Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9236265-20130507170249/@comment-8284783-20130507205703

One thing that a lot of people seem to overlook, however, is that your first 2 rows can mitigate damage to your leader row.

From what I understand, a character's Def value will directly decrease any attack damage to its HPs. With that in mind, putting characters in your "grunts rows" with high Def and HP values (and giving them weapon with similar modifiers) would give you a big damage sponge, which can be useful against bosses, as they tend to decimate your groups in very few attacks.

With that strategy, you could put your glass cannons as leaders in the back, and give them stuff like Flamewar's Weapon 2 (which gives a ridiculous boost to ATK, but lowers your DEF) to deal high damage.

I'm 100% sure the "recommend" option doesn't take Event bonuses into account, since it kept offering me to put Autobots or Autobots weapons in my team. It is possible that it takes your event bonuses into account when it calculates your total power, however (because my team, despite having no MTM'ed characters, still computed as being about 9300 power, but I did have four X5 bonus characters and, now that the event is over, I'm down to about 5k, despite having put all my R4 autobots rewards in).