Channeling Zeus:
Bob's Practical Guide to Titans

a note on Bob’s Practical Guides: these guides are intended to be as helpful, informative, or at least thought-and-discussion-provoking as possible to a wide range of players, but are primarily for players who DON’T have all the latest-and-greatest, because of limited resources, limited luck, and/or being new players. If these guides are useful or interesting to better-resourced players as well, that is a nice bonus, but not the main intent!

So: let’s talk about titans.

Titans drop loot.  (Sometimes.) But notably — when they do — items that aren’t generally farmable. (Including, potentially, random titan body parts for crafting.) Plus? PoV/PoG tasks often have you chasing these mega-monsters.

But regular map-stage, event-stage, or raid teams generally don’t cut it here: titan teams are their own kind of specialty, enough so that the intersection between “my best titan heroes” and “my best heroes overall” can wind up being quite small.

This is hardly the first titan guide, and I’m not going to pretend that it will be, or should be, the last. But I’m going to try to touch on each of the major “food groups” of taking down titans, as much as possible, all in one place.

Firstly, the first rule of titan fighting is

• tile damage, tile damage, tile damage

Doing direct damage from Special skills almost always pales in comparison, so let’s talk about how tile damage works.

An empirical fit for E&P damage from an old forum thread:

 Damage ≈ 100 x ( θ x Att / Def ) ^ 1.35 

Tile damage is divided by three
θ is a random parameter between exp(-.5)=0.606 and exp(.5)=1.649

This estimated formula is behind many of the major abilities you’ll want to pack on a titan team.

Firstly, θ is a random parameter you can’t help, but the ratio of attack to defense you certainly can, and note that the ratio is inside a power law: once attack starts to exceed defense — and the more it does — damage output rises rapidly.

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Let’s start with offense:

• color stacking: bringing a strong color against the titan’s color is double damage, so generally you want to stack as much of the strong color as possible

Titan teams are often mono, or at least 4-1 (if an important ability on this list isn’t available in the strong color, or is simply much better in a different color)

• base attack rating: add up the attack scores of the heroes, so… while abilities are important, bigger titan specialist heroes are preferable to smaller (or just lower-attack) ones, all else equal; a good “filler” when you don’t know what else to bring is one or more heroes that make this attack total as high as possible

• attack up: many heroes, but also items, can boost the overall attack rating by multiplying by a significant percentage (often more than just adding a high-attack hero… but adding andmultiplying is even better when possible)

• normal attack up: notably stacks with regular attack up, leading to truly prodigious attack boosting. (note: this ability will often note the maximum amount of attack stacking allowed, so read up).  

Note that regular attack-up buffs generally tend to have “upward tilting sword” icons and “normal attack up” icons tend to be “flexing arm” icons (as opposed to “dice” icons, which come with a miss chance, see below point) . Examples of those include Bertulf, cWilbur, Shar’kai, Tarlak, Miki, Gastille 

Also note: if you are using a miss-chance attack-up buff, that applies to ALL attacks, not just normal attacks (usually denoted by “dice” icon, e.g. Edelaide, Wu Kong, Ranvir) – but the miss chance ALSO applies to your Specials… which can be a real problem if you are relying on Specials to apply defense-down, elemental defense down, or other debuffs. Either be careful with timing (fire all debuffs before firing the “dice” buff) or try to avoid using miss-chance buffs altogether! 

• growth: when it affects attack, in some sense, very much like an attack-boost buff, but is permanent and stackable, with itself and with attack buffs. The size of the Growth stat adjustment and your ability to fire it several times during the titan fight are both considerations.

• critical hits: critical hits do double damage, so substantially increasing to chance of crits — which automatically already counts all tiles that hit the titan’s weak spot! — is an attack modifier not to be ignored when available

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Affecting defense: note that since damage depends on the ratio of offense to defense, cutting defense rating in half is equivalent to doubling offense rating — and, of course, the two effects amplify each other.

• defense down: a common ability, and even replicable by using harpoons (when a titan is stunned), but generally the first step to this side of the ratio. Pay attention both to the amount of defense down and to its duration!

• elemental defense down: notable as it stacks with regular defense down, so a powerful addition (and thus sought after)

• wither: like growth, permanent and stackable, with itself andwith defense debuffs. The size of the Wither stat adjustment and your ability to fire it several times during the titan fight are both considerations.

• ”damage received is increased": straight up multiplies damage after the damage calculation takes place. If that sounds powerful, it’s because it is; examples include the 3* Buster, 4* Franz, 5* Gastille (the latter who is a titan-slaying king due to his massive “damage increase” AND “normal attack up” abilities)

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You might be noticing that this a lot of statuses to keep up in the air at once, and that can mean getting your timing right. Unless the tiles especially like you, that means mana and tile manipulation

• direct mana boosts: heroes that boost mana generation, hand out free mana, or more commonly, mana potions of various sizes and/or tornadoes or hurricanes

• tile manipulation: heroes that boost tiles in various ways (attack, but also mana), or ways to horse tiles directly (tornadoes and hurricanes again, or expensively, scrolls of alteration)

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There’s another dimension to titan hunting, of course: keeping your heroes from dying.

• raw size: if your titan specialists are big enough and/or you don’t hunt the biggest titans, you might just shrug off hits, or even titan specials

• attack down/defense up: buffing yourself and/or debuff the titan’s hit (note that the latter is an effect of throwing harpoons)

• preventing specials: depending on the titan’s special attack, you might prefer to block it from going off with mindless attack or the like, mana cuts, or even time stops (note: this can sometimes matter even more with Rare titans; make sure you are aware of what the Special actually does, and be ready for it if you aren’t just keeping it blocked)

• healing: not a primary titan fighting ability, but could be handy, not least if you have healers that throw one or more of the buffs or debuffs above

• stunning: good old fashioned “hit the titan where it hurts” – ideally, you want to direct strong tiles into the titan’s weak spot, but any tiles will do (unless it’s a Rare titan with elemental reflection!), and stunning freezes the titan’s normal AND special attack for that turn. Can be effective if you keep stirring the board with tornadoes, etc.

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I’ve mentioned battle items in passing, but let’s talk about them specifically for a moment

• attack up items: these can replace an attack-up hero, or supplement one before/between such a hero firing — the most common and cheapest here are bear banners (+25%, 4 turns); the more expensive dragon banners give +defense as well, but only marginally better +offense, and all for 3 turns instad of 4; titan banners are significantly bigger at +50% but are expensive Hunter’s Lodge items

• defense down items: if you don’t have much of a DD hero in your color, harpoons, while somewhat expensive, are popular for harvesting titan parts and applying attack-down and notably defense down (but only when titan is stunned!); valkyrie’s banedirectly applies DD, but are expensive/rare enough that if you’re using them, you’re saving them for Rare or Mythic titans

• items to help you not die: the absolute cheapest are arrow attacks and their miss chance, though axe attacks and their attack debuff are also fairly cheap; harpoons are more expensive but count toward titan body parts and apply attack-down even if the titan isn’t stunned; time stops are a gold standard for “I’m bringing one or more tiny heroes with good Specials against a big titan,” but are more costly, and keep an eye on the titan’s mana bar — time stops stop normal attacks for a few turns, but they won’t stop the titan Special from firing when its mana fills (unless you time stop it again in time to drain its mana, or otherwise block its Special); the fancier, more expensive time freezes (hunter’s lodge) work similarly; finally, various healing potions are a possibility, or even antidotes if the titan’s Special inflicts a crippling/lethal effect

• mana: practically required — as you cannot count on friendly tiles to get all your statuses running at the same time. Don’t sleep on minor mana potions for cheapness and for topping up almost-full heroes, but mana potions and super mana potions(the latter especially for effects you want on turn zero) are also good brings, depending on how many item slots (and how many resources)

• tile manipulation: overlaps with mana, as expensive tornadoes and hurricanes directly supply mana and RESHUFFLE THE BOARD, which is a good way of moving things along when the tiles are garbage. (note that tornadoes give partial mana to all heroes, hurricanes give full mana to three heroes). The gold standard here are scrolls of alteration, which FORCE there to be tiles of your desired color, but tend to be “special occasion hit” items only

Note that often the most direct way to get a much bigger titan score is to force the issue with some amount of these tile manipulation items — but that really depends on your ability to resource them!

Personally, I tend to have a few standard item loadouts for titans:

• BUDGET: Bear banner, minor mana potion, mana potion, arrow attack OR axe attack

• BUDGETPLUS: Bear banner, minor mana potion, mana potion, harpoon OR time stop

(the last slot isn’t that budget, but I tend to use only 1-2 per fight)

• FULL: Bear banner, mana potion, time stop, tornado

(when I’m more actively aiming for a bigger individual hit)

• MAX: Titan banner, hurricane, tornado, scroll of alteration

(pretty much only for Mythic Titan hits, usually my first one or two attacks; it’s generally not sustainable to spend these items constantly)

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Let’s put it all together.

If this seems like a lot, it kind of is (and you hardly need to try to pack ALL the abilities above into five heroes!); given the multiplicative nature of many of these modifiers, even though titan fights are on a timer, it often pays to be deliberate.

A few tiles that strike while many buffs and debuffs are running may do far more damage than an entire cascade of tiles with few or no effects running.

So it pays to choose effects that last longer, and it may pay to not just hammer through match-3s (or even fire Specials the instant they are ready) - you really want to have as many effects as possible running at once, then, while they are, hit with as many strong tiles as possible.

That… is an art form, not a science.

In this example, a 14* yellow titan is under attack, and note that a mono purple team has

• attack up

• normal attack up

• defense down

• elemental defense down: purple

• “extra damage taken”

• mindless attack

running simultaneously. Here, single tiles inflict over 10000 damage each as critical hits, and while Gastille is a particularly lucky fine example of an anti-titan specialist, the other heroes are not especially large in power.

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Finally, let’s talk about loot. (An old, but good resource.) Let’s condense this, focusing just on successful titan kills. Loot depends both on the titan level (TL, the number of stars the titan has) and the “grade” of your total titan hits relative to the other members of your alliance.

• A+: #1 total score in your alliance, Loot Tier TL+3

• A: #2-5 total score in your alliance, Loot Tier TL+2

• B: 6th place or lower AND > 3.3% of titan’s HP in damage, Loot Tier TL+1

• C: 6th place or lower AND > 1.0% of titan’s HP in damage, Loot Tier TL

• D: 6th place or lower AND < 1.0% of titan’s HP in damage, Loot Tier TL/2 (rounded up)

If you’re getting going on titans, you want to start consistently scoring at least a “C” as much as possible (since the loot tier can be significantly different between C and D).

You may notice that the actual loot random rolls aren’t that much different between C, B, A, and often even A+; a slightly higher loot tier gives you theoretically a slightly higher chance of Good Stuff, but often it’s hard to tell the difference titan to titan.

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Oh, and titan body parts and the harpoon count?

How many harpoons your alliance throws at a titan determines the level of titan spleens and whatnot that drop as crafting items for the Hunter’s Lodge. Notice each titan has three checkpoints: a relatively small number, a moderate number, and a berjillion 

The harpoon count checkpoints influence titan body-part drops, not other drops. Most alliances will at least seek to hit the first harpoon checkpoint every titan to get some crafting material drops, and it’s not uncommon to aim for the second checkpoint (this varies by alliance, as to resourcing harpoons and how much people want increased drops of this kind). Fully filling the harpoon bar is possible, but seems uncommon for many.

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As always - Questions? Comments? Feedback? This post may evolve as folks sound off. Let me know what you think, and may RNG occasionally show you mercy!

Getting started: intro teams

In the main first post above, I talked about all the ingredients one might use. But what would a basic titan “recipe” look like, for a relative beginner?

(scroll to the bottom of this post if you just want to see a few different starter titan teams)

If you’re really getting started, of course, you may mostly be “welp, I just bring what I have” and I get that. But what about once you’ve started to build a roster of 3*, maybe the occasional 4*?

As I’ve discussed above, just bringing your biggest heroes regardless is not necessarily a winning move for maximizing titan damage. Let’s look at a few basic “starter” moves (these are not meant to be comprehensive, but list some potentially “gettable” – especially S1 – heroes).

NOTE: I am only going to discuss 3* and 4* heroes here. There are a LOT more 5* options, but it’s hard to give general advice about much-lower-chance-of-getting-them heroes!

When starting out, while there’s a lot of fancy things you can do, a good first step is bringing attack up and defense down. Titans are BIG compared to anything on the regular PvE maps, so taking a bite out of their defense ratings is a big first step; attack-up heroes are also good (see below), but you can bring Bear Banners (relatively cheap) if needed to get started.

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Starting out: defense down heroes

Early on, Valen is reasonably likely to be an early defense-down specialist - he supplies defense down (at Fast and for 6 turns!) as a vanilla 3* S1 without needing any of his costumes. Ulmer is Slow but also brings the DD.

If you’re gunning for costumes at the Costume Chamber, there’s also cGunnar (blue), cBerden (green), cBrienne (green).

4* S1 heroes who also do the work are Gormek (red, and great multifunction costumes once you get them), Grimm (blue), Tiburtus (purple).

Outside of S1, you might be able to pull other defense-downers like Gill-Ra (purple, Atlantis/S2), the infamous Treevil (purple, Challenge Festival 1; other ailments besides DD), Maeve (purple, Challenge Festival 2), Koda (purple, Clash of Knights), Boots (red, Goblin Village), Dolrak (yellow, Beach Party/summer), Bogart (yellow, Covenant).

Ideally, you’d like to have a defense-down in each color – but starting out, you might just need to bring the best one you can get and level early on.

Eventually, you’ll also want elemental defense down, since it stacks with defense down (note: this makes it more important that you are bringing a team mostly of that color, of course)

EDD heroes to watch for:

Nordri/cNordri (S3/Valhalla)
Almur/cAlmur (S3/Valhalla)
Lexi (Contest of Elements)
Guardian Jackal (Challenge Festival 1 or Hero Academy level 8)
Guardian Falcon (Challenge Festival 1 or Hero Academy level 8), Bagreg (Untold Tales 1), cColen (Costume Chamber)

Another tasty debuff to apply is “all damage received is increased” if you can land it.

Buster (3* red, Santa’s Challenge/Christmas)
Franz (4* green, Clash of Knights)

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Big attack boosters

There are a number of heroes who boost attack, and they are good to have – especially if using Bear Banners regularly is an iron drain you’d rather not have while concentrating on building your base.

But the big jump comes with BIG attack boosters, especially those that stack with regular attack up – this can be a next-level jump in your titan damage.

The first player in this area for many folks is going to be S1 Wu Kong (+185% attack, -32% accuracy); replacing every three hits with two-hits-for-nearly-triple-damage can be a big jump (though he can make your Specials whiff as well).

Mostly titan damage is tile damage, so “increased normal attack” is your friend (and stacks with regular attack up) – Bertulf (yellow 3*, Clash of Knights), cWilbur (red 4*, Atlantis/S2), or Shar’Khai (purple 4*, Untold Tales 1, also boosts critical chance) will be nice goals when you can get at least one.

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Sample teams

Let’s say you’re getting to where you can start assembling titan teams and are facing, oh, a green titan.

• Valen (blue, defense down)

• Wu Kong (yellow, big attack boost)

• Hawkmoon (red, heal; also some attack up if cHawkmoon)

• Azar (red, mana cut)

• Namahage (red S2, with self-boosting attack up) or other highest-attack-rating red

You may not be able to field a titan-busting mono team at first, but getting one or two important abilities in off-color and then filling in with the strong color is a way to get started.

Maybe once your roster has a few more heroes, your team might look closer to (for mono red)

• cHawkmoon

• Gormek

• Azar

• Bagreg

• cWilbur

or even

• Boldtusk (possibly with costume bonuses)

• Gormek (possibly with costume bonuses)

• cWilbur

• Guardian Falcon

• Buster

Note that the abilities you’re most likely to bring off-color, when you get them, are going to be “normal attack up” and “takes extra damage” since there just aren’t that many of them, especially amongst 3* and 4* heroes.

Once you start getting 5* specialists - or even one or two just-big-attack-rating 5* - then a fuller “juggling my titan team” game can proceed along the lines of the first post above!

But what about 15* (and 16*) titans?

With the advent of new and bigger titans, how does the titan-slaying game change?

Frankly… 15* (and 16*) titans kinda suck for a lot of alliances

Summary:

as currently implemented in titan difficulty and titan loot, 15* titans are a resource loss for a significant number of fair-sized alliances, and a resource gain for almost no one (and a tiny one for those few who do gain).

But maybe you’re doing what you can with what you have (which is a lot of this game, after all).

A bigger titan is still a titan, albeit (obviously) bigger and with a great big honking caveat:

• “[30%] now 20% extra chance to resist all status ailments and buff dispels”

ouch.

That Titan Resist is going to go off an awful lot, and I don’t say that in a conspiracy-theory, “SG has set the true Resist rate to be a lot higher for me personally” way, but in a “you kinda often want to land a bunch of ailments at once, which means you are firing a lot of them during any titan fight, which means you’re going to see a fair few of them bounce” way.

Because big titan tile-dump damage tends to come from not just one ailment, but getting a collection of them to take at the same time, that resist can be a pretty big spanner in the works.

The general analysis in the first post still applies, but with a couple of tweaks:

• long duration debuffs: any titan with Titan Resist is going to make some of your status ailments fail, so you want the ones that do stick to last longer. It was always an advantage to bring, e.g. defense down, that lasts 6 turns instead of 3, but now that’s even more important. This might lead you to consider weaker heroes (or ones with lower defense-down %) if they have longer ailment durations.

Note especially that ailments that are essentially “permanent” (e.g. that have the Lasting quality, or are tied to the presence of fiends) become especially valuable when any given application has a 30% fail rate.

Note also that Wither isn’t considered an ailment, so presumably it can reduce defense as always without any fail rate….

• “duration of status ailments is reset”: if landing an ailment is uncertain, then extending the ones you can land is a surer bet than taking your chances with reapplying them, especially if you can reset a bunch of ailment durations at once and especially if they are all of fairly long duration.

Resetting duration doesn’t matter for “permanent” ailments, but since it’s likely at least some (if not most or even all) of your ailments will have durations…