Advanced gearing

Counter:Side is a live-service game which means things can and will change, for better or worse. Two most prominent examples are the CC-Resistance (now renamed to Debuff Resistance) and the DMG Calculation rework. This means the guide might become obsolete / less relevant.

If it does happen, do let us know so we can make changes to the guide to keep them up-to-date.

As you progress through the game you will find things you enjoy and want to be better at. We have a limited number of Maze, Humming, and Gordias gears so eventually you will be faced with choosing how many sets for each gear you want to have. Currently on SEA we have: 9 Maze Hands, 9 Maze Case, 13 Maze Crowns, 2 Humming Hands, 5 Gordias Crowns, and 3 Gordias Movements.

You should try to tune them all first before going all in on one single gear as per the tips in “Beginner Guide to Gearing”. Once you have done so, you will want to min-max your gears to your needs. We will not tell you “you must have X amount of gears for this content” but we will try to show how many gears are needed for each type of content so you can draw a conclusion yourself.

You can bring 8 units in your team for PvP. You will be given 1 Leader + 3 randomized units at the start of the fight + 4 randomized sequence. Knowing this, you will want a team that will allow a good flow of deployment no matter what happened during the fight.

A basic team for PvP consists of 2-3 Tank (1 Main + 1-2 Off-Tank), 3-4 DPS (Defender shredder, Striker killer, Backline deleter), and 1-3 Flex (Crowd Control, More DPS, DP Battery, Helidrop/Nuker, Healer, Buffer)

Tank will obviously need defensive gear:

• HP/DEF/EVA set: generally for your Tank that just needs to survive and be a wall to disrupt the enemy (Yumi and A-NYB for example).
• Defensive ASPD: generally for your Tank that has utility that needs them to hit (Chifuyu and A-Jake for example).
• Defensive CDR: generally for your Tank that has useful Special and Ultimate skills (Serapel and A-Hilde for example).

You can gain 67.2% Ground RES + some Type/Role/Range-Melee RES to maximize your gear. CDMG RES is not very useful in PvP as only some hits will eventually CRIT and you do not try to tank Kestrel shots (guaranteed CRIT), it’s either you kill her fast or you die.

While you can use a standard 20% aspd from set, you might want to have more haste than the standard 30%. This means you will need to sacrifice some RES for Haste. The best way to do it is to get the Haste from latent, and use the gear’s substats for the RES.

DPS will need either ASPD, CDR, or ATK-Spectral gear:

• Offensive ASPD: generally for your DPS that doesn't need/have skills with cooldown to use (Soldiers/Mech and units with “do this after x hits” skill for example)
• Offensive CDR: generally for your DPS that need to spam their skills by reducing it’s cooldown as much as possible (most Counter units for example)
• ATK-Spectral: generally for your DPS that has Exclusive Equipment (EE) and you want to maximize its damage by using role-dmg + ground-dmg stats from Spectral gear too (Gaeun and Nestkeeper for example)

The best ASPD will be Swift Relic aspd obviously; you can get 40%+ ASPD just from the gears (20% set + 7.6% 1st substat + 20.2% latent). Add ground-dmg from 2nd substat and you will have your unit shred your opponents.

The Maze CDR is arguably the best offensive CDR there is, but there is also Challenger CDR for units with huge damage on Special skill and Sc CDR for budget gear.

A compromise between ASPD and CDR will be Maze ASPD. This gear set can get 20% ASPD + 42% Haste (46.2% if T7) + 44.8% ground-dmg (51.2% if T7).

This gives you a picture of how many gears you will need. The Flex units will need gear following the role they have. Mostly will be CDR (Crowd Control, DP Battery, Healer, Buffer) but some Nuker/More DPS will want Anti-X or ASPD gears (Kang with anti-sniper for example).

You will need 8x2 units for Danger Close (DC). The team will be fixed, no randomizer. Different with PvP you don’t need to adapt to the flow; you create the flow. Problem with DC is that gears and units will be locked for each boss (there are 2 bosses per DC). Another problem is that the bosses are unique and will need a different team for each. Add another layer to it: each DC will have special battlefield conditions and a certain buffed unit faction. There are already guides on each boss in “Danger Close” Guide Section, each with detailed boss mechanics and how to tackle them.

This guide will only say that you will need to prepare several Tank, ASPD, CDR, and Anti-X gears enough for 2 teams. That means having 2-4 Tank gear, 6-8 DPS gear, and 2-4 Utility gear. You will obviously need more than this because of how the DC bosses rotate.

The guide will focus on Worm 1-7 because to get the max reward you are only required to kill these. Worm 8-15 are for the leaderboard with no reward.

Similar to Raid, you will have 16 units with no respawn. The key for co-op is to have your DP Battery + Healers out early, then have DPS, Debuffer, Buffer out in that order.

• You need a defender so you get the Protection effect, best is Mone but can also use Serapel (1 ASPD/CDR)
• Linxien as main DP Battery (1 CDR) + Sigma as off DP Battery (1 mech CDR)
• You only need Harim + Evelyn as the healers (2 CDR)
• You need someone to kill the flying mobs, best option is A-LSY (1 CDR)
• You need to seal/delay the worm’s skills using John Mason (1 soldier CDR)
• You want to have enough DPS to kill Worm 1-7, typical units used are Xiaolin, Orca, A-Mina, A-SY (1 CDMG-EE + 1 CDR + 2 ASPD)
• You want to full-strip the defense of the worm by using Chifuyu, Terminator, Tarras, Roy, Seoyoon (3 ASPD + 2 CDR)
• The rest will be DMG Amp/Buffer/more DPS like Doma/R-Queen/Shinjia/Hilde/Ifrit depending on how many slots you have left

Other PvE like Shadow Palace, Relic Dungeon, Dive, and Raid will also need proper gearing so you can clear them. Generally you don’t need to prepare specific gears for these if you have done preparing your gears for previous contents. The guide will give a quick look on each as well as what gear will be needed.

Shadow Palace 4 - the fast and consistent team to clear this is using the Striker+Ranger team, it works for all rooms (1-5) and this means you will just need to set up one team. 3 ASPD and 5 CDR should suffice. More details on the Shadow Palace Guide section.

Relic Dungeon Weapon 4 - The boss is a Striker, meaning anti-striker gears will help you here. Xiaolin will be a must bring (can use ASPD/CDMG/Anti-Striker). You will also need 1 defensive gear and 3-4 CDR sets for your Supporters and DPS.

Relic Dungeon Armor 4 - The menace is “Jake”, a striker, meaning anti-striker gears will be your best ally here. Note that you cannot bring Counter units here so prepare Mech gears.

Relic Dungeon Accessory 4 - This stage is cheesed with 3 flying units (A-LSY, Rosa, Lyudmila) each with CDR gears (Rosa can also use ATK/Spectral gear).

Dive - you will eventually need 5 teams, each with 6-8 units or even less. Only around half of them will be properly geared while the rest can use random aspd/cdr standard set.

Raid - If you are ready for co-op, chances are you are also ready for raid. More details for Britra and Inhibitor raids are in the Raid Guide section.

A word of warning

Gear tuning has no pity, unlike when you roll for a unit. This means that improper investment can potentially brick your account. Tip for new players will be:

Always try to ask people with better knowledge and experience before committing to use your tuning/set binaries and before you sell/enhance a gear. We have a discord server with lots of helpful people willing to share, so do check it out.