Today I achieved a comfortable (46 mil) 1 key Nightmare Clan Boss with my untuned Clan Boss Team. I posted previously (here) about achieving 40 mil 1 key NM but that was borderline and a less reliable team while today's achievement was very safe/comfortable and repeatable.
This team is:
- Untuned
- No counter-attack champion
- There are no shields or increase defense or strengthen
- There is no unkillable or block damage
- It plays fully on Auto from beginning to the end (in this case Turn 51)
- There are no special orders or priorities, everything is by default AI.
- The equipment and/or stats of the champions are average. My Great Hall is very far from max so these kind of stats are poor compared to most Clan Boss videos. I still have a bunch of items at +12 enchantment and few items are 4 star, so there is definitely room for improvement.
Champion Roles
- Deacon (leader) provides DEF down + Leech and his Aura increases speed for the team. He also manipulates Turn Meter a little bit. As leader and Spirit Affinity he takes the stun. In the spirit of untuned team it does not matter when he casts his skills. His Leech is reliable and his DEF down happens often enough.
- Geomancer is the main damage dealer.
- Apothecary is there just to increase Speed. I don't care about his healing since I have no idea when he will do it and on which champion. I would be happy to replace him if I find a better booster.
- Aox's main purpose is to reduce Clan Boss's attack. He also supports with healing and random debuff extensions and random poisons. Sometimes he can add good damage if he gets lucky with his poisons.
- Raglin, who was originally my leader to provide increased defense has now been demoted, so the team's defenses are only their own without his leader bonus. He heals based on his attack and he can revive 1 single champion fast. So if one dies it's usually OK, but if the team sometimes loses 2 or 3 from an AOE that's usually gave over. Sometimes Apo kills Raglin by healing the wrong champion so CB targets and kills Raglin. And Raglin also provides a completely random Turn Meter boost, which is why he is impossible to use in speed tuned teams, but in this messy team he is fine. Still, I am looking to replace him also as I only needed his leader bonus in the past.
The good things:
- Since there is no speed tuning you can plug and play any champion at any time for trying out different things.
- There is no special setup - just auto from start to finish.
- None of the champions are required - all of them can be swapped with other champions as long as the basic ingredients remain the same (e.g. someone must do Attack Down on the boss, someone must increase speed and/or Turn Meter).
- There are many champions which give random Turn Meters which are not possible to use in any Speed Tuning, so this type of strategy allows using all those champions.
The bad things:
- With untuned teams there is much bigger RNG so untuned teams are always less reliable or deliver a wider final damage number - sometimes much higher sometimes lower.
- Although not in this team I want to mention since I learned this from the previous team I used: if you use a poisoner in an untuned team then the RNG could fill up the 10 debuff slots not letting your Attack-down champion to put ATK down on the Clan Boss which may result in an earlier loss. This is why I changed from the previous success I posted to this new team structure without Frozen Banshee.
- In untuned teams there is also a higher probability of champions doing skills at the wrong time especially since it is surviving so many turns. For example if my Geomancer steals the Clan Boss's increase attack at the right time then there will be less danger for the team, but if he uses that skill before the boss buffs up then the team will take a lot of damage.
The main purpose
I am not making this post to recommend untuned teams, just to say that it is possible and if someone feels lazy or does not have time or does not want to learn speed tuning then they can still achieve 1 key NM without any great requirements.
I am working on my speed tuned team in parallel but so far my untuned team is significantly outperforming my tuned team. This is mostly because I don't have some important champions to make a big difference. In the long run I expect that my future speed tuned team will easily outperform my untuned team but who knows maybe it will not :)
Recorded short video of it
Not to waste your time, I recorded a short video just showing the last turns of the battle and the champions with their equipment / stats. You can check it on my RAID YouTube channel or here:
How does this same team perform on UNM Clan Boss?
Adding this Ultra-Nightmare Clan Boss reference in case someone is curious how this same untuned team performed in UNM:
Just finished a run against Magic Affinity with the same exact team and they did 23.4M damage (picture below). In my notes I had written 22-23 mil from previous runs so this run fell in line with my notes.
This is not bad at all. It makes a comfortable 4 key UNM and with some improvements may be 3 key UNM. However, UNM is a completely different beast with higher requirements.
