I’ve been working on a guide, breaking down the strategies, techniques, and loadouts used to complete factions at level 500 using only faction troops, to achieve “Exalted” status in that kingdom and reach 2,500 Renown.
The Google Docs format is ideal for this guide, due to ease of collaboration (anyone can make comments, and notable community members can be given permissions to make changes directly), simplicity of managing changes (there is a built-in revision tracker), the ability to embed images, and the ease of maintaining a table of contents.
Please dedicate this thread to discussion of pure faction completion in general, as well as specifically to feedback for the construction of this guide. Videos are especially appreciated, and discussion of potions and non-faction teams is discouraged (please use the Delve strategies megathread for that).
I’m wondering if anyone has any experience playing several of the more recent factions without potions, especially Frostfire Keep, which doesn’t even have any non-potion discussion that I can find at the moment.
I did it with potions, but I’ve cleared several other delves without potions, so I think I can at least start the discussion. I’m pretty sure Frostfire Keep has one of the hardest level 500 rooms so far, possibly beaten out only by Sea of Sorrow and Dark Pits. The AI troops are incredibly deadly with their obscenely inflated magic stat, which applies several times when they deal multiple instances of splash damage.
The only viable counter-strategy I could come up with was to DPS them down with 7 potions of power. I lost a couple times before eventually winning with one troop left. Without the potion boosts, you’d have to cast more than twice as many times (and wouldn’t have barrier, etc).
One thing worth noting is that you absolutely can’t path through the room that gives enemies immunity to freeze. You need to keep their team frozen as much as possible.
On another note, I think the upcoming faction will have the opposite problem. The faction troops are so terrible that the level 500 room should be doable, but getting there will be almost impossible without massive raw stat boosts.