Gameplay

* Chests
* Daily Quests
* Gold
* Guardians
* Rozh Gemstone

## Overview

The gameplay in Runeblade takes you, a hero priestess, on a journey inland from the Cursed Shores, battling throngs of increasingly difficult monsters, each one influenced by a strange enemy. Your goal is to fight your way first to level 1000 and then towards level 2000. Every 5 levels you will encounter a Guardian who must be defeated before you can advance further. Your first play through—the first generation, as the game terms it—you will be forced to Retire at level 100. At this point, the game and its inherent strategy truly begins...

After you retire, Crystals you have earned during your battles will transfer from your watch app to the app on your iPhone. The purchase of Artefacts is now possible, allowing you to increase your abilities and develop your fighting prowess as you enter future generations. Be sure to check the story and make use of the library whilst you're busy with your iPhone—the game has a rich background story that will continue to unfold as you progress further into the game.

## Game User Interface

When you launch Runeblade on your Apple Watch, you'll see first "Quest" screen. In "Quest" screen, you'll battle the monsters using TAP button (sword button), watch the damage that DPS runes automatically do to monsters, and go through the gates to Guardian battles that happen every five levels.

The first monsters are easy to defeat using TAP, but they'll progressively have more and more hit points when you progress in levels. To upgrade your Heroine's Runeblade to defeat monsters faster, you can use the gold from the monsters to upgrade the runes. "Runes" screen, the second screen on the game, is where the upgrading of the Runeblade happens. You have one rune that increases TAP damage and five runes that increase DPS damage.

Once you manage to progress any one of the runes to level 5, you'll unlock a spell for that rune. Third screen "Spells" enable you to cast them. Each spell has a certain effect linked to it with a cool down period after which you can cast the spell again. Spells provide extra damage and gold buffs that make them perfect for easing the guardian fights.

Fourth screen is "Map" screen where you can view your progress, open chests that randomly appear and start quests. The screen also provides information on time-based events and on fortune events. Time-based events (TBEs for short) are global events that simultaneously appear to all players and provide different kind of buffs for limited amount of time. Examples of buffs are double diamond drops, double chest drops or doubling the amount of gold player receives from defeating enemies. Fortune events are activated on phone application from "Fortune Teller" and they also provide additional bonuses for player. A fortune event lasts for three hours and the bonuses and remaining time can be checked in "Map" screen.

"Heroine" screen is the last screen of the game and it shows your current statistics, amount of collected crystals that will be passed on to next generation and the button for retiring Heroine and starting afresh with new generation. Player can also view inventory, which lists bought magic items as well as additional cumulative bonuses from e.g. Warrior's Periapt artefact or Mithrode Jewel artefact.

## First Session

During your first gaming session on Apple Watch, you should get to level 6 on Beach Cliffs and gain enough gold to update your runes to a point where Heroine will continue to defeat monsters while on idle mode. On the first four levels, there will be only five monsters per level starting with "Bewitched Rat" and they are easy to defeat. Remember to check the "Runes" screen to constantly update first rune, Kha, to improve your TAP damage.

First Guardian appears on level 5. You have to go through the gates pressing the button on lower-right hand corner of the Quest screen to enter the battle after defeating all the required monsters on level 4. Note that you can continue grinding on level 4 as long as you like and gather gold from defeated monsters, but in order to progress in game you'll need to beat the Guardian. You'll have 30 seconds time to defeat it and if you have been updating Kha at least to level 3 the first Guardian should be easy to win.

Once you hit level 6, there are two paths you can take with rune upgrades. You can grind using TAP for few more monsters and then you should have enough gold to buy the first level of your first DPS rune (Eyr). Other way is to update Kha to level 5, which unlocks "Endurance" spell for you. After activating the spell, Heroine will automatically perform TAP attack for next fifteen minutes generating more than enough gold for buying first few levels of Eyr rune.

## First run to level 100

When coming back to game after first session, the game has progressed further as Heroine continues to march forward in the game world. Guardian levels act as gating levels and the progress is halted on every five levels (though Heroine keeps on defeating monsters and gathering gold all the time). You'll need to manually enter and successfully defeat the Guardian on every five levels. Guardian battles are at the beginning quite easy, but they get harder as you progress in levels.

The speed of advancing depends on how you update the runes, use your spells especially in Guardian battles and how often you complete e.g. daily quests to gain more gold and chest keys to help upgrade Runeblade faster. Depending on how actively you play, it'll probably take four to five days to get to level 100 in your first run.

Once you make it to level 100 ("battle of Dol Goroth") and defeat Master Guardian on a special battle, Desolation begins and new generation starts on the level 1. You'll get the crystals that you have amassed from chests, daily quests and Master Guardian on level 100, and you can use them to buy artefacts on Black Market in iOS application. Available Artefacts provide strong boost to your TAP and DPS damage and should make your way from level 1 to level 100 considerably faster than on the first run.

Note that after the first run, you can upgrade only three artefacts. Once you accumulate your retirement count and new generations continue the journey, you'll get access to more and more artefacts.

## Generations

Each Generation consists of battling enemy monsters and Guardians, collecting Gold to upgrade Runes, using Spells, collecting keys to open Chests and completing Daily Quests. The primary goal of each Generation is to accumulate as many Crystals as you can before your Heroine Retires to help the next Heroine from The Order advance more quickly and further than you did.

You can retire at any point of time on "Heroine" screen after defeating the master guardian on level 100. A good strategy for retiring your Heroine is to look for significant slowdown on the progress. You either cannot defeat the guardian in the given time limit or just killing a regular monster takes considerable amount of time. It might be then best to retire, take the crystals and boost the next generation Heroine by upgrading your existing Artefacts or buying new ones.

## Strategy

The Strategies in Runeblade primarily revolve around which Artefacts you buy, how you use your Spells, deciding when to Retire, deciding how many Crystals to use on your Rozh Gemstone each generation, getting the most out of the Keys you collect, successfully completing all of your Daily Quests and deciding between TAP and DPS attacking.

### DPS Attack Strategy

The DPS attack strategy is to upgrade the Samadun Runic Stone instead of the Etraxxan Wristband and to only upgrade the DPS Runes on your Runeblade and not the TAP Rune. The advantage of this is that your Heroine will do continual damage with little player interaction. This should probably be your go-to strategy for your first few generations.

### TAP Attack Strategy

The TAP attack strategy is to upgrade the Ring of Odagh to max so that you can use Endurance to do continual attacking for 1 hour and 55 minutes at a time. Ideally you would also upgrade the Nanzuum Mana Cube so that the cooldown on Endurance is only an hour, so you have a 50 minute overlap window where you can login and reactive it. You can also combine this with Intensify to reach almost 4 hours of continual TAP attacks, but you'll only want to do this if you can't be on for several hours. If you can login within the next 2 hours, you're better off to use Intensify with Dark Alchemy to get the added gold.

TAP attack requires more advanced Artefacts to make it viable, so you probably shouldn't try this until you've made some deeper runs that have started to yield Crystals in the hundreds. But the 30% bonus damage per level for the Etraxxan Wristband over the 20% for Samadun Runic Stone makes it a strong strategy once you have the Crystals to invest.