Level 375 right now and I am never going to match Chandor. If you like doing the same things over and over and over again, I could highly recommend this. I'm not sure why I keep going.

Well, I can say that level 10 repair seems to be enough. I kill those dragons every week (gametime) and I don't bother healing or fixing things while I do, I just run around and shrapmetal like crazy til they're dead (takes about a minute). Once I'm done I fix everything and usually most things are broken by then (though generally not the artifacts). I've never failed to fix everything up though, never had to go to a shop.
Now level 800. Takes longer getting levels now

--Chandor

One of my goals is to be able to do the arena with no spells at all. It wouldn't be all that hard to kill them; it's surviving it that's the challenge, and of course all the repair.

Been some time since I ran out of spellpoints. I toss dragonbreaths all over the place in VARN to kill the genies at range

Not really worth the extra time to do it, but I'm glad I gave it a try. Maybe in another 50 levels or so it won't be much of a problem.

But using the leap into the stands technique I could blaster the dragons into oblivion at level 120 or so. Although I also did a lot of repairing and I did use power cure spells...
Just tried using blasters to kill the dragons. Apparently if you just hold down the fire button (A) in realtime mode it only checks whether the blasters are OK when you start firing. The dragons broke all my blasters and I kept firing anyway!. Until I had to move to line up on some more dragons. Then I had to repair them before I could start another continuous fire round
I didn't need to heal, but everyone was in the red at the end. Took about twice as long as shrapmetalling. That's at level 808

--Chandor

Shrapmetal is way better. If you really want to prove that, try using blasters to clear that lower room in the Control Center — the one with all those floating robots in it. I've had numerous attempts at it, but the Terminators got me every time, while my party's blasters hammered away uselessly at weaker units that happened to be closer. Using Shrapmetal in turn-based mode, there's no problem, because you can pick out the Terminators one by one and blow them apart, before you tackle any of the others.

With the dragons I just get up close to them one by one and go into turn based mode. One interesting thing I discovered: Sometimes they'd fly up too high and be difficult to target or they'd fly up over the stands. If you run straight at one dragon firing your bows constantly, it won't move at all. I kind of move from side to side in the arena and use that method to get most of them close to the ground. It makes it a lot easier.

Fortunately I can confirm the Control centre does respawn, I clear it out on the 24th April every other year

I kept my blasters. Just having them equipped appears to make you faster oddly enough. I also kept one other weapon for each person just to play with them from time to time although I don't carry them. I use the Warlords Fortress as my storage. Plenty of chests (though every 2 years I have to move everything while it resets)

--Chandor

And it's worse in MM7, where you can't use Harden Item potions on Artifacts/Relics. So you can make normal equipment unbreakable, but not Artifacts/Relics