We continue our new TFEW Guides section of the Website and the Building A War Team series of articles. Today we will continue to look at Team Composition as James “Emrakul Tat” Hogan of Alpha Cartel guides us through the main areas of focus that you need to take a look at when building your war team in Transformers: Earth Wars. He left us yesterday after discussing what every good war team needs in TFEW, and today we start to look at what we want on our team and the sacrifices we will have to make elsewhere to get what we want on that team.
Damage Mitigation
Having an ability that reduces how much damage your team can take in one way or another can be incredibly valuable to a war team. Abilities that reduce damage, often by 50% or more, can drastically increase your team’s effective life pool for the duration of those abilities, taking an enormous burden off your medics. After all, you don’t have to heal the damage you didn’t take in the first place. This allows your team to do what it does with much less risk, and also allows you to punch well above your weight in wars. How much above your weight? What a great question – one that I am about to answer which will blow your mind.
A max level Beam Laser, Zone 15 mind you, can put out 430 DPS. Reduce that by 50% and we are between a level 8-9 beam laser. Where do you find that? Zone 12 is where you find that. You can reduce a max level base’s damage output to that of a Zone 12 base. That is incredible, and Tracks is the king in this area. Even if you only use his ability once, I venture there is no other ability in the game that costs only 2 points and can do more for a war team for that price. If you have Tracks, please use tracks unless you are warring against my alliance, Alpha Cartel, in which case you should bench him. First Aid is also a phenomenal choice. His medi bots are cheap and if kept alive can give your backline boys a continuous 40% damage reduction for the entire battle.
Alternatively, you can choose bots that attract defenses, effectively reducing your overall team damage by focusing it all onto a single target and absorbing it. Pipes, Jumpstream, Hot Spot, Springer, and Impactor are great examples. They all attract defenses and then put up a shield that greatly reduces the damage they take (sometimes up to 90%!). These draw fire away from all the other bots on your team and allow them to fight effectively, relatively safe from damage, or at least from all the things pointing at your tank.
Other notable forms of damage mitigation are hacks and debuffs that directly affect the base defenses. A prime example of this is Sky Lynx and his ability Plasma Shroud. A lot of people forget this and just see Sky Lynx as an AOE powerhouse or a single target one shot powerhouse, but his Plasma Shroud is great all on its own. It lowers damage by 50% for over 10 seconds with a little Spark. That is a very long time with a massive debuff! When you’re low on ability points, this ability can save your life. Blades is another option. His special ability hacks a large AOE for about 6 seconds depending on Spark. That’s 6 seconds of all the turrets caught in the hack dealing exactly zero damage to your team. That max beam laser we talked about before? That alone is 2,580 damage you aren’t taking. That’s not even factoring in the damage the ability does and the damage the defenses do to each other!
Stuns also work much the same way. Having Bumblebee or Punch throwing stun grenades, at a low ability cost, all over the battlefield can prevent a lot of damage. Elita-1/Lugnut and Star Saber/Deathsaurus can protect the team from a group of targets with their stuns while Silverbolt/Thundercracker can effectively take a key structure out of the fight for 3 ability points with his 17 second eternity stun.
Oh damage mitigation, how I love you so…
