by DasFuchen on reddit
FIRST OFF right now you get these free stuff in 2020
- 2 Free new release characters that you can use together, or use either separately as the basis for either a Physical or Magical core team, both of whom are pretty OP and fun
- Lots of currency
- Lots of login bonuses
- Your choice of Unique Weapon and Unique Treasure for one of the two from the Dungeon Event
- A number of additional selection and random UW/UT tickets as you play and as you complete milestones and learn the game’s systems
- Additional UW/UT tickets from a free in-game shop coupon
- Additional UW/UT ticket crafting materials as you Transcend characters to level 5 and raise gear
- Soul Weapons and Soul Weapon frags via playing and from login rewards
- Three 5* characters: one from story, one from a tower mission, and one for the 7-day rewards
- One of the best tanks in the game as an early game character for your team
- A free all-in-one 11 item pull
- One free single premium item pull and then reduced ruby cost item pulls each day
- 10k in rubies to start plus increasing amounts of them each day
- Lots of rubies for achievements
- Lots of good deals to spend rubies on, as well as a number that you can get good value for your cash
Newbie trap #1: Mileage, the Most Premium Premium Currency
Mileage is not worth working on unless you just like to spend money. Don’t worry about it.
Mileage is the game’s reward for buying and spending rubies, the game’s premium currency. Buying heroes and rolling the High Quality gacha will provide you with mileage, which can currently be used to purchase a unique weapon ticket- redeemable for one unique weapon of the players choosing (New hero unique weapons are excluded).
Unique weapons are certainly fancy, but they do not improve your performance enough to worry about. They are also available from the arena for free and can be rolled in the High Quality gacha, so they aren’t quite as elite as mileage would make them seem.
Given that this is the only use for mileage currently, I strongly recommend you only see mileage as a side bonus for the people that spend serious money.
Newbie trap #2: Purchasing New Units in the Special Shop
All units are B+ or better, even the starters. Only use rubies to establish a core team of 4 units unless you just feel like spending money. Do not buy characters if you are free to play.
Characters are cool. We all want them. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of resources to level them up to max, and you can only use 4 at a time anyways in the current game, which means variety will invariably slow you down as an actively progressing player.
Luckily for us, the game is very generous in this regard, giving us:
- 4 characters to start with(Kasel, Roi, Cleo, Frey)
- A free 2 star unit (Finish every mission in chapter 1 on easy difficulty with a 3 star rating)
- Clause (Finish every mission in chapter 1 on normal difficulty with a three star rating)
- You get free 5 star selene after 5 days
- You get 3 star mirianne for free
With all of these freebies, you should easily be able to establish a core team of 4 units to progress through the game with. Brief description of what a solid starter team should look like, give or take. A well rounded team would be comprised of:
- A front-line unit that takes the brunt of the damage (Kasel, Clause, Morrah, Jane, Demia, Phillop, Gau, Naila)
- A Physical DPS (Roi, Reina, Fluss, Selene, Rodina, Miruru, Lakrak)
- A Magical DPS (Cleo, Pavel, Lorraine, Maria, Epis, Dimael, Luna)
- A healing support(Frey, Kaulah, Rephy, Baudoin, Leo)
Establish a team of 4 units, then don’t make another purchase until you have a maxed level 60 team, because it will absolutely be a waste earlier than that. Instead, utilize the inn to bring new people to your army without using rubies while you level your main squad.
Newbie Trap #3: Rolling for Items on the High Quality Gacha
Waste of rubies in all regards, should not roll other than the daily free roll before you have progressed to chapter 5 and have at least one 5 star unit.
Now to address the other newbie trap in the room, the High Quality gacha. Most free to play games utilize the gacha as the money hook, they put the real goodies in the slot machine and eat the gambling addicts and the big spenders right up, while the free to play either reroll to oblivion or suffer in irrelevance.
With King’s Raid, however, this simply isn’t the case. The High Quality gacha contains higher rarity gear that is scaled to your level, with the low chance to drop artifacts and unique weapons. These prizes, however, are a trap. To even equip an artifact you have to spend 2 million gold unlocking the slot on the character you want to equip it to, and even then the effects will barely have any impact.
Unique weapons are similar. They require a lot of resources to enhance, and the extra passives they provide are not going to completely change the game for you.
Therefore, it is a terrible waste of your valuable rubies to roll them on the High Quality machine unless you have nothing else at all to spend them on.
In fact, I would even save the free rolls the game gives you until you get to chapter 5 anyways, since the prizes for the gacha scale to your level. You are much more likely to just get high rarity equipment from the gacha then you are to get the big prizes, and that equipment can significantly improve the pace at which you clear chapter 5.
As an alternative to the gacha, players can obtain unique weapons from the arena with their daily arena rewards. Yes, it will take a while, but again, they aren’t going to be changing the game for you much anyways. Artifacts can also be obtained without rubies from the Tower of Challenges.
Spending your rubies Wisely: Scrolls and Alternative Stamina Refreshes
Scrolls are a decent investment, and refreshing is the best thing you can do. Skip to the next sections for methods, math, and stuff.
In the special shop you will notice that there are gold scrolls, exp scrolls, and loot scrolls being sold for 100-500 rubies. Each of them double their namesake- gold scrolls provide double income, exp scrolls double the amount of exp received, and loot scrolls give you a second item for every item that drops. Gold and exp scrolls work during hot time- you get 3x exp/gold if you have a scroll active during a server double effect of the same nature. Gold scrolls work on the Treasury, and Loot scrolls work on the upper dungeon.
Using scrolls is not a waste of money, but they aren’t top priority either. Use them if you want to, and don’t feel bad for it. Note that the bundles provide 12 scrolls for the price of 10, so you get 2 for free if you buy bulk. Loot scrolls, while more expensive, are far more valuable.
Now, Stamina in this game recharges at an almost alarmingly high rate. Stamina boosters can also be purchased in the guild shop and in the inn. It’s not exactly a limiter on your gameplay. There are, however, some activities that you can only do 5 times a day. Those would be:
- Clearing the Stockade for skill books
- Clearing the Castle Treasury for gold
- Clearing the Upper Dungeon for fragments
Thankfully, the wonderful people at Vespa decided to allow us players to utilize rubies to get another 5 runs on each of these things at the low, low cost of 100 rubies. The price doubles each time you do on the same server day, but still, the amount of time saved vs rubies invested is staggering. Now, how to use this to our advantage?
Using Your Rubies to Farm Fragments
Get a loot scroll, wait until 30 minutes before server reset, use said loot scroll, then run the upper dungeon 15-20 times both before and after the server resets. This is the best use of your rubies.
Evolution of your characters is the biggest wall you will face as you progress through the game. The prices of evolution increase drastically as you progress, from 60 fragments to make a 3 star, to 240 fragments to make a 4 star, to a whopping 840 fragments to make a 5 star! Meanwhile, at the basic rate you get 25-40 fragments a day, assuming you run the upper dungeons 5 times a day. This means it will take you a staggering 84 days minimum to take a team of 4 stars to their 5 star form, which is pretty absurd when you realize how quickly you can get a 4 star team maxed out.
Thankfully, Vespa decided to spare us this misery and allow us two boons for this situation- loot scrolls and ruby refreshes. Loot scrolls double our return on a run of the upper dungeon, and a ruby refresh grants us 5 more runs at a time, so if we do as many runs as we can in the 1 hour period a loot scroll provides, we can maximize our fragment farming rate.
Now, each ruby refresh costs double the last during a server day, so doing this at just any point in the day can get rather costly. To circumvent this cumulative increase we use our loot scroll exactly 30 minutes before the server resets(reset occurs at 11 pm US Central time), giving us 30 minutes of double fragments on two different days. So:
- Use loot scroll 30 minutes before server reset
- Run the upper dungeon 5 times
- Pay 100 rubies to get 5 more runs, then do those.
- Pay 200 rubies to get 5 more runs, then do those.
- (optional, depending on rubies and time) Pay 400 rubies to get 5 more runs, then do those.
- Server resets because 30 minutes have passed. We get 5 dungeon runs to start our new day. We do those.
- Pay 100 rubies because the price has reset on a new day, then do our 5 more runs.
- Pay 200 rubies for 5 more runs, then do those
- (optional, depending on time and rubies) Pay 400 rubies for 5 more runs, then do those.
by doing this, we spend 500 rubies plus the 600 for the 4 refreshes (1100 total, or 1900 if you did the extra two runs) to increase the rate we get fragments dramatically. Instead of 25-35 fragments in a day, we get 150-210 a day for 2 days (300-420 in one run, or 400-560 if you took the optional runs). This means instead of 84 days for a 5 star team, we can have the 4 units promoted in 14 days, which is far more reasonable- and it only costs between 8800-11000 rubies total depending on how many runs you do at a time and which dungeon you run.
Shaving 70 days off of your wait to progress to the late game is well worth every ruby, far more so than the 40-50 days you would save purchasing 2 characters for around the same price. This is by far the best way to spend rubies, whether you want to spend money or not.
Other Things to Do with Rubies
Don’t buy gold with rubies, refreshing the stockade is surprisingly good, and buying stamina potions with rubies isn’t awful but not really worth it.
So, what else can we do with rubies? Honestly, not a whole lot. You can refresh your actual stamina, but you should never do that. If you want to spend rubies on stamina, buy stamina potions from the special shop instead. I mean, it’s not as bad or wasteful as buying heroes or rolling the gacha, but there are enough sources of stamina that it’s unnecessary.
One last thing you can do if you want is refresh the stockade. as it stands, if you can run the stockade on the highest difficulty, it will take you 20 weeks to max out a character’s skills. By refreshing just once a day, you can cut down the time by 10 weeks, for a mere 1000 rubies total per character. refreshing twice a day reduces it to 7 weeks (or 10 weeks if you can only do the hard difficulty), but costs 3000 rubies per character, which is quite a bit more. Maxing skills isn’t necessarily top priority, but it is definitely more pvp relevant than a unique weapon. Do it if you want to get stronger faster, consider it if you make small purchases, wait until you have a full 5 star team if you are fully free-to-play.
Some Final Tips
Enhance your gear- it makes a huge difference in your ability to clear content. The difference between a base item and it’s +10 form is staggering. Make a point to get gear relevant to your level and enhance it ASAP when starting a new chapter, in particular weapons for your dps and armor/ secondary gear for your frontline unit.
Don’t do raids during hot time. It’s a waste of the stamina you could be using to level characters or make money.
Use a gold scroll during the gold hot time if you have one, then run the treasury. You make a good chunk of change this way. It’s not necessary, but it helps.
Gear options are the extra stats randomly assigned to higher rarity gear, and having a good set of appropriate options can significantly increase your unit’s performance. That being said, do not raise the value of options on gear that is less than T5 unless you have a mission that tells you to. It’s just not worth the investment. In fact, don’t max the options on a piece of T5 equipment either unless it has the options you want on it, because it drains tons of resources to do so.
2 star purple equipment is more than enough to get you to normal difficulty of the next chapter- further awakenings of equipment are ultimately a waste. Similarly, don’t waste the resources it takes to enhance a gold weapon that is less than T5- the purples will do just fine.
Use guild points for stamina potions. The heroic runes are good, but they also drop from chapter 5 hard mode, which you will be farming a LOT in the future. Using the stamina potions to maximize your hot time farming is a much better use of your guild points.
Consider grinding extra equipment instead of selling it. The gold you get isn’t bad by any means, but maxing options on T5 equipment has an insane dust requirement, and you will need all of it you can get if you want to have the best gear.
When you raid, you get to bid on up to one item each, then the other items are randomly distributed- whether you want them or not. Don’t get mad because someone stronger/weaker than you got most of the items in your raid- they have no say in the matter.
