So, in light of the “Worse Than Bone Dragon” thread, which you can easily find elsewhere, I have decided to start a thread where people who enjoy SHARING their teams may do so.
I have always been impressed with the openness and camaraderie of this forum and this is my attempt to create a place where that generosity can be appreciated by new and old players alike. Please share your BEST Teams with the community! (If this is not your style, please respect the thread and don’t troll. Thanks!)
To get the party started here is my favorite TRAITSTONE Farming Build: On NORMAL difficulty, it nets a trait stone every 20 seconds, on average. (That is PLAY time, it takes longer to click through the screens and wait for board to load then to win the match!)
HOW TO PLAY: All troops are FAST thanks to Mechanist’s 3rd trait, once the board spawns find a 3-gem brown match, fill your first bombot. WAIT. Cast Bombot and kill most enemy troops. Explosion generally will lead to either second Bombot being filled or Flame Cannon being filled. WAIT. Cast either one. Collect your traitstone.
DON’T HAVE WRENCHMASTER? DON’T WORRY!: The Wrenchmaster is a weapon that may not be available for you, don’t worry. It can easily be replaced for Golden Cog, though this fully mana blocks the Flame Cannon, it will not slow you down in the long run. Or you can use any NON-BROWN Hero Weapon for variety, since the Hero is essentially a skull sponge in this build.
PVP USAGE: If you need fast gold, look at the eHP (Armor+Life) of your EASY PvP opponent. If its below the total dmg from both bombots then go and destroy in PvP as well!
ENJOY!
TEAM INDEX: For details on how to play and variations, click link to posts below. (Numbers only indicate the order in which teams were added.)
BEGINNER BUILDS: Teams designed for use in early game, no troop above Epic allowed.
Not easy to beat a bombot in normal explore speed-wise, if you want only traitstones, it’s probably the most optimal (as long as you have the Mechanist traited).
Personally if I do explore (and I rarely do, too lazy) - I try to get some free souls on the side too. So my go-to team for explore is double-valk + mercy + either Mab or Bat. Mab is faster, with a good board you win in “1 turn” (popular thing recently ), because you go mercy → valk → mab → valk → mab and collect your traitstone and get close to the cap souls too. The downside is ofc rolling something Impervious to play against (you can just exit and start another one).
The Crimson Bat version of the team doesn’t have that problem, but also doesn’t have a chance for the extra turn with enough blue around. Either works really, personal preference.
e/ since I didn’t mention it before, for both teams I use double yellow banner (so that mercy can charge both valks, since valk doesn’t have much problem charging the bat, and worst case - bat gets blue mana and red mana priority too).
and the order I use is Bat(or mab) / mercy / valk / valk (why mab exposed? why not? in normal explore there are no threats, and if mab is first, you can put mercy 2nd which saves you a second on waiting to use her - the traits triggering, so it’s just about min-maxing).
For an explore soul farming team that utilizes the necro changes I like this one that a guild member shared:
BANNER: Abyssal
TROOPS:
Giant Spider
The Dragon Soul
Sacrificial Priest
Warlock
DIFICULTY: I play on warlord II for bonus souls and my stats/bonuses still allow me to get the 4 (I think) casts I need to max while allowing quick mop up after fourth one. Use whatever difficulty suits you.
STRATEGY: Get up dragon soul as quickly as you can (hence abyssal banner). Hopefully it fills up itself or giant spider. Proceed to use dragon soul 4 times (if memory serves me). Finish with a sacrificial priest (I sac giant spider) or warlock.
I walk out of every battle with 200+ souls usually in a minute or less. This is my favorite soul farming team. It’s more fun and less tedious than some of the other ones I’ve tried.
There’s been necromancy changes to the consoles already, so I’ve leveled up Warlock (for future use), Flesh Golum, and keeper of souls with valk (who still has it) for soul farming. 110 per battle on normal, and i’ve started going to wl2 in explores sometimes:) Fleshy turned into a mean thing:)
A variation to Bombot teams for beginners could be:
Deep Borer
Bombot
Bombot
Ship Canon → Edit: Steam Turrent from Adana would make a better pairing because:
No traits needed, but it would be better to fully trait Deep Borer at least. The Banner can be any combination of Blue or Brown because with blue mana you will fill Deep Borer fast, faster if you unlocked Water Link on it’s traits, and extra brown for the rest of the troops. Bombots should be able to wipe the enemies, but if anything is left the explosions may give some mana for Ship Canon to finish the job. Even a summoned troop alone should die from Ship Canon’s damage because all three shots will hit it since it’s the only “random” troop left.
The new Blackhawk mechanics are quite fun… and powerful aswell - so it works in pvp, but is far too slow for explores. I’m currently playing:
Hero, Warden with Bronzelock pistol
Alchemist
Bonnie Rose
Finley
How does it work?
Bronzelock pistol deals some 20± damage to a target and destroys an amount of gems that gets boosted by the amount of gold collected. Bonnie Rose deals huge damage boosted by gold collected. Alchemist and Finley are mostly there for their Merchant trait, which is a must have on both of them. With double merchant trait, you can collect a total of 150 gold, which then allows Bonnie Rose to deal some 95± damage to a single target for 12 mana. Bronzelock pistol destroys some 40+ gems and therefor almost always refills itself (unless the enemy transformed browns and/or blues), with lots of additional mana to charge Bonnie Rose again. Alchemist and Finley are still useful to remove all gems and to change the board if necessary.
So the first thing you do is get Finley and/or Alchemist ready and collect 150 gold without losing the turn. Once that’s done, the match is pretty much over, cause Bonnie Rose will oneshot almost any target.
Pro: fun to play, can be played against any other team (avoid Mab teams though)
Con: slow, tricky, sometimes risky (especially vs Mab teams)
If someone tells me how to embed a youtube video here, I’ll upload some =P
For newer player, with 2k-3k troop strength, steam turret could also be a great replacement for ship cannon. as it give extra +6 (adana & mech bonus) armor to bombot, which means extra 3 damage from bombot.
Any basic banner with brown and blue can do the trick. Personally i’m using the “silly octopus banner” even at a minor penalty for using Black Manacles in my composition (Deep Borer/Bombot/Bombot/Mechanist with Black Manacles) because i like the picture on the banner.
I try to post simple/basic teams every once in a while because it helps when people don’t have all the traitstones to follow our strategies. I myself had to endure a good number of explores until i could get Arcane Lava traistones for Clockwork.
I see you’ve already started, but if this takes off, it’s just going to be a laundry list of teams which will be overwhelming without the kind of detail and context that you, @Fifthelement, @Mekkalyn, @Ivar, etc. added to your posts. Without the ‘how and why does this team work’, it may not be of much use to have them all in one place. Just my two cents.
That distinction has always confused me. From the description, I always thought “Community Content” was more for stuff like the poetry thread, fan art, fan fic and that kind of thing, but some people want to move a lot of useful guides, videos, etc into there just because of the format. Personally, I think this is more “gameplay chat” so I’d leave it where it is.
@Stan I appreciate the feeling. Thought of it myself in fact!
However, my hope is that everybody includes that in the posts and then the OP would function like an INDEX of sorts. A new player could look through for a team combination that looks appealing, or has some troops they want to use, and then can scroll down to find that one specifically.
If they can be structured in a sensible fashion then having them in the OP would surely be better than looking at dozens of teams in the midst of hundreds of posts. Maybe?
Edit: looking at the current layout I now agree with @stan. It is a little messy without some form of link/reference. Also, my personal preference would be to list the troops in a column instead of a row.
), because you go mercy → valk → mab → valk → mab and collect your traitstone and get close to the cap souls too. The downside is ofc rolling something Impervious to play against (you can just exit and start another one).
