This being a mobage, of course, there are a few characters that stand out from the others, which are an incredible boon in modes like Memory of Chaos, Swarm Disaster, Gold and Gears, and Pure Fiction.
All spoilers are unmarked.
Please add entries in the following format if possible:
- The character (and their Element-Path)/Relic set/SU Path/blessing (in alphabetical order).
- Explanation of why their kits are excellent, overpowered, etc...
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5★ Units
- Acheron (Lightning-Nihility)
- Acheron can be a little more complicated to work with than previous main damage dealers, but she absolutely delivers once she's all set up. Her Ultimate is the primary source of her damage, letting her deal a multitude of slash attacks that will utterly eviscerate any unfortunate foe she's faced with. Said Ultimate also deals Toughness damage regardless of the enemy's weaknesses, and it reduces the All-Type RES of all enemies until the Ultimate ends, so virtually no enemy is safe from itnote . With her sixth Ascension Trace, the damage her Ultimate deals to a target increases by up to 90% as long as there are Crimson Knot stacks are on said target, which can be applied by afflicting it with debuffs, so she synergizes extremely well with characters like Silver Wolf, Pela, or Black Swan. When she removes Crimson Knot stacks from a target via her Ultimate, she also deals damage to all enemies on the field, with said damage increasing based on how many Crimson Knot stacks are removed. She also gets a 60% boost to her damage if she is in a team with 2 other Nihility charactersnote , and she gains Crit Damage from her Traces as well, which leads to synergy stacking upon synergy that turns her into a boss-deleting monster. Her only drawback is that her Ultimate doesn't use energy, so she doesn't pair well with characters like Huohuo or Tingyun, and her reliance on pairing with other Nihility characters (as well as characters who can apply debuffs) can limit the number of teams she'll work best in. Getting around these limitations however, rewards you with an extremely powerful attacker who functions as a Destruction, Hunt, and Erudition unit all at the same time. Her Eidolons are also rather busted: her 2nd one, aside from reducing the required amount of Nihility characters in the team to buff her, will also make her regenerate her special "energy" meter per turn, and her 6th one makes her Basic Attack and Skill be treated as Ultimate, complete with the similar properties her Ultimate has (increased RES PEN and breaking Toughness regardless of weakness).
- Acheron's Technique, Quadrivalent Ascendance, has a very unique property: if used against a normal enemynote , it instantly kills them and grants you their rewards. This can be used to make exploring the overworld trivial and farm materials. But her Technique becomes broken in the Simulated Universe, as you still get Blessings and other rewards as normal with her instantkill, allowing you to speed through the worlds with little risk. But in the event you fight something you can't instantkill, the Technique does far more damage than most others, breaks Toughness regardless of resistance, and gives her a bonus stack for her second Ultimate. As the cherry on top, in wave-based combat such as Memory of Chaos, she recasts the technique every wave for free. Oh, and did you know that this technique works even when you are low-leveled and is also cost-free from technique points if it doesn't hit an enemy?
- Argenti (Physical-Erudition)
- This Knight of Beauty is among the most powerful AOE attackers in the game, sporting a simple yet extremely effective skillset that deals tons of damage. His ultimate can be charged twice, with the charged version dealing an extra barrage of hits that can shred even single targets, and his skill grants him large amounts of energy to help facilitate this. Argenti is at his most powerful in Pure Fiction, where the constantly spawning horde of enemies allows him to always have targets to quickly charge his ultimate off of, and tear them all to shreds, giving him superior kill speed and scoring over most characters.
- Aventurine (Imaginary-Preservation)
- Aventurine has proven to be an insanely bonkers shielder that can rival or even surpass Gepard's tanking capabilities. From the get-go, his skill can provide a shield (called "Fortified Wager") to everyone in the party. Yes, you read that right, his party-wide shield is accessible from just a simple push of the E key, inheriting the strengths and forgoing (most) of the weaknesses of March 7th'snote and Gepard'snote shield; while his "Fortified Wager" shield isn't as strong as Gepard's shield at comparable talent levels, Aventurine's can be stacked multiple times, bolstering its durability. His "Fortified Wager" shield also increases the Effect RES of protected allies while Aventurine himself can outright No-Sell Crowd Control debuffs once every two turns, mitigating any nasty status effects that can be detrimental to your victory. His talent allows him to accumulate stacks when allies protected by "Fortified Wager" get hit (with his Ascension 6 passive unlocked, Follow-Up attacks can also grant stacks); once he reaches seven stacks, Aventurine will consume them and unleash a Follow-Up attack that hits all enemies randomly. His Follow-Up attack can also apply another layer of shield to all allies, potentially giving him near 100% shield uptime that can make the other Preservation characters green with envy. And if that's not good enough, his Ascension 4 passive immediately grants a "Fortified Wager" shield whenever a battle starts, ensuring that the team doesn't get immediately injured by the bad guy's attacks before they can even act.
- In addition, Aventurine lacks "split-scaling" in his kit as the damage of his basic attack, ultimate, and talent scale off of his DEF, which means that he deals more damage the tankier he gets (which will also help with making his shields even more sturdier), and completely eliminates any need to build ATK. Unlike previous Preservation characters, Aventurine equally excels in damage dealing as with his shielding, with his Ascension 2 passive giving him increased Critical Rate that scales with his DEF, easing his build by letting him focus on building DEF and Critical Damage.
- Black Swan (Wind-Nihility)
- The new crown jewel of Damage Over Time teams, Black Swan turns DoTs from a ticking time bomb into what could best be described as consecutive nuclear detonations. Her kit revolves around Arcana, a special form of DoT that lasts indefinitely and cannot be dispelled. It stacks up to 50 times, and when an enemy takes their turn, they take 240% of Black Swan's Attack as damage, plus 12% for every stack of Arcana beyond the first, eventually reaching up to an explosion of 840% of her attack at 50 stacks (for reference, Argenti's 180-cost ultimate with all of his bounce attacks hitting one target does equivalent damage). Additionally, reaching certain thresholds will add additional effects: at 3 stacks the detonation will become a blast attack, and at 7 stacks the detonation will ignore 20% of the enemies' Defence. This is on top of the fact that her skill reduces enemy Defence by 20%, leading to absurdly high damage upon detonations. Even better still, enemies taking damage from Arcana can spread the effect to other enemies, leading to entire waves of enemies dropping like flies, provided that they don't immediately die before Arcana runs its course. Not to mention, Arcana still counts as a debuff and DoT for gameplay purposes, so characters and relic sets who scale damage based on the number of debuffs and DoTs on the enemy like Kafka have powerful synergy with her.
- Bronya (Wind-Harmony)
- Bar none the most powerful of the standard banner 5-stars, thanks to her simple yet incredibly potent supportive capabilities. Her skill, by its own, does 3 things at once: 1) cleanse an ally's debuff (including crowd-control ones), 2) buffs their damage output (regardless of which stat their attacks run on), and 3) advance said ally's turn right after hers, which, given the turn-based nature of the game, is very powerful and versatile. With Eidolon upgrades, she has a chance of recovering 1 Skill Point after using her skill, and extend the damage boost to 2 turns, which now makes her damage boost helpful to characters who rely on follow-up attacks or Damage Over Time as their main source of damage. If the action order makes it somehow undesirable to make her use her skill on an ally (usually when their turn is already right after hers), she can instead use her talent to advance her next turn when she uses her basic attack, thus turning the action order around in a different way. As cherry on top, her Ultimate buffs the whole party's Attack and Crit DMG, the latter scaling off her own Crit DMG.
- Dan Heng • Imbibitor Lunae (Imaginary-Destruction)
- Dan Heng as the Imbibitor Lunae establishes himself as one of the most powerful damage dealers released so far, capable of dishing out burst damage that easily rivals even Seele. The way he works is by stacking self-buffs upon self-buffs conferred by both his basic attack (increases Crit DMG) and his talent (base damage boost), relying on how many times he hits enemies - which, with the further-charged versions of his basic attack and Ultimate, is quite a lot of them, boosting the already-high multipliers of his attacks to insane heights. His only problem is that he needs hefty amounts of skill points to use his enhanced basic attacks, which his Ultimate and Technique ameliorates by granting him Squama Sacrosancta (up to 3), which are used in lieu of Skill Points.
- The sheer damage output Imbibitor Lunae deals cannot be underestimated, and like Seele, is capable of tearing holes in the enemy even without a weakness to Imaginary, even moreso with the right supports (i.e ones that can help "manage" skill points so he can grab the lion's share of them) like Luocha and Sparkle.
- Fu Xuan (Quantum-Preservation)
- Fu Xuan has very quickly established herself as the new queen of Preservation as her kit combines elements of Preservation, Abundance, Harmony, and Destruction to turn her into a nigh unkillable Stone Wall with powerful support abilities. There are 2 big things running for her: her skill, which is a party-wide buff that boosts the party's max HP and CRIT Rate, protects them from crowd-control debuffs once per activation (with one of her Bonus Abilities), and redirects most of the damage they take to her; and her talent, which passively grants party-wide Damage Reduction for as long as she stands and recovers her HP should it fall below 50%. Unlike shields bestowed by other Preservation characters, her protective skill's duration is tied to her own turn (like Luocha's talent), so you won't have to worry about your speedier characters running out of protection before the enemies' turn. Her Ultimate also grants her 1 charge for her talent's self-healing ability, in addition to dealing AOE damage and (with one of her Bonus Abilities) also does a minor heal on the party.
- In addition, Fu Xuan lacks "split-scaling" in her kit as the damage of both Fu Xuan's basic attacks and ultimate scale off of her HP, which means that she deals more damage the tankier she gets (which will also help with soaking the damage that her teammates take), and completely eliminates any need to build ATK. Combined with her ascension traces and signature Light Cone which provide some passive healing to her party, Fu Xuan can essentially keep an entire team alive all by herself, without the assistance of a dedicated healer. In summary, Fu Xuan ensures her party members will only take minor scratch damage as she redirects all of it to herself, and then pops passive heals on herself and the party to keep everybody topped off while at the same time dealing heavy Quantum damage to whatever she hits. The fact that any party she is in doesn't require a healer means players have far more flexible options for adding supports and damage dealers.
- Gepard (Ice-Preservation)
- Gepard is a strong contender for being one of the best standard banner 5-stars, thanks to his straightforward and highly powerful defensive prowess. His abilities are pretty decent, with his Skill having a good chance to freeze the enemy for crowd control, and his Talent being an Auto-Revive that further adds to his durability, and when upgraded with one of his Bonus Abilities, can restore the energy for his ultimate at full. But what truly makes him incredibly powerful is his Ultimate, which puts up an extremely sturdy shield around the entire party for 3 turns, letting them shrug off powerful attacks that would severely damage them and require healing. Gepard's shield is sturdy enough to practically make a healer unnecessary, and his sixth ascension Bonus Ability boosts his ATK by 35% of his DEF, letting him at least provide an increased semblance of damage. He's also one of the best characters to use on the Path of Preservation in Simulated Universe thus far, as listed in its folder below.
- Huohuo (Wind-Abundance)
- Huohuo provides highly consistent debuff cleansing alongside great healing over time. Her Skill restores an ally's HP and adjacent allies as well, removes a debuff, and grants her two turns of her Talent. While her Talent is active, before an ally's turn begins (or when they use their Ultimate), they immediately cleanse a debuff and restore HP, letting them always start off in healthy condition. Her Talent's debuff cleanse can trigger up to six times, in which Huohuo can simply recast her Skill to reset the trigger count. Her Ultimate provides powerful offensive utility as well, boosting the party's ATK alongside charging up their Ultimates, which allows for greater damage output sooner. As many debuffs tend to be quite crippling, especially the crowd-control ones, the ability to immediately cleanse them as soon as an ally's turn begins (as opposed to having to spend a turn and skill points to use a skill or waste energy by casting Ultimate) is a highly powerful utility. Her only drawback is the lack of a "panic button" heal (such as what Lynx and Natasha get), which can be a problem if the enemy chains together multiple attacks before she can move.
- Jingliu (Ice-Destruction)
- Jingliu is one of the best sources of Blast damage. Her selling point is her Spectral Transmigration state, which only needs two Syzygy stacks from each Skill or Ultimate use to activate. This state does many things at once: (i) Action Advances her by 100% upon activation, (ii) massively increases her Crit Rate,note easing Rutilant Arena's hefty Crit Rate requirement, (iii) enhances her Skill to consume one stack of Syzygy (instead of Skill Points) to deal massive Blast damage (while disabling her mediocre Basic ATK), and (iv) consumes her allies' HP (which is low enough to be negligible) whenever she attacks to boost her already-high ATK. On top of being buffed by the Spectral Transmigration state, using her Ultimate in that state still grants one stack of Syzygy to ensure that she deals big damage as long as possible.
- Her first Eidolon upgrade increases her Enhanced Skill and Ultimate's damage by 100% ATK if she only hits one target, putting her on par with Hunt units in terms of single-target damage.
- Kafka (Lightning-Nihility)
- Kafka completely trivializes Simulated Universe thanks to how well her abilities sync up with the Path of Nihility. Kafka's skill and ultimate trigger any and all Damage Over Time debuffs, (Burn, Wind Shear, Bleed and Shock) on targeted enemies without consuming them, meaning the afflicted enemy will still get the full brunt of the stacked damage when their turn begins. Not to mention she can still inflict her own DoT debuffs while she's at it. Path of Nihility's resonance, meanwhile, applies all four DoT debuffs to all enemies on the field, which Kafka can then forcibly trigger over and over again for massive damage. Through the combination of Kafka's innate abilities and certain Nihility blessings, such as the ones that heal or regenerate energy when enemies are hurt by DoT, it becomes laughably easy to solo SU with Kafka and Kafka alone. The icing on the cake? Her build is incredibly straightforward, since she has excellent synergy with a Light Cone given to you for free as a reward for spending enough Shield (Belobog's currency), and her relics require very little min-maxing, as crit stats don't affect debuffs like Shock or Bleed, and so the much more common ATK stats are always going to be your best option.
- Luocha (Imaginary-Abundance)
- This man is one of the godliest healers in the entire game, packed with incredibly strong healing and utility all in one character. His Talent forms a significant part of his potent healing with the "Field" effect after using his skill or ultimate twice, allowing all allies' attacks to inflict Life Drain for its duration (and can also do minor healing on all allies with his 2nd bonus ability unlocked)note , and his Technique lets him deploy the Field immediately from the start of battle. His primary healing skill is a powerful heal and debuff cleanse in one, but what makes it stand out is that he automatically uses it for no cost when an ally hits 50% HP, making him very skill point friendly. Luocha's ultimate is yet another powerful utility he boasts, damaging all enemies and dispelling a buff from them, just to further compliment his immense power. His only drawbacks are that unlike other Abundance Pathstriders, he scales purely off Attack, which makes him noticeably squishier than them (which becomes significant when you're fighting overleveled enemies), and that he has no on-demand panic heal (unless you use an ultimate while his field is active) but the sheer healing and utility he pumps out renders this practically moot.
- Ruan Mei (Ice-Harmony)
- Ruan Mei has quickly proven herself to be one of the top damage buffers in the game. Her Skill improves the Weakness Break Efficiency of allies, something that previously could only be done through a Blessing in the Simulated Universe (or by event-specific buffs), making it easier to stun enemies, while her Ultimate allows her allies to place a debuff that delays enemies from recovering from a Break, keeping them essentially stunned for longer. And that's before you get into the damage buff that her Skill provides (which, with her A6 passive, can reach a whopping 68%, more than Bronya's skill buff and permanently active as well), or how her Ultimate allows her team to ignore a significant percentage of the enemy's resistance to all elemental types. This synergizes extremely well with established DPS characters like Jingliu and is a huge boon for damage-over-time teams as well, letting them keep an enemy stunned for longer so more DoT's can be landed before they recover. Ruan Mei isn't without damage either; whenever an ally Breaks an enemy, she'll deal a hefty chunk of damage to them that scales off her Break Effect stat. Simply put, Ruan Mei is a massive force multiplier for any team's damage output.
- Aside from her usage as an actual character, she is also designed to essentially be a walking cheat button for Simulated Universe. Simply put her Technique gives her Silver Wolf's ability to get a weakness break every enemy regardless of weaknesses. It also gets stronger with each blessings the player has on them with a cap of 20 blessings, at which point even the domain boss gets their toughness bar depleted to ZERO AND a good chunk of their health shaved off, up to the point where you can effectively skip the first phase. Normal enemies will also die just getting the initiative well into the 13th floor. As an added bonus, if you are fortunate enough to come across her own Random Event while she is in your team, you can get all of the overpowered "gifts" she offers instead of having to choose one.
- Seele (Quantum-Hunt)
- Seele is one hell of a speedy killer. Her main claim to fame is her talent Resurgence, which allows her to take an extra turn if she lands the finishing blow on an enemy (unless if already in Resurgence). The Resurgence triggered by her Basic Attack/Skill and by Ultimate are considered separate from each other, potentially allowing Seele to act four times in a row. In addition, she can give herself passive buffs to her speed, allowing her to very often get two turns in before the enemy can act. Suffice to say, this kind of action economy is incredibly powerful in a turn based system, and a fully leveled and geared Seele can easily trivialize entire groups of enemies, potentially killing all of them before anybody else can act - turning her into a pseudo-Erudition character. And since she already has very high ATK and CRIT stats as part of the Hunt path, Seele can still easily deal with bosses and enemies without Quantum weakness through sheer brute force alone, especially if she's paired with potent offensive buffers like Bronya, Tingyun, or Sparkle.
- Silver Wolf (Quantum-Nihility)
- Silver Wolf is a godly boss killer notable for her ability to make a core mechanic of the combat system completely irrelevant. The bread-and-butter of her kit is her skill Allow Changes?, which makes an enemy weak to an element in your party, while at the same time decreasing their resistance to that element by 20%. This alone makes team composition a non-issue, and can in fact reward you for bringing a Hunt unit that the boss isn't weak against. The extra weakness lasting for three whole turns before Silver Wolf needs to refresh it makes her action economy incredibly efficient, and she herself isn't lacking in damage output. Her ultimate, which can cut an enemy's defense almost in half, her talent, which can apply even more debuffs and can proc with any attack she makes, and her technique, which deals Toughness damage to all enemies regardless of whether or not they have a Quantum weakness and inflicts Entanglement on the ones broken this way, are just the cherries on top of an already absurdly powerful skill. Thanks to the sheer number of debuffs she can spam, she's a perfect pairing with Acheron, building up her Ultimate quickly and opening the enemy up to Acheron's ridiculous damage. If Silver Wolf has any real drawback, it's that she has no multi-target capabilities.
- Starting with the release of Fu Xuan and Lynx, Silver Wolf's skill also enables the ability to build a mono-Quantum team, which mitigates the RNG nature of her skill by forcing it to only choose Quantum as a Weakness Implant, therefore it will always match your main damage dealer(s). This is accomplished by having Fu Xuan or Lynx serve as the sole sustainer, Silver Wolf and Sparkle acting as supports, and any one of Seele, Qingque, or Xueyi as the main damage dealer.
- Sparkle (Quantum-Harmony)
- This girl from the Masked Fools has proven to be a powerful support unit, and brings a special one-of-a-kind utility that is not seen in any playable character to date. Her skill is similar to Bronya in that it can advance ally actions forward and grant damage buffs; while the action advancing is only half as potent as Bronya's, and cannot cleanse debuffs, Sparkle instead boosts her ally's Crit Damage by a sizeable chunk in addition to a percentage of her own Crit Damage. Her biggest claim to fame however, is her talent and ultimate. The former increases the skill point cap by two, allowing you to have a maximum of seven skill points. Furthermore, when allies consume skill points, the entire party gains a damage boost that can stack up to three times. The latter instantly restores four skill points and makes Sparkle's damage boosting talent stronger. The combination of her talent and ultimate is a godsend for SP-heavy teams or individual characters that consume a lot of SP (ie. Imbibitor Lunae and Qingque). On top of all that, her sixth ascension Bonus Ability not only boosts the entire party's ATK by 15%, it also makes mono-Quantum teams much stronger by increasing all Quantum characters' ATK depending on how many are in the team.
4★ Units
- Herta (Ice-Erudition)
- Time has been very kind to Herta, and while she's at her absolute best in Pure Fiction, a slew of indirect buffs ensure that this former Low-Tier Letdown has got plenty of tricks for Simulated Universe and Memory of Chaos as well. Her specialty is hammering away relentlessly at hordes of enemies with no less than three different methods of hitting all foes at once, with her talent being able to trigger multiple times in a single proc. Her particular combination of traits means that she synergizes incredibly well with no less than three Paths (Elation, Remembrance, and Erudition), and can still be slotted into most of the others to great effect. Her ultimate also charges up incredibly quickly and she deals a deceptive amount of Toughness damage to the main threatnote when she's allowed to rampage. It used to be that her middling single-target damage held her back against bosses, but the ever-increasing quantity of Flunky Bosses and Wolfpack Bosses has made this less of an issue. Oh, and you get her for free barely an hour into the game. Talk about a case of being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
- Pela (Ice-Nihility)
- An all-purpose debuffer who gets the majority of her utility from her Ultimate, which reduces the DEF of all enemies currently on field for 2 turns, up to 40% with no Eidolons. You'd think having the majority of her utility locked behind her Ultimate would make her a pain to use, along with the debuff only lasting for two turns, but that's where her Talent and Technique come in. Her Technique reduces enemy DEF by 20% for two turns while at Eidolon 5 (the one that adds an additional 2 Levels to her Ultimate and Talent), while with a Level 10 Talent, every time she debuffs an enemy after an attack, she generates 10 Energy. That last part isn't limited to her Technique and Ultimate either, her skill has a 'guaranteed' buff removal for a single-target enemy, no Effect Hit Rate needed. Give her an Energy Regeneration Rate Link Rope with either the Sprightly Vonwacq or Penacony's Dream-Seeking Tracks set and you can have her Ultimate up indefinitely with the right rotations. Speaking of which, while her Ultimate needs Effect Hit Rate unlike her Skill, Pela has so much of it in her traces, including her Ascension Trace, The Secret Strategy, which increases all party members Effect Hit Rate by 10% as long as she is on field, that it's practically child's play to build her.
- Qingque (Quantum-Erudition)
- Is widely considered to be one of, if not the, most powerful 4-star DPS characters in the game to the point where players who main her joke that she's actually a 5-star in disguise. The core to Qingque's power is her talent Celestial Jade and skill A Scoop of Moon, which increases the damage she deals based on the number of matching tiles she is holding. While this makes her damage output reliant on RNG, Qinque has ways to mitigate this as she can spend up to 4 skills points in a single turn to draw the hand she needs, and if all else fails, her Ultimate will effectively guarantee her the best hand when used. Combined with her Ascension Traces and Eidolons which massively boost her damage output, Qinque can rival or even surpass 5-star damage dealers. Not to mention, she can be obtained for free in the game and her 4-star status means dupes for Eidolons are fairly easy to come by. Her only disadvantages are that her unconventional playstyle makes her somewhat Difficult, but Awesome to use, and she requires her Traces to be fully maxed out to be viable as a damage dealer.
- Tingyun (Lightning-Harmony)
- For a 4-star character, Tingyun is considered a fantastic addition to just about any party. Her key asset is her Ultimate, Amidst the Rejoicing Clouds, which provides her target a large amount of energy for their own Ultimate and boosts their damage by up to 56% for 2 turns. This makes Tingyun competitive with Huohuo for buffing a hypercarrynote , and that's before we get into her Skill, Soothing Melody, which boosts a target ally's Attack based on Tingyun's own Attack stat and causes their attacks to deal bonus Lightning damage (also based on Tingyun's Attack stat). Additionally, while an ally is blessed by her Skill, Tingyun's own attack will deal bonus damage based on the Attack stat of her blessed ally, which can let her deal a surprising amount of damage for a Support Party Member. Her Technique also restores her own energy outside of battle, which ensures that she'll always start with her Ultimate fully charged in settings such as Memory of Chaos or Pure Fiction. When paired with allies like Jingliu or Seele, Tingyun can be a powerful substitute for characters like Bronya.
Relics and Planar Ornaments
- Ashblazing Grand Duke
- While this set is highly specialized for multi-hit follow-up attacks, it is greatly credited for essentially saving several Erudition units. The 2-piece bonus is already respectable by increasing the damage of follow-up attacks by a whopping 20%. The 4-piece bonus gives the wearer a stacking 6% attack bonus every time their follow-up attack deals damage up to a max of 8 stacks, meaning you could potentially get a 48% attack bonus buff. This obviously benefits characters whose follow-up attacks either inflict multiple hits on a single target or hit multiple targets at once, which several Erudition characters specialize in. In particular, this set provides a massive power boost to Jing Yuan and Himeko, turning them from niche characters at best to viable mainline damage dealers.
- Genius of Brilliant Stars
- One of the more powerful sets in the game and for good reasons. Its 2-piece bonus gives a 10% bonus to Quantum damage, which any Quantum-type DPS appreciates, but the real kicker is the 4-piece bonus, which allows the wearer to ignore 10% of the enemy's Defence, with an extra 10% on top if they're also weak to Quantum. This is a huge DPS bonus to any DPS, even ones that don't benefit from the Quantum damage increase, but works especially well on any DPS with huge amounts of Attack, like Jingliu, and on any team that runs Silver Wolf, since she can force an enemy to be weak to Quantum and activate that extra 10% Defense ignore.
- Messenger Traversing Hackerspace
- A Simple, yet Awesome choice; it gives the wearer a 6% increase in Speed if you have 2 pieces of the set equipped. This may not sound like much, but it enables supportive units to go faster than their teammates, allowing them to generate more skill points for the team to use, set up buffs and debuffs for the DPS to exploit, and frees up substats for more defensive stats. The 4-piece bonus also has some uses in advancing the entire team forward, though one must take care to not disrupt the party's Speed tuning.
- Prisoner in Deep Confinement
- Although the only relic set designed for a DoT playstyle, it greatly elevates the power of that playstyle. Its 2-piece bonus contributes a pretty standard 12% Attack, which all DoTs scale off of. However, its 4 piece is a powerful 6% Defense ignore per DoT, for a maximum of 3 Dots. This 18% Defense ignore almost matches that of the Genius set listed above, and arguably has an easier requirement to reach (3 Dots can be achieved with 2 Dot based units and a DoT created from a weakness break, or from Kafka's signature Light Cone, while Genius's extra 10% needs an enemy to be naturally Quantum weak, or have Silver Wolf, a limited character, artificially implant the weakness).
- Sprightly Vonwacq
- This relic set from Simulated Universe is a fantastic option for support characters, as its set bonus boosts energy regeneration rate by 5%, which helps supports charge their ultimate faster, and also advances their first action in battle by 40% if their Speed is 120 or more, which gives them a headstart in buffing up their allies before the boss can act. It's especially useful on Bronya and Sparkle thanks to their skills advancing ally actions.
Simulated Universe
The Roguelike nature of Simulated Universe can lead to some hilariously broken builds.
Paths
- Path of Abundance
- Like the Path of Preservation, this path is based around survivability, this time through keeping everyone's HP topped off. However, it also gives bonuses for healing allies, such as increased speed, attack and defence, and even provides a substantial damage bonus through its Path-exclusive status effect: Dewdrop. Dewdrop accumulates charge through either healing or when a character's turn begins (based on current HP), and breaks when a character unleashes an attack, dealing additional damage based on the total charge amount. As this path can increase your characters' Max HP and healing power, this damage can get very high, giving a lot of offensive power to a Path that is otherwise generally defensive.
- The world you unlock this path (world 5, with Kafka as the end boss) was practically made to show how broken Abundance can be. The three upgrades you can get for the Abundance's Path Resonance include having a free party-wide heal every round of turns so you no longer even need a healer, removing debuffs from the party, and preventing death. With the upgrade to remove debuffs, the world's boss becomes much easier because it nullifies their main gimmick.
- As detailed in the Dice section below, in Swarm Disaster, this Path's die applies Mercy to tiles which increments countdown, making the threat of Planar Disarray nonexistent.
- Path of Erudition
- The Path's focus is in AOE attacks and Ultimate, the latter of which often involve AOE attacks, which non-Erudition characters may also have. 2 of the 3-star Blessings center on the Brain in a Vat mechanic, which, when fully charged, allows your character to repeat their Ultimate once after it's unleashed; for the damage-dealing ones especially, this can lead to huge damage. Enhancing BCI-34 Gray Matter allows your characters to begin battle with Brain in a Vat 100% charged. Then there's Analysis: Subliminal Sensation, a 2-star blessing that grants your characters 65% more energy at the start of battle, and 100% when enhanced (in addition to increasing Ultimate's damage), allowing them to Begin with a Finisher easily; if you also have Brain in a Vat at 100%, you can effectively spam Ultimates for massive damage from the beginning of the battle. Then there's Mimesis: Tactile Pathway that deals additional damage the more enemies you hit at once, and VEP-18 Occipital Lobe that increases your Ultimate's Resistance Penetration the more enemies take a hit by Ultimate damage at once, and when enhanced, both allow the blessings to take effect at maximum even on a single target so long as said attacks have defeated/hit multiple targets beforehand in the battle; this also goes well with another blessing that makes AOE attacks deal additional damage based on a percentage of the initial total damage if it happens to hit a single target. Finally, there's its Path Resonance, which inflicts a special debuff that links all enemies together; whenever one of them takes a hit, they and another enemy with the highest HP (such as Elites or Bosses) take extra "Ultimate" damage, which will benefit from all of the blessings tied to Ultimate damage. With AOE attacks (including Ultimates), the extra damage caused by this debuff can reach extreme heights, especially on Flunky Bosses.
- Path of Nihility
- This Path in general is absurdly great; when built right, it allows your characters to deal high Damage Over Time, potentially more than the direct damage they can do, so much that even an underleveled team or a more survival-oriented team has a chance of completing the run. The "Suspicion" debuff brought by 2 of the 3-star Blessings of Nihility increases the damage of DoT by 1% and can stack up to 99. As stated above, Path Resonance: Nihility can inflict all 4 kinds of DoT onto all enemies, and if that isn't enough, the 2-star blessing Twilight of Existence allows your characters' attacks to inflict DoT debuff on Weakness Broken enemies. Another 2-star blessing, Night Beyond Pyre, increases Weakness Break efficiency, allowing your characters to break the enemies' Toughness gauge faster; very few other Blessings in the game can increase characters' Weakness Break efficiency and it's still a good Blessing even when you're on another Path. There's also another blessing that lets you deal Break Effect on adjacent enemies (enhanced: all enemies) whenever you break an enemy's weakness; while the purpose of this is to spread DOT debuff associated with Break Effect, this can also be effective on crowd-control debuffs (Frozen, Entanglement, Imprisonment), allowing you to stall enemies (including bosses) with less effort.
- Path of Preservation
- If you have any of the 5-star shielding units (i.e. Gepard, Aventurine), this path becomes game-breakingly powerful. The blessing Divine Construct: Metastatic Field causes shielded allies to retaliate with a powerful Counter-Attack against the enemy whenever they get hit for 340% of the remaining shield value. Enhanced, this spikes up to 420% of the shield before it gets reduced by incoming damage. When the enemy uses an AOE attack, they take Quake from each shielded ally hit, which results in massive recoil damage. Compounded with additional Preservation blessings, it's quite the glorious sight to watch the enemy basically kill themselves trying to break through your shielders' supreme defenses. That's not even getting into the Path Resonance, which deals massive damage based on total shield value, and can be upgraded to be a guaranteed critical hit with Resonance Formation: Zero-Dimensional, and further increases in critical damage based on how many allies are shielded and made into a borderline Spam Attack with Resonance Formation: Isomorphous Reaction refilling a small portion of the Resonance Energy bar every time a shield is applied, which both Preservation characters and Blessings can compound on into nearly a dozen procs each turn.
- Normally, when a shielded character takes damage, all shields on them takes the full damage, making shield stacking pointless. Divine Construct: Macrosegregation grants your characters a small shield once every 2 turns, which increases whenever any other shield is gained, essentially enabling shields to stack without limit. Enhanced, it increases by 130% of shield value instead of 100%. Add in effects like Interstellar Construct: Sanctuary applying a shield every single turn, and Interstellar Construct: Quadrangular Pyramid granting another 30/35% boost to shield size and things can quickly spiral out of control.
- Path of Propagation
- Your reward for painstakingly grinding through the Swarm Disaster mode is the Path of Propagation, and its power more than justifies the effort needed to unlock it. The path revolves around using basic attacks and skill points for all sorts of power and utility, and it boasts one of the most powerful Path Resonances in the game, granting a selected ally their turn immediately and restores 2 skill points. Another major part of its power are the Spores, which are inflicted on enemies through consuming or recovering skill points with the 3-star blessings unlocked, and detonated with any attack for humongous damage. And the Spores can further be enhanced to deal increased damage and be able to spread to the same unlucky target to burst again for even more damage. The power from this path brings two specific characters into the spotlight: the already game-breaking Imbibitor Lunae, and the seemingly unassuming Qingque, whose heavy usage of skill points turns them into walking nuclear warheads that will devastate everything in their way. While the path doesn't always work for everyone, it's still powerful and versatile enough to benefit most DPS characters.
- If you're playing through Swarm Disaster using this path, you can try your luck to get the best result in the Dice of Propagation: letting you skip straight through the Boss domain and gain Blessing of Propagation equal to the number of Swarm-related domains you skipped through this way, allowing you to finish the mode more quickly and with increased power as well.
Path Blessings
- Auspicious Star
- This 2-star Hunt Blessing regenerates a massive amount of Energy for characters after they defeat an enemy, 60% at base, 100% of their maximum energy when enhanced. This allows your damage dealers to deal a constant Spam Attack as long as the boss keeps summoning minions, potentially eliminating all summoned ones in one go and allowing you to focus on the boss itself.
- BCI-34 Gray Matter
- This 3-star Blessing of Erudition is one of the blessings that work well even if you're on a different path, thanks to the "Brain in a Vat" mechanic, which, when fully charged, allows your character to repeat their Ultimate once after it's unleashed. For this blessing in particular, you charge Brain in a Vat by entering battle and whenever you perform Weakness Break (the other one charges Brain in a Vat by killing enemies, which isn't as easy). The ability to use Ultimate for a second time can lead to either big damage, or extra utility (such as generating shields with Gepard or more healing with Abundance characters).
- Champion's Dinner: Cat's Cradle
- The Elation Path is a rather restrictive Path that explicitly revolves around follow-up attacks, normally limiting its utility to dedicated follow-up attackers like Clara, Jing Yuan, Dr. Ratio, and Topaz & Numby. Not anymore once you get your hands on this bad boy. This blessing is a 3-star Elation Blessing that causes all offensive Ultimates to count as follow-up attacks. Get this Blessing and suddenly every offensive character can now gain the benefits of Elation Path, and as an added bonus it boosts the damage of all follow-up attacks by 15% (and can be enhanced to 55%!). Seeing this Blessing in a run is practically an auto-win button especially if you are already on the Elation Path as you not only gain the ability to flex into any offensive character you want, it collectively snowballs with every other follow-up attack buffs and the Aftertaste damage to crank up your team's damage to utterly monstrous amounts for very little additional effort required. Additionally, it can easily be combined with Erudition blessings for even more bonkers shenanigans with Ultimate/follow up attack spam!
- Celestial Annihilation
- This 3-star Hunt blessing advances the turn of whoever does a Weakness Break by 100% and their next attack does 50% more damage (75% with an upgrade). Depending on how far enemies are broken on Weakness, this allows a character to chain attacks as they continue breaking weaknesses. This blessing is especially good against Flunky Bosses whose mooks' toughness gauges you can break repeatedly to continue your assault.
- Disciplinary Flicker
- This 2-star Destruction Blessing almost single-handedly enables any character to Solo-run Simulated Universe, by making so that any time a character's HP drops below 35%, they are instantly healed by 12% of their Max HP. Furthermore, this effect has no limit to the amount of times it activates, meaning that chip damage can become completely negligible. Even self-inflicted damage, such as that inflicted by Blade's skill or enhanced Basics. can be healed away, and the Blessing can even be enhanced so that it heals more the lower the character's HP is.
- Night Beyond Pyre:
- Simple, yet Awesome at its finest. This 2-star Nihility Blessing increases Weakness Break efficiency by 30% (Enhanced: 45%), which enables units to stun enemies faster and get all the buffs for doing so faster. It also stacks with other Blessings or effects that buff Weakness Break efficiency, allowing even Basic Attacks to shave off large amounts of toughness. Incredibly useful regardless of Path.
- Regression Inequality of Annihilation
- This is a 3-star Destruction blessing that causes all damage taken to be distributed evenly amongst your party members. When enhanced, it also gives a flat 15% damage reduction buff to the whole party. Combine this with Gepard, who can consistently apply party-wide shields, and numerous other Preservation blessings that either give even more shields to the whole party or strengthen the ones you can already made, and suddenly it takes a truly overwhelming onslaught of Area of Effect damage (such as World 6 Cocolia) for your party to ever take damage. It also has ridiculous synergy with Blade, since it allows him to take damage more often to charge his powerful follow-up attack. Just keep in mind that if you're playing Fu Xuan, the blessing's damage distribution will override her skill's own damage distribution (to her), though her damage-reducing talent and the Max HP-boosting skill are still synergistic with this blessing.
- Resonance Formation: Anatta
- With this blessing active in the Abundance path, if Path Resonance is triggered for the first time each battle, it will make the resonance insert itself in the action slots and immediately greatly heals the party every time it's the resonance's turn. The heals are a decrease by 30%, but the frequency makes it worth it. The Path Resonance button doesn't go away either, and it's excellent at keeping the party alive. And if it somehow isn't even enough, you can partner it with Resonance Formation: Anicca; not only will you get healed on its every turn, but also cured of debuffs every time too. This is even handier if you don't plan to have a healer in your party, but you want to lessen the risks of members getting knocked out.
Curio
- Corrupted Code
- This Error Code Curio allows you to regenerate your characters' energy whenever they perform a Weakness Break. This curio is useful for practically every situation or path, but especially for Hunt and Erudition paths as they also have ways to empower your characters after a Weakness Break.
- Typical Genius Society Gossip
- A dauntingly broken Curio in the correct circumstances, Typical Genius Society Gossip doubles the amount of Cosmic Fragments you earn in exchange for preventing you from earning Blessings from combat. The downside is largely irrelevant in Expansion Module runs where you pick it up as many of the stronger dice encourage forgoing combat entirely and exploiting non-combat Domains such as Transaction and Occurrence to hoard up on Blessings and Curios, and being able to double every source of income, even being refunded Cosmic Fragments from dice passives and events, is monumentally powerful.
Dice
- Company Time
- This is the dice in Gold and Gears that most high difficulty runs use, for a good reason: whenever you purchase something in Transaction domains, you'll get refunded by 30% of the Cosmic Fragments used, and the more CF you spend (not necessarily in Transaction domains alone), the more "path boost" (depending on your chosen path) you gain. The strategy often involves the curios Typical Genius Society Gossipnote and Price of Peacenote ; some other curios such as Gold Coin of Discordnote and Vile Mechanical Satellite #900note will also help with this. Aside from allowing you to potentially purchase many blessings and curios (and get many path boosts in the process), this also pairs well with the curio Robe of the Beauty, which increases your damage output by 16% per 100 fragments you currently have - this dice is the easiest way for you to get a lot of CF to power this curio, which will lead to your damage output skyrocketing to insane levels. There are also several dice faces that can help with this, such as Heterogeneity: Interestnote , Heterogeneity: Alienationnote , and General: Pawn Shopnote . The only problem is how RNG-dependent this method can be since you need to get the first two curios as early as possible, particularly the Price of Peace.
- Countdown
- Swarm Disaster's Abundance die or Gold and Gears' Countdown die make the countdown timer in these modes a non-issue, which is huge considering the fact that the higher your Planar Disarray level is, the more your enemies get buffed, which can outpace yours and end the run. The dice makes the Path Boost scale of countdown points and applies "Mercy"/"Knowledge" tiles which increments the countdown when traversed. This comes with a cost of non-Mercy tiles costing 3 points of countdown instead of 1 (Swarm Disaster) or reduced initial countdown (Gold and Gears), but optimal play and careful tile management makes this a non-issue.
- Curio Extrapolation
- While Company Time is better for getting meme runs where characters do several trillion damage and repeatedly hit the integer limit, Curio Extrapolation is touted as being just as effective for crushing Gold & Gears under your heel for much less effort. The concept behind this die is that you immediately get 40 Cosmic Fragments upon getting any Curio and Path Boost for every Curio in your possession. The key behind this die is the Shining Trapezohedron Die, a Curio that replaces every Curio in your inventory with a random Curio. The trick is that for the purposes of the die's 40 Fragment bonus, having all of your Curios rerolled by the Shining Trapezohedron Die counts as receiving new Curios, immediately giving you 40 Fragments multiplied by however many Curios you're currently holding, which can be doubled if Typical Genius Society Gossip shows up in your inventory. Furthermore, by holding on to a specific set of Curios, it is possible for Herta's shop in any Transaction Domain to always contain a copy of Shining Trapezohedron Die (since the Curio itself is rerolled upon acquisition and rerolled Curios cannot become a Shining Trapezohedron Die), meaning it is entirely possible to shuffle your Curio stock multiple consecutive times in a row and rake in a ludicrous amount of Cosmic Fragments (albeit nowhere near as much as the amount you can get with Company Time). Now combine this strategy with the fact that there are multiple Curios that immediately give you Blessings or enhance Blessings you have upon acquisition and you can hoard enough Blessings to become a walking unkillable machine of mass destruction.
- Occurrence Extrapolation
- One of the starter dice, Occurrence Extrapolation is extraordinarily powerful and relatively easy to use. This die immediately rewards you with a random Blessing whenever you enter an Occurrence, Occurrence: Abnormal, or Reward domain, and for every Occurrences you cleared, you get a Path Boostnote . It's pretty simple to figure out how quickly this can snowball, especially since the versatility of random events means there's a possibility that you will wind up with a ton of Blessings and Curios extremely quickly. What really breaks this die are the faces you can work with; die faces like General: Inspiration (copies a target Domain to two random nodes), General: Counteract (copies a target Domain to an adjacent node), General: Confirmation (overwrites a random Elite or Adventure Domain with a Reward Domain) can allow you to quickly swarm the board with Occurrences and Rewards, letting you avoid combat as much as possible while raking in the benefits from free events (including the Ruan Mei below).
- Pursuit
- This Gold and Gears dice rewards you for moving to non-adjacent domains, which it allows you to do via its ability that allows you to move to any domain of the same type as the one you are currently on. While it sounds niche on paper, it has some amazing usage if you use a very specific strategy: namely, copying Abnormal Occurrence domains (and/or Reward Domains) all across each plane, applying as many "double" and "select" beacons on them as humanly possible, and visiting as many of them as possible to get two Ruan Mei Occurrences, which are game breakers of their own. This allows you to stack up on huge amounts of Cosmic Fragments, Blessings and Curios, all while remaining (relatively) safe by picking out only the advantageous Occurrences, while only needing to fight every once in a while.
Others
- Ruan Mei (Occurrence)
- Wanna know why so many people were enamoured with Ruan Mei even before her official release? This is why: Part 1 of the Occurrence allows you to instantly gain all the blessings of a random Path, or 2000 Cosmic Fragments, a huge power boost to any run. Part 2 then allows you to Enhance up to 99 Blessings (random, but at what point are you gonna have more than 99 Blessings?), obtain 10 random Curios, or (in Expansion Module modes like Swarm Disaster or Gold and Gears), 10 Cheat chances, allowing you to massively turn the board in your favour. Even better, if you have a Ruan Mei in your party (or downloaded her at some point during the run), you can instead choose to gain all the benefits, which, on a Occurrence this strong, just pushes it through the roof. Really its only downside is how rare it is, though considering what it does, that's more than likely intentional.
Other
- Aetherium Wars:
- One of the strongest Aether Spirits in this minigame is in fact the very first one you properly catch, the Silvermane Cannoneer. His skill allows him to launch an Area of Effect follow-up attack whenever his chosen ally attacks, which can be easily abused by pairing him with units that can take lots of actions per round such as the Silvermane Lieutenant, the Voidranger Trampler, or the Auromaton Gatekeeper (whose summons' attacks count as its own actions), allowing him to unleash a relentless barrage on most of the enemy formation with little setup required. And then there's his ultimate, which grants an ally a sizable damage boost on top of granting them enough energy that they can usually use their own ultimates right away, making these damage cycles all the easier to trigger right away. The only time you wouldn't want to use him is if the enemy formation is almost entirely Aberrant-type, which is a rare occurence.
- The Aurumaton Gatekeeper is an Overlord-type Aether Spirit that allows you to wield its devastating Demonic Spider powers against your foes. Its Ultimate immediately Advances Forward its next action and causes it to enter Sanction Mode for two turns, summoning two Illumination Dragonfish to your side that have their own turns and deal AoE damage with a high chance to inflict Burn, as well as powering up your normal attack to deal heavy single-target damage with a base 100% chance to inflict Imprisoned. What breaks this monster is its synergies; the Saturation Activation Chip immediately fills its Ultimate on its first possible turn, circumventing the need to use its otherwise lackluster standard kit to get going, and because the Illumination Dragonfish summoned by Sanction Mode count as its own actions, casting Support Mode on Aurumaton Gatekeeper with Silvermane Cannoneer effectively allows the latter to dish out a whopping three Burst damage attacks per cycle. As an added bonus, the player-controlled Aurumaton Gatekeeper functions differently from enemy versions as the Illumination Dragonfish summoned by Sanction Mode don't count as extra units on your side, meaning you don't have to worry about them being a liability to your team.
