I have found Dungeon Defenders to be a very addicting game, but one of its big issues is the fact that a lot of useful info is hidden and must be discovered through trial-and-error. The game itself is especially keen to obscure a lot of the statistical information that might be useful for both a beginner and a die-hard player. Hopefully, this guide makes a few things clearer by outlining a few basics and negating the need for guesswork and experimentation.

I have also included a few basic suggestions on strategy and hero builds to help newer players. The guide is written in standard FAQ form with questions followed by answers and a short section of general tips at the end.

Many hotkeys aren’t even listed in the options menu, so it’s best to mention a few.

• G starts the next wave
  
• H hides the HUD
  
• TAB enables in-game chat
  
• F1 shows the chat log
  
• U brings up the trade window
  
• E (and F, as well as +/-) cycles through stacked defenses when upgrading or selling
  
• X swaps weapons (Jester and Series EV heroes only)
  
• ALT-clicking on hero portraits on the hero selection screen swaps their positions
  
• Hovering a mouse over an item in your item box and clicking L locks / unlocks the item
  
• When assigning stat points to your hero, holding CTRL and clicking on a stat invests 100 points, whereas SHIFT-clicking invests 5 points; right-clicking on a stat removes assigned stat points.

Generally speaking, there are two types of heroes in Dungeon Defenders – builders and DPS heroes. Builders are used to place defenses during the build phase and DPS heroes are used to fight enemies during the combat phase. When you’re just starting out, you’ll likely be using the same hero for both roles, but as you progress further into the game and play on higher difficulties, you’ll likely be needing multiple builders and possibly more than one DPS hero.

The stats for builders should be focused mainly on defense damage. When you’re still starting out, it’s best to spread your builder stats fairly evenly between defense health, damage, attack rate and range, because the first handful of points tend to provide a very notable benefit. However, as you progress further into the game, the damage stat begins to take priority. When your builder's average stats reach somewhere around the 1000 mark, it’s best to respec your hero and focus solely on damage.

The reasoning is simple. The enemies on nightmare difficulty have a huge amount of health and you need to bring them down quickly before they can reach your defenses. Most nightmare builds use self-healing minion walls to keep enemies away from your actual towers, so the towers should never be hit, which makes their health less important. Defense attack rate and range also hit diminishing returns pretty hard by the 1000 mark, which means that improving those stats further won’t be as beneficial as improving damage, because damage scales very well throughout the game.

The exceptions to the "always focus on damage" rule would be the Summoner, who needs a decent bit of health for his minions to be able to funcion well as a minion wall, and the Monk, who needs around 2000+ range for his auras, because aura radius is heavily reduced in nightmare difficulty.

The stats for DPS heroes should once again be focused exclusively on damage. You only need enough health to reliably survive against enemies. High resists also help out a great deal in that regard. Hero speed caps out at 100, so you don’t need to put any points there, because you’ll eventually get those 100 points from a few random pieces of gear anyway. Hero cast rate (upgrade and repair speed) is also not important for your main DPS heroes, as long as you have a separate hero (usually a Jester) for upgrading your defenses during the first few waves and then switching to your main DPS hero for the more difficult waves.

As for hero abilities, the most common DPS heroes are Monk with his Hero Boost, Huntress/Ranger with their Piercing Shot and Barbarian with his Hawk Stance, so those are the abilities you need to focus on when choosing your gear. Anything that improves the stats of those abilities is very welcome, although you don’t need to put any actual stat points into those when upgrading your gear or leveling up your hero, because you get better returns from simply improving your hero damage.


The damage and health of each defense (tower, aura, minion or trap) increase in a linear fashion:

• Each upgrade increases defense health by 20%.
  
• Each upgrade increases defense damage by 10%.

A fully upgraded defense (at three stars) therefore has about 100% more health and 50% more damage compared to the unupgraded version.

The attack speed and range usually hit diminishing returns fairly quickly, meaning that if your hero's stats are high enough, you will barely see any improvement to range and attack rate when upgrading defenses. The cost for each upgrade level scales exponentially (100, 200, 400, 700 and 1220 mana), while the benefit remains the same.


Crystal skins are purely cosmetic and don't affect the game in any way. You unlock new skins by earning certain achievements. You can change the skin of your crystals by clicking the Edit Crystal button on the hero selection screen before starting a new game.


Costumes are mainly just cosmetic and don't affect hero stats, but there are a few exceptions. Some costumes make heroes slower in exchange for increasing their health (and in rare cases, damage). The more extra health a costume gives, the higher the speed penalty. The most notable are the Legendary and Super Legendary costumes earned as rewards for beating the Crystalline Dimension with certain hero classes. Consult pew pew pew’s DPS hero guide for a nice comparison table.

It’s also worth noting that the female versions of the main heroes (Adept, Countess, Huntress and Initiate) are faster but have less health, so they're better as builders but worse as DPS heroes compared to their male counterparts (Apprentice, Squire, Ranger and Monk).


Each hero has a different base speed that can be improved by the Hero Speed stat, which caps out at 100. This means that there is no point in improving Hero Speed beyond that, as there’s absolutely no difference between 100 and 5000 hero speed. Having maximum hero speed makes your hero run exactly twice as fast compared to a hero speed of 0. There are a few unique pets that can further modify hero speed:

• Skeleton on Treadmill: ~10% increase
  
• Turtle on Treadmill: ~25% increase
  
• Diamond: ~40% increase
  
• Pet Rock: hero speed always set to 0

The hero with the fastest base hero speed is the Jester. You can easily compare hero speed by running from one end of the Throne Room map to another and clocking the time. This is the order of heroes from fastest to slowest:

Jester – Adept – Initiate – Huntress / Series EV – Monk / Countess / Summoner – Apprentice – Ranger – Squire / Barbarian

This is explained very well in the illustrated beginner guide found HERE[www.dungeondefenders.com]. For an example of a typical build that could be applied to virtually any map on any difficulty, the basics are as follows:

The triple aura stack: Ensnare, Electric and Strength Drain auras covering all choke points.

Strength Drain auras remove elemental resistances, so that the other two auras could affect all enemies. It also lowers enemy damage output by a significant percentage, plus it removes their elemental damage, which makes enemies even weaker. It should be noted that Strength Drain auras deplete incredibly fast and require constant maintenance, especially if your builder has low stats.

Electric auras can kill virtually anything (except ogres) all by themselves, so you don’t have to worry about goblins, orcs, archers, etc. These auras pretty much always have the highest kill count compared to other defenses by the end of the map.

Ensnare auras drastically slow enemy movement. This means that most enemies die in Electric auras before even reaching your other defenses.

The minion wall: Archers, mages and spiders lined up on a Buff Beam blocking the choke points.

Far superior to barricades or even physical beams, the minion wall is a great roadblock for stopping any enemy. However, make sure there are no gaps in the wall – if you can walk through, enemies can as well. You can always move minions around as a Summoner in Overlord Mode to shore up the gaps. So, what’s so great about minion walls?

Firstly and most importantly, they're completely self-healing thanks to the mages. This allows minion walls to withstand ogre assaults all by themselves, where other defenses would need constant repair.
Secondly, minions can’t be pushed out of position by charging sharken. If you’ve ever had to deal with sharken, you know the frustration they can cause to static defenses.
Thirdly, the minions cover a 360-degree arc, which means they can hit enemies in any direction. This includes flying enemies.
Fourthly, they use a separate resource – minion units. This saves up a huge amount of defense units which you can then use for building other defenses.
Fifthly, the spiders are invaluable for dealing with ogres, because webbed enemies take double damage from all attacks and therefore die twice as fast.

The buff beams especially make your minion walls much more powerful, as well as increase their survivability. The combination of well-upgraded buff beams and Strength Drain auras can reduce all incoming damage by a significant amount.

The extra DPS: Harpoon Turrets or Fireball Towers placed behind minion walls to draw the attention of ogres.

In terms of the cost-to-effectiveness ratio, these two are the best towers, bar none.

The harpoon turret is usually straight-up better in comparison to the fireball tower, but also costs an extra defense unit. The main reason for using these towers is to draw aggro from ogres, who often attempt to reach the towers even if a minion wall is blocking their way. This results in them standing in front of your minion wall and staring at the turret, occasionally throwing a poison projectile, but otherwise doing nothing until finally getting killed. These towers can significantly reduce the pressure on your minion walls, because the ogres usually aren’t smart enough to attack the minions while trying to reach the towers in vain.

The added safety: Gas Traps and Reflection Beams to round up the build.

Whenever you have extra defense units left over, these two are the best choices to spend them on.

Although gas traps don’t affect ogres, they can help clog choke points and buy valuable time for your defenses to whittle down the enemies. While these traps can’t be triggered by flying enemies, they will still affect them if triggered by another enemy. This is very effective against djinns, as it helps protect your defenses from being unsummoned.

Reflection beams stop literally everything from archer arrows to ogre poison projectiles, goblin copter missiles, fireballs and spider webs. This prevents your minion walls from getting pummeled at a distance and allows you to safely sit behind the reflection beam and upgrade / repair defenses when needed, without some random ranged attack hitting you.


Yes. Not every hero gains the same benefit for the same amount of stat points spent. Here's some general info about the four main hero stats:

Health. Each hero gets notably different returns for each point spent on hero health. The health increase is also not linear. For example, you get more health for the first 100 points of hero health than you would for going from 1000 health to 1100. For comparison’s sake, here are the stats for all the hero classes with 1000 stat points put into hero health:


Hero health is also multiplied on nightmare difficulty. Squire, Countess, Barbarian and Jester have their health multiplied by 5,28. Each other class has their health multiplied by 7,75.

Damage. Like health, hero damage scales very differently for all classes. For example, the Huntress, Ranger, Series EV and Jester can all use the same Heavy Crossbow, but even if all four heroes have identical Hero Damage, the resulting damage will be different. I’ve listed the exact percentages in my in-depth weapon guide, found HERE.

Overall hero damage is also reduced by 84,5% on nightmare difficulty, regardless of hero class.

Hero Speed. Look up the answer to the question "Who’s the fastest hero in the game?"

Hero Cast Rate. The Jester is the fastest builder / upgrader in the game, followed by the Adept and Initiate. The Summoner is by far the slowest, as anyone who's ever attempted to summon minions during the combat phase will surely attest to. To be honest, this stat doesn't really matter too much, because upgrading is fairly quick even with a few hundred stat points, especially on nightmare difficulty.


Squire
Tower health increased by 62,5%, damage increased by 62,5%

Apprentice
Tower health increased by 62,5%, damage increased by 62,5%

Huntress
Number of trap charges reduced by 25%, damage increased by 35%

Monk
Aura health reduced by 15%, range reduced by 30%, electric aura damage increased by 12,5%

Summoner
Minion health increased by 62,5%, damage increased by 225% (!)

Series EV
Buff beam multipliers unchanged, physical wall health increased by 62,5%

Hardcore Mode. If killed, the player does not respawn during the current wave and has to wait until the end of the combat phase. Even after dying, the player can still continue playing the map if the defenses and/or other players manage to protect the crystals and kill all enemies in the wave. The benefits of hardcore mode are a 45% bonus to the XP gained for beating each wave and greatly improved quality of item drops and map rewards. The 45% XP bonus applies both to the wave-completion XP and the time bonus XP, but not to XP gained for killing enemies.

Mix Mode. Can be used only for survival maps. It notably improves the quality of item drops, but doesn’t affect map rewards. These are the other differences between normal and mix mode:

• The monster spawns in each wave are random. With mix mode, you can encounter dark elf mages on wave 1 of The Deeper Well, for example.
  
• Mix mode adds spiders to all regular spawn points. Wyverns can also appear alongside other enemies from regular spawn points on maps where wyvern spawns are otherwise possible.
  
• Skeletons can appear as individual enemies and resurrect themselves twice if killed.
  
• In regular survival mode, the number and composition of monsters in every spawn point is fixed, but in mix mode, each individual spawn point has a wildly different number and composition of enemies.
  
• The total number of enemies in each wave also varies. Mix mode may occasionally have less enemies per wave than regular survival mode. However, the number of enemies is usually about 10-20% greater.

Playing the Lab Assault challenge is the single best thing you can do for acquiring gear that will help you beat all the harder maps and challenges on nightmare difficulty. There are several maps that can offer better weapons and pets, but in terms of the effort and time required for a decent return of investment, Lab Assault is second to none. I’ve written an in-depth guide regarding this map, which can be found HERE.


For a new player, upgrading items may seem far too costly and pointless. However, if you want to have powerful endgame gear, you often need to spend a few billion mana on upgrading each individual item. Yep, billions and billions of mana for upgrading a full set of equipment, including armor, weapons and pets. Let's talk a bit about the reasons for upgrading, shall we?

First tip, turn on "pro mode" on the hero screen when upgrading items. It's ridiculously cumbersome to upgrade anything with the "invest" button.

Armor

Armor is upgraded primarily for increasing the resistances of your DPS heroes. There's a great Steam guide written by sniffy and wat that describes the optimal method very well. The guide can be found HERE. To sum it up, your hero can have at most 90% of each resistance, but nightmare difficulty reduces all your resists by 45%. You therefore need 164% to max out any resistance on nightmare difficulty. In other words, you need an average of 41% resistance on each of the four armor pieces. Maxed resists (at least generic damage resist and to a lesser extent, fire resist) are vital for surviving nightmare as a DPS hero.

You can also upgrade the defense stats of your builders (usually defense damage), but at a certain point, it becomes too costly to spend millions of mana just for a single extra stat point. It really depends on how much mana you’re willing to spend for a few extra points.

Weapons

Weapons are basically upgraded for base damage and nothing else. This is where most of your collected mana will likely end up going. I’ve written a bit more in-depth about upgrading weapons in my weapon guide.

Accessories

Never ever upgrade these. You only get a single stat point per upgrade and the cost of each upgrade scales ridiculously fast. It’s just not worth it.

Pets

Similar to ranged weapons, you’ll want to always max out attack rate and extra projectiles (if any). Everything else into damage!

Upgrade costs

The cost for upgrading items scales exponentially fast. While the upgrade cost of lower-quality equipment is cheaper compared to higher-quality ones (mythical and above), you won't likely be doing much upgrading before mythical gear anyway. For mythical-level (and higher) gear, the total upgrade costs are as follows:

Armor and weapons


Pets


Mega Chicken


Accessories

There’s a very simple method for leveling up your heroes – playing the Tavern Defense map on pure strategy mode on nightmare difficulty. You first need to beat Tavern Defense on nightmare to unlock pure strategy mode, but once you do it, you’ll be able to level up your heroes ridiculously fast.

One Tavern Defense pure strategy run from wave 10 to 25 takes about 30-35 minutes, depending on how much time you need to set up defenses and upgrade them. If you have high builder stats, you can pretty much AFK the entire map after the first couple of waves. By using a controller emulator, you can level up four characters at once. The amount of experience is also higher with multiple heroes.

When running TD solo, the hero will get about 30 million XP from waves 10-25.
When running TD with four heroes, each will get about 36 million XP from waves 10-25.

There's no point in playing the map past wave 25, because the number of enemies starts increasing rapidly after that and it's much better to just restart from wave 10, because the later waves take too long to complete. Furthermore, the XP gained per wave actually starts decreasing in later waves. The "sweet spot" is between waves 11-19, where each wave gives about 2,5 million XP. By wave 25, the XP gain is reduced to 2,3 million per wave. Plus, the Kobold pet rewards from nightmare pure strategy are infinitely worse than insane hardcore survival ones.

By the way, if you’ve never played pure strategy before, here are the main differences between pure strategy and survival:

• Your hero can’t participate in combat – you can’t attack, your pets can’t attack and you can’t use abilites or repair / build defenses during the combat phase. Basically, the only things you can do is upgrade defenses and pick up / drop mana.
  
• Your hero is invulnerable – you can’t take damage, enemies won’t attack you and you’ll be able to clip through your defenses.
  
• There are no ogres, djinn, sharken or goblin copters – each wave basically consists of a large amount of cannon fodder.
  
• The item drops and map rewards are godawful – you’ll be lucky to see a handful of mythical items with horrible stats even on later waves.
  
• Enemies have no elemental immunities – which means Strength Drain Auras are not needed.
  
• The number of enemies per wave does not increase when more heroes join the game.

You’ll ideally want to start on wave 10, so you’d have enough mana to get all your defenses down immediately. This is the setup: BUILD[ddplanner.com].

All you need to do is upgrade your defenses to the point where they can hold up throughout each wave and you’re done. You can pull up a movie on a laptop and watch it while hitting G every so often to trigger the next wave. Any repairs that you need to do between waves (if any) can be done with a Summoner in Overlord Mode in a matter of seconds. The minions are there to draw out the dark elf warriors, who otherwise won't leave the spawn point if there are no physical defenses to attack. You don't actually need any defenses at the southern crystal, but it might be worth it to place something there in case a few orcs somehow manage slip through.


Tower buff beams are virtually mandatory for beating the harder maps on nightmare difficulty. Despite their name, however, tower buff beams also affect things like traps, auras and minions. Here's how:

Resistance boost: a multiplier to damage reduction (a multiplier of 1,5 decreases damage taken by 33%, a multiplier of 2 decreases damage taken by 50%, etc). Does not affect auras and traps.
Damage boost: a multiplier to the base damage of the defense (a multiplier of 2 increases the base damage by 100%)
Range boost: a multiplier to the effective range of the defense (a multiplier of 1,5 increases range by 50%)
Attack rate boost: a multiplier to the attack rate of the defense (a multiplier of 1,25 increases attack rate by 25%)

Buff beams are especially useful for increasing the effective range of your auras and traps, as well as for boosting the survivability of your minion walls (especially in conjunction with Strength Drain Aura).


There’s a great guide by wat that describes the concept of minion stacking and it can be found HERE. Basically, as long as you don’t move your mouse when summoning a minion, you can summon another minion directly on top of the first one. You can repeat this as many times as you like. This makes it harder to upgrade each individual minion, but can be useful in some situations. You can also move minions around in Overlord Mode, which allows them to stand much closer to each other compared to simply placing them down.


If you switch to another hero, any defenses you summoned have their base damage reduced by 25%. For example, building a Harpoon Turret with 600 base damage and switching to another hero for the combat phase results in the turret having 450 base damage instead. Other stats (health, range and attack rate) are not affected.


I kindly direct you towards my weapon guide HERE, which discusses this question in-depth. I’ve done my best to explain why certain weapons are good and others aren’t. If you simply want to skip ahead and see which weapons are suggested for each class, there’s also pew pew pew’s guide on DPS heroes which has some very thorough statistics regarding the best weapons for all hero classes.

Each armor piece has a name consisting of four parts. These are, in order:

Quality. This indicates the item's overall quality in terms of possible stats and the number of potential upgrades. Lower-quality items will usually have weaker stats and less upgrades, whereas higher-quality items tend to have higher stats and more upgrades. Because items are generated randomly, a higher-quality item can sometimes have worse stats and less upgrades than a lower-quality one, but as a rule of thumb, higher quality always means better items.

The possible item qualities are:


The number of potential upgrades, the maximum upgrade cap for hero stats and the set bonus provided by that armor all increase with quality. Here are examples of the high-end quality scale:


Regardless of armor quality, each stat can only have a starting value as high as 330 on any piece of armor. For example, a Mythical helm may spawn with +284 hero damage (out of a possible 330), which you may then upgrade to 360 if the item has enough upgrade levels. If you have the set bonus as well, the value becomes 468 instead of 360.

There are also Ultimate+ and Ultimate++ quality armor pieces in the game, but these are so rare that I’ve only encountered one of these in over 800 hours of play, so there’s no way to reliably compare the stats of those.

Damage Reduction. This shows the armor's elemental resistances. In addition to generic resistance, each armor can have up to three elemental resistances:

• Enchanted: armor has all three elemental resistances, all of them positive
  
• Lucky: armor either has two positive elemental resistances and one negative, or only a single (positive) elemental resistance
  
• Unlucky: armor either has one positive elemental resistance and two negative, or only a single (negative) elemental resistance; or has two (negative) elemental resistances; or has three (negative) elemental resistances
  
• Blessed: armor has only two elemental resistances, both positive; due to the lack of a third resistance, it's the worst possible type, as negative resists can still be upgraded into positives, but a missing resistance is a major drawback

The generic resistance can spawn as either positive or negative, regardless of the name of the armor. If an item has none of the above names, it either has one positive and one negative elemental resistance, or no elemental resistances at all. Note that having a hero with negative overall resistances doesn't increase the damage taken.

Class. There are five different classes of armor in the game - leather, chain, mail, plate and pristine. The armor class does not affect its quality in any way. Its only purpose is to divide armor for the set bonus.

Type. There are four types of armor in the game - helm, gloves, boots and chest. You need to wear all four to get the set bonus for each individual piece. The armor is not visibly displayed on your hero. Only accessories show up on the actual in-game character model.


If all four of your armor pieces match – all leather, all chain, etc – each piece gets a large bonus to all of its stats.

This set bonus applies to each individual piece depending on its quality. Items lower than mythical quality (up to godly) can be mixed together, but mythical and higher quality items can only be mixed with each other (godly items become obsolete fairly quickly anyway). You know when the set bonus is active by the blue outline around each armor piece in the hero info screen. The set bonuses are:


Examples:

1) You are wearing full leather armor - epic helm, legendary boots, godly gloves and mythical chest. None of the items gets the set bonus, because mythical items can't be mixed with lower-quality items.
2) You are wearing all-mythical armor - leather helm, leather boots, leather gloves and plate chest. None of the items gets the set bonus, because all items must be of the same class.
3) You are wearing a mythical leather helm, mythical leather boots and mythical leather gloves. None of the items gets the set bonus, because you need a full set of all four armor pieces.
4) You are wearing mythical plate helm, mythical plate boots, transcendent plate gloves and ultimate plate chest, each with base +100 hero damage. The set bonus applies in this case, because all items are mythical or higher and of the same class. The helm and boots get a +30% bonus to all their stats, so the hero damage on both pieces becomes +130. The gloves get a +33% bonus, so its hero damage becomes +133. The chestpiece gets a 40% bonus, so its hero damage becomes +140.

There are generally three types of pets: attacking pets, builder pets and unique pets. Pets hover around your hero and can’t be damaged by enemies. Each hero can use a single pet, with the exception of the Summoner, who can use two. Pets are earned by reaching a certain wave on a survival or pure strategy map (usually wave 15) or by completing the final wave of a survival or pure strategy map. Pets can also be granted as random rewards for completing certain campaign or challenge maps (such as Akatiti Jungle, Lab Assault, etc).

Attacking pets

These pets automatically attack any nearby enemies. Pets can be upgraded much like weapons and they also provide extra hero stats. The pet’s damage is further improved by the Hero Damage stat, as long as the pet is of mythical quality or higher. The damage scaling for pets is different for each hero. Each pet also has a hidden damage modifier, regardless of their quality:

Elemental pets (Dragon, Griffon, Serpent): +50%
Melee pets (Tiger, Steam Robot): +25%
Other pets (Hawk, Hamster, Laser Robot): 0%
Shards DLC pets (Shroomite, Donkey, Seahorse): +100%

Some pets also have unique damage modifiers:

Goblin Cupid: -15%
Djinnlet: -20% (damage penalty is reduced with higher Hero Damage)
The four Animi: -35% (damage penalty is reduced with higher Hero Damage)
Cowboy Monkey: exponential multiplier
Mega Chicken: +150%, plus an exponential multiplier

By far the strongest attacking pet is the Mega Chicken. It has both melee and ranged attacks and its damage scales far quicker than any other pet in the game. The Mega Chicken is awarded for completing the Tinkerer’s Lab on survival or pure strategy mode by beating all 35 waves. For a great comparison guide for DPS pets, take a look at pew pew pew's pet guide, found HERE.

Unique pets

These pets can’t attack, but instead provide a unique benefit to the hero. Their efficiency is also not dependent on Hero Damage stat. The three most useful pets of this kind are:

Propeller Cat

Increases the base and elemental weapon damage of nearby heroes (yourself included) and the damage output of other pets. Awarded for reaching wave 25 on Sky City survival or pure strategy mode.


Boost intensity can be upgraded once per 3 levels, effective range once per 5 levels (caps at 90), and the number of affected heroes once per 30 levels (caps at 4).

Genie

Gives a set amount of mana to your hero each time you damage an enemy. This ability can only trigger after short intervals (about 3 seconds). Awarded for reaching wave 15 on Hall of Court or Tavern Defense survival or pure strategy mode. Can also be earned as a random map reward. For a more in-depth description of the Genie and its uses, check out THIS[guidescroll.com] guide.

Fairy

Periodically heals your hero and nearby allies. Especially useful for difficult boss fights on hardcore mode, most notably the Old One in the Crystalline Dimension. The healing effectiveness of the Fairy is increased by 285% on nightmare difficulty. Awarded for reaching wave 15 on Royal Gardens survival or pure strategy mode. Can also be earned as a random map reward.

Builder pets

These pets can’t attack and have no unique abilities, but tend to spawn with much higher hero stats than all other pet types, making them ideal for builder heroes, who don’t really see combat anyway. These pets are generally awarded for completing the final wave on a survival or pure strategy map.

Turtle / Giraffe / Kobold / Skeleton on Treadmill

Giraffes are awarded for completing nearly any survival or pure strategy mode and can have hero stats overcapped at 400.
Kobolds are awarded for completing Tavern Defense and Akatiti Jungle survival or pure strategy mode and can have hero stats overcapped at 600.
Skeletons are awarded for completing Winter Wonderland survival or pure strategy mode and can have hero stats overcapped at 600. They also provide a small speed boost to the hero.
Turtles are awarded for using the "Konami code" easter egg in Akatiti Jungle campaign mode and completing the map. They can have hero stats overcapped at 400 and provide a decent speed boost to the hero.

Pet Rock

Awarded for completing Talay Mining Complex survival or pure strategy mode. It can have hero stats overcapped at 600, but reduces hero movement speed to 0.

Diamond

Awarded for collecting 88 coal. You earn 1 coal each time you complete the Winter Wonderland or Silent Night map on nightmare difficulty. The Diamond can have hero stats overcapped at 800 and provides a large speed boost to the hero. Insanely difficult to acquire.

• It’s always better to use reflection beams that cost only 1DU, because two 1DU beams can cover a wider area than a single 3DU reflection beam.
  
• Enemies and chests only drop weapons that your hero can use. If you play as a Monk during the combat phase, only Monk weapons will drop. The relative number of weapon and armor drops is roughly equal for all classes, with two notable exceptions. Since the Jester can use every weapon in the game, weapon drops are much more common than armor drops when playing as a Jester. The Summoner can’t use any weapons, so only armor will drop when playing as a Summoner. The latter class is especially useful when attempting to farm armor on survival maps.
  
• If you want to compare upgraded stats for weapons, pets, etc, but are unwilling to spend a ton of mana upgrading everything, simply import your ranked profile into open mode. This overwrites all previous open data and allows you to experiment with the same heroes and items without affecting your ranked profile. You can always import your ranked profile again to reset the open data whenever you want.
  
• You can use a controller emulator to get extra rewards from maps and powerlevel several heroes at once. The emulator can be found HERE[www.dungeondefenders.com]. It's is easy enough to use. Simply add extra heroes before the final combat phase of the map to get multiple rewards instead of just one. The emulator offers limited control over the extra heroes, allowing you to do little else other than move, jump and attack. It’s still an extremely helpful tool, especially if you’re mostly playing solo.
  
• If you keep attacking enemies while you have the Genie pet equipped, the mana bonus can trigger multiple times and instantly refill your mana. This is known as "Genie swirling" and described very well in the following article HERE[guidescroll.com].
  
• Many enemies can’t actually damage Eternia crystals and instead attempt to either kill the heroes or destroy your defenses. These enemies are spiders, dark elf warriors, airdrop ogres and djinn. The poison projectiles from ogres also can’t damage crystals. The same applies to all boss attacks and evil hero clones.
  
• Winter Wonderland awards the same costumes as the Etherian Holiday Extravaganza challenge. Considering that Winter Wonderland is much easier to complete, it’s a nice alternative if you desperately want that Rudolph costume for your Monk.
  
• You can go over the 600 million mana cap by generating a mana token at the shop. This allows you to store billions of mana in your item box in the form of mana tokens. Selling a token returns 100% of its listed mana value and hardcaps at two billion. This means that you can reach the two billion cap by selling four mana tokens worth 500 million each, for example. This is useful when you intend to spend a lot of mana at once for upgrading items. You can also make mana tokens with a value up to 1 billion by selling several cheaper mana tokens and then generating a mana token worth 1 billion, which is the maximum possible amount for a mana token.
  
• You can use Overlord Mode to summon multiple minions at once, as long as they’re of a different type. For example, you can simultaneously summon an archer, a mage and a spider, all the while upgrading or repairing another defense. Leaving the Overlord Mode will not cause a minion to be canceled mid-summon either.
  
• You can reduce the size of your auras and traps by clicking "-" when placing them. This can be useful for placing auras nearer to enemy spawn points than would otherwise be possible. An alternative would be to remove your gear before placing the auras, so they’d have a smaller radius; then put the gear back on to instantly expand the aura, allowing it to cover areas it normally couldn’t.
  
• The training dummies in the tavern are an excellent way of testing your hero’s damage output. The dummy near the stairs can also be used for testing the damage of your pets, as pets instantly attack it if they’re close enough. There are also dummies on The Deeper Well, which allows you to compare hero damage on insane and nightmare difficulties. You can also summon and upgrade defenses, as well as use hero abilities in the tavern for no mana cost.
  
• The "sell all" button only sells unlocked items in the current folder. Anything in subfolders or parent folders remains untouched. However, there is no way to get back items you’ve sold, so be careful that you don’t accidentally sell anything you actually need.
  
• For a better overall gaming experience, disable options like Auto Show Level Up, Auto Adjust Camera, Camera Shake, and Step Towards Melee Target. Definitely enable Fast Gameplay Menu Transitions and increase the Camera Field of View until you’re comfortable with it. Everything else is pretty much down to preference.
  
• You can reassign hotkeys by accessing the action wheel (middle mouse button), hovering the mouse over a skill and holding down the hotkey (1-0) you wish to assign.
  
• Like mana dropped by enemies during the combat phase, dropped items also disappear over time if too many are on the ground at any given time. However, unlike the items that remain on the ground as you start the next wave, you won’t get any mana from items that disappear during the combat phase. If you want to maximize the mana gained from each wave, grab as many items as you can and sell everything later in the tavern rather than letting them simply disappear.
  
• Items with transcendent quality (or higher) never disappear during the combat phase, so you don’t have to rush in order to reach them in time. They’ll still be there during the following build phase. Transcendent and higher quality items are also always indicated on the minimap with a unique color, even if they are superior to the equipment you’re currently wearing. In other words, they are never "hidden" as green blips on the minimap.

That's about it.

If you're interested in some in-depth guides, feel free to check out the following:

100% Walkthrough Guide
Weapon Guide
Lab Assault Guide

I hope this guide has helped answer a few questions you might have had about the game.

Have fun playing!