Core Review

Introduced with the release of the Upper Floors of the Demons’ Castle, Cores are the latest progression system that will greatly impact both Sung Jinwoo And your Hunters, giving massive stats as well as having special effects depending on the sets they belong to. For the time being, Cores only affect the characters they are equipped to, and they’ll quickly become a great source of Stats and TP, massively boosting the power of any character when the proper Cores are used.

For now, their availability is extremely limited and they can only be acquired by defeating the various stages of the Workshop of Brilliant Light (WOBL), with the Burning series sets being moved to the classic Artifact Dungeons starting from Level12. Here’s a quick breakdown of where the Cores can be looted and what they do:

• The First Slot Cores will be focused on offense, always giving ATK as the main stat and having damage buffing set effects, the two current sets giving either Cdmg to Basic Skills on Ult or a simple ATK% buff at all times. They can be acquired in any difficulty of both Vulcan and Baran’s dungeons;
• The Second Slot Cores will boost defense, with DEF as their main stat and giving the equipped characters purely defensive buffs from the set effects, like Shields or Damage Reduction. You can obtain them starting from Medium Vulcan and Easy Baran;
• On the other hand, the Third Slot Cores can only be dropped when defeating the Normal mode Bosses of Baran’s dungeon, making them much more difficult to gather compared to the other two types. Those will give HP as main stat, and their set effects will be focused on utility, such as MP Regen or Power Gauge charge.

All Cores will come with a random secondary stat, ranging from Crit Rate to MP Recovery Rate or even Damage Reduction. Those secondary stats can NOT give you any of the ATK, DEF or HP stats however so keep that in mind when you assess the viability of a Core.

When assessing the Core’s worth, you’ll have to look at 3 main angles right from the beginning, and the order of importance will vary based on your account’s progress:

• For the majority of people, the most important aspect will be the secondary stat. Getting Damage Reduction on an ATK Core will drastically lower its value, regardless of set and Element;
• If you rolled a good secondary stat, the 2nd thing to look for will be the Core’s Element and set. Indeed, the set effect will only be active if the Core is equipped to a Hunter of the same Element, SJW having his own version of the Cores with a little SJW head instead;
• The 3rd, and least important criterion when you are not pushing the very endgame content, will be the rarity of the Core. It goes without saying that Legendary Cores will be stronger than Heroic ones, and that the latter will similarly outshine the Rare Cores. Nonetheless, having enough Cores for all your most used Hunters, as the TP boost and the Raw stats will be noticeable.

With that said, the priority isn’t entirely set in stone. If you don’t mind swapping Cores before every fight, it can be useful to hyperfocus on a couple of Offensive Cores in order to benefit greatly from the massive Raw stats they’ll give to your Carries (DEF Cores will be considered as Offensive options for Hunters like Chairman Go and Charlotte, and HP will be the same for Harper and Seo Jiwoo for example), the set effects being powerful but not as impactful as the sheer amount of stats you’ll get from a high level Core with good stats.

• For the 1st Core slot, Ancient Wraith set (ATK%) will be the King for any ATK based carry except potentially Mirei. For any carry using DEF or HP, you’ll be defaulting to the Nameless Demon set (Cdmg for Basic Skills on Ult);
• For the 2nd slot, the Nameless Demon will excel when defending against Burst, but will otherwise offer little value when facing packs of enemies and high DPS foes. Still, this slot offers more leeway and you should focus mostly on the raw stats;
• In the 3rd’s slot case, Ancient Wraith is once again stealing the spotlight, with a powerful Power Gauge charge effect whenever you perform 3 Basic Attacks (10s CD). The Nameless Demon isn’t any good, giving back at most 5% MP whenever your character Ults (at 2,000 Mana this is a 100MP refund, which is not even a Basic Skill’s cost). For most characters you’ll still give more importance to the raw stats, but when it comes to scoring content 3% Power Gauge on up to 10 characters over the course of an entire boss fight is a big deal.

For the stats, you’ll follow more or less the same pattern as the artifact recommendations:

• For the main stats, the Flat stats will be most useful for all Hunters, while SJW might prefer ATK %, DEF Flat and HP Flat;
• For the secondary stats, this will mostly depend on your Artifacts: Crit Rate will be awesome if you can't reach 50% with your Artifacts and will be the highest priority in that case. You should also consider crit rate cores if it lets you drop ‘bad pieces’ of gear with average crit rate value, to expand and minmax the offensive stats you can get. Otherwise, Defense Penetration, Crit Damage and Damage Increase will be favored on Carries, with some exceptions like Mirei benefiting greatly from Additional MP (and even SJW if you play mostly on AUTO). Note that for Guild Boss, many Carries can run out of MP within the first couple of minutes, so you can consider MP secondary stats in that case, but be careful when building such niche Cores at first.
• For Supports and non damage oriented Breakers, you’ll be looking at mostly Additional MP, or any MP related effect if you can’t find the perfect mix of main stat + second stat + element + set. Special mention for Min Byung-Gu, who still benefits greatly from Crit Damage even as a Support.

You’ve got a good Core, now you naturally want to upgrade it. But how?

Well, there aren’t too many options as of now: you’ll have to feed it other Cores to increase its Level, sacrificing the offerings in the process. This is going to be very costly at first, Cores being very scarce so be sure not to waste your fodder on upgrading average Cores. Once you take your Cores to Level 10, you’ll likely still be very far from maxing its stats, and that’s where the Solidified Stones will become relevant.

You will only be able to use Solidified Stones of a similar rarity as the Core you’re enhancing, with the Tier 3 Stones being very rare drops on Normal Mode Baran only. You’ll have to craft most of those materials, and for this reason it’s not recommended to spend any Solidified Stones on Cores below Legendary Tier.

Ideally, if you don’t need a core immediately, it doesn’t hurt to wait until you get the right stat combination with a starting value of 15-20%. This way you will decrease the number of upgrade materials you will need to use when maxing out your core!

Lastly, it’s good to know that once you decide to change Cores for better ones, those getting replaced can be used to give more experience to the newer Cores, even though the ratio isn’t amazing.