Rune Event Investment Breakdown

Hillbilly has created a breakdown of costs/rewards for the rune event for those who would like to fine tune their resource expenditures during the event.  Just click the image to see it full size.

Luther, and In Team Hero Positions

I got a lot of questions a few days ago regarding team composition, and especially Luther.  This article will be about a less often talked about aspect of team composition, how it can affect your specific team, and hopefully, how to use Luther more effectively for those of you who chose to capitalize on his event recently.

So first things first, if you have not read the first article about team composition, you should consider doing so.  Though not required, it will be very helpful for this discussion.  You can find it here.

Each hero has a position in the team.  For Tanks, it is position one and two.  Support is usually 3 and 4 in the middle of the team, and healers often occupy position 5.  There are some notable exceptions:  Maya is a healer, but she will occupy positions 2 or 3 depending on who you have in your team.  Celeste will also do the same.  These two are not dedicated healers, they are actually support and will do quite a bit of damage, and heal also.  Sort of a two for one.  Some mages will occupy the fifth position on the back line. Orion, Helios and, Cornelius are notable examples.  

All of this has an effect on your team dynamic.  Certain heroes will be more effective in certain positions. Nebula works best in the middle of the team.  In position 3, she can give all of your heroes support.  If she is in position 4, she will mostly effect positions 3 and 6.  Since most of your damage dealers like to occupy positions 2 and 4, having her in position three has obvious advantages.

There is another position that is less talked about, and that is the position of "Off-Tank", or position two.  This is a position that, depending on overall team makeup, is occupied by the following heroes:  Galahad, Qing Mao, Ishmael, Maya, and Markus.  There are others, but these are the most important.  

You will notice throughout the course of battles you fight that once your Tank goes down, the line usually falls fairly quickly.  The same happens with a team's healers.  But what happens if your tank doesn't die, but instead leaves position one when they activate their first skill?  That, gentle reader, can be very bad; which brings us to the point of this article.

It will be helpful to examine this issue with a sample team.  For our purposes, I have decided to use heroes that most already have.  They were also part of the original discussion on this topic, so hopefully, will allow those of you who use them to take away some effective battle applications as well.

Our hypothetical team will be:  Luther+Qing Mao+Kiera+Nebula+Martha/Dorian/Celeste/Thea.  There are many other options for the last hero, I will not go into all of them here, there is an amount work you will have to do tuning your teams.  Martha would be good with this team, but Martha is good with every team.

Moving on...

So, let's examine this team in a little more detail, paying attention to the team member positions.

So our team line up is going to read from right to left here.  In Position one, We'll have Luther.  Position two Qing Mao, and so on down the line.  

So, in this team Luther will act as the tank.  He is classified as a tank officially, but functions in a crowd control capacity.  This can spell trouble.  Luther's first skill will cause him to jump into the middle of the enemy team.  At this point, he becomes a potential liability.  

Looking at the still pictured above, we see that Luther has left the team formation.  In doing so, he has cleared a direct path to the back of the line where Martha is.  This will make scoring damage on her much easier.  Krista in this team is occupying position two.  She will not put up much of a fight here.  This spells real trouble for the Luther team here.  

So how do we work around this?  If you're going to use a Hero like Luther or Ziri as a Tank, you will need to fill the second position with a very strong hero that has a good amount of armor and a strong attack.  This is commonly referred to as an off tank.  There are many heroes that can function as an off tank.  Galahad, Astaroth, Qing Mao, Luther, Ishmael, Aurora, Andvari, and possibly Elmir.

For our purposes, we are going to use Qing Mao.  She will work well in this team as she is paired with Kiera.  There is another reason for using this duo here.  Kiera and Qing Mao will work together to boost the team's damage output.  This is absolutely needed here.  If we are going to run with a softer Off Tank, and Luther is going to jump into the other team, we'll want to end this fight as quickly as possible.  This means the more damage, the better.

So we have Luther Jumping into the middle of the enemy team.  When he does this, he's going to attack the hero occupying the fifth position in the enemy team.  Often times this will be their healer.  If the healer is killed, the team will not be able to recover. This is where Kiera and Qing Mao come in.

Qing Mao isn't really set up to be a tank, but she has a lot of abilities that will allow her to perform the job with a little support.  Her first skill will damage the front line of the enemy team and push them back, this will give her a little breathing room.  Her green skill will deal damage and blind the enemy hit by it.  This means that the enemy's attacks will miss for the duration of the blindness.  Her Blue skill damages the enemy based on the level of their current health.  Qing Mao does not have armor.  This is a disadvantage, but she does have dodge.  If sufficiently leveled, dodge will allow her to avoid being hit by attacks.  Dodge success is determined in the same way that Critical Hit chance is.  If you have questions, you should take a look at the article on Critical Damage Here:  Critical Hit Chance and Dodge.

Okay, the last thing that we need to consider in the Qing Mao Kiera team is how they work together.  Kiera is a damage dealer plain and simple.  To do this efficiently, she needs to be able to get around the enemy's armor.  Armor penetration is needed here.  Kiera has a glyph that can be leveled to increase her armor penetration, as well as her Winter Skin.  Her second artifact will also increase her armor penetration, her first will increase Physical Attack.  

We can further boost her Armor Penetration abilities by teaming her with Qing Mao.  Once Qing Mao has been promoted to Violet, her fourth skill becomes available.  Every attack reduces the target's armor.  This effect will last the entirety of the battle, even if she dies.  The net effect of this armor reduction is the same as armor penetration.  Her main artifact also increases armor penetration.  This allows more of the damage from Kiera's attack to get through and um, damage the enemy targets.  Kiera has a very large AoE.  These two together are a potent combination.  

We follow up with Nebula.  I am not going to go into full details on her, if you'd like a more in-depth look at Nebula, let me know.  I will create an article specifically about her.  In this team, we need Nebula because she will do quite a bit of physical damage on her own, as well as boost Kiera's physical attack, and keep both Kiera and Thea/Martha alive longer.  She will also remove debuffs placed by the enemy team, such as Celeste's Cursed Flames, or Lian's charm.

This brings us to the healer, and our final considerations on hero placement.  It is important in this team to use a back line healer.  The reason for this is Nebula.  If we use a position 2/3 healer in this team (Maya or Celeste) Nebula will be the last hero in the line.  This means her healing effects will only effect the hero directly in front of her.  This reduces her efficiency.  This is bad for obvious reasons.

In closing, there is not tried and true formula that I am aware of to come up with the best placement.  You will have to look at your hero's stats, and decide for yourself in many cases.  Fight practice battles, and see what works, and what doesn't.  In other words, go forth brave hero, and be destructive.

Who Exactly Is Satori?

*UPDATE*

(Please skip to the end of the article, if you just want to see who Satori is effective against.)

Ravenous Pack

So with the Satori event coming up, I thought that I would go ahead and do a write up for him.  As one of our members found out today, he can be quite impressive. 

To start off, let's take a look at his skills.

His White skill: Ravenous Pack

Looking at his Skills page, we see that Satori's base attack applies "Fox Fire Marks" to the enemy opponent in addition to dealing magic damage.  When Ravenous Pack activates, Satori at this level deals 10641 Magic damage for every Fox Fire Mark! So if an enemy has three marks, Satori would deal approximately 30K damage!  That can kill some heroes in one hit!

His Green Skill:  Spirit Banishment

 

This skill attacks all enemies and applies a Fox Fire Mark, tying back in to his White skill.  This is just going to amplify all of that damage that we talked about with his white skill.

His Blue Skill:  Centurial Wisdom

This is an interesting skill.  It steals intelligence with every successful base attack.  You know who's smart?  Your HEALERS, and most of your support heroes.  Lars and Krista also are intelligence based heroes.  After the intelligence is stolen, Satori recovers 200% of damage that he was dealt as health.  Hit him with 10K damage?  He just gained 20K health!

His Violet Skill:  Looming Justice

Satori applies NINE, yes NINE Fox Fire Marks to every hero that gains bonus energy.  This ties right back in to his first ability.  When it fires, our example Satori is going to deal someone 90K worth of damage!

Satori's main artifact will give the whole team increased magic attack.   

All right, so let's break this down.  Fox Fire Marks are where all of Satori's damage really comes from. Since his artifact increases Magic Attack, he's going to fit in best with Magic based teams, or hybrid teams.  Team composition for Satori could go something like this:  Astaroth (Big Magic Attack), Maya (She's a good healer, and has an awesome Magic Attack), Celeste (She also increases Magic Attack, and is a great Healer), and Martha.  This is one time where a three healer team makes a lot of sense.  Other suitable heroes are: Jorgen, Lars, Krista, Kiera, Aurora, Galahad, Faceless, Kai, K'arkh (only if he's paired with Faceless/Kai/Lars).  

The most important thing about Satori in a offensive situation is his fourth skill.  It will apply 9 Fox Fire Marks to any heroes who gain bonus energy.  So how do we define bonus energy?  Energy is gained by attacking, and being attacked most of the time.  Any energy gained by a way other than this is considered bonus energy.  You know who gives away bonus energy like it's going out of style?  Jorgen.  So when Jorgen steals energy and gives it to himself or his teammates, he's basically signing their death warrant.  Satori is our fabled Jorgen Killer.  Simply put, don't fight a team that has him with Jorgen, and bring him to the party every time you face a team that has Jorgen.

What you don't see here is what happened next.  Satori fired his White Skill and killed Cleaver, Jorgen, and Martha in ONE SHOT.  The battle ended shortly after.

So, it has been pointed out to me that it would be helpful to know who exactly Satori is useful against.

To discover who we can take Satori to defeat, we need to go back to what he does.  Satori's skill applies 9 Foxfire Marks to ANY heroes that gain bonus energy.  As we've already seen, that can be a very bad thing for teams that use Jorgen; because he gives everyone on the team bonus energy.  

So, let's try to understand energy generation itself first.  A hero receives 10% energy for any ability they use other than their white ability, or their violet ability, even if the opponent dodges the attack.  The second way that Heroes gain energy is through health loss.  They gain 1% energy for every 1% of max health lost.  Finally, a hero gains energy for killing an opponent.

None of these are considered bonus energy in the game.  Okay, so what is?  Well, if it isn't listed in the previous paragraph, it's considered bonus energy.  

A little known element of the game, bonus energy is gained every time a hero executes a dodge.  This means that Satori will damage/kill a good deal of the Agility based heroes.  Ishmael, Auora, and K'arkh are an example.  Other heroes that give themselves bonus energy are Ishmael in Demon Mode, K'arkh (again I know), and Orion for example.  I will add more as I find them.

Feel free to leave your questions in the comments!

Upcoming Events - Jhu and Elmir, who are they, do you need them?

As you already know, resources are a major limiting factor in this game.  So it makes sense to skip heroes that don't fit into your strategy and/or teams that you've already worked on.  In this article, we'll get to know Jhu and Elmir.  Hopefully, this will help you decide if you should go all in, or pass on them.

Let's start with Elmir.  His event will begin on June 17th, ending on June 20th.



Summoning Elmir requires 30 Soul Stones.  He will have two stars.  We will need 150 more stones before he will be really useful.  If we look at his stats page, we see that he has a fairly strong physical attack, light armor, and fairly low health.  His main strength is Agility.  Moving down the list we see that Elmir has the dodge ability.  This means that even though his health is low, once we get him to Violet +1, we can start leveling up his dodge glyph, and in time he will be able to avoid getting hit.  Dodge works the EXACT same way as Critical Hit Chance.  If you missed that article, or need a refresher, you can find it here:  Critical Hit Chance

So, what can we do with an Elmir?  Looking at his skills page, we see that he has four skills like everyone else.  For the sake of brevity, I will not be posting screenshots here.

White Ability:
Elmir will move to the far line, (The Back) and use his second skill, if available, and carry out ranged attacks for the next 10 seconds.  He will get an attack bonus while this skill is active.

Green Ability:
Elmir will create a sand clone with a percentage of his health.  This percentage is dependent on his level.  The higher his level, the more health the clone gets.  At this point, the clone can only take damage.  This is good though, because while the enemy team is attacking the clone, your heroes aren't taking damage.

Blue Ability:
The clones can now attack!  Clones created with the first ability will continue attacking with ranged attacks from afar.

Violet Ability:
When using his Green Ability, Elmir gets the chance to make two, or four clones.  This is based off of chance, and the higher his level, the better the chance you will get two or four clones.

Okay, so what is all of this information really telling us?

Elmir is a force multiplier.  He adds more firepower to your team with his clones.  If Elmir can successfully create four clones, your hero team just went from five heroes to NINE heroes!  Used correctly, this can have devastating effects.

So how do we use him effectively?

As with so many other things, what you will get here is more opinion than fact or hard rules.  That being said, Elmir is not a good fit for a heavy armor team that can take a good deal of damage.  He will die early on in a fight like that.  So, we'll put him in a dodge/strike team.  This team is based on Critical Hit Chance.  The goal being, "Do as much damage as possible, as fast as we can, and get the hell outta' dodge."  <- Pun intended, you know, because Elmir has uh, dodge. Never mind... There is an upcoming article on the team that I am planning, and I will go into much more detail there.  For now, I will say that Ishmael is a key part of that team.  Ishmael's artifact gives his hero team Critical Hit Chance.  Elmir is adding up to four more members to that team.  I think you can see where this is going.  Nine heroes with Critical Hit Chance can be extremely difficult to defend against.

So now we come to the real question, should I go all out on this event?

Well, maybe.  If you are at a point where your main team is solid, and you've already done a good deal of ground work on your secondary team, this might be a good next step.  The issue you will run into is expense.  A good Elmir team will be VERY resource expensive if you want to really make it strong.  These teams also focus on less common heroes, some of which you can only get from special events.  The types of teams you will be creating with Elmir will likely be a little more exotic.  The team that I will be outlining in the Critical Team article consists of, Elmir+Ishmael+Dorian+Jhu+Ziri.  This is a team that will take quite some time to raise.  Other possible choices for this team could include Sebastian, and Jet.

Verdict?

If you're ready to start a Critical Team, you need Elmir.  Otherwise, don't throw everything you have into the Elmir event.

Satori will be the next hero event, starting 6/23 - 6/26.

Satori is definitely worth investing in.  Once he is sufficiently leveled, he can be absolutely devastating.  I will not go into a huge amount of detail here, if Satori is something everyone is interested in, I will write a separate article on him.  Just message me on Discord.  Satori works well in Mage based teams, and can be a good addition to mixed damage teams as well.  An interesting thing to note is that Satori's abilities are structured in a way that does significant damage to the opposing team when they gain energy.  I have been in battles where Satori has killed two of my heroes in one shot due to this ability.  He is not to be taken lightly.

The next hero event will be Jhu.  This event will run 6/28 - 7/1.

I will also not be going into detail on Jhu.  I do not have this hero yet, so I am still unfamiliar with him.  If you are planning a Critical Team, you really should participate here.  Jhu's artifact also gives your team Critical Hit Chance.  Jhu himself has Critical Hit Chance.  This means that in the team outlined above, specifically, Jhu+Ishmael can be a very big problem for your opponent.  Keep in mind, however, that he will need proper support.  If not, the fight will be over before it even gets started.

It is worth mentioning here that there will also be an event for collecting Runes.  You need these to level up glyphs.  Where Jhu and Ishmael are concerned, you will be needing lots of Runes so you can boost their Critical Hit Chance Glyphs.  To fully take advantage of what the month of June will have on offer and build a Critical Team, you will need to participate heavily in the Elmir+Jhu+Runic Milestone events.  Otherwise, I'd save it for Satori+Runic Milestone.

The Different Types of Damage, How to Defend Against Them, and How Does Armor Work?

This will be a short article.  We have a war to fight in 2 & 1/2 hours!  So, let's get to it.

There are three types of damage in Hero Wars.  They are:

Pure Damage, this will be shown as white in battle, and green in your hero's description page.  We are going to return to pure damage later.

Magic Damage, this type of damage will be marked as purple in your hero's description and in battles.

Physical Damage, this will be shown as red in your hero's description and in battle.

At this point, you may be thinking, "Well thanks Captain Obvious! I already knew that heroes did damage."  I hope you do anyway, if not then you might belong in one of those "other" guilds, like the one who's name rhymes with Everyone's favorite tank.

It is important to know what kind of damage is being dealt for a number of reasons.  In my mind the number one reason this is important, is because I play back battles, both training and real, as slowly as possible.  When I do this, I try to watch for what kind of damage this or that hero is taking.  This allows me to better assess where a particular hero is struggling, i.e is Magic Damage killing him/her, or is it Physical, or is it pure?  You can go back and replay all of those Guild War Battles, and Arena/Grand Arena for a reason you know.

Another less obvious purpose, is to go back and watch battles you have fought with opponents (think Guild Wars) and watch THEIR team to scan for weaknesses.  This can give you clues about what to bring to the next Guild War/Arena Battle.  I look for a weakness, and then I make the enemy suffer for it.

So far so good right?  Let's examine further.

Pure Damage is NOT, I repeat NOT effected by armor OR magic defense. That's right, if you're seeing a lot of white damage pop up, you're in trouble, and it's time to look at increasing your team's health glyphs, main stat glyphs, and attack glyphs.  Pure Damage is only defensible by adding health.

Magic Damage can be defended against by increasing your Magic Defense (I know right?) glyph.  You can also choose to add a hero to your team that can boost the team's Magic Defense with their abilities, or their artifact's activation buff.  Offensively, you can increase the amount of Magic Damage that you do, by increasing both Magic Attack, and Magic Penetration.  For teams that have Magic Defense, you MUST have good Magic Penetration.  If you're having trouble with Celeste in Dark Mode, then you need to increase Magic Penetration.

Physical Damage works exactly the same way.  Having issues with you heroes dying from Physical Damage?  Well my friend, it's time to visit the blacksmith and get some Armor.  No Blacksmith?  No problem.  You can increase Armor using glyphs, or by adding heroes that boost the team's armor.  Astaroth is a prime example of this.  Offensively, you can increase the amount of Armor Penetration that your hero has.  Some are better than others, for example Kiera's winter skin provides Armor Penetration, and Qing Mao's Artifact, and fourth skill provide Armor Penetration.

So how much Magic Defense/Armor do we need?  Glad you asked.  We can figure out an estimate with a formula:

Here are some armor values and how much damage they can reduce:

500 - 14%
1000 - 25%
2000 - 40%
4000 - 57%
8000 - 72%
12000 - 80%

If you'd like to stop here, you can.  Magic Defense works the same way.  You can use these values for Magic Penetration, and Armor Penetration as well.  If you want to have a more complete knowledge of what is going on, then fear not and read on intrepid explorer!

We take our Armor value/Magic Defense value (we'll use 3000 for simplicity.), and divide by 3000. We will always divide by 3000, unless the developers change something.  This number is constant.

So,

3000/3000 = 1

We will now add 1.  We will always add one, it is a constant number in the game.

1 + 1 = 2

Now we will divide 1 by our result (2).

1 / 2 = 0.5

Next we will subtract this number from one.  Again another constant.

1 - 0.5 = 0.5

Next we multiply by 100.

0.5 * 100 = 50.

That number is our Armor/Magic Defense value expressed as a percentage.  This means we will block 50% of the incoming respective damage.  Let's try another.

8000 / 3000 = 2.666

1 + 2.666 = 3.666

1 / 3.666 = 0.272

1 - 0.26 = 0.728

0.278 * 100 = 72.8 (This WILL be rounded down to 72)

and we get 72% which is how much incoming Physical/Magic damage that we are blocking.  

So, if we have 8000 armor, and our enemy does 9000 Physical Damage, we will block 72% of that damage.  Our hero takes 2,520 damage!  This is a HUGE decrease in damage.

Armor Penetration and Magic Penetration work in a similar fashion.  If you have a penetration value of 3000 and your opponent has an armor or magic defense value that is 2000, and additional 1000 damage will get through.  Hopefully, this will give you a new way to analyze your battles, and target areas you would like to improve.

Critical Hit Teams and Critical Hit Chance - AKA WTF JUST HAPPENED!? And How do I keep it from happening again?

Fig. 1-1 Ishmael is a hero with Critical Hit Chance

So what exactly is Critical Hit Chance?  Critical Hit Chance is the probability that a hero with critical hit capability will land a hit that does double the amount of damage he/she normally does.  Simple enough right?

Before we go on, there are only certain heroes that have Critical Hit Chance, and they are:  Daredevil, Ishmael, Artemis, Jhu, Jet, and Fox. (disclaimer, I don't have a lot of these heroes, so there may be others I'm not aware of.)

In figure 1-1, you will see the number 9070 in orange.  That was a critical hit, and it dropped Peppy like a bad habit.  Also, if you look closely, you will see that Ishmael just wiped out a team of 5 by himself!  Let's explore this further, and try to figure out what is going on here.

There is really no simple way to explain this, so we'll jump straight into the deep end.  Critical Hit Chance is exactly what it sounds like.  It is a chance, defined by probability.  Luckily, there is a way to calculate this.

The possibility of landing a Critical Hit is calculated by:  Hero's Critical Hit Chance / (Opponent's Main Stat + Hero's Critical Hit Chance).  We then multiply the resulting number by 100.

Our result is the possibility of a hero landing a Critical Hit; expressed as a percentage.

Let's try it:

So, if we look at Ishmael's stats page, we find that he has a Crit Hit Chance of 653 that's our first number.

Let's look at the opponent:

Peppy's stats page tells us that her Main Stat is Intelligence, and it is at 79.  That's our second number.

Let's plug it in and see what we get.

653 + 79 = 732

653 / 732 = 0.89

0.89 * 100 = 89

So, against Peppy at this level Ishmael has an almost 90% chance of getting in a critical hit.  At 90%, he will get in Critical Hits more than he won't.  Peppy is screwed here.  When Ishmael delivers a Critical Hit, he will do double his physical damage.  His stats page shows that as 4539.  So he will hit Peppy with 9078 damage with a critical hit!  Peppy's health is 2605.  When he hits her, she's dead.

Let's give Ishmael a bigger challenge.

Dorian's main stat is also Intelligence.  We can see that he is at 2085.  Let's use our formula to see what will happen:

653 + 2085 = 2738

653 / 2738 = 0.24

0.24 * 100 = 24

So Ishmael's chances with Dorian have dropped to 24%.  This is still something we should worry about, but not as bad of a situation as Peppy faced.

So now that we have a good idea of what is going on here, we need to figure out a good defense plan. The single biggest factor here, is our hero's main stat.  For Dorian that is intelligence.  Luckily for us there is an easy way to influence the value of this stat.  To do this, we need to head to the forge and upgrade his main stat glyph.

Looking at the glyph screen, we see that Dorian is at level 15 on his intelligence glyph.  This glyph is the last one to unlock, and that does not happen until Violet +2.  If you are coming up against critical damage, you need to be at Violet +2, and you need to level up that main stat glyph. Period.

Other strategies for dealing with Critical Hit teams involve using Agility based teams that can dodge, attacking critical teams with a stronger critical team, adding huge amounts of armor to your heroes, and outright overpowering the opponent.

There is also a devastatingly effective solution.  This is where Helios comes in.  Helios specifically damages critical damage capable heroes.

Every time your opponent scores a critical hit it, Helios will activate his fourth skill.  Flaming retribution does a ridiculous amount of retaliation damage when a Critical Hit is scored.  He is the best way to deal with these types of teams.

This defense will be most effective with a hero like Orion on the team with Helios.  Orion does obscene amounts of damage rapidly on his own.  His artifact adds Magic Penetration; further augmenting the retaliation damage don by Helios.

Hopefully, you now have a few skills in your tool box that will help you deal with Critical Damage teams more effectively.

Next time, we will build a sample Critical Damage team so we can explore using Critical Damage offensively.  

Team building basics, and dynamics.

The question that a lot of our guild members seem to have is, "Why isn't my team very good?"  Well, there are a number of reasons for this.  First we need to see what is going on, by asking a few diagnostic questions.

1. What is your team level, and what is the level of your heroes?
2. Am I losing to teams that are higher in level/overall power to me?
3. Am I losing to teams weaker in level/overall power to me?
4. Am I losing to teams equal in level/overall power to me?
5. I've seen other guild members just destroying higher level opponents, why can't I do that?

The answers to these questions will determine the next direction that you should take, as each requires a slightly different solution.

1. Your team level is going to be important pretty much throughout the game, and is a fair indicator of progress for you and your hero teams.  Team level is definitely not an absolute measurement, but is a strong indicator of your team's strength and capabilities.
2. If you are losing to teams that are higher in level, there's nor a whole lot you can do.  This is going to happen, and you will just have to accept that.  A general rule of thumb I use is, "Don't attack opponents that are more that 5K-7K higher in power level than you.  This will keep you from taking on challenges bigger than you can handle.  There are certain scenarios where you can take on opponents up to 50K stronger than you!  Some of these scenarios are relevant here, but I feel like those are best discussed separately.
3. If you are losing to teams that are weaker than you, this is an indicator of a problem with your team dynamics.  Fear not brave hero, the solution is at hand!
4. If you are losing to equal teams, then you may want to reassess your team's style.  For example, are you going up against a heavily armored opponent with a team that does only magic damage?  Hint: This is the wrong team to use for this, and you should avoid heavy armor if your team has no armor penetration, and does not do very strong damage.
5. If you are at level 80 and are getting absolutely destroyed by level 100-120 opponents, then pick a weaker opponent.  You are a brave and courageous soul, but that won't save you.  If your opponent is only a few levels higher, see our answer to #3 and you'll be taking down teams much stronger than you, and they won't see it coming.

So, the real issue here is number 3, and it stems from poor team dynamics.  If you can find the right team composition, issues 1 - 5 will mostly be resolved.

Firstly, let's try to examine what we mean by team composition.  Simply put, you need to find heroes that compliment each other.  

The ideal team will be composed of powerful individuals that all bring skills the team doesn't have.  Further, these individuals will compliment and augment each other.  To illustrate this concept, I will use team that I am building. 

So, the first thing we need to decide upon is a hero that we like, and a team specialization.  The idea with this team is to deal as much damage possible as fast as possible.

I really like K'arkh, he does loads of damage, and I got him during an event, so I was able to get a lot of soul stones for him.

So let's take a look at K'arkh, and see what he can do.  He has three abilities that are interest at first glance: 

The first is Negator of Laws.  This allows K'arkh, to block attacks.  For each attack blocked, he gains energy.  This means that he can attack repeatedly very quickly.

The next ability is Deadly Tendrils.  This ability allows K'arkh to deal damage to every enemy in the air.  This ability also deals double damage to enemies less than his current level.  Looking at K’arkh above, we see he's at level 89.  Every enemy he attacks that is at 88 or less will be hit with double damage. This squid is looking like a great choice so far.

The final ability of interest to us is his fourth skill survival factor.  When an enemy is thrown into the air and attacked, a percentage of his health will be recovered.  

Well looking at his main attack, we know that he is going to be healing himself if we promote him to violet.

So, considering the information we have found about his skills, getting heroes into the air is very important.

If we take a look at other heroes, we will find that Faceless can help with this.  

His second ability "Power Throw" will toss an enemy up into the air.  When this happens, K'arkh's third and fourth abilities get triggered.  This is great news for us, bad news for our opponent.  K’arkh and Faceless are going to seriously bust some heads.

I we look at his fourth ability, we find that Faceless actively provides magic defense for the ENTIRE team!  This is great, because we can now worry less about mage based teams.

Finally, Faceless copies the last used ultimate of ANY hero in the battle, friend or foe.  This can boost your healing or damage dealing capabilities depending on when this ability is used.

Now that we have our DPS foundation laid, it's time to decide who we need to add next.  Unless you are ridiculously powerful, you're going to want a healer, plain and simple.  We need to choose carefully here.

Since we want to do as much damage as we can, Celeste is an obvious choice here, but she is a better fit different team that I have, so we won't use her.  This really only leaves two viable options.  Martha, and Maya.  I do not have Martha, and unless you plan on buying here when she comes through, you won't either.  This means we're going to have to use Maya.



There are a number of things that Maya provides for the team.  She can heal them, and she has some crowd control with her third ability Poisonous Bonds, and she can restrain enemies and damage them at the same time with her fourth ability.

Perhaps the most important skill Maya provides is her ability to attack the furthest hero in the enemy team.  This is usually the healer, and we want the healer gone.

Also, Maya can heal AND do damage at the same time.  Celeste can only do one or the other at a time, and that is why we want Maya instead.  Also, with the other healing abilities that Faceless and K’arkh provide, we can depend on Maya even though she doesn't heal as efficiently as Martha or Celeste.

That's three down, we have two to go.  There are a couple of choices here.  We can add more support, we can add more damage, or we can put in a tank.

This team absolutely need to have a tank to help absorb damage.  K’arkh is kind of weak in armor, and Faceless is weak in health.  Our tank will help mitigate this.

For this team, I chose Astaroth.



Astaroth can protect the team with his first skill by creating a shield that protects from physical damage.  He has some healing ability, for those who weren't keeping track, we now have four out of five of our heroes healing on this team!  A whopping 80% of our team is now healing, this is going to make them really hard to kill.

He also has some offensive capability with his second skill and specifically reduces the energy of the farthest enemy which is usually the team's healer.  Now we have two heroes attacking the furthest enemy.  Things aren't looking too good for Martha...

Astaroth's fourth skill Last Word, is why we really need him.  Last Word can bring back a fallen ally. This ability alone can alter the outcome of a battle.

For our last hero, we are going to go with another support/control hero.  Jorgen is going to be our creepy ass manimal on this one.



Jorgen has some very interesting abilities.  He primary skill, Torment of Powerlessness, deals a crap load of damage.  We're a damage dealing team, so this is a good skill to have.  It also prevents effected enemies from gaining energy for 9 seconds.  This helps a lot if K’arkh attacks in this 9 seconds, since damage helps a hero gain energy, and we want them to fire their ultimates as little as possible.

Jorgen's second ability will shield an ally with a magic shield.  This shield increases their energy at a doubled rate until it is destroyed.  If he shields K’arkh, K'arkh can attack even faster!

Jorgen's third ability Leper, makes the furthest enemy the target of a curse.  When any enemy heroes take physical damage, the curse redirects the damage to the furthest enemy.  This is phenomenal, because K’arkh damages three enemies at a time!

This is now a third hero who is attacking that back line healer!  Everybody say, "Bye Martha!"

Jorgen's fourth ability allows him to steal energy from the enemy with every attack.  So we have two heroes that are now recycling their ultimate rapidly.

So now we know what everybody is doing on the team, are there any other ways they can benefit each other?

Let's examine their artifacts.

I will not be going into artifacts in depth here, that is an entirely different post.  For this discussion, I will assume you have your team's artifact weapon at three stars minimum.  This ensures 100% artifact activation.

When Astaroth fires his primary ability, he gives the team Armor.
When K’arkh fires his primary ability, he increases the team's Physical Attack.
When Faceless fires his primary ability, he increases the team's Magic Penetration.  Think of this as the equivalent of armor penetration; only for magic.
When Maya fires her primary ability, she gives the team Magic Defense.
Finally, when Jorgen fires his primary ability, he gives the team increased Magic Attack.

As you can see, we have all of our bases covered.  Armor, Physical Attack, Magic Penetration, Magic Defense, and Magic attack.  We don't have armor penetration, but it is easy to add with K'arkh's Stellar Skin.

This team is a potent combination, and can be absolutely devastating if they are well leveled.



Other heroes that can work well with this team are Nebula, and Dorian.

In summary, we have created a team that over laps and covers almost every offensive and defensive situation thrown at it.  When building your teams, you need to pay special attention to what a hero's skills do, as well as their artifacts.  You want to overlap whenever possible, but you can also create teams that augment in one direction like Physical attack, but it might compromise elements of your team such as Magic Attack, and Healing.

Remember, this is just an example.  You should create and experiment on your own.  Trial and error will be your friend.  Everyone in the guild is willing to give critiques, and suggestions on how to improve your team.

Here are a few ideas:

• Dorian+Helios+Orion
• Cleaver+Peppy
• Maya+Martha
• Jorgen+Lars+Krista
• Ishmael+Elmir+Jhu
• Jet+Sebastian
• Jet+Jhu
• Kiera+Qing Mao
• Daredevil+Fox - (I added this for completeness, but DO NOT recommend trying to build a team around those two, unless you have a good amount of experience.)

Leave your team ideas in the comments, and as always, I am available to help on Discord most days.

Good Luck Team Raze!

Inaugural Post

Welcome to Team Raze Warfighter 101!  If you have questions, or would like to up your game, this is the place for you.  I will cover topics like, team building and dynamics, specific types of teams (Physical, Magical, Hybrid, Critical Damage, etc.), strategies for winning battles, strategies for increasing your rank and rewards in the Grand Arena and Arena.  Heroes that are worth the effort, as well as heroes who are better left until much later after your team is established.

It is my sincere hope that you find this useful, and can come away from the information here with a better hero team.