I played around with it too, but I came up with the same result.

There are three possibilities for Emo's 200% boost: place him in the corner, he needs two animals, the center where he'd need six, or anywhere else where he'd need four. You can take out the six because that's not possible to use without an empty space, and is just really bad... yeah.

If you were to use a four-neighbor spot, you'd need to use four of Panda, Gryphon, Phoenix, Artaxes, and Sal, who should not count as a human. However, if you still wanted to stick with other strong buffers, you'd be down to 5 spaces. Having to pick between Sasha, The Princess, Jim, Nate, Natalie, and Khouri isn't really a good plan for your DPS. Plus, you have to make sure your formation would be better than the DPS of Merci, Thalia, and King, who would all get left behind (and who all have valuable abilities...).

Which leaves us with the three corners and two animals to block him. But... This means that regardless of which spot, Emo can't be buffed by both Sasha and Artaxes, so it's near impossible for him to match other's DPS. But let's see.

The front area would be a terrible spot for him, because you'd be cutting off two rows entirely, which means you lose a primary DPS column. The DPS loss from not being able to use Sasha AND Artaxes on the same row is more than you can regain from Emo alone.

But the back row faces the same problem: you must put an animal into the third row, which limits the DPS gain there. Normally you'd have Jim and 2 DPSers in the third row - but with one spot lost to an animal, you lose a primary DPSer. Sal might be a good fit here, but Merci and Nate, and later Natalie and Kaine will all outdo him. There's just no strong animals that early that will fit.

I need to play around with it again, because I want to see if you can make a concentrated back row instead of the third. Maybe the back row with Jim, Artaxes, and Emo, and Sal, Sasha, and Khouri in the third might do some good? But I just reset, so... gimme some time, lol.

It's important to note what equipment you have there, Elusion. Equipment plays a pretty big role for end-game levels.

For example, none of my Crusaders have XP yet, so I'm roughly the same place you are in that screenshot, give or take a bit. My Jim is level 625, my Werewolf is level 600. Here's the comparison image:

http://i.imgur.com/IDifjv2.png

As you can see, my DPS goes down from my formation to yours, although I admit it's not by much. And Emo does, in fact, grow stronger than Jim, but at the cost of Khouri buffing all six places. However, I'm not getting anywhere near the massive gain you are. Even if I push Emo up to 625, that puts him at 10Q, but yours is at 50Q. So either you have equipment I don't have (I have the 50% increase cape on Emo, nothing else. I also have two 50%s on Jim) or you've leveled them both to high that 575, to what looks like 650 each.

However, I should say that that is the best Emo build I've seen so far.

How about

https://gyazo.com/7c58a2cd862a4b09af9facd8ed16bd33

so Jim still gets a bit of extra bonus from WD and makes that 3-man line able to tank bosses a bit if need be. I don't have much gear, just a handful of idols so when Jim and Emo cost the same to upgrade the next batch of 25 Jim is always half the damage. IT makes a good back and forth of upgrading so far.

I see well once i have a +gold item on natalie for sure i'll be using her. Thanks

I use the same formation as you do tunderguy with a single change. If i'm active i put kouri instead of sasha in boss fights as soon as my tank (natalie) loose life then put sasha back. But if i'm idling, i put kouri. This way the balance in strenght between regular and boss level is better.

For the diamond, compare to your formation :
_ remove Nate
_ put detective in 2 (can't bipass magnify and the loss in gold in not so important)
_ put jim at the place of kaine
_ change sal for griffon in front so you can switch sasha for kouri if you need.

This is the formation i used with diamond (removing natalie and griffon for battle ram, using sasha exclusively).

This is what i use for quick runs and what i used for campaign. However i have lots of idols so i can easily sacrify a spot for kaine and sasha.