Okay, so I know this is pretty early, but I'm fairly new to the game and want to ensure I'm checking all the boxes. (i've glanced at the overviews for past Springfests, and it seems pretty complex haha) This thread is really just a question of what y'all usually do to prepare for Springfest. (i.e. do you use your regular party? how much should you have saved up? are there any useful items to have in advance? design tips? etc.)

Thanks in advance!!

you can generally go through the fest zone with just your regular team, though if you want to have a good shot at a battle board while those run you may want to have some gold saved up if you need to buy some pets to make a good team of a particular species (and potentially the equips needed for them) (see Guide to fest boards)

Making gold during fests is fairly easy (chests, selling fest items, selling equip drops from fest zone) but spending that gold is also pretty easy if there's things you're after


Aside from that, there's not much, you can check the themes that this year will be the old themes (this is the official spring theme list)
The majestic themes are irrelevant (they're now retired, and there'll be an entirely new set of majestics)
The ones on the right on the other pages will be retired this year and not available, ones on the left will become the Aged themes, and the new ones will be decided from the ones submitted in the not-yet-posted 2023 Spring Theme Design contest thread.
Egg Hunt theme will also likely be retired and replaced with something else



For theme design contests (i assume this is what the Design tips thing is about?), I'd suggest having a solid understanding of how they actually work (see guide here for full)
- the design is about the colours, the traits on the submitted designs are for showing the colours, the actual themes can have any traits, not only the ones you have on the submission

- make sure it's the sylestia pet image url, off-site links, eg, imgur, are invalid

- if you submit two of the same species but with different colour allocations (eg, male image has blue eyes, female image has red eyes) this counts as two different submissions for one species, and disqualifies them. Make sure if you're using more than one image per species that the colours are the same across the board between them.

- you can get feedback from people to help refine designs

- don't steal other people's designs

- you can use the theme codex to make sure your design isn't too similar to extant designs/ so you don't use a name that's already used.

Thanks for putting in the time to type all that!! It's always super beneficial ^-^

I glanced through your fest guide and it was really helpful. Just two quick questions: For a fest team, should I be looking at max stats? And is there a difference between a level 30 or level 50 team?

you don't need a max or supermax team, though it can be fairly useful. Most of my board teams are high stat but not necessarily max.
Lv30s with full Runic elven [x] of Shadows gear (lv26 epic gear, buyable from Sanctuary of Saerielle with high enough reputation. It's non-tradable, so you can't find it anywhere else. It can also get... a bit expensive) tend to get the battles done maybe a bit faster than lv50s with mythic gear from my experience (both can typically end a fight in under 4 turns though, my lv30 teams tend to do 1-2 turns, to my lv50's 2-3, 4's if we're unlucky on the rng rolls)
(lv25 legendary gear is a lot cheaper and easier to get and also works, it's just weaker than the RE gear, which is stronger than lv30 legendary gear itself)

(here is one of my aurleon team, with full Runic Elven gear)

Thank you! I probably wouldn't have figured that out myself haha

So should one invest in freezing these pets at lv 30?

if you have a board team that you don't want going over there, sure. And hey, if you ever want to raise those pets to a higher level for some reason you can always reverse the Unlearning philter with a Learning philter.
They're both the cheapest philters you can get, too so it isn't really a strain on the scale or gold pocket

I mean, to fully understand, the enemies' stats change at certain levels, so by leveling above 30 I'd be putting myself at a disadvantage?

Enemy stats rise with every level, just like with a player's pets, but the major difference is in the amount of HP they have. Lv30 just happens to be a perfect balance of enemies having low HP and being the level where pets get their second proficiency point, letting you give them a pretty respectable boost in their int(/str but most board teams are all int elements)

Lv50 is the other common level because that's the lowest level you can equip the lv50 mythic tier equipment

Lv60, enemies get a pretty large boost to their HP stat, like... it's been puttering along on a fairly even upwards line, then lv60 it jumps upwards. There's more HP jumps in enemies, I think every five levels after? so 65, 70, 75. Definitely at lv75 at least.
(This is the fest zone scaling taking into account the existence of attack ranks and lost grove gear- a fully ranked lv75 team with some good +5 lg gear can still take out the lv75 enemies in like, 4-5 turns)

and only the festival zone ranks up dynamically like this? I'm still finishing up Umbra Forest