When you're staring the enemy down and you need to command your daemon to take action, you'll have to choose from a set of their known techniques to utilize in battle. Daemons can learn techniques that do all sorts of things: some ignite their enemies on fire and others will conjure a gust of wind to blow their enemy off the battlefield. Deciding what technique your daemon should use is crucial for obtaining victory. This week we'll review a few techniques and talk about how best to utilize them.
First, let’s take a look at Immolate. Immolate is a pretty basic technique at first: it just deals fire damage. However, once you’ve used immolate once, every consequent use on the same daemon will deal significantly boosted damage. Because of this, it’s better to use Immolate when you know you can get that second hit off. Additionally, your opponent is much more likely to switch daemons to avoid that big second hit. The most interesting thing about Immolate, though, is that it doesn’t matter which daemon used Immolate first: so long as the enemy has been Immolated before, any other daemon on your team can capitalize on the boosted damage.
Next up is Dark Ambition. Unlike Immolate, Dark Ambition doesn’t do any damage, but it’s still useful! Instead, it raises each of your stats (except health) by 1 stage (about 33%) at the cost of 20% of the health of ALL your daemons. This may seem like too great a drawback to make the technique useful, but that effect is really powerful. To make the most of it, you want most of your other daemons to already be banished and out of the fight. That way, losing 20% of their health doesn’t matter since it’s already at 0.
To make the most of it, try to build a team that focuses on making a lot of trades and utilize Dark Ambition as a final cleanup after the other daemons on your team have done their job.
Chum is the last card we’ll cover and it’s also one of our favorite techniques to watch. Like Dark Ambition, Chum doesn’t do any damage on its own, and like Immolate, it deals a lot of damage if you have used it before. You didn’t misread that: Chum is a delayed damage technique. Once you’ve used Chum once, the opponent’s field has been “chummed”. When you use the technique again, a massive sea monster will rise up and chomp on your opponent. Just like Immolate, the daemon that triggers the sea monster to rise doesn’t have to be the same daemon that used it first. However, unlike Immolate, Chum works even if the enemy daemon switches out. In order to make the most use of Chum, play around the fact that it doesn’t technically deal any damage, hits very hard when it goes off, and plan out which of your opponent’s daemons is most likely to get hit.
That’s it for now, we’ll be doing more coverage of gameplay in the future but right now we’re working hard on getting our open alpha environment stable.
