Bit of a bump, but I find this discussion interesting, mostly because Beginner is the only tier where I can be reasonably competitive, given the fact that I lack Wukong or any five-star hero.
With the lack of a high score per stage, posts such as this one and the one in [Challenge Event Feature Request - High Score for every stage](this thread) are interesting, as they show where we can squeeze out more points per stage.
The reason the posted scores are relevant even though they’re from past events, is because from what I’ve seen, there seem to be no scoring differences between two different challenge events. Based on the past challenge events that I’ve participated in, each wave seems to have two scoring components that are the same for each specific wave in the different events: enemy bonus and health bonus.
Enemy bonus is simply the bonus you get for beating the enemies. It’s not the same for each different wave, but the same wave always has the same bonus. For instance, completing Wave 1 on Beginner will always give you 5500 points for beating it, but Wave 8 on Beginner will always give you 11040 points.
The health bonus decreases as you take hits and increases as you recover health. It’s similar to the enemy bonus in that it’s the same for same wave, but different per wave. The maximum number of points for health is 4400 in Wave 1 on Beginner and 8832 on Wave 8 on Beginner. This point total cannot be influenced by tossing in Heroes with more health, as it seems to be based on the percentage of health you’ve lost: when you lose 20% of your total health pool, you’ll get 80% of the maximum score. This approach is close, but still off by a few points.
Both of these point totals is at least true for Wave 1 on Beginner, in both this event and a previous event (sorry, forgot which one). I haven’t tested it for all waves, but I’d wager it to be true for every wave. These are also the easiest to influence, as healing your entire team is easy to do for the final blow and you always get the enemy bonus for beating a wave.
Based on those numbers, I believe that there is no real difference between the challenge events, other than what enemies you’re facing.
This basically means that a high score is dependent on two factors: speed and match bonus. These are trickier to control. Beating a wave purely with items and skills gives you zero match points. I once beat wave 1 this way, but it resulted in a very low score: lower than when I simply matched gems.
This is probably why Brienne is very useful in this tier: her skill allows you to kills opponents faster, while still making matches.
Since this is based on the board, I can only assume that getting a good score requires a lot of restarts.
Here are my Beginner scores for this event:
Wave 1: 31042
Wave 2: 36405
Wave 3: 39624
Wave 4: 41947
Wave 5: 46259
Wave 6: 53308
Wave 7: 56904
Wave 8: 54482
Wave 9: 60916
Wave 10: 68016
The lower waves are pretty similar in score compared to those @Ellilea’s first post, but there is some room for me in the higher waves.