Collection of tips and tricks you may or may not know! This is mostly made as a quickstart guide to newer players to the series but overtime it will grow and maybe be helpful to anyone!
Hero Deck
You can essentially have as many 'save slots' as you'd like. You can make new heroes with their own name, stats, and gear sets which is super cool so you can make any combination of builds you would like. The only limiting factor is how many heroes you can equip at a time in your "Hero Deck"
At the start of the game, before you get too far I strongly recommend filling your deck with one of each hero (currently only 4) Heroes in your deck all gain XP evenly which means you can level up every single hero at once.
Now as you progress through the game, you will have 4 different heroes that will be evenly leveled so if you want to try someone else later you don't have to re-farm xp to get them up to par with your progress.
Hero Subclasses
Heroes can have either Ranged Attacks, Melee Attacks, or they can do both.. Pretty cool right? Each hero also has a different set of active abilities, and a different set of defensive "towers" to place.
Reaching back to the hero deck; The cool thing about having 4 different heroes in your hero deck is being able to switch between them while preparing your defenses. You could set up some spike blockades as knight and then swap to monk and setup shock auras in front of those blockades, and then switch to apprentice (mage) hold G to start the enemy waves so you can fight with the apprentice, yet have the defensive towers of knight and monk.
In this case, the Knight and Monk would be builder subclass, and the Apprentice would be your DPS subclass. Play around with who you like for each job so that when it comes to gear and stat points, you know where you want to spend them per each character.
Gear and Stats
Gear
There is a ton of gear in Dungeon Defenders.. if you're a fan of loads of loot you'll be ecstatic to hear this game has levels of loot on par with the loot god games like Diablo and Borderlands.
You blow through loot so fast in the early parts of the game you'll be fine with just equipping whatever has the highest "Power Rating" until you get close to max level/end game.
But if you want to take it further, you can give gear with specific stats to specific heroes so that those heroes get those boosts most relevant to what you use them for. An example..
I use knight for his blockades mostly; so I want his blockades to have big health so they don't break. I give my knight gear that increases his "Defense Health" and I only focus on that stat for him. Before I call the enemy waves I'll switch to Apprentice to run around and fight because he's my DPS. So I give him all gear that increases his attack. Cool right? The same concept applies to stats.
Note: switching heroes does not affect already built defenses. If you build a blockade as knight who has the stats and armor that increases defense health, switching to another hero will not reduce the health of structures built as knight.
While correct about the health, the dps/damage will drop off when you change from the builder due the build using hero stats and armour stats. It will revert to the base hero stats without armour. there for losing turret dps/damage.
Misc.
- Upgrading Defenses also repairs them fully. Use this to your advantage by waiting to upgrade until defense is damaged to save on gems.
- All heroes in hero deck receive the same XP as the active hero.
- You can easily repair/upgrade auras by aiming for their icon and not their "physical core", the icon appears above the "core" of the aura, and the each different aura will have their icon at a different height, making it easy to target them in a stack.
- Probably a bug, but using monk's active ability (drops a buff aura) before your previous one is finished on the same towers, will make the 2nd aura not provide any buffs, so make sure the previous one is completed.
- If you open menu during game (with "esc") you can see on the top of the screen the players in your map (sometimes a bug doesn't display the host but the host can see u), you can check their profile through there.
- On the same menu (with esc key) you can also see "build sugestions" that will link you to a tool where people can check and post their build ideas.
- If the hero that builds the defenses is being used during the wave, his towers do deal more damage.
- Atm increasing the weapon's damage or range damage is by far the best way to increase dps, investing in hero damage doesn't give you that much.
- Combining the above you can probably see that simply having a hero with a decent weapon upgraded for damage will have both your towers dealing more damage and your hero wont lose that much DPS.
- Armour do have "types", such as pristine, leather, plate, mail, chain (might have missed some), equiping a full set of these (not sure if partial sets also work) provides a bonus to stats, I remember in DD1 being 25%, don't have a number for sure.
