so from what I gather, the key abilities to look for are battle skill activation rate increases, enemy attack % down, any way to reduce damage from pests, and anything that increases health, either from the springs or from walking over a pest node. beyond that, anything that increases attack of my team. Any other key abilities that i missed? and what's the opinion on dodge and on counterattack, are they worth it or not? thanks all

Dodge is fine if you don't mind RNG. I think it's like a 25% dodge rate. Obviously, Ionocidium/Pumpkin/Lycoris are the most ideal units to use, and Waterlily is incredibly fragile otherwise.

Counterattack works great with any attack-down and/or defense-stacking units, since the counterattack is based on the girl's defense.

You should also keep an eye out for any characters with enemy skill down abilities, like Gentian and Southern Cross.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

so from what I gather, the key abilities to look for are battle skill activation rate increases, enemy attack % down, any way to reduce damage from pests, and anything that increases health, either from the springs or from walking over a pest node. beyond that, anything that increases attack of my team. Any other key abilities that i missed? and what's the opinion on dodge and on counterattack, are they worth it or not? thanks all

Dodge and Counter are both abilities which you can focus on, but which should also be paired with one other abilities.

Dodge: You can dodge a lot of attacks, but still want to deal some damage to, so would want something like +ATK in the team as well. Dodge units may have low health/defense, so if you can squeeze a unit adding with +DEF or a healing passive into the squad, they'll live longer. It's not an ability to completely rely on.
Counter: Counter squads work by being attacked, so they take damage. Including a unit in the squad which has a +DEF bonus helps them both defensively and offensively. However, it's near impossible to get high enough defense to reduce damage to only 1 point, especially on the higher level maps, so ideally, it's also combined with units that give a -ATK debuff to the target. (-Special rate, like Southern Cross has, also helps reducing damage, but is less ideal because it also reduces the amount of AOEs a boss may do, which means your counter units won't counter together)

For the "solar effect" there are two strategies:
1) Strategic use of Solar Blast on bosses or for weak squads at important pest nodes. Basically, this is when you use Solar Blast especially on the fights where it really matters. Units who increase Solar damage are good here. Units who increase the Shine Crystal drops and/or spawn extra solar nodes (they're worth half a bar) may help, but are not always necessary.
2) Quantitive use of Solar Blast. Or in other words, use Solar Blast as often as possible! Units with the +ATK on Solar Blast like Dogwood and Leucocoryne benefit a LOT from this strategy. Their +ATK bonus lasts throughout the map, and works even when you use the Solar Blast from another squad. But, to reach that maximum +30% (Leucocoryne) or +42% (Dogwood) ATK bonus, you need to pull 3 solar blasts. At 2 solar blasts, Dogwood and Leucocoryne are comparable to other units of their rarity, but at 3 solar blasts, they pull slightly ahead of most others. So you'll really want to have several units which increase Shine Crystal droprate and/or add Solar nodes to get the most out of them.

There's just one little problem with the units that add Solar Nodes: they interfere with girls who add healing Chocolate nodes, like Chocolate Cosmos. The two types of nodes seem to overwrite eachother, especially on maps with few empty nodes, so it's best to decide which one is more important to your overall strategy, and simply don't use the girl spawning the type of node that is less important.

Also note that raid bosses don't drop Shine Crystals when hit, so any passive effect relating to Solar Blasts, Solar Nodes or Shine Crystals is useless against them! They're still pretty powerful on regular maps though.