Astralis' Advanced Battling Guide

Link to First Battle Guide : https://www.marapets.com/blogs.php?entry=502014&id=5060658

Welcome to my second battle guide! Here I'll be teaching you the rest there is to battling. I'll be going into a lot more depth so this one may be a bit more wordy, but should cover absolutely everything! The more advanced sections have a summary at the top if you don't feel like reading the nitty-gritty details.

Gym Stats
Level - This stat determines what level your other stat can be. Other stats can be 2 * Level + 1. Ex. A level 10 pet can have a maximum of 21 strength, defence, speed and health.
Strength - Boosts pets damage
Defence - Currently does nothing towards battling, but does give Kirin Prizes. May be worth training incase of a future battling update.
Speed - Boosts pets damage
Health - Increases number of hits your pet can take, and allows you to battle more difficult cards

Elite gym stats, which are trained with diamonds, do not affect battling in anyway. However, they do allow your pet to enter better Olympics categories which allows you to earn more Olympic Points.

Boosters
Boosters can be used to instantly increase the stats of a pet, but can only be used once every 2 hours. "Min" boosters earned from the hospital can reward 1 stat, or restore your pets happiness, thirst and hunger. Regular boosters containing the name of a stat (bought from the Olympic Shop) will increase that stat by 3-6 points.
"Max" boosters purchased from the AU shop
can increase a stat by 5-10 points, but are pretty expensive.
Any other booster will give 1-3 random stats (including magic).

Weapons
Different weapons can hit for different amounts, with damage scaling with your pets strength and speed stats. Weapon damage is based off of the number of icons a weapon has. A list of the best weapons can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/marabattleguide/weapons/top
https://sites.google.com/site/marabattleguide/weapons/bottom
If you're serious about becoming a battler, then it's worth investing in the best weapons you can afford, and upgrading further when possible. Better weapons will do more damage, meaning faster battles and the potential to beat better cards.

Trading Cards
A trading card's health is based off of it's difficulty. A card with difficulty 50 will have 50 health, simple! Each time we win a battle this difficulty increases, and so does health. But we also earn BP equal to the difficulty of the card we beat.

Calculating Damage
As a preface to this section, a quick way to check your current damage is to just enter an easy battle, and see how much damage your pet does. This next section can allow you to calculate your pets potential damage with different weapons.

We have a bit of math here, but this will come in handy later. We can calculate the exact amount of damage our pet will do with weapons using gennie's formula here :
https://sites.google.com/site/marabattleguide/weapons/icons
(Speed + Strength) x Icon Strength = Total Damage per Weapon (rounded to the nearest whole number)
Ex. A pet with 50 speed and 60 strength equipped with 2 Grassy Axe. 50 + 60 = 110. Multiplied by 14 icons of damage using gennie's table (0.1303523634) = 14.3. Rounded down , this is 14 damage using a single grassy axe. So, with 2 axes our pet will deal 28 damage, + a little bonus damage
from their final attack. (This bonus damage seems to be anywhere from 2.5%-4.5% total strength + speed, and is different every turn).
So , we've now calculated how much damage our pet can do. We can now figure out if we can beat any trading card.

Calculating Healing
As a preface to this section, a quick way to see your healing is to enter an easy battle and heal. Use both your wands and 100% magic to see your maximum healing. Realistically in long term battling, you aren't going to heal more than once with 100% magic, and your magic stats tend to be much more valuable than healing items, as the current strongest items only heal for 120hp each.

Healing works slightly different to damage. The only thing we can improve this with is magic, at the ratio 1 magic = 1HP healed.
With 2 Kirin Magic Staffs with 0% magic use, we heal 24 from the first wand and 24 from the second wand, for a total of 48 HP healed.


We now know how much damage we can heal per turn. We can combine this with our damage in the next section to figure out if we can beat cards.

Can I beat card XYZ?
As a preface to this section, obviously the quickest way is to just battle the card! In this section I'll go into detail into figuring out if we can beat a card.

Thanks to Civ's battle guide, we have a nice list of the damage most cards start with here : https://mara.guide/trading.php?search=
You can use this to see how much damage a card will do to your pet. To beat a card, you need to have more health than the damage they can do, and have the damage to knock them out in 1 turn. Or, you need to be able to outheal the damage that card will do to you in order to heal your pet, and proceed to defeat it over several turns of attacking and healing.

For our first option, it's a simple matter.
Look up how much damage that trading card can do. If your pet has more health than it can deal damage, we can proceed to the next step.

We now need to look at our own damage. Is our total damage higher than the trading cards difficulty (health)? If so, then we can beat this card in one turn, without our pet being reduced to 0 health, winning the battle. If we can't , there's still a final check to be made.

For our final check, can we outheal this opponent? To calculate this, we need to use the healing we calculated in our other section, and subtract the damage our opponent does. If we can heal for more than our opponent can deal to us, we can beat them by switching between healing and attacking when necessary. If you can only outheal by a small amount, you may need to heal several times before attacking again.


Summary
Damage is a combination of strength, speed and weapon icons. We should always get the best weapons available as we can potentially beat more cards this way.
There's tons of math you can do to figure out the exact numbers for damage and healing, but the fastest way will always be to simply just enter a battle to check these. However, the math can be useful when we are considering upgrading our weapons/wands.
We won't win every battle! Some cards are very strong and can take months, or even years to beat. Don't let this discourage you, each new card you can beat is a personal milestone. The Knutt Knight quest for goals is generous in his first 100 quests and will ask for easier to beat cards, so don't worry about the harder cards! You will beat them with time.

Any comments or advice on how to improve the guide is appreciated!

*TO DO* - ADD PICTURES
Last Revised - 22/08/21
Revision List:
22/08/21 - Removed a section made irrelevant due to removal of "healing bonus" depending on wand used.
21/07/24 - Changed gennie's battle guide link which no longer works to Civ's mara guide link