You know that feeling when a boss health bar just evaporates? Not “chips away over ten turns” evaporates. One attack, nine digits, fight over.
That’s what these four builds do in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The first one guarantees over 100 million damage before the enemy gets a single turn, and with a couple of tweaks it clears a billion. I found these through a fantastic video breakdown (credited at the bottom), then spent way too long cross-referencing every Picto, Lumina, and weapon against the wikis to make sure the names and numbers actually hold up. Auto-generated transcripts butcher this game’s French vocabulary, so consider this the corrected, verified version.
The best part? None of these require beating endgame superbosses first. If you’ve got the free Verso’s Drafts update installed, you’re most of the way there.
Quick Context: Verso’s Drafts and Where We Are Patch-Wise
Sandfall dropped the Verso’s Drafts content (the “Thank You Update,” patch 1.5.0) for free on December 12, 2025, right after the game swept the Game Awards. It added a new explorable area east of Lumière, roughly a dozen new weapons, 17 new Pictos, and Lumina loadout saving, which you will absolutely want for swapping between these builds.
Two of these four builds lean on Verso’s Drafts gear. The other two work with base game items, so don’t bounce off this article if you haven’t finished the new zone yet.
One housekeeping note: this game’s balance has shifted across patches 1.5.0 through 1.5.6, and a few interactions here have known bugs. I’ll flag those as we go.
Name Corrections (Read This Before You Search the Wiki)
If you watched the original video with auto-captions on, or you’re coming from a transcript, here’s your decoder ring. These are the correct spellings you’ll find on Fextralife and Game8:
- Gommage: Maelle’s tier-3 Gradient attack (not “Gage”)
- Esqium: Maelle’s Fire weapon from Verso’s Drafts
- Esquim: Lune’s Dark weapon from Verso’s Drafts (yes, they’re one letter apart, and yes, that’s evil)
- Yeverum: Maelle’s shield-stacking weapon
- Medalum: Maelle’s early Virtuose Stance weapon
- Sireso: Verso’s weapon that shares his Perfection damage bonus with the party
- Blodam: Verso’s missing-HP weapon for the Duo Strike build
- Litheson: Sciel’s weapon (with an important bug, covered below)
- Feint: the Barbapapa Picto with the 600% fifth-hit bonus
- Clea’s Life: the superboss-locked healing Lumina
Alright, let’s break stuff.
Build 1: The Gommage Master (The Delete Key)
Party: Verso, Sciel, Maelle. Damage: 100 million guaranteed, 1 billion+ with optimizations.
The whole idea is simple: build three full Gradient Charges as fast as possible, then unload Maelle’s Gommage, a four-hit extreme Void nuke that scales off the target’s max HP. Big bosses have big HP pools. You can see where this is going.
Verso: The Charge Battery
Verso goes first and does one thing: spam free aim shots until his AP runs dry, then close the turn with a base attack. This is the classic machine gun Verso setup. The Energising Lumina family (Energising Attack, Energising Shots, and friends) refunds AP as you shoot, so “until his AP runs dry” takes a surprisingly long time. Exposing Attack slots in here too, applying Defenseless so the enemy takes more damage later.
The Gradient generation comes from the Charging Lumina set: Charging Alteration, Charging Attack, Charging Burn, Charging Critical, and Charging Mark. Each one converts your normal actions into Gradient Charge. The free aim spam ranks Verso up to S and nets roughly a full charge on its own.
Stack Combo Attack I, II, and III and his base attack hits four times, which multiplies the Charging Attack payout. Then the Cheater Lumina (dropped by the Sprong world boss south of the Blades’ Graveyard) gives him a second consecutive turn to run the whole cycle again. Two Verso turns gets you close to three full charges.
His weapon matters more than you’d think. Use Sireso, which extends Verso’s Perfection Rank damage bonus to the entire party. That S rank he built with free aim shots? Maelle inherits the bonus. Even a barely-upgraded Sireso works since the party buff is the point, not Verso’s own damage.
Pictos: Energy Master, Greater Defenseless, Combo Attack III. All three have expensive Lumina costs, so equipping them as Pictos saves a pile of points. Even so, budget around 208 Lumina points for his full loadout.
Sciel: The Setup Artist
Sciel needs exactly two jobs done. Turn one: Marking Card to put a Mark on the boss (another damage multiplier for Maelle, and Charging Mark converts it into more Gradient). Turn two: Fortune’s Fury on Maelle, which doubles her damage for a turn. She gets that second turn from her own Cheater Lumina.
The AP she spends across both turns tops off your third Gradient Charge. Her weapon genuinely doesn’t matter. Pictos: Charging Critical, Energising Turn, Energising Start III. Lumina: Cheater, Energising Start I and II, and First Strike (which you want on all three characters so your party opens the fight). Total cost: around 66 points. Cheap date.
Maelle: The Delete Key
Turn one: Last Chance. It drops her to 1 HP, refills her AP, and flips her into Virtuose Stance. Sitting at 1 HP activates At Death’s Door for another fat damage bonus. This feels terrifying the first time. The boss never gets to punish it, that’s the trick.
Turn two: Gommage. Nail the QTE timing for a Perfect and watch six to nine digits pop.
Her weapon path has three tiers:
- Medalum (base game, missable, from the Gestral Village tournament): tens of millions. Great mid-game version of this build.
- Yeverum: feeds Maelle shields constantly, and switching to Virtuose Stance doubles them. Combined with shield Pictos you hit the 9-shield cap, which maxes out the Powerful Shield Lumina bonus. This is the reliable 100M+ setup.
- Esqium (Verso’s Drafts, found west of the Reverie Path flag, down the grappling point): the ceiling-breaker. It hard-caps Maelle at 4 AP per turn, which sounds bad but pairs with its damage perks to push totals toward 600 million in the video creator’s testing.
The final push past 1 billion is the Roulette Picto, which randomizes your damage output. Pure RNG. Some attempts it cuts you down to 200-300 million (still absurd), some attempts it launches you past the billion mark. I don’t love slot-machine damage either, but 200 million on a “bad” roll is a very funny floor.
Round out her kit with Confident Fighter and Shortcut as Pictos. Both feed her crit rate toward the 100% you want, and Shortcut hands her an instant bonus turn the first time she drops below 30% HP, which Last Chance triggers immediately. Use that extra turn for Phantom Strike if you want to restart the Gradient engine (it refunds 35% of a charge on its own, roughly 70% total with the Charging Luminas working). Budget about 160 Lumina points for her.
Attributes: crit rate to 100 first, then dump into Defense and Agility, since Medalum, Yeverum, and Esqium all scale off those two. Leftovers into Might.
Build 2: Fire Paints (Burning Canvas)
Party: Verso, Sciel, Maelle. Damage: hundreds of millions.
Same Gradient engine, different warhead. This one swaps Gommage for Maelle’s Burning Canvas, a Void skill that consumes Burn stacks off the enemy for scaling damage. It eats up to 100 Burns, and with Double Burn and Longer Burn running, the community routinely stacks 200+ Burns anyway, so you’ll never starve it.
The star Picto is Feint, which you win by parrying Monsieur Frappe three times in Candy Land. Feint starts each turn with 4 Barbapapa stacks (cotton candy hands, this game is unhinged and I love it). Your first four skill hits deal 1 damage each. The fifth hit deals 600% more damage. Burning Canvas is built for exactly this rhythm.
Stack on top of that:
- Frenzy (Verso’s Drafts Picto): +10% damage per successive skill hit
- Gradient Overcharge: consumes your 3 Gradient Charges at turn start for a listed 200% damage boost (community testing suggests it may apply as double damage rather than triple, so treat the exact multiplier as squishy)
- Shield Affinity (+30%) and Stay Marked (+25%) if the Mark survives long enough
Maelle runs Esqium here, which caps her at 4 AP, so AP Discount is mandatory to keep Burning Canvas castable. Esqium’s kit handles Marking enemies for you, too.
Verso’s setup barely changes from Build 1, except now he moonlights as an arsonist. Add Burning Mark, Double Mark, Double Burn, and Critical Burn so his free aim spam piles Burns onto the boss alongside the Gradient Charge. One rotation change: on his second turn, skip the closing base attack and throw a Healing Tint at Maelle instead to proc the Shielding Tint Lumina for extra shields.
Sciel helps with Burn stacking this round, so she borrows several of Verso’s Luminas and free aims on her turns too, saving 5 AP at the end for Fortune’s Fury on Maelle.
One correction from the source video: it recommends Sciel’s Litheson weapon for “AP on free aim shots.” That’s not what Litheson does. Its level 20 effect grants +3 AP when applying a buff or debuff, once per turn, and per Fextralife it’s currently bugged so the AP never arrives if you’ve used free aim that turn. Which is the entire gameplan here. Skip it. Her weapon slot is flexible, so grab whatever has stats you like.
Then Maelle’s turn: Last Chance to drop to 1 HP and refill AP (Esqium immediately trims her to 4), then Burning Canvas. Four hits of 1 damage, and then hit number five turns the boss into a rounding error.
Build 3: Dark Lightning (Lune’s Turn to Shine)
Party: Lune, Verso, Sciel. Damage: 1 billion+ fully optimized.
Lune finally gets her superstar moment. Her Verso’s Drafts weapon is Esquim, unlocked by popping three multicolored balloons around a paint cage near the Candy Land cave, just down the hill from the first flag in the new zone. Its level 10 perk converts all her existing Stains into Dark Stains with a base attack. Its level 20 perk lets any skill consume 4 Dark Stains for a 300% damage boost. If you’ve used the base game’s Scaverim, this is that weapon minus the RNG.
The loop is beautiful in its simplicity:
- Lune turn 1: Elemental Trick. It hits four times, and criticals generate Stains, so at high crit you seed 4 Stains in one cast.
- Lune turn 2: base attack. Every Stain converts to Dark. Payload armed.
- Sciel: Fortune’s Fury on Lune (double damage), then Intervention, which hands Lune an immediate bonus turn plus 4 AP.
- Lune again: Lightning Dance.
Lightning Dance is the reason this build exists. It’s an 8-hit Lightning skill where critical hits trigger bonus hits, topping out at 12 hits with 100% crit rate. Now stack the multipliers: Frenzy adding 10% per successive hit, Feint’s 600% bonus every fifth hit, and Double Third (another Verso’s Drafts Picto) doubling every third hit. Twelve hits compound into something obscene.
Lune has no Last Chance equivalent to reach low HP for At Death’s Door, so give her Auto Death + Survivor. Together they drop her to 1 HP automatically at battle start. Sciel runs Auto Death too, which procs Shielding Death to shower Lune in shields (hello again, Powerful Shield), and Second Chance revives Sciel right after. It’s a whole Rube Goldberg machine of strategic dying and I’m here for it.
Pictos for Lune: Survivor, Cheater, Feint. All three are Lumina-point nightmares otherwise, and two feed her crit rate. Attributes go Agility and Defense, since that’s Esquim’s scaling.
To crack a billion, add Verso running his exact Build 1 setup with Sireso, so Lune inherits his S-rank party buff on top of everything. Turn order: Lune, Verso, Sciel, so Sciel’s Intervention throws it right back to a fully loaded Lune.
Build 4: Duo Strike (Two Damage Dealers, One Party)
Party: Lune, Verso, Sciel. Damage: 10-50 million from Verso, 100-200 million from Lune.
Someone noticed that Verso’s Steeled Strike hits 13 times, one more than a maxed Lightning Dance, and asked the obvious question. This variation turns Verso from support battery into a second nuke.
Steeled Strike charges for a turn, then unloads extreme single-target Physical damage across those 13 hits, with a damage bonus at S Rank. It gets interrupted if Verso takes any damage, which is why the setup matters.
Swap his weapon to Blodam, which sets his Perfection Rank based on missing HP. Lose 80% or more of your HP and you’re at Rank S instantly. The source video shorthands this as “starts at Rank S,” which isn’t quite right. Blodam only hits S when paired with Auto Death + Survivor putting Verso at 1 HP from the opening bell. Same trick as Lune’s, same result: instant S rank, no free aim spam required, and 9 AP ready for Steeled Strike immediately.
The weapon swap tanks his crit rate, and here’s where it gets clever. Run Alternating Critical as a Picto: after a critical hit, your next non-crit deals 100% increased damage. That’s double, which beats the 1.5x a regular crit gives you. So you actually want crit in the 70-90% range, not 100. Enough crits to keep charging the buff, enough non-crits to cash it in. Sitting at 50% sounds tidy but back-to-back non-crits waste the effect. (Heads up: some players report Alternating Critical currently applying around 25% instead of 100% on recent patches, so test it before you commit.)
His Pictos become Energy Master, Alternating Critical, Confident Fighter. Turn order stays Lune, Verso, Sciel. Lune arms her Dark Stains over two turns, Verso fires Steeled Strike (Cheater gives him back-to-back turns, so it triggers right away), and Sciel Interventions Lune into Lightning Dance.
You trade the single-hit ceiling of the other builds for two damage dealers and way more flexibility in long fights. My pick for Endless Tower climbing.
The Turn Order Trick (Still Works)
All four builds die on the vine if your characters act in the wrong order, and this game loves scrambling turn order based on Speed. The fix is dumb and wonderful: open the party menu, remove everyone, then re-add them one at a time in the exact order you want them to act. First character added goes first. Speed stats get ignored entirely.
The Verso’s Drafts patch notes mention fixing turn order, but that fix only applies to map-initiated First Strikes where you attack an enemy in the overworld. For standard battle starts, the re-add trick still works as of the current 1.5.x patches. If Sandfall ever kills it, you can fall back on juggling Agility points and Speed-granting Pictos to force the order manually.
Patch Watch: Stuff That Might Be Bugged
A few honest caveats so you don’t tear your Lumina setup apart wondering why your numbers look off:
- Powerful-status Luminas (Auto Powerful, Empowering Attack, SOS Power, Greater Powerful) have a documented history of override bugs. Patch 1.5.0 fixed some hidden damage errors and 1.5.6 addressed Powerful buffs overriding each other based on party position. The source video found them lowering damage on 1.5.2 and left them out. Test on your patch before slotting them in.
- Gradient Overcharge may be applying double rather than the listed 200% more.
- Alternating Critical may be applying ~25% instead of 100% for some players.
- Litheson’s +3 AP effect fails if you free aim that turn, as covered above.
None of these break the builds. The core engines (Gradient charging, Feint fifth-hit, Dark Stains, Steeled Strike) all check out against the wikis.
Oh, and Clea’s Life (the transcript calls it “Clea’s death,” close enough) got left out of these builds on purpose. It’s locked behind beating the superboss Clea in the Flying Manor, and the whole point here is builds you can run without superboss trophies on the shelf. Same with Shield Affinity in most setups, since its 30% damage comes at the cost of gutting your shields’ defensive value.
Credit Where It’s Due
These builds come from Arktix , who did the original theorycrafting and damage testing. Go watch it, drop a like, and subscribe if you want more Expedition 33 build content. What I’ve added here is the fact-checking pass: corrected item spellings against Fextralife and Game8, verified the mechanics, and flagged the patch-dependent stuff so nothing sends you on a wiki goose chase.
Go Delete Something
If you only try one of these, make it the Gommage Master. It’s the most forgiving to assemble, Medalum makes it work in the mid-game, and there’s nothing in this genre quite like watching a superboss health bar just stop existing before it takes a turn.
Tried these builds? Hit a number that made you screenshot it? Come brag in the TAG Discord. Bonus points if Roulette blessed you past the billion mark on the first pull.
