EPIC SEVEN: BUILDING CLEAVE TEAMS
What are Cleave Teams?
Cleave teams are teams that will defeat the enemy team in one or two rounds. Usually before Enemy even takes a turn.
It is very popular because it is a very simple composition to run. There are only 3 basic questions we have to ask in PVP:
1. Are we faster than the other team?
2. Do we have enough damage to kill them or not.
3. Do they have any anti-Cleave units
In this guide, we will share how E7 players typically build their Cleave Teams. Hopefully this will help readers decide if the path of Cleaving is the way for you.
We list out heroes that can be used in Cleave teams in our Arena Tier List

Pros and Cons of Cleave Teams
Pros
Cons
Pros
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Fast Matches
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Less things to consider very straight forward
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If your gear is better than enemy you automatically wins
Cons
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Requires fast speed gears
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At higher rank (Champion or above Rank), it gets harder to cleave
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Have to be very selective on which opponent to play against
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Some RNG involved like Speed RNG, Counter Attacks, Anti Cleave Mechanisms

Cleave Team Compositions
Cleave Team Compositions
Turn Order
Cleave Team Compositions
A typical Cleave Team Composition will need some sort of combination of the following:
1. AOE Damage Dealer
2. Buffer
3. Combat Readiness (CR) Pusher
4. Defense Breaker
5. Tank Buster
6. Buff Dispeller/Stripper
7. Speed Imprint
8. Tagahel's Ancient Book Artifact Holder
Notice there are more than 4 roles, so players have to decide what combination to use, or use heroes that can fulfill multiple roles.
With that being said, we think every Cleave Team needs a Combat Readiness Pusher for sure to lower gear requirements.









AOE Damage Dealer
Heroes that can deal massive Team wide damage.
Some examples are:
Arbiter Vildred, Blood Blake Karin.
Buffer
Heroes that provide buffs to help increase damage of the Damage Dealers. Typically we should try to combine Buffer and Combat Readiness Pusher and there are many heroes like this.
Some examples are:
Rose, Tywin, Auxiliary Lots
Combat Readiness (CR) Pusher
Heroes that help increase the Combat Readiness of Damage Dealers. The more Combat Readiness push players can get. The less speed is required on your main damage dealer.
There are also heroes that decreases CR of the enemy team which can also be helpful, which works similarly but if your enemy is significantly faster than you, it may not help as much.
Less speed will mean more damage stats!
Some examples are:
Rose, Auxiliary Lots, Judith
Defense Breaker
Defense Breakers are heroes that apply Defense Break debuff on the enemy team. Defense break will decrease the defense by 70% which make any hero very squishy. This is very useful if you noticed enemy is using a very tanky hero that may require extra damage to kill.
Some examples are:
Tywin, Falconer Kluri
Tank Buster
Tank Buster is usually high single target damage dealer to break through tanky units.
Some examples are:
Remnant Violet, Watcher Schuri, Challenger Dominial
Buff Dispeller/Stripper
Epic Seven has many Heroes, Artifacts, Equipment that can apply immunity or Barrier or other type of buff at the start of the battle that could stop us from setting up our combination. Having a Buff Stripper will help players remove those buffs.
Some examples are:
Basar, Hurado
Speed Imprint
Speed Imprint are heroes that gives allies Increase Speed if they have imprints. This will help players outspeed teams that are trying to speed contest.
Note multiple speed imprints can stack, so you can potentially gain an extra 16 speed just through speed imprints.
Some examples are:
Cidd, Mirsa
Tagahel's Ancient Book Holder
Tagehel's Ancient Book Artifact at max level will give 20 Souls right in the beginning of the battle. This will allow many heroes to increase damage dealt or gain an extra turn or extra effect.
One of the most popular example is Judge Kise. She needs 20 souls to soulburn and gain extra turn after using S2. She can then immediately follow up with S3.
ISome popular heroes to use this on:
Challenger Dominiel, Basar
Turn Order
There are so many ways to build your team and Turn order will vary depending on the team. However we can typically agree with the following order:
1. Combat Readiness Pusher or Buff Stripper
2. Buffer or Defense Breaker
3. AOE Damage Dealer or Tank Buster
#1 and #2 can be in any combination, the main goal is to set up for the damage dealers to destroy the enemy team.
Speed imprint and Tagahel's Ancient Book holders can go whenever, hopefully they fulfill multiple roles like a damage dealer or something.
Determining Turn Order is very important for later Speed Tuning which we will go over in the next section.

Building Cleave Team
Speed Tuning
Speed RNG
Example Team
Summary
Speed Tuning
Speed is everything in Cleave Team. If we can move first running a Cleave Team, half the battle is won. However we have to know that sometimes its not about just having one 300 speed character. If you put all speed on that one character and everyone else is 170 speed, your team may not be as effective as you would like. This is where Speed Tuning comes in.
Speed tune requires some math but not too difficult. The basic formula is shown

Speed RNG
Speed on any character has chance to float between 5-7%. So if you have a 190 speed hero, you could potentially be treated as 180 speed or 200 speed instead of your 190 speed.
It also deteremines who wins speed ties. So When two characters same speed, System will randomly decides which hero wins the speed tie.
Due to speed RNG, the Set up heroes like Buffers and Defense Breakers needs to be around 7 to 10 speed faster than the AOE damage dealer to ensure they move faster than the Damage Dealer even with Speed RNG not going our way.
Example Team






Judith = CR Pusher
Tywin = Buffer + Defense Breaker + CR Pusher
Romann = Buff Stripper, Tagahel's Ancient Book Holder
Blood Blade Karin = AOE Damage Dealer
Turn Order desired:
1. Judith
2. Romann
3. Tywin
4. Blood Blade Karin
For this example, we save our Soul Burn for Tywin's Defense Break + Buff combo. We also assume we have a level 30 Tagehel's Ancient Book which allows us to have 20 Souls at the start of the battle.
We always use the speed of the fastest character and then trickle down.
Let's say our Judith is at 240 speed
Judith's "Mark of Acceleration" gives 20% Combat Readiness
Using the Speed tuning formula
240 * (100% -20%) = 192 speed is the minimum speed needed for Tywin and Romann to guarantee no Gap
Now we want Romann to move second to strip all the buffs so that Tywin can apply Defense Break afterwards.
We would want Romann to be a little faster than 192 speed. We recommend around 202 speed to avoid speed RNG messing up Turn Orders. while Tywin can be at 192 speed.
Now we Soul Burn Tywin and defense break and gain extra turn and CR Push + buffed Blood Blade Karin.
We use the Speed tune formula again to see what Blood Blake Karin's speed needs to be at.
Tywin's "Commanding Shout" increases Combat Readiness by 30% for the target.
Using the formula:
192 * (100% - 30%) = 134.4 Speed is all Blood Blade Karin needs to move in turn 1.
Final Speeds for each character:
Judith = 240 speed
Tywin = 192 speed
Romann = 202 speed
Blood Blade Karin = 134.4 speed
Picking the Right Opponent
Things to Avoid
Example
Video
Things to Avoid


Not every team comp can beat all the defense out there. Cleave Team is no exception. There are many anti cleave Defense set up out there that we should try to avoid.
Some things we try to avoid currently:
1. Teams with Multiple Knights with Healer
Knights have a lot of damage mitigation with all defensive artifacts. They also deal enough damage to hurt our Damage dealers that are usually very squishy.
Usually it will take a very good setup to cleave teams like these. So try to avoid them, or change up the Cleave team to bring multiple Tank Busters.
2. Gimmicky Counter attacks and Anti Cleave Heroes
Heroes like Celine, Fallen Cecilia, Kayron that have skills that can cause a lot of trouble for Cleave Teams.
Example
Here we will showcase one of our Writer's Cleave team and below shows two different days, one day is from a month ago where this account is climbing from Challenger and second day is from Champion.
The Red Rectangle circles the match up we want to fight with our team.
Notice the ones we did not Circle are mostly with ML Ken. That is because with this team, ML Ken will post a lot of trouble and we have to avoid him at all cost.
Every team has a different weakness, once players identify them, you will start losing less and climb rank a lot easier.


Video
This Video showcase the example team in action.
We recommend players constantly investigate and build up heroes that can counter their weaknesses.
The biggest difference between Legend Rank and Normal Rank is not just gear quality, it is also because they have a lot more answers to what the enemy throws at them.
Final Note
To build a successful Cleave Team, we need to do the following:
1. Utilize enough Hero's Role in Cleave team composition
2. Speed Tune the team correctly
3. Pick the right opponents
4. Continue to add more weapons to counter Anti Cleave or Tank units
This concludes our E7 Cleave Team Guide. Feel free to check out other guides here.
E7 made EZ by Sez Gaming. Until Next time!