What I did was actually make some notes and create a plan to help me make the most optimal teams to get the maximum out of each play through. Before I did this I was just trying to play runs of maximum turns taking out as many Mimics as I could, some times targeting certain Mimics, but while I found this method great for unlocking dossiers and amassing a TON of items and Astral Gems, I was making hardly a dent in the Mimic skins counter. So yeah, ultimately the most optimal way to play in order to unlock the Mimic skins is to NOT go after individual mimics, but to go straight for Gargos every time.
Not sure if anyone else went as far as to make notes and such, but at the time when I started the process this was the first thing I thought of. I didn’t do anything crazy, just scribbles on scrap paper really, counting all the Mimics I had killed up until then for each character, and putting those numbers up against how many Mimics I had to ultimately defeat to get those skins. In doing this, I essentially found that there were like 5 categories in terms of the amount requirements for each skin (I’m doing this from memory so bear with me):
- Defeat Gargos 15 times
- Defeat Gargos 5 times
- Defeat 100 Mimics / Defeat Gargos 20 times
- Defeat 75 Mimics / Defeat Gargos 15 times
- Defeat 30 Mimics / Defeat Gargos 6 times
From there I just made teams as according to how many times I needed to defeat Gargos so I could hopefully unlock 3 skins at a time, each time. It actually worked out really well, and I actually started unlocking skins right away! Obviously though, the ones that were at the 100 count were the ones that took the longest, as defeating Gargos 20 times in a single go is draining. So yeah, it was an on and off again thing to just grind it all out.
Beyond just knowing how many times I needed to win, the most optimal way to get through SLs each time currently is to deploy as often as possible, and skip turns at every chance. Skip actually fighting as much as possible, aiming to ONLY fight Gargos at the end. When you deploy, you CAN NOT die, and because when you skip turns your characters heal 50%, you can really save on healing items, not to mention everything else.
Initially I fought all the Omens to weaken Gargos and then kill him, which took about 20 to 25 minutes each run (that’s about 3 Gargos kills an hour), but then I just decided to start utilizing my Guardians more and more, so just started using Killers during each Gargos battle, after skipping all the Omens (skipping those raises Corruption even more!), and then facing off with fully buffed Gargos. Each of those runs are about 15 mins (4 Gargos kills an hour).
Even better, now since all the nerfs to Gargos on Normal difficulty, and all the buffs they gave to the rewards for defeating Gargos when fully buffed, it is easier than ever to beat him, and you earn decent coin in the process every time.
There is a down side to doing things this way though, some of which I was able to bypass because I had played so much initially, and that is you don’t amass a lot of items or the max amount of gems, and thus you don’t get guardians and such. By the time I started “ONLY” fighting Gargos, I already had like 4 Killer Guardians, and all the other ranks of each Guardians, on top of have a TON of gems and items. But yeah, because I had so many items/components, I was able to use said items to speed up the process a lot more, especially by creating A TON of the artifacts that raise corruption.
I forget the name of the item right now (again, I’m doing all this from memory), but if you use 5 of these in succession you can automatically jump straight to fully buffed Gargos on turn 1. Due to how much I played BEFORE I started just boss rushing SLs, I was able to gain like 50 of these artifacts in my inventory at once. You can imagine how much time that saved on my final push to unlocked my last team’s Mimic skins. During my last run, each play through was like 5 minutes, so I defeated Gargos 8 time in like 40 to 45 minutes.
It is a good mode to grind all the characters to level 50 just because you can pick 3 characters and just keep playing. I don’t use that many characters, so before SLs many characters in the roster just went unused on my console (I have all the characters). Now though, I just pick a team of 3, just in to SLs, and just play in order to unlock dossiers and skins, on top of leveling up characters I wouldn’t normally play.
