Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms - Champions, Time Gates and Events

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms 2

Guide to Champions, Time Gates and Events

How Do I Get Champions? What Are Time Gates?

In Idle Champions, a lot of your power is dependent on which champions you have.

Most champions, you get via time-limited events. After an event is over, you can open a time gate (or wait until next year when the event comes back). Every event has a new champion, and every event retires the oldest champion, at which point that champion will only be gettable via time gates. You can see the (unofficial but accurate) event calendar here.

There are also a couple champions available in patron stores.

Every weekend when there isn’t an event, there’s a free time gate. Free time gates don’t take any time gate pieces. They let you choose one of three champions to get.

“Paid” time gates cost 6 time gate pieces, and they let you choose ANY champion. You get one time gate piece every 5ish days, and you can purchase one time gate piece from each patron you have unlocked every week. So, early game, it’ll take a long time to get a paid time gate, but after a couple months, you’ll probably get a time gate at least every other week.

It’s okay to end a time gate early. You generally want to do the three adventures to get 3 gold chests (if you don’t, you’ll be refunded one time gate piece, so it’s up to you whether you value the extra time gate piece more than gold chests). You can do the free play as many times as you want. For every unique 100 levels you push, you’ll get one silver chest for the champion. That’s nice to have, but it’s not super important (you can use electrum chests to get full greens on your champion easily, so extra silver chests will just give you a few more item levels), so don’t kill yourself to get one extra silver — that time would probably be better spent on other things.

Note that “unique 100 levels” means that if you do a free play up to level 500 seven times, you get a total of 5 silver chests, NOT 35 silver chests.

What Are Evergreen and Core Champions?

Core champions are the 12 that you start with.

Evergreen champions are the 12 core champions plus other ones that aren’t time limited. You get them by playing the main campaigns, not by doing events or time gates. You can also get Hitch by signing up for the newsletter. Hitch is great, so everyone should get him!

The evergreen champions, in the order you’ll likely unlock them, are:

Nerds (slot 1)
Hitch (slot 8). Unlock by signing up for the newsletter. Great buffer for Asharra, and Asharra is the best DPS champion.
Drizzt (slot 9). Unlock in Sword Coast. Minor gold find buff but pretty bad in general.
Azaka (slot 12). Unlock in Tomb of Annihilation (you probably want ~e16 favor). Game-defining gold-find champion.
Dragonbait (slot 11). Unlock in Tomb of Annihilation (you probably want ~e20 favor). An okay tank.
Ulkoria (slot 10). Unlock in Waterdeep (make sure you have 9-10 champions that work). Can reduce the attack cooldown on magic champions, which is powerful in some cases.
Reya (slot 6). Unlock in Avernus (difficult).
Xenophon (slot 7). Unlock in IWD (very difficult)

Evergreen champions get their items from generic silver and gold chests (vs silver and gold chests that have a champion’s name on them).

Generic silver and gold chests are much much much easier to get and more plentiful than champion specific chests, so your evergreen champions will have much higher item levels than your event champions. Even with that, good event champions are much more powerful than many of your evergreens.

What’s a Slot?

Every champion is in one of 12 slots. If you want to use a slot 1 champion, you’ll need to click the little arrows on Bruenor’s picture to swap Bruenor out and the other slot 1 champion in.

If you want to use a slot 2 champion, you’ll need to click the little arrows on Celeste’s picture to swap Celeste out and the other slot 2 champion in. Etc.

What Should I Do During Events?

Your goals during an event are:

Unlock the three champions.
Push whichever one of the three free plays is easiest to get favor to make the variants easier.
Complete the three variants for all three champions.
Do the free plays for all three champions until they cost 2500 tokens (free plays start at 500 tokens per run and increase by 500 until they max out at 2500).
Use up your remaining tokens by doing free plays up to level 50 on the champion you care about most.

Every time you get to level 50, you’ll get one chest for that champion. It has a 1/3 chance to be gold and a 2/3 chance to be silver. You’re guaranteed to get a gold chest if you get 3 silver chests in a row.

Each gold chest gives bounty contracts worth an average of 169 tokens, and it takes around 200k event tokens to get full epic on a new champion (though if you had the worst possible luck with 4 free plays per gold and 10 golds per epic, it could take almost 600k tokens), and each gold chest costs 500 gems, so you need almost 600k gems to full epic an event champion.

If you’re still new and have a limited champion pool, pay careful attention to the restrictions on the variants. Some of them are very difficult and you won’t be able to complete them until you have more champions, more favor, or Modron Core.

If you aren’t sure if you can complete an event variant with restricted champions, you can try doing a free play and manually applying the restrictions yourself (e.g., if the variant only allows champions with 13+ int, then try doing a free play but only using champions with 13+ int and see if you can complete it!).

Doing anything during an event will require event tokens. You get tokens for free over time (144 per hour), but the amount of tokens you have during an event will be limited, so you can’t just do the free play forever to get a million chests. The only other way to get more event tokens is by using bounty contracts or by having the “Start Strong” Torm blessing before the start of the event.

Can I Save any Event Tokens When Doing Free Plays?

Yes! The cost of a free play only goes up when you complete a free play rather than when you start a free play. So, if you have completed Split the Party and Split the Party 2 and have 3 total parties, you can start three free plays for the same champion for 500 tokens each. Then complete one (not all three) and start a new one, etc.

Can I Get Even More Favor From Events and Time Gates?

The formulae for event and time gate favor conversion is:

Events: favor bonus = 10% × log10(event favor)
Time Gates: favor bonus = 2.5% × log10(Mystra’s favor)

In other words, if you get e20 favor in an event, you’ll get a 200% bonus to your main campaign favor. If you get e20 favor in a time gate, you get a 50% bonus to your main campaign favor.

Sword Coast (Torm) is the campaign you’ll use for gem farming, so you’ll almost always be converting your favor to Torm.

When you’re in the early and mid game, that’s all you should worry about. When you’re late game, you can get more favor, but you shouldn’t worry about that until you’ve maximized your main campaign favor in other ways. E.g., you’ve already gotten good champions and pushed as far as you can, either using click/debuff or Jimothy, and you have good gold find champions as well, so favor conversions are the only way that your favor goes up. The way to get more favor is double (or triple) conversion.

To triple convert, you need to have 3 parties total (2 background parties), and to double convert you need 2 parties total (1 background party). Right before the event ends, you push as far as you can in your two background parties. The foreground party doesn’t matter. Then, after the event ends, go on your foreground party and start a new adventure to trigger the pop up that asks you to convert your favor. After converting your favor, switch to your first background party. This background party has gold in the event, so when you complete the adventure, you’ll get favor again. Then, you can convert that favor. Then, do the same thing for your second background party to get a third conversion.

It’s theoretically possible to quadruple convert, but that requires waiting for one week for a forced conversion, which means you can’t do anything with any of your three parties for a whole week, which is a big waste.

This same principle can let you carry over favor from one time gate to a second time gate so that you don’t have to start with 0 favor (though you can’t triple convert time gates). But if you had enough time gate pieces to spam time gates, you probably also have enough gold find on your modron core that you don’t care about starting your time gates with low favor, so carrying over your time gate favor isn’t that useful. As of 2021-07-18, this still works, despite what some folks have been saying. To do this:

Farm favor (as normal — you probably already did this when you were getting your gold chests)
Push party 1 until you would earn as much favor as you want to carry over (it doesn’t literally have to be party 1 — that’s just an example). Do not end the adventure.
Switch to party 2
Close the time gate
Switch back to party 1
End the adventure to get favor. You will notice you now have Mystra’s Favor.
Open your next time gate

Which Champion Should I Get?

Your goals when getting champions are:

Unlock Modron Core. This means you need two champions per slot. You will likely get Hitch, Drizzt, Azaka, and Dragonbait before you unlock Modron Core. Some people who push really hard also unlock Ulkoria, but it’s common to unlock Modron Core before Ulkoria. You won’t get Reya in time for your core.
Get speed champions. Speed champions make your game go faster, which lets you push to your wall faster. They also make gem farming go faster, which helps you get both faster and stronger. Your speed champions are:
- Briv (slot 5). Briv lets you skip levels. If you script, he’s the best speed champion by far. If you don’t script, he’s okay — skipping hard bosses is still great. He’s also an amazing tank (though you can get by without having a great tank), and he works for Asharra’s second bond (along with Avren and Omin), though Calliope works for that too. You *definitely* want Briv if you script. If you don’t script, I would recommend waiting on Briv.
- Hew Maan (slot 8). Hew makes your kills count for more. If you don’t script, Hew is the best speed champion. If you do script, Hew is the second best speed champion. He’s also great for tough multi-hit bosses.
- Shandie (slot 6). She makes the game go faster.
- Deekin (slot 1). He makes monsters spawn faster.
- Sentry (slot 4). She lets you complete levels without having to kill as many monsters (like Hew but less good)
- Havilar (slot 10). She makes fiends count for double. She needs to have a specific imp summoned for this to happen, though. If you’re not scripting, a familiar on her ultimate will just cycle through her 3 imps. The only non-scripting way to make the correct imp reappear after a Modron reset is to keep the “Level Up” button on x25 or x100. Overall, like a worse Hew.
- Melf (slot 12). He randomly chooses between 3 different speed effects. One of his effects is like a worse Hew. One of his effects is like a worse Deekin. One of his effects is like a better Minsc.
Get power champions. These will let you push further and do more challenging variants.
- Avren (slot 11) is the best support. His first spec should be whatever alignment your DPS is (neutral for Ash or good for Zorbu). His second spec should always be Sturdy Mirrors.
- Baeloth (slot 4) is almost as good as Avren, but he takes a lot more effort. When a champion dies (once per minute), Baeloth will summon a djinn, which buffs the whole party. So, take 10 minutes to kill off every champion in your party one by one, and then Baeloth is almost as good as Avren. However, Baeloth’s djinn disappears if the game crashes or otherwise closes, if your party dies, or if you switch to a background party, so he’s incredibly annoying to use. Baeloth is also available on all patrons.
- Zorbu (slot 12) used to be the best DPS. He’s still a very good DPS, though, and you can use him on some patrons that don’t allow Asharra.
- Orkira (slot 1) is a great debuffer and healer. She needs a lot of other specific champions to be an amazing support (see the Click Debuff section), but she’s still good out of the box.
- Omin (slot 3) is an okay gold find champion and an okay support. He’s mainly good because Asharra is the best DPS, and the best second bond for Ash is Avren + Briv + Omin.
Get your Modron Speed Core, which requires 3 champions per slot
Get gold find champions. You swap these in at the end on an Azaka farm (or with a Makos ultimate).