@Lord

Thanks for your answer! Super helpful information! This thread is a treasure!

Sorta updated this with current thoughts. Wolves are all very weak so I have lowered their tiers to better reflect my current experience through testing. Some thoughts on this 6.15.2023;

-Poison is overwhelming and chews through teams regardless of health pools or healing amounts. Max health and healing synergies lose to poison despite being the obvious counter option. Poison cannot be replicated using a team with 3 Wolves, as none can help stack poison dots.

-Critical Hit damage was a problem before now, as many enemy teams hit like absolute trucks regardless of levels. All wolves except for Jocol and Kit can be one shot by Kuzma or two shot by Zapscour. Intersect could counterplay this if properly juggled, either by having multiple intersect units or powering an intersect team with a yellow battery. However, intersect units get eaten alive by poison now, so they're not very useful to stack. Wolves either die to poison or die to a critical hit, which out scales literally all counter play options.

-Coordinate units often stack upon themselves, locking out players from getting any turns. This is often because support units are giving them infinite energy to use coordinate every turn, but can also happen because of stuns.

-Stuns act strangely and given so many last 2 turns, units simply become stunned again before the first stun fades, effectively locking out players.

-Players lose time-outs, so even if players build for tankiness/healing, they will lose to other tanky teams because time-out gives the computer the win in Gauntlet.

-Building for pure damage doesn't work for players, as gauntlet requires sustainability and critical hits will knock out all damage-oriented wolf breeds in one hit.

-Dodge rates on enemies appear incredibly high above level 10, this might be a "scaling" thing, as anything about level 10 now feels completely cracked compared to what the player can put together. Units with no particular bonus in dodging or synergies for it dodge multiple attacks in a row, including dodging intersect far more often than before.

I thought I'd share my current gauntlet team, just for data and camparison, I hope that's ok.

Front:

1x Nightlight Sparklequill
1x Kickstarter Krane

Back:

2x Kit
1x Bracchus

This team is still getting to level 10 pretty consistently, can usually get to level 12 (if I'm not too unlucky) and I think the furthest I managed to get today (16. June) was level 15.
It's definitely not the most optimized or anything like that, but I thought sharing it, might still be helpful as a comparison or something like that.

The Sparklequill specifically might be a viable alternative for the Monstropod (if you're not relying on the yellow synergy), since it has similar abilities but overall better stats (it has less health but all it's other stats are almost 2x as high).

@Lord

Have you trialed this team: Two jocols in front,two furmus and one kit in back? I looked and didn't noticed any mention of it--apologies if I missed it.

(I think a good team name would be "Weasel War Dance." ♥ Which is a reference to this cute prancy thing ferrets do when happy/excited.)

This team gets the full protector bar plus the first healer and second tactician bonuses. It has three interceptors. It's important to put the jocols in front: A) they are the tankiest on the team and B) it helps their blossom maul trigger more frequently. I find blossom maul is pretty powerful as it heals the whole team evenly--it's also not bad as an offensive move, doing 180% damage. Between frontline placement and the jocol's "energetic" passive ability, it triggers quite frequently.

The highest level I have won with this team is 14, and that was kind of a one-off freak event. However, it gets to level 10 with all five surviving almost 100% of the time. I typically tap out after beating 12, sometimes 13. It also very rarely has total wipes--that is: Unexpectedly losing the whole team even when going into a round with good health and energy, which is very frustrating. Because of how defensive the team is, you almost always just lose one or two and thus can quit without losing everything.

This was my team before I switched to King Rat 4-5 days ago. IMO they are kind of a wash against each other in terms of pebble income. King Rat did take me the furthest I have ever gone and that was really cool. However, I find it's prone to losing team members at single-digit levels as well as unexpected total wipes. I've had 3-4 total wipes at level 8, which I only saw once in a month of aggressively running WWD. I think this is because KR only has protector (6) and because of how fickle siphoning scratch can be, since it only heals one ally randomly.

That said, WWD just doesn't seem to have the damage output that KR does, I would assume because the intercepts don't go off as often due to lack of support synergy/motivate? WWD gets to where it can go very reliably, but its full potential is not as high.

(Of course, I could just be having some bad luck! I'd estimate I've run KR maybe 30-40 times since starting it 4-5 days ago, which might not be enough data.)

Updated this with a new build that can get to about Level 12, which is the top end for most builds at this time. It cannot go past level 14 because tanks become unkillable with current scaling, so you'll time out. Just quit out, even going in to a level 15 fight with full health and energy is a bad idea.

My previously mentioned Jocol/Kit front + Krane/Kit/Grouger back team is doing pretty well. I check back on this guide for updated tactics every few days and I haven't noticed a real spike in difficulty the past few days- I've never wiped before round 10 with them, though I do a relatively small amount of gauntlets due to my time constraints and the overall energy cost. I guess the Grouger pulling double duty as yellow battery and some healing might give it a boost? Unsure if I should attribute my success to that or to small sample size. I'll do more testing, we'll see.

Edit: wiped once at level 9, got to level 13 once, did not attempt level 14 LOL. data is fun!

I just use two furmus three jocol easy simple gets you to 10 - 12 consistently. Just quit when one dies or you get too far into unbeatable territory haha

(gives you something easy to start with while working towards the more expensive companions :3)

@Lord

I've actually been running a 3 kit, 1 jocol, 1 zerda and I'm pretty consistently hitting level 8-10 with them. If I'm lucky I can get higher. Not sure if you tried that combo? I just couldn't afford an enderling, so figured to try this one out.

I've tried out most of the suggested builds to me and had much less luck making them work as described. In my experience, I am barely getting to level 8-10 with most suggestions. I do appreciate the ideas, but I'm not having the sort of results I'm being told about. I'm not sure why that is. Gauntlet is in a really strange state at present time, I might be testing it too late with certain suggestions as unseen tweeks are maybe happening...

I would also heed that the (2) KS Krane build is nothing special anymore, as it does not do enough damage to get my runs past level 12, which can be accomplished by most decent non-KS builds. I've heard people getting very hung up over the power of the Krane and I don't think it's really worth the hype at this point. I wouldn't suggest people run to buy these if they might regret rebalancing or lesser results than I've seen proclaimed.

My favorite build has also been updated! It is the Pandosa and Icefisher Stork + 3 Kits. The 5 Tactician Buff makes Kits feel S-Tier again, I would only consider them C-tier (still better than any other wolves rn) without this full buff. I'm very much waiting to acquire and level a Varani to swap out the Stork with, as it should solve the survivability issue the Stork has because it is very fragile and needs constantly Intersect protection and healing to target it correctly (this is unreliable with Siphon Strike being an rng target and Festive Feels being a useless ability with its current numbers. 5% healing a turn makes no difference when everything one or two shots units, at best this counters the teeny-tiny-tic damage of bleeds.)

genuinely no idea why our experiences are different, I'm sorry! full disclosure that I don't watch battles so I can't analyze what's going on within them, but today's gauntlet results so far:

quit level 10
quit level 11
quit level 14
quit level 13
failed level 10 (should have quit, my leads were both at half, oops)
quit level 13
quit level 14

Will do some more this evening and see how it shakes out. I'm not a spreadsheet guru but I am a believer in hard collective data. If it would be valuable to collect data on the makeups of enemy teams as well I can start doing that. (Possibly in another thread so I stop clogging yours :P)