Contributor: Pippi
Table of Contents
Introduction
Hello Adventurers! This guide will go over the basics of the Hunting Fields Event. As this event has many similarities to Abyssal Expedition, mechanics that are shared between the two events will be quickly summarized. If you would like more detailed explanations of those shared mechanics, feel free to check out the Abyssal Expedition guide. If you have already played AE and understand how it works, then you can skip the “Shared Core Mechanics” section fully, as it will contain no new information.
What is Hunting Fields
In Hunting Fields (also known as HF), you work together in a 5 man group. Just like AE, the objective of this event is to progress through a map, raise the strength of your units, take down minibosses, and defeat the final boss.Each player must choose a certain faction that they will play with (LB, Mauler, Wilder, GB, Cele/Hypo/Dim), and the units they can use for the entire HF event can only be from the faction they choose.
Shared Core Mechanics
Each tile on the map can be attacked and taken over by defeating the enemies on that tile. As you progress further throughout the Abyssal Expedition map, the tiles and the enemies on them become much stronger, increasing both in strength and the number of fights. Similar to the way Legends Challenger works, units used in the first fight of a tile may not be used on the second fight, so spread out your strongest units accordingly, or work together with your teammates to take down tiles.
Taking over a settlement will cause it to begin generating resources for your units. The stronger the tile that is taken over, the more resources it drops, allowing you to increase your strength faster. Constantly replacing your tiles with stronger ones will be key for becoming strong enough to move into the other zones and defeat stronger enemies. By taking over a tile that is next to one owned by you or a militia member, the tiles become connected. You can only attack tiles that are directly next to ones that you own, but by connecting up with other tiles, you can attack tiles that are farther away without having to path there yourself. Spreading out and linking up with your teammates will allow you to have access to more settlements and conserve stamina.
Stamina is the resource that is required to attack tiles. When attacking a tile, stamina will be used up. There are three stars that can be obtained in each fight by accomplishing certain missions. Each star obtained in a fight will recover stamina on your heroes. By getting 3 stars on every fight, you will have more stamina to use and therefore be able to attack more tiles. Every hour, heroes will recover a certain amount of stamina.
Stamina and Tiles
In HF, path tiles only cost 1 stamina to attack. While stars can be earned, they do not give any stamina back. What this means is that retrying on path tiles is extremely inefficient. If your units are about to die, then let them die instead of retrying, as no stamina will be saved using that method. Additionally, heroes only recover 3 stamina per hour instead of the usual 4 in AE.
Settlements, unlike path tiles, work the exact same as they do in AE, with the only difference being that they look different. 2 fights also start at t4s, instead of t5s like they do in AE. Just like tiles generate blessed essence in AE, these tiles also drop resources, known as “Gear” (check the gear section for more details), and “Marks”. Marks are essentially the exact same as blessed essence, and are used to purchase gear.
Mini-Bosses and Challenge Seals
One of the first things you might notice when you enter HF will be the minibosses scattered throughout the map. These bosses drop gear (the equivalent of relics in AE, check the Gear section below) after reaching certain HP breakpoints.
After killing a mini boss, it will respawn in 20 minutes, but the time it takes for a respawn will increase after each life. Each time it revives, the boss will gain health, and the quality of gear dropped will also improve. As the HP of the mini boss increases, so will the amount of dmg required to hit the breakpoints and gain chests. When a damage breakpoint is met and a chest is gained, each team member will gain a chest, even if they have not attacked the boss.
Attacking these mini-bosses uses up a challenge seal instead of stamina. These challenge seals are very rare and are only given once for free at the very start of HF, and once every time your team ranks up. Because of this, it is important to save your seals until you are strong enough to deal significant damage to the bosses, or give the seals to your strongest member so they can attack the boss for you.
Gear
Rather than buffing all your heroes at once through relic upgrades like in AE, you now upgrade each hero individually. After opening a chest, you will receive pieces of gear. These pieces of gear give stats, and after equipping three pieces of gear on a hero you will be able to level them up, just like leveling up core relics.
Heroes can be upgraded a total of four times. Increasing the level of a hero also raises the rarity of the gear that they use :
- Level 1 heroes will equip rare gear
- Level 2 heroes will equip epic gear
- Level 3 heroes will equip legendary gear
- Level 4 heroes will equip mythic gear
Mythic gear has two special traits. Firstly, they come with % stat buffs, meaning they give bigger buffs than the lesser rarity gears. Additionally, equipping 2 pieces of mythic gear on a hero will unlock a special effect for a hero, with some providing decent buffs and others being mediocre.
The grey slot at the bottom right is for a unique type of gear called a fusion rune. Fusion runes give % stats and can be equipped at any level. They also stay equipped permanently, unlike normal gear which disappears after you level up a hero. Each hero can only equip the fusion rune specific to them, meaning that you will not be able to give them to your carry units first.
Boss Mechanics
For all past versions of Hunting Field, the final boss has had three stages. Pre-enrage, Beacons, and Enraged.
Pre-Enrage (100%-80%hp) : The boss will cycle through several abilities while attacking your units; each attack on the boss costs 16 stamina.
Beacons (80%-40%hp) : Immediately upon hitting 80% hp on the boss, it will no longer be attackable. Instead, there will be 6 attackable beacons. Each beacon has several fights that increase depending on which life the boss is on.
The different lives of the boss require different amounts of beacons to be taken down to reach 40% hp. For example, the first life of the boss will only take two beacons to reach 40% hp. For the second life, four beacons will be required, and so on. The 6 beacons correspond to the different factions. Wilder, Mauler, GB, LB, Chad/Hypo/Dim, and Fallen (no faction). Each beacon has debuffs for any units that do not have the same fashion as the beacon itself. The fallen beacon can be beaten without much trouble by any of the 5 factions.
Enraged (40%-0%hp) : The boss is now in an enraged state. It has a new set of abilities, which is both better and worse for the different factions. Some factions may deal better damage in the enraged state as compared to the pre-enraged state, so be sure to keep this in mind.
Ranking Up
Similar to AE, Hunting Fields also has a rank up system. The rank obtained during the hunting fields run not only determines the rewards you get but also gives benefits, such as more tile slots and a new unique feature called “sweep”. It also raises the level limit for your units.
The sweep feature, upon being unlocked, allows you to instantly take over all path tiles in a certain area without having to spend any stamina. This allows players to reach settlements without having to sacrifice stamina.
The number of heroes available to use will stay at 10 for the entire Hunting Fields event, no matter what rank you are.
The Leaderboard
There are some key differences between the HF leaderboard and the AE leaderboard. Firstly, instead of being ranked by boss damage, the HF leaderboard goes off of a point system. Points are given to players for many different things. This can include; taking over settlements, defeating beacons, dealing damage to the bosses, collecting marks, etc. Boss damage is one of the biggest sources of points, so efficiently managing your stamina and dealing as much damage to the boss is key for anybody looking to get a high leaderboard placement.
Another thing to note is that the most recent iteration of Hunting Fields had two runs. Players could play Hunting Fields twice in one ranked season, meaning there could be two separate scores up on the leaderboard by the same player/team. Many people choose to call scores submitted by the same team as “dupes”. These dupes take up leaderboard spots, and old runs ARE NOT replaced by the new ones. What this means is that the top 30 will mostly be made up of the top 15, just with both of their runs.
Bag Mechanics
After receiving gear from a chest, it will be sent into your bag. In it, there will be three tabs : Mine, Shared, and Other. Gear claimed from chests will automatically go into the “Mine” tab. If a player wishes to do so, they can move their gear into the “Shared” tab, and all players in the hunting fields team will have access to that gear. However, they will be unable to move that gear into their personal bag. The “Other” tab will show the gear that is in your teammates’ personal bag.
In your personal bag, you will find several buttons. Upon clicking the gift-shaped icon, you will be able to gift marks (the equivalent of blessed essence in AE) to any player. Turning on “Move Excess Loot to Shared Bag” will automatically move any loot that the game thinks is useless for a player to the Shared Bag. The “Choose” button allows you to quickly select multiple pieces of gear at once and either sell or move those selected items. In order to sell gear in the shared bag, a player must first take out the gear and put it into their personal bag, and then go through these steps to sell it.
A Final Note
As you may have noticed, this guide does not go into any detail about the current meta, or strategies used, such as funneling the GB and Cele/Hypo/Dim players, or farming beacons. This is because the meta way of playing HF is bound to change eventually in the future. As a result, only the core mechanics, or the future-proof information about this event, has been written. If you wish to find out more about these strategies, then looking up information on popular sites such as reddit, or asking around in the afk arena discords may help.
Thank you for reading this guide!
-Pippi