Howdy!
I’m not a shiny top100 competitive hulk, just a f2p dude getting by. This guide is thus not meant to score in the top brackets for massive rewards - this is a guide to get through the magic tower with little to no investment, while reaping all the completion rewards (emblems, 4* battle items, coins).
Probably late for this tower, but hopefully still applicable to the next one.
What you will need for this to work:
- ~20 assorted 4* and/or 5* heroes of magic classes (wizard, sorcerer, druid, cleric). Try to have at least one Isarnia, she helps a lot. Mist is a huge boon for all the luckier folks.
- Small stockpile (say, 20-30) of the following battle items: small antidote, axe attack, healing potion (+225 one), fourth utility item of your choice.
- (Optional) 250 gems to be able to complete the whole thing. Yeah, it’s disgusting that you need this in the first place - but honestly, it nets you almost a full summon and enough emblems to make it worth.
- (Optional) Some dumb luck, or just optimism.
- (Optional) A PhD in Math, specifically Statistics.
Preparation - hero choice
After you get the train running, you want these for each stage:
- 1 (one) standard issue instant healer (non-costume Melendor or Rigard are both fine, Melendor can be used in costume initially)
- 1 (one) defense debuffer. Isarnia works best out of all the vanilla heroes, provided she is one of the next group too
- All the biggest, meanest, slowest juggernauts you can fit. All of your Isarnias, Quintuses (Quinti?), Horghalls. Hit-threes also welcome. Colour stacking is irrelevant - in fact, you’re best off going in rainbow. Where we’re going, we don’t need tile damage.
Critical blessings
The start is a bit rough, since the train really gets going when you acquire a double stack of one particular epic blessing. But when it does, it has no brakes - you will steamroll through Impossible. The blessing priorities are thus:
1. Gain (5%) mana on all heroes when you cast a special. This is what makes the whole thing tick. You can get a double stack of this to gain 10% instead. This means that after a full round of specials, your heroes will immediately have 10-50% mana available for the next salvo, and you only need a couple of matches to fire it all again.
2. Heal all heroes for (100) health when you cast a special. One stack of this is enough to make you essentially immortal until the boss wave, and close to it even then.
3. Gain a (5%) attack/defense stack every turn, up to 10 stacks. Undispellable 50/100% attack/defense buff, stacks with any other buffs, guaranteed full stack on boss wave.
4. Gain (50%) mana when you enter the boss wave. One stack of this is enough to let you spam specials through the first waves without the need to prepare specials for bosses.
5. Take (15%) less damage. This will reduce your odds of getting accidentally oneshot on higher impossible levels.
Minor blessings:
- Mana regeneration / mana every 5 turns. Further reduces the downtime of our heavy weaponry.
- +5% attack / defense, +health every 5 turns. Small useful buffs that add up and help with early game.
- Everything else.
- +5% health. Would be up there in #2… IF IT WORKED.
Gameplay / tile matching tips and tricks:
This section revolves around the fact that once you get the build going, you literally cannot die, and you can match any colours anywhere on the board. You do damage my spamming specials almost every turn (make sure to use Isarnia first, and your healer last).
This means your main enemy is curses, and you can focus entirely on getting rid of those.
This is also the reason I found this tower a lot more fun - it embraces the actual puzzle element of the game, making sitting through 75 stages bearable.
-
Don’t rush your turns.
We’re not hunting high scores here, so take your time to find safe ways to dispose of those pesky books. -
Save your bombs and diamonds.
They give you an alternate condition to pop the books, aside from matching them away, diamonds being 100% guaranteed. Don’t pop them unnecessarily if you can help it. If you can dispose of a book both using a diamond and by matching, match it away and save the diamond. -
While you have no curse on the board, match near the center.
Curses are a lot more difficult to remove when they’re at the edges. -
If you have a curse match ready, wait out the timer to 1 if you can.
Each turn you have a matchable curse on your board is a turn you don’t have to deal with a new one at the edge of the board. Just make sure that your moves in the meantime have low odds of ruining your prepared match.
Example
That bomb will almost certainly remain next to the curse until the timer runs out, so I have 2 calm turns to do whatever.
- When you’re SOL, consider probabilities.
The odds of a particular colour tile to spawn in a particular place are always the same, 20%. When you’re in a pickle and don’t have a match ready, think of all the possible outcomes that let you match: the more there are after a turn, the better that turn is.
Example
Match 1 looks worse than match 2 because it doesn’t combo, but it actually gives the same number of opportunities - you may get a yellow tile either right next to the curse (allowing to match horizontally) or a tile below (allowing to match vertically). Match 2 loses the horizontal opportunity, but has an extra opportunity of another yellow below the bottom yellow tile.
However, that doesn’t matter because match 3 may dispose immediately (yellow between the two), give a dual match opportunity (one tile below), or an extra combo possibility if the one below is blue (and then any of the three nearby bottom row tiles being yellow gives a match).
This is IMO the most fun and skill-dependent aspect of the gameplay.
6. Sometimes, you're just SOL. Accept it and move on.
(Actually matched that one away, but that’s what the optional dumb luck is for. You can see I got quite some curses on the way.)
Addendum: battle item use
- You want to antidote away the poison/debuffs from Agrafena and Anton, perhaps the Athena-like defense debuff from Kornel too.
- Unless you have a dispel ready, you want to axe attack the berserk buff from Kornel. Seriously, my defense-specced Mitsuko got whacked by the boss for something silly like 1950 when I didn’t.
- After impossible ~15, you want to use a healing potion whenever one of your heroes is below half HP, and you don’t have specials ready to heal. Bosses can and will focus your only wounded hero.
