New to Puzzle and Dragons?
Welcome!
So you just picked up this new game, whether because you've seen your friends play it or because it looked like a cool free game off the App Store. Be ready, because if you immerse yourself in this game you will find that it is to Candy Crush as coke is to your kush.
If you haven't beaten the tutorial yet, go ahead and do that. Next it's time to get down and dirty. You'll need to know the basic pad lingo to understand anything about this game.
Card/Monster:
The things that you've been collecting throughout the game. Enemies that you fight are also the very same monsters. All artfully drawn, but you'll quickly come to realize that while you love seeing certain cards, others will piss you off every time it appears.
Stats:
Each card has three stats, HP (health), ATK(attack), and RCV(recovery).
Team:
You enter a dungeon with a team of up to six cards: a leader and four subs coming out of cards you own, along with a leader coming from something that your friends own.
Lead/Leader:
The head of your team. Unlike the rest of your team, your lead will provide a leader skill bonus. For example, if you started off with the red starter Tyrra, his leader skill gives fire attribute cards 1.5x attack, so setting him as your lead will give all fire attributes on your team 1.5x attack. Your friend's leader skill also applies (every team has 2 leaders), so if your friend also has a Tyrra, your fire attribute cards will have 1.5x1.5=2.25x attack!
Sub:
This refers to the four cards on your team that aren't in the lead slot. If they have a leader skill it won't be applied.
Active/Active Skill/Ability:
This is the special move your cards can use after they charge up. All cards, not just the leader, can use their active skills.
For a full list of all the terms you will ever hear of, check out the Learn the Lingo page (under construction).
As a new player, you have a couple priorities to fulfill:
- Get a good lead. When you pull (roll) on the Rare Egg Machine (REM) after the 5th tutorial stage, you have a chance to roll for a really good card. Unfortunately, the rem is unforgiving and merciless and habitually gives you crap for your 5 magic stones. Because stones are a finite research, pad players will "reroll", a euphemism for reinstalling the app, starting a new account, rebeating the tutorial, and rolling the rem again and hoping for a better card. The process can take anywhere from a single restart to 30+ restarts. If you don't feel like rerolling, feel free to continue through the game, but if the card you received wasn't good enough, you'll quickly see why so many people will reroll. The guide for rerolling can be found here (under construction).
-Rank up as fast as possible. Ranking up gives you higher max stamina so you can do more stuff and a higher team cost so you can use better cards. After getting a good lead you'll notice that it costs so much you won't be able to run a lot of other cards. Rank up several times and you'll fix this.
-Clear normal dungeons. Every whole dungeon cleared is another magic stone, every magic stone is 1/5 of a roll on the rem or 5 extra space for your box. And on that note...
-Expand your box space. Some people naturally expand their box. Others greedily hold off on expanding box space, wanting to save stones. As a rule of thumb, you want your maximum box space to be double your rank up, until rank 150 when you should keep it, at the bare minimum, equal to your rank.
-Collect evo materials (evo mats). You may wonder why you need more box space; it's to hold the cards labeled 'evo material' such as the Rubylit or Dragon Seed. These cards aren't useful subs, but are necessary for later evolutions. Although you'll collect them passively through running new dungeons, if you get rid of them now they're a pain in the ass to obtain again. If you're pushed for box space, try to save at least 2 of each evo material. They feed for shit, so just sell them if you're getting rid of them.
-Save the plus eggs (eggs). Sometimes the cards you find come with a + on them. This means they are receiving a tiny bonus in one stat. You'll want to save them because you can feed them to other stuff later on to transfer the bonus. Yes, they sell for a ton gold, but saving them is worth it. The eggs stack, and a fully egged card (+297) is receiving +990 hp, +495 atk, and +297 rcv.
-Find good friends. Every friend you add will only allow you to use whatever he is currently running as his leader. A good friend will make your early gaming much, much easier. After settling into the game (rank 20ish), go to the online friend finder and search up some people with good leaders. Usually, people with the same leader as you are always good to add. A good leader to be friends with regardless of your own is Odin and any of his evolutions.
-Level up and evolve your leader. Why isn't anybody respond to your friend requests? Because your lead is underleveled, unevo'd, unulti'd, unawakened, and unegged. Gtfo n00b.
These are things you should avoid doing:
-Looking for good subs. After finding your leader, he can singlehandedly take you through a load of dungeons. The extra things you find (slimes, goblins, carbuncles) are all useless. If you have team cost feel free to put them on your team, but don't waste your money feeding stuff to them or your box space holding them if you're low on space.
-Investing exp in your starter. Sorry, the tiny dragon you received at the beginning is only good at doing two things: being fed for exp and telling the world what a giant noob you are. Use the card you rolled from the rem as your leader, don't invest in your starter. Yes, your dragon can be evolved 4 times. He will still suck. I kept mine as a memento but seriously, don't waste your time on him. He's even cutest unevo'd, so yeah. Don't bother.
-Touching +eggs. If you find something with a + on it, as mentioned above, don't sell it. But don't fuse it to anything either, because firstly it costs an extra 1000 gold to fuse anything with a +egg on it, per +, so it gets really expensive. Also, the only way to transfer a + is to fuse away the card carrying it. So if you invest 50 eggs into your current lead, then roll a way better lead, you can either sacrifice your current lead into oblivion or miss out on those 50 eggs.
-Yolo Rolling. At any given time you have ~10% chance to roll a good card (5 stars or more) out of the REM. On godfests, a 48 hour event appearing roughly once every two weeks, you have 30%-40% chance of rolling one. If you really must roll, spend your stones during these events; rolling any other time is considered yolo rolling because yolo and you'll probably kill yourself after receiving shit for your stones. Plus, obtaining cool stuff at this stage isn't even that useful because your team cost restricts you from using too much of it.
-Special dungeons. The majority of the special dungeons you'll see will either be too hard, cost more than your max stamina to run, or give you absolutely nothing useful. Stick with the little leagues and run your normal dungeons, noob.
The Daily Dungeons
Below are the only special dungeons you will concern yourself with at this time.
From Tuesday to Friday, there are special dungeons that appear with very obvious names (Tuesday Dungeon appears on Tuesday, for example). These dungeons appear with the sole purpose of providing you with evo materials. In general, the 50 stamina ones, marked Mythical, mean don't run at all or you'll die. The 25 stamina ones, labeled Expert, aren't impossible but will take a carefully crafted team. The 10 or 15 stamina ones are for beginners like you! However if you don't need evo mats corresponding to that day, don't bother running them because they give you crap exp, crap gold, cost a lot of stamina. For now just ignore them.
On the weekends, surprise, the Weekend Dungeon appears. These dungeons come in lots of difficulties, you'll probably handle the bottom three difficulties with ease. They give you incredible amounts of gold and exp, but don't drop monsters. On the weekends, if you can beat it consistently, you can power level off the Expert difficulty (25 stamina). These dungeons are tricolor, meaning only fire, water, grass, and heart orbs appear.
The second kind of daily dungeon involves metal dragons such as the Hunt Ruby Dragons! dungeon. There is one for every color, with the RGB dungeons costing 20 stamina and the dark and light ones costing 15 stamina. These dungeons are ridiculously easy, perfect for you! While they give very poor rank exp and gold for their cost, they drop metal dragons in three sizes: smalls feeding for 1000-2000 exp, mediums feeding for 10000-15000 exp, and larges feeding for 50000-55000 exp! While the smalls are decent early on, mediums and larges can power level your leader very quickly. Note that feeding a card to one of the same color gives a 1.5x exp boost, so feeding a King Ruby Dragon to a red card actually gives 82500 exp!
Now where exactly are these metal dragons found? The dungeon appears for one hour, two times, every day. Every day a color rotates out. You can find the schedule in the sidebar here. Notice how there are 5 columns labeled A, B, C, D, E. These are the 5 groups, and when you create your account you are randomly assigned into a group, and it doesn't change. After you find out which group you belong to (if it says A group has metal dragons at 2 pm and you see you have metal dragons at this time, you're in group A), you'll know you can always check that group's schedule.
Closing Words
Pad is a very extensive game, and this is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Just know that by far the best wiki/database for the game is puzzledragonx.com. You should memorize the name or bookmark it, because it's always up to date on the daily schedules, new special dungeons, updates, godfests, monster stats, and every single aspect of the game. Good luck.