Tips for new players.

[wulfster42]

I'm fairly new myself, but a week in, and there is alot I have learned that I wish I knew earlier. I figure I would make a thread about that to help other new people. The tips may not be in order of when they are useful, as I will just post the ones I think of.

First off, when you start researching things in the firestone tree, the first research level can be rushed for free for each of them. This only saves 3 minutes per skill, but there are 16 skills per tree, so that adds up to 48 minutes saved per tree by rushing the first level of each skill.

Second, guilds help ALOT, and you can contribute to a guild just as much as higher levels as long as you do the expiditions regularly. Try and join a good guild with active members asap (it took me a week to upgrade from a level 1 guild with 1 other player...who eventually went to sleep).

Third is fellowships, this is a bit different than guilds because you can't actually contribute much to one right away. I have about half of my guild points into Battlecry (it's the way to boost your contribution to a fellowship in the personal guild tree area), but after a week I'm still WAY lower then most other people I see playing (who are much higher level than me). I can say though that as you level up, the fellowships they list upgrade as well, so don't be afraid to leave your low level one). I literally just did this today, and while my fellowship is still not great, it's way better than my level 1 that I was in this whole week. Don't make my mistake, upgrade as you go.

For me, I found that Solaine is my best character with the highest dps and most useful abilities. Ice barrage is the most effective, so she is the best leader for me. Eventually all your other characters will use their abilities as well automatically, but Solaine is actually better manually using them ifyou can, and JUST using ice barrage as your regen is equal to using it always once it's ready to go. This actually lets you kill at a much higher level consistantly, even if your other characters can't one shot the enemy. Every stage boosts the gold you get, so if you can fight 8 stages higher, but only kill stuff with ice barrage, which is only active 75% of the time, you still end up with way more gold over all (especially if your other characters can take down an enemy or two with their specials, and Solaine's basic attack takes down another. In effect you have about 50% of the kills when ice barrage is off, compared to your chars one shotting everything, and 100% of the kills when it's active (about 75% of the time). That nets you about 80% of the total kills per rotation. Each additional stage though boosts gold gotten by 25% (of the last stage), so even just 3 additional stages doubles the gold recieved. Anyway that has been my experience early on with just 4 starting characters.

At 200 you get another character (I'm hopefully going to make that tonight). It's a LONG haul from when you get your last advantage to 200 (I don't even remember when it was, I think stage 50?). I was hoping for something at 100 and 150, but no dice. Be patient and realize that you are gaining in power every day if you do all the quests (do them!!) and use the tavern etc.

I made a mistake with my meteorites early on. I suggest focusing ONLY on getting double research asap (wish I had). I did eventually do that, but not till I had spent over 1000 on the meteorite tree, which didn't actually do that much (especially since I spent 600 on armor trying to get to the gold upgrade before I refocused). Get the research upgrade first and then get your tier 2 and 3 equipment upgrades asap. Try and save chests (any non-common if you can still finish the daily quests without using higher tier chests) till you at least open all of the tier 2 equipment slots. You are going to have to spend enchantment points on the weapons of the characters to get a high enough power to open tier 2. After that only spend enchantment on tier 2 or 3 equipment for all of them (unless you know for sure you will keep using that character later, like I do/know for Solaine (who's weapon I upgraded 3 times).

If you are actively playing, and resetting after an hour or so, then boosting skip stage can speed things up. It won't work on a boss level, but can work on level 1 in a stage. So far I have never seen it work for 2 stages in a row, although I only have like a 15%. Still I think I would have, which probably means you have to fight at least 3/5 per stage (skip 1/fight 2/skip 3/fight 4/fight 5 or fight 1/skip 2/fight 3/skip 4/fight 5. That is the best scenario I think even with 100% skip stage,but it would still reduce the time to get back to the top by 40%...which is very worth it. You get skip stage from achievements, and also from research, and as far as I know they combine.

Use the chat feature, the people in there are pretty cool/fun to chat with and have great tips as well. I am in there as wulfster42 (although I think I heard there may be multiple servers so you may not be on the same one as me). I enjoy the chat almost as much as playing the game lol. It certainly mixes things up and it helps with a few other things I'm about to mention.

Actively playing (at least to me) seems much faster. If you hold down the left mouse button your guardian will auto attack the enemies, and till you get towards the highest stages you can fight, the guardian one shots everything making you zoom through the stages WAY faster than even Ice Barrage would so. It's (in my experience) the fastest way to rush up the stages, and saves a ton of time especially if your well over stage 100 before you get to a stopping point. The chat helps with that since you can just hold down the mouse while reading the chat and then quickly type stuff before holding down the mouse again.

After you get to the higher stages though, again for me, the guardians damage stops being as good. I find that Ice barrage does most of the killing, and so I just need to click on it every time it resets. That makes chatting even easier lol. I also watch tv shows etc while just clicking on the ice barrage ability every so often. So far that seems to be the way for me to gain the most gold (and experience), and it's pretty easy to do while doing other things. You can also set your leader to auto use abilities and minimize the window etc, but it's not as effecient (or even close) as you waste mana on the first 2 abilities. If you ONLY cast ice barrage it's up almost 75% of the time, if you have it on auto though, it's more like 25% of the time. Still decent, but I would make it so at least 2-3 of your chars one shot enemies on the stage you are at if your going to use auto. If, like me, you focus on ranged/magic users, then just Sol and Burt one shotting is probably enough with auto attacks going for both of them (since burts will destroy a whole group every so often, and Sol will use ice barrage, plus both kill 1 enemy a pop (make sure they are in the back row so they are not getting killed and losing that dps).

Few things I initially had done differently. As soon as I got the shop option in town, I started finishing the daily quest to sell 10 items. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Problem is, I didn't get that option till day 4 or so, which means, I can't finish the weekly quest for it. Meanwhile, I won't have enough items to sell next week to finish it then either!!! So frustrating. If I had held off selling till my first week finished, I could have used those items to finish it for sure next week. Sigh. Oh well, at least it's just 500 exotic coins lost, but it's still frustrating and I would have done it differently if I had known.

I would also have started working on battlecry earlier. I didn't even know what it was for until I had spent almost 10 points in the tree. I am putting all my points into it now, so hopefully I can get into a good fellowship (my current one might be good if the sleepers in it start playing again or get replaced). As it is, it's very slow to increase battlecry with me only getting 1 or maybe 2 points in it a day. Those 10 points I spent elsewhere are helping me a bit (went with gold, prestige bonuses mainly), but I have looked at better fellowships and the % increases on them are amazing. I probably would have spent a few more points on it (maybe 50% into battlecry) and just 2-3 points into the gold/prestige ones. The damage ones that I put points into seem to be additive, not multiplicative, which means they don't seem to make a huge difference since I have such large boosts from other sources. I need to do more experimentation, but it seems like if you join a group of other players putting points into battlecry, it may be one of the strongest options even for yourself in the tree, and it helps all the other players as well.

Ok that is a few things I wish I had known for now. I'll probably remember more later and post them, and of course find out new things as I play. Hope this helps some new players:)

[wulfster42]

Btw, I was wrong, finally noticed a double skip, so it's possible. Curious if you get to 100% skip chance or close if you can just skip between boss stages lol.

[wulfster42]

60 days in now, and alot has changed.

The point you get the new characters was lowered for the first two, making it easier to start for future players (congratulations!!)

I got blaze eventually (fairly soon) after posting the above, who replaced Solaine as my main damage. Sadly even after getting Astrid, blaze has remained my leader.

I would suggest NOT specializing in magic like I did, so you can switch between character types (I could have gone leader etc in my esotic merchant instead of magic). Eventually you get alot of energy characters, and if you are lucky/unlucky like my, you may get alot of energy artifacts (my 3 artifacts are 2 energy 1 rage, no freaking magic).

I do things different then most and it seems to pay off, passed tons of people also playing a ton in the last months, possibly due to using my gold items instead of selling them. I have a few other tricks that may be helping as well which I will mention.

First your gold items (x amount of time worth of gold). You want your damage > enemy health on the stage you use them. My basic setup is to use them when I get back to the end stages of a run, to pump up my damage/gold find to a point where it'll take more than an hour to get an upgrade that will improve the rate again. Then I log out (cause with blaze you actually get more offline then playing active) and log back in again when I can upgrade (and to do quests etc).

While you might think that selling the gold items will give a long term bonus and be better, the truth is that you increase your production by using them, and you get meteorites as well. This adds up and it's especially important to do before going to bed (make sure you have hit a "wall" where it'll take hours before you could advance anything and are making the most coins per hour (this will level you up fast as well).

Another trick is when you are about to get a new character. It'll always tell you when that is btw, just click on the greyed out character and it'll say when it unlocks. Now 2 things to do for this.

First, save up chests before hand, the more the better. Each "all damage, All statistics and All gold" drastically boost the max level you can climb to, often extremely if you luck out and get an epic item etc. The difference can be HUGE if you have a bunch of legendary/purple chests and get 1 or more of those all items as epic.

You want to start with the Warmachine chests first, using those to open up tier 2 and 3 on the normal equipment for a new character. This way when you open any normal chests you have a chance to get the all items.

Next up is the way to jump ahead a bit to get your new character. I would not suggest using this for too many levels, but you can skip through the last 10 or so levels pretty easy by using the totem that halves enemy health. Use one, and then when it wears off, use another and the enemies just die (no matter how stronger they are). For bosses you will get kicked back before that happens usually, but just go right back in (or wait till it's almost timed out to go back in) and poof you will pass the stage.

This can let you beat a boss even up to a day earlier then you would normally be able to, get all the bonuses from having a new character , and let you zoom a bit further right away because of it.

Another thing I advocate over many players is beer, beer is good in this game. You can zoom ahead in many ways, but luck is hard to get extra of. There are really only 2 ways to get more luck, an amulet (5% more) and events (you can also get a small boost to getting double beer from trees etc, but everyone gets though (always grab them though).

The even (just had my first one) only costs 99 cents to double your rewards. I had not spent money till then, but I will always spend 99 cents on events in the future. I ended up getting 69 beer rewards (500 beer each time) over the event. Which is worth 115 pulls on the luck table. That is really the only way I know of to boost your luck. Luck levels not only boost the rewards you can get, but also boost damage/gold find etc. It's where you get artifacts from as well (which is what I need more than anything else unless I switch to energy eventually).

Guild and Fellowship matter a ton like I mentioned above. If you are very active you are useful to a guild no matter what level you are. I pretty much hit all the possible expaditions which means I generally top the rankings for donations for a guild. It's not to hard to do that if you play regularly.

Fellowship is much harder because it's regulated by your Battlecry %....I have always maxed mine out as soon as possible, but you hit tons of walls along the way. I'm behind everyone anywhere near my level due to playing for such a shorter amount of time. There is no way to speed that up without spending money, so I just struggle on. Luckily I'm in both a good guild and fellowship though:)

As far as amulets etc, I actually suggest using your gems for beer (lol) cause luck is so huge and the bonuses from amulets are not that big. Keys I save for upgrading artifacts (if I ever get a freaking magic one grrr). I would spend them on different artifacts first since it doubles the base bonus (a second upgrade costs more keys 25 instead of 20, and only boosts it 50% compared to the initial doubled bonus).

For the very very long haul you might want to get the 5% extra beer but......I don't recommend it since you get chances for double beer from your trees and WM bonus etc already, so it's not actually a full 5%. Might eventually be worth it, but it's gonna take a very long time.

You don't need the 10% faster mission or extra person to do mission bonuses. By about 2 months in or so, you will have 6 of them already, and that is easily enough to do all the missions every time the pop up.

My suggestion is once you get enough you do 1 or 2 of the long missions and keep the last 1-2 open for the other missions along the way. Even with a naval and monster mission along with the blood mission I can easily get everything done about 2 hours before they reset (I have never spent gems to reset early).

Anyway that is a few more tips/tricks. If I didn't mention it before, don't go hog wild on the main weapons for your characters, even the one you use as a leader. Just get that weapon high enough to upgrade it to legendary and eventually if you get the option mystic. That is 5 or 6 I believe (for legendary). Forcus on gettingall the all damage/gold/stats items to 5-6 so you can upgrade them to legendary right away if the option is there.

Every one you upgrade doubles it's bonus, no matter what the current level is, so one that costs 600 to upgrade gives the same bonus as one that costs 3600. The only difference is ifyou can then upgrade it to a higher rarity (legendary) because you reached the min required level for it. Damage all >>>> individual characters damage and again, if you don't actually specialize in magic/energy etc, that means you can switch who your leader is and who does the most damage, while also eventually having multiple characters that can do high damage at the same time.