Optimizing Your Raid Teams

This article is going to focus on building a better / more efficient raid team so that you can save mana, kill faster, earn more rewards, and place higher in your raids. Granted, these are my personal feelings and opinions and what I’ve been having success with, but the general ideas should be able to be applied to YOUR teams, even if you don’t have the same cards that I do.
 

½ MANA TEAM (OR LOWER)

Obviously one of the most important things to do is conserve your pots, so I typically try and find the lowest mana cost team that is still capable of completing front attacks. My strategy is always to build a team based on who we're raiding against, I don’t have a generic raiding team since every boss is different and has different stats.

My best suggestion would be to take your total mana, divide by 2, and build a team that will use that much mana. This gives you your "2x attack / potion team". IF that team is killing the boss easily, try dividing total mana by 3 and seeing if you can still defeat the boss. If you can, try dividing by 4, etc.

This will optimize your team for mana efficiency, allowing you to get the most hits in per potion spent. This is always the FIRST thing I look at when building a team: “How many hits can I get / potion and still survive?”

 

COMBOS / SKILLS THAT HELP

Bosses don’t have any “abilities”, so damage reduction really works well. Some of the most common and easiest to put together include:

• Mhor + Giant Boar (Thick Skinned -30% damage)
• Psycho Butterfly + Doomweaver (Giant Insects-40% damage)

Another way to survive is to increase your hit points with +%HP combos. More HP = more hits able to be taken = higher possibility of survival. Some of the common ones include:

• Giant Eagle + Celestial Lion (+50% HP)
• Balzathor + Fenric (Demons +80% HP)

Note: Going purely defensive like this may get you a lot of HP, but if you aren’t doing enough damage (or are doing damage too slowly) to defeat the boss, then you’ll have to modify your strategy. Sometimes high damage is greater than high hit points because you can kill them before they kill you!

That is how I position my team when facing easy bosses like Bourgard… Hit him so hard he can’t kill you before you kill him! Some good combos for +ATK% are:

• Paladin + Armored Warhorse + Grail Knight (Knight Warband +100% ATK)
• Gaznar + Morbius (Unholy Strength +80% ATK)
• Ysbadden + Mhor (Titans +50% ATK) 

 

MY RAIDING TEAMS

While these are probably far from optimal, I’ll share the layouts I use for my teams when I’m battling raid bosses.

My Bourgard team is: 

• T4 Fenric / T3 Paladin / T4 Grail Knight / T4 Armored Warhorse

This team BARELY survives vs Bourgard front, but defeats him everytime. Mana cost is only 32x / attack so I get 7x attacks per mana potion.

 

My Jezebel team is:

• T3 Mhor / T4 Giant Boar / T4 Psycho Butterfly / T4 Doomweaver
• T3 Paladin / T4 Fenric / T4 Grail Knight / T4 Armored Warhorse

I like the damage reduction teams because they can take a LOT of hits for you before they go down. I put Paladin in the lead of team 2 so that the healing proc keeps team 1 alive longer. This gets me 3x attacks per potion.

My Ossion / Lord team is:

• T2 Druid Initiate
• T3 Mhor / T4 Giant Boar / T4 Psycho Butterfly / T4 Doomweaver
• T4 Fenric / T3 Paladin / T4 Grail Knight / T4 Armored Warhorse

This team is almost the same, but adding the single 1* card in team 1 to absorb the first hit so that the other teams survive. As long as I get a "crossed swords", I can get 3x attacks per potion with this team vs both Ossion and the Lord from Seige.
 

FINAL SUGGESTIONS!

We’ve all got different cards at different evolutions and level so what works for me may not work for you. Try and make use of the combos you have available, set up chumps to take hits like I have w / my Ossion team, hit the bosses hard and have survivability in your party. Experiment with your ½ or (or 1/3 etc…) mana teams and remember that not ALL of your teams need to survive… just one.

Good luck with your raids! J

 

Carl Szalich

Psilence6K on Bors-46

Raids / Schedules / Policies

 

This post is primarily for members of the PALE_RIDERS, but perhaps other guilds follow these same sets of ideals so can use this as a reference for their own raid schedules and policies.

RAIDS – MOVING FORWARD

We have a fairly robust raiding schedule. Four times a week us PALE_RIDERS get together and take on various baddies for loot, cards, and honor. Our present schedule for those who don’t read our Guild Message Board are:

• Bourgard – Mon / Fri @ 2000 EST &
• Jezebel – Wed / Sun @ 2000 EST

We currently have the following number of scrolls:

• Scrolls of Death – 399 (Bourgard / Ossion) &
• Scrolls of Cruelty – 664 (Jezebel)

This scroll horde should allow us to continue with our raid schedule unabated, but aside from our wealth of Jez scrolls, we don’t really have a ton of “extra” Bour / Ossion scrolls just “lying around waiting to be used”. However, I feel it’s important for us to start farming Ossion, which uses the same scrolls as Bour, which puts them at odds with each other.

We all love Bourgard. He’s super easy to kill, and many of us can get 4+ hits per potion which results in mad profit of summon stones / streaks, feeders, and charms. BUT we can’t get 5* cards, which is what we really need to improve at this point.

Hence where Ossion comes into play… He hits a LITTLE harder than Jez, has a LITTLE more health, but you get a 1 HOUR timer instead of 30 minutes. It’s the 30 minute timer that makes Jez difficult, so Ossion has a higher chance of completion AND better rewards!

 

A NOTE ON JEZEBEL

Let’s face it, she’s useless.

We’ve only defeated her once because frankly, no one cares about her. She takes a lot of pots to defeat, doesn’t drop 5* cards, and again… that timer, it sucks. As such, completing a Jezebel raids seriously depletes the limited number of pots that we accumulate through the week, and makes it nigh impossible to defeat her once, let alone TWICE like we have her presently scheduled. It is NO surprise to me that people aren’t showing up for her raids because of the poor rewards vs resource cost, and as such, those that DO hit her hard end up failing the raid due to lack of participation.

This creates a vicious cycle as those that DID hit her now have less pots and have to build back up, which results in THEM possibly missing the 2^nd Jez raid, causing those who participate in it to fail, and so the circle completes itself anew.

This means that we should probably only run her ONCE a week, especially since the pot use of a Jez raid will possibly prevent Ossion from completing.

Battles per week: 2 -> 1

 

SPEAKING OF OSSION…

We MUST add him to our rotation ASAP. Killing Bour is not making us any stronger. Sure it gets us useful items like S/S and feeders, but soon we will stagnate unless we continue to get “quality” cards of 5* caliber to actually improve our decks and evolve our existing 5* cards. Since he comes w / a high pot use requirement, mixing him in place of our other former Jezebel raid seems convenient.

Battles per week: 0 -> 1

 

WE WANT MHOR BOUR!

We can’t just stop farming him, if for no other reasons than he keeps us rich in S/S so that we can keep grinding arenas at +200%. As such, I feel we should keep him in rotation twice a week.

Battles per week: 2 -> 2

 

NEW PROPOSED RAIDING SCHEDULE

Ideally, what I’d like to see is the following raids per week:

• 2x Bourgard  - WEDNESDAY / SUNDAY @ 2000 EST
• 1x Ossion (High chance to defeat) – MONDAY @ 2000 EST
• 1x Jezebel (High Probability of Failure) – FRIDAY @ 2000

I think the following schedule can be maintained PROVIDED WE HUNT FOR SCROLLS. If we DO NOT DO THIS we will run out of scrolls very quickly since now we are using 21+21+48 = 90 / week instead of just 42.

How do you guys feel about the above schedule?

 

UNSCHEDULED RAIDS

A quick comment on requests for unscheduled raids: They will not happen. As a guild we farm the scrolls, so as a guild we should all get the opportunity to engage in raids. Some people collect more scrolls than others, and some people are more active than others, but we’re all members of a guild and we will succeed or fail AS A GUILD. Were we to start randomly doing guild raids it would undoubtedly cause sour grapes among those who didn’t know “special” raids were occurring. After all, they helped farm those scrolls… why should they miss out on a raid just because they weren’t lucky enough to be online when someone decided to arbitrarily start one on a whim? Yes, there will be times when you can’t make a scheduled raid, or miss it for some reason or another… that is not “unfair to you”, it is life, and $#!+ happens outside the game. Now what WOULD be unfair is if you woke up from sleeping and someone in another time zone used all the teams’ scrolls running random raids while you were in bed!

So there will be NO UNSCHEDULED RAIDS.

(Please don’t ask for them.)

 

HORSEMEN CAN NOW START RAIDS!!

I am glad that finally, officers can start raids. If a raid is due to begin and I am not online within 5 minutes of start time, ANY OFFICER SHOULD START THE RAID. If it’s Wednesday at 2005 EST and I’m not there… START THE RAID. I try my best to always show up to at least START the raids, but I also have a life, and it’s not impossible that something has happened on my side. So horsemen please consider this your written confirmation to start the designated raid at 2005 EST if I am not online.

 

PLEASE POST YOUR RAID COMMENTS!!!

If the new schedule isn’t working for you, please post your opinions on this blog (obv this applies only to PALE_RIDERS) so that we can try to figure something out that accommodates you. I'm not ALWAYS online, nor are the horsemen, so posting to this blog will allow me to see if all is well amongst the team or not.

 

I hope this clears up a little bit about our raids and why we are running them when / how we do. Again, we’re a TEAM, and we all need to work together to maximize our FUN as well as our rewards J.

See you in Ragnal’s Cove! Happy Riding!

Carl Szalich

Bors-46