Anime Vanguards: How to Run the Farm-Free Escanor and Meliodas Team

Most Anime Vanguards lineups are built around money. You place a farm unit, wait for income, then spend it. The Escanor and Meliodas pairing skips that entirely. Iscanur (Pride) becomes free to place and upgrades himself once your slots are burned, and his upgrades pull Wrath (Assault) up the ladder with him. The result is a two-unit board that you can leave on auto-play through most of a dungeon floor.

Quick answer: Burn every loadout slot except Meliodas before the match starts, place Escanor and Meliodas on the track, turn on auto-play, and let Escanor’s self-upgrade carry both units — then sell and replace Escanor on the boss wave and chain The Power of Friends into Lion’s Sin.

How the Escanor and Meliodas auto-upgrade loop works

Two passives do all the heavy lifting. Escanor’s The One Above All turns burned or empty team slots into permanent hour stacks, and if every slot is burned or he is the only unit equipped, he upgrades himself every wave and costs nothing to place. Meliodas then rides that progression, because an upgrade on Escanor triggers an upgrade on him as well. Neither unit needs you to click anything once they are down.

Meliodas contributes the damage multiplier. His Dancho passive adds 20% damage for every different element sitting on the unit bar, counted once per unit. That is why the filler units in the lineup matter even though they never touch the track — you are bringing them for their element tags, not their stats.

Escanor’s own scaling stacks on top. High Noon grants an hour stack per wave for 15% damage and 1.5% range each, and at 12 stacks he gains another 30% damage while burning everything in range. Sunshine applies burn on every attack, and Prideful Blaze converts those burns into follow-up damage worth 70% of his base damage, climbing another 5% for each burned unit slot.

Lineup and burn slots for the Escanor and Meliodas team

The six-slot lineup is Iscanur (Pride), Ice Queen (Release), Wrath (Assault), Alligator, Blossom and Vogita. No farm unit is included — no Bulma, no Speedwagon. The last three exist purely to be burned, and their levels and rarities are irrelevant, so use whatever low-investment units you already own.

Pick filler units with different elements from each other. Each unique element on the bar feeds Dancho, so three mismatched throwaways are worth more than three copies of the same element.

Build sheet: traits, Memoria and Familiar

All three named units run the Monarch trait at level 60. Escanor is the damage core, Meliodas is the multiplier, and Ice Queen (Release) sits in the lineup with her own build.

Ice Queen’s numbers above include her Familiar. Without it she sits at 74.62K damage, 8.1s SPA, 34.7 range and 9.21K/s. Meliodas carries a 17.6% crit chance, which comes straight off his Familiar.

Birb is the reason Meliodas crits at all, granting 29.2% crit damage, 17.6% crit chance and 16.1% damage, at the cost of a negligible 0.1% range. Blazing Solstice is the bigger swing on Escanor: it adds 200% damage, feeds him an aura stack every 30 seconds and on every upgrade, raises the max aura buff from 30% to 100%, and hands him his ultimate the moment he is placed.

The One Above All Memoria is what makes the burn strategy hold together. Its three passives are narrow but decisive.

Match setup: burning slots and placing both units

Boss wave: the nuke order for Meliodas and Lion’s Sin

Idling covers the regular waves. The boss is where you actually touch the controls, and the order matters — firing Escanor’s nuke first wastes the multiplier.

Note: Escanor’s Ultimate sets him to 12 hour stacks and adds 50% damage with no further stack decay, but he sells himself five waves later. On a 15-wave floor that timer is rarely a problem, though it is worth tracking if you pop it early.

Confirming it worked on Lunar Bridge Floor 11

If the loop is set up correctly, you should reach Wave 13 of 15 on Dungeon Stage 8 – Floor 11 without leaking anything and without having spent gold on placements. The end screen is the clearest confirmation.

Why the setup underperforms: shields, extra units and stack decay

Three things break this specific loop, and all of them are avoidable.

Placing more units is the most common mistake. Lone Fighter cuts Escanor’s damage by 50% for every additional unit on the map, so adding a third or fourth body actively lowers your clear speed instead of raising it. Keep the board to Escanor and Meliodas.

Multi-hit shields are Escanor’s structural weakness. His attacks land as single hits, which means shield layers eat time that would otherwise go into health bars. If a stage is built around shielded bosses, the shield-bypassing Armored Mage’s Day Bayoff Memoria is the better fit than One Above All — but swapping it means giving up Unstoppable Pride and the sell-and-replace trick.

Finally, watch the stack count. Once Escanor hits 12 hour stacks, every subsequent wave removes one, so a boss that arrives several waves after his peak will meet a weaker version of him unless the Ultimate has locked the stacks in place.

The appeal here is less about raw numbers than about how little the setup asks of you. Two placements, one burn screen, and a single ability sequence on the boss wave is the entire interaction budget for a floor that would normally need a farm unit, a support and constant upgrade clicking.