The digital world is a battlefield. Streams of data carry out our thoughts and opinions out onto the internet and it is there where we find where we stand. In more recent times, such battles can be fought through virtual arenas where combatants choose a form, an avatar, that allows them to wreak an assortment of powers onto their opponents.
The world of esports is rapidly growing and among the genres of this gigantic gaming subculture is the MOBA genre. Short for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, MOBAs have since been recognized by their modern titles. Big names like Dota 2, League of Legends, Smite, and others have become easily recognizable titles that have shaped the MOBA landscape the way it is today. This landscape had spread so far and wide that it had even stretched into mobile gaming.
The mobile gaming community is no stranger to MOBAs either. Popular titles such as Mobile Legends, Brawl Stars and Marvel Super War have recently made waves among MOBA warriors regardless of their skill level. A new contender opens a new battlefield to players who dream of earning real money through MOBAs bearing blockchain technology — Thetan Arena.
Playing similarly to the aforementioned Brawl Stars, Thetan Arena offers the player a colorful roster of characters, short but intense battles, and of course, the chance to earn money. The last bit is to simply get good at playing the game, but this is why this guide exists. We have created this Thetan Arena beginner’s guide to teach you how you can be a better player and how you can slowly climb your way to the top.
Have you just arrived here at Thetan Arena but also wish to know the secrets of combat? Grab your favorite snacks and soda and give the guide below a read!
DISCLAIMER: This Thetan Arena guide does not cover how to earn your payouts. It only covers how you can get better at playing the game.
1. Play Matches To Get Familiar
The best way to play a game, any game, is to become familiar with how it feels. Especially in a MOBA where you’ll be matched up with people who are of your skill level.
In the beginning of Thetan Arena, you might be a little bit confused, maybe a bit unsure of how to play the game, but that’s how we all feel in the beginning. Aside from the tutorial, the game aims to teach you its mechanics but the best true teachers here are exploration and failure. Let’s start with exploration.
Exploration is how you learn new techniques, maneuvers, and possibly the playstyle you would like to master in Thetan Arena. Do this by swapping out different skills, trying out different characters, or even diving into different game modes. Trying out different modes is especially important since playing these is what makes a better player.
You will learn different means to achieve your goals. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with a specific character, you may even try the Practice Mode which you can access by changing the mode at the bottom right portion of the Main Menu.
Simply tap the mode button to the left of the Find Match button and you will be able to change your mode. On the upper right, you should see Current Modes and Practice Mode. Tapping Practice Mode should give you the screenshot above. This mode allows you to pick any hero you want to try and also gives you the freedom to explore their skills and various firing modes. But the best way to learn how to play quickly is to play real matches, especially team matches.
In a team match, nothing is more demoralizing than a teammate who has no clue on what they’re doing. If they never pick up on what needs to be done, they become a liability to the team and grant everyone there an even slimmer chance of winning. But that’s to assume you’ve already got experience under your belt.
It’s demoralizing, yes, but if you are that clueless teammate, you should be observant with what is happening. Take the Superstar Mode for example. The team has to collect stars to win and the one bearing the Superstar generates stars nearby. If you’re their friend, guard them, if you’re the enemy, try to steal the stars or even take the Superstar for yourself.
In Tower Mode, taking the battery allows you to charge up your robot. Once the robot has been deployed, it will attempt to destroy the enemy’s tower. If you get eliminated and the enemy takes the battery, they’ll be charging up and they have to be stopped. It’s these little things that you have to understand if you wanna win. Now, we talk about exploration’s harsher sibling: failure.
Losing and being beaten shouldn’t keep you down. You should instead try to reflect on the match that transpired. There are some mistakes you made and preventing these mistakes from happening again should turn you into a better player. For example, running into enemy fire should instantly annihilate your character. What should you do next time the enemy comes at you, guns blazing? Figure that one out yourself!
Apart from being familiar with the game, there’s always the skill of being alert.
2. Alertness Pays Off
The enemy is cowering in their base! Or are they?
If something seems amiss to you, you might be right. The enemy could be plotting something or they could be readying themselves for a charge to wipe your team out. If you’ve seen the enemy jump into the bushes, caution will be your friend. This is how alertness comes into play.
Oftentimes, alertness saves you death and a respawn counter. Paying attention to every detail on the map will keep you alive a little bit longer than it should. Let’s say you see a bunch of numbers pop up on the sides of a barrel as you’re in the bushes and it is neither you or your teammate doing that. What could that tell you? Or, let’s suppose that you’re playing Superstar and the star mark appears on the floor next to a bush. Isn’t that suspicious?
The moment you stop being alert is the moment you fall prey to a surprise attack. To help you out, try glancing at the minimap on the upper left portion of the screen. You’ll be sure to see the blips of your teammates as well as your enemies. More importantly, if you are playing team modes like Tower and Superstar, the map will tell you where the bearers of the battery or Superstar are, at least for your friends anyway. Knowing where they are should help you rush to their side.
Apart from alertness, there is the extreme opposite of it that can completely ruin a match.
3. Recklessness Kills
There’s nothing that gets you more pumped than scoring a kill. You’ll want more and more of it as you go on your rampage. What will stop you is a mistake you’ll make if you aren’t careful.
On the other side of alertness is recklessness. Recklessness is diving into a firefight without assessing a situation. It’s where you try to get back at your opponents as an act of revenge after they took you out a few seconds ago. It’s also where you rush at the objective without having any backup plans. These are a few examples of what recklessness is and these can easily get you annihilated within a few seconds.
This doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t take risks. Case in point, going on the offensive to take an item from the enemy team when your team couldn’t do it is one form of bravery and not recklessness. If you were to be reckless instead, you would probably march behind enemy lines to retrieve what the enemy stole, and not assume that someone might have been following you this whole time.
This doesn’t mean that you should hang back and let your teammates do all the fighting either. The point of the game is for you to do your part to help the team win. If you aren’t out there trying to take risks or getting into firefights, you’ll most likely cause your team to fall.
As recklessness itself is quite dangerous, taking too many risks also contributes to failure. The key point between this bullet and the last one is balance. Take risks, but at the same time, hang back when you have to.
Now that we got most of the main MOBA bits out of the way, let’s tackle how the game really plays.
4. Know Your Character’s Purpose
Like in every MOBA, Thetan Arena has a lot of characters each with unique powers and playstyles.
The variation of these characters simply makes the MOBA a more challenging game to play as it teaches players how to adapt and play different roles. Mastering multiple characters is important, but you first have to know what they do. This is how you figure out how to play them.
Similar to RPGs, MOBAs have a class or role system. The role of a character dictates how they should behave in a fight. The beauty of Thetan Arena is that there are only three roles, saving the player from complicated strategies:
- Assassin – These characters excel at short ranges but also provide a considerable amount of DPS. They usually deal high amounts of damage but may have low health, making them easy targets.
- Marksman – Heroes that fall under this category typically have longer ranges than most. Like assassins, they have lots of DPS, but they have even lower health than their short-ranged contemporaries.
- Tank – The meatiest ones of them all. These heroes know how to soak up damage and take a hit. Some of them deal decent damage overall, but they suffer from severely low mobility.
The first three heroes fall into these three categories and are quite easy to use for beginners. Raidon is classified as an Assassin, Cluster is classified as a Marksman, and Breaker is classified as a Tank. Once you have picked a character with a playstyle you enjoy, try to stick to playing as them as much as you can.
While you’re familiarizing yourself with the characters, it also does you a service to be familiar with the map.
5. Farm The Barrels Before Engaging The Enemy
The battle commences!
What should you do now? Hit the enemy hard and fast? If you’re absolutely new to this, we recommend not taking the enemy on toe-to-toe, but farm the barrels nearby.
The barrels (sometimes called boxes) are stationary, cylindrical objects that drop experience points (EXP) when you destroy them and they come in small or large sizes. EXP is used to level up your character. After each level up, your character will be given the choice to level up their skills. Depending on which skill you favor for the fight, prioritize it.
You can gain EXP from killing enemies as well, but at the very beginning, farming the barrels whilst assisting your teammates should give you an early boost. If it isn’t you getting the EXP, it’s your friends who picked it up before you. Stronger heroes and stronger skills will often get you far into the match quicker than solely fighting your opponents.
Even in the later parts of the match, barrels can still be quite useful in making you stronger. Most of the time, these will be collateral damage after a scuffle between the two teams. Don’t simply pass by a weakened barrel, crack it open and take what’s inside. You’ll be a few EXP ahead of your opponents (and your teammates if you have the highest level among them). The bigger barrels will especially come in handy.
We’ve covered barrels. Now let’s address the elephant in the arena.
6. Use The Bushes To Your Advantage
As soon as you hop into any match, you will quickly notice that there are patches of foliage everywhere. These are bushes.
Popularized by many MOBAs, bushes are places where a player may hide and ambush their opponents. On the other hand, it’s quite dangerous as well since the opposing team can do the same to the player. Entering any of these patches will conceal the player that entered. The player will give out their location once they start attacking an enemy from the bushes but after a short delay, they will become hidden once more.
Bushes are a tactical tool. They can be used to escape opponents using a technique called “juking”, set traps for them, or even surprise them as we mentioned earlier. If you want to know how to properly use the bushes, here are a few tips we can lend you:
- Don’t be predictable. If you’re trying to escape an enemy using the bushes, try not to run in a straight line if there is plenty of room to move around. A high-risk, high-reward move you can pull is to run in the opposite direction, but only to run past them. This will only work if the bushes are big enough for you to move past your opponent while estimating where they went.
- Never tap the fire button. You’re more likely to hit a barrel than another person while you’re hidden. This is unless it’s your intent, of course. Take aim and wait for your opponent to get within firing range.
- Wait for the enemy to make the first move. You’ll be able to spot where they’re firing from and you should be able to shoot at them in return, catching them by surprise.
There are many more ways you can apply the bushes’ cover to your advantage. Use it to study the enemy or even find new ways to spearhead a counterattack.
A player’s skill overall can only get them so far, but the hero’s skillset, on the other hand…
7. Pick A Complementary Skill Loadout
Because Thetan Arena is a MOBA, it’s bound to have heroes that tote awesome skillsets. Right? Not exactly.
Unlike most MOBAs, Thetan Arena actually has heroes who only bear a signature skill called an “ultimate” (or “ult” for short). These are irreplaceable, but the other two skills a hero can wield can change every match. While using different skills at a time is impressive and versatile, it’s ideal to simply stick to just one pair for the duration these skills are available, especially to complement the hero you’re using.
For this item, we will take Raidon as an example. Raidon is armed with a powerful shotgun and a more destructive shotgun blast for his ult. To complement his abilities, try giving him skills that will allow him to attack enemies from afar. Skills like the Bullet Storm or Lazer will help him score kills from a better distance. If not, try skills that keep his enemies from running away like the Bubble Prison or the Drone Chainer.
Skill combinations are easily changeable. You may experiment with these in Practice Mode or try them on live subjects in an actual match. Finding the right pair for your character is trial and error, so patience is a must.
What isn’t trial and error is sticking to your friends!
8. Stick Around Friends
As it’s been said time and time again: there is strength in numbers.
Make no mistake that here in Thetan Arena, you are more likely to survive or win a scuffle with the enemy team if you stick with a friend. Not only will you be working together, but you can look out for each other, cover each other, and even help an important member of yours escape (for example, someone carrying a battery or the Superstar).
This doesn’t mean you should be reckless, however, try to read where your teammate is going or who they’re trying to attack. Chances are, your common target will be easily defeated and you’ll move onto more pressing objectives. You might even make the enemy change their tactics once they witness your combined firepower.
This tactic is useful if you’re a player who isn’t too confident in their skill in surviving alone. This also means that it’ll greatly help if you’re unfamiliar with the enemy heroes, the game mode, or the map. If you’re confident with your skill in survival, you might expect some of your teammates to join you. They wouldn’t really know, but it’s still nice to fight alongside a friend.
What else is it that brings a team together? Communication, of course!
9. Communicate With Your Teammates
In most MOBAs, a chat feature is present, allowing players to convey messages to friends (and sometimes enemies). What they also have is a quick chat function that allows players to send out rapid-fire messages, making their point across at the push of a button.
Thetan Arena retains the quick chat for team matches. We’re pretty sure you’d agree, but mobile keyboards are quite clunky at best. They’re prone to typographical errors and they also bear the autocorrect feature that annoys most people. To avoid this, the quick chat only focuses on the messages that matter:
- Attack – Useful if your opponents have stolen the key item of the match or if your teammates are holding back too much.
- Defend – Should be used when a friend needs to be protected, such as one holding the robot’s battery or the Superstar. Likewise, if you’re playing Towers, you may use this to signal your friends to concentrate fire on the robot.
- Regroup – Especially useful in Team Deathmatch. If you think your team is too scattered and easy for the enemy to pick off, signal them all to regroup immediately.
- Emojis – The emojis are a collection of wordless symbols that will appear next to your character. These can range from a thumbs up or a thumbs down, a face blowing a raspberry, a white flag, and a few others. How you use these to communicate with your teammates is entirely up to you.
Mastering the art of communication should put you at ease when playing alongside people you’ve just met. But the best teams are composed of people whom you know or even through sharing your party link in the chat.
10. Find Teams To Play With
No man’s an island!
It’s true that sometimes you’d love to play alone, but in Thetan Arena, finding people to play with is key to success. You’ll build trust with them, and maybe even befriend them. This is key to building a team.
Knowing your teammates, especially if they have different heroes, will be important if you want to reign victorious together. Getting together on a Discord channel whilst playing the game will make communication a whole lot easier. Plus, it should make your movements, everyone’s movements in the team, more well-coordinated and fluid.
Just remember to work together. If you like, you may even convince some people you personally know by telling them about Thetan Arena. If they love MOBAs, they’ll surely love this one.
Your last resort, if you can’t find anyone to play with, is to share an invite in the chat by tapping the Share Button on the upper-right portion of the Main Menu. After tapping that, you should tap the Country button and you will alert everyone from your country currently in the chat. As much as possible, try not to play with random people; form a stable, coordinated team and you’ll keep your losses low!
In a nutshell, Thetan Arena observes many tenets of MOBA combat. Mainly, you’ll need to practice a lot and keep your wits about. If all else fails, fighting smart and utilizing the boons of the battlefield may help you turn a fight around. Picking a good skillset that complements your character could be advantageous to you since it could open many opportunities to secure your victory.
Friends should be stuck to if you aren’t confident in how you play and forming teams with people who you can properly speak to will push you through the ranks greatly. If these are people you just met, try to communicate with them using the quick chat and maybe the outcome of the match will change. If you’d like to get your feet wet and join the Thetan Arena community, drop by the Official Thetan Arena Discord server. Good luck, have fun, and may the best teams win!
If there are things that we’ve forgotten to point out or if you have tips for Thetan Arena that you’d like to personally share, please leave them in the comment section down below!