PROs & CONs of Turvold's Guaranteed champion event

To help RAID players decide about the new 80 Void shard Turvold Guaranteed champion event I created this PROs & CONs list:

PROs:

Turvold really has 1 main advantage: his A3 hits super hard (single target) – can do 1 million+ damage per attack on Clan Boss (needs buffs to do more damage).

CONs:

• Old outdated Legendary
• Bad Survivability (Low HP 17505/DEF 914)
• Very low Speed (93)
• Niche use. Mostly only used in Clan Boss and Faction Wars – most players don’t use him anywhere else.
• No Extra Turn mechanic (after kill in Arena have to wait to cycle to his next A3 again)
• Without the extra “Other” considerations he is probably not worth 80 Void shards – better save for another champion.
  

OTHER considerations:

• His guaranteed event is running at the same time as interesting x10 events (e.g. Hegemon, Nekret, Krisk)
• Also overlaps with CvC event & Summon Rush. Can do 79 pulls on x10/SR and 1 pull to summon on CvC for extra points.
  

Risk to consider

If Plarium buffs him later on he could become an amazing champion (he is “friend” of the Ultimate Deathknight so there is some logic, from marketing perspective, to to connect them)

Summarized in 1 picture:

Hope this RAID blog post was useful to you - feel free to like/share or add your own comments about Turvold.

Hydra Brutal 35M Damage with 5 star rare (1 picture guide)

Here sharing with you my new record & guide on doing 35 million damage to Hydra Brutal with a team including a 5 star rare, mediocre stats and much to improve.

UPDATE: after reading all the tips here also check out the latest result: Hydra Brutal 73.5M Damage with a Rare (Pain Keeper)

You can directly check the large image here with all the guide / details, but to add some more tips / explanations:

• Really very impressive result with 5 star rare. I did not expect to succeed so well when I was planning this team.
• And there is so much more to improve, so this team can actually do around 50 mil damage or more.
• Key points of the team are:
• 2 provoke sets: on Nekmo and Geo. This gives a very high chance to keep the Head of Decay always provoked. Despite that it managed to cleanse 2-3 times during the run. He got really lucky.
• Husk was actually eaten early and due to multiple bad lucks I did not manage to free him, so maybe I could have done even more damage.
• Reflex set on Husk was planned to help him to more Max HP attacks. As alternative Relentless set can be used - I just did not have good enough items.
• Would have been great to have some more ACC on Husk to act as a backup Provoke champion, but I don't have good enough equipment for that at present.
• While 2 champions have 250 speed, all others are much too slow. This is what would bring the biggest damage boost - if everyone could be 250+ or ideally 270+.
• Obviously the 5 star rare Pain Keeper can be hugely improved. Both by making him 6 star and by giving him masteries and better equipment.
• Rector Drath was equipped recently so I am OK with her gear but I still have her old masteries where she was a high RES champion. I need to switch these to Warmaster and this should give at least another million damage.
  

Hope my RAID blog post was useful to you - best of luck with breaking your Hydra records.

Nogoryo's Fragment Fusion Event Calendar

Just for reference, here is the Nogoryo Event Calendar that was provided to the RAID players who plan to participate in the fusion event.

Nogoryo
Rarity: Epic
Type: ATK
Affinity: Magic
Faction: Shadowkin

EVENTS

• Summon Rush Event (August 26-30) - 25 Fragments
• Champion Training Event (August 30 - September 3) - 20 Fragments
• Dungeon Divers Event I (August 27-30) - 10 Fragments
• Dungeon Divers Event II (August 31 - September 3) - 10 Fragments
• Artifact Enhancement Event (August 28-31) - 10 Fragments

TOURNAMENTS

• Champion Training Tournament (August 25-28) - 15 Fragments (+5)
• Ice Golem Tournament (August 26-29) - 10 Fragments (+5)
• Fire Knight Tournament (August 29 - September 1) - 10 Fragments (+5)
• Classic Arena Takedown (August 31 - September 3) - 10 Fragments (+5)

Possibly the weakest team to complete the Rare Spirit HARD Secret Room 4 - E.Dragon Doom Tower

Here a little blog post to share possibly the weakest team to complete the Rare Spirit HARD Secret Room 4 of the Eternal Dragon Doom Tower rotation.

• The team has only one 6 star champion.
• + two 5 star champions
• + two 4 star champions
• only 1 champion has masteries; all others don't have any
• very low stats
• 3 out of 5 champions are in a stun set
• Gnarlhorn's main job is to provoke when the stuns fail.
• Furystroker is the main healer.
  

This is a large picture - you can click on it to enlarge.

A lot of people struggle with the Secret Rooms for various reasons. In my Clan currently only 1 other person has completed this stage:

Also check out the more general guide on planning for Rare Secret rooms here. If you want to be efficient in RAID you must plan and that guide will help you with that.

Hydra Hard 69 million Damage with good (not great) stats - 11 pictures, stats, masteries, tips (2000 words)

Here I share with you my new record achieving 69 million damage on Hydra Hard and provide you with all the pictures, stats, masteries and tips to hopefully help you as well.

Let's start with the victory screens summarizing the team and the damage output:

Hydra Hard 69 million damage - Victory Screen 1 of 2 + Time issues

The battle took a very long time, over 1 hour. RAID has a visual bug where it shows 09:34 instead of 69:34. It's an old bug they never bothered to fix.

Before this battle I had several other failed attempts trying out different champions, so it actually took me over 3 hours to use this 1 key. Such problems in RAID are widespread and Plarium refuses to address these issues. Because of this many players just waste their keys on auto-battles with low damage results. And I am definitely not planning to spend the same time in the future; this was a one-off run for a possible record.

Victory Screen 2 of 2 + Equipment Tips

This is from the Clan view which also shows the equipped sets:

Here you can already see that the only "interesting" set is the Provoke set on my Nekmo Thaar. I think it's a great option for him due to his AOE attacks. I did the same for my Geomancer who is in another team. 

For all others I don't care about sets - just trying to get the best stats I can manage. There is a Regeneration set on Godseeker Aniri but this is only because she is helping run my Bommal team. The Immortal sets on Raglin is only because I searched to get high HP on him to survive Arena attacks.

I would like to ideally have 2 champions in Provoke set in the future, because 1 champion does not manage to control the Head of Decay always. But that would mean changing the team which I cannot at present.

Hydra Hard 69 million damage - Last Turns - Picture 1 of 2

Near the end, before the team is eaten, I decided to take this screenshot. This is another proof of the "over 1 hour" time and at this moment shows 64.7 mil damage and 226 turns.

I also already know I cannot keep up with RAID's cheating (the Heads start eating every turn) and the battle will end very soon.

Last Turns - Picture 2 of 2

This is the last picture before death. Turn count = 250 turns!

You can see that 3 champions are being digested at the same time and the last 2 will be grabbed immediately. This has nothing to do with skill or strategy - it is designed to make you lose at this point by consuming champions every turn. This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact.

Hydra Hard 69 million damage - Team Stats

Below are the summary showing all the champion stats and gear from RSL view. As noted the stats are good but definitely not great. Top players have significantly better stats than this.

Tips / stat targets:

• Nekmo - I only need him to go as fast as he can and apply the debuffs. While I don't care about his damage output I did give him Warmaster since all his attacks are AOE, so that adds up but his own damage is irrelevant for me.
• Ninja - Main damage dealer 1 of 2 - mine is in a very old Clan Boss build where I needed him to have 256 speed. I never bothered to change his build, so he is very squishy but fast. His main job is to do HP Burn / damage.
• Raglin & Godskeer - They act as the revivers for the team, usually picking up the dead damage dealers. I usually prefer multi-reviver like Arbiter but mine is in another team so I ended up using these single-revivers for this team. They just have to be fast and tanky to do their job. Raglin's high RES is not for Hydra but was made for Arena. 
• Uugo - helped my team a lot. Block Buffs, DEF down and the Leech, although chance based, did help a lot with the healing. Here again fast and tanky is the aim.
• Sicia - Main damage dealer 2 of 2 - unfortunately she failed putting the HP Burn on all enemies very often, but despite that her explosion was very helpful in freeing champions, especially when Ninja was eaten.
  

Champion details:

Below you can see all the equipment details and champion masteries. You can see that a lot of the equipment can be improved significantly. This is why I said good stats but not great.

Uugo detailed equipment and masteries

Godseeker Aniri detailed equipment and masteries

Sicia Flametongue detailed equipment and masteries

Nekmo Thaar detailed equipment and masteries

Ninja detailed equipment and masteries

Raglin detailed equipment and masteries

Tips & Other:

(in no particular order)

• For reference: the starting Hydra Heads for this rotation were Decay, Mischief, Blight and Wrath.
• For Nekmo I think it is important to first cast the Slow and only then go for the Speed which will allow rotation into Slow much faster. Doing Speed then Slow applies the buffs immediately but results in a longer cooldown to re-apply Slow. Given the different affinities and him failing to apply the debuff to all the Heads I think it's better to cycle Slow faster.

About replacements:

• I think all champions on this team are replaceable with Nekmo being the least due to all the benefits he brings, but still:
• Nekmo could be replaced by Kimi for example.
• Revivers by other revivers.
• Uugo by another Block Buffs champion.
• And damage dealers by any other equally strong Hydra-specific damage dealers, which could be HP Burn based like these or Max HP based like Royal Guard (which also brings slow) or Husk (which also brings Provoke).
• That said one must always consider the entire team when making replacements because you might have the case that you don't have a replacement for 1 champion but if you change 3 then you do because your other 3 might together bring the same benefits which 1 alone cannot bring.

Tips continued:

• If you can get your champion to die instead of being eaten that's much better. You can on purpose not heal and even provoke the super-attack of the Wrath just to kill one of your champions. This is because freeing champions is very dangerous the further you get especially if they are eaten by Mischief or the Fat Head (Suffering).
• If you had Hex from Mithrala then Mischief becomes a lot less of an issue. My Mithrala is in another team so this team always failed attacking Mischief and I could get him only via the HP Burn hits and explosions.
• While the Fat Head has both too much HP and, if you are unlucky, he can go 2 times in a row.
• Otherwise, if you cannot get the champion killed off then prepare your big attacks to be used immediately upon digestion. This means not using your main skills for possible several turns.
• Managing Blight with Decay is extremely important. If you fail the Provoke and Blight gets off the poison cloud and, at the same time, one of your champions is eaten before you managed to at least get HP Burns then it's game over.
• So watch carefully the cooldown of Blight's poison cloud. Slow/Provoke Decay. Target them and take one of them down if possible. Blight is actually relatively easy to kill. Decay is tougher.
• When you get the ATK down and Block Buffs on Wrath he basically becomes not important. Still, use the opportunity to attack him when he is outside his counters. And only if there are no other higher priorities.
• Try to kill 1 Head at a time to allow you to "farm" damage on Decapitated Heads. Have a sort of a staircase approach and a plan which ones you are taking down and in which order.
• Do pile into a Decapitated Heads but only if it will produce good damage. Attacking opposite affinity is not a good idea even if it is a Decapitated Head. Attacking Decapitated Heads of certain Hydra Heads (tough ones) is not a good idea because you will do less damage. Fat Head (Suffering) being the worst. 
• If you are unsure, hit it a couple of times and see. You want to aim for minimum 100k damage per attack, but damage dealers should bring 200k or more per attack.
• If you are waiting for the cooldown of Decrease Defense then I believe it is better to attack an Active Hydra Head with DEF down instead of attacking a Decapitated Head without DEF down.
• DEF down and Weaken are very significant for boosting damage output.
• If Mischief is up (in a team like this without Hex) then most attacks should go for Mischief when the Wrath Head is in crazy-mode. This is because this is the only time you can safely attack Mischief and not increase the cooldown of Wrath. If you can bring Hex then ignore this point as Hex will allow you to target Mischief safely.
  
• Torment is one of the most dangerous Heads for this team as neither Shamael is here nor there is any Veil. My approach to Torment was to completely ignore him. Still, this resulted in my Fears and I just brute-forced through the Fear. This immediately dropped the success rate of Provoke on Decay, so Torment in combination with a Champion being eaten was very dangerous. I usually softened Torment down via HP Burn attacks/explosions and then jumped on him to finish him when his HP was low.
• It is also important to choose if you should heal or revive. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Healing lets the champion remain on the field, but, for example, a Godseeker revive would allow damage dealers to immediately use their powerful skill again. Still, that said using revives as an offensive tool is dangerous since the skill will go on cooldown and if something bad happens it won't be ready. It is a consideration to make which you get better with the more comfortable you are with your team.
• Apart from eating Champions I did not care about Mischief at all in this team. This is because this team has no buffs at all. Only 1 actually from Nekmo (SPD). So most of the time Mischief attacked and stole nothing. Other times I had Block Buffs on him or if it was not on him (he is very fast and cleans it quickly) then on the other Heads which prevented him from sharing the buff. I think in the entire battle only 1-2 times their team managed to get the Speed buff, but it didn't really make a big difference in the battle as I kept Slow on them most of the time or killed them off.
• Other teams handle Mischief by using a high RES bait champion. That is a very valid strategy also. Others use Hex to be able to just kill him off (as he is the weakest).
  
• I almost never paid any attention to the Head of Suffering. Although few times he managed to get his Ally Protect through which did make freeing champions more difficult. Still, I think he is the lowest priority Head both because he is so slow giving you lots of time to take action and because he is so fat that he does not allow you to "farm" damage (+ his Decapitated Head is much harder to damage). He only becomes extremely dangerous further down the road when there is very little time to free champions. So you must watch his Turn Meter and try to count which Head will eat the champion. If you anticipate that he will eat and you will only have 1-2 turns to free the champion then this becomes a high risk situation. Also then watch when his Extra turn skill is coming.
  

Hope my RAID blog post was useful to you - best of luck with breaking your Hydra records.

1 Picture Guide for Doom Tower RARE Secret Rooms to help you plan

An obstacle in front of all RAID players is completing all Secret Rooms in the Doom Tower. Some of those rooms require only Rare Champions of various types which many players are not prepared for and therefore end up losing rewards.

Therefore I prepared this 1 picture guide to help RAID players plan their account to tackle these Secret Rooms.

• There are in total of 10 Secret Rooms which require some type of Rare Champions
• As the picture guide suggests, a team of Rare Magic Attack champions (e.g. Kael, Athel, Elhain) would already be able to complete 6 rooms out of the 10, which is 60% by 1 team.
• Then another 30% (or 3 rooms) can be taken care of by Rare Void HP champions.
• Which leaves only 1 room where Spirit Rares are needed.
• But already with 2 teams you can cover 90%.
• Please see the picture guide below for full info:

It is a large picture - click on it to enlarge. Hope you like this quick RAID guide.

While this would use the least number of 6 stars, HGCenty gave useful feedback that it can be helpful to use other champions, such as Non-Attack-type, to help complete various Secret Rooms. Some of these champions are:

• Greybeard is an AOE Freezer.
• Executioner is AOE TM control. 
• Apothecary - good in any team. 
• Soulbond (Spirit Attack)
• Coldheart - TM deplete
• Hellfangs and a Hound Spawn for their combo AOE Freeze ability. Total shuts down waves.

Rare Magic champions only: TOP 18 teams

Here I checked what were the top teams completing the Rare Hard Room 12:

 

Using Sand Clocks to help players Grind

Recently Plarium again said it is impossible to speedup RAID. While many players believe that Plarium is lying, here is a concept proposal that can be used to help RAID players grind without speeding up the game:

Using Sand Clocks to help players Grind

• Each earned Sand Clock expires in 24 hours - the reason for this condition is to cater to those people who don't want players to move gear around.
• Earn 1 Sand Clock every 3 completed runs - the number of runs can be adapted as needed. Lower value would be more player friendly.
• All areas have a separate Sand Clock counter - this is to prevent abuse of running campaigns and using fast earned Sand Clocks in other locations. When each area has it's own dedicated Sand Clock counter then there is no abuse.
• 1 Sand Clock allows 1 instant-complete helping to save time for tens of thousands of RAID players. 

Explanation of why my proposal is better than Super Raids:

1. Super Raids are turned off by default and we have to wait until they allow us to use them. That also means if they are in a "bad mood" or "busy" they can just not turn them on.
2. Even when they are turned on, they only work for 1 dungeon while player may wish to do other dungeons as well (e.g. Minotaur, potions, special event dungeon).
3. Super Raids do not exist in all parts of the game.
4. Double-runs is usually not matching exactly the number of runs we need.
5. Even if Super Raids logic was copied to Campaign it would not allow the most efficient way of leveling when an efficient players runs X of one difficulty and X of another difficulty to max out champions.
6. Super Raids would not work for those players who 1-key complete Clan Boss.

Whereas the proposal I made here gives maximum choice to the players who can run exactly the number of runs they need in the different parts of the game and without having to wait for them to turn it on.

Frenzy Urogrim Dragon 20 Solo + Mithrala + Ragash Dragon 25 Duo Builds

For any RAID player interested in a Frenzy Urogrim Dragon 20 Solo Build please find below the 1 picture guide:

and below this find the Frenzy Urogrim + Mithrala Dragon 25 Duo build.

Note: my equipment is not great - with much better equipment more champions can solo/duo and do it in faster times.

Frenzy Urogrim Dragon Stage 20 Solo

Frenzy Urogrim + Mithrala Dragon Stage 25 Duo

Frenzy Urogrim + Savage Ragash Dragon Stage 25 Duo build

If you have nice RAID builds - feel free to share them.

Clan Boss time saving idea that costs nothing

Here is a very simple Clan Boss time saving idea that costs nothing and is a win-win for everyone.

A simple button to apply previous score by using a Clan Boss key instead of having to burn phone batteries / mindlessly running an already established CB Team for the thousandth time.

If there is a concern about people doing it 1 time and then removing equipment from champions then this is easily solvable but putting a limit such as allowing the button 3-5 days after any manual run and greying it out afterwards.

Lonatharil Event Calendar

Just for reference, the Lonatharil Event Calendar that was provided to the RAID players who plan to participate in the fusion event.

And below is also a version by Ork-Skol for FTP accounts or those who don't want to bother with this entire thing.

Lonatharil Version by Ork-Skol

Consider this before you refer your loved ones to RAID

Recently RAID expanded their referral system to motivate players to bring more of their friends/family to play RAID and spend money.

Please consider the below before you recommend RAID to your loved ones. These are from different RAID players on what happened to their family or friends after their recommendation.

3 Tiny stories

One player recommended it to his friend and said that now he is playing every day multiple hours even during work. Significant negative impact on RL.

One player said he hates himself and is ashamed that he spends so many hours playing, actively hiding that info from his friends and family.

One player who got his friend to play RAID said he regrets it because his friend ended up spending a lot of money in the game.

Player Quotes

Quotes from different RAID players:

• I wouldn't want to inflict that onto anyone whose well-being I cared about.
• My cousin's exact words to me "you have put me in a financial trap"
  
• I would only recommend this game to people I hate
• Letting people know you play this game is equivalent to informing them you smoke in the car with kids
• I would never in a million years recommend this game for anyone in my friends/social groups. It is addictive, in a wrong way
• When i tell my friends i play raid they just look at me and laugh.. its embarrassing AF
  
• I can not in good faith recommend it to anyone.
• Never in a million years
• I love them. Why would I ruin their lives after I've ruined mine?

Extremely skilled in creating addiction

Plarium, owned by  Aristocrat, is an Israeli game developer with offices in Israel, the United States and Ukraine. Aristocrat Leisure Limited is an Australian gambling machine manufacturer.
They have extensive data and knowledge to create addictive behaviors and exploit human weaknesses, basically converting regular people into addicts.

There was a voting

Online poll results asking RAID players if they would recommend the game to their friends or family were by large a "NO" as shown on the picture below.

 

What many RAID players are doing

Many RAID players who want to collect the referral rewards but don't want to recommend the game to their friends or family are creating fake accounts and using various 3rd party tools like Bluestacks macros to automatically play and level up those fake accounts on a constantly running computer.

I saw estimates around 50 days - 2 months that these fake accounts have to be played to gather the rewards. It is a tedious and ridiculous thing to do but some of those players who are fully addicted or fully invested (already spent a lot of money) choose to do it. 

And this system probably supports the bot farms helping them get extra quality champions making it easier for them to create and sell accounts.

Not telling you what to do

You do whatever you want - this blog post only suggests to consider = think about the potential consequences.