Fortress Saga: AFK RPG - Understanding ATK Meta (Late Game)

Quick Guide to ATK Meta (Late Game)

By Kaiton.

With Hero Path, ATK meta has now become the strongest meta again, but only at end game. ATK meta requires you to actually upgrade heroes since fort does very little dmg in ATK meta. It’s possible for HP fort build to carry you for quite a long time until t5 greens.

Once you switch, if you’ve already grown kits much stronger, then you can continue to keep upgrading kits then swap levels.

Progression goes like this:

You do dps team with ATK (no sanctum).
Once sanctum is upgraded, switch to dps team with HP (since iris carries).
Once engines are strong, switch to hp fort build.
Once u have t5 greens, 5 stars violet with close 5+ affinity, augment 7, abyssal constellation maxed, then switch to ATK late game build with meph.

Boss team (early game):

You’ll first start with ATK until you upgrade sanctum. After that, you can switch to HP build since iris with HP will likely carry you better until you build up strong engines for fort build.

Boss team (mid-game, HP fort build):

Once you get strong engines, HP fort build will do more dmg while your heroes are still low stars.

Boss team (late game, heroes ATK):

Reqs: max last constellation’s abyssal node, t5 greens, violet 5 stars+ with close5 affinity, aug7.
Mael, violet, ruin/gildong, meph, luna, scare with healing+squeaks.
Replace scare with Tilly in first slot if need tanking.
Gear violet with best ATK gears, then second best to mael. Their summons feed meph. Gear bdmg on meph (but roll 600% se on his rune).

Dormants:

All heroes se.

Gears:

Se for Ruin/gildong.
Bdmg meph.
ATK all other heroes for bossing, gold for farming.

Farm Team:

Jib, ungu, iris/gildong, Louis, 2 buffers with 3 rune slots
Note that gold scales linearly, which means diminishing relative returns, so in the early stages you want to be able to farm as high as possible as this will get u the highest gpm (maybe just 2 stages below your max). For this, gear jib, ungu, iris with atk and the rest gold.

Conquest:

Jib, ungu, iris, mael, Luna, Louis with knockback+wrench
If your mael is too low lvl, try replacing with victor
If 5 slots, take out mael

Arena:

Kub, mael, luna, valentine, styria, scarecrow
If 5 slots, take out valentine
Pay attention to only mael’s power. Click i next to your name and opponent’s name in the ranking chart to compare mael’s power
You can also try 2 healers, 2 tanks for more sanctum amp (replace valentine and kub with Tilly and victor), and have luna deal the finishing blow

Wave:

Iblis, Elizabeth, Lilith, meph, violet, louis with knockback+wrench
If 5 slots, drop Elizabeth

Understanding Buffs:

There are 5 types of buffs in this game that can influence dmg output:

ATK buff (actives of iris, gildong, ruin)
DMG buff (passives of mael and ruin, active of Luna)
Passive buff (atk-Luna, val, soba, etc; hp-styria, boomer)
ATK SPD (Yaksha, gildong)
Cooldown reduction (Louis, Falin)

You can think of these 5 dimensions of buffs as being multiplicative with each other. Buffs of the same type stack additively. Try to always have at least the first 3 types in your team.

ATK SPD buff mainly only benefits Lan hua.
Cooldown reduction is mainly for farming to reduce skill downtime = higher kpm. Cooldown reduction isn’t good for boss fight since there are many buffers that buff more dmg than you’d get from the number of extra casts.

How to upgrade gold (after sanctum upgrade):

Get crit% to 50% asap while following the guide missions for rewards
After that, to optimally invest ur gold, we calculate for the power gain per cost and try to keep this ratio the same for ATK, ATK%, cdmg.

Steps:

Put on ur boss team preset with gears equipped
Upgrade ATK. Check ATK power increase. Divide ATK power increase by cost of upgrade (just keep 3 significant figures).
Upgrade ATK% and record the ATK power increase. Divide this ATK power increase by the ratio from step 2. This will tell u how much cost for ATK% should be to be optimal.
Repeat step 3 for cdmg.