Overview
Shards, Ascension levels, Gear, and how to leach. Plus other random tips.
Opening Notes
Farm Assault on Throne room on Normal until level 50.
Farm Harbinger on Normal then Hard until gear capped.
Equip Warlock (ap/hp) and Warrior (hd/hp) gear depending on your focus. Legendary gear needs
to have crit damage, life, and ap/hd.
Save all medals for buying heroes/pets. (start with the EV2 imo)
Have 1 dps hero, 1 waller hero, and at least 1 builder hero. These heroes may overlap roles so you might not need 3, or you might need more.
Get a Sparkle Party ability on a Cat pet.
Make sure to have all Standard Campaign shards needed.
For all Chaos progression except C2 and C5 you can use only a monk and a squire. Use Flame Auras, Sky Guard towers, blockades, and then dps monk.
For C2 and C5 build using Huntress Poison Dart Towers or The Apprentice Flamethrower Tower with Squire blockades.
Make sure to have the shards needed from each chaos as they usually help in the next difficulty.
You can apply what I say in this guide to probably any set up (A dps, a waller, and some builders).
Also, for some reason the names of the relics Mark and Orb were changed to Skull and Speed. No idea why or what, but Mark = Skull and Orb = Speed.
Shards
Standard: Construction, Defense Critical Damage, Fortification, Speed Boost, Worm Scarf
C1: Bulwark, Critical Strike, Destruction!
C2: Defense Critical Strike!
C3: Deadly Strikes, Shielding Guard!
C4: Defense Rate!, Power Transfer
C5: Burning Strikes, Vampiric Empowerment!, Explosive Poison
C6: Enhanced Poison, Sharpened Spikes
C7: Fiery Brimstone, Charged Shot, Node Increase (EV2), Power Pylon, Power Gambit
! are shards that I used when I got them, but no longer use them in C7 due to having better ones.
Right now, I use 3 Power Transfer, 3 Deadly Strike, and 4 Speed Boost. Everything else I only need one to use.
Monk has Concussive Chi in Standard, Smashing Fists in C4, and Pole Power in C6. The C4 monk shard is where the AP monk build truly begins to shine.
Crit hit chance cap for defenses is 33% so the Defense Critical Strike is almost useless by the time you get it depending on your ascension level.
Where to begin gearing?
First thing is to get to level 50. Farm Assault on Throne Room Normal/Hard once you have done the campaign once through on Normal. Both give 629k experience and the same loot. So, I guess do Normal since Hard is harder? This game is weird sometimes.
Once you’re level 50 farm Harbinger on Normal and Hard. He drops gear around level 42-46 on Normal and level 50 on Hard. Then you want to pick a single hero that is not the Gunwitch to put all your best gear onto. I made my main builder the best since I normally had a decent medal on them due to this. My waller got my second best totem and my dps got my second best AP gear since I went AP Monk.
By best I mean the following: Weapon Damage on weapons. Armor on head, chest, gloves, boots, and I guess shields if you’re going squire. Main stat for relics (defense power for medallions, defense crit damage for marks, and defense health for totems). I don’t use Orbs because they have a reduced main stat and therefore comparing an Orb to a Medallion is a pain anytime except at cap C7.
You no longer must only have 1 hero in your deck for the purposes of quality, but you DO only want one hero if you’re hunting for a specific weapon type etc. As in, if I want monk weapon drops then I’ll only have my monk in the deck so only polearms drop. Do not play with the Gunwitch only as she affects relic drops, unless your goal is to farm only armor.
So, now that we know what to do with gear that we get, how do we get upgrades?
The way gear stat drops work in dd2 is different from dd1. For dd2, it depends both on how good your best equipped gear is and what Chaos you are on. You cannot get to Chaos 7 gear cap until you’ve worked your way from the bottom. You can, however, only farm Chaos 7 (via being carried) and will eventually have the best gear in the game. It takes around the same amount of time either way.
The goal to get better gear is to take what you can get, upgrade its levels a bit, and look for drops that are now about the same or slightly better. That gear won’t be upgraded though, so you can equip it and upgrade it to get slightly higher gear and rinse repeat.
Once all the best gear is on a single hero you will notice that there are periods where you get big upgrades (a few hundred points or more), medium upgrades (20-40 points perhaps), and small or no upgrades (5 points or less perhaps). Whenever I got stuck in a small or no upgrades period I would use gold/medals to upgrade the level of my gear.
Ascension Levels (asc, or asc lvl)
You unlock ascension levels as soon as a single hero hits level 50. You then level up the same way you did before level 50, via beating maps and getting exp. To access it, open your inventory and go to your hero. On the left side of the screen you will see something that says Ascension and it’ll have a green plus in the top right corner of it if you have a level up. Open that bad boy up. Now then, you have three trees of stats. Offense which is dps, Defense which is building, and Utility which is unique things from both. Offense only matters for dps, Defense for builders, and Utility for both. The trees take turns getting a point starting with Offense, then Defense, and lastly Utility. This means you need three level ups to have a single point in each tree.
Offense: I max Hero Health for all characters. Living is the most important thing and the life helps a ton.
Defense: I max Defense Speed first on all heroes. Then the main tower gets defense power points such as the Huntress Poison Dart Towers.
Utility: For dps I max hero crit % chance first and then Movement Speed second, and then all into Hero Crit Damage. For builders, I do all into defense range for the given tower that I’m using first, then all into defense crit % chance, and finally defense crit damage.
Awesome ascension level benchmarks: 60 allows max defense speed/crit, 150 allows max range, and 210 gives max crit and range!
Leeching and how to be less of a burden
I want to preface this section by stating that I believe leeching is a fun part of the game and should never be completely removed. The two most important things for a leech to remember though is that you need to attempt to not be a huge burden and, most importantly, you need to help carry others when you are able to. Furthermore, please remember that not everyone wants to leech and not everyone wants to carry leechers so don’t pester people or spam lfg trying to get a carry when you are completely capable of playing solo if you stop being lazy.
I don’t know about the rest of the player base, but I got carried a ton in dd1, a fair amount in dd2 (especially in the last part of chaos trials) and I owe a lot to a handful of awesome people. So, I’m going to explain how to be a less burdensome leech so that others might be more okay with taking you along.
Step 1: Make sure you have your best geared hero already as explained from above. Make them the only hero in the deck. Un-slot all shards and make sure they are all locked!
Step 2: Other than the shards above, or the ones you personally really want to keep, sell all your other shards, useless gear, eggs, useless pets etc. This is if you are using the 2 default bags. If you have more bags, then you don’t have to be as strict with what you keep. Bag 1 will have auto sort and auto loot both OFF. This is where anything you don’t want to sell asap will go as well as any shards etc. Bag 2 will have auto sort and auto loot both ON. This is where everything goes from each map.
Step 3: Once in a map, end the warm up asap and give the mana to the carry. While they are building you will sort Bag 2 asap to empty it. To do this fast you first check everything for main stat upgrades (hero damage for weps, armor for gear, main stat for relics) for your best geared hero. Then lock in legendary medallions and totems. Then you go to filter and choose filter by gear. Lock all Legendary gear that has hero health, hero crit, and ap/hd depending on build. Click on all and pick Warlock if you are building AP or Warrior if you are building HD. Lock all the gear that shows up if it isn’t all ready. Then go back to bag 2, open any pet boxes (since those stack), shards etc and then press Y to sell all. The locked warrior/warlock gear then needs to be picked up, and put in Bag 1. You can quick deposit by left clicking the gear, and then right clicking on Bag 1 in the top row without actually switching bags. Once you get 2-4 of a given piece of gear sell all but the strongest (if they are close then choose highest AP/HD for the sake of time). For relics, keep 1 totem and 2 medals at any given time. You can keep Legendary and Mythical gear depending on the situation, but only keep Legendary relics.
Step 4: Try to be done with step 3 during the building at the start. If you need to spend 10 seconds in between waves to catch up, then fine, but do not spend 30-60 seconds doing this between waves. You need to hit G asap.
Step 5: Assassins show up from C5 and above. They choose a target and a purple glow will appear around you when you’re about to get hit by one. You can’t do anything except use pet ability, move, and jump while getting attacked. When the assassin lets go of you (or you die lol) it will do splash damage (I think) so you DO NOT want to be near a silver shield objective, the main crystal/crystals, or weak defense like PDT’s. Furthermore, do not stand behind the roller with assassins since you might kill the carry. That’s not cool. The best spot to stand when you get hit is in the line of fire of the tower/auras that were built. This way the assassin dies!
Step 6: As a rule of thumb, stay the hell away from silver shields and the main crystals when getting carried. Especially on C7. Mobs like to randomly target players that are not directly near them and throw/shoot projectiles that will inevitably kill the main crystal or silver shield. This can, or will, lose a map.
Step 7: Make sure to thank your carry and promise yourself/them that you will carry others when you have time and are geared enough. If you have 8k+ main stat relics you can go help carry C1 for those struggling to break through super easily etc. So, don’t necessarily wait to help carry until you’re in C7 cap gear.
Random Tips
Relics only affect the tower for the slot they are in. The first slot for monk is for flame aura, the third is for anti-air etc. This took me uncomfortably long to realize since I came from Nightmare era and this wasn’t a thing at that time.
Don’t use the Quake shard in the boots since it can destroy the silver objectives.
I didn’t realize I could look at the specific tower stats until I was in chaos 4. To do so you just click on the little icon that is above the stats and below the hero type name (huntress/monk).
The big dps dummies in the tavern are amazing for figuring out what’s strong or not. I unequip my pets and then place it for 60 seconds at a time. At 60 seconds sell the item and it’ll go a moment more before rewinding to the dps when you sold it. I learned this thanks to MrJuicebags videos <3
You can choose to only upgrade your gear by 20 levels or so instead of all 30 or 60. You could only upgrade level 30 gear. You could only upgrade one piece of gear. I’m not too sure how it works exactly and it is hard to prove otherwise unless Trendy makes a statement saying how it works. I had great success with upgrading all of my gear to max whenever I wasn’t getting upgrades in my progression though.
Get a cat with Sparkle Party. Nothing else about it matters and it can be any cat pet. No other pets really matter except an earth type with the Poisonous tips and the 7.5k medals Dragonlich pet for its ability. The last two abilities (Dragonlich and Earth type) are pure dps boost, while Sparkle Party is a huge 5 second stun that will yank assassins off of you since you can use it while getting attacked by one. The Pet Updatetm will probably change all of this though. I just use a Kitty General with Sparkle Party for now until I can save up for Dragonlich. You can use the item Pet re-roll Ability to get it, so you don’t have to level up and evolve a bunch of cats over and over.
Make sure not to build towers directly behind blockades since the Kobolds that explode on the blockades can hit the towers if they are directly next to the blockade.
The builder EV2 is strong in all modes, op in C6, and broken in C7. The Node Increase lets you place up to 4 extra Weapon Manufacture nodes. You can un-equip the shard though and they don’t disappear. I don’t think this needs more explaining for why this is the best shard in the game. So, save all medals for EV2, or even buy her with gems so you can spend medals on other stuff like pets etc.
For Hero Damage EV2, you’re going to want a staff canister with the shot type Meg’Mannus Projector. This is 6 shots a second total and procs Charged Shot a crazy amount. The best gear is legendary with hero damage, hero crit damage, and hero life with 3 slots. If you’re in mythical then drop the hero crit damage since hero life is a must in C5 and above.
Links and References
Max Gearing Values by Difficulty Slightly outdated, but still amazing to reference for the time being.[docs.google.com]
DD2 Tools Super helpful for looking up shard information.[dd2tools.com]
Whitesushi’s Twitch The stream that led to me joining the DD2 streaming community. Very engaging and interactive with the viewers.[www.twitch.tv]
https://www.youtube.com/user/MrJuicebags
Disclaimer
Some of what is in this guide could be wrong (mainly which slots need to be equipped with gear), but if it is it shouldn’t affect you too much or matter in the long run of getting to C7 gear cap. If there’s a glaring error then I will of course make the correct changes. Furthermore, this is simply a guide and is in no way the only way to play the game.
Special thanks to all the people who helped (carried) me along the way, the streaming community for being amazing (check it out), dd2tools for having info on all the shards, and Trendy who has made an awesome game (despite the hiccups along the way).