Late March Progress

Last time I wrote, I had started bringing up Valentina, who I had just rolled.  She's now at 180e, capped:

Love trumps lack of energy.

Since I have a new use for honor badges (read on), she'll probably stay where she is a while.  I'll put a decent talent on her if I roll one.  But possibly she's still have Enlightenment when I get back to her.  I have put her into my LBF lineup.  I'm very hopeful that I'll break 1000 for the first time with this addition and another...

Ghoulem is now 198ee, having gotten all the experience when Val was blocked on honor badges.  I'll take him though 200ee eventually.  No real rush on that.  It's good to have a place to dump experience when HB are lacking.

The first big news since last time is I rolled this guy, who has eluded me since I started over two years ago:

He's still at level 1, because Val was already past 180 when I rolled him.  I have no immediate plans for him.  Mid term, I'll get him to 180e and that should be enough for him to help me through HBM III.

Vlad was going to be next on my to-give-experience list after Val, probably Val to 200e since there's no huge hurry on him.  But then yesterday there was a "Spend Gems and Win".  Rolling time!  And I rolled this lovely girl:

Nice hero, crap talent.

Yowza!  My buddy has a Heartbreaker, and from his experience I want her ASAP in my LBF lineup and perhaps also available for GW.  She's definitely A list, right up there with SK, DD, Ghoul, etc.  On her own she can (a) keep many enemies from proccing, and (b) heal herself.  Not to mention being the most damaging single target hero in the game other than Trixie.  [UPDATE: that last sentence is incorrect.  Still, she's as damaging as PK, and that's quite good.]  I'll definitely put her in my Challenge a Boss lineups.  A bit low on hitpoints, so not really a tank.

I think HB might work well in a brute-force sort of attack in GW.  The plan is HB, DD, Ghoulem, Grimfiend going straight into a HtH with enemy heroes, with sniping support from Cupid and Aries.  (I'll definitely post about it if it works.)

One other big event since last time.  I rolled an A grade talent!

Scatter ninja!

This was a tough one to place.  According to the wisdom of reddit, the placement for Scatter 5 is PK, Grimfiend, and HQ -- other things equal.  But I have several scatter 4 sets, so I can crest that on PK and Grim.  And I have no Molt, so I want HQ for pushing HBM.  I asked for advice at reddit and got people recommending all three choices.  (Sigh.)  As always, you can't push responsibility away easily.  And then the very next quest board, I got a talent refresh quest.  Had to decide.  Some of the names I recognize as old timers seemed to go with HQ, and I was leaning that way anyway.  So...

HQ is now at scatter 6.  I suppose I should just go ahead to 8 since I have more than enough fame, and I will upgrade to scatter 8 anyway eventually.  Also I am not going to be double-evoing many heroes for quite a while.

That's a lot of fame.

One benefit of blogging.  It makes you think.  I still have 26000 fame left, which is four devos and a bunch of evos as needed.

So, right now I have an embarrassment of riches.  I want to pour experience/honor into five different heroes, all of them at least B grade: Ghoul, Val, HB, HQ, Vlad.  All of them need at least single evo, and HB should be double evoed ideally.  And I have a C-lister -- Revenant -- still waiting also.  Not sure if I'll ever get to him.

March Progress

Time for a progress report.

I have been pouring all experience and HB into my Ghoulem.  Have not rolled any dupes for him, so double evoed him using shards.

Costly, but it's Ghoulem.

Had to pause giving him experience only a few short times when low on HB.  Still not selling anything other than greens.  Gave Druid a level or two instead.

Ghoulem is now 187ee, with skill 8.  Put Corrode 5 on him that I rolled soon after he was born.  Not as good as Bulwark, but certainly useful for the time being.

Formidable.

Ghoulem has made a significant difference in my game.  I have him in LBF now, and I have been flirting with breaking 1000.  Sad story: I was at 988 last Saturday.  Was guaranteed to break 1000 on Sunday.  Except... not if I forgot to play.  Oops.

But Ghoulem's main effect is in GW.  He's quite helpful with a sniper team as the "send in someone for that last DD."  But also he opens up a new strategy: cheesing.  Now I can do DD-cheesing in GW reasonably effectively.  So I have been looking for opportunities to do that.

For those who don't know, the idea in cheesing is you isolate an enemy tank who can withstand very large amounts of damage, but whose damage you can tank also with the right team.  Then you put in your own heroes on him, and use remote damage output of your heroes' procs to win the battle.  (I plan to make a "how to cheese" post here eventually.)

I am still getting the hang of DD-cheesing.  I failed a few times where I got 50%+ and then something happened: my heroes kill the enemy DD I am keying on, or my heroes get killed.  You really want to be sure the situation is stable before you pass 50%, which is kind of hard to do.)  But that was last week: got a rotten GW score, about 1800 IIRC.  Anyway, last night I finally got a cheese really working well against a supertanky enemy DD:

Cheesing, cheesing, over the bounding main...

You can see my Ghoulem, Aries, DD, and Treantar in there if you look hard.  I tried doing a sniper-cheese, but the enemy has a Bubblow (you can see it above) and I was not making a dent.  So, it's a building-cheese.  DD and Doom Balloon, with other heroes there to keep them alive.

Result: all buildings dead, no heroes killed on either side.

Take that you buildings!

Took down a ~220000 might base, worth 511 points.  I finished in my guild's top 5.

Ha.  Extra HB.

In other progress news... heroes.

No really interesting heroes rolled in a while.  Got a Beast Tamer dupe last night.  This may have some value in the very long run, but my BT is already single evoed.  (I did this because I am using him on archdemons, and I wanted him to wield an artifact.)  His priority for 2evo is way, way down unless IGG adds some new boss with really good rewards that he is needed to get.

My plan was to keep pouring all experience in Ghoulem.  He's mostly done, but getting him to 200ee will help a little bit.  Still, I was starting to look at my options for bring up other heroes.  I have 2 Aries dupes, so maybe double-evoing him.  (I also have many other heroes at 200e that I'd like to 2evo, but they have either zero or one dupes.)  Or maybe bringing up Revenant for LBF.  (I rolled a Rev a month or two back, don't recall exactly.  It's just been sitting at level 1 in my altar.)

Then I rolled one hero for a quest this morning:

A late present for February.

OK, Val is now top priority.  She was born with flameguard 3: meh.  Fortunately I had an enlightenment 1 talent sitting around unused from a talent roll last night.  Here she is now, after the morning's experience:

That skill needs work.

She's inscribed to level 63.  I actually care about mana for another day.

Ghoulem!

I got two blue slimes in one gem roll!  Mwahaha!

And that guy in the middle.

Here he is now:

Not a Jedi yet.

Obviously not ready for primetime.  He was born with a 5/8 talent! ... deadly strike.  Actually negative for some uses...  Oh well, replaced it with Berserk 1 (how often is that an improvement?), and will be hoping for that Bulwark 5...

Got a Hero from Trials!

I've been playing this game nonstop for two years now.  In all that time I have rarely lost any hero trials to a maxxed queue.  So I have probably run around 2800 of them by now.  The first year or so was spent in Challenge I.  The second in Challenge II; I've been doing HT16 for the last six months or so.

I've never gotten a hero card as a reward.  Never... until yesterday!

Pixie card!

It comes in the mailbox and you must claim it:

More work.  Cannot just gimme?

My Pixie is already evo1 199.  This is my second dupe for her, so it brings me that much closer to evo2ing.

Druid Amping at High Speed

Someone had a question about the last bit of my post yesterday: where did you get the numbers for the boost to damage that a Druid gets when hitting at maximum speed?  This is fairly easily computed, but it relies on information about the game that not everyone knows.  So I thought I'd show the work.

Druid's boosts per proc at various skill levels can be seen in game (look in the Hero Compendium) or at the wiki.  That's the easy part.  The harder part is understanding how speed boosts work in conjunction with energy and the proc system.

Heroes accumulate 15 energy per hit.  Thus, absent any outside energy source, and assuming that they are immobile hitting as often as they can, heroes proc every 7 hits  (7*15 = 105, 105>100 and extra energy is discarded).  Castle Clash has quantized time steps of 200ms.  7 hits at max speed is thus 1.4 seconds.

The stack of procs that a hero can create is a function of his proc's duration and his skill cooldown.  Most heroes have a cooldown that is longer than their proc's duration.  So they don't stack at all.  Druid, however, has no cooldown.  His proc lasts 5 seconds.  1.4 divides 5 into 3 plus a remainder of .8 seconds; that .8 second is 8/14 of the 1.4 seconds between procs.  Thus, we find that Druid will stack 3 times about 43% of the time (.43 = 6/14), and he will stack 4 times about 57% of the time (.57 = 8/14).

To compute the average boost we get from Druid, therefore, we need to average the effects of a stack of three of his boosts and a stack of four of his boosts.  (To be more precise, we don't literally average them but compute a weighted average with ~.43 weight on 3 stacks, and ~.57 on 4 stacks.)

Here's a table showing the net damage boost Druid gets at maximum speed.  The "Weighted Average" column is the multiplier.  For example, my Druid has skill 7, so once spooled up he creates a team multiplier of 2.5.

Druid Attack Boost, Max Speed

In practice, if you have a Valentina and/or Cupid you will do somewhat better than the attack boost computed above, since your Druid will proc somewhat more often.  Druid by himself generates 375 energy over 5 seconds.  Cupid (skill 9) adds 0 to 55 to that, every 6 seconds; so Druid should be getting closer to 4 procs continually.

An Archdemon Highscore

Castle Crisis is on, and as usual the iOS server did the first three subgames on the third day (and not long into it, either).  Fortunately for me, I am usually up at midnight when the tries-per-day is reset for Castle Crisis.  So I always do well on the lucky imp, and I can always get the full set of crest rewards from the Avaricifer.

Now it's archdemon time.  I used to get great scores against the one that could be beaten with a custom Atlanticore and Death Knight.  Then they stopped sending any archdemon except the latest one.  (I spend a lot of shards getting that DK's skill to level 9!)

The current archdemon is very hard to deal with, since it is immune to stunning, scatter, and silence.  It is not immune to slowing, but slowing it doesn't help much since it will switch targets from time to time (not sure how this works).  This will mean that it will target your PD, who is always close, and then, unless you can tank the damage, you lose.

If you can tank the damage with PD anyway, you might as well forget about slow locking and tank the damage.

The only way I am aware of to deal with it is a combination of massive hitpoints, lots of healing, and protection for your heroes.  Unfortunately for me, I have no Ghoulem.  So I am lacking both the massive healing and the group protection that he supplies.   I can get in the 10 million range just by brute force: lots of revive crests, Tre, and luck.  That's about a much as I thought I will ever get unless they change the archdemon, or I roll Ghoulem.

Today another thread about the archdemon came up on reddit, and after reading shlam16's comments I decided to have another shot at it.  One interesting thing I learned is that this archdemon has a high crit rate, which accounts for a lot of his instakills.  Makes sense.  Valentina can protect somewhat against crits; otherwise it's a vulnerability that you cannot fully address.  You mitigate it by having revive crests or talent on every hero, and Treantar to revive them a third time.

I don't have Ghoulem or Valentina, so I used the core team suggested by shlam, but putting in Medusa and Cupid.  Medusa is great for getting rid of the eye-catchers, which is another thing Ghoulem does if you have him.  Cupid amps damage and adds energy, like Valentina.

For those curious, my lineup is: PD/DD/Druid/Cupid/Medusa/Tre.  The first four are double evoed; Medusa and Tre are single evo.  I crested them all with Revive of various levels (4/4/4/3/1), except Tre who has Revive 5 for his talent.  PD has Berserk 8 and the Blitz Scroll 5, so he amps up fast.

My first run didn't work very well.  I didn't exceed the 17.3 million I got yesterday.  I was close, though -- 17.1m -- so I felt positive about the second run.  Obviously there is a lot of luck involved with the archdemon; you have to try a strategy a few times to have a decent sample of what it's capable of.  (Indeed part of what is hard about archdemon is that you only get two tries per day, so it's hard to experiment.)

The second run, things just went much better.  Here it is after two minutes...

Beating on the archdemon.

You can see PD, Druid, and Cupid have all been revived by Tre.  This means they are on their final life.  No permadeaths yet though.  Eventually, though, the archdemon killed PD one more time:

PD down for the last time.

And after that it goes downhill rapidly.  With PD gone, his stacks unwind over 8 seconds and then the eyecatchers can't be killed fast by Medusa, and they amp up the demon.  Meanwhile, Druid stops his heals every 1.4 seconds, and Tre's shield is no longer providing nearly fulltime coverage.

The end is nigh.

Then a rapid end, with about 26 seconds left.

183m is currently good enough for 382nd place, which would give 1200 fame if archdemon ended today.  My old highscore, 17m, was around 4100th place with a reward of 700 fame.  500 fame is worth working for!

To improve my reward, I would need to place above 200th, which currently requires at least 326m damage.  That seems quite unlikely.  Even if I can get luckier and go the full 3 minutes, it would only increase my score by around 30%, to around 237m.

One easy thing I could do to improve my score is beef up my Druid's skill, currently at level 7.  This won't get more than about 5-10% though.  Not enough to matter, rewardwise.

Other than that, I can't think of any cheap way to get more.

Out of Eggs

It finally happened: I ran dry on pet eggs.

Empty nest.

This was predictable, and I knew it was coming, but still kind of interesting.

Does it change anything?  Well, not really.  However, there is one thing that I should have mentioned as soon as the pet-egg-hatch-time boost appeared.  We now expect, over the long run, to have lots of spare hatching time.  (This will be true for everyone unless they either spend money to buy pet eggs -- and I am not sure you can keep pace even then -- or unless IGG creates new ways to get them.)

Given that there is now excess hatching capacity, this means that obtaining eggs is now important, whereas (pre-Yulephant), it wasn't.  Back then, getting extra eggs would help you only if the extra egg was blue or purple.  They'd give you slightly better chances at rare pets.  So, even then, the benefit of extra eggs was marginal.  As such, it was never worthwhile to do anything to obtain that extra egg.  It just didn't matter, so there was no reason to change what you did.

But now, any extra egg can be hatched.  The benefit from the marginal egg is a full egg's worth of pet dupes.  That's a lot more than it used to be.  As such, it may be worthwhile now to change how you play to get those extra eggs.  Everyone should be getting the 2 daily eggs, and the 2 bonus eggs for doing quests.  But now there is the question of should you spend gems to get the 3 bonus eggs you get via gem spending.

For a gemmer, it seems pretty obvious that you should now do a handful of gem rolls every day, just enough to bring your daily spending of gems up to 900.

I don't think FtP players can do that; we don't get enough gems for it.  (Here's my earlier article on gem spending strategy.)

Generally, I think that FtP players should not worry about pets much.  The marginal value you are getting from a pet egg is quite small.  I don't have any characterization for it in terms of gems. But just intuitively, getting a few more pet dupes is not going to make much difference.  (By comparison, gems cash out as either chances at new heroes or crests; both can have dramatic impact on your game.)

By comparison, the gem bonus you get from doing "Spend Gems and Win" at the 2500 level is, in effect, at least 36%; and usually it is higher than 36% since it is very rare that you have spent zero gem over two days.  (My record spending before topping off during two days of SG&W was 1310 gems.)  So, you should definitely save for that.  

Now we do find a small difference that pets make.  When a SG&W is on, you should spend gems on both days, not just the second.  On the first day spend gems to get to 900 to get the extra eggs.  Second day spend so as to hit 2500 as normal, again (probably) getting extra eggs.

What about extra gems beyond those needed for SG&W?  IGG doesn't run SG&W that often.  With my gem income, SG&W does not consume all my gems.  What's next in terms of value?  Well, the other kind of event for gem spending is "Uncover the Treasure".  Usually this runs two days, sometimes one day.  My feeling is that you should continue to do these also, to help consume extra gems.  Soulstones are not worth that much, but they are still better than pet eggs.

Again, there is a small difference if the event is running over two day.  Spend at the end of day 1 to hit 900 and get those extra eggs.

I'll have to see if the two spending events can use up all my gems.  If they don't, then that's when I will want to consider doing daily spending to round up my gems-spent to the next 300.  Obviously, the most efficient way to do this is one hero roll on a day when you are at 150/450/750.