AFK Journey Returnee Guide

Welcome back to AFK JOURNEY!

This is a guide for players who are checking out the game again after not playing for a while. If you are just starting fresh, check out our beginner's guide below instead.

Beginner guide

Now, if you already know how the base game works, allow us to show what’s new with all the updates over the years!

Upon logging back into the game, you may receive returnee rewards. Those can vary between seasons, but may include rewards such as character resonance boosts or extra free pulls. You may be wondering if your characters are still viable in the current meta. The good news is that many characters released day 1 and during early banners are still relevant, such as:

• 
  Bonnie
  
  Odie
  
  Eironn
  
  Smokey & Meerky
  
  Arden
  
  Parisa
  
  Rowan in AFK Stages;
• 
  Kruger
  
  Reinier
  
  Sinbad in Dream Realm;
• 
  Dionel
  
  Arden
  
  Alsa
  
  Eironn
  
  Odie
  
  Silvina
  
  Igor
  
  Damian
  
  Koko
  
  Hewynn
  
  Rowan
  
  Niru in PVP;

Over the seasons, there have been many new character banners, and the meta has shifted over time, but by slowly pulling the most relevant characters from the latest banners, it is possible to catch up, as it allows us to focus on the best characters, skipping lesser banners entirely.

Check out our wishlist guide for a detailed breakdown of wishlist suggestions and priority:

Wishlist tips

Now, we’ll talk about an important mechanic that keeps the game fresh and introduces exciting new content: Seasons.

AFK Journey’s major update patches are delivered in the form of Seasonal Content, lasting around 4 months each. Seasonal Content is unlocked once you have finished the base game’s story, and reached 240 Resonance Level.

Each season brings major changes to the progression, as well as new game modes and new characters released as a season progresses:

• New Seasonal Levels and Equipment. These levels and equipment levels are added on top of the base levels, and reset at the start of every season;
• Season Milestones;
• New Map and Story content;
• New Characters;
• New Charms and Charm skills;
• New Supreme+ Level 2 skill upgrades, often used as a way of buffing underused characters;
• New Game Modes;
• New Bosses;
• New Events;
• New Seasonal Artifacts;
• New Faction Tiles and Talent Tile effects;
• Seasons also introduce Talent Trials, a type of AFK Stage, and Supreme Arena, a PVP Game Mode, both having Seasonal Talent Tiles, Charms and Artifacts active.

Now, below we’ll provide an explanation for each major new mechanic:

Charms

Charms essentially act as a new equipment system, though with different stat buffs based on which charms you equip.

Charms have 4 Quality Tiers: Elite, Epic, Legendary and Mythic.

When you have at least 3 Elite or higher quality charms equipped, you unlock a charm skill (shown in-game as Quality Bonus), which gets an extra effect at higher quality tiers.

Mythic Charms (Shown in-game as “Magic Charm V”) can be upgraded further, up to V+ and V++ using currency earned through salvaging duplicate charms and through events and stores. Having 3 Mythic charms upgraded to at least V+ earns you an additional bonus shown in-game as “Type Bonus”.

For more information on charm effects, check out our charm guide below

Charms - Season 4

These charms are earned through a gamemode called Dura’s Trials.

Dura’s Trials are stages for farming Seasonal Charms, with a daily rotation. Each stage allows a different selection of characters, with some of them receiving special bonuses, which can make non-meta characters more viable, and rewards players who have a well rounded collection.

Faction Tiles

Faction Tiles, are a new mechanic introduced in Seasonal Game Modes, activating a battlefield effect when you have at least 3 characters of the same faction, creating 1 or 2 special tiles that grant special effects to the characters placed there, and sometimes affecting the rest of the battlefield too. These effects change every season.

This mechanic also introduces a skill tree system, where you level skill nodes to improve these talent tiles, using currency earned through afk stages. The skill trees are divided into 4 Stages, and include a total of 3 major upgrades.

Seasonal Artifacts

Each new season comes with new artifacts, with a much higher level cap than the +10 of regular artifacts, and powerful effects.

For info in the latest Seasonal Artifacts, check out our Artifacts guide below:

Artifacts - Season 4

Supreme+ Level 2 Upgrade

These skill upgrades improve the kit of an older character, in an attempt to buff them back to usability. They use a special currency called Shadow Essence, which is earned through Season Milestones progress.

Season Milestones

Season Milestones are a new reward track introduced with Seasonal content. In this reward track, you complete Season Quests to earn Points that grant Season Milestone Rewards. Initially, most of the rewards are time gated, but this limit is slowly lifted as the season progresses.

End of Season Rewards

At the end of the season, you get awarded extra rewards based on your final Season Resonance Level, Season Equipment, Artifacts and Magic Charms.

Dream Realm, is the main rotating boss gamemode, where you aim to build a team to deal the most damage to the boss, with ranking-based rewards.

We can roughly divide Dream Realm into Season and Pre-Season content.

Pre-Season Dream Realm

Initially, the boss selection is quite limited, and features the first bosses introduced into the game, Skyclops, King Croaker, Necrodrakon and Snow Stomper, each introducing a basic teambuilding restriction to build a team around.

• Skyclops introduces a powerful AOE attack that kills any team without enough survivability built in, such as Koko, and also favours true damage carries due to his rotating Physical and Magical defense buffs.
• King Croaker introduces an instant kill attack, originally making Thoran the meta character to get around this, but over time characters such as Phraesto or Elijah and Lailah with multiple bodies also became relevant.
• Necrodrakon introduces a mechanic that punishes characters for standing still, favouring high mobility characters such as Sinbad, Temesia, Vala or Korin.
• Snow Stomper introduces a mechanic that makes it difficult to use ultimates, making characters that don’t rely on ultimates, or that can effectively space ultimates out, more relevant, such as Mikola, Sinbad, Sonja, Harak or Shemira.

Season Dream Realm

Upon unlocking Season content, that amount is doubled, new bosses are added and some bosses are rotated out.

As players advance through different difficulties each week for each boss, the best teams shift, eventually settling into a meta that generally favours HP% damage in the final difficulty, Endless, due to incredibly high boss defenses.

For specific teams for each boss, please check out our Dream Realm guides below:

Necrodrakon

Nocturne Judicator

Sigmund

Crazed Shellbrute

Plague Creeper

Illucia

Thalassa

Crystal Beetle

Supreme Arena is similar to Arena as far as awarding ranking-based rewards go. It is a 3vs3, multiple team PVP mode, where each player makes 3 teams do defend with, and 3 teams to attack another player with.

Season Features (Artifacts, Talents and Season Tiles) are all active in this mode.

For team suggestions for this gamemode, please check out our Supreme Arena team guide below - updated weekly.

Best Supreme Arena Teams