The world of Tya is under attack by an unknown darkness. In this dark hour, heroes are scattered, and infighting has taken the world when unity is needed the most. This world needs a hero, and it needs one fast.
So goes who gets stuck with coming back from the dead to fix everything?
Watcher of Realms is a tower defense fantasy RPG, that’s similar to Arknights. In Watcher of Realms, you’ll fill the shoes of the newly-deceased-but-recently-reborn commander to repel the darkness that has pervaded your homeland. To achieve your goals, you’ll need to gather powerful allies, find legendary equipment, strengthen your heroes, and master the art of tower defense. Those willing to fight for Tya’s freedom can get the game on the Google Play Store and the App Store.
Veteran players of both hero collectors and tower defenses will no doubt find the game easy enough to pick up and play. However, if it’s your first foray into the genre, then I bid you welcome to this beginner’s guide, and hopefully, you’ll emerge from it with a better idea of where to go, how to get stronger, and a solid grasp of the basics.
In this Watcher of Realms beginner’s guide, we’ll be going over:
- Learning to read and analyze your heroes.
- The many ways of strengthening your heroes to ensure they do their best in battle.
- Mastering the battlefield and some basic tips.
- Guilds and why you should join them.
Understanding Your Tower
The first and most important thing you need to understand in a tower defense game is what each of your towers – or in this case, heroes – can do and how best to utilize them. Sure, you can just put whoever anywhere and see some results, but a good tower defense player knows that there’s a tower for every occasion.
Quick Tips:
- Heroes have both basic and advanced stats; both can be seen by tapping “Details” in their info panel.
- There are five classes of heroes – fighters, marksmen, mages, defenders, and healers. Each has a unique and distinct role in battle.
- Different heroes deal different damage types, making them more effective against certain foes. Piercing damage does 20% more damage to light armor, while magic damage is 20% more effective against heavy armor.
- Each hero has several skills to aid them in battle. Apart from their normal attack, a hero can have passive skills as well as an ultimate.
- Ultimates require the use of a hero’s rage bar, which accumulates over time.
- Ultimates are divided into automatic or manual use. Automatic ultimates are usually augments to a hero’s normal attack or a minor, helpful effect. Manual ultimates must be triggered by the player and are powerful effects that can change the flow of battle.
- Some heroes also have a talent, which is essentially an extra passive ability.
- Each hero also belongs to a faction. By placing a Lord of that faction in the Lord slot, heroes of that faction gain a powerful bonus in battle.
Hero Stats
Let’s start with the basics – hero stats. To view a hero’s stats, tap on “Details” on their info panel.
The basic stats in Watcher of Realms are:
- HP – how much damage this hero can take before becoming incapacitated.
- ATK – how much damage this unit does.
- DEF – how resistant this hero is to physical damage.
- M.RES – how resistant this hero is to magical damage.
- Cost – how much energy it costs to deploy this unit.
- Block Value – how many enemy units this hero ties up in combat.
- Revival Time – how long it takes before this hero can be deployed again, if incapacitated or withdrawn.
Below these basic stats, you’ll find another set of numbers, labeled “Promoted Attributes”. These are more in-depth numbers.
- ATK Interval – how long, in real time, before this hero attacks again.
- ATK Spd. – attack speed. The higher your attack speed, the lower your attack interval.
- Crit. Rate – the chance to land a critical for more damage.
- Crit. DMG – how much extra damage a critical hit will do.
- Healing Effect – how many bonuses a hero has to their healing.
- Rage Regen – how many bonuses a hero has to their rage regeneration (ultimate energy).
- Rage Regen (Auto) – how much rage a hero generates passively.
Hero Roles
Different heroes perform different roles in combat. You can tell what role a hero has by looking at the icon beside their level.
The classes in Watcher of Realms are:
- Fighters are indicated by a sword icon. These heroes are melee brawlers, often boasting high ATK along with decent HP and/or DEF.
- Marksmen are indicated by a bow icon. Marksmen use ranged weaponry to take foes down with high physical damage. Marksmen are especially potent against flying enemies, with many of them packing a skill that increases their damage against flyers.
- Mages use a wand or scepter as their icon. Mages slay their foes by wielding the arcane arts and are especially potent against foes with heavy armor.
- Defenders are heralded by a shield icon. Like Fighters, Defenders are melee combatants; unlike Fighters, Defenders focus on tying up foes rather than damaging them. These warriors have high HP, DEF, and a good Block Value to force enemies back while their stronger allies pick them off.
- Healers use praying hands as their icon. These heroes usually don’t fight on their own, instead focusing on keeping their allies alive through the healing arts. Make no mistake – even your units on platforms will take damage!
Damage Types
The type of damage a hero does isn’t just for flavor. By utilizing weaknesses, your heroes can do a lot more damage and have an easier time clearing levels!
Attack types and weaknesses are as follows:
- Normal attacks are neutral and have no bonus or malus when attacking armor types.
- Piercing attacks (usually from Marksmen) do an additional 20% damage against light armor enemies.
- Magic attacks (usually from Mages) do an additional 20% damage against heavy armor enemies.
The type of damage an attack does is tied to the hero’s basic attack skill. While it’s generally safe to assume that a hero’s normal attacks deal the same damage of their type (i.e., Marksmen always do physical, Mages do magic), always double-check!
Skills
Each hero has several skills at their disposal to help them in combat. Skills are what distinguishes a hero from their peers. Heroes have skills that are tuned towards certain elements – some heroes have skills that let them attack multiple targets with their normal attack, buff their ATK or attack speed, or even deal tremendous amounts of damage on command.
As I mentioned earlier, a hero’s basic attack counts as a skill. Apart from this, heroes can have passive skills that can help them with their designated combat role. Finally, all heroes have access to a powerful ultimate skill. Ultimates can make or break a mission, so don’t ignore them!
Ultimates can be used when a hero’s rage is full. Rage accumulates by itself over time while a hero is deployed on the field, and is indicated by a blue bar underneath a hero’s HP. When rage is full, the bar will glow.
Ultimates are classified as either manual or automatic. You can see the type of ultimate a hero has by looking at the right of their ultimate icon, or below their ultimate icon while in combat.
Automatic ultimates, as their name suggests, are activated automatically when their hero has enough rage. These ultimates are usually augments to normal attacks. It’d be a hassle to cast these ultimates manually, so they’re just used whenever and wherever appropriate.
Manual ultimates, on the other hand, are very powerful skills that have a variety of effects. These effects can greatly change the outcome of a battle, so it’s up to you to decide when and where to use them. Note that rage doesn’t deplete, so don’t be afraid to store your manual ultimates and unleash them when the tide turns against you!
Talents
Some lucky heroes also have a talent on top of their skills.
Talents are passive abilities that don’t count as skills. On one hand, this means that a hero with a talent is more effective in their job as they have more tools to fight foes with. On the other, you can’t do much – if anything – to boost a talent. Think of it as a cherry on top.
Lords and Factions
Apart from their class and skills, another thing that sets heroes apart is their faction. Each hero belongs to one or more of several groups in the world of Tya. A hero’s affiliations can be seen below their name.
Factions aren’t just lore fluff. Every organization needs leaders, and this is exemplified in Lords. Lords are special heroes that lead their factions to battle and glory. In gameplay terms, this means that heroes of a specific faction gain bonuses when they’re being led by a Lord of their faction.
Each faction has its own unique bonuses, so it’s a good idea to find a faction you like and build around upgrading its members while hopefully getting their lord. Note that there are multiple Lords per faction, with rarer Lords offering better bonuses.
Lords can be distinguished by a crown in their faction icon.
Strengthening Your Heroes
Once you’ve found a cast of heroes you like, it’s time to buff them up. While there are many wonders in the land of Tya, so too are there a myriad of horrors that you’ll have to face. To ensure that your heroes come out triumphant, you’ll need to make them stronger.
Quick Tips:
- Leveling up is the fastest way to raise base stats. Units gain experience from both participating in battle or drinking experience potions.
- Leveling gets very expensive very quickly. Ideally, you’ll find a cast of heroes to stick to early in the game and proceed from there.
- Units can be promoted to get a big boost to base stats and can even gain range or change their appearance. You need class insignias to promote, which can be found in the insignia raid.
- A unit can only be promoted as many times as it has yellow stars in its rarity.
- You can increase a unit’s star rating to give it more yellow stars, to a maximum of 6. You need to sacrifice heroes or psychic power of that star rating to rank up.
- It’s a good idea to build up the star rating of your common/trash heroes so they can be sacrificed for your better characters.
- Skills are leveled randomly. You need Skill Dust of a hero’s base rarity as well as gold to increase its skills. Skill Dust can be farmed from the Tide game mode.
- You can only increase a unit’s star rating if it has hit either its level cap or promotion cap.
- Heroes can equip up to 5 pieces of equipment. These pieces of equipment bolster base stats and can be upgraded to impart bigger bonuses. Equipment also has substats which are rolled at certain upgrade levels. You can always see what the substat type will be, but not the numerical min-max values it can roll.
- Equipment comes in sets; wear equipment from the same set to trigger a powerful passive effect.
- Awakening a character means feeding it duplicates. Each awakening level gives bigger bonuses. Low-rarity characters cannot be awakened.
- The more characters of a faction you have, the bigger the bonus they get. You can view and activate these bonuses via the Gallery.
Leveling Up
The easiest way to strengthen your heroes is to level them up. Each level confers a minor increase in a character’s base stats – HP, ATK, DEF, and M.RES.
Experience is earned in two ways. The first way is by bringing a hero into battle. So long as a hero was in a deployable team (yes, even if they never saw actual combat), they’ll get some experience points.
The second, more reliable method is to feed your heroes experience potions. While this is a quick and efficient way to level up your heroes, it’s also very expensive. Heroes require a ton of experience potions per level, meaning that even 10,000 potions won’t last you very long. You get this stuff from clearing stages and quests. However, there’s a more reliable method of farming them…
…and that’s the exp raid. This stage features a simple level layout and challenges you to kill as many mobs as possible. The more mobs you kill, the more experience potions you get. Due to the high exp costs of leveling heroes, I strongly encourage you to clear this raid every day at the highest difficulty you can manage. If you’re not going to spend your auto-fight charges on anything else, you may as well spend them here.
Remember – leveling heroes is expensive, so it’d be best if you find a good core team and stick with them.
Promotion
The next, more powerful way of strengthening units is by promoting them.
Promoting a unit gives it a very respectable boost to its stats. Apart from this, it can also unlock new skills, increase a unit’s attack range, and even change the unit’s appearance. However, promotion is trickier than levels.
For starters, you need promotion insignias to promote a unit. The type of insignia you need depends on the unit’s type, and the higher its promotion, the higher the level of the insignia needed. These insignias can be earned by doing the main quest and finishing missions, but they can also reliably be farmed for in the insignia raid. Note that stages in this mode are unlocked in ascending order, so you’ll need to complete stage 2 to go to stage 3 and so on.
Note that a unit can only undergo as many promotions as it has yellow stars, and each promotion will turn one of its stars purple. You can, however, circumvent this via the star-up system below.
Star Rating
Heroes can’t grow forever. When a hero reaches its level or promotion cap, you’ll be prompted to raise its star level.
She’s my free healer, so I guess she’ll have to do.
To raise a hero’s star rating, you’ll need to sacrifice either heroes of that star level, or better yet, psychic power – residual strains of that rarity. The higher a hero’s star rating, the more yellow stars it has, meaning a higher base level cap and more opportunities for promotion.
Take heed, though – when it comes to skills, what you see is often what you get, so don’t blindly increase the star rating of your common heroes. On the other hand, the star rating system means that you can build up low-rarity heroes (such as the ones you get from the Dwarven Association) to use as sacrifices for your higher-rarity heroes.
Note that you cannot manually raise a unit’s star rating – you must hit either its level or promotion cap before the “Star Up” button appears.
Skills
Our heroes have numbers, and they have skills. So naturally, their skills have numbers. The higher a skill’s level, the higher its numbers – more damage done, more healing, more DEF buffs, and what have you.
Annoyingly, leveling skills in Watcher of Realms is not deterministic. Instead, you need to pay gold and Skill Dust of a hero’s base rarity to level a random skill it has. Eventually, yes, you will max everything out, but it’s annoying that you can’t pick what to prioritize.
Skill Dust can be acquired from quests, but you can reliably grind it out via the Tide game mode. Do note that you only have 3 Tide battles per day, so make the most of them!
Gear
Heroes can also be given equipment to gain a substantial stat boost.
Each hero has five equipment slots – one weapon, body armor, a bracelet, a necklace, and a ring. Fill each of these when you can as any bonus is better than none.
Just like heroes, equipment has rarity as denoted by their color. Blue is 3*, purple is 4*, orange is 5*, and so on. Naturally, the higher a piece of equipment’s rarity, the better the stats it gives. And just like heroes, equipment can be upgraded to make it even better.
Equipment also comes in sets. By equipping items from the same set, you’ll trigger an extra set bonus that can push your heroes’ numbers even higher.
Tap on a piece of equipment and then “Enhance” to go to the upgrade screen. Here, you can risk some gold to level up that equipment. The higher the rarity of said equipment, the higher its upgrade limit, and the higher its upgrade limit, the higher the base stats it gives. But equipment doesn’t just give base stats. At certain upgrade levels, you’ll unlock substats.
Substats are unlocked when a piece of equipment reaches certain thresholds. When that threshold is reached, hold your breath, because you’ll be able to see how much of that substat you’ll get, as denoted by the bar. Note that you can always see what substat an item has, as well as what the upgrade levels required to unlock it are. You cannot, however, see the numerical minimum or maximum of the substat roll. You also can’t change the substat types it gets, so be sure that you want those substats before upgrading rare (read: expensive to upgrade) gear.
You can buy arms and armor from the Dwarven Association, but you’ll need to progress further before you can unlock and farm for the other three slots. As a new player, check the market regularly as the bonus power from gear helps quite a bit!
Awakening
What are we going to do with all our hero duplicates? Eat them, of course!
Awakening is essentially feeding your duplicate heroes to strengthen that one. Each time a hero consumes one of their duplicates, they gain one ascension level, to a maximum of 6. Each awakening level unlocks powerful passive boosts for that character; on rare occasions, they can even make or break a character. However, because this process requires you to feed duplicates, it can become very difficult to awaken your 5* heroes. At the same time, common heroes (1-2*) cannot be awakened at all!
And no, before you ask, you can’t deploy more than one copy of a hero at once.
Faction Collection
Factions aren’t just for Lord bonuses. The more characters from a faction you unlock, the bigger their passive boost.
You can view and unlock your faction collection bonuses via the gallery. While these bonuses aren’t super game-changing, they’re a nice reward for sticking it out with a particular faction. That, or they incentivize you to roll with your pulls.
Note that faction bonuses only apply to characters from that faction.
Mastering The Battlefield
The meat of Watcher of Realms is in its combat, so it’s time to go through the basics of fighting. Remember – when things go bad, you can always fall back on your basic training!
Quick Tips:
- Enemies will come from the red portals and will march toward your blue portals. You will see a preview of what path an enemy will take before it spawns from its portal.
- Each enemy that makes it through your defense costs you one life. Run out of lives and you lose the stage.
- Melee heroes can only be placed on ground-level tiles; non-melee units can only be placed on elevated tiles.
- Drag a hero when placing them to change their attack range. Heroes tend to attack whatever enemy is closest. Melee units will engage enemies on the 8 tiles around them.
- Some heroes have an extended attack range. Tap on them, then tap the right icon to see this extended attack range.
- To use an ultimate, tap on that hero then tap the icon. Unless indicated otherwise, the ultimate’s range is the same as the hero’s attack range.
- Heroes that hit zero HP are forced to retreat. They can be deployed again after their Revival Time is up – normally that’s one minute.
- You can also manually retreat heroes by tapping on them and then tapping the left icon. This still incurs a Revival Time penalty.
- You’ll get a brief description of an enemy the first time you encounter it. Use the data you’re given to pick heroes effective against that foe or form a counterstrategy.
- You can tap on the settings (gear icon) in battle then Monster Manual to review monster data. You also get to see a breakdown of their stats here.
- Auto-combat is unlocked when you clear a stage perfectly for the first time. Note that you have a limited number of auto-combats per day and they are not instant.
- Analyze the battlefield and look for tiles your enemies must pass through – that’s the perfect place to set up a chokepoint to make your defense more effective.
- Consolidate your ranged heroes. It’s often a better idea to focus on their 3×3 center tiles rather than the one outlier in the middle. By stacking ranged heroes and their 3×3 range together, you can consistently and effectively mow down hordes.
Stage Objectives
Almost every level in Watcher of Realms has the same objective – your enemies will go from point A to point B, and it’s your job to ensure that they don’t. Simple, right?
At the beginning of a level, one or more red portals will spawn, as well as a blue portal. Enemies will come from the red portals and will march toward the blue ones – your portals, called the soul cores. Any enemy that makes it to your portals vanishes from the field, but they’ll cost you one life. Run out of lives and you lose the level but wipe out all your foes and you win!
The number of enemies, as well as how many lives you have left can be found at the top of the screen.
To help you make tactical decisions, the path of an enemy that emerges from a portal will appear as a preview a few moments before it spawns. Watch the lines and ensure that you’re covering that path!
Deployment, Tiles, and Range
To prevent enemies from getting to your portals, you’ll need to put down your heroes.
A hero’s deployment zone depends on its type. Melee units can only be deployed on the ground-level – that’s the same level where monsters walk. All other units can only be deployed on elevated tiles. Note that each hero has a deployment cost – that “C” above your icons – with stronger heroes often having a higher cost than weaker ones. Deploy your units at your discretion.
When you deploy a unit, you’ll be asked to select which way it should face. This dictates its attack range. Non-melee fighters can engage any foe in their tiles – usually prioritizing the closest foe – while melee heroes can attack any enemy they are facing. Note that melee heroes aren’t static as they will turn to face foes in the eight tiles around them.
If you mistapped on a hero or don’t like your placement options, you can cancel their deployment by dragging back to the hero itself (essentially the middle), then tapping the X button.
Some heroes, like Voltus, have what’s called an extended attack range. This is a special range that only applies in specific circumstances, like during an ultimate. Heroes that have this trait will have this button on their info panel when you tap them…
…which you can tap to see their extended attack range.
Ultimates
Tapping on hero also brings up its info panel. It’s here that you can give a unit special orders, such as to retreat or use its ultimate. Remember – automatic ultimates fire on their own, but manual ultimates must be triggered by you.
Unless indicated otherwise, an ultimate has the same range as the hero’s normal attacks.
Retreating
Beating up monsters isn’t a safe job. Though your melee fighters will often get bruised and battered from scrapping with monsters, even your heroes on elevated tiles aren’t safe as your enemies will often send archers or mages of their own to hurt your squishier heroes. When a hero runs out of health, it retreats.
It’s not the end of the world if a hero retreats. If a hero retreats, it’ll need to rest. The exact amount of time it needs depends on its Revival Time stat. Once that time is up, that hero can be deployed again, though you will need to pay its deployment cost once more.
Heroes can also be manually retreated by tapping the retreat icon on their panel. Note that even if you retreat this way, that hero will still need to rest!
Enemy Data
Your foes are just as varied as your friends. Different enemies require different approaches, which means you need to study what your foes can do so that you can effectively counter them.
The first time you run into a new enemy, you’ll get a brief blurb on what it can do. Use this to your advantage when picking out heroes to place as a stage that introduces a new enemy type often has waves of that foe. Trust me – getting swarmed by flyers is not a pleasant experience.
If you want to review the enemies you have data on, tap on the settings menu while in battle (the gear icon) then head on over to the Monster Manual. You’ll not only see a summary of each monster’s characteristics but also a breakdown of their stats.
Auto-Combat
You may have noticed the game uploading data after you clear a stage. That means that you got all the marks for clearing that level and have thus unlocked auto-combat for that stage.
Auto-combat is incredibly useful, but it isn’t instant. The upload that the game’s server receives is an exact copy of what you did, such as who your lineup was, at what millisecond did you deploy a certain character, which way they were facing, and when you popped their ultimates. This ensures that, at the very least, your auto-combat will results will be equal to your best attempt.
Note that auto-combat is only unlocked if you completed all stage marks – that means no leaks. To help you get that perfect score, here are some basic strategies to get you started.
Chokepoints
Chokepoints are a very important concept in any form of combat. By maximizing chokepoint use in Watcher of Realms, you can make your heroes much more potent than they would be in an open field!
When deciding where to place your units, look out for tight spaces – usually 1×1 tiles or narrow corridors – or tiles that your opponents must pass through. Placing a defender in the middle or endpoint of this chokepoint means that your foes can only approach from one direction. By funneling your foes into a tight spot, you both limit their offensive ability and make it easier for your defenders.
Consolidate Your AOEs
Your heroes are much stronger together.
Most, if not all ranged heroes have a 3-4-3 range. While it can be tempting to maximize the single extended tile, it’s usually a better option to focus on the 3×3 center tiles and overlap them with other ranged characters. That way, you have a more consistent line of fire and can take foes down faster and more reliably.
Guilds 101
Guilds are virtually a must-have in Watcher of Realms as they offer you quite a lot for tasks you were likely going to do anyway! Join a guild as soon as you can to reap the benefits of working together as a team.
Quick Tips:
- You can fight Guild Bosses twice daily. Guild bosses are complex foes with unique mechanics that also rapidly become stronger the longer the fight goes on.
- You gain one dragon blood per bar of HP that you deal to the boss. At the end of a scoring period, you get a reward based on how much dragon blood you’ve managed to earn.
- Guilds have guild quests, which award contribution and coins.
- Guild coins can be spent in the Dwarven Association. The higher the guild’s level, the better the items for sale.
Guild Bosses
What kind of guild doesn’t do raids?
Guild bosses are your chance to fight together with your guildmates. Guild boss fights are asynchronous – when you enter a boss battle, your damage will be recorded and added to the total amount of damage done to that boss. Guild bosses have health in the millions to the hundreds of millions, so don’t expect to solo them. You can fight a guild boss twice per day, and each fight consumes a charge. These charges are refreshed daily.
During a raid, you’ll face the boss in a special arena – no tower defense here. Your task is to damage the boss as much as you can to earn contribution points. Note that guild bosses are not only very powerful, but you’re also under a time limit. After a certain amount of time has passed, a boss becomes enraged, vastly increasing the damage it does and assuring a team wipe. Hurt it as much as you can before then.
Do note that there are other loss conditions in a boss raid. Unlike a normal tower defense stage, you don’t have a base to protect, but you will automatically lose if your team gets wiped and you have no one in reserve to deploy. It’s a good idea to stuff your teams to the gills even with characters you didn’t invest in – a timely intervention can save you from a wipe!
The longer the fight goes on, the harder the raid boss becomes. Expect to deal with mechanics such as powerful attacks that require you to focus fire to stun the boss (a great time to pop your manual ultimates, by the way) and more boss phases of increasing difficulty. You have no choice but to persevere as each HP bar you shave off the boss earns you some dragon blood as contribution.
Guild bosses only hang around for a limited time, so get off your butt and fight the boss whenever and wherever you can. Once a guild boss leaves, all guild members who participated in the fight gain a reward, based on how much dragon blood they earned. The more you earn, the higher your reward tier.
If, however, your guild actually manages to kill the beastie, you earn more than just bragging rights – anyone who would have gotten contribution rewards instead gets double the rewards they would normally have gotten.
Guild Quests
Being part of a guild gives you a special to-do list that will, of course, reward you for doing the stuff on it.
These quests are divided into individual and public quests. Individual quests refresh daily and give you some small supplies as well as guild coins. Public quests are tasks that need to be contributed to by each member of a guild; these often have to do with the guild boss.
As you complete both individual and public quests, the meter at the top will fill up. Get it all the way to full and you’ll be able to redeem a large sum of guild coins. Do note that this reward refreshes weekly!
Guild Shop
The guild shop isn’t a special place, but you do need to be part of a guild to earn the currency needed to trade there.
Help your guild and it helps you. Win-win!
The guild shop is accessible via the Dwarven Association, the same one on your main menu. Here, you can trade for various items based on your guild’s level. The higher your guild’s level, the better the items you can buy. The shopkeeper will only accept guild coins for this store though, so make sure you’re doing your guild quests!
For Tya!
The road to a free Tya will be long and difficult, but so long as you have brave heroes willing to fight for you, victory is all but assured. All that’s needed will be courage, determination, and the fortitude to see the path to its conclusion.
That ends my beginner’s guide to Watcher of Realms, and I hope I was able to help you understand the basics, as you’ll need them to advance to more advanced tactics and defeat ever-stronger foes. If you have any suggestions on how to improve this guide or have any tips or tricks of your own you want to share, let us know in the comments below!