Hello!
I've been playing Guild of Guardians for a while now and have learned a few tricks to get further into the campaign and climb the leaderboards. For a largely idle/auto battler, there's a decent amount of strategy and tactical thinking at play (along with RNG, which warrants paying attention to, but more on that later). Surprisingly, getting past a level I've been stuck on for a while and climbing higher gives a much larger sense of accomplishment for breaking through those walls than I thought - something I've only felt in a handful of games
The biggest factor in progression and getting better was drastically changing my strategy, and it was a lot more impactful/less costly than I expected. With that said, let's dive into what I've learned:
1. Only Level and Craft Gear for Five Guardians
This was a pretty big shift for me - going from trying to field 10 guardians to only 5. The PvE modes (Endless & Campaign) allow for bringing in 10 guardians into a run, so why wouldn't I want to equip them all? I tried having my "A Team" and "B Team", with a focus on filling out the A Team's equipment and power first, then moving gear down to the B Team. This was a bit of a waste unfortunately - I was hitting a pretty big wall with the difficulty spike in the Deadlands. Fortunately, there was an easy way to fix this, a hard reset.
When resetting a guardian, all experience and gold used to level them up is refunded back and immediately available for use. This does not reset the ascension or enlightenment though, this is strictly to go back to level one. With reseting 5 guardians from around level 90, I was able to further power level my A Team of 5 guardians from around 95 to level 120 which was a huge boost. Same thing for the gear, by salvaging the gear from B Team, the gold was freed up to further strengthen A Team's weapons and armor. The result? A Team became an absolute wrecking crew in PvE content, surging into the (now) final chapter of the campaign and placing 3rd on a Diamond level endless board.
Now, what happened to the B Team? They still get brought in as fodder / distractions. Combining with the rune where a guardian deals 10-15% of the enemy HP as true damage on death turns these low level unprotected units into traps that can change the course of a battle.
2. Focus on Synergy
Heavily related to the concept of focusing on a single team, is making sure that team has a good "Domain Synergy" composition to unlock buffs.
Running a 4 Hydris/ 1 Solas team yields a total of +20% ATK and +25% HP buff in PvE and PvP content (hence why this is a common meta in the arena currently).
But the idea of synergy goes beyond this - there's also inter-guardian ultimate synergy.
Sounds buzz-wordy, but hear me out. Grisell is an excellent support guardian for building out a powerful combo - on her own, her ultimate does nothing, but when paired with another guardian, it refills the guardian with the highest power's energy for their ultimate. I've opted to combine her with Elohatt - another support guardian with an ultimate that deals 210% of his attack as magic damage, which is also increased by 2% for every 1% of HP an enemy is missing, to all enemies.
The result is a 3 ultimate combo - Elohatt hits once (for huge damage thanks to the buffs + focus on upgrading), Grisell refills his energy, Elohatt hits again even harder thanks to the missing HP caused by his first ultimate.
3. Pay Attention / Don't Use Auto
Of course the above ultimate combos only work if you're paying attention and not having the auto trigger of abilities. The auto system won't trigger ultimates in the optimal order nor will it not use an ultimate right at the end of the battle where it's not needed. But that's not the biggest reason to pay attention - the ability to pause and restart the battle is.
Restarting the battle also resets everything to the state it was at the start of battle - meaning any guardians that died thus far, will be resurrected for free.
It doesn't matter if one or four are down, as long as there's at least one guardian alive the battle can be restarted. This also causes re-rolls of critical hits, buffs/debuffs, etc - a completely different outcome can be made (along with the ability to re-position or swap out guardians). It may take 5-10 tries, but a close loss can usually be re-rolled into a win with this.
This might be considered cheating, but it's only applicable in a PvE mode and with absolute masochistic rulesets like the below, it can even odds:
There's a few other tricks I've found, but will save that for a later post and for discussion in our Discord. With the upcoming changes and expansions to guilds, if you're looking for one consider joining CVIL and the C-Ville Discord.
Thanks for reading!