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Star Wars [Galaxy of Heroes]. Why Yes, Kylo, You Can Be on Vader's Team.
belligerent
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A long time ago on a Samsung Galaxy far, far away.
[/center]I'm not normally into mobile F2P games, but this game has just enough hooks to get me to play. I've only spent 10 bucks on the 100 crystals a day thing but I think I might have a problem...
So here's how this works: There are several modes but the basis is that there this is a 5v5 team based game. You unlock Star Wars themed characters from all 7 movies to fight on your team. Each dude or dudette has 2-4 abilities, with the more generic people having fewer abilities vs the big names. There are achievements, and daily quests and this is definitely free to play. The basic components are:
Energy: Your cap is based on level, which just got raised to 70. I want to say it takes about 8 hours to fill up your bar, but I honestly don't know. This energy is spent on the Light side and dark side battles. Early battles take 6 energy. and if you win with 3 stars, you can "sim" the battle over and over as long as you have the energy. At battle level 5 it goes up to 8 energy.
If you clear a whole level, you can do "hard mode" battles, which cost about twice the easy level energy and generally award better loot and character shards. you can do a specific hard battle 3 times a day for free.
Catina Energy: a separate mode unlocked early, this mode also does not have a sim limit, offers character shards on some fights, and rewards ability modules.
Credits: you use this to upgrade and train characters.
Crystals: This is the freemium currency. You can spend real money on this, i think 10 bucks gives you 1200 crystals. You can spend crystals to refill your energy, purchase credits, Chromium cards, refresh shipments, and purchase character shards.
Various mode currencies: Catina battles, Galactic war, and Arena game modes reward currency for wins, which can be spent on characters or equipment.
There are Key Card Battles, Catina Battles, Lightside/Darkside battles, Arena, Galactic War, and Challenge modes.
Key card battles seem unfinished. You get a credit key card and a training drone key card for free once a day. if you don't use it that day you lose it. Once you use it it unlocks a 50 energy battle that's stupid easy and rewards you either credits or training drones. The battle is unlocked for an hour, and although it says you can only do it 3 times, I was able to do it 5 times in a row.
Arena battles is the asynchronous PVP option. You take your 5 peeps against a similarly powerful team (literally based on the total power level of the group). If you win you go up in rank. if you lose, you stay the same. Every day you are rewarded based on your rank. You don't litterally play against anyone, just a person's team.
Galactic battle is basically horde mode. It's PVP where the results of the previous battle persist from game to game. You can use your whole roster, and if one of your army dies, they are dead until you win or reset. You can reset once per day.
Challenge modes: I don't know if they're random but sometimes it's just attackers allowed or just tanks. Or sometimes it's boba fett and he gets healed. Fuck Cad Bane though.
Characters:
There are several important characteristics of your people. They basically are level, rarity, gear level and ability level. These things are calculated to give you an expected power level of characters.
Level: Your account level is the max a character level can be. Training droids and credits are used to level up people.
Rarity: Most characters start between 1 and 4 stars. The stars multiply the base stats of the character. To gain rarity, you must collect character shards. 1->2 stars is 15 shards. 2->3 is 25 3->4 30. 4->5 is 65. I have no idea what's after that because I'm a scrub.
Gear Level: Your character has several statistics. I have no idea what they are, don't ask. But you equip gear earned from fights to increase these stats. there are 6 slots per character, when all are filled you can "upgrade" their gear to the next tier. They're colored green blue and purple, just like wow.
Ability Level: Each character starts with an ability to attack and maybe do something else like buff or debuff a character. These abilities can also be leveled up. There are also passive characteristics that can be leveled as well.
BLERG.
So the cool thing is that several of the modes allow Allies. These are people you can friend when you're a certain level and they let you bring a 6th character in. Under the allies section, you can find your ally code. If you use a friended ally, you get twice the ally points (20 instead of 10) and these points are used to purchase bronze cards that give low level characters or equipment for free. You get like 6-8 of them per day for free (every 20 minutes) My phone is charging so I can't find my code. i'll pretty up the OP after I put the kid to bed.
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The combat animations are ridiculously satisfying for little-screen stuff. My tiny Darth Sidious is adorable.
The first time I played, I bought the Droid Starter Bundle -- it's $20, but it's basically a very competitive team-in-a-box with a fun flavor. If you think you're going to play for a while, I recommend it over the others. At least if you're cheap like me. The "Heroine Pack" includes a strong healer, Barriss Offee, but $50 is way too premium for my freemium. The star of the Jedi Pack ($30 maybe?) is Mace Windu and he's not all that.
Now I've started over on Android due to a busted iPad, and doing fine without any starter packs. You really don't have to spend cash to have fun. That being said, the 7- and 21-day "subscriptions" are offered seemingly at random, and represent a pretty good bang for your buck.
Darth Sidious (from Arena credits) and Luminara Unduli (from Galactic War credits) are two good early characters for beefing up your team. Luminara is the strongest attacker and healer on my team. She's an utter beast.
have to echo what bonaventure says if any new players are looking: darth sidious and luminara are 100% your best early targets for farming stuff, in addition to just buffing up some of your starter dudes
one of the weird things that is a little irritating though, is that some of the characters are still only available from the chests you get with crystals, which means that it's very difficult to farm them up to the same strength as characters you can just get in-game. this ultimately makes spending crystals on them kinda...lame? like you're hooped into spending more than you initially wanted.
anyway it's not the best game i've played in the genre of gatcha arenas, but it's not the worst either
100% this.
You're going to feel ripped off the first time you buy a Chromium Pack, more ripped off the second time, and the experience will repeat until you learn your lesson or run out of money. The characters you only get from packs are inherently worse than farmable ones. You will not spend enough to make them competitive unless you are a cash-hemorrhaging fool.
Fortunately, I only bought a couple with free currency and wised up fast.
Refreshing your battle energy starts out very cheap every day -- well within the "free crystal" budget you're given -- and advances you way faster than buying card packs or anything else. You want to get up to Galactic War level above all else. Just buy refreshes until they increase in cost, then do something else until tomorrow.
It's certainly an average game cut from the same old "mobile freemium time-waster" cloth. But as an excuse to have a pet Darth Sidious (d'aww, look at his tiny evil grin!), it's good clean fun. And playing for free really doesn't suck, as it does with most of these monstrous things.
EDIT: My "Ally Code" is 326-332-991 if anyone wants to touch my Darth. There's no real benefit to me, but he'll probably enjoy the attention, so have at him!
MIne's 951-543-864 and trust me, pick Lando. Dear lord.
Regarding the Chromium only characters, they just had an update today that apparently moved one such character to one of the shipments, so it seems there'll be a rotation, but they're not 'stuck' as being lower in stars than their farmable cousins.
I have more (probably a lot more) to say on the topic, but it's approaching 1am on a work night, so I should sign off... and check in on my dailies and shipments that have reset.
Edit: they offered a $5 starter pack early on when I started playing, which had Greedo at 2 stars and a few other bits, which I found to be worth it. Also spent $10 for the 100 crystals a day for 3 weeks or whatever it was, which I like. Other than 50 crystals to fill my energy when I was on the cusp of getting allies (which made things immeasurably easier), I strictly save for packs, which have served me pretty well thus far.
Yeah, I'd love to unlock kylo from arena but there are already plenty of dudes available. Hell, the top meta characters are ALL unlocked via regular gameplay.
One thing I find a little obnoxious are the brick walls you can run into in the form of fights full of AoE'ing enemies. Losing a battle before I even activate a character because 6 Stormtroopers each lobbed a grenade for 10-20% of my character's health (killing most or all of them) is kinda bullshit. There's a battle on the Light Side... 4-I maybe? It claims to have level 30 enemies, but even at level 40+ I was still just getting blown up.
Enough healing can overcome a lot of challenges in this game, but there's only so much you can do when the enemy gets practically a full free round to light your guys up.
Of course, more levels, more gear, and now I can just plow through them without hesitating, but it definitely slowed me down.
Oh, which brings me to another eye-roller; just how much certain items are needed. There's one... The Mk V Armor Mod Salvage, I think? I have characters that need 15 of those fucking things across 3 items of a single gear level, and getting one crafted up causes like half a dozen characters to get the little green star of "please, put it here!". And yet I have like 140 of the Mk IV salvage bits. Some manner of crafting lower tier versions into higher tier ones would be nice. 2 to 1, 3 to 1, shit I'd go 5 to 1 at this point, just something to alleviate that chokepoint. Seeing 3 of them up for sale on the shipments list is the easiest OMG BUY in the game for me right now.
it's because the level 5 battles don't unlock until level 43, so it's juiced to be closer to that level (not necessarily fair, but way closer to that level than the level you CAN do it)
instead of being a natural difficulty curve it's a sudden cliff
Currently player level 52, though most of my standard combat team is 50-49, and there's a giant pile in the 40's that don't see regular use unless the A and B teams are wiped out, or they're called upon for a Challenge mission. I know people suggest keeping the top tier folks at cap, but I'm not exactly drowning in training droids, so being able to bump a character 3 or 5+ levels (or several characters 1-2 levels) for the cost of taking one top tier guy up a single level isn't always the most appealing prospect.
It might be holding me back a bit in PVP, but I mostly just do that for the Daily, and to stay in the top 1000. Was sitting comfortably in the top 500 for a while, but I just can't be bothered to worry about it.
I got in after the "everybody buy Dooku for $5!" offer, so I'm farming him very slowly from Hard missions. I can never decide to target that b*****d first or last. I'm not too far from Vader, but -- is there any point without a way to farm him up? How long would it take to 5-star him, if that's even possible? My small mind boggles.
My A team right now is Darth Sideous, Jedi Consular, Luminara Unduli, and pick two of (Clone Wars Chewbacca/Jawa/IG-86 Security Droid). Doesn't sound like much, but I've focused pretty hard -- Sid's 6-starred, JC and Lumi are at 5, and the rest are 4, and the first three are geared to purple. They do surprisingly well. I can see them all, even the stupid Jawa, proving handy in the future.
It's hard for me to imagine dropping Sid or Lumi. Sid's debuffs are murder and Lumi does everything better than everyone else.
I'll need better synergies someday, but right now it's good times. I have Old Daka and Poggle reasonably up-to-date. But right now, I think I'm best off maxing out the first-stringers. Oh, and working on Qui-Gon. I had a bunch of Cantina tokens stashed, so he's well on his way. He's Qui-Gonna be awesome!
I'd tell everyone to get Qui-Gon first from the Cantina, but I don't know how you'd survive the Dark Side campaign without Old Daka for heals and control. Talia's a suicide machine.
New, huge patch scheduled for next week, too long to quote the notes
To unlock him you will need jedi who are 5 stars or above. if you have 7 star jedi, you will be able to get enough shards to unlock a 7 star.
So start farming the shards for jedi.
They're also changing the cost of refreshing the galactic war shipments, which sucks. also a BUUUUNCH of QOL fixes.
looks good.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I finally unlocked Emo Vader, need to star him more up so he can replace someone on my pvp squad who I have no idea.
pleasepaypreacher.net
You're correct. I think it takes 55k coins to run the raid, so a 50-man active guild can do it once every two days. I have no idea what the actual raid is like.
It sounds confusing, like everyone contributes to the victory or something? I'm lost.
Apparently the heroic version will finally unlock regular Han.
pleasepaypreacher.net
So I guess if you want to join up we need to ally first, so here's my code: 647-899-573
What is this, Nintendo Wii?
Otherwise, I guess just join a random guild that's fairly full to maximize the chance to get some good players together to run the raids?
I feel like there should be a lot more information and openness about this guild thing.
The guild I'm in currently is chewing up Tier 5 Rancor's pretty easily, a 6 a week or two back took a while but we're going to give it another whirl, if just to go for the higher rewards and build up enough guild coin to power through some more 5's in rapid succession.
Really wish they'd enhance our ability to earn cash. 280k or whatever it is for a challenge day is cute, that's a little more than it takes to level one of my characters to 78 (where I am for now), but with a broad/deep pool, I can't even imagine what the cost for characters above 80 will be. Like, getting 300 or 500 credits from the bronze packs is a joke. It costs something over 4 million just to get a character from 1 to 78, wouldn't be shocked if it was closer to 4.5 or 5 million to get to 80. I'm not blind to them wanting people to put in cash for credits (Freemium gaming, yo), but at least hide it better. They could increase those rewards by a factor of 10 and it still wouldn't be anything remotely useful. 100? Meh. Look at the credit events; 24 energy for 8,400 credits (with a chance at a 3X multiplier!). Ooooh, 8k, maybe 25k, still a drop in the bucket.
And gear. While being able to buy the higher end stuff finally at the guild store is nice, the 'fractal gear' thing is getting out of hand. There's pieces where making A is fine, then the B version takes 2 of those, fine, then the Cversion takes 2 of the B's, meaning 4 of the A's, and man making the original wasn't bad but making 4 of them just for a single slot is getting obnoxious.
Then there's the effort/time needed to make substantial improvements at the higher levels. Apparently I need droids for the current event (have IG-86 and the Magnaguard, still a couple of days from unlocking IG-88), and Rebels for the Omega material event (but everybody has Stormtrooper Han? Ugh, I hadn't been working on him, because everybody had Sidious too, and as someone who only places in the top 200 most days it's not like I'm drowning in pvp shards), and the Flavour of the Month grinds (work on Dooku and Royal Guard!) and Jedi for Yoda (got him to 6, but still need to get 2 more up to 7 stars), and 6/7 star'ing characters in general for high end raids, etc.
*sigh*
Look, I'm no stranger to freemium bullshit. I get the business model. I generally enjoy the game, and like collecting characters and slapping a bunch of gear into them and bumping them up into the 40's or so fairly cheaply to use as canon fodder in the Galactic War, but it feels like we're being pulled in a ton of directions and it's only going to get more bogged down. Protection took some adjusting, and having a deep enough bench helps a lot, but sometimes I run into someone with 3 level capped GL 9's who must be drowning in Omega materials because it's like running headfirst into a brick wall.
And the crafting. It would help a lot if we could craft one version into another. Now, unless the credits issue is addressed, I wouldn't be overjoyed if it included a large credit sink, but make it a sizable exchange! 10 to 1 for upgrading, 1 to 2 for downgrading, or something like that. It can be annoying to have 0 level 1's and 250 level 2's, or 0 level 4's but 900 level 5's of a given gear piece.
While I'm on a roll, I also kind of dislike the implementation of the Rancor. It doesn't feel quite right to be ostensibly working as a team but rewarding people on damage dealt this way, simply because it rewards people avoiding Phase 1 (unless they'd miss out on the attempts otherwise), which without a hardcore lineup and/or access to reliable buff wipes or stuns it can be even more hazardous than 2-4 (in my experience at least).
Oh, and the forums are a steaming pile of shit. Half the posts are 'lol lern2play scrub' bullshit. I swing through just to get a little info now and then (another complaint! Why the shit do they advertise pending events on the forums but not in game? Having a few days notice about the droid thing would've been fucking helpful!)
Sorry to get on a bit of a rant there, but as much as I enjoy the game and have fun comparing collections and experiences with my friends, there are bits of it that I find frustrating and wish they'd improve upon, especially the ones like credits and 'fractal gear bits' that I can only imagine are going to get worse, not better.
2nd day, and while I'm enjoying myself . . . I'm running into the resource barriers pretty hard.
Is the game enjoyable if you don't want to spend afk credits?
(I don't want to tell others to start playing if they are going to have to spend a lot of cash to play the game, when they could instead keep playing their other f2p game(s).)
There are aspects to the game I enjoy, and obviously they're digging into the IP appreciation to get and hold onto people, but as a purely F2P game, there are some seriously aggravating mechanics at times that are fairly transparent attempts to get people to open their wallets.
Thanks for the reply.
I go back and forth with it. I enjoy all the characters and the collect-a-thon, but as it is a F2P game with heavy pay-2-get-anything mechanics, it can be extremely frustrating.
A few examples:
Main characters you probably want, you will never get or use. These are locked behind random packs you get from crystals or in the case of Darth Vader, achievements for playing the game. Even though I have him unlocked, he's far from the most powerful character I have because I've gotten characters like Ewoks who are freely available to get additional shards for upgraded to 7 stars and they do more damage than he does.
The game is extremely repetitive. No matter if you're playing light-side, dark-side, arena, galactic war, or any other mode, it's the same game, the same style, the same battles. Unless you spend money you aren't going to be putting together custom teams to overcome obstacles. You'll end up with your top 5 characters who you've gotten the shards and equipment to upgrade and just running them forever. Specialty events will highlight this, like the recent smugglers event to earn credits. I have a total of 2 smuggler characters and you need 5 to even participate. Same with the droid and ewok events they've done.
Everything takes a LONG time to collect. I've been collecting shards for QuiGon since December. He's available in one of the stores you can earn money for, but he needs 400 for every 5 shards and it takes a few days to earn 400 in the cantina unless you spend money for more energy. So he's at 6 stars right now, but it is an extremely slow process.
Forar's already mentioned the Galactic War, which is irritating when you get through 8 battles and suddenly the 9th battle is against top level characters. Your characters don't heal between battles in the GW, so you'll be weak and unprepared for them.
All in all, I'd say unless you enjoy the grind, you could probably pass. At this point I feel like I can't quit because I've put so much time into it, but I also don't really "play" anymore. Every battle is on auto or simulated to speed things up so I can finish whatever dailies I can and move on. I should probably just uninstall it.
Anyway, now I feel bad I've been a downer. A friend of mine really really enjoys the game, plays it whenever he can, and has a ton of fun with it even without spending money. So YMMV?
The combat is fun, but I don't like the heavy PVP focus. I want more PVE battles. The rancor is fun and I want more of that. A lot more.
The game suffers from needing to collect too many different types of currencies, items, gear, mods, shards, and coins. The entire system is super bloated.
And you gotta take an incredibly long view of this game. Nothing at all happens in the short term. There is no instant gratification. At all. You want a new character for your team? Plan on 3 months minimum to acquire enough shards to make them competitively viable. Merely unlocking the character isn't enough. I'd say 5 stars is the bare minimum for putting a character on a team, but really you need 6 or 7 stars with as built up as everybody else is.
If I never face another team with Rey and 1-2 more heavy hitters hiding behind a RG, it'll be too soon.
You run up against a droid team and you're fucked. An IG-86 or IG-88 with full mods can literally oneshot most dudes. It's completely ludicrous.
Which is *ridiculous*, because the power rating isn't remotely representative of many character's actual usefulness in the game. Like, the Nightsister Initiate has a pretty absurdly high rating, but nobody is basing a top 5 arena team off her. My Rey is my 11th most powerful character, who can one-shot many characters allegedly much more powerful than her (or leave them weakened enough to be easily finished off).
And yeah, mods have completely broke things, especially the aforementioned credit crunch. Even if we manage to complete the GW for maybe 50-100k more credits than the original version, levelling up 4 and 5 dot mods (of which I only have a few) costs like a quarter million, and we need dozens of these things for our teams. They increased our potential credit income while making it absurdly difficult for some to actually pull that off, and adding a massive credit sink on top of it.
The supposed goal of their recent GW updates was to make it fast, challenging, and fun. By that standard, they failed at all 3.
And that doesn't include gold spent on levels.
I could drop 5mil on stars alone right now, and probably another 10-25m+ on levels, possibly much more. Such a shame, clearly they want to inspire people to use synergy and build towards teams, but building a Jedi squad and an Ewok one and a Scoundrel one and a Rebel one and an Imperial one and a Droid one, etc, etc, etc takes simply absurd amounts of time/resources.
And 600 crystals for 560k (let's be real, that multiplier is no more likely than the rest of their RNG bullshit) is a drop in the bucket. That's like a week of saving up just to get one free Galactic War full completion? At the cost of not having crystals to spare for cantina energy resets or whatever?
Pass.
I'm just going to toss this out: if you want to a guild to raid with, we have open slots. We're doing 2-3 tier-6 raids a week. Good loot. The more people we have, the quicker we can get through each raid, the quicker the loot.
Question: does anyone know if the Consular's Saber Strike has the chance to proc to reduce the healing ability if he's called upon to assist? If so, I really need to get him to 80 and 7-star. His heal is low, but if you can increase his chance to proc the cooldown reduction when he assists, that would just nasty.