Trials of the Mighty have element and weapon restrictions, which I find pretty neat! It’s kinda nice to have a quest where Zena’s relevant again (due to the hitcount weakpoint), where I can finally use my maxed-out Su Fang and newly-pulled S.Norwin, and where Panther’s sleep res is relevant and handy for AI... but uh, Kamuy’s Trial limiting you to wind lances/staves/manacasters is definitely a far harsher restriction than the rest, haha.
You can tell team-building is constrained when Pia is seriously worth consideration...!
The latest Dragalia Lost update finally added in an Encyclopedia... as well as Battle Records tracking how many quests you’ve done with each element, each weapon, and each unit type. For the most part this is just for fun to see your preferences, but there are epithet rewards for reaching 500, 1000, and 3000 total quests for each... and as described in the news post introducing it, having multiple elements/weapons/unit types in one team only counts as +1 per clear.
In other words, there’s an actual reason (even if temporary) to make diverse teams...!
I figured that farming every single draconic essence during the 1/2-stamina + 2x drops anniversary event was a good opportunity to inflate my numbers and get the epithet early, which meant making balanced teams with four elements, four weapons, and all four unit types... but that’s a surprisingly hard mathematical optimization problem, so I mostly just didn’t try and winged it instead.
We could make 45 different teams to ensure that all the numbers are perfectly balanced, but frankly that takes up way too much space and would take waaaaay too long to set up, so for simplification purposes I’m just making five teams (in which each one ignores one element); that way every weapon should be used 2 or 3 times, and then the rest is naturally dealt with (all elements used 4 times, all unit types used 5 times).
First off, the main simplification: every single Healing unit type is a staff, except for Summer Amane who’s an axe, and so I chose to use S.Amane twice and then actual staff healers three times. (This constraint actually makes 45 perfectly-balanced teams impossible, by the way; you’d want 45 Healing units but would only have 20 axes and 20 staves to work with.)
After that, manacasters are obviously the weapon in lowest supply, and I only have two elements of ‘em (so Lapis and Ilia), so I made sure to include them both.
Then, the least common unit type is Defense; I arbitrarily picked one for each team, making sure to avoid axes and also not double up on elements.
For the sake of auto safety, I tried to get life shields on as many teams as possible... but without repeating adventurers that basically means having Grace, Peony, and Meene on three different teams.
Finally, with just under half the slots left, I just filled in with whatever Attack and Support units, still avoiding any other adventurer dupes. The teams are obviously sub-optimal (using a bunch of 4* level 70 units I never intended to use), but the final result led to a near-perfect weapon balance (only lances and staves have 3 copies instead of 2):
Protip: using a Skip Ticket still counts as a clear, so as long as you’ve cleared a Very Hard story quest once in the past (or preferrably after manual/autoing with the desired team, to save it in the Preferred Team) you can just skip it afterwards.
Analyzing Drops from Dragalia Lost Elemental Ruins Using Linear Regressions
(Alternate title: “I just learned how to use the lm function in R and wanted to test it”)
With the five new levels for the elemental altars, even endgame players need to farm a staggering amount of orbs to max them out, especially rainbow orbs... so as a F2P player wanting to optimize stamina I asked myself ‘how worthwhile is it to reset elemental ruins until I maximize gold bag drops?’
First things first, the data. Most of the data came from my reset runs where I specifically reset for one gold bag drop from the menace plus each of the four chests, but eventually I started doing no-reset just-log-whatever-happens runs for the sake of more data. It’s only 208 runs total but for a preliminary analysis it’s probably enough.
Even with that, though, there’s a wide variance in drops... Gold orbs and rainbow orbs aren’t guaranteed even with 5 gold bag drops, after all! Both of these were from reset-for-gold-bags runs:
Entering the csv into RStudio, we can use the lm function to run linear regressions based on variables of our choice. For example, estimating the rainbow orb payout under the assumption that each regular and gold bag from the menace and four chests are all independently relevant, we get:
This significance... is not very good, and in fact the most significant result is that getting regular bags decreases your odds of any rainbow orbs, which is real silly. In practice, though, it’s probably a fair assumption that all four chests are interchangeable and we can batch together their drops? Modifying the formula to do that gives:
in which case we do get good significance on the chests’ gold bag drops! If you straight up remove all but the sum of chests’ gold bag drops, it tells you that your expected rainbow orb payout is 0.006894 plus 0.132838 times the number of chest gold bags - which you can probably interpret as ‘the boss never drops rainbow orbs but chests’ gold bags do at around a 13% rate’.
Rainbow orbs are definitely the material you need to farm the most, but what about the gold orbs (inferno, deluge, maelstrom, etc.)? We can repeat the above but for gold orbs, and it’s found that both chest gold bags and the menace’s gold bag are relevant:
from which we can probably extrapolate that each chest gold bag has something like a 13% chance at giving a rainbow orb, 16% chance at a gold orb, and 71% chance at giving a silver orb.
Somewhat amusingly, it’s in almost a one-to-one correspondence between all regular bags and bronze orbs. Nice and straightforward and simple.
‘But what does the intercept mean in this situation?’
You don’t only get bag drops from the menace and four chests; the boss also drops some! From what I can tell the boss can visually drop 3-4 gold bags and 4 regular bags, but if you pay attention to your total bag drop count you’ll find that the boss actually drops something like 12 to 15 bags total, so presumably the game only displays four of each. You obviously can’t reset for good boss drops when you can’t see the actual number, and also the quest ends immediately afterwards, so it might as well be treated as a baseline intercept. (Notably, doing the above analyses but for monster mats – fiend horns and fiend eyes, or granite and meteorite, etc. – finds that none of the bag drops are significant, only the intercept is, and so if you did need to farm those for some reason then resetting does nothing for you.)
...
Okay, so... is it actually worth resetting for rainbow/gold orbs? Probably not. From some early logging, as far as I can tell it’s approximately an independent 50% chance for the menace and each chest to give a gold bag, so if you’re going for all five gold bags then you’re resetting for a 3.125% chance... and I don’t think idly resetting for 20-30 minutes per run just to go from an expected 0.26 rainbow orbs and 0.61 gold orbs to a perfect 0.52 rainbow orbs and 1.16 gold orbs per run is worth it.
(It’s a moot point anyways, given that you need over 3000 rainbow orbs total and that you’re definitely going to auto-farm it with hundreds of honey during the anniversary 3x drops event instead of resetting for every run...)
The thing that keeps me playing Dragalia Lost (and also makes me not interested in trying other mobile gacha games, ha) is its gameplay: it’s an action-RPG with dynamic battles where positioning and skill timing/optimal attack rotations is important. One extremely minor yet existing factor, though, is verticality! Despite the hitzone being purple, I can still dodge the tornado by... literally jumping over it.
This clip is only 24 seconds long, but it’s what I would use as a quick intro to show off Dragalia Lost gameplay (without just linking to 4+ minute endgame runs).
A while ago, Mentor Bonuses were added to Dragalia Lost: an incentive to help new players clear High Dragon Trials on Standard and Expert, by rewarding wyrmite to veteran players (who have already cleared the quest) that help out another new player with their first-time clear.
Despite the good intentions, this implementation... has a lot of problems:
since it gives access to wyrmite – the pull currency which is otherwise very slow to accumulate – mentors have started room-hopping in Standard and Expert, only staying to clear the run if the room says it’ll give a Mentor Bonus upon clearing (since the game now does say in advance whether it’s someone’s possible first clear once all four players ready up);
since mentors are just in it for the wyrmite, they’re willing to basically carry the new player’s corpse across the finish line only a single time, which means the new player won’t learn the High Dragon’s move patterns and thus will be woefully unprepared for farming Expert after each first clear is used up (ie. once veterans won’t have the goodwill/self-interest to help new players anymore);
you’re limited to earning five HDT Standard mentor bonuses (of 50 wyrmite each) and three HDT Expert mentor bonuses (of 25 wyrmite each) every week, which incites veterans to try and get all of it since otherwise they’re ‘missing out’ on an easy source of weekly wyrmite;
you get mentor-related epithets for reaching total mentor bonus counts... and the final one is for 1000 mentor bonuses, ie. almost two years straight of eight weekly mentor bonuses;
each new player can only give their mentor bonuses to three other players for each quest, so ‘everyone can get all their mentor bonuses done every week’ would imply that the Dragalia Lost playerbase gets multiplied by x4/3 week-by-week, which is clearly unrealistic.
Unsurprisingly, a large number of players just completely ignore mentor bonuses as a result, simply accepting the bonuses if they happen to get one during their usual HDT farming but otherwise not going out of their way to seek them out, since actually trying to find someone who’s going for a first clear has such an astronomically low chance of happening.
...And if people do still want their weekly wyrmite, the only 100%-reliable option is to roll a new alt account every week.
I’ve been doing this for a short while, making a new alt account every week on my old phone and gunning for 13k team might in order to unlock and clear all five High Dragon Trials: Standard (for the 250 weekly wyrmite), and without super-generous events (like MH-crossover Primal Crisis’ easily-accessed 5* Rathalos/Fatalis weapons, or Valentines event’s easily-accessed level 100 wyrmprints) it takes a surprising amount of effort to simply reach 13k!
As such, here are some tips to reaching that point:
if you don’t get a half-decent healer in your initial tenfold (preferrably a light/shadow regen healer, such as Vixel or S.Verica), then picking Hildegarde in order to have a good healer while going through the story campaign is a decent choice;
you’re going to want four max-level units each equipped with a 5* dragon (since you won’t even have enough pulls to reliably get a MUB 4* dragon); if you’re lucky you’ll get both the 5* adventurer and 5* dragon off of the current banner thanks to free daily tenfolds, but if not your best bet is to sell off spare dragons for eldwater and promote adventurers to 5*;
if there’s an event going on, check whether there are easily-accessed useful rewards! Farming a raid’s Expert boss for blazons in order to get a MUB 4* raid welfare dragon can be useful, for example;
you’ll need a lot of crystals to get your main team to max level, and especially if you aren’t getting carried through the regular Dragon Trials: Master (which unlocks High Dragon Trials: Standard) and need five mono-element teams, so spare stamina should probably be spent auto-farming Avenue to Power;
the Mercurial Gauntlet gives a bunch of orbs and scales for relatively little effort! Even a rainbow team with a healer (plus a random high-level helper) can clear level 6 or even 7, meaning you won’t need to farm Elemental Ruins too much or go through the Dragon Trial cycle in order to upgrade units;
on-element 3.1.0 weapons give about as much might as 4.2.0 weapons... but the former only require a level 3 Smithy (ie., 40 total facility levels) whereas the latter require a level 5 Smithy (ie., 100 total facility levels);
if you’re running low on mana, don’t bother to farm any of the farming event quests, just go through the story to clear chapter 8 and then farm the highest-might daily 2x-drops void monster for void leaves (each of which trades for 5000 mana);
in order to reap the benefit of facilities without levelling too many of them, try and double up on your team’s elements/weapons! For example, pulling both Agni and Konohana Sakura means flame altars will be able to boost two members on your team, and having both Xania and Pipple on your team means the wand dojo will boost two members (and feel free to use Hustle Hammers).
By the time you reach 13k might, your team will hopefully have at least three different 5* dragons (level 30+ and bond level 15+) on matching-element adventurers, all at max level and 40 mana nodes and wielding a level-20 3.1.0 weapon, with eight randomly-dropped 4*/5* wyrmprints around level 20+, and level 15 altars/level 10 dojos.
It’s kind of a pain to do that every week!
As for actually clearing Standard HDTs, you need to have the alt account still be in the room by the time the quest is cleared (so you can’t just ignore the alt account, since they’ll time out and disconnect after around 20 seconds of idling), but otherwise there’s not really much a new account can do to help with clearing the quests.
In the end, for all five sHDTs I chose a single adventurer with a team-wide defense buff (such as Cleo or Lowen) and gave them enough Skill Prep to use the skill before the initial blast – thank goodness Chocolatiers is non-limited now! – so that the main account’s team can survive while running pure DPS prints, plus a MUB Dragon Prep print (to make sure the main account’s team can transform during Break for extra damage, or dragon-tank an unavoidable attack), then made sure to just have them run into the wall after the first revive in order to avoid the idling disconnection.
If you’re extra dextrous, though, you can definitely play on two phones at once and reap the benefits! For example, in High Mercury your weak alt can handle the long-range baiting, or ensure all the dives are cancelled in High Brunhilda, or even run away before the prisons in High Zodiark so that as many DPS units as possible are still able to attack. I also like to put Phoenix on my alt account’s weak unit so that the entire team is at full health after the Break, in order for the rest of the quest to go smoothly!
...At the end of the day, though, it takes a lot of effort to get this second account to that point, and just for a ‘measly’ 250 wyrmite (ie., the equivalent of about 5$ if you just bought diamantium directly instead, so less than one hour of real-life work)... This is definitely only for people who have way too much free time (by which I mean ‘don’t have a job’), and desperately want as much wyrmite as possible to avoid missing out on (say) limited units.
Seems like Shadow Imperial Onslaught is coming back again in just over 24 hours, and for another three days total, so at least that’s a chance to do even more co-op IO!
I’ll use up most of my honey on Double-Drops Avenue to Fortune instead, since this is literally the first time I’ve encountered the event and I need almost 60mil rupies just for all the weapons and dojo upgrades I have lined up... but I’m definitely gonna farm Shadow IO using all my ashes and natural-regen getherwings.
Move over, Fractured Futures raid, I have more important events to take advantage of!
One of the worst bottlenecks in lategame Dragalia Lost is Imperial Onslaught farming for the mountains of Dyrenell coins required to upgrade all sixteen Dojo facilities — starting from scratch, you need to do almost 6000 total runs of IO to get all the coins required to max them out at level 35, and even if you only aim for level 31 that still requires almost 3600 runs.
As a result, I personally find it to be the top priority to farm Imperial Onslaught as much as possible when there’s a double-drop event going on, which has basically happened once for each element in the last six months I’ve been playing... up until the current One-Year Anniversary, which brought back the event for all five!
...Honestly, even if I spend all my waking hours auto-ing Honey away and speeding through Ash usage as fast as possible, I don’t think I can physically use up all these resources... Kind of a shame, knocking out over a thousand runs this weekend would nearly get me to 31.
For us new Dragalia Lost players, this Eastern Emissaries banner rerun was very generous! Three adventurers with bleed (an amazing stackable damage-over-time debuff that no enemy is immune to) plus a dragon with bleed (and the highest strength-boost passive of any Shadow dragons) means it’s probably one of the best banners to pull on...
...which makes it all the more sad when you fail to get the most important featured unit.
The basic idea isn’t too complicated or surprising, but if you haven’t heard it yet, when trying to get a 5* unit it’s sometimes recommended to do ten single summons before doing any tenfold summons: the game has a ‘pity’ mechanic where 5* appearance rates increase by 0.5% every ten pulls (with 3* rates lowering in exchange), but only resets the bonus once the current summon is done, so if you have a heightened 5* rate and do a tenfold summon then all ten pulls will have boosted rates, even if a 5* is the very first pull. Conversely, if you do pull a 5* from your single summons and reset the count, you can immediately start building up another ten without ‘wasting’ the remaining pulls from a tenfold.
Which leads to two interesting questions that you can’t simply mathematically solve:
How much better is it to do ten single-summons first?
Can it be better to do twenty, or thirty, etc., single-summons instead?
As well as two possible situations we could ask them in:
having infinite Wyrmite, for average pull count;
having limited total pulls and seeing the overall chance of pulling them.
After writing my own summon simulator to investigate... surprisingly, doing more than ten single-summons can be even better! It’s not too much of a difference (and eventually becomes worse again), and it does vary based on whether you have limited Wyrmite or not; as long as you do actually do singles first, though, there’s a notable difference.
So yeah. If you’re still chasing a featured 5* unit, definitely do ten (or twenty or thirty) single summons first!
After the Dragalia Lost news that the gacha was removing one of its worst randomness led to a bunch of praise in communities I’m in, I finally decided to give the game a try.
Pretty fun game! Kinda sad that I finished the story in about a week and am already stuck farming and grinding in order to take on challenge quests, though... and it really doesn’t help that I’m specifically saving up and waiting for the gacha update next week so I have very few adventurers/wyrmprints/dragons to work with, so I’m forced to make up for it by overlevelling and concentrating on weapons. The above pictures are the only gacha pulls I’ve done!
Not really a good sign when I want to play more but the stamina system is what’s holding me back, and a non-trivial percentage of times I want to use getherwings in co-op I instead constantly disconnect...
EDIT - For the record, early on I was saving all my wyrmite to pull on the upcoming FEH banner, since I knew it’d have limited units and definitely didn’t want to miss any of them. The full set of pulls I did on that banner can be found here, but suffice to say the game was very different back when I had so few adventurers/dragons, hahaha.
Literally no one asked for this and I can guarantee no one would want to replay with the Charis with accurate guest stats again, but whatever, here are (NA) QR codes for the four versions! I know she’s probably meant to look like an EO3 Hoplite but I’m not a fan of how the portrait looks, especially the face; I’m much more a fan of the EO4 Fortress’ smile, matching how cheery Charis is.
For the record, these are four separate characters, so if you really love Charis then you could scan all four of these and use them all at once! (Or, more practically, you could scan all four of them, plus the entirety of my 22-member guild from the very start of the game, as well as 23 more QR codes with them all retired at max level then re-leveled to max again — I made a clone of one character for superboss-fighting — and be almost halfway to the 100 necessary guild cards to unlock the Scarlet Evil Eye!)
It also might be fun to replay the game but use replicas of the in-game explorers... The only real problem is that not all of their classes are obvious from their clothing, as even fewer are stated outright. You could go with... Marco, Leo, Charis, Artelinde, Blót? Iunno how easily you could customize portraits to imitate them though...
Now that I’ve 100%ed Etrian Odyssey Nexus, I had a few loose ends I wanted to take care of, such as making sure everything in the shop was available for purchase if I wanted to come back to the game...
but the guild card keeps track of your one-turn total damage record, and of course it’s shared when making QR codes and through StreetPass, so I figured I might as well try to set a really high record for bragging rights! While staying on Heroic difficulty!
My previous record was around 80k total, from my usual Force Boost buffed afterimage Regiment Rave burst strats against bosses, but clearly if I want a higher number then I’ll need a trick... It seems like the damage cap for a single hit is 99999 damage, which (given the damage formula’s giant multiplier for out-levelling an enemy) doesn’t seem too hard to hit with buffs and stuff on first-labyrinth enemies, but the problem is that you can only deal 99999 damage per enemy and no more, since you can’t keep hitting a dead enemy for more damage, and I don’t think any random encounter has more than five enemies...
Except boss Wicked Silurus isn’t allowed to die while it’s diving in mud.
Cue various spreadsheet calculations to figure out the optimal party for max damage! Sadly you can’t use debuffs on Wicked Silarus (since buffs, debuffs, and ailments are removed while it’s diving) so you’re limited in multipliers compared to regular fights, and you only get one turn to do damage while it’s diving (since it immediately surfaces once hit) so you can’t take advantage of an Imperial’s Charge Edge or a Ronin’s Duel...
In the end, I settled on having three Gunners (ie., one Gunner/Ronin and one Gunner/Ninja that clones themself) that all used a Bravant for +40% ATK, plus a Shogun/Landsknecht (for the gigantic Great Warrior +60% ATK buff, Force Boost for x1.15 damage, 5-Ring Sword for bonus damage, and an Initiative +10% damage for the gunners), Harbinger (x1.35 damage from the Force Break) and Sovereign (x1.3 damage with Shock Arms, and doubling all attack buffs with the Force Break)...
...and then praying for multiple lucky 15% Multi-Shot procs on Charged Volt.
After trying for a while, I finally lucked into having it proc for both Ninjas, plus having it proc on the Ronin’s Double Action hit (which is only 40% of usual damage), which was more than enough to get over 500k (and thus out-damage regular strats against five enemies). Nice!
I just realise that Leo does indeed cut his hair before the Wyvern mission. A symbol that he’s willing to change his outlook on his life, I suppose. Still very cute~
Also want to point out that the dark rings under Leo’s eyes have also eased, and he’s smiling slightly now. Obviously, small subtle signs that he’s grown from spending time with the guild. It’s really nice to see the subtle changes now~ [second post]
Oh my god, you’re right, that’s amazing. How did I not notice that?
Guest party members are always a fun time in Etrian Odyssey... because you can check out their equipment and skill sets! And Charis is an especially super-fun example, because it all changes gradually as you see more events with her and delve deeper in the labyrinth.
She first joins on the first floor of the stratum, at level 18... but doesn’t have her shield equipped and can only defend in battle. After your first victory, it’s pointed out to her, and so she equips it... but still is too scared of monsters and can only defend in the next few fights.
Once you leave the first floor and rest to the next day, Charis joins up again... and apparently did a reverse-Rest at the guild, because she comes back 2 levels higher! At this point she’s come to terms with fighting and can actually attack and use skills, so you stick together until the end of the floor.
At that point you go back to rest, and learn that she basically starts delving solo to train and you don’t encounter her again until right before the boss room... where she’s now reached level 24 and gotten better equipment. Neat!
It’s a shame that this stratum is the only time in Etrian Odyssey Nexus that you have a guest character join you, it’s always pretty interesting to play around with a class that you don’t have in your party. I tried to recreate the three dragon-fighting guest characters in EO4, and straight-forwardly remade the first stratum guest in EO5 (I know there are more but I, uh, stopped at floor 11), but the Untold games don’t let you recruit characters from QR codes (due to grimoires) so there’s not much point in recreating those.
It’s tempting to recreate the four Charis versions, though...
After four hours of failing to get any Mutagen using Plunderblade and Plunderang, I swapped over to farming Ancient Leshen body breaks instead... and by my 25th run I got my third one! After you’re done killing Ancient Leshen for skulls and antlers, and Plunderblade-ing for claws, bones, and resin to craft everything usable, this is definitely the most reliable way of getting Mutagen if you don’t have a squad to reliably kill it in under 20 minutes.
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