Guide for New Players

Welcome to the Introductory Guide for Lionheart: Dark Moon! This guide is intended to be a resource for newer players in their quest to graduate from the introductory level to a mid/end tier level. It will not address more advanced elements of the game such as high level draft dungeon strategies, event specific tactics or hero talents as they are beyond the scope of this guide. The opinions espoused in this guide are merely those of the author and are not meant to be definitive on any issue.

**General Advice**

* Be sure to join the official discord channel. There is an active community including the devs who can help you with any questions you may have. Most news regarding updates and events are also often posted on discord first.
* This is not a game where you can reach the level of the top players in a few weeks or even a couple of months. There is a limit to the number of hero tokens and other resources you can get in a day so don’t get frustrated when you hit the first wall in your progress. You will grow stronger in time.
* YOU CANNOT UNLOCK HEROES USING TOKENS.
* Hero tokens are only used to upgrade the rarity and max levels of heroes. Do not get confused or upset when you get your first legendary hero token and the hero doesn’t show up in your roster. Heroes can only be added to your roster by unlocking them from a key or winning them in the arena or from events. This is different from many other gacha games and can be a source of frustration for new players who are not used to the system.
* Events are usually the best opportunity to gain significant resources or new heroes. Be sure to login during the weekends and try your best.
* The AI on your side is stupid. The AI on your opponent’s side is not. If you autoplay a battle between two teams of equal strength, the enemy will win every single time. This is by design. Only autoplay battles where you are far stronger than your enemy.

**Heroes**

   Heroes are the core of Dark Moon. A hero’s stats can be increased through level ups, gear upgrades and equipping pets. A hero’s active and passive abilities are unlocked through the use of gems. Larger gems are often needed for more advanced abilities.

Heroes are separated by their property and their rarity. Each property is strong against one other property and weak against another. As seen in the image below, Gaea heroes deal extra damage to and take less damage from Mirror heroes. Similarly, Mirror heroes are strong against Elemental heroes who are in turn strong against Wyld heroes who then have the advantage against Dark heroes who finally beat Gaea heroes to complete the cycle.

When selecting heroes for your team, it is generally advisable to select heroes that have a type advantage against the enemies you are going to face. For example, Tumbledowns is primarily populated by Wyld enemies making elemental heroes a good choice to bring along.

In general, heroes with higher rarity have better stats than heroes of lower rarities. However, this does not mean that you should ignore lower rarity heroes. Certain common and rare heroes have useful abilities that make them useful and essential well into the late game. Do not make the mistake of thinking you can only compete with other players if you have the best legendaries. While heroes of higher rarities have higher stat caps, they also cost more to upgrade in terms of gold and gems. Their tokens are also rarer and harder to obtain. A level 40 common hero will often beat a level 10 legendary in terms of stats. The scarcity of resources in the early and mid game means that you will often be better served by focusing on a small team of heroes rather than spreading your resources. Very rare heroes can take you all the way into the depths of Bloodstone league so don’t ignore them.

If you’re looking for what heroes on which to focus your resources, I highly recommend checking the Tier List. You're going to want to focus on heroes with higher rarity and that are higher on the Tier List. That being said, Epic and Legendary heroes cost a lot to upgrade, so if you're short on gold (as you're wont to be at the beginning of the game), you may want to focus more on VR, Rare, and Common heroes until you are able to push further in the Draft Dungeon.

Just to clarify, when we say "focus", we mean to prioritize those heroes when looting for hero tokens and to give them priority when using your resources to upgrade rarity and skills. A good resource when trying to figure out how to get tokens for heroes is this list: Heroes Fragment Locations. You can use that to know which heroes you can and cannot loot based on their availability in the levels that you have unlocked.

**Stats**

Some heroes are useful for their unique abilities while others are useful for their high base stats and damage output. Understanding how the different stats of your heroes affect their utility can help you choose where to direct your resources.

Health

* Health is simply the amount of life or HP your hero has at the start of a battle. More health means your heroes will survive more attacks and will last longer. It is a universally useful stat.

Attack

* Attack determines the amount of damage dealt with a hero’s basic attack and also contributes to a lesser degree to the amount of damage dealt by a hero’s special abilities. This stat also affects the amount of healing done by certain moves like Solar Unicorn’s base heal ability.

Defense

* Defense reduces a percentage of the direct incoming damage dealt to your hero. For example, an attack that normally deals 100 damage to a hero with 0% defense would only do 50 damage to a hero with 50% defense. This stat is capped at 80% which means that any excess defense over the cap limit will not have any effect.

Skill

* Skill affects the amount of damage or healing that results from special abilities. While attack also contributes to the output of special abilities, it does so to a lesser degree than skill. Furthermore, most heroes tend to have twice as much base skill as base attack.

Critical Chance

* Critical chance is the probability that any attack that deals damage to an enemy deals additional damage. While there is no cap to this stat, any excess critical chance beyond 100% does not have any practical effect under most circumstances.

Critical Damage

* Critical Damage represents the multiplier that is used when a hero lands a critical hit. For example, if a hero with a 200% critical damage stat has an attack that normally does 100 damage, this attack will deal 200 if it’s a critical hit.

Speed

* Speed determines the order in which heroes take their turns in a battle. Battle order is determined at the start of a fight and does not change again during the match. This means that any passives or abilities that affect the speed of a team will remain in effect even after the hero who possessed that ability has been killed.

When looking to enhance your hero’s stats, the role that the hero plays in your team composition will determine what stats have priority. If you have a hero whose role is to act as a tank and absorb damage, then you should focus primarily on defense and health. On the other hand, an attacker might need more critical chance, attack/skill or speed. However, as a general rule of thumb, DEFENSE IS KING. No other stat will have as much impact on your progression as defense. If you’re ever in doubt as to what pet to equip onto a hero, a pet which adds defense and health is almost always a good option. If your heroes take less damage and last longer, they have more opportunities to use their abilities and will outlast heroes of a similar power level with less defense.

While Defense and Health will allow you to conquer most PvE hurdles you face in the game, Speed is also an important consideration especially for PvP battles. Having heroes with higher speeds than your opponent will allow your heroes to use their abilities first and control the battle. If you have strong enough heroes who go before your opponent, you can kill enemy heroes before they have the opportunity to use any of their abilities.

**Pets**

Pets are the most versatile option for enhancing the stats of your heroes. They can be found by quicklooting in the world map, acquired through the tower and friend shops, bought from the shop’s pet boxes and are also frequently awarded during events. Each kind of pet has its own unique abilities which are useful in different situations. Similarly to heroes, pets are also divided by their rarity with higher rarity pets offering more stat enhancements and more powerful effects. Common pets increase one additional stat. Rare and Very Rare pets increase two stats while Epic and Legendary pets increase three different stats. However, higher rarity pets also cost more to upgrade. The cost of fully upgrading a legendary pet to level 60 is an astronomical 1.3 million gold. More information on the different kinds of pets can be found here while the numbers and details regarding the cost of leveling them can be found here.

A common mistake many players make in the early stages of their game progression is to invest all their gold into epic or legendary pets. Upgrading pets is the most gold intensive part of the game. If you’re below level 20, don’t bother leveling up the single legendary pet you have. Your time and resources will have more impact elsewhere. However, Common pets don’t generally offer enough stat enhancement while most rare pets tend not to have any useful abilities. An exception to this is the Common Hart with DEF boost, which offers a cheap and effective way to grant a defense boost better than any Rare pet can offer.

Very Rare pets are often the best balance between value and stats and can serve you well through to the end of the campaign. Not all Very Rare pets are created equal though - if you’re a level 15 player with limited gold, it would be foolish to spend any to upgrade a Toxic Tsula that offers 50% tangle resistance. This kind of pet would only be situationally useful and would not be a good value investment. Some of the more common Very Rare pets that tend to be useful in almost every situation are Mist Shields which allow a hero to start the battle with a shield, Mist Tsulas which allow a hero to start a battle with vanish and Flame Harts which allow a hero to start the battle with True Strike.

**Gear**

Gear upgrades are a permanent way of increasing the stats of a hero. Unlike pets which are transferable, gear upgrades only affect the hero in question. Upgrading gear costs gold and uses gear pieces, cores, and forge dust making this a very resource intensive process. All the necessary materials for gear upgrades are found in Daily Dungeons.

Gear pieces are divided into four types: Weapon shards, Gauntlet shards, Armour shards and Relic shards. These shards are then further divided by tier with higher tier gear shards needed to upgrade higher gear levels. Each of the four types of gear focuses on improving specific stats. Weapon and Relic upgrades increase the offensive abilities of heroes with weapons initially increasing the critical chance and attack stats and relics increasing the critical damage and attack stats. Gauntlet and Armour upgrades are more defensively focused with Gauntlets initially increasing Skill and HP while Armour increases Defense and HP. Higher level gear upgrades starting at level 17 increase more stats than the initial two.

Cores are divided by property: Wyld, Dark, Gaea, Mirror, and Elemental. Each type is used to upgrade heroes of the same property and can be found in its respective Daily Dungeon. Cores are also further divided into tiers with higher tiers necessary to upgrade higher rarity heroes. For example, upgrading a legendary elemental hero such as Vault Master Timothy will require tier 5 elemental cores while upgrading a rare mirror hero such as Mirror Knight will require tier 2 mirror cores.

**Daily Dungeon**

Daily Dungeons are a challenging and property specific series of dungeons which are the source of gear pieces, forge dust and cores. Each daily dungeon is only open for a single day each week.

* Monday: Wyld
* Tuesday: Dark
* Wednesday: Gaea
* Thursday: Mirror
* Friday: Elemental

Daily Dungeon challenges are fundamentally different from draft dungeon and campaign battles. Each battle within a daily dungeon has two stages and only lasts for a maximum of 10 rounds. You can only use heroes that match the property of the daily dungeon. In addition to this, each floor has certain modifiers that either aid the enemy, hurt your heroes or add other unique effects. These factors make daily dungeons the most challenging portion of the game. Success here requires a player to develop at least 4 solid heroes of each property and also place an emphasis on offence. You cannot outlast your opponents. If you have not defeated all the enemies within 10 rounds, then you automatically lose.

**Draft Dungeon**

As the only game mode unencumbered by any restrictive entry or loot tickets, the Draft Dungeon is the most grindable part of the game. Conquering each 5 floors of enemies grants you a one-time prize of multiple hero tokens related to the theme of the floor and a repeating prize of gold. The Draft Dungeon is reset weekly. Each set of 5 floor follows a theme that determines the enemies you face. The heroes you select come in sets of twos and the order in which they show up are determined by their power level.

When choosing your hero from the draft, it is important to pay attention not only to the theme of the current set of floors, but also the set of floors that follow. You can also click on the floors to get a preview of the specific enemies that you will face. Use this information to guide your hero drafting process.

When you leave a draft dungeon battle at any point, your progress is saved and you return to the same floor when you enter the dungeon again. However, not everything is saved. While the game saves your heroes, their hp and their skill cooldowns, it does not save their status effects. This means that if you have a large number of negative status effects on your heroes like wound, poison or stat reductions, then you should return to the dungeon after completing the floor and re-enter it. If you have a number of positive buffs on your heroes, then you should continue onto the next floor without exiting in order to preserve that advantage. Similarly, many heroes have abilities that activate at the start of a battle. These abilities can be reactivated on every floor by exiting and returning to the daily dungeon.

Since it is a source of both hero tokens and gold, there are different strategies for maximizing one or the other. Focusing on tokens means making a deep run trying to get as far down the dungeon as possible. Focusing on gold means making a large number of quick runs which you can grind to begin amassing wealth. Therefore, before embarking on your draft dungeon journey, it is important to establish what you want to achieve in your run.

Deep runs

The key to going far in the draft dungeon is the ability to draft a balanced, sustainable and defensively capable team. Many players tend to focus on a limited number of heroes in the beginning due to the scarcity of resources. However, the structure of the draft dungeon means that most of your strongest heroes will only show up at the end of a run and if they’re all bunched together, then you’re forced to choose between them.

If you only have a few good heroes in your roster, you want to be able to bring them all into the dungeon rather than be forced to choose between them. Since the order of heroes is determined by power level, it is possible to manipulate the order of the draft by changing the power level of your heroes. The easiest way to do this is by unequipping or switching between pets.

Quick runs

Quick runs are designed simply to gain as much gold as fast as possible. It involves manipulating the roster through the use of pets and gears to be ordered in a specific manner and then autoplaying through your roster. It is currently the undisputed king of earning gold. Unlike the sometimes tanky builds needed to make deep runs, quick runs focus far more on offense. There is no point to going 10 floors further in a quick run if it takes twice as long.

**Ending notes:**

This guide is still a work in progress. If you have any questions, concerns or advice, please message me (AspenMartin#0481) on Discord. Many thanks to everyone who helped me out with this.