Gram

Gram behaves similarly to an Ego Sword. It counts as an Ego Sword in most regards (leeches XP, increases XP if used with multiple Ego Swords on the same team, etc.) but it also gives a bonus amount of XP on top of the normal Ego Sword behavior. It differs from ego swords in regards to not giving exp to a pet wielding it outside of a dungeon team.

When unlocked, Gram will give an extra 20% XP to the equipped pet when used in dungeons. This can be increased by 2% each new Patreon Boss defeated.

The extra Gram XP is on top of the already existing extra XP given if multiple Egos/Gram are used on the same dungeon team. Meaning, Gram can give the equipped pet an extra 25%(Full Ego team) + 20%(Gram) XP at unlock if used with 5 Egos on the same team.

Note: The last paragraph above is inferred from user data, and the exact XP increase if using Gram with 5 Egos on one team is not known.

Unlock
Wolf of Nobina is a special boss that replaces the newbie ground boss if your party items includes a single runestone. It is tougher than a D3-10 boss. Defeating it for the first time awards you with Gram which is a unique named Tier 4 weapon which also starts out as SSS+20 (20). Defeating it multiple times provides no additional rewards.

Upgrading
Gram can only be upgraded by defeating each of the Patreon Bosses in the Newbie Grounds. It cannot be upgraded/enchanted/reforged by your Blacksmiths or Alchemists, but can have Gems embedded. Gram counts a T4 weapon, so Gems give a bonus of GemLevel * 4.

Additionally Grams base attack increases with each Patreon Boss defeated. Its base attack value is 27% and it increases by 1% for each Patreon Boss defeated (including Nobina). This means that upon unlocking it its actual attack value is 72.8%.

Bosses/Strategies
To start the first fight, you have to bring one Runestone into the Newbie Dungeon and advance to the boss. For the second boss, you have to bring two runestones and so on. You have to have defeated the previous boss to be able to summon the next boss.

Wolf of Nobina
You can fight this boss if you take 1 Runestone with you to the Newbie Ground and fight 6 rooms. Winning this fight will give you Gram.

This boss has an incredibly high amount of speed and can quickly overwhelm your team if you aren't prepared. A team with an average dl of 160-170 should be fine here as long as you have Hourglass and Elephant in the team. If you do not have these pets or would rather fight without them, you could need a team of dl 200+.

Since the boss has so much speed, it is recommended that you utilize speed gear/gems to minimize the bonus damage it will be inflicting as well as having enough speed to be able to hit the boss since it has the ability to dodge your attacks if you're too slow. Nobina can poison you, similar to the Poison trap you can find in some dungeons. Just make sure your Supporters can keep up with healing, and you pack enough antidotes, and it shouldn’t be an issue.

After reducing its HP to 200,000 Nobina will get a boost in power. Both Attack and Speed increase by 1,000 and its Element switches from Wind to Neutral. Total stats can be seen in the table below, with the numbers on the right being after the boost.

Wolf of Nobina is a great powerleveling target as you can farm it for XP. The base XP drop of a mimic is 4,500 while D3 bosses (you encounter 2) have a base XP of 12,000 per encounter (6,000 each, except for evolved balrog who is encountered alone and gives 12k by itself). Moreover encountering Nobina only takes 6 rooms vs the 30 it takes to encounter a D3 boss. D3 mimics are even harder to encounter. The only downside is having to repeatedly and manually start such short fights.


 * XP: 15,000
 * Special: Inflicts Poison with each strike. Has a chance to dodge attacks based on speed difference at a rate of (1 - (PetSpeed / NobinaSpeed))*100%

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front Row: Elephant, Dog, Archer

Back Row: Hourglass, Supporter, Dragon

Note: If you bring Elephant, you must bring at least two Supporters on the team with you. If you do not, Nobina will reflect the Burn effect onto your own pets.

Team Example
The following teams are to give you an idea of the setup required to win this fight.

This team had 50-70k growth, used 50 phoenix feathers and took over 40 turns.



This team was able to defeat the boss on turn 49.



This team had 54-79k growth for all except Anything with 114k, used 42 phoenix feathers, 42 health potion X, 5 health potion S, 123 antidotes and won on turn 46.



Fawn / Wisps
You can fight this battle if you take 2 Runestones and only 5 party members with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated Nobina previously and received Gram.

The goal in this fight is to heal Fawn to 4 million hp. The percent based heal power of your supporters is disabled in this fight. The Wisps do a lot of damage so your whole front row needs very good defense, and because the percent based heal power is disabled, water gems on your equip are not very useful. The back row supporters should go for full attack and hope they don't get attacked often.

A good team in this battle would be 2 defenders and 3 supporters. Neutral pets are at an advantage and hourglass helps to keep your supporters on 3 actions because the enemies will slow your pets down, potentially halving your speed. Both defenders want to have at least 4000 defense with all elements positive and hourglass, in the front row, wants to have more than 1000 defense with all elements positive.

Stats are listed below, but are mostly irrelevant except for Attack and Speed since you do not need to kill the Wisps.

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front row: Dog, Anything (defender, maxed titanium equip with earth gems), Hourglass (supporter, Titanium Armor with earth gem, Inferno Sword + Inferno Gloves with fire gem)

Back row: Any supporter specialists (supporter, one supporter Gram with fire gem, all other equip inferno with fire gem)

All pets should be higher than level 200/55.

Winning this fight will upgrade Gram to SSS +22 (22). This will increase the attack to 79, all elements to 90 and the extra exp gained to 22%.

Zombie General
You can fight this battle if you take 3 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated both Nobina and Fawn/Wisps previously and received Gram and its upgrade.

The Zombie General has a shield, which is impenetrable by dungeon class pets. This means you need adventurers to destroy the shield. For this fight, you need a high damage output and because you also need ~2 adventurers, there is no place for a defender in the team. The Zombie General also has a defense buff, which gives him high defense for a set amount of hits. Bringing Mages will be best for this, since they will deal multiple attacks per action and reducing his defense buff faster than with a single-hitting pet like an Assassin.

Winning this fight will upgrade Gram to SSS +24 (24). This will increase the attack to 86, all elements to 97 and the extra exp gained to 24%.

Good Team Compositions For This Fight
Front row: Supporter (Neutral is best), Assassin (Archer or Mimic), 1 adventurer (knives, 1000+ speed)

Back row: 2 Mages (BHC, Sylph, Witch, and Balrog are all very high-DPS Mages that can be strong here. Full damage gear, but should survive a hit, above 1k HP), 1 adventurer (knives, 1000+ speed)

For the Adventurers, you can always class change Book, Anything, or the Gray Child since they will most likely already be at a decent Dungeon Level. Flying Eyeball is another good option if you've been using it in dungeons.

About dungeon level 100 is enough for the adventurers. The other pets should all be above level 250/60 and 150k growth.



Lernean Hydra
You can fight this battle if you take 4 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated all previous Patreon bosses and received Gram and its upgrades.

When one of your pets kills a head, two more heads will spawn (up to 25), which typically causes an ultimate combined attack, and a loss. The only way to prevent this is to have the hero Heracles join the team. He will auto-join once there are 25 Hydra Heads... if you left them an empty spot on the team.

With every attack, the Hydra Heads will also poison your pets with a unique toxin. This poison will stack, and will deal damage based on the number of stacks the pet has every turn. You can use an Antidote every turn to reduce these stacks by one per pet per round. Alternatively, you can bring the Hydra pet to the fight, who prevents the poison from being applied in the first place. This makes it easier, but is not mandatory.

Heracles has another ability vital for the fight... only he can prevent the heads from doubling on death. Your own damage dealers should kill less than one head per turn at average, otherwise the fight will never end and the room will collapse at round 50. Even Heracles can't save you from rocks falling.

Each Hydra Head has 40,000 hp, low Defense, and good Elements.

A level 350+/100 Archer with 200k growth + a cl 100 Blacksmith would do too much damage. If you have pets that strong, consider a Defender instead of a Blacksmith. Or bring a slightly weaker Assassin. Mages will not help you as much as you would think in this fight.

That all is phase one. There is another one that happens once Heracles has crushed enough heads...but it is fairly straight forward.

For the second phase, the Lernean Hydra's main body comes to fight you. It has almost 1.5 million HP, and scales that prevent Knives from reducing its Defense all the way to 0... so have fun with that. Heracles is your pinch hitter.

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front row: 2 Assassins (Archer + Mimic) or Assassin + Defender, and 1 Blacksmith

Back row: 1 Supporter, Hydra

The Blacksmith and Supporter should both use T3 Knives. Blacksmith and Hydra should have above 1000 speed, better 1500. Water element would be best to mitigate damage taken, otherwise using at least one T3 Water equip for pets with less than 100 water helps. For the Hydra pet, a dungeon level of 120-150 is enough, but your Assassins might want to be level 280+ with ~200k growth and a mimic multiplier of > 2. The Blacksmith should have a class level of 65+.

I would suggest making the Hydra the Blacksmith, if there are enough Pet Stones / CC Tokens to spare.

Ghost is a possibility, but they can only scream at six Hydra Heads out of 25-ish, and there is no guarantee that they will be the ones hit that round. That said, it can be helpful.

Chicken
You can fight this battle if you take 5 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated all previous Patreon bosses and received Gram and its upgrades.

The battle starts off against just one Chicken, but many others will spawn for a total of 25 Chickens. These enemies have incredibly high Defense, have the ability to weaken your own pet's stats, and can revive themselves if killed. To completely kill a Chicken, you must have an Adventurer deal the killing blow when the Chicken is at 1 HP, cooking the Chicken in the process. This will heal all pets for 3,000 HP. One Adventurer can cook one Chicken per turn.

Because the Chickens have such high defense, you will most likely rely on speed damage to deal with them. Equipping your pets with Sticks and Wind Gems, while still maintaining a high degree of tankiness is key. Hourglass is helpful for a boost in Speed, but not necessary with the right gearing. Thankfully, the Chickens only have 300 HP so it won't take much damage to bring them down to 1 HP to be cooked.

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front Row: Defender, Defender, Adventurer

Back Row: Hourglass, Supporter, Supporter

You can always use Nothing, Book, or one of the Graylings to class-swap and become your Adventurer for this fight, since you will most likely not have any Adventurers with a high Dungeon Level.

The below team example is with pets at around 180k growth. This setup can be improved on, but as of writing not many players have reached a point to be able to beat this. Feel free to share your teams on Discord for other players to use as a benchmark.



You can also add a second Adventurer if you cannot handle the fight for too long with your Defenders.

With around 180k growth pets the fight was a success around 75% of the time.

Godly Statue
You can fight this battle if you take 6 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated all previous Patreon bosses and received Gram and its upgrades.

The speed and attack of every single one of your pets is multiplied by small value every time the boss gets hit, so actions/turn is the name of the game here. The goal is to hit infinite attack before turn 51.

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front Row: 3 mages

Back Row: 3 mages (Sylph ideal but not necessary)

Animal Band
You can fight this battle if you take 7 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated all previous Patreon bosses and received Gram and its upgrades.

In this fight, six bosses are fought at once, replicating another team of pets fighting your own. Each of the enemies has a special ability similar to some of your own pets. You will fight 2 Defender-type enemies with an ability similar to Gnome's shield, 2 Supporter-type enemies with an ability similar to Salamander's AOE heal, 1 Mage-type enemy that will regenerate all of its HP when hit, and 1 Assassin-type enemy who can attack 2 pets at once with a piercing strike that attacks a pet in the front row and the pet directly behind it in the back row.


 * Danger Noodle and Sunny McChubs are a Water and Earth Defender respectively
 * Starshine and Flopsy are Neutral Supporters
 * Sgt. Softie is a Wind Assassin
 * Caramel is a Fire Mage

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Similar team composition as the later Aether boss (DEotF) fights. Which is to say, 1 powerful DPS, 1 supporter, 1 blacksmith, 3 defenders, with DPS geared for maximum attack and the rest geared for survival (but with knives; blacksmith gets rune patch). The supporter can under-heal if geared too defensively though. Eyeball is possibly a good pick for the fight to gun down the enemy DPSes first, yet it is not crucial.

Front Row: DPS, Defender, Defender

Back Row: Blacksmith, Supporter, Defender

Chromatic Dragon
You can fight this battle if you take 8 Runestones with you to the Newbie Ground and reach the boss room. This fight can only happen after you have defeated all previous Patreon bosses and received Gram and its upgrades.

Chromatic Dragon will change its element every 6 actions according to a fixed order, and will heal whenever it is attacked by an element it is weak to. The strategy is to have 1 or 2 paramount non-neutral DPSes of the same element, and to time the boss hitting 0 defense from knives such that there is enough time for the DPSes to kill the boss before it switches to the element the DPSes are strong against (in which case the boss will heal for more than the damage dished out to it previously).

Neutral pets are perma-stunned for the whole fight, so only non-neutral pets are viable. You can use Neutral Defenders, but just remember they will essentially act as HP sponges and will not be able to attack the Dragon or defend other pets from incoming attacks. Their passive shield is still effective, but they will not actively block incoming attacks. Neutral Defenders are more likely to survive, so test which is better for you: Stunned Neutral Defenders, or potentially weaker Non-Neutral Defenders. In the below team example, Neutral Defenders were the better option.

Good Team Composition For This Fight
Front Row: Non-neutral Assassin, Defender, Defender

Back Row: Non-neutral Mage, Supporter, Blacksmith (with Rune Patch)

You will want pets with DL 300+ and CL 80+ with several Dojo buffs. Have a hard-hitting DPS like Witch, and/or Succubus, supported by Defenders, a Blacksmith with Rune Patch, and Supporters.

This team was able to beat the fight after a couple attempts. Requires some good RNG due to the changing elemental weakness.