Nightmare Mode Guide - Seven Knights Idle Adventure

Nightmare mode is the beginning of the end-game in Seven Knights Idle Adventure, allowing you to continue your adventure by replacing stages with tiers and facing new bosses. This mode offers the best rewards in the game and is essential for progressing your heroes.

How to Unlock

Nightmare is unlocked when you clear the final floor of the current stage in the game.
Once unlocked, the mode becomes accessible and resets every two weeks.

Objective

The objective in Nightmare is similar to standard floors, except instead of floors, you progress through tiers. At each tier, you face a boss. If you succeed, you advance to the next tier.

For each tier completed, you receive 1,000 Topazes usable in the Nightmare Shop. The goal is to complete as many tiers as possible before the game mode resets.
Nightmare lasts for 2 weeks and resets every Thursday with major game updates. You restart from Tier 0 when it resets.

Why Play Nightmare

• Great Elixir source (10,000 per week)
• At Tier 30, you unlock Deep Nightmare for even more Elixir
• Best Golden Dice source (36,000 per week)
• Unlock Medea hero cards

Nightmare Shard Buff

Unlike regular stages, Nightmare doesn't use dishes. Instead, you have the Nightmare Shard buff. This buff starts at level 1 and increases as you collect more "Nightmare Shard EXP" by killing normal monsters in Nightmare.

For each Nightmare Shard level gained, you get +2% to final stats.
Note: You continue to earn Nightmare Shard EXP even while offline.

Loot

The chests and loot obtained from defeating monsters are always based on the loot from the last floor you cleared.
By farming Nightmare, you also get resources for monster essences while progressing through tiers.

Nightmare Shop

Unlike the game mode, the Nightmare Shop resets weekly on Mondays. My priority purchase is Elixir - this is more interesting for progression than the other options.
Elixir is essential for hero awakening and should be your main focus in the shop.

Team Composition

There are two types of team compositions in Nightmare: farming normal mobs and fighting bosses.

Vs Normal Mobs

Use exactly the same team as your stage farming team: Heroes with movement speed buffs and maximum damage output. The goal is to clear mobs as quickly as possible to maximize Nightmare Shard EXP gains.

Vs Bosses

The Nightmare boss team can resemble a classic boss team in normal mode. However, you need to add a hero that boosts damage against Nightmare bosses:

• Priority 1: High Lord Sun Wukong (+70% upto +100% final damage against Nightmare Boss)
• Priority 2: High Lord Orin (+80% final damage against Nightmare Boss)
• Priority 3: Medea,Alcyion or Velika (+50% final damage against Nightmare Boss)

Here's the team I use:

Why This Team

This is a versatile team that can handle all boss types effectively. With this team, I get all the recommended buffs and debuffs applied. I use the best DPS heroes available in the game.

High Lord Sun Wukong is my damage booster against nightmare bosses.

I have good survivability with Arang with veils, combined with Undercover Ruri who heals and provides a buff that increases Final HP.

For DPS, that I don't bother with, we take the best ones: Erin, Fenrir, and Juri.
The new heroes Erin and Fenrir are completely overpowered: Erin has become my best DPS by far, and Fenrir provides the first buff to vital strike rates and is finally a big DPS with the bleed DOT.

Improvement point:

Replace Undercover Ruri with awakened Karma or the latest healer, Rauha.

Use Ecilia which provides an overload buff, increasing my team damage even further.
Reminder: If Ecilia has a strengthening stack at 9 and uses her skill, the overload damage boost is 3 times more powerful.This is where we also see the usefulness of High Lord Sun Wukong, which increases strength stacks.

Strategy

All my heroes use critical trait to counter critical hit rate resistance. This ensures consistent damage output even against bosses with high critical resistance.

Strategy against bosses

Depending on the reset, you will face different types of bosses.

Each boss does not require any special strategy; simply start the fight in auto mode.

The first boss requiring a strategy is the ”Black Tortoise's Illusion”. It has the ability to remove these debuffs and applies a healing buff.

1. To defeat him, equip heroes who can remove buffs and heroes who can at least apply curses and reduce critical strike resistance.
   Without this, he will heal himself and have too much critical resistance for you to defeat him in time.
2. To further enhance this strategy, I recommend manually moving your team at the start of the fight.
   Move closer to the monster until it casts its healing spell, then move away from it.
   Wait for the healing buff to wear off, then send your heroes into battle.
   
   This is very useful because, since you are not engaging in combat, the timer does not start, and the boss will waste its ability to remove debuffs.
   This will give you a huge advantage!

Conclusion

Nightmare mode is very challenging, and it's hard to get past tier 100. But keep in mind that the primary goal is to buy all the items in the store once a week.
So there's no need to try hard to reach tier 200 or more to achieve that 😉