Brown Dust is a game developed by Neowiz and can be defined as a combination of Autochess and a Gacha game. If that idea is appealing to you, then this is the game for you.
It’s all about your luck getting units and how you place them into the battlefield.
Here you can see the units and order: the numbers above each unit indicate in which order they will attack. Each unit has a different range and effect. You can see the range and effect in the character description.
If you get to understand the ranges, orders and effects of the units, that pretty much sums up Brown Dust. However, there are lots of compositions, combinations and strategies to follow in order to be able to succeed.
Download Brown DustUnit roles
There are four different roles in Brown Dust:
- Warriors: main damage dealers, they usually need buffs to do even more damage.
- Supports: these units are the core to heal or buff other units giving them crit chance, attack, defence, heal etc.
- Defenders: main defence units, will probably have defensive skills and passives to soak all incoming damage.
- Mages: these units are a bit more complex. In the first turn they have, they will charge their attack, needing another turn to release all their power in that attack. They are usually nukers or stronger damage dealers than warriors since they need more preparation.
Skills
Since each unit has a different role, they have different skills, either active or passive to help the units to deal more damage. You empower their skills by summoning the same unit until +9 by doing that. Each time you empower your skill by +1, your skills get improved (maybe in damage, duration or in getting another subskill).
Therefore, if you know a unit is top tier, you should probably try to summon that unit again if possible. Skill books are designed to be a copy of a unit so you can use them to skill up if they match the same stars.
The image below shows one of the current top tier warriors:
The red square in the skills represents the range that the mercenary has. In this case, she will attack the frontline and just one unit; her main role as warrior is to take defenders down. Continuing with her as an example, I will review her skills to give you an appropriate depiction of a Brown Dust unit.
The effects are quite clear: her main skill is that she will deal 3 attacks at the same time, but she will have her attack damage reduced by a -50% because it would be too powerful otherwise.
This is her core skill to take defenders down, since she ignores defences and deals additional damage. The other subskill consists of a heal ban: the enemy unit won’t be able to receive heals for 12 turns (both rival and allies turns included).
This skill ensures that she will deal lots of damage. Wilhelmina will need supports with agility or crit damage buffs to deal even more damage.
Awakening
Units can be awakened, which gives them extra stats, but also unlocks an extra skill. I’ll use the example of Wilhelmina again.
After attacking she receives “debuff immunity” which makes her immune to stuns, freeze attacks, or charms. This is very useful, as defenders usually have those skills to prevent warriors from dealing more damage.
Rarity
The rarity of units in Brown Dust depends on their ‘stars’ or rank, which ranges from 1 star to 6 stars. You can summon up to 5 star units, and the 6 stars can be achieved by ranking up.
The rank up method works using units of the same rank that you accumulate during matches, for example:
This unit is 5 stars, so I will need 5 units with the rank of 5 stars to get her to 6 stars, in case of 4 stars units will be 4 units of 4 stars etc…
Note: you cannot rank up a skill book. A skill book of 4 stars means that you will be able to skill up a unit of original rarity of 4 stars.
Also, the max level a unit can get depends on their starting rarity. For example, a unit with a 4-stars rarity will get up to lvl 80 with the 6 stars rank but a unit of 5 stars rarity will reach lvl 85.
Legendary units
There are few units which have the legend rarity in Brown Dust. They have a 0.2% probability to be summoned and can only be summoned by legend scrolls, which are bought weekly with 600 diamonds (in-game currency). These units can be summoned as well with 900 diamonds, which gives you mileage. (I will explain what mileage is later)
These units have more powerful skills and can reach until level 90
Summoning
We have talked about the important core stats and things you should know before starting to summon, and so now you are prepared to get some salt or joy with your summonings.
This is the first screen you will be facing when you tap into recruit (summon): there you get the chance-up characters, legend characters, mileage, friendship, class and normal recruits
In the chance-up recruits you will get new chance-up units and custom chance-up (where you can set the 5-star unit and 4-star unit you want from the pool to get a better chance). If there is a collaboration event going on, it will sometimes also be there. The price to recruit is 600 diamonds or premium scrolls (using diamonds gets you mileage and +1 bonus).
This appears in the legend icon, being the legend scrolls as I said and the x10 recruit paying 900 diamonds. You can get legend units (which are not in the same pool of the summonable ones) with a selector, which can be bought with ancient coins (you get those by doing story, quests or arena rewards).
Next you can see the mileage, and as you saw in the screenshots before, you get it by recruiting with diamonds. When you get enough tap into mileage menu and you will see this:
In conclusion, the mileage is pretty much to get the 5-star unit that you want
Friendship summons are 3-4 stars unit that you can summon there. You use class summon to get mercenaries from a specific class (red being warriors, blue being defenders, green is for supports and violet is for mages). Normal summons are for fodders, you will use them to rank up better units.
Mercenary Recruit Probability
Legends: 0.2%
5 stars: 2.25%
4 stars: 13.5%
3 stars: 84.05%
Growth
Runes: they are very important to improve even more the stats of a unit. If you read that a unit benefits a lot of attack damage, you will probably equip an attack rune into that one. A defender will probably benefit more of health/defence runes. Supports and mages are special cases. You have to read what benefits them more since some supports will buff even more with defence runes etc.
- Assault: attack damage runes
- Vital: hp runes
- Shield: defense runes
- Fatal: crit rate runes
- Rage: crit damage runes
Runes are obtainable by rune temple in challenge menu or in some quests/events.
Awakening shards: in all games it is probably the same. You have to gather up the awakening shards, and once you get enough, you are able to awaken that unit and unlock their special skill. (And a fancy animation when they attack).
Soul gear: when a unit reaches +9, the only way to skill up again and get the unit to +10 is by using their soul gear. Each unit has 3 different items, each one being only equipable to those units. You obtain them in co-op raids and the soul gear shop.
Companions: mercenaries with companion option surpass the +10 cap of skill up to +15. You obtain them by summoning or fate. (They have their own rate up as well, you can see it in the details of recruitment). Fate means that you get a companion item when you do daily missions, when you feed that unit enough to reach 100% you will receive one copy of that companion. (Only one available by following that method, the rest is up to summoning)
Little tips for gameplay
The best way to start in Brown Dust is to reroll until you get the characters you want. Furthermore, you can search for a detailed tier list (must be updated since they release mercenary really often). Play the story until you unlock “Evil castle”. Focus in those two modes because they are what give you the best rewards besides arena. Since you won’t probably have a really good team for arena until you play the game for some time, just try to climb as much as you can to get weekly rewards (Arena resets on Sundays at 22:00 GMT+01:00)
The best investment for your diamonds should be the legend scrolls promotion that is available every week in the Gift & Pack icon
Try to level up and skill up the mage named “Hell”. Since the rarity of this character is 4 stars and it’s a really good mercenary for PVE and Evil castle.
The best way to reroll is the following one:
You won’t even have to log out, the game itself resets the data.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed and the guide was useful for you, If you want to see more info about mobile games click here
