Guest article

This article was composed by one of my long term readers and Twitch Mod as both a means to share his love for Xiu Min along with helping ease the workload for content creation. I personally have no experience playing Xiu Min and having a perspective from someone who regularly plays the team is invaluable.

I have left the article unedited to better preserve their voice and thoughts. Kaz will also try his best to reply to comments and questions.

Introduction

Hello I’m Mantastic and Fanta.. wait , no I’m not. Hi there I’m Kaz272 you may know me from Mantastic’s twitch stream where I am a Mod or the PAD subreddit or from PAD itself where I’ve been known as Dad?, Jeb!, 耶稣会打死你, and 秀敏(◍•ᴗ•◍)❤。When I wrote this, I have been playing pad about 233 days and have cleared up to Arena 1 using my Myr team.

When Xiu Min was first announced, I was still a fairly big noob in PAD. I had a good Tharia team, but I was not using it that well. When I first saw his artwork and name I was very excited. Chrysanthemums are my favorite flower and I love Chinese painting so his everything was perfect and I had to buy him. Unfortunately I lacked a few key subs, namely DQXQ and Wukong, luckily I rolled in the light gala prior to his release and got lucky.

Upon his release he was deemed to be the weakest of the Four Nobles since he required 13 orbs to reach 110.25x and had not health/RCV multiplier. Then heart crosses came in and really knocked him, and everyone else, out of the meta. Apparently Gung-ho agreed he was in a bad spot so the decided to buff the multiplier for making 2 light combos from 1.5x to 2.25x This means with Dual Xiu Min leaders you can achieve 306.25x with 13+ light orbs while stacking rows! With my teams 11 rows this is an effective multiplier of 643.125 which is more than enough to kill anything this game can throw at you.

Why he was bad before

The biggest hindrance to Xiu Min a top tier glass cannon was how orb hungry he was for a relatively low multiplier. For most of this review I will be comparing him to Saravati because she is a popular glass cannon leader that stacks rows. Sarasvati can achieve 100x with 9 water orbs, by comparison pre-buff Xiu Min could only achieve 36x with 9 orbs and his leader skill lacked the skyfall buff that Sarasvati has. Without that passive buff to light orbs, he became much more active hungry than Sarasvati. This lead to it being difficult to sweep every floor consistently, especially in longer dungeons or in solo as you can easily run out of actives and have no safe way to stall.

Xiu Min’s other large weakness was his active, 10 turn cooldown that creates 6 light orbs at random and gives a 1.5x to physical monsters. This active can be useful to ensure the exact number of orbs you need, but is all-in-all not that useful and is on the long end to inherit on top of.

What the buff does

As I said above his leader skill was buffed to 6.25x fro two combos when using dual Xi Min leaders. The net effect of this is he becomes a lot less orb hungry to hit 100x and can hit the astronomical multiplier of 306.25x while stacking rows.

Here is a table I constructed showing the number of light orbs on the board, the number of light combos, and the max light orbs connected.

# Light orbs	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
Max # Connected	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
1 combo	4x	9x	16x	25x	36x	49x	49x	49x	49x
Max # Connected	5	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2 combos	4x	6.25x	6.25x	25x	56.25x	100x	156.25x	225x	306.25x

Comparing him again to Sarasvati, who reaches 100x at 9, he now achieves a 56.25x attack at 9 orbs. However, Xiu Min creates a row with this combination of orbs which means, again with my team, this is an effective multiplier of 118.125x which is spectacular damage with just 9 orbs and two combos. From here on up you can see just how effective rows and his new multiplier becomes.

The other large impact this has is to the minimum number of orbs required to beat out the 10 orb 49x. Previously if you had 10 light orbs on the board you were better off making a clump of 10 orbs to make a 49x  rather than a 3 + 7 combo which was 36x and if you had 11 orbs you wanted to make an 8 + 3 combo to make 56.25x. Now if you have 9 orbs you can make a 6 + 3 combo to get 56.25x as opposed to the 36x for clearing a clump of 9.

I took the time to create a large table showcasing how much damage a monster with a 1000 attack stat would do on my team with 11 rows. To find out how much damage a specific monster you have would do just divide the specific damage by 1000 and multiply your monster’s attack stat by that number, it won’t be perfectly exact but it will give a very good approximation.

Scenario	3 orbs	5 orbs	1 row	2 3 orbs	1 row 8 orbs	2 TPAs	1 row 9 orbs	1 TPA 1 5 orb	1 row 1 3 orb
11 rows 0 TPA	1000	6000	33,075	15,625	118,125	19,531.25	189,000	85,950	406,113.75
11 rows 1 TPA	1000	6000	33,075	15,625	118,125	29,296.88	189,000	128,925	406,113.75
11 rows 2 TPA	1000	6000	33,075	15,625	118,125	43,945.31	189,000	193,387.50	406,113.75
11 rows 3 TPA	1000	6000	33,075	15,625	118,125	65,917.97	189,000	290,081.25	406,113.75

Scenario	1 row 10 orbs	1 row 1 tpa	1 7 orb 1 3 orb	1 row 11 orbs	1 TPA 1 7 orb	1 row 1 5 orb	1 row 12 orbs	2 rows	1 TPA 1 row 8
11 rows 0 TPA	282,975	442,968.75	375,000	146,997.90	406,300	479,941.88	334,425	1,085,273.44	1,553,671.88
11 rows 1 TPA	282,975	664,453.13	375,000	146,997.90	609,450	479,941.88	334,425	1,085,273.44	2,330,507.81
11 rows 2 TPA	282,975	996,679.69	375,000	146,997.90	914,175	479,941.88	334,425	1,085,273.44	3,495,761.72
11 rows 3 TPA	282,975	1,495,019.53	375,000	146,997.90	1,371,262.50	479,941.88	334,425	1,085,273.44	5,243,642.58

Scenario	1 row 13 orbs	1 row 1 7 orb	1 TPA 1 row 9	1 row 1 row 10	2 TPAs 1 row 8	2 TPAs 1 row 9	2 TPAs 1 row 10
11 rows 0 TPA	360,150	984,480	2,215,080	7,596,914.06	2,337,890.62	3,543,750	5,064,609.38
11 rows 1 TPA	360,150	984,480	3,322,620	7,596,914.06	5,260,253.91	7,973,437.50	11,395,371.10
11 rows 2 TPA	360,150	984,480	4,983,930	7,596,914.06	11,835,571.30	17,940,234.40	25,639,585
11 rows 3 TPA	360,150	984,480	7,475,895	7,596,914.06	26,630,035.40	40,365,527.30	57,689,066.20

Another improvement Xiu Min has received since Mantastic’s original review was the introduction of the awoken badge system. I don’t have anyone to play Xiu Min co-op with so I use the RCV badge to add a defensive mechanic to him. This gives some amount of time to stall on certain floors given I have the heart orbs to do so.

Team building

Team building remains pretty much the same as previously and I will mostly devote this section to my team and why I choose the specific subs/inherits/latents I did.

Monster	Reason	Inherit
Xiu Min	Leader	Light Sasuki for the haste, 7 turn CD, and Jammer/poison removal Will swap to Sylvie or Apollo once I finish her/ilm
Wukong	Fairly high RCV, Great active, Superb Awakenings	Awoken RA for the guaranteed damage, less necessary on a team with this multiplier but more for my Myr team.
A. Apollo	I prefer A. Apollo over L/B Apollo for the skyfall buff, even with the buff, Xiu Min is still orb hungry so keeping the flow of orbs reduces active consumption.	None
Saria	Good active that combos with apollo for damage or A DQXQ for healing, good stats	Saria for protection
A. DQXQ	High RCV, good active, good awakenings	None
Things I am working on
Ilm	The new evo brings 3 rows and Two TPAs will probably switch out A. Apollo for Ilm	Possibly take my extra saria or my Sylvie
Things I want
Raphael	5 rows is always nice, although a bit unnecessary at 11 already. Damage void is almost necessary to get through some dungeons and huge heal/full light board with Apollo
Superman	Basically better Saria with a slightly diff. active, combos with Wukong.
Things I swap out situationally
Ariel	Triple TPA means with 18 orbs and no other combos she alone hits around 126,798,736, so if I really need to burst something down, that will do it	Something as her skill is base 4, probably wedding Akechi, although he is used on my A Izanagi on my Myr team.
A. Sakuya	If it is a really bind heavy dungeon as Xiu Min is vulnerable to binds.
Wedding Izanami	If I need a shield, also brings great passive damage with enhanced light orb awakenings

TPAs or Rows and how many of each?

In today’s meta rows rule the landscape, and for good reason. They are not card specific and they can create insane burst damage when stacking them. While most teams can stack up to 3 rows on a board with cascades to fulfill the requirements for 306.25x Xiu Min can only stack 2 rows on a standard board meaning an effective multiplier of “only” 1,350.56x for me. If you want to make 3 rows you’ll active 56.25x with an effective multiplier of 520.93x. AS you can see here it is more important to hit your full multiplier with 2 rows then the 56.25x with 3 rows.

Now, is it better to hit 306.25 with two rows or 1 row and two tpas? Let’s take Ariel for example. With base 2198 attack and three tpas using the optimal 2 TPA 1 row 306.25x board she will hit a whoppong 147,933,080 without enhanced orbs. This will toppel anything this game can throw at you. With an optimal 18 orb 2 row board she is only hitting 25,975,368.60 damage. Again this is monumental but this only about 1/5th the damage being done by the 2 TPAs. So with a full team we can estimate combined damage with 2 rows to be about 155,852,212 which is just barely more than Ariel’s solo damage with the two TPAs.

I find stacking a little over 10 row awakenings and then situationally bringing a TPA sub to be the most effective way to team build. As I said above I use A Apollo who has 2 TPA awakenings and only bring Ariel if I want to do show off damage or need to punch through a ridiculous shield and health pool.

Alternate pairings

As Mantastic said before you can pair Xiu Min with Wukong to now reach a max multiplier of 87.5x. The other possible pairing is the recently announced REVO Venus grants a max 105x attack and 75% damage reduction from light monsters. This gives you guaranteed stalling on any light monster. While this is very situational it is very important to mention nonetheless as given the correct dungeon this can be a very powerful tank team.

Tifa

The recently released, and soon to be buffed, Tifa from the Final Fantasy Collab offers a very strong pairing with Xiu Min. Possibly even being a better pairing than dual Xiu Mins. Tifa and Xiu Min only reach a max multiplier of 87.5x but this is done on a 7×6 board as Tifa brings this new mechanic to the game. With a 7×6 board you are able to stack more rows, with more connected orbs for a heck of a lot more damage. This also allows you to overcome combo shields easier as you are still able to make clumps for max damage but are still able to make other combos around them. Now you may be thinking, post buff Xiu Min already does massive damage why is this necessary? Well Tifa also brings a whopping 5x RCV multiplier to the table when matching 6 light or fire orbs. This makes it much easier to stall as 5x rcv is an insane multiplier that should almost always guarantee full health. With Xiu Min team’s naturally high health this rcv boost is exactly what he needed and in co-op your health can easily reach 50k with a hypered team. Not only does she change the board to a 7×6 and has a 5x rcv mult. She also brings 5 rows and a great active that lets you tank DQ hera in solo while also having offensive capabilities and synergy with Saria if you lack an A. Apollo or a Wedding Akechi. Pre-buff for both of these I was able to clear A1 with this pairing solo, which is only the second time I’ve cleared A 1 solo. So they are certainly a solid pairing. It is also worth mentioning that the minimum multiplier is higher, achieving a 20x with a row of 7 orbs vs 16x with 7 connected not in a row. This generally is not an issue as 20x is still relatively low, but just good to note you have less damage control. All in all though, this is a better pairing than Dual Xiu Min for most end game content. If you just need to blow things up go dual Xiu Mins, but if you want to clear Arena easier Xiu Min x Tifa is a much better pairing.

Conclusion

The buff to Xiu Min reduces the the 100x threshold from 13 to orbs to 9 with a row or 10 without a row and raises his damage cap significantly. Xiu Min was already capable of clearing a lot of endgame content and the buff will only make this easier. However, the buff didn’t address the biggest weaknesses to Xiu Min, a lack of a heart cross… I mean a defensive mechanic especially a RCV multiplier or a reduced CD active/more useful active.

I will continue to use and worship my high health Husbando to the end of time and he will always remain the first slop in PAD so long as PAD continues to exist. In light of the recent RA drag and Yomi drag buffs, who knows, maybe Xiu Min will be be buffed to the powerhouse he deserved to be.

Thanks for listening me ramble on about my favorite leader and a big thanks to Mantastic for letting me be the first guest writer on the site. Please let him know if you enjoyed this and want to see more guest writers in the future!

❤

Kaz272