Guide to Items, Equipment and Consumables
How does equipment work? What are item levels? If I get item levels or a shiny and then upgrade my gear, will it carry over?
When you open a chest, you get equipment. Equipment lasts forever, not just for one adventure.
Equipment has four rarities: white (common), green (uncommon), blue (rare), and purple (epic). You can get up to blues using silver chests and electrum chests. You can only get purples from gold chests.
Equipment has three gilds: normal, shiny, and golden. Every chest you open has a 1/1000 chance of having a shiny item in it (or maybe every item you get from a chest has a 1/1000 chance?). That means you’ll get more shinies from silvers than golds. You can only get golden epics for a champion by paying real money for them. If a golden epic replaces a shiny, you’ll get a shiny potion to replace the “wasted” shiny.
Equipment also has item levels. You get item levels by getting a duplicate copy of a piece of equipment or by using blacksmithing contracts on a champion.
All three of those things are independent from each other, which basically means that whenever your equipment gets better, it’s good for you and you don’t need to worry about it. In other words, if you get a common axe for Bruenor, and then you get another common axe for Bruenor (bringing up the item level to 2), then when you get an uncommon axe, it will still have an item level 2. If you then get a common shiny axe for Bruenor, your uncommon axe will become shiny.
Even though the user interface makes it look like the different rarities are different items, they’re actually the same item. If you have a common axe and then get an uncommon axe, it has the same effect as if you only got the uncommon axe and never got the common axe.
Every champion has 6 equipment slots. You can’t choose which equipment slot your upgrades go to.
Should I buy silver or gold chests?
The generally-accepted wisdom is: at the very start of your game, buy silver chests until your core champions mostly have common and uncommon equipment. Then, buy gold chests forever.
Silver chests give slightly more blacksmithing contract levels and slightly more potions (I do mean slightly — it’s only like a 1% difference or something like that).
Gold chests give almost the same amount of blacksmithing contracts and potions. Plus they give higher rarity potions (you can use multiple potions of different rarities at the same time to stack the effect). Plus they give bounty contracts, which is the only way to get more event free plays. Plus they give purple items. Plus they give champion feats.
When you’re very late game, you might switch back to silvers to get full shinies on your evergreen champions. Or, when you’re very late game, you might switch back to silvers because you don’t need bounty contracts, purple items, or feats, so the slight improvement in blacksmithing contracts and potions is better.
- If you want to dig in more, you can see the probabilities of each item type for each chest at.
I heard I should open chests in a specific order
For generic silver and gold chests, open silvers first. Then, when you have mostly greens on your evergreen champions, start buying golds, and open whatever generic chests you have.
For the weekend newsletter chests, you can only get items for champions that you own, so make sure that you own all of the event champions (otherwise, the chest might go to an evergreen, which would be a waste).
For champion specific chests:
- Unlock the champion.
- Open electrum chests until that champion is full green (and wait to open these electrums until your evergreens are full green). After a few weeks of playing, you should have enough electrum chests to do this for every new champion you get.
- Open all of your silver chests for that champion.
- Open all of your gold chests for that champion.
If you don’t want to worry about that, then that’s totally okay — this is a micro-optimization. The reason to open electrums before silvers is so that your silvers will all give item levels to the new champion (but that’s a micro-micro-optimization — opening silvers before electrums is basically just as good).
The reason to open electrums and silvers before golds is because gold chests have one guaranteed blue and one guaranteed upgrade (up to blue). That means, if you have a blue on slot 1 and no equipment on any other slot for a champion, a gold chest might give you a blue on slot 1 and a green on slot 2. Then, the next chest might give you a blue on slot 1 and a green on slot 3. Then, the next chest might give you a blue on slot 1 and a green an slot 4. You would need to be extremely unlucky for this to happen, but if you got yourself to full green before opening any gold chests, then those three gold chests would guarantee to give you three new blues.
Where should I use blacksmithing contracts?
Use them on Briv (if you script) or Hew (if you don’t script). There might be a time when you want to give some item levels to Sentry too. You probably won’t need to give Melf any blacksmithing contracts.
If you script, most people recommend to get to 100% single skip Briv before investing in Hew, then getting Hew to 3x or 4x (with the feat and 4 adjacencies), then getting Briv to 100% 4x, then maxing out Hew (though I don’t think anyone has done the math on this, so there might be slightly better breakpoints where it makes sense to invest in one champion or the other). Then, you shouldn’t put more blacksmithing contracts into Briv until you can go directly to around 30% 6x. If you intend to Jimothy, you’ll need 100% 6x.
If you want to Jimothy, then after getting 100% single skip Briv, you can get Hew up to 7 progress per kill (so that, with Havilar, you can complete zones with 2 kills).
If you need power, you may want to give Avren some blacksmithing contracts too. The way his mirror image works means that you effectively get the benefit of his power increase multiple times.
When should I use bounty contracts?
The only way to get more event tokens to do more free plays (aside from waiting around and one Blessing) is to open bounty contracts. You get bounty contracts from gold chests. When you use a bounty contract, you’ll get tokens. You may want to save up your bounty contracts until you’re doing an event for a “good” champion. It’s totally fine to spend them during any event, though!
You absolutely should NOT use bounty contracts in off-event periods, though, because then the tokens will go to waste.
I hope the above information was helpful. Happy gaming!
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