How To Play Guide For Dungeon Defense

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The following is a How To Play Guide For **Dungeon Defense.**

## Getting Addicted

First bits of wisdom:

• It hardly matters what character you pick on your first run, they all do enough damage to make it through your first few reincarnations, but the Wraith or Slime are always good choices.

• Easy mode is **too** easy, and doesn't pay off as much when you "reincarnate," which is the main way to increase your party's power as you play the game more.

• Grinding can take a while, and one of the first things you should save up for in the rebirth store are the "auto" features.

• Auto-battle, auto-skill select, and auto-research are the three which will allow you to not have to input anything between levels, allowing you to leave your device to grind on it's own.
As the game progresses, it becomes much more about long-term resource management and min-maxing your teams damage/equipment.

### Making and Managing Money

• Making tons of gold (and reducing building prices) is one of the most effective ways to build up your dungeon walls later in the game, helping you progress further.

• Upgrading the Bank and Statue buildings should be your top priority, along with maxing the Bank and Builder skills of your characters.

• The Statue also generates gold, but it scales off the number of achievements you have, so until you have a lot of those, it's main purpose is boosting the income of your bank after you research the "Guild Bank" upgrade (which gives 1% bonus bank income per statue level).

• The most efficient combination of bank/statue levels to get the most gold income per gold spent upgrading is approximately 2 bank levels per statue level.
**TLDR: 2 Bank 1 Statue**

#### Money-related skills

1. Bank (Wraith): as mentioned above (+175% income at lvl 85)
2. Builder (Ogre, Orc): reduces cost of upgrading buildings (-75% at lvl 73)
3. Accountant (Slime): reduces salary paid to mercenaries (-whatever% because mercenary salaries are a drop in the bucket)
4. Bounty Hunter (Skeleton, Living Sword): Increases gold gained from battle (+500% at level 97)
5. Miner (Ogre, Orc): Reduces equipment mod and enchant costs. (-50% at lvl 24)

#### Money-related items

1. Ring MK-XX: +Damage/+Gold earned (+15%/+65% at lvl 10)
2. Necklace MK-XX: +Daily research points/+Gold earned (+75%/+60% at lvl 10)

```
Note that any items giving "+% gold earned" apply ONLY to gold from battle, bank/statue income is unaffected. As well, items giving gold stack multiplicatively with Bounty Hunter. So if you have 6x gold from BH, 1.6x gold from necklace and 1.2x gold from ring, this gives 11.52x battle gold, which can be quite a hefty amount later in the game.

```

#### Other money-related things

1. Nature Scenery (Nature Dungeon T1): Reduces dungeon building costs. (-40% at lvl 10)
2. Statue of Light (Light Dungeon T2): Increases statue income> (+100% at lvl 10)

Overall, try to max Bank and Builder ASAP.
Upgrading your wall can wait, because if you aren't taking damage during combat, all that money you spent upgrading the wall is essentially doing nothing in the meantime! Bounty hunter can give a nice boost to battle gold, but takes a very long time to upgrade to max (330 levels is a long way to go). [Bounty Hunter now maxes out at level 97]

### DOING TONS OF DAMAGE

In general, characters who do AoE damage (like Wraith or Slime) tend to do much more damage overall.
Ricocheting projectiles don't usually bounce more than a couple times, so their damage output is limited. Upgrading the multiple-shot abilities will quickly increase damage output, while skills like "power of the guardian" and "basic training" which give flat bonuses to damage are more useful as "dump skills" for when other damage-increasing abilities are maxed.

Ricocheting projectiles are, however, very effective at applying "on-hit" effects, like the "Suppress" skill (Ogre, Living Sword, Orc, Nameless) which gives a chance to slow enemies when damaging them. Ricocheting projectiles will apply less damage, but many more times, giving more chances for these effects to trigger.

The Snake however has most likely the highest damage of the starting characters due to her "assasinate" skill, which will lead to even more damage if its awakened because of the "the power of assasination" skill which grants a buff of up to 6000% damage. But keep in mind these skills won't show up on its tooltip dps on the team page.

## General Advice

•"Party" skills do not stack, so having two characters with the same party skill will not increase the effect. If there are two of the same, the one with the highest level will take effect.

•The +1 all skills necklace is extremely helpful. Fully upgraded, it will +3 all skills. This is useful for raising "Potential" to level 6, so you can more quickly level up a specific skill such as builder. You can also use it with the "blacksmith" skill to get a little, but permanent bonus to your weapon mods (+162% mod power vs. 150%).
•Getting the amulet of +3 all skills also makes the builder skill much more effective, reducing building costs by 78% vs. 75%. This multiplies the purchasing value of your gold by 4.54x, compared to 4x at 75% reduction.

WARNINGS

•Do not get the Ruby upgrade of starting weapon level; it will make your inherited weapons unusable by your mercenaries until they reach a high enough level. This can make the leap from one difficulty to the next that much more difficult. (Not true? You begin each run with only one mercenary, and items being level 1 **severely** lowers your DPS on day 1. If you upgrade your hero starting level via rebirth store, and upgrade weapon starting level enough, it doesn't matter that your mercenary cannot use the weapons, as your hero will do much, much more damage than both characters combined with a level 1 weapon. This may only be true when reaching higher difficulties.)

•As of version 1.81, the hell store has a limited number of resets, and you will not get reimbursed for the IAP purchase of hell store features. (After running out of resets, you may now purchase additional resets starting at 2000 Rubies, increasing gradually for each Reset)

## **Clearkill's Tips and Tricks for Fun and Profit**

* Never buy rebirth stones, rubies, or hell stones. If you like the game enough, you'll eventually be earning millions of rebirth stones, tens of thousands of rubies, and hundreds of hell stones every reincarnation. At this point you'll feel like a right dumb-ass for having spent $50.00 on an amount of in-game currency that amounts to a fraction of what you're earning every reincarnation. PS: It sort of looks like hell stones are limited before you start earning them. They're not, the quests are repeatable.
* If you really want to drop cash, consider the rebirth XP improvement, fateful group talent, or unlocking all elemental seeds. These are all things that will actually benefit you long term. They're not really necessary though and you can succeed just fine without them.
* Your characters starting off don't matter too much, pick whatever makes you happy. That being said, it's very important to always carry both a builder in your party (-75% construction costs) and a bounty hunter in your party (+500% gold from battles). A scientist is nice as well (faster research speed). I'd recommend Orc for your builder. He also has negate attacks (-50% chance of attacks hitting at max) and Rampage (party skill, +damage from critical hits when enraged) and Vanguard when awakened (+dungeon health).
* If you really want party suggestions, a good starting party is Orc as leader (builder skill, party skills, carries late-game when awakened, sucks at higher difficulties though) Wraith (bank skill, decent AOE, damage sucks at higher days survived though) Mr. Death or Snake (carries early-game, Mr. D has some regen which can be nice) Slime (meh-damage, has scientist though) and Skeleton (bounty hunter, you can also use Living Sword for bounty hunter).
* Once you get the rapid research achievement you get a legendary necklace that improves your research speed and gold earned. Max upgrade that thing ASAP and stick it on your bounty hunter. There is also an epic ring you'll run into eventually that increases gold earned. Upgrade it ASAP. Once you have one or both of these on your bounty hunter you don't need to bother making banks and statues. My upgrade order (higher difficulties, results may vary) is first max laboratory, then max relaxation room, then training room, then expand walls with some auto-regen and living walls thrown in. The theory behind relaxation room before training room is you'll get more damage from leveling up faster and those benefits will start stacking up whereas training room is a flat damage boost you can get at any time.
* The best characters for damage are Sunstar and Mr. Blade, they hard carry. At some point switch your main character to one of these, they'll make starting off a new difficulty much easier than using a default character. Mr. Eye is extremely good at late-game damage when the waves start getting tough, and he's also a scientist. My party is always Sunstar, Mr. Blade (for damage) Mr. Eye (damage/scientist) Orc (builder/party skills) and Skeleton (bounty hunter).
* The spirit characters are very underwhelming. They have an ability that greatly increases their damage multiplied by the number of spirits in the party. This means their damage is balanced around having a party full of spirits. With just one or two they're trash. Ms. Love (hell stone character) is also hot garbage, and she doesn't have any party skills that salvage her.
* Enhance your equipment every day. Aside from level ups it's what makes your characters more powerful.
* Mod your equipment to increase your attack speed, reload speed, and ammo. You can experiment around with it, but the theory is you want your characters special skills (which deal waaay more damage than their default attacks) proccing as much as possible.
* Set a preferred skill for your NPCs (and later yourself when you get the upgrade). This is very important for your builder, scientist and bounty hunter.
* The rebirth stones you get rewarded with when you reincarnate doesn't increase linearly. The more days your dungeon survives the more rebirth stones you'll get per extra day survived. It also increases your ruby reward from endless waves.
* Legendary weapons deal more damage than their same level epic counterparts. Epic weapons are much cheaper to mod though. At some point you'll get enough rubies to unlock carrying weapons over when you reincarnate (they start at level one, but you can also upgrade this). When you get this unlock is a good time to bite the bullet and get and mod legendary weapons (or you can do it every game, power to you).
* See also

* Dungeon Defense

•Touch Arcade Forums: Dungeon Defense