I have been using Draco the serpent king for DPS since he came out. He is just so good. But lately I have been looking and looking for anyone else to use instead. I have tried a bunch of formations, getting gear up and calculating what they would have and all and I can not find anyone else that even comes with in .1% of the DPS I can get out of Draco.

So I am looking for suggestions? Who are other characters that people have built good formations around? Just need somewhere to look, suggestions?

I've been playing around to build my formation around The Exterminator for main DPS. Since he caps much later than others, he is working nicely for me. Especially since his all three of his own legendary gear supports his DPS abilities or a robot formation directly.

Right now Kizlblyp is killing it for me, however before I started on her I was rocking it with the Robbie/Broot combo. With Kizlblyp you need plenty of males, including Billy and with Robbie you just need Broot directly in front of him. And since Robbie is an animal Montana and Boggins will give him a nice buff.

I get a lot of use out of Prince Sal the Merman due to a few different reasons.

1) I have all of his golden legendaries, so his DPS is pretty good by himself.

2) Mr Boggins gives a great buff to animals and doesn't require him to be adjacent, and that buff also gets self-buffed based on the number of human crusaders in the formation, which works well since a lot of other support crusaders I use are human.

3) One of Thunder King's legendaries buffs royal crusaders.

4) One of Sal's legendaries gives a buff based on the number of female crusaders in the formation, and since Mindy the Mime, Gold Panda, Baenarall, and Veronica are all female, that's a pretty great buff from already-useful crusaders.

The DPS formation I use requires almost no "adjacent requirements", which leaves it easy to modify for objectives. I haven't tried an Exterminator formation for the same reason as Teschio - my gear for robot crusaders just is CURAP compared to my currently-used crusaders. Even if an Exterminator build has more potential, I wouldn't be able to actually reach that potential with sub-par gear.

If you cap your heroes easily, Sal becomes much worse than Kiz. I used to use Sal a lot, probably for close to a year, but once I started capping him, he needed to be replaced.

By the way, unless your formation with Sal has a DPS 65k times bigger than with the Exterminator, and you can still instakill when you cap the Exterminator, you should definitely use him: the two heroes have about 200 levels of difference, and 4^8 is 65,536. Yes, level cap makes THAT kind of difference. Good thing you can disenchant those legendaries now, right? :D

Also, if you can cap your DPSer (and I've seen you around long enough that I assume you can), I don't understand why you are using gold finders like Panda: if you cap your heroes without them, they are irrelevant, since gold becomes worthless when you reach the cap...

The benefit of gold finders is speeding up the capping, after that you can switch formation and engage auto pilot again.

The issue with Ilsa is that I have never actually seen her damage increase with "Absorb Evil". Otherwise, she'd be very useful to tack onto a DPS build with Merci. Get to the end of a run with whatever, then throw her into the formation to make use of all the damage the other DPSer got over time. If her "Absorb Evil" skill worked, I'd use her more.

Teschio, that is actually wrong. Idols are based on buffs AND levels. Once you reach the cap, one of those factors stops increasing, and so the gain for the next 100 levels is less than the gain for the first 100 in a new run because the new run will start gaining levels again. Believe me, I've tested it. Going from about 870 to about 1070 (my reasonable stopping point) brought my total up only about 150-200 idols, which is basically tax on the 3500 I was getting before the update when I tested this. Compare that against 200 levels in a new run and it isn't even a contest. Beyond the cap, you're ONLY getting idols from area progression, whereas in a new run, you're getting idols for both area progression AND levels.

I think your confusion is coming from the fact that buffs are percentage-based. Understandably, you are seeing it as "If 100 extra areas gives another 50% buff, then that 50% is an amount based on more levels than you'd have at level 100 in a new run" which seems like it would be true. 50% of 128,000 is very different than 50% of, like, 4000 (by area 100). But the buff is additive, so that extra 50% has lost a lot of it's effect by the time you've hit area 900. It isn't adding 50% to your idols, it is adding 50% to the 450% buff. You're getting 1/9th the buff at that point, which might bring you from 3400 to 3550 (pre-update, since these are numbers I am more used to) for the approximate 60-90 minutes it would take to progress 200 areas, compared to the ~123 that you'd end up having by just area 100 in a new run (with a gold formation). By area 200, that number becomes about 270 idols.

To be clear, I did just test that last part in a new run while being able to sprint to area 100, ergo minimizing the time-buff (which was only 1% at that point). Looked at my reset amount of 8, which was -93.5% because of reset fatigue. If 6.5% = 8, then 100% = 123. By area 200, it was 300 after being buffed by 10%, so the base was about 270.

Im using a Shadow Queen build for DPS, on the later levels. SQ only has 3 abilities that increase her base DPS but she's human, supernatural, Royal and most importantly at the far right of the spectrum. She gets buffed by Reginald (52k% due to lvl 7 cape), Princess (3 legendaries that boost 400, 800 and 400%), Thalia, Pres, Veronica, Pete, Monkey and Bubba. Mindy enforces Reginald and Veronica. Pretty big damage seeing the fact that most DPS legendaries are only lvl 4 or so.

some gold finders are good dps when legendary.
6 nore idols in how much wasted time? not efficient
can i have some of those beets, i like beets