Wind Best End-Game Dodge Build (King of the physical meta)

This guide is part of my article series on wind builds. If this build is not to your likeing, have a look at the rest of my builds on the wind build page. I have multiple builds for any taste available, IB, PvE, arena/ToS builds and F2P/cheap builds.

• Kills holy and earth whales
• No special ToK skills required

This article is on hard countering physical damage dealing marches with Wind. As you know, there are many whales with holy and earth mains, which makes a strong counter to physical damage extreemly powerful in Infinity Kingdom’s current meta (currently on patch 2.3).

Wind is NOT free-to-play friendly. You NEED to spend a fair bit to be able to run wind at any level, simply because wind dragon shards are very hard to come by.

Strengths and weaknesses

This is a very strong build that works as a hard counter to other players running physical builds such as Earth, Earth Hybrid and Holy. However, for the player who needs a wind main to do everything with, you are in luck. This build has immense sustain making it excellent also in PvE gnome raiding.

However, it sucks versus bosses (don’t use wind for that ever…) and it is also VERY WEAK against fire teams. This build is hardcountered by dual-mage fire (see page). If you are running this as your main, you should make a second formation with this build if up against anyone using fire magic.

How does it work

1. Physical damage as cleave and backline-nuke (with Qin unique artifact) we can melt backlines quickly.
2. Strong sustain with auras, wind-protection and Charles’ insane shielding.
3. Dodge dodge and more dodge! Dodge is insanely powerful and much underrated by many players. In the physical meta a strong dodge build is absolute insanity!

Physical damage

We are dealing solid cleave and backline damage pressuring any setup into dropping those squishy backlines quickly. Even against assist + absolute defense backline setups, Atalanta and Barca will make quick work of the enemy backline. This is because we are using Qin’s Unique Artifact effect making Barca cleave beyond the nearest enemies.

Sustain

We are running Berserk for it’s attack speed (scaling well with both Atalanta and Barca) but also providing us a solid sustain booster. Especially against non-wounds setups, you will see surprising large effects from Berserk healing in a wind setup. The slow-sustain fits well with the dragon healing and with shielding giving a buffer for slow HoTs (healing over time effects) to take effect.

Dodge

Furthermore, because we are running a dodge-build here, we take full advantage of Wind Protection offering massive healing to your Barca because we are boosing his dodge chance massively. To dodge we take advantage of Missleading and After Image in combination with your dragon’s Turmoil Breath accuracy debuff.

The result of running all these in synergy, is a massive reduction to enemy hit rate and a very good chance for your Immortals to dodge enemy physical attacks. Dodging is a very powerful defensive capability, since we are not merely reducing damage taken but are not taking ANY damage at all from a dodged attack. As such, the Hannibal Barca I fought below, misses 67% of his attacks meaning a TON of damage is mitigated.

Even against coercion setups, we are still getting consistent dodges for massive damage reduction and heal-procs. This is from testing against my main’s Alexander the Great with Coercion from his support backline.

The Build setup

Emperor Qin: Coercion + Assist + After Image
Atalanta: Missleading + Death Breath + Anger
Hannibal Barca: Cleave + Duel Master + Wind Protection
Charles: Berserk + Oaken Guard + Adrenaline Rush

Emperor Qin is run with Coercion to make sure we are missing as few attacks as possible. Assist to retain the troop count of our Atalanta. This is very important, since she is our main damage Immortal. Furthermore, we have After Image for that dodge boost, a very important passive for this dodge-synergy build.

Atalanta is all about damage, hence we run Death Breath and Anger. If you are able to get Desire, then you should use that and give DB to Barca or loose an aura. Lastly, we are running Missleading, against as a crucial part of our dodge build.

Hannibal Barca we use for a combination of damage pressure and sustain making sure we stay alive long we use our dodge chance to boost our sustain on Barca further with Wind Protection. Likewise, we make sure that the healing procs from Wind Protection as well as the healing from Berserk and Wind Dragon’s Breath cannot be nullified by wounds effects, by running Duel Master on Barca. We also enjoy the boost to physical attack which works nicely with our fast attack speed and Cleave immortal.

Lastly, on Charles we are running Berserk aura boosting attack speed of all our Immortals and providing a nice sustain to this high speed setup. Works well in synergy with Qin’s attack speed Ultimate Ability. Besides that, we have the must-have Passive Oaken Guard to reduce that incoming physical damage, as well as Adrenaline Rush to provide a huge boost to his energy regen and working even better than normally since we get so many boosts to attack speed in this build.

Wind Dragon is a bottleneck problem

The wind dragon sould fragments are much more difficult to come by then other elements such as earth, lightning, fire and water. This can be a big problem for some players. Wind can be very very powerful, but once you get to a point where your enemies have 5-5-10 dragon talents (like my earth below) Then your wind begins to be challenged.

Especially, because there is a lot of accuracy talent nodes reducing the effectiveness of your dodge-build significantly. Despite this, you will NEVER become obsolete – others merely get a chance if they fight you with a max dragon while yours remain wholly unupgraded.

When I test against some of the absolute best physical setups in the game (holy-khan, earth-wind hybrid and earth-khan) this wind setup is on equal footing with wind dragon at 1-1-10. Sometimes this wind looses to max out dragon setups, but with a few Dragon talents, your wind will become competitive again. At 3-1-10 I consistently begin to beat my maxed main earth-Khan, my holy and my earth-wind hybrid again.

Furthermore, if you are able to complete the wind dragon talent tree, your march overtakes anything I am able to set up besides a heafty fire main. The problem with Wind is that the Dragon Talents are so expensive. But if you can get them, wind is an absolute beast if you build it as a physical counter!

Improving the dragon into a 3-1-10 means that the wind march becomes very very powerful and I cannot kill it with anything I have besides fire!

Conclusion

Ultimately, even without spending to upgrade your dragon, this setup will perform very very well at the highest levels of end-game content. Furthermore, if you are able to get even a few levels in the dragon tree – your quickly become unstopable!

Lastly, if you are a spender and wants to maximize the potential of this setup. You level up the dragon talents 5-1-10 then 5-5-10 (take Claw and Armor major nodes BEFORE upgrading Stormy Breath. And you can even add Manco instead of Charles if you want to really max out this setup. By adding Manco, we further add to the dodge rate of this team, boosting our defenses enough to make up for loosing Charle’s shields and adding a ton of damage!

Published: 01-12-2022