User blog:Crimson Storm Mich/Guide: Squad Building - Raid Edition

Due to questions about how to build a Raid squad keep popping out here and there and to avoid having to answer every time, I copied this mega guide from someone with full permission for convenience. Probably still in the process of updating so pardon me if it lacks something that the author forgot to put in.

Importance of Buff Stacking
Naturally, one needs to try to stack as many buffs as possible to have the most damage output while being able to survive. Wow, who would have thought yeah? You would be surprised how people fail to grasp such a basic concept. So many cringe worthy team setups that I have seen in Raid that I can't even believe. Here are a few squads that I managed to pick up while leech raiding Mistzug.



For someone who has this many 7*, the team composition is terribad level. No elemental buffers, NO SPARK BUFFER, 2 Feevas, extremely redundant BC management, having Kanon and Rigness in the same team. Just... CHRIST, with these units I wouldn't doubt that he can have much better units to replace the Rigness or Feeva slots, seriously.

Somewhat better. 2 crit damage leader means that your damage out put will be very inconsistent. Further more with Maxwell low crit buff you have to use her SBB last and then Colt SBB first the next turn (or Max first then Colt 2nd), but due to their animation (Colt's is quite fast while Max is slow and spread out) this will mess up the spark order a lot. Once again no spark buffer, but generally on the acceptable level.

Despite being a weaker team than former examples due to the lack of 7*, this team is actually much more slot/buff efficient. Every unit has their own role and no one is redundant. Obviously there are still rooms to improve (ie lack of DEF buff), but you should get the ideas I am trying to make.

Elemental Weakness, Spark and Crit damage
Another popular concern I haven seen from a lot of people is whether to pick for their raid team among these 3, so here is a bit more in-depth analysis about it.

First is elemental weakness, basically it is a simple x1.5 multiplier on top of everything (haven't factored elemental weakness damage boost yet, mostly because it is very rare, and quite hard to utilize as well due to only applying to base).

Example:
 * Say your attack deals 5000 damage, it crits and becomes 7500, and 7500 * 1.5 = 11250 damage with elemental weakness

So it means that no matter how much critical damage boost and spark boost you have, elemental weakness will always serve as a x1.5 total boost. In other words: it's HUGE. Another things that need to be mentioned is that it is extremely consistent. You may fail to crit sometime, or you may miss/not spark all of your hits, but once your team is buffed with the right element the damage bonus will always be there (unless bosses can change element but this is quite rare). This makes me feel that elemental buff is the most important among the trio and should always be considered if you want to bring the boss down as fast as possible.

Now for the comparison between spark and critical damage, here is another math example:

Test subject is a Mifune with 10000 damage SBB.


 * Mifune has 0% crit damage and +0% spark damage: 10000 * 1.5 * 1.5 = 22500
 * Mifune has +300% crit damage and +100% spark damage: 10000 * (1.5 + 3) * (1.5 + 1) = 112500
 * Mifune has +200% crit damage and +200% spark damage: 10000 * (1.5 + 2) * (1.5 + 2) = 122500

As you can see above, balancing between critical damage and spark damage actually gives higher damage output than focusing too much only on one aspect.

That said keep in mind that crit damage usually has the edge (assume that boss doesn't have crit chance and crit damage resistance) since you gain the full benefit of crit damage boost for the entire attack. On the other hand if you have 150% spark damage but only spark 50% of the hits then it kinda equals to 75% spark boost. (spark damage wins when it comes to consistency though)

So please folks, I have seen too many Rosetta/Claire lead with Batootha + Heavenly Bud, or Kira/Colt with Blighted + Geldnite. While it kinda fits their themes whatever, but one crit damage and one spark sphere would be the best choice if you want to balance your damage out put. Well Blighted + Geldnite can still work, but the damage can be crazily inconsistent that it may bring some other hassles that I will explain more later.

Of course, this also applies to leader skills, 1 crit damage lead (Kira/Colt/Owen) + 1 spark damage lead (Roset/Claire/Raga) not only deal a ridiculous amount of damage but quite slot efficient as well.

BB Fill when Spark & BB Management in Raid
Here I will explain a bit more about why BB fill when spark is important in Raid.

Due to most of Raid bosses having 3+ parts, having a BB fill when spark basically remove the need of %BC drop buff all along. A Rosetta as lead can be even better than Feeva lead + a spark buffer as you only need to spend 1 slot, while having the extra 75% spark damage boost as well. Furthermore it removes the RNG that is BC distribution, and you can almost guarantee to fully fill. Only those scenarios that BC drop is better is when you are fighting against single target enemies or having units like Zedus (3 hits SBB - 30 DC) or Loch (1 hit SBB - 35 DC).

Another reason why BB fill when spark great is because it bypass the abomination horror that is BC resistance.

FYI this is Draegar datamine info that I managed to grab from Xerte/Deathmax
 * HP: 4,500,000
 * Atk: 2,800
 * Def: 1,200
 * Innate: ATK increases based on amount of HP lost, up to 30% at 1% HP remaining.
 * Status Resistance: Paralysis 70%.
 * Status Immunity: Poison, Curse, Weaken, Sickness, Injury.
 * 25% Base BC drop Resistance (multiplicative)
 * 50% Buffed BC drop Resistance (multiplicative)
 * 50% Critical Resistance (multiplicative)

Base BC drop is 35%, after resistance it becomes 26.25%. Assume that you have Feeva in your team with 35% BC drop buff, it will be reduced to 17.5%. Basically a total of 70% BC drop now becomes a mere 43.75% BC drop chance, and almost 30% is eaten away completely.

What? You thought this was bad? Then you still have a lot of learn. From my test experience against Draegar, this level of BC resistance is nowhere to be compared with some later RC 5 bosses (yes that's why Alice sucks since her BB fill rate buff also gets affected by BC resistance and it is even worse than normal BC drop buff).

And don't even think about stacking % BC drop over the cap to make up for the loss. Due to the multiplicative formula, the more your stack, the higher penalty you will have to suffer. A 30% BC drop will get -22.5% penalty while 50% BC drop will get -37.5% penalty, even though both are 75% BC resistance. So not only you will barely drop many more BC, but you have to sacrifice valuable spark damage boost, or Trial EX spheres (+15% all stats and other bonuses) or even sphere like Vermillion (regen your BC while providing 40% chance to heal back 30% damage received) that can save your pitiful lives a lot of time.

The solution? Back to square 1: use BB fill on spark, you can easily overcome any amount of BC resistance if you know how to spark properly (and you should). Furthermore, by using Rosetta or Raga as lead you can also have extra spark damage in both forms: lead and buff, meaning that they are extremely slot efficient, while removing the need of bringing a BC buffer (reasons why not many top players use Feeva in Raid later).

About boss parts start dying and you can't fully fill your BB after spark any more? Don't worry, after the change that killed boss parts still dropping BC it is no longer a problem anymore (yes it is implemented to Global also). Since damaging the killed parts will be counted as overkilling, this will double your %BC drop chance. I'm not even sure if %BC resistance is still there for these dead parts, but basically when you have 2+ dead parts you shouldn't have troubles managing your BB to be honest.

A cheap way for new player if you want to utilize BB when spark but don't have Rosetta or luxury 7*

With Karl lead and Elza in the sub you basically have a pseudo Rosetta LS, while still can enjoy the crit damage and % HP from Colt friend. Sure you lose a layer of spark boost compared to Roset + Colt but for RC4 this combo should work fine enough. Too bad Karl 6* isn't released in Global yet.

Alternately, BB fill when damaged is another great way to counter pesky BC resistance (and BB drain) especially when bosses have <= 2 body parts and there are many great units for this purpose such as Kikuri, Oguro and Yura. Sometimes you would want to stack both to counter BB drain once again as it is everywhere later.

At the end of the day, set up a team that can mange your BB properly, not too little but not too much. You can always get more damage to finish the run faster, but the difference between dropping 1000 BC or 100000 BC on the floor, or between 3-5 BB fill when damaged and 50 BB fill when damaged when you can already fully fill with the former is basically zero. Over BB management is seriously wasteful and yet there are still many players stepping on this mistake.

Importance of killing boss parts


There you go folks, written in the in game Raid guide itself. Most of JP people have already known this, but I am sure that there are still a lot of global players that are not aware of this. In some cases you even need to kill a certain specific part of the boss for its rare material to drop, else the chance will literally be 0%.

With this in mind, the strategies now will be somewhat more complicated than the usual "just kill the boss" with BB spam and will be separated into 2 main scenarios:
 * Your team is weak or you just want to finish the boss as soon as possible to farm medals, unlock the new missions or rewards (Dreagar, final mission in RC 5, etc)
 * You want to farm the rare drop AND carefully kill all the parts also to make sure you have the highest chance to get the mat

If it's the first one then no worry, just set up a team that you can deal the highest amount of damage to the main body while ignoring everything else.

However, if you actually want to farm, then there are many things one needs to concern themselves with:
 * Elemental Weakness: sometime you can abuse it by avoid bringing an elemental that is strong against the main body. For example Alkemu in RC5 has 5 elements for each part: Dark, Fire, Water, Earth, Thunder. Dark is the main body. This means that by bringing someone like Quaid and not Grah, you can kill the other 4 parts quicker than its main body and leave it last.
 * Critical Damage: this is the reason why I mentioned that bringing too much critical damage may create a problem, due to the nature of its inconsistency, you can easily kill the main body before the desired part and have your runs ruined. Not to mention some parts even have critical damage resistance (it means that you can still crit it normally but the % critical damage will be reduced by certain %, sometime it is even defaulted to the base x1.5 critical damage.
 * Critical Buff: Same reasons above, just less extreme. Still, some people are so cautious that they even refuse to use a critical buffer even. From my runs in RC4 it's fine even with it so pick your poison.

Basically it's quite a controversial matter and depends on your preference. If you keep killing the body too fast, remove all things that relate to crit from your team. If you feel that you can already safely kill the wanted parts before the main body and want to speed up your runs then you can ramp up your critical damage bit by bit.

Team Building
So the usual question: What's the best team for Raid? The answer: There is none. Due to massive difference between each bosses, their elements, their abilities (whether they have critical damage resistance or not) their weakness to status ailments, which parts of them drop the rare material and so forth, you will need to build different squads for each boss to maximize the effectiveness and this is what makes it fun aside from getting the items instead of "Herp derp best squad to faceroll".

I will try to give you some examples on how to build a team for each boss by applying, well, common sense. How you actually build it depends on your style and resources naturally.

First one is Balmedia, a popular boss to farm Ruling Fang for Buffer Jewel (since Mistzug is kinda too easy at this point). You can refer to my Raid Boss Profiles blog for Balmedia skill set.


 * He has 3 Fire which implies that you should avoid Earth units as much as possible. And if you do decide to bring one, make sure that unit should be quite well equipped (something like Lafdonia + Heresy)
 * Water/Earth elemental buffer duh
 * His tail is where Blaze Pearl drop, and it is noticeably tankier than other parts, so bring a USBB unit (aka Tazer's wet dream)
 * Tail also seems to have critical damage resistance, so go with spark lead instead if you want more damage
 * BB drain so BB fill when damaged is recommended unless you are luxuries enough to spam Fujins
 * DEF buff

In other words an ideal team probably looks like this (no % HP lead + spark damage sadly)


 * Tazer lead: Spark damage boost because consistency. The + % BC will help manage BB and % HC is enough to sustain. Single target UBB to kill tail and can switch to AOE once the tail is killed.
 * Kira: Crit buff + ATK down.
 * Shera: ATK buff + mitigation + spark background
 * Quaid: Elemental buff
 * Kanon: Cure status + 140% DEF buff
 * Claire friend: Spark boost, BC buff, spark background

My test solo time is around 8 minutes, could have been faster with better connection + device (so not lagging when spark) perhaps.

Got none of the above? Here's another one:


 * Granados lead: +20% HP/ATK and 15% fire mitigation. SBB has 45% crit and 80% injury rate, your team will be very tanky against Balmedia with him as lead
 * Narza: mitigation + immunity (Balmedia doesn't remove buff) + BB fill when damaged to counter BB drain
 * Atro: 100% ATK/DEF buff
 * Madia: Earth + Water buff and 5 BC regen
 * Arus: with 80% spark buff and water add he can serve as a mini Tazer. The BB fill can be helpful against BB drain as well
 * Claire: Spark boost, BC buff, spark background

Another example is Nalda Delia, another boss to farm Buffer mat. Drops Doom Jewel, Ruling Fist and Doom Ring.


 * 2 parts are highly susceptible to Injury = Ragshelm/Fadahl to the rescue
 * No status ailments so no need for status cure/immunity
 * His Doom Ring drops from his Light arm, you know what to do
 * Can also bring Earth/Water buff to kill Top and Lower Body faster but not essential
 * Probably better to leave out Fire elemental buff due to Main Body element

Team example:


 * Kira lead: Critical damage boost, amplify Ardin/Cardes weakness damage. Crit buff and ATK down in one package
 * Shera: mitigator + ATK buff + spark background
 * Ardin: Dark elemental add to kill Arm faster + ATK down
 * Ragshelm: Injury buff + ATK down
 * Cardes: high damage + DEF buff + spark background
 * Claire friend: Spark boost, BC buff, spark background
 * Yujeh or Grah can replace Ardin if you don't have him.

Kill him in like 5 minutes without receive any damage with multiple layers of ATK down + Injury. Light arm is dead by the 3rd turn or something.

Well that's it folks, try to adapt with the bosses' skills and abilities along with what you have instead of constantly asking what's the best team zzz. Leave a comment below if you have any questions. Any questions not related to the topic will be deleted.