Quick preamble

To learn the most about battles, always turn on battle logs! ( owo battlesetting logs=link ).
I've learned 50% of what I know today, just from logs.
Other sources of learning include Helper bots, as some of them also have logs and can help you simulate & understand matchups better.
Otherwise, just talking with experienced players is a great recource, as the community is super helpful and always happy to explain mechanics.

OwO Battles

There are 2 types of battles: friendly battles  owob @user  and random battles  owob  .
When doing a friendly battle, the challenger will always go second, in random battles, however, they will always go first.

The way that owo does random-battle matchmaking is by generating a random ID and checking what team correlates to that ID. Which means that you mostly battle old and inactive teams, not the actively played ones.
When a user gets their team deleted, that ID is no longer available and gets rounded up when checked. This is super rare, but when it happens, another team would be twice as common to encounter in battles.

the Battle System

Each battle is split into 24 turns. And each turn is split into a pre-phase, a main-phase and an end-phase.

Pre-Phase

Firstly canAttack gets checked, which will determine whether your pets will be able to act this turn.
This returns false for dead pets and for pets with the freeze debuff applied.
canAttack getting determined this early in the turn, means that even if your pet is un-frozen or revived later in the turn, it still won't be able to act.

Then, during the pre-phase only, pets holding a Shield or Banner might act.
If a pet is holding a Shield but has no active Taunt Buff, then the pet will use its shield, casting said buff.
For Banner the logic is slightly different, it will cast if it has no AttackUp Buff or if the AttackUp it has, were to expire after this turn.

Main-Phase

This is where the real magic happens! Damage is dealt, health is healed, and more!

During the main phase, all pets act in alternating turns: First your pet in position 1, then the enemy pet in position 1, then your pet in position 2, etc. - if a pet is dead or its canAttack is false, its turn is skipped, but the order will stay the same, i.e., two pets of one team might act after one another.
Position is incredibly important because of this ordering.

End-Phase

For the purposes of this, Buffs and Debuffs are both considered Buffs.

During the end phase, post-turn buffs will trigger: Poison, Flame, Celebration.

  • Their effects are executed in reverse order of reception, which also reduces their duration by 1.
  • But as these don't proc on dead pets, their duration is never reduced on them. ⇒ Dead pets keep these buffs indefinitely.

the other Buffs also lose duration: (but duration is reduced elsewhere)
Buffs also have a "just created" tag on creation, this tag is removed now. Only now, after all buffs went through their thing, a "clean up" is performed, and any that are at 0 duration (ie. marked for removal) are removed.

Hgen and Wgen afterwards also trigger, and heal/replenish their pets.
I.e. when a Mortality Debuff ends in, say, turn 10, then Hgen will work again at full power in that turn.

Notes on reading logs

Only after the Turn has ended, does the Battle Snapshot you see in the Logs get made.
Example: You'd think my Tank didn't have this turn, but that's incorrect.
It had throughout the whole turn, but only after the turn has ended, does OwO show the Battle Snapshot.