Werewoods 249: no chance
Werewoods 250: done first try easily 
Wyrmun lvl 500 pure faction: How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love the Randomness
Just beat this earlier today with hoard level 158+50% stats from kingdom leveling. Team was Terra Wrym, Nether Wyrm, Great Wyrm, Great Wyrm.
I know multiple people have taken down this delve recently in this thread, but my experience was a bit different, so I figured it was worth posting. I saw several people had success without Great Wyrm on their teams, so I went with that strategy for a while. But it led to me struggling in the middle rooms of the delve a bit more, without much payoff when I made it to the boss room.
So I decided instead to lean the opposite direction, with two Great Wyrms, and ended up winning on my third try with the team above. The boss room is essentially decided in the early game, where you have to fill and cast your Terra Wyrm enough times to heal from the inevitable skull hits coming your way (and scale your own attack as much as possible). Having two Great Wyrms paradoxically allowed me to clear more skulls and have a better chance at getting an extra turn with my Terra Wyrm casts than my attempts with 1 or 0 Great Wyrms.
In my winning run, my Terra Wyrm lived until the enemy team was down to a low-health Great Wyrm and a virtually full-health Horned Wyrm. It was an intense finish regardless, as I lost my Nether Wyrm shortly after the enemy Great Wyrm went down. The free skull hits generated by my Great Wyrms were really critical down the stretch though, and were eventually what won me the game.
Shoutout to Dr. Strangelove!
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Has anybody else here completed pure faction Obsidian Depths at 100 hoard without potions? I’m having a dog of a time with it, annoying particularly since it hasn’t been flagged as one of the harder pure faction runs.
It feels a bit like Hell Gate, in that you have to rely on damage-all Obsidiaxas casts to win. But it feels harder despite having a skull reduction troop because your board control is so limited and you have zero room options on the way to the boss.
can’t say I have at Hoard 100 since I’m at a point where I just level every new faction to 199.
Obsidian Depths is annoying, but nowhere near the difficulty of Hell’s Gate.
I used:
Dark Golem
Obsidiaxas
Obsidiaxas
Obsidiaxas
Cavernous Banner
The “potion effects” from the higher hoard go a long way to making this easier.
Bless all at the start of battle can keep your troops from Evil Gargoyles from ruining some of your troops. (I like to keep 3rd and 4th slot full and blessed until I’m closer to kill range.
The 25% extra skull reduction makes Dark Golem really tanky to skulls.
Barrier all at the start of battle buys you enough time to set up your offense.
Enchant all is very helpful for filling the 2nd and 3rd Obsidiaxas, which would otherwise go unusued.
Whatever happens, you more or less bully the enemies by spawning way too many Evil Gargoyle gems and use Dark Golem to explode as many skulls as possible to explode other random gems to stack effects. You don’t want to empty the board of Evil Gargoyle gems as you’ll need some for Obsid damage, but some debuffs go a long way to make it easier.
Basically, don’t get greedy on damage in room 1-4 and use some of those debuffs to your advantage.
Unfortunately, the team falls apart the moment Dark Golem dies, so… yeah, don’t get lazy and eat too many skulls.
The biggest threat on the last room enemy team is their Dark Golem, since that can pop your Gargoyle Gems and cause some serious problems to your team. In the last room, you’ll want to get hyper aggressive, use debuffs and take out their Dark Golem asap.
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Thanks.
Yeah I should’ve considered hoard before the difficulty comment. I finished Hell Gate with over 2x the hoard I’m trying to delve Obsidian Depths at, whoops.
I could just dump some more trinkets into my hoard here, but just wanted to gauge how hard it is at 100 before doing so. We have video evidence here that it is doable, so if others aren’t having problems it could just be me?
I only have 11 factions that aren’t at PF500. All are at NP500, though. All have a minimum hoard level of 100, all faction troops owned and fully ascended and traited.
Which of these would y’all consider easiest or should I tackle first? Would also appreciate tips for any of these if people have advice on strategies or team construction.
Werewoods | Hell Gate | The Labyrinth | Dark Court | The Black Heart | Lyrasza’s Lair | Eldrazhor | Sunken Fleet | Dark Pits | Fang Moor | Mirrored Halls.
@Mana_Surgeon what TheIdleOne said above. I paste my Factions server write up here too, and if you haven’t joined the server, check the post above! 
Team: Onyx Gargoyle, Dark Golem, 2 x Obsidiaxas
Banner: ++Purple +Brown -Green
Hoard: 100 + 50%
Strategy: This delve is all about inflicting negatives status effects. Your Legendary troop Obsidiaxas creates quite a bunch of Gargoyle Gems during a battle. Use Dark Golem to inflict negative status effects on the enemy troops. In the best case scenario you find extra turn or skull match with the gem explosion, but quite often there is a skull in the area you are about to explode and it’s very likely that the planned cascade won’t happen because the RNG explodes random gem in the area ruining your plans. If the board has plenty of GGs, you can actually explode an area with many skulls and GGs in hopes that the random gem explodes even more GGs. Strategy wise, if enemy is under negative status effects that benefit you (tank is entangled, Obsidiaxas is silenced etc.) you could save your Golem cast for situation when their Golem or Obsidiaxas are about to cast, so that they won’t benefit from those GGs on the board. It also makes sense to save your other Obsidiaxas for cases when the board is full of GGs or Faerie Fire is inflicted so that you get the most out of the spell cast. I feel you have to kill their Golem asap to ease your own game so that the enemy can’t inflict those negative status effects on you, except with some lucky Doomskull match. Dying to Death Marks in the boss room is very annoying. Pick brown & purple gems over other colours and hope for Death Mark kills or Lycanthropy transforms that benefit you.
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I initially thought statuses was the way as well, but the middle rooms seem way too random. I invariably hit stretches where I was trying to hit 3-4 gargoyle gems on the entire board with the stupid Dark Golem spell. Worse, if I was lucky enough to hit an enemy with a helpful bad status, it tends to get cleansed in 2-3 turns. Dark Golem generates mana way too poorly to keep up the bad statuses for more than a few turns at a time, particularly when gargoyle gems start to get scarce.
I experimented with having Onyx Gargoyle or even the Chromite Sphinx to ensure a steadier supply of gargoyle gems. But neither was reliable enough (and Sphinx has the annoying habit of lining up enemy skull hits when it jumbles the board, what a garbage troop!).
I’m now thinking playing it very slow and only using Dark Golem defensively is the way. But wow can you get unlucky in the middle rooms. Any enemy team with a real exploder tends to steamroll me. And god forbid I get the stupid Obsidian Golem-led construct room, which is pretty much an auto-loss.
I’ll think about it…
No doubt it’s full of great info, and I appreciate that it exists. But I hate joining new servers, I want to be in as few as is possible; only in 6 servers right now, and one is private/just for me to save notes and stuff.
Of those you listed, these I feel are the easiest: Dark Court, The Black Heart, Eldrazhor, Mirrored Halls.
Check this thread for strats. I posted my strats for Hell Gate and Lyrasza’s Lair here, and you’ll find tips and/or vids for many of the others. Feel free to ask about specific delves once you start doing them too.
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That’s why I use 3 Obsidiaxas. You get flooded by Gargoyles at a decent rate. Any less and you risk the spawn rate being too slow.
That being said, I mainly focus on filling Obsid #1 and use Dark Golem (usually on skull/garg mixes) when the table starts to fill up on Evil Gargoyles. It gets a little awkward when there’s only 1 match on the table due to the number of EGs.
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Thanks, I’ll give it a shot with 3 next time. (I’ve been running 2x Obsidaxis with 2x Dark Golem in my most recent attempts.)
EDIT:
Aaaand it’s done! Was very happy to get it done at hoard 100 too, on my last free sigil of the day.
I tried the 3x Obsidiaxis team first, but found it just too hard at hoard 100 to keep the Dark Golem alive. But I wanted to have the extra gargoyle gems, so I switched to @Hazard1’s team, thinking Onyx Gargoyle could help keep Dark Golem alive plus serve as an extra source of gargoyle gems. Stuck with the +2 purple +1 brown banner, though it occurred to me that the team might work better with +2 brown +1 purple to speed up Obsidiaxas casts on my last run (never got to test it).
Sure enough, the key was only casting Onyx Gargoyle when I had a Dark Golem cast on deck. Casting Onyx Gargoyle too freely clogged the board and slowed the mana generation for the rest of the team. The good gargoyle gems created by Onyx Gargoyle were also critical - barrier, bless, and enchant all came in handy at times.
(Even still, some good ole-fashioned luck was key - I survived one of the middle rooms with just 3 hp on my Onyx Gargoyle! The boss room was surprisingly anti-climactic when I got there with my team intact; you benefit from the enemy Obsidiaxas gargoyle gems. 2 enemy troops were taken out by death marks, and the other two were transformed multiple times by lycanthropy.)
Thanks all for your input.
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Well done, I’m happy you got it out of the way! 
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