Sometimes the best offense comes from a strong defense
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Far too often I’ve seen people disregard a defensive skill because it doesn’t improve their offensive power or “star rating”. These people are then forced to run epic or even legendary equipment to clear content consistently and would even fail against the ocassional Huge mini boss.
Ever wanted to clear the same end-game content as these people but in lower gear rarity? The trick is simple, just get a purely defensive skill for your DPS heroes.
I’m here to tell you that a purely defensive skill is very strong for DPS heroes and you could even call it optimal for questing success rates.
Only 4 of my 33 heroes do not have a purely defensive skill because I was pretty new when I promoted the first 3 heroes (2 Warlocks, 1 Pathfinder) and the 4th one was by choice because it was a Chronomancer (I didn’t have to worry about mini bosses or failing when I get bad RNG because of their innate)
Edit: Updating this part since they added 8 more hero slots to make the total hero slot go from 33 to 41. I did hire the last 8 hero slots and the number of heroes that I have without a defensive skill went from 4 down to 3 because I finally got my desired defensive skill for one of my two warlocks I talked about earlier!
Why Defensive Skill/Spirits
Building your heroes for pure damage while ignoring defensive stats would result in you needing to kill the enemy before they kill you, but the higher tier dungeons (Specifically Ancient Jungle) will not let you achieve this easily due to its much higher health pool of 7,000,000 HP or 14,000,000 for Huge Mini bosses.
Edit: Coming back to this article, this very much still applies for T16 Meteor Zone and even more so than before!
This can be negated by building your heroes with equipment that boosts your hero’s survivability through HP/DEF/EVA, but you would still need flawless/epic equipment for its much higher base stats to boost your hero’s stats to a point where they’re able to comfortably survive while having enough DPS to kill the enemy.
By building for one purely defensive skill in your kit, this will give you enough defensive power to survive comfortably while still having enough DPS to finish off the enemy. You can usually get enough offensive power for your heroes from just a weapon skill, a skill that provides bonus attack, and a current tier weapon.
Picking a purely defensive skill for your DPS heroes will also allow you to get away with running much lower rarity equipment to clear the same content that other people struggle with higher tier equipment. For example, my own heroes are able to clear Ancient Jungle – Extreme with only normal rarity equipment at level 40 with unpromoted champions at rank 11.
My heroes can also clear Ancient Jungle Huge mini-boss – Extreme with mostly flawless rarity equipment while other people would struggle even in full epic equipment.
In full flawless, my heroes can even beat out star power hypermax astramancers/conquistadors in full legendary equipment.
For added clarity, the defensive spirits I am referring to are:
- 1 Titan spirit on ALL promoted heroes
- Griffin/Ouroboros for green type heroes
- Ouroboros/Mammoth for red type heroes
- Blue type heroes can utilize leviathans/ouroboros/bahamut and whichever is optimal may change, but not having enough damage to clear dungeons may be something to be aware of, so I’ve decided to use leviathans even if Ouroboros could end up being better here
Disclaimer: The following accordions will all include screenshots from the questing simulator, if you don’t understand how it works you can refer to this article to learn about it or you can ignore most of it and just check the results at the very end.
My Heroes in Flawless VS Hypermax in Legendary
I will do a few tests; the tests will be conducted with two teams.
Team 1: My heroes in full flawless
– Ashley
– Astramancer (Impervious + Leviathans)
– Conquistador (Cloak & Daggers + Ouroboros/Griffin)
– Chieftain (Extra plating, Impervious + Mammoth)
Team 2: Hypermax heroes in full legendary
– Ashley (Same)
– Hypermax Astramancer (Pure damage build)
– Hypermax Conquistador (Pure damage build)
– Chieftain (Two versions, hybrid and pure tank)
Team 1: My Heroes
Team 2: Hypermax
Test Results
| Team 1 Mine in full flawless | Team 2 Hypermax in full legendary with hybrid chieftain | Team 2 Hypermax in full legendary with pure tank chieftain | |
| Huge | 93.10% | 52.27% | 43.64% |
| Legendary | 98.90% | 87.96% | 84.67% |
Proof:
“Okay girl, so what? We all know hypermax is terrible for questing. What if we use defensive equipment to compensate for their squishiness instead of offensive equipment instead?”
Great question! If we keep the skills the same for hypermax but change up the equipment to the setup that’s recommended from the ST Central BiS page, then the team in full legendary without the defensive skill would achieve 100% success rate against both enemies!
But that is in full legendary equipment. The results change a lot when we drop it down to epic or even flawless rarity equipment only! Let us see the results!
My Heroes in Flawless VS No defensive skill in epic rarity
I will do a few tests; the tests will be conducted with two teams.
Team 1: My heroes in full flawless
– Ashley
– Astramancer (Defensive gear + leviathan)
– Conquistador (Defensive gear + griffin/ouroboros)
– Chieftain
Team 2: Questing heroes in full epic
– Ashley (Same)
– Astramancer (Defensive gear + leviathans)
– Conquistador (Defensive gear + leviathans)
– Chieftain
Team 1: My Heroes
Team 2:
Test Results:
| My Heroes in full flawless | Heroes in offensive setup in full epic | Heroes in full offensive setup in full flawless | |
| Huge | 93.1% | 90.17% | 43.84% |
| Legendary | 98.9% | 98.40% | 83.51% |
Proof
Okay, now let us see what happens when we take the hypermax skill setup in full flawless STC BiS setup and compare that to the same hypermax skill setup but replacing one of the skills for a purely defensive skill.
Hypermax skillset VS One defensive skill skillset
I will do a few tests and the tests will be conducted with two teams.
Team 1: Hypermax skillset in full flawless with defensive equipment
– Ashley
– Astramancer
– Conquistador
– Chieftain
Team 2: One defensive skill setup in full flawless with defensive equipment
– Ashley
– Astramancer
– Conquistador
– Chieftain
Team 1: Hypermax skillset
Team 2: Defensive skill skillset
Test Results
| Offensive setup | Defensive skill setup | |
| Huge | 43.48% | 71.20% |
| Legendary | 83.72% | 96.97% |
Proof
“Wow! That’s amazing! But those success rates are still quite low for the huge spawn. Is there a way I can push the success rates to well above 90% in only flawless gear?”
Yet another great question! The answer to this is actually quite simple. We’ve established the fact that having a purely defensive skill on top of defensive equipment is how you increase quest success rate substantially based on the previous tests. How else can we improve our defensive stats even further? By changing the spirits!
The defensive spirits I will use for this test are griffins/ouroboros for my rogues. Targetting for high evasion (Close to 95% for extreme quests due to the -20% penalty from extreme quests) then matching with Ouroboros which increases DEF and provides HP regen.
Changing to Defensive spirits
I will do a few tests; the tests will be conducted with two teams.
Team 1: Hypermax skillset in full flawless with defensive equipment
– Ashley
– Astramancer
– Conquistador
– Chieftain
Team 2: One defensive skill setup in full flawless with defensive equipment
– Ashley
– Astramancer
– Conquistador
– Chieftain
Team 1: Offensive spirit setup
Team 2: Defensive Spirits
Test Results
| Offensive spirits | Defensive spirits | |
| Huge | 66.45% | 92.88% |
| Legendary | 96.40% | 98.37% |
Proof
Hard to believe? Test it yourself!
You can test it for yourself using the quest simulator, feel free to check out my article on how to use it optimally too!
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2 replies on “Power of Defensive Skills/Spirits for Damage dealers”
It would have been helpful to include what the defensive spirits you are talking about in the text of the article instead of expecting people to click into small screenshots of a spreadsheet and squint to figure it out. And as far as I can tell you only switched the Conquistador over to Ouroboros Spirits and didn’t change anything else. But it’s hard to say for sure!
Thanks for the feedback! I originally meant it as a general any defensive spirit thing so that it still applies for future articles without me having to come back and change up the spirits to match future spirits.
I can definitely see the frustration in trying to figure out what I used so I’ve edited the article to also include the spirits I used so you won’t have to go through that frustrating process of trying to figure it out yourself!