Age of Magic - Cloud Wanderers (CW) Faction Guide

The faction contains 7 heroes – Roxanne (Roxy), Ramfort, Ever, Teodor, Astoria, Capfei and Bliss. CW is a team worth developing all through the game, and if you are able to obtain them they can easily serve as your primary squad for your entire game experience.

I would personally argue they are the Best all-around team in Age of Magic, slightly beating out Guardians of Order (GOO) though it is very close. The reason, for me, is that while GOO can generally beat a similar-strength CW team in arena, CW has a bigger advantage in tournament because a smaller CW faction can be far more effective than a smaller GOO faction, allowing you to earn more Tournament bonuses. CW is also in Celestial Raids, while GOO is not part of any event raid side.

Strengths of CW Team Include

Ease of Use. The CW team is relatively straightforward to play.
The CW team’s skills are extremely complimentary of each other
CW is very effective at healing, second only to GOO with their resurrection ability, allowing them to serve as a strong raid team without needing much healing kits
CW team is very effective at buffs, debuffs, and dealing a massive amount of damage.

Team Construction

The CW team, at its core, is built around 3 indispensable members (who considering the faction lore I affectionately call the Holy Trinity) – Roxy, Ramfort and Ever. More recently Capfei is the next irreplaceable character. I’ll briefly describe the heroes and their utility below:

Roxanne – Leader. Her passive and leader skills hold the team together, she’s the best at removing debuffs and adding initiative.
Ever – Healer. One of the top 2 healers in the game. She’s also the last line of defense because of her amazing resurrection skill. With proper awakenings, she’s got the ability to keep the team at nearly full health in almost every round
Ramfort – Tank. He has one of the highest HP count of any character in the game. Amazing damage absorber and slower.
Capfei – Caster. huge damage dealer, booster for Roxy and Bliss but has somewhat low HP and frequently targeted
Astoria – Ranged damager.Frequently the 5th member until NM raids or facing other meta squads (especially Chaos Spawns) in arena
Bliss – Rogue. Great at charming and becomes the more effective 5th member when pure damage is less important than control.
Teodor – Melee damager. Usually he’s the first CW member excluded from any lineups.

Ideal Team Structure (Highly Dependent on Need)

There are 3 “ideal” CW teams (all of them contain Roxy, Ramfort, Ever, Capfei), depending on what you are targeting:

Raids until Nightmare – Roxy, Ramfort, Ever, Capfei, Rhiannon.
Maximum DPS – Roxy, Ramfort, Ever, Capfei, Astoria.
Survivability and PVP (especially against Chaos Squad) – Roxy, Ramfort, Ever, Capfei, Bliss.

Awakenings

The CW team is both blessed with and cursed by having many extremely useful awakenings. Blessing is that it really strengthens the team, but curse as it involves a lot of investment. I will break up the awakenings for the team in 2, necessary and nice to have…

Necessary. I list these in order of importance for the first 2. After the first 2, the others are listed by character.

Roxanne: 2nd – Ode to Heavens. This is the most important CW awakening skill of any character. I would recommend getting this awakening before any others. The base skill increases speed and removes debuffs. The awakening prevents CW from receiving debuffs for 2 turns. This is the skill that allows you to boss around full druid/archon squads with just Roxy/Ram/Ever.

Ever: Passive (Shadow healer) – this should be your second awakening after Ode to Heavens. This allows every flying skill to trigger healing DOTs to heal 3 team members. This basically turns every CW character into a squad healer.

Ramfort: Passive (Celestial Protector) , this is arguably not as necessary, but for Arena and Tournament as I’ll discuss below, it’s essential to his survival. Also, the counter-attack ability is very nice. I added this awakening 3rd after Roxy’s 2nd and Ever’s passive.

Note – after these 3, the other “necessaries” can be done in whatever order you feel necessary.

Roxanne’s Leader is highly necessary for Nightmare raids. However, if you use Rhiannon in D5 raid, which I do, and you mainly fight with 3-4 Cw characters in tournament, its not super necessary. But, for those in Nightmare, its obviously pretty critical.

Roxanne: 3rd (Gusts of Wind) and Leader (Keeper of Knowledge)

Ever: 2nd (light Cyclones)

Capfei: 2nd (First steps). This is also very useful in Arena to fight Chaos Squad.

Nice to Have. These are listed in random order:

Capfei: 3rd (Emergency)

Ramfort: 3rd (Cloud Singer)

Ever: 3rd (Beware the Ray)

Bliss: Passive (Heartbreaker) and 2nd

Strategy

The CW team has very strong survivability.
Its main objective is to keep Ramfort alive, which is good because he’s an absolute TANK (not as high HP as Sekhmun but close).
Second, Ever’s passive is a last line of defense to keep you alive.
Once Ramfort falls, the other team members become significantly more vulnerable.
For gear 12+ the entire CW team is on the “Nature Essence” equipment track, which is fantastic because they are the best team by far for that equipment and so has no natural competition for advancing their equipment other than each other (Unlike GOO which is mostly Order stones but also Chaos stones for Omphis and Sekhmun, which are massively competitive).

The following 2 team members should be prioritized for power boosts:

Capfei. He’s very damage prone due to his low HP so getting him stronger is very important.
Ramfort. He’s already got the most HP of any character, but given his taunt ability and how important his survival is, keeping him alive really matters.

Tactics

Ever’s passive skill (coupled with her 2nd, especially awakened) makes basically every CW member a healer because all of their flying skills wind up healing the rest of the team, allowing you to stay at full health for a while.
It’s important to keep at least 1 member’s flying skill unused as the emergency healing if necessary – most likely Ever’s.
Roxy’s 2nd skill (awakened) prevents the team from being debuffed for 2 rounds (usually enough for them to debuff and demolish the opponent significantly). If you have it awakened, I highly recommend starting each fight casting it, as it makes the rest of your life easier.
Capfei’s 3rd skill increases its damage by the number of unique buffs he has on. Virtually every CW’s skill casts some form of buff, so the more you cast prior to using the skill the more devastating it is.

Approach to Most Battles

CW is a fairly easy and intuitive team to fight with, because their skills are highly synchronized with each other.
If you have Capfei and Bliss, Bliss will have the first initiative. Use this time to cast Bliss’s 2nd ability (Enchanted Flute) which makes all CW debuffs land more effectively.
Next (or first if you don’t have bliss), have Capfei cast his 2nd ability (First Steps) which stops enemies from buffing for 2 turns (having Bliss in the party makes this ability especially effective (if awakened this means Roxy will probably have next turn).
Next, if Roxy has her 3rd ability (Gust of Wind) awakened, and the opposition has a decent amount of initiative, cast it. If not, cast her 2nd (Ode to Heavens) which if awakened will make CW debuff resistant and faster for 2 turns.
Next, depending on if Ever or Ram go next, have Ram cast his 3rd ability (cloud singer – slow), followed by Ever casting her 2nd (Light cyclones).
Once this cycle is done, your CW squad should be massively overpowered against the opposition. After this point, you can start dealing damage at will. The only other useful strategy is to build up more buffs for Capfei’s flying skill (which increases in damage by each unique buff on him). You can cast Roxanne’s flying skill to increase everyone’s damage and add the additional buff for Capfei. Afterward, Cap’s attack should finish off most teams.

Special Tournament Tactics

As I noted earlier, the CW team is incredible for tournaments because they are very effective with a small number of members.
This strategy even works up to the 2nd to last tier level (though the efficacy is lower at that stage)
In the 3rd to last tier stage, you will encounter quite a few teams that the Holy Trinity can defeat by themselves with just a few awakenings (Roxy 2nd, Ram passive, Ever passive). This allows you to add random characters, who don’t have to be strong themselves, but provide points bonuses which increase total scores.

This trio is more than enough to defeat any non-aligned 5 opponents as well as weaker factions (demons, dwarves, etc) with relative ease as well some common tourney factions including:

Archons without Crimson Order
Druids (druids takes some practice though)
Dark Elves
High Elves
Wild Elves , etc

CW Weaknesses

CW does not fare as well against 3 teams in PVP settings:

GOO – the other meta faction they compete against for the best. GOO’s frequent re-spawning poses significant problems for CW. GOO is probably the most difficult team to fight for CW.
Chaos Spawn – which is a problem for every other team since this is the best PVP squad available as its their focus. Usually, using Bliss instead of Astoria helps massively against CW.
Vans with Reimund. Reimund is a strong counter to CW’s strength as he absorbs most of the CW’s buffs. Hae’lis passive is also very anti-Ever, but without Reimund it’s usually possible to kill Hae’lis before Ever dies.

How to Obtain

The CW team was introduced more than a year ago, so obtaining them organically is very difficult now.
Roxanne is obtainable through Shadow Talisman summoning
Teodor and Ever can be obtained in the last stage of level 5, legendary campaign, light and dark. However, if you are able to clear this stage, you most likely already have the CW team maxed out.
The entire team periodically cycles through the Hero Hunt Trophy, and this is the most effective place to obtain them.

Age of Magic – Cloud Wanderers (CW) Faction Guide