by KadavuFC
I am writing this article to provide information for both beginners and the more advanced players, I will start with the basics, but if you think you already know this stuff, skip to the advanced section. You might learn something new. If not, it probably means you have nothing to learn about Cerberus.👏 You will also not find any formations to ‘copy’ here, as everyone is at different levels in the game and has a different barracks and hero availability, so just posting formations isn’t really going to help anyone learn how to best utilize their own barracks.
Cerberus is one of the current two Honor Hunting bosses in Art of War: Legions, which rotate every seven days. During this seven day period, you have three attempts per day to battle Cerberus for a chance to gain honor hunting medals. At the end of the seven day period, the total damage you do to Cerberus will determine your global ranking, and you can gain more honor hunting medals, as well as coins and scrolls.
ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL INFORMATION FOR BEGINNERS TO CERBERUS:
IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR SCORE, YOU CAN QUIT THE BATTLE BEFORE THE TIMER RUNS OUT OR BEFORE YOUR LAST TROOP DIES AND IT WILL NOT RECORD THAT SCORE AND YOU CAN TRY AGAIN.
THE BASICS:
The Phases:
There are three phases to Cerberus, in each phase there are differences in the amount of damage that each of Cerberus’ skills will do. But, as the phases go on, you will do less and less damage as his defenses increase and your troops die quicker.
As you can see, as the phases change the damage each skill increases.
Phase One: Day One and Day Two.
Phase Two: Day Three and Day Four.
Phase Three: Day Five, Day Six and Day Seven.
The Skills of Cerberus:
The Magma Ball is a fireball that is spit out towards the feet of Cerberus, it will target the nearest troops to Cerberus, which will generally be melee units, until all melee units are gone. Then, this Magma Ball will start targeting ranged units. This is Cerberus’ most deadly skill and will be the skill that kills your troops the quickest due to its frequency (the most frequent of Cerberus’ skills).
This is the Magma Shock, a tunnel-like skill which will damage both melee units and ranged units. It’s the biggest damaging skill of Cerberus, but also the least frequent.
This is the Soul Release. It’s probably the least effective of Cerberus’ skills but will damage every troop.
On top of these three skills, Cerberus will also damage you with his reflective armor, where the more damage you do to him, the more damage gets reflected back.
At certain points during the battle, Cerberus can trigger multiple skills at the same time. Here, both his Magma Ball and Magma Shock have triggered. The red circle indicates when each skill will trigger.
Troops to use:
Troops that can help your troops not die as quickly:
Brawlers: Brawlers are essential to keep your troops shielded (particularly your ranged) from Cerberus’ skills.
Pilgrims: Pilgrims heal those troops around them as they themselves do damage, but they cannot heal ranged units as they are too far away.
Pumpkin Guard: A single pumpkin guard can help reduce the damage that Cerberus does to your troops.
Nuns: Nuns heal, and unlike Pilgrims, can heal ranged units.
Necromancers: Necromancers are ranged single load units which create up to 4 skeletons with every ‘attack’, these skeletons then march towards Cerberus as melee units. These skeletons can help keep your ranged alive longer by constantly providing melee units to soak up Cerberus’ main weapon, which is his Magma Ball. They can also provide quite a bit of damage.
If you are lacking in these troops, using Paladins can be an option, as they can create shields for those troops who are low on health.
Troops that will do the most damage:
Voodoo Dolls: These are generally the highest damaging troops against Cerberus due to both their melee damage and the damage they do when they die.
Further Melee in general order of damage they can do: Ghost Assassins, Undead Soldiers, Orc Hunters, Bandits, Inquisitors.
If lacking in these Melee units, the next best troops would be Magic Apprentices or Harbingers of Fire.
Ranged units like Peltasts, Taurus Witchers, Frost Archers and even common Archers, if you don’t have any of these, are also high damagers. Depending on which hero you are using and in which phase the Cerberus is, more of these can be beneficial to having more melee, but I will get more into detail on that later.
Generally speaking, 9 load units will vastly out perform single load units and you should minimize single load units to a single Pumpkin Guard and any Necromancers you wish to use.
Heroes to use:
Jinn is the best hero against Cerberus due to the critical attack boost he gives your troops.
Followed up in a close second is Dracula, who allows your troops to heal themselves with every attack they make.
If you don’t have Jinn or Dracula, the third option would be a high level Aly, whose bombs can do quite a bit of damage to Cerberus.
Two more readily available heroes, Hohenheim and Diana, can both perform very well against Cerberus should you not have any of the other three heroes.
Hohenheim, similar to Jinn will boost your troop’s attack and also weaken Cerberus’ defense when his active triggers.
Diana, will take away all of Cerberus’ armor and allow your troops to do true damage.
Other than these 5 heroes, Seon and Drake can both be options.
How to build a formation to combat Cerberus:
There’s no real easy way to do this, it all depends on the hero you choose to use, the phase in which Cerberus currently is and the troops at your disposal. But obviously, the best way is to test, test and test again. You can use 10 gems to practice fight against Cerberus, and you will get to see the battle report after it is over. That’s a good place to start to improve your formation. You will have access to how long each troop survived and how much damage they did. Moving troops into different positions can change things considerably. You can also practice fight against Cerberus for free by hitting the regular battle, and seeing the damage being done, just as long as you quit before the battle ends. The downside is, you will not get to see a battle report.
Speaking generally, however, put your biggest damagers and mix in some protection to keep them alive longer. Finding the balance is the tough part and also what makes this game kind of addictive. Some absolute basics I would suggest would be to put your melee closer to Cerberus so they don’t waste time walking to him (or floating on a broom). You can put Ghost Assassins and Orc Hunters further back because they will immediately beam to Cerberus. Likewise, put your stationary troops such as ranged and Nuns further away from Cerberus, as we don’t want them slowing down your melee as they try to walk towards Cerberus. Using Necromancers to keep your ranged alive longer is also something you will want to experiment with.
ADVANCED SECTION:
So, here I am going to talk about more advanced hero methodology and what appears to be ‘dev bug exploits’ that one can use to increase your damage against Cerberus.
The Phases:
The first one of what appears to be a developer bug is that the three skill phases of Cerberus are not always the same. Sometimes the initial skill order is Magma Ball, Soul Release, Magma Shock. Or, for those who prefer the more relevant terms: Fireball, Lame Skill that does nothing, Fire Tunnel. Other times TWO Fireballs occur before the Tunnel Skill does. Now these two skills are the biggest damagers to your troops and the skill order can determine whether your melee is taking more of a pounding than normal. You can keep starting and quitting a round of Cerberus until you get your preferred skill order to maximize your damage. At certain times having the skill order Fireball, Fireball, Tunnel Skill can be quite beneficial to you, I will refer to this skill order as 1–1–3. Other times, having the regular skill order, which I will refer to as 1–3–1 (fireball, Tunnel, Fireball) is better. We are ignoring the second skill because it’s lame and isn’t a threat like the other two.
Phase Two:
This is a second bug, I believe. During Phase two of Cerberus the Tunnel Skill (or skill three) does not kill Necromancer Skeletons if they are at level 9 or above. Despite the supposed damage increase of the skill, in Phase One and Phase Three the Necromancer Skeletons will be killed by this skill, but not during Phase Two, and generally speaking, the skill itself does less damage to most melee units. Again, during Phase Two Necromancers can be of extra importance to getting a better score here.
Exploiting these bugs with the two most relevant Cerberus Heroes Jinn and Dracula:
Dracula:
The key to getting the most out of using Dracula, is not having his active skill set to Auto and instead using it manually. When you hit Dracula’s active skill at the right time, his bats can force Cerberus to drop his fireball on himself, preventing a lot of damage from hitting your melee units. You can hit it just before the skill is about to activate. But, depending on the level of Dracula you have, 15 and above for example, you can distract two out of every three fireballs by hitting his active at the halfway point on fireball skill (6'O’Clock) and then leaving it on auto for the second fireball, turn auto off then let the troops take the third fireball and then start again at six o’clock for the fourth Fireball. Rinse and repeat.
You want to hit it at the halfway point of this skill.
Now if you have a lower level Dracula, that means the cooldown time on his active will be longer, so you may not be able to distract two out of every three, but you should be at least able to distract one out of every two.
This is where taking advantage of the skill order comes into play, and this will only count once all your melee are dead and you only have ranged left. If you can get the order 1–1–3: By distracting the first fireball, the necromancers can take the 2nd fireball and they won’t make it to the third fireball as they will be killed by the tunnel skill, but you will be able to distract that third fireball with Dracula (Obviously during Phase two the skill order will not matter as the necromancers will not be killed by the tunnel skill). But, it is relevant for Phase One and Phase Three. This will not work if the skill order is 1–3–1, as you distract the first fireball. The necromancers will be killed by skill 3 before they can get to the next 1.
What this can do is help keep ranged alive until the timer runs out or at least a lot of ranged alive. This is why Dracula will work a lot better with a lot of ranged units as opposed to melee units.
Jinn:
During Phase Two, I mentioned how the tunnel skill doesn’t appear to kill high level Necromancer Skeletons. You can take advantage of this with Jinn by having him live until the timer runs out. Oh, you read that right. He can survive the whole battle during phase two, and you can reap the rewards of his passive skill for all five minutes. How you ask? Trap him in Cannons. Jinn can be trapped if you position him at the back and place Goblin Techs in front of him. The Goblin Techs themselves do very little and poor damage, but they can keep him in place if you get some good RNG. Keeping it on 1x speed will help keep him in place, as on 2x speed he will run right through them. Sometimes leaving it on 2x and switching back to 1x whenever you start seeing him move up a bit will also help. As long as you have a stream of Necromancer Skeletons heading towards Cerberus, Jinn can live until the timer runs out. Obviously you will want to increase the amount of ranged and Nuns in your form to take full advantage of this.
The reset bug: <AS OF JUNE 2022 THE DEVS HAVE FIXED THIS ISSUE AND IT WILL NO LONGER WORK>
Now during the change in phases, when Art of War resets to the new day at 12 UTC or whatever it is for your time zone: Say between day two and day three, when Cerberus jumps to Phase two. If you have the game open and are in the honor hunting section when the clock resets, and the challenge button goes from unclickable, to clickable again. If you click challenge, you can have a ONE TIME ATTEMPT at fighting Cerberus in the previous phase for your first attempt before he will permanently switch to the new Phase. You get only one go and have to live with whatever damage you do, you cannot back out as he will immediately switch to the next phase. But because with each phase change comes less damage, you get a one time chance to do a bit more. The Devs are fully aware of this bug and have taken steps to prevent this (before you used to be able to back out until you liked your score and it would still stay in the old phase). Now, they have made it so you only get one chance at it and most likely cannot fix this issue.
Ok, so I am going to share ONE FORM:
I know I said I wouldn’t share any forms here so people can copy, and really I am not. I am sharing this to talk about some methodology behind troop placements and the troops I have selected here.
Yes, this did 40m damage to Cerberus during Phase One.
This is what the formation looks like.
This is from Phase One, which is obviously different from other phases, as it is the phase where you can do the most damage and less damage is being done to your troops. I also have a very high level Jinn (the highest current level).
Some tips about methodology here: During Phase one Jinn works best with a lot of melee units, so that’s why I have so many here. I position Ghost Assassins at the back because they don’t have to walk forward to get to Cerberus. If I put a Voodoo Doll back there, they will spend the first valuable seconds of the fight trying to get to Cerberus. I put the biggest damagers close to Jinn because his active will only affect those troops which are closest to him when he activates. My Jinn is providing synergy to sacred troops, so I have a lot of sacred troops I wouldn’t recommend for other heroes or lower levels of Jinn in my form, such as Harbingers and Paladins. I have put my healers close to Jinn because I want to keep him alive as long as possible. He died at about the 3:10 mark in this battle. I have Nuns to keep troops alive longer, especially with Jinn’s legendary skill that grants troops an extra second or so of life after they die, so the RNG gods can keep troops who even died alive if they get hit by a nun heal at the right time. I have also trapped my nuns with a bunch of immobile frost archers, this is to keep them from thinking they are melee units and going off walking towards Cerberus and certain death. The Brawlers are there just to shield everything, particularly the ranged side where the Necromancers can allow about 20 more seconds of fight time after Jinn and all my melee have been wiped out. You are probably wondering where all the peltasts are. The truth is, the peltasts with my Jinn, in this particular phase, do not perform as well as the other units I have at my disposal. During Phase two, they will all come out, but not this phase, for me.
But the point I am trying to make here, is that creating a formation for Cerberus, is more than just copying and hoping it will work for you. It most likely will not work better than implementing the right strategy for the troops and hero you have at your disposal. Anyway, that concludes how to Cerberus from me.
A little about me:
I’ve been playing this game for a long time, back when the likes of Beowulf, Mephisto and Athena were on the Wheel of Fortune, and clearly I have spent way too much of my real world money on this game.
When I first began to fight Cerberus, I used Diana. Then, I started using Hohenheim when he got to a higher level than Diana, before I would switch back to Diana for Phase Three, then I moved onto Drake, before settling on Dracula and now Jinn has surpassed my Dracula.
I joined Vector last year having spent most of my time in clans that were just not very helpful, and to be honest, just not very talkative or active. I also spent a bit of time in one of the top 20 clans. At Vector, I found a group of people who are willing to help, thirsty to learn and most importantly are very social. I highly recommend joining if you want to learn and grow as a player, even if you are more advanced in the game like I was. There’s a lot less pressure to perform like in the top clans. All they ask is for you be active. If you are reading this far, you obviously have the same problem I do. You are likely addicted to this very simple, poorly developed game. Quit watching those Phasecast videos and join Vector.😜Check out this link to join our discord: https://discord.gg/CZ6sSCsH95
