Heretical Ruins – Dungeon Guide

Heretical Ruins is a dungeon in Dragonheir: Silent Gods where we can farm Positive Runes, a secondary gear slot that is unlocked after reaching Rank 4 on your heroes.

In this guide we will aim to tackle any questions you might have and help you to be able to clear this dungeon to the highest stage, of course, your heroes’ levels will impact this, so ensure they are at the maximum level that you can currently reach for the best chances of success!

With each new Season of Dragonheir, the bosses receive some tweaks to how they work, the base of this guide will focus on Season 1 Heretical Ruins to cover the basics, and we will then cover the Season 2 and Season 3 variants towards the end of the article.

As mentioned above, this dungeon drops Positive Runes which fill the slot unlocked by reaching Rank 4 (Level 70-90).

There are 3 rarity tiers of gear that drops in the Heretical Ruins, Rare, Epic, and Legendary.

Runes, unlike standard gear pieces, require a matching element to the hero you are trying to equip them on, for example, a Poison Hero must use Poison Element Runes.

Positive Runes can come in an array of Primary attributes:

• Attack
• HP
• Defense
• Enlightenment
• Crit Damage

In terms of Secondary Attributes, they can have anything, apart from the matching attribute to the primary, an example here is an Enlightenment rune cannot have Enlightenment on the secondary attributes.

So, collecting the perfect Positive Runes for your heroes can be frustrating, as often you will struggle to find the perfect mix of Primary and Secondary Attributes.

Heretical has 3 active skills for you to worry about, and just the one passive skill, which all bosses have, however, the first active skill will be cast twice per rotation of the boss.

Control Immunity [Passive]
Immune to all control effects.

Scorch [Battle Skill]
Spews fireballs at the current enemy and splashes on all enemies inflicted with Burn, dealing Fire Damage.

Nirvana [Battle Skill]
Induces the hatching of all phoenix eggs. If at least one Dead Phoenix Nestling is reborn consequently, Dead Phoenix gains Invisibility for 12.0s.

Fire of Dead Phoenix [Ultimate Skill]
Deals Fire Damage to all enemies, inflicting 2 stack(s) of Burn for 12.0s.

The Corrupted Pheonix Eggs will be summoned by the third skill used in each rotation of the boss, Nirvana [Battle Skill] , eventually spawning a Phoenix Nestling.

A hatchable Phoenix egg transformed from a Dead Phoenix Nestling. Upon hatching, the reborn nestling gains the following skill: Eternal Fire: Enters the state of Worshipper for 10s and heals the Dead Phoenix by [+1% Target’s MAX HP] every 1s, granting it 1 stack of Total Damage Bonus permanently.

When it comes to tackling this boss, there are a few things we need to consider, first of all, damage is very important – we must kill the Phoenix Nestlings when they are spawned, or else they are going to keep healing the boss and ramp the damage up massively to the point that you are unable to survive the damage from the boss.

Secondly, we want to reduce the damage we are taking, and doing that is relatively simple, the boss hits incredibly hard on the Ultimate Skill, so we want to ensure ATK Penalty is active when this skill is cast.

On top of the fact that the boss hits hard, its first two skills will hit all targets that are affected by Burn Debuffs, which are applied by the Ultimate Skill, a common way to handle this is to dispel those debuffs once they have been applied to significantly reduce the amount of damage your team are taking.

There is one alternative, however, it will require some very serious single-target damage, from the likes of Flora in a Wild Team, Ivellios or Nastjenka in a Dauntless team, and that is to outright burst the boss down, ignoring the adds with the use of Heal Prohibition; this is risky as you will take a LOT of damage if you don’t kill the boss incredibly quickly – this method is not advisable unless you have very strong gear and a roster of strong legendary heroes, at which point the heal reduction may not even be necessary.

Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding attacks from this giant Phoenix unless you are dispelling the Burn debuffs, but it does mean that you are able to stack your team in a position that everybody  can receive healing, which boosts the value of certain heroes such as Frurbath, the Epic Poison Tank as he provides healing within close proximity to himself on his battle skill, whilst also ticking the box for ATK Penalty.

One thing to note, is the way Burn debuffs work is they do deal splash damage to allies in adjacent tiles, however, with good support this can be mitigated, IF you do not need to stack for your healing, or are struggling to stay alive, try moving your heroes at least 1 tile away from each other.

There are many Heroes in the game who can help you to defeat this boss, here are our suggestions for some of the key roles:

• Bring Damage dealers capable of quickly killing the Phoenix Hatchlings, whether this be 2 strong single target damage dealers who can time their ultimate skills to take them out, or strong AOE Damage dealers who can also line up their ultimate skills to quickly handle them.
• The boss is on a 24-second rotation, so skill-haste is not going to be necessary to reduce your cooldowns on this fight.
• Don’t waste your ultimate’s on the boss, it will die, the adds are always priority.

The only change to this boss in Season 2, is the boss gains a new passive skill:
Thicker than Water [Passive]

For every Dead Phoenix Nestling on the field, takes 40% less damage. Whenever a Dead Phoenix Nestling dies, takes damage equal to 15% of its Max HP.

The addition of this skill makes the Hatchlings even more important to kill quickly and to fully focus them, as while they are active the boss will take 40-80% less damage, and subsequently take large chunks of damage when you kill them.

This doesn’t change our approach to the boss at all, it just means that ‘burst strategies’ to kill the boss whilst ignoring the Hatchlings are less impactful.

Season 3 saw the passive skill added in Season 2 completely scrapped, replaced by an enhancement to some of the active abilities instead:

Scorch [Battle Skill]
This skill will now also place ATK Penalty II for 10.0s

Nirvana [Battle Skill]
This skill absorbed Season 2’s passive, it will now grant the hatchlings with Damage Reduction (30%) if all of the eggs are rebirthed, and if none are rebirthed, the boss will instead gain the Damage Reduction Buff, whilst retaining the Invisibility buff if only ONE Phoenix Egg is reborn.

This doesn’t drastically change anything from Season 2, as we still have Damage Reduction to deal with, the only difference now is that the Hatchlings gain the buff instead, we will also have ATK Penalty when the Phoenix’s hatch, reducing our ability to quickly kill them off combined with the damage reduction, so what we do here, is when they are reborn, we wait 12 seconds before unleashing ultimate skills on them; this ensures that we are able to kill them off quickly before the next cast of the third skill, Nirvana [Battle Skill].