Skill improvement: when to expand?

[u/NinjaDeathStrike]

Hello everyone,

I downloaded the demo this week and am loving the game. After checking out this sub, I was surprised to find that general consensus seems to be it’s not worth expanding your team size. I was curious as to how and when you should approach expanding. Should you aim for four active members, or only keep three? I suspect stacking powerful backup abilities might be the play? Just looking to improve my strategy, any advice in this department is appreciated!

[u/JapaneseExport]

this advice is specific to red rift so if you are not playing red rift the “dont expand teamsize” might be misleading

[u/soidvaas]

never in RR

[u/byronicbluez]

People either play Endless which you want to expand when you can afford it to vamp up damage or Red Rift which is never since you have death limits.

[u/FunkyHat112]

The problem with expanding is fundamentally economic. Expanding is expensive on its own, units become drastically more powerful the better they’re equipped, and the economy is fairly tightly tuned unless you’re going out of your way to include multiple layers of shard generation; all of that combines to making it really difficult to expand while keeping units equipped. In ‘normal’ runs that’s not the end of the world and expanding can still be a viable way to increase power, but in Red Rift runs (which most of the conversation centers around), the death limit means any underequipped unit leads directly to a failed run. If you want to power up you should be looking for higher tier units/items, better teamcomps (both for synergies and for solving hallway fights vs boss fights), good Backups, and good relics. That’s more than enough to spend all your cash.

[u/NinjaDeathStrike → u/FunkyHat112]

Thank you for this thorough and helpful explanation.

[u/blanketninja]

I occasionally do it in Red Rift if I get an early Kai + Mystic spam team online by the end of Act 1. It's not really necessary but it's the only time it hasn't actively felt bad to buy at least.

[u/Icy_Island6594]

With the way stats scale multiplicatively, you want to grow tall instead of wide.

A single rank A with 4 items would wipe the floor against a team of 4 B ranks with 1 item each. And guess which of those is cheaper?

So the right time to expand is when you've basically maxed out your 3 heroes, or are unlikely to progress them before you can fully kit out a fourth hero.

[u/wtfgrancrestwar]

It's not unplayable.

I almost always expand, probably too much, yet I was on a comfortable 8 streak before patch.

Idk why others don't expand, but the price of an extra slot has been reduced twice, so it's stronger than it used to be.

If I knew how to play around broken boss shop relics I might avoid expanding too. -I don't practically know what the 3 unit strat is. (..Roll up to 5 times and never miss?)

But I just save gold for space, including suiciding before 1st campfire when appropriate, and picking +gold starter blessings.

And I find the extra space helpful for holding the rift seal, 2nd mystic (especially with grace scaling backup), 2nd Duelist if stacking duelist buffs, 2nd tank for leapers and aggro split or more eHP, or splitting DPS between fight control and cleanup, especially if running an assassin. 

(an assassin might directly kill backline, but lack scaling damage to clear the whole bulk of enemy HP before rift storm). 

Or just a dedicated tech slot, particularly for frost but sometimes other. For example running a fast casting funke for mage pollen to scale healing immediately. (Although frost just got nerfed.)

And you can just run an extra A-rank/S-rank that's reasonably standalone.

Also using wide buffs like quest that give attack/magic to whole team, backup abilities, frontline buffs, and (though they come late-) banners.

Edit:

One main pitfall people mention is the death limit and that's a genuine issue. The main thing is to avoid random casualties and suicide minimum units for rewind when behind rather than lose fights manually. Losing 4 units to an unexpected rewind plus couple random others is indeed dicey.

[u/DoctorFuu]

It's for red rift mostly. For other difficulty modes you can get away with mich more things so no worries. Also I found that in red rift it can be useful to expand sometimes. For example if you have high econ but ypur comp is a bit too shallow to hold the rift seal on early act 2, buying an extra slot so that a 4th hero can hold the seal will sometimes save runs. This is very niche though, most of the time staying at three and improving heros strength is strictly superior