Delves: Strategies, tactics and tips

I can imagine lol. Hell Gate pure faction team is painfully slow. Out of curiosity, are you running 2x Lemure, or some other configuration?

(To tie up the Eldrazhor discussion above, my issue was I was using a green-centric banner, not a purple-centric one. As long as you use a +2 purple banner, the team churns along quickly enough that the risk of not having mana for Essence is low.)

None of the combinations seem to be working and I have no plans to take it past Hoard 199.

Have managed to do every major delve without the faction event/potions of power but Hell Gate at 199/50% kingdom. (Amanithrax at 100).

Hell Gate
Fire Rift
Lyracza’s Lair

are probably my pick for top 3 hardest factions outside of the Faction Event.

I mean, I guess City of Thieves could be the 2nd hardest or even straight up the hardest without the Cedric treasure room.

(22) Amanithrax is still Easy, even if the delve doesn’t flow well anymore. Used 1 Mushroom Man, 3 King Gobtruffle as reference

(27) Sea of Sorrow is easier than Frostfire Keep any day of the week. Probably still a Hard at heart.

(20) Hall of Guardians is more of a Challenging than Hard, but still probably at the same spot. Sunken Fleet is infinitely more inconsistent to complete than HoG ever is/was and that’s only 1 spot below it on that list.

Interesting. I did not have as much trouble with Lyrasza 500 as the others. I went 2x Lyrasza - once your Dementicore’s attack gets stacked up and has neutered the front troop of the enemy team, you want to keep churning the board and whittle down the enemy with skulls and trickling spell damage. I needed to get a good run of Lyrasza casts to win, but it didn’t take as long as some of the other delves.

Stonesong was absurdly difficult, and is probably my pick for biggest disagreement with Timeknight’s list.

Hard agree. Frostfire Keep is a contender for my top 3 (of those I’ve completed).

yeah… that’s the problem. The attack steal doesn’t always happen and your Lyra doesn’t always want to be useful. After that, their Lyrasza always seems to magically get the damage to all enemies effect.

I tried it with Chaos Hound and it was just never useful. Even the times it summoned, it was never really enough to be useful and the times I tried to summon it would just create skulls that backfired.

Yeah as a rule I don’t use the skull generating troops in delves. The risk/reward is just terrible for them.

Maybe I just got lucky, but once I settled on the 2x Lyrasza team things fell into place without too much trouble on both lvl 400 and lvl 500 pure faction runs. (This was after banging my head against the wall with 2x Dementicore (and even 2x troll) for some time.) The hardest part was not getting screwed over on the second to last room with a spell-damage-heavy team, which was often unwinnable. Especially if the enemy team feasted on blue or purple gems.

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I found Dark Forest Troll pretty useless for this faction, but I guess at least someone liked it.

What make you think I like it? :laughing:

It’s my personal challenge, to beat Deep Delve with new troop. Gotta keep myself occupied somehow before new faction.

In Primal Rift, most of the time, your top two will keep being killed and replaced anyway, so it doesn’t matter much.

But, with Dark Forest Troll, you get to cast Treant more because of the green flood, and get to boost attack faster because of brown flood that no one use. So it can be more helpful than usual Dark Dryad sometimes.

I will add this one to the “interesting” category, they can’t all be in “powerful” like the first three. I’m just happy none of them are “lackluster” yet.

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Woohoo, finally beat Hell Gate lvl 500 pure faction this past weekend! I’d been on this one for several weeks, and broke through even though I was far from sure I had the right team/tactics. Hoard level 194 +75% stats from kingdom leveling. Team was Fury, Charonas, Judge, Judge.

In the end, this was another delve heavily reliant on RNG. Fury was on the team solely to add her death marks and initial bonestorm as additional ways to get lucky (I was dead meat if I got undead teams in the middle rooms). Sure enough, in each middle room I picked off one troop via death mark, allowing me to get to the boss room with the entire team intact. I was pretty conservative in my Charonas casts, only exploding the board when my next move risked setting the enemy up for skull matches.

Did not get any death mark love in the boss room, but as per the plan, I managed the bonestorm better than the AI (i.e. didn’t get horrifically unlucky), and did a lot of damage to the enemy Charonas early in the round. From there, it was all about not getting screwed over by RNG (either by skulls or casts of the enemy Lemure/Fury; also was fortunate that skyfall did not gift the enemy team an excess of red or purple gems). My team’s Judge casts were enough to wear down the enemy team to victory. Ended up losing my first two troops, but most importantly, my Charonas didn’t die until the enemy team was down to two troops and I had a decent life lead. Best believe I was sweating it out until the last hit though, having no board control left!

After all that, I still needed help from gargoyle gems to secure the win - in a middle room, I secured a crucial entangle of the first troop where skyfall skulls would’ve killed my Fury in the next turn, and in the boss room, I webbed a full-mana enemy Judge when his next cast would’ve killed my Charonas. This pure faction delve is insane, in the running for the hardest one I’ve cleared. No promise that I used the right strategy, but I’d had it with the Lemure luckfest, and thought I’d post my ideas if it helps anybody with the struggle. :crossed_swords:

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Yeah, Hell Gate is the worst one. I’d say in my opinion, but it’s really not an opinion. Not a good distinction.

Lack of skull reduction + forced starting bone storm if trying to win with Death Marks + low/slow damage + forced fights through an Epic and Legendary room

Since the devs love to do Deep Delves in order for some forsaken reason, it’s going to be multiple years (like what, 5 years?) before this gets another troop and even then, it’ll probably be some wacky gold steal troop that does nothing for this faction :sweat_smile:

:laughing: We know the drill by now, don’t we?

It’s funny, I rejected using Fury outright for the longest time, until I started noticing that the starting bonestorm+delve potion starting barrier was working significantly in my favor in the first room with some consistency. That was a turning point, as my performance in the middle rooms improved once I started including her in my team.

(We won’t talk about those times I tried 2x Fury on my team hoping to optimize death mark value and ran into undead-heavy teams in the middle room repeatedly :joy:)

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I haven’t tried PF500 in Hell Gate yet. Only DL500. That was an easy run.

But so far my worst delve is Werewoods. DL500 I had done at hoard level <150. PF500 I still couldn’t finish at level 249 with a 50% bonus. Now I’m out of gold and shards to get to 250 for another potion.

Even Wyrmrun PF500 was a lot easier. And that was my first PF over a year ago with way lower stats. :thinking:

But on Werewoods my first 1-2 troops don’t even live to see the 2nd battle most of the time despite being gold medaled as well. At least one of them. Mostly because of Deathmark and no transformation to another troop before dying (or winning). :frowning:

You have plenty of stats to do it as is.

I recommend:

Werebird
Werebear
Beastmaster Torbern
Werecat
Burning Banner/Warband banner (+2 Red, +1 Yellow, -1 Blue)

Werebird does a lot of skull damage with Hunter’s Mark. I would only cast it when it starts to get lower in Life. If it transforms, get it back to Werebird asap.

Werebear should be used for bad boards/skull flooded tables so you can protect yourself. Only cast when needed, would not use it as a regular exploder.

Beastmaster Torbern is something to use when you have alignments or safe casts.

Werecat should never be cast unless you can get the 13 or more red gems on the board for the triple damage cast + red gems for looping. Basically, I would never cast it until the last room where you can use it to get a quick kill on a dangerous enemy and it doesnt matter what the team is after the last room.

You’ll win by heavy skull damage. First slot Werebear is a bit of a trap as you need to cast it to get Enrage, but then you risk the transformation. The 25% skull reduction isn’t worth that situation.

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That’s exactly my team and style of play. But for 2 weeks now (aka 42 tries in a row) my Werebird and/or one of the other troops get killed instantly by Deathmark or a cascade of 3-4 skull hits in a row with extra turns (from skulls that fall down onto the screen after the enemies extra turns happened, but before I did anything except my 1st move). In case my Werebird (or any other troop) survives, I’m able to try 1-3 casts with that troop, but it’s never transforming and therefore killed soon after.

I def took a different path on Werewoods pure faction, as I found Werebird’s spell to be too crappy (particularly with its awful transform percentage) to rely on as the first troop. Any other Werewoods troop can provide more value when you have to cast it repeatedly to try and save the first troop, and the majority of your skull hits will come from Torbern casts anyway (which afflict the first troop with Hunter’s Mark).

It’s been too long for me to remember unfortunately my exact team, but I’m pretty sure I had Werebear in front and 2x Torbern in the back. Second troop was either a second Werebear or Werecat - I don’t remember, and it probably doesn’t matter too much, as the first three troops are likely to be transformed a few times during your run. The second Torbern is there to provide trait value, and to be cast only in a pinch if/when your first Torbern is transformed.

I did use the strats mentioned by Idle for my spellcasting - in particular, be defensive with your Werebear casts, and only cast Torbern when the board you leave behind is favorable. Werecat is the only troop whose spell you want to spam, and then only when there are 13 red gems on the board.

(In Switch land we aren’t subject to the death mark heroic gems from hell yet, sorry you have to navigate that. It must be boring having to use 3x Orpheus all the time to avoid RNG stealing your sigils.)

I never used Werebird as a spellcaster except to try to save it. For how many skulls I kept getting from the sky with my attack at 141 before hunter’s mark meant things died very quickly. 300+ damage with season medals per skull adds very very quickly.

If anything Torbern usually underperforms since there’s not always a board to cast it that doesn’t just get you killed.

You’re basically conditioned to take red matches as 3 of the troops use red, so blue to red isn’t always common. That just leaves Brown to Skulls being the part needed to be a reliable cast and that isn’t reliable.

That was kinda my point though - you will have to cast Werebird (or any troop you have up front) to save it, as it’s so squishy that a single skull hit at lvl 500 is enough to start putting it in jeopardy. And at 15% transform chance, with zero other RNG factors in your favor, I just found my Bird dying before it provided big value in most of my runs. Playing the delve as slowly and conservatively as I played it meant random skulls were just not very available to me very often before I cast Torbern. (YMMV of course. Maybe a faster strategy worked for you better?)

Re: Torbern, as you’ve noted before, you aren’t playing for 4-matches, you’re playing for any safe cast. Creating more red on the board and picking up boosted skull damage (particularly if you have a raged Bear up front!) at any chance is the priority. With blues and browns being uncommon on the board, that usually became easier to do as a round went on.