Geo Power!

Are Geomancers hidden gems of cheap easy quest victories? Yep!

Lets start with some lead up…

Awhile back a few of us on Discord were discussing the cost of best in slot suggestions, specifically the insanity of how quickly it reaches very expensive levels. In response I started to recommend a ‘budget’ best in slot to bridge the gap. It came out pretty neat, and started a whole new slew of ideas that I wanted to explore.

The hypothesis became – What is the easiest and cheapest way to clear our current end game farmable content?

Farmable end game content is defined as Haunted Castle Hard, because thats what most of us at the end game are consistently farming.

The requirements

Base hero stats no higher than level 35
No gear higher than Flawless quality
No reliance on specific skill rolls
100% win rate (non mini-boss spawns)
Zero deaths

Is it even possible? Can we build a team of heroes who can clear content with mid range gear and no reliance on skills?

We can 😀

Why Geomancers?

Recently the game saw an update that dropped us a new tier of Elements that add +15 of their respective element to a heroes total. This is a +5 increase over the previous highest Element.

A Geomancer’s innate skill gives him +1% ATK for each point in any element. Effectively, this patch gave them a +30% ATK buff. This innate ability also comes with a raw +40% ATK bonus when fully leveled, plus 90% from all T9 elements on all 6 pieces of gear. Final result is a built in 130% ATK bonus!

Zero chance or reliance on evasion to perform well, just raw ATK values. No other heroes innate ability comes remotely close to this standalone effectiveness, and this is what this theory is based on.

The Task

To topple Haunted Castle Hard, a team must deal 250,000 damage before they die.

Notable data to help:

Damage taken slope is: -0.0168x + 146.73
% chance to be attacked by AoE: 20%
Enemy crit rate: 10%

Building the Geo

A level 35 Geomancer has the following base stats:

HP = 253
ATK = 812
DEF = 364

We know we have to deal as much damage as possible, but we also need to survive. The following gear set takes into consideration the damage taken slope in relation to max health, so that the Geo could survive at least 3 normal hits (6 AoEs), or 1 critical hit.

Evergreen Wand
Ostara Vest
Astral Hat
Drakeskin Gloves
Grimoire Aeternum
Milesian Shield
6 Flood Elements
6 Bear Spirits

All Flawless quality, fully enchanted to include the full innate ability, our level 35 Geo now sits at these stats:

HP = 384
ATK = 7376
DEF = 1738
Damage taken on Castle Hard = 118
Critical damage taken = 294
Hits survived normal/crit = 3/1

This is with zero skills!

The First Setback

There appears to be no cheap easy, minimal RNG way to make a Geo only team that never loses. At best we are looking at 9 rounds to kill with the computed no-skills values from the last section, and these Geo’s are only setup to survive 3 hits. This would require all 4 Geo’s to roll at least 170% ATK bonus worth of skills, and that misses the objective of making this cheap and easy.

I decided I needed to add a tank to the mix, a Berserker specifically.

Bringing in a non-Geo shifts around the thresholds a bit. Given base threat values, this Berserker will be targeted on 75% of hits, and each Geo 8%~. Its obviously not perfect, because RNG is RNG, but we can assume that in a 10 round fight, any Geo will only be targeted 25% of the time.

Our Geo build from the last section, can survive 3 normal hits or 2 crits. 1 Geo will potentially be targeted 8% of hits. How many rounds translates into taking 3 hits 8% of the time?

X = 3 rounds / 8% chance to be targeted

37.5 rounds!

Ok yeah, that is unlikely, but at least it gives an idea of how much theoretical potential adding in a Berserker has, and gives us a ton of wiggle room to find stats that work.

The new bottleneck or metric we have to work in is how many rounds the Berserker can take damage.

Now that we have the team designed, let’s find our ATK breakpoints.

The Breakpoints

I now had to figure out ATK values for all 3 Geo’s plus Berserker, that would kill the target in X-1 turns, where X is the number of normal hits the Berserker can take.

Result: 5 rounds

This also has the added benefit of being 1 round lower than the amount of AoEs the Geo’s can survive. Meaning we will kill before any deaths, even if the enemy AoEs every single round.

Coming to the conclusion was really nothing more than me just playing around with my simulation until the numbers made sense. I did not design anything fancy here, just tried numbers over and over.

Keep in mind that I am also shooting for easy affordability, and minimal RNG required. Here are the stat thresholds we need:

Berserker –

HP = 600+
ATK = 3000+
DEF = 2000+

Geomancer –

HP = 384
ATK = 16000+
DEF = 1738

The Berserker stats are incredibly cheap to obtain, and most will reach those values without effort

The Geomancer stats are from the previous section, plus some attack. To obtain 16000+ ATK from our previously shown build, a Geo needs to acquire an additional 120% bonus, or some combination of increased +ATK and less ATK%.

For example, if a Geo rolls a defense skill, then you can sub out Milesian for Clover.

I can, with a great deal of certainty, tell you that reaching those stats is possible on ANY level 35 Geo with Flawless only gear, with any 4 skills you roll.

The Results

I have been running this team for 2 weeks now, and they never lose. I have never had 1 death, and no Geo has ever received a critical hit.

The big picture is the Berserker, smaller ones are the Geomancers. You will notice that the Geos are not perfectly aligned with the breakpoint stats, alluding that those breakpoints are not set in stone, but more like reference points.

The Geo’s crit rates are 5%/7%/19% and trigger often enough that some fights end in 3 rounds easily. Other than that this team wins on the 5th round every time, with roughly 2 hits to a Geo on average for 113 or so damage.

Going Above and Beyond

To reiterate, this strategy is mowing down Haunted Castle Hard with nothing but stats you can easily obtain with flawless gear and ‘take what you get’ skill rolls…

If you switch to all Epic gear instead, then a 4 man Geo wrecking crew is almost too easy.

If you roll some lucky S tier skills, you can probably start to duo/trio your Geos.

If you put Epic/Legendary gear on AND roll some S/A tier skills, you can very easily solo.