The Phoenicia Dilemma

[igniteice]

Cedric Sparklesack in the Vault at level 80 (120% Rewards) has a combined 165 armor/health (76/89). Phoenicia deals double damage during a Firestorm. This means she needs to deal 83 damage with her Rising Sun ability to one-shot the enemy team. My current team is the following:

[1206,6649,6265,6955,3059,2,1,1,3,3,3,3,14016]

Here’s a current snapshot of the total damage from one fight using that team:

Phoenicia	Magic Bonus
Kingdom (Levels & Power)	24
Guild (Tasks & Statues)	4
Renown (Factions)	1
Medals (3x Nysha)	12
Base (Level 20)	4
Elite Level (Gold)	6
Fire Spirit (Gain 1 Magic for each Red ally)	2
Fire Talent (Gift of Fire: All Red Allies gain 1 Magic)	1
Total	54
Sacrifice (Arcane Surge)	24
Sacrifice (Virtue of Sacrifice)	2
Total	80
Boost: Red Gems	11
Boost: Burning Enemies	3
Total Damage (Magic+1)*2	190

Ideally how it works is… I cast Herald of Damnation, it turns all blue to purple, Sacrifice is full, I cast sacrifice and make red gems, Phoenicia gains 26 Magic, there’s a bunch of red gems on the board, I one shot.

Bad case scenario is I don’t get enough purple to fill Sacrifice, so I have to manually match purple gems, then even worse would be if I cast Sacrifice, but I don’t get enough red to fill Phoenicia.

There’s also this team…

[1206,6649,6387,6457,3059,1,2,3,2,1,3,3,14034]

Here’s what I ended up with:

Phoenicia	Magic Bonus
Kingdom (Levels & Power)	24
Guild (Tasks & Statues)	4
Renown (Factions)	1
Medals (3x Nysha)	12
Base (Level 20)	4
Elite Level (Gold)	6
Fire Spirit (Gain 1 Magic for each Red ally)	3
Air Talent (Thunder Fist: All Yellow Allies gain 1 Magic)	1
Team Bonus (Elemental)	6
Total	61
Lord of Storms (Elementals gain 1 Magic when Ally casts a spell)	1
Total	62
Boost: Red Gems	6
Boost: Burning Enemies	2
Total Damage (Magic+1)*2	142


This starts off with using Fire Bomb, which creates a Firestorm because of Sunbird. Elementalist class doesn’t have a way to create a Firestorm, but to get 6 Magic, you need 4 Elementals (and it’s 0 Magic bonus with only 3 Elementals).

There are a very limited number of ways to create Firestorms with Elemental troops, and by limited, I mean exactly 3 (aside from weapons):

Infernus - summons a firestorm when an enemy dies (a bad choice, because you want to kill all enemies at once)
Garuda - summons a firestorm with his ability (a bad choice, because he’s yellow/red and would either color block Phoenicia, or be color blocked)
Sunbird - summons a firestorm when an ally dies.

Sunbird becomes the only viable option. And it just happens that Fire Bomb destroys itself, explodes gems, and is empowered. The downside is that it only explodes 4 gems. It does trigger Lord of Storms though.

Now… hypothetically…

If all 4 enemies are burning (Phoenicia has a 50% chance to burn a random enemy at start of turn, but Elementalist can burn randomly on 4+ matches).

It’s perfectly possible to get everyone burning with 4-matches, because you have a Firestorm… in fact, here’s my screen right now:

I did unfortunately kill one of the enemies with a skull match (triple skull damage against burning). There’s only 10 red gems, and 3 burning enemies. That’s a total of 152 damage. That’s not enough to kill Cedric. It brings him down to 11 health, then 8 after taking burning damage. I can kill him easily the next turn though, but that’s not the point.

In total I would have needed 14 red gems and 4 burning enemies (or 15 and 3 as it were), to get 162 damage, to have him die the next turn. Of course, the bonus Magic damage from Campaigns helps too.

When it comes down to it… there are a few things on the horizon.

• Total max Renown is currently 85k. At 88k, we gain another +1 Magic. That will require two additional factions though. One of them is coming out really soon, for Broken Spire. The one after that though will have to be for an additional class and new kingdom. That could take some time. If the next Class added is a unique one (like Elemental was), it would be either Wargare or Construct.
• All of my Kingdoms are already at Level 15, which means the next Magic Boost would be level 20 (Blighted Lands, Darkstone, Karakoth, Silverglade, and Zhul’Kari are Magic). This is a ways off though. The most I could even do right now is get Karakoth to Level 18, and that would use all of my purple books. I would need 18 more books to get just Karakoth to Level 20.
• Power level 20 provides an additional Kingdom Skill Bonus. That said, all of the kingdoms I listed are already maxed power, and the only one that isn’t at 20 yet is Silverglade. It’s stuck at 17. It’s not even on the horizon to get to 18. To unlock 18, we need 27 troops released (we only have 26). To get to 20, we need 29 troops. There is one unreleased Silverglade troop in the database, but it doesn’t have a release date and it’s been there for months.

So what’s the best case scenario for more Magic then? Well, it’s not Renown, Kingdom level, or Power levels.

• It’s not Stryx, because 3x Stryx doesn’t provide a Magic bonus.
• 3x Suncrest troops does provide 3 Magic, but currently there are no good candidates for this. There are only five Elemental Suncrest troops, and you would want them to be Red as well (each Red troop is +1 Magic for Phoenicia).
• There are two Suncrest troops coming out, one has a release date but it’s not an Elemental so it doesn’t matter. The other doesn’t have release date or troop type yet. Fingers crossed.

Another possibility is to run Sacrifice with some other kind of Empowered troop. Ideally, you want either two things to happen: a way to quickly fill Phoenicia while having enough Magic to one shot. Or, a way to quickly fill Sacrifice, so you can give Phoenicia enough magic (and hopefully red gems).

The best banner for Phoenicia is Maze Banner (+2 Green, +2 Red), since neither of those colors are color blocked by using Flammifer (Yellow+Brown), but the -1 Purple does hurt in filling Sacrifice.

The other possiblity is giving up on trying to keep 4x Elementals and sticking with the Sunspear class. Sunspear has the benefit that you don’t need to get a Firestorm from another source. However, it immediately means you can never get the +6 Magic (12 extra damage) from having 4 Elementals.

[XLS78]

So, uh, does it have to be Phoenicia? Smackrifice team will handle this task with Draakulis or Crimson Bat in the lead. Bat is a little easier to fill but takes one less color and does 2 less true damage.

Use Elspeth to kill Deathknight hero. Everyone on the enemy team gets death mark, so +40 magic from Sacrifice cast. Cast Sacrifice on whichever color is most likely to fill your top troop. That gives my Draakulis 98 life steal to all, which can one-shot wipe the 120% Vault.

[6169,6265,6326,1263,3063,1,1,2,1,1,3,1,14011]

[ALP]

I prefer picking “Challenging” level. 1st Leprechaun 2nd Phonenicia

[Globey]

I’ll show y’all an even easier team…

[Voq]

@Globey

I’ll show y’all an even easier team…

Ok, what is that team that will one-shot / defeat the enemy team in a few clicks?

[Nullings]

I believe he talks about Zuulagon team (Elementalist + EoE / Centuragon / Zuul’Goth / Leprechaun).

[ats1080]

I just use the scorpius explore 12 farm team

[Voq]

Could be but I’ve noticed he has often has unique opinions on troops, like Abhorath. I’m curious if he’s talking about a known meta team or something new.

[Dr_Killbrew]

Thanks for that tip, I was using Thrall and that genie mythic that makes all the gems/stats, but this one is way faster

[igniteice]

This is a pretty good team! It seems to be about as fast as my first team. Elspeth creates 11 purple gems, which may or may not fill Sacrifice. Then Sacrifice creates a mix of 15 purple and either red/green/blue gems (I pick whichever one is highest on the board already). Like my team, it’s only slow if I either don’t instantly fill Sacrifice, or don’t fill Draakulis with Sacrifice’s cast.

Example: this is what I was left with after casting Elspeth, filling Sacrifice, then casting Sacrifice.

It took just a few more matches to fill Draakulis.

Match right after: immediately after casting Elspeth, I didn’t get a single match – instead it set up some 4-matches for the enemy, and the turn finally passed back to me:

Yellow match into a second purple match, then enemy turn, then back to me:

12 blue gems on the board, so I’ll choose that… nothing good, enemy takes their turn, back to me:

Make a blue match, no mana surge. Enemy takes their turn. Back to me. No 4-matches. Make another blue match, back to enemy. Back to me. I finally can cast.

So some matches go REALLY quickly, others do not. The only difference is that with Phoenicia, I can use Flammifer to create 12 red gems.

[Flip407]

I just use my standard daily team -Manacles, Phoen, Lep, Maraji Queen. As the OP is virtually the same team lvl as me then I would say this is optimal. Vaults at lvl 80 take 10-15 secs on a good Lep match and perhaps 30 secs at a max if I have to charge Phoenicia twice.

[jpraveensn]

I use the PvP standard with no issues.

Rope Dart (Frostmage)
Queen Beetrix
Obsidius
Leprechaun

The idea is to stun Cedric and pull him to the front. This is not a fewer-clicks team, but a very safe one and a big damage team too. I preferred Obsidius over Elementalist because of “stun all” against “stun randomly”.

[Starlite]

So, it’s worth noting that this thread isn’t really about Phoenicia – it’s about The Vault.

Flaming Oni and Tink Steamwhistle also produce firestorms for Phoenicia (the double storm does count).

However, the danger is that you’re providing red mana for the Treasure Gnomes if you get unlucky casts of your mana generators.

I agree that the Scorpius team can work, but I found I was losing one Treasure Gnome every 5 or so attempts because it’s a bit random.

I’ve also used the D12 Zuul’Goth/Egg Thief team, but again, you’re trying to use a red storm to make things happen.

I’ve ended up settling on the Venoxia/Barbarian team for my Vault battles. Apart from being mindless and very good at looping, the best part is that you’re working with a Green Storm, which makes it far less likely that any of the Treasure Gnomes will escape. And if Cedric casts, it really doesn’t make any difference to you.

Good luck!

[Fleg]

Just an FYI, you still get full rewards from vault battles even if the gnomes run away.

[Starlite]

Really? Oh. I’ll have to check that.

[xolid99]

However, if you are running GaPs, the gnomes that run away do not count in the reward table. Obviously you can mitigate that completely by running the 1 shot IHawk teams…but if you are after more cursed runes, there is that risk when running higher explore levels.

Like running E12 GaPs with Veno teams, the brown on the board after a QB miscast can be used by Cursed Gnome and Mechagnome, so it’s suicide to do so.

[dank-o]

What @Fleg said: Gnomes that run away during vault fight still give full rewards, so if anything, that just makes the fight easier.

But gnome escaping anywhere else (wild, events, GaP) does not give any rewards. GaP is something you trigger manually yourself, so you’d only do that with a team that can slaughter them fast & not allowing them to get away.

So ultimately, for Vault purposes, you can just use… whatever you feel like using really. I usually just use my Rowanne team that I use for class xp, but mainly if you have a team that can’t quickly oneshot the vault, you’ll have to make sure it’s not a team that ends up mana blocking each other when Cedric starts rotating your team.

Edit: I understand @igniteice’s idea, he’s looking for ways to do it in the fewest & fastest reliable moves possible.

[igniteice]

@dank-o

Edit: I understand @igniteice’s idea, he’s looking for ways to do it in the fewest & fastest reliable moves possible.

Exactly – when vault weekend is over and you have 200 vault keys… that’s a lot of vault runs.

[Wow]

You’ll get used to it. I open 100 vks daily until they are all gone. Excited on the weekend now.

[Hazard1]

I understand the OP is talking about getting it done with as few moves as possible, but still going to say that I am having the best success using 50% start to hero class and with these troops and this order.

Phoenicia
Dawnbringer
Tink
Leprechaun

I am also using Dragon banner, not the Maze banner.

Very rarely I need to match gems. It’s Lep, DB, and Pho. I cast DB first because it sometimes gives extra turn when it destroys those few gems after spell damage.