Team Building, Not Guesswork

This case study will use the sample hero roster from ST Central assuming ML60. We will tackle the barriers for Ancient Jungle and Elysium & plan out our teams accordingly.

We have 18 heroes in total to work with so we will want to build 6 teams of 1 champion + 3 heroes. These examples are just to show how you should be pairing your teams.

Elysium Extreme: Water/Dark/Earth
Ancient Jungle Extreme: Air/Fire/Light

Elysium Extreme

What we are working with:

Remember the main guidelines!
1. Any two combination for barrier (If applicable)
2. One champion per party
3. One red hero per party
4. Any two combination of blue/green heroes (DPS red can count for this)

Let’s start with Elysium’s barrier requirements of Water/Dark/Earth and set up teams for those barriers first! We want to setup 6 teams and each team want two heroes that match one of the three barriers mentioned.

Guideline 1: Any two combination for barriers

After setting up the barrier heroes/champion, we will now move onto the 2nd guideline.

Guideline 2: One champion per party

The next step is to have one fighter in every party, but we only have 5 of them to work with, this is why we will have one of the fighter champions supplements as the tank which in our case would be Ashley.

First off, let’s see what we have to work with then I’ll reorder the party table to go from Champion/Fighter/DPS/DPS to make it easier to see which teams are lacking a fighter.

What we have to work with

Reordered Table

Guideline 3: One red hero per party

This part will just have us add all five fighters we have into all the parties we have setup except for Ashley’s party since she will act as that party’s tank/fighter.

All that’s left to do is to add in our remaining heroes in there in whatever order we want.

Guideline 4: Any two combination of blue/green heroes

Ancient Jungle Extreme

What we are working with:

Remember the main guidelines!
1. Any two combination for barrier (If applicable)
2. One champion per party
3. One red hero per party
4. Any two combination of blue/green heroes (DPS red can count for this)

Let’s start with Ancient Jungle’s barrier requirements of Air/Fire/Light and set up teams for those barriers first! We want to setup 6 teams and each team want two heroes that match one of the three barriers mentioned.

Guideline 1: Any two combination for barriers
Guideline 2: One champion per party
Guideline 3: One fighter per party (Covered by Bjorn and Rudo)

Guideline 4: Any two combination of blue/green heroes

This is a short/quick example to show that you can have a roster without a single spellblade and still manage all 11 teams against Elysium extreme or Ancient Jungle extreme which have two completely different barrier combinations.

I’m doing this example because I’ve seen a few people going around telling others that it’s impossible to have 11 teams on extreme without a single spellblade.

It’s not impossible, it’s just that it requires a bit more optimizing and there are barrier combinations where the roster may not be able to achieve all 11 teams. You also need a Rank 7 Rudo to achieve 11 teams on Elysium/Ancient Jungle (He boosts elements by 50% which makes one hero element teams possible)

You might also not be able to achieve 11 teams for future tier content, so it might be wise to make one or two spellblades.

However for Elysium/Ancient jungle, it is completely fine to have 11 teams without a single spellblade.

Roster breakdown

Elysium

Earth/Water/Dark barriers

Note: Rudo boosts elements by 50% at rank 7 which will allow you to have single hero breaking barriers.

Ancient Jungle

Air/Fire/Light barriers

This will assume a very balanced roster of 5 heroes per element across all three archetypes, at least one of every class in the game (Except thief/trickster), balanced number of archetypes and 3 spellblades.

Roster Breakdown

First Step:

The first guideline is to match any two combinations for barriers. The second guideline is to have one champion per party. We will work on both at once.

Since we are working with Air/Fire/Light and we want at least one champion per party, I will list out all 6 champions which match these three elements along with one rogue/spellcaster that matches the barrier requirements.

Second Step:

First, let’s see what we are working with. These are the remaining heroes/champions that we have available to us.

We still want to match barrier requirements for the remaining 5 teams that have been left out. We will continue double hero pairings until we run out of double hero pairings that do not involve a spellblade.

Third Step:

Let’s take a look at what heroes we have leftover.

We have one barbarian, ranger, and knight leftover & need 2 teams. But we can’t pair fire and air since each jungle area has its own barrier.

This is where the spellblades come into play. We will pair one of the three mentioned heroes with one spellblade to deal with the barrier.

I will be saving the barbarian since barbarians have the highest threat in the game, and I want to pair the barbarian with Malady to reduce the chances of her being hit. That’s where my ninja will go too since Ninja’s do not want to be hit.

Now that we’ve built all 11 teams for barrier, I will make it look better by grouping the elements together.

Fourth Step:

Complete guideline 2 & 3 by adding one champion and one fighter per team.

Champion pairing doesn’t really matter all too much since we do not know how these heroes are built, if you want to tailor the champion pairings to be even more optimally, refer to the advanced section earlier which gives some tips and tricks for it.

Last Step:

You’re free to mix and match the remaining heroes into the teams however you like!

Thought Process

Team 1

The first thing I look at is how many heroes we have to work with, which in this case is 20 heroes. This means that if we go for the standard 1 champion 3 hero split, we should be able to build 6 teams for extreme jungle with 18 heroes and have a leftover of 2 heroes.

What we are working with:

Seeing as he only has 5 fighters, we’d want to make good use of the advanced tips I talked about which is to use fighter champions to supplement as the tanks.

Knowing that Argon’s the strongest of the fighter champions and he matches one of the barriers we need (Light). My first thought is to look for a Velite, Cleric in the roster to make a light based team. If I can’t do that, I might pair two spellblades in the party for barrier requirements since a single spellblade + low rank Argon won’t be enough to meet ancient jungle’s elemental requirement of 280.

His roster does in fact have a velite, so I will be pairing the velite with Argon for light barrier. The next step is to pick 2 other DPS heroes to form the team but it will depend on a few factors:

1. Number of blue/green heroes remaining (Try to keep things balanced)
2. What heroes pair well with Argon’s Champion ability (All heroes pair well)
3. Preferably heroes that do not match Air/Fire/Light/Spellblade so I can use them for other teams.

Since I know that Argon is one of the stronger champions with the stronger champion buffs, I will get one strong DPS hero that can carry the fight then 2 weaker DPS heroes that are still decent but may not be able to carry well.

That said, I have the velite in the party so I’d pair druid2 and sensei1 into the party to make my first party Argon + Velite 1 + Sensei 1 + Druid2

Druid2 is on the weaker side because they’re not promoted and the velite is missing a critical component which is shield master. I’m relying on the sensei to hard carry this team. Now that we’ve set the first time, time to update the sheet from earlier:

Team 2

Before pairing for the 2nd team, I’ll look at the remaining number of teams we want to build and number of fighters we have left.

We want to build for 6 teams in Ancient Jungle – Extreme and have completed the first team, so we will look to build 5 teams. We have 5 non-champion fighters and an imbalanced number of rogues/spellcasters with only 5 rogues to 7 spellcasters.

Therefore, we can conclude that we can have one fighter in each of the remaining 5 teams and one team will run double spellcasters + one fighter.

I usually like to get certain champions done earlier, specifically Sia/Polonia/Malady since those three give us extra loot.

Pro tip: I also check to see if certain heroes want to be paired with certain champions such as an evasion rogue that needs a lot of evasion which pairs well with Yami or a hero with CD but lacking in CHC which pairs well with Rudo.

For the 2nd team, I will focus on Malady since we can get her to give us a lot of T14 elements if she survives the quest in Ancient Jungle. Malady herself is light element and wants to be paired with a fighter that can help her survive better.

This should let you know that we will be pairing one of the knights with her which will deal with Light barrier and provides protection to Malady. Malady wants to survive, so it’s better if we can pair her with two very hard-hitting heroes.

It would also be preferred if we can pair two non-air/fire/light DPS heroes with Malady so we could save them for other teams. This leaves us with the grandmaster, Archdruid, Warlock, Geomancer.

The grandmaster will be coming along so that leaves the last slot which is between the archdruid, warlock, and geomancer. Since the geomancer is unpromoted, the archdruid actually fits in better here for damage, quest success, and champion survival (I properly tested it in the quest sim) so we will pair the archdruid along.

The 2nd team will comprise of Malady, Knight 1, Grandmaster, Archdruid.

Team 3

As always, let’s take a look at what we are working with after setting up the 2nd team.

Earlier I mentioned that I like to setup for Sia/Polonia/Malady teams first since they provide us with extra loot, so the third team I will setup will be between Sia and Polonia.

Sia is an air element champion while Polonia is a water element champion. This means that Polonia will be harder to setup since you’d want to pair 2 heroes that have the same element with both element being either Air/Fire/Light or pair one spellblade.

With these higher restrictions in mind, I will be setting up Polonia’s team first since we want to get the harder ones out of the way to make our life easier later.

Polonia is a special case and there is one class specifically that wants to be paired with Polonia, that class being Tricksters. I will check to see if there are tricksters in the roster, if yes then I will pair them with Polonia without needing to think about it. This means that we’d want to setup a trickster + air element hero/spellblade.

In this case, my guildie doesn’t have any tricksters so we are free to pair Polonia into either Air/Fire/Light. There isn’t a single answer as to which we want, preferably we want to do Light since that’d allow us to send more parties to Ancient Amber for slightly more gold from components.

You can force light barrier by pairing Polonia with a knight, spellblade, and a flexible fourth (Likely warlock) which lets us deal with Light barrier. There are problems with this approach which is that Polonia’s champion ability also provides Evasion which could be better utilized when paired with Rogues and/or evasive fighters.

Having better optimized teams for quests will also lead to higher quest success rates, especially when faced against mini-boss spawns which will in turn lead to far more gold gained over a longer period of time. That’s why I will not force Polonia with the knight/spellblade combination, since that’d also lead to us having one less spellblade to use for later.

I’d love to pair Polonia with 2x dancers to fully utilize both her champion ability and deal with air barriers but this will also lead to some slight complications down the line when we want to pair Bjorn/Sia.

Both Bjorn and Sia are air element champions, so we’d pair another air element hero with them to form a team, but we’d only have dancer 3 leftover which leaves either one of them in an awkward position.

This isn’t really a major problem since we can always hire another air element hero with the next hire which solves our problem.

But it’s still a problem since the next hero hire is supposed to be an Earth element hero since my guildie only has 2 earth element heroes

Note: He has three spellblades but it isn’t standard to have spellblades act as the primary barrier breaker and you still want three heroes per element.

Another “problem” is that we have too many spellcasters leftover while having only 4 rogues left to work with. If we force this pairing, we’d be down to 2 rogues and 6 spellcasters.

That’s why the final pairing that I decide to go with is a berserker + conquistador with a flexible 4th. You can go with either one of the pairings I provided earlier, and it’ll be fine too!

Both the berserker and conquistador could make good use of Polonia’s champion buffs and also provides enough elements to deal with fire barrier. The last slot would be a spellcaster between the warlock and both geomancers. It doesn’t really matter but I would prefer pairing the geomancer in there to make the team a fire/water team which can deal with both barriers simultaneously.

The 3rd team will comprise of Polonia, Berserker, Conquistador, Geomancer 2.

Team 4

These are what we have to work with.

Last of the major champions I talked about earlier is Sia. Her pairing is quite easy since you’d want to pair an air element hero with her.

A single spellblade won’t be enough unless your Sia is high ranked or you downgrade her aurasong to Aura of storms. Going by the current recommended BiS setup for spellblades, you will only get 240 elements which contributes to 120 for the barrier. Meaning that you need 160 element from Sia to have 280 total element for Ancient Jungle barrier on extreme difficulty.

You won’t have enough with just rank 11 since you’d get up to 155 element with Sia at rank 11 while on Avatar + Aura of Inspiration. If you downgrade to Aura of Storms, you will have 160 air element which is barely enough for Ancient Jungle barrier of 280. With this setup, your Sia can be rank 10 with Aura of storms OR rank 11 + 1 for Aura of inspiration.

Since I know not everyone reading this has a rank 10 or higher Sia, I will proceed under the assumption that we won’t be using a spellblade for the barrier requirements here.

Note: Spellblade + Hero for barrier requirements is much easier since the “normal” hero will have at least 210 elements if you’re enchanting with T14 enchants (Which you should) guaranteeing that you have more than 280 after including the spellblade. Spellblade + Champion is harder to guarantee.

That said, the only air element heroes we have access to from this roster are dancers so we must use one of the dancers to pair with Sia. That leaves us with 2 flexible spots where I will pick one fighter and one spellcaster.

As always, we want to prioritize fighters/spellcasters that are not fire/air/light element (Or named spellblade/spellknight). Therefore, the only choice we have left are the Dark knight and warlock which fits perfectly into making a team for both Air/Dark element.

The 4th team will comprise of Sia, Dark Knight, Dancer, Warlock

Team 5

You know the drill by now, this is what we have left.

Now that we’re done with the higher priority champions. We can now work our way with the remaining champions based on what we need from them.

Noticed how I left berserker 1 out from Polonia’s fire team? That’s because Berserker 1 is a full on critzerker with no defensive skill which leaves much to be desired as far as defensive stats goes.

If you’ve read the advanced tips & tricks, you should already have an idea which champion we will use to pair with this berserker now. Here are a couple of hints, we have a fighter with very little defensive stats and is a crit-based fighter. This fighter also happens to be of fire element.

The champion we will pair this berserker with is none other than Rudo who will supplement as the secondary tank in the party, provide his own fire element to deal with the barrier, and provides CHC to strengthen the critzerker.

Notice how we also have 2 rogues and 4 spellcasters? We have 2 more spellcasters than rogues so we will pair 2 spellcasters with Rudo to make a team that’s squishier than most teams but with very high damage ceilings that can easily take down enemies quickly.

It’s a given that we’d pair Geomancer 1 and Spellblade 1 with Rudo. Both of them are crit oriented spellcasters and spellblade 1 specifically has Death dealer but no CHC enhancing skills in their kit. Geomancer 1 specifically will overcap CHC by over 18% which is a bit of wasted stats but that’s fine.

I recommend keeping a mental note that we may want to take out the spellblade from this team if we happen to need a spellblade in a future team slot.

For the 5th team, we will pair Rudo, Berserker 1, Geomancer 1, Spellblade.

Team 6

Last but not least, the final team. Let’s see what we’re working with.

This last team is highly flexible, I recommend pairing this team randomly since you’d very likely need to break the team up in the future as you get more hero slots to work with and need more barrier breaking heroes.

That’s why for this team, I would recommend Ashley + Dancer + Spellknight + Spellblade.

Other things you could do are to replace Ashley with any of the other champions or replace either of the spellblades for another dancer or the knight. There isn’t a single answer here and you have a lot of freedom to mix and match.

Team 6 will comprise of Ashley, Dancer 2, Spellblade 2, Spellknight 3.

Leftover heroes

We can add these heroes for future teams whenever we get more hero slots in the future.