Puzzle & Dragons Tamadra and Awakening Guide

Puzzle & Dragons Tamadra and Awakening Guide by WhyIsTheNamesGone

I’ve seen a few requests for a guide to help our newer members acquire the the TAMADRAs they need. Well, here it is.

S-Rank

15-50 stam (mostly). Medium to endgame hard.

Some dungeons’ hardest floor (mostly 15-stamina Special dungeons) are scored. You can tell if a dungeon floor is scored, because it will have your high score (or “Score: –” if you haven’t run it yet) displayed on the button. You get points based on number of combos per round (higher is better), number of turns to complete the dungeon (lower is better), and average rarity of your team (lower is better). At the end, you get a letter grade based on your total points. If it’s high enough (S), then you get a TAMA.

Most of the time, a successful S-rank run involves using all 1-star rarity subs, such as the lowest-quality evo masks, and clearing with just 2 good leaders.

On tri-color dungeons, you can cheat on combos per round with Orb Refresh, which adds to total combos (if any breaks occur) but NOT to total rounds. I’ve seen people post pictures of 15+ average combo using that method.

If you have access to a team with powerful active skills and a lot of skill boost awakens, such as 6x Red Odin, you can cheat on number of turns by killing enemies with active skills, which doesn’t increase the number of turns, potentially allowing a zero-turn completion.

Free TAMA

Sometimes GungHo gives out 1 TAMA per day as part of an event. This used to be more common than it has been recently. They sometimes also do a TAMA gift dungeon, featuring 1 TAMA and 1 Stone for 10 stam. The most recent one of that was last Thanksgiving.

Urgent Dungeons

TAMADRA Retreat / TAMADRA Spotted? 50 stam. 4 floors. Medium.

A new-ish urgent dungeon has shown up recently, featuring 4 floors of mixed TAMAs, Baby TAMAs and ChibiDra (junk) for 50 stam. All the monsters have 100k defense and ~20 HP. The TAMAs and Babies hit tiny amounts of damage, but the ChibiDra can be dangerous. They hit 6666 every turn, AND convert a random orb color to jammers.

I recommend bringing poison, piercing damage (like Ra’s active skill, for example) or armor break effects to bypass the 100k defense, both for faster farming and to survive ChibiDra spawns.

Between the actual TAMA drops, TAMA invades, and feeding Babies directly, you get about 2 awakens per 50 stam. If you have materials to evolve the babies, then more.

Metal/Gold Outbreak 25 stam. 5 floors. Easy.

This urgent dungeon is older than TAMA Retreat, and happening tomorrow evening like right now, check PDX! As the name suggests, it’s mostly full of Metal/Gold dragons. It’s also super-easy. Nothing has more than 25 HP, and nothing hits more than 400 damage. Easy peasy.

For 25 stam, you get 5 floors of mixed metals, golds, and Baby TAMAs. Expect about 1/4-1/3 awaken per 25 stam.

Dungeon of X Dragons / Hunt X Dragons 15-20 stam. 5-7 floors. Easy.

Often during events, these urgent dungeons will have a bonus of “2x King Appearance Rate” and/or “TAMADRA may appear!” When the latter bonus is in effect (visible only on the News, NOT on the dungeon button in the menu) then TAMAs will sometimes appear. Then, if it does, it will sometimes drop. They’re quite rare, so this isn’t a good source of TAMAs, unless you were going to run the dungeon anyway.

Pengdra Village 20 stam. 5 floors. Easy.

Since the Pengdra update, this has become an excellent source of fodder XP. Well, Baby TAMAs sometimes invade, too. It’s rare, but this is a good dungeon to run anyway, on the rare occasion that it’s available. Even including the stam cost to acquire Dragons Plants/Seeds, this has one of the best fodder/stam ratios in the game.

That said, you won’t get many TAMAs. Expect ~0.05 awakens per 20 stam.

TAMADRA Village

99 stam. 5 floors. Hard.

At rank 100(?) you gain the option to buy “coin” dungeons in the Shop menu, for coins. This one costs 10M for 1 hour, and gives 2.5ish awakens per run.

It’s mostly easy, except the final wave, which features a Red and Green Odin TAMADRA, which skill up those two gods. They hit 11k every turn, 22k every 2nd turn, and pre-emptively bind one monster. A common strategy is to bring 2 poison monsters so that even if one is bound, the other can still clear the wave.

This is the best way to quickly obtain many TAMAs for IAP and/or endgame players, but TAMA Retreat may be better for others. Considering the cost (300-500 stam spent farming coins) per purchase, it doesn’t make sense to run if you aren’t planning to spend stones on farming it.

Thursday & Friday Dungeons – Mythical

50 stam. 4 floors. Very Hard.

Assuming you can handle these dungeons, you have a 1/3 chance to loot a Baby TAMA on the third floor. 1/6 awaken per 50 stam, and useful Evo materials on the side.

I’ve not needed Thursday – Mythical yet, so no comment on how to clear it. PDX has some ideas though, check the Team Builds.

Friday is typically a balancing act between getting active skills up before the boss floor, and not dying before then. Many strategies involve stalling against the bind-spamming monsters on floors 1 and 3. Some builds use an off-color sub that is bind-immune to make this simpler.

Awakening without TAMADRA

Awakening via Dupes

If the monster in question is reasonably common, you can feed a copy of itself (same card number) to get a “free” awaken. This is particularly useful for dungeon bosses. Note that the card in question has to actually be able to learn awaken skills for this to work. If you want to see how it works, try it out with the common 3-star Ogres that drop in dungeons.

Consider this method for any farmable monster that you want to awaken. Just keep in mind the costs of acquiring the dupes. If it costs lots of fodder XP/evo mats, stam, or stones to acquire the dupe, it may not be worth it.

Pre-Awakening

If a card has more awakens in a later form, you can “pre-awaken” it before evolving.

A good example of this is Annihilate Mechdragon, Hadar. Hadar has 2 awakens in his un-evolved form, allowing you to awaken him via duplicates. In his evolved form, he has 4. He’s also a 100% drop from a permanently-available dungeon. If you take a Hadar, feed him 4 more Hadars, then evolve him, he’ll start out with all 4 awakens in his new form.

(Confirmed: this DOES work even if the later form with extra awakens doesn’t exist yet. Feel free to pre-awaken for JP-only evos, or based on speculation, if you’re crazy.)