Which is a good armor set to use for challenges?

[kevinshow]

So I've been following the general guideline of throwing away old sets of armor. I'm now up to Gaudy Set but using mix and match of Gaudy and Spooky Gear (Ancient Battlefield and A Very Strange Place zones)

Just for some playing variety, I thought I'd see how I'm progressing and saved the game, tried a basic challenge again.

I thought I would blow through the first couple of bosses with the overpowered armor sets. Nope...

Turns out they are severely level-locked up until around boss 82 (even starting 0% effectiveness! of course that changes with the first boss defeated)....which means my progress to defeat bosses in a challenge is still very slow since Attack and Defense is tied somewhat to the gear's Power and Toughness also.

So just for a discussion about future planning, how is this part handled by the players that are more advanced, but coming back to try the challenges?

[Fel]

Even with them being weaker until a certain boss they are still overall more powerful than earlier sets by quite a large margin.

Your power/toughness from equipment also acts as a bonus multiplier towards attack/defense so the stronger sets help you more than just with their special bonuses.

With the set from a very strange place fully levelled and boosted you should have no problem with the basic challenge since it's around that time that you are supposed to fully clear it in order to get to mega land.
Having at least 1 bars for every 20k cap in the base values will help you a lot since the best ay to clear challenges is with very short rebirths chained.
Later on you will even have double that on the bars side since they are the main stat for beards, making short rebirths significantly easier to handle.

This starts after UUG and usually you gradually raise your base bars compared to base cap in the time until you finished grinding Walderp's weapon (the one that drops all the time at level 5, you want to keep one copy at level 100 and boost it since its stats are very good).
At that point you will be ready for the first clears of the harder challenges as well as the full clear of all of the challenges where the target boss doesn't increase.

[kevinshow]

I did some more observations.

Magitech set is locked until boss 20, and Clock set is locked until boss 33. Those bosses would be reached sooner, of course.

But even with being locked until boss 82, meaning that more percentage of the full power and toughness was locked even upon reaching boss 20 or boss 33, the Gaudy or Spooky set was still providing a higher numerical benefit of power and toughness than those earlier sets.

So that satisfies for me that I don't need to be keeping older sets of gear, to do early challenges that could take hours to reach that boss 20, 33, 58, 82, at which point, the armor set would have its full effectiveness ready to be used.