Mini-Guide for DE Farming - you want super heroes, don't you?

Out of Date

I don't post on the forum often because I am usually always farming like crazy lol So please pardon my lack of writing skills ;)

And I am posting this because it appears that there isn't much of a focus on DE farming on the forum (correct? because I don't check forum too often). So I just want to share my understanding and experience, that DE farming is more important than gold farming in TH9, actually :)

The key reason is because if you focus too much on gold farming, and neglect DE farming in TH9, you will end up with sleeping builders near the end of TH9 - I know a few high level farmers ended up like that and have been forced to upgrade to TH 10 without maxing heroes - in order to avoid wasting builder time.

And I believe in prioritizing heroes in upgrades for TH9 because:
- BK has 20 lvs to upgrade, and AQ 30 lvs in TH9, and you can only put 1 builder towards each hero at any given time, while the rest of the towers only have 1-3 levels of upgrades to do (if you maxed TH8)
- It takes about 6 months of builder time for AQ approximately (can't remember exactly the total time but should be roughly this much)
- It takes about 4.5 months of builder time for BK approximately (calculated right after last update came out)
- If you focus on gold farming, you might need 7-14 months of farming time to gather needed DE to max both heroes, but if you focus on DE you should be able to farm enough de to keep both heroes upgrading almost non-stop (fingers crossed, and I will post my DE farming journey in this thread if I may - I estimate about 4-5 months of DE farming before I can max my heroes)
- Each hero is like a CC： costs nothing to get, simply has a cool down period, and they are useful in both defense and offense

My Archer Queen is currently being upgraded to lv 14 and Burger King going to lv 15. I started DE farming a bit late and also when I got to TH9 I didn't realize how important DE farming is, so I hope other farmers will not make the same mistake I have made :( A clan mate of mine, Abrenan321, also focuses on DE farming heavily. He has developed some excellent strategies for DE farming in TH8-TH9. He just got to TH9 like 2 weeks ago, and his Archer Queen is already upgrading to lv 9 I learned a lot from his DE farming strategies to formulate my own, which I will talk about in upcoming posts. I will record some DE farming videos and share with everyone on the forum soon, including army composition and deployment strategies :) Here are a couple of screen shots to show some credibility for my post, if I may :)

Here is my army composition:

http://i.imgur.com/YNGmvPW.jpg

Example attack #1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKDe1LNZNs8

Some people ask why upgrade heroes for their regen time will increase a lot:

I think a lv 30 Archer Queen can 2-3 shot a maxed wizard tower. When my Archer Queen got to lv 10, I took her to a spin before upgrading her again, and she just refused to die! My builder was idle for 3 hours before she finally died in battle! She helped me got a lot of loot during those short hours because she stays in the back and just kills everything so fast. I notice that whenever I take a strong hero to battle, and don't use them as tanks, they deal great amount of damage and help me mop up the base much faster. And this will only get better as they get upgraded, and I usually have 30 minutes of troop cooking time between battles. So if they don't get hurt much they usually will return to fight every battle, especially the archer queen. Remember that the bigger your offense, the quicker you destroy the enemy's base, and the less damage the enemy will do on your army ;)

So in contrary of having a harder time with longer regen time, the stronger heroes really help farming (easy bases), and tag 2 lv 4 healers to the heroes and their regen time will be reduced.

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And here is my tactical guide, not 100% complete, but a good starting point I think ;)

- DE storage is usually always the most heavily defended storage tank, so you would need strong CC support. A bunch of archers will not work most of the time. Dragons & wizards are the best troops to help you punch through to the middle fast.

- Players holding a lot of DE usually have good defense and have successfully defended against lots of attacks to be able to save up the amount of DE I want to attack

- I have tried farming range from Gold 3 all the way up to Master League 1, and after a couple months of experimenting, I have to say 1700-1900 is probably the best range for DE farming (not too hard to get, and the amount is decent = maximum DE loot per hour).

- According to my attacks in the past few days, I average about 3600-4000 DE per hour. I have improved to this rate from 1500 de per hour in the past, after many tweaks and experiments. So now I just give you the good stuff, the strategy we have finessed :)

1. Army composition: 2 healers, 4 wizards, 15 giants, 7 wall breakers, 10 minions, and about 20 each for archer, goblins, barbs. Also a CC full of strong troops (wizards and/or dragons). Cook time = about 38 minutes, and I know it is overkill for easy bases, but most bases with good DE are not easy bases. Sometimes I hit TH 10 with inferno tower(s) with this army, and get the DE somewhat easily (sometimes I do fail). So yeah, avoid inferno towers until you are experienced with this farming strategy.

2. Staying in the 1700-1900 range, when searching, the DE amount I aim to get is at least 1400 per attack, sometimes if they have a lot of gold & elixir (say 400k+ combined) and only 1100-1300 DE I would go for it too.

3. Now, check for CC location. If the CC is in the center, then perfect. Most good farmers have the CC in the center, and most good farmers have nice amount of DE loot. So when the CC is in the center, the CC troops are hard to lure out, but it is good to turn this against them. Why? Because when CC troops come out, all of your troops nearby will rush toward them and attack the CC troops, so the enemy CC troops actually act as a vacuum which suck in your forces to the core, and that is exactly what we want. Now, you might ask, wouldn't your troops get slaughtered then? Some yes, but because our goal is to get the DE storage, it is worth it (I will talk about the cost & benefit in a later post). And because of my 2 healers, they will heal my "bio ball" (reference from Starcraft) of troops so the casualty is minimized.

4. Next, check for heroes. If they are in the center, then its great, you do not need to lure them, same as what I talked about CC above. If they are near the outside or just outside, then proceed to step 5 first.

5. VERY IMPORTANT: pick the side that is closest to the DE storage to attack, and clear the buldings outside the wall first with a few archers. You don't need to clear them all out before starting the main attack but get them about 1/2 way done if possible. This will prevent your troops go around the outside of the enemy base and miss hitting the core where the good stuff is at. If your archers will get killed by their towers then just forget it and just let enemy heroes and enemy CC troops suck your force into the core.

6. Depending on how far the enemy heroes are, you should lure them with 1 barb each at this point, so that they will kill the barb and then head towards your main deployment zone (where you are clearing the outside buildings with a few archers).

7. If the enemy CC is on the other side of the map, you should lure with a couple of barbs as well, so all the troops come out. You might want to do this step early if the CC is full of archers, will take a few barbs to get them all out. You can see how I lure them in my videos :)

8. Next, spam your entire army very very fast, except for goblins and/or maybe a few wiz. I use 2-3 fingers to multi touch the iPad to deploy fast. Here is the order of deployment (doesn't have to be exact since the deployments should be fast to maximize your army's DPS on the field ASAP, but following the general order is recommended):

a. Barbs to trigger spring traps - I often forget this though and jump straight to giants :(
b. Giants
c. 2-4 wall breakers, depending on how strong the wall is. Also time it to deploy the wbs after mortar hits ground first so your wbs will survive
d. 4 wiz (lv 5 is almost a must)
e. 10 Minions (to distract air defenses and protect your healers).
f. 2 healers, you can deploy healers before minions if there are no air defenses nearby, this way your healers will tank the air bombs for the minions, which is better.
g. CC
h. remaining archers & barbs if any
i. remaining wall breakers in 1-2 bursts to break 2nd or 3rd layer of walls

By this time, your army should have broken toward the core a bit, maybe 1/2 way through. Drop a rage spell ideally covering 15%-20% of the core area, so that the forward of your army is soaked in rage spell and I want my army continue to rage when they get into the core (to maximize the benefit you receive for the spell duration). They will punch forward fast and the rest of the troops will follow, then most of your army will immerse in the rage spell. I tend to drop the rage when the forward of my army meets the enemy CC troops and/or herors. This is the perfect time to rage your army to finish off enemy troops quickly, reduce your own casualties, and suck in most of your troops into the core very quickly (because your troops under rage will run much faster)

Note: I usually carry a jump spell so if the enemy base is heavily segmented with strong walls (lv 9+), I usually would use the jump spell instead. Jump spell has a larger radius than rage spell, so I can try to cover 2-3 intersections with the spell to let my troops through. I try not to use a rage if I have used a jump spell unless the base has lots of gold I can get easily ;) - hey I am a farmer, haha.

6. Next, after you break open the core and there is no high level mortar or wizard towers pounding the core, you should release all of your goblins to get the loot in the middle. I sometimes release them earlier if the enemy is very strong (high level defense and high level walls), to clear out all the resource buildings fast in the outer area of the base, and then my wizards will go near the core, next to the DE storage and kill it fast. I love wizards as they can obliterate the DE storage within a couple of seconds while my army is under fire from maxed TH9 defense or inferno towers.

So enough of the talk, here are a few of my recent DE farming videos. Please feel free to provide your input and tips, and share your journey to get your super heroes here :)

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Example video #2:

Hmm, this base design looks quite familiar... Dunno whose design is it but it seems popular and deadly. But I just love bullying skull wall TH8s, because they are usually fully loaded & very yummy :cool:

My starting position was wrong for this base, should have been bottom right, not bottom. I got lucky here. But that's why I love wizards, just need a lv 5 wizard to take down a storage tank quickly http://forum.supercell.net/images/smilies/biggrin.png

http://youtu.be/pYeH3gO3CBw

Added on July 2:

So folks, here are some stats. I pulled a double yesterday because I was helping out our new feeder clan (20 hours straight, lol), so I was able to get 43 raids in, decent amount of stats generated from that. Sometimes I encountered bases that had little or no DE, but rich in other resources, so I couldn't pass them up (one even had everything in collectors, yum!). The success rate was 100% for the first 10 hours, then as I got more tired, I started getting sloppy, and the success rate went down quite a bit. But even with 100% success rate, the max I could make was 2800 DE per hour, so according to yesterday's stats, I was wrong about 3600-4000 DE per hour (those stats were from the beginning of 2 very good days apparently).

Key take away from this exercise:
- Raid less when you are tired, haha
- Assuming that I raid 12 hours per day and maintain similar performance as below, then I will not be able to upgrade both heroes constantly starting level 23-24 http://forum.supercell.net/images/smilies/frown.png
- So if anyone has better tips and tricks, please share them NOW! I want them to improve my performance!! http://forum.supercell.net/images/smilies/smile.png

Hmm, anyone know why I cannot add more images? I have 13 more attack log screenshots to upload but it won't let me...

http://forum.supercell.net/attachmen...719885&thumb=1

Screenshots of all 43 attack logs are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/98308519@N04/9188867720/

******************** Added on July 11 *************************
To solve the long training time problem, you can utilize the Clan Castle to your advantage. I think of CC donations as TRAINING TIME donations, compare these donation compositions in a CC lv 5:
-30 archers take only 12.5 minutes to train
-1 dragon, 2 wizards, and 2 archers take 51 minutes to train
-7 wizards and 2 archers take 71 minutes to train
So getting wizards in your clan castle gives you the highest value in terms of training time saved.

There are 3 solutions to get the wizards in your CC:
1. Grow an alt that feeds you wizards and healers
2. Join our alliance where wizards and dragons are the default troops (Unity & Unity Elite), or another clan that donates like that
3. Convince your clan mates to change the donation system to be like ours. This is what I did, and if you are a clan leader then you would be in a good position to do this.

And then you really only need to train 2 wizards instead of 4-8 for this to work. With 2 wizards the training time for the army would be about 30 minutes. I train 4 wizards so that I can fight TH10s with inferno towers and maxed TH9s, but in reality I do not need to take those on. I just don't want to play the game too frequently and want the added security, thus the longer training time.

You need the support of strong CC troops to get DE because DE is almost always heavily protected, and CC troops cost no time for YOU to train. Take advantage of that http://forum.supercell.net/images/smilies/smile.png

******************** Added on July 16 *************************
This is the latest composition, using 3 healers. I found it to be the most reliable and the cook time is slightly less (33 minutes). You need to have all wizards in your CC though. If this composition keeps working well for a week, I will replace the main strategy with this.

http://i.imgur.com/c7DCsUp.jpg

There's plenty of time to farm DE on the way to maxed out walls. ;)

True true, but if you have super heroes, wouldn't farming gold be much much easier? ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by josue452

There's plenty of time to farm DE on the way to maxed out walls. ;)

Nowhere in this thread do you actually talk about how to farm DE.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blobertson

Nowhere in this thread do you actually talk about how to farm DE.

Was about to say that.

But the main message of this thread, is to prioritize Heroes upgrade in TH9, which I agree whole heartedly.

DE farming wise, just go up in trophies, there are TONS of DE at 1,900, 2k+ haha.

where does it talk about maxing out de drills ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blobertson

Nowhere in this thread do you actually talk about how to farm DE.

Plan your upgrade schedule wisely.
Attack to farm de.
Have a good base in order to protect the DE.

The thread in three sentences.

Quote:

Originally Posted by UnitySharp

My Archer Queen is currently being upgraded to lv 12 and Burger King going to lv 15. I started DE farming a bit late and also when I got to TH9 I didn't realize how important DE farming is, so I hope other farmers will not make the same mistake I have made :( A clan mate of mine, Abrenan321, also focuses on DE farming heavily. He has developed some excellent strategies for DE farming in TH8-TH9. He just got to TH9 like 2 weeks ago, and his Archer Queen is already upgrading to lv 9 I learned a lot from his DE farming strategies to formulate my own, which I will talk about in upcoming posts. I will record some DE farming videos and share with everyone on the forum soon, including army composition and deployment strategies :) Here are a couple of screen shots to show some credibility for my post, if I may :)

Recent attacks on a pretty good streak :cool:
Attachment 11167
My current base :o
Attachment 11168

Please feel free to post your opinions and share your experience, as well as tips and tricks. I still got a long way to go and I want to get my super heroes faster!!

lol burgers cost maybe 4.50£ not dark elixer

Eagerly awaiting the next installment. Im at the end of TH8 with about 20 to 30 days of cannons/archer towers and teslas to upgrade. Would be good if i can save 60k DE for golem and the last 3 levels of my BK. All walls are done so can focus fully on DE.

Come on dude ;)