Playing strategically
I write a lot of guides on this forum that look deeper into parts of the game and offer lots of useful information or tips. Killerdog’s guides is my main thread with links to all that I’ve written. Go have fun playing the game but if you want to learn more than follow that link and find out more about whatever else interests you. The rest of this post will give you a little bit of food for thought about using your gems and team building and general tips.
In-game help
In the news section on the online screen it will have information about all the current content. However, go near the back and you’ll see a page titled “Useful tips for rookie players”
I highly recommend you read through these carefully, coming back to it a couple of times more to make sure you remember it all. A particularly useful thing is checking monster skills during a battle by clicking their icon on the time bar. This helps you learn their movesets and plan ahead with what they are likely to do in the battle. Additionally, be sure to click on all the “i” buttons on pages that have them. There are many small details to aspects of this game or the events that can be overlooked but are explained here.
Monster analysis is a very extensive source of useful information about monsters that you will find in the monsterdex. If you ever want to learn more about how a monster works or how best to utilise it then you should read its analysis there.
Increasing hero rank
In an earlier post I wrote about working on improving your hero rank by getting to chapter 4 then using the shadow temple final mission to level up. It gets very boring playing this mission over and over but it is the most efficient. Another good mission to play for levelling once you’ve got 60+ max tickets is the pyramid ingredient mission. This is a very fast mission to complete and gives you roughly half the exp for the tickets compared to the chapter 4 mission. This may seem unappealing but I have personally found it a very easy way to dump my tickets somewhere quickly and gain a benefit (exp and pyramids, maybe even a Cryptamid - a rare ingredient for legendaries).
Here are all the best options:
Chapter 4, shadow area, final battle = 271 exp/ticket
Trainer’s dojo, last stand, first battle = infinite (just time)
Pyramid mission = 133 exp/ticket
Elemental dungeon = 120 exp/ticket
Mouth missions = 140 exp/ticket
Chapter 7, lost area, final battle = 245 exp/ticket
Monster archetypes
Poison, sleep and stun are the three core archetypes in the game. You will see them on many of the monsters from the islands and, going forward, the stun monsters are the most reliable for helping your teams work effectively. For example, you can have a couple of monsters built to kill the enemies then use a couple of stun burst/bomb monsters to stun the enemies before you kill one and keep killing the new one that enters while the other enemies cannot do anything. As you collect more monsters you will have access to many more possibilities as well as extra archetypes like link, raw, detox and stealth / sneak attack. Be sure to think carefully about each one and what it might be able to offer your team. Building your team around a particular one (e.g. poison) can work well because the monsters support each other or, like described above, you can utilise stun to control the enemy team and kill monsters with bloodthirst rather than using timestrike on the stunned monsters. There are certain combinations which don’t work, like poison and sleep at the same point in the team. Be wary about putting any monster with poison revenge nearby monsters that want to put the enemies asleep.
Team building
It can be hard to build a team with proper synergy until you have a large collection of monsters. What I would recommend is creating a team that has two sections, the first half focusing on one archetype and the second on another. Where you have monsters that you want to keep alive place a protector or two. If you find a particular section is too weak to stun then put a stun absorber like Leoronix or Bitterbeast at that point. Stun absorbers should typically be placed every 6-8 monsters in your team, if you want it to be reliable. Ultimately what you should do as you gain some more monsters is revolve your team around the strongest mythics, legendaries and super epics you get. Many legendaries have blood moves which can be charged and become one-shots on any enemy.
Using gems
If you’re going to be spending money on gems then what is probably best is thinking in the long-term. I recommend you go read one of my guides about eggs and using gems. However, if you’re a free player then I believe your focus should be on getting as many legendaries as possible to begin with. What this means is you only want to roll when there is an egg with 1.5x chance on legendaries (6.1%) and with featured monsters that are not too restricted in their use. Once you hatch a featured legendary it’s often a good time to stop so you don’t hatch the same one again. These “festival eggs” with boosted chance typically come every few weeks, especially on seasonal celebratory times that are often seen in universal games like Christmas, New Year, Easter, etc. You should only hatch eggs in 10-packs, no matter how tempting it might be to spend your gems before, because you get a rare gem as a bonus for doing so. 5 rare gems can be used to get a guaranteed super epic, legendary or mythic and all the super epics in the rare egg pool are ones with unique, typically stronger movesets.
Further down the line (once you’ve got a small collection of legendaries) you can start rolling in eggs where you like the featured monsters but I would again recommend you stop rolling once you’ve hatched one of the featured. There will always be opportunities in the future to hatch the ones you’re missing when they’re featured with other monsters you do not have.
Knowing which monsters are good
There is a thread on this forum which rates all the monsters in the game for both the general content and for PvP. It’s known as the Neo Monsters tier list and while I’ve been put in charge of keeping it up to date it’s a community project and many give input to rate the new monsters coming in. If you want to know how good a monster is then it’s probably the best place to go look. I’ve been trying my best to write all updates in full (even more so than Buckingham did) so it creates an archive of information about particular monsters as time has gone on. You can use the search in topic function for a monster to read all the references to it there and why it’s been positioned where it has.