darkSpyro

Anyone else feel like sharing their helpful hints which help out a lot? Below is my list of things that I found to be super helpful when leveling up.

1) Only clear totems, trapium, chompy pods, and sugarized bats right when you first log in. All others (ground spawn, troll camps, and sheep) can be left and will not despawn so you can leave as much or little as you want. (I still tend to like less clutter so clear it all right away).
2) Buying the three daily wanderers pays for themselves quickly and then you get nothing but free bonuses from them daily. This is Hyde (blue cap) for a gem, Ma-Boo (ghost costume) for a wish stone, Chieftess (big tan hat) for gold.
3) If you own Hugo and have his den here is a hint to get an extra gem or two easily. If you log in late at night the toy link towers take QUITE a bit of time to give the next payout (I think its 6 hours may be 4 don't have it right in front of me). The thing is as SOON as the day rolls over a tower that has a spawned reward will CHANGE FROM GOLD TO A GEM REWARD. This means log in see what the next days element will be. Gather your current gem reward from the days element and then leave the reward for the next days element and then gather it right after it changes for another gem before the standard gather rotation.
4) This wait for the next element also works on the elemental bonuses you get for adventures and sanctuaries. So if your going to not harvest at the end of the night and send out a bunch on adventures for when you wake up send out the next days the day before!
5) Along with number two's companions that are best for low level, are the ones that pay for themselves and keep paying you back. Things like Capybara King and Captain WhiteClaw go VERY well together since Captain WhiteClaw increases the chest spawns and then the King adds a free gem to each harvest.
6) There are MORE than enough sales to wait to buy what you want on a 50% off time. During the year I played every month SOMETHING was on sale and a few times a year they put almost everything on sale. Save up your gems and use these for a much better bang for your buck.
7) Unless you just want to waste gems skipping quests, ending activities early are really just a waste of gems.
8) Skylanders buyout with gold seems to cap at 5m. I noticed it went up but always wondered where it stopped.
9) Buying the bonus troll tower, the sheep sheerer, and the summoning portal upgrades are really a waste of resources only buy them if you have nothing more your wanting to buy. Luckily I bought the first two on sale so spent only a small number of gems but still kicking myself for not keeping it.
10) The sanctuary upgrade quests if your turning them in they finish the quests automatically for the skylanders you put in. My advice is do all but 1 orville collect, wait until you add 3 skylanders. collect from orville, have it auto finish their quest and give you back 3 rewards, and then read them a second time. More bang for your buck.
11) The adventure airship return time once every 24 hour building is GREAT at finishing long quests that you may need to do to finish a quest or to quickly level your skylanders. What I do is make sure it is ending and then ensure all my pads are not in use. I send all airships out on the longest adventure time they can. Then use the return and get back all 13 and then send out on whatever I want after that.
12) The best bang for your buck things to use every 24 hours on the dot are adventure airship return, and the molekin mine.
13) Try and level up your swap force skylanders for each element in such a way they are returning from the quest as you are logging in. The evilized bats only stay a few minutes and you do NOT want to have the element you have out on adventure and miss out on the free 2 gems. So what I do is if I know I am not going to login for 8 hours I wend them on the 7 hour adventure. this way they are done waiting for me. Do not send them on a 10 hour adventure and check back at 8 hours you will lose the sugar bats.
14) If you have REALLY bad roll luck and you want at least one or two good items from the wishing well save them up and roll like 200 at a time. Tossing in intermittently seems okay but if your like me and have bad luck the only real way to get a good item or two is to do a long streak of rolls.
15) Its also good to save these up for the times they bring back alternate alter egos you may not have. The last two alter ego returns I have rolled 3 more skylanders in total outside of the standard two months totals.
16) Beatrees is a THUMB SAVER! This is the one companion that when you get it you wonder why you ever played without it. It also gathers potions from all statues and sheep topiaries (when you have 300 of them that's a lot of gathering)! But remember statues ALSO sometimes spawn wish stones or gems so ensure to look at them to make sure they do not have a surprise Beatrees did NOT gather.
17) Anything that just spawns a resource are like free printed money. (Sheep topiaries/Statues/elemental shrines) Get them asap to make your stash grow exponentially. (I know with me I didn't focus on these first and I probably should have)

Are there any other good tips people do not see on my list that I may not know about that you would like to input as well?

Great Tips.
If you have time and want to power level. I use the sheep topiaries to surround buildings and move community buildings in and out when they are ready for collection.
I have EON Statue touching each corner of the 2 boxes to get the extra 25% boost
I get about 155-165% per building I move into the sheep topiaries box.
Sure it time consuming but its a quick way to double your XP if you don't have the companion.

I would say that ma boo and chieftess really don't pay for themselves. There are plenty of better ways to get wish stones, and at some point you have just way too many of them. Chieftess may be OK if she costs gold. But if she costs gems, then you are paying gems in exchange for a low gold payout 1x per day. I would not say that's a good trade. They are all fun to hunt and tap though, so I enjoy having them but I wouldn't put them high on the wish list.

Nice one SpinCycle. I never thought about moving to be harvested buildings into a spot that is highly +ed by surrounding items. I just click them away. Seeing I am close to hitting level 40 I don't have much more of that to go but I'll keep that in mind. midas73 IMHO anything that gives out "free" per day pays for itself in one way or another. Since I have the Chieftess I use her income per day to help offset my costs to use Diggs which is costing me 500k gold per day. As for Ma-Boo as many wishstones I can get is always a good thing because I am constantly buying legendary houses, spinning and getting gem buildings like B&Bs which are as good as having Gems. So I do think the fact they are a bit low cost vrs other options and the fact they pay out daily make them a good investment and find that long term they have been super helpful. Also considering Ma-Boo will show up in others islands its an added bonus where you can sometimes get a good 5 stones in a day.

Quote: Bolthar

Nice one SpinCycle. I never thought about moving to be harvested buildings into a spot that is highly +ed by surrounding items. I just click them away. Seeing I am close to hitting level 40 I don't have much more of that to go but I'll keep that in mind. midas73 IMHO anything that gives out "free" per day pays for itself in one way or another. Since I have the Chieftess I use her income per day to help offset my costs to use Diggs which is costing me 500k gold per day. As for Ma-Boo as many wishstones I can get is always a good thing because I am constantly buying legendary houses, spinning and getting gem buildings like B&Bs which are as good as having Gems. So I do think the fact they are a bit low cost vrs other options and the fact they pay out daily make them a good investment and find that long term they have been super helpful. Also considering Ma-Boo will show up in others islands its an added bonus where you can sometimes get a good 5 stones in a day.

You have a long way to go, if you're only at level 40. The last 5 levels are long and tedious. The Chieftess really doesn't add that much value. Her bonus is trivial compared to even the cost of Diggs. And as for visiting other kingdoms, I forget you can even do it to get more collections from Mab-Boo and Hyde. It was never worth the effort, plus I was never able to find them on other people's islands. Though the only time I really tried finding them was when they had the Hyde glitch where you could keep tapping him for unlimited gems if you found him on another island. Never did find him.

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The last 5 levels are long and tedious.

I suppose that depends if you have a Rufus and Fiznik and Willowbark . We all want a Diggs but that comes at a cost of slow leveling I suppose.

I actually find a Hyde and Maboo at least twice a month if i visit Aura,s kingdom daily .

Quote: Dark fhoenix

Quote:

The last 5 levels are long and tedious.

I suppose that depends if you have a Rufus and Fiznik and Willowbark . We all want a Diggs but that comes at a cost of slow leveling I suppose.

I actually find a Hyde and Maboo at least twice a month if i visit Aura,s kingdom daily .

They do help, but still long and tedious.

And your experience with Hyde and Maboo are exactly why I don't deal with it. It's not worth it for 1 gem from Hyde, especially if your chances of finding him are 2 times in a month.

Keep in mind that 2 times in a month is with Dark fhoenix ONLY visiting Aura. It's really 2 times in 30 visits. If you visit 30 friends in one night, that's twice a day. Which seems in line with what I remember from when I did visiting.

Quote: arkhamhorrorfan

Keep in mind that 2 times in a month is with Dark fhoenix ONLY visiting Aura. It's really 2 times in 30 visits. If you visit 30 friends in one night, that's twice a day. Which seems in line with what I remember from when I did visiting.

Again, with the time it takes to visit islands and the many times that it potentially crashes, it's still not worth it.

Aura is 100 percent safe to visit . If she is your only friend then you do have time to say hi and harvest . Batterson and Avril actually become useful companions too .

You mean visiting others kingdoms isn't safe? I have been doing it the whole time and never realized that it wasn't. I have about 52 friends on my list and I visit them daily. I find Hyde and Ma-Boo a good 4+ times per day when doing my rounds, I don't think Chieftess even extends outside of your own village. I had no clue it wasn't safe to visit others? Do you mean safe because of the connection crashes? I get those randomly but a restart always fixes it for me. Hyde no matter what has already paid for himself and then some. Of the three finding companions I would rank it Hyde>Ma-Boo>Chieftess and its just a fun little minigame within the game itself. No matter what the looking for them is minimal when you fill up your outside islands and they can only spawn in the middle anyhow. Also I would not even be as high I am on gems right now if it weren't for Hyde. Even the one time a day I started almost 11 months ago so that's almost 330 gems and I bought him with 25 I believe. This is not including the large number of times I find him in other islands I am visiting. I have not got either Batterson or Avril yet. I have already maxed out the sheep topiaries and the Admiral Thumpback so at this point they are just sitting there. I know it can help me hit 5k to use in the moleskin mine but this would take me quite a few visits to make it not a net loss. Right now I am very focused on Ole Mac and Callie I have 2.5k gems but need Ole mac to come back and both be on sale. I think with double the adventure gold and double the energy I can make some major headway (I have not unlocked any small islands yet and still have MANY skylanders to roll for).

Every now and then visiting islands that aren't Aura's would cause the game to crash and people to lose their save data, not sure when was the last time. Aura also caused crashes for me every now and then, but I'd always come back to my game safe and sound.

Things like minidragon's issue with a hall of legends not working were sometimes related to save corruption that occurs when the game crashes while visiting islands. Not sure if that is minidragon's problem as they may well have fixed this issue, but I'm not willing to test that out by visiting anymore. And I don't need to either so no reason to risk it.

It may very well be safe now. All of the people who have posted with corruption issues lately seem to have been related to the recent merging of accounts and update to iOS8.

But if you were reading the forum a little over a year ago, everyone posting with corruption issues had it happen immediately after visiting.

It used to be that when visiting, you collected gold, energy, and gems. I would often be short on energy, do some visiting, then proceed with what I wanted to do. It was useful. But kudos become useless very quickly. Well, to be fair, I suppose the gold and energy you'd collect would seem like nothing to me now too!

So for people who had to go through the frustrations of a corrupted game, or kept reading daily about others going through the frustrations, kudos and occasionally finding Hyde just isn't worth the perceived risk.

But really, we have no reason to believe these issues weren't resolved months ago - we just also never got anything from Activision saying "We've figured it out and solved the issues".

Quote: arkhamhorrorfan

But really, we have no reason to believe these issues weren't resolved months ago - we just also never got anything from Activision saying "We've figured it out and solved the issues".

Over the weekend, I was visiting a friend's kingdom and the app crashed. when I reloaded, all the quests from buying an island reset, so I now have eight uncompletable quests (restore sanctuary, clear x wreckage, etc.)

Quote: obidawsn

Quote: Dark fhoenix

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The last 5 levels are long and tedious.

I suppose that depends if you have a Rufus and Fiznik and Willowbark . We all want a Diggs but that comes at a cost of slow leveling I suppose.

I actually find a Hyde and Maboo at least twice a month if i visit Aura,s kingdom daily .

They do help, but still long and tedious.

And your experience with Hyde and Maboo are exactly why I don't deal with it. It's not worth it for 1 gem from Hyde, especially if your chances of finding him are 2 times in a month.

The last five levels are very long and tedious, even with appropriate companions. Rufus is a boon, but it just means you have to check back twice as often as you previously did. Besides, the rewards from the last five levels are very minor and gem generation is a much preferred path. You get a tiny island for each level (for a high gold cost) and a very long mission with a mediocre reward (a bunch of exp as I recall). Whereas Diggs allows you to acquire other companions faster. You get him, then you get Rufus/etc. faster. If you get Rufus/Fizznik first it just means you have less gem generation, which makes eventually getting Diggs slower.

I think you have to look at getting the companions first that increase resource generation as a priority. And resource value is like this:

Gems > Gold > Energy > Wishstones > Kingdom exp

Of course that varies a little bit depending on your current level. Getting up to a level where you have more options is obviously important early on, so prior to 30 it is higher priority. Energy is important until you generate enough to do your daily tasks. Gold is important until you have sufficient housing and then later your upgrades. Wishstones are important until you can generate 200 a month to virtually guarantee being able to get the monthly alt ego and later enough to dump in on "all alts in the well" events to catch up on ones you missed and some B&B and other goodies.

In my opinion, Ole Mac is probably the most game changing companion. He makes Energy a non-issue. After that the exp increasing companions for Skylanders since they are cheaper (leveling Skylanders and their quests are good gem production). Then Diggs, simply because gems are clearly the most high value resource, once gems lose real value due to high production, you have basically "won" the game.