Fire – Cleo support

This guide is part of my article series on Prime League Illusion Builds. If this build is not to your likeing, have a look at the rest of my builds on the main Prime League page.

During round 1, 2 and 3 of Prime League Pre-League 2023, this build has been one of my favorites. It is a pretty standard fire build but run with Cleo in the backline for high amounts of damage mitigation. We are building magical damage defense to overcome enemy fire pump teams.

This build focuses on magic damage and on reducing the enemies energy regen while securing magical defense and lowering enemy magical damage dealt significantly. The idea is simple, when enemies deal less damage you keep more troops and you deal more damage in return!

In addition we are using Cleo to pump some damage and to apply her Magical Damage Reduction debuff.

Setup

The setup is all about getting a crits and surviving long enough to make them count! There are a few general things you should be aware of in IB Prime League. With every round we have only 50 Violets more to spend. We are can’t max very many passives and must choose very carefully.

Empress Wu: Death Breath + Annihilation + Chase
All around just solid damage passives. We boost our magic damage and then pump as hard as we can.

Cleo: Malice + Assist + Absolute Defense
So basically Cleo is there to deal a surprisingly large amount of magical damage while maintaining her magical damage debuff on the enemy. Furthermore, she supplies assist on Wu in combination with Absolute Defense providing massive survive on both your backline Immortals (Wu and Cleo). This maintains high backline troop count and gives a huge edge.

William: Missleading + Energy Suppression + Rage Blessing
William is our Buff machine. We need Crit buffs from him. Other then that he deals a decent off damage but mostly we are using him as a support. You can opt to go more offensive and remove some of the defense from resist or missleading in favor of blessing of war and fighting will, but for now no one runs coercion hence missleading is huge value.

Hippolyta: Adrenaline Rush + Weakness + Resist
We are playing the energy-game. Thus, Adrenaline rush on our Hippo allow us to both deal more damage and put a further hamper on enemy energy regen. We want to maximize the number of hits from Hippo reducing the enemy ultimate-count massively! We are expecting to take a lot of hits on this build, since we are not maxing regen but instead doing mitigation. Hence high level resist on top of Cleo’s debuff hamstrings any magical damage dealers quite nicely.

Furthermore, we want to enjoy both the nice boosts of Blessing buffs as well as the dragon damage buff that these activate for our Wu. We are getting buff uptime secured via Rage blessing / resist and William’s ultimate.

Strengths and weaknesses

This setup is built around nuking the enemy hard with magic damage. This build performs very well against most all fire builds. It was created speficically for this very purpose too. We rely on the elemental advantage to pump damage on Merlin whilst boosting our energy regen passives and debuffs to get ahead in the burst game. As such, we perform quite well against fire setups.

Published: 25-05-2023