faction advantages afk arena guide
in ,

How Much Do Faction Bonus & Advantage Change In Reality?!

I wanted to write this guide on faction advantages and faction bonus for quite some time – it looks like some players are going all-in with that while others ignore them pretty much.

So, what’s the best way to handle them? That’s what this guide is about – showing you how much you need to care about and how much is too much 😉

Difference Between Faction Bonus & Faction Advantage

I will handle both here in this guide but just for clarification I’d like to briefly explain the difference.

faction bonus overviewThe Faction Bonus is basically a boost you get by having more heroes of the same faction in your team and it will give you percentage boost of their stats. You can see the faction bonus when you click on the top left corner in battle and you will seee your current faction bonus:

The faction advantage is how each faction performs against another faction. So, every faction will deal 25% more damage against one other faction while one faction will deal more damage to that faction. This is this one here:

faction advantages afk arena guide

Why Is That Important?

I primarily want to answer the question here how much that should have impact on your choices of heroes and what heroes you will send into battle and how to position them right to get the most out of your setup.

It’s possible that the same setup will get crushed and with some re-arrangement will beat the same enemy or that swapping one hero can make the difference between victory and loss!

Let’s go.

Faction Bonus – How Much Impact Does It Reall Have?

If you look at it there are actually two strategies you should use (and they depend on what heroes you have available):

  1. Ignore the faction bonus with a rainbow squad that uses really strong synergies. If your team works that well together that it stays alive and deals good damage without using 3 of the same faction you’re good – don’t break such a team for some 15% higher stats, that’s totally not worth it! Lucius/Shemira/Nara/Rosaline/Athalia is such a setup just to name one that totally crushes without any faction bonus and there’s no way a faction bonus could make that setup stronger.
  2. Go for the 3/2 faction bonus (3 of one faction, 2 of another faction). This will give you 15% boost and you still have some freedom to build a viable team. Don’t go for the 5 or 4 of the same faction bonus, there’s no faction that has that many heroes that work that well together to build a team that’s strong enough that will use the faction bonus to get better.

Overall I recommend rather going for a team with great synergies rather than a team that uses the faction bonus because the extra stats don’t compensate a team that works well from its general strategy.

Faction Advantage – Placement & Hero Selection

Lightbearers are strong aginst Maulers that are strong against Wildheart and so on.

This means that your or an enemy hero will have 25% more damage against another one.

Small tip from me if you have problems remembering this, just take a look at the order in the bottom bar, from left to right it’s always the stronger one (and Graveborn go to Lightbearers again) – makes it a little easier to remember 😉

easy remember faction advantages

In general I wouldn’t swap a hero just because of that.

Re-arraging the positions is the key here most of the times. You can then swap them so they are not directly facing an hero that has that bonus against your hero – or other way round, let one of your heroes with a bonus face an enemy hero where you have the 25% faction advantage.

Let’s make an example real quick:

afk arena faction advantages exmple before

If you look at the image here you can see that I have several problems with the opponing heroes:

  • I don’t have any positive faction advantages here
  • My Saveas will have to face two heroes that have advantage against him
  • My Vedan has to directly face Ogi directly who has an advantage against him

So just some re-arranging here:

afk arena faction advantages exmple after

Now all the faction advantages favor my team:

  • Saveas deals more damage to Ogi
  • Vedan deals more damage to his directly opponent heroes
  • removed most disadvantages

You see, even if this was just one example, that re-arraging is most of the time really powerful and swaping out heroes is only neccessary if you face a team of a faction that is really bad for your team.

The only situation I really consider this is when I have problems with the frontline heroes and the backline heroes as well.

Conclusion

So, bottom line, the takeaway from my point of view is that you should either build a good rainbow faction team or go for the 3/2 factions bonus and cover the faction advantages by re-arranging your heroes, especially the fronline heroes 🙂

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.