Are you tired of getting your butt handed to you in League matches? Sick of the AI stomping your tuchus in Adventure mode? Fed up with feeling like your rear is going to get handed to you if you don’t spend some real money on some items soon? Have no fear, this Returners beginner’s guide is here to teach you how to kick butt and play optimally.
I will skip going over the basics of the game as the tutorial does a thorough job of explaining the mechanics. This guide will instead cover the best use of your time and resources for your first several hours of the game.
Team Building Tips
The image above shows the basic team you start off with in Returners. I’m a free-to-play player in most games, and Returners actually isn’t that much of a pay-to-win game, so you can get quite far with just this team if you feel like it. You’ll definitely have no problem getting out of bronze if you put the time and effort into leveling your characters.
That being said, there are certain characters that synchronize better with a specific teammate over others. For example, King Arthur is a tank, but he needs heals before his ultimate attack can activate. You can either bring a healing tactic card that you have to watch very carefully, or you can set yourself up with a healing support like Panacea.
You should also build your team around the specific fight you’re about to engage in. If your enemy team is mostly mages, don’t send a bunch of characters in with only physical defense. You will need to adjust formations and equipment as need be. Take some time to go through each piece of equipment you get, especially once you start getting multiple rares and legendaries for each role. You’ll be surprised by your ability to take down foes with much higher CP than you if you play smart in terms of counters.
Battle Enhancements and Tactic Cards
When you unlock the ability to spend formation points, you will want to very carefully consider what you want to do. There are counters to pretty much every team composition in Returners, so even if you play as smart as possible, you can still lose. That being said, go with what feels right. If you want an attack-heavy team, just take some battle tactic cards to help you burst down your foes before defense becomes an issue, or take some to enhance your defenses.
The tactic cards you bring in will change from battle to battle. If your foe is going to burst down your mage, you’ll want to take a taunt to draw the enemy team’s attention to your tankiest character(s). If you lack a healing support, you can either gamble and try to burst your foe down before you die with some attack enhancement cards, or you can play it safe by bringing some heals. This will be something you learn with trial and error. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to use your cards in Adventure if you can. For example, heal a character with about 80% health to keep them topped off. Your cards will refresh their cooldown faster than you think in Returners.
How to Spend Your Bluestone
There’s quite a bit of debate in the Returners community about the best way to spend your bluestone. From my experience and from what I’ve seen other players talk about, you will want to spend it more on equipment than on characters. You can get a character you really want, but avoid spending your precious resources on characters you won’t use just for the sake of completion. Once you get up to higher ranks, you can do that if you want. Until then, either use it for equipment or for energy (discussed below).
Resource Acquisition
By the time you’re reading this Returners guide, you’ve likely already completed the tutorial and need something else to do. Check out the dungeons. You can get items necessary to level up and enhance equipment, level up skills, and more. As a lower-level player, though, you will want to focus on the daily Upgrade Material dungeons instead of the non-daily ones as there will be a much larger energy cost if you do the latter. If you play every day, though, you will have ample resources, so this shouldn’t be a problem for you after a week or so.
You will also get plenty of relics, equipment, experience books, etc. from playing through the Adventure and League in Returners. Just put the time into those modes, and your characters will level up, you can enhance them to upgrade them, you can level up and enhance weapons/armor, rinse and repeat.
Another simple way to get more resources is to check the achievement list (like in the image above). You will be able to get gold, bluestone, energy, potions, scrolls, etc. Check the achievement list often because there are both daily and weekly missions as well as the items you get from achievements. Always do your dailies and weeklies if you want to play this game without spending cash.
Save Your Money by Gaining Energy
Most mobile games like Returners are insanely greedy. They try to get you to spend as much of your money as possible and punish you for being free-to-play. Thankfully, this one isn’t like that — or at least is less so than others on the market. Like we’ve discussed above, there are tons of ways to accrue resources. Energy is probably the most important resource in the game because without it, you can’t really do much.
There are many ways to regain energy. The most obvious one is by ranking up. Doing so will increase your maximum capacity for energy. Another obvious way is by spending bluestones and/or real money on bluestones to get more energy. You will get a lot of bluestones just from playing the game as a beginner, so you can save them up for higher levels when you need more energy if you don’t feel like gambling with the equipment gachas.
You can regain energy from claiming rewards from your achievement list like discussed above. You can give your friends friend points to get energy. You can even watch your most recent League match replay to get some energy. Returners is surprisingly generous in this regard.
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All right, that does it for this Returners beginner’s guide. We went over the best use of your resources, how to accrue more of them, battle formations, tactic cards, and team building! Stay tuned for more Returners content, and let us know if there’s a specific guide you’d like to see for this game. If you have any questions or tips, leave them in the comments section!
