Non-Row Gremory Teams? THEY EXIST?!?!
Since Gremory was released in North America I’ve occasionally used him for different purposes and even bought a Plum for him the same day I rolled him. But something always felt off… Coming from Myr that was extremely easy to play, I found myself unable to consistently row, cross and clear all other combos.
There was a dilemna.
Unlike his brother Ronove, Gremory only comes with 1 TE and row requirement is generally a bit harder than straight combos or TPAs.
That’s when it struck me…
Designing a Gremory Team
When I first started playing Gremory and trying to design teams for A3 I came to a few dilemmas.
- Time extends are a thing. To be able to consistently clear the full board every turn, time extends are helpful for the majority of PAD players.
- Active skill rotations because Gremory needs it for full activation (which is required to clear floors in A3).
- Utility requirements mean system builds and solo can be harder since less slots to put all the actives.
- (Optional) for coop, double the cooldown for subs.
Time extends are a thing, except that a lot of dark subs that fit on Gremory had 0-1. Akechi has a whopping 0 even though his active is one of the strongest changers for Grem (if not the strongest). APanda has 1. Plum has 1. Laila has 0. The list continues. It was not looking great.
Just 7c, row and cross with just 2 TE
I saw this pretty often when it came to Gremory discussions or people offering “help” for Gremory (just run 4 Akechis his active is the best!).
Sure, I’m certain that there are some people that are fine doing that but for the majority of PAD players having TE either improves their max combo count significantly or at the very least makes comboing a lot more leisurely. Sure I could activate Radra on 4-5s but being able to start a combo without even looking at the board and still 8c is pretty leisurely and relaxed.
Let’s look at some simple math:
Let’s say that every 2 TE after the first 2 on Grem means 1 more combo (starting at 2). Up to 10 TE or consistent 6 combo. Assume 10 rows.
First case, low TE, 2 combos total (cross and row)
Multiplier for leader skill: 144x
Row multiplier: 2x
Team attack: 16000
Multiplier for linked orbs: 1.75x
Combo multiplier: 1.25x (2)
Total damage: 16000 x 144 x 2 x 1.75 x 1.25
Total damage: 10,080,000
Second case: high TE, 6 combos total (cross, row, 4 other non-dark)
Others: Same as above
Combo multiplier: 2.25x (6)
Total damage: 16000 x 144 x 2 x 1.75 x 2.25
Total damage: 18,144,000
Wow, that’s quite the difference!
Also consider that if you’re going to be clearing so many orbs per turn, you’ll be able to consistently activate without needing orbs from actives (while this doesn’t seem important for a normal Grem team that’s using actives every turn to kill, it plays a role in the alternative Grem strategy).
More combos = more damage
Don’t downplay the value of TE.
There are a few more things to take away from that overall example.
10m is not a one shot on all enemies in A3. That hypothetical damage would not kill Grisar, Meimei, Lifive, and would generally be fairly weak against the Radars and Kalis.
If you’re only clearing cross and row every turn, using a Plum (say by a system) per turn will generally not give you enough orbs to activate every turn. Using two actives on a turn outside of say killing Kali is inefficient.
Combo shields will pose a high threat.
Making system builds generally means lacking utility and being open to issues.
The general system is considered to simply be Grem / Plum x 4 / Grem and you can use a Plum per turn. Plums are bindable so that leaves you with 2 slots to add utility or to leave empty so that you can bind clear + generate orbs when necessary. Let’s say you leave 1 Grem open for this purpose, that leaves you with 1 slot. What are you doing with that 1 slot? Delay? Vishnu could decide to destroy your ___ if he wanted to. Spike for Kali? Shield / Fujin for Radar possibilities?
This isn’t getting us very far.
This leads me to generally produce for coop setups more since A3 has quite high utility requirements which means running less utility if you’re solo and therefore introducing RNG in spawn possibilities.
If you’re running coop then both Gremory leads will need to be left open. This is because subs will charge extremely slowly compared to the leads in coop. Therefore, when considering coop, most actives will only be used once or twice so having longer cooldowns on subs is not a problem (such as Fujin).
Making an Alternative Gremory Team
Matching requirements between rows and TPAs are significantly different. There are 6 ways to position a row (higher orb requirement too) while there are 27 ways to position a TPA on a standard 6×5 board (both excluding cascade possibilities).
Remember the first point about TE? Running TPA based teams could lighten the matching requirement and allow for more efficient matching on lower TE teams.
However, in the past when Grem first came out, options were limited to cards such as Kakkab, Jizz, Whale Panda. The first two being the more common ones that people would have while Whale Panda is definitely not something most of us would have.
One interesting thing to note is that Jizz is a 2 turn active which makes him very effective for consistently activating Grem often especially in solo.
By this point it should be clear that the purpose is to have a TPA based Grem team and we’ll be using Jizz for consistent activation.
Back on Grem release however, the TPA options were horrible.
However, one big addition came with Cecil in the FF collab. (Technically not a new addition but came back around shortly after Grem’s release and worked perfectly for this)
However, myself and many others only came out with one Cecil, so what could we do about that?
I was excited when I saw Hinomitsuha.
But why did she have to be god type?!?!
Lucky for us wanting to play these builds, Grem got buffed to include god typing (which she should have had from the beginning).
This opened up a few options, namely Yomidragon and Hinomitsuha.
The team I run:
Grem / Hinomitsuha (Utility) / Hinomitsuha (Utility) / Cecil / Jizz (Board Changer)
Hinomitsuha fulfils the same 2TE 2TPA that Cecil does and is a low CD base for inheriting the utility.
In coop with a mirror team it would look more like:
Player 1:
Grem (Ishida) / Hinomitsuha (Orochi) / Hinomitsuha (Fujin) / Cecil / Jizz (Board Changer)
Player 2:
Grem (Ishida) / Hinomitsuha (Facet/Sheen) / Hinomitsuha (Flex) / Cecil / Jizz (Board Changer)
This leaves you a spare slot to run a utility. Cecils for full boards in situations where you want to remove junk from the board (jammers before Lak, Mortals from Grisar, full poison board from Beelze), Grems and Jizz can be used to activate frequently between both players (will still require stalling a couple turns here and there), utility to handle all the spawns in A3. Flex can be an additional shield (Indra, Raph, Ganesha, Susano. With Dark Susano coming out you can inherit an on-color shield now), unlocker (might help with Ilsix) or just a spare active like a board.
Now, this same idea for a team composition can still be applied to row based Gremory teams but this is meant as a concept TPA Gremory.
A similar setup with row based subs might feature something like Pandora / Plum / Plum / Yukari. What works for you / what you have available is obviously the most important thing to consider.
And just an update, Plum received her buff this week so she now has 2 TPA and 2 Rows, making her an extremely strong, high stat, card with an active that has synergy with the leader skill. So with the buff Plum can replace Hino easily.
Hopefully you learned something from reading this and stay tuned for more guides!