Team composition

Your ranger is a single unit that is always active on your battle board. Sadly, they are very weak when they have no weapon or armor on. So, you may decide to add 5 weapons and 5 suits to your team, as you have plenty of choice to upgrade your ranger. That is usually not necessary, however, as your ranger only can wield a single weapon and a single suit at a time. Having more allows you to be more flexible in your equipment choice, but a wider range of Illuvials tends to create even more flexibility.

In a team, you normally choose one or two classes to specialize in. If you have a team full of fighters and some bulwarks, it may not make sense to add a staff or daggers to your bag of weapons. After all, you want your ranger to synergize with your team. One or two swords may be enough and then add a shield for good measure. One sword for the early rounds, and one sword or shield for the later rounds to increase the flexibility of your tactics.

Suits seem to be even less impactful than your weapons. Each suit has a similar boost, roughly 200 HP, some attack speed or damage and a bit of resistance to enemy attacks. One weak suit and a single strong suit should be plenty, as they aren’t significantly stronger than one another.

While your ranger is a jack of all trades and can be outfitted with all the unique affinities and classes, Illuvials are much more restricted in their use. The Illuvials each have a single class and affinity that determines what role they can play in a match. When choosing the Illuvials, it’s important that you take their specific use into consideration. Illuvials like Colossus should take up a defensive role, while Slayer Illuvials have some of the highest damage outputs in the game.

When you build a team, you will need some units that take the damage, while others should incapacitate the enemy team in the meantime. Some Illuvials can take up either role; Fighters, for example, have relatively high HP and can absolutely demolish enemy Illuvials. A simple line-up is presented in the image below.

Through this example, it’s easy to understand why a lot of weapons don’t help you in most cases. After all, you wouldn’t require a Shield, Staff or Daggers in this specific composition. The single sword may be too expensive, however, so it could be beneficial to add a secondary sword that you can equip during one of the earlier rounds.

Looking back at the current “fighter” team, you have 8 Illuvials, one or two swords and one or two Suits. This gets you to a total of 16/28 cards. We know that more weapons may not help, as we only require swords. Similarly, two suits should be all we need. So, we can add more Illuvials to refine our team strategic flexibility or add augments to strengthen our current choice of Illuvials.

Not just the Ranger starts out weak when put on the board. Illuvials similarly aren’t as strong as they can be when placed. These units can equip augments that grant them powerful abilities. Some augments increase the survivability of the Illuvials, while other augments can exponentially increase their damage output.

After choosing the right amount of Illuvials and a synergizing weapon, it’s time to choose these augments. Do you have a lot of defensive Illuvials? Then you may benefit more from an augment that increases your damage output. You may also choose to focus solely on defense. Imagine an augment that adds extra defense, and adding another that deals damage whenever the unit is hit? You could probably make a strategy where the enemies are purely killed through return damage!

In short, Augments are incredibly powerful, and are the most important to invest in. They will decide whether you can beat an enemy composition or fall prey to their ingenious tactics.

An average team has about 8-12 Illuvials, 2-5 equipment items for your ranger and roughly 10 augments. You can play around with these numbers, as the theoretically strongest composition would be: 8 Illuvials (the maximum on the field) 16 Augments (the maximum usable on those Illuvials) A weapon and Armor, and 2 remaining slots. But you don’t normally get to play all of those assets. The road to the final board is filled with obstacles, and you may lose in round 5 if you aren’t careful. To ensure that you have the best strategy, you need to take into account the PVP rounds and mastery point acquisition