AFK Journey King Croaker

King Croaker is one of the four available Dream Realm bosses you will encounter in AFK Journey. In this guide we will go over the boss mechanics and the best characters and teams to use against him.

At the start of the battle, King Croaker will designate the player’s closest character as the “Tank” and will keep attacking that character, pausing to attack the Backline with a Ranged AOE attack from time to time, or to cast his Instakill Bubble on the Closest character. This allows us to choose between two different boss movesets, the Melee Tank Moveset and the Ranged Tank Moveset.

• Choosing a Melee Tank will cause the Boss to use his Melee AOE attack, damaging all Frontline attackers, and attack the Tank directly moderately with basic Melee attacks, along with the rest of his moveset,
• Choosing a Ranged Tank will cause the boss to use only his basic Ranged attack, but he will use it twice as often, while also using the rest of his moveset except for melee attacks, unless the Ranged Tank dies.

King Croaker takes about 30-34 actions in the span of 90 seconds (the full length of the battle - if you survive through all of it that is). Here's a list of all possible actions:

Melee Tank Moveset

• Melee attack on Tank (up to 2 times per cycle)
• Ranged attack (up to 2 times per cycle – only if Melee Tank is far from the boss)
• Ranged AOE attack on area with most enemies, usually Backline (9x)
• Melee AOE knockback + stun attack on Frontline (6x)
• Instakill Bubble cast on Closest character (3x)

Ranged Tank Moveset

• Melee attack (up to 2 times per cycle – only if Ranged Tank is dead.)
• Ranged attack on Tank (up to 4 times per cycle)
• Ranged AOE attack on area with most enemies, usually Backline (9x)
• Melee AOE knockback + stun attack on Frontline (only if Ranged Tank is dead.)
• Instakill Bubble cast on Closest character (3x)

In all stages of the game, the number 1 choice of tank here will be

Thoran, because he can eat all the Instakill Bubble attacks by himself with his EX Weapon at Mythic rarity. He is the only one in the game who can bypass this boss ability.

You will want constant healing, especially for your Backline in order to deal with the Ranged AOE attacks, which will quickly wipe out your entire Backline in the early stages of the game. This stage does not feature skill channeling interruption, so

Smokey & Meerky is king here as they are able to keep buffing the team throughout the entire fight with little trouble while also healing the Backline.

For this boss, you will need:

• Melee Tank/Ranged Tank (choose one)
• Bubble Tech
• DPS Carry
• Buffer
• Debuffer
• Healer

Do try to keep faction bonuses in mind when putting together a team, with at least 3 characters of the same faction. You get more value the more support roles you can condense into a single character.

Realistically speaking, your meta team will depend on your specific box, and your account focus, so use your highest rarity DPS carry characters, along with whoever can best boost their damage. Try running Dual/Triple carry, as currently there is no way to boost a Hypercarry’s damage high enough to make it worth running only one. Keep faction bonus in mind but don’t run suboptimal characters just to force it.

Still, below you can find a few example teams.

Team #1 - Dual Carry – Melee Tank

Marilee and

Odie are the dps carries, and

Thoran acts as both the Bubble Tech and Melee Tank here.

Kruger can be replaced with

Reinier for best results since his debuff benefits Odie’s magic dmg and Marilee’s true dmg attacks.

Artifact used: Starshard Spell.

Team #2 - Dual Carry – Ranged Tank

This variant uses

Reinier instead of Kruger and is the optimal choice if you want to make full use of characters who deal True Damage and Magic Damage and remain competitive in dream realm leaderboards. But you need a minimum of Mythic+ to get the debuff to work, so the example on the picture above (showing one of the possible positioning configurations) would not work at low dupes.

Artifact used: Starshard Spell.