This is a battledome guide for absolute newbies. In this guide I have included advice on training methods, abilities and equipment in the battledome.
Training
This is an obviously important aspect of being a good battledomer.
There are 5 statistics that you can improve for your pet. These are strength, defence, agility, endurance and level.
First of all, one thing that should be made clear: Agility does NOTHING whatsoever in the battledome. Increasing your pet’s agility is a waste of time and neopoints. Some people like to train it anyway to have nice rounded stats but I personally don’t bother.
Strength is a measure of how much damage your pet does in the battledome.
Defense is how much your resist taking damage.
Endurance is a measure of how much damage your pet can take before it conks out. When your endurance or HP (hit points) falls to 0 you have lost the fight. Since no statistic can go over twice your level, you also have to increase your pet’s level too. Also, higher level pets have access to more abilities.
There are many ways to increase these statistics. For newbies I would recommend using the academy or the training school. You pay in dubloons at the academy and codestones at the training school. For low level pets, this can be done at a reasonable price. High level pets however, have to pay a higher price.
Doing kitchen quests is a less reliable method of gaining statistics. This is because the prizes for completing them vary as does the cost of doing the quest. I would stick to the codestone or dubloon training.
So which stat should you train in first? It’s completely up to you! Some people go for brute force while others prefer pets who can stand up to a lot of damage. Others like to be all-rounders.
Abilities
There are 3 types of abilities: normal abilities, faerie abilities and species abilities.
Surprisingly enough, species abilities vary from species to species. Your pet will learn a new one when the grow to a certain levels. In general the later ones are better but since my pet is only level 22, I’m no expert.
Normal abilities are the same for every pet. You start with defend, cautious attack, normal attack, jump attack and fierce attack. These are also known as combat stances. Defend increases your pet’s defense by 20% in the round it is used, but also decreases the amount of damage it does by 20%.
Cautious attack has no known effect, while normal attack increases your attack by 20% but decreases your defence by 20%.
Jumping attack does the same thing for 30% and fierce attack for 40%.
At level 50 your pet can also use he berserk stance which increases attack by 50% but has the tiny drawback of decreasing your defence by 50% too.
Faerie abilities are a different thing entirely. To get these, you have to have a bottled faerie and then have it bless your pet, before it flies away. There are six types; water, fire, earth, light, dark and air. Your pet does have to be of a high enough level to learn the ability however. There is a list of every ability on this site and on Neopets. Unfortunately a lot of faerie abilities are almost useless. The ones I would recommend are heal, bless, burrow and later drain life.
Equipment
Equipment is an important factor in any battle. Without equipment you won’t do any damage in the battledome! There are hundreds of items that can be used in the battledome. It is important to remember that very expensive items aren’t necessarily better than the cheaper ones. My recommendations for newbies with a limited budget are:
- Improved Lightning Beam: Gives you reasonable bang for the buck.
- Mud Mixture: Can be obtained by doing Illusen’s quests. If you can’t be bothered, just buy one on the Shop Wizard. Very cheap. It does decent damage and also heals your pet a little. Note that it can only be used once per battle.
- Caustic Potion: The equivalent to the mud mixture for Jhudora’s quests. Has similar effects and is similarly cheap.
- Green Frost Cannon: Another decent choice for newbies. It’s definitely affordable. Although it does less damage than the Improved Lightning Beam, it has a 15% chance of freezing the opponent when it is used, which stops them doing anything on the next turn.
That concludes my guide on battling for newbies. Hope you enjoyed it! – Patrick Gower