Welcome to the Jungle

Hello and welcome to the Jungle! Prior to ancient jungle, you could mostly get away with running glass cannon builds and they’ll still perform well. The principle of “Kill the enemy before they kill you” worked well because the enemies prior to the introduction of jungle didn’t have a lot of HP.

With jungle hard, the enemy now has 2,500,000 HP which goes up to 7,000,000 HP for jungle extreme and up to 14,000,000 HP for huge mini bosses on extreme or the jungle boss itself. Going glass cannon here means that there’s a good chance that your heroes will end up dying before the enemy die.

If you are a player who can already send many teams down extreme jungle and/or defeat mini bosses consistently, then you’re not the target audience I have in mind as I’m writing this article. This article is meant for the players that just got to jungle and are still struggling to get their first few teams in jungle or the people that have been doing jungle for a bit but are still struggling to send many teams on them. These players usually have fewer promoted heroes, non-legendary equipment, and non “perfect” skillsets. However, I do believe that you should be able to pick up a few neat tips here and there that you may not already know!

One thing I do want to make clear though, it is feasible to run full glass cannon skillsets. You just need to compensate with the right equipment pairing by getting more defensive stats from your equipment, if not then your hero will likely die as soon as the enemy breathes in their direction.

There are four main levels of difficulty in ancient jungle with each of them requiring different levels of investments to beat. I will briefly talk about the expected skills and/or equipment choices required to beat these difficulties. If you see me talk about success rates, assume that I have used the questing simulator to test out the builds. But please, do NOT blindly copy the exact setup that I show, they are just examples:

1. Ancient Jungle – Hard (Requiring the least amount of investments but you still need functional and cohesive skillsets)
2. Ancient Jungle – Extreme (A huge step up from hard and requires more investments. Promoted heroes are almost mandatory to beat this level)
3. Ancient Jungle Boss – Extreme (Even harder than regular extreme and you really should be sending your A team with at least one promoted hero, preferably two or even all three promoted heroes)
4. Ancient Jungle Mini Bosses – Extreme (Not to be confused with the Jungle boss, mini bosses have around 2% chance of spawning for regular quests and there are five varieties. Three of them are easier than jungle boss (Wealthy, Dire, Agile) but two of them are widely considered to be much harder than the jungle boss which are (Huge, Legendary) with Huge being infamous for wiping out even the greatest of teams. Expect to win with no less than flawless gear and two-three promoted heroes with extremely decked out skillsets)

On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is very easy and 10 being very hard. If ancient jungle hard is a 1/10 then jungle extreme and wealthy mini boss on extreme would be a 6/10. Jungle Dire and Agile mini bosses on extreme would be a 7.5/10. Jungle mini bosses with legendary spawns on extreme would be a 9/10 while jungle mini bosses with huge spawns on extreme being a 9.5/10. Jungle boss on extreme would be a 10/10

I’ve seen a lot of people who prioritize getting good skills on their heroes and their skills are very strong, some I would even call perfect. But they end up managing to only send 2-4 teams on extreme jungle instead of 7-9 which they should be able to.

Skills are very important, but I personally like to say that skills only make up half of a hero’s strength. The other half is from the equipment you put on your hero, rarity, enchants, spirits.

As an example, look at the following skill setup for a berserker/geomancer/dancer:

Most people would see those skills and say that they’re terrible and you should fire them as soon as you can! But it’s a functional hero that can clear content. I want you to guess how well those three heroes will do against Ancient Jungle on hard.

Let’s say that they’re all unpromoted and on Flawless rarity gear only. All of them are level 40 with 40 HP/DEF/ATK seeds each. The champion we pair with is a rank 7 unpromoted Donovan at level 40 too. With that in mind, can you think of the success rate for those three heroes in ancient jungle hard?

Got your answer? If you said 80% then you are very far off.
If you thought 90% then you’re close but still far off.
If you said 95%, you’re getting closer.
The correct answer is 99.25%

So, what was the point that I’m trying to make? The key point is that even heroes with “bad” skills can clear content, if the skills you have make sense.

I want you to consider the following: Why did my example heroes work? What part of their skills make sense? What does it mean to make sense!? This part gets a bit complicated, but it can be summarized in one very simple question:

Does the hero have skills that complement their role? If they are an attacker, do they meet the attacker rule? If they are a tank, do they have enough defensive stats from their skills?

Attacker Rule:

• All attackers must have one weapon skill with a few exceptions.
• All attackers must have at least one bonus attack skill with only one exception.

If your heroes meet these very generous requirements, they should be enough to clear most content. But if you want them to also clear extreme content or even mini bosses on extreme, it gets just a bit tougher (I will talk more about that in the extreme jungle section of the article).

How does our example heroes fare here? Let’s take a look at the team composition first. We have a berserker (Red – Fighter), dancer (Green – Rogue), geomancer (Blue –Spellcaster) and Donovan (Blue Champion – Spellcaster). Team composition is also very straight-forward and simpler than you may think, you just need to meet the two rules below:

1. Has a champion.
2. Has a fighter (Red type hero or one of these champions – Argon, Ashley, Bjorn, Rudo)

As long as your team composition has a champion with the best Aurasong equipped and/or a red type tank in the party, you will be fine. (Note: The Aurasong does not have to be high rarity, you just need it for the buff it provides to your heroes).

The second part means that you can skip putting in a tank altogether if you’re using a tank champion which are Argon, Ashley, Bjorn, Rudo. However, I usually do not recommend this and would advise that you also send a fighter even alongside those four champions. It does work but you need your champions to be pretty high rank or have three strong DPS heroes because they are quite squishy compared to a traditional tank that can soak a lot of damage.

As for the example heroes, let’s start with the berserker. All four skills that the berserker has works to boost their defensive stats. S1 On Guard provides defense, S4 Fast Healer gives them a boost in health, S2 and S3 are hybrid options that provides some attack (not necessary) but more importantly some defensive stats in the form of flat hp from S2 Cleave and defense% from S3 Smite.

All red type heroes (Fighters) are considered tanks, so you want to build them to be able to take a beating. The only exception are Samurais which are attacking classes who happen to be fighters, they are quite tough to build because you need to optimize them to have a weapon skill, bonus attack skill, and enough defensive stats to not die too quickly. But this isn’t a Samurai guide. (Just don’t get a Samurai until later because they’re quite tricky to get right)

Next up we have the geomancer, S1 Mace Master is a critical component for a geomancer which is a weapon skill. (Note: It can also be either warlord, adept, wand master, staff master. It does NOT need to be mace master specifically). S2 Arcane Blast and S4 Smite provides some bonus attack and even def% from Smite which increases the damage output of the geomancer and some defensive utility. S3 Sturdy is a purely defensive skill that most people take for granted. Having one purely defensive skill is a great choice even for attackers, as ArchonMal likes to put it “A corpse does 0 DPS” (more on this later.)

Finally, we have the dancer. S1 Dagger Master is a critical component which is the weapon skill, S2 Backstab and S3 Perforate are both the 2nd critical component to making them work which is bonus attack. You just need at least one bonus attack skill but having two or even three is fine as well. S4 Acrobatics serve as their hybrid skill. This may come as a surprise to some of you to hear me call it a hybrid skill when it only provides evasion.

The evasion it provides helps the dancer stay alive which acts as a defensive skill but whenever a dancer evades an incoming attack, their next strike is guaranteed to crit which is where the offense comes in. It effectively acts as your CHC (Critical Hit Chance) skill as well which is neat to have!

A common misconception I want to talk about is that people seem to think that dancers do not need CHC (Critical Hit Chance) because of their innate which guarantees the critical strike. It sounds logical on paper but unfortunately, that is absolutely not the case and CHC is still important for 2 reasons:

1. Your dancer won’t always get targeted.
2. Even if they get targeted, you can’t guarantee that the dancer will dodge the incoming attack.

And for those of you that are thinking about running solo or full dancer teams, I won’t advise that at all.

Understanding all that and building your heroes to have the right tools in their kit is the first 50%. The remaining 50% depends on what equipment you give those heroes and what spirits you pick. This part gets trickier if you want to make your own build from scratch.

The easiest way of building them is to go for the highest tier weapon/spell/ring that also gives a secondary defensive stat such as HP/DEF. Then for the remaining equipment try to get DEF/HP as a combination for most heroes but for rogues, DEF/EVA might end up being better.

For spirit combinations, always get one titan spirit if your hero is promoted (Regardless of class). The rest will depend on what hero you’re using, but as a general guideline. I recommend griffin for green type heroes until you hit 75% Evasion for hard or 95% evasion for extreme quests (Extreme quests have a -20% penalty to evasion, if this number goes into the negatives, then the enemy will have increased CHC against your hero). Once you hit your evasion goals, I recommend ouroboros for the remaining spirits.

For tanks, if you have some good tank skills then you should go for 5 or even 6 mammoths (I know I said earlier that promoted heroes should always have a titan spirit, but if your fighter can take a lot of hits you can ignore the titan spirit and go for 6 mammoths, it’s generally not recommended unless you know what you’re doing). Otherwise, go for 5 ouroboros. For wardens, if you have blurred movements or a lot of evasion from skills, it may be worth it to build griffin and ouroboros combination.

For spellcasters, either go for leviathan or behemoth. Leviathans are generally better but if you’re building your spellcaster for pure attack in preparation for content that may nerf CHC, then behemoths are a very solid choice as well!

If this sounds too complicated, the experts from ST Central have compiled a general best in slot setup for all classes here.

One thing to note is that a purely defensive skill is always a good thing to have. I personally build all 22 of my DPS heroes to have one defensive skill on their kit and two defensive skills for all 11 of my tanks. Personally, I highly recommend getting one purely defensive skill for your DPS heroes but do know that it is not mandatory to beat extreme jungle. It’ll just make things a lot simpler.

After the many tests I’ve conducted, if you have two heroes with the exact same equipment choices, rarity, and spirits. The setup that has the higher quest success rate is the one where the DPS hero has a defensive skill. However, this does have the drawback of lowering champion survival rate.

To conclude this section, remember the attacker rule which states that all attackers need a weapon skill and bonus attack skill. Make sure you select equipment that provides you enough defensive stats to survive long enough to win. Finally, a purely defensive skill on attackers is great but not mandatory.

But to be fair, the setup I showed earlier does struggle to handle ancient jungle on extreme because the skills are a tad too weak and none of the heroes are promoted. The setup I showed earlier got about 30% success rate on extreme jungle even in full flawless gear and promoted (Yikes).

Extreme jungle gets a lot tougher, and you want to put in more effort to get slightly stronger skillsets. How much stronger? First, let’s talk about some things that will really help boost success rate as a whole.

Things that will really help boost quest success rate (you can get one or more of them)

1. Promoted heroes
2. Flawless rarity weapon (Everything else can be superior rarity but full flawless is generally recommended since it isn’t that expensive to get)
3. Enough defensive stats (At least 1k+ HP on your heroes)
4. Having a defensive skill on your DPS heroes
5. Stronger skills

If you still can’t clear and you meet most, if not all of the 5 points listed above. Please head over to additional information where you can find the link to the ST Central discord server, you can get more personalized assistance. We will gladly look over your heroes and tell you what the problem may be.

Promotion makes a really big difference here. I tested with my actual teams on the quest simulator with the following:

1. Team A: Three promoted heroes in full normal rarity gear
2. Team B: Three unpromoted heroes in full flawless rarity gear

Both teams had the exact same heroes, skills, equipment, and champions. The team that ended up with better success rates? For all 10 teams that I had, it was always the promoted team that had the better success rates:

Okay, that’s great and all but you mentioned something about needing stronger skillsets. How much stronger are we talking? All gold skills? All green smiley face skills?

The answer?

Just a small upgrade to something like this gets us up to 99.06% success rate on extreme jungle! Notice how all the skills adhere to the attacker rule? Weapon skill and bonus attack skills on both DPS heroes. These are level 40 promoted heroes in full double enchanted flawless gear. NO epic/legendary equipment on any piece at all.

Soooo you should be copying those skills exactly, right? NO! Those are just example skillsets that work, you do NOT need to target any of those skills specifically for your heroes.

You should be able to clear Ancient Jungle on extreme, as long as you focus on heroes that follows the attacker rule, get defensive stats from equipment, use higher rarity equipment, and send at least one promoted hero per party.

The last main thing I want to bring up to complete this article is to completely ignore star power as a stat entirely. It does absolutely nothing for hero strength and it’s the only stat I completely ignore and pretend doesn’t exist when I’m building my heroes. You do not need to build specific heroes for dragon invasion unless you’re already able to send many teams down extreme jungle and you’re in a guild that’s pushing for leaderboards in dragon invasion.

Do NOT judge your hero by their star power, the game in its current state only uses star power for four things and none of those things involve how good your hero is for questing.

Star power is ONLY used for:

1. Dragon Invasion – Assault Phases
2. In-game hero power leaderboard
3. Quests have a minimum star power requirement to enter
4. Flexing to other people
   Rei Note: We genuinely don’t give a toss if you have high star power.

To further prove this point, I’ve tested the current hypermax builds for Jarls, Acrobats, and Astramancers in full flawless gear and even full epic gear.

I want you to take a guess how well the build I showed earlier would fare against 3 hypermax heroes built for max star power in same/higher rarity equipment. Do you think my setups with one defensive skill and mainly bronze/silver skills will beat out setups in mostly gold skills with highest star power? Let’s find out!

Note: The images shown are in legendary to prove that they’re the hypermax setups. The actual tests will make them use only full flawless/full epic and level 40 with 40 of each seeds only.

The hypermax builds will be shown below but make sure to read the BIG disclaimer that’s coming up soon.

Hypermax Setups

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT COPY THE HYPERMAX SETUP. THESE SETUPS ARE BAD FOR QUESTING.

Acrobat Setup:

Astramancer Setup: (Gloves won’t load but it’s Hallowitch Gloves)

Jarl Setup: (Admittedly, I could not find anyone who knows what the hypermax setup looks like, so I went with a full offensive setup instead. If anyone knows what the proper hypermax setup, write it in the comments or DM me please and I’ll update this part)

My setups

Acrobat

Astramancer (That’s a Hallowitch Hat)

Jarl (Quest simulator does not have Idols, so we’re using a cloak for now)

1. Don’t have a lot of promoted heroes? Aim to have at least one promoted hero per party and pair your strongest heroes with your weakest ones
2. Using heroes with high evasion but not quite 95%? Use champions like Yami, Malady, Donovan, Polonia.
3. Use Argon with one decent promoted DPS hero, his buffs are very strong and will help you clear with more ease
4. Using heroes at evasion cap? Put on Ouroboros and pair with Lilu to create a near unkillable team
5. Have a few less tanky and more DPS oriented fighters? Pair them with Argon/Ashley/Bjorn/Rudo to ease the burden on them.
6. For promoted heroes that can use Idols, I would highly recommend putting the titan enchant on the idol. That alone would get you about 30% HP which is the same as having Sturdy at rank 2 (Credits to Cattails for pointing this out in the comments!)

That should about wrap up this article! I would love to talk about tackling jungle mini bosses and the jungle boss itself but this article is getting far too lengthy! I’ll leave those for next time! Please feel free to leave a comment if you want to request a specific topic to be covered! Until next time, thanks for reading!

Need even more assistance? Head on over to our ST Central discord server and create a post in #hero-help! I will be there to help with any hero related help you may have! You have my express permission to ping me @yukiilai and I will respond once I do see your post!

Please be sure to bring along an image of your roster! You can create the image for your roster using the hero tracker tool developed by drakeonfire here.

Notes for the hero tracker tool:

• There is no way to do this quickly, you just need to import them one at a time. The first time setup takes a bit of time, but after that, it’s quite fast to make changes to the tool
  whenever you update your heroes.
• Just enter the class, level, name, and skills when you add a new hero.
• You can ignore the other stats and equipment when adding heroes.
• The position of the skill you enter matters for this tool, please make sure the skills you enter matches the position with your actual heroes in game. (Note that the order of the skills doesn’t affect the strength of the skill)
• Make sure you do not have any hero names that are repeating.
• Would recommend adding (R) in front of a hero’s name to indicate that Roland has been used, and leaving it empty if it’s available (or the other way around if you have more
  heroes that have used Roland.)
• Use the “Share your heroes” button at the top once you have the full roster on the website, then enter your merchant level, Argon Finest’s level, select if you have Royal Merchant, Roland, or Mundra. (All of these are important information for people giving out advice.)

Exceptions to the weapon skill rule

• Crit-based Druids/Arch Druids
• Crit-based Spellblades/Spellknights
• Sorcerers/Warlocks
• Monks/Grandmasters

For a crit-based druid/spellblade, the weapon skill will still perform just as good as another skill in its place but the difference between having and not having the weapon skill isn’t that big unless you’re running an epic/legendary rarity weapon or Adept, in which case, you’ll be better off having the weapon skill.

Sorcerers on the other hand do not need the weapon skill entirely. Their innate ability makes it so that the two spell slots are their main source of attack rather than their weapon. You want bonus attack skills more than you want the weapon skill until you have a high amount of bonus attack from your skills (Usually 350%). Do note that this does not mean that a weapon skill is bad, it is crucial that you get enough bonus attack from your skills, but a weapon skill is by no means a bad/terrible choice like how some people would try to make you think.

Monks/Grandmasters can’t even equip a weapon in the first place, no weapon means no weapon skill (but they do have a built in weapon skill from their innate which boosts the attack stat of rings, so that’s their weapon skill.)

Exception to the bonus attack skill rule

• Geomancer/Astramancer

They’re quite literally the only attacking class where you can completely skip out on getting bonus attack skills and go for four other skills instead. The reason for this is also because of their innate ability which grants them 1% bonus attack for every point of element they have from their equipment. Note that this is for ANY element and not just water. So if you have enough elements to max out your skill tiers, it is very much a viable option to enchant your equipment with its affinity rather than water.

For my example, I will be using T14 elements. If you get all six equipment slots enchanted, you are looking at 210% bonus attack at the very least, even if none of the items you have matching affinities. This is almost the equivalent of having a free double cast which gives 220% bonus attack from having their innate alone.

Key thing to note is that they do not need bonus attack skills, please do not mistake this as them not needing bonus attack entirely. It’s just that they get bonus attack from a source other than their skills.