Originally Posted by Drip

Funny thing is: my Whaleship Leading team (Unit 1) is an exception to that rule. It's a trigger team, and the whole idea is to kill the pests on the first combat round already. Which means, the higher ATK from the +10 rings give just that little extra.
Was a close call this time, my squad sometimes managed to kill one or two pests out of three, with always one left after a Solar Blast, but I hope to replace Apple with Iberis before the Magic whaleship missions return, that should be just enough to kill all three pests without a Solar Blast.

I was actually referring to the boss mob... most people seem to have trouble beating the boss before losing their ship not fighting the pests on the ship. Thus more event rings = more ship defence and thus less damage taken. Having said that I only have equipment on my normal 20 girl team and hyper loli so my whale ships are missing over 50% of the possible equipment I could be running and I have yet to lose a ship or even team 1 to any current whale map.

I'm not sure the recommended levels are accurate for the stage 5 ships because I generally only just hit 100k and it says 120k required but I have no trouble....