Idle Huntress - Why Burn Is One of The Best Teams for PVE

Burn Mark Archetype Guide

By Nanjiroh.

This guide will be covering the “burn mark” archetype, the units, and why it’s the best team concept for clearing most content.

What exactly is burn?

Burn is a status affliction which reads: “at the start of each turn, each stack of burn deals damage equal to 3% of the characters max hp and can stack up to 10 times and lasts until the end of the battle (or until it is cleansed).

Because this effect works off the stats of the enemy rather than yours, it’s a source of cheap dps that ignores the inflated hp pools of the ai.

Merlin is the finisher of our strategy. This is due to Merlin’s ultimate skill that looks at the total amount of burns on the enemy team and activates them all at once as an aoe.

Okay, so how do I make this team?

The team Is budget and f2p friendly

What you’ll need are:

2* Takeda is the realm setter and our main form of cc. By maxing her first skill, you gain the ability to stun any unit(s) on the enemy team with 6 or more burns on them.
4* Mich (Standard banner). The way Mich works is that any time she takes an action she applies 1 stack of burn. Her lv 3 passive allows her to activate her ult at the start of battle (for 1 burn) followed by a 2nd burn when she uses her basic skill. This combined with Takeda 4 burns (2 on realm cast 2 more at end of turn) is how we get our 6 burns to stun while also setting up for Merlin. As I mentioned earlier, burn uses fixed damage that scales off enemy stats. So, Merlin (contrary to popular belief), doesn’t need to be 6* to get her full dps (of course, having higher stars will increase her survivability but its not a requirement).

Additional and/or Luxury options:

2* Prometheus. Prometheus is a limited banner character and boasts very high burn mark application. Serves as a strong replacement/improvement/addition to Michaelangelo.
2* honda.. this is a worse version of Takeda but is still fine since all we care about on this team is getting up our realm.

Generally, the gameplay flow for burn is something like this:

Turn 1 Mich/Prom use their basic skill causing burns to be applied to the enemy team. Next, Merlin uses her basic skill. Finally, realm user casts Realm. Realm is important as it both guarantees that everyone has at least 1 burn mark on them (Merlin ult will not do the additional sum if the targets don’t have any burn marks) its also your main source of crowd control. Depending on whether you have Mich or Prom as your secondary burn setter, the realm setter will either take some time to stun everyone (end of t1) or stunned immediately; but the key points are:

You need to keep realm up/Merlin alive.
You want to apply burns fast (the sooner you apply them the sooner you get the stun).
You want to have the correct unit order; Prom or Mich move first, Merlin moves 2nd and realm setter is the 3rd to move.
If you are not using Prometheus, enemy Helen’s will stop your strategy unless you bring mitigation/disruption for her such as Dante/Hannibal, or running freezer burn variant etc.

You’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve only listed 3 units and that teams in Idle Huntress normally use 5 units. For burn teams, because you only need to have the 3 units I mentioned, you typically round out the team with various support tech choices such as things to keep your units alive or deal with specific enemies. This is because Merlin effectively fulfills all of our damage requirements perfectly, any more tends to be redundant and unnecessary so we instead focus on survivability and/or mitigation of enemy units such as Helen or Copernicus.

Now let’s talk formation/positioning:

For the most part aside from making sure your realm setter and merlin are out of danger (if they are say 2* and not 5 or 6*), you can freely position the other units however you like. Typically I use the formation in the screenshot below as my default template. I have left the 2 spaces open because they are flex spaces and change according to.