Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians is not a difficult game to get your head around. Not only does it belong to a genre that will be at least passingly familiar to most gamers, but Ubisoft has done a brilliant job of making it intuitive and easy to understand.
Even so, there are many pitfalls on the path to total success. If you’re not aware of them you can easily waste hours, and perhaps even money, on pointless exercises that will get you nowhere. And getting nowhere isn’t much fun.
Thankfully for you, we’ve been playing Elemental Guardians for so long now that we’re painfully aware of every stupid decision or oversight you can make. Whether you’re an experienced player or a newbie learning the ropes, this list of 15 common mistakes should help you stay on the straight and narrow.
You waste your time on 1-star creatures
We’ve all heard the story of the ugly duckling. Any creature, however ostensibly useless, has the potential to be a paragon of excellence.
Don’t believe a word of it. While it’s technically true that a 1-star creature can be leveled-up to 5 with enough effort, that doesn’t mean it should. Magical Books and other resources are much better spent elsewhere.
The biggest problem is that 1-star creatures are not eligible for evolution, and all of the best creatures bar none are ones that have been evolved from lesser forms. A 1-star creature therefore lacks the most important kind of potential, and should be broken down for food without delay.
You dismiss 2-star creatures
Just because 1-star creatures are not worth the effort, that doesn’t mean 2-star creatures are a waste of time too. That’s because — you guessed it — 2-star creatures can evolve, and in some cases their evolved forms are among the most powerful creatures in the game.
Of course, some aren’t. We recommend that you consult our Tier List whenever you acquire a new creature, just in case that 2-star weakling you’ve just added to your inventory is a star in the making.
You forget to claim your free Seals and crystals
You can easily get swept up in Elemental Guardians’ gameplay loop, entering battles as often as possible to level-up and earn rewards. But it’s worth staying on top of your housekeeping — and that means claiming freebies.
Two of the islands on the main screen are dedicated to giving you free Seals and crystals, every day. Redeeming these whenever possible will make a huge difference to your rate of progress.
Whenever you see an icon attached to the Crystal Mine or Dragon Utopia, tap on it immediately to collect your freebies. You can generally do this every six to 12 hours.
You neglect to log-in daily
However dedicated you are, there will be days when you simply don’t have time for a proper gaming session. On those days we recommend that you at least try to log-in to Elemental Guardians, to keep your reward calendar ticking over.
It’s worth making the effort because the rewards get better as you progress through the calendar, and valuable items like Magical Books and Legendary Soulstone Fragments are pretty tough to get through normal gameplay.
You can miss a day or two without blowing your calendar progress for that month, but it’s a good idea to get into the habit of logging in for a few minutes come what may.
You use the same team in every battle
It’s natural that you’ll favour certain creatures over others, ranking and leveling them up and using them across the game modes because they always seem to work for you. This is perfectly healthy. But don’t neglect your lesser creatures.
The sheer range of challenges you’re going to come up against in battle in terms of elemental affinities and classes means you’ll need a broad spectrum of powerful creatures to see off every threat, and your creatures won’t become powerful unless you harden them up in battle.
You keep attacking enemies with red arrows over their heads
Q: Should you waste attacks on enemies that are barely susceptible to them?
A: No.
This might seem like the easiest quiz ever created, but you’d be surprized how often inexperienced players blindly smash out attacks without paying attention to elemental effects.
To summarize, if a creature has a green arrow over its head, it’s affiliated with an element that’s particularly vulnerable to the attacker’s element. If the arrow is yellow, the elemental effect is neutral. And if it’s red, the attacker will do minimal damage.
So you should never attack a red arrow enemy unless you have absolutely no choice — typically because all of the enemies have red arrows.
You believe that higher rank is better than higher level
Your ultimate ambition with every creature is to max it out at five stars, and in many cases this is pretty easy to do. But you’re wasting your time if you don’t also level your creatures up.
This is most evident in the Arena, against human opponents. In this context you can easily find yourself outclassed by opponents with lesser ranks who have taken the time to level-up their teams.
You mix your glyphs
We couldn’t possibly tell you which glyphs are better than others, since they all serve their own purposes. However, we can tell you how to get the most out of your glyphs, and that’s by ensuring that you don’t mix them.
Each creature has six glyph slots, and these should contain six examples of a single glyph type rather than a mixture of the types. Why? Because sticking with one type will give you a bonus. For instance, if you have six different glyphs belonging to the Vitality type you’ll get a 40% HP bonus, which is pretty huge.
It’s important to switch glyphs out as you acquire new and better ones, but always keep type with type for maximum impact.
You just don’t understand how to use glyphs
There are many different ways to refine your creatures in Elemental Guardians, and glyphs are only one of these ways. But you overlook them at your peril. According to the Elemental Guardians player community, glyphs are vitally important in letting a creature achieve its potential on the battlefield.
It’s also important to bear in mind that different glyph types give you different set bonuses.
Vitality – HP
Strength – ATK
Frenzy – CRIT percentage
Defense – DEF
Precision – ACC
Destruction – CRIT damage
Endurance – RES
Life Steal – Buffs Life Steal abilities
Appeasement – Buffs Healing abilities
Meditation – Reduces ability cooldown times
Immunity – Buffs Immunity abilities
You spend your Seals and Soulstones without a strategy
Naturally the temptation whenever you have 130 Seals is to buy an Epic Soulstone. Equally, it’s only human to want to open a Soulstone as soon as it comes into your possession. But this isn’t always wise.
Some events in Elemental Guardians have particular requirements around opening Soulstones and spending a specific number of Seals or crystals. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself unable to achieve an event goal because you squandered the necessary resources earlier in a moment of rabid excitement.
You level-up when your energy is full
Every time you level-up, you get a total energy refill, free of charge. Of course, sometimes you’ll already have full energy when you come to level-up, so it won’t make a difference to you.
Except it should. If you’re about to level-up and you have full energy, spend it on Instant Tickets and quickly charge through a few battles, picking up a bonus rewards. It might feel a bit frivolous, but there’s no reason not to since you’re energy is going to be replenished anyway.
You use up your abilities before the final wave of a battle
One of most important lessons to learn when it comes to using your abilities is that timing is everything, since almost every ability is on a timer.
What that means in practise is that you should never use your abilities just before the final wave. This is where you’re going to meet the toughest monsters, plus bosses in many cases, and if you don’t have every possible tool at your disposal you’re likely to be defeated.
You fail to farm
Elemental Guardians is an RPG, so the farming we’re referring to is RPG farming — i.e., returning to completed levels to scour them for extra rewards.
You can do this automatically using Instant Tickets, unless you’re thinking of taking on a stage at advanced or nightmare difficulty. As you can imagine, completing a stage at a tougher difficulty gives you better rewards — plus an additional challenge.
You prioritize offense over defense
It’s natural to adopt an aggressive stance in a game where the aim is to defeat opponents, and there’s no question that dealing damage is very important. However, it’s more important to be able to survive damage dealt to you.
At least, that’s the consensus among experienced players, who feel that Elemental Guardians, in its current form, favors defense over offense.
That means you should choose glyphs that emphasise HP and DEF, even in creatures that play an attacking role. Defending is never as glamorous as attacking, but it’s the winning strategy.
You fail to focus on evolution
We want to leave you with this one because it’s arguably the most important entry on our list.
The bottom line is that the best creatures only get to be the best through evolution, so you need to evolve them as a matter of urgency.
This will take Magical Books, which you can obtain by battling in the Arena as often as possible and saving up your reputation points. And it’ll take regular visits to the Dragonmist Islands to farm the various resources needed to evolve you creatures into their own kickass descendants.
You can avoid these mistakes for yourself and download Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians on the App Store and Google Play now. You can also check out the other Guides we’ve written on the game here: