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. We continue to discuss what every good war team needs in TFEW, and today we continue 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.
One Shot Ability
This one is a lot more obvious on the value prospect. Pay X amount of Ability Points and make a problem go away. Like a dirty mobster, Flyers and Volatile Mixture gunners are here to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Unlike Joe Exotic’s case however, you aren’t punished for it. There is a big problem with this type of bot however, and that is the barrier to entry. Be prepared to invest a ton of time, grind, spark, energon and core fusion to get this bot to where you need it. With HQ17 being here it is harder than ever.
Three bots that make life a little easier in this department are Skydive/Skywarp, Strafe/Thrust and Sentius Magnus/Sentius Malus. They can deal a lot of damage to a single target early on, but at additional cost. Skydive and Skywarp have an expensive ability compared to other bots and it doesn’t kill things right away. It’s a looooong 10 seconds to make things dead with him and he is going to need a good Enhanced Ordinance core more often than not. Strafe and Thrust hang in the air begging and pleading to get shot down by everything, and once he is up in the air, who knows what path he will follow. You can gamble, though he is going to come back down worse for wear if he even survives the trip. Sentius Magnus/Sentius Malus lack range so most defenses will out range him. Ideally you want to kill key structures before they can apply any damage to your team and the Sentius twins, despite their insane damage output and health pool, will fail you here more often than not. Sky Lynx/Blitzwing may be the best choice for most players here since they can one shot early for 5 Ability Points on the first shot without needing an extremely high level and spark. Plus they can do it without the use of a core.
AoE Damage
Why kill one thing when you can kill everything? Well, it comes with a cost. Just like a one shot bot, be prepared to level, spark, and core these bots to ridiculous levels to get them functional and when you do, you are investing a lot of Ability Points in the field of battle to operate these bots because they are EXPENSIVE. So why use these bots over one shot bots? With HQ17, the days of one shot are pretty much gone. Unless you have high level 5 star bots or very choice 4 stars, with appropriately high level cores, it just isn’t happening. A max mortar has a base health of 5,100 – add a health core to that and you’re in trouble! When it comes to Ability Points spent to damage done, AoE is just way more efficient. Bots like Star Saber/Deathsaurus, Elita-1/Lugnit, Sunstreaker/Swindle, Jazz/Mixmaster, Sky Lynx/Blitzwing, and Sandstorm/Octone to name some key players here. I would take a moment here to point out Swoop/Scourge is considered an AoE bot by many but are not. These Aerials’ ability has diminishing returns based on how many targets are under their attack circle. Swoop and Scourge can do 10k to 1 target, 5k to 2 targets, 2k to 5 targets, etc. A true Area of Effect (AoE) does the same damage to everything in an area. For this reason, as well as his extreme ability cost after the first use, and how much you need to level the ability and bot, I would stay away from Swoop & Scourge when building a well-rounded team. They are great bots, but both need a particular team that is normally reserved for those who spend a lot of money or for those that pulled very specific bots to build a very specific team. These two are amazing on defense though!
