Kongregate’s BattleHand is a new 3D action RPG for Android and iOS devices, and the game does advise you that your objective is to defeat the evil minions of Queen Amethyst. She is the “dreaded” queen of the in-game land you’re playing in, and as she has awoken, so have her evil minions that had once resided underneath FellCrest. As you may expect, it’s up to you, as one of the “forgotten” heroes of FellCrest, to defend your land and get “ready to fight in pursuit of honor and justice.” You will be training these heroes, unlocking their special moves, and taking part in quests and battles, as well as different game modes. In terms of mechanics, there’s a whole lot of TCG in here – as the word “hand” in the title suggests, the game involves a lot of card-collecting.
That’s pretty much all there is to know about BattleHand, as far as its basic premise and main features are concerned. But what about actually playing the game? Do we have any tips to share with you that could help you in just about every facet? We’ve got a bunch of them here, and we’ve compiled them in this new BattleHand strategy guide.
1. Complete The Quests For More Heroes, More Progress
We’re going to start out with one of the simplest, most general tips for the game; if you want to progress quickly and unlock more heroes in BattleHand, you should complete more quests. Completing a quest won’t just take you through the right progression in the storyline; it will also boost your Fame and allow you to make faster progress. In fact, you can consider quests to be almost akin to tutorials, only this time you’re earning something substantial.
2. The Right Way To Upgrade Your Cards
We’ll be dealing more in a bit about when to upgrade your cards, but how do you do it in the first place? As a rule of thumb, the cards you want to upgrade first are the rarest and best ones; you’ll know a good card by the number of stars displayed. Work your way slowly till you reach your weakest, most common cards. This strategy is advisable because you can use any stronger card you have to replace a card that wasn’t upgraded; this would result in additional upgrade materials for the rarer ones.
3. Save Your Card Upgrades For Later
Some quests will specifically ask you to upgrade your cards, but you wouldn’t want to upgrade too many of them early on, as you still wouldn’t be too sure as to which cards could help you the most in the long run. What you should do is to upgrade the bare minimum to complete the missions, but not your entire deck. Stick to your meat-and-potatoes cards until you cannot progress any further. By that time, you should be almost sure to have some meaningful cards in your deck, cards that you would then want to upgrade to the fullest.
4. Upgrade No More Than Two Cards At A Time, And Remember The Elements
One wise thing you can do when upgrading your cards is to work on two at a time, instead of trying to focus on getting the whole bunch up to speed. And as a bonus tip for upgrading, take note of the elements when choosing which cards to upgrade with what booster; for instance, you’ll get more experience points for upgrading a fire card with the matching fire booster.
5. Work On The Perfect Deck Of Cards
All heroes in the game come with specific cards that you can equip to them; that means you’ll eventually have a plethora of cards, but only a select few for a specific hero. That actually works in the favor of most players, as it makes it easier to work on a perfect deck.
At first, you want to have a balanced deck. It may sound tempting to take all of your high-damage cards and introduce them to your deck right away. Remember that these are typically slow cards; you will sometimes require fast cards during certain situations, such as the enemy having only a tiny bit of health remaining. Also balance out those high-damage cards with a healing card and a shield card. Some have experienced success by using one card for healing and support purposes alike, but most find it better to have one healer and one shield per hero, plus some high-damage cards and quick cards.
6. About Element Cards
We’re actually still talking about building a perfect hand, but this specific tip about element cards is detailed enough to stand on its own, we’d say. All heroes in the game correspond to an element, and with that in mind, you should equip a good percentage of your element cards to the right hero. There is a rock-paper-scissors system where one elemental card is strong against the other, but weak when played against another element. We would recommend having about 50 percent element cards for the best effect, with the rest being neutral cards you can use in a pinch.
7. Scout Your Opponents First
We’ve talked about upgrading cards and building a good, or better yet, perfect deck. Let’s now move on to the battle aspect of the game, which also happens to be a very in-depth topic.
When trying to maximize what happens in those battles, remember that your draw is very important, and scouting your opponents is imperative. Check out your opponents so you can choose the right hero on your roster, and again, remember the elemental system. Always try your best to go for elements that beat those of your opponent.
8. Kill Your Enemies One At A Time
Moving on to the actual battles, you should start out by trying to defeat one enemy at a time. You don’t want to have several enemies that have merely reduced health; you want one dead enemy, and to repeat the process of focusing on one enemy alone when battle.
9. Play Your Shield Card Early
Although we touched on shield cards a bit, and even if we know that they are self-explanatory, we shall cover it in a little more depth here. Having a good shield card could reduce your dependence on healing cards, so if you’ve got a good shield card, go use it and make the most out of it.
10. Strategies For Attacking
It’s a good move to choose attacking cards that can guarantee you a chance to hit the enemy first, and maybe even kill them before they have a chance to strike. Don’t pick on an enemy who’s currently in the process of healing someone else; wait till the character is healed up properly before you attack. That’s because you would typically not be given any clues as to whom they’re going to heal. Enemies tend to often heal those with full health, which isn’t very smart at all; they end up wasting their moves that way. But that often happens when dealing with AI enemies; in any case, exploit this weakness and save the kill for after the opponent prepares a healing move.
11. Unlock Your Heroes’ Special Powers
Each action you perform in the game will allow the meter on the right hand side of the screen to fill up. Once that meter is 100 percent full, that means you can unleash a Hero Trait, which is what the game calls special hero moves. That’s going to help you survive many more levels than expected, provided you know when to activate them.
12. How To Choose Which Heroes To Unlock
Don’t be overwhelmed by BattleHand offering a host of heroes to choose from and those heroes appearing to be very similar to each other. The fact of the matter is that they are indeed very similar in terms of skill level, but ultimately different in subtle ways. That should allow you to choose any hero you want from the ones available; it boils down to your own preference, but you should also check the traits to make sure you’re getting a hero you can reliably work with.
13. Use The Auto Battle Feature Wisely
Auto Battle sounds like a great way to go, as you can just sit back, relax, and let the AI fight your fights while you don’t lift a finger. But as we hinted at a couple tips above, the AI is not very smart, so you wouldn’t want to use the feature all of the time. Auto Battle only becomes available once you’ve completed a stage, regardless of how many stars, but if you are able to auto-battle your way to a three-star level, you won’t be credited for the extra stars. The long and the short of it is this – Auto Battle is best used if you’re grinding for XP, coins, equipment, and the like, not for a difficult battle.