Renoafags guide for newfags

What is CZN? Give me a summary of what to expect?

Chaos Zero Nightmare is a turn based card battling gacha game which will be mechanically familiar to any Slay the Spire player. The “hook” has been until recently that you take your slay the spire deck out of the roguelike run (from now on referred to as “Chaos”) and use it for your daily farming and end game modes. Your day to day will look like any other gacha of burning your stamina for materials to level up/strengthen your combatants. Your end game will add deck farming and min maxing your units to successfully complete end game content. Smilegate is also currently pushing a new “sortie” mode that leans more into the slay the spire roguelike aspect of the game, where you do NOT get to keep your deck after the run. This mode may become Smilegates vision for the game to avoid the burn out a lot of the community has felt from the aforementioned deck farming.

Ok, sounds fun. What should I reroll for?

Rerolling is a waste of your time. As long as your not leaderboard chasing (and leaderboard rewards suck anyway) you can complete all content in the game with the 4 stars, let alone adding in any premium units. That said, if you are obsessed with a “perfect” start. Aim for a generic strong support unit. Narja (Healing + Multi hit support), Veronica (Draw support, pot of greed is good), Tiphera (Single target damage support + healer), Orlea (Single target damage support OR vulnerable status slave + healer) would be your reroll targets. Hugo (card draw support and sub DPS) and Renoa (can cosplay Veronica but better with the right build [ergo only OUT of Chaos can she support]) are lower priority supports, especially since Renoa is a DPS in roguelike content. Supports are applicable to more teams than DPS’s and therefore have more account value.

Every unit can clear? Does that mean there is no power creep?

We’re only 6 months in, but the base launch roster still has the three theoretically strongest DPS characters in the game, Luke, Kayron and Mei Lin. Their infinite scaling cards have not been replicated conceptually since launch. Two other infinite scalers (Cassius and Tressa) were nerfed and had their infinite scaling removed. Luke and Mei Lin are forever potential man and potential woman as a new boss keyword was introduced to hamper their infinite scaling (with some other combatants such as chizuru, suffering collateral damage). Kayrons infinite scaling has been left alone but takes to long in most content for it to be relevant.

Does this mean that since nobody post launch has powercrept the base roster that we don’t experience power creep?

Yes and no. We have a different, but in some peoples eyes, equally large issue to contend with instead. Every “Season” (9 week period) directly shills a mechanic. The end of Season 1 (And the start of this direction) shilled ravage (Breaking tenacity bar). Season 2 shilled Single target damage and Season 3 will be shilling discarding. You can clear (get all relevant rewards) all content with non shilled units. However, if you want to leaderboard chase, you need to play the meta which will often involve rolling the latest unit who plays into the shill mechanic. There are exceptions, notably for one half of season 2 Kayron actually surpassed the shill banner unit and the first half of season 1 had a very weak conceptual shill that allowed unnerfed infinite scalers to dominate. Basically, dont buy into leaderboard FOMO and you wont feel as annoyed about seasonal shilling. Early in your account life, you may be missing units that play into the seasonal mechanic, if thats the case then you may want to roll the FOMO shill unit for QoL but at that point, the fomo shill is also a investment for whenever that mechanic gets shilled again.

Ok. I’ll keep in mind that every season I’m being actively shilled at. I’m still new though. What’s my focus?

Play around with the units you’ve rolled in Chaos. Do weird team comps and shenanigans. You should be able to take your units to level 30 and play a two layer Chaos without having spread your resources to thin. Find two team comps you really enjoy and will be making into your “Clears Basin” teams. Then invest in those 6 units. Supports dont necessarily need their potentials maxed, but they definitely need a good deck farmed. DPS’s will want potentials maxed. If you can multi task and play into the seasonal shill so that you also can clear Nebula Distortion (Basin but a single increasing difficulty boss fight), all the better.

Any advice on team comp building?

Read your combatants cards and look for either specific synergy (ex. Kayron wants to exhaust his cards to enable his degeneracy, Tiphera can exhaust other combatants cards) OR generic usefulness (Mika gives AP, Narja gives cost reduction, Veronica gives card draw). Typically you’ll combine something generically useful with some specific synergy that a support will have with another DPS. Though there’s nothing wrong with two specific synergies working with a DPS (Ex. Tiphera and Orlea both boost a single hit, Nine is a single hitter). Don’t be afraid to experiment, the only cost of building a deck is time.

Ok, I found my team comps. What’s this memory fragment thing? How much should I worry about it?

It’s hell, but you can mitigate the pain. Account level 40 unlocks highest rarity fragment farming (technically you can farm it at account level 30 via chaos runs, but doing a chaos run just to spend stamina is a real nice way to burn yourself out). Typically, until acct level 40 you’ll upgrade your frags just enough to make your highest difficulty available content smooth to deal with. Once you’re at account level 40 the memory fragment grind begins. However, I have good news for you. Most 4 piece sets in the game are not worth farming. Instead you farm 2 piece attack (or defence, for defence scalers), 2 piece crit damage and 2 flexible pieces. 4 piece sets with 2 piece crit damage is usually stronger than 2/2/2 BUT its not a significant margin. In some cases less than a 5% performance boost and in the most extreme of cases only a 10% boost. In exchange you get to save your mental health and build more of your units which again, is more important because you need more and more coverage for all the different shilling.

The crit ratio to aim for is 50/200 or 60/180. They give you the same result. (You can also be in the middle ex. 51/198, 52/196, etc). You can do better than those numbers, but thats the “optimal” ratio without making you want to kys. For supports that dont attack, dont stress about your fragments, correct primaries is all you need (note healing scales off defence NOT health) 2 piece defence 2 piece health is often fine, though there has been an increase in good 4 piece sets for supports such as Glory’s Reign. Read the support sets, see if your supports can fulfill their conditions. If so, 4 piece support set and 2 piece defence is the way to go.

I’m geared up. I have my core 6 level’d, potential’d and ready to take on the world, but my decks feel bad out of Chaos. What should I be doing?

Identify a core card (and specific epiphany for that card) to center the combatants deck around. This card is what you will copy in Chaos and should also indicate their role. For example, with Veronica the card may be Repose to draw 2 other combatant cards, with the epiphany for cost reduction. Veronicas role will be drawing cards for faster deck cycling.
Identify any cards that do not support the plan. Veronica’s Pendant of Resolution and Bombardment prep enhance her sub DPS potential. I do not care (in this scenario) about her sub DPS potential. These 2 cards are my removal targets (alongside her basic cards). My finished deck will look like 4 repose’s, a firing prep and a Sir Kowalski.

Let’s pick someone else. Haru will be my DPS. Her build will be centered around Anchor shot, the one that combo’s for a extra hit. If I want to maximize playing that anchor shot and getting the second hit every time, I’m going to want to see it more and play a justice card beforehand. Duplicating Anchor Pointer fulfills those goals. I will remove Power charge (alongside basics, as always) as it doesn’t contribute to the goal. Charge Energy and Lift Anchor both make my Anchor shot better and will be left in the deck.

That’s it. There are only a handful of combatants who want to spread their dupes between multiple cards. 4 of the same card is usually the way to play and for the few exceptions, you’ll still have a great deck with 4 of the same card.

I’m now able to clear everything! How do I optimize?

Welcome to end game hell, hopefully you don’t burn out doing this. To optimize you should be playing your entire deck every rotation. This means hunting for a combination of AP and Draw divines and engaging in deckbuilding that allows you to cycle through your deck ASAP. Count how much AP it costs to play your deck, count how many cards are in your deck. Make it line up so that you achieve both goals. Or don’t. You don’t need to min max if you’re not a leaderboard chaser. However, if you’re going to min max, that’s the short answer to it. You’ll need to run a tier 15 chaos with nightmare mode enabled so you can have both 4 copies of a card with 4 divines and all basics removed. Some characters you may need to have only 3 copies for extra draw/ap divines. Have fun. (Why are you doing this to yourself?)

I HATE farming Chaos it’s so annoying! How do I make this easier on myself?

In terms of divine RNG farming. You don’t. Either you get the divine you were after on the correct epiphany or you dont. However, what you can do to make life easier is find two characters to serve as a “wheelchair”. A combination where no matter the epiphanies these two characters have, no matter the fact they have no dupes and whatever basic equipment you find, no matter who the third character is you can clear the chaos run. Your wheelchair might change based on the chaos you’re running but having two characters that can solo a chaos run makes your life much easier while you focus on that third unit. Most wheelchairs tend to use Mika for her spectacular sustain and stress removal, but she has a lot of junk cards that clog your deck. Figure out your wheelchair.

Are Ego Manifestations any good?

For most units, no. There are a handful of “good” Ego’s in the game: Haru E6 (her E2 has too much damage reduction, Narja E6 (More cute than good, unlocks a entire new play style) and Tiph E2/E6 (genuinely great dupes!). For the most part dupes in this game are not worth it. The new limited has an E6 that might join the ranks of good dupes, but need more playtesting time.

Outside of the aforementioned dupes, every other dupe tends to fall into two categories.

QoL. Rin getting her stance at the start of turn, Sereniel putting extra lasers into her starting deck. Dupes like these just make the unit more smooth to play. In Sereniel’s case her E2 allows her to become a wheelchair for chaos runs. However, they dont actually make the unit stronger in non Chaos content. They’re just quality of life.
Absolute ass. Diana E2 is a good example. It’s a Renoa Instant Judgement, upgrade epiphany, that is played at the start of battle for free. If you play Diana’s mechanic it should do triple the damage of Instant judgement. This is garbage. You’re spending two character rolls for a imaginary +1 draw +1 ap at start of battle free upgrade. And as has been mentioned numerous times, you need numerous characters to cover different kinds of shilling. Sure, this isn’t the most offensive one (holy crap does Renoa and Magna E2 suck sooooo mucccchhhh) and theres even an argument to be made its in category one, but my point is that a lot of dupes just dont have enough value to justify the performance boost. This isn’t HSR/genshit/wuwa/whatever the fuck is popular these days, dont roll dupes unless you see a whale actually making a difference with them or you have good enough kit evaluation to figure out the value of a dupe.

What do I spend the bonus pull currency on? Dupes? Partners? Rolls?

This is a question of values.

Do you value having the best currency : pulls saved ratio?

Dupes are the best. They save you up to 140 rolls for 400 cost, vs partners saving you up to 70 rolls for 300 cost or pulls just only giving you 40 pulls. And if its for one of the few broken dupes like Tiph E2 or Haru E6, great power spike.

Do you value vertical investment?

Every partner is a notable increase in combatant power. Not anything to write home about, but its notable. Better than two dupes most of the time.

Do you value roster variety?

Get more pulls.

Based on https://pastebin.com/8VD9xrrT