Now that the weekend has passed and with it my favourite descends to farm on 10x, I have turned my morning stamina to playing Thoth & Sopdet 5×4 from the coin dungeons in hopes of acquiring the 1% light resist Tamadra  . 5×4 descends are much more challenging than their regular counterparts as you face the same bosses/mechanics, but on a smaller board. This automatically cuts down on viable leaders to use, but you can find a handy reference list I created HERE of strong 5×4 leads.

Aside from the invading  , the major hurdle of this descend is a 5-combo shield put up by Sopdet. Normally 5 combos should not be an issue, but in a 5×4 dungeon, it can be quite challenging as many of the top teams are row enhance/match 5 connected orbs reliant. As such, two prong attack  heavy teams will have an easier time. Regardless, I still elected to go with my Yomi Dragon  as it has the most pluses along with an augmented recovery multiplier to help stall on minimal heart orbs.

I initially had Awoken Haku  in place of Dark Izanami  , but decided to switch to increase my health pool as well as benefit from the 1,500 auto healing. In an ideal world, you want to have more than 27,320 health or sufficient damage reduction to survive 2 consecutive attacks from the invading Tamadra. This is because your skills will be delayed by 2 turns and may face heart orb troll. Auto heal  awakenings also contribute to your health pool in this instance as it restores health without triggering heart orb matches.

Dark Valkyrie  and Awoken Lucifer  joined the party as they have smaller orb changers (critical for the final floor and 5 combo shield) along with 5 dark row  enhances to augment my damage. By smaller orb changers, I am referring to their ability to spawn a few dark orbs in hopes of retaining a 5-combo board. Furthermore, the true damage component from  can be used to execute the invade and his god killer  ensures massive burst. Zaerog Infinity   was the last sub as I wanted to help my chances of achieving 5 combos through his dark skyfall enhance active.  is not guaranteed to produce an extra combo, but why not take all the help you can get.

Conversely, the safest way to guarantee 5 combos on the final floor is to bring Dark Kali  and use her active in conjunction with  (or any other single orb changer if you run different colour teams) to ensure at least 5 dark orbs along with a set of red, blue, green, and light orbs. You may need a dark orb enhancer such as Dark Metatron  to enhance the orbs if none came enhanced after the board changer. You can also use Light Kali  , but she cannot be combo-ed with any other orb changer and may not fit all teams or produce boards with sufficient damage.

The rest of the dungeon plays smoothly as none of the floors should provide too much trouble and is simply a matter of managing your orbs and actives. However, you should always try to keep yourself at full health as the invade can happen at any time. If possible, try to also save heart orbs in a bottom corner so you can heal as needed.

The boss floor itself can prove tricky as you need to deal 3 million damage to 2 different targets, make 5 combos, and have both die on the same turn. This is where luck (through skyfalls) can come into play as you may not have a guaranteed board. You can help yourself along as best as you can through smaller orb changers that either spawn a few specific orbs or convert a single orb to your desired colour.

However, PAD, like life rarely goes according to plan. This is where you take a gamble with skyfalls to reach your 5 combos and using  or any other skyfall enhance active greatly increases your chances, it doesn’t even have to be dark, any colour combo will suffice. In addition, you can continuously kill the purple boss (who does not have the combo shield) to trigger the resurrection and not take any damage. I had to do this repeatedly for a few turns before I finally matched 5 combos, but it eventually got the job done.

I wish there was a more foolproof way to guarantee 5 combos aside from  + any single orb changer, but we must work with the tools we are given. I only did 5 runs successfully, but was quite fortunate with 3  invades and hope you are just as lucky too!

Let me know what teams and strategies you used to conquer these 5×4 descends safely in the comments below.

Happy Puzzling!