Game Tips

The following tips are aimed mostly at improving your own game experience, and do not necessarily affect others in the guild – choose to follow or ignore them as you see fit.

=USEFUL LINKS= Community page

Collection of resources and links (community-maintained)

=GENERAL=

Do the harvest
In order to make any meaningful progress in the game, you’ll need to upgrade your heroes and titans, for which you’ll need all the resources that you can get your hands on. For free players, the way to get resources is through obtaining the daily rewards available for various daily activities, such as the Tower, the Dungeon, the Airship, etc. Study the list of daily quests for resource-generating actions and work out a daily collection routine.

Caution: Below team level 120, avoid EXP (team experience) bonuses from (daily) quests, unless you have a special reason to collect them. The EXP bonus will work towards pushing your team level up, which in turn will result in more powerful teams thrown at you in the tower – and the gold attached to EXP bonuses will not offset this higher difficulty you’re going to face in tower runs. Once your team reaches level 120, the progression of levels suddenly gets a lot steeper, so you will actually want to start collecting those EXP bonuses again, just so that you get level 130 in reasonable time.

Do the numbers
You can inform every kind of choice in this game by comparing the numbers: Should you upgrade this hero or that one? Should you level-up this skill or the other? Does it make sense to burn 1000 energy to get that reward? Scarce resources can be spent in numerous ways, and not all rewards are equal. Do reckon and compare in advance the effects from your choices, and aim to get the best bang for the buck.

As a rule of thumb, graze where the grass is cheaper (more expensive upgrades tend to bring less value per unit of resources spent.) If in doubt, do the numbers.

Farm for rewards
Plan and time your spending and acquiring of resources in order to maximize your rewards.

Periodically, the game puts on special events with quests that drop additional rewards for obtaining or spending certain resources – mostly energy, emeralds, artifact chest keys, titan summoning spheres, and hero soul stones. Hold on until the right event comes up, and then plan how to spend/acquire in order to maximize the rewards. Your mileage will vary, but it would make sense to keep 2-3K emeralds, ~50 summoning spheres, and ~100 artifact chest keys for the right occasion, and to postpone obtaining hero soul stones from inventory chests for as long as you can.

Energy is a somewhat special case: normally, it’s replenished at a steady rate of 10 units/h during the day, up to a maximum that depends on your team level. Thus, if you’re spending it regularly, you will be able to spend 420 units every 24h (24×10 + 3×60,) whereas if you’re just collecting and storing it, you’ll only have 180 units made available to you in the same 24h (the 3×60 free energy bonus.) The difference is usually offset by the much higher rewards for spending energy during the right special events, but you need to consider how this plays out in your particular case – which is to say, do the numbers.

=TITANS= You need to roll your titans in order to take any meaningful part in Guild Wars, as well as to power-up your heroes through the Gift of the Elements.

Get your free totem
Titan teams can be made significantly more powerful by obtaining a totem (elemental spirit.) In theory, a totem fragment will drop at random from opening titan artifact spheres, but the random drop rate is so extremely low, it’s hardly worth talking about.

The sure-fire way to get a totem is to open said titan artifact spheres for emeralds. The first totem fragment is guaranteed to drop after opening 4,500 emeralds’ worth of spheres, the second after 45,000 emeralds, etc. While throwing in 45K emeralds almost certainly requires spending cash on the game, the 4,500 goal is relatively easy, especially in the early stages where emeralds are much more abundant as a resource, and, once the 4,500 goal is achieved, the game will return 5,000 emeralds back to the player as a reward for a quest – thus, the net reward for completing the feat is a totem fragment plus 500 extra emeralds, all free of charge.

Do the dungeon
To star-up and level-up your titans, you need to do the dungeon regularly. It’s time consuming and requires special care in choosing and carrying-out your titan battles (it’s perfectly safe and reasonable to run hero battles in auto, or to skip through them using divination cards.)

Almost any amount of daily progress will result in titan soul stones and titan potions, but there are two particular goals that are especially worth pursuing:

Collecting 90 titanite: Requires clearing the last two floors from the previous day, plus two new floors, activating a new save point. Awards 1 titan summoning sphere. (Note that the actual daily quest is for 75 titanite, which you'll get three levels before the save point, but stopping short there is actually counter-productive.)

Collecting 150 titanite: Requires clearing another two extra floors, activating yet another save point, for a total of 2 save points for the day. Awards 2 additional summoning spheres, for a total of 3 for the day. Note that this is thus 1 ½ times the hassle involved in the 90-titanite goal, for 3× the reward – so double the efficiency – but it takes non-trivial proficiency in manual titan battles, and almost certainly a strong water titan team that can heal efficiently.

=HEROES=

Get everyone
Never pass on a hero. Characters in this game get reworked often enough that there’s no telling how today’s bozo will turn out to be tomorrow.

There is a lot of talk in circulation about “the best heroes” and “the best team,” mostly due to wishful thinking and/or lack of experience with the game. Some heroes are more useful than others, hands down, but, as is readily evident from max-power hero battles, for every seemingly perfect team there’s always one that will shred it to pieces – you can actually try this, so don’t take anyone’s word for it.

It is easy to fall for the “best team” myth in the early stages of the game (up to around level 60,) where, through trial and error, most teams get rasped down to, more or less, the same handful of blokes, who seem to possess, taken together, the best resilience in tower and campaign runs. You’ll be surprised how quickly things change around level 80 ;)

Star them up
Collect hero soul stones so that your heroes can evolve – at 3 or fewer stars, they’ll be so pathetic as to be practically useless. Soul stones available from the various merchants come in a limited daily supply, and collecting enough of them to star-up a hero is a slow process – so you had better start collecting as early as possible, and be persistent about it.

It’s only fair to mention that, by some advice, you should rather prefer the items available from most merchants. This probably works for small hero teams – “best teams” ;) – or if you know straight up-front how you’re going to play the game for the next several months (which raises the question of why you would want to play it at all =D)

Note that evolution will have a significantly more pronounced effect at fewer stars – a hero evolving from 2 to 3 stars will get roughly a 50% increase in their stats, whereas one evolving from 5 stars to full-star will get only about a 20% increase (those are rough approximations, the actual numbers vary across heroes and stats.)

=TOWER= The Tower is the main source of gold in the game, which is the resource you need for most upgrades. You had better maximize your rewards there.

Aim for perfect runs
A perfect tower run (i.e. one where you won all battles with 3 stars) is worth at least 350K gold in bonuses, on top of any gold obtained from chests, so you should always aim to do a perfect run. (Technically, you’ll get the full bonus even if you’re one star short in one battle – but that’s all the “slack” you get.)

After a certain level, perfect runs will almost certainly require both manual battles and changing your team to match.

Manual battles: Mostly, towards the end of a battle, you need to pull the reins of your team so that they won’t waste their first skills on a single standing opponent that can’t harm them, as well as to let them some time to heal and/or collect energy before they need to jump into the next fight.

Change your team to match: Some of your heroes have specific vulnerabilities, and you need to protect them – Yasmine and Jhu suck against Helios, Helios and Keira suck against Corvus, etc. Don’t send a team member to certain death, or you run the risk of forfeiting at least 100K of the total bonus. (If you're playing the tower completely in manual mode, i.e., with no recourse to Auto whatsoever, then you may be able to get through with a single team, without any changes.)

Cop out
As long as neither team is fully defeated yet, you can always retreat from a battle in the tower and try it again, with your heroes’ health and energy as just before the battle.

Do that. If, in the middle of the battle, you see that you’re losing a hero, pull out and then go back in again, changing the team if needed. (Actually, even going back in with the same team could make a difference, given the element of chance in the game.)

Get team level 80
At team level 80, you get 50% more gold from tower chests. ‘Nuff said.

=DUNGEON=

Don’t rush it
There’s no point rushing through the dungeon. If you made 150 titanite for the day, you’ve gone far enough, and there’s nothing else in there for you – except the measly save point activation bonus, which won’t offset the onus of having to battle stronger titan teams for the next batch of titanite on the next day…

Water rules
Get a water team with a totem, and prefer water/mixed battles whenever you’re given the choice. With the apt timing of the invocation of main skills, a water(-dominated) team can come out practically unscathed from a battle, which can make pursuing the 150 titanite/day goal a lot more comfortable and hassle-free.

Cop out
Just as with hero teams in the Tower, you can pull out of titan battles in the dungeon at any time, and go back in with the original team’s health and energy. Figure the rest.

=ADVENTURES=

Use Instant Clear
If you completed an adventure and opened 4 chests, you can use the Instant Clear option on this adventure upon leaving it, until the end of the day. Thus, keeping an adventure open until the next day will let you get by with doing actual battles only every other day.

Prefer higher levels
Don’t waste your effort on low-level adventures, unless you’re lending a guild mate a hand, or you need to exploit the map’s topology for fulfilling a quest (e.g. for activating two or three Altars of Power, or for defeating a certain number of towers,)

If you need some pedestrian kind of stone for upgrading a pet, do instead the highest level adventure you’re comfortable with, and buy the stone with some of the chaos particles you’ll get. Even though buying a stone is a lousy deal, the difference in the amount of rewards across three or more levels would offset the loss.

Prefer simpler levels
If you find this to be in contradiction with preferring higher levels above, that's because it is :)

Unless you're feeling adventurous (pun intended,) pick a level that you and the mates can do with your eyes closed. The added onus of having to go through a taxing level might offset the benefit from the higher rewards, as will forfeiting a fourth chest (or maybe even the boss chest.) It's a trade-off -- do the numbers.