The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross – Detailed Guide to Combat
The long-awaited Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross has finally had its global launch today and it did not disappoint! Straight from the very beginning, new players are thrown into combat and given a quick brief of how the system works. However, even though the tutorial itself is fairly long, combat doesn’t occur frequently, so you don’t have many chances to explore all your possible options during a battle. Learn more about everything from combat to characters and farming and rerolling in our guides.
If you feel like you might have missed a few pointers or you’re just looking to improve your strategy with a few neat tips and tricks, you’ve come to the right place. In what follows, we’ll give you a detailed account of how combat works in SDS: Grand Cross and teach you the best ways to emerge victorious even when fighting against opponents who are stronger than you.
The Importance of Combat Class
Like with any Gacha game, the rarity and strength of your characters play an important role in combat, but The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross is a Netmarble game, which means that battles are a lot more complex than number crunching. In fact, it is possible to defeat stronger enemies, as well as players who have better characters than you if you know what you’re doing.
Still, Combat Class (CC) is not completely irrelevant. Not only does this number let you know how your team would fare up against an opponent, but it is also used to decide the order in which you and your enemies act. The party with higher CC always acts first in combat, so it’s a good idea to boost your CC if you start to fall behind. If you don’t yet know how to do this quickly, don’t worry: you can find all the relevant details here in our How to Increase CC Guide.
The Card Combat System
Combat in SDS: Grand Cross is card-based. Each of your heroes has several abilities, which are represented by cards during battles. With a full team of 3 heroes and 1 back-up, you get 7 cards to choose from every turn and 3 action slots where you must place cards in order to use them. If one of your heroes is defeated, the number of cards goes down to 6 as the back-up hero becomes active. If two of your heroes are eliminated, you are left with 5 cards and 2 action slots, whereas if only one of your heroes remains standing, you get just 4 cards and 1 action slot.
Every turn, you can take a few different actions. For example, you can:
- Use cards in order to activate your heroes’ abilities.
- Shift the position of cards in order to rank them up by bringing two identical cards together.
- Cancel your currently placed cards and essentially restart the turn if you are unhappy with your choices.
- Lock one or two action slots in case you don’t need or want to use any additional cards.
Before you jump into combat, it’s important to take a good look at your heroes and their abilities. Although you can check out an ability by pressing it down, this will only provide a description of the skill at its current rank. In SDS: Grand Cross, each ability has three possible ranks. Improving the rank of a skill can enhance it in various ways, such as, for example, by adding more damage or a special CC or debuff effect.
Ranking up abilities is an essential part of combat in this game, but it can be an inconvenience to constantly give up one of your action slots in order to shift cards around. A better way to do this is to use abilities in such a way as to ensure that the remaining cards shift (or collapse) into place for a rank-up. In other words, if two identical cards are separated by a different third, you could use the third ability in order to collapse the remaining two. This will give you a rank 2 ability without wasting an action slot!
It’s also important to consider that cards do not appear in a random order. Each hero gets 2 cards at the start of each turn and these cards are generated in the order of your character placement. The 7th card always comes first and is randomly chosen from the pool of abilities of all your heroes. This is important because there is a 1 in 6 chance that your left-most hero will get a rank 2 ability from the get-go, before you make any moves. If you’re playing with a character like King (which you totally should be), you might want to position him on the left side just to increase the chance to get rank 2 petrify ability from the start.
Ability Types and Ultimates
There are 6 ability types in SDS: Grand Cross. These are the following:
You can check the type of an ability by looking at the right upper corner of its respective card. In addition, you can anticipate the type of skill that an enemy will use by looking right above them, where you will see one or two icons. This is also a good way to tell if an enemy is just about to use an ultimate and should be disabled.
Ultimates have separate cards that only become available once a hero’s gauge is filled. To pop more bubbles into the gauge, you have to either use one of the hero’s abilities or merge two identical cards belonging to this hero. Once all five bubbles are yellow, the hero’s ultimate appears in your hand and you can place it in one of your action slots in order to use it.
Using your ultimates often is a great way to beat an opponent that is theoretically stronger than you. To do this, you have to constantly look at your cards and anticipate collapsing abilities. While it is important to select the best ability for a certain situation, you should always consider the positioning of your cards and might even prioritize a less effective skill just to generate better abilities and more ultimate points.
Finally, don’t forget that your opponents’ ultimates can be just as devastating as your own. Some heroes have debuff abilities that remove an ultimate point, which means that they can be used to constantly postpone the ultimate of a single powerful target throughout a battle.
As you unlock more heroes in The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross, you’ll find new abilities with interesting effects. It would be impossible to capture the vast diversity of skills in this game in a single article, but even if you have to adapt your strategy to your own set of heroes, the tricks that we’ve outlined here will help you push through regardless of the situation. If nothing else works, it’s time to farm some resources and upgrade your heroes!
