Introduction

This article was based on a Guns of Glory submission by Boris Pore, I found very insightful and decided it needed its own place in the guides section for King of Avalon, but please be aware, although most things are identical for King of Avalon and Guns of Glory (with different names), there is no guarantee this is. I have added the posts and replaced the Guns of Glory terms with King of Avalon terms.

Another comment I wanted to make is about the Ice Lord set. Recently it dropped in price, so that you could obtain all 6 designs with the purchase of 80 chests, or about $2,000 USD. In addition they included 45-55 fragments of rare material in each chest, as well as enough crafting materials and steel to be able to produce an entire 6 pc set. Buying 80 chest would give you approximately enough frags for 6 designs, 40 rare materials, and enough steel and other materials to craft. For full Ice Lord you need 84 rare materials, so you're still short 44 pc. But if you already have a full Deathseeker set it can be recycled and give you back 24 rare materials, so you're now only short 20 rare materials. Finally the gold cost of rare materials dropped too, from 100K to 64K. So you "only" need 1.28 million gold to buy the rare materials.

Of course compare that to when Ice Lord first came out. The cost for all 6 designs was much more, I did not pay close attention but I think around $5000 usd (not sure about this number). Also no rare materials were included. And at that time rare materials were 100K gold. You would have had to spend 8.4 million gold!!!!!

Never was Ice Lord an economical way to pay for increasing your stats. On paper it was a 30pt increase in normal stats over Deathseeker (with a smaller increase to troop stats, and no increase at all to damage stats). Crafting and real money requirements were insanely high, it seemed like the type of item only a very high level high spender would buy when they had purchased everything else first. But with the recent price drop, inclusion of rare materials, and the recent introduction of high cost airship parts and new guards, it started to seem like Ice Lord may be worth looking into, and so I did just that. I will explain what I have discovered below.

I bought a few packs of Ice Lord to get an understanding of the crafting requirements for enhancement. So I will discuss that first.

Here are costs for enhancement of Ice Lord (this is per piece, not for the whole set):

• Lvl1: 402,400 steel, 1200 Dragon Essence
• Lvl2: 603,600 steel, 1800 Dragon Essence
• Lvl3: 804,800 steel, 2400 Dragon Essence
• Lvl4: 1,006,000 steel, 3000 Dragon Essence
• Lvl5: 1,207,200 steel, 3600 Dragon Essence

TOTAL: 4,024,000 steel and 12,000 Dragon Essence.

For all 6 pc of armor that becomes: 24,144,000 steel and 72,000 Dragon Essence.

With my forge at lvl 30 and above I get a discount of 15% and up on steel. But the requirements are ridiculous. As a comparison, if I dismantle my Deathseeker lvl5 set, each pc yield approximately 2 mil steel, and exactly 3000 Dragon Essence. So for entire Deathseeker lvl 5 set you get back about 12 mil steel, 18,000 tools. So you need an additional 12mil steel, but the big kicker is the 54K in Dragon Essence you need!!! They are only sold in expedition store at 40 per day, and they have special gold events once in a while where you can win some if you spend exorbitant amounts of money, and of course the shooting gallery but prizes are around 1100 tools, and thats the last prize. The only way to get tools is to use gold, at 75 pc per tool, 54K tools needs 4.05 mil gold!!!

So the idea of getting lvl 5 Ice Lord set again became unrealistic. However that wasn't the only problem, the biggest problem is the way the boosts increase at each level of enhancement, and that will be explained below.

The biggest problem with Ice Lord is the stat boosts themselves. Deathseeker is basically 70% on all single stats that are not damage related, and once enhanced to lvl 5 they go up to 94.5%. Impressive! Triple stats (troop att/def/health) are impressive as well with the lvl 5 set resonance, you get troop attack and defense at 119.25% (74.25% plus 45%). and troop health of 126% (81 + 45). Ice Lord looks like Deathseeker lvl 5 to begin with. All single stats that are not damage related start at 100%. Damage and damage received are identical to Deathseeker, so no advantage there. Troop attack is 75% compared to Deathseeker 55% (I don't include set resonance for these since they increase at different rates when enhancing). Troop def is 65% to Deathseeker 55%. And troop health is 65% to Deathseeker 60%.

But once I started enhancing my first Ice Lord armor, I learned the awful truth.

• Damage and Damage received stats all increase identically to Deathseeker enhancements, at 5%, 5%, 5%, 10%, 10% for a total of 35% at lvl 5.
• Set resonance enhancement is identical to Deathseeker, +50% at lvl1, 120% at lvl3, 200% at lvl 5.
• The rest of the stats, including the troop stats. all increase only 4% at each enhancement lvl, with no increase. So it's 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, for a total of only 20%. You don't max out at 135% for all those stats, you only max out at 120%.

How does this play out when comparing Deathseeker 5 to Ice Lord 5? For single stats you lose that 30pt advantage you had in the beginning (100 pts over 70 pts), as you now are comparing 120% to 94.5%. Thats a 25.5% increase. Not bad, but worse than the 30 spread you started out with. For troop stats you go from 75% to 90% for attack (remember lvl 5 enhancement is only a factor of 1.2 of original), 65 to 78 for def and for 65 to 82.5 for health. Comparing to Deathseeker 5, for troop attack you have 90% vs 74.5%. The initial 20 pt spread goes down to 15.75pt. Troop defense is 78% vs 74.25%, the initial 10pt spread shrinks to 3.75 pt. The real kicker is Troop Health, as Ice Lord 5 is 82.5% while Deathseeker 5 is 81%. I had to look at several pieces to understand this. This game is so messed up. For the Ice Lord armor it starts at 35% troop health and enhances at a rate of 4% to reach 20% at lvl 5 to yield final stat of 42%. The Ice Lord Helmet starts at 30%, but instead of following the Ice Lord boost scheme, it reverts to the Deathseeker boost scheme, and does 5, 5, 5, 10, 10 for a total of 35% at lvl5, so it gets to 40.5%, this way resulting in a lvl 5 Ice Lord set that is higher than Deathseeker 5. But only by 1.5%.

So Ice Lord lvl 5 is definitely better than Deathseeker lvl 5. In single stats its a 25.5% increase. In troop stats there is a 15% troop attack advantage, but def and health is nominal. Damage is identical. However the Dragon Essence requirements are ridiculous. The real question becomes is Ice Lord lvl 3 better than Deathseeker lvl 5? You need 5400 tools per pc to achieve lvl 3, after recycling Deathseeker 5 (which yields 3000 tools per pc) you need 2400 pr pc, or 14,400 per full set. Thats over 1 million in gold. Not cheap but more manageable than 4 million. You get 112% stats vs 94.5%. For troops stats you take a hit, because you are only getting a set resonance boost of 33% vs Deathseeker's 45%, 12 pt difference. Plus your damage stats are all at +15% while Deathseeker 5 is at +35%. To me it is hard to say, maybe a draw. But given the huge cost to craft the Ice Lord set and then the enormous cost to enhance it only to lvl 3, it seems like it is a big NO!

My advice for other players is to stay away from Ice Lord until it becomes free like Deathseeker did. Maybe another two months. LOL

Closing Thought

I would like to thank Boris Pore to contributing this, great stuff that I would never have been able to figure out without spending big. Reading this I realize that my previous assumptions regarding the enhancement increments of Ice Lord were wrong and had depicted a wrong idea of the attractiveness of purchasing that set, great that has been corrected now.