Challenges With The Altar of Flame

A few days into the new areas and I'm not a huge fan of the enemies in the Altar of Fire. They're about as frustrating as the ones in the Ancient Museum. The long ranged blondies wielding dolls (Judy) and the blowtorch guys (Hanabi) are insanely powerful. The range on the blondies are ridiculous. She'll whack my rangers from across the path. The blowtorch guys have a ton of health and their close range splash damage is absolutely horrendous. Koichi, the guy with the "Be Happy" t-shirt, has an absurd amount of health, but he attacks single targets only.

Of the stages I have laid eyes on, the ongoing theme seems to be that all the stages have a dense, continual stream of enemies with high-HP, high-damage enemies peppered in at various parts of the stage. The difficulty with this is you need to balance your team with the right kinds of damage in order to deal with each stage. More so than in any other zone before, I am finding that I need to choose different rangers to combat the various quirks of each stage here. Before, I mostly had a core team of 5 rangers and I pretty much used them for almost every stage. Can't really do that here anymore.

So far wherever I've gotten stuck, I find myself often going back to the basic battle strategies and coming up with ways to deal. Some stages afford you the time to powerlevel minerals while other stages require you to deal with the onslaught immediately. Not only do you need to think about how to spend your first set of minerals, you need to tactically plan out the order of the rangers you're deploying as your first line of defense.

The stages vary on how quickly the blowtorch guy pops out as well as how many of them pop out. Most of the stages in Altar of Flame will force you to pick your team based upon how you want to deal with the blowtorch guy because if you don't, he'll roast your entire team in 2 shots. So it is important to ponder: Do I need more single-target rangers to quickly kill a heavy-hitter? Do I need more (or in some stages, fewer) splash rangers to deal with the marching stream of smaller enemies? Do I need any tank/health rangers, or is it more economical to use lowbie(s) if the blowtorch guy is roasting everything?

I am getting a lot of use out of level 60 Sindy and Ellin these days. Their attack is high, attack speed is also quite good. I think if you have a Lucifer Cony, she would also be useful in some stages. I leveled up Legend Boss in case I needed a 3rd single target ranged attacker, but so far haven't gotten any good use out of him. Surprisingly, I got one team composition that could employ Sol. He's big and slow and attacks even slower, but he's really meaty. I used him just for fun for 85, and he works fine for that!

I am also personally finding that beyond 87, the use of at least one lowbie is almost mandatory unless you have some fancy rangers. In fact, even with fancy rangers, a lowbie may make life a lot easier. Fully upgraded mineral production, max, and missile power are absolutely must-haves as you step into this area because the demand of the amount of damage output you need to deal to keep the blowtorch enemies at bay is very intense -- and Sindy & Ellin are not cheap!

On the subject of cheap, don't be cheap with preparations. Spend the 500 coins to get all 4 of your Items. I don't think there was a single stage I cleared the first time without using 3 or 4 of the items. Spend the 500 coins on Sidekicks and use your Friends tactically. Deploying 3 extra power hitters at the right time can really mean the difference between a win or a loss.

It is a real bummer to be forced to go back to old zones to farm coins and grind levels but I've been doing exactly that. I've done 76, 80 and even 84 more times than I care to count, but as a result I have a big fat coin wallet. I've also found that 85 is quite farmable once I got the right team composition for the job to do it safely.

In case you were curious, the treasure for Altar of Flame is a Hermes Sandal. It increases ranger move speed. I still need a piece in the third section to activate it! I just got the 3rd star in the first section. Whoo! Although in general this treasure benefit doesn't seem to be anything worth writing home about.

This zone doesn't appear to be as insanely skewed towards using splash rangers, but in case anyone missed their opportunity to get their max level 60 Clara last week, she's now the 4-star ranger obtainable in boss stages here. Clara does really well as the token splash ranger in the team just to deal with the little enemies while your single target rangers are dealing with the bigger guys.

All in all, I'm finding Altar of Flame quite tough. I haven't finished it yet, either. It's a big gear shift from the style of play that we have gotten used to in Temple of Ice, but so far I've found it a great deal more playable for the average person as long as you play strategically. Wish you all good fun and good luck here.