Best tanking and damaging Armor

Looking over a couple days farming of items, I've been trying to figure out the new Items lottery design.

So far, these are my two favorite prefix/suffixs at this point for Plate:

For Damaging Troops, (ie glass dps cannons.):

"Martyr / of Ultimate Speed"

• This Prefix scales up to 90% damage with a higher level item

The negatives are the following:

• Bad DR - its glass
• Morale - who cares
• Light HP penalty. who cares, it's glass
• Decent Movement bonus
• Light ATR penatly. Not a problem if the weapon makes up for it.

For Tanking style Melee Troops:

"Raider's / of Lion's Pride"

• This item has 3 good stats + stamina
• I really like HP bonus on tanks. I've seen 11,000 hp tank units, and that really helps.
• Speed is important for melee troops, more time on target.
  

Quest: Mithril Mines, Melee Troop Leveling and Strategies

So since I've been back, I've been running lots of leveling quests.

One quest I did alot back in the day was Mithril Mines. Back in 2008 I did this quest differently. I would kill all the archers, then bug out all the mobs by sticking one of my units in a spot that would cause a pathing bug for all the mobs. This would get them all grouped up, then I would Fireball them down. As the fireball had a 1 minute refresh time, (unlike now, where you use it and its gone), I could rotate two sets of Fireballs to kill the mobs with no danger.

I wroteup the quest back in 2008 if you want to see even more info on it: http://sagathoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/who-loves-mithril-mines-everyone.html

So today's post is to talk about the differences, and why this quest is still excellent for leveling.

1. First of all this is not the experience farm the "Blasted Lands" quest is. Blasted is much better for leveling your Army from 27-35.
2. The problem with Blasted Lands, is it doesn't do a good job of leveling all your troops to troop level 10. It is best to run with Human Archers, or any troop that kills Drake easily.
3. If you need to level non-ranged troops, Mithril is better.
4. Blasted Lands runs faster, Mithril has a pause in the middle between waves, so if you are loot farming, Blasted is better

Strategies for Mithril Mines:

1. First of all, make sure you farm Blasted Lands first to get a good set of items for your troops in Mithril Mines. I personally like DR, hitpoints, movement for my melee that I level in Mithril Mines. This seems to make them survive long enough to get good experience.
2. I like to run mostly Melee troops in Mithril. Then, I stick them in Ranged Defense formation, and don't change that the entire fight. (Ranged of course increases their defense vs ranged attackers and gives a speed bonus, but penalizes them vs melee mobs.)
3. I hand select the target, and make all my units focus fire. Many of the mobs in Mithril have need 8000 hitpoints, so if you let your 400dps units attack them individually, it will take 20 secs to kill each unit, and you will get swamped.
4. The kill order is Melee troops, then ranged. Because you are running around in ranged Defense, the ranged archers shooting you are not doing very good damage. Kill those melee troops, they can hurt you the most. Fire your use abilities anytime you get to a pack of melee to quickly own them.

Overall this troop experience isn't great, but you end up leveling 6 troops at once. This is useful for getting your army to 10. In my last army, I ended up with alot of certain troops at 10, and alot at 5. I would rather take longer, and have a better balanced army at the end.