Challenge Scoring Tips from a Hack

I have an excellent team but I do not consider myself a great player nor a good strategist. I finished the previous challenge at about #700 in advanced, but this time I stumbled to a #24 finish. Since I don’t plan on doing this much again, I hope that my account can provide some helpful tips on future challenge events.

I started the challenge on Friday night and looked at the rewards for the advanced level—good finishing rewards, modest items for 100-1000, and lots of items for 50-100. I thought it was impossible to get 100 or better so I set my sights on getting in the top 1000.

My initial run was good, somewhere about 650,000 and because I had really good heroes (Hel almost completely ascended, Melendor and Boldtusk fully leveled and Athena and Lianna almost to third tier completion). I redid some of the levels and I got up to about 715,000 fairly quickly. I realized that I was near the top 50, even though there was a long way to go. I decided to go for it, and kept churning levels over and over again, burning 10 World flasks and nearly all of my items in the meantime. I played for so long that I had headaches, and all it got me was to about 736,000.

There was a lot of activity the last day, and I was about #48. I had to work so I could not stay on constantly, but despite raising my score to 745,000, I dropped to #52. I tried to hammer the levels for an entire 90 minutes but nothing would help. With 10 minutes left, I tried a Hail Mary. I did the last level with the hard bosses even though I had little left other than tornados. I kept fleeing until I got a game in which I got two good boards and was on the third fully charged. I used all five tornadoes at certain points, and decimated the bosses. My score went up about 25K and I finished #24, just ahead of one of the people who is always at the top of the raid leaderboard (although he probably spent an hour on this). My totals were 16 world alliance flasks, 10 hours on the last few levels, and my wife staring at me like I was crazy.

Here are some of my observations and tips, feel free to use or criticize them.

  1. Have two extra heroes. This is obvious, but last challenge I had only five good heroes. I needed to use Hel on purple reflecting targets, and that wastes time, energy, and healing. After that I started planning for it. The next challenge should reflect red, green or blue so be ready for those.

  2. Use healers, two if necessary. There is no way for most of us to do all the levels without using a ton of potions. Yes, there are people who don’t use healers all the time, but they don’t usually need help. Going without healers can give you a higher score, of course, but a reasonable number of high level teams use them.

  3. The game says items may be valuable – heed this advice! I used standard items and some banners. However, those five tornados were awesome, because they regenerated mana and allowed me to score very high on the last level. Had I thought of this before I could have saved myself six hours of futile gaming.

  4. Churn the same levels to score higher. Your score is a combination of health, time, and combinations. Obviously, it helps to heal yourself at the end. The good scoring runs will use fewer items and will finish more rapidly. If a level is not going well, don’t be afraid to flee to save time and resources. Don’t waste a lot of revival scrolls, especially if you are repeating levels. Finally, getting a good combo score is a matter of statistics, and repeating levels helps that.

  5. Don’t churn the lower levels too much. I found that I reached a near maximum fairly quickly on levels 1-5. The upper levels have much more room to finish quickly and get higher scores.

  6. Prepare by having a lot of items, and food as well. The levels generate a lot of hero drops, and using these to level players uses a lot of food. I had 500K when I started and 100K when I finished.

  7. Most defense lowering heroes affect three monsters, so keep the middle one alive if possible as to not split the attacks.

  8. Use the reflected color to make diamonds just like any other color. Although it doesn’t give points, it can lead to rapid churning of the board.

  9. Other than the rare quest, ignore quests and other distractions. I made the mistake of doing a Dark Chest and it cost me time. That would have been there after the quest was done. Also, titan killing and challenge are different, so try to separate them. I screwed up big time on the titans after churning the challenge because I was ignoring the weak points.

My captain obvious observation is that the last level of ascension makes a big difference. I noticed my one hero who was close to a fully maxed 5-star survived significantly longer than the rest. This is just to note that some people have it easier than you, so don’t feel so bad. On the other hand, some skilled players do very well with 4-star teams on advanced.

Gene Dude

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boosting the signal during event!