How does the Dragons Spirit Breath mechanics work? How can I eliminate it/slow it down?
It is very frustrating to die suddenly when all of your bars are still full. Why can’t I die when my health is completely gone while defending the Kingdom?
I would be okay to lose a lot health in one go when the dragon is powerful and die like this but when you are pretty healthy and die with a Spirit Breath suddenly is very frustrating. Any comments? Thx
Spirit Breath is just an extra difficulty feature, giving you a limited amount of time to deal with the dragon. Both this and the debuff protection make Kingdom defense a unique type of battle, needing a different approach than general content. In my opinion, it is great having different types of battles that need different type of builds and gameplay. I also like having kingdom defense as an extra difficult event giving you a big challenge to work towards.
Even if spirit breath is kind of a countdown to defeat, you can still interact with it. Mainly, you can slow it down denying mana to the dragon, either matching gems of its color or converting them with spells.
Higure… covered it pretty well. The mode is just different. It’s like a balance puzzle. You have to try to do damage while denying mana as much as possible, and live through hits. Sometimes, those three goals conflict.
Survival focused classes like paladin or classes that depend a lot on debuffs suffer a bit. Don’t think of your goal as outliving the dragon. Your goals are just to 1) survive long enough to get killed by spirit breath and 2) to do as much damage as possible before that happens.
Add the runic set bonus I and esgaard bandolier together with the spell holy avenger amongst other gear and spells for paladin and you have a build that is good for kingdom defence.
Just defending the Paladin because I’ve seen it written numerous times that it’s not a great class to play.
Sure there are better builds for some other classes but it still only ever takes me one turn to get gold on the xx dragon (unless the Dragon gets very lucky in a gem cascade).
You got me curious. Can you share your loadout for the Paladin?
Showing my Kingdom Defense build for a Paladin:
Reasons:
Royal II - for more big gems at start to get spells going
Runic I - for a % chance to create 2x skulls when casting a spell
Saviours helm - more big gems at start of battle.
Guards gloves - Increase % chance for crit hit with every 5 gem match made through the battle
Esgaard Bandolier - turn red gems to skulls with each spell cast.
Spells:
Smite - creates yellow gems
Holy Avenger - Does massive damage
Bless the dead - mixes the board mid turn by removing skulls possibly dropping more red gems for the esgaard bandolier to then convert to skulls or just more skulls or yellow gems and possibly creating barrier. I used to run a different spell here not sure what it was?
Devine steed - Increases power and armour.
Other options I like:
I like the royal sword as it increases power with every 5 gem match of it’s colour and is part of my royal II set bonus.
Jeweled tower - Adds yellow gems to the board. This means I only need one yellow generating spell and if there isn’t enough yellow gems on my first turn to fill spells this can possibly help in making sure I can fill spells on my second turn. Utterly useless against the yellow dragon because it creates the gems on the dragons turn. So I change the shield against the yellow dragon (still waiting for this to be fixed as per fate of the night mask thread)
Elven Charm - Helps fill spells that are close to full when casting other spells.
If you need more armour to survive longer I believe guard I bonus with guards shoulders or shield to go with the gloves isn’t a bad choice.
There are plenty of other tweaks you could make depending on your preferences.
REMINDER: This if for KD. A general content build may be a little different
Another kingdom member has built a KD Paladin build with corrupted shoulders and shield, duskside helm and oborons keybelt and saviours necklace.
Also posted on the Paladin discussion on discord.
Thank you very much for the detailed explanations! It looks very nice.
For my Mercenary I used to have similar loadout except for the shield, necklace, runic ring and boots. Since KD is long term play, I decided that Savior’s helm is useless to have for long term. Yeah, it gives you some big gems at the start, but doesn’t do anything else til the end. So I decided to replace it with Royal Helm. Because of this change I was able to replace the Royal Leggings with Serpentine Belt.
I guess at some point I saw your kingdom member’s loadout, because I adopted the corrupted guard shoulders and shield. While it works well most of the time, sometimes I fail to fill my spells, which in turn prevents me from gaining armor when I cast them, and I get killed early.
All my items are legendary, and my current limit is KD level 12 by myself.
I love my Paladin. And yes, if you are geared up in mostly mythic, you can make it work for anything.
When I say it suffers a bit I only mean that a paladin’s gimmick (for lack of a better word) is survivability, which doesn’t get to be used to full effect, in KD. Similar situation with Shaman and Warlock. Because debuffs can’t be used at all in KD. That doesn’t mean those classes can’t succeed in KD. They can. They just don’t get the full benefit of their class strengths.
