Fire – Merlin elemental advantage

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 classic fire build that pure and simple gets you ahead in energy and wins on initial rounds of burst damage.

This build focuses on magic damage and on reducing the enemies energy regen. The idea is simple, that with everything being low level and without tech, VIP and other buffs, no passive is going to be dealing insane damage at this point. Hence, we are reliant on the Ultimate Abilities to cause the majority of the damage dealt in these early rounds (until violet count catches up atleast). This means Hippolyta is a lot stronger here than in normal play. Reducing the energy regen of your enemies significantly while your own Empress Wu wreck havoc on the enemy troop count along side your dragon.

In addition we are using Merlin to pump some damage using the elemental advantage water has over other fire teams. He does this quite nicely.

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. The below is based on being in round one. The next skills to upgrade are continuations on Wu damage as well as more rage blessing regen and higher levels on malice and energy suppression. We are can’t max very many passives and must choose very carefully.

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

Merlin: Malice + Concentration + Annihilation
Basically we are just pumping more magical damage. As we are prioritising energy regen in rage blessing as well as upgrading energy suppression on our frontline (coming up) we are comfortably able to secure ultimate casts before our enemy. That is the entire focus of this build, get skills off first and as the biggest possible amount. Hence we use Merlins water counter to fire for added damage.

William: Energy suppression + missleading + resist
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 and everyone run fire Wu damage so resist value is through the roof!

Hippolyta: Adrenaline Rush + Weakness + Rage Blessing
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 also want to max our own energy regen, hence a maxed rage blessing is a priority. Adding weakness is just more damage which we always like!

Furthermore, we want to enjoy both the nice level 1 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