Milestones and Costs upgrading dragon talents (a season 2 guide)
Season 2 is when dragons finally start to come alive. You unlock their Talent Trees, giving each dragon powerful upgrades that directly impact your marches. If you’re still in Season 1, this guide is worth bookmarking — because Season 2 progression can eat up crystals fast.
The short version? Start saving crystals now. You’ll need a lot of them once dragon talents open up.
This guide covers:
- Dragon node types and upgrade costs
- Key milestones to hit in Season 2
- Smart pathing choices depending on your build
- How to avoid wasting crystals on low-value nodes
Understanding Dragon Talent Trees
Each dragon’s talent tree is split into two sides, with unique nodes, minor nodes, and major nodes. You’ll have to work through the tree, unlocking and upgrading nodes as you go. Here’s what each one does and costs.
🔹 Minor Nodes
These are your bread and butter — small stat boosts like:
- Resilience
- Accuracy
- Physical Attack / Magical Attack
- Physical Defense / Magical Defense
Each minor node has 3 levels, giving +30 attribute points per level (so 90 total when maxed).
Costs per level:
- Level 1 → 150 crystals
- Level 2 → 300 crystals
- Level 3 → 450 crystals
That’s 900 crystals total to max one minor node.
🔸 Unique Nodes
Unique nodes are checkpoints in your tree — they’re the key to unlocking your dragon’s special abilities and next sections of the tree.
Each unique node costs:
- 30 Dragon Essences
- 3000 crystals
They’re expensive, but you can’t skip them if you want to progress or upgrade your dragon’s signature skills.
🔺 Major Nodes
These are the big hitters. Major nodes offer percentage-based boosts like:
- Claw → +% Damage Dealt
- Armor → -% Damage Taken
- Accuracy and Resilience (later in the tree)
Each major node has 5 levels, scaling like this:
- 600 → 1200 → 1800 → 2400 → 3000 crystals
- That’s 9000 crystals to max one major node.
Key Milestones and Crystal Costs
Here’s the practical roadmap most players follow when building their dragon in Season 2. We’ll break it down step-by-step so you can plan your crystal budget ahead of time.
🥇 Milestone 1: Unlocking Your First Major Node (Claw or Armor)
You’ll need to push through 7 minor nodes and 1 unique node before you can unlock your first major.
Cost:
- 7 × 150 = 1050
- 3000 (unique)
- 600 (Claw unlock)
= 4650 crystals total
You’ll repeat this on the opposite side to unlock Armor for another 4650, bringing you to 9300 crystals total to unlock both Claw and Armor.
💡 Tip: If you’re using a magic-heavy march (like Fire with Wu or Himiko), you can skip Accuracy nodes — they don’t help you at all.
🥈 Milestone 2: Upgrading Claw & Armor to Level 3
Once unlocked, getting both Claw and Armor to level 3 gives a strong early boost for relatively low cost:
- Each: 600 + 1200 + 1800 = 3600
- Both: 7200 total
- But since the first 600 was already spent unlocking, you’re actually only spending 6000 more to hit Level 3.
✅ Result: +2% damage and +2% damage reduction — a massive early jump in performance.
🥉 Milestone 3: Unlocking Your Dragon’s Primary Unique Talent (Level 5)
After you’ve got Claw and Armor to a solid level, it’s time to push deeper into your dragon’s tree toward its main unique ability.
The Straight Path (Rushing to Level 5)
- 8 minor nodes × 150 = 1,200
- 3 unique nodes × 3,000 = 9,000
➡️ 10,200 crystals total
The Smarter Path (With Maxed Core Minors)
Along the way, pick up the best minor for you (magical attack for example) and upgrade your best minor nodes to level 3.
For example, I max Magical Attack and Magical Defense minors on my Fire Dragon.
Each of the 4 key minors adds:
4 × (300 + 450) = 3,000 extra crystals
➡️ 13,200 crystals total, but way more value gained.
✅ Result:
- Level 5 main unique ability unlocked
- Core stat minors maxed out
🏅 Milestone 4 & 5: Your Path Splits Here
Now it depends on your dragon and your build:
- If both unique abilities are strong
→ Do the same process on the other side and unlock the second unique talent to level 5.
(Expect another 10,200 – 13,200 crystals) - If the second talent isn’t useful for your setup
→ Skip it and instead max your Claw and Armor nodes to level 5.
Cost to max Claw + Armor to 5:
(2400 + 3000) × 2 = 10,800 crystals total.
👉 Example:
For Fire Dragon, I skip Flaming Breath because it only reduces physical damage dealt by enemies, which is useless against mage teams. Instead, I max my Claw and Armor and invest in all magical attack and magical defense minors.
If you choose to do the unique first then finish armor and claw after, if you do armor and claw level 5 first, finish your unique after.
Upgrade minors that are best for you along the way, then finish the tree with the last majors as the completionist you are and begin banking crystals for later when the rest of the tree is unlocked and you do it all over again!
Published: 23-10-2025