Favorite Party Builds

Story Mode Adventure Progression
Balanced parties are most commonly used for progressing through Story Mode Adventure songs. Changing your party configuration in between songs as you progress through the game may confuse newer players, so when starting out, its best to make small changes to the party configuration until you learn the basics. Keeping that in mind, here are some well balanced party configurations for progressing through the songs in Story Mode Adventure.

Balanced Party 1 - This party focuses on buffing with Inspiration and Taunt, stunning with Bash and Shock, healing with Grin and Awe, and dealing strong elemental damage with Violet. As your only cure early on will be a heal over time (Grin) and later a Damage/Heal (Awe), you will want to work Grin into the rotation earlier in each song and then refresh it when health drops below 50% in order to stay alive. Incoming spikes of damage due to multiple enemies, bosses, or missed notes are your biggest threat, making the stuns and taunts important in the rotation. Adjusting the abilities in each tier to suit your play style is also recommended. Variations of this party include swapping Sara with Clark for more predictable healing and protection at the cost of a stun and more importantly the Focus buff that makes abilities require fewer notes to cast. Both parties are well balanced and viable for progressing through Adventure mode.
 * Wade (Warrior) - Attack, Inspiration, Whirligig - Headbutt - All Strength Gear
 * Gwen (Protector) - Awe, Bash, Taunt - Shine - All Defense/HP Gear
 * Sara (Labcoat) - Grin, Shock, Enlighten - Refresh - All Strength/Magic Gear
 * Violet (Exploder) - Splash, Flame, Rumble - Choke - All Magic Gear

High Score Running (legacy scoring)
''Please note: this section is currently outdated as the scoring meta has changed. This will be rewritten in due course, and is preserved here for posterity.''

Once you've reached the endgame and have all your characters at maximum level, it's time to shoot for the high scores! At maximum level, most levels will feel easy enough to survive, even if you have a slightly inefficient party setup and/or are focusing your gameplay more on hitting notes instead of paying attention to enemy types.

A well-balanced highscore party should typically feature attacks on the highest tiers - that way, if you find a track that has a lot of notes, you would want to stay on it the longest, and at the end of it deal some damage to the enemy so that they don't gradually stack up and make your life difficult. For this, it is also advisable to stick your heals at the second tiers, that way you can overcast the heal all the way to near the top, change lane, and still end up with nearly a third-tier number of notes hit, but with a powerful heal.

Alternatively, a radical but entirely viable highscore party aims to do absolutely (or close to) zero damage to the enemies. While 3 enemies will emerge, if they stay on the field the level won't progress to spawn more monsters. Crucially, this means that no minibosses will ever emerge, so no mines, no meteor showers that can ruin your chances of getting the most dense note patterns. To prevent damage, a multiple-enemy stun (Clark's Flash) will be crucial.

Character order is also key. Different songs will have the densest note patterns featured in different places - don't be afraid to reorder your party members so your key characters are situated on the lanes with the most dense note patterns.

Suggested Party 1 Remember that you are free to reorder your abilities however you wish, depending on the most prominent enemy types in the song. Note also that Gwen and Sara have their Stunning attacks at the top - you may choose to reorder if you find you can't Stun the enemy before they pull off a detrimental attack. Because high scoring requires you to consistently hit accurate notes, you may consider equipping any, if not all, of the characters with The Master's Judgement.
 * Wade (Warrior) - Whirligig, Inspiration, Attack - Headbutt - All Strength Gear
 * Gwen (Protector) - Awe, Taunt, Bash - Mend - All Defense/HP Gear
 * Sara (Labcoat) - Toast/Soil, Grin, Shock - Refresh - All Strength/Magic Gear
 * Violet (Exploder) - Splash, Flame, Rumble - Choke - All Magic Gear

Suggested Party 2 - Similar to the above, but instead replace Violet with: With this modification, you try to stick Gift at the highest level instead to chain into Sara's Refresh, which makes lanes return from cooldown even faster than a standard Haste buff.
 * Gruver (Druid) - Phantom Time, Fluorination, Gift - Tin Foil Hat - Puuuumps, Impatience Overwhelming or any Defense Gear if you do not own DLC

Suggested Party 3 - A completely radical highscoring party that does nearly zero damage depending on ability selection:
 * Sara (Labcoat)
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Clark (Medic)
 * Gwen (Protector)

Sidequest Completion
NOTE: With the release of the Slay The Dance Floor expansion, these strategies may no longer necessarily be the best choices for party composition, so take these with a grain of salt.

The Sidequests in The Metronomicon Story mode require you to complete various objectives. Balanced parties are not usually ideal for these specific challenges because they require a different set of skills than you might normally use. The first time you complete each Sidequest song you will receive a reward, either a piece of gear or Street Creds to spend. When you first encounter each Sidequest as you progress through the story, you may just be able to pull together enough abilities to complete the objective. Once you have progressed further into the game and unlocked most of the abilities and acquired a lot more gear, some very customized builds become possible and you might want to revisit the Sidequests to test your skills against the rest of the Leaderboard. You may want to play through each challenge once, just to see what types of enemies come up, specifically, what elements they are and what element the mini-boss of the song is. It should go without saying that completing these challenges will require dancing precision and successful note streaks. Team Attacks are not permitted in the Sidequests so you can't rely on their boosts to complete the objectives.

Here are some builds that you might want to consider trying for the various challenges.

Enemy Rampage
This type of challenge requires you to simply kill as many enemies as possible before the song ends. The optimal party will be designed with pure aggression in mind. This challenge is similar to the Damage challenge except that you simply need to kill the enemies which means if they are almost dead, just do a basic attack to finish them off instead of charging up the perfect critical spell.

This party is basically only viable end game. With no healers, you must kill enemies incredibly fast which means no missed notes.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Ralf (Berserker)
 * Violet (Exploder)

Cure Output
This type of challenge requires you to heal as much HP as possible before the song ends, any and all healing counts even if you are at full health. The optimal party will be designed with healing in mind, which means buffs to speed, focus, and of course primary and secondary cure spells.

This party can't die, you just chain all your healing together and never attack.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Sara (Labcoat)
 * Clark (Medic)
 * Gwen (Protector)

Maximum Streak
This type of challenge requires you to maintain a successful chain of notes for an extended period of time. While any party can complete this challenge there is one particular ability which will make this challenge much easier to complete later if you want to come back to it.

The key to this build is Gruver's secondary ability which allows you to keep your streak alive. Each stack of Hatting will cancel out one missed note.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Gwen (Protector)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Sara (Labcoat)

Critical Hit
This type of challenge requires you to land as many critical hits as possible on enemies. In this scenario, only attacks that type-trump the enemy will deal 99,999 damage (and kill the enemy straightaway) - all other types of attacks will deal a paltry 1 damage.

Since you don't actually need a lot of damage, study the monster pool in the song then pick your elemental abilities accordingly. Usually, there's never more than 3 elemental types in a song. Don't forget to pick appropriate secondaries.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Violet (Exploder)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Sara (Labcoat)

Damage Output
This type of challenge requires you to deal as much damage as possible before the song ends. As with the Enemy Rampage challenge you will want to focus on a very aggressive party. The key difference is that in the Enemy Rampage challenge you just need to kill the enemies, so doing 4000 damage to an enemy with a super powerful attack when he's almost dead is a waste of time. The Damage challenge rewards you for concentrating on dealing the exact right damage to each enemy which guarantees critical damage. And all damage dealt is added to the total so overkills are part of the optimal strategy.

This party is essentially the same as the Enemy Rampage party. You could certainly go for an elemental party and unleash waves of crits, but this party will deal massive damage ridiculously fast. Enemies will die before they can walk on the screen once you have all the end game loot.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Ralf (Berserker)
 * Violet (Exploder)

Spell Count
This type of challenge requires you to cast as many magic spells as possible before the song ends. All buff, healing, and attack spells count towards the total for this challenge. Additionally, your secondary abilities that are auto cast based on successful note streaks count towards the Spell total. For this challenge you will want to bring spell casters that can buff, heal, and do damage with their Tier 1 ability and cycle through them as fast as you can. Completing the objective is possible with the equipment you have at the time it is unlocked. However, mastering this challenge will require much more advanced gear and an optimal strategy.

The key to this challenge is that secondary abilities also count towards the total, and Gruver can make secondary abilities require less beats...in more ways than one (HUGE hint!). Once you get all the buffs, just cycle through Tier 1 spells as fast as you can.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Sara (Labcoat)
 * Clark (Medic)
 * Violet (Exploder)

Loot Grab Challenge
This type of challenge requires that you steal and loot as many elemental crystals as possible. The quantity of the number of crystals looted does not matter - rather, the number of times looted is key.

As usual, Gruver and Sara will heavily figure into increasing the number of spells cast - but for this, Pierce is a MUST.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Sara (Labcoat)
 * Pierce (Thief)
 * Gwen (Protector)

Triple Enemy Score
This type of challenge is exclusive to the Daily Challenge pool in the Arena. You have to score as high as possible, but this is made tricky because you'll be fighting three enemies at any one time.

For this, bring party members that can damage multiple enemies simultaneously.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Violet (Exploder)
 * Clark (Medic)

Timed Boss Kill
Revamped for the Slay The Dance Floor expansion, this challenge is now structured in a different fashion. While previously you simply needed to kill the boss of the world as fast as possible, this time you now have to play a few more songs before you reach the boss song. In most cases, these songs are the bonus songs unlocked by killing a certain number of minibosses (you would have to kill every miniboss in a world to unlock these challenges, anyway) - but in the later world a few more songs are added.

This means you can no longer focus just on the song with the boss; you need to bring a party that can handle all of the songs in the challenge. The GOTTAGOFAST page might have some tricks to help you with that...
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Wade (Warrior)
 * Gwen (Protector)
 * Violet (Exploder)

Timed Boss Kill (Legacy)
The old form of the Timed Boss Kill challenge still exists in some form in the Daily Challenge pool in the Arena. You get a boss song and need to kill the boss as fast as you can. Note that the boss will not hide at specific intervals, but will be there for you to attack throughout.

Try to land powerful and strong hits on the boss - it is much faster to inflict massive burst damage than multiple small hits.
 * Gruver (Druid)
 * Ralf (Berserker)
 * Pierce (Thief)
 * Violet (Exploder)