Surviving sky trial 3-5 and God's descent

Today I would like to give a few advices how to fight particularly strong pve opponents. I already gave general advices about god's trial strategy here. The article below is mostly about survival.

First of all, here is the sky trial 3-5 boss. Some top players could beat it already, but for most of us, mere mortals, this boss is still too difficult. Now that sky trial bosses are unslowable, it looks quite impossible. I can't tell you how to kill it now - but I can say a few things how to improve your chances.

Earlier I mentioned that with the help of Tihh, we could reverse-engineer how combat works in Wartune. This knowledge has many uses - for example, I could understand what combat stats the sky trial 3-5 boss have.

She have an attack of 335.568! Yeah, you would like to have an attack like that, I bet :) He have 2 skills he is using. one is an AE, which hits for 120%, and another is a single-attack, which hits for 250%. He uses AE, then 2 single, then AE, then 2 single. The first AE clears your troops, so after that, you are on your own.

So how do you survive this?

HP or Armor?
The first thing you can see that your defense is pretty neglectable. If you increase your defense by 5000, then it will reduce the damage by about 1000 only. This is because in the combat formulae

(ATK - DEF) /2 * multipliers (skill, god's blessing, resist etc)

So 5000 Defense is something like:

5000/2 * 1.2 * 0.7 * 0.6 * 0.86 = 1080 damage reduction (2250 vs the stronger attack).

The same is true for other strong PVE bossess too, like dragon invasion, god's descent etc.

You remember when I said don't spend mount whips on armor? The devs make monsters stronger by giving them astronomical attack values. But this means, +100 defense means less and less.  When you increase the Armor stat in your stables by 1, you get +20 defense. So to get +5000 defense, you need to increase it 250 times. If you spend the same amount on endurance, you would get 25.000 HP. So the HP is more useful vs big bosses. Not to mention that to survive World Boss final attack, you need HP too.

Note: I don't say armor is not good. It DOES reduce the damage. Just when you can choose between armor and HP, take HP. 

Damage reducers

Damage reducers are your friend in fight such as this. Effects which reduce damage by a percentage, not by a constant, like armor. God's blessing is a must. And now you can enhance it by refining it's astral slot. Just 5% reduce can be 5000 damage less per attack.

The other key damage reducer is your resistance. PVE resist checks were bugged, the monster did not take the corresponding resist, but your highest. So a Hercules was better vs a dark opponent than Hades! Now it seems this bug is corrected finally with the last patch, so Hades is your best friend here. Try to work up your resist as high as possible - so better have 5 lvl 5 electro resist and 5 lvl 3 fire, than having all of them level 4. I don't know yet if there is a cap to resist's damage reduction- let's hope there is not and it can go even higher than 50%.

If block is triggered, you take 25% less damage. If you convert all your defense gems into block gems, you will take like 6-7% less damage in average. On the other hand, you lose about 5k def, which reduces the damage by about 2%.

Active damage reducers are not so great as passive ones, but you can use them too. The archer's IS is great, since it deals damage. The new mage skill, mana shield is not so good.

Astrals

Bosses are either MATK or PATK. So if you have both MDEF and PDEF astral equipped, one of them is useless. You can easily test which is needed, run a few test battles and see which is which (write down damages). For example, sky trial 3-5 is MATK.

Enchanted regeneration is a must. At 10%, you heal 50.000 - so that's an average of 5.000 heal per round!
Even if you are a will destroyer user, I recommend Determination + Sniper's edge vs. these bosses, where you need one lucky run from several. But at Determination 9+ and critical 7k+ you are better of with critical in average as well.

Use every astral which can reduce damage somehow, enshieldment, even the nerfed Illusion. If necessary, you can even remove the second of MDEF/PDEF (at least you don't have to test around which is not needed).





Healing
Use heal rune. Using a rune takes little time. Don't forget that now you can upgrade your level 10 heal rune further with advanced runestones (available in the arena shop).

Even if you can reduce the boss damage to something like 60-70k (with a 500+ resist, god's blessing 35%, frequent blocks etc) and have 250k+ HP, you need to heal yourself fully once every 4-5 turns. For archer and knight, this seems doable only with Iris...

Conclusion. Please don't forrget that the above advices are only for big attack PVE monsters. In PVP situation, where the damage comes from skill and other multipliers, armor is still an important stat. It's justthat  in PVP, the biggest reward you get for your efforts is like 200 mount whip (in class wars). In PVE, you get much better rewards - more hoof, dragon soul in dragon invasion, more horn for sky trial, not to mention God's descent rewards.