kill this monster to instantly return it to your control, but beware of bringing overpowered monster that could wipe your own team in a single turn.
- Why Won't You Die?: The Ancient Lich King would automatically resurrect himself with 50% of his max hp everytime he dies. Thankfully this effect has a cooldown and his maximum hp also goes down with each damage he takes, so make sure you kill him quickly the 2nd time around.
