GENERAL
DIFFICULTY
There are several difficulties on Taiman and Battle Royale.
Rookie, East Blue, Grand Line and New World.
Rookie limits the number of stages and the enemy CPUs. You can only encounter a small selection of them.
East Blue is like rookie but with more stages and varied enemy CPUs.
Grand Line has enemy CPUs with filled live bars.
New World has 3 CPUs on Fight 2, which has 2 fighters on Grand Line difficulty.
These categories have traits that make them distinguishable from one another. Resetting the Fight without exiting it was allowed eventually.
The moderators realized that it was convenient to not exit to the main menu every time. The only category where exiting to the main menu is necessary is: New World Taiman, which is inditinguishable from Grand Line Taiman (maybe).
Warning: Resetting the Fight from within the game will restart you on Fight 1. But changing character or supporters won't, you will resume from Fight nº 2 if you changed characters during Fight nº 2.
The elephant in the room: Let's say I'm playing East Blue Taiman, on WR pace, but none of the fighters or stages of my run are new. Then, East Blue Taiman cannot be distinguished from Rookie Taiman. But if the run is not spliced, you can always include your previous failed attempt, before resetting, to prove you are playing the East Blue difficulty without a shadow of a doubt.
BEST CATEGORY TO GRIND?
The easier difficulties have CPUs running away from you a lot. The harder difficulties have CPUs blocking every attack of yours.
New World Taiman forces you to exit to the menu every time, unless you stream your attempts I guess.
New Word Battle Royale is hard to survive, plainly.
Normal and Hard have the best of both worlds. I'd say these are the better categories.
SUPPORTER AND ITEMS
Use Supporters that will boost your attack or increase your GP. For Rookie and East Blue Difficulty, the supporters will barely have time to Load. So you won't be using them much, therefore you need them to boost your stats at the start of the fight.
Best item is the spice, because it takes away the opponent's ability to block. Memorize the mushrooms, one of them gives you a stat boost, one of them can poison the opponent.
The effects of your support change depending on which of the main characters chooses them. Most people play the game from a japanese save file, but I bet not all of you know japanese. So beware of that.
Other interesting supporters: Magellan poisons your enemy, at a cost. Ivankov can boost your stats at the cost of your life, or hit the enemy and lower their life. I wasn't comfortable with either one.
You can trigger a heat man from the get go with the right Supporter, to perform several special attacks in a row. I'm not sure this is a viable strategy though, since your life bar is short, it is not consistent due to RNG, and the time-save will be lost the following round through random status effects.
CPUs
I think the CPU has 4 main modes: Object seeking mode, Track and fight mode, Block and protect mode, and Jumpy mode. If the CPU is jumpy and the character has a diagonal air attack, you can wait for them at the corner of the ice patch. The CPU will come and attack you on Hard Superhard.
Many times, CPUs will target each other. If CPU 1 is on seeking mode (it seeks an item box), CPU 2 targets CPU 1 and CPU 3 targets CPU 2... You will witness a lame CPU train and a run killer.
When the CPU is in seeking mode, you can make it target you if you punch it enough.
You might notice that enemy CPUs start poisoned or with a heat man state. The poison is caused by choosing Magellan as a supporter, the heat man was caused by either Pandaman or Oda, since one of them causes random statuses.
STAGES:
Little East Blue: I have noticed that the fastest way to hurt the opponent, at least on 1vs1, is to run all the way to the right. They will usually be airborn, they will fall (so they can't block), it's easy to sneak an special move.
Sabaody: The opponents will attempt to jump to the left, to seek for items. You can dash to the right and get in their way, so that they never run around the level aimlessly. Don't stop them at the very right of the Stage, preferably stop them in the middle, because the rightern-most side has an elevated floor (therefore the opponents won't have time to jump after knocked to the ground, and they will lay on the ground fainted for a while).
Alabasta: If the CPU is jumpy and the character has a diagonal air attack, you can wait for them at the corner of the ice patch.
Skypea: Oars, the pit and the corner of Thriller Bark are good grinding spots. Although they seem limited in usefulness.
Impel Down: I think to sneak in a Special Move it's good to climb to the ice layer, then fall down to the lower floor. Trigger the CPUs to pursuit you. While the CPU is airborn, they cannot block your Special Move.
There's this trick I witnessed on DBCade's run: to lure the CPUs to the fire area and trigger them to fall recurrently, but that's only worth it on higher difficulties of Battle Royale. Otherwise you can punch upwards inside the Ivankov room, and they will burn from fire.
Marineford: If the opponent does not exit the Ice zone, climb upwards or corner them. The goal is to lure them to a narrow flying platform, where they will enter the freefall state. The lower floor is too abnoxious unless the opponent is cornered. The execution area is the best, but most CPUs won't walk to there.
You can let an item box spawn on the ice to keep prevent YOU from sliding when you attack, but the CPUs themselves move a lot.
Boss Island with a big tree: Collect a diamond every so often, free buffs. Drown them plentifully.
GRAND PRIX 100%
One final piece of advice for 100%.
The final battle of Nightmare island is "easy" to win with Ivankov, unlock Iva as soon as possible and grind a bit on battles wothout fights or with countdowns.
The strategy is to use tension hormone on your enemies. It substracts 25% of their lifes after a while. Whitebeard can be grinded down like that. Blackbeard is a matter of luck. The 3 admirals as well can be defeated with the tension hormone.
