XBorg x Ethlizards Illuvium Showdown #3 Recap

On April 15th, 66 players competed in the third edition of the Illuvium Showdown put on by XBorg and Eth Lizards.

Each participant had the entire day to reach and defeat the highest wave they could with the top 8 players earning prizes. In the event that players reached the same wave, the tiebreakers came down to whoever had killed the most enemies and then whoever took the least amount of time in preparing for each wave.

A whopping 12 players all completed Wave 34 but failed to beat Wave 35, so determining the Top 8 winners came down to tiebreakers. Winning by one with a total of 225 enemies killed was SJUD_XBorg (myself).

Here are the final standings of the Top 8 prize winners.

There were some troublesome waves along the way to the finish so I will go over how I built my team and the strategy behind completing certain waves.

The Early Game (Waves 1–13)

Pretty basic early game utilizing Rogues and the Composite Steam. Start off with just Rogues and then use 1–2 frontline Bulwarks as you get further so that your Rogues are able to deal damage without being targeted.

The Midgame (Waves 14–23)

During the midgame, I transitioned to using Scoriox as my main carry and using more bulwarks in both the frontline and backline to protect him. I’m still bonding the Ranger with my Rake to keep the Steam composite active as it’s a great source of backline damage that Scoriox can’t get to immediately.

The Late Game (Waves 24–34)

Wave 24 is where I completed my full team and changed my Ranger bond to the Revenant Composite. I am still able to keep Steam by adding in the Dualeph with Final Abounding (omegas can crit) as my second carry to go along with Scoriox. As you can see, I am still using the almost exact same formation with my Bulwarks and Rogues which lets me breeze through the waves quickly.

Wave 33

Early on in the competition Wave 33 is the wave that a majority of the top players were getting defeated by.
To defeat this wave I used my usual setup with one small difference. I moved my second backline Bulwark, which is now the Nature Lynx, to the frontline in order to draw the enemy Rogues up to it. This not only avoids having 5 Rogues in my backline overwheling my two Bulwarks and getting to my own carries Scoriox and Dualeph, but also puts them directly in line of the Dualeph Omega. My own Rogues kill the opponents Phyriox and my carries are auto attack down the opposing Dualeph.

Wave 35 (Death)

Here is the dreaded Wave 35 which nobody was able to defeat. After reaching this wave on my first serious run and dying, I believed that it was beatable. After multiple attempts at it with a couple of different strategies I decided that this would probably not be beaten. Not only is it a heavily defensive wave with 6 Nature/6 Empath/5 Air, but it also has multiple units with Saccarines and a lot of damage output with the Rogues and Scoriox.

My best solution at this wave only kills 6–7 units (depending on the RNG) but luckily that was good enough to win the competition

I switched the bond on my Ranger to Granite in order to stall time from their high damage units in both the frontline and backline. I then put a heavy stack of my own Illuvials on the right side hoping to burst down as many enemy Illuvials as possible very quickly. While this strategy works well in the opening seconds, after the Granite effect wears off the opponents damage just becomes too much and overwhelms my team.

A big thank you and well played to all the people organizing the tournament from both the XBorg and Ethlizards community as well as all the players for participating. We look forward to bringing everyone even more tournaments in the future. Hopefully our next event will be on a new build of the game that will be adding more Illuvials, a return of the hyper system, a revamp of how classes and affinities work, and balance changes.