Dragon Age Legends Low Level Guide for New Players

Dragon Age Legends Low Level Guide for New Players by Soliloquynights

I know there’s quite a few guides here already that does an excellent job talking about the formula’s and theories of castle building. I thought I would break it down so new players has an easy guide to follow and understand the game better.

THIS IS A GUIDE!!! this is not meant to be a bible for DAL that you have to follow religiously in order to be successful. Trials and Errors are the best part of this game, what works and what doesnt for me may not be true to you.

To build on Avi’s ( a google plus friend) recent post about character build, I thought i should contribute by talking a little bit about your castle for the new players.

GOLD is REALLY scarce in the beginning, but dont be tempted to buy gold. worse decision you’ll ever make (one that i didnt make but was tempted to). Your castle will be neglected, and you’ll feel inferior compared to all the insane castles with 16 wheels, and 20 smiley faces with every room available purchased and upgraded by the higher level players. DON’T BE DISCOURAGED! We all walked the same path of being low level and poor, but have faith! Because once you reach orzammar, every drop is 200 gold plus and you no longer get level 3 drops that sells for 10 gold.

CASTLE BUILDING – Again, dont be discouraged when you see your 3×3 castle barely fitting an apothecary and a alchemy lab with 2 castle workers and a hero’s room. It comes with time and patience, and good planning. When i first started, i had no idea you can move rooms around and i wasted so much gold, selling, then re-buying the same room. SO MOVE YOUR ROOMS AROUND when you build expansions to suit your needs. Remember to place your worker rooms above ground   and try to build down because expansions are cheaper. A basement 4th floor is 500 gold to expand, while a 4th floor above ground is a whopping 1600!

ROOMS – At low level, i find the apothecary and alchemy lab always busy. Pump those mana and health potions out because you probably dont want to waste a turn healing. In this game, the best defense is a good offense, and you can’t have a good offense without mana! Get the upgraded mana potions asap! That one extra mana is totally worth it since you can only bring 5 to battle. 5minor mana potions = 10 mana, or 5major mana potions = 15! that’s 5 extra spell/skills you can use! The health potions isnt AS important in the beginning because you wont get any enemy that’ll hit your harder than 1.5 hearts unless you’re a mage in the front row getting hit by a power strike. (you shouldnt be in that position anyways).

Power/Defense/Agility/Luck potions – While it seems attractive to get added bonus to your stats, at low level, it’s uncessary. Faster you kill something, the faster you level up, faster you level up, the better the gear, the better the gear, the higher the stats, the more useless those potions become. Just my opinion but ithink they’re also a waste of space on my radial, but I’m sure someone can prove me wrong about the uses.

BOMBS – are equally important to potions because they essentially up your damage by A LOT!. if your warrior hits for 1.5 heart, and you throw a shard bomb, that’s 3 hearts total! that’s one turn to kill that mage you know will heal on her next turn. Fire bombs (-1 heart damage and -3 mana) are great as well, because your low level mage wont be able to drain more than 1 – 2 mana. If you’re just starting out, i wouldnt suggest putting a lot of points into mana drain until you have other skills (but that’s for another post) The firebomb will essentially take away any special attacks your opponent will have AND does 1 heart of damage.

What i took next was frost bomb simply for the added effect of freezing one enemy for 8 turns. Really useful when you have a hard hitter (boss), or a mage that’s going to heal, and you stop them from taking a few turns.

Shock bombs are great for the AOE (area of effect) damage (-1 heart to all enemies)

Acid bombs (minus -1/2 heart and -50% def on all enemies)  what else can i say about acid bombs besides GET AS MANY AS YOU CAN! I always carry a stock of 80 and i feel it’s not enough. It’s vital to raids, and regular battles and to taking down those Silver hearted (more than 5 hearts) enemies. The reason why i suggest getting this last is because most enemies you encounter up until waking sea/orzammar wont have high defense or probably wont have more than 5 hearts sans bosses. Your attack probably wont be high enough to fully take advantage of acid bomb’s effect.

For example, your level 10 warrior’s regular attack does minus 1 heart, with A.B.’s effect, you’ll do 1.5 heart damage (woopee!)

Your level 40 warrior’s regular attack does 3 hearts of dmg, with A.B’s effect, you’ll do 4.5 hearts of damage (BIG WOOPEE!) Thus, rendering Shock bombs useless in this situation.

Poison Bomb is probably something you’ll want to have on the side to kill something with high defense or immunity. (-.5 hearts every turn for 10 turns)

Grease bomb is useful for long drawn out battles (-50% agil, -25% resistance to fire) Probably not useful at a low level because your enemies’ 10 agility will be reduced to 5, and you probably have 15 at most. Also the way turns are made in this game is a little wonky. Your 50 agility mage doesnt mean you’ll always have 2 turns before your 25 agility warrior.

Time bombs (does big damage after a number of turns) – never unlocked it, always thought it was useless, waste of space on your radial. By the time you have the gold to unlock all these bombs, your character should be pretty high level, and should kill stuff before this bomb goes off.

INFIRMARIES – They are vital to the game, but i highly suggest upgrading your pots/bomb labs before upgrading your infirmaries.

Team injury Kits – amazing amazing amazing (+2hearts to all allies) instant mass heal when you just got hit by a lightning or if your party just took a beating. Also great at the end of each battle to reduce the cooldown of your party members

Greater mana salves – (+4 mana to one ally) This in conjunction with greate mana potions, you should never feel starved for mana. Perfect for warriors and rogues with quick lunge + another skill.

Team mana salves – (+2 mana to all allies) another vital consumable you should always have a ton of.

Poultices are great, but they only last 8 turns. Later in the game, you’ll be fighting 5-6 enemies per wave and chances are, the buffs will go away by the time you get a 2nd turn.

greater injury kits – (+4 hearts to one ally) good stuff here, but i rarely find NPC’s focus firing on one ally, they usually spread their damage around so team injury kits would usually heal things right up.

WORKER ROOMS – Gives you an additional worker to do tasks.
A good thing to mention with workers is about windows making them happy. So if you rearange your starting keep you can easily get a tower 3 high with double windows for all workes thus two smiley faces for free, and a free 5 minutes faster production rate. :)
This is qute handy up untill you can afford the taverns easily”
quoted Loswaith

FURNACES/TAVERNS – They are a great way to give you more consumables, with more furnaces, you get to make more consumable. With more taverns, your workers will complete the task faster. There’s a breakdown of each in the DAL forums if you want to learn more about each.

TAVERNS – In the beginning as a poor player, taverns arent very useful. One tavern will give each worker room touching it +1 happy face. the time difference between 1 and 2 happy is a merely 5 minutes (or so). So essentially, you’ll be building a lot of taverns, or upgrading it before you see a dramatic difference. whereas,

FURNACES – I would take furnaces first because a room with 4 gears will give you +1 item to the first time tier. Example

1 gear room = 2       2 gear room = 2          3 gear room = 2    4 gear room = 3
4                            4                                5                         5
6                            7                                7                         7

dont’ quote me on that because i might be wrong. Point is, getting one more of consumable is more important than gaining an extra smiley face. Also, with worker rooms, you should build it above ground for the default 1 smiley face. To take benefits of the taverns, it has to touch the worker rooms or else they wont get the bonus. This goes back to building rooms above ground is more expensive than building below.

THRONE ROOM – The T.R. unlocks other rooms  you can build such as treasury, great hall, and store houses. Only necessary after you have a good sweat shop set up that you’re not running out of consumables after 3 nodes. It’s time to build a TR when your backpack is stuffed with bombs and pots.

STORE HOUSE – (+ 4 spaces to your backpack and must be built underground)  First thing to build would be a store house, very cheap to build (only 600 gold and the first upgrade is only another 600 gold which gives +2 space) Essential because you space for more bombs and pots. Only concern with store house is it takes up 3 horizontal spaces so you’ll need to plan ahead before building one.

GRAND HALL – (+4 friends to your guild) You can never have enough friends, but this room is not vital to your gameplay. Only advantage with having more friends is you have a bigger pool of players to choose from for raids. By the time you hit orzammar, most battle nodes are 7-10 energy so you really only have enough to maybe have 3 fights before running out of stamina. Unless you’re willing to spend the energy to keep grinding, i suggest not spending the money for the grand hall. It’s expensive to unlock, must be built above ground, and it’s a 2×3 meaning it’ll take 6 expansions room to fit. Lots of money you should be spending upgrading your tavern/store houses.

TREASURY – (send a worker to collect friend’s gold) Most useless room of all, in my opinion. Unless your character is the hottest thing on the block, it probably wont get much use. Take the time to visit your friends castle and collect them manually. You also get a good idea of how to build your castle. Besides, if you have a smart phone (who doesnt nowadays?) you can just use the DAL mobile app to collect the gold. It’s one energy per friend, but if you do it during your work time, you should regain that energy by the time you come home.

Wow, this is a long ass article. I’ve always wanted to write something like this, I know facebook group probably has something similar set up over there but i figure i should contribute here since i only play on G+ and im sure there are others who only play here. I hope this helps the new players, and the ones who are between new and seasoned. I wished i had this when i first started so i wouldnt waste so much time/gold on useless crap.

Happy leveling!