Summoners War Ultimate Beginners Guide to PVE

July 2024 · 49 minute read

Contents

Building Your First Giants Team

Why Giants?

The first major PvE milestone in this game is to have a consistent team for farming the highest difficulty of Giants, which is the hard abyss level or “GBAH”. No one knows what the B stands for, some people say it means “basement” as in a certain floor of the dungeon but who knows. Giants is one of the 3 major rune dungeons in this game, this game is all about farming runes, and you will be spending the majority of your time farming for runes. I hope you’ve realized by now that this game is a grind.

Since it’s possible to jump straight into farming the highest difficulty of these rune dungeons, there’s never going to be any reason to waste time farming the lower levels such as B10. The quality of rune drops in abyss hard difficulty is significantly better than B10.

And why Giants over Dragons or Necro? I thought violent was the best rune set in the game? Not quite. At least in PvE, all that matters are stats, and 4 out of 5 giant rune sets give you stat bonuses. Violent runes are actively harmful in the majority of PvE content, as a lot of bosses have automatic counters after you take X number of turns (giants, steel fortress), or limit you a certain number of turns before moving to the next phase (rifts, tart bosses), or grow permanently stronger the more turns you take (raids, both regular and dhole). And then even when you get to PvP where vio does become dominant, swift and despair are still super important to have.

People always ask “when can I stop farming giants” and the answer is “never.” GBAH is already an end game dungeon and you will never stop farming it. As you progress through the game you’ll farm other dungeons in addition to farming Giants.

Lastly, you may have seen other recent beginner guides suggesting farming DBAH instead of GBAH first since it’s easier. While it’s true that a DBAH team isn’t hard to set up, it’s definitely not easier. You’ll see from following this guide that it only takes a few days to make a GBAH team.

The Giants Abyss Hard team (GBAH)

Veromos (Dark Ifrit) – This is a 5* fusion monster. The fusion requires 4 different 4* monsters, but Event 2 of the Summoner Welcome Event will let you pick 3 out of those 4 fusion pieces for free. The only one you’ll have to get yourself is the dark yeti, which can be farmed from secret dungeons (more on SDs in the next section). You’ll want to 6* him as soon as you get him, and he should be the first monster you skill up with devilmons. You can start farming GBAH before he is fully skilled.

2a Kro (Dark Inugami) – You get a Kro for free from quests, but second awakening it is required and will be a bit involved.

Shannon (Wind Pixie) – You get her for free from quests, you can evolve her to 5* and stop, she doesn’t need to be 6*’ed. Skill her up with other pixies.

Belladeon (Light Inugami) – You’ll need to farm her from SDs, and max skill her with other inugamis. You need to 6* her but you do not need to 2A her.

Darion (Light Vagabond) – Just like bella, you’ll need to farm him from SDs and max skill him with other vagabonds. You need to 6* him but you do not need to 2A him.

Returning players may be a bit concerned that a lot of these monsters seem like they will quickly become useless after the first few stages of the game – don’t worry, this guide was written with efficiency and maximum reuse in mind. All of these monsters will continue to be useful forever in other areas. The reason these monsters are needed over traditional ones like Loren and Fran is that the new abyss Giant counters your entire team after receiving 7 hits. Having multihitters on your team will absolutely wreck you.

Assembling The Team: Secret Dungeons (SDs)

SDs are admittedly one of the most annoying things about this game. When farming the elemental hall dungeons, there is a 2% chance that you get a random secret dungeon for that element. It’s open for 1 hour, and then you can farm that secret dungeon for monster pieces. For 3* monsters, you need to collect 40 pieces, and each run gives you at most 4 pieces if you complete all 10 floors (if you fail then you’ll still get some pieces depending on what floor you reach). There is no way anyone can reasonably hope to get the secret dungeon that they need by farming elemental halls themselves. Fortunately you can join other people’s secret dungeons.

You’ll automatically be able to join SDs from your friends. In addition, if anyone in your current chat channel gets a SD, a message in chat will pop up and you can tap it and request to join that person’s SD without having to friend them. So the best way to get SDs is to sit in a populated chat channel, watch the chat carefully while you farm other things, and try to join the SD that you need whenever you see someone else get it. If you’re on the Global server, join channel 1050 as that is the “SD channel.” You’ll have to be fast though – there is a limit to how many people can request to join a person’s SD, and the more popular ones fill up fast. My suggestion would be to both request to join the SD, as well as sending a friend request to the person to maximize your chances of being able to get in.

The secret dungeons that you’ll need at the start are:

For Kumae and Darion, you only need to farm 1 copy of the monster. For Loren, you should farm multiple copies to skill her up as well, although you can do it slowly over time. It’s not immediately required. For Bella, you can farm additional inus from scenarios, but it can still be quicker to get multiple copies from SDs.

Assembling The Team: 2A Inugami

In order to second awaken your Kro, you need to max skill him. As mentioned earlier, you can farm additional inus from SDs (either light inugami or dark inugami SD), or farm scenarios for them. There are 3 scenarios that drop inugami:

The higher difficulties have a higher drop rate of the 3* monster, and the boss floor has an even higher chance. If a scenario can drop multiple different 3* mon, then the drop rate is split between them. Since Faimon has 2 different 3* drops, Garen and Telain actually have double the drop rate of inugami than Faimon. However… Faimon gives you a lot more exp for leveling your monsters, and it drops the building crafting mat Solid Rock which you’ll need a lot of to complete Summoners Way. My recommendation is to do a combination of farming Faimon Hell 1 and SDs.

Then for the second awakening, you’ll want to farm B5 (highest difficulty) of the Secondary Awakening Dungeon – Inugami in Karzhan of Dimension Hole (2A inu B5). The team for this is as follows:

You can go straight boss and ignore the towers. Runs should take roughly 1:00 to 1:45 min. Also note that you can actually start gaining 2A exp before you finish max skilling Kro.

Artifacts

When you get to summoner level 27, you unlock artifacts, which are farmed from the 2 artifact dungeons: Steel Fortress and Punisher’s Crypt. Artifacts can only be equipped to 6* monsters and it will give them all quite a nice stat boost. Each artifact comes with a flat main stat of either +100 ATK, +100 DEF, or +1500 HP, which is not insignificant at all. Artifacts also come with 4 substats that do various things – don’t worry too much about them yet. There are a lot of different substats and only a small pool of substats benefit any one specific monster. Since you won’t be able to farm the higher difficulties of these dungeons yet, it’s not worth spending the time and energy to try to farm good artifacts with appropriate substats.

For now, you should just be farming a lower level (i.e. B2) until you can get at least some artifact equipped on all your 6*’ed monsters. Between HP/DEF/ATK, HP and Def artifacts are much better since tankiness is much more important than damage for reliability in early GBAH teams.

Once you’ve made sure all your 6* monsters are equipped with 2 HP or DEF artifacts, you can move on.

Trial of Ascension Normal (ToAN)

As you collect the pieces for your giants team, you should start working on ToA. While you’re running repeat battles farming SDs, scenarios, or elemental halls for essences, you can be autoing ToA at the same time.

Your ToA team should be as follows:

This team autos completely from floors 1-100, there may be a few stages that fail on auto and you can either retry the auto (and hope for better RNG) or just manual. Another thing you can do is if you notice you’re dying on the last wave of a floor, there’s an option to choose manual for the last wave so that you can still auto the easier 1st two floors and then come back to manual the boss/harder floor.

Additional note on runes: the free Despair/Focus set comes with a weird slot 4 Atk% main Focus rune, atk is pretty useless on a support like Shannon so you should look to replace it with a slot 4 HP% main rune of any set (it’s ok to break the focus set). This can come from rune crafts, random events, or other quest rewards. For example one of the scenario completion rewards is a 5* set pick of either Energy, Fatal, or Blade – I took the Energy, and at worst you can use this 5* slot 4 HP main Energy rune for Shannon. You should not be farming any rune dungeons for runes yet at this point.

As for Vero, you can initially give him the free Vio/Focus set from the Mellia fusion quest line of Summoners Way. However note that unlike the other free rune sets from the Summoner Welcome Event, these runes come at +0 and you’ll have to roll them. The rolls are random so you can end up with either really bad or really good runes. This is a good opportunity to start learning how to rune monsters, you can mess around with swapping runes around to optimize each monster.

Putting Your GBAH Team Together

You’ll want to make sure you complete ToAN before starting GBAH, because we’ll need to borrow some runes from the ToAN monsters. Once you’re done with ToAN:

Don’t worry, as we start farming runes from GBAH you’ll quickly be able to re-rune Fran and Loren and start using them again.

Go straight boss, ignore towers. You should be able to achieve 99% consistent runs that take around 3:00 – 3:30 on average at the start. Kro may die sometimes but you should still win with the remaining 4, it’ll just be a bit slower. Congrats on being able to farm endgame runes!

I know 3 min runs are very slow. To speed things up, the first 2 steps in terms of runes are to get Vero on a slot 4 CD build with as close to 100 CR as possible, and then to get Kro tankier (possibly even using a slot 2 or 6 HP% main rune), so he no longer randomly dies and slows down your run.

The Path to Rifts

2A Spectra and Speeding Up GBAH

The first monster upgrade to our GBAH team will be to replace Darion with a 2A Spectra. As you start getting better runes and making your team (in particular Kro) tankier, you shouldn’t be needing Darion’s passive team damage reduction anymore. Spectra keeps the atk break debuff that Darion had, but adds a really strong nuke with her S2. Using a fire monster against the water Giant boss may seem a bit weird but Spectra is versatile and strong enough to be worth it here. Since the S3 does not actually do damage, it can’t glance so her chance to land S3 debuffs is unaffected even when hitting water. Her S2 can glance, but we’re still at the point of doing a bruiser team with infinite sustain (as opposed to a late game speed team with no sustain) so we’re only concerned about average damage output. Glancing and doing no damage half the time is fine, and still an upgrade over Darion who is doing no damage all the time.

Spectra can be obtained from SDs. To skill him up I recommend farming Tamor Hell 1, not just because griffon skillups can drop there but also because you can get both building craft mats Solid Rock and Shining Mythril which you’ll need to complete Summoners Way quests.

The 2A B5 dungeon for griffon is pretty easy too, you can use a team of Loren, Kro, Fran (with your 6*’ed and runed Spectra) going straight boss. Yes this does mean you’ll have to rerune your Fran and Loren with new runes dropped from Giants. Having to switch runes back and forth to farm different content is too much of a hassle, and soon enough you’ll need to use all of these monsters on the same team in Rifts and Raids.

Spectra should be runed very similarly to Vero – Spd/CD/HP, 100 CR (or as close as you can), and 45 acc (making him usable for ToA). Any Atk you can get is nice bonus but not required.

Spectra should be the 2nd monster you devil, after Vero. S2 CD reduction and increased activation for S3 is very helpful.

Why No Sig?

Returning players may notice that Sig is no longer part of this beginner Giants team. The short answer is that Sig simply isn’t needed anymore, he’s always been an early game only monster and not useful at all past PvE. It’s not worth the cost of an expensive 5* fusion and possibly devils as well if you don’t have to.

The longer answer is that Sig and Spectra have always shared similar roles, they both have aoe control and do damage that scales with enemy max HP. In the past when Sig was heavily recommended, Spectra was always optional. Now with the new abyss changes, Spectra is usable in both GBAH and DBAH. Late game, Spectra is almost a hard requirement for ToA Hell, and also usable in the new dhole raids too. With Spectra being more important and covering the same role as Sig, it makes more sense now to just go straight for Spectra and skip Sig.

Sig is still very much usable and good early on, that hasn’t changed. So if you already have Sig or there’s a fusion event that gives Sig for free, it doesn’t hurt to use him. You can either use Sig in place of Spectra, or in addition to Spectra as a +1. On this account I did end up testing an unskilled Sig and found him to be only a slight improvement to GBAH, DBAH, and ToAH teams. I’m sure if you skilled him up he may be a more considerable improvement, but then you’re spending a lot of devils on a monster that will soon be permanently storaged.

Whichever combination of Spectra/Kro/Sig you end up using for GBAH, at this point you should expect average runs to take 2:30 – 3:00. With increasingly better runes, starting to use grinds/gems, and max skilled Vero + Spectra you should be able to hit 2:00 average run times before the next major team upgrade.

Trial of Ascension Hard (ToAH)

Completing all of ToAH will require building only 2 new additional monsters: Mellia and Mav. You’ll be using Vero, Fran, and Mav as your core for all stages, and then 2 of the following 4 as flex options depending on the specific stage: Shannon, Spectra, Mellia, and Loren.

The biggest misconception people have about ToAH is that it’s all about keeping the enemies permanently CC’ed and never getting hit. Yes this was true… when the game first came out in 2014. For the past many years, there’s been a huge power creep on your side with almost no difficulty increase on the ToAH side at all. You can basically bruiser ToAH now, with just a bit of CC to help you rather than having to completely rely on it. It’s ok to get hit, and getting hit shouldn’t ruin your run. Tankiness on all your existing PvE monsters is a lot more important than super high speed, or trying to form a team of the best CC monsters in the game.

Building traditional ToAH monsters like Tyron, Sig, Verad, Rica, Gany, water Homunculus, whatever – sure it may make ToAH easier, but it’s not required at all and only serves to slow down your overall PvE progression. ToAH is considered trivial content now and not any sort of significant milestone. It can be tedious at times since manualing is involved, but nothing should ever be difficult or near impossible to beat. Experienced players can complete it within their first week of a new account without any nat 5s. There are much harder parts of PvE that deserve your attention and monster investments.

This ToAH team should auto to floor 50, and then you can sort of partial auto the rest, with full manual for the difficult floors and bosses. For majority of stages I usually set it to auto but watch the runs to jump in if I see an impending disaster, or I’ll manually change targeting while it autos.

The standard way to rune any ToA monster is as follows:

Other notes on the 3 core monsters:

Other notes on the 4 situational monsters:

Steel Fortress B10 (SF10)

It’s time to start farming real artifacts. And by real I mean start caring about the artifact substats rather than just the main flat stat. For this dungeon we’ll need to add 2 monsters to our roster: Ling Ling and 2A Raoq. Ling Ling is a 4* fusion, and Raoq should be your 3rd 2A monster. The team is Loren Fran Raoq Kro Ling Ling.

Raoq is runed exactly the same way as Kro. Ling Ling is a bit trickier. For purposes of SF10, Ling Ling is mostly there just for her buff block debuff. You don’t need any damage on her for runs to be safe, but it does help speed them up. It’s ideal to have Ling Ling move first on your team so that she can apply the buff block debuff before anyone else on your team moves and triggers a shield. However, runing Ling Ling to move first is a bit difficult as until now I had recommended that your fastest swift set go to Loren, who is also on this team. And then the bigger problem is that Ling Ling will be used in Rifts and Raids as well, and those Ling Ling builds will require her to have damage.

Basically what I’m getting at is that for now, you probably want to rune Ling Ling on a slower damage build (very similar to Kro/Raoq) even though it’s not ideal for her SF10 usage. You still will get consistent runs, but they won’t be as fast as they could be if you had a Ling Ling dedicated to SF10. Whatever you do, make sure she has 25% acc to land her debuffs, and at least 125k eHP (approximately +15k HP and +500 def with low towers). This may be tankier than what you’re used to, so one possible compromise is to rune her with slot 4 CR, sacrificing a bit of dmg/CD for the extra tankiness/spd you need.

As always, go straight boss and ignore towers. You can expect an average of around 1:15 runs.

Dragons Abyss Hard (DBAH)

Next up is to do another 4* fusion, Verde. He’s also runed just like Kro/Raoq, except he can be even squishier (his S1 has innate vamp which gives him extra survivability), even slower (he should always be the last monster to move on any team he’s used in), and doesn’t need any accuracy (no debuffs). Those extra stats can all go into damage.

Having Verde gives you your beginner DBAH team: Verde Vero Loren Spectra Raoq. Runs should take about 1:30 – 2:00 min. I know a lot of people are probably excited about being able to farm Dragons for Vio runes, but I really have to urge you to resist the temptation of wasting your time. As mentioned in the intro, all of PvE is purely about stats, and Vio actively hurts the majority of PvE teams. Stick with Giants farming if you want to progress faster, the only time you should farm DBAH for the duration of this entire guide is if you need a 10x for your Daily Mission.

The reason why this section is even here is because you need Verde for other content, and you get Dragons for “free” with it so might as well mention it as a content unlock. And of course there’s not actually any Giants Police that will come knocking if you do want to farm this dungeon a bit for “fun.”

Rift Dungeons

There’s only 1 more monster you need to build before having SSS teams for all 5 Rift Dungeons. Ardella is a farmable nat 3 (SDs) with a surprisingly good kit. Her S1 scales with debuffs on enemy (excellent for Rifts and Raids), comes with an atk break (very valuable for Raids), her S2 has speed scaling giving it a lot of extra damage, and her S3 gives you free crit stats making her easier to rune.

Now for the Rift teams – there are 4 core monsters that you can use for all 5 rifts. The remaining 2 will change depending on the specific rift. For the frontline, your 2 core monsters are Fran and Mav. Fran is an obvious important monster as a healer with atk buff. Mav is a bit weirder, but his usefulness comes all from his S3. It’s just an extremely good skill that amplifies your entire team with the CD reduction, and the speed buff will help your monsters get an extra attack or so during the non-groggy phases. Another thing to note is that during groggy phase, skills that don’t do damage (i.e. Mav S2 S3) don’t fill up the boss’s atb as much as regular skills that do do damage.

You will need to re-rune Fran and Mav with higher def for them to survive on frontline, since the Rift Beasts do extra damage to frontline monsters the lower the def they have. You should be aiming for close to 1500 def before towers, meaning nearly +1k def. To help you achieve this, you will need a slot 4 or slot 6 Def% main rune, make sure both your artis are flat Def, and take advantage of flat def substats. This will allow Mav to even survive in Fire Rift.

Your 2 core backline monsters are Verde and Kro. Verde’s benefit is that despite the non-standard way of Rift Beasts gaining ATB for attacks, he does give your team more turns to help you kill the boss a second time during non-groggy, which is required for SSS rank. This holds true even in Water Rift (yes it’s weird, but it works). Verde lead can be used for all rifts except Fire, where you can use Lapis atk lead.

The 2 additional backline monsters you should use for each rift are as follows:

Some rifts may be harder for you than others depending on your runes, either way your goal is to achieve 90% SSS before I’d consider it acceptable to farm. If things are failing a lot, watch the runs to try and troubleshoot what is happening. If there is a monster that’s always dying first, make that monster tankier. If you’re not able to kill the boss a 2nd time before the Rageful Breath attack, you probably just need more damage on your damage dealers.

Rune Check

Understanding runes, how to rune monsters and what runes to keep, is the strategy behind this entire game. It’s not something you can learn once and know how to do it like riding a bike. It’s more like practicing an instrument or playing a sport where you continually gain experience and knowledge. There are a lot of guides out there but it’s not really possible for any guide to teach you everything. The best way to get better at runes is simply to keep playing the game, see what runes other players use and keep.

Probably the most confusing part about runes is that early game runes or “PvE runes” can be very different from PvP runes or late game runes. Rune guides and general rune advice are unfortunately focused only on the PvP/late game rune mindset. For example, a lot of common advice is directed towards synergy between substats, trying to match runes to certain archetypes of monsters (damage dealers, tanks, supports), and certain thresholds for stats to be usable (for example, runes need x amount of speed). This kind of advice is just completely misleading for new players tackling early game PvE, because the vast majority of PvE monsters need practically some of every stat in the game other than resistance.

Let’s take Kro for example – he is a damage dealer that needs Atk, Crit Rate, and Crit Damage to deal damage. He needs some speed so he actually gets to move. He needs tankiness in the form of both HP and Def, because otherwise he’ll just die instantly to a Giants counterattack and dead monsters do 0 damage. He also needs accuracy, as he has valuable debuffs on 2 of his skills. So he literally needs 7 out of the 8 stats in the game. How does synergy make sense when everything is synergistic/helpful? Archetypes don’t make sense either if your damage dealers need to land supporting debuffs, and tank all enemy hits as well.

As you can tell by now, the majority of PvE monsters are all bruisers/damage dealers. But even some supports need more than just Hp/Def/Spd/Acc, for example Fran’s heal scales on attack. And there are no pure tanks in the game for PvE, the closest are Darion and Mav, but both need a lot of Acc and a good amount of speed. There’s a reason why Darion on your first GBAH team gets a Swift set.

And as for speed, it’s largely overrated. A lot of PvE monsters are fine with just +40 speed or so, allowing for runes with no speed on them to still be potentially amazing, and slot 2 Atk% or HP% to be used more frequently than slot 2 Spd.

Rune Examples

Another huge area where beginners get mislead is the importance of rune sets. In PvP, rune sets with special effects (Vio, Despair, Will, Revenge, Nemesis, etc.) are definitely super important and often the focal point of any monster build. In PvE though the mantra is “stats > sets” and rune sets simply do not matter. In 95% of PvE cases none of the rune sets with special effects are worth anything (and we’ve already discussed Vio being worse than nothing), so they may as well be broken.

And as for the stat sets (Fatal, Energy, Swift, Blade, etc.) – because as we’ve discussed, most monsters need all stats – they’re pretty much all the same as well. What I mean by this is that literally any stat set between Energy, Fatal, Blade, Swift, etc. is equally good for any monster. Energy is just as good for Kro as Fatal or Blade is. Stats are the same whether it comes from a rune main stat, a rune substat, or a rune set effect. A Kro using Energy sets with a lot of Attack and Crit substats is the same as a Kro using Fatal/Blade set with a lot of HP substats.

Here are some real examples to show you what I mean:

I’ll end this little digression by giving a few pieces of general rune advice from my viewpoint, mostly geared towards early game:

Raids and More

Homunculus and Speeding Up GBAH, Again

Now that you can SSS rifts, you’ll want to start farming them for whatever gems you need. You’ll quickly start amassing a lot of rift crystals, and it’ll be worth it to summon an attack homunculus. Specifically you’ll want the wind one which was buffed recently to be extremely good in GBAH. He has enemy HP scaling on all 3 skills, has def breaks to be a backup def breaker, and even has a second life which acts as a safety to clean up in case your team wipes. The other support homunculus you shouldn’t worry about until much later, eventually you can get the dark support unbalanced field homunculus for ToA Hell, or light fast pace homunculus for PvP usage.

One thing to note is that after you completely level up the homunculus’ skills, you get a free homunculus skill reset. That means that you can level the homunculus skills using a different element besides wind, and then convert him to wind for free at the end. This is really helpful because at least for me, I wanted to farm water rift the most (for blade/energy gems, also because it was the one that was the most consistent SSS for me early on). So I leveled up a water homunculus which costed mostly water rift crystals, then converted it at the end to wind.

The wind homie replaces Bella on your GBAH team. He adds the damage you need to not need a healer anymore while still maintaining consistent runs. You can rune him on an Atk/CD/Atk build, moving last on your team, 85 CR (he has elemental advantage), and much squishier than everyone else. I also like to give him 35 acc as a backup def breaker, although this is less important.

Adding wind homie to your team should drop you below the 2 min mark, I had average runs of 1:45 with Vero wind homie Shannon Spectra Kro. This doesn’t seem like a huge improvement but it sets you up for upgrading to any end game speed team.

If you have Teshar, the best meta GBAH speed team is Teshar Prilea wind homie Kona Teon.

If you don’t have Teshar, there is a Prilea Julie Kyle wind homie Kona team that is almost just as good, but takes a bit higher rune quality to pull off.

As a middle ground before you get to either of the above mentioned speed teams, Shannon can be replaced with a Galleon as soon as you max his S3. Personally I even think Galleon is a great option for your free Welcome Event nat 4 summon. Since you’ll be farming Giants forever, speeding it up with F2P means is quite important. You can even wait to use your free 4* skillups from Summoners Way on Galleon so that he can be ready with skillups faster. You can finish him off with devilmons (max skilled S1 is also important), eventually when you get into PvP and siege most players will have multiple dupe Galleons so those devils won’t ever be wasted.

Spectra can replaced with Amir, he’s usable unskilled, and is a great source of aoe waveclear if you don’t have Teshar. Note that this replacement will take a significant jump in rune quality to be worth it. Losing Spectra’s soft cc in his S3 can potentially drop the consistency of your runs by a lot.

Kro can be replaced with Lyn, Lyn just has higher consistent dps output than Kro for Giants, especially because at this point you can optimize a Lyn purely for GBAH (i.e. give her a +water arti), whereas Kro is probably being used still in multiple areas.

On my playthrough at this point I immediately added a Galleon in place of Shannon at the same time as adding the wind homie, but didn’t have an Amir or Lyn yet. My Vero Galleon wind homie Spectra Kro team was able to average 1:15 runs.

Rift Raid Level 5 (SR5)

BJ5 (Baleygr Janssen R5) is dead. This was a very specific and difficult to build team with tight requirements that allowed for consistent and fast R5 runs. It’s not dead as in it doesn’t work, it still works just fine. It’s just dead as in no one runs it. In order to run BJ5 raids you have to find 2 other real people who also have BJ5 teams, and since now SR5 (solo R5) exists and players can raid all by themselves, all players who get through progression are no longer going to be searching for BJ5 raiding buddies.

For a period of time it still made sense to start with a BJ5 team and then progress to SR5. SR5 was harder since you needed 3 teams, and you could even use the BJ5 team as 1 of the 3 teams. Perfect stepping stone. But then they greatly nerfed the difficulty of R5, making it very reasonable to jump straight to a 3 team SR5 without doing BJ5 first.

It’s not even recommended to fuse a Bale anymore at all for new players, although if you already have a Bale, he’s still a good option to use as a DD in one of your 3 teams.

There are several speed SR5 teams requiring specific monsters with certain tunings and runesets. For example you may see some with a Bale team, a dog team, and a twins team. These work just fine as well, but can be pretty tough to build, and is not what I’m going to be discussing here. My suggestion for a SR5 team is simply to use 3 “regular” R5 teams. Basically, the types of teams people built before BJ5 existed. 3 Individual teams that each have sustain/cleanse, damage, and debuffs to safely beat the boss.

The advantage of 3 regular R5 teams is that it’s easy – rune requirements are much lower than a speed SR5 team, nothing needs to be tuned in any particular way, and the goal is to re-use units that you’re already using elsewhere. It’s super customizable and there are no must-have monsters in this kind of team.

This type of SR5 team is meant to to be super flexible, and I’m not going to recommend 18 specific monsters. Instead I’ll explain the important parts of each of the 3 teams, and you can mix and match for yourself based on your own monster box. Note that while nothing is truly 100% required, meeting every single one of these suggested components/guidelines would be the way to build a successful SR5 team with the lowest rune requirement. As such, every one of the 3 teams needs to have the following:

Leader Skill

Prioritize having HP and Def as 2 of your 3 leader skills, and then for the last one it’s up to you between Crit rate, Speed, and Attack. The reason HP and Def are important is because it helps all 18 monsters on your teams, and keeping everyone alive is the most important part of having a consistent team.

If you’re an old returning player, you’ll notice that resistance lead was recommended in the past but not anymore. It’s just not efficient. If you want to try to resist some of the boss debuffs you really need max res, having just some res won’t help one bit. And even then you’ll still see your max res monsters get stunned a lot. While it does lower your chance of getting debuffed, reasonably the only monsters you could consider on max res are your healers and cleansers, and you should be able to rune them with 100 res without the lead.

For your HP lead, it only makes sense to just use your Vero. You can put him on the frontline as a tank which may require him to be even tankier than you have him now, but that’s fine since he’ll need it for dhole raids eventually. He still should be on CD though for GBAH/DBAH/ToA.

For your Def lead, you could consider any of the the following options: Raviti, Skogul, Amarna, Bastet, Mei Hou Wang, Xiong Fei, Fedora

For your last lead, here are some suggestions (not an exhaustive list): Hwa, Liam, Stella, Douglas, Jamire. Fran and Loren are usable but not ideal since they’re small.

Cleanser

At least 1 full aoe cleanse is required on each team. Full aoe means that non 2A Lulu doesn’t count (only cleanses 2 debuffs), Vero doesn’t count (only cleanses 1 and can get oblivioned). Immunity doesn’t count because the boss can strip your buffs. 100 res is recommended for these units, but it’s not required (and remember as always, res is all or nothing – if you’re not going for 100, don’t bother with any). Make sure the cleanse skill is max skilled. If you put anything on Vio, this is the monster to put on Vio.

Kona is too good not to build and use, his S3 has only a 3 turn CD and comes with a heal. For your other 2, here are some suggestions: Delphoi, 2A Lulu, 2A Lala, Amarna, XF, Lisa, Anavel, Ariel, Jamire, Raviti, Vela, Fedora.

Attack Buffer

Colleen is too good not to use for R5 so everyone needs to build her. Fran is a good second one to use. For the 3rd team, Shannon is decent since she comes with other debuffs and you already have her runed (can stay 5* too), but there are some other options to try instead of Shannon if you need the slot to do other things. Those include Riley (healer), Bastet (lead and debuffs), Hraes (damage), or Kahli (damage). This is another slot where you could consider 100 res and Vio, but it’s not required.

Attack Debuffer

This is the most important debuff. If the boss doesn’t have atk break on it’s very easy for your team to wipe. You’ll want a monster with the attack break on S1 for consistency. Colleen and Fran again are a given. If you’ve followed this guide from the beginning then you should have an Ardella too. This debuff is so important though that you can even consider more, so here are a few other suggestions: Bastet, Douglas, Berandotte/Ken, Coco, Huan, Tien Qin.

Healer

Each team needs a source of sustain. Between the Fran and Bella that you already have and the Colleen and Kona you will build for R5, most likely you won’t need to build anything else just for heal. A lot of other common cleansers such as Lulu or Delphoi also come with heals. However this is just here to remind you to have a healer on each team. Keep in mind that different healers have different amounts of heal, for example Kona’s heal is only 15% so he can’t be your only healer in whichever team he’s on. Also, while Darion doesn’t have a heal, his team damage reduction passive falls into this category of sustain. You can put Darion on the team with the weakest amount of healing.

Damage

Once each team has met the requirements of having a healer, cleanser, atk buffer, and atk debuffer, the remaining slots should be filled with damage dealers. Damage is important in raids because the boss permanently gets stronger every 16 turns you take. There is no way to infinitely sustain/tank the raid boss. The more damage you do and the faster you can kill the raid boss, the more consistent your runs become and the less tanky you’ll need to be across the board.

The best raid damage dealers are those that do some of the following:

See the graphic for a summary and examples.

The following are some rough numbers to shoot for. Note that these are just general guidelines and not firm requirements. There’s 18 individual monsters each contributing something and everyone is going to have different exact teams and setups. Some teams may work with less than the suggested numbers, but at the same time, hitting all the suggested numbers doesn’t guarantee your team will work either.

Healers/cleansers should have at least 200 speed, the more the better. They will benefit from 100 res and Vio, although neither are absolutely necessary. If you choose to get res, go for 100 or don’t bother with any at all. If your cleanser has exactly 200 speed, no res, and is not on vio, then it is NOT meeting the stat guidelines.

Vio is not as helpful on other units, but won’t hurt either. Forcing Vio at the cost of stats is always detrimental though.

It’s ok if your damage dealers are not 100 CR. It’s a good goal to aim for but since you have sustain, you’re only look for average damage output and a missed crit won’t kill you. 150-160 speed is enough for most damage dealers.

You should expect 1:15 – 1:30 runs at the start. If it takes longer you need more damage. Eventually this style of team can go all the way down to 35-40 sec average.

It won’t hurt to run a bit of R4 first if you just need a bit extra of stats. You can get a lot of progress really fast with basic grinds on most of your runes.

Punisher’s Crypt B10 (PC10)

Progression and difficulty-wise, you can do this dungeon before SR5 if you want. The only reason I put this after SR5 is because being grinds are just so much more important than right side type artifacts. This isn’t to say that artifacts aren’t important, because they definitely are. Most new players end up spending not enough time in both R5 and artifact dungeons, and too much time just farming runes. But I’m getting side tracked here, to do this dungeon you just need to build an atk buffer that doesn’t have atb reduction or an aoe attack. That means you cannot use Fran or Galleon (if you want to know the reason why, just read the boss’s passive skill). You have 3 options for this atk buffer: Kahli, Riley, or Eirgar.

Eirgar is ideal, but it takes ancient coins to get him. It’s very likely that at this point you just don’t have the 500 ancient coins yet and you shouldn’t wait another month and not farm this dungeon just to wait for him. Riley is a 5* fusion so kind of expensive for this purpose only. I went with a Kahli (yes you’ll want 2A, team for her 2A dungeon is Verde Raoq +1 any fire DD like Nangrim/Astar) just because it’s the easiest, and Kahli is an extremely important monster for siege later on anyway.

The team is Verde Kahli Kro Raoq Bella. It’s important your Bella is NOT 2A’ed for this, as Bella gains atb reduction on S1 with 2A. You can start by going L > R > boss for towers, eventually you can just go straight boss.

You may need to make Kro even tankier than normal for this boss, and/or give him a -light artifact. Mine has about 140k eHP at this point which is around +14k HP and +600 Def.

Average run time with this beginner team should be around 1:30 – 1:45.

If you are a returning player and have Eirgar or Riley already OR if your Bella is already 2A’ed (do not make a 2nd Bella), you can try the following: Verde Eirgar/Riley Raoq Icaru Kro.

Dimension Hole Rune Farming: Lumel 5

At some point you will not have an immediate need for another 2A, so you’ll want to spend your precious dhole energy on ancient rune farming. Currently there are 5 different dimension hole areas each with different ancient rune sets that can drop. The easiest (and arguably also most helpful for newer players) is Lumel. The biggest reason for Lumel is that it drops will runes which are super important for PvP, and at this point you are nearing the end of PvE progression and should start thinking about PvP. It also has destroy which is one of the best offsets for siege – the easiest and more rewarding PvP area to get into. Later on you can also choose to farm Karzhan, Ellunia, or Khalderun, but those are a bit harder. Sacreon just sucks right now, I don’t see a reason for anyone to farm it given the current meta.

Regardless of which dhole you end up farming, I’d focus your efforts on just 1-2 at a time. You shouldn’t try to farm all of them, as getting the ancient grinds and gems you need for your ancient runes can be even more difficult than getting runes themselves. Spreading out your energy across multiple different dholes only makes it harder for you to get the grinds you need.

To start farming Lumel you’ll want to build a 2A Vigor. At this point any 2A dungeon should be fairly trivial, Loren Fran Raoq Vigor should be pretty fast.

Vigor is a bruiser/support that should be runed Spd/HP/HP. Swift or broken is fine for now, eventually you do need him on Vio for PvP. Dhole dungeons will want 35 acc. While attack and crit stats do help a bit for his damage, it’s much more important to focus on his tankiness and speed. In other words you should be ignoring attack and crit on him.

The Lumel 5 team is Vero Fran Raoq Vigor and it should average around 2:00 at first. Go straight boss.

Spiritual Realm Abyss Hard (SBRAH)

Nobody cares about this dungeon, and I strongly recommend that you just completely ignore it. Seal and team stat runes are basically the least useful rune sets in the entire game. That being said, if for some reason you do want to farm it, it’s not too difficult. You’ll have to build at least 2 new monsters for this dungeon, the first is a Sieq, the second is a consistent fire def breaker like Shaina or Carcano. Yes I realize Shaina/Carc are not farmable and up until now I’ve always given 100% farmable options for everything. But again this dungeon doesn’t help with progression or anything and is not remotely important enough for me or anyone else to try to come up with a completely F2P farming team.

Between Shaina and Carc, Shaina is the best for this dungeon specifically, but Carc is an extremely useful monster overall that’s pretty high up there in terms of important unfarmable nat 4’s to target with engraved summons. He’ll be required in dhole raids and siege later on.

The team is Shaina/Carc Sieq Raoq Verde +1. I used Astar (again, sorry for not F2P option), but this slot is a bit more forgiving as you just need any big fire damage dealer. If you don’t have Astar, maybe you built another fire DD for SR5 like a Nangrim or some fire nat 5.

This dungeon requires your monsters to crit all the time and makes it so that all your monsters start off with only 50% of their crit rate. Buffs give you bonus crit, so that’s why you should only be spamming fire monsters in this wind dungeon, and Sieq is especially helpful with his atk buff + crit rate buff. Having a shield set on someone on your team is great as well since that’s another free buff for everyone.

Turn order is Shaina/Carc > Sieq > Raoq > fire DD > Verde, go straight boss. The trick to making this dungeon consistent is to have everything (especially Sieq) runed a bit tanky like a SR5 monster with 120k eHP, so that they can survive in case of initial bad RNG.

Necropolis Abyss Hard (NBAH)

This is not an easy dungeon, especially without premium monsters. I’ve saved NBAH for last just because of its difficulty. The basic beginner team template for this dungeon is Fran + 4 multihit damage dealers. One of those 4 can be Raoq and that’s a given since he’s free and everyone has him. The other 3 DD though are a bit more box dependent. I’m going to list out options roughly in order from best to worst:

Premium Options:

F2P Options:

There are of course even more options you can use than the ones mentioned above, but I think these make the most sense in terms of how good they are versus how accessible they are. It’s possible to make a successful team using completely F2P options, for example I verified on my previous beginner account using Fran Loren Raoq Icaru Kro that it works. However, it just takes much better runes. If you have any of the premium options, you definitely should use those as it will reduce the rune requirement for this dungeon.

Necro is pretty much the only place in the entirety of PvE where vio runes are actually beneficial. It’s still not absolutely required but definitely helpful. You need more hits to break the boss’ shield, and there really isn’t any drawback to taking a lot of turns with the exception of a stolen unit going crazy on Vio and wrecking your team. Fran for sure should be Vio here if she isn’t already, and if you’re building a monster like Abigail/Scarlett for this dungeon then that’s a great candidate to try to get on a vio set. Since they will be moving first and are mostly there just to break the shield, they don’t need to be runed extremely well and can utilize a weaker vio set (this is assuming that you’ve been following this guide and haven’t farmed Dragons at all to get any good vio runes).

An additional note about runing Astar, in the past she was used in old Necro speed teams which required her to be on vamp so she didn’t kill herself on the reflect damage golems during waves. This is no longer a big issue, she should NOT be on vamp. You should put her on a big damage set.

As always just like 99% of other PvE areas, everything needs a decent amount of tankiness (100k eHP at least) because taking some damage is unavoidable.

The team I ended up using was Fran Scarlett Raoq Astar Xiao Lin which averages 1:45 – 2:00. The current best reasonable speed team you should eventually work towards is Abigail Raoq Icaru Astar Shamann.

Congrats, if you’ve completed everything up to this point then you can consider yourself done with PvE!

I hope you found this helpful!

More Guides:

ncG1vNJzZmifkaKysbjAsmWtoaCofKjByJ2crGejqrquu82eqaxlp5a%2FbsHLraCmmaSaeqOxxqKlp52iqHqowcidnGasn2K9t7GNoaumpA%3D%3D