Shrine of Frigidity - a.k.a Ice Dragon Nova Crest
This document is readily available through the “.qp icedragnova” command.
Maintained by the GSGL Official Discord Advisor Team
Introduction
This is the fourth Nova Palace released on Global. Full disclaimer that there is still a minimum difficulty level to be expected, and not everyone can farm Nova Crest, due to the difficulty and restrictions that Nova Crest Palaces have.
Please note that this guide was drafted before the initial release of Shrine of Frigidity on Global only with the reference of JP clears, and as a result the available team compositions to clear will not be limited to the ones listed here. You are encouraged to experiment and build teams accordingly based on the mechanics and strategies described in this guide.
Wave 1 - Adds
Normal Mobs will spawn in the first wave with no special gimmicks, gives you time to start your team up for the waves to come.
Wave 2 - Germose and Leader
Germose
- CRIT RES
- CRIT Rate Up against frozen units
- Attacks/Arts have a chance to inflict Freeze
- At 50% HP, casts Arts and gains permanent DMG UP
Leader
- Magic RES - but it’s as good as nullifying it completely, MAG attacks will deal 1 DMG to her
- Periodically casts a short lasting healing-over-time spell that affects Germose & herself, healing 110k HP/tick and 64k HP/tick respectively
Both Germose and Leader are very squishy and Germose should be cleared threshold to threshold. In the event that you are unable to blitz through his HP, the healing from Leader can restore him fairly quickly. On the bright side, he doesn’t do much damage at all. Deal with the Freeze effect accordingly with Freeze RES. You need a source of Physical damage to go past Leader.
Wave 3 - Saar and Leader
Race: Beast
- Arts Drain RES
- Physical Evasion UP
- Negates Barriers
Leader
- Magic RES - but it’s as good as nullifying it completely, MAG attacks will deal 1 DMG to her
- Periodically casts a short lasting healing-over-time spell that affects Saar & herself, healing 160k HP/tick and 64k HP/tick respectively
Arts (Saar)
- Wicked Fang, Minadzuki [Water, Physical] (Arts): Gains CRIT Rate UP for the duration of Arts. Moderately damaging Arts.
- Phantom Bladestorm, Oborodzuki [Water, Physical] (True Arts): Gains CRIT Rate UP and invulnerability for the duration of Arts. Painful True Arts.
Thresholds
70% HP - Casts True Arts, gains CRI DMG UP and Physical Evasion UP
30% HP - Casts True Arts, gains CRI DMG UP and Arts gauge filling speed UP
Mitigate and heal through this and all should be well, Saar casts Arts really fast and hurts whilst negating barriers. Magic damage is favoured to get past Saar’s physical evasion or just bring some Accuracy, and the opposite goes for Leader. Quite potent healing here again so burst Saar down or kill Leader first.
Wave 4 - Lozze and Leader
Race: Beast
- Reflection, Arts Drain RES
- Equipment damage and break have reduced potency/effect
- The more times Lozze is broken, the more damage your units take
- Each time Lozze is broken, gains permanent Break RES
Leader
- Magic RES - but it’s as good as nullifying it completely, MAG attacks will deal 1 DMG to her
- Periodically casts a short lasting healing-over-time spell that affects Lozze & herself, healing 140k HP/tick and 64k HP/tick respectively
Arts (Lozze)
Lozze’s 5 Orb Arts always alternate between Arts and True Arts before repeating.
- Shooting Blade [Water, Physical] (Arts): Applies a permanent stack of ATK Down (up to 10?) on your units. Moderately damaging Arts.
- Blade Ultima [Water, Physical] (True Arts): Purely damaging arts. Painful True Arts.
Lozze has no thresholds, but doesn’t take much damage pre-break. His initial break bar with no Break RES is not that huge. You can either have a breaker to respect the gimmick or just brute force it with plenty of buffs. If brute forcing, you can also choose to have equips to at the very least cut his break bar down substantially and have your units do the rest with their raw break values then burst Lozze. It’s ideal to clear fast as Lozze will constantly reduce your ATK the more he gets to cast Arts.
Wave 5 - Aerugraxes
Race: Dragon
- Reflection, Arts Drain RES
- Taunt Killer
- Increased damage taken while Burning
- Targets the unit dealing the most damage, CRIT Rate UP to said target
- Attacks have a chance to inflict a long-lasting DMG RES Down debuff, jump attack can inflict Faint
Arts
Aerugraxes’ 5 Orb Arts always alternate between Arts and True Arts before repeating.
- Ice Breeze (アイス・ブリューレソ) [Water, Magic] (Arts): Applies a permanent stack of HP Recovery Down (~20%) on units.
- Hellfrost (ヘルフロスト) [Water, Magic] (True Arts): Gains a permanent stack of DMG UP. Very lethal if not mitigated.
Thresholds
80% HP - Casts True Arts, gains Earth RES UP.
50% HP - Casts True Arts, gains Burn RES UP.
20% HP - Casts True Arts, gains CRIT RES UP and DMG UP.
Strategy
Nova with many waves. Thankfully, the first 3 can easily be breezed through. Have a team that has both Physical and Magic damage as you need them to go through Wave 2 to 4. You’ll find that the whole Nova consists of Water enemies, so defense equips with Water RES are invaluable here. Going through the important stuff wave by wave:
- Only Wave 2 has some form of Freeze inflict, but Ces Wavy Frill is still very effective here for its MAG RES.
- Wave 3 can hurt and negates barriers, so damage reduction and any form of healing is key here.
- Wave 4 is quite hard to damage without prior breaking, and while Lozze directly reduces break from equipment, you can still bring equips with Break Power UP to assist units in breaking, regardless of whether you’re respecting the mechanic or brute forcing it.
- Wave 5 has Earth RES UP after 80%, so Earth DPSes will require a lot more support if you force it. There’s also Taunt Killer, so that’s out.
Burn from equips like Milim’s Necklace or Mira’s Sailor Swimsuit, or units like Rin can be useful for Wave 5 since Aerugraxes takes more damage while burning. Red-Nosed Roy Doll, Ces Wavy Frill and MAG RES defence equips are very good here. Mitigators are important too: Shirou, Beta, HSaitama, Hazuki and the like.
Example team comps:
- Mono Water variations:
- UPRoy / Shirou, Beta / Houka / Summer Miyu
- UPRoy / Shirou, Beta / Houka / Jay
- UPRoy / Shirou, Beta / Houka / Shadow
- Water trio + DPS
- MDD
- Standard baseline of Mitigator / Artsgen / Artsgen / DPS
this was written a long time ago so it’s quite outdated