So, you’re now a Gladiator and you’re thinking of flexing your muscles and dealing out some serious hurt to your adversaries. The trouble is, you’re soon going to run into about 10000 other people thinking the same thing. So how do you get ahead?
Well, start thinking a little strategically!
Like all RPG based games, your character’s stats are important since they’re what differentiate you from your opponents. The in-game explanation is rather brief, so let’s go into some more detail. Here’s what I’ve been able to gather from my 3 months of playing this game. This guide will give you some general pointers about how you should generate your character build, and what things to concentrate on.
Level & Experience Points:This is rather self explanatory. As you gain more experience points, you’ll level up. Unlike other RPG games however, leveling up does not automatically upgrade your stats, except for your base HP level. Leveling up is mainly useful for one purpose. The items that you can see in the shops, market and auctions depend on your base level, so the higher up you go, the better items you will be able to potentially purchase. There’s an exact formula somewhere around, don’t bother to memorize it, there are online tools that can help you with that, but I’ll get to that later.
Also, leveling up will affect your maximum stats. The exact formula is:
Your max stats = Your level + (1.5 x base stats)You should also consciously realize that experience is under your control by your selection of expeditions and opponents. Therefore, in certain circumstances, you may want to stop your leveling up. This is particularly true if you’re gunning for the no 1 spot in your arena league. In general, attacking opponents 4-5 levels lower than you will allow you to raid gold, but you will receive no experience. If you attack opponents more than 9 levels lower than you, you will receive no gold and no experience, so that’s generally not a good thing to do.
Strength:Strength as the in-game explanation says, increases your damage and is the only direct influence of your stats on damage. However, the extra damage added by strength is quite minimal. For every +10 points of Strength, the damage dealt is increased by +1.
Considering that strength is the most expensive stat to upgrade, and it’s the only one of all the stats that affect damage, a lot of newbies spend a considerable amount of resources upgrading strength. I don’t particularly recommend it, since it’s a lot of money for not much gain. I would actually put strength last to upgrade on the list unless the strength value is just at the incremental value of 9, 19, 29 etc.
Skill & Agility:These two stats are very intertwined, so I will talk about both these skills in the same breadth. Both Skill and Agility affect the chance to hit.
Your skill and your opponent’s agility affect the chance for you to score a hit.
Your agility & your opponents skill affect the chance for you to be hit.
The exact formula for you to hit is:
Your Skill / (Your Skill + Your opponent's Agility) x 100 [Always rounds down] In my mind, these are the two most important stats in the game. These two should always be upgraded first, when you have the money. There’s no point having incredible damage and strength but your skill and agility is so low that you cannot score a hit.
Constitution:Constitution directly impacts your HP level and your regeneration rate. The regeneration rate of HP is directly equivalent to your constitution, and the constitution number provides a bonus of HP to the basic HP of your level.
This should not be ignored because there are two ways to lose an arena duel. Whoever gets the most damage within the battle, or whoever reaches HP less than 1 will lose the battle. I have won duels against opponents 3-4 levels higher than me simply because they don’t take care to immediately replenish their HP or because their HP levels are too low due to low constitution base stats.
High constitution levels mean that you regenerate faster, and that you have a much higher tolerance to damage. This gets more and more important as you progress up. Also, be aware that food prices increase the higher your level. At level 1-9, each point of HP would cost maybe 1-2 gold. At level 10-19, each point of HP would cost you 2-3 gold, and at level 20-29, 3-4 gold. Therefore, a higher constitution saves you gold spent on food. Due to all that, I typically upgrade constitution after skill and agility.
Charisma:Charisma affects the chance for a double hit during the battle. The exact formula is as follows:
Your Charisma - Your opponent's Charisma [0% if the result is negative] In duels where the opponent’s skill and agility are comparable to yours, charisma difference will likely be the component that determines whether you lose or win. Having an item that gives charisma bonus is usually good, but try not to sacrifice skill or agility too much. I usually upgrade Charisma after constitution, skill and agility.
At higher levels, Charisma becomes important, probably more so than constitution. Around level 30 or so, there are items that will enable you to get charisma levels of beyond 100, and still maintain good levels of skill and agility. If your charisma level is around 70, and you are going up against an opponent with a charisma of 120, you're in trouble because he will be able to hit you twice every other time.
Damage And Armour:Damage and Armour are pretty self explanatory. Armour reduces the damage your opponent does. These stats are primarily affected by items rather than by your base stats. These should be continuously upgraded of course, and you should get the best items that you can afford. One point to note, it's much more effective to upgrade damage via items rather than via strength, but don't totally ignore strength upgrades.
Keeping a balanced build:Having said the order that I would train up the stats, I think it’s also important that I emphasize that you need to keep a balanced build. No stat should be overlooked for another e.g. don’t build up your skill and agility to ridiculous levels but deal very low damage on each strike. The upgrade order still assumes that you upgrade all stats roughly equally.
As a rough guideline, I right now keep Agility & Constitution at equal levels and Skill, Strength and Charisma at equal levels. Agility & Constitution are roughly +10 above the others. This is mostly due to the cost delta’s to upgrade each one. When I go on an upgrading spree, I normally upgrade Agility, Skill, Constitution, Charisma then followed by Strength.
Item bonuses can be tricky to determine. Once you reach the mid levels of 20+ above, it’s more worth it to get items that provide % upgrades rather than absolute numbers. If you’ve built up your base stats enough, these provide much more bang for the buck. Therefore, it’s really important to upgrade your base stats as much as possible during a level, don’t depend on items absolute bonuses alone.
Also, don’t go overboard on the damage & amour items. High damage items usually provide a skill bonus, but they tend to be low on Armor and agility. Equipping every item with Rayol’s modifiers for instance, means that you’ll be quickly defeated if you go up against someone with high agility bonuses. Similarly, high armor items tend to be low on skill, and if you overdo it, you can absorb a lot of damage but won’t be able to place a single hit of your own.
I find the following pointers work quite effectively in determining what items to get and what stats to upgrade. I assume that I am in a battle, and this is my order of priorities in the battle.
I want to hit my opponent with nearly every try (Skill).
When I do hit, I want to do as much damage as possible. (Damage)
I want to avoid my opponent's strikes (Agility).
If he does hit me, I want to mitigate the damage as much as possible and survive as many hits as possible (Armor and Constitution).
If I get a chance, I want to hit him twice (Charisma)That's about it for stats and attributes. I will probably send another post to talk about general tactics to progress, but I hope you guys find this helpful.
