A follow up on the Epic Seven Expedition teams post I made back in July (Blooming Snag Lich, Destructive Gigantes, Brutal Pherus). The rotation finally switched to the two bosses I hadn’t covered: Pain Pursuer Moroi and Hopeless Symaqus. Pain Pursuer Moroi is a complete pain in the ass just as his name suggests. Hopeless Symaqus isn’t too bad as long as you have good earth DPS characters.

Since I made the last post, Smilegate has come out with a Sweep option that lets you automatically complete five of your own expedition posters and five of your friends’ posters every week, using the highest score recorded. This means you don’t really need to Auto the most troublesome bosses. If you can use manual attacks, soulburns, whatever else it takes, and get it complete even once, you can use Sweep to complete the month’s requirements and get all the rewards on the chart.

This is especially possible now that Epic Seven has also added permanent free unequips (FINALLY!!!) and a limited but still useful way to rollback equipment from characters. You can pull all the best equipment and artifacts off other characters, build your strongest team and go to town on the bosses, then roll everything back. Unlike Hunt and Episode sweeps, the game doesn’t play out the battle, so there’s nothing to fear once you clear it even once. That said, there’s still plenty of merit in soloing or even auto-ing your own non-Sweep expos, because that 30-stamina charge for hitting others is steep!

Enough of the intro, let’s get into it. And again, credit goes to the multitude of YouTube content creators for giving me ideas, particularly this video from Tristen Wulf that prompted me to try Fenris instead of Cermia for Pain Pursuer Moroi. The difference was phenomenal.Boss: Pain Pursuer Moroi

Boss mechanics:

• Casts Isolation and Vampirism on your characters. Isolation means they can only heal or buff or CR push themselves, i.e. your Tamarinne has no power here. Vampirism means they can also heal up by doing damage to the boss: more damage = more healing
• However Pain Pursuer Moroi casts defense up on himself when you first attack him in the battle, then whenever you attack him after he has taken a turn.
• He also casts a wyvern-like undispellable barrier on himself that you have to burst down quickly before he attacks, or he will poke the whole party to death.

This means you need buff strips and unbuffable for your party, and either high damage characters or a way to enable high damage. I’ve been using:

Daddy Brieg: Defense buff stripper and defense break lander. Pain Pursuer Moroi will target the knight in front for single attacks, so Daddy Brieg needs to be a bit tanky or do a lot of damage to survive. Any artifact and/or set will do as long as that objective is met.

Zealot Carmainerose: I fought for years to avoid building her, because I didn’t want to build a character just for one game mode. You risk ending up with people like Kane and Suthan who become largely useless once that mode is taken away. Unfortunately the years have come and gone and the fact remains that Zealot Carmainerose is the best in slot DPS for Pain Pursuer Moroi. You can put her in Grace of Growth, or just build her because it doesn’t cost mola. She hits hard, strips the boss and casts unbuffable, and casts an extra vampirism so she’s never in danger of dying. She’s a three-star fire unit, so you can get and specialty change her easily.Destro set should work as well, I just had leftover rage gear after pivoting away from Hunts towards Rift. You should easily be able to get a better one than this if you’re willing to borrow good gear from others. Somehow I’m still not used to being able to switch gear on the fly, I feel like something could go wrong.

Fenris: Crazy Earth DPS. I built him slow and powerful for Hopeless Symaqus, but he works just fine for Moroi at low speed. His attack is high enough that each hit will heal him significantly, no worries. Use Special Strawberry Cake or Our Beautiful Seasons if you have them, or any other damage boosting artifact.I used to use Cermia. Fenris is straight up better and more consistent, but any powerful single attacker should work. That said, Fenne didn’t do too great, so… yeah. Play around and see who works for you.

Double attacker: Cerise or Camilla. I find Cerise annoying for some reason (think it’s because she’s so weak and yet she’s limited and requires good gear to use, like “Know your place, trash” y’know? Also super random but I’m annoyed that her relationship with Pavel has just been kinda there all these years), but she’s probably best for auto-ing. She brings unbuffable, which helps a lot when (not if) Zealot Carmainerose fails. She’s less likely to die because she has Invincible on her S2. And she’s built way faster so she cycles more.

Song of Stars artifact for the target debuff so I can do 15% more damage. All Expedition battles are DPS races, so the more damage the better. You can tell from the half-hearted gear that I don’t actually use her for Pain Pursuer Moroi, despite all the nice things I just said.

I use Camilla instead.Camilla is okay if you’re willing to manually use her S1/S2 to keep up the double attacks. She’s a 3-star unit unlike Cerise the limited 5-star unit. You don’t need molagoras to level her up, and you probably have her built already if you’ve been seriously tackling Abyss.

Unfortunately Benimaru’s Tachi/Strike of Aspiration doesn’t work against Pain-in-the-butt Moroi, probably because Isolation is considered a debuff. Give her whatever artifact she needs to stay alive and producing. Come to think of it, does her Speed Imprint work? Dunno.

And as I was typing this, I just had the idea of ditching Cerise/Camilla entirely and running Zealot, Cermia and Fenris for more dakka. Why hasn’t anyone else tried this brilliant idea so far? Here I go… <and Kina was never heard from again>.Just kidding. I think it would work fine on manual where you can soulburn for extra damage. On Auto, Carmainerose and Brieg missed too many debuffs and strips, so it’s best to have an extra source of debuffs, especially Unable to Buff and Def break.

Boss: Hopeless Symaqus

Boss mechanics:

• Casts “Fatigue” on the unit with the strongest attack at the start of the battle and when his skill bar is full. This makes them unable to move until someone CR pushes them.
• If you hit him six times in a row before he gets a turn, he gets mad and hits you twice, usually cleansing whatever debuffs you’ve put on him.

Maybe Smilegate wants you to take him more slowly and strategically, but most people just rush him down. For that you will need CR pushers, buffers, and debuffers.

Because of Hopeless Symaqus’s extra attack mechanics, Roana makes a good frontline tank against him. I’ve run that before and she’s good at keeping y’all alive but not much else. Daddy Brieg is still my favorite to use against him because of defense break, slow and barrier. Same build as above. Any good artifact works (War Horn sounds good to me), but something protective is best if your people are dying.

Healer and CR pusher: Tamarinne if you don’t use Roana in front. Yes, the boss is Ice against Tamarinne’s Fire, but he’s slow enough and she’s fast enough that she can outheal the damage. She’s not called the Queen of PVE for nothing! Magahara’s Tome artifact just to make sure, but Idol’s Cheer might work well too, maybe even Eternus.

DPS: Same Fenris as above. He gets extra attacks when the boss gets extra attacks, so with that 4900+ damage (more with Lilka and Tamarinne’s imprints) he hits like a truck whenever he gets a turn. He also has a self Attack buff which turns into Greater Attack buff when Tamarinne boosts him. Basically he’s fantastic for the fight.

Before building Fenris, I tried Immortal Wukong and Zahak but they both lacked a bit of oomph. I’ve heard of people using Midnight Gala Lilias, but she didn’t do the trick for me either. Some suggest Rem from Re:Zero collab, or Cidd. And I’ve even seen Fenne used as the DPS (sorry, can’t remember who) and she seems to work as long as her attack is the highest in the party. Try different characters if you don’t have Fenris.

Debuffer and CR pusher: Lilka. I’m told Mercenary Helga can work well as a debuffer, but Lilka pushes Fenris up, slows the boss down, gives attack down, defense breaks if you’re lucky and can carry Song of Stars for the Target debuff. She has a kit tailor-made for Expos, it’s just unfortunate that I can’t find anywhere to use her except here. Oh, and Ancient Inheritance.Hopeless Symaqus can be taken down with lots of flexible builds, so play around with him.

What’s next for me in Epic Seven

Anniversary events are almost over, and normally I would take a break until headhunt, but there’s a Frieren collab coming up, so I’m not going anywhere! I haven’t read or watched Frieren (yet), but Epic Seven collabs are always worth doing. The characters may fall from meta quickly, but some of the artifacts like 3F and Benimaru’s Tachi will have you kicking yourself for years if you miss them. I need, like 10 copies of Frieren’s artifact first off, then we can talk about other things.

Since I’m playing more Epic Seven, I’ll be writing more about it too. I still haven’t gotten round to tackling Trial of the Constellations seriously. IIRC last month I did Fire and Water on Nightmare, Light and Earth on the easiest setting and then ignored Dark altogether. I suppose… ugh, I suppoooose I cooould figure that mode out… ick… Oh, and I had a bit of a wild ride two days ago when I rose from Arena Champion V to Emperor V in about 30 minutes, and then dropped right back down to Champion V in an another 30 minutes. Climbing was easier than expected, so I might post an update to my old Champion V climbing post one of these days.

In other gaming news… there’s no other gaming news. I’m off to play Xenoblade Chronicles X right now, though, will post if anything interesting happens in there.