Despite all our protests, Smilegate went ahead and removed Nightmare of Azmakalis Raid (why remove PVE content?!!) so now it’s either do nothing or do Trial of Constellations like they want us to. On one hand, grrr, I don’t want them to get away with it, but on the other hand, grrr, that is some fine-looking gear in the exchange shop. Gear or principles, gear or principles… of course gear wins hands down. 🥲 I’m so weak.

Luckily the Epic Seven theorycrafters and content creators have been hard at work figuring out the best teams to clear Nightmare and Perdition Trial of Constellation battles. I’ll credit Tristen Wulf and Moriyaism in particular, especially this video from Tristen Wulf and the accompanying comments which helped me come up with my own teams. Trial of Constellation has so many unintuitive gimmicks that I really recommend watching a video FAQ at least for your first time. I’m noting stuff down firstly for my own records, and also because I’m old-fashioned and prefer text FAQs instead of videos.

Note about Perdition battles

Don’t stress yourself trying to do Perdition the first month or two, unless you have great gear or really like a challenge. You only get Perdition rewards once a season, and a season is six months long. You’ll do just fine waiting a month or two, or three to rack up some points and make things easier for yourself. I mean sure, give it a try if you want since there are lots of guides out there now, but don’t tear your hair out or feel like a failure if it’s not working out. You can get the most important rewards just fine with Nightmare trials. That’s what I’m doing for now. I think I have enough points to do Magnar and Aquina pretty easily next month though.

About Blessing of the Stars

Get whatever makes your life easier. This is what my Blessing page currently looks like after Augsut and September:

You’ll fill the whole thing out eventually, but IIRC the advice is to put more points into Gemini and Sagittarius because they’re harder. You can also redistribute points by paying skystones. To actually light up the stars… this is such a pain, but since I’m making a guide, I might as well be thorough. To light up the stars, you click on a constellation, use points from fighting Trials to unlock slots, then put in the required characters. You get points based on to their combined strength. E.g. to light up the stars in Sagittarius you need 800 for level 1, 1660 for level 2, 2600 for level 3 and so on.

Okay, so how do you get those strength points? First you need to have those characters in your active inventory, not your waiting room and not your imagination. Then you need to equip them with your strongest gear regardless of set coherence. They must be fully awakened. And they must have a +30 artifact. Anything will do. Look at this Ocean Breeze Luluca, for example:

So don’t be quick to trash high gear score equipment that you can’t use yet. And, of course, save one copy of every character in the game, which is just normal good advice for Epic Seven but now applies even more with Trial of the Constellations.

Here’s what it looks like in action. It would be higher if I didn’t have characters like Silver Blade Aramintha geared up “properly” for PVP.

Okay, enough set up. Let’s get into the actual constallation battles and teams.

Scion of Hellfire Magnar 

Mechanics: Lol dunno. He casts burns at the beginning of the fight, I think?

Fenne solos, full stop. If you don’t have Fenne, get her. Simplify your life. Apart from this mode, she’s also really useful in Expedition, Abyss, Automaton Tower and general PVE.

I hear you can even solo Scion of Hellfire Magnar Perdition with Fenne, you just need around 23000 HP, and I am not prepared to regear her. Also there’s a spot at which you’ll have to stop and manually do the fight, and I’d rather just press Auto and tab out till later. PC client/emulator for the win.

Apart from Fenne, take a couple of blue characters for the imprints. Zero gear because they’re just there to die. You want a soulweaver in the front to take the first burn for reasons you don’t need to know about because Fenne solos. Best fight ever.

My Fenne

Alternate teams: Just get Fenne already.

Scion of Frostbite Aquina

Boss’s gimmicks

Counterattacks make her slow down, so you need green DPS that spam counterattacks. Counter attacks also reduce that moon thing she has in the corner. In general you never want the moon thing to fill up when fighting Constellation battles because bad things happen when it does.

Aquina also does double attacks, which is where Roana’s passive comes in to keep the team healthy. The whole battle consists of using Ervalen’s S3 and constantly soulburning Charles’ S3 to ensure they have constant uptime on their counterattacks. Ervalen is in front with the Blessing of the Stars that gives boosts to the thief in front. Ignore the boss’s add when she shows up. Young Senya exists to cleanse and push, and occasionally use “No Bullying!” to do some damage. Heal as needed and enjoy your win.

My team: My team was Roana, Young Senya, Ervalen and Charles. Had to build Charles and use a +15 selector for Ervalen to do this, only to be told later that Violet works just fine in place of Ervalen. Nyoron~. Roana is useful in a lot of scenarios, worth using a story summon to get. Young Senya is limited, but I believe Ray and Bernard work fine. Protip for Epic Seven: pull for every limited unit, no exception.

No speed needed for either DPS since they will be working off counters.

Alternate team: Try Violet instead of Ervalen. Try Ray or Bernard or another cleansing healer instead of Young Senya. Try building everyone on Counter set to proc more counters.

Scion of the Verd Herais

Theoretically the most “solved” battle after Fire, with plenty of accessible free-to-play teams that can do even Perdition without breaking a sweat. In practice, I ran the Researcher Carrot, Tamarinne, Mascot Hazel and Achates team that Tristen Wulf recommended and died 10 times out of 10, always right before the battle ended. There’s another team with Fire Tieria, Aram, Mascot Hazel and Achates, but in the end I went with Beehoo and Holiday Yufine, Mascot Hazel and Researcher Carrot because I felt like my problem was not enough burns to keep the moon thingy low. That wasn’t the issue though, the real issue is lack of bulk, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Boss’s gimmicks

You’ve got to stay alive at all costs. And to do so, you have to inflict burns on Herais himself to lower his moon stage and his HP (doesn’t kill him, but reduces the damage you take), and you have to burn the little mandragoras he brings along before they hurt you. Ensure you have enough healing, enough HP to take the hits and enough burns to mitigate damage and clear the adds. If even ONE character in your team dies, the whole team wipes. So if you’re wondering like I did why your runs keep failing, the answer is very likely that someone died. If it’s hard to figure out who, just boost everyone’s HP and defense and use damage reducing artifacts like Proof of Valor. Take Kazran as your guardian and use him if you think his barriers will help.

My team: Holiday Yufine, Beehoo, Researcher Carrot and Mascot Hazel.

Haven’t bothered to awaken her. There’s a Blessing of the Stars that heals when the fire warrior in front uses her S1, so that’s what Holiday Yufine there for. She also casts an extra burn that helps Researcher Carrot stay on top of the adds.

My Researcher Carrot that I use to two-man Rift together with Charlotte. It took me at least an hour of fiddling with gear to get her stats to where she and Charlotte could one-turn Rift, so I don’t dare touch anything on her kit, but IMO she would be safer with about 15000 health.

Standard Beehoos are run with a statline like R. Carrot above but I prioritized staying alive. Beehoo is run with his skills off, S1 only, so he can keep burning Herais and keeping his moon level under control.

Any artifact that boosts healing or survival works. IIRC Mascot Hazel’s healing scales off her attack, so you can easily build her better than this.

Alternative teams: The three soul weavers and Researcher Carrot team I mentioned above. Just build them all like tanks. Other burners like Robin might also work if you have them.

Scion of Aurelight Ethel

Boss’s gimmicks

Super annoying: you have to hit the Forma of Creation and Forma of Destruction mobs in front of her twice to make sure one is dark and one is light at all times. If they are both dark or both light, they give buffs to the boss which can either reduce the damage the boss takes or get you killed. The most likely to kill you is the Constellation buff, which raises her evasion by 70% and hits back with a dangerous attack when she dodges.Worse than that, you start the battle with a number above your characters’ head, called the Essence of Light. Whenever the mobs uses their Mana Emission skill, the number goes down. When a character’s number reaches 0, they die. To manage the mobs, you need to keep them provoked at all times so they can only use their S1 Mystic Flash skill which buffs your party instead.

Long story short, you need at least two provokers for the mobs, one powerful DPS for when you can hit the boss, and one utility player. You don’t need a healer. A typical battle goes like this: the provokers hit the mobs to provoke and color change them, the DPS attacks whenever s/he has a shot. The utility player helps whoever needs help. Do as much damage as quickly as you can, then it’s back to toying with the mobs. Annoying fight, but just constantly provoke the mobs and hit the boss as hard and as often as you can.

My team: Shadow Knight Pyllis, All-Rounder Wanda, Dark Corvus because I have him (otherwise use Assassin Cartuja or any other reliable provoker), and Eligos as main DPS. Wanda and Pyllis are 3-star moonlight characters you should be able to pull and specialty change easily. Other DPS will work instead of Eligos, as long as they have increased hit chance so that they can attack the boss even when her Constellation buff is up.

Shadow Knight Pyllis has a provoke on her S1 and S3, so she’s good at provoke-locking the adds. Her S3 also cleanses one debuff, getting rid of the pesky blind so you can keep hitting Ethel. There’s a Sagittarius blessing that buffs the knight in front with more hit chance and effectiveness, which is Epic Seven‘s way of saying “Just use Pyllis.”

Also my standard PVP Dark Corvus. He’s been out of a job lately with Boss Arunka and Lady of the Scales taking over Guild Wars and the arena, so this gives him something to do. His S1 has a 100% provoke chance and his S3 does good damage whenever you can fire it off.

Song of Stars for Target debuff to Ethel, in addition to Wanda’s own chance to cast Target (increases damage taken by the target by 15%, while decreasing evasion by 15%) on a random enemy at the end of her turn. If you can build her faster and stronger (and you definitely can), she can be a good sub-DPS too.

He naturally has increased (50%?) hit chance, but you can run a hit chance artifact like Symbol of Unity, Air-to-Surface Missile MISHA or Andre’s Crossbow to make extra sure you don’t miss Ethel when she has her constellation (Radiant Energy) buff up. If you attack and miss in that condition, she will decrease your Essence of Light and bad things will happen.

Alternate teams

Many guides recommend Remnant Violet as the DPS here, but unfortunately I don’t have him. I also tried Commander Lorina, but she was too slow and inaccurate. Might be better with her recent buffs, IDK. Zahak might be good, with his inbuilt extra hit chance. Challenger Dominiel has also been recommended in place of All-Rounder Wanda. IMO a ranger that can apply Target and a DPS with increased hit chance will make this battle a whole lot faster.

Scion of the Abyss Rahel

The most gimmicky but not necessarily the hardest. I’ve seen dozens of complaints about not being able to finish Rahel because she has a sliver of health left. That is caused by poor management of her Dusk-Skull Warrior and Warlock mobs and her moon level, though I don’t blame players because the whole thing is poorly explained.BTW, I’ve been typing for a while, but have I mentioned that Trial of the Constellations sucks? No? Well it does. One of the things I liked about Epic Seven was the ability to use different characters in different modes instead of being forced to build particular characters or go home. Slowly but surely, Smilegate is eroding those options and forcing us into playing the way they want us to by locking great rewards behind garbage puzzle bosses. First Rift, then Hall of Trials, then Trial of Constellations. What’s next? Well whatever, they won’t listen until players start uninstalling in droves, and I for one ain’t going nowhere.

Boss’s gimmicks: Focus on deleting her mobs. When they die, she takes damage. When her moon phase goes down to zero once before a wave of mobs dies, she takes extra damage. Her moon phase goes down when you use soulburns. The mobs are weakened and die easily when they are hit with sleep, stun or fear. The flow is this: Rahel summons mobs > you cast sleep/stun/fear on the mobs > attack them while using soulburn where possible to reduce her moon phase to 0% > clear all the mobs > tank Rahel’s hits until she summons the next wave of mobs.

Sounds simple, right? And it is, as long as you have three things. 1) AOE stun, sleep or fear. I tried bonking them one by one and it just wasn’t efficient. 2) A unit with a 100% def pen skill for when Rahel summons an enhanced mob. 3) A way to cleanse the sleep and poison she casts from time to time. And always, always make sure you reduce her moon phase to 0% at least once per wave before killing all the mobs.

My team: Infinite Horizon Achates, Watcher Schuri, Lady of the Scales, Schniel.

For emergency heals and emergency stuns. The unit in front generates souls, so ideally you’d want them fast, but I build IH Achates slower and bulkier because she has to absorb 70% of all the party’s damage due to Lady of the Scales’ passive.

The best character I found for AOE fear, since hers takes just 1 soulburn. The soulburn reduces Rahel’s moonphase, and Lady almost never misses with the Fear, so she’s highly recommmended. If you don’t have her, see the alternative teams below.

Taking time off his busy schedule of shooting Boss Arunka in the face, here’s my PVP Watcher Schuri. Save his S3 for the enhanced mobs, or use the Blessing that resets it whenever you soulburn it.

Eye candy and Banshee solo-er extraordinaire. His passive cleanses Rahel’s poison and sleep like it was never even there. Maybe with a stronger Celestine or other healing artifact, you could run someone else in Infinite Horizon Achates’ place. Schniel doesn’t contribute anything else to the battle except spamming S1 soulburn and S3 to generate more souls.

Alternative teams: Dragon King Sharun for the sleep, if you have her. General Purrgis is apparently really good for the AOE stunning part. You’re much more likely to have him than Silver Blade Aramintha, who I imagine would work really well too. Maybe regular Aramintha too, if you don’t mind the 70% chance screwing you over, or Mort if he is not too slow. For the 100% def pen attack, Jenua comes to mind as a good substitute. If you don’t have him already, you can pull him from Story summons.

Trial pet

You can get a pet to give you extra damage, extra charms, extra gear drops and so on. I’m still using the free one Smilegate gave us while I attempt to build my own, but I’ll update this section when I have the perfect pet. I’m thinking of dispensing with the extra damage entirely in favor of more charms, drops and coins.

What to get from the Trial of the Constellations Exchange

The gear looks amazing at first glance, and in my experience, equipment with a starting score of 42 almost always turns out usable at +15. I’ve bought the ring, and I bought the boots during in the beta. Before the season is out, I’d like more boots, the chest and maybe the helm. The sword and necklace look like traps. However, what I’m really, really starving for right now is not gear but rather charms to roll that gear, so I’ve been buying the Epic Equipment Charms every day. I’m thinking I’ll get one gear piece a month and charms for the rest of the month until the end of the season.

And that’s it for the guide! Let me know if anything is unclear. Definitely let me know if you have better team suggestions, because some of these were very narrow wins. Thanks for reading!

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.