What I found to be one of the best team comps is the Knight, Barbarian, Fire Mage, and Lady. To break down the thought process behind this, and our goals while building up this team, we’ll take a quick look at what they should look like going into Chaos Castle.
For the fire mage we’re going to upgrade fireball, burning hands, and attack. Try to grab any magic damage increase items to put on him as you go through.
Moving onto the knight we’ll want to get protection upgraded early on and follow me upgraded after. I wouldn’t really worry about putting items on him and we’re only going to upgrade his attack after both the fire mage and barbarian have had their attacks maxed.
For the Barbarian we’ll prioritize getting throw axe maxed and his attack maxed first, and double attack maxed after. Item wise you want to give him any equipment that adds to attack cards with body damage. For fun, you can also give him the lightning orb if you go through the dragon area as it’ll trigger for both attacks on a double attack.
Then for the Lady we don’t really care about upgrading her attacks, but we’ll want to upgrade sacrifice immediately. Then divine shield and attract we’ll want in the mid to late game. As for the equipment we want to give her, any steel boots to add armor on movement, adding armor in general, and green amulets are essential. We want her to be moving beside enemies and gaining armor, so that she can tank damage, and heal the party with sacrifice.
I’ll show the runes I got while going through my run, so you have an idea on those. They aren’t really required, but these are some of the best ones to get for this team comp. Having one enemy attack another prior to the battle can be huge late game, doubling the healing from combat cards is huge, having a hero gain an extra action at the start of combat is practically required in chaos castle, and the plus 5 to each armor for all heroes helps make them all much tankier.
For combat cards you basically want to stock up on healing potions and potions of heroism. I got super unlucky and didn’t actually get to buy any potions of heroism, but this team comp is so good that I still had no trouble getting through chaos castle.
Our main strategy going through each fight is going to be to use secondary actions of all characters at first, before ending the first turn. Knight will protect the lady to add armor to her, the lady will put divine shield on a character that is most in danger of being hit other than herself, and the barbarian and fire mage will use secondary attacks to clean up extra enemies that may pose a threat to our goal of using the enemies' attacks on the lady to farm health for the rest of the group.
Then to use an actual action we’ll generally start it off by moving the lady to a position where enemies will attack her, but occasionally she’ll already be in that position and it’s better to use an attack to finish another more dangerous enemy off. Then continue to pay attention to turn order and enemy abilities to make sure none of the characters other than the lady will take hits and get it down to one or two enemies left. Then once in farming mode you can just use the move and stand card to give her more armor each turn and let her tank hits while healing the party. This is the gameplay loop we’ll be using pretty much up until chaos castle.
Alright, now getting into the first area of the run. Of course, the first two abilities we want to work on, and honestly max, are sacrifice for the lady and protect for the knight. Upgrade the barbarian and fire mage’s attacks first before putting points in either of the other two’s attacks.
Any time you have a choice between taking an equipment card and a combat card you basically always want to choose equipment. These are going to snowball your run along with your abilities much more than the combat cards can.
When you get a choice to fight weaker enemies you want to take it, and for the most part any time you get to upgrade something from a fight you’ll want to take those as well.
In fights early on you’re not going to have as much damage to throw around, but we do have the lady there to tank most of the damage for us. Just pay attention to the attack patterns of enemies and check their targeting card if you need to so you can plan a few turns ahead. You want to keep anyone from being damaged more than their armor but try to leave at least one enemy to keep alive each combat to farm some health.
Once sacrifice is maxed for the lady and we have a point or two in protect with the knight, we’ll want to at least get one point in throw axe for the barbarian and fireball and flaming hands with the fire mage. Since these are all secondary actions, they can essentially do all of them for free before we have to use a real action and give the enemy a turn. Plus, the attacks all scale their damage with the equipment we’ll be giving them.
For the second area we’ll try to go to the mushroom kingdom. That has a lot of smaller enemies that we can use to farm more health for everyone and plenty of free upgrades from the encounter cards.
If you have to have a character wander off, you’ll want it to be the barbarian so he can throwing axe kill one enemy, and then attack the other. You’ll generally get through it for free and get an attack upgrade that way.
On the large ambushes on this map, you’ll be fine taking them. Once the first enemy attacks just pay attention to positioning and use your free secondary action attacks from the fire mage and barbarian to clean up any enemies that wouldn’t be going for the lady, and farm as much health off the encounters as you can.
I’m going to choose goblin caves next as it’s another great one to farm healing off of. There are a lot of smaller enemies, and the encounters aren’t that tough so just keep employing the strategy and get through these fights.
For any of the encounters that result in a party member disappearing for a turn or two I honestly didn’t care that much. Generally, it won’t result in anything too bad happening, but definitely avoid any large amounts of damage, hero deaths, or having them disappear for some amount of turns like 4 or more. Even 3 is pushing it.
I’ll have an example fight playing here where you can see how these early fights grinding health should generally go.
Now moving on from there you may think that the tower of mirrors would be easier than the labyrinth, but I actually find the labyrinth easier with this build. Especially if you’ve already put a point or two in divine shield for the lady.
For the encounters where you’ll either end up fighting two or three enemies I’d recommend trying not to take on the three enemies unless you’re very confident with the amount of damage and upgrades you have on your team. Two enemies here you can easily manage, but three will take a lot more thought since these enemies are bigger and tougher.
I’ll show an example here of one of these 4 enemy fights in this area to show the general strategy in action here as well as how to effectively take care of it without taking much, if any, real damage.
Then moving onto the next area we’ll go to the city. It’s not too tough especially with this build, and you can get a lot of money as long as you have a few dice stocked up.
Again, you’ll want to be taking most fights to farm health and upgrades to get as much health as possible onto your party. By this point you should have the machine running and with a little bit of thought throughout the fights you can get through them without taking damage, or just a bit in tougher fights like the boss fights.
Next up I went to the dragon valley. It’s not necessarily the easiest, but it isn’t too hard either. The big dragon fight to transform a hero into a dragon you probably don’t want to do on this run so I would skip that fight.
The dragon cultists aren’t too hard so definitely take those fights and get some easy upgrades.
If you have the key to the dragon vault, you’ll want to probably choose the magic amulet to greatly boost the damage the fire mage does. Ideally you won’t have any heroes dying so the amulet of immortality would be a dead card for you anyway.
As long as you’ve gotten a good amount of health farmed, I would highly recommend taking on the lightning dragon to get that piece of equipment to do electric attacks after you use your weapon. That’s a crazy amount of damage you can add to the barbarian.
While going through these last areas you’ll want to take a point in a couple of less important abilities like kick, counterattack, attract, etc. as there’s a point coming up in chaos castle where you lose an ability.
Now when it’s finally time to move onto the Chaos Castle you’ll take your last upgrade for the game and ideally, you’ll have your lady alive with 30 or 40 health, and the rest of your party will be around 100 health. If you’re anywhere close to that you’re going to breeze through this area.
The first fight will be at the entrance of the castle. You don’t want the trident guys to get a turn, but honestly you can probably get through this fight without them getting a turn.
Don’t sacrifice your heroes if you had an okay run. You only want to do that if you’re just barely alive and there’s no way you can beat the rest of the fights.
The bridge will be a slightly harder fight, but you have some predictable enemy attacks here to make it easier to plan out. Remember to use your bonus actions before ending your turn to mitigate the damage the enemies may be able to do. As you can see here, I manage to get through this fight while only taking a small amount of damage.
Then we have a mirror fight which you’ll mainly want to take out the barbarian and fire mage first and make sure they don’t get turns. They both do a lot of damage, and we purposely leave the other two as more support characters for this very reason. If you can leave the lady and possibly the knight alive to farm more health with your lady, then go ahead and do that as well. It may not be that necessary, but I’d take any advantage I can get.
Going up to the summoning portal we have another big fight, but it shouldn’t be that tough. You’ll of course start out looking at the enemies' abilities and how they target. I fireball here to finish off one enemy and damage three others. Then I protect the lady, give the barbarian the divine shield, and move her up here. The enemy that attacks next attacks the closest enemy, so he’ll just hit her and heal one of our other heroes while also damaging one of the enemies and even killing it.
Then I send the barbarian to throw an axe and finish off the other staff enemy as we don’t want them controlling our people on their turn. We use the mage to finish off the enemy with an extra attack and let the other hit the Barbarian, so it negates all damage with the divine shield.
We have him go down to finish off the other one and end the round. Now that everyone has their moves again, we can have one of them finish the last enemy and we get through it without taking any real damage. That’s the power of this build.
We go through chaos lightning, one of our heroes attacks the others, and then we can finally fight the horsemen. You honestly deal enough damage with secondaries and can negate all of the damage from the melee one so you can do that, finish the magic one off, and then easily finish the other one. At this point you’re basically good to go as we only have the wizard left and he’s pretty easy compared to the rest of the castle fights.
He has 99 health, but we have a crazy amount of damage that we’ll do before turn 1 and we can use protection on the red mage, and divine shield on the barbarian. These are the two we need to keep alive to keep the damage coming so that’s how we’ll prioritize that. Of course, with the knight's command we can even get the barbarian to take an extra free attack so use that to your advantage. And finally after a few more hits you’ll have the wizard defeated.
