Expert Raid Guide for noobs

Disclaimer: I mean expert difficulty, not that I’m an expert writing the guide.

Okay. We’re all going through growing pains at the moment in terms of mastering the fresh new raid content. I’m writing this in hopes to subdue unwarranted biases, but also to help you scrubs get that expert run down pat so we can all go home with our gold medals.

The non-negotiable

1. You shall not run wind units. Don’t care how cute Maribelle is. No wind units

2. You need to bring damage. You’re going to be relying on i-frames primarily for defense, so as long as your damage unit can survive more than 1 hit, bring them. (Edit: This point primarily pertains to your backline; your leader should ideally be a water dps, like Lily or Celery) A 2.5k off-color damage dealer > a 1.8k water tank. Fight me.

3. For the love of god, farm and use the raid event wyrmprint. It contends with 5* print for top damage bolstering in this event (and only in this event). The only exception to this is if your lead needs additional skill gauge fill speed to reliably rotate their skills.

Here are the basic points of the strategy

1. Hold your skills and use them to mitigate orange AOE damage on your team. Why is this important? Because losing units means an overall decrease in dps, and as the raid goes on, your windows for outputing dps will get smaller. This is actually the whole crux of the strategy. Everyone losing 2+ units across the board is how you run out of time.What not to do: Blow your skills right off cooldown.

2. Kill the tail, kill it first and kill it fast. I don’t remember the exact sequence, but the boss will go through a single rotation and then start spamming his tail spin if you haven’t chopped it off. Why is this bad, you ask? Because with his tail attached, the purple area he hits is huge and, because it’s purple, extremely difficult to mitigate using skills. You can use jumps/air skills to mitigate the damage, but that’s much too difficult for 95% of the population, assuming they even have an air skill. Once he starts spinning, it’s likely already/about to be too late to save the run if you haven’t chopped the tail. What not to do: “Oh, 3 people are on the tail, so I’ll just get started on this other limb/do body damage.”

3. Destroy more than one volcano, two is usually enough. Don’t be that Lily that thinks killing one volcano is enough because that tiny triangle you’ve created is safe to stand in so your allies are so dumb for getting hit. This is super important because this time you can’t just skill i-frame the aoe, and it literally covers the whole map. You’re aiming to save your AI, of course, but more importantly, your allies’ AI. Generally speaking, if you can get past the first set of volcanoes with minimal casualties, you’ve secured the win. Bonus tip: You can freeze the volcano to stall it from blowing — this is useful if you need that extra second or two to destroy it.

If you abide by these guidelines, you will beat expert raids. I’ve run successful, public, 0 coordination raids multiple times, with all sub-8k might mixed teams. When I first started succeeding, I was running a 6.9k team (3 water lead + Eze). I would generally suggest 7k. I’d believe you if you told me a set of four 6.5k might teams could reliably beat the raid. We’re seriously nowhere near a point of difficult where the margins are so thin that you absolutely must run mono-colored optimized teams. Just don’t play like an idiot.