Just completed City of Thieves at 500 - Warrens, Sea of Sorrow and Dark Pits left. I believe these are the 3 hardest?
Here’s my quick guide to City of Thieves. Cedric Moneybags thing was in play, so it made it rather easy … I imagine this is near undoable without this.
Hoard 200, Kingdom 14.
Team:
King of Thieves
Street Thief
King of Thieves
Cat Burlgar
This is basically undoable without killing Cedric room - so if you don’t have it in the current run, either use it for practice on room 1 or just exit or whatever.
In the first fight, focus down slot first, to remove random skull interference. Once slots 1 and 4 are down, don’t let the AI match purple/green and kill them. This may take practice, as this is a bit of a wonky group and does die to bad luck quite a bit.
Second fight (Cedric!) - here is the easy method: DO NOT ever cast King of Thieves, unless Cedric is dead. You want to prevent AI from matching yellow/blue (there is a caveat!) and use Cat Burglar to kill him. Cedric has to get either: 0 casts off or 2 casts off. If he gets the first, you need to let him get the second before killing him - you want KoT in slot 1. You only have 2 casts or someone will die. Casting KoT before Cedric dies increases likelihood he will kill a team-mate. Once Cedric is dead, finish off the room. If you beat this will all 4 in tact, it’s pretty straight forward. If you have less than 4, I’d just recommend abandoning the run.
Third fight - just pick a room that doesn’t reflect skull damage or has limited offense - I chose chessboard in my run. You really just need a few 4-5 matches then cast Street Thief, then let King of Thieves do his thing. Once he’s pumped up, this fight is simple. Focus down the damage dealers, then the support, naturally.
Final Fight - if you have all 4 dudes, this fight should be straight forward (I beat it on first attempt). Same thing as prior fight … you need to buff up KoT through 4 matches and Street Thief. Kill their KoT, then their skull creator; then it’s over, basically. Your second KoT will probably be your main damage dealer, so work on pumping him up - first one will probably die to bad luck early.
All Seeing Eye is not that bad. The 4 troops actually work well together and you can summon replacements. It’s really a stealing attack battle in the boss room and hoping you wind up on the good side of it.
You’ve inspired me to join in the misery … I’m advancing Warrens… in 11 days, I’ll start trying the faction run. Took hoard to 200 and kingdom to 14 in preparation …
There are maybe a half dozen delves that are extremely difficult without potions. My advice would be to just be patient and in maybe a year or so when kingdoms go above lv 15 it will be easier. A hoard of 300 + 100% kingdom bonus should make any delve doable. Just be happy with 2300 renown until then. Or do them with potions
It’s just a shame to be “wasting” your daily delve scrolls because a loss means basically no rewards shards/gold etc. These rewards add up especially over weeks/months.
I think I’m going to take your advice. Fang Moor is just silly. I’ve no Genie’s Lamps and no Sacred Treasures, 5 Kings Crowns and 0 Shards. Granted today I’ve now invested to get some shards, but it now costs me 268,000 gold for less than 1 Hoard with Priest Chalice’s. Gold is not the issue at all, it’s treasures.
Now at 265 Hoard and at 255, 2 attempts today, don’t even make the boss. In fact I have yet to make the boss with a full team intact still. Unreal.
I’m going to do 2 dailies elsewhere and have 1 go at Fang Moor daily. At least that way I can build treasures back.
Edit, I just got close, for the first time, all intact at the boss, but their Setauri matched about 20 skulls, as it would do with 1 bleed…
Still, killed 2, so a glimmer of hope mebbe…
If I was you and not wanting to spend gems on potions, then the two pure factions I’d recommend having a go at first are Deep Hive and Amanithrax. Deep Hive is doable at 100 Hoard with Scarab Knight and 3 Queen Beetrix. Can probably get 25% hoard bonus there. Trident Banner
Amanithrax - similar setup, Mushroom Man and 3 King Gobtruffles. Mushroom Banner
After that, Crypt Keepers is fairly reasonable. It’s either 3 Lady Morana’s and Grave Seer or Nightshade or what I used 2 Lady M’s, Spectral Knight and Grave Seer. I found Spectral Knight really handy over 3 Morana’s. I was able to work on top slots if Morana failed.
Wild Court is okay, Stonesong Eyrie okay. Silver Necropolis is also reasonable. Generally all of them can be done with sub 130-150 hoard. Primal Rift also, but they changed the room path to what it used to be and it’s probably a little harder than it used to be. This one was a problem for me, unlike many others, I just had bad RNG summoning Treants for some time, wheras Crypt Keepers I did it on my second attempt.
All Seeing Eye is a little more difficult. If you are going potions, then you probably need around 150 Hoard and I dunno, maybe 5 potions of power. I don’t know what your bonus to hoard is. I did ASE without potions at 177 Hoard. Not sure what the bonus was, it was at least 25%.
Ocularen Leech
Xerodar
Watch Mother x2
Basically vs some of the rooms if you encountered say Ancient Golem at the back, you have to go through 4 troops to get him. So the extra Watch Mother for me anyway worked a charm. Summoning Ocularen is as good as having one in the setup in some ways. The troops will die, but 2 Watch Mothers can raise your chances of a) surviving losing one of them, b) Keeping Xerodar alive and c) refilling summons. Others have done it with the mirror team. It’s a faction I think where there are no hard or fast rules on the exact team composition, as summons seal this one, with O Leech stealing attack.
From reading your post, the best way of not getting frustrated is to actually do as many of the faction events as possible. Invest gems into them to get treasures, to build hoards. Pick normal factions to raise to 500 for daily delves and wait a little, while you get more powerful with stats. Guild stats are important too. Some of the really harder factions should really only be done with potions - Werewoods, Lyrasza’s Lair, Sunken Fleet, maybe Sea of Sorrow, Fang Moor. Several others are far better being done with potions.
Faction delves are incredibly frustrating because the AI power is so much stronger and some of the troops are awful - see Fang Moor, and some of the setups are so RNG with explosions - see Warrens. Skull hits inflict serious damage, so a double hit will often send a troop to the morgue. Others need out of the box thinking - Mirrored Halls. Others, well, as has been pointed out throughout this thread, you really need potions to do them.
I’ve done 13 of them without potions, not done any with potions, however I am now at a roadblock where the harder factions require your stats to be reasonably comparable (see potions really) and strategies are dependant on higher stats and even more luck. Skill is really out of the window with some of the harder ones, you need stats+luck. Perfect play is confounded by troops that have to explode = RNG.
That went on for another 3 minutes btw. Yeah, the first room took 23 minutes to finish. Jesus christ what an AWFUL DELVE TEAM.
Lost in next room. Transformed my Doppleganger into Fenrir. Had first enemy at 20 health and enemy got cascading skulls that killed my golem (which only has 25% skull damage reduction for some stupid reason even though every other golem has 50%). Then I lost my Fenrir of course. Then my Copycat failed the 50% roll and so did my Mirror Queen.
By far one of the worst set of delve troops ever made. Every single one of them is trash.
Hoard 202 + 50% bonus from deed upgrades
3x Dementicore/Lyrasza with faction banner; Anu/Seasons/Nysha medals
I had been on/off trying it ever since release (with also beating potionless Silver Necropolis in between); having cheated by completing it during initial event helped, I guess, immensely because now it’s easy to just shun all the frustration with - whatever, I don’t care, I’ve already maxed the delve so awful random doesn’t matter.
Two middle rooms were Infernal Den (Hellhound/Warg/Hellcat/Barghast) where a Dementicore died and Dark Cabal (Gluttony/Sacrificial Priest/Dokkalfar/Medea).
Strategy? Bring offerings to whatever gods you believe in.
I did get lucky with Dwarven Gates. Need Dopp to survive.
Copycat is not a bad faction troop tbh. It least it can copy and replace. It does backfire a lot, but most of them are designed this way.
This went about as well as I expected. My first troop died, like I wanted, then I got my Dwarven Gate, and everything went downhill from there. Couldn’t get another Dwarven Gate after 5 casts and lost all my troops. This delve is dumb. Off to Stardew Valley!
Apart from visual bug on my second slot it’s just a question of time now. Hoard 111 with no bonuses.
Starting team of Glass Golem/Doppelganger/Copycat/The Mirror Queen with Anu/Seasons/Nysha medals.
Middle room with Gluttony (Sacrificial Priests killed slot 4, then slot 3, then himself and their Gluttony didn’t get a devour, but killed my Glass Golem nevertheless); copied it, used it to devour boss room Glass Golem and Mirror Queen. Used my Copycat to summon additional Gluttony’s but - how else? - they would die to skull cascades right thereafter.
Obvoiusly, this strategy is very fast and effective when it works (namely, Gluttony gets those devours and exploding 4 gems doesn’t backfire terribly; also boss room Doppelganger shouldn’t turn himself into Gluttony and start doing what you’re trying to achieve in reverse).
