Oh wow thanks. You are like the Rosetta Stone of this thread. :P
-Todd
You play Bejeweled, or, if you’re familiar with it, Puzzle Quest, by swapping gems around a small board filled with randomly placed gems. If you get enough of the same color in a line, they disappear.
The colors are linked to the quasi-elemental traits of various monsters in-game. You must defeat these monsters to progress through stages, linked together in dungeons, at the end of which you receive rewards in the form of gold and, sometimes, monster eggs. These monster eggs give you monsters, who provide your “attack power.” For instance, if you match a line of Red gems while you’ve got a Red-aligned monster on the board, he’ll use his Attack power (whatever it may be for that particular monster). If you match Green gems, he’ll (typically) do nothing. Some monsters you face are weak or strong against certain colors. Furthermore, the monsters usually have abilities that change the rules somehow–some bosses can “turn off” your monsters temporarily or make themselves invulnerable. Some of the monsters you use can change gems from one color to another or add a damage multiplier to “similar” monsters on your team (you take 6, IIRC, into the dungeon with you each time, and can have quite a large stock of monsters held in reserve).
The game, like most F2P stuff, also has alternative advancement methods. You have Stamina that controls how many dungeons you can run in a row and slowly recharges. You have gold which pays for certain operations, like Fusing monsters together to improve them. You also have gemstones which fund different activities, like paying for more slots in your Monster box (more room for multiple, special-purpose teams or to hold many weak monsters to use as components in the aforementioned fusion) or gambling for powerful, rare Monsters that are otherwise difficult or impossible to get by dungeon crawling.
Oh, and some of the monsters are dragons, and that’s why Dragons is in the name (also because including the word “dragon” in your game title on mobile apparently ensures a 50% uptick in downloads because people fucking love dragons, especially cute anime-style ones!).
To be honest, most of my main monsters aren’t even dragons. Most of them are gods or devils. Actually the title is kind of misleading nowadays. :)
Reemul
1724
Puzzles, Dragons, Devils & Gods works for me ;)
Hansey
1725
I actually finally scored Sandalphon recently, thanks primarily to your un-evolved Kirin. ;) I have LOADS of Kirin friends, but they’re all max evolved, and as you know, Sandalphon doesn’t allow duplicate cards. Thankfully your un-evolved Kirin still gives the same multiplier without counting as a dupe. (So don’t ever evolve her, k?) ;) I actually pulled a dupe Kirin from the REM not that long ago, so I’ll probably keep that one unevolved for these purposes in the future.
I don’t know if I’ll ever use him, though he could be useful on either a Valk or Light Meta team - but there’s nothing that Sandalphon will let my current healer teams get through that they can’t get through already without him. Still, it’s nice to have him on the sidelines.
Regarding Zeus and Satan, I use both of mine for certain situational dungeons (still using Zeus for twinlits, even though it’s unreliable) which works out okay because my Zeus and Satan friends usually only have theirs up at those times as well. (Very rarely see any Zeuses on my friends list outside of Fridays.)
Reemul
1726
Lol, I still havent snagged a Gold Keeper yet, cant manage teh dungeon and no luck on Pal roles either. Maybe one day.
I did snag 2 Dark Metatron’s though
Hansey
1727
Ironically, Kirin teams are actually great for running Keeper of Gold, but you do need a fairly decently leveled team and have to hit the HP threshold to take the pre-emptives from the Light and Dark Keepers (>16879). Since you get at least three turns to kill each floor, you have time to heal up after each pre-emptive and clear for orbs you need if you are missing any to activate Kirin. The biggest risk is accidental skyfalls activating the 25x before you’ve healed up enough to take the preemptive on the next floor.
I’ve put a lot of work into my Kirin team though, and am fortunate enough to have Apollo, so I use Bubblie for blue and get to do 75x damage to the Gold Keeper (except for Valk and Echidna, who are not Physical type). I ran Gold Keeper this week because I needed another to give Mechdragon Hadar his ultimate and almost one shot him… he was down to a sliver of health after the first turn. Was able to easily finish him off on the second turn. (Of course, having two 20% gravities available is a huge help against a 7 million HP pool.) I don’t even use Echidna on the Gold Keeper, as the 75x burst is generally enough to take him down to nearly dead. Delay gets used on the Keeper of Light, who I’m rarely able to kill and heal up in the 3 turns you get.
Tengu on the highest level pooped on me. I have no idea how I’d kill 160K HP critters with the RCV I (didn’t) have.
Hansey
1729
Tengu is tough without a decently leveled team, which means putting effort and XP into low cost monster that most people would rather be putting into their main monsters. I managed to snag Tengu early on with a lucky drop from the lower difficulty, and then went on to ignore it for months and months while I worked on leveling up a Flame Chaser team. I managed to zero stone the higher difficulty a short while ago finally, and I think the team I used was:
Dual Flame Chaser leads (mine still isn’t max level yet, but he’s getting up there) which give x2 HP and x2 ATK to Physical (12 cost)
Max level Echidna, not skilled up at all (8 cost)
Max level Ice Samurai Ogre, only skill 2 but max awoken (2 skill boosts) (11 cost, is Physical type - his active will one shot the Will-o-Wisps on floor 4)
Max level Gigas, max skilled (10 cost, is Physical type)
Max level King Bubblie, only skill 2, but max awoken (2 skill boosts) (7 cost, is Physical type - active gives x3 attack for Physical for one turn)
As you noted, the biggest problem with most viable Tengu teams is RCV - this team only has 628 RCV (assuming I get a max level Flame Chaser friend), so you need to stack HP and ATK - kill them before they can kill you. There’s not a lot of room for stalling (with such bad RCV) so the skill boosts are useful here. My total HP with this team is 38,316 and red ATK is 16,030 (after Chaser multipliers). Comboing is important to maximize damage, as are orb changers. I’d love to put another Gigas on here for another orb changer, but I don’t know what I’d replace, because all the other team members are pretty essential. Tengu himself should go down with enough red orbs (either Gigas or Chaser actives) + Bubblie active + as many combos as you can manage.
It’s not easy though by any means. I’m sure the last time I did it (it’s been awhile) it was a bit touch and go. I might try again one day once my Chaser is max leveled and maybe if I get some skill ups on my low cost Echidna. But I’m not all that fussed about skilling up my Tengu (at least not yet) so it’s pretty low priority for me.
I should probably see if I can luck it on the lower level, or wait until I have a chaser and try that. My team was all max level, but probably all level 1 skill, with 0 eggs.
Canuck
1732
LOL
I don’t play COD but I can generally understand what people are talking about.
I’m more interested in the original purpose of the topic. I live in Japan and while this may be a bit of an exaggeration at night during prime time it feels like 2 out of every 3 commercials are for cellphone games. During prime time! I don’t know how they can pay those outrageous commercial prices unless they’re making a lot of money but I don’t get how so many different games could be that profitable. I just can’t get over the fact that I’m watching cellphone game commercials when it’s rare to see a commercial for even the big name AAA titles from consoles.
Hansey
1733
Actually the original topic title is woefully out of date. As of a year later, this article from February 2014 indicates that Puzzle & Dragons was making about $4.5 million per day at that time.
This article claims that Puzzle and Dragons makes more than the next nine mobile games combined, which doesn’t surprise me. (I can’t speak to the accuracy of the claims in that article - the comments seems to be full of people crying BS.) It’s crazy, and I expect a lot of Japanese developers are trying to capture whatever magic GungHo did with PAD.
Big patch dropped today. One of the biggest changes it that stamina recharges twice as fast. I’m somewhere around level 220-ish, I have 126 stamina. That used to take almost full day to recharge, so I usually only played once a day. Now I can play twice a day if I decide to, and spend twice as much money on the game…which would still be $0.
I’m sitting on 100 stones right now too. I need a good godfest to show up so I can roll 8-10 times.
Reemul
1735
Yeah the stamina patch is nice. I am 207 on my us one but focus on my uk game which is now 154 but hasnt got the stamina patch yet.
Lots of new UE’s as well.
100 stones should get you a couple of sonias and other new gods no problem.
I am now over 500 days and still pick it up daily and play a while.
It’s official. Monster Strike has defeated Puzzle & Dragons.
http://www.metaps.com/press/en/blog/157-jptrends1202
I’ve been playing Monster Strike on and off, but I’m just not feeling it. It seems like the game maybe gets interesting at some point, but the gameplay is so simple so far.
Maybe I should check out Disney Tsum Tsum. Or maybe not. It looks like some kind of puzzle game.
I gave up on Monster Strike pretty quickly after the NA launch. Couldn’t stand the artstyle or the character designs, and couldn’t stay interested in the gameplay.
Also, I remember hearing a TV ad for that Tsum Tsum game from the living room and thinking they were saying “tsun-tsun,” which would be a very different game entirely!
Reemul
1739
Yeah I gave up after a while. I got 4 or 5 5* creatures at the start and a pretty powerful team and after it that it seemed to become a bit samey. PaD is still my daily hit
Indeed, i don’t really like Monster Strike because it is mentally not challanging enough for me where PAD is. The challanging part in PAD to me is about picking the right team with the right lead/subs for the task and about getting the right combo’s to beat the monsters.
In Monster Strike the battle is sometimes just more about luck and the skills involved are a little bit meh…
