F2P friendly: Water & Fire & Hybrid

I get a lot of players sending me requests for march setups, lately I have been getting a lot of interest in running a F2P version of the earth-wind hybrid as a second or third team. Furthermore, many people seem to be running water mains where they have spent a little to get Attila and Merlin then pure free to play from there on. Other prefer fire or lightning marches but many players are writing saying they have water main since the beginning of the game, but don’t know what to do with it to make it fit with a second and third march build.

For the purpose of this guide I shall use a real player from the community. This player reached out and asked me to setup a complete three-march-setup that fits with what he has going for him at the moment. If you are a F2P or low-spender and is looking for inspiration for how to setup your marches, this guide may just be for you!

Togeather with the community I ended up with this three-march-setup to recommend for our requesting-player: (1) Water main (2) Fire secondary and (3) Earth/Wind Hybrid third.

In addition to these builds and collective setup, I will include a link to future work on how these builds can improve and develop if you choose to spend to unlock new Immortals.

Message to the trolls: Yes this is considered F2P builds. Yes, this is technically not true since u pay a couple bucks unlocking the third builder to get Merlin. No I do not care that i’m technically incorrect, I consider the third builder “the price of installing the IK app” and No that does not make anything P2W… Aight… With that out of the way, let’s dive in and actually enjoy some content!

Current player setups

First up, we have got four different elements going here but only want three marches fit for combat. We are going to be leaving out Lightning, simply because we do not have any solid replacements for Peter. Peter is spearman tech as our only Immortal, this is terrible simply because we want to eliminate one troop tier to make a more slim technology progression path.

While the best options would be to replace Peter with William or Hippo, we would also have multiple magic passives in reserve since we do not have access to a Hammurabi. If you have Hammurabi yourself and a high level lightning dragon, you can go Hammu-YSG-William-Richard. But since that is not the case for our player here, it is easy to eliminate lightning from our combat roster.

The second thing we need to do is figure out what we want to focus on. You always want to focus on a main, then a second then a third. Doing all three marches at the same time (upgrading dragons and ToK passives equally) is a huge disadvantage. Since this player is invested in water dragon having it at max level progressing through the dragon talents, we are going to stay the course and keep water for main. For the second and third team, we are actually for once going to be not focusing on them as either or. Instead we will be setting up builds that fit each other so well that there is no overlap between the skills you want to run and as such can consider either one of them your second. Complete player preference.

My recommendation for all three builds

We got some pretty scattered passive combinations going on however a decent setup for water as is. What I am going to do is move around a bit making small ajustments to the water team to fit in the current meta. Moreover, we are going to make a clear goal for how our second and third are going to look once we finish building it out. This sets up a nice goal for our player to work towards, and once achieved is an excellent position to further improve on with the later game P2P immortals, if he so chooses. Either way, a solid position for a basic setup with a good division of tok skills which means you can easily change it to fit your current server meta and also means that you are not running multiple setups that all need the same passives to work.

I will show the builds visually from an IB-league formation. So disregard the power and lack of artifact. The images are only to visually show you the Tower of Knowledge builds. Beware that Gilga = Arash!

We are turning the water into a standard control-centric setup with Merlin as our core dps. As for the fire, we are building full offense and maxing its burst crit potention, with a bit of luck you can take down a huge chunck of HP on even marches with much higher power with an offensive fire. Lastly our hybrid will be a standard wind-earth hyrbrid with a few modifications since we are not running it as a main. Basically this hybrid is able to get massive value out of a lot of tok skills which are terrible anywhere else. Running it in this way means that we are using top tower of knowledge skills on all three marches instead of having a third with nothing going on (as is often the case)

— WATER —
Merlin: Concentration + Annihilation + Death Breath
Yoshi: Assist + Malice + Absolute Defense
Herald: Missleading + Energy Suppression + Oaken Guard
Attila: Adrenaline rush + Fighting Will + Fighting Master

— FIRE w. GILGA —
Gilga: Anger + Chaotic Blade + Onslaught
Wu: Chase + Toxic Nova + Rage (if you have enough crit to consistently proc chase, you can go double nova over rage)
Hippo: Energy Burst + Sacrifice + Garrote
William: Weakness + Blessing of Rage + Resist

— EARTH-WIND HYBRID —
Zeno: Berserk + Blessing of Speed + Life-link/After Image (depends on phys. enemy vs backline nuke mages)
Qin: Coercion + Blessing of War + Blessing of Defense
Hannibal Barca: Cleave + Shelter + Heavenly Thunder
Alexander: Duel Master + Combo + Absorb

While I have not played these myself, the respons I have gotten back from the Player who sent in the request are overwhelmingly positive. The setups seem to work very very well for him. Versus other waters and fires he prefers Life Link on Zeno and is running with double nova on Wu for the best result.

Further development and build progression

Like I said in the beginning of this guide, this is tailored for one particular player and then made into a generalized guide for others to seek inspiration from. Your Immortals roster, willingness to spend, server PvP meta may be a lot different from this player’s and as such you should as always make careful decisions that fit your situation. Use the above as inspiration!

In addition to the three-setup-builds we have gone other in this guide, I have made some progression pathways as part of a broader series on low-spender-three-march-setups: Read more here.

Fitting with this particular three-march-setup with Water main, Fire and Hybrid second/third, you may want to consider a progression path that develops and evolve into: Water w. Bath/Himiko + Fire w Gilga/Seon + Hybrid.

Published: 17-02-2023