Turf Wars Boss Challenge guide

Hello Dragon Ladies and Lords! The Turf Wars Boss Challenge event has started today. In this article, I will provide you with some general tips that hopefully will help you reach possibly high prize and a guide through estimating how far you can get in the event without changing your daily routine or spending gems. Tomorrow I will also review all the rewards, so that knowing what you can get and how much work you need you can already decide if you want to put your effort in this event. So, let's start!

Event rules

The rules are very simple. To finish a round, you have to win 15 fights, 4 of them are boss fights. After you finish one round, another starts, up to 5th. At the very beginning, you can bring any of your dragons to a fight and as you progress the event, the battles become element-restricted. Element restrictions are random, which means you can't efficiently plan in advance what dragons you should feed. Element restrictions stay the same for battles between bosses and refreshes each time when you defeat a boss. As you progress the event, the restrictions become tougher, according to the official announcement: "The hardest battles allow for only 3 Elements: Divine and 2 other random ones.". Although it hasn't been said clearly, it seems that the Divine element is fixed for all the battles in the event, thus, a divine dragon can enter any of the battles, regardless to other elements. After winning (or loosing) a battle you have to wait 2 hours before you can start another one. You can also manually refresh the element restrictions, to get another random set of elements, but it will cause you have to wait another 2 hours before starting a fight. You can speed up timers for gems. 

As far as I remember from the boss challenges during Divine New Year, there is no cooldown between defeating the last boss of a lap and the first fight, which means that every lap contains 14 cooldowns, 2 hours each. (Please note that I'm not sure about it, and this number can actually be 15, we will be sure once someone finishes first lap).

After you defeat the last boss in the lap, you'll have to wait another 2 hours before the first fight of the next lap. This means 15 cooldowns, 2 hours each in every lap, expect for the very first lap, which only has 14 cooldowns.

The event will last for a full week, so it will end at 15:00 GMT next Monday. You can only fight the battles of Boss Challenge this week and any progress will be lost after the event ends (for example, if you will be just one battle away from getting Turf in the moment event ends - it will be no different from not participating the event at all in terms of getting Turf. Of course, you will keep all already earned rewards, but you will not be granted any chance of making the missing fight up after the event ends and you will not get Turf from this event, no matter how hard you try).

General tips

Here I'll list general ideas that hopefully will help you to take maximum gain from the event possible by your means. I'd suggest following them in the same order as listed

1. Try to estimate, how far you can go without gemming, missing sleep, failing to fulfill some of your obligations etc. If you don't know how to do this, see the section below. 
2. Decide how far you want to go in the event. It may actually be further than what you estimated in point 1. - in this case, you will need to spend some gems. It may also be a lower number of laps, if you decide that the prize isn't worth an effort for you. 
3. If you feel putting a lot of effort in the event, start preparing your dragons for heavily element-restricted battles (see the section "Teaching dragons" below).
4. Ask your clan leader if they could put the Striker or the Gravelis as a clan dragon for this week.
5. Save your food. Many players usually feed their battle dragons whenever they earn enough food for the next level, but during the event, it may be better idea to wait a couple of hours or even days before spending the food. The level of opponent dragons is adjusted to your dragons' levels, but I'm not sure when and how often is it determined. But for sure, once you can see the opponents in a particular battle, their levels will not change. So it is possible, that if you waited to feed one of your dragons to an hour before you will use it for battle, you will face lower level opponents with the same level team, than they would be, if you had fed that dragon sooner. The best idea is to feed the dragons before battles that seem doable, but hard.
6. Save your enchantment materials - just like food.
7. Whenever you aren't 100% that you will win the battle easily, train a dragon before entering it. 
8. If you can set up a timer for 2 hours after a battle, do it (i. e. when you are home, reading a book, learning or working on a project) - there are no notifications about finished cooldown between battles, so setting up a timer will help you not to loose some precious minutes by forgetting to log-in the right moment, it will also help you not to check the game too often, which would reduce your productivity on what you were doing between fights.
9. When you have time, be simply active. Gathering and replanting the food, fighting to earn food and enchantment materials will help you in small last-minute improvements to your dragons' battle performance.
10. When you see that one of your battle dragons isn't able to participate in next few battles, that you can win without him - it is a good moment to send him to academy.
11. Even if you know that you will spend gems on this even, don't do it known. There were some rumors about a gem spending event that would occur this week simultaneously with announced gold gathering event. And even if there is no gem spending event this week, the cooldown between the battles is the same for every lap, so speeding up earlier will not be better for you by any mean, and may result in spending actually more gems than needed if you underestimated your possibilities. The only exception is when spending little number of gems will buy you full 2 hours cooldown (for example, if you have 5 minutes left to the next fight, but your break in work and in 3 minutes, if you pay 1 gem to speed it up, and next 2 hours of your work will count toward refreshing a battle, so you may think of it like about buying those 2 hours for 1 gem)
12. If you are experiencing a problem of being unable to start a fight, refresh the fight, but don't speed it up with gems. According to Gameloft, this problem should have already been solved, but if you are still having it, don't spend any gems till you'll be sure everything is OK. Make some screenshots, so that if the issue turns out serious, you'll have a proof for the costumer care that you deserve a compensation. Some people reported that tapping "participate" in the Crowded Nursery event solved the issue. I don't know if it was a real reason of this bug, or just a coincidence, but it's worth a try.
13. Stay tuned! Some information about this event aren't publicly known yet (like i. e. number of gems that you can possibly get), and when we learn them or Gameloft reveals them, you may want to change your strategy a bit. The sooner you learn, the better for you. You can go to official DML Forum, Facebook fanpage, or simply keep reading my blog. I will make a note whenever I learn anything useful. To make sure you won't miss anything, you can subscribe via e-mail, to get notifications about my new posts, or like Vicia Nocturna DML blog Facebook fanpage. 

Estimating how far you can go

First, check how much time is left till the end of the event. Calculate how many hours it is (i. e. if you are reading this post when there are 5 days 12 hours till the end of the event, it's 5*24 + 12 = 132 hours).

Second, estimate, how much time will you loose during the event. For example, if you are going to sleep for the 8 hours and you know that battle will refresh in 2 hours, it means that 8 - 2 = 6 hours of your sleep is "lost time", when you could have started a battle, but you didn't. If you are going to have a break after 4 hours of work, 2 hours of your work is "lost time" in the terms of this event. Think about all the things that may make you unable to play for more than 2 hours, and sum it up.

Now, subtract your predicted "lost time" from the actual time left in the event. For example, if you calculated that there are 132 hours till the end of the Boss Challenge, and predicted that 54 hours will be "lost time", you get 132 - 54 = 78 hours of "effective time".

Divide the "effective time" in hours by 2, so that you get the number of battles you can fight during this time. In my example it would be 78 hours ÷ 2 hours/battle cooldown = 39 battle cooldowns. Now, knowing how many battles are left in your current lap and that each next lap means 14  15 cooldowns, you will calculate easily how far you could get.

Keep in mind, that this is upper bound: it is very hard to take into consideration everything that should be considered as "lost time", so you will probably underestimate it. It is also likely that you will need to use some of the cooldowns to refresh unlucky element restrictions. 

Teaching your dragons

When you get to very element-restricted battles, you will probably not be able to bring 3 dragons from your battle team to a fight. In this case, it's generally better idea to take a low-level sacrifice dragon than to have an empty space - enemy dragon will probably loose a turn to defeat this dragon, because the A. I. that controls them isn't really great. In most cases, usefulness of a sacrifice dragon in that battle starts and ends on taking that hit, but if you teach this dragon some specific skills to the level 6, it can help a bit more. Those skills are:

 Great Blessing: a divine element skill cast on ally to increase his attack by 60% and his health points by 80% of their original value for 3 turns. So, a level 10 divine dragon can possibly make a level 60 battle dragon have 80% health points for 3 turns! Isn't it amazing? Obviously, that divine needs not to get defeated before his turn, but with some luck, defensive skill, or enemy casting a defensive skill it is possible. Even non-mastered divine skill would be useful in this situation, but Great Blessing is much better not only because it has so high % health increase, it also lasts one turn longer. I recommend it over Mass Blessing, that only last 1 turn, but affects all allies - in a battle where at least one of your dragon is just a sacrifice dragon, Mass Blessing is a waste. To train your dragon Great Blessing, you'll need to spend 12.63M gold and 157 scrolls.

 Frightened Speechless: a shadow element skill, that gives you 50% chances to make hit enemy unable to use any active skill. You need your dragon with shadow element to stay undefeated until his turn and some luck to have it work, but if you are lucky, it may prevent the enemy dragon for example from applying Infection or Storms'-a-Brevin on your strongest dragon. Training your dragon this skill costs in total 11.05M gold and 64 scrolls.  

 Dazzling Aura: a light element passive skill, that gives your dragon about 15% chance to dazzle an opponent who attacked them. If opposing dragon gets dazzled, it will loose a turn, which can be a really great help in a hard battle. It is dependent on luck, but still it's better to have a chance to get that turn than not to have this chance. Teaching unskilled dragon to this mastery costs in total 11.05M gold and 64 scrolls.

 Burnout: an energy element skill that removes any positive effect from the attacked dragon. I find it very useful in this kind of battles: if enemy is using a defensive skill like a shield or metal sword, it will not attack your sacrifice dragon with energy element, so it will stay in battle and be able to use this skill to cancel the positive effect. In result, enemy dragon will only loose a turn. The other energy skill mastery, Power of Thunder gives you 25% chances to stun the attacked target for 1 turn, which also would be helpful, but Burnout seems a better choice, as it's not so dependent on your luck. Teaching this skill costs in total 7.97M gold and 51 scrolls

 Restorative Resource: a water element skill cast on ally, that removes any negative effects (like damage over time, stun, dazzle, death mark). I think I don't have to explain why is it great to have, even if the healing that comes with it is marginal for much higher level dragon? Training this skill costs in total 5.15M gold and 48 scrolls 

 Stone Cold: an earth element skill cast on ally that makes the target stay the battle for one more turn after it's defeated. So, for example, if your dragon casts this skill at itself, no matter how much damage it takes later, it will stay battle for one more turn and leave after attacking/using skill. Except for a very special cases, sacrifice dragon casting Stone Cold on the strongest dragon is a bad idea: you want your strongest battle not to get defeated so quickly. It's better idea to cast it at itself, because the A. I. doesn't understand that there is no point attacking already defeated dragon with Stone Cold and would often loose a turn for such a pointless attack. Training this mastery to unskilled dragon costs 5.15M gold and 48 scrolls in total.

So, training a sacrifice dragon a skill is quite expensive. It definitely isn't strategy for anyone, only for a determined player. But I still think it's worth a try if you have much spare gold and scrolls or if you want the Turf Dragon really, really much but don't have a great, balanced battle team yet. Keep in mind that once trained, that dragon may help you in any other element-restricted battles, for example in future castle event or boss challenges.

Which skill and which dragon to train? Well, the choice is pretty hard. In my opinion, water and energy skills are really useful and still rather cheap, so they would usually be a good idea. Other skills are also good idea if you can afford them. As the training at academy takes quite a long, so you can pick up just a few skills, and you have to choose actually before you know what element restriction will be your problem. So, you need to choose the dragon very wisely. As the divine element seem to be fixed in all battles, a divine dragon with one of above elements as a secondary element (so that you don't have to spend 99 gems and wait 2 days) seems a very good choice. If you don't have any divine dragon, you should pick a dragon with two elements that you miss in your team (so that you can bring him to many harder battles), and one element from the list above.  

I will be posting any news or further tips, as well as prizes review as soon as possible, so stay tuned!  If you have any problems with this event (like you don't know which dragon to train some skills), contact me via contact for and I'll do my best to help:) Have a wonderful day at your Dragonlandia and a good luck in the event!

PS. If there are any language mistakes in this text, I am very sorry for them. English isn't my native language and I usually have my texts checked by the Silent Grey Eminence, but he's asleep now ;) And I want to publish this guide as soon as possible, for many players may need it now, especially those who'd like to train some of their dragons some skills, as it takes 12 hours just for the latest level. The post will be corrected soon, I promise.