(Tips & Tricks)
I’ve played a fair bit of
Dragon’s Crown the last week, and I wanted to write down a small guide of Tips
and Tricks to help newcomers to the game. I’ll skip over the basics, not the
least because there are a few websites with really good guides out already, most
notably Destructoid
and Primagames.
If you read Kanji or can suss out the Google translation of the Japanese
website 4gamer.net,
that is a really good place to start out as well. So here we go:
1. First of all take that character
guide you got of the internet, you know the one with all those cookie cutter
builds; throw it out. This isn’t by any means a besmirching of whatever guide
you got your hands on, it might even be a great guide. However, Dragon’s Crown
is a dungeon crawler; you are going to spend tens of hours playing this game
with or without people around the world. You don’t want to be spending time
looking up a skill in a guide to see if it’s ‘any good’; that’ll suck the joy
out of the game faster than you can say abracadabra.
2. Before you finish the first nine
stages solo, make sure you play each character. This is sort of a part two of
the above tip. After you finish your first mission make sure to go the
adventure guild and scope out the skillset for each class. Maybe you know what it’s
about, or at least you think you do, but you can be surprised how a class that
looked promising can be totally out of your normal play style. Fighters can do
good damage on land or in the air, but they can also tank; they have beastly defensive
abilities that don’t even require items to use. The Amazon can be a beast on
the ground, in the air, or use her health bar for skills but she can be
murderous at tougher difficulties without practice. The Elf can burst some of
the fastest DPS in a short amount of time or she can play tactical and
conservative using her Bow to create distance and finish off enemies up close
and personal with her legs or a dagger and backstab.
3. Your most important resource
in Dragon’s Crown isn’t Gold, Experience, or even Gear; rather it is Skill
Points. As such the most important part of leveling your character is the side
quests. Not only does every side quest give at least one SP, you also get
better experience gains than just going the different stages. While some side
quests can be teasingly difficult to wrap up whether solo or in a party, be
aware that opting out of a stage will grant you all experience, gold, and gear
you’ve gained up to the point of exiting. It’s oftentimes a timesaver to simply
exit the stage rather than finish through it.