Raiding Guide

Before you start

So anyone can get in on the raiding and if you want super high damage, you'll want to try to push for more well-rounded accounts. The nice thing about raiding is you don't really need to MLB your characters to do well but it will require a lot of awakening stones.

The purpose of this guide is to help you to find the highest raid damage obtainable given your resources. Whether it be 300k a fight or 4m a fight, I'll see what I can do to get you there.

Who Makes the Cut?

So the obvious question is: which of your heroes are cut out to be raiders? Generally a max level and a decent amount of awakening stones. My minimum is a 4 star hero but I'm pushing higher raid numbers than most.

The tricky thing is you need 12 characters to form a full raid squad. You will have one stronger squad (the heroes you generally play most of your content with and then other squads that aren't as tough. What you want to do is build those other squads up to be as viable as possible within a raid schedule. To do that you'll need XP, awakening stones and if you can pull it off, exclusive weapons.

Making the Hero Selections

The easiest way to do this is to watch other well-endowed guildmates in the battle log of the current raid. You'll quickly get an idea of the characters they use against given bosses and you'll have a better idea on who to bring and who to invest in for the next raid.

If you see that a guildmate can pull 2 million damage with a given hero composition, so can you, if you invest in those heroes.

Practice Mode

If you neglect to read all other parts of this guide, pay attention to this section. Practice mode is by far, the most useful tool you can utilize to increase your raid damage. I don't care how many times I've killed a raid boss, I don't go into a fight without hitting a practice mode session to get warmed up. Once I feel comfortable, I'll actually hit the main boss in a legitimate attempt for raid damage.

Other than warming up, Practice Mode is crucial for testing your DPS. At the start of every raid, I take a decent amount of time to go into and out of Practice Mode to test different heroes, different accessories and different compositions for different bosses. I try to make a mental note of how much damage each composition does and then I think outside of the box on how I can improve that damage.

Despite common belief, if you have a Dark boss you don't just field a light team. You test out various heroes against that boss and their attacks to arrive on your highest DPS. Sure, some of your heroes may be Light (stronger vs Dark) but you probably won't have a full light team because there are just other options out there from other elements that will yield higher damage output. Why would you use Plitvice (Fire hero) against a Earth hero when you could instead have Lilith? You use Lilith.

Just practice before, practice often and practice constantly.

Tank or no Tank? Healer or no Healer?

It really depends on your resources, the boss and his damage output at the current raid tier you're at. For instance, the damage output of a level 55 boss may not require any defensive buffs and you'll wreck them. That same boss 15 levels later may all the sudden require a healer and a tank and other defensive buffs.

The goal here is to rely on tanks and heals as little as possible because healers inherently have lower DPS and tanks have defensive buffs. If you have a healer in your party and you never see your health go below 90%, it may be time for a shift to someone with less healing. If the boss doesn't interrupt, chase you and doesn't have individual damage output, perhaps you don't need a tank (life hack: you usually don’t).

Optimally you'll have 4 damage dealers in your raid beating the boss up. If you're on a level 60 boss and you need healing, after some awakening stones, a better strategy and perhaps a few levels, you may not need that healing anymore so you drop your healer. That's why practice is so crucial so you can test where you are and what you need to maximize DPS as the season progresses.

Who to Attack

This is a more complex question than most people realize and aside from a few obvious situations, it takes me a little while to figure out everytime the new bosses show up during raid week.

The primary thing to look at is their element. If they are Fire, you'll probably want to grab a water-heavy lineup of heroes. If they are Earth, Fire heroes should be your common lineup. If after you test out your lineups versus each boss, just choose the highest 3 damage outputs out of the 4 bosses and those are your optimal bosses.

You may need to re-evaluate this as the raid progresses due to boss difficulty increases.

The other consideration is which boss is the bottleneck. This will become far more apparent when your guild gets to the later stages of raiding and one boss either puts up so much damage it's hard to fight against it or it's a ranged-friendly boss that has a melee-friendly element (i.e. Sandmonster that's weak to Fire). There's usually a bottleneck every raid tier and it can get frustrating.

Common bottleneck bosses are: Harvester, Shadow Beast, Sandmonster, Elphaba, Fiery (vs melee), Bullworm (vs melee)

When to Attack

Since we're trying to maximize your raid DPS, you're going to want to be patient here. As I type this I see that one boss is left in my guild's raid. It's not my best boss. I know that I can put out anywhere from 1.5m - 3.2m this raid season (vs any boss). If I attack the current boss, it'll probably be around the 1.5m mark and if I use all my raid attempts immediately, I'd use up my 3 full raid attempts to beat it. So rather than attack, I'll wait. Over the course of the next 12 hours that boss will most likely be defeated by other guildies and reset the round which allows me to focus on the bosses that I have a higher damage output against. The raid season will get my 6m+ damage for the day and they'll be content with me being patient.

My point is, know what bosses that you can get your higher numbers on and be patient enough to wait for their availability. It's pretty damn motivating getting really good numbers for the day and being pushed to rank even higher after watching your guildmate's performance.

Furthermore, if you know you can pull 1 million damage on a boss, make sure that boss has at least 1 million hit points left before you attack. You basically want to make sure that the fight always ends in "Times Up" because you know you had your full 60 seconds to put up the numbers.

There is of course, a caveat to this. There’s nothing more frustrating than a guildie leaving a boss at 100k hit points out of 10m hit points. That means that one of your guild mates that could potentially do 1m points of damage will have to waste an attempt to do 100k hit points. Overall, that lowers your guild’s performance in a raid and you should be mindful of that when preparing/playing.

Attack!

The time is right, you know your potential damage output, the boss has more than enough hit points and you've done your practice research. You're ready to attack! Now you get to prepare even more!

This will sound like overkill to some but once again, you're attempting to obtain your highest damage possible and this is how I do it.

As you step up to the first boss, you'll want to equip your highest damage accessories possible. Which most likely means a Golden Compass for the leader of the group and Sharp Shooters for all the other raid members. You'll also want to equip all of the Atk cards for this one, solitary fight (don't worry, you'll be trading them out on the next boss).

Then you take a few swings in the Practice Mode just to make sure you feel comfortable. Then you go in, do what you do. Get those high numbers!

The annoying part about this process and the way Guardian Tales limits your Cards is you will have to re-equip your cards and accessories for every group you have, for every fight. It’s kind of cumbersome and more than a little annoying but if you’re trying to kick ass on the rankings, this is how you’ll do it without being a whale and spending crazy cash to get there.

Eeking out that Extra Damage

Now that you've got the basic gist of everything done, I'll go a little into how you can min/max your damage output.

Group Buffs

This is almost singularly the most important adhesive to a high DPS raid team. You want offensive raid buffs or at least as much as possible. Nari and Tinia on the same team? Large DPS boost. Beth and Lilith on the same team? No doubt! It's important to maximize the group buffs as much as possible but never underestimate the power of practice. Always practice to ensure that your composition and group buffs convert to higher damage output.

Chaining

While pretty important for the most part, it's still secondary to group buffs. If at all possible, you want to ensure that your entire raid team can chain skills accordingly. That means that during any chain skill, all 4 members of your team can use their chain skills.

Once again, and let me be clear, if finding a hero that ensures that you get your 4th chain skill cast actually REDUCES your damage output, it's just not worth it. It's not. The most important thing is your damage and it's what you live by.

I'll give you a for instance. One of my current raid teams isn't super optimal but given the high damage output of the boss, health can get scary. Nonetheless, it's a Light boss so Nari is the leader and she is the ONLY hero that chains outside of the healer (which is just defensive). Now I can put up 2.7m with this setup, on this boss and I can't find any composition to beat that so I stick with it. While I can certainly find 4 heroes to chain in that fight, their output is still lower than the 2 chain setup that I am working with. Perhaps when more heroes are introduced, I'll be able to properly chain all 4 heroes but not right now and that's just fine because I'm maximizing my damage output.

Chaining Effectively

One really useful thing about having the maximum chain size (4 characters chaining rather than only 2 characters chaining, etc) is that you can stun the boss longer which means they don’t move, which means it’s just straight, optimal DPS.

So when you use a Chain Skill what you are doing is putting them in a debuffed state where certain characters (melee or ranged) do more damage to that boss during that state. That’s great but I don’t focus on that per-se. What I do focus on is that the boss will be sitting still for 3 seconds per Chain Skill usage. Read that again, 3 seconds. What this means is if you have 4 characters that can chain and you use your chain skills together, one right after another, without pause, that boss will be held in place for say 6 seconds. If, however, you pause for about 2 seconds before chaining the next Chain Skill, you have the boss stunned for a lot longer, between 9-10 seconds.

While giving extra time in between Chain Skills can be risky because if you let it go too long, you’ll lose the chance to chain the next hero’s skill (this is one reason we practice so much) you can really gain a considerable amount of damage and get some health back (if you have passive healing). Not to mention if you can get off two full chains during a single fight, that’s 1 / 3 of the fight that they’ll just be sitting there, getting beat on. Remember, if they stand still, it’s a HUGE dps increase.

The caveat however is bosses like Harvester can break out of Chain Skills so this tactic won’t work on him. You’ll just have to chain as fast as you can and hope for the best. This is a primary reason why Harvester is a massive roadblock.

Elemental Weapon Exchange

So this is a tricky one but it can work wonders. So one of my raid squad against Fire bosses is Garam, Bianca, Coco and Hekate. Now Hekate is an earth hero which should be weak to fire but rather than using an earth weapon, I use Rachel's Ex which is water. Due to this, Hekate is effectively a water damage dealer and pushes higher numbers. With this squad, in our current raid I can push 3.2m+. It took a lot of Practice Modes and watching teammates but this is my high output squad during this raid season and it's just straight fun to play.

My point is, don't be held back by your hero's element. You can always switch out a weapon to maximize your output. Now keep in mind as for damage intake, their element has not changed so you'll need to pay attention to that but we're in the business of damage output, not intake so we'll just move on.

A caveat to changing your weapons out. If you’re going to change your weapons out, you may have to change your merch. You want your merch to improve your current damage output and in the above example if Hekate is an earth hero using a water damage weapon, she should be using something that will increase water damage.

Accessories

Honestly, this is easier than it sounds. The poor man's approach is a Golden Compass for the leader (assuming their skill is a higher damage output and it should be) and then most likely Sharp Shooters for everyone else. The thing is, you can use Option Change Stones on the Sharp Shooters until you get the exact stats you want. Then, after every boss fight, switch them to the next group. You really only need 3 Sharp Shooters so MLB them (not easy but useful) out and pass them around between each squad to maximize your DPS. Also remember, you don't have to level them to the max level to get their obtain their MLB attribute.

If you've got a more formidable account, the Minotaur Necklace (600 battle medals) is going to beat out almost every other accessory's DPS/Wep reload. So eventually your group leaders should all be sporting Minotaur Necklaces. The Mirror Accessories are also quite good though it's a MUCH heavier investment (option stones) to roll the right stats (and usually it's more arena-oriented (mitigation) than raw damage output for raids).

Research the Boss

The most advanced part of raiding can often be the most beneficial. For instance, let's say you have Bullworm and he's weak to Fire. Bullworm at 30 seconds will eventually do his death spin and unless you have a healer handy, (at the higher levels) it will wipe out your team. Not only that but while he's spinning, your melee characters (and since we're using Fire, most are melee) cannot attack. The spin takes 7 seconds or so and not attacking during that period is a massive DPS loss. But... if you know the bosses patterns and abilities, you'll know that at around 30 seconds or so, he'll use that spin attack. So you'll want to time your abilities so that you have a lengthy and slow chain that will overlap his spin ability's start time. That way, no spin, no damage and you can fully DPS the worm. This small strategy can almost double your damage if you play it properly.

Each boss has a few small things they do that changes the way you approach them with certain characters. Finding out those little tips and tricks are pretty damn key to increasing your raid damage. So how do you figure it out? Practice or watch videos. Research can pay off in big ways when it comes to raid damage.

Finding your Raid Guild

So now that you're armed, ready and determined, you may want to find a new raid guild. The in-game tools are sufficiently lacking so your best bet is on the #GuardianTales subreddit Guild Recruitment Megathread.

You can also look at this site's recruitment page.

Alternatively, if you're on NA2 and can put up some solid raid numbers, you may be able to join our guild. You can find our raid requirements here.