(That's not how it works)

I just want to buy the traits I want. Make them expensive for all I care

Someone said exactly that a week ago, and the monkey's paw curled a finger.. 

1. I think it has to be equipped as you finish a droid. If this is incorrect, I hope someone corrects me below!

2. Yes, having a protocol equipped increases your base's total coin output when you have them equipped. The best case scenario is to get a '+50% scrap' trait on 2 protocol droids, and dual-wield them as companions. I do this with LOMs, then upgrade them to Kyber with chips.

3. Yep, higher crit chance = more multi-crits. There's an optimal crit path cheat sheet out there somewhere, it gives you the mathematical most bang for your buck. 

4. Not after they added Protocol droids. 

5. Credits only matter for 2 things, the last handful of RBs, and getting back to ~50t ASAP after RB so you can afford a Kyber Mythic if one shows up. If you aren't upset by how long it takes to get to 15Qa for RB 40, then your credit income is fine. I'm at scrap income level 12, and that does pretty good. I'm still wanting a few more levels, but I'm spending my Nova on Iconics now, and level 12 is taking me a bit more than an hour of pure scrap grinding to hit 15Qa which isn't too bad. T

TLDR: up to you, more = faster high level RBs.

5a. Max those lounge and BP slots eventually, the more wiggle room the easier it is to stockpile droids for future RBs.

Yep, it's tough to use a move that isn't super effective against anything, doubly so after they nerfed Body Slam.

TO HUNT IS TO TRULY LIVE!

I rolled a +6 pickaxe trait on both chopper and DJ Rex, so that's been pretty good so far. I still need higher crit chance, but I'm easily enough 2-3 shotting the Scourge rocks now depending on how lucky my multi-crit is at the time. 

Sure. None of that has anything to do with the discussion you replied to though?

Yeah, Termina probably ends if Link doesn't get jumped in the woods and horse-jacked, but it's still Navi's fault Link gets mugged, teleported and then transformed.

Saria says that when adult link beats the forest temple. She is in the Sacred Realm at the time, and as a sage must remain there, in a separate world. 

Also, ignoring that, she says this to adult Link. Who gets sent away. That Saria is in a completely different timeline than the Link she grew up with. Well... "grew up with."

About as separate as separate worlds can get by my reckoning. 

That's the one! It's one of those phrases that stuck with me and entered my vocabulary lol

Great, they may have changed it/fixed it. Again, several posts of people who had it fail over the past 28 hours.

CRUCIAL DETAIL: The Scourge droid MUST be the leftmost droid in the fusion bay, or it will not be a Scourge fusion. 

Idk why, probably spaghetti code, but there's multiple posts showing this off.

Eternatus is the most insane cashgrab the game has ever done. Blame Scopely since they were running the game at the time, blame Niantic as they designed the event before selling to Scopely, it's all the same. My advice is to raid as much as you can within your budget, get the pass if it's a good value and you can afford it, and build it as much as you can. 

I mean, how many scourge do you have? This is assuming at least 28, as that's what it takes for Scourge to out-earn Kyber.

Each Scourge adds 10% to every Scourge in your base. 5 scourge TDAs = 1.5x more base credits for 28x scourge (including the ones buffed by your C3P0). It's definitely more than having a Kyber TDA give an extra 1.2x to just the droids in that section. 

But feel free to downvote this comment too if you want lol. 

Per some OG SilphRoad research, it takes an average of 42 in-person raids to max a Zacian or Zamazenta to 50. This includes using a lv 3 mega, and trading all of them for extra candy. This can be reduced slightly by trading during friendship Friday's guaranteed 2 XLs per trade.

Per this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/1mu2lq2/eternatus_how_many_raids_you_need_to_do/) it takes about 180 raids to max an Eternatus to 50. No trading to reduce the raids, not like 2 XLs per raid will make even a slight difference lol.

It's a ludicrously insane grind for a maxed Eternatus. Most people who have one at 50 spent 200 coins to double their candy in every battle. 

Last time (IIRC) it took 6 raids to get your Eternatus from the pass, or you could catch enough mons in the wild to get enough points. This time will likely be similar, though no guarantees of course.

Having 5 Scourge protocols gives a bigger buff than the .2x you're missing out on. And really, how many kyber TDAs do you generally get going from rb 1-40? Because I'm getting less than 1 on average, and spending my chips on mythics i need for RBs.

With the info here, it's definitely due to an underdeveloped wall IMO. Dying early is the biggest chunk for sure, but if your tower isn't clearing the enemies fast enough, new enemies won't spawn in, which is also a massive impact. Unless you're specifically going for a DEVO strategy (it doesn't seem like you are), you want your wall thorns to be doing as much as possible to constantly prune enemies.

I believe that wall thorns are the main culprit, 9% means it takes 12 hits for an enemy to die, pump that up to 13% and it'll only take 8, and your spawn rate should be much better. 13% is a good stopping point, 15% is better, but the labs get pretty long, so aim for at least 13% and work on it as you can. (There's also different breakpoints if you have Sharp Fortitude and/or crit% over 100%, but I won't get into that. Aim for 13% and figure the technical stuff out later)

Also, damage increases by 4% every hit the enemies do. Going from 12 hits to 8 is gonna be a shockingly big decrease in damage taken, which will improve your waves by a good chunk.

Ignore wall rebuild and invincibility for now, go all in on wall health until it's maxed, pump that wall regen as high as you can, and every single time you can afford wall Fortitude after a single run, upgrade it a level. 

Wall health is the cheapest and fastest, get that one finished asap. Simple enough, more ehp is more better.

Wall regen is (arguably) the most important, run it as you can afford it until it is done. I unlocked the wall a few months back, and am still working on it, but every time it goes up a level I gain a ton of waves in my farming tier, highly worthwhile. 

In addition to wall regen, work on your regen lab until it's at least 60. Your Wall HP is important, sure. But it's your wall regen that actually keeps you alive, and that scales off of your base regen, so getting that as high as possible will pay dividends, especially with 3000 extra levels from Infinity Threshold.

As a last thought, add levels to your regen and HP workshop until you know for sure you're hitting your 3000 extra levels in your farming tier. If you do another run and are hitting it, no sweat, but you want to be goldboxing ASAP so you can start over-levelling them ASAP. I've found that 5500 makes it pretty easy to max in the first few hundred waves, but YMMV.

Fortitude is expensive, and just keeps getting more expensive. Well worth it for the extra eHP, but I don't think it's worth saving 2+ runs for a level of it, so hit it as you can afford it and you'll see improvements. Like I said, regen > HP. Don't ignore this lab, but don't hurt your progress in other areas to feed this one, ya know?

I could also be missing something obvious to a more experienced player, if so I defer to their judgment.

With the return, what are the general best practices? 

All of this is based on the last run. Things may be different this time, but here's the breakdown:

Go to a local meetup, do as many in-person max battles as possible. Remote raids will be terrible, as they tend to be for high-difficulty Max Battles. If remotes are your only option, so be it, just note that you have to pay twice as much per raid, 1 remote pass, and 800 max particles per remote raid adds up fast.

You cannot catch them, you just get candy for winning each raid. Typically about 450 candy, and 50ish XLs. Sounds good, but Eternatus has unique candy costs, unique meaning ludicrously expensive. I don't recall the numbers offhand, IIRC it's 8,900 candy and 8,900 XLs.

In addition, they're able to battle in DMax/GMax raids, so you need to power up their Max Attack (def and heal are useless on them, last time at least), which also cost a massive amount of candy and XLs.

Last time, there was an event pass that rewarded a significant amount of candy and XLs for Eternatus, it was very worth buying if you wanted to use Eternatus in battles.

So that's a ton of work, a serious amount of grinding. Is it worth it?

Well, TLDR: yes.

Eternatus is the unbeatable Dragon Type for Max Battles, they made his max attack deal GMax levels of damage, and his attack is higher than any possible dragon type for max battles, including the other dragon GMax mons.

In addition, their Adventure Effect is REALLY REALLY GOOD. It increases the power of all DMax and GMax mons (so everything but Zacian and Zamazenta) by 1 level, increasing them to level 4 if theyre already at level 3. As with every aspect of Eternatus, it costs more candy than usual, but it works out to be a 22-28% damage increase depending on the mon. The other Adventure Effect that increases max battle damage is Zacian's, and it only gives a flat 5%, Dynamax Cannon is a VERY STRONG AE.

For raids, Eternatus is in a similar place as Mega Rayquaza for dragon type damage, and blows them away if you have party power. Some new Super Mega may out-rank Mega Ray, but you can still bring your Eternatus, who well outranks normal Rayquaza. Very strong as a neutral attacker as well, near Dawn Wings' level, but not quite.

They have mixed play in Master League, they're pretty good but not been top meta, but they're a really solid mon with the right team (and the right meta). Haven't been able to build mine to ML level, so I haven't kept close tabs on their performance recently.

For Max battle purposes, there's a chart on how to maximize your candy somewhere out there. It's something like level 30 with Max level 3 out-damages level 40 with max level 2, but it's been too long for me to remember the specific breakpoints.

If you must remote raid, it will be cheaper to do half as many raids, and pay coins to double the rewards each time.

That's all I remember off the top of my head.

TLDR: Eternatus is very strong if you invest in them. It takes a LOT of grinding to build them, look up that chart, figure out what you want to grind for in advance and budget accordingly. At a minimum (or if you're free to play), do enough to get your Eternatus (likely from progressing in the pass), and get a stockpile of candy to use with his Adventure Effect. After that, get enough to max the Max attack, and level them up as much as you can.

Best luck!

In addition to that, it also tracked every attempt before the pity system was even announced.

Nah, I already had the blue registered, but I got the green one registered at least.

Not currently. Possibly when they add Kyber missions, but as of now the missions haven't been updated since Stellar was added.

get a couple purple b1 heavies

I got a purple RIC1200 as my first kyber mythic, and spent the entire rest of my cycle hunting for those B1 Heavies. 5 greens and later I gave up on the purple fusion. 

Fusing is fully random outside of the 17 specific fusion recipes, but those can't be used to make any droid you can get from the belt or missions.

The rewards are based on two factors: your RB level determines the rarity of the droids youget, and your chosen astromech mission determines what variations you can get. 

At low RBs, you get rares, around rb 10 you get epics, and by rb 20-25 you get legendaries (just estimating based on my personal experience, not sure the specific RB thresholds).

The variation is determined by the mission you choose; the 20 billion missions award rainbow and rarely Beskar, the 1 trillion mission awards Beskar and rarely Galactic, the 6 trillion missions award Galactic and rarely Stellar.

I did the same thing when traits came out, 1 try each iconic.

Got incredibly lucky, and got DO's Iconic trait, as well as pickaxe +6 on Chopper. Nothing else worth mention.

With the candy trade for Nova, I did some more rolls on my BB8 and got "+100% chips on craft", and it is NICE. I'll eventually go for their Iconic trait when I can afford to go all the way to 60 just in case, but in the mean time I'm getting 4500 chips from crafting and selling a rainbow mythic. 

My ultimate goal is to get the +100% chips on craft on my Chopper like you got. I'll stop rolling if I get the Iconic trait or +10 pickaxe level, or maybe + crit damage or chance (I need to do some math on those to see if I like em more than raw pickaxe damage).

Rolled a bit on DJ Rex, got Pickaxe +6. I'll go for the Iconic trait down the road, but I called it good for now since it helps during the mine rocks World mission.

Got Offline earnings +6% on CB23, gonna be going all-in on them next for the Iconic trait. The way I see it, the trait pays for itself over time. Even in a worst-case scenario, hitting the nova reward 100x is a full refund, and then every hit after that is pure profit.

And that's it for my luck, decent overall so far! Nothing too notable outside of what I've mentioned. I guess I also got the gold splash perk on WG22 (name may be wrong, the new Gonk Iconic), but some testing has shown me that it's so close to useless. Eventually I'm gonna go for a pickaxe+ trait on em so they aren't dead weight when going for flawless. I don't care about the Iconic Trait, it's cool, it's good when it goes off, but I'm trying to minimize number of droid swaps, and I'll resent every random flawless I get for "what could have been." I'm only gonna be using them to hunt for Flawless during 2x flawless events, when that dex is done, they're just gonna be a credit droid for me.