New player guide

I'm new what do? tl;dr

This blog is long, and I'm too lazy for pretty images to soften the assault of a wall of text. Therefore, this tl;dr.

If you get nothing else from this guide, here are 15 things for a new player to remember:

1. Scroll down and read the "Festival Events" section.
2. Scroll down and read the "managing your heroes" section.
3. Scroll down and read the "How to Campaign (find loot)" section before you do anything irreversible.
4. (Ha! Did you really think this tl;dr was going to be that simple?)
5. Buy Blackguard/Warmaster/Shaman/Knight as soon as possible. Don't be a hipster like I was and ignore these 4 heroes.
6. Use the Cleric with them. Always set her passive as Tithe because gold farming is that important.
7. Join the best guild you can. Quit your old guild that's holding you back (unless it's at least top 10-15). Everyone's heart clenches at leaving the first people they met, but everyone brave enough to move on soon feels relieved for having done it.
8. Prioritize getting a fist of the dark one at level 32 (you need level 32 artisans across the board). Give it to your shaman. You will feel good about yourself.
9. Get a Rod of Ruin at level 40 (level 40 alchemist). You will feel even better about yourself.
10. Craft quality plate armor (minimum Shell of Protection) as early as possible.
11. Leave all heroes without an immediate use at level 1. If possible, always leave the Pirate, Archer, and Sorceress at level 1, and don't level up the Fighter. You can always change your mind later.
12. Don't craft anything below super rare, and try to get feedback before crafting any super rares, as crafting the wrong super rare can be one of the most costly mistakes possible in terms of resources (see "how to manage crafting" section for ideas).
13. Whenever you are about to lose PvE, hit escape to open menu and quit. (not really one of the top 10 but it's irksome)
14. You can click chickens for extra food. There's a chance (maybe ~10%) for you to get food equal to your keeper level.
15. Read Kong chat and definitely join the discord community! They will help a lot. (most of them)

Introduction

Hi, my name is blaisem. The first month of Tower Keepers is very exciting, but after that players usually wish they were a bit stronger, only to find out it's difficult to correct one's course after making mistakes. This guide intends to equip you with the knowledge to get off to a good start in Tower Keepers, so that the only difficulties you encounter are ones you choose to have rather than scars from accidentally falling for noob traps.

To this end, the blog will not be about covering definitions or basic features of the game, but instead correcting mistakes that can set unsuspecting newbies on a crash course for disappointment later.

Feel free to comment for suggestions/corrections!

How Tower Keepers works

Tower Keepers is a game of long-term investments. Expect a good 6 months for the average player to access end-game content, and even longer to be on par with end-game peers who've been farming for a year or more.

This means one important thing: Your performance will be a culmination of months of investment. How you invest these months is the deciding factor between being strong or weak for your current level. There is no easy way to repair months of mistakes later in the game.

In other words, mistakes set you back. Permanently. Or at least until max level where you can grind the difference after months of being weak (worth?)

The good news

Doomsday warnings aside, now the good news:

1. Everyone makes mistakes. You will always find other players, who like yourself, were tricked by Ninjakiwi's deviously placed noob traps, which means there's probably a decent chance to salvage things and catch up to a good chunk of the playerbase. (You just won't catch up to maybe 10% of players/smurfs who've invested their time perfectly).
2. PvE (fighting monsters) is easy. You will always be strong enough for this. If your goal is to PvE, then feel free to ignore this guide. Just be aware you will reach a point, within your first month or two, where you will be struggling in PvP content, and that it will only get worse and harder to recover from.

Playing efficiently

Efficient play boils down to one thing: Gain as much resources as possible for as little exp as possible, most especially soul stones to increase your heroes' star rating. Compare two players:

Player A: Rushes to level 40 in 10 days. He can't afford epic gear and only has a few heroes maintained at level 40 with star ratings small enough to make any man angry at the rest of the world.

Player B: Reaches level 40 after 30 days. He avoided content that gave a lot of cheap exp, so he leveled more slowly. He spent the extra time gaining more resources. He can craft epic gear, and his heroes have a massively impressive star rating. He will take hold of player A, lift them up, and place them in the dumpster.

Strike a balance

Hardcore players will never play the game at all, avoiding 95% of the content and take forever to level up. You don't need to do this. Play to have fun. Read this guide and only cut corners you feel comfortable cutting. But cut some corners.

Sources for Resources

Two lists (for starters, try to cut the not good stuff):

Good

• Wizard Tower
• Feasts
• Boss Portal
• high ranking guilds
• Tower attack and defense
• Some bonus campaign content
• Catacombs up to 300 points (1-2 man teams ideally)
• Daily Tasks
• Hero Battles (real or "swapping")

Not Good

• Catacombs over 1,000 points (with a full 4-man team)
• "Find Loot" on high-level campaign missions (high level = high food cost = high exp)
• Wizard's Chosen in Hero Battles (without daily task)

Very bad

• Dying in PvE (you gain exp with zero resources).

Always quit via menu before you lose in anything that gives exp (like PvE content)

Quitting before losing prevents you from gaining exp in the loss. It's honestly not that much exp gained, but still it feels like a waste.

Guilds

Very, very common mistake for noobs: If you are playing actively at all, there's no excuse not to be in a top 10% guild. Simply go to the guild menu and search for top guilds. You want one in the top 40-50, but you can probably find one in the top 10-15 with low requirements if you look. There are plenty that accommodate extremely casual and poor players.

Leave your guild for better ones. You'll be here for many months, and you will be much weaker if you spend that time in a crappy guild. In a bad guild, your peers probably go inactive after the first month or two anyways. Better guilds will have friends more likely to weather the months with you and carry each other to fame and riches.

If you plan on being super active (especially if you intend to play optimally for PvP performance), you can look to join one of the top 5-6 guilds for top 1% weekly rewards. This is very possible for anyone above level 30 and recommended if you're serious about being active.

But at least get a top 10% guild.

Boss Portal

Weekly rewards aside, the top 10 guilds, especially sister guilds of the top 3, will go very far with the boss portal, which is incredibly beneficial for low-level players. The dragon is designed to provide attractive loot to late-game players. Importantly, whenever the dragon is defeated, the reward is shared among all guild members. It's not split or divided up. Everyone gets the full reward.

This means that a high-level guild will be unlocking end-game tier rewards—and you will receive that exact same reward at a low level!

What other low-levels spend literal weeks grinding will be available to you in a single boss portal, completed within a single week. After several weeks of this, you will have benefited from multiple dragons and be months ahead of someone whose guild couldn't go beyond the first few stages. Super important for getting ahead!!!

What heroes to buy

• Blackguard
• Warmaster
• Shaman
• Knight

It's not recommended to purchase any other heroes with gold, as they will be acquired naturally, within a matter of a few weeks, via portal stones for free. Spend your extra gold on the hero shop instead (next section) or city upgrades.

Managing your heroes

The most important property of a hero is their star rating. This seems trivial at low levels, but later on 5, 6, and 7 stars take months to power through. These higher-star stat bonuses are so insanely large that having a higher star rating typically singlehandedly determines the winner in PvP.

So how to get soulstones? Read on.

Heroic Missions

You can only do a maximum of 3 heroic missions a day for 1 stone per mission (max 2 stones for the gold mission). Make that 1 stone count.  Send Blackguard on heroic missions. If Blackguard isn't available, then send another epic. Epic stones have the most value. You may send a preferred super rare on the bronze or gold mission, but only if they are preferred. Sometimes you do this for time-related reasons (epic on gold missions is 24 hours which isn't always sustainable), or if you want to send stones to a particular super rare hero, or if you need the epic hero right away.

Tower

Every 24 hours you get a free soul stone in your tower. Like Heroic Missions, make sure it's a highly valuable epic stone from one of your epic heroes.

Hero Shop

Buy soul stones from the shop. As many as you are comfortable with. You might buy 3-5 common, 1-3 uncommon, 1-2 rare, 1 super rare, maybe 1 epic as you get higher level. You can ignore heroes who aren't useful, although investing in a few stones is almost never bad. This seems expensive, but after a couple months you will be miles ahead of anyone who doesn't do this. At max star rating, new stones will refund 25% of their base value in the shop, so to an extent, it's an investment that pays off later.

Emerald Chests

At the start of every day, 1 emerald chest per campaign is unlocked, which will always contain a random soul stone & 2 random drops at your level. These chests can be a great source of soul stones over time. Pro Tip: Left click + hold on the emerald chest in the difficulty select screen to see its contents—you can skip chests with poor loot or soul stones you don't prioritize! Skipping pointless emerald chests will at the very least save you food for other tasks.

Epic Battle Chests

These can be acquired from Hero Battles or certain events (dragon, bonus campaigns mostly). Open these for stones and pray it's for good heroes. Farming these in normal PvP is okay, but doing Wizard's Chosen just for epic battle chests isn't recommended.

Guild Shop

Here, you spend guild marks earned from tower PvP and hero battles (or as rewards from events). Anything purchased here will apply to the whole guild, making an active guild highly valuable.

What to buy? If you're in a good guild, the guild master should handle this for you. If not, look for guilds that prioritize portal stones. You can buy about 5 portal stones pack a week before they are sold out.

The order of priority should be:

Portal Stones > Resources/Keys > Catacombs Maps (only when desperate because everything else is bought out)

Resources and keys may at times be debated, but particularly at low levels, portal stones unlock you heroes for free. Easy best choice.

Do NOT spend guild marks on scrolls. These actually make your festival event (see below) harder in the long run and so are in fact detrimental to you in almost every circumstance. If your guild buys these, do NOT claim them unless you're in your first month of play or need them for the scroll event.

Occasionally, good items appear in the shop which are worth diverting marks toward (ideally after purchasing some/all portal stones for the week):

• Boosters (you will see once you start crafting)
• Wand of Swiftness (best wand for Witch)
• Abjurer's Staff of Protection (best staff for Mystic, also good on Druid)
• Sword of Wonder (excellent sword for Knight)
• Coat of Quickening or Mithral Mail (for spare marks after everything else is bought out)

Lower level guilds will waste marks on other stuff. This can be okay, but at least complete the portal stone packs first.

Spending resources, ie. Festival Events (DO NOT IGNORE)

See the Festival Events page. Festival events are 100000% an extremely necessary part of the game. DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT ignore these. The sooner you start planning for festival events, the sooner you can crawl out of the sheltered womb of the mother of all noobs and breathe the same fresh air as everyone else.

The key is to not spend any of the following resources outside of their respective event, unless you are sure you will have enough when the event does come around. You will be weaker for weeks as you hoard scrolls/skill points/gold! But the pay off is so rewarding that I haven't met a player above level 40 who doesn't save up for festival events.

Gem

You need 2750 gems, or ideally 5500, for Master craftsman's packs. Only spend gems on these, even if you have to save forever. Void core daily promotions in the shop are also good and can be bought outside of the gem event as long as it doesn't keep you from a master craftsman's pack in the gem event.

Gold

You need 600k gold minimum. (Save anything that costs lots of gold, such as upgrades, for this event, or you will never be able to spend this much gold at once.)

Skill Points

You need 50k skill points.

Scrolls

You need 2k points, which means about 1400 scrolls. You can check this by opening the hero menu and clicking on the golden scroll in the top right. If it costs 140k gold, you're probably ready.

Training Points

trains you to be a monkey

You will probably fail your first month because you're too low level, but scrolls followed by skill points should be within reach if you start saving after your first 2-3 weeks of play.

If you don't make the minimum, then save for the next round. You can always spend earlier once you are above the minimum.

Void Cores and gem spending

You might be wondering about those minimum amounts in the festival section. In fact, they all have one thing in common: void cores.

But first: epic gear. Epic gear is your long-term goal, equally important to collecting soul stones. If you don't have epic gear in your 40's you will lose. Straight up. From tower attacks to hero battles to bonus campaigns. Along with a high star rating, epic gear is the most important factor in your performance.

Void cores are the rarest crafting component in the game and essential for epic gear. Initially, void cores function as the bottleneck; they are the wall between you and crafting your next epic item.

There are 5 ways to get void cores

• Do festival events to gain handfuls of them at a time.
• Spend gems in the shop.
• Get extremely lucky and have them randomly trickle in from guild shop resource packs or loot from battles (maybe 1% drop rate, 1 at a time or 2 at a time after level 50).
• Be a god in PvP or in a top 1% guild (same thing) to find them one at a time in weekly rewards
• Grind your entire week away and break all rules of efficient farming to earn 5 a week from catacombs.

Clearly, festival events and gems are the only reasonable way to attain void cores to craft any epic gear at all. This is why everyone plays around festival events, and you will not regret it later.

Finally: ONLY SPEND GEMS ON VOID CORES, at least for now. Later on, gold will be more important and you can spend gems refreshing tower attacks for gold.

How to campaign (find loot)

The ideal campaign set up is to complete campaign 1 on normal and hard, campaign 2 on normal, and the first mission of campaign 3. Then quit. That's right. No more campaign.

Now what this means is all your find loot will only appear in low level missions that cost almost no food. Since food cost is equal to exp earned, you are gaining potentially soul stones for almost no gain in exp, stacking up your star rating relative to peers at the same level.

Personally, I would not use find loot on rare+ heroes if you have unlocked campaigns 5 and 6.

However, if it's on the first 2 campaigns, or campaign mission 3-1, then it's almost always a good deal.

If you choose not to find loot for some heroes, try to arrange it so they occupy the higher food cost missions. A find loot mission assignment never changes until you complete it. If a low-priority hero is going to stick on one mission for eternity, then it makes sense to repeat their find loot until they land on a high food cost mission before ignoring them. That way, heroes you do care about will stay on low-cost missions.

Bonus Campaigns

Every day there is a bonus campaign, lasting 2 days, and occasionally a bonus campaign lasting up to a full week. These are up to your discretion. Check the wiki for the rewards to see if they are worth it. Typically I find a few rewards I want (usually late in the campaign), and just do normal missions to reach it. I avoid training point campaigns because I don't need training points. Again, this is your choice for how you value your exp. In general, lots of gold, void cores, or battle chests are quality prizes.

How to farm resources

There are 3 heroes with useful passives that give bonus gold:

• Cleric
• Pirate
• Thief

Always use the cleric, and always give her Tithe (bonus gold) unless you are afraid of losing. The pirate and thief may not always be used, but also use their gold bonuses.

The mage and sorceress have training point passives. Training points are less useful than gold but still good to have. Use these passives whenever you feel you need training points.

Campaign

Ideally, you want four level 1 heroes so that you can campaign at disgustingly low food costs. Pirate/Thief are great choices. Sorceress can be one. Fighter is forced by the game to be level 2/3 but he can also work. Templar/Cav are also options since they are weak until level 55 anyways.

At higher stars (5+), you will find yourself able to complete level 20+ missions with a level one team, which is both highly convenient and extremely efficient (this allows you to complete low level missions from bonus campaigns at minimal cost, instead of always gaining max exp).

The most efficient campaign mission is 1-10 hard. It costs 4 food minimum but gives rewards of a level 10 boss mission.

Boss missions give 3 item drops that can be sold for extra gold. Campaign missions give 1 item drop. If you are more than twice the level of the mission, the number of item drops is reduced by 1 (2 for boss, 0 for mission). This makes campaign 2/3 bosses on also viable if you want a less tedious prospect than 1-10 hard, or if you no longer have level 1 heroes to farm 1-10 hard for 4 food.

Catacombs

The Catacombs give you resources around your keeper level, but are too difficult to farm with low-level heroes. Still, if you can solo the catacombs (Blackguard or Necro are good candidates for this, with Dark Defender as a weapon), or even duo them (eg. a cleric for heals + remove debuffs), the rewards are great.

You can also use maps at 20-21 food, which is very efficient. The minimum is 20 food. 21 food will give you an extra catacomb point.

How to manage crafting

Remember that talk above about epic gear turning you into Zeus, but being really expensive on crafting components? Well, here's the guide on what to craft.

If you ignore this section and craft too much crap, you might have void cores one day but you will still find yourself lacking Celestial Orbs, Arcane Shards, and Mystical Essence, unable to craft epic items you will actually need. And it will feel very bad. For example, I ran out of Mystical Essence at level 50; others run out of Hardwood and Steel Bars at level 55 trying to craft combine material to level up the best items. It may not seem important, but these will all be relevant one day.

Plan ahead! Target gear you want and start researching now (it takes weeks). Click on the green links below to see their pages for artisan level requirements and plan your artisans accordingly. Crafting epic items as they become available will give you a huge edge.

You should always be researching 3 recipes at a time until you run out.

Common items

Craft none except for daily task, where the tank machine costs a bit more gold but crucially uses almost no crafting components. These will be relevant again at level 55 when you need to upgrade equipment. Save up!

Uncommon items

Craft not more than 2-3.

Rare Items

Not more than 1. The Coat of Quickening (cloth armor) may be one, although it can be found in the guild shop. Mithral Mail is not great but better than awful; however, it can be found as well.

Super Rare Items

• Chill Turrets (warrior machine good at all levels)
• Suit-of-Arms (tank machine for newbies)
• Fist of the Dark One (Highly recommended for Shaman)
• Chainskin (Highly recommended for Shaman)
• Shell of Protection (plate armor, but can be skipped for epic)
• Pulverizer (if you run berserker)
• Moon Mace (Low priority. Can be okay for Warmaster/Cleric, but easier to craft Ambusher's Hacker since it also can be used by Barb/Thief)
• Perfect Katana (can be good for the knight, but a slightly better sword, the Blade of Wonder does appear in the Guild Shop)
• Vicious Vestments if you're a Kensai fanatic can be okay.

These cost void cores, so except for Fist of the Dark One or maybe some armor, think very, very hard about crafting any of these before you've gotten at least the important epic gear. If in doubt, wait. Suit of Arms during gold event are the exception because they don't require void cores.

Epic items

• Rod of Ruin (staff). Available at level 40. Super good investment. Turns PvE and most tower floors into cake.
• Wand of Endless Suffering. Available at level 45. Same as rod of ruin but for warlock (and therefore better). Rod of Ruin will still find use though on mage or druid.
• Strength of Legend. Optimal plate armor; alternative: Dreadplate (Shell of Protection can be run provisionally).
• Dragonscale Armor. Optimal chain armor (Chainskin can be run provisionally).
• Great Wyrm Hide. Optimal leather armor
• Aetheron Robes. Optimal cloth armor (Coat of Quickening can be run provisionally).
• Any of these epic weapons if you have a hero who can use it: Vorpal Warsword, Ambusher's Hacker, Dark Defender, Frost Spike, Jade Fist of Kung Huo (replaces Fist of the Dark One, but low priority as the difference is small).

Tl;dr on what to craft

Fist of the Dark One (if you have Shaman), Rod of ruin, tank plate armor, and cleric armor (chain) should be your first priorities. After that, weapons.

Enchanting and Combining

Enchanting provides a permanent attack+defense boost to your equipment. An item can be enchanted up to 11 times. The cost doubles the first 3 levels, then compounds after that, so the cost becomes very high eventually. Enchanting bonuses are based on your current keeper level. Once you an enchant an item, every subsequent enchantment will be for the same amount, regardless whether you increase your keeper level. For this reason, it's recommended to never waste money enchanting an item until you can get maximum value for it. This is at keeper level 51.

Combining equipment levels up your gear, increasing all of its stats. There's a flat penalty for leveling up an item that is above your keeper level. Late game all of your equipment will be above your keeper level, making this a considerable gold sink. Boosters have no cost associated with them, which is why they are important here.

Enchanting and combining gear is why gold becomes the bottleneck in the end game, more than void cores.

Tower Defense

Tower defense is a great source of soul stones later on and worth investing in at some point after level 30, but only if you can make a good team. Before this, don't bother as it will exhaust your resources. If you are fast leveling, then you will never win. But don't be a jerk: fill up your tower with high level monsters so the rewards aren't shit.

You can capture monsters via random loot. Boss stages are best for this. Be sure the mission you fight has a level within the level range of the monster. You can also get monsters as rewards from the Witch Campaign which appears every few weeks. PvP can drop monsters around your keeper level.

How to defend successfully:

• levels 30-35: Druid stall floor. Druid + 5 Suit-of-Arms (tank machines). Useless after 35-40.
• levels 32+: Shaman with Fist of the Dark One and 5 Chill Turrets (super rare machine). Upgrade to Jade Fist later, and this will be a viable threat even up to 50+ if Shaman has 6-7 stars by then.
• level 42+: Ninja with vorpal warsword, 2 Corrupted Inquisitors, and 2-3 chill turrets or a wall. Probably the single most deadly floor you can build.
• Levels 40+: Rod of Ruin with Archmage/Mage with chill turrets or some combination of chills/taunts/wall. Consider a Black Fist Evoker if you have chill turrets (find in Witch campaign).
• Levels 45+: ^ with wand of endless suffering on warlock (minimum 6 stars). Highly fatal at max wand level (use boosters).
• Berserker with 6+ stars: Pulverizer with Vicious Overseers (pig animals you will find later or in Witch campaign) or Black Fist Skirmishers (black archers you will easily find later) and a wall. Can also use chill turrets.

Make one of these floors and put it on the first floor. As you approach level 50, make a second one of these and put it on the 2nd floor, then stack more of these after 50. Never use a stall floor past level 39. Vile Assassins are little zombie women with a big knife; they make good 2nd floors in your early 40's but fall off after that.

The first floor is by far most important because you have an initiative bonus there where you can land free hits on an attacking team.

You can also put a single crappy unit on the first floor (like a level 1 templar) to bait out an enemy's buffs. Buffs do not carry over from one floor to the next. The enemy will activate their buffs on the first floor, clear your low-level defender, yet gain almost no soul energy before facing your real floor. By doing this, you lose the initiative bonus of the first floor but also remove the enemy's buffs. This can be great if you use the shaman. Many teams use the Knight as a tank, and wasting his armor buff (from taunt) on an empty first floor makes him much more vulnerable to the Shaman. This also wastes the Necromancer's debuff, so you may not need a wall on the 2nd floor, which is valuable.

ALWAYS put a hero on every level (obviously, only heroes worth investing resources in). The more heroes, the greater your chances to earn a soul stone. Trust me, it's a big difference in drop ratio!

Try to place rarer heroes closer to the bottom to give them a chance at stones. Then place an uncommon hero on the 5th floor in case you're never lucky on your other 4 heroes; he will almost guarantee at least a stone drop for himself.

Also don't be that guy—you know, the salty dickhead who hates losing so much that they don't put any monsters in their tower to minimize the rewards for defeating it. It costs you nothing to lose a tower defense. Spend 10 seconds to click and grab the highest level monsters you've randomly captured and throw them into the tower (unless you are baiting on the first floor as described above).

Hero priority list

Necessary tier (Not having prioritized these heroes is grounds for automatically losing)

• Blackguard
• Warmaster
• Cleric
• Knight
• Shaman
• Warlock

Eventually necessary tier (you will wish you had these heroes at high stars eventually)

• Spellsword
• Barbarian
• Druid
• Witch
• Monk
• Ninja

probably eventually necessary tier (you will probably wish you had these heroes at high stars eventually)

• mage (worse than warlock but will be very useful nevertheless)
• mystic
• Samurai
• Berserker

good tier (perfectly viable and as uniquely strong as the above heroes if you invest in them, but if you don't prioritize them you can still be okay)

• Ranger
• Valkyrie
• Necromancer

Technically also good but redundant tier

• Archmage (mage can do everything he does with no investment early. Late game Warlock is faster)
• Thief (outshined by Shaman/Kensai, has niche use vs dragon boss for low-level comps)
• Paladin (not best-in-class in anything important but might find a niche use in a couple applications)
• Kensai (Overshadowed by Shaman early on, has a resurgence once he gets T1 epic sword, but falls behind again at max level due to inferior T2 damage weapon compared to Shaman).

Eventually good tier

• Cavalier (at 7 stars)
• Templar (level 55 with best epic 2h sword)

Eventually bad tier

• Amazon (relies on melee crits, ie. hard countered at level 55 by The Fortress)

Probably bad tier

• Archer
• Sorceress

Forsaken by all divine authorities that might conceivably exist tier

• Pirate
• Swashbuckler

Forsaken by all conceivable authorities that might conceivably exist tier

• Fighter

Don't rely on the last few tiers. Especially the Fighter. Please find the nearest trash heap and bury him a grave in it.

Attack vs Def.

Not exactly a new player topic, but I didn't have anywhere else to add it. One day I might make a separate blog with the raw data I collected. The short of it is that I tested the damage from attack and defense. I used a rod of ruin on a 5* Archmage in tower test defenses. The Rod of Ruin has a fixed weapon damage. This damage is clearly displayed on each attack always hits for the same value, unlike skills that deal damage in a range. This easy readibility and lack of variance is perfect for testing. Using various att/def combinations, I came up with a formula. A simple attack divided by defense ratio, multiplied onto the weapon's damage stat and then applying resists seemed to consistently arrive within 10% of the in-game value. The error peaked around 15% when attack and defense were near each other in value. This contradicts Elysium's conclusions, but it's what I got out of fitting a range of values. It bears mentioning our test conditions were different.

One other thing I noticed: the ratio capped when attack was 3x larger than defense, or defense 3x more than attack. Further attack or defense had no benefit. Also, resist seemed to be calculated last, so it wasn't affected by a cap in the attack:defense ratio. For example, the Amazon's cover allies had no effect once the 3x cap was reached, but resist did.

In summary, this means a skill's base damage can be increased by up to 3x its value through attack, or decreased to 1/15 its value if the targets defense is 3x the attack + at max resist (80%).

Attack/defense are extremely important, along with damage bonus multipliers.

Faq

• How do I get artisan points? Use Feasts. Your artisan levels will mostly depend on how fast you level. If you level slowly they will always be maxed out; otherwise you will need to pick and choose which artisan to prioritize.
• What artisans do I level up? Level all of them evenly up to 32, then pick a recipe you plan on using and level them one at a time to meet each target recipe you set. You will eventually need 43/45/44 for a very worthwhile wand (or 43/45/45 for all T1 epic equipment). After that, 55 Blacksmith is your next milestone.
• What heroes are good? See tier list above. It's a general guideline and feel free to ask others their opinions.
• Why is PvP queue empty? Low population. Don't give up, champ.
• What is slow leveling? It's avoiding exp to get strong and shit on people who leveled less slowly than you in PvP. See the "playing efficiently" section, then cut out anything that gives exp.
• Some people are telling me to just enjoy the game and play. Is this okay? Yes. The moment any of the advice above makes the game unenjoyable, ignore it. You'll find a way to make things work later. Join the community (Discord); it makes everything more fun, which should be the focus of the game.
• Other questions? Check around the wiki, you might find answers. Otherwise ask in the Discord or Kong chat.