User:FOE-tan/Advanced WING Guide

Aim of this guide

The aim of this guide is to teach you how to get S-ranks on a consistent basis and how to pass Utahime Rakuen (the final audition in season 4 that gives 300k fans), looking into what is absolutely essential to passing auditions and what decisions players with weaker supports might make that are no longer needed as your support line-up grows stronger.

Core Concepts

Here we will be looking at the things that you absolutely must do every WING run in order to S rank pretty much every time without fail.

Audition-only Season 3 and Season 4

The most important thing to keep in mind when aiming for S ranks is that the entirety of season 3 and season 4 will be spent on auditions. This means you need to spend pretty much the entirety of the first two seasons reach a minimum of 275 mental. EX skill can help you reach this target, but it ultimately means you will be spending most of your time in the first two seasons in the radio room (or in photoshoots if you have access to Audition Mastery Mental and multiple gold/rainbow starting mental EX skills). Retirement is a much bigger threat than the opposing AIs in the season 3 50k audition, meaning that mental should always take priority over your actual stats when aiming for S rank.

As a result of this, you cannot use the main lesson rooms very often and will often only have access to a lv1 memory appeal for the difficult auditions as a result.

Six Strong Skills

Since you will be playing 16-19 consecutive auditions in a S-rank run, it is of the highest importance that you never draw a bad hand. The way appeals work in WING is that your Produce idol has four appeal slots where they can take appeals from your team's skill boards and the remaining four slots are filled by the appeals that your support idols have for eight different appeals in total. During an audition, you will have access to three different appeals out of the eight you brought into the audition at any one time. Therefore, if you have six appeals that you consider to be strong, you will never be forced into using a subpar appeal in any audition.

The most reliable way to guarantee that you will always have a reasonably strong hand is the ensure that all four of your supports can attack decently well (at least 2.5x multiplier, 3x or higher recommended), then take the generic 2.5x appeal found on every S-SSR and a singular max limit broken appeal from one of your support cards. This will generally cost 170 SP in total, assuming you're taking the appeal from the same support as the generic appeal of your focus stat. If your 4-star appeal is on a S-SR instead of a S-SSR,it will cost 190 SP though.

Once you reach that point, you should pretty much be guaranteed to at least pass the 50k audition by aiming 1st regardless of trend since nobody focuses on 1st, along with giving yourself a chance in every other audition you play as long as you remember the trends and which AIs are the most threatening to your success.

Build Confidence

Shiny colors isn't the type of game where you have to be careful with your stamina. During a Scenario Event, you can get a max limit broken free S-SSR that will have access to a support appeal that scales up to a 3x multiplier at lv80 just by winning WING semifinals once (which only requires a B rank that can be achieved without ever touching an audition in season 4) with one of the featured characters. That support can quickly become the star of a newer account regardless of how good or bad their skill tree and support skills are.

In other words, just keep playing WING with the all auditions S3 and S4 mentality in mind and see how far you can get. until you can buy max copies of the support. Even if you fail, you get EX skills that can help in future attempts by completing runs, no matter how bad they end up.

Building your team

Produce idol

Ultimately, your choice of produce idol actually doesn't matter that much. The idea is just to have supports strong enough to carry literally any produce idol, even one without any damaging appeal like P-SR1 Kogane to a True End on a semi-reliable basis (No dance or visual build can true end reliably without bringing a trend magazine thanks to Vocal 1st WING finals being a thing).

The most important thing you can do to improve your run with any produce idol is to equip the correct EX skills. Usually this is a mixture of starting mental and starting SP EX skills, meaning you have more leeway in the early seasons to reach your goals before the beginning of the audition marathon. You can also bring production items such as tarts, stat books to make building core stats easier. If going for a True End as Dance or Visual, you can also bring a trend magazine to more-or-less guarantee the victory provided you reach WING finals to begin with.

Support idols

For consistent true ends and S ranks, the choice of which supports to bring with your produce idol is critical to success. In this guide, we shall run down what to look out for when picking a support to use for a true end run.

The roles of supports in WING can basically be broken down into three categories — Attackers, supporters and providers. A strong WING support lineup will generally have 4 attackers if possible, 1 provider, and at least 1 supporter. Supports that fit into multiple roles do exist, so including supports that fill multiple roles in your WING set-ups allows for greater flexibility in your other slots.

Attackers

Attackers are exactly what they say on the tin; they're there to hit the judges with their appeals. A good attacker can be identified from the strength of their support appeal If a support has a 3x appeal at lv80, then that makes them a prime candidate for an attacker role. However, 2.5x appeals are generally strong enough to suffice in situations where a 3x appeal isn't available, such as when you have to pass Utahime Rakuen (season 4 audition unlocked after reaching 1 million fans) using SR rarity supports only to clear a special mission. Also look out for a high base stat since just like your produce idol, your supports will deal more dance appeal damage the higher their dance stat is. Good EX skills to equip on attackers include base stat increase and starting support tension up to further increase damage.

Even though there are certain 2.5x appeal supports with especially high base stat numbers behind them which may lead you to believe that they hit harder than a low base stat 3x appeal, there are various other factors calculated such as support idol tension and your idol's own stat for that appeal that gets calculated into the damage formula that ensures that the number that is being multiplied from is a lot bigger than the support's base stat for that appeal. The bigger this number gets, the bigger factor the appeal multiplier becomes. Therefore, an on-stat 3x appeal will always be stronger than a 2.5x appeal, even if the base stat number is a lot bigger on the 2.5x appeal idol. Also, this gap will grow wider the further into the produce run you are, meaning once you hit the auditions where appeal damage really matters in season 4, a 3x appeal on a support may end up being stronger than even a 2.5x appeal from your produce idol.

Providers

Providers are there for their skill tree. They provide strong skills and passives for your Produce idol to unlock. Providers are especially important when going for True End on P-SRs that have niche skills that cannot be used effectively in a WING situation. A good candidate for the provider role will generally have a gold passive with a condition that allows it to activate on turn 1, preferably with a 30% or higher activation chance. More importantly, the provider will provide a 4-star appeal with a multiplier of at least 2.5x that also has a tangible upside, such as a buff to your main stat. A 3x or 3.5x appeal with a downside can also make for a great provider candidate, though you should proceed with extreme caution if the downside involves increasing the mental damage you take from judges. Since unlocking a gold Produce appeal on a maxed support generally takes 140 SP by itself without considering generic produce skill unlocks or your P card's own skill tree, you generally only need a single support in the provider role, and never more than two.

Examples of gold passives that can activate on turn 1 include "activates on 3rd turn or earlier", "activates if you have 4 or fewer stars", "activates if you are in 1st place" (everyone is tied for 1st place at the start of an audition), "activates if you have 50% or more mental" and "activates if you are auditioning with the support character in your lineup."

Since EX skills don't affect anything related to a card's skill tree, you generally run Support commue chance up if you are running the support as a dedicated provider, or whatever the the other role requires if they are an attacker/provider or provider/supporter hybrid.

Supporters

Finally, supporters are there to help your produce idol reach key stat thresholds (such as 300 mental and 220 SP before the start of S3W1) with a combination of commues and support skills. In high-level WING play, you spend very little time in the lesson rooms compared to auditions and work rooms, so good supporters have support skills that provide bonuses in the three work rooms (Radio Mastery, Talk Show Mastery and Photoshoot Mastery) and when finishing 1st in an audition (Audition Mastery). On top of these supports. Stamina support, along with stamina masteries in general, can be very effective support skills to bring along, possibly letting you go a week longer without rest if it activates often enough. As for commues, you are generally looking for at least +40 in your main stat between the first two commues they provide (the third commue is not likely to activate on an average run unless you run support commue chance EX skills, so it matters less)

If you want a guideline about which supports full which role well, you can refer to my recommended WING support list for a rundown of all of the notable supports that are permanently available, sorted by attribute. As far as limited cards go, any limited support SSR from February 2020 or later, along with any limited support that can attack more than one stat for Excellent damage, should be viable as an attacker at minimum, and is also likely to provide value as a supporter provided their kit isn't too heavily tied up into Unit Masteries.