If you’re an MMO novice on the lookout for a way into this rich, thriving genre, you can’t do much better than King’s Raid. Vespa’s gorgeous SRPG is the epitome of accessible yet deep RPG gameplay.
But there’s no getting around it: this kind of game can be daunting to newcomers, what with its many modes, currencies, items, obscure terms, and so on.
This handy guide will give you a solid grounding in King’s Raid, preparing you for the long and happy journey that lies ahead.
Building a team
King’s Raid is all about battling, and you can’t win a battle without a team of heroes. Your team should consist of a healer, a DPS character, a support character, and a tank. But it’s not quite that simple. Some enemies are vulnerable to magic attacks while others are susceptible to physical damage. To survive, you’ll need both kinds of heroes in your bench.
There are seven different classes of hero available – Knight, Warrior, Archer, Priest, Wizard, Mechanic, and Assassin.
Over the course of the first few battles you’re given a handful of core characters for free. These are Cleo, Roi, Kasel, Frey, and Clause. All of them will almost certainly be central to your team, but Frey (healer) and Clause (tank) in particular are indispensable.
The obvious course is to build your team around your favorite characters, but there’s another way of approaching the game. Each hero has its own Unique Weapon, and it makes as much sense to build your teams around these.
That said, the right approach is the one that lets you spend time with the characters you like the most, and sees you building up a team rather than trying to distribute XP across the whole pool of available heroes.
As long as concentrate on one team, and that team has a healer and a tank on it, you’ll be fine.
Combat
For the most part, the combat in King’s Raid is automatic. There’s an ‘auto’ button in the top-left of the screen, and as long as you tap that you don’t really need to do anything while your heroes join battle with their enemies.
Or, if you feel like it, you can not tap that button and handle matters yourself. But before you do you’ll need to choose a team.
Your formation is cut up into front, middle, and back, with heroes forever bound to one of those positions – i.e. a healer will always go at the back, and can’t be dropped in the middle or the front.
Once the battle has begun, you can deploy skills at will. Each hero has three, and they recharge after use. If you’re managing them yourself it’s worth holding back your assault skills until you encounter a particularly tough enemy. And you’ll need to keep an eye on everybody’s health bars, so that you can unleash a healing spell and fix them up before they die,
Progression
Over time you’ll unlock all sorts of modes in King’s Raid, but to begin with you just need to hack your way through the chapters. The quickest and easiest way to do this is by going to the Quests menu on the left of the screen and jumping to the next quest.
After completing a quest – often a battle – you’ll have some loot to look after and dispense among your heroes. Go to the Inventory screen to Enhance your loot items or Grind them down for parts. Then, go to Heroes to equip the best items from your inventory. There’s an ‘Auto-equip’ button to take the pain out of it.
As long as you follow these basic steps for the first few hours in King’s Raid you’ll make steady progress and end up in a good place from which to attack the rest of the game.
Now, here’s a quick overview of some of the terms you’ll come across during these initial stages.
Levelling up
Levelling up your heroes increases their Skill levels and basic stats, getting them in tip-top shape for the battles ahead. To level up you’ll need EXP, which you gain by battling – and in particular by battling in Conquest.
Awakening and Transcending
Separate from your heroes’ levels are their star ratings. To increase a hero’s star rating you need to Awaken them, which you can do in the character screen. Once you’ve Awakened them all the way up to five stars, you can Transcend them. Both procedures require Fragments, which you get from Dungeons.
Skills
Your skills can be enhanced, just like everything else. To do this you’ll need to get your hands on some Skill Books, which can be found in the Stockade.
Gear
Throughout the game you’ll collect Gear, which you can equip to your heroes or Grind. Gear comes in several varieties, including Armor, Accessories, Weapons, Orbs, Artifacts, and Treasures. Crucially, a hero can only equip an item of gear at the same Tier as them.
As well as types, Gear come in degrees of rarity, with Common at one end of the spectrum and Legendary at the other. The rarer the item, the more powerful it is.
Unique Weapons
For every hero there’s a UW, or unique weapon, with powerful attributes and which only they can wield. To obtain these UWs, you need to use Special Item Summons or Unique Weapon Tickets.
This guide barely scratches the surface of King’s Raid’s gameplay, but it should set you up for your first few hours of gameplay. After that, you’ll have to work it all out for yourselves – or alternatively you can check out this handy tier list, or go to Reddit and see what the King’s Raid community has to say.
Check King’s Raid out for yourself via the App Store or Google Play now.