FourThirtyThree Games is the gaming company known for several titles in the MOBA and MMORPG genre, including the likes of Monster Super League, Battle Boom, and Battle of Arrow. But this company has something you may enjoy, if the DC Universe is your cup of tea and anime/manga RPGs aren’t. DC Unchained has been out for a good several weeks already, and this is an action game where you can control your favorite DC superheroes and supervillains, forming teams of three as you compete against human and AI opponents alike across a very wide range of modes. You can complete story modes for heroes and for villains, battle it out against real-life, human players, in PvP action, and gain all sorts of rewards through the game’s many achievements, quests, and whatnot.
At this point, we’ve discussed most of what you need to know when playing the game, and once you reach level 4, you can probably call yourself an advanced, or expert player who knows the ins and outs and has played most features. But if you’re still at a point where there are still some things you need to learn about this extremely deep and occasionally challenging game, we recommend that you read our third, and final DC Unchained strategy guide. We shall be covering several more tips in this guide, mainly focusing on other game modes you may not have played too much, as well as a couple tips that we may have forgotten to include in our first and second DC Unchained guide.
1. Do Not Miss A Login
We thought we’d start our third guide with something fairly simple that we should have included much earlier. But since you may start missing a day or two once you’ve been playing DC Unchained for a bit, we might as well warn you if you haven’t yet — not opening the game for a day automatically resets your daily login rewards! We’ve seen other game makers relax their requirements and still reward gamers for daily logins, even if they skip a day or two in between. But FourThirtyThree wants to keep it old school and play by the rules, we guess, which is why you go back to the simple stamina potion package (the first-day reward) if you miss a day. You don’t actually have to play the game for your login to count — just open the game, and maybe collect your reward and exit right away, should you have too much on your plate to complete even a single mission.
2. Use The Exchange Feature
Here’s another simple tip you might have missed — ever considered using the Exchange feature to trade in one item (or items) for another? There are several options in Exchange, as this would allow you to swap cards belonging to one family to get cards from another (separate options for silver and gold trades), swap a gold card to get multiple silver cards, swap multiple silver cards to get one gold card, or exchange Magical Mineral for some Element X. Regardless of what type card you need, the option is there, so if you’ve got a little extra of something, or are in need of a more effective gold card for one reason or another, you might as well go to Exchange and see what your best options may be.
As a bonus tip, Element X is the element used to upgrade Valorium and unlock new Valorium slots, so you will want to trade for this resource as well. Valorium, after all, can have a surprisingly visible effect on your characters’ ratings and stats, so it definitely wouldn’t hurt if you acquired some Element X via Exchange.
3. EXP Books Can Help Your Characters Level Up
You will earn these from time to time, may it be via daily login reward, mission completion, or by leveling up. But the game doesn’t really tell you much about them. We’re talking about the EXP books, which you can use to level up your characters, especially those you have just unlocked! This works much faster and much better than the usual method of replaying levels you’ve already completed. And while you shouldn’t overuse them, especially the ones that come with more XP within them (you’ll usually get the basic 100 XP books anyway), these are great to use if you want to get a new character up to speed and at a similar level to the characters you already have. Once you’ve gotten them past level 10, then ranked them up (if you have enough Family Cards), you can then switch to old-fashioned grinding. Combining both methods to get the new heroes or villains up to speed is probably the best way to go when playing DC Unchained.
4. What Is Simulation Combat?
The name “Simulation Combat” may sound harmless at first — it’s just a simulated environment and ideally, in such situations, anyone going through these simulations is not likely to get hurt or injured in any way. But this is a must-play game mode nonetheless, and also one that could help you and your characters alike level up faster, due to the XP rewards once you’ve completed one floor. Heroes, Villains, and Alliances alike can play in this game mode, though there is one requirement in order for your team of three characters to play — their combined rating absolutely needs to be equal to, or higher than the recommended rating. That’s because the enemies you face in Simulation Combat are often tougher than the Parademons you encounter during your usual hero or villain story missions — they can easily take out more than half of one of your characters’ life after just a few seconds of battle!
The obvious tip here for Simulation Combat is to be more hands-on than you normally would be. If you’re the type who likes auto battles, you may need to do more than your share of dodging (to avoid damage, to allow you to access the healing potion faster) and character switching. In fact, it’s recommendable that if your rating is fairly close to the recommended total rating, you should jump into the action and make sure everyone is doing their job right in the simulation. The name of the mode may be “Simulation Combat,” but just as a final reminder, this is not a mode to take lightly.
5. Get Social And Add Some Friends
Need some help making your way through the different modes and battles in DC Unchained? You might as well add some friends in the game, and leverage its social features. While this might seem like an optional aspect of the game, we regret to inform you it isn’t — one of the tasks in the Basic Guide is to send one friend request, and another one is for your friend request to actually get accepted, for instance, so you really will need to try adding some people.
Aside from the friend-adding part of the game, which you cannot bypass if you want to keep moving forward in the Guide, there’s also the matter of joining or forming a Guild. Joining is more recommended than forming, but should you join one, you should make sure it’s active. We already discussed this in one of our previous guides, but we’re mentioning it again, because you can win Guild Medallions by completing the social-related achievements, and that involves adding even more friends!
6. Purchase The $1 Starter Pack To Get Huge Rewards
This is a fairly new addition to the DC Unchained store, but if you haven’t been there in a while, you should definitely check out the latest deal, which is a Starter Pack worth only a dollar or its equivalent in local currency. In that pack, you’ll be getting one Character Unlocker, which we had previously established as being quite hard to obtain for free, and comparatively expensive to purchase with real money, and 500 Gems. That, according to FourThirtyThree, is worth 28 times the value of the dollar you’ll be spending, though you should keep two things in mind before buying this pack. First, this appears to be a limited-time offer, so you may want to act sooner rather than later before the offer gets pulled. Secondly, you’re only limited to one of these starter packs per account, so once you buy it from the store, that’s it — the deal will no longer be available, unless you’re willing to restart from square one, create a new account, and buy the pack all over again! Which really wouldn’t be too practical, if you come to think of it.
7. Pay Attention To Your Characters’ Tactics
As you level up your characters, you will discover that they have their own unique Tactics, which are like special strategic maneuvers they perform automatically during a battle, so as to make the game’s Auto Battle feature smarter. These tactics can, at times, be game-changers, but most of the time, these are simple actions that allow your team more breathing room and give you a better chance of winning, with none of your characters getting killed, of course. (In case we haven’t mentioned it yet, if even just one character dies in battle, that’s an automatic mission fail for you.)
Tactics in DC Unchained are divided into four categories — Risk Management, Basic, Elite, and Boss. Risk Management allows for strategic tagging of team members, using skills once fully charged, using skins at given moments during the battle, etc. Basic involves strategies to employ when you’re up against the smaller fry of the enemy world, Elite allows you to act smartly when up against Elite-level monsters, and Boss tactics, of course, are designed to help your characters do the right thing when confronted with the level boss. You will unlock Tactics Slots and get new Tactics during certain milestone level-ups (for example, you unlock your second slot once a character reaches level 10), and when choosing Tactics, you’ll need to choose wisely — go with the Tactics that you believe will be most useful when you’re fighting enemies in the different game modes. If you want more variety, you can go to the in-game shop and use your gems to buy a Tactics Box, but if we were you, we’d leave things as-is and wait until your characters reach those milestone levels.
8. Breaking Down Your Battle Mode Options
Next to the Missions tab on the bottom of the main menu is the Battle tab. What’s in it for you if you choose this particular game mode? To summarize, the main prize here is Honor Points, which you could also earn by completing achievements, but can primarily be earned by taking part in Competitive, Quick Play, and AI Battles. Competitive Battles involve real-time PvP battles against human opponents, and will affect your ranking in this game mode — this is where you really need to focus and bear down, and make sure you’ve got a good internet connection wherever you’re at. Quick Play is similar to Competitive, except that your ranking is not affected, thereby lowering the stakes and allowing both of you to practice against each other with nothing on the line. Lastly, AI Battle also involves real opponents, only this time, they’re controlled by DC Unchained’s AI; likewise, this has no bearing on your Battle ranking.
When playing in Battle mode, it’s pure one-on-one action here; no lesser enemies to deal with, and no bosses either. You don’t have the option to auto battle either, which means your Tactics will not come in handy. You’ll need to act quick, especially when it comes to dodging your opponent’s attacks, or tagging from one character to another. It can be especially frustrating to tag in this mode; if you aren’t quick enough, you could easily see your health go from 50 percent or thereabouts to zero, meaning your tag will be too little, too late! Keep a close eye on your opponent, and don’t button-mash; button-mashing is a shortcut to an easy win for your opponent, especially in AI Battle, where the computer can, once again, be surprisingly smart and intuitive! Just as usual, you lose the battle if one of your characters die, and the same applies to your opponent.
One last thing when it comes to Battle mode — you are capped at 32 Honor Points a day, and you earn them whether you win or lose!
9. A Brief Look At The Other Game Modes
We’ve covered most of the game modes so far, and covered just about all the important aspects of the game that you should know at this point, now that you’ve been playing DC Unchained for quite some time. We’re not sure if we’re going to be covering these next few modes in greater depth in the future, but to give you a quick primer on what to expect, let’s talk about Team Training, Special Missions, and Vision Quests.
Team Training gets unlocked once you complete the fifth stage of Kahndaq in Story Mission mode, and its main purpose is to improve and level up your team bonuses. There’s no real rush to focus on this game mode, as you may be more inclined to get more rewards by playing the Vision Quests instead. These missions do not cost you any stamina, and better yet, allow you to try out different characters that you may not have unlocked yet — Vision Quests, after all, require specific characters, so if you haven’t unlocked Robin yet, you can still play as him when playing the first Vision Quest in the game. (As such, you don’t need to worry about stats, skills, and character level either — you’re given a character whose stats/level are at par with the difficulty level. The main reward here is AP, which you can accumulate in order to get an even better set of rewards once you’ve collected enough of these points.
Lastly, Special Missions get unlocked after completing select levels in Story Mission mode. You can think of these as side missions of sorts that aren’tr really essential to the main storyline, but nonetheless a good way for you to stock up on Stamina Potions.