Are crystalline heros worth it?

[Pandemo]

I heard these crystalline heros will only go to the endless mission, are they worth the space to farm crystal? All these lv6 heros are very tempting.

Btw the Collector's minion one-shot my vestal (46 dmg crit and bleed out before I can do anything, RNG at its finest), ending my killing spree at 117 monsters, stupid collector.
Now she have a question mark in the Roster, am I going to get her back?

[Devil Breaker]

Yes, she will return with new affiction as I remember. And I never used crystaline heros because they take crystals as payment. On the other hand, if you do not want to bore other heroes, you can use them. (sorry for my bad english - I'm from Russia :))

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by JasonKai:

I heard these crystalline heros will only go to the endless mission, are they worth the space to farm crystal? All these lv6 heros are very tempting.

Btw the Collector's minion one-shot my vestal (46 dmg crit and bleed out before I can do anything, RNG at its finest), ending my killing spree at 117 monsters, stupid collector.
Now she have a question mark in the Roster, am I going to get her back?

Mainly only if you don't have 4 appropriate level 6 heroes or don't want to use them. Each of them costs 10% of your shards, so using just four shard mercenaries takes 40% of them.

There are a few reasons this might be the case. You might be early in the game. In that case, even with minus 40% you can treat the mercenaries as a free practice run, since it doesn't eat a week.

Another case might be you don't want to get your "real" heroes afflicted. You might be playing Stygian and have a week limit for the whole campaign and while an endless run doesn't eat a week, fixing up your heroes afterward might.

So you could, every week, just alternate between sending out a real team to advance the campaign and then send out a throwaway team of mercenaries just to harvest shards to buy trinkets and/or convert them for heirlooms to build buildings/districts, just fire them if they get too many bad quirks, and treat it as a free, non-time-spending way of getting free stuff.

[Piorn]

Crystal heroes don't take a roster slot. Grab em, no downside.

And people don't die in the farmstead. They'll return.

[Blastom]

They are free, except a proportion of crystal yield in quest and farmstead harvest doesn't take a week.
So four crystalline hero to farmstead = free loots. Though it still take your time :)

[GarbageCollector]

Originally posted by Skinny Pete:

So you could, every week, just alternate between sending out a real team to advance the campaign and then send out a throwaway team of mercenaries just to harvest shards to buy trinkets and/or convert them for heirlooms to build buildings/districts, just fire them if they get too many bad quirks, and treat it as a free, non-time-spending way of getting free stuff.

Oh man that's genius. I didn't even think about that in my last playthrough I just finished on stygian. I kept thinking it was mostly a downside that it doesn't progress the week, so my dudes didn't get cured and stuff while I waited, but this seems pretty foolproof. Some of the crystalline trinkets are amazing also, so that's a great strategy.

[Globter]

How many of them can be grabed ? I have 6 and can't pick more .

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by Globter:

How many of them can be grabed ? I have 6 and can't pick more .

I may have just never had six or more but I didn't notice this. I usually had a shard mercenary team before having a dedicated endless team, and would usually swap them out for better ones if they showed up (or dump them if they got negative quirks).

The two major drawbacks to recruiting these is you spend a stagecoach recruitment you could have spent on a real hero, and I think that even while they don't exhaust a roster slot, since they're L6, they could add up to triggering the Vvulf event before you want it.

Since that event can be really ugly if it occurs before you have your Dream Team for that specific dungeon, and since after that event, you probably have heroes who can cope with endless anyway (your successful DD heroes are probably capable of handling Endless just fine), there's really a limited window of time when it makes sense even to have these guys at all.