All festival chests have been added to itemIndex, as well as a patch to ensure I can tag the chests as festival items through the itemIndex. A SVG has been added for the festival items, which previously (incorrectly) used the specialty SVG.
The festival chests have also been added to the itemIndex used for the Coliseum Drop Guide
So I’ve seen a bunch of people on here asking where the best place to coli is and so I thought I would shoot this guide out here.
Maki’s Festival Guide gets updated for every festival and shows the percent of that element in each venue and what the top venues are. Also a bit later in the festival they add which mobs drop which chests and which chest drop in each venue. I’ve always found it super helpful so I thought I would share it if you peeps didn’t know about it.
Or rookies. Y'all aren't dumb, but you are new. So I thought I'd explain you a thing just in case you needed help. And if I'm saying things you already know, then good! You're that much closer to achieving all your greatest dragon dreams. But, if you're anything like I was when I joined about this time last year, a little bit of explanation will really, really help.
I'm sure you've already gotten the fairgrounds and breeding mechanics down, so I'm here to talk about the coliseum.
The coliseum is a function on the site where you can pit your dragons against either Shade-touched monsters/beast clans, or, if you're feeling lucky, against other players' dragons. PvP might net you bragging rights and a place on the leaderboard, but it doesn't really get you anything you need. But that's where the non-PvP part of coli comes into play.
Long post is long, more under the cut.
1. Pick your team.
You can put as many as three dragons in your coliseum team. These dragons must be named, and they must be adults (although sometimes there's a bit of a bug where technically-adult dragons still display their baby forms).
It's good to pick a balanced mix of dragons for your team. Either three melee fighters or two melee fighters and one mage will get you the best results, but don't take my word for it. Experiment, have fun, try new things. See what works for you.
But you'll have the best luck if you have a range of elements in your team. Each Flight element has three strengths (against which they do massive extra damage) and three weaknesses (which is the same epic damage except you're taking it instead of dishing it out). Some of these weaknesses overlap, so be careful if you have, for example, a Plague/Ice/Nature team, because all three members of the team will get decimated by anything Fire-based if an elemental attack lands. Once your dragons get stronger, this becomes less of an issue, but be wary at the early levels.
2. Stats
All dragon breeds have different starting stats. Some breeds make more sense as mages, others are definitely meant to be melee combatants. However, you can seriously do whatever you want with any dragon. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to fight in the coliseum. However, there are builds that will make it much easier, and builds that will make it much harder. We'll get into that later.
This section is where we'll talk about what the statistics are and what they do.
STR is Strength. This is how much physical, melee damage your dragons can inflict on their enemies.
AGI is Agility. Agility determines your dragon's ability to hit, to land critical hits, and dodge enemy hits.
DEF is Defense. Defense determines how much physical/melee damage your dragon doesn't take when it gets hit. Higher defense means less damage per hit.
QCK is Quickness. Quickness is probably the most important stat no matter what build you're using for your dragons. Quickness is your dragon's speed score. The higher it is, the more turns they get in combat, and the more turns your dragons get, the fewer turns your enemies get. Quickness is your friend, always. In the immortal words of Richard Marcinko, "Fuck the fucking fuckers first."
INT is Intelligence. Intelligence determines how much magical damage your dragons can inflict. This is the mage's equivalent of strength, and also sometimes determines how well potions work.
VIT is Vitality. Vitality is the score that goes into determining how many hit points your dragons get per level. There's a hit point increase with every level, but a higher vitality score means the point increase gets bigger.
3. Build Archetypes
You may have noticed more experienced players lobbing around words and phrases like "tank" or "glass cannon".
The glass cannon is a very popular build around FR. The point of the glass cannon is to be so fast and so strong that they don't need any defense or vitality because the fight should be over before they get hit. Glass cannon dragons are very frail, but very strong. If you're looking for a guide on how to construct a glass cannon, Culex has a handy walkthrough. I personally don't favor it, because I like my dragons with a little more speed to them, but it's a good place to start.
The tank, on the other hand, is meant to outlast the competition. They're tougher, more defensively built. They're not as good at coliseum grinding as the glass cannon are, but, and here's the important part if you're into PvP, they wreck glass cannon. They've got the hitpoints to outlast any glass cannon and the speed and strength to do some real damage, especially to dragons that aren't built with defense or vitality in mind.
My first advice to you, however, is not to think about archetypes when you choose your first team. Screw archetypes. Have fun. Go crazy. Experiment with different builds. Maybe you want to have a glass cannon. Maybe you want an agility-based critical hit machine. Maybe you want to try a team with three casters. First of all, if it doesn't work out, you can undo everything you did with a Tincture of Dissolution, which wipes the stat points clean and lets you re-allocate them. Or, if you're not up for spending 30k on a tincture, you can always start again with a new team. There is no rule anywhere that says you can only have one coli team. I have, like, six. And I'm still just getting started.
4. Battle Stones
How do your dragons get special abilities, you ask? Battlestones. These hunks of magical rock can be found while scavenging, drop as coliseum loot, or purchased from places like the battle section of the Marketplace, and also the Auction House.
Some of them are level-dependent, like Ambush or Eliminate, and your dragon will need to be a certain level before it can utilize certain stones. Others, like Contuse and Shred, are indifferent to a dragon's experience level.
There are four tiers of stones. The top tier has one slot, and that's for the breath-gathering ability. Breath is what a dragon needs to execute special abilities, so they need to be able to build that up. For melee attackers, it's Scratch. For melee defenders, it's Anticipate (where they receive breath for getting hit rather than delivering a hit), and for casters, it's Meditate.
The second tier is all about special abilities. Every dragon starts with either Shred or Contuse. Shred is melee, while Contuse is magical. This middle tier is where you'll put elemental attacks or other special abilities as your dragon levels up. There are a total of four slots, and you likely won't need them all.
The third tier is for augmentation stones. These are stones that have no real special effects except to increase your dragons' statistics. Basic strength or acuity fragments give one point to either strength or intelligence. Elemental strength or acuity fragments give a two-point bonus. Hybrid shards have a myriad of different effects depending on which ones you find. The most important augment stones, however, are the Berserk and Scholar stones, which give five points to strength (berserk) or intelligence (scholar), three points in quickness, and one point in agility, and these stones are unlocked and usable at level seventeen. There is room for exactly three augment stones in a fully-leveled dragon.
The fourth tier is for passive abilities. These passive abilities are only unlocked at levels nine and fifteen, and there are only two slots. The three passive abilities are Ambush (which gives your dragon a preemptive attack before the actual turn order starts), Discipline (which has a chance of doubling the breath intake of Meditate), and Field Manual (which lets you see how much breath your enemies have -- which is useful if you're dyslexic or pulled AFK mid-fight and your mental log of which enemies are primed to fuck you up gets scrambled).
5. Why is the coliseum important?
Your personal economy as a person with a clan of dragons will depend on the coliseum. Or, I should say that it should, because the coliseum should be your best friend and greatest provider.
Do you pay treasure for food off of the Auction house? You shouldn't. AH prices are very, very steep, and relying on it to feed your dragons gets progressively less sustainable as you go on. The coliseum is not only free, but nearly every enemy has a high chance of dropping food items. Grind long enough, and you'll have thirteen or so pages of food items saved up for later and a nice stock of food points to keep your dragons happy and well-fed.
Do you buy familiars off of the AH or from the Marketplace? You shouldn't have to do that either. You can, and certain familiars (most notably the gem familiars) don't spawn in the coliseum, but the vast majority of familiars do. And there's a good chance that you'll collect a lot of familiars from coliseum grinding. And familiars are a reliable and steady source of treasure.
Do you like opening containers full of treasure? I thought you might. Certain venues of the coliseum drop those, by the way, containers full of treasure. They're not much if taken individually. Leafy chests from the training field are a hundred treasure and an ivy food item. Featherfall packs from the Harpy's Roost are still only triple-digit. But imagine this -- you grind for a long time because you're on a roll, you've got Netflix going and you're grinding while you're watching your favorite movie, and you get a solid chunk of grinding time in. Movie ends, you stop grinding, and look in your hoard to find forty or so burlap sacks or featherfall packs or skirmisher packs or whatever the native treasure chest is in the venue you're imagining. That's several thousand treasure. And it adds up. And keeps adding up.
The coliseum is also a fine source of Swipp-swap items, apparel, crafting materials, doohickeys, gadgets, and assorted miscellany.
Oh, and do you like festival currency? Because that's a coliseum thing too. Element-neutral enemies and enemies of the specific element of the festival tend to drop the festival currency when you fight them in the coliseum, which is especially useful to know before the next big holiday. We have one coming up. Plague's festival, the Riot of Rot. All-Seeing Shrooms will be dropping from Plague and Neutral enemies.
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And that concludes StormSerthis' dissertation on how the coliseum works and what it's useful for.
And if you need leveling services, my newbie friends, come talk to me. I live in the coliseum and I can help you get started with a good team to grind with for the upcoming holiday. :D
My FR handle is StormSerthis, my ID is 41691, and I would be happy to help you out.
So earlier today someone put up a really in depth Coliseum guide of how to build your party on Flight Rising (Tank, Scout, Caster)...and I have no idea where it went. Anybody know where to find it? It was really cool and I wanted to take a second look at it.
