Battle Cats - Prelude to Ruin - Possessed by Evil (Merciless)

Note: You must complete An Ancient Curse before this stage will unlock. After that, this stage follows the same schedule as Hannya.

This stage starts out with only a few Sir Rels off the bat before quickly spawning in a Capy and the stage’s boss, Evil Emperor Cat. Emperor is essentially a Relic variant of Nyandam with lower damage, but also with piercing range and a guaranteed Lv. 3 Surge that Curses and Freezes cats for 4 and 1.5 seconds respectively. He has 1.2 million HP and 8 KBs.

Your goal for this stage is to lure in Capy and Emperor toward your base, then rush them down before after about a minute an Oldhorn spawns and gets in the way. Midway through, another Capy will spawn in. Luckily, Courier Cat fills the necessary role perfectly. Although Emperor’s Surge is quite deadly, it only spawns near the far end of his Omnistrike, meaning that units close to him take relatively little damage. Because of this, units with good durability and low reliance on abilities should also be used such as Can Can and Manic Island. Make sure to send Bahamut after an Emperor Surge has gone away to maximize his effectiveness. If you successfully rush down Emperor before Oldhorn goes in front of him, the stage is over and you just need to DPS stack on the Oldhorn. If not, that’s where Slapsticks come in since their stats vs Relic are extremely high for how stackable they are. Try to burst down Oldhorn as soon as you can and when it dies you will have all the time in the world to finish off Emperor.

Recommended Ubers:
Generalist tanks
Rushers, especially anti-Red
Balrog

This stage also has a 30% chance to drop Stone Cat. Stone Cat and its evolved form Boulder Cat have equal stats, and from here on out I’ll just refer to them as Rock. Rock is a meatshield that costs 360 and a 4.87 sec cooldown. Its main draw is that in addition to having a ludicrous 84 speed, Rock has a whopping 340,000 HP at level 30 with 1 KB and immunities to all status except Curse and Toxic. However, there’s a catch. Rock dies after attacking. Rock will linger after he attacks for about a second before he disappears and dies instantly. This makes him essentially a spammable version of the Iron Wall cannon, being able to take practically any amount of damage for the entire duration of his existence at the cost of not being as spammable as other meatshields… without Research combos.

Under the effects of 3 Research S combos, a Research M and S combo, or Research L combo, Rock will become fully spammable, only leaving enemies about half a second to push between Rocks. It goes without saying that this is absolutely broken and makes Rock the most exploitable unit in the game, trivializing the difficulty of stages that would otherwise be brutal. Although not unstoppable, this synergy makes Rock one of the strongest units in the entire game, and even without Research, Rock’s effect is so powerful that he can just slot into lineups anyways. This is especially true on stages with hard-pushing enemies, though if there’s enough damage, Rock actually can still die normally. If a stage seems impossibly difficult, it’s probably broken by Rock. Unit’s straight up busted yo.