Windstacking

**Windstacking** is a strategy that uses the Wind enlightenment to increase Helium gains, at the cost of also increasing the length of time spent, during a run.

The basic concept is simple: in Wind zones, you gain extra Helium from **world zone enemies** (Corrupted, Healthy or Omnipotrimps) based on the number of stacks of Wind you have. **Windstacking** forces every Wind zone enemy to remain alive until you have the maximum possible number of Wind stacks, therefore increasing Helium gains.

**Windstacking** gives **no** bonus helium in Void Maps, apart from the bonus conferred by the Scryhard II Mastery.

## Requirements

The only strict requirement is the Wind enlightenment, which is unlocked at Level 50 of the Wind empowerment. However, there are other recommended components to the strategy:

* A maximized Wind transfer rate (80).
* An Heirloom shield with the Plaguebringer modifier.
* The Natural Diplomacy 2 Mastery (+5 transfer).
* Fluffy evolution 8, level 10 or equivalent (5x Helium from Wind).
* Fluffy evolution 10, level 10 or equivalent (+50% to Plaguebringer, stacks accumulate twice as fast).

You don't need all of these to begin **Windstacking**, but the more of them you have, the better.

## Details

It's strongly recommended to do **Windstacking** only in a Daily challenge, because of both the time requirement, and the Wind token cost of activating Wind enlightenment. It's also strongly recommended to use this strategy only when you have the time to let it play out (overnight, or other long periods of absence), using the game's automation to progress through zones.

Also note that you don't generally need to do Windstacking for an entire run. Most of the Helium is acquired in the final zones of the run, so you can simply activate the W formation (see below) for the last 100-150 zones or so, or whenever you're about to go idle.

Activating Wind enlightenment has the following effects, which begin once Nature zones appear:

* You gain a 10x bonus to all non-Helium loot.
* Wind stacks accumulate twice as fast.
* The limit on Wind stacks increases from 200 to 300.
* Wind transfer is increased by 5.
* You gain access to the Wind (W) formation.

The Wind formation has the following effects:

* Gives no changes to your attack, health or block (same as X formation).
* Grants all the bonuses of the Scryer formation (can collect Dark Essence, get Scryhard I/II bonuses).
* Will not kill an enemy in a Wind zone until there are 300 stacks of Wind.
* Disables Overkill in Wind zones.

The primary consideration in whether **Windstacking** will be worth the time is how sharply you can reduce the amount of time it takes to build up the Wind stacks. With maximized Wind transfer, plus the 5 point bonus from Wind enlightenment, you have an effective Wind transfer rate of 85%. With Natural Diplomacy 2, this becomes 90%. At 90% transfer, your second enemy will begin with 270 stacks of Wind, meaning you need to accumulate 30 more stacks. Since stacks accumulate at a rate of 2 per attack (while enlightened), this means you need 15 attacks per enemy. (Without ND2, you begin with 255 stacks, so you need to add 45 stacks, which requires 23 attacks.)

Having Plaguebringer reduces this number, by causing some extra Wind stacks to be transferred from one enemy to the next.

The **Windstacking** also occurs in maps, even though there is no Helium benefit from it in maps. Therefore, it's strongly recommended that you *avoid* using the W formation in maps. If you're playing manually, you can toggle the formation off and on when you're going in and out of maps. However, if you're relying on the game's automation, you will want to set up Map At Zone so that it doesn't do any mapping at all in Wind zones. This is normally achieved by using Bionic Wonderland raids from Poison zones, at the points where prestiges are needed.

Void Maps should *not* be done in a Wind zone. They should be done in a Poison zone, in either W or S formation (assuming Scryhard II is obtained).