Kamazon Guide

How it all works

I'm sure you've participated in Kamazon at this point so I'll not go over the obvious stuff, I'll go over the strategically worthy stuff.

First off, know your overall goal. It'll take around 43,00 Bottle Caps to buy everything in the Bottle Cap shop every first of the mont. That is to say, if you're doing well, with decently geared heroes, this won't be a problem as you’ll probably cap out halfway through the season and accrue extra Bottle Caps to be used on the next season. After hitting the cap you can either buy the cosmetic items in the Bottle Cap shop, spend them on hammers or just stockpile them for a future update that may give further use for your Bottle Caps. It’s up to you.

The core goal is to get to as many valuable nodes like Elite, Shopping Cart and even ? nodes (in certain Kamazon seasons). The Elite nodes you’ll want to hit early on and the second you get challenged on a node, you may want to just remove the Elite nodes from the rest of your run to ensure smooth sailing.

The more in-tune and synergistic your artifacts are with your team, the farther you'll progress and the more bottle caps you'll earn. The Benefits are also key and you’ll have more Benefits as the season progresses, the difficulty should always be harder in the beginning, easier at the end of the season.

There are but a Few

One big misconception is that Kamazon is there to make you flush out your teams better. That is to say if you had all the characters maxed out, you could effectively clear Kamazon floors effortlessly because even if you lost a team, your second team would just come right back in.

That's just not true or at least not to the extent that you believe it is.

You'll be using one squad of heroes, probably 5-6 to get through Kamazon. I go Range, 2 Tanks and a Healer but by node necessity sometimes that turns into 1 Melee, 2 Tanks and a Healer or 2 Melee, 2 Tanks or 2 Ranged, 2 Tanks, etc. That’s pretty much all it takes and if you use Ranged or Melee Immunity Benefits, you can be more specific on who you bring.

Benefits

As you progress through Kamazon you'll earn Kamazon points. You can use these points to allocate Benefits before each run. This will greatly smooth out your run's performance, especially later in the season when you can purchase many benefits.

It's best to use the Benefits to keep you progressing through whatever stages you need. My general rule of thumb is "be damage oriented". I can always stack on defense in my run but too much defense is over kill but too much damage is never overkill (so long as you're not dying).

There are also special, season-specific Benefits that really help things along and some are even unlocked by long chain events. One of those most advantageous things you can do try to unlock any special Benefits you can while you play through Kamazon (generally done so within the ? nodes) and check your Benefits before every run to see if anything changed.

As I'll mention in a section below, I typically always pick up the nodes that remove Melee or Ranged Immunity from monsters. This allows me to focus on one damage type (Ranged or Melee) and not have to worry about nodes that will utterly stop me in my tracks.

Pause is your Greatest Asset

Pausing and returning to the lobby does NOT require you to gain another keycard to re-enter the battle and if one of your heroes has fainted in the battle going back to the Lobby will REVIVE them. This is probably the most crucial thing about the Kamazon. You can retry each battle as many times as you want, with different characters, different setups, so long as you can get past it just once, you're good to go without penalty.

I usually run with a ranged, two tanks and a healer. Sometimes when I enter a node and see they have a melee only monster, I may pause to switch my ranged hero out for a melee hero or perhaps a tank out for another ranged hero (if a ranged only mob was present).

Sometimes, on a given boss you may need to refine your positioning dozens of times to get the just the right RNG to get past the node. I had it happen this morning on 16-6, I reset the boss node at least 50 times before I finally got through with an extreme bit of luck... but i got through. =)

The Concerning Creatures

Cursed Towers

Cursed Towers are a bane to our existence because our teammate AI doesn't really keep them out of danger. You may end up resetting that node numerous times to get through it due to unfortunate AI.

Ranged / Melee Shields

These shields require you to have at least one or two other well-developed heroes in your roster as mentioned in the example above (Pause is your greatest asset). When the shields are placed on regular creatures, it's not that big of a deal but when placed on Tanky creatures and ranged DPS like Sohee, it become problematic very quickly. In addition, you can have a single node that has a creature with a ranged shield and another creature with a melee shield. You can even have a shield on a creature during a boss stage. It's all random and sometimes these shields will halt your progression.

With Benefits, you can actually remove this issue altogether and I typically do this every season. While you won’t be able to start every season with that Benefit (because you have to activate it while playing the season), it’s a lot more beneficial than most benefits.

To active the Anti Ranged / Melee Immunity Benefit you’ll need to play through Kamazon and have at least 300 coins at a given point and hit as many ? nodes until you are given the option to buy either immunity benefit. After that, you can use that immunity type as a Benefit before you start any Kamazon challenges after. I highly advise this as you can just focus on one damage type for your entire run. I have Lilith and Beth capped out so I usually use the Anti-Melee Immunity Benefit.

Bosses

It goes without saying that the bosses can be dangerous. Well let me tell you, they get down-right nasty when they are level 120+! Whatever the level of progression you push in Kamazon, just know that you may need to reset several times on a boss to get through it. More often than not though, it's not the boss that makes the node impassible, it's the random creatures/heroes that boss spawned with.

Healers

Healers aren't generally a big problem in Kamazon except in the boss nodes. Sometimes you'll have a healer like Aoba who will stay so far away that your AI just never gets to her and she prolongs the fight so much, it just wittles you down and the boss eventually gets you. Other times you can have multiple healers like an insidious boss node with double lorraines and melee characters. They all fought in a clump and I just couldn't out-damage them fast enough to keep up with the sheer group healing they were putting out.

Time

Sometimes you'll be fighting a tanky mob or hero that has a shield on. Depending on what heroes you use, this may become a problem due to time constraints. This is obviously solved with more DPS but if you don't have it by the time you hit the node (from artifacts), it won't get any better.

Artifacts You Want

As artifacts are added every season, I can't provide a complete list of l33t artifacts because by the time you read this, it'll be outdated. I would suggest visiting the patch notes, jumping on our discord and talking to us or just asking guildies what they use in their Kamazon runs.

What I can say though is if an artifact requires another artifact to be present before grinding an ability, you only need to have one secondary artifact present to give all other respective artifacts the benefit. For example, let's say you have a Lonely Left Ear (20% defense) and it requires you have a Lonely Right Ear to get the (80% attack power). You can have 5 Lonely Left Ears and only a single Lonely Right Ear to get the 80% attack power boost from all Lonely Left Ear Artifacts. This remains true to other similar artifact combinations.

? Nodes are Season-to-Season

What i mean to say is that depending on the season, the ? nodes may be invaluable or just another thing to deal with. We just got done with a Kamazon Season where the ? nodes were as valuable as the elite nodes and you prioritized them heavily. In the current season though, they aren’t all that useful and are somewhat deprioritized.

The nice thing though is you’ll be able to challenge over and over and you’ll eventually use some wrong choices on the ? nodes and start to uncover what each decision will gain or lose your characters and what ? decisions are invaluable and event-driven.

How do you get past a hard level?

So there are a few tricks you can pull out to eek out that extra efficiency to potentially beat a harder level. Let's go through them.

What is beating you?

What creature keeps killing you? What creature is keeping them alive? How do you get to that creature first? If a healer is in the back row of their lineup just healing over and over, it's unlikely a range unit will kill them very quickly. I usually try to utilize melee because they'll usually peel off the main target or just attack the back row right at the start. If it's a creature that has a long cast like a Rich Goblin or Succubus then you may adopt the same strategy.

If your creature is a rifle-wielding knight, well then put your highest defense tank in front of it. If that doesn't help, look at it's school of magic (light, fire, dark, etc) and see what heroes can be swapped out to either remove the creature faster or tank the creature longer.

Change your Positions

This is the most cost-effective means to beating a hard level. Just change your start positions around before the match begins. You would be amazed at how much that can make a difference. For instance, Beth won't run directly in front of her to attack, she attacks a diagonal target. With that in mind, if you know the target you want to kill first, put Beth diagonally from it. Make sure your tanks are in front of the proper creatures to negate as much damage as possible at the start of the fight.

Change your Heroes

If you're like most people, you don't have a huge amount of MLB heroes at your disposal. You'll probably have your main 4 heroes geared up and perhaps a few others as well. Do what you can. Swap a hero out and throw 10 attempts at it. If it doesn't work, try it again with a different hero.

Change your Gear

If you're like 5-10% off from actually killing the final creature (Orbital Lift memories haunt me here), you may want to change some of your gear. See if your tanks go sport some DPS accessories. See if Future Princess can lose the shield. See if your main DPS can change out their weapon in favor of a weapon more geared to take down this specific type of monster. Just play with it, through attempts, over and over and see what you can do.

In Closing

Kamazon is kind of like the Coliseum. If you are getting your gems (i.e. bottle caps), why think of terms of this game mode to spend money on progressing your characters? Just understanding, it's all about the bottle caps and so long as you earn the 10,600 bottle caps the rankings won't benefit you at all.
If however you do want to push progression, it can be a pretty fun and dynamic mode of gameplay. You'll be swimming in Bottle Caps and hammers before too long!