Best line up

[RedDevil757]

So including the event characters, what would be a good set to use for grinding and trying to get everything done? I've looked myself and just get lost in all the stats. Also any characters I should aim for ASAP?

[The-Captain-388]

That’s a tough question, as various builds require different champions. In general, most of the newer champions are much better than the evergreen (original) champions in the game. Really when you play and move around your champions in the formation you’ll find where they work the best. My advice is to work towards 2 champions in every slot as soon as you can so you can unlock Split The Party and modron automation. Some general advice to make the game easier is be sure to play every event when it comes around to unlock more champions and enter all the free chest codes weekly.

 

Back to your original question, Avren, Zorbu, Freely, Baeloth, Morgaen, are all really good. Unlock Azaka and/or Jarlaxle for gold, Deekin and Shandie for speed. There are so many ways to play this game, preferences of the “best” champion can vary a lot.

 

The easiest way to grind Free Plays is modron automation on Mad Wizard, which takes zero effort once it’s set up. The easiest way to complete 72 variants is play all the event variants and work your way through the kingdoms. Nothing in the game is overly difficult, it just takes a long time to grind.

Edited March 11, 2021 by The-Captain-388

[punkshepherd]

On 3/9/2021 at 2:43 AM, RedDevil757 said:

So including the event characters, what would be a good set to use for grinding and trying to get everything done? I've looked myself and just get lost in all the stats. Also any characters I should aim for ASAP?

 

Its like the above poster says, you can use pretty much anyone. They all are "good" in some ways. I guess just some more than others.

 

I have the platinum (took ages) and my best advice is to use whatever characters you, 

A: Like the look of

B: Have decent equipment for. Equipment makes a massive difference i noticed especially when levelled up. 

 

The 2 biggest influences on my party were Krull and Gromma. Krull should be the next character you get, if you dont already have him. Krull is the best debuffer in the game and Gromma is a great defensive allrounder with even a potential to go offensive at a push. Once i had them i didnt ever stop using them. 

 

In terms of DPS, my guy was Jim but thats cos i had great gear on the guy. Plus a "mainly mage" party so i could abuse his passive buffs. Zorbu is also good but it takes a long time for his passives to get good. 

 

[GastNDorf]

I still play to this day, months after I got the platinum because I got hooked on, the game has more strategy than you would expect from the title. I got all released champions and finished most of the contents so I can give you some advices too.

 

The problem when you start the game is that you don't really have a big choice in terms of what you will get, you will get 3 heroes per event which are set (and among the three there's always a new one nobody really knows how good it will be until it lands) , then you have the free timegates between event which pull 3 random heroes, among which you can choose just one of them, that's kind of a choice in itself but you don't controll what 3 you will get and you can land on bad ones (even if a only few are really plain useless). Then there are the timegate pieces which allow you to choose any champion, but these don't drop often, about 1 per 5 days and you need 6, so one month to be able to manually open a timegate. Sometimes they give them away for special events or through codes but it's rare. Even more rarely they give champions away, so it's good to watch when the new codes come out (one almost everyday but it's mostly chests).

 

Like someone said above ideally you want to get a second champion in every seat to unlock a second party and the modron core early, but personnaly I unlocked it after I got the platinum so I wouldn't rely on it too much, unless you want to delay your platinum until you get a modron core that automatically reset, and grind with less effort (not that it requires a lot to reset after 50 zones manually). You can still kind of plan who you will get in the next events (it's always 3 different slots), you can get the easier evergreen: Hitch is basically free, Drizzt is super easy to get after a little progress in Sword coast, Azaka is not too hard but need to make some progress in Tomb of anihilation, Ulkoria is decent to get but you need to almost finish Dragonheist, Dragonbait is hard to get and you need to finish ToA, and Reya is very hard and almost impossible to get if you're not end game so don't count on her. Knowing all that it may help you choose who you get from your timegates. 

You can even have a third party and a second modron (speed core) with 3 in each slot but that's not worth waiting on it.

 

 With that said I think the heroes you should get asap are the speed champions, they allow you to complete waves faster, in order of priority:

 

1) Shandie: speeds the game after your party doesn't take damage for 1 minute, no gear required so she will be as good with 1 or 100 Ilvl, she also has a decent buff but it applies to champions wiht high DEX.

 

2) Deekin: speeds the spawn time of enemies, no gear needed either, also a very decent buffer.

 

3) Hew Maan: makes your kills or items collected count for double, meaning you can finish a wave with half requirements. He needs specific placement though. Having higher gear divides the requirement even more, with high enough Ilvl you could even reach 1 kill per wave (but you probably won't go past the double if you're just aiming for plat), subpar buffer though unless you decide you don't want his speed and prefer buffing (very wrong thinking).

 

4) Sentry: has a chance to reduce requirement by 33% meaning only 17 kills/items per wave, more Ilvl means better chance to reduce it (can go up to 100%), decent buffer but has to be in the  front row or she won't buff anything.

 

5) Havilar: She also doubles the kill/items, except hers doesn't scale so it will always be double from start to finish. Also it only works on imps enemies which aren't that common outside of Avernus, so her speed perk has very limited use. Good buffer though, even better against imps, subpar tank.

 

6) Melf: He is quite special; he can do the same as Deekin (spawn speed), Hew and Havi (double kill/item) or spawn extra enemies but the problem is he does only one of those things at a time, and it's random, and it may change every 50th zone (so if you put him in z49 he will change at 51 regardless). So it's not reliable at all. In regards to his gear, these perks scale with it, so spawn speed will be better than Deekin's at some point, but for kill/items (the most important) it scales way worse than Hew so you would rather invest on him if you had the choice. One good thing though, nothing stops you from using Melf with the others. And he is a decent buffer too and has a little debuff.  

 

7) Briv: he can skip waves completely, which is awesome, he is hands down the best speed champion, but I put him last for several reasons. First in order to skip waves, he needs to farm stacks by getting hit, and it takes quite a long time to farm them reliably so it kind of negates the point of seeking speed. The other reason is that it takes a ton of Ilvls to be able to have a good skip. He starts with a really low chance to skip 1 zone, and to get him to 100% chance to skip one is long enough, and then it becomes 1 auto skip + chance to skip a 2nd but it takes even more ilvl to get there. Even if he was your first unlock, there's a good chance you won't even reach the first auto skip by the time you got the plat. Apart from that, he's probably the best tank in the game, tied with Aila, subpar healer outside of healing himself, and subpar buffer too (but yeah, he kinda does everything besides gold find and DPS).

 

Other great event champions outside of speed include: Avren (best buffer in game), Freely (very good debuffer + boosts gold and directly favor gains so it's a great asset when you start), Aila (arguably best tank on par with Briv and great debuffer, can stun enemies), Baeloth (decent debuffs and big buffs but needs a little bit of setup), Donaar (good buffs, decent healer and unique crowd controll skills), Orkira (best debuffer in game and decent heals), Gromma (great debuffer but needs ice spec, stone spec has bigger debuffs but is tank oriented and she's subpar tank due to not having a +%health gear compared to other tanks), Beadle&Grimm (two champions in one, Beadle is a great buffer, Grimm is a great debuffer, due to sharing stats they can do almost any variant); Krull (great debuffer and proabbly best gold find champion but requires a lot of active play), Zorbu ( second best DPS but needs to make a lot of kills, which stacks all the time even after adventure reset,  his shots are also AOE that go through all the mobs so he's really great against crowds and take a great advantage with debuffers who take advantage of crowds like Krull or Baeloth), Turiel (big buffer especially if there are many Lawful in the team, and can act as pseudo-tank, which means he can be in the frontline and never be hurt as long as he's not alone, doing that buffs the formation even more) Talin (decent debuffs and decent buffs but only for Good champions, also crowd control), and more ...

 

Current meta for what's strongest is mainly two different parties, who will perform better or worse depending mostly on Ilvl of all your champs:

 

- First party: Magic party boosted by Ulkoria, with Asharra DPS with pot-pourri spec. Both of these make Ash the best DPS because Ulkoria brings a serious buff in a magic party (you're aiming at 7 magic users minimum, 9 optimal, ideally the last one is the tank since there's sort of no magic tank in game), and pot-pourri buff applies twice for Asharra, once because she qualifies as the right race, twice because of parangon of Kir Sabal (this needs at least 2 other champions who qualify for pot-pourri). Second spec depends on what you can put but mostly it's half blood, simply because there's Avren and Briv in it, exotic and short folks have less better champions (and you need 3 to trigger parangon of Kir Sabal). It's can also be a good party early game because you can use several base champions (evergreen) who are available from the start or at all time to unlock, they also have higher Ilvl in general thanks to silver and gold chests. 

For the rest just add magic users and/or Asharra's specs qualifiers:

- Pot pourri: Orkira(m), Donaar(m), Talin(non m), Gromma (could be m but she needs DPS spec, NOT worth it, so non m, but tank), Qillek(m), Makos (m), Strix (m) , Tyril (non m, also in the same slot as Ulkoria so unless you don't have her then he could be sort of decent, also tank, but only buffs Good champions in his tank spec, which Asharra isn't), Havilar (same slot issue as Tyril, non m, tank)

- Half bloods: Omin (non m), Jaheira (non m), Calliope (m), Briv (non m but tank), Avren (m)

- Exotic: Turiel(m), Sisaspia(m), Korth (non m), Sentry (non m but tank), Birdsong (non m), Nova (non m but tank), Dragonbait (non m but tank), Warden (non m)

- Short folks: Deekin (non m), Regis (non m), Spurt (non m), Freely (m), Hew (non m), Lazaapz (non m but tank)

- Good magic users that don't qualify to these parangons: K'thris, Baeloth, Beadle, Jim

And to finish this list, people tend to use Hitch in their Ash formation although is neither magic, nor a tank or qualify to parangons, because he is a pretty potent buffer for high CHA champions (Ash is) and he's evergreen so again, higher Ilvl than average so better buffs and easier to get for starters.

 

Second party: Debuff party oriented around Zorbu and Krull, the reason being what I said earlier, Zorbu is very strong due to having a lifetime counter of enemies so virtually he could be the best buffer in game with enough time, and his buff applies to himself too. His AOE is ideal for spreading debuffs, meaning that the more enemies there are the more they spread damage to each other which is essentially what Krull's "traitor" debuff revolves around. If his "pain" debuff hadn't been nerfed a couple months ago this party would still probably be the best meta. Baeloth also has a debuff that spreads but not to the degree of Krull, but he still adds to the party so why not. Then you add debuffers so the damage spreading is increased by the debuffs: Orkira, Talin, Gromma, Freely, Catti-Brie, Aila, Strix, Warden...

This formation may perform poorly while offline or background because the game tends to not take into account debuffing.

 

 

If you want to start (or have started) the game, I really advise you to join the official discord: https://discord.gg/idlechampions it is very active with a lot of people who know almost everything about the game and will help you without second thought for any question, a lot of ressources about strategies, upcoming events, updates, keeps track of all the codes you can enter to receive various things (mostly electrum chests though), even the devs are on it since they're a small indie team (which still has a big contract with WotC), even if they are not the most actives.

Edited April 25, 2021 by GastNDorf

[IntroPhenom]

@GastNDorf  Hi.  Great write up.  I recently began playing, and have encountered a glitch that has no yellow health bar appearing after I deplete the purple health bar on the level 50 boss of one of the Events.  Any ideas as to why?  I've reset more than once to no avail.  

[GastNDorf]

20 hours ago, IntroPhenom said:

@GastNDorf  Hi.  Great write up.  I recently began playing, and have encountered a glitch that has no yellow health bar appearing after I deplete the purple health bar on the level 50 boss of one of the Events.  Any ideas as to why?  I've reset more than once to no avail.  

 

In the current event the last boss (spider queen or something right?) is a little bit special, the purple bar isn't really her health it's more her reinforcement level, the bar depletes the more drows you kill. Once the bar is depleted it disappears and no more drows spawn, then you just have to strike a killing blow just like you would any other enemy. She doesn't have a yellow bar.

The only glitchy part is that you can't see how much HP she has even if you press L2, but it should be about e3 more than the other mobs in the zone, like any other bosses.

[IntroPhenom]

3 hours ago, GastNDorf said:

 

In the current event the last boss (spider queen or something right?) is a little bit special, the purple bar isn't really her health it's more her reinforcement level, the bar depletes the more drows you kill. Once the bar is depleted it disappears and no more drows spawn, then you just have to strike a killing blow just like you would any other enemy. She doesn't have a yellow bar.

The only glitchy part is that you can't see how much HP she has even if you press L2, but it should be about e3 more than the other mobs in the zone, like any other bosses.

 

Thanks!  I just had another go now and managed to defeat her.  Perhaps I just wasn't powered up enough before.  

[PhantomWarcry]

For brand new players who may not be able to access optimal characters right away, Hitch from the free email signup was a pretty big boost for me, I was struggling and switched to a charisma boost lineup and I'm smoking everything right now