Hydrissea OVERRATED? Evera THE BETTER START? Awaken: Chaos Era

Welcome to the textual guide following Darth’s video linked above.

Darth had spent a lot of money and time trying to figure out the Heroes. He had read every Hero’s kit including the comments, legendaries, abilities, and cooldowns. This will not be a “Tier List” article, but we will discuss some of the Heroes in the Awaken: Chaos Era!

Tier list would probably be viable in this game but it is going to require a good amount of work and some details. PvP vs. PvE tier list as well as breakdowns for different dungeons will be great. That is a long-term plan and if you are interested in that we can do that together as a community.

Before we cover the general discussion about Heroes and which ones are good, which ones you should avoid putting resources in, we must talk about the re-rolls.

When you do your re-rolls in the beginning, when you get your rookie summons as they’re called, you get a certain number of Heroes. There are only seven Heroes you can pick from when that happens. Hydrissea is more than likely the Hero you’re looking to get out of these re-rolls.

Hydrissea

Hydrissea offers something in utility that a lot of other heroes don’t, primarily Speed Down.

She is a Hero which is not the fastest in the game, but she has okay Base Speed when she’s fully maxed out with Glyphs, etc.

• Darth’s thoughts regarding Glyphs → Glyphs increase speed, while some Heroes seem really good because of Speed Down, if you are F2P, or if you haven’t progressed as far in the campaign and you don’t have all the Glyphs out yet, going first isn’t really as viable of an option.

There is a little bit of counter-intuitiveness to picking Hydrissea right at the start, if you are planning to level up her abilities and Glyph her up quickly it makes sense, you will be able to use her competitively in PvP where the Speed Down matters. In PvE, Darth hasn’t seen speed down matter that much at all because minions aren’t really “lapping” you unless it comes to turn orders of setting up combos.

Why is Hydrissea so popular?

Looking at her abilities, it’s the combination of pure damage and the Speed Down with the Trait where she effectively has a chance to continually splash damage, which is pretty solid damage as well.

Hydrissea is basically AoE PvP DPS, she is as well really good in the Ash Magisteria, which is where you get your speed gear. Speed gear is the most important thing in the game because going first typically wins.

The reason Darth thinks it might be counterintuitive to pull Hydrissea is that Evera might be the best Hero to start with.

Evera

If you are in the situation where you’re playing second, you have started playing the game later, for example, Evera counters Blue affinity because she is Green affinity. The affinity makes a really big difference of 50% damage straight up, as well as the chance to deflect is significantly higher if you are the right affinity.

Because of all the above said, Evera can do great against Hydrissea because she is the counter.

Looking at the Arena, you can go second with her, which allows you to kind of go for attack percentage boots, for example, she will hit really hard.

Evera is one of the only AoE green “continual nukers”, and if we look at a lot of the other Heroes, there are a lot of Blue affinity AoE nukers → Virgil as an Epic, Hydrissea, Tia, Ciara…

These are the Heroes that you can get for free, either from synthesis or from the Altar with the fusion. When you go to the Altar→ synthesis and you fuse these Heroes you can do it again and again as Darth has been told.

For that reason, you could max affinity out at Tia who is then going to be your sort of a go-first PvP Hero. She might be as good if not better than Hydrissea due to the fact that Tia also has your AoE freeze. On top of that, she has better speed allowing her to effectively go quicker than Hydrissea.

Keep in mind one other thing about Tia. Because of the Frostbite passive, the enemy Heroes will get negative speed too. You kind of get your speed down in a way from her. It requires enemies to go first which is why Tia is slightly more overrated than Darth thinks is fair.

She is good but in order for the Frostbite to land the enemies have to go first, if that happens what is the point of the Speed down anyway?

Looking at the speed, Hydrissea has 95 and Tia 115 speed. That is a 20-speed difference, a four-star maxed-out boot for instance gives 30 speed. For this reason, Tia will beat Hydrissea going first, she is farmable, for PvP Tia is maybe a little bit better anyway.

Tia’s AoE is also good for Ash Magisteria because she Freezes when she does AoE. Even if you don’t kill the minions for the Ash Magisteria, even though you kind of do need to kill them, they will be Frozen and won’t be able to do the joint attack.

The other thing is that if you Freeze them and you have Ciara, another free Hero, her passive triggers when enemies get below 50% HP. She will do more AoE damage to capitalize on the Freeze that Tia did which gives you 50% damage on Frozen, that is the way Frozen works.

If you’re starting with Tia as a F2P player who started Evera your turn is going to look something like this:

Tia Defense down → AoE Freeze into Evera AoE plus another Rage stack, that is going to be your opener. After you get your AoE from Tia, and then your big damage from Evera since she is the correct affinity against most of the Heroes, Ciara out of turn will mop up with 50% damage on top, if someone hasn’t already been one shot.

You don’t necessarily need the Speed down to go first if your Tia is going first and she is landing Freezes.

What Darth is trying to emphasize is that speed is the meta for sure and he is not discouraging anyone to participate in rushing for speed, but he does believe that Awaken: Chaos Era is the game that allows you to not rush the straight speed only meta.

Going first is a huge, huge deal, and being able to get the Defense down is a huge deal, but in order to go first, you have to sacrifice a lot of stats. This means that players rushing for speed are going to be weaker on the attack and you can be stronger on the defense. Keep that in mind when it comes to the discussion of the power levels of Heroes.

In the video above Darth went 2nd in the Arena battle. His opponent had what players consider “optimal speed start team” with Heroes: Windstrex into Hydrissea, Mary. Darth won the battle, you don’t have to have an absolutely ridiculous comp.

Darth did lose to the number one player on the leaderboard at that time, but he has good speed with Heroes: Evelyn Firstdawn, Zatlux… Looking at the other similar comps, if your Heroes are not instantly killed by them, you will be fine.

For this reason, there is an argument to be made that you can start with Evera over the Hydrissea and that Tia will eventually be your PvP farmer. Darth is not saying “Don’t start with Hydrissea”, but pulling out Evera might not be the worst decision in the world.

We hope you found this guide helpful. Good luck!