CRK Cookie Alliance Guide Season 3 (November 2022)

Mint Choco – Healing and Attack Speed Buff

Madeline – Great frontline and incredible damage. I recommend full solid almond to patch up their defenses unless you are going full glass cannon squad.

Pastry – Basically built for this mode, with constant AoE damage. Does incredible damage but is fragile. I think bouncy caramel and searing raspberry are about equivalent on them so if you are light on searing raspberries for your squads you might save some here.

Lilac – Force multiplier for speed comp. Necessary

Flex – For a more resilient build consider Strawberry Crepe to split damage with Madeline or an extra support like Parfait for extra healing and buffs. For all out offense consider another dps cookie or specifically Pancake. They provide another attack speed buff which is where all your damage comes

Raspberry – Good damage and survivability although she is spoiled with some of my best searing raspberry toppings which give her about 20% damage reduction.

Sorbet Shark – Massive damage ability especially against cookie fights.

Herb Cookie – A quality throughput healer and the cleanse has marginal value

Carrot – No I’m not trolling you. Try them out if you haven’t their dps, buffs, and healing is not incredible on their own but considering all those aspects together they are surprisingly competent. Great for a team that needs more healing but still wants some damage.

Flex – Currently testing Tea Knight who I mostly like but I have issues with his survivability. I’ve used Red Velvet in the past but don’t think they have many fights to shine in this season.

Twizzly – Scales with crit and breaks shields. Does acceptable damage.

Cream Puff – If you are still sleeping on Cream Puff in this mode you need to wake up. With scythe and maxed out Juicy Apple toppings they have closed to if not exactly 100% crit chance. And if every spell is a crit spell than their healing and damage is great. Competes with Twizzly for damage and out heals most support healers.

Hollyberry – I shifted this around since I was really trying to keep this team alive long term. Hollyberry is obviously one of the best tanks to have and will just be used on whatever team needs a strong front line.

Healer – I wouldn’t use PV unless you weren’t using HB on this team. I think spreading out your ancients strengthens your overall resilience but you do you. I use Pomegranate but any of the healers could work. I wouldn’t recommend sparkling both because their ability only heals 2 cookies and you already have ~100% crit with scythe and apple toppings so the buff is wasted.

Flex – Add more damage or healing to taste. I like Espresso, Black Raisin and Squid Ink for strong AoE damage. Consider giving them apple toppings too to free up searing raspberry for your other cookies. I don’t know if they scale particularly well with it but if this team already has the ability to hit ~100% crit why not?

Cocoa – Tank/Extra Healing/Stun Negation practically no damage but not their job

Avocado – Still happy with this choice. They miss with their skill a lot but doesn’t matter. Splits damage from Cocoa and gives Sea Fairy an extra %30! strength

Eclair – Literally built for this mode, can actually set a debuff that will last long enough for another team to meaningfully use. Also ensures that things will go down eventually

Sea Fairy – Uh, Big damage go splash?

Pure Vanilla – This team just needs to stall and wait for Eclair and Sea Fairy to win so they get the best healer

Cotten – Great healing and damage while providing bodies to block damage

Pumpkin – Good damage and the healing reduction debuff is still useful to have as an option

Tiger Lilly – Surprisingly competent role-player. Infinite tigers absorb a lot of damage while still providing good damage and yes Tiger Lilly is affected by summoner buffs whenever she summons the tiger. Which can last through to her being knocked off based on buff duration.

Licorice/Snow Sugar – In my testing Licorice has actually out performed Snow Sugar’s damage while still providing similar utility. You can do both but I would recommend having…

Tank – Another off meta pick, try werewolf. They don’t get the summoner buffs but they cheat in this mode. On ability use they gain 20% of their current health as bonus health while increasing their max health by 20%. But when the duration on the ability runs out they just lose the max health increase and keep the bonus health up to their regular cap so they can actually heal themselves. A non-trivial amount at that. Try it out. They can take a surprising amount of damage. Though I believe the health is based on current health so once they get low they will gain less health per ability use.

Scroll – Free damage take it on everything

Monocle – Debuff cleanse and importantly AoE heal based on percent max health

Ghost Horn – Extra defense. This mode is about surviving the grind.

Librarian Robe – For speed comp

Pincushion – For summoners

Scythe – For crit team or maxing dps

Jelly Watch – Cooldown is good for damage but will not make up the lost healing from monocle so keep that in mind.

Sorry Blast Mode

Ditto

Once more

Finally I can help! And what a wake up this battle was. I certainly appreciate the removal of the dragon from wave 8 but putting Raspberry this early is rough. My strategy is to lead Speed Comp because I comfortably have enough damage to burst the 3 cookies joining her. Then at just after 10 seconds into the fight swap to the next team. This isn’t required but this is when she first uses the ability that she has a player cookie which does INSANE damage to whichever cookie has the highest attack. Seriously at my stat level she dealt 70% of their health in one cast. I learned this timing because for a while I was leading werewolf and I realized that if I swapped right as their ability ended then I would usually get the timing. If you team swap correctly it will blank all the damage. Even if the timing is hard to get, I would still swap since she will probably knock out whatever cookie she targeted the next time she does the attack and you can heal them up over later fights. I then use my single target team to finish her off. My Sorbet does over 300,000 damage because percent max health damage is absurd. If you don’t have her down by the time she does another ability cast I would swap to another team to again preserve the wounded cookie.

Crabs. This wave is more annoying than threatening. Your frontline cookies will be stunned constantly unless you use Cocoa. I do just that. I swap to Sea Fairy and friends and clean up this fight.

Forest spirit things? Not super threatening but they do piercing damage and apply a stacking defense debuff. This shouldn’t matter so just AoE them down and swap or cleanse if the debuff is becoming a concern.

Infamous beetle battle. Pretty well known at this point but the beetle cheats and refreshes a massive shield faster then you can DPS it down. You must use Twizzly, Dark Cacao, or Paper Charm treasure to remove the shield at which point this wave is trivial.

Jelly worm. This is so laughable compared to the dragon it’s absurd. Almost like an apology from Devsisters. Kill the adds and then DPS down the worm. It does less damage then Raspberry I’m pretty sure.

2 Taunt goblins and some casters. I just AoE down this wave. It has non trivial DPS but the taunt just doesn’t do a whole lot. I use Sea Fairy and friends or summoners.

3 crabs and a wizard. So this is actually a fascinating wave. So the wizard’s cast bar isn’t really a cast bar. It’s actually a rage bar at least functionally. It fills based on damage taken and when it gets below 30% health the enemy finishes the cast and enrages. Dealing substantially more damage and taking reduced damage. Ideally you finish all the crabs before dealing with the wizard. Consider a swap to refresh abilities and burst the wizard faster once they are sub 30%.

Goblin Buggy and Carriage. Why??? This isn’t really difficult so much as it is annoying. I use summoners or Sea Fairy and friends to deal with the cookie who spam stuns you with trash.

Durian Bombardier and Trash. This is actually a fight that really rewards high DPS and having access to pushing ability. Speed comp actually does really well here. So the bombardier like most bosses are functionally immune to knock backs. So if you use someone like Madeline they will push the trash back but not the boss so you can easily get the trash out of the way to DPS the boss. And you do want to rush the boss down because every 10-15 seconds they use their ability doing massive AoE damage. Ideally they only use the ability once or twice because the ability will outpace your healing in most cases.

3 Waffle Walkers. Again strong damage is your friend. These do strong AoE damage while being relatively fragile.

Forest Spirits but Bigger. Such a blah wave. Just cleanse or swap your tank before they stack the defense debuff too much. That’s it.

Yummi x3. Oh my god don’t use a melee heavy team and don’t swap teams if you don’t have to. The attack speed buff combined with their piercing attacks do massive damage. Exceedingly fragile at this stage in the run so burst them with your crit comp or Sea Fairy and friends.

Sniper tower. Annoying but straightforward. I just fight this with my single target team. It’s fights like these that I have them for. The AI seems to rotate between your back line every few attacks. Just swap if you are worried about a cookies health.

Angry Jellyfish. I don’t like this fight because they shock you which what does that even mean? And I think that is different than the slow motion effect they apply which I don’t think is a glitch. Just AoE and do your best. Moving on.

Hopping Spiders. Melee is really bad since they will spend a lot of time chasing the enemy taking free hits. Stuns and the like are your friend.

Shielded Scorpions. Twizzly is perfect here. I’ve found if I time the switch right at the end of the previous fight then HB nicely pushes the trash next to the scorpions for a Kumiho charm followed up by Twizzly and Cream Puff Combo that mostly nukes the wave. They do heavy damage to your front most cookie so consider a safety swap.

Hogrider and Hogs. Just annoying. The hogs appear to be functionally unkillable until the boss goes down. I haven’t even tried to use Pumpkin’s healing debuff but maybe that might be an option. I just commit to trying to down the rider as fast as possible. Consider the shadow effect is increased ability cool downs. I recommend you can use your abilities. Wait for your abilities to come up a second time. Then immediately swap after the second use. Since most cookies cool downs get close to or over 20 seconds with this debuff and the swap cooldown is 20 seconds. While the swapped in teams get their starting cool up duration of like 4 seconds or less. Then swapping again after that team uses their abilities a second time. This should be more efficient with cool downs but I don’t want to explain the math. So if it’s actually the same I’m sorry.

2 Slugs. Ranged DPS is your friend. They will infinitely spawn tiny slugs with massive health pools that will overwhelm you if you don’t get down the big slugs.

Red Velvet. This wave is cruel. Especially since the cake archers have higher attack than Red Velvet so Raspberry won’t focus him down correctly. You can’t do it for every ability use but if you time your swap immediately after Red Velvet’s ability then you should save whatever unfortunate squishy he pulled. Unless they are one shotted.

Trash Slingers and Box Trolls. My teams are just worn out at this point. Stun resist, cleanse and counter stun are helpful.

Dragon. Frustrating but arguably more fair than the guild dragon. It does massive damage to your teams but has windows for you to get in damage. Just kind of a numbers check that I’m starting to regularly overcome. 25+. No clue my teams are wiped out at this point. Save for one or two cookies

Werewolf – I mentioned it in the team build section but in case you skipped that. On ability use they gain 20% of their current health as bonus health while increasing their max health by 20%. But when the duration on the ability runs out they just lose the max health increase and keep the bonus health up to their regular cap so they can actually heal themselves. A non-trivial amount at that. Try it out. They can take a surprising amount of damage. Though I believe the health is based on current health so once they get low they will gain less health per ability use.

Kumiho – Has some value on cheese comps in arena but the AoE damage is surprisingly competent. Don’t treat them like a full tank. Treat them as an occasional tank with mostly damage.

Carrot – Competent healing, buffing, and damage. I was shocked when I tried it.

Avocado – Solid tanking and their damage doesn’t matter. They are a walking Sea Fairy buff and that works for me

Gumball (And by extension the other bomber cookies) – they all have surprisingly competent damage. They don’t beat Sea Fairy or Poison Mushroom but they aren’t slouches. However against tightly grouped enemies Gumball actually does beat Poison Mushroom and gets close to Sea Fairy. I was amazed. Did you know their attack speed debuff can stack? I’ve seen 2 stacks fairly frequently.

Ninja – Ok this is just for my own validation. They aren’t that bad. It’s not good DPS per se but it is arguably better then Chili Peppers while being more reliable. If you are using Chili Pepper try Ninja and see what you think. (Wow, what an endorsement. Ninja. Arguably better than Chili Pepper. lol)

Devil – Likely not a surprise but I wanted to call out how bad their targeting is. I did some DPS tests on wave 4 for my own curiosity and devil straight up overshot every enemy Like how?

Almond – Auto battle kills this especially combined with the fact they have like the highest preference for the back line in the game. If you manage to get their ability to work out I’m impressed.

Knight – Don’t do it. Strawberry is arguably a better tank. Strawberry Crepe is miles better but I’m not talking about that. Strawberry has fairly comparable stats and dps.

Commons other then Ninja – Feel free to show me otherwise but they are just bad without redeeming utility.

Purple Yam – Like just not good at anything really. I would honestly consider Princess or GingerBrave over him

Frost Queen – If you are using frost queen try some of the other AoE cookies like Espresso, Squid Ink, or Black Raisin. She doesn’t do that much damage without freezes and bosses are always immune to freezes.

Latte – Again try some of the other AoE cookies. Her rune targeting is better then devil but that isn’t saying a whole lot.

Moon Rabbit – Good damage but not worth it unless your are reliably getting the healing off cookie enemies. Cookie enemies are rarer in the first 20 waves than last season so this is tough. But if you do manage it the heal is massive

Milk – Their damage resist is tied to their ability usage which is impressive but in testing there were a lot of times where they would get interrupted or not have it up at an important time.

Tea Knight – The damage should be there based on my testing but their survivability just seems off and I’ve struggled to engineer a team where they are the last one standing. (It doesn’t help that I haven’t gotten his treasure because guild gacha must torture me so)