D-dive 45K Aequor/Caro Guide

[somber narwhal]

Overview:

I’ll provide a quick guide on one specific team that allows me to secure daily a Master of Dream title everyday, at the cost of some time

The team in question is: Aigis/Celeste/Thais/Genesis Helot (GHelot)

the process consist of doing the madness lvl with HP x 275% (x1.25 score) and DMG x 200% (x2 score) for a total of x15 score and 45k points.
Check the video if you just want to see how it's done: https://youtu.be/w0f5npCjc3M

General Tips:

First of all, this is a hard content with a minimal investment pushing the limit of what this team can do. This means, you’ll restart battles a lot and that’s normal. It takes me on average about 1h to do it daily because I have to redo battles regularly. A few rare time I’ll have to restart the whole run because I don’t have good enough relics or enough amount of aliemus for the next battle, but thankfully it doesn’t happen that much. That said, I’m still looking forward the future change that will remove the necessity to do the dailies to get the time gated materials.

If you prefer a more chill and faster completion, with just having Deep Dive Master title, then setting HP to base 100% and doing DMG at 200% will accelerate a tons the run and net you the score of 36k, most likely needing at most 0-2 battle restart per run but you’ll kill enemies really fast, so their dmg won’t matter most of the time. Hopefully you’ll still find this guide useful for your own goal!

Support:

You may have noticed that one of the awakeners in my team is from support, and insanely invested. You might think that I lucked out to get to befriend such high ranked player to get to use his best support, but rest assured, the community is actually very receptive to friend request.

Main reason it is very easy to be added by high lvl players is, we have 1K slots to add friends (honestly I’ve never seen that in all gachas I played), so there are plenty of rooms to be added. Even if it shows they have reached the 1K caps, I still managed to get added in their friend list when I added them, so I assume they just removed inactive, and they likely have many.

So I went ahead and added as many people I saw with highly/maximized awakeners as possible in various leaderboards and now have a large choice with Tawil, Ghelot, Gdoll and even Liz (but no Pandia, sorry Pandia lovers, I couldn’t find any).

It usually takes a day to be accepted back, so it pretty fast. Go ahead and make friends! (Might as well add me if you’d like, I only have a lvl 70 Doresain with half baked pizza though)

Seeded RNG:

The game has RNG, but that RNG isn’t a true RNG but a pseudo one. Without going deep in the vocabulary, it basically means that, doing a set of decisions, restarting battle, and doing the exact same chain of decision will lead to the exact same result, same remaining HP, dead/alive enemies, remaining aliemus, same cards in hands etc… Despite there being RNG behind it.

Why does it matter? If you had done a certain chain of decisions, and at some point regretted just that one decision that ended in a loss, then restarting the fight and repeating the exact same action until the said moment of regret, is actually possible and allows you to change the fate of the battle from this point. It also allows you to explore options like using the symptoms for drawing and see if the 2 cards drawn are good or not, and restart to do not draw if it's bad.

So honestly, thank god Morimens for the retry battle, otherwise it would be way too stressful to judge what action is the best. This is the super power of our main character, his silver is guiding us to the best results.

In the video, you’ll see one example where I restarted the battle, and doing things differently gave me a better RNG on the cost reduction applied by Titan’s blade on Ghelot’s Crimson Shackles (https://youtu.be/w0f5npCjc3M?t=820)

The Team:

The philosophy:

Basically, this team has 2 extra survive per battles (Petrify and Revive) without triggering DR, then it’s all about creating as many Ghelot’s Bloodthirsty Flails as possible. Ghelot’s exalt purpose is not to deal dmg but to create even more and cheaper Ghelot’s flail, then make more copies with Thais’s exalt and obliterate the boss with 5-6 Ghelot’s flail, usually reaching the 500K damage in a single round, and likely final round.

Everytime you have an opportunity to create Ghelot’s flail without dying, it’s most likely the best thing to do.

For rouse pick during exploration, Ghelot’s rouse will always be the first pick. You absolutely want to have all her cards in your hands when you use her exalt, and her rousing allows her to keep ALL her cards in hand on top of creating one Crimson Shackles, which is just game changer.

Second pick for rousing will always be Thais, you will feast a lot on that corny embryo

Posse Tiny Wish (35 Aliemus to target char) helps a lot with versatility on which exalt to trigger, especially when you’ll be reliant on Celeste and Aigis’s exalt to survive extra turns.

Boss:

The very likely scenario is using Celeste revive on first turn, killing the boss on second turn to trigger his revive, using Aigis’ petrify on third turn, and finish the boss with 5-6 flails on 4th and last turn.

If for any reasons you were forced to use Aigis before triggering the boss’ revive, you’ll very likely not manage to kill the boss, and should try something different.

It’s also very important that you trigger Ghelot’s OE as often as possible, at least twice. The extra Crimson Shackles are very important to get 5-6 Flails on last turn.

What cards to sell?

I always sell Celeste’s 3 cost card, the healing is negligible most of the time and if you need to weakness the enemy, then Thais’s 2 cost card will do a better job for a cheaper cost.

The second card I always sell is Aigis’ 1 cost card. Its embryo generation and vulnerability debuff is quite useful actually, but by the time you reach the second shop, you likely already have other ways to create vulnerability, have her rouse on your 3rd pick and strong relics.

Per Character analysis:

Aigis:

Is E0 enough?

Very likely yes, you’ll mostly only want her for the petrify.

Why her wheel? (Winter’s Requiem, Aigis’s Wheel Signature)

The free Vulnerability is very handy as it allows you to use her command Decomposition with a refund, nicely providing keyflares along the way since it’s a 3 cost card, on top of drawing, which basically means it’s most of the time a free card, free keyflare along with reducing the deck size. If you’re an avid card gamer, you know how important it is to reduce “deck size” to more consistent hand.

Celeste:

is E0 enough?

Definitely yes, she provides revives, Arithmeca on her exalt and on her Tintless Dream, that's all we want her to do and we love her for that. (Edited, thanks @placid egret for pointing out that her Tintless Dream already has Retain at E0)

Why Tulu’s signature wheel? (Hymn of the Sovereign)

This wheel gives Aliemus on battle start, and I often like using Celeste’s exhalt first, providing revive and Arithmeca, whereas Aigis’ petrify requires embryo to trigger. So between reviving with 1 more arithmeca or petrifying requiring one embryo, I much prefer Celeste’s Exalt most of the time.

Thais:

is E0 enough?

That’s difficult, you’ll really want her E2 because the -2 cost reduction is quite important on GHelot’s flail. Could be still doable, but you may depend even more on relics giving you arithmeca to make it work.

Why her wheels? (Merciful Nurturing)

Her wheel is just insanely strong, more cards room, generating 5 aliemus on posse often gives the little nudge you need to get 100% or 200% exhalt, on top of generating a lot of keyflares AND Embryo. Honestly it’s just broken.

Ghelot:

is E0 enough?

No

why her wheels? (Drowning in Crimson and Blade of the Titan)

These wheels are designed to deliver massive damage for her Bloodthirsty Flails, and Drowning in Crimson gives extra card room, which adds up with Thais’ wheel, which can go up to 15 cards room sometime (You’ll see that in the boss battle in the video)

FAQ

I see some of those teams without any DR triggered, but it looks like to me it wouldn’t be possible to go through the whole stage without dying at least once, how is that possible?

Well, Celeste’s revive doesn’t count on the DR trigger count, because, well, it’s not a DR after all. So rest assured that the team likely has still died at least once during their run, but Celeste’s revive saved the day.

I’ve tried on my own, and damn, it doesn’t look like it’s possible to avoid a DR on the first encounter, is that normal?

Definitely normal and I’ve won plenty of runs with the first DR triggered on the first encounter. You just don’t have any relics other than the starting one, which may or may not help your team, and so you are even more reliant on your first hand. It’s fine to restart the run until good first hand if you want to go that path, it worked for me as well when I felt like it. Naturally it’s advantageous to keep as many DR as possible for the final boss, but it doesn’t mean the end of the run if you can’t avoid it on your first encounter.

R relics like Epiphany (wheel with a monocle, giving 1000 keyflares at stage start) can help you to have a better start against the first encounter, check other similar teams in the leaderboard for inspiration.

Alright, that run was too long, I’m on last boss and honestly can’t be bothered to retry, so what happens if I use a gnosis to finish the boss?

You’ll get a -20% score penality, so you’ll end up with a score of 36k, which should net you the title of Deep Dive Master very likely.

So I’ve done a run and used a gnosis and have a score of 36k. What happens if I use the field ticket if I was a Master of Dream before?

You’ll get Master of Dream title automatically, even if you’ve done a worse run. Field ticket matches the highest title of your account, so it doesn’t matter if you do worst afterwards.

Ok so today’s relic is absolute dogshit, is there another team you can recommand?

I’ll try to cover new teams over times, but in the meantime you can just look at the leaderboards, you’ll see plenty of viable teams to try to get the Master of Dream still.

I had one instance where I couldn’t do it (and it looked like many people couldn’t as well in the leaderboard), so I looked at the leaderboard and managed with Aigis/Thais/Halmem/Ghelot and ending in the Pure Caro ranking. Barely scrapped the Master of Dream with 200% DMG (x2 score) and 125% HP (x1.1 score) for a score of 39600 but it was 1 player away with a higher score from pushing everyone at 39600 out of Master of Dream. But I don’t think the score of 39600 is safe for pure caro leaderboard.

That’s it for now. I’ll take on feedback if people want more indepth analysis, perhaps a relic per relic evaluation for this team specifically. Or perhaps you’ll be more interested in other staple teams in D-dive that I could showcase as well.

Just lemme know and I’ll reply here if you have more questions about this team.

[placid egret]

Very nice guide my only suggestion is that I don't think using 2 sets of life siphon stacks, and celest 0 card has retain at e0 already

[somber narwhal]

ah is that so? I don't remember how her Tintless Dream looks like at E0, so I went to check her E2 since I have her at this Enlightenment and saw the text saying the "Tintless Dream retains for each turn", but I guess it is a rewrite of an already existing retains to add more effects

good point on double Life Siphon not stacking, I didn't think about checking if it does work or not, will do some testing

Ah well, it says Team Unique in the covenants, guess it wouldn't lol

[somber narwhal]

So it looks like the first Life Siphon from left to right will take effect, ignoring all the others next in line

not that it matters much, it's just better to not have 2