Getting Started Tips & Tricks

Hey everyone,

Let’s share what we wish we knew when we started playing the game to help new players coming in:

  • Try to decide which Gear sets you want to level up by the end of chapter 2. This way you can save your shards and relics to put into the Gear you actually want early on to make levelling your chosen Gear easier in the long run. Even if it’s not perfect to start with, focusing on specific pieces early will help you face the challenges ahead.

  • Use your Daily Deals in the shop - it’s the number 1 place I spend my Gold!

  • If you need extra Gold, playing some Open Tourny (pvp) is the fastest way to get it

  • Don’t forget to register your game account so if anything goes wrong with your phone or the game and you need to reinstall you can do so no worries.

What tips do you all have for people just starting the game?

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Greetings Puzzle Questers.

I’ve been playing this game since the beginning of early access along with many of my friends in the Throne of Odin kingdom. There have been lots of changes and updates leading up to the launch of the game. There are the tips and tricks that have helped us the most along the way (we’ll continue to update this after launch so check back!)

Overall Gameplay

  • The typical player is going to pick a class, attempt to play the storyline through to Chapter 15, and do other stuff along the way (e.g. PvP, Events, farming, etc.). However, the game is currently optimized to play all 5, or at least some, of the classes up to about 20 to 25 which will increase the levels of important resource followers like Eveline, Northelm, Brie, and Adhakus. This approach also benefits you in the Events system, one of the best sources of daily rewards, since your Event Tier is based on your highest hero level. By not levelling one hero too fast, you can benefit from the rewards of the Event system more easily.

  • Refer to this chart when trying to determine where to find each follower’s Evolution Crystals. Remember, to maximize your followers potential, you will have to do all 5 class playthroughs. Although you can find Crystals randomly through other means (e.g. Daily Challenges, Shop Deals, very rare Chest drops, etc.), the primary means to level followers is from Crystals earned through Follower Sidequests:

  • If you play several hours daily early on, then get comfortable with salvaging chests. Don’t worry, there’s always more chests and at higher levels they have even better value

  • Skirmishes have an improved chance of dropping shards relative to the other game play modes. This matters because you need many, many, many shards :laughing:

  • Do the Open PVP daily, it’s worth the extra Honor earned as a currency resource. Do the Restricted PVP just enough to get the weekly rewards (it’s painfully slow until you get better gear in each color alignment)

Gear and Spells

  • Dungeon 1 (Dragonguard Depths) and Dungeon 2 (Ruins of Morsauloth) have some of the best gear early on for benefitting from the gear set bonuses (particularly 4-piece Royal Set bonus). It’s worth spending some time doing some early dungeon farming to get useful gear and gear set bonuses early.

  • Make regular use of Eveline’s exchange and create relic abilities (especially the Tier I create as soon as it is available). This is an awesome way to target specific gear for valuable evolves and to help with difficulty progression

  • Spells (beyond the starting 4 spells for each class) can be found either from Gold, Ruby or Diamond Chests or from the crafter Xione (Chapter 9)

  • If you are attempting to farm a particular class spell from a dungeon, you don’t have to run the dungeon with that class, but you do need to open the chest with that class. Use your vault to save the chest and then open the chest with the preferred class. Here is a helpful chart on which spells can be found from which Dungeons:

Resources & Economy

  • When you first start, be aggressive in spending gems in the Daily offers and Bundles to get shards for levelling gear. You have the potential to earn approximately 40,000 gems from all 5 class playthroughs and the various Goals and Achievements. The prices for Minor, Lesser, and Greater Shards are pretty affordable and are critical to levelling your gear to keep up with the difficulty of the storyline progression.

  • Purchase the daily Key and Shard Bundles for Gold as often as possible, as gold is easily earned from regular game play and early on is subject to a very low cap

  • Join a kingdom - although kingdom benefits are a bit sparse currently (a dozen keys a week, access to Kingdom bazaar for purchasing Shards, etc.), the key rewards are easy to obtain in an active guild. Don’t miss out!

  • Another good source of Wooden and Iron keys for starting players is using Honor gained in PvP in the Rewards section of the Shop tab. 60 Honor buys 2x Wooden Keys, a key type that new players will be desperate to find (in Early Access low quality keys were abundant but that is no longer the case). This deal is better than the Kingdom Honor Deal, where Wooden Keys are more expensive.

  • General Salvage Advice: Once you start having excess minor and lesser shards, use them to advance the level of Rare+ gear to 5 or even 7 and then salvage yielding you a greater return of Greater Shards, which are the most needed shard overall

More tips and tricks to come from your friends at Throne of Odin kingdom! If you are looking for a place to start your PQ3 adventure, come check us out here:
https://community.puzzlequest3.com/t/throne-of-odin-is-recruiting-come-get-your-tacos/1922/2?u=sibelios

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My starting tip :point_up: This guy - listen & learn
(I did and now am happy to recommend to others)

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Adding onto the existing list here,

Gear Score is Everything In the Early Game

  • Unlike most RPGs, the hero(ine)'s level means little. Instead, as the game frequently points out to players, difficulty is based on comparing the player’s current Gear Score to the Gear Score rating of the encounter. The player should always be focused on raising their gear score as much as possible by improving the level of their gear and spells.

  • Each level gained on a piece of gear generates greater benefits than the level before it. As the story advances, the damage output of enemies will increase to match these gains. Do not be afraid to stop the story and run side skirmishes and dungeons to farm additional shards to continue to improve gear.

  • Keep your weapon maxed out as much as possible. In the early game, weapon damage is far more important than spell damage.

Chest Capacity

  • Early in the game the player will have a restricted carrying capacity for chests, especially so before unlocking the Guard at the end of Chapter 2. As minions can run missions to open chests without keys, keeping a smooth flow of chests being opened is important. An early-game trap occurs when all of the player’s slots are locked down with high-rarity chests with long opening timers on them. When this occurs, the player might end up in a situation with no chest capacity and no keys to open further chests, resulting in having to salvage everything until the situation resolves itself.

  • In the early game, try not to invest more than half of carrying capacity in Ruby or Diamond chests. Do not be afraid to salvage Ruby/Diamonds chests when they appear. Over the duration if the game, they will appear far more frequently than their rarity suggests.

Eveline, Eveline, Eveline

  • Utilizing Eveline’s skills are critical for advancing gear once each piece reaches level 15 (unless that piece dropped at Rare rarity [blue background, 3 stars] or higher). Past level 15, each gear needs Relics to advance further at key level milestones (15, 25, 35, 45).

  • Eveline specializes in creating and converting Relics to the ones needed to ascend each set of gear. Each set of gear requires a specific Relic unique to that set of Gear. Eveline can create random relics and then convert them to the ones you need efficiently through Epic (levels 25-35) rarity.

Shop Rotations and Offers

  • Shop offerings rotate daily in a predictable manner each week.

  • Monday to Friday, shop offers focus on a specific type of gear (ex: Monday = weapons).

  • Saturdays focus on bundle packages for all types of shards.

  • Sundays have special offers. These special offers often include selling things for currencies in which they are not normally available (such as follower crystals for Gems instead of Crowns). Lesser Relics (needed for level 15 gear ascensions) can be purchased with Gold instead of Gems on Sundays only.

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Purely for getting started, I would say to forget about your ideal equipment loadout. While it is nice to work towards your “perfect” loadout, that is really a luxury for later on when you are better positioned to farm dungeons for gear from that set.

Initially aim to get a Rare (blue) piece of equipment into each slot. Doesn’t matter the set, or the colour of gem associated with it. It will be better for you than a Common or uncommon item in that slot because you can level a Rare item up to L25, while Uncommon only reach L15, and Common L5. Rare is also the first time to get a bonus attribute on an item.

Later on you will be able to afford to evolve items into higher rarities, and spend time trying to find that perfect item of the right set in the right colour, but initially you work with what you have.

The shards needed to upgrade items level, and the materials needed to evolve into higher rarities will be in short supply so try to use them only on items you intend to keep. While you do get something back from salvaging an item the return rate is awful.

Gold - one of the early things you are likely to hit is the gold cap. Initially as low as 10,000 gold and when you hit it you don’t earn any more gold from battles or chests until you spend some. An easy way to spend gold is on upgrading equipment, but realise that shards are more valuable than gold. Gold can always be earned, while shards, of the type you need, are harder to find.

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Greetings all. I just started and I have what seems like a ridiculous question–how do you farm the lower level dungeons, skirmishes, etc., if you can’t even open the chests?

Brand new players will have issues with chest slots. It will require patience to begin with but it will get easier later on with more slots and more keys to use. Later on it won’t be an issue at all.

This is a great point. During Early Access low quality keys, like Wooden and Iron Keys were abundant, available from different modes in the game. However, over time, all those sources have dried up making low quality keys exceedingly rare for the new player starting out. I’ve updated my tips with the following:

You can earn 210 Honor from completing the weekly rewards in open PvP as well as an estimated additional 30+ Honor/day by doing PvP daily (based on a new player’s starting token amount).

Between using Honor to buy Wooden keys from the Shop and using Gold to buy the daily Key bundles, this should help to provide some relief for Keys allowing you to use your chest slots for the rarer chest types, like Ruby and Diamond. Don’t forget: low level wooden and iron chests also give fewer resources so its ok to save up some of those keys and use them on level 10+ chests later when you really need them.

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Thanks for all the great tips for a newbie like me. Played the original PuzzleQuest years ago and glad to see an update. I have downloaded and started playing for last couple days and really am enjoying. One basic spell question - when a spell says deal xxx damage as ice or dark or poison or fire, I understand those correspond to colors but not sure what that means. Does that mean it only does damage to the enemy if that is one of their mana color? Or based on that color gem on the board? Or what? Sometimes it seems like when I cast a spell, it doesn’t do much damage and other times it does. Thanks in advance

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Enemies have elemental advantage/weakness against another color. So Fire damage does increased damage against Poison (Green) opponents and reduced damage against Ice (Blue) opponents. Light and Dark have elelemental weakness against each other.

When you are in battle, you can see these relationships against your current opponent in the top right of the screen. In this case the Goblin is a Fire Enemy, therefore takes increased damage from Ice sources and decreased damage from Poison sources.
Screenshot_20220303-165855_Puzzle_Quest_3

Currently, I believe the bonus/reduction is 20% (for those playing pre-launch it was I think 50%). So in the scenario above, if your Ice spell does 1,000 damage according to the tooltip, then it will do 1,200 damage to a Fire enemy (provided there are no other buffs or debuffs)

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Perfect explanation. Thx a ton!

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Just started playing yesterday, question as a noob. What spells, minions and gear should a new player focus on first to be the most efficient for progression but also saving up bulk of the upgrade mats for later gears?

I’ve been upgrading the three blue gears I’ve found, because I read that we should first upgrade blue gear without care about their sets, and worry about fine tuning the gear sets later.

How about spells? Are there anywhere that shows what are the better spells for each class? Should we upgrade all spells starting with the starter class spells without discrimination?

And should we upgrade blue minions, or save the mats for later minions?

Really just in general a question about what mats to save, and what spells/gears/minion to go all out and upgrade with mats on.

Thanks all.

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Don’t forget to check out the Tips and Tricks offered here!

Would be nice if this was pinned for a while to the top of the forums.

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Hey everyone, there have been lots of changes in the game since launch. Many of the previous items of advice given earlier in this thread are out of date!

Throne of Odin kingdom has put together an updated New Player Guide with tips on starting your adventure in Etheria. This document is a work in progress so please refresh occasionally to ensure you are looking at the most current version:

Player Advice for Beginning Your Adventure in PQ3

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Since we have lots of new players joining with the console launch, check out these tips and guides for the game!

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Before you finish for the day it helps to fill up all the chest slots available. Do this every day. In the morning you’ll have several unlocked chests. Helps too if you use high percentage minions like Pussbag with the chests - that way you have a good chance of a bonus key as well.

I under utilised these slots to start off with but now I keep them full all the time. Even if I have to pay for the occasional unlock with food - this gets cheaper as time ticks away while playing.

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