Some tips from someone who is progressing well but not finished

[Merlinmast]

Capes General Tips

Every turn you should be minimizing damage. Look at enemy attack zones and do not leave characters in them unless you have to or to set something up.

There is no* healing in this game. Health can be thought of as “number of mistakes I can make (in regards to tip one). This means low health characters usually risk/reward and you should never leave them exposed just to get a hit in.

Disarm is more valuable than you think. Yes killing off enemies is the most important way to live. But due to how AI works, an unarmed enemy within range of an armament will always use his action to pick it up unless a hero is closer. This means you can tie up enemies by chain disarming them. Try use abilities that disarm as a side affect so you're still doing other things.

Team ups are game changers: piggybacking on the previous tip, you always wanna get good bang for your buck. Action economy (what you can do with an action point) is king and team ups take a thing you were already going to do and give it a free extra thing. You don't have to keep all your heroes clumped up but know what moves you like to use most and who can enhance it for greater effect.

Dont move all in one go. If you play other games you might be in the habit of moving and then action or vice versa. This game heavily benefits from taking advantage of partial movement. A gun user on his way and you have no safe disarm? Peak out from behind cover, do a thing, go back. You can often really take advantage of this by only moving up to a melee enemy enough to use your ability and then retreating. You can even use this to move another hero (or area denial ability) into the intervening space you just actioned from. This also factors into characters with abilities that move them. Mercurial can do some insane plays between her high movement, ability to act multiple times in a turn, and her kick. Only move a character as much as you need to reach your target so you have the most flexibility.

Watch your ultimate generation. Many characters generate ultimate by doing something in their kit. Every time you do those action while your ult is already charged you're wasting buildup. Do the ult first, then the actions when possible.

Don't stress all the bonus objectives in your first attempt. I consider my self a but of a tactics nut and so I tried to do them all. It was fine… for a bit. Things quickly spiral as the difficulty ramps up. It's easier to get a few levels/skill points by barely squeaking by and then coming back later to hit any you missed. Some of the missions will likely require a specific team comp that you might not even have yet to complete all optionals in one go.

Try to always secure one side of the map at a time, preferably one that doesn't eventually spawn reinforcements (which may take trial and error to learn). You want all your enemies focused on one side. Causing enemies to clump up isn't just a tactic for AOE (which isn't super prevalent in this game anyway). Enemies in the back will get stuck behind enemies in the front. Manipulating the front enemies pathing can make New York traffic jams look like a joke. Keeping enemies on one side helps this.

This tip might be personal opinion but prioritize your skill points to add function to a hero before damage. Damage increases are typically very small. They add up, don't get me wrong, but getting something new like a new ability or disarm added to an ability you already use will likely be much more valuable. Even upgrades to increase range often let you pull off plays you couldn't otherwise.

Some hero specific tips:
Facet: don't sleep on his shard. Much of the game is stalling enemies by blocking them, either with abilities like this or their own allies. If you have a choke you can shard it to make them go way around. Even putting it in an inconvenient place that just makes them use a LITTLE extra movement can give you the time to clean up closer enemies. Remember that if you're using it to block or slow the enemy, don't use it on an actual enemy, target the ground. Pinning an enemy lasts 1 turns. Blocking the ground lasts 3, allowing you to really mess with pathing.

Rebound: I love this girl. But her tip is one of the previous; don't overuse her movement. She has good range on her abilities and most don't require line of sight. Always try and use abilities at max range so you have movement to get to a safe place after. Basically play like Batman: attack people then disappear out of sight.

Mindfire: he eventually unlocks an ability that lets him decline moving to get another action. This is pretty good but if you're also using Rebound it means you can use her team up to trade your movement for a teleport. This makes his movement much more versatile and lets him get into better positions to support your team.

Weathervane: His chain lightning is often a trap. I'm not saying it's not good, and in my estimation he's the best AOE character in the game . But 8 enemies with 2 health (maybe even 1 if you followed up with his ult) are not as good as 6 or 7 enemies and 2 dead ones from a gust or pull death. If your turn order (you know you can delay turns right?) allows you to finish off enemies right after: great. But remember that he's one of the few characters with AOE so there aren't many who CAN finish them off. And now you're dangerously close to the enemy front line.

Mercurial: get her into ult asap. It doesn't take too long but it's easy to do a lot of dashing (which doesn't charge her ult) and delay it. Once you have it she can safely dive into enemies she knows she'll get another turn before. She also has imo the most plentiful knock back and disarm at minimal cost. Acting more often let's her reposition to fully utilize that kit.

Kinetic: kinetics benefit of to charging other people's ults cannot be understated. They have decent single target damage with some knock back but their real strength is how many of their team ups give the other hero free ultimate charge just by being in proximity.

Ignis: know how fire works. Targets on fire take .5 damage at the beginning of their turn. If they have only .5 health left, they're already dead. Ignore them. Characters also take .5 fire damage each fire tile they move into. A character already on fire with 2 health will die on their turn if they then move through 3 patches of fire. You can force this with knockbacks. A character knocked back will take damage from the attack, .5 for every tile of flame, and additional if they hit something. Sometimes having her consume flames is not worth the area denial

[Stan]

Nice knowledgeable take Merlinmast will do.

[RyanEX2000]

Right now for me, some characters are very average, while others are very good.

Rebound - pretty much a permanent member unless a mission comes up where she CAN'T be on it. Her port team up grants so much mobility and versatility that it's hard to imagine NOT using her. If used well you can almost guarantee her ult every three turns.

Facet - is good at what he does which is tanking and forcing enemies to take the long way around. He is especially good when paired with Mercurial since their team up lays out a wall of shards to inconvenience enemies. But beyond that... His damage is mediocre, even with his counter, and against later enemies his hp tends to go down as fast the others. He is a pure support character.

Mindfire - is a mix of support and damage with how he can make enemies take extra damage. He really shines when paired with Rebound, to guarantee a backstab or with Mercurial for a dose of increased damage and disarm. His ult really shines since you can upgrade to use it twice in a row.

Weathervane - AoE king. His is potential the fastest ult to charge as each enemy he hits charges it up. On some missions you could potentially unleash it every turn for several turns. He's beefy and can tank in a pinch as well as having some mobility and the ability to affect enemy positioning.

Kinetic - I honestly haven't used much. Decent damage, decent health as well as a knockback and the ability to give other heroes an extra charge. Problem is that, other than the last one, other heroes can do what he does and do it better.

Ignis - a situational heroine. Enemies will do what they can to avoid fire unless they can't. So it's a good kind of "oh ♥♥♥♥" move it you're hoping to guide them away from lower health heroes. Her abilities are low spread aoe, with the benefit of a low damage dot. You can get her out of stick situations by creating a fire patch somewhere safe and using her ability to travel to fire to escape. Her ult is potential powerful IF you're willing to wait to use it.

[Stan]

Thanks RyanEX2000
I'm working on searching for Kinetic and Ignis.

[Lionheartwolf]

I'm going to be honest, if you are ignoring the optional objectives then you can really just do whatever you want. The optional objectives basically are the difficulty of the game. Rarely did I fail a mission, and much more often I was restarting because of optional objectives.

Pay me now or pay me later, you are going to have to stress about those all-in-one stars, and finishing the game doesn't make them easier. The only 2 I would recommend skipping the first time around were Industrial Sabotage and Crossed Lines. The latter because during your first attempt you only have 3 heros and when you come back you can have 4.

Most optional objectives are just super tedious, and no amount of skills, XP, or SP is going to change that. Fair warning: just because a level calls itself "medium" doesn't mean you won't spend hours reloading your saves. Never Meet Your Heros, and Home Target were especially annoying and long for no good reason. (Even if you plan on ignoring the optional objectives.)

Just to add. There is healing in the game. The final hero is pretty good at it. They even heal themselves to full HP when coming out of their ultimate. It's fairly sustainable for 95% of the game, and with the exception of one specific boss who continously does increased damage you will be okay.

Which brings me to my next point. Time is your friend in every mission that doesnt have a timer. Learn to kite enemies around, learn how to create bottlenecks. Anything that gives you time, because you need it, and a lot of it. (Especially in Stealth missions.)

I will agree that you shouldn't sleep on disarming. Late game becomes pretty dependent on it. I also agree that managing your ultimates is important. I would also add that initiative and delay are going to save you from reloading more often than I can count.

So with that said, what do you prioritize on your skill tree? Honestly, it's different for everybody, and you probably know how you your heros. For example, I never put points into pushing enemies into Weathervane, or Crystals. Maybe others do.

I would always recommend saving SP just in case, and I highly recommend farming Tech Advantage for XP and SP. It's pretty easy, quick and worth 8XP

[ravenswald1]

Speaking of Tech Advaantage is there any way you can obtain the objective "beat Primax and her androids" in the 1st phase? Given she is immune to everything (even things like fire, electricity and crystalize which is not stated in her kit summary) I cannot see how it is possible . Am I wasting my time trying?

[Artifice Knight]

Primax is immune to damage and disarm. This is not an objective you can complete-and indeed it changes very quickly to one that is achievable.

[ravenswald1]

Thanks I finally (after an hour) worked that out.Now my objective is to get all the heroes out without being ko'd. Primax just seems to get one just as I am about to break that last barrier.

[Artifice Knight]

One of the strategies I used was having Facet bring up the rear. As long as you mitigate damage he'll be able to absorb most of it-even more if you got the ranged damage decreases going. use Shield Shard to stop other people from taking hits and bring that wall down!

[RyanEX2000]

At each barrier I utilized the Facet x Merc combo to build a line of crystals. Dunno if it's a bug but she seemed adversed to jumping over it and pretty much stayed in the main room.

[Artifice Knight]

Oh thats pretty clever, I like that

[somethingoffensive]

You can delay turns? How? The game doesn't tell you this, though it is a genre staple.

[ravenswald1]

Once I understood that you can't archive the objective to take down Primax it became fairly good for xp generation. I've played it now 5 times to level up Ignis to level 3 and have maxed out both Rebound and Facet so they are level 5. For first timers it definitely better to have all the high hp heroes so they can't be one shotted by Primax.

[Cheeseness]

Originally posted by somethingoffensive:

You can delay turns? How? The game doesn't tell you this, though it is a genre staple.

There's a delay button in the bottom right of the HUD, above the next turn button. Default keyboard shortcut is V. It requires a confirmation step, and while the confirmation dialog is up, a preview delaying is shown in the turn order.

Hope that helps!

[GrandMasterFox]

Allow me to HARDLY disagree about bonus objectives. With very few exceptions, in every mission you can complete them all on the first try (I have). One such exception is as noted above - when you have only 3 heroes but need a 4th.

The way to get bonus objectives is rarely to come back with upgraded heroes. The upgrades aren't that great. It's to understand the mission and what you're doing - possibly bringing in another team structure. The first thing I always do before picking heroes is to look at the objectives and then bring someone who can do that (disarm, push etc)

In most cases, bonus objectives is just not rushing the mission and counting to make sure you still have the enemies you need alive.

[GrandMasterFox]

As for Kinetic, it's actually one of the stronger heroes in the game.

First, he charges up other heroes fast. This is really helpful with Mindfire or sometimes to tip over Weather. Also note that his team up with Weather is one of the best in the game.
But most importantly, he can charge Facet. There are so many missions that have the "use all ultimates" and Facet \ Hyde are heroes that can't charge themselves but need enemies to do actions for it. So Kinetic is great for any mission with that objective.

Second, his attacks are versatile and powerful. His first ability has 3 damage which is more than any other hero without a restriction. His other ability has some range to it and gives you double charges. His last ability (Don't recall the names) let him throw something and push things in all direction which is great for knocking over missions.

Lastly, his ultimate is a very decent AOE that has both push and disarm. And because he charges so fast, he can do that multiple times easily. So many bonus objectives become a joke with Kinetic on board.