Monster Stance

Monster Stance is a system in Castle Age that is only applied in Monster Hunting versus specific monsters as specified below. There are 3 types of Hero Stance:

Aggressive stance	Defensive stance	Balanced stance

Game Description[]

Monster Stance[]

Equal or surpass the monster stance difficulty rating to enable extra benefits. Your equipped hero type determines the benefit and the hero stance power is determined by the sum of the hero level and same type heroes in alliance with him.

Defensive alliances increase the critical stance bar which gives a flat percentage increase to the chance to get a critical hit.

Offensive alliances increase the damage bar and the damage done by every attack.

Balanced alliances reduce the rate at which the critical and damage bars decay.

Once you reach a level on either bar, you have a limited time to reach the next level. When the timer ends or when the bar decays back to the start, the bar will reset to the starting value.

Ultimate Mode[]

Get both the damage and critical bars to max level to unlock ultimate attack mode. When ultimate attack mode is activated, players have a limited time to take advantage of vastly increased damage and critical chance before both bars reset to their starting values.

~~However, CP is not awarded from hits during UM so despite having over minimum stance, if you hit solely during ultimate mode you might not get minimum CP for a legendary.~~
=> This doesn't seem to be true.

Bonuses[]

For most Stance Monsters, this is how it works:

	Critical Bar bonus	Damage Bar bonus	Stamina/Energy required	Total Stam/Ene required
Lv. 1	+2% critical	+10% damage	250	250
Lv. 2	+4% critical	+20% damage	750	1,000
Lv. 3	+6% critical	+30% damage	1,500	2,500
Lv. Max (4)	+7% critical	+50% damage	2,500	5,000
Ultimate Attack mode	+100% damage & +10% critical		10,000 (reaching Lv. Max on both bars)

Once you've reached the Ultimate Attack mode it lasts for 2 minutes only. And once it's over, both bars are reset to 0.

The bonuses you can get are the same for all Stance Monsters, however for some of them the requirements to reach each level differ.

Cronus Astaroth and Phantom of Lightning require a lot more resources to reach each level:

2,500 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 0 to Lv. 1
5,000 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 1 to Lv. 2
10,000 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 2 to Lv. 3
30,000? stamina/energy to go from Lv. 3 to Lv. Max

Ouroboros requires a bit less resources to reach each level:

250 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 0 to Lv. 1
500 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 1 to Lv. 2
1,000 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 2 to Lv. 3
2,000 stamina/energy to go from Lv. 3 to Lv. Max

Details & Strategy[]

As you can see in the table, in theory you need 5,000 stamina/energy to level one bar to its max level on most Monsters.

To do so, when you reach a certain level, you have 30 minutes to reach the next one. When you reach Lv. Max, you also have 30 minutes to benefit from its bonus (as long as the bar doesn't decay under 0).

However this doesn't account for the bars' Decay Rate.

It starts at -5.0/sec (except for Cronus Astaroth and Phantom of Lightning: -10.0/sec, and Draculia: -8.0/sec), which means that after the first hit on a monster, every second that passes, you will need 5 more energy or stamina to reach the next level. So in practice, especially if you're doing relatively small stamina hits, you may end up needing a much larger amount of stamina (or energy) to reach the higher levels.

Attacking the Monster with a Balanced alliance will decrease the Decay Rate (of both bars), allowing players to take their time to reach the next levels.
However, unless you're attacking as a coordinated group (and probably even then, as a lot of resources will be used in a short amount of time anyway), decreasing the Decay Rate at the expense of increasing the bars' values even more is probably not the most efficient strategy.

In practice, it may be relatively easy to reach Lv. Max on the Damage bar if many players are attacking a Monster at the same time (which can often be seen on public Monsters during events involving Monster hunting). However reaching Lv. Max on the Critical bar happens much more rarely as most players attack Monsters using Aggressive generals. It usually requires a coordinated group of attackers.

Calculation of your Stance[]

Your Monster Stance is calculated by the level of your general/hero.

For example when battling a Monster Stance Monster:
A 4 lvl Aggressive general will give you 4 Monster Aggressive stance.
A 4 lvl Defensive general will give you 4 Monster Defensive stance.
A 4 lvl Balanced general will give you 4 Monster Balanced stance.

If your hero is a General Master of a General Alliance then only his Monster Stance changes. The change is determined by the sum of his/her level with the hero level of the linked general with the same Stance.
example 1) 13lvl Aggressive General Master + 5 Level Aggressive 2nd link + 2 lvl Aggressive 3rd link equals 13+5+2=20 level Aggressive Stance.
example 2) 7lvl Aggressive General Master + 8 Level Defensive 2nd link + 14 lvl Aggressive 3rd link equals 7+0+14=21 level Aggressive Stance. (Since your Master General is Aggressive, you don't count the level of the Defensive hero in the General Alliance)
example 3) 8lvl Defensive General Master + 5 Level Balanced 2nd link + 2 lvl Balanced 3rd link equals 8+0+0=8 level Balanced Stance.(Since your Master General is Defensive, you don't count the level of the Balanced heroes in the General Alliance)

Attacking a Monster Stance Monster[]

While attacking, players have the opportunity to gain bonuses by attacking all at once. When attacking or healing, if a player's equipped Alliance Stance exceeds the monster's stance difficulty rating, the amount of stamina or energy used is added to the corresponding bar.

Contribution Points (CP)[]

When you attack a Stance Monster, you increase your CP in addition to the usual damage. The CP value roughly corresponds to how much damage you would have done without any active Stance bonuses¹; and as such sort of represents your contribution towards moving the Stance bars up.

CP is only used to determine whether you are eligible for Epic and Legendary drops. Once eligibility has been established, how many epics and legendaries, and at what drop rates, will be determined by the damage you've dealt.²

In practice, unless maybe you only or mostly hit while Ultimate Mode is active (which should award you CP at roughly half the rate of your damage), if you deal enough damage to get certain drops, you should always have enough CP to be eligible for those drops.

Monsters using Monster Stance[]

The following monsters use the Monster Stance system:

Notes[]

The system was first introduced with the release of Cronus Astaroth on October 20, 2014.

Monster Systems
Siege Weapons - Fortify/Dispel - Monster Class - Tactics - Dark Rage - Divine Items - Piercing & Resistance - Target Area - Monster Stance