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Star Wars [Galaxy of Heroes]. Why Yes, Kylo, You Can Be on Vader's Team.
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Full ewok team + one random guy for me usually royal guard works disturbingly well for it being a bunch of ewoks. They have great synergies with each other and they wind up getting a lot of attacks per every move of their opponents. I can usually get 2-3 full waves of attacks to kill one guy off before the other team ever moves. Having a good tank like royal guard + the ewok elder who is probably the best rezer in the game that I have come across means even if you manage to lose an ewok here or there there is a better than average chance you can pop him right back up again.
I used to run luke a lot and he does hit really nice and hard but he is just to slow. He is far to easy to focus fire and kill before he does anything at all. Rey does everything he does 100x harder and with her forsight if she gets a quick first attack she will generally ignore the next attack so she can at least murder a couple people and then add in a tank or two to keep people busy she will wreck most of the enemy team before they can do anything.
Currently I'm running with Phasma leading Luminara, Fives, Rey, and RG. They don't seem to lose too much on defense (sometimes I don't even fall out of my chosen band), and on offense as long as it's not some absurd 'full 4's and 5 dot mods' shit, I win far more than I lose when attacking.
Note that I'm not suggesting that people emulate this, and as a Magic and Netrunner player I *love* me some synergy, but it's not the end-all-be-all either. I've had fights where Fives went 1 vs 3 at the end and won (I've often lamented that he's the worst 'tank' in the game; the AI seems to actively avoid him, meaning he's often the last man standing with most of his protection left), the RG's stun/taunt is absurdly useful, and using my own Rey to evaporate an enemy in a single attack is not going to get old anytime soon.
Basically, don't be afraid to experiment, to work with what suits your playstyle and available characters. It's a long grind to max out more than a few, especially while being pulled in a dozen directions at once.
Rey is the only toon that I have a severe hatred for.
Once you get to 60, the grind gets real. Before that, it's a lot of leveling up, which replenishes your energy and such, allowing you to play a lot. End-game, like all good RPGs, involves a ton of grinding for a single piece of gear.
It really boils down to this: if you enjoy a extensive grind and maximizing your daily rewards by playing daily, then this game is fun. If you hate grinding, this is not the droid you're looking for.
Also, I guess my team defends for poops. When I have arena turns to burn, I can crawl up into the 150's. But soon after I'll get beat down into the 400's again.
For Ewoks, I just have Teebo leveled and promoted. I've been using him as a leader with QGJ, Rey, GS, and Phasma. I can pull close to or just over a million damage in Heroic P1. I'm hoping once I get Teebo geared higher than 8 (those damn stun cuffs), my damage will increase further.
I could still use a giant Jabba's Palace sized money pit, of course, but it's not nearly as painful as it was a few months ago. Now that I can semi-reliably complete the GW again, the Credit heist, finally clearing out an event on both tiers, cash is still a precious commodity, but it's no longer the penny pinching I used to do.
Though until we actually know what the next event will be, I probably should start building a nest egg again all the same.
https://swgoh.gg/u/sym7/collection/
Reading this thread led to me downloading and trying out the game; I enjoy games of this type for a few months at a time, and it really scratches the theme-element for me.
I do have a few n00b questions though, now that I've gotten my player level up to 25 with a dozen or so active characters. Hoping you're willing to answer a few of these:
Luminara is an excellent healer. I believe she's in the galactic war shop.
Time to farm any particular character is going to be measured in months. That's why those character packs are priced so high. I think it's ridiculous, but to each their own.
Shard drop rate for hard battles for me probably averaged 33%. So for the 3 battles you get per day you'll likely get one shard. Some days none, some two.
There's no real reason to limit your growth. Do all you can each day. My only real recommendation for early players is don't activate characters you've earned shards for unless you REALLY need them right now. (ie. A fifth dark side character to run battles with) You'll likely pull a 2-4* character from bronzium or chromium packs (if you redeem the 8 packs after earning the crystals) and they don't give you very many shards if you already have the character. If you instead wait, you might be able to save those shards to promote them after getting them.
Yes, that's all ally points are used for.
The best places I found to get shards (at least the ones you want anyway) is the Cantina and Hard Mode PVE. You can also buy shards in the Store or the Shard Shop when certain heroes are available. Generally a good deal.
Do not forget to buy and grab gear whenever you can. Even one Gear level can make a big difference in how your heroes fight.
If you need credits:
Galactic War is the best bet early on and is still useful later as well. You can also get a lot of tokens to buy some good heroes with. There is some formula for the difficulty level. I would search the GOH forums for that. I've never really felt the need for that info though.
Have a team of Scoundrels around to take advantage of the Credit Heist. The game is changed a bit from when I started but early on I didn't need credits as much as I do in the late game where I'm always hard up for some.
For Raids:
You will want to get heroes that have Turn Meter Reduction and slow down abilities. So QGJ, Chewbacca, Old Ben, Teebo, Fives, Yoda, and the like.
Useful Heroes:
QGJ - Really good all around abilities that can be used a variety of ways. A good taunt breaker. A little soft on HPs so you will have to baby him a bit until you can slap some HP mods on him.
Luminara - Excellent early and mid game hero. Extremely versatile, doing some significant damage while also having a great healing ability. Does lose some luster late game but is really useful on GW.
Royal Guard - Has stun and an automatic taunt that will save your bacon. Pretty much the best tank late game but may not be that useful early on though until he gets his abilities leveled up.
Daka - Early healer (one of the few Dark side healers) that can also stun and resurrect. Really important for the Dark side missions.
Phasma - Great buffer that works well as a leader with all factions. The additional attack can really tear it up with the right team. IIRC also gears up relatively easy.
Rey - IMHO OP as hell. Works best in the late game. It seems almost everyone has her.
Anakin - If you are making a Jedi team he's a must have now. He's the only healing immunity ability Light Side I know of and he can break taunts pretty easily. Isn't really that farmable until late game though.
Dooku - Strong if kind of annoying. Can farm him relatively early in Cantina. I haven't really messed with him much but others clearly like him. His abilities are so random in their effects that he can be incredible one match and worthless the next.
Droids - Can be very good but if you go down this route go all in. Droids don't really work that well with others with the exception of the Jawas. They can be really strong but they are basically just damage engines with few hit points. You either win quick or you lose the fight. Not the best for things like GW.
GS is Geonosian Soldier as far as I know.
Yes her damage is just out of wack compared to any of the other damage dealers. Leia can get lucky and get the full three shot chain and hit pretty hard but rei can both do it on demand AND hits for about twice the damage. I have seen her one shot people with full shields and full health and no other damage dealer can really come close to that.
They ewok the hell out of the rancor if you have all four of them. Their synergy of teebo when he uses invis basically gives them all an immediate attack + chirpa sending all of them to attack plus speed up means they get about three attacks per every enemy attack and if teebo is landing his basic attack he can keep murdering the ability of the rancor to even get a turn.
They are not a high damage team but they are attacking constantly combined with they have one of the best healers in the game with two rez abilities one guaranteed and one with a chance to do so.
Honestly if you concentrate a bit on getting the free to play smugglers geared up and leveled up which is pretty easy getting your guys up to 70's is not hard any more. The smuggler training drone event that comes up pretty frequently and the credit heist are huge boosts to leveling up the minions.
The weirdest thing in this game is I did spend a like 40 bucks on buying some stuff early on but in reality this game unless you are going to go all in on being a whale does NOT reward you for plinking a couple bucks here and there. It is FAR better to spend your time just going after the free to play shard stuff because if you spend money and unlock chromium stuff chances are you won't be able to improve them and so they wind up being under powered and not very useful. There are a TON of characters that are pretty easily improvable for just about all types/sides for free without spending a time on it.
I agree basically the best option at the moment is work hard on pimping out a smuggler team. The credit heist if you can do the higher level ones starts getting REALLY lucrative.
I'm just going from memory here, but that original pack was priced at $59.99, which is literally the cost of a brand new video game. An entire game. And what you got for that $59.99 was two characters unlocked, plus a random assortment of Jedi shards, up to a max of 30 additional shards or something. And I think maybe some purple crystals.
But come on now. Two characters and 30 shards for the price of an entire game? No thank you. Not at all. You don't get my money you greedy sons of bitches.
Saying that they are feasting off of the addictive nature of games and making people who cannot control themselves a target is not fair nor realistic. Now if they went after those people by sending them flyers, emails, texts, etc., then yeah, they'd be targeting them. In some ways, I'm addicted to gaming. The first thing I do almost every morning is stare at the ceiling and wish that all I had to do today was sit on my couch and game. The thing is, I get up and go to work. Yeah, I play this game a bit while I'm at work, but I don't let it consume my time. And while I'm at work, all I want to do is get home and sit on my couch and game, but I can't because I have responsibilities. Those responsibilities allow me to game (among other things that require monetary gains).
Now there are those people out there who just don't care and will spend whatever in order to be successful at a game. I've read stories about people who pay others to farm their characters while they are doing other things in real life, just so that they can continue to succeed in the game. I personally think that is insane, but to each their own. The price structure is set up (for the most part) in the hopes that out of the (let's just use simple numbers) 200,000 people who are playing the game, at least half of them will buy a $10 package at some point. That's $1,000,000 right there. From those 100,000, maybe half of them will buy another $10 package. That's another $500,000. And then there are those that are insane and will go gung ho. For simplicity's sake, let's just focus on the normal folks. For a 200,000 player-base, they've made $1.5 million + whatever those insane fools spend. I'm not going to blame the game for that. I'm going to blame the people who did it.
If a bar offered me two free drinks and then was going to charge me $20 per drink afterwards, there is the chance that I may stay for one or two (depending on the drink and company). After that, I'm going home to have the drinks at my house. Alcoholics don't drink just in the bars. They'll drink wherever the hell they choose, and if it is costing them $100 a day to drink at the bar, they'll soon enough choose to drink for $40 a day by doing it at home, and they'll be able to have as much as they want without anyone saying they have to stop.
But yes, part of the reason this game is free to play is because there are people out there who don't care about spending $200+ on this game, simply because they want to be top dogs. Those people exist in almost every game that costs extra money for an edge.
At some point, people need to take responsibility for their actions and stop trying to find someone else to pin the blame on. FYI: I say this as someone who has fought addiction before, and I accept the fact that I alone was to blame for it.
Yeah, that's not being addicted to gaming.
As for the rest of your post ... too much... I'll just agree to disagree.
It's likely the current prices were arrived at after lots of A/B testing. I remember early in the game (possibly in the beta) when the crystal subscription was only $8.99 but somewhere along the way it got raised to $10.99. They probably had data that showed that to be the sweet spot. Some of the prices may seem crazy to you (and me if I'm being honest) but there are people who don't blink an eye dropping several hundred on a FTP game. I've been on projects where people actually wrote in saying there wasn't enough stuff to buy in the game.
So then I start thinking about the PVE we have, and it isn't really fair either.
The rancor is a terribly designed encounter. Downright awful. The phase 1 Gamorean fight is easily the worst part, and at least in my guild, a lot of people skip that phase and just wait for phase 2 before they even participate. But Rancor phases cheat too, and it's so frustrating. Why does each phase of the fight (including the Gamoreans) have a hard-enrage point, where after so many turns they just start one-shotting your dudes? That doesn't feel good at all.
Good play and strong teams are punished because each time you make an attack, you are basically hard stopped after so many turns. So even good planning and bringing a well-designed team doesn't really pay off.
Ackbar is a strong asset in Phase 1 because he can clear the mark of death debuff and ensure that your dudes all live the max amount of time. But then once the Gamoreans hit that hard-enrage, Ackbar doesn't even matter and your whole team is just gonna drop anyway.
Likewise on the Rancor phases, he starts one-shotting dudes after a while, and his one-shots ignore dodge. So if I bring Rey and get her dodge buff, and the he swats her, she's gonna die even though she should avoid the attack.
Just... I dunno. I really just want to quit this game. It's hard to find anything positive to say about it. The combat isn't even that fun. PVP cheats in favor of the defender, and in PVE they put in these cheap kill mechanics that punish good players.
Basically, nothing is very well designed in this game and I don't really know why I continue to play.
Because if you stop, even for one day, you'll miss out on something. You won't get the daily login shards, or the galactic war rewards, or something else and you know you can't ever make up for it.
It's crazy, but it's the same reason I played for a while even when all I did was sim until I did all the daily goals.
It will be interesting to see what the next raid is like, from what I've heard TM will not play as much a factor.
Except it is impossible to dilly dally in this game. There's no turn passing option, so at the very least, every turn your characters will be hitting with a basic attack if nothing else.
In MMO's the enrage timer serves as a difficulty measurement, where you have X seconds to do Y damage or you fail. It's what's called a DPS check.
But in this Star Wars game, the enrage doesn't serve as a DPS check or even anything other than a hard-stopping point for that attack. Like basically they're saying you only get 15 turns before you die. And that's kind of bullshit.
Yep. The people that want to hit an easy million go for Phase 1. And Teebo is your main hero there. You don't need a debuffer like Ackbar when you can just stealth everyone (Teebo), lower TM (Teebo and to a degree QGJ), and inflict speed down so the big guy never gets a turn (Phasma). I got him down to 20% before he even managed to take out one of my characters. He almost never attacked. If I want to stay anywhere near the top 10 in my guild, I have to do P1.
I'm more pissed about being devoured. A full-health toon can be gone *snaps* just like that. And the slam can reduce the devour cooldown, which is crazy annoying.
This is a mighty victory for the rebellion.
The current guild I'm in is doing Tier 3 raid and it takes about two days to complete. I'm usually coming in rank 4-6. Should I look for a different guild, or is that a reasonable pace? If I should look for a different guild, is there a good place to do so?
That's pretty good. Ranking high is good for rewards, and many guilds are probably higher level than you could contribute to with lvl 63 toons. I'd say where you're at for now.
If you feel like you're in a rut, you may want to consider looking for a guild that is doing tier 4.
EDIT: I should have given you a link to easily view the rewards: https://swgoh.gg/db/raids/the-pit/rewards/