This build is modifiable to work in all current content with minimal fuss. The guide will focus primarily on its endgame, finalised form, though later on it will touch on its applications through the early and midgame
A quick disclaimer
This build is, mostly, an endgame build, though later elements will address the earlygame. While I’ll be making no direct reference to the story, you may find that some mechanics are spoiled simply by virtue of the game’s progression. If this bothers you, this guide is not for you and I’m sorry.
The Basics
You are like me. You like birds. You also like indirect damage, because it’s harder to deal with. While normal people would go for something like a djinn or something to do damage with living, breathing monsters that don’t like dying, we take the chad move. Our creatures are expendable. Their lives, forfeit. Again and again and again.
As you can probably expect, this build revolves around three primary mechanics:
The Dark Ritual spellgem, which allows you to sacrifice one of your creatures in order to give the casting creature those stats. The stat gain isn’t that important really, but between this and Death Siphon or the other one that deals damage based on hp, it has the better stat benefit. That, and who really cares? You’re just looking for an excuse to kill something for free, you wonderful psychopath, you.
Lifebinder, the Ancestral Phoenix trait. While this build has multiple methods of self-perpetuation, none are more important than the instant gratification this one gives. If one of your creatures kills an ally, then all of your creatures are revived. It’s pretty nifty, but why are we so determined to inflict an endless purgatory on our creatures like this?
Buffet. This trait comes from one of the first creatures you’ll meet: the Volatile Phoenix. Put simply, this puts the butter on the bread that the previous two mechanics set up.
But why is Buffet so good, you ask? I’ll tell you the heck why. Speed-based damage. That’s right. None of that pansy attack or intelligence. Speed. Normal builds, they like their normal virgin stats. Us? We like speed. We go fast, we play fast. We deal damage to Every. Enemy. When, you ask? Why are you even asking? On-revive. 50% of your creature’s speed goes right in the enemy’s face like wha-bam.
A mixture of apocalypse traits for long-term, non-destructible stat bonuses, Royal Phoenix to keep ourselves on top as much as we can, an “invincibility” setup on a Bile Slime to help us have somewhat consistent revival capabilities and a backup Panda Rebirth to help mop us up when things get spicy keep us fighting for longer. Regalis is also here to just give us more firepower. How nice of her!
It’s terrifying in the early game, and with a bit of help, makes for an almost perfect accompaniment to afternoon tea while you stroll through the realms massacring hordes of helpless, innocent creatures many thousands of levels your better. Because you can. Because you’re worth it.
There’s a whole lot of other traits at play here that propel this simple formula into viability and I’d love to go through them all with you. That’s pretty much what this entire guide is for.
Before you scroll down any further, if you end up liking this guide, I’d really appreciate it if you give it a quick rating, or let me know your thoughts. Hell, even dumb build ideas are valuable to me. I like making dumb builds to make up for my crippling inability to form a coherent, useful thought <3
Preferred class, and why
First off I’m proud to announce that, barring a bit of risk on classes like Animator and Grovetender, this build is viable on all classes with varying flavours of success.
Why, I hear you cry in despair? I’ll tell you why. Because that goblet is a hell of a thing to have to deal with during your early and midgame woes of “never enough resources”. A good, solid, all-rounder of a team puts that thing to work and lets you unlock classes to build that reward multiplier up without worrying.
For those that prefer to stick to one class, we really like the Purgatorian. Check this magic out.
THE IMPORTANT STUFF
Dark Covenant
Picture this. You’re going about your day and suddenly one of your creatures drops dead. Not very sporting tbh. This baby pumps your creature’s stats by 50%, but only while they’re dead. Now, because of how we pick ourselves up so often, this isn’t the greatest boost, but look at that wording for a moment. Have. That’s right, dear reader. This effectively raises your base stats, meaning that any statboosts it gains while it’s dead are effectively boosted as well.
Life after Death
Your creature’s traits are active while dead. This is pretty important for our damage scaling, as all of our scaling traits (aside from the last one) are our fused traits. Regalis solves everything else.
Misery
THIS. This is funny. This is actually the funniest perk in the entire game. Now, because our spells scale off of speed, this thing is absolutely brutal. After your creatures are killed, one of your other creatures casts Murder of Crows. That’s 3 ticks of moderate damage on random enemies, +2 for every creature you have dead. Oh, also Medium kind of makes this even spicier.
Never Forgotten
Literally the only reason we use this spec. Stat changes persist through death. That’s the ones that are literal stat gains, not the ones that say “your creatures have more stats because x”.
Eternal Damnation
Aside from being what you deserve for playing such a heartless build, this is probably one of the more satisfying perks to have. At 10 ranks, this is 10% more damage for every time one of your creatures takes an L and eats dirt, whether you caused it or not. Now, this doesn’t help us deal damage to begin with, but when we do hit, we hit hard. Harder if we took a few falls along the way. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Wait… No, that’s not right.
LESS USEFUL/FALLBACK STUFF
Designated Survivor
This is our “Oh no” trait. If, somehow, you’re down to one creature because your team was killed in one of the few unfavourable orders that can sometimes hamper it, you’ve got up to a 50% chance to wipe the sweat off your brow and hit Flourish, the absolute gigachad spell of second chances. Head up, king. Your crown’s falling.
Destiny Bond
We don’t really use buffs and minions, but hell this is always nice to have if you end up changing up some of your spells. Your creatures’ buffs and minions persist through death. We plagiarised this off of the Necromancer, but please don’t tell him. I need my skeletons to decorate my closet.
From the Grave
Your dead creatures attack a random enemy for up to 100% additional damage every 3 turns. This helps us pump out a bit more damage on those troublesome, longer-run fights, but again we don’t really stay dead that often. It can happen, sure, but we’re not really looking for this kind of benefit.
Intangibility
We’ve got scant few ways to keep ourselves on top, and this build likes to stay in control just in case the unimaginable happens. Up to a 5% chance to give your enemy the finger and send it to slowsville: population “that loser” is a nice little thing to have sometimes. Especially since it stacks for every dead creature you have if you’re in a pinch.
Last Word
We’re not really interested in this, but if you feel like moving away from Dark Ritual as a thing, this is also a pretty solid perk to play with. Say, if you’re silenced. Your creatures get 30% of a provoking creature’s stats, and said creature shuffles off this mortal coil. Pretty sure this doesn’t proc Lifebinder, so using this on your last creature is a very solid strat so you can proc our fifth creature’s setup.
Madness
…Is pretty much what you have to have. That or a poorly timed silence stopping you from dark ritualing. Another contingency, but your creatures attack once more for every dead creature on your side.
Masochism
It’s basically Madness but more defensive. And less attacky. Another contingency. Can you tell why we like this?
Medium
Madness, but for spells!
Psychic Suicide
We don’t stay dead long enough for this one, but if you’re somehow surviving against elves long enough for it to matter, then welcome to free damage.
Trauma
30. more damage if your other creatures are dead. Makes the spell we put on our artifact hit better if we’re in dire straits. Can’t go wrong with a backhander like that.
The First: Volatile Phoenix
Boom. This straight-up chad. He is the reason we’re here. Picture yourself roaming the realms and you see yourself a cool-a*s looking bird. You put him down, but not before peeping that trait. “Why,” you think, “I literally have a unicorn vivifier just aching for a partner in crime”. Because for some reason that’s the creature the game just gives you.
My friend, you’re on your way to greatness.
Class: Chaos. You’ll understand why soon.
Personality: Shy or Bashful. We want speed at the cost of stats we don’t use.
Scrolls: All speed, all the time. Come on now, did you expect any different?
Colours: We give this one the skin, and we stay on the defaults. This is mandatory. He is the coolest bird.
Traits
Buffet. We’ve gone over this already: 50% speed, damage to all when an ally rezzes. And because he’s such a cool dude, he shares this trait with everyone else. We have him on the first slot because this is probably the most important trait the phoenixes can give us.
Urh Harbinger, from the Aaxor Apocalypse. Every turn your creatures take, they HAVE 15% more of a lot of stats. The most important? Speed. This is non-destructible, so even if you’re not playing Purgatorian, these stats do not reset on death. This is also the second coolest thing ever. What really tips it over the edge is our Royal Phoenix just handing us free turns for doing what we do. So thoughtful.
Gift of Scylla, boss trait material. This is one of those things you could probably easy enough replace when you’re not playing purgatorian. When your creatures die, they pony up 25% of their useless attack stat and their delicious speed stat and spread the love to your whole team. This resets on death outside of Purgatorian’s protection, but even outside of that it’s a nice temporary boost that scales well late into harder fights.
Artifact
Stats: all speed. You’re basically using performance enhancing amphetamines at this point.
Trick: 20% rebirth on damage as a just in case, and whatever else takes your fancy. I took scorned on damage this time.
Spell: Rapture. You’ll understand why later, but this will work. Insane damage, weak and vulnerable. Keeps the enemies in check.
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Class swap: Chaos. We do it this way so that your creatures ALWAYS have a Dark Ritual to cast, and have an extra little buffer in case a realm gets spicy.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Chaos. A holdover from before this build scaled entirely off speed, Ethereal Knives is my old faithful in terms of a decent charge count and decent damage. It hasn’t let me down since. This can be changed for anything you like, but I recommend keeping it a damage spell.
Rapture: Generous, Magnetic, Class Swap: Chaos. But Sparky, I hear you whine, we already have Rapture on our artifact! Shut your mouth, dear reader. Sometimes our artifacts can’t be trusted. For everything else, there’s a manual cast rapture to the face.
Summary
The Volatile Phoenix is our primary source of mechanical damage, and if we’re not playing Purgatorian, we tend to avoid Dark Ritualing this one so that the Harbinger effect keeps ticking freely.
Thanks to Regalis, Buffet is shared to everyone in the team on behalf of our dangerous friend here, even if that one Realm Instability effect is playing its sweet and sickly tune. You will never go wanting for raw damage.
Gift of Scylla gives us some surprisingly powerful, sometimes temporary scaling in longer, drawn-out fights. Changeable if needs be, I’ve never found a reason not to keep it a permanent part of my team.
The spells chosen are exactly what they need to be. Dark Ritual is our most important spell, and the rest just dole out damage, plugging a gap caused by our reliance on indirect damage and on-death, on-revive effects.
Volatile Phoenix is a force that is not to be trifled with.
I really want some trifle now.
The Second: Royal Phoenix
The Royal Phoenix is probably one of the more niche, understandably overlooked creatures in Siralim. With a trait that under normal circumstances would likely be superceded by something more fitting a build’s theme, it’s easy to see why he’d feel unloved, or unwanted. But we’re always willing to give creatures a second chance.
Class: Chaos. You’ll understand soon, I promise.
Personality: Shy or Bashful, shedding the useless Attack and Int traits for the far more enticing Speed stat
Scrolls: Speed. Gotta scale that buffet!
Traits:
Second Chance. Our Royal’s innate trait, Second Chance gives us a 50% chance for our creatures to pop to the top when they drop and get up with a hop. That last one was a bit of a stretch. Now, since this is our innate, Regalis makes us share, meaning this somewhat niche trait is always going to be active even if we’re not a Purgatorian. Don’t be scared off by the fact it doesn’t stack, we just always want it to be a thing. This helps us scale up our Apocalypse traits by giving us free turns and control over a battle.
Naxor Harbinger, from Inox Apocalypse. With this, our creatures deal 40% more damage per turn taken. It’s not as important as the Volatile’s trait which elevates us over potential defence barriers with stat power, but should a time come where you’re relying on that, this trait will make sure that when you do hit, you leave a mark.
Cyhra’s Adamance, boss trait material. Naxor Harbinger doesn’t do enough. Your creatures deal 100% more damage each time they’ve been mopped up from the earth. Just bear in mind for a moment that the rez cap per creature is 15.
🙂
Artifact
Stats: Speed is the ticket, as usual
Trick: Like the volatile, we want rebirth on damage, and then anything that tickles our fancy. I took Protected this time, as it’s a small point of defence for a creature whose traits might be nice to keep ticking.
Spell: Rapture. We always want a chance at proccing Rapture.
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Class swap: Chaos.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Chaos.
Rapture: Generous, Magnetic, Class Swap: Chaos.
Just like the volatile Phoenix, our spell setup focuses on putting out Dark Rituals as our primary spells, with the backup of Rapture and Ethereal Knives for direct damage output.
Summary
The Royal Phoenix setup we have here is an amalgamation of noticably niche traits that all come together to make our previous setup slap harder. Your creatures won’t be hitting any more than normal, but when they do, they’re going to use their fapping hand. We all know that’s the strongest hand.
The Third: Ancestral Phoenix
The string that holds it all together. Except it’s really cool string. With LEDs on it. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ glowsticks. Woe betide the poor creature that tries to get in the way of you killing your own allies. The raw power of this trait will leave enemies wondering why your dudes just keep coming back for more.
Trust me, they love it really.
Class: Chaos. Again. I really really promise you’ll understand soon.
Personality: Shy or Bashful. I don’t know if you’re seeing a pattern here yet.
Scrolls: Speed. I am speed.
Traits
Lifebinder. The innate trait of the Ancestral Phoenix, it’s friendly fire apologism in action. When your creatures kill an ally, all your dead dudes are revived at 50% health. The numbers don’t matter. What matters is the fact you’ve just invoked a metric asstonne of Buffets, and your enemies are about to feel every last one of them.
Blending In, from the Cold Cockatrice. This is part of the puzzle that explains why our creatures are chaos class. At the start of battle, the last 3 creatures in your party become the same class as your first creature. We have to put this trait in before Regalis I believe, as based on information we know from how Panda Rebirth works, the team traits seem to trigger from left to right. I might be wrong on this one, but better safe than sorry.
Endurance Aura, from Phase Knight. Our artifact trait might seem a little weird for a team that likes dying, but this actually gives us a little insurance against the realm trait ‘damage reflect’. There is a certain kill order that, if we’re unlucky, will see us dead. This makes sure we can still pump out the damage we need without gibbing ourselves in the process.
Artifact
Stats: All speed, all the time. Be a speedy boy.
Trick: Rebirth on damage is a must. As for the second, I went for another Scorned on damage. Why? Because I can.
Spell: Rapture. You already know why by now.
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Class swap: Chaos.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Chaos.
Rapture: Generous, Magnetic, Class Swap: Chaos.
Just like before, we keep to our core on this one. Almost every creature we have uses this spell gem setup. It’s just so damn effective.
Summary
If the Royal Phoenix was the jazzy homebrew wine that you’re sure you put way too much of that one weird fruit you’ve never heard of in, this is the tried and true stuff from italy or something. Wherever wines famously come from. This is a really bad analogy, but basically we’ve got some nice, stable traits here.
As ever, Regalis makes sure that we’re sharing that innate trait not for any real benefit other than ensuring that, no matter what, we get its effect. This is a squishy team and you need all its moving parts to make it go.
The Fourth: Regalis, Goddess of Lust
So for some reason, the game lets us give Regalis the “bashful” personality. There is literally nothing bashful about Regalis.
Regalis makes this team tick in ways unimaginable. Despite how strangely we use the trait, she makes sure that no matter what, we’re doing our thing and we’re doing it right so that everyone can be sent right to horny jail.
She’ll probably do unspeakable things to them later. Better we pan the camera away before I get started with my flowery language.
Class: Life. Get pranked. This is where we can start branching out and doing some real creative stuff.
Personality: Shy or Bashful, in flagrant disregard for canon
Scrolls: Speed. Spiders ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ go, man. Have you ever seen a spider? They haul butt.
Traits
Brothel. As well as being about as on the nose as a brick to the face, this trait is why we choose Regalis over any other God Avatar. She makes sure that our non-stacking traits still affect us even when our squishy creatures are dead, and makes sure that important traits later in the build affect everything. It may seem like an odd choice, but even if you’re running Purgatorian where it doesn’t matter, there is still one trait in this build that necessitates this one.
Blessing of Sands, from Sphinx Ordainer. Because of a quirk in the order of changes I made to the build, this trait’s use won’t be immediately apparent. It basically makes the game think we have 3 more creatures of the Chaos class than we actually do – or rather, makes other Sphinx traits think that. This is important later.
Vext’s Invocation, boss trait material. This is a weird one. Now, I’m not entirely sure whether this affects the Apocalypse trait we have on our Volatile Phoenix, but the gist is that our stat boosts are 50% stronger. This means that, failing all else, all the ways we have to give our dudes more speed are more powerful. That means that, even if we’re not running Purgatorian, Gift of Scylla is giving us an even more hefty, but temporary boost.
Artifact
Stats: Speed. Come on now.
Trick: Rebirth on Damage. For some reason I also use Warded on Damage here. Probably a holdover from an old version of the build. You can basically use anything here.
Spell: Rrrrrrrrrrapture.
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Class swap: Life.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Life.
Rapture: Generous, Magnetic, Class Swap: Life.
In a stunning display of changing it up, we now run the class swap: Life enchantment! Will wonders never cease?
Summary
Regalis is another example of the “little by little” building blocks of this build. Nothing that Regalis does is impressive, at least in this setup, but she makes sure that what we do, we do consistently. That, and the innate trait the sixth creature has makes her so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worth it, plugging gaps in the build we never realised we had.
I mean until tier 3 chroma and flubris. Jerks.
The Fifth: Bile Slime
Gross.
The Bile Slime setup is one of the cornerstones of our build. If the Ancestral Phoenix is the offensive option, this is the defensive. I lovingly call this the “immortality setup”, because while it doesn’t make us totally immortal, it makes us FEEL immortal. Until the kill order goes wrong.
Then we just sort of weep in a corner for a bit, honestly.
Class: Life. It’s not a phase, mom.
Personality: Shy or Bashful, which honestly given how gross this thing is probably comes off as more of a blessing than anything else.
Scrolls: Speed. As in “get the hell away from me as fast as possible”.
Traits
Secret Recipe. After this creature is resurrected, your other creatures are resurrected as well. This is a bit of synergy with how this creature’s artifact trait works. But before we get into that…
Pharaoh’s Boon, from Sphinx Elder. 10% more useless, useless, defence, and speed. We redacted the stats that don’t matter and replaced them with more fitting words. With our team setup, that means we’re running 60% more speed for free. But wait, there’s more: remember Regalis’ fused trait?
90. 🙂
Myrtle’s Perseverence, boss trait material. This is what makes Bile Slime’s innate trait shine. When any creature is killed, this creature is resurrected with 100% health. Yes, before you say it, this wasn’t my idea. I’ll credit the relevant person later on, but basically this absolute cosmic brain strat gives us insane defensive options and helps mitigate one potential shortfall of the build by patching up a glaring killorder problem. It doesn’t solve it entirely, but would you argue with this multi-eyeballed freak of nature?
Artifact
Stats: Speed. We can’t stop running. My legs hurt.
Trick: Rebirth on Damage. For some reason I took Frozen on Damage as well, probably in protest for how crap Frost Phoenix is in this build. I promise, I tried.
Spell: Brrapture. I’m not proud of what I just did.
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Class swap: Life.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Life.
Flourish: Generous, More Charges, Healing Increased.
So in a departure from the norm, I decided to give this one a bit of extra utility. If, for some reason, everything has gone horribly wrong and this creature is the only one left alive, Flourish gets you out of this tough situation. It’s Generous because this could happen to any other creature. I think. Maybe. It’s also a holdover from an older version of the build. I just didn’t see much point in getting rid of it.
Summary
The Immortality Setup is a deeply flawed masterpiece. It neither renders us immortal nor really sets us up for all that much. It just helps us stay in the fight for longer, helping us win turn 0 duels by synergising with both itself and our sixth creature’s artifact trait.
The Bile Slime is also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disgusting and I want it to go away. It’s literally the only reason I might just restructure this entire team in the future.
The Sixth: Mogwai
Mogwai is basically the epitome of “oh god my team doesn’t do direct damage what do I do”. There’s a story behind this one. Around the time I was starting to bump into real legit issues with the lack of direct damage in my build, someone who was outspokenly a total newb had looked at my build and was like “you use regalis, why not use mogwai instead of bard balladeer?”.
So in short, I’m a massive idiot and that person basically revolutionised this entire build, letting me free up trait space used to try to prop things up in ways that were failing.
Class: Death. By now I’m sure you understand that these classes literally don’t matter.
Personality: Shy or bashful. Exactly like this thing shouldn’t be.
Scrolls: spid
Traits
No Sanctuary. This trait alone is probably enough to justify Regalis as our avatar choice. Instead of lame stats like attack or int, we use SPEED to scale our attacks and spells. This means we can pump literally everything we have into speed. Speed is the only stat that matters. Ever. Regalis ensures that all of our creatures benefit from this absolute gift of a trait.
Salted Earth, from Transient Spectre. This was a hard choice for me, but I figured that the best way to boost this build would be to lower enemy stats. Specifically, lower them by factors of their own stats so that this trait is always relevant, even when level disparity gets super high. This means that we need to change tack a little bit for this creature’s behaviour. We’ll cover this later in the macros.
Pandemonium Rebirth, statue trait Direct synergy with the fifth creature’s trait means that this creature will continually pick itself up as long as fifth creature is dead. There’s still room for poor kill order involving this one dying first, but there’s only so much you can do in this game to render yourself invincible.
A quirk of this trait means that it has to be on the rightmost creature. If your entire team is wiped by the same action, then Pandemonium Rebirth will only revive creatures to the LEFT of it. This is why I justify certain trait orders.
Artifact
Stats: Do I even need to tell you?
Trick: Rebirth, and another frozen on damage. I REALLY got mad at frost phoenix being bad. Honestly might think of a master of phoenixes style CC setup at some point.
Spell: Rapture go brrrrrrrrr
Spell gems
Dark Ritual: More charges, Generous, Chance to Defend. Past the second turn, we want to just randomly proc our Salted Earth trait whenever. Just for laughs.
Ethereal Knives: Damage increase, Magnetic, Class swap: Death.
Rapture: Generous, Magnetic, Chance to Defend. Yet again, we want to proc Salted Earth whenever we can.
Summary
Mogwai is the disaster management creature if ever there was one. Namely the disaster of my inability to make a team that makes any sense. He props up our ability to put our direct damage and generally just teabags on anything he doesn’t like.
What a cute little dude.
Desirable netherstones
Unless stated otherwise, you can safely assume that the netherstone choices here are good for every creature.
Stats
Generally we want to see as much speed here as possible. Now, we stack so much speed in general that we can forego speed on a netherstone in favour of every other desirable factor on a stone, because at this point an extra 20-50% speed (on your average semi-decent stone) isn’t going to do much for us, but in general, if you were to choose a stone based on stats alone, speed’s your game.
Spell procs
There’s really not much we can work with here. Here’s a list of possibilities. Before you ask: Yes, I had the codex up and I went through literally every spell gem, filtering out the “only vaguely useful” from the “yeah this’ll slap”. You’re very welcome.
- Abundance. A heal and a small universal statgain is pretty nice to have.
- Acid Rain. Because we already scale so much speed, lowering enemy defence is valuable. However, this might not scale well into the super endgame, as you really want to scale enemy defence loss off THEIR stats rather than yours.
- Affliction is never a bad choice. Free debuffs!
- Blur is really good for our build, especially since we scale our spell potency on speed. It lets us just… Get more speed, for free. If it’s on-defend, make sure it’s on the Mogwai.
- Charm of Life seems like Blur, but better. It gives us max health too, which seems a bit counterproductive given we like dying, but it offers us a buffer against potential poorly ordered teamwipes.
- Cyclone Strike is solid for raw damage. We wouldn’t want to manually cast this as its charges are smol, but as a nether stone proc? Aw yeah.
I’m going to edit this list later, I promise. ADHD kicked me and I wanted to get this guide out.
Basically the gist is “if it gives you speed, reduces enemy defence or damages stuff, all in an aoe, it’s a good one”.
Desirable Traits
We’re looking for stuff like Horde or Kindness here. Anything that lets us scale more speed to a significant level. Breath of the Dying offers nice utility since it’s a phoenix trait, though Thunderstruck is the direct opposite of useful due to the bizarre way Stone works. You also want to look for anything that lowers enemy defence stats.
Desirable relics
Honestly, this is the most boring part of the guide. The relics are not useful to us at all, outside of a couple of edge cases that are mostly due to the fact they give us stats. Even then, later on that won’t matter much. I’ll try my best to list what relics are best to use in general, but honestly? If it gives you speed, it’s what you need.
This section will be split up into two sections. How you should spend your Piety to make the most out of this build quickly, and what relics you want to run.
Budgeting a healthy birb
So to begin with, you want to get yourself a healthy base of relics. Focus primarily on the speed ones at first: those are your go-to sources of extra spice. Extra pizzaz. I managed to get my 6 relics up to level 50 (and then the rest up to 20 for achievements) before I had to worry too much, but your mileage may vary.
Once you’ve got your relics up a bit, you want to mosey on to the Enhance function on the altar. Your goal? Max out the Synergy perk. This will ensure that your relics benefit your entire team regardless of whether they’re equipped or not. Since none of the relics give us any significant direct benefit outside of stats, this is a vital change. Sprinkle a bit more around whatever utility suits you too, but don’t neglect the artifacts themselves, for in them lie achievements to boost your Piety gains.
So I have my speed: what artifacts do I want to run?
For a significant amount of time, you’re going to be hella leaning on your speed-based artifacts. Do not be afraid to max these out or at least put them to rank 50, as they’ll be a large part of your life.
In terms of what you want to run overall, though, I have a few choice picks for you
ASSKICKER, SPARE BOOT OF TORUN
This is an obvious pick. Timeline shenanigans to help keep you on top, speed boosts for basically free, and a bit of extra attack speed scaling as well. While few relics really give us much of the ‘oomph’ that many other builds might get from a relic, this is one of the standout few that give us some real pep in our step.
Put Asskicker on a high speed creature. Something that’ll really benefit from it.
Bloodseeker, Hungering Dagger of Mortem
Our build lacks in defence, and while you’d think that’s a good thing, it really isn’t. There’s the ever-present danger that your creatures die in a bad order, and that’s something you want to avoid.
Every time the holding creature deals damage with an attack or spell, it’ll give you a bit more of a HP buffer. Ranked up a little more, you’ll spread that benefit to all your team. A very comfy bit of kit.
Petra and Aes, War Drums of Meraxis
This is another really solid bit of kit for our team. Once again, we’ve got excellent speed boosting and scaling with very little in terms of dead perks. If you’re looking to max out a relic, max this one out and give it to your highest speed creature.
Salus, Jade Guardian of Lister
This is another nice defensive relic, and synergises well with Bloodseeker once you get it to rank 80. Increased max hp means that we’ve got even more of a defensive buffer, and by rank 100 this thing’s giving as much as it takes in terms of damage. I’d personally put this on the Mogwai, as he wants to be the last one dead.
Temptation, Bladed Whip of Regalis
This one isn’t the best, I’ll admit. It’s a long slog of an animation spammer and it really doesn’t do that much for us. With slim pickings, the tipper for this one is the rank 90 trait where the bearer gets 5% more speed each time the relic attacks.
Temptation attacks a lot.
Thousand Needles, Honed Bow of Apocranox
Okay, so it turns out that almost every speed-based relic is really good for us. This one is… less so, admittedly, but once again, there’s specific parts of this kit that really shine. Specifically, the multicasting. When the bearer of this relic starts dishing out Raptures and the like, it’s going to keep hitting. There’s really nothing more that can be said on the matter.
Materium, Shifting Gem of Aurum
A bit of an honourable mention, this one, and since it’s the 7th pick, consider this one merely a potential gamechanger for the future.
Opening up a wide variety of different spell gems for use without wasting a class change is nice, but what really makes this pop is the perk that makes it change a creature’s class based on the first spell gem equipped. We could potentailly remove one of our phoenix’s lower-impact chaos fuses and move into something much more effective, all at the cost of equipping this instead of something like Thousand Needles.
It’s something to consider.
Desirable cards
Siralim’s full of cute little buffs. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of what cards to get in what order, this should give you some idea of what cards to aim for when you start to struggle a bit.
This section will be updated as I discover more card sets.
I’m also going to avoid listing cards that are universally important, such as Griffons or Smiths, as such entries belong in their own guides.
Phoenix cards
This is a mandatory pick if you plan on pushing the lategame beyond your means. Raising the rez cap for your creatures is so goshdiddlydarn important. It’s just a shame that you need all the cards to get much out of this set.
Mite cards
Mites triple-dip into increased speed. Each tier of card perk offers you another 10% more speed from stat boosts, making Gift of Scylla and Dark Ritual offer you far more bang for their buck. I don’t know if this applies to the Harbinger and Sphinx traits, but god could you imagine?
Spectre cards
The 3-card perk for Spectre offers us a cheap 5% debuff to enemy defences, and the full set gives us a luck-based debuff to any enemy with defence on their artifacts. It helps us push endgame further, and after a while you’re going to want that boost.
Amaranth Cards
Because our team lacks defence, the Amaranth set is valuable to us. 5% more defence per card tier isn’t much, but it helps patch us up against some of the more moderate hitters.
Forsaken Cards
Just like with Amaranth cards, Forsaken offer us just a little extra boost with 1 more base defence per tier. This picks up quick.
Mas*chi*t Cards
Another case of ‘patch up our defences quick’ – 3% less damage per card tier up to a whopping 9%. By this point, you should be doing a lot better for yourself.
Pit Worm Cards
While this is a direct synergy with the Mite cards, given all our sources of speed tend to give us defence too, we don’t actually want to prioritise this one outside of use with Purgatorian. 10% more defence from stat-boosting effects doesn’t give us the punch we need, nor does it give us the permanent boost we need to survive. Again, Purgatorian mains will see this as higher value.
Macro setups
The macros I use are weird as hell and probably won’t make much sense to you. This is okay. I’m both autistic and really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid so honestly it’s probably for the best that you skip this and use your own judgement.
For those that can’t help but take a look, here’s an example of what I run, with explanations as to why I run them.
Phoenix 6 (the 6th slot)
If Ally (1) is dead, cast Flourish — This is a holdover from an old setup, but still very relevant. Since we want our first phoenix to be alive, at least when we’re not a Purgatorian, we tend to give it special low-risk treatment.
If this creature has taken <2 turns, defend — This is specific to the Mogwai, and ensures we proc Salted Earth at least a couple times. No other creature runs this.
If ally (5) has >0% Health, cast Dark Ritual on that creature — We check to the left, and look to see if our ally is dead. If they aren’t, we make them dead. This is all part of a poorly thought out setup to ensure we have a roughly equal amount of deaths across the team. It never works but it makes me feel better.
If ally (2) has >0% Health, cast Dark Ritual on that creature — We check to the right, skipping creature 1. This is because we want to avoid killing the harbinger trait in case something’s really wrong and we’re fighting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ elves. More on that later.
If ally (3) has >0% Health, cast Dark Ritual on that creature
If ally (4) has >0% Health, cast Dark Ritual on that creature — We basically checked the last two creatures that are eligible for sacrifice.
If this creature has Silenced, attack a random enemy. This is the epitome of laziness. Generally if you’re attacking you want to pick your target, but hold e go whee.
If enemy (all) has Invisible, defend. Pretty nobrainer honestly, but if you’re in a situation where any of the above failed, you’ve got way bigger problems than this.
If this creature has >0% health, attack a random enemy. This is the catch-all proc for if, somehow, literally everything else has failed us. Even then the game might just decide not to let us to anything. Should this be the case, I recommend curling up into a ball and weeping openly.
Build Weaknesses
No build in this game is without its flaws. This build fails in small, specific aspects that will be explored in a couple of different categories, and I’ll do my best to explain what you can do to avoid taking a big fatty L.
Realm modifiers
Since you’re a total gigachad and you run Realm Instability 5, you’re going to be facing a lot of adversity in the form of negative modifiers to your team. Now, there’s no way to avoid getting hidden traited into oblivion, but you can mitigate by rerolling out of visible traits.
Can’t Resurrect. This literally shuts our build down, but the small mercy here is that this never rolls as a hidden realm trait. Roll off on sight.
Maximum extra traits: 1. This is the worst thing that can happen to your team. Roll out of this on-sight.
Reduced speed. Reroll off of this. This is your only important stat, and it won’t be expensive to avoid.
Reduced indirect damage. This kind of sucks, but as long as you’re doing damage at all, you’re ok. Reroll if you care for efficiency over common sense, or if you’re in the extreme endgame where you’re desperate to actually kill things.
Can’t manually defend/provoke. This one hurts to see, but you generally don’t want to worry about it too much unless it rolls with too many other directly detrimental effects.
The rest of the traits should be fine generally. There’s a couple of universal problematic traits that I haven’t listed here, but if you’ve ever bumped into them you already know what to expect. If you don’t, then I’ll let you discover them yourself 🙂
Enemy traits
If you see elves, or fused elf traits, just shut down your pc and go outside. Failing that, play aggressive against Hate and Other Triumph, and Justice and Other Fallacies. Those traits shut you down hard.
Shadow Bulwark is also a trait that can cause you problems, but Rapture procs should see to this.
Bosses
The two names that should strike fear into your heart are Chroma and Flubris. These two nerds are immune to indirect damage, and are pretty much the sole reason aside from elves and shadow bulwark that we run Mogwai. They’re also total ♥♥♥♥♥ because they can just be immune to whatever they feel like.
Surprisingly, Andrick isn’t much of a threat to us. He tends to be a problem boss for a lot of players, but this build should see to him well enough. Because we’re total gigachads who don’t use conventional means to win.
GOTG: What modifications to make
This build can generally deal with almost all of the GOTG encounters, but there’s a few edge cases where you need to make specific moves to help deal with them. This build has been tested against level 10, where most of the easier to attain achievements reside. I’ll keep you posted if I manage level 50.
Aeolian, God of Wind The big birb is basically Chroma but more obnoxious. Since you can prep for this one better, bring a Timewalking gem with Generous, and put it on your fastest creature. That’s the one that’ll be casting it the most. Cycle him to Chaos, but not too soon, and consider making use of Regalis’ Seduction sooner rather than later.
Azural, God of Frost. Frosty the Snowman here should go down easy enough if you run Warden. It’s free buffs for just doing what you do.
Friden, God of the Sea. This is a tough one, and until I learn about Mogwai my only recourse would have been to use Muster. It’s still a solid spell, since it should scale off of Friden’s stats and make him gib himself, but if you run Cleric, you should be in with a shot at killing him with kindness. Just hope that your immortality and panda setups keep you alive. Failing that, Purgatorian should do you fine through raw stats alone.
Gonfurian, God of War. Play as Necromancer, and play defensively. He basically gives you this fight for free. There is wisdom in using Lister in your first slot for this fight however, as by the time you’ve cycled a few deaths, you’ll just stop caring about incoming damage.
Lister, God of Fortune You don’t need to do anything special for this fight, though I recommend that, since you won’t have Lister yourself at first, you look to the Apocalypse traits for a defence buff. Specifically Zarox Apocalypse, who has the damage reduction trait that Lister’s avatar folds into his innate.
Tartarith, God of Punishment Again, nothing special, but here you really want to NOT be defensive. Let your creatures die, play Purgatorian, and just keep letting him duel you. You’ll keep reviving and slapping him back.
Tenebris, God of Shadows. Mass Dispel. Very good spell.
The Earlygame: broadstrokes and tips
So I have like 900 hours in this game, so I don’t remember much of the earlygame. I remember going into this idea hard though, and I’d started as an Animator. The Animatus sucking up all those delicious phoenix and rez traits was just an amazing treat to behold, and allowed me to bruteforce almost the entire mainstory.
Creatures to look out for early on are Wights especially. Resurrection Code is an amazing trait that, if you stick it on a few creatures, will give you some slightly shaky but surprisingly consistent self-revival. You shouldn’t have to get too lucky to get Pandemonium Rebirth, and your full compliment of Phoenixes should be easy to get early on.
You start with a Unicorn Vivifier, so consider investing into the early Hounds as well. Dire Wolves is a really good trait for you to build on early, as they trigger on-attack and scale from your speed stat. Seriously, this carried my earlygame and I highly recommend you go for it.
Transitioning into your midgame, up to real depth 500, you should start looking into working towards the full team. You want to have a Mogwai/Regalis setup by the time you fight the nether bosses for the third time, as that’s when things get really problematic for you, especially in terms of Flubris and Chroma. Thankfully Regalis isn’t a very difficult fight, so she’s an easy get early on.
Don’t be afraid to play around with the goblet early on. Avoid Grovetender and Hell Knight, as well as Evoker and Cabalist early on, as they don’t really give you all that much benefit. Later on you can use them like any other class because your build will stand on its own.
Final Summary
This build is hella unique. Asking in the discord for help with this was like asking someone to tell me where the needle was in a particularly big haystack that was also on fire: it’s just a concept that people don’t really bother with.
Well I bothered with it.
Mathematically I didn’t really do much: it was all theorycraft. Anybody that knows the game better than I do would be a far better fit to help optimise this build, and I’m very open to suggestions about how I could do it better. I enjoyed making this build a lot, and while I really want to make another build, I don’t know if I have it in me.
Credits for certain setups are as follows.
G*y Monster Aunt gave me the headsup on the Bile Slime Immortality Setup. Very nice and slick and cool.
Armadi in the Thylacine Studios Discord is the dude that gave me the idea for the Mogwai, and helped me theorise on a couple of things that really broke this build wide open. Couldn’t have done it without you bud.
Raikomaru for sitting with me for half a day theorycrafting an entire rebuild of my team when I changed from Lister to Regalis. He helped a whole bunch.
I hope you guys enjoy this build as much as I did. This guide took me hours to write. It’s time for me to relax and do what I do best.
Kill my own dudes and win.
This is all about Siralim Ultimate – The Phoenix Ritual: Because friendly fire is still fire; I hope you enjoy reading the Guide! If you feel like we should add more information or we forget/mistake, please let us know via commenting below, and thanks! See you soon!
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