First a hit in Japan, Dragon Project has crossed overseas and hit the North American app stores where it’s proving itself as a very interactive and addicting MMO. You’re able to deck out your character with upgradeable gear, traverse the world map, and cooperate in battles against fierce Behemoth with other real players.
However, Dragon Project can be intimidating and confusing for new players. It’s a very simple MMO, but knowing some general tips before diving right in can save you a lot of time. Read on for some advice on how you can get into leveling your character as fast as possible.
Know Your Moves
The tutorial in Dragon Project is pretty bare, and it doesn’t go as far as to teach you all of your available moves in combat. Swiping your screen will move you and tapping will attack, but there are other moves you can perform.
Quickly slide and release against the screen in combat to perform a tumble. This is a great way to be evasive against powerful Behemoth moves. If you hold your finger down on your screen you’ll perform a special ability.
As a new player, you wield the shield and sword and this ability will be to guard against an incoming attack. If you guard just before an attack, you’re guaranteed 90% damage reduction, and releasing your guard after blocking an attack will perform a counter.
Here are the special abilities for other weapon types:
- Two-handed Sword – Charged Slash: Keeping your finger held down will charge up a powerful attack but leave you unable to move. Releasing will then perform a vertical chase, dealing damage multiplied based on the charge direction.
- Spear – Lunge: Lunging acts as both a way to deal damage to your nearest enemy or you can chain lunges in succession to close distance on an enemy in short time.
- Dual Blades – Ranbu: Holding your tap will allow you to charge up and then jump upward with a flurry of attacks. During this, you become invulnerable against enemy attacks.
- Bow – Snipe: Holding your tap will trigger a moving recticule that you can aim with. When it’s over an enemy, a target recticule will appear and releasing your tap will often one-shot the enemy. Enemies behind the first will also take damage.
Your Magi powers are your most powerful attacks. On the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see two gems that gradually fill into full color as you attack enemies. Once full, you can tap on either of them to perform the Magi ability. Saving these for Behemoths is optimal, as they do way more than enough damage to wipe out any basic monster.
Finish Those Missions
As is with most mobile MMOs, Dragon Project offers a plethora of missions separated into different types: story and events, and also daily and weekly.
As shown above, there are three tabs. Daily and Weekly are self-explanatory, and General is where you’ll find missions that aren’t time sensitive. The optimal strategy is to log on each day and knock out your daily missions. There are even daily missions that gets completed when you finish all other daily missions.
After that, you’ll want to progress to weeklies. Saving missions in your General tab for last, although they can have greater rewards, is most efficient when you’re trying to use your time wisely. After your weekly missions are finished, move onto the story missions. Again, there’s no rush to complete these so it’s best to do them last.
Events, or Expeditions, are a great way to rack up EXP.
Events in Dragon Project are similar to Missions. The more important ones last for weeks at a time, as shown above, but they also have their own form of daily clears. There’s currently two “Tuesday Hunting” events available for me right now, and you’ll find similar events if you check in every day.
Events are usually longer and much more demanding, but if you can survive and endure them then they’re very rewarding. Some events challenge you to meet certain goals, like not taking damage throughout the entire map. Try to do them as often as possible, but focusing on clearing your missions is mandatory for new players.
Get Your Friends
When you head into battle against Behemoths, you’re going to need a party of three others. Your party is assigned a number that you can give to other people so that they can join your party and help you out. If you don’t have any friends to invite, random players (or in worse cases, NPCs) will join up with you.
If you’re able to get your friends to join up and play Dragon Project with you, it’s a huge benefit to have a reliable group of people who you can count on to DPS and play the Behemoth fights optimally. The more friends you have, the more active opportunities you have. Maybe they’ll even invite you to clear their Behemoths. Everybody wins!
Freeload Behemoths
With or without friends, you have access to joining other parties just as they have access to yours. That means you have tons of opportunities to join in on fights against Behemoths with other players. Often times, these players are going to be much, much stronger than you are.
While it may not be the most noble of methods, joining these parties and just surviving while the higher-leveled players DPS the Behemoth down is an effortless way to rack up loot. You still get the rewards of the battle by playing this way, but you shouldn’t expect to come across any tablets.
Optimal Forging and Summoning
You’re going to have the option to forge a lot of different weapons of armor as you complete missions and events. However, you don’t want to simply forge the next-best thing you can get. You want to wait until you’re able to forge higher-level gear, ranks S or SS.
Investing your materials in gear ranked A or below is going to permanently eat up your materials to create a piece of armor or weapon that is going to be very temporary to you. Resist the urge and hold off for those S or SS pieces. Although these materials can be found when by mining and gathering on the field map, I’d advise for you to not treat them as throwaway resources. They can take time to farm.
You’re also able to obtain gear at the SS or S ranks by spending your Summoning Crystals to summon Behemoth. If you manage to summon an S-rank Behemoth, you can get an S-rank weapon from that battle.
When it comes to farming tablets, you’re not able to just join in on other players’ Behemoth fights and expect to see them drop at a decent rate. You can actually only expect to get them in about one out of every 400 fights. However, there is that small chance if you’re dedicated enough to grinding (although I’d never recommend it). Otherwise, Summoning Crystals can be used to obtain new Magi abilities. Try to get yourself geared up with S+ equipment and then you can begin safely investing those crystals into Magi. Look for a good balance between your gear and Magi strength.
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Dragon Project offers the unique opportunity to participate in battles on a world map with other real players, and being such means you’re allowed to learn and progress off of their backs. Don’t be shy about jumping into those Behemoth battles and leeching EXP. Everyone does it, and it’s going to progress you deep enough into the game where soon people will be doing the same to you!
Be sure to also check out our guide on how to get tablets in Dragon Project.
