[Alchemy Stars] Giles vs Astor | Desolation Codex | 7.9M

Desolation Codex | 7.9M | ft. Giles
Week 1
Boss - The Forsaken: Astor
Challenge Mode - Normal Hunting

Calamity Codex has been rebranded to Desolate Codex. This is the first boss of the rebranded codex.

This run abuses the fact that Astor can NEVER attack you as long as you extinguish enough candles and stay out of its range. This allows you to go down to 0 sanity on turn 1 to maximize the damage from Giles, and stay close to 0 HP during the entire run to maximize the sanity support from Jeno and May. If you get lucky enough with the random spawn locations for the mirages, you can go over 8M damage.

Optimizations:
There's potential for much higher damage if you go with tier 3/4 Giles' actives instead of only tier 2 actives, but that adds an extreme amount of RNG to the run, as the mirages can block your path or kill you if you don't remove them every turn, and you need to hope the mirages spawn next to the boss to get all of the additional damage. Another option to explore is cutting one of the converters for Lucoa to boost damage even further, but it will take even more work to map a good path from scratch with only 1 converter.

Stage Effect:
You gain assault stacks for each instance of damage you do to the boss. Each stack provides a 0.3% ATK buff. Stacks are reset to 0 every time you lose HP from getting hit by the boss. Damage to shields does not count as losing HP. The "Normal Hunting" mode was selected for this run, which sets your max stack cap to 100. The "Targeted Exile" mode raises the stack cap to 150, but the boss now attacks you every time a candle gets lit, which is not feasible for this strategy.

Disclaimer:
I am not a codex player. Any codex videos uploaded to this channel are made by members of the Discord community. You can find them in the codex channel of the official Alchemy Stars Discord. They do not play regularly and don't wish to maintain a YouTube channel, so I will be occasionally uploading any interesting clears here with their permission. As for this particular video, the initial run was done by SleepySheep, and MissileMan5 optimized and recorded the final run.

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