Any tips on 'finishing up' the first Overlord?

[Destrin]

Hi all,

I've been playing steadily since release and across the couple of versions since the game came out and am at the stage where I've killed the Lieutenants and need to do my run on the Overlord.  I've got a good mix of lv 6 spells and I've stacked myself with a lv 6 health and attack enchants to try and keep my survivability/damage output up.  However, none of it seems to be enough.

I went through 4 avatars just getting through the first screen of the overland region of the overlords tower, two dread gazebos were perched either side of the portal that I knew I would need to escape the region later and it took me ages killing both of these to make it so I wasn't at risk of instadeath from them being there shooting me every time.

I've managed to clear to the second boss that is guarding the second switch room in the overlords tower but I can't seem to make any progress, I can run in and do small amounts of damage, but when he hits me I still seem to end up losing about 50% of my health, and get panicky and run away through the portal, back to the village to heal up at the Ilari.  I don't want to risk filling the room with vengeful ghosts.

I managed to lower the Overlord to 10 from 11 by sending my only adventurer off on a quest to bring his level down but this killed my adventurer (sadly wasting the 12,000 consciousness shards I used on buying her silver rings to up her survivability) so now I will need to find and train up another adventurer (who I will again be at risk of losing).

Are there any tips you guys can give me as to what I'm missing?  Is it supposed to be this tough to progress?  Should I lower the difficulty level (I'm playing on hero, which up to this point has felt totally fine!) or should I just be grinding away looking for shiny items to level my villagers, so I can send them on suicide missions to drag the Overlord down to my level?

Edit: Just seen the post by Xanirus below mine about Overlord difficulty.  It sounds like I do need to get working on levelling my NPCs again, it just struck me as very painful and grindy to spend 12,000 shards buying the components to make my lone adventurer happy enough to take the mission on, only to have them die (I had the success/survivability capped out at 85/75% or whatever they are set to max out at).

[tigersfan]

I'd recommend doing some "Rescue NPC" missions, getting a few more NPCs, and using them to take him down a couple notches. A lvl 10 Overlord is pretty tough.

[Misery]

Hi all,

I've been playing steadily since release and across the couple of versions since the game came out and am at the stage where I've killed the Lieutenants and need to do my run on the Overlord.  I've got a good mix of lv 6 spells and I've stacked myself with a lv 6 health and attack enchants to try and keep my survivability/damage output up.  However, none of it seems to be enough.

I went through 4 avatars just getting through the first screen of the overland region of the overlords tower, two dread gazebos were perched either side of the portal that I knew I would need to escape the region later and it took me ages killing both of these to make it so I wasn't at risk of instadeath from them being there shooting me every time.

I've managed to clear to the second boss that is guarding the second switch room in the overlords tower but I can't seem to make any progress, I can run in and do small amounts of damage, but when he hits me I still seem to end up losing about 50% of my health, and get panicky and run away through the portal, back to the village to heal up at the Ilari.  I don't want to risk filling the room with vengeful ghosts.

I managed to lower the Overlord to 10 from 11 by sending my only adventurer off on a quest to bring his level down but this killed my adventurer (sadly wasting the 12,000 consciousness shards I used on buying her silver rings to up her survivability) so now I will need to find and train up another adventurer (who I will again be at risk of losing).

Are there any tips you guys can give me as to what I'm missing?  Is it supposed to be this tough to progress?  Should I lower the difficulty level (I'm playing on hero, which up to this point has felt totally fine!) or should I just be grinding away looking for shiny items to level my villagers, so I can send them on suicide missions to drag the Overlord down to my level?

Edit: Just seen the post by Xanirus below mine about Overlord difficulty.  It sounds like I do need to get working on levelling my NPCs again, it just struck me as very painful and grindy to spend 12,000 shards buying the components to make my lone adventurer happy enough to take the mission on, only to have them die (I had the success/survivability capped out at 85/75% or whatever they are set to max out at).

For the Overlords, you're going to want to drop their level as far as it can get before you attack them.

The one big problem with this right now is the rate at which "gift" items appear in stashes.   The, uh, "drop lists" I guess you could call them, for stashes, seem like they're still pretty wonky right now (for example, still finding tiny amounts of shards instead of an item, and too many wood platforms/crates).   The "gift" items are WAY too rare at the moment, and I get the impression that they're not supposed to be.

For the most part, the whole citybuilding/NPC mission system works very well.  At least, when you're doing the normal missions.   When it comes to knock out the overlord, it gets wonky.  I'm usually playing on Metropolis difficulty, but when I hit the point of actually doing the Overlord, I'll drop it JUST for that part, simply so it doesnt take forever, and even then, it still seems to require many shards.  If I were to leave it on Metropolis it'd take AGES. 

Until they fix/change some of the item appearance rates in stashes, doing that is probably the best advice I can give, so that it doesnt turn into too much of a shard grindfest.

[kasnavada]

More or less the same as Misery.

You currently have to farm stash rooms for stuff, buy items from the opal guardian to get other adventurers to lower the overlord level. If you don't like that, you can remove the extra overlord levels by changing the citybuilding difficulty.

[Destrin]

Thanks for the advice all.

I think the fact that the first guy I sent to the overlord took me a long time to get to the stage where he was maxed on survival and yet he died anyway, and I was put off by the impending grind.  I was beavering away scouring stash rooms for stuff yesterday and actually hitting a few other unlockables along the way, so it's not quite as depressing as I thought it was going to be.

Mood items are the only way of increasing mood right?  I can't do anything else to get them more keen about keeping themselves alive?

[kasnavada]

Sometimes "small" missions get their mood up, but I've not found how exactly.

[Snave]

Sometimes "small" missions get their mood up, but I've not found how exactly.

Yeah, this is kinda wonky/glitchy too. Basically, if you send someone out on a mission and they don't die (success or failure) then you will lose mood. However, if the NPC you sent out is below average skill in his/her profession, the mood loss is cut significantly. Similarly, if the NPC you sent out is below average in missions (guaged only by successes: take note of this, its important) completed, the mood loss is again cut significantly. If the NPC is below average by both metrics, you will gain a small amount of mood instead.

Now, to game this, you basically need to find an NPC who is an adventurer by profession before building any adventuring guilds (you want his/her skill level as low as possible), then boost his/her mood up to the point of 100% survival on the safest arcane ingredient quest (rather trivial). Next, get a different NPC up to a handful of arcane ingredient dispatch successes, and then give a single skill book to any other adventurer. Now, your first adventurer is below average in both stats, and ideally has a near-zero success rate and a 100% survival rate. Now just keep sending him/her out on arcane ingredient quests and with return, his/her mood will increase and because you're failing each dispatch, the NPC still remains below average in skill and disptach successes. You can hypothetically do this a few times to prop up a few NPCs by just layering more a skill book on to each "primed" adventurer.

Once done, finally build your adventurer's guilds to make them actually functional.

At present, you don't actually need to get the skill level down that low, if the skill level gives you a success rate of about 50% or so you'll still endlessly accumulate mood AND gain arcane ingredients provided you stay on the NPC menu. However, this is likely a bug that'll soon be fixed as it relies on the dispatch stats failing to update after a given dispatch (rather, only updating when you return to the main dispatch menu).