I have a question, a genuine question that is, not a complaint or gripe, about the citadel guardians. I don’t really understand how they work.
I successfully battle 3 (at least I think it’s 3) opponents before coming up against the guardian. Suddenly, they are hugely more powerful than any of the previous opponents and the magic on my own team is drastically reduced so the damage I’m dealing via spells is also drastically reduced. Consequently I’m defeated quite quickly. Only once have I defeated the guardian and that’s because I was wielding my mang sword and was able to build up a stupid amount of attack at the same time as getting lucky with skulls on the board!
For all other teams, however, the circumstances I outlined above seems more than a little unfair to me but it’s probably more to do with me not quite understanding how things work. Can someone help me understand what I’m doing wrong please?
You’ve got two things working here, near as I can tell:
First, you might notice that opposition teams get stat boosts as you progress through citadel battles. The first opponent you beat has base statistics, but each team after that is augmented.
(It’s also four victories to fight the Guardian, not three. But I digress.)
Second, the reasons that the guardian isn’t taking a lot of damage is because they all have Guardian Armor (75% reduction of skull damage) and Guardian Ward (75% reduction of spell damage) plus immunity to all status effects meaning you can’t eliminate these traits through Curse/Stun. It’s not that your stats are nerfed as you seem to be suggesting; the guardian has vastly (trait-)augmented defenses that sap your damage-dealing capabilities.
So either you want to find a team that can reliably loop without dropping the turn, as to hit the guardian repeatedly until it dies without giving it a chance to do its’ thing. Or, you want to do something similar to what you did do, vastly augmented attack combined with skulls. If you do the latter, having a tank with Enrage would also help because that would ignore Guardian Armor while it is active.
As a singular enemy, the guardian is meant to be a difficult opponent. As a team, I typically struggle more with a lot of the citadel opponents because many of them are well-crafted teams that synergize well whereas the guardian battle has three semi-randomly picked troops alongside the boss.
Well it’s been answered pretty well. But in the off chance a different wording might be needed…
The guardians are just ultra resistant to both physical and magical damage (as well as impossible to debuff.) So you need to keep buffing your own stats (like Mang) and/or minimize the enemy’s ability to have a turn (loop teams.)