Guide to Strategy and High Level Priorities
What should my goals be early on? When should I do variants?
Don’t worry about variants early on! Some variants are much harder than free plays! Even if a variant says “easy” it might still be too hard for you to do.
If you want to do variants because you find it fun, go ahead! But in general, your goals should be to get further in each campaign, get more favor (in free plays), get more champions, and unlock your patrons before you worry about variants.
It makes sense to do variants when you need to do them. For instance, to unlock Azaka, you need to do 30 Tomb of Annihilation variants. Also, you need to do variants to unlock patron versions of those variants, which are needed to get patron favor, which is needed to buy time gate pieces and modron chests from patrons.
Which adventures should I use for pushing?
In general, you want an adventure that doesn’t have many hit-based or armored enemies because those can be very difficult when you’re at your wall, which might result in an earlier wall. Ranged can sometimes make things more difficult, but it usually isn’t a huge deal. This usually means that free plays early in a campaign are better than later ones.
Here’s a possible set of adventures to use in each campaign:
- Sword Coast: Beast Intentions (if you use Minsc) or Cursed Farmer
- Tomb: Ring of Regeneration
- Waterdeep: A Mysterious Summons
- Avernus: A Tale of Two Cities
- Icewind Dale: It’s all bad. But thankfully, you don’t need much favor here! Giant’s Bane Tavern, Moose Tracks, and Civilization each have 1 armored boss. Giant’s Bane has a million hit-based levels too, and the others only have a couple. Everlasting Rime has 10 hit based levels but no armored levels.
I want to spend money on the game. How should I?
TLDR:
- DO buy familiars and golden epics for champions you care about.
- DON’T buy stuff for evergreens, potions, modron chests, or time gate pieces.
You can get some familiars from gems and patrons, but you’ll probably want more familiars than that, so it’s good to buy a few familiars with money.
Golden epics can usually only be attained by spending money, so they’re a reasonable thing to spend money on. That said, you probably won’t use most of the champions you get very much, so you should be selective about which golden epics you buy. E.g., a golden epic for Briv’s slot 4 item is possibly the best item you can get! A golden epic for Avren is great! A golden epic for Bruenor or Krydle is probably a waste. A lot of golden epics can only be gotten from wild offers (or from buying weekend chests when they were first released), so pay attention to your wild offers.
You can get champions for free from time gates, so in general, most players won’t recommend spending money on champions. But if you want to spend money on a champion to accelerate your progress, go ahead!
- Don’t buy chests for any evergreen champions (except maybe a golden epic for Asharra)
- Don’t buy something just for potions, modron chests, or time gate pieces
There’s a daily deal each day that lets you buy chests for a specific champion (including a golden epic and guaranteed shiny) cheaper than usual.
What are patrons?
When you meet a patron’s requirements, you can unlock them. Mirt is the first patron you’ll get. You need to open a bunch of chests until your champions have a total of 2000 item levels, and you need 20 champions unlocked. Then you need to give him some time gate pieces and silver chests.
When you have a patron unlocked, you can run free plays and variants with them selected as your patron. They will add restrictions (e.g., Mirt doesn’t let you use neutral champions, so no Asharra DPS), and the variants need to be completed at a higher level in order to get a reward. You need to complete the variant with no patron before you can attempt that variant with a patron.
When you complete a free play with a patron, you get patron currency.
When you complete a variant with a patron, you get patron influence. Patron influence lets you unlock perks (similar to blessings), but it doesn’t give you a gold find bonus (so it’s not the same as favor). Spending your patron influence on perks doesn’t have any penalty. You can refund your patron influence at will for no cost.
What should I buy from patrons?
You can earn a maximum of 11000 patron currency each week: 5000 from free plays, and 6000 from patron challenges (including the bonus from having a Mirt perk maxed out).
You want to buy a time gate piece (2500) every week, at least while you still need more champions (and likely longer than that since you’ll want to get everyone purple and then get item levels).
You want to buy a modron chest (5000) every week, at least until your three modron cores are maxed out.
That means you’ll accumulate some extra patron currency each week. You can use the extra to buy patron chests, unlock the skins (which also unlock champions), familiars, feats, etc.
Which patron variants should I do?
Don’t worry about the early variants. They don’t give much patron influence. Figure out which patron variants give you the influence you need (e.g., so you can purchase modron chests) and then do those. That way, you can get everything you need from a patron while only doing a few variants.
- This spreadsheet lists a few patron variants that are easier to do than some other ones.
Personally, I did a few easy variants to unlock time gate pieces because I couldn’t do any of the harder ones yet. Then, I did Demons Here, Demons There to unlock Modron Chests. That’s not necessarily the best strategy — it’s just what I did because I was already at the end of Sword Coast, so I had that variant accessible to me.
I hope you found this helpful!
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