Ash Echoes - Mercy Upon Us - Simultaneous Raid: Iris

Ash Echoes – Mercy Upon Us – Simultaneous Raid: Iris

Written by Reineau

Overview

The moment we’re finally done with a Sim Raid, they pull us back in?!
Being our first Sim Raid after the release of the 3rd Nexus path, you can expect a noticeable increase in difficulty which definitely requires ‘Otherworld’ updated builds, if only for the vastly increased Stats and an important skill from the path which we’ll cover later on in the guide.

IMPORTANT: This Sim Raid features heavy story spoilers for the newest arc ‘Mercy Upon Us’. It is impossible for us to avoid those spoilers if we want to post pictures and explanations of the newest mechanics that come with the new chapter, so if you want a spoiler free walkthrough, please do not even open the Sim Raid tab before finishing the Story of the newest arc.

Core Elements

The first thing to mention is the massive increase in HP and overall DPS of the Boss, whose 300% difficulty is very much tuned around 3rd Nexus Engravings. The 300% difficulty sports a whopping 9.5 billion Health, constantly respawning sources of Damage Reduction and many, many summons;
Unlike the recent Shriek Party Sim Raid, it is not recommended to push your teams past their first HP bar, as the bump in DR is significant enough that it feels like a waste of time. For the record, our sub-optimal Fire Team was capable of taking the first HP bar in about 54 seconds extremely easily and safely, but it took a whole extra minute to shave off the next 10% of the second HP Bar;
The DR mechanic: The Pink Flowers, continuously spawned throughout the encounter, each bring 50% DR to the Boss so long as they remain on the field. These flowers do not take damage, but are instead destroyed based on the number of hit instances, 20 for the first HP bar then 60 if you keep going on a second phase. This means that it’s completely useless to waste big one-hit AoEs on them and you should instead focus on basic attacking them or using Active Skills with lots of hits per use. Skirmishers tend to do well in that regard, but most ATK Speed/Summons build can also make very quick work of the flowers;

2 Pink Irises are summoned at the start of each phase, with both Pink and Blue flowers being constantly spawned after that

The Nukes: Last but not least, Iris possesses powerful nukes that are tied to the Pink Irises. A red text warns you that if not destroyed those flowers will deal massive damage to allies in an area around it (see picture above). This is a pretty far reaching burst that if poorly timed with other damage sources, could one shot most of your Echomancers aside from dedicated tanks. Squishier units could very well die from a single hit of those Nukes, let alone taking 2 or 3 alongside dozens of Summons and Iris’ own DPS. Not two ways about it, make sure to always keep at least one powerful skill or repositioning available in case a flower spawns next to your squishies.
The Blue Flowers: Unlike the pink ones, these flowers do not possess any harmful effect, and instead help you recover from the ‘Mental Instability’ debuff that if not cleared, eventually results in a high damage CC that will make your Echomancer uncontrollable for a long period of time. The best way to deal with these blue flowers is to exploit the new Environmental Skill, which bathes an area of the battlefield in light, dealing continuous damage to every enemy entity inside its radius. This also works on pink flowers of course. Fortunately the skill has multiple charges and a short CD, meaning you’ll often be able to hit multiple flowers at once, both pink and blue;

The Blue Flower and the Environmental skill

The 3rd Nexus Skill, a saving grace: The Children’s Home path in the new Nexus directly provides a great boon to tackle any fight where [Hidden Fear] is in effect, in the form of a Domain Skill: ‘Soulquell Domain’. At Lvl3, enemies are no longer invisible, you deal 30% more damage to them, take 30% less damage from them, and to top it all if you are inflicted by the crippling [Fear] debuff it will end quicker and deal less damage. Needless to say, we highly recommend picking this skill if you’re not confident in your ability to perform extreme amounts of Burst damage, as it will greatly improve both your offense and defense. It’s also good to know that the 30% damage boost currently isn’t categorized as Extra DMG or any other common modifier, which could make it a much more powerful buff than we’re giving it credit for;

Example of how the Modifiers are categorized in-game

Target Priority can be annoying: With the Echomancers’ tendency to always attack the closest reachable target, it can be a pain to deal damage to the Boss when add-ons are constantly spawned, especially when the Boss’ hitbox is so big that a huge part of the tiles surrounding it can’t be repositioned to. It’s gonna take careful positioning to be able to properly hit what you want, even more so for ranged auto-attackers;

The Teams

This time around, both Burst and DPS teams can participate in the fight, including Necromancer setups. Ironically, even though this is Leilani’s release the Corro team is at a disadvantage due to the vast amount of Corro Blast mitigation. It is still perfectly possible to clear a HP Bar with Corro, but you’ll certainly feel the difference in ease of execution.

Here are 4 teams that we’ve had more or less success with:

Fire

Easy to play, and showcasing impressive displays of high DPS, the Baili/Cyros team is hitting this Boss like a truck. Begonia applies her DR shred, while Tian Ruo was here as a safety net in case we’d need a Barrier urgently, which wasn’t necessary in the end.

We went with ‘Into A Paper Crane’ since we brought Baili as Leader, considering that the Boss makes all your Echomancers lose HP all the time his Leader ability was quickly triggered and ramped up.

Heavy focus on the ATK/VIT Stats, with enough DEF to survive the Nukes and recover with Thea/Emptiness, and enough TRM to get a bit over 1000 when factoring in the Director’s Engraving for that sweet 125% Atk skill right before Baili get his Ult out, which starts the massive Burst-like DPS of the team.

Note: Each Burn tick from the Fire Zones seems to count as a hit instance for the flowers, so do consider turning the map into a wildfire by having Cyros spread the Zones all around Iris.

Triangle Corro

This one was a bit messy, both in the team composition but also in the execution, however it still worked out in the end. From the relatively low impact of the Corro Blast, to the difficulty in targeting the right enemies with Leilani and Caroline, without forgetting the unwieldiness of bringing Uni + Kylin when the field was already full of important units, this team wasn’t easy to play.

Our strategy ended up being to bring the whole Corrosion + freda package first, with Lorelle on Def mode while we were ramping up, before switching her to Off mode then tagging her out for Uni, which starts our MVIC setup and then opens up our Burst window alongside the Terminal skill. Once the MVIC effect is triggered we try to keep Yuqi active as long as possible to exploit his high hit count on skills, and switch in Su Xiao if the damage taken starts getting too high in order to protect Caroline/Leilani.

There’s probably a lot that can be improved here, but that’s how we did it for our first hands on experience with Leilani on Global.

Cen Ying

Did you miss Cen Ying? Didn’t have time to huh? Well, she’s once again a staple in our setup so at this point you should realize she’s the one pulling the strings and deciding who’s making the cut and who’s not.

As usual, the summoner team is perfectly equipped to deal with any situation, and this time around Cen Ying truly brings the pain to the flora. Her Summons are insanely quick to take the Pink Irises down, and her Ult’s amazing range allows it to destroy every Summon while still hitting Iris at the same time. We bring Boss to kickstart the Ult gauge, as a single Ult from Cen Ying is enough to end the fight coupled with all the buffs and drones.
Gauya was taken along to protect Cen Ying after she Ults, in case a nuke reached her. That was fortunately unnecessary, but if you need a safety net consider it.

Feng

Amazing Burst is what Feng is all about, and the Necromancer setup works quite well in this Sim Raid.

Changyao is there for the Water Zone + Inspire and Bellia to help generate more Inspire stacks.
Tong at D3 gives 15% Skill Dmg buff to Rangers, so Feng is boosted simply by having him in the background. Not only that, but Tong has a very high hit count on both Skills and auto attacks which makes him a viable flower plucker.

Because it is difficult to properly target Feng with Su Xiao’s res in this setup full of squishies vs a high AoE DPS Boss, Mo is the very decent addition of a tanky Echomancer unlikely to die first, on top of having a massive hit count on her Flame Barrier, which can take care of a flower in a single skill use. With a duped Feng, you could easily ignore 1 pink flower and power through the DR in a couple of hyper buffed Cloudbursts, that’s how powerful Feng is in this Raid.

Since Boreas is used in this setup, you may see a significant drop in Cen Ying’s Firepower, however the Summoner team is so good it hardly matters. Because we played neither Begonia nor Thea in our Feng Setup, the Fire Team is still capable of operating at its full potential for any round.

Here’s the Cen Ying Team used after the Feng Necromancer in case people are curious: