Guide to Elys Floor 60 (Warrior / Turtle / Demonic) Build
By Mihealsick
I’ve seen a few people asking about an Elys build, and I’m here to tell you that there isn’t really one–at least, not one that I’ve been able to get working. Instead, I’ll share a standard build that can get you to floor 60 without any problems–even with Elys.
Elys has the passive Vampiric tag, which allows her to cast Drain to conditionally break the normal healing rules. Drain will auto-cast on any turn where you do not currently have the “Overheal” status, and during that turn you will heal yourself for 25% of the physical damage that you deal to health.
The healing from Drain works a little differently from other sources of healing in the game (like recovery and lifesteal/omnivamp). Normally, you can only heal up to your yellow bar, which is 75% of the damage you took in a turn. Drain lets you go beyond that, and it appears to currently be the only way you can heal past your max hp to gain the “Overheal” status. While you are Overhealed, you ignore the next one instance of damage.
Elys’s special Bloodcaster talent tree spec also allows her to deal magic damage to her target equal to the amount she heals +1. As far as I can tell, this only triggers from Drain, and the magic damage it deals does not allow you to heal further and loop damage using the Shadow set’s Omni-Vamp effect.
We’re not going to use any of that in this build, and I’ll explain why.
Why no HP strategies?
On the surface, it looks like Elys’s health-centric effects could offer some survivability while also letting you exploit other synergies that care about your health and the damage you take (like Magma set, Flesh set, and Berserker set for example).
Unfortunately, in v1.09 I don’t think there is a health-centric build that’s viable. Enemy damage far outpaces your ability to scale up your health pool, so generally if you’re taking damage to your health it’s either killing you all at once or it’s from an enemy that’s not actually a threat. The “Overheal” effect only really matters if you’re taking one instance of damage, but almost every threatening enemy in the game has more than one attack, so this isn’t a meaningful defense.
Since health damage is generally all-or-nothing, Berserker set doesn’t really have any uses in an HP strategy (unless you’re using a defensive workaround strategy like this one, which notably doesn’t need or care about Vampiric set: Viran (Berserker Physical) Build.
Drain does allow you to consistently gain the Vimblow effect from the Flesh set, but the damage increase is just outclassed by literally anything else. To even notice the damage increase, you’ll need to focus a lot of dismantles on HP, and even then it’s not much value. You’d be better off not even having Flesh set equipped at all and just using those dismantles for stats that actually increase your damage.
Magma set loves hp, and it scales really well to hp! But unfortunately, there are just a ton of way better things to do with Magma set. Also, Magma set just wants a big hp pool–it doesn’t care if you actually heal or drain with it, so there’s no synergy with Vampiric set.
Finally, Elys’s Bloodcaster spec is in-and-of-itself a non-combo. It requires physical damage to trigger, and it deals magic damage. If you split your attention between 2 damage types, you’ll be behind the entire run.
And so, we just stick with the most basic of runs and don’t use anything from Elys’s built-in kit.
Early Game (Floors 1-10)
Just survive here. You’ve specced into a second attack, so I’d recommend picking up a wand, some warrior boots, and a wisdom neck on floor 1 and just keep upgrading from there.
By floor 11, your gear should look something like the attached image.
You can run with either physical or magic damage from this point. I’d recommend Physical because it’s just easier to build, but if you do go Magic then remember: your attack type defaults to whichever (atk + atk%) is higher. Since you’re equipping physical damage and physical damage% in this build, you’ll want to avoid upgrading your weapon and demon ring or else it could force you to swap to physical.
Both lines of play are reasonable.
Midgame (Floors 11-60)
Once you have the gear in the image above, you’re all set. That’s your wardrobe clear to 60.
Moving on, you’ll want to maximize your damage. Your plan is to kill everything before you have to care about it, but you’ll also need to take a couple of precautions to make sure you don’t get blown out by certain enemies:
For Kotyas, Turtle set does all the work. Just attack right into them.
Precision Cap – Make sure you have 100% precision before you see Jupiters on floor 20.
Penetration Cap – This build needs to have 154% penetration before you see Iron Golems on floor 26, plus another 15-16% penetration on average per floor beyond that. This will take up about a quarter of your dismantles, but it’s okay because Bloodedge has great physical damage output and good penetration.
For Saturns, your 5 multi-attacks will be enough to wipe these out early on, but later guys will have 6 stacks of armor shield. To help ping this down, I recommend you dismantle one low-level electricity item and one low-level cinder damage item. The actual damage from those dismantles is insignificant, but the instance of damage pings down a tick of armor shield and lets you break through easier.
For Suns, you must open the Opportunism chest. This build has no other way to deal with them, so you gotta eat the 25% damage debuff
Fpr Iron Golems, you’re fine as long as you have 100 more penetration than they have toughness (see: penetration cap).
For Death, these have a bigger hp pool but you should be dealing plenty of damage to get through them. If you’re not, tighten up your dismantle rotation!
When dismantling for damage, you care about physical attack, physical attack %, power%, faith%. Pictured below are the items that offer the best value in these stats, but don’t forget to keep up with penetration and precision caps! Magic damage follows the same principles, but you’ll also be interested in Insight.
Endgame (Floors 60+)
After floor 60, the dungeon becomes an increasingly hostile place where you’ll need more specific answers along with defenses and attacks with excellent scaling.
It’s certainly possible to keep Elys rolling past 60, but her Vampiric set and talents don’t contribute anything unique that other characters can’t just do better. If you’re looking to go the distance with Elys, I’d recommend using Chromalure / Celestial / Magma similar to this build: Viran Floor 192 (Silver / Celestial / Magma) Build.
thanks a lot of information keren