[Player Guide] Dragons Guide (Updated 5/20)

 The battles are not just decided by the troops and commanders. These days, in most epic fights, the game-changing factor is the dragons. In this guide, I’ll review everything that one must know about the dragons. 

Growing a Darkfyre

To have a dragon, one must find a dragon egg and infuse dragon essences to help them hatch. You will get Red Dragon’s egg when you start playing the game for free. You can hatch the egg by infusing 5 Fiery Essences (Red essences) into it. You get those essences for free too, you just need to continue the story quests! 

Just like the commanders, Dragons can get upgraded to level 60 too! To level up a dragon you need to give them two different consumable items. One is the food that will increase their experience and level, the other is the essence which will increase the dragon’s maturity (from egg to whelp, to drake, to young, to adult, to Elder, to Ancient).

You can’t level up a dragon higher than certain levels unless you increase their maturity first. Here is a table for all maturity levels and the number of Red essences you need to upgrade the Red dragon:

You can get the food that is required to increase dragon levels by sending dragons to explore, or you can buy them from VIP shop or game packs. You can get Red essences by doing rebel camps. You can turn 5 “Mark of the True Dragon” To 1 Red essence in the Merchant shop after it's unlocked as well! You get 5 “Mark of the True Dragon” and some food when you do 170 points daily activity (From Active rewards). You can also get “Mark of the True Dragon” or "Red essences" from the game packs for black diamonds or by doing some of the Benefits Page quests or by participating in Dragon Lair rallies (will get to them later!).

 Also need to mention that if you send your Red dragon to explore, he might find some extra red essences for you!

Growing a ShadowMoon

To have a purple dragon egg, one must buy it for 200 “Mark of the True Dragon” from the Merchant shop. You can’t do this if your Red dragon is not yet level 50. 

This dragon can also level up to level 60 and has different maturity levels. You can see the cost for each level in the table below:

The Purple essences can be purchased from the Merchant shop for 10 “Mark of the True Dragon”. You can also obtain them directly by sending your purple dragon to adventures sometimes or by doing Dragon Lair rallies. “Mark of the True Dragon” and Purple essences are both available in the game packs as well. Dragon Forge daily/ weekly packs on the benefits page is a great way to get extra “Mark of the True Dragon”. There is also a recurring event that allows you to recycle your extra Red essences to Purple essences or “Mark of the True Dragon”! "Treasure Seeker" event is also a great event to obtain purple essences as the level 5 mines drop a lot of purple essences.

Growing a Sapphire

Sapphire the third dragon, is the strongest of the three. You can only obtain Sapphire essences from special game packs that are available on champion city siege week.

Sapphire can have 8 passive skills instead of 6 like the other two dragons and has 5 unique and powerful active abilities. We will discuss the passive and active skills later in this guide. Sapphire requires a lot of food to grow up but has a skill that will allow this dragon to grow by killing enemy troops instead of consuming food like the other dragons.

Dragon Hunt

The main method to earn “True Marks of the dragon”, is to rally Dragon Lairs which is pretty similar to rallying Rebel camps with one major difference. Dragon Lairs don’t exist normally on the map and to spawn them, you must consume an item called “Dragon Bait”. “Dragon Baits” themselves are obtainable only in a monthly – 2 days long event called “Dragon Hunt”. During this event, attacking rebel groups on the map has a chance to drop “Dragon Baits”.

Pay attention to the following chart about the level of the dragon bait you can obtain by attacking different levels of rebel groups:

A level X Bait will spawn a Level X Dragon lair. After spawning, these Dragon lairs must be rallied and killed in the next hour or they will disappear. The higher level Dragon Lairs are harder to rally but gives a chance to all participants to draw extra “True Marks of the dragon”. As you can see in the above picture as well, these rallies might also give some of the participant’s purple essences and the “Horn of Awakening” (I explain its use later in this guide). Joining/starting a dragon rally consumes 300 endurances so it’s important to do it efficiently.

Few things to have in mind about Dragon rallies:

- It’s better to know your strength based on your rally leader's power. I mean, if you can’t kill level 5 lairs with low casualty it's better if your allies work on gathering level 4 baits. The rewards of lower-tier lairs are not that lower than the rewards of higher tiers.

- Try to summon the lairs when your allies are online. It might be beneficial for your alliance to have some routine for killing the lairs so your allies know when it will happen. That way more people can join them.

- Having more people in the rally will not reduce the prize you get. Try to run rallies that have 30/30 members. This way more people will earn the prize for the endurance which is used.

- Try to not summon lairs when the “Dragon Hunt” event is on. That way players can use their endurance to hit rebel groups to get more baits which can be used on other days to do dragon rallies.

So far I talked about how to grow a dragon. From this part of the guide forward, I’ll be talking about the benefits you receive from a grown-up dragon!

Dragons in War

You can deploy two dragons on your wall, so they defend your castle from attacking enemies. If you have all three dragons you can ask the game to replace your third dragon as a backup if one of your other two dragons were away from the city. You can also deploy dragons when you’re attacking others. Unlike commanders, you can deploy dragons when you’re joining a rally.

The first way your dragon contributes in a battle is by attacking the enemy directly during the war. This is just like the Active ability of all commanders on the battlefield:

Unlike commanders, the amount of damage dragons deal in battle is not based on your army power. It’s based on the dragon’s stats. In this table you can see the dragon’s stats when they are maxed and level 60:

Strength determines the dragon attack damage. Dragon defense determines, how much your dragon can reduce the attack damage of the enemy dragon. Agility determines how fast your dragon will engage in the war. The dragons with higher agility will fight more regularly on the battlefield.

The dragon attack ignores enemy troops' “defense” and only enemy dragon defense can reduce your dragon damage. Dragon always attacks all the enemies on the same row and will attack the front row first.

Passive Skills

The second-way dragons can contribute in battle, is by their passive Skills. On the “Skills” tab on the dragon page, you can see 6 slots to add a passive skill which each unlocks with the next maturity level of the dragon. An ancient dragon can have up to 6 Passive skills. An ancient Sapphire can have up to 8 Passive skills.

These skills have different qualities (from Common-Grey to Ancient-Red). The main way to obtain these skills is by using the “Skill raffle” page on your dragon page. You get 5 free normal raffles and 1 free advanced raffle every day.

Normal Raffles can be done using a “Normal Skill Raffle Token” which you can also buy 5 of every day with 250k gold from the “Raffle Shop”. After a Normal raffle, you can get a Common, Uncommon, or Rare skill.

Advanced Raffles can be done using an “Advanced Skill Raffle Token”. You can buy 5 advanced tokens from the VIP shop with 250 diamond costs. You can also buy 30 tokens every day by paying 500 diamonds for each from the “Raffle Shop”. Advanced raffles have the chance to drop a common to an ancient skill. Pay attention that only the ancient skill that is highlighted might drop.

The drop rate of ancient skills is very low but by doing an advanced raffle you have the chance to drop an “Ancient Skill Fragment”. When you have 300 fragments for the ancient skill you seek, you can trade those fragments in Raffle Shop and obtain the actual skill. The available skills which are available in Skill Raffle are legendary troops' health and defense skills. Only ancient bowmen attack skill is available in the Skill Raffle.

Some of the ancient skills are not available in the “Skill Raffle”. Instead, you must obtain their fragments in an event called “Battle of the Long Night”. In that event you can do “Winter Raffle” by spending a special key which you can get by diamonds or doing some specific tasks or by spending black diamonds, to have a chance in obtaining the special Skill fragments. When you have enough of those you can trade them in that event shop for the “Infantry/Spearmen/Cavalry Attack”, “Total Attack”, “Total Defense”, “Total Health”, “Legion Survival”, “Legion Building”, “Legion Champion”, "Army Reroute" and "Total Counter" Ancient dragon skills.

Some of these Ancient passive skills give powerful special effects to your dragons. These effects are such as:

• Reserve Forces: To temporarily gain additional troops for your own army when entering combat that will fight before your own troops.
• Rally size increase
• Mother Mercy: When this skill is equipped on your dragon there is a chance that all your wounded troops will be instantly healed after battle
• Reduce your own Casualty rate / Increase enemy casualty rate: By default defenders will have all their damaged troops hospitalized if they have enough hospital space and attackers will have 60% of their troops hospitalized if there is enough hospital space. By increasing the casualty rate the amount of troops that can get hospitalized reduces and more troops will die.
• Reroute: This special skill will remove a percent of enemy troops from the battlefield before the battle takes place. This skill will remove the strongest enemy troops (the highest tier) in a balanced manner. Reroute can affect both defense and attack. The rerouted troops can't participate in battle anymore and this skill has no effect on the capture of the enemy lord.
• Total Counter: By default, your infantry deals more damage to enemy spearmen, your spearmen deals more damage to enemy Cavalry, and your cavalry deals more damage to enemy Infantry. This effect is called countering. This special skill can increase this damage. (For more information about formations and countering check this guide)
• Follow Up: After commanders using their active skills, the dragon will have a chance to perform a follow-up attack which will deliver a coefficient of the commander damage

Each skill can be leveled up by consuming other skills. When you consume a skill, all of its progress will also be transferred as well. In other words, if you consume Skill A on Skill B to level up Skill B then you consume Skill B on Skill C to level up Skill C, That’s just like consuming Skill A and B directly on Skill C. This way, you can focus on growing the skills you want and consume them on other skills you get in future without being worried about losing your progress.

Each Battle Skill has 2 main outcomes, that their effect increases as you level up the skill. The basic outcome is for when you solo attack the enemy. You can see their effect when you check the battle log at the end of the buffs report:

The second outcome is called “Rally Assembly” and is for when your dragon participates in a rally as a rally filler or as the rally initiator. When a rally happens, based on the best skills of each type that are with the dragons, other players can assemble their dragon skills to get buffs. You can see the effect of a “Dragon Assembly” on the “More Details” page of a rally report.

These effects only unlock for ancient skills or legendary skills when they are at least level 5 so it’s important to level up those skills to level 5 at least as soon as possible. 

For example, in the above picture, if there are no Ancient “Spearman Health” skills in the rally, a legendary version will start to Assemble. A level 7 skill can contribute 16.6% to this assembly. Maximum Assembly will also be 90%. With all that's said, it makes sense if your allies work on different skills to master so you can have different maximized assemblies at the same time in your alliance.

Dragon Assembly can also happen when the dragons are sent as reinforcement to a castle so it’s always a good idea to send them to your allies even if you’re not sending too many troops. It’s very important for competitive alliances to not fill the rallies and reinforcements so more people can send their dragons – so as a result, more dragon skill assembly can happen.

Most of these skills have a third outcome as well which for legendary skills only happen when they are at maximum level and for ancient skills since the start. For example, for Spearman Health Legendary Skill that I mentioned above, at level 9 it can start an assembly for enemy Spearman Health reduction:

In addition to battle skills, there are gathering skills that will increase the gathering speed and their second effect is to increase the number of resources your troops will bring back from a node. It’s just noteworthy that dragons must be sent with the gathering march for these skills to effect and because of this, the skills won't affect all your gathering marches at the same time.

Active Skills/Dragon Talent

Each dragon multiple active skills that are usable with a cool down. The red dragon talents are:

Which will reduce the time of construction and research by a set amount of time each time they are used. Because they have a 24-hour cool down it's good to use them daily whenever they recharge.

The purple dragon first skill is “Instant Collection”:

“Instant collection” will allow you to instantly finish some gathering nodes so as a result, you will get extra resources using it. This ability can be used to force someone’s troop to go back home if they are marching toward a gathering node to hide their army.

The second skill is called Dragon Bite and is the only skill that is not free to use. Each time using that skill will consume 10 “Horn of Awakening”. This item is available in the Merchant shop and you can also get them directly by doing dragon rallies.

This skill is also the only skill that is not usable directly on the dragon page. To use this skill, you have to click on an enemy castle on the map and use the dragon skills from that page. After a castle is under the dragon bite effect, it will have an icon showing it. It will also appear on the Sept page of the victim.

Sapphire has 5 active abilities that some will consume “Horn of Awakening” for each time use:

“Glory of Combats” adds a passive skill to your dragon since he is a Whelp to increase your total attack by 5 to 20% in battles your dragon participates in. Also because of this ability, Sapphire earns EXP for killing troops.

“Agile” the second ability has a passive and an active part. Both the passive and active add Marching speed, Army size and Rally size expansion, so by using the active ability you increase the effect of this ability.

“Devastate” the third ability is an active ability with 2 parts. After using this skill for a maximum of 3 battles that happen in the next 60 minutes, Sapphire will kill troops instead of wounding them on the battlefield. Also at a maximum level of 40% chance the dragon will freeze the enemy troops for 5 seconds during battle, stopping them from damaging your troops.

“Blockade” is also an active ability that is can be used on enemy castles like Dragon bite of Shadow moon. This ability will stop them from using random or precise transfers for the duration of 12 to 30 minutes. When maxed it will also freeze the nei***or castles with the same effect (you can freeze 9 castles with one ability use). Blockade won’t stop translocational scrolls or kingdom port in CCS (Note that you're using precise and random ports during KvK to change kingdom so blockade works in KvK)

And last ability “Flaming Breath” will increase Sapphire attack up to 100% and will reduce enemy attack up to 20% for 30 minutes after using this skill.

Thanks for reading and I hope that you found this guide useful. Burn your enemies and have fun!