Farming 101 - What to farm, when to farm, how to farm

This guide will be about farming (running stages over and over for experience, silver, artifacts, or whatever). Specifically I’ll cover the different places to farm, why/when you should be farming them, and how to farm most effectively.

Farming (also called grinding) is the core of Raid, at all times you will be farming for SOMETHING; that might be for exp to level up your team, or to level up champions you intend to sacrifice to rank up others (commonly called “food” champions), or for silver, or for gear, or for scrolls. At the end of the day, you’re doing what you’re doing because you want something. But different time requirements, difficulty, energy costs, means that different places are more or less efficient at certain tasks.

A Note on the use of Auto

Farming is virtually always done on auto. If you can beat a stage, but can’t beat it with your champions on auto, it really isn’t a viable farming stage. Auto will go faster and save you time and effort. So anytime I state to farm at the maximum stage you can beat, I mean that you can beat on auto.

Campaign

Campaign is where you’ll spend most of your early levels. Each chapter consists of 7 stages. Each of the first 6 stages will drop one piece of gear, and level 7, the boss stage, can drop any of the 6 pieces dropped in the other stages. Stage 1 drops the weapon, stage 2 drops the helmet, stage 3 shield, stage 4 gloves, stage 5 chest, and stage 6 boots.

Stages 1-6 drop only common and uncommon gear, stage 7 has a chance at dropping rare.

Each chapter drops a different set. These drops are, in order from chapter 1 to 12: life, offense, defense, crit, accuracy, speed, resist, lifesteal, destroy, retaliation, fury, and curing.

Energy costs for stage 1-6 are 4 on normal, 6 on hard, and 8 on brutal. Energy costs for stage 7 are 5 on normal, 7 on hard, and 9 on brutal.

Campaign is the best source of exp and is where you should be levelling your champions, or levelling your food. If all of your champions are not max level, just push as far as you can in the campaign, and once you hit the highest level you can beat, just run it until you’re max level.

If you’re levelling food you will need a farming champion. This is a champion who can effectively solo the level you’re farming. The idea is you will send this champion with 3 food champions, who will usually die in the first round, and then the farming champion will solo the rest of the stage.

The best farming champions are those with AoE. You want to be able to kill each stage as quickly as possible, to decrease your farming time. This can be either a champion with an AoE primary attack (such as Sinesha, Skullcrown, Saurus - although he may be difficult to gear sufficiently, etc), or someone who has multiple AoE abilities. Counterattack champions are also effective, as they can retaliate against every hit, and ideally, kill each enemy that way. This is the main use of Executioner. Another option are champions who gain extra turns on kills, like Relickeeper. These champions MUST be capable of killing every enemy in one-hit to properly farm, however, so there is a large gearing requirement. If you lack any of those, properly geared in lifesteal, most of the starting champions make at least competent farming champions.

If you are capable of one-shotting the entire stage on every wave of enemies, just build for attack (or whatever your main stat is) and crit/crit damage and try and do as much damage as possible. If you can’t quite do that and the enemies get a turn to hit you, you may need to equip your farming champion with lifesteal to survive.

Farming food champions should be done on the highest difficulty your farming champion is capable of soloing.

Raising food should always be done with 3 food champions, as exp is split equally. Assuming your farming champion is max level, that means any exp going to them is wasted. So with 2 champions, that means 50% goes to the farming champion is wasted, but with 4, only 25% is wasted.

In each chapter there are two potential targets for farming exp and/or silver: the 6th stage will always give the highest exp (more than the boss stage, which also has a higher energy requirement, and so most people do not run it). However, the 3rd stage only gives slightly less, in most situations, but drops shields, which sell more than other pieces of gear. If you’re light on silver, consider farming stage 3 of the chapter you’re on and selling the shields, rather than the 6th stage.

You will also be running campaign for gear. The reason to run campaign for gear is that you can target the exact pieces you need, making it easier to equip your champions.

People often think it makes more sense to farm dungeons for gear than campaign, because dungeons drop epic pieces, and why use a common when you could use an epic?

The reason comes down to energy efficiency and progress.

Unless you get a 5-star epic piece, you will eventually replace that piece. So the piece you replace doesn’t matter if it’s a 3-star common or a 3-star epic: it will get swapped out. So any energy you spent to get that piece is “technically” wasted. This is unavoidable to some degree, obviously you can’t START with 5-star epic gear. So minimizing the “waste” is the most efficient way. Farming gear in campaign, takes a fraction of the energy. You should be equipped in 5-star campaign gear before attempting to seriously farm dungeons for gear. This will allow you to press further in dungeons and get better, more permanent drops.

Think of the odds:

In brutal campaign, you can select which piece will drop. So you know you won’t get gear you don’t need. It takes 8 energy per run. To get even a TINY chance chance of 5 star gear you need to be capable of running at least stage 7 of a dungeon, at 10 energy. But realistically, stage 7 will mostly drop 3 and 4 star gear, more than 5 star. You need to farm at least stage 10 to ensure that no more 3 stars drop, and now it’s 12 energy each.

Each run has a chance of dropping any of 6 pieces of 9 sets. So getting the piece you want has a 1/54 chance of dropping (and that isn’t counting when the dungeon drops green shards, or XP brews instead of gear), then that gear has to be the right star count, and then it has to be the right main stat for gloves, chest, and boots (1/8 chance for the gloves and chest, 1/7 for the boots), and all of that adds up to a TINY chance of getting the piece you need.

Now, it’s not quite that inefficient since even if you don’t get the piece you want for champion X, you might get a piece that would be good for champion Y, but meanwhile, champion X has no boots, or chest, or whatever.

You can gear more quickly, and more efficiently, by targetting the pieces you need and farming til it drops with the right main stat, and some decent substats. You’ll have to level it up a bit to see them, but you’ll get enough that it won’t be an issue.

It won’t be as effective as epic gear, but you’ll be probably 85-90% as strong, in much less time. Then you can use that gear to push to better farming stages in dungeons, down around floor 13+ and get better chances at proper, 5* epic gear.

In addition, on dungeons you can’t really farm food champions, you want to farm the highest level you can beat. But farming campaign, you can level food at the same time as you look for gear, doubling your efficiency!

Campaign is typically beatable just by raising rank and levelling your gear a bit, there aren’t bosses that truly require specific strategies so I won’t be addressing those here, but if you’re struggling in a specific stage, feel free to post a question in the comments or PM on the discord (Bade) and I’ll try and help you out!

Dungeons

Dungeons are where you find ascension potions, mastery scrolls, and the best gear raid has to offer. Dungeon bosses are much stronger than campaign bosses and often require specific strategies to defeat. Knowing what the bosses can do is vital to beating them.

With the exception of spider, each dungeon involves facing two waves of minions before fighting the boss. I won’t be covering strategies for the minions. If you can’t easily clear them out, you’re probably not strong enough for that floor of the dungeon yet!

One broad note: most buffs and debuffs are useful against most bosses. Defense down increases your damage, speed debuffs slow the boss down and let you get more damage in, counter-attack buffs will let you counter every time the boss attacks (since they all only have AoE attacks), I won’t be specifically noting these things unless they are notably or exceptionally effective or essential to defeating that boss, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t good.

Potion Dungeons

Potions are used for ascension of your champions. Ascension gives a very small boost to your base stats. Some champions have abilities that are either improved, or unlocked, at 3 stars of ascension. Additionally, amulets can only be equipped after stage 5 of ascension, and banners after stage 6 of ascension. Stage 6 of ascension also often increases stats that don’t normally get increased by level or ascension, like accuracy, resistance, crit damage, etc.

Since ascension is such a small boost, it should only be done to get a champion’s skill improved, or to unlock an equipment slot. In other words, get a champion to 3-star if they have an ability that is improved or unlocked, then don’t ascend them again until you can ascend them to 5-star. 4-star ascension is largely a waste of energy and time due to how small the increase is.

Other than arcane, each potion dungeon is available on certain days of the week, with magic, spirit and force rotating every day, and void only available on sunday. All potion dungeons are available for the first 7 days of playing, but after that will go to the rotating schedule. In potion dungeons, every enemy and the boss will be the affinity of that dungeon. The arcane boss is void affinity and the minions leading up to him are a mixture of affinities.

Each dungeon drops lesser potions only from stages 1-3, which costs 6 energy, lesser and greater potions from stage 4-7, which costs 8 energy, and lesser, greater and superior potions from stage 8-15, which costs 10 energy from stage 8-11, and 12 energy from stage 12-15.

Higher stages increase your chances of dropping better potions, so don’t think that because a superior potion drops on stage 8, you should just farm there! But if you don’t need superior, feel free to farm lower level stages to save energy.

Arcane Keep

The Arcane dungeon is available every day and drops arcane potions, which every champion uses to ascend.

The boss of the arcane keep has two abilities:

His primary attack is Wind Slash. It is an AoE attack that deals 50% (increasing to 75% on stage 7) more damage to targets that do not have a buff.

His secondary ability is Last Stand, a self-buff that increases his defense by 60%, and his speed by 30%. This ability has a 4 turn cooldown.

He has two minions with him. The right minion will attempt to remove all buffs from your party to strengthen the bosses’ wind slash, while the left minion will use an AoE defense down on your party to further increase the damage.

The minions should always die first. The arcane boss is not very hard, but if you have all buffs stripped and are hit with defense down, he will hit you surprisingly hard.

Once they’re down the fight is straightforward. As long as you bring someone who can keep a buff up, his damage is not significant. It’s not necessary, but it may also increase your farming speed to have someone who can remove his defense buff, as he will then die faster.

Spirit Keep

The spirit keep drops ascension potions for spirit type champions. It’s available on Monday and Thursday.

The boss of the spirit dungeon is infamous for her regeneration. She has two abilities and a passive.

Her primary attack is Melt, it deals increased damage the more HP she has.

Her secondary ability is Cleansing Spring, it removes all debuffs from the boss and places a Block Debuffs buff on the boss for 2-turns. It has a 6 turn cooldown.

Her passive is what defines her. Every round she will heal for 20% of her max hp (increasing to 50% at stage 7), this will not only make her hard to take down, but will also increase the damage of her primary attack.

She has two minions: the right minion will place a decrease accuracy buff on your team, to try and prevent you from placing a healing reduction debuff on her, and the left minion will try and stun your champions.

The right minion should go down first, to make sure you can place your buff, but don’t bother placing your debuff until her debuff block is gone. If you can strip this buff, it will speed up your farming. For stages 1-6, you can usually outdamage her healing and no strategy is necessary, despite the healing, she’s fairly fragile. But once her healing increases to 50%, it becomes increasingly necessary the farther you go to have a champion that can apply a heal reduction debuff, ideally 100%. If you lack anyone who can do so, Rocktooth (farmable from chapter 5) is a good choice, as he has a 100% chance to apply a 100% heal reduction, and is magic affinity, which has a superiority over spirit.

If you can get the buff to apply, the boss is very easy, as she can’t heal, and her primary attack will deal less damage. Speed down and turn meter reduction are also effective, she can’t heal if she can’t get a turn!

Force Keep

Drops ascension potions for force champions. It’s available on Tuesday and Friday.

The boss of the force keep is a brick wall of defense. He has 2 abilities and a passive.

His primary ability is Smite, an AoE attack with a 60% chance to apply attack down to your team, which cannot be resisted if applied.

His secondary ability is Quake, an AoE attack with a 50% chance to stun your party, the stun cannot be resisted. This ability has a 4 turn cooldown.

His passive, Force Armor, increases his defense to 1500 (increasing to 4000 at stage 7).

He has two minions, the right minion will cast a defense buff on the boss. The left minion will use a heal reduction on your team.

For the most part this boss is very straightforward. His damage isn’t all that high. His main challenge is how slow it can be to kill him. He has thousands of defense, and his minion can increase it even more. Killing the right minion before it can use that buff is essential to quick farming. Bring a champion with defense down or one who can ignore defenses, and he’ll go down quickly. Bringing a champion who can remove his attack down debuff will also increase your farming speed.

Magic Keep

The magic keep drops ascension potions for magic champions. It’s available on Wednesday and Saturday.

The boss of the magic keep specializes in self-buffs and shields. She has two actives and two passives.

Her first active is Mow, an AoE attack. It has a 20% chance to decrease each target’s turn meter by 50%.

Her second active is Magic Shield, she shields herself for an amount proportional to her max hp (the game isn’t specific, but it looks to be roughly equal to 50% of her max hp from stage 1-6 and equal to her max hp from 7-15, equal to her shield from Defense Up) and buffs her attack by 50%, OR defense by 60%, OR speed by 30% (after stage 7, she applies all of these buffs, not just one). This ability has a 3 turn cooldown.

Her first passive is Leyline, it increases her damage by 25% for every buff she has active. If she has magic shield up, that’s a 100% increase to her damage, on top of the attack up she gets from the buff itself.

Her second passive is Defense Up and it grants her a shield proportional (again, the game is non-specific, but it looks to be around 50% of her HP on stage 1-6, and it changes to being equal to her max hp on 7-15) to her maximum hp at the start of the fight. This will only trigger at the beginningof the fight.

She has two minions, the right minion removes and debuffs and places a block debuff buff on the boss. The left minion places an AoE defense down on your team. The right minion should go down quickly, so you can remove or block her buffs.

Much like the spirit keep boss, this boss can get hard if you can’t stop her from shielding or do enough damage to break the shield. In early stages, you can usually do enough damage to take down her shield and kill her, and simply heal through her damage, but this becomes less feasible the farther you go in the dungeon.

There are three main ways to deal with her:

1. apply a block buffs debuff before she can apply magic shield. This strategy means that the right minion MUST go down before you apply the debuff, or it will be removed or blocked by his block debuffs buff. (The block buffs debuff is blocked by the block debuffs buff. Say that five times fast.)
2. Buff removal. Bring someone who can remove or even lower the duration of buffs and try and remove them. Each one you remove will lower her damage and make her easier to kill.
3. Steal buffs. You can also steal her buffs. Stealing her shield is hilarious, leaving you with a champion with a shield of hundreds of thousands of hp at high levels.

Champions that can ignore shields are relatively rare, and most can only do it on long cooldowns, so are generally not overwhelmingly effective, but they won’t hurt either.

Void Keep

Drops ascension potions for void champions. It’s only available on Sunday.

The boss of the void keep specializes in dealing poison damage. He has two active abilities.

His primary ability is Grim Reaper and it damages your whole team and applies 2 stacks of 5% poison to your whole team. These poisons cannot be resisted.

His secondary ability is Bane and deals all damage from all poison buffs instantly. It has a 5 turn cooldown.

He has two minions, the right minion places a weaken buff on your whole team (which increases poison damage), and the left minion removes your buffs and places a block buff debuff on your whole team. If using a block debuffs ability, kill the left minion first. If you’re just trying to kill the boss as fast as possible, kill the right minion first, or just go straight for the boss.

There are two ways to beat the void dungeon:

1. Kill the boss. The void boss is rather fragile compared to the other keeps, and can often be killed before his poison damage becomes a significant threat. If you can do it, this is the fastest option.
2. Block/remove debuffs. Use a champion that can place a block debuffs buff on your party. If you don’t have one, spirithost, the farmable rare from chapter 4, has one. This will make him unable to poison you and make him trivially easy to defeat.

Minotaur’s Labyrinth

The minotaur dungeon is where you will obtain mastery scrolls for your champions. Mastery scrolls are used to buy masteries, the exact details of which I will cover in a later guide.

Grinding for masteries is one of the longest grinds in the game. Even if you can auto-farm stage 15, it will take between 201 and 377 runs of minotaur to get full masteries for just a single champion. Since scrolls are divided randomly between parties members (one member is chosen after each run to receive the scrolls from that run) and scrolls cannot be transferred, this means it will take between 1005 and 1885 runs for a team of 5 to be fully mastered meaning 14070 to 26390 energy. Not to mention even if you can run it in 2 minutes (which would be fairly quick for minotaur 15), that represents 33.5 to 62.8 HOURS of non-stop grinding. Running mino 14 increases these numbers by about 20%, and it just gets worse from there. EDIT: As of the 1.7 patch, Minotaur drops twice as many red scrolls, significantly easing the grind. It’s still a very long one, however. For exact numbers, please refer to my Mastery Guide!

Feel free to get basic masteries on your champions. This is only 100 basic scrolls per champion and shouldn’t take that long, even at low levels. However, do not start grinding for divine masteries (red scrolls) until you can farm at LEAST minotaur 13.

The Minotaur himself is a fairly straight forward boss. He has two actives, and a passive.

His primary ability is Tremor Stomp a straightforward AoE attack that deals double damage to champions affected by the hex debuff.

His secondary ability is Swift Doom, an AoE attack that places a unique “hex” debuff on a target (increasing to 3 champions at stage 7) for 5 turns. Champions that are hexed take 200% damage from Tremor Stomp. this ability has a 2-turn cooldown.

His passive is Raging Bull. Minotaur will begin the fight with a “Rage” buff, this buff increases his damage by 400% for 3 turns.

Once the 3 turns are over, he will lose the buff and gain a debuff called “Dazed”, which increases damage he receives by 200% for 1 turn. Once this debuff expires, he will gain the rage debuff again and the cycle resumes.

He will always act in the same pattern: Swift Doom, tremor stomp, swift doom, tremor stomp, etc.

He has two minions, both simply attack and deal a fairly decent chunk of damage. They should die first.

The minotaur is, in MMO terms, a “gear check” boss. They are bosses that essentially just have a bunch of stats but have no tricks or anything particularly special, and exist just to see if you’re sufficiently powerful to pass them. If you can tank his damage and heal up, you can clear him, no problem.

Also, since you’re going to have to constantly change champions based on who you’re trying to get masteries for at that time, you can’t really have one fixed team like you can on other bosses. You will generally want 4 members and then cycle out the fifth for whoever you are training. Once the main 4 have all their masteries completed, they will no longer receive scrolls, so the 5th member will receive all of the scrolls dropped.

There are some things you can do to make the fight easier.

1. Have some sustain. Minotaur deals pretty considerable damage, a tremor stomp while he’s raging on a hexed target deals 800% damage. Having someone to heal up helps.
2. Slow him down. Particularly in his dazed state, the longer you can keep him there, the more damage you’ll do. Speed or turn meter decreasing abilities are useful.
3. Increase the damage he takes. Weaken and defense decrease debuffs will compound with his dazed debuff and if you can have all 3 happen at once, you can hit him for damage into the 6 figure range! This will speed up your clear time considerably.

Gear Dungeons

The remaining four dungeons: Ice Golem’s Peak, Dragon’s Lair, Fire Knight’s Castle, and Spider’s Den, are the places where gear drops. Ice Golem, Dragon and Fire Knight each have the same pattern for gear and energy:1-2 star gear at stage 1, 1-3 at stage 2, 2-3 at stage 3, 2-4 at stage 4, 3-4 at stages 5 and 6, 3-5 at stages 7-9, 4-6 at stage 10-15.

Note that at this point 6 star gear does not actually exist in the game, but will be added at some point.

Ice Golem’s Peak

Klyssus the Ice Golem drops the following sets: Life, Offense, Defense, Critical Rate, Resistance, Retaliation, Reflex, Cursed, and Taunting.

Klyssus himself has two actives and a passive.

His primary attack is Frost Nova which is simply an AoE damage attack.

His secondary attack is Numbing Chill which has a 4-turn cooldown and places a 50% decrease accuracy debuff on your party.

His passive is Frigid Vengeance. At certain points on his HP (75%, 50%, and 25% from stages 1-6, 80%, 60%, 45%, 30% and 15% from stages 7-15), he will trigger an attack called Frigid Vengeance. This attack will revive his minions if they are dead, and, importantly, ignore 50% of your defense for each minion that is alive. This means that if it is triggered and both minions are alive, it will entirely ignore your defense. This attack has a 20% chance of placing a freeze debuff on your characters, which increases by 40% for each minion alive. So if both are alive: 100% chance, though it can be resisted.

He has two minions. The right minion will place decrease defense debuffs on your whole team, the left will attack and deals moderate damage. The right minion should be focused down every time it is revived.

People often underestimate Klyssus; for a long time he is very easy, and people can ignore frigid vengeance and his minions, but towards stage 14 or 15 his difficulty increases dramatically. If a frigid vengeance is triggered when both minions are alive, this hit is devastatingly strong for most teams, and without VERY strong healing, you won’t be able to keep up if you just try and burn him down.

Some tips:

1. Always focus the right minion first. You don’t want the defense debuff, and the break you take killing him will let your healers catch up before you hit Ice Golem and trigger more frigid vengeance.
2. Be careful of team counter-attack buffs. They are amazing in almost every aspect of the game, but they can become a huge liability in Ice Golem. Frigid Vengeance will trigger a full round of counter-attacks. Which decreases his life. Which triggers frigid vengeance. Which triggers counter attacks. You can literally set off a never ending chain which only ends when he dies or you do. Great if you can tank it. Not great if you can’t.
3. Block revive. A rare ability, but great if you have it. Preventing the minions from coming back to life saves you a TON of time and takes the bite out of frigid vengeance! Some people use a Conqueror (farmable on chapter 1) just for this reason.

Dragon’s Lair

Dragon’s Lair is the home of Hellrazor, the Dragon, who drops Accuracy, Speed, Lifesteal, Destroy, Toxic, Frost, Daze, Avenging, and Stalwart sets.

Hellrazor has 3 active abilities and 1 hidden ability.

His primary ability is Swipe, which deals AoE damage and places a 50% decrease attack buff on the party.

His secondary ability is Wall of Fire, which has a 3 turn cooldown. It deals AoE damage and places two 5% poison debuffs as well as a 25% weaken debuff on the party.

His last ability is Inhale, which activates his hidden ability and has a 3 turn cooldown.

His hidden ability is Scorch. When Inhale is triggered, Hellrazor will draw back to prepare for his attack. First, everyone will have their turn meters set to 50%, both the boss and your champions (this effect only occurs after stage 7). This means that generally, everyone will get 1 attack before the attack triggers. A portion of his health bar will turn purple. If you can do enough damage to remove the purple portion of his health bar, his attack will be cancelled. If you don’t, he will fire off his Scorch attack which is a very strong AoE attack that ignores defense and will place an irresistable stun debuff on your entire party.

It doesn’t say this anywhere, but Hellrazor is immune to decrease speed debuffs and turn meter reductions.

Beating Hellrazor is a damage race. If you can deplete his scorch bar, you should have no issues, if you don’t, then you will need considerable healing to make up for it.

Tips:

1. Champions with moves that are based on enemy max hp are notably effective. A properly geared coldheart can sometimes wipe out his entire scorch bar on her own.
2. Boosting your damage is very effective as well, use weaken and defense down debuffs on the first round before he does scorch, so that you can do more damage when he uses it.
3. if your team isn’t very high damage, but is very tanky, and has a healer, you can sometimes just tank scorch. As long as you can compensate for the stun and have enough resistance that the weaken and poison from wall of fire don’t apply to you very often, you can sometimes struggle through, but it’s not an optimal strategy. Note that you need high HP for this, not just defense, since scorch ignores defense.

Fire Knight’s Castle

Fire Knight’s Castle is the home of Fyro, the Fire Knight. He drops Fury, Curing, Immunity, Shield, Crit Damage, Frenzy, Regeneration, Stun and Savage sets.

Fyro is one of the most specialized bosses. If you don’t have the right team, you’ll be stuck on him, and you won’t be able to beat him until you make a team just for him.

Fyro has two active abilities and a passive.

His primary ability is Searing Storm, an AoE attack. (Also decreases your max HP by 15% of the damage done after stage 7).

His secondary ability is Dazzling Flames, an AoE attack that places a 30% decrease speed debuff on all of your champions.

His passive, and the defining aspect of Fyro, is Cloak of Fire. At the start of battle and at the start of every round, he will raise his shield. This shield decreases damage done to Fyro by 80%, blocks any debuffs that are applied, and it cannot be removed by any skill that removes buffs. The only way to remove the shield is to hit it the required number of times. You must hit the shield 5 times from Stage 1-6, and 10 times from stage 7-15 to break it.

If Fyro begins a round with his shield unbroken, he will make a bonus attack that also decreases your max hp. He will also heal each round based on his shield’s strength at the start of the round.

If you don’t break Fyro’s shield, he is essentially invincible. Unless you are enormous stronger than that stage, you simply won’t do enough damage, he’ll heal back up, and hit you extra hard.

For stage 1-6, breaking the shield is trivial. It takes 5 hits, you have 5 champions. For stage 7-15, this becomes harder.

It’s important to note that the shield counts “hits” not “attacks”. A champion like Athel hits 3 times with her primary attack. A champion like Kael only hits once. Build a team of people with multiple hit primary attacks and you should be able to get the shield down.

Tips:

1. Multi-hit, as I said above, is mandatory. You won’t be able to do anything without breaking that shield.
2. Counter-attack. He hits everyone at the start of his turn, and a counter-attack is just free extra hits on his shield. Team counter-attacks are even better, but even just placing a single counter-attack buff on a multi-hit attacker will start the round off with an advantage! Jizoh, who you get for free, has a buff he can place that can do this.
3. Speed and Turn Meter decreases. It’s important to note that while he’s immune to debuffs while his shield is up, this is not the case when it’s down. Once his shield is down, try to lower his speed, or decrease his turn meter, to keep him in that vulnerable state longer. Also, he’s immune to new debuffs, but he doesn’t remove existing ones each turn, so a decrease speed debuff will also give you more time to bring down the shield on his next round.
4. Speed. You want your champions to be as fast as possible. Getting a single attack off each round will simply not cut it. You want to be getting at least two attacks to his 1, he’s not that fast, so this shouldn’t be that difficult.
5. Reflect Damage. Every tick of reflect damage counts as “an attack”, so just like counter-attack, if you have a team-wide reflect damage buff up, when he uses his AoE, he’ll receive 5 hits in retaliation. Not quite as good as Counter-attack, but a bit easier buff to get!

Spider’s Den

Spider’s Den is home to Skavag, the Spider, and works very differently from most of the other dungeons. First up, there are no minions before facing Skavag. You will begin fighting her.

Second is her gear. She drops accessories. 1-2 star rings on Stage 1, 1-3 star on stage 2, 2-3 on stage 3, 2-4 star rings and amulets on stage 4, 3-4 on stage 5 and 6, 3-5 on stage 7, 3-5 star rings, amulets and banners on stage 8 and 9, and 4-6 star on stage 10-15. Accessories can technically be gotten from campaign, specifically from stage 12-7 in each of the chapters, with normal dropping rings, hard dropping amulets, and brutal dropping banners. These are only 1-3 stars and common or uncommon, even on brutal. So you would think that would make spider better? Wrong. Skavag isn’t like the other dungeons that only drop rare and epic, she can also drop uncommon accessories. But, from stage 12 onward, she will only drop rare and epic. If you’re going to run spider to get your accessories slots filled, that’s fine, but I would only seriously farm her if you can do stage 12, to save wasting a ton of time on a very difficult boss.

Skavag has two actives and two passives.

Her primary attack is Venom Spray, an AoE attack that increases damage by 15% if the target is poisoned.

Her secondary attack is Enfeeble, an AoE attack that has a 70% chance of decreasing turn meter by 30%, and after stage 7, will put the target to sleep if the turn meter is fully depleted by the attack.

Her second passive (discussed first because it’s short) is Healing Assured, she is immune to healing reduction debuffs.

Her first passive is Spiderling Horde, and is the definitive part of the fight.

At the start of every champion’s turn, she will summon two spiderlings. At beginning of the battle and at the end of each of her turns after that, she will summon 4 spiderlings, to a maximum of 10 spiderlings at once on screen. These spiderlings are relatively fragile (though at high levels have decent amounts of HP) but hit fairly hard (especially when there are 10 of them) and can apply a 5% poison on their attacks, which add up VERY quickly.

At the start of her turn, she will consume every living spiderling, healing for 3% of her max hp for every one she consumes and permanently increasing her attack by 10% for each that she consumes. If she consumes spiderlings on one round, she will not consume on the next. Life Steal and spells that heal based on damage done will only be 35% as effective against both Skavag and her Spiderlings.

Spiderling management is crucial to winning the fight. If you ignore them, you had better be able to kill her EXTREMELY fast, or you will lose badly. This is doable (indeed some very high end players focus on enemy max hp hits and just kill her in a few hits), but requires a very high level of gear on very strong champions and is not really a generally available strategy to most players.

Tips:

1. AoE champions. You will likely need at LEAST two with a primary AoE attack, geared so that they can kill all the spiderlings in one attack. Some champions that can do this include Saurus (lizardman uncommon), Sister Militant (Sacred Order, common), Sinesha (Knights Revenant, Epic), Skullcrown (Knights Revenant, Epic), Psylar (Dark Elves, Epic), and many more. The more spammable their AoE, the better it is.
2. Speed control: minimize how many turns she gets to cut back on her healing. Turn meter reduction is very effective.
3. Watch cooldown on Consume. Know when she will consume. Sometimes it’s best to actually let her eat one or two spiderlings just to put the ability on cooldown, particularly if your champions aren’t quite strong enough to clear all the spiderlings every round.
4. Attacks that scale on enemy max hp: Skavag has the highest HP out of any dungeon boss and skills the scale against enemy max hp will hit her VERY hard. Take a champion with them, give them a ton of crit damage and crit rate, and watch the big numbers light up. Coldheart (dark elf rare), Husk (undead hordes, epic), Royal Guard (high elves, epic) are all good examples.

Important Note: I’ve seen a very common misconception that champions that get an extra turn upon killing a unit will be good on spider. People like Hordin or Relickeeper. This is the exact opposite of the case. The extra turn they get following the kill is still a turn; meaning she will summon two more spiderlings again. So each time they will kill a spiderling, get a turn, which will cause 2 more spiderlings to spawn. In other words, they will literally just fill your screen with spiderlings as they spawn more than they kill!

What should I be farming?

This is a very common question in raid, there’s a ton of stuff to focus on! Do you farm for better champs, more silver, more levels, better gear?

I’ll do my best to break this down.

At the beginning of the game, you should be entirely focused on campaign. Grind your best champions to max level, then grind food up to sacrifice them to your best champions to raise your rank, and level them up again.

Rank ups are the single biggest increase to your stats in the game, and should always be your priority, particularly early when you have basically permanent double xp for a good week or two.

At this early stage dungeons should only be done to complete progress missions and challenges for rewards, and then left alone. Ascensions can be done to get level 3, but no farther, and minotaur can be done to get your tier 1 masteries.

Until you’ve cleared normal campaign at the VERY least, you should barely know what the inside of a dungeon looks like.

Once you move into the mid-game and are starting to get some stronger champions you can work more on refining your gear. Farm hard and brutal for the correct pieces, equip your champions properly, level up the gear to +12 or so. You should still be focusing on ranking up champions; by this point you should be aiming for 6-star champions and trying to 3-star hard and maybe even brutal.

As you progress and have 3-starred hard, probably 3-starred brutal and have at least 2-3 level 60 characters, geared with gear that has the proper stats and is levelled up, you can start making serious attempts dungeons. You should start with potion dungeons to get your people ascended, and some limited spider runs to try and get the accesories to fill those spots, but don’t go crazy if you can’t hit the banner dropping stages yet, you’re just looking for place holders. You can also work on the other dungeons to work on replacing your campaign gear with epic gear. Don’t replace a good campaign piece with a crappy epic piece just because it’s epic. A 5-star common crit damage glove is better than a 5-star epic flat hp glove.

Minotaur you should only work on once you can clear stage 14 or 15 in under 4 minutes (ideally under 3). This is the longest grind in the game, but also one of the best rewards: giant slayer. The giant slayer mastery not only massively boosts your damage against Clan Boss, but also helps a huge amount in other dungeons as well. You’ll do a ton of extra damage against Skavag, the giant slayer procs count as an extra hit, so Fyro’s shield will go down faster. I’ll be covering more on masteries in a later guide.

If you are trying to farm silver and only silver, dungeons are your best bet. Run dragon and sell any artifact you get that isn’t good, the artifacts will often sell for over 30k each. You can sell an artifact from the victory screen by clicking the artifact and hitting sell.

People have asked if you can farm blue shards. The answer is technically yes, but practically no. Blue shards can drop from Ice Golem, Dragon, Fire Knight and Spider, but they have a very low chance to drop. Likely under 1%. They’re more of something that you can get as a side effect of grinding, not something you set out for.