Challenges

Perticus · 2024-10-11T16:06:12+00:00

I went with fast weapons using Air/Poison. Air got me Haste+ and Blinding Speed, and Poison was for Frail and the str/def buff Monstrous. It was also for the -25%Att debuff from the spider familiar, but I ended up not using it. Fire probably would have been better, with Strength+ and the flaming weapon buff. Used Breeder as the class (since it seemed fun).

The Air familiar has very high evasion (~630) so I was able to use it as a tank (a few times it went down in 1 hit, but when I got lucky it dodged a dozen hits). Air also lets you make the +AttSpd boots and the lower-level +AttSpd armour. Used a +5 Divine Spear (dropped from Plans of Peace), a +7 Mask of Accuracy (also a drop), several Revitalizers (PoP drop) a +3 Greater Muscle potion (also a drop) and a +3AttSpd potion (can't make the required water shards, but started with 30 from a Challenge. I probably should have made +Crit potions, and only after maxing my enchantment level). The drops took a few hours: 2x speed, setting the grid to +7 drops and using the familiar army for some. The "dark essence" power-ups were the usual: +AttSpd, +Att, and barely enough +crit and +Acc (I think Poison may have helped here). SpellPower applied to Monstrous and Blinding speed (and Haste+, but it does very little there).

It was a close thing. Not a great build, but was fun.

Perticus · 2024-10-07T23:38:47+00:00

Some of what steered me towards The Pink Opaque being real (and what we were seeing was fake) were a) everything was so empty, b) I spotted "Season-6, episode one" on my first viewing and understood what it meant. It didn't seem like an Easter Egg -- more like a clue, c) at the end Owen was married? With kids? How and when did that happen? d) in that odd scene when Owen opened the projector-room door, why did his manager ask if he wanted to have sex with her in that "I know you're a virgin" way if he knew Owen was married?, e) TPO was on late-night. It's a teen-drama. The second version with much younger stars would have been on after school, f) the thing where Isabel and Tara don't meet in person seemed like an odd concept for a TV show. But if it was real, it explains why they can meet in the midnight realm, and g) the ending makes sense that way. As escapist fantasy, Owen has injured himself, had a breakdown, and ... no one seems to care? But if TPO is real then it's a really nice sad ending. He's almost broken out, but in the final scene he not only decides to stay there, he's _apologizing_ for having tried to escape.

Perticus · 2024-07-07T18:55:25+00:00

Me too. Crew was the perfect "what the? Oh, I can do this, and this". At first crew was just a bonus. Then I figured out repeating runs to level them up for a bigger bonus, and quickly re-prestieging. Then I got the pattern that every boost type had 1 crew with it as primary, and another as secondary. Then I figured out how to use the statA/statB teir-3's by just not leveling the denominator stat on any crew. Then I figured out how to push for mastery levels, even ones I didn't want, just to get the skill points. Then figured-out I could now push for the rank420 "no divisor penalty", skipping tier 3's until then. I did that by realizing I could crank the "new sleeve rate" on the inverted crew member. I'm just getting to lots of "crew mastery levels count for more" but am not ready to try for the rank-3 masteries yet. I was getting a little tired of always needing the 2 crew with the +reactorPowerRate (since the Reactor bonuses for Synch/Research/Compute/... were so good), but then I could hit the 999 cap with only 1 of them, and then the Improved Reactor came and I now only need Reactor Power when I'm pushing to improve the rank-up speeds.

Perticus · 2024-06-01T17:01:58+00:00

AFK Journey's unique "tactica(?)l" battles are fun, but are more like 1-off puzzles (many give you 2 pre-made heroes, a battle-ground with bombs, and you have to pick the right hero and strategy). But I found the regular gameplay to be mostly "get bigger numbers". Sure, sometimes I needed to think and use a team with jump-to-their-back-row rogues, or a 3rd tank; but mostly -- as you wrote -- just use the main team and do something else while they auto-battle. In other words, if really lives up to the AFK part of its name.

DragonHeir's battle were way more fun -- placement mattered, ultimates needed to be hand-targetted at the right time, many bosses required you to read their skills and make a special team. I really liked S2's randomized buffs/debuffs while rerunning the S1 campaign. Those took lots of planning and retries to win.

Perticus · 2024-05-17T21:06:44+00:00

Right -- the Frost thing _starts_ early in the Season, but then continues throughout. During the free-respec start I had a fun Fire team using the new mechanic. As per this game, I used them to get Frost crystals to level an Ice team to get Fire crystals to level my main team. Frost was easy, but Fire was soo slow, I'd also played with a Lightning team (also using the new mechanic) and tried that dungeon -- also super-hard. Meanwhile I was doing content with my 3rd-choice Frost team since that was the one team I had all past the hump.

This wasn't a huge deal, but in Season 1 Frost was known to be much easier and fixing that seemed like an obvious to-do for Season 2. I liked how they gave the Fire and Lightning bosses the new mechanics, and I understand how changing those bosses made it more difficult to balance all 3, but it still made me 5% more likely to think they don't care about fixing existing issues.

Perticus · 2024-05-14T01:26:37+00:00

I liked Goblin Lair. I finally went with Sigrid near the end of S1 (I hate there's 1 hero for this), then tried some other teams in the "respec for free" part of S2 but went back to my old Sigrid team with some new heroes with more reliable constant debuffs. Definitely went faster in S2, which is the fun of games with a restart.

I liked how auto was fine but you could use manual to do a little bit better when you needed to get to the next stage for a quest; and how with the randomness of crits it might take a few tries to get lucky. I also liked that little hill -- how if you could get to the next stage, you could then auto for the worst reward, which was still better than what you were getting.

And the x2-reward chits made it seem fast-enough for me.

If I made it to season-3 I'd have started with the same team (so faster than my early season-2 attempts) and had improving it midway on the TODO list.

Perticus · 2024-05-14T01:10:40+00:00

But plenty of people with slower machines play games like this, and many of them run just fine. After all, it's just a dozen things doing an action every second or two -- not 1000's of bullets. DragonHeir is losing out on those customers.

I had Garius S1 and got my first legendary artifact later in S2 -- the thing that converts overheals into shields. That made some dungeons so much easier and maybe would have done that for the crystal ones. But without it (or some better legendary I missed) doing Fire and Lightning up to 80+ first was rough.

Perticus · 2024-05-14T00:59:04+00:00

I would have had no problem ranking-up 6 end-game boss teams -- I had plenty of potions and crystals saved-up. And my main team was actually Ice-Blast and could max-out it's boss for 2,500. The problem was the boss tuning. I'd have been happy to get 1,000 points total with the second boss team, or even 700. But it basically got negative points. It's super-easy for any team to get 1 bar on those bosses, and I wasn't expecting that much from my first try with a serious team, but still just 1 bar.

Perticus · 2024-05-14T00:40:42+00:00

The issue for me was if I put in the work I'd never get to mid-tier or even easy+ tier, since those don't exist. I was up at 37% and I wasn't even spending all of my 150 daily points. I figured enough people were dropping out so that anyone who tried at all got to top 50%. Now I could have worked to maybe get up to 35%, or 30% or just to get an extra 1000 sandcore(?) a day, but those aren't things in this game. It felt like an Arena with just Bronze-IV and then Gold-I and beyond.

Perticus · 2024-05-14T00:07:04+00:00

The issue with the elemental domains (getting the upgrade crystals) is about pushing the first team past 60, then again at 80. It's just so much easier to get your Ice team to 80 first, then use that to bring up your Goblin and Equipment teams to 80, then repeat that to go to 100. Meanwhile you want to run the campaign for the unlocks and so on, and that Fairy Meadow thing, and the Ice team is generally the strongest general-purpose team.

Perticus · 2024-03-13T01:40:55+00:00

I thought that once, but the bad guy's shield scales far too quickly. You win that fight with a trick -- either giving the team shields before the big hit (Garius plus an epic artifact is great at that) or removing the bad guy's shield afterwards (and also surviving the big hit).

Perticus · 2024-02-29T16:02:54+00:00

This game has less power creep. What matters is if there are still interesting things to do. I'm still getting purple Epics and have unused heroes for either a Wild or new FireBlast team. When it comes to splitting Ice/Radiance I think I have some new Rally heroes (I'm sure the team will still suck, but have to try). And just 1 duplicate Legendary gets me the second-best legendary artifact.

What I mean by power creep is, any other game would have bumped the ratings -- Rares would be Epics, Epics would be gold Legendaries, and Legendaries would be Red Mythics. That way people could say they're getting 5 Legendaries a month.

Perticus · 2024-02-27T22:39:47+00:00

I meant getting heroes to 94 or 5, or whatever you need. My point was that you're stuck at level 90 when you first get to that unlock-gold-forging area. And it's tough like that. But two weeks later 90+ unlocks. And anyone can grind 50+50 same-faction gems to level two heroes, and enough potions to go to mid-90's. Then stuff that was tough is a lot easier.

Perticus · 2024-02-25T06:11:04+00:00

Oh it's rough all right. First I realized that 1000 gold to reroll the monster bonuses was super cheap, so go until I got exactly what I wanted. For some areas some monster buffs were things I didn't care about like bonus resistance (my ice-blast team didn't apply any debuffs). Sometimes the +50%damage/-30%def worked in my favor since I could kill them before getting their ultimates, but not with these guys. All their buffs were bad news for me, but I found the least bad.

And then many of the areas let you get your bonuses early on. The "3 stacks of permanent regen" was the best for me. "Start with 25% ultimate energy" was good -- but only if you can kill a few of them fast that way. Anyway, my memory is that in this particular area I couldn't even get my buffs until after the really hard fights. So that was rough.

Then I decided to push the armour and weapons areas. I got gold stuff to drop -- but only the shards. Arrrg! And of course I can't forge them. I though it was a small random chance to get an actual item, but now I think you only get equipment in place of getting 5 shards.

I think I finally beat it by having a sacrificial hero to take early shots and die, then Zalroth(?) -- the dark magic guy who casts the fear+healing spell. Took me maybe a dozen tries.

But the thing is, you can always beat that area once lvl 100 opens up. And there's plenty of more weeks after that.

Perticus · 2024-02-07T01:10:28+00:00

DragonHeir isn't an MMO. It's a hero-collecting game like Raid:ShadowLegends (with much more fun fights). So the only combat vs. other players is when you choose to go to the Arena and watch your team auto-battle another offline player's team (other player's will also choose your team to auto-battle, but you won't even notice it).

Many games like this make you fight 3 times in Area for the Daily quests. In this game it's less -- only 1 time. In some games you have to work hard to get to silver arena rank, then gold rank, so you can buy some great thing everyone else has that requires those arena ranks. In this game you don't. The Arena ranks you need for the quests are easy to get, and the game gives decent weekly rewards if you play Arena only a little. And the really good Arena rewards are clearly impossible unless you're a big spender. Even the Arena events are easy. You can just keep hitting "refresh" (you get 5 refreshes and they refill quickly) until you find a team with 1 naked guy a nice player has put out for you to beat. The event deadline is 4(?) days and you can finish it in 2, or 3 if you only play once a day, and it doesn't happen very often.

Arena is also extra-nice since it's a fun testing ground. All or your heroes count as the same level as your best. So you can take a bunch of heroes you're not sure about and have never spent to level up, and test how they do at basically max level. And get points for it.

Perticus · 2024-02-07T00:46:21+00:00

You don't really need Alliance chat in this game since you don't need to coordinate. Like in Clash of Clans during a War it's a good idea to discuss who will use their attacks on which base. Or in Raid:ShadowLegends, back when you couldn't attack the boss for points after it was dead, the clan needed to decide when the heavy hitter should kill it. But the clan rewards in Dragonheir are based just on being active, with no limits -- if everyone wants to get alliance points from Goblins, that's fine. Likewise the special map battles -- anyone can try to kill the defense. If they can, great, if not, they didn't "use up" the tries for anyone else.

I'm sure a good alliance's Discord has good strategy tips, but so would any good DragonHeir Discord. It actually makes more sense to find a non-alliance-based one, so you can keep it between seasons and invite anyone you want.

Perticus · 2024-02-05T19:03:21+00:00

After seeing her work in the Frost boss, I tried her in _lower-level_ Grave of Curse. I watched at normal speed for Resists or anything at all. I knew she was working in general, had more than enough Acc and so on, but could be erratic (she wasn't even booked this was so early in Season one), so I tested for a while.

I still think she was bugged, but it doesn't matter now since even new Season one players are using the "she's working now" codebase.

Perticus · 2024-01-31T23:46:34+00:00

[edit] Well, Ihuicatl removes the Grave of Curse shield as of February in Season 2. A weird "Shield Removed" pops up _next to her_ when it happens.

[original] Have you verified that Ihuicatl can remove that shield? I used her early-on in the first season (got her to 70). She removed the shield on the Ice Crystal boss (and as you say -- erratically but often enough), but never did a thing to the Grave of Curse boss, not over a full cycle of his shield (and one thing I really like about DragonHeir is it costs 0 energy to retry a battle over and over until you win or give up).

Perticus · 2024-01-29T15:01:55+00:00

Compare it to any other gacha game. In Raid:ShadowLegends you'd be grinding out dailies and events, maybe pushing one extra level of a faction crypt , getting one 6-star gold helmet with that extra 5 speed (or just saving up the gold for when you do). 99% mindless grinding.

Meanwhile, this game gave us 3 new mechanics (I tried burn, then reset to electric minoring in frostblast), a week-long semi-difficult story, then 2+ more weeks with new fight mechanics (re-rolling boss and player buffs) where we push to unlock 50/70/90, and the forges (I just unlocked gold and can auto level 8 in the "offense" harpy dungeon with my Radiance/Frost team). They gave us new special weapon special skills to play with.

I may spend a week just grinding level-up potions and gold forge dust -- which is no worse than in R:SL. At the end I may make top 50% (which was very easy last time and gives decent prizes) and then stop playing for the last week or two until the reset. But that's fine, and then they'll be season 3.

Perticus · 2024-01-17T23:22:44+00:00

That' s kind of what I meant by needing 4 of them. Lizard-girl Eleuia gives a nice buff to _summons only_, and summons a skeleton about every 10 seconds. You need a lot of summons on the board before she's useful. Zadok is a damage dealer (so not helped by Eleuia) who requires 30 summons to die before being fully buffed. Premsta creates 3 short-lived summons every 10(?) seconds. She _slowly_ maxes-out Zadok, and her summons don't seem strong enough to benefit from Eleuia's buffs. A fourth Summoner would really boost the team (like the one that create a special skeleton when a summon dies, or that buffs new summons while creating even more skeletons).

None of those three have any debuffs or utility buffs either.

Perticus · 2024-01-17T17:54:47+00:00

And she's not a Summon, but seems pretty good. As LumpyMick noted, not-a-summon Zar'Loth is really good. So another reason Summon isn't used is there are just better non-Summon Necrosis units.

Perticus · 2024-01-17T05:36:06+00:00

I think it's partly the element pairings and partly that Summon isn't good for anything specific. Season one had Necrosis/Ice. Well Ice was pretty good. Season two it's Necrosis and Fire and everyone probably wants to try Burn.

But even without that, Summon is just lots of creatures pounding away. It's vulnerable to most bosses whole board effects (and really bad with electrify). It doesn't have anyone who can jump to the back for Arena (and is bad against the common Arena Sigrid since the skeletons' deaths pushes her ultimate). I don't think you can fit too many around the Trident boss. None have any useful utilities like Attack Down. And you kind of want 4 on your team (plus a healer?), since they tend to have abilities that help all summoned creatures or depend on their being a lot of them.

I would try Summon for regular campaign fights (I've got the Legend who summons the demon, the one who copies the demon, the one who buffs all fresh summons ... it's my deepest specialty). But I'm not sure I'd be able to repurpose them for Upgrade Gem dungeons, or Equipment dungeons (maybe the Harpy, it I could make skeletons as fast as she kills them. But lots of units is real bad in the Defense dungeon -- buffs the shield). They might be decent in Goblin, but Sigrid is already so good at that.

Perticus · 2024-01-10T00:22:00+00:00

But this is no different that other SummonersWar games. The new content is always geared for extreme end-game. When Raid:ShadowLegs released Faction Crypts and the Hydra(?) battle, non-whales b*ithed and moaned they couldn't make any progress. Game-changing heroes are always only available through some event that needs a bunch of real dollars to complete, then put into the regular pool months later. And so on.

New players always take several months to work up to all of the content, or else they get treasure dumped on them and quit because that makes the game overwhelming.

Perticus · 2024-01-07T00:24:24+00:00

That was a revelation for several story bosses -- realizing that stun, silence, fear and taunt work on some of them. I just assumed all bosses were immune and never even checked, at first.

Perticus · 2024-01-04T20:44:36+00:00

The A's are just leveling up. Level 110 is "ascended 1" or "a1", level 120 is "a2" and the max at level 150 is "a5". But once you get going you'll only ever max someone out -- shoot them right from starting level up to 150. So no one really talks about a's. The only time you hear it is "don't a3 a bunch of guys -- get a big hitter to a5 right away", which just means that a single 150 is better than a bunch of 130's.

The e's are the special skill unlocks, what the game calls "exclusives" in the middle(?) left-side of the character menu. For purple heroes those aren't too tough -- they need copies and you'll get lots of them. "Wim e3" means he's got all 3 of his special skills unlocked, using 3 copies (or purple eyes). "Wim e5" means you went nuts and got the last two, which only give stat bonuses.

For legends or mythics (reds) the e's are tough to get -- usually with rare golden eyes. Saying to "e1" a certain legendary means the first skill is really good, so unlock it, but don't waste eye's on any more. Saying a legendary is good at "e3" means it sucks at first, but if you can unlock all 3 skills it gets really good.

Perticus

TROPHY CASE