Defense Derby Guide - Expert strategy tips for defeating bosses and spending currency

Anyone who has played Defense Derby since its recent launch have probably noticed there is a lot more to it than your standard tower defence. Even with a few matches under your belt, there is always room for improvement, and we’re here to offer a hand with a few useful tips.

Complete your daily tasks

If you want to be successful you need to continuously recruit new units in order to keep increasing everyone's power, so make sure to stay on top of your daily jobs. Each day you can get 600 Cubics simply by logging in and playing games as normal, and this only takes about ten minutes tops. Add the 1,000 from Weekly quests, and you get 52 units per week. Throw in those Missions as well, which are slightly more of a hassle since you need to hope for specific bosses, and you will be racking up those artefacts for their passive bonuses.

It can be easy to forget about the Valley of Trials, tucked away as it is in the Adventure menu, but this is also an excellent way to recruit more characters. Since you can repeat your highest completed stage three times a day for Faction Crystals, it is worth adding this to your daily routine to strengthen anyone you may have to Scout during those dry deck Derby matches.

What’s worth the investment?

There are quite a few types of resources you can pocket through your defence journey, and it is a little daunting with all the options of where to throw them, but it's quite simple. Starting with Cubics, you can only spend these on the Fated Summons so that one is quite simple. Keep recruiting to power up your squads.

As you start doing your Valley stages every day and collecting all those Crystals, you are going to want to save up 3,000 before each Faction Summon so you can summon 11 units instead of just 10. You will also get generic Crystals when you first finish a level that can be used on any of the Factions, so just add them to your favourite team.

The most difficult choice you have is with Defense Derby’s premium currency, Gems. You won’t be able to grind that many, and there are a lot of places to use them such as unlocking new deck slots, opening Army slots, and auto-completing Valley stages. The thing to remember is all of these are just small time-saving options, and not overly useful. Instead, save up 2,000 Gems for the 11x Gem Summons, as they are the best way to recruit Heroes for upgrading, and will help you most in the long run.

Who best to upgrade?

The final two currencies are the ones needed to upgrade your units; Gold and Elixir. Hopefully, by now you have advanced as far as you can through Derby Mode to maximise your Garrison rewards because you need a lot. Even then, you won’t have enough to power up everyone, so we must prioritise.

Start off with the obvious choice; your primary deck. Each time you merge and upgrade someone in your starting lineup, immediately max their level. This will help you with both Derby Mode and, of course, Blitz, which you can then continue to complete to get more resources to pump back into powering up - a lovely cycle.

After this, make a deck for each specific Faction, and then keep those characters levelled up when you can. This will keep you being able to go through the Valley of Trials stages for each of the three types, bringing more Crystals for more summons. Finally, make sure whenever you open a new Army slot to immediately fill it, so that's one less character to spend resources on.

Build your deck around synergy

Having to make three decks to make the most out of every mode can be a bit daunting, and you may be wondering what's the best way to go about it. Our advice is to focus on Factions, just on numbers alone. Faction bonuses can stack up to 60%, whilst the Type synergy will only work once for 30%. If you plan your formation well, every unit can almost double in power with this approach.

As well as these generic bonuses, you should also bear in mind each individual unit's abilities when building a team that works well together. If we take a Human team, for example, we can form a powerful combination around three characters and one Hero. Swordmans’ power increases by 40% when next to units, which can stack up to 80%. Put Floral Mage on the other side of the line who gets extra bonuses from synergy, and then add Apprentice in between them to complete the Faction bonus, and take full advantage of his passive that increases his attack by 20% of nearby friendly attack. On a team with Merham as a Hero, Magic Types get 32% power boosts, making Floral Mage and Apprentice insanely strong.

Beat back the bosses

So by now, we have created a few powerful decks to tackle those Derby waves with, but we still need to deal with those beastly Bosses that pop up every few waves. They can be daunting, but there are ways to minimise their annoyance. With Summoner, you want to make sure your heaviest hitters are also focused on them, otherwise they will keep summoning waves to overwhelm you. Keep your AoE units at the beginning to hit the mooks whilst shuffling your strongest single targeters around.

For the Blocker, you want your rapid-fire fighters to be upfront to whittle down the boss's shield stack. Units like Archer and Lupine Berserker are perfect for this with their speed, and then when you break his shield, hammer him with your strongest team. Greed isn’t a particularly difficult boss, but their ability to heal themselves a lot can be annoying. You will want to focus on slowing or knocking them back as much as possible to keep them from those healing hearts.

King Slime is fairly straightforward as long as you keep your formation correct. Focus your single-target soldiers at the start to split Slime up as soon as you can, then mop up the remains with your AoE fighters. Our final boss is Ping and Pong, the most annoying in that you can’t really plan for them when they start shuffling your formation and pinging all their cooldown timers. Your tactics will be in the first few seconds of the fight. Set up any pushback characters you have towards the end so you have some definite map control, and put a slow or freeze unit at the front with as many damage dealers as can reach so you can get as much of a burst window as you can.

By taking these tips to heart, you should be well on your way to joining in the race to the top of the Leaderboard, but there is still a lot more to discover. So until then, keep grinding out those daily quests, powering up your decks, and experimenting to find the most powerful synergy squads you can.