YMMV / Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms

• Accidental Innuendo: Astarion's specialization options are Outflank (Top) and Outflank (Bottom). Considering what he's like in Baldur's Gate III, "Top" and "Bottom" could be taken as something more sexual.
• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: In Baldur's Gate III, Astarion's Vampiric Bite is limited to being used only on living enemies who have blood. In Idle Champions, however, its counterpart, Sanguine Hunger, can be used on any enemy, causing things that should not have blood, like plants, Stone Golems, and enchanted inanimate objects to all spray blood when bitten.
• Broken Base: Season Passes. While locking cosmetic skins behind a paywall is nothing new, locking Feats and (in Season One) a Modron Core behind the same paywall has proven very controversial. Not helped by the fact that the only initial statement of what will become of them after the Season is that they'll eventually be added to the Wild Offer pool, meaning they'll forever be paywalled.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Before a character overhaul and re-balancing, any formation without Barrowin and Strix was considered sub-par by several players, as the former could give the latter a ridiculously high multiplicative stacking buff that dominated enemies with sheer damage. Other formations could not deal as much damage as this. Once Barrowin got nerfed, this mindset all but vanished.
  • At one point there were significantly more differences down specialization paths for core and early event champions (most notably Gromma); rather than a single choice with an obvious result the original choice also affected what level some future upgrades were at, what they were, and what their multiplier was. This got ironed out for a very simple reason: almost no players actually were keeping close enough track of the upgrades they were clicking on to notice the differences were there. Including the players who were writing the guides new players were following to catch up. Eventually it became clear that it didn't matter how much a champion's specialization was buffed if none of the more vocal players ever realized the buffs were there, and champion paths were gradually symmetrized during updates.
  • Shaka seems to be an attempt to avert, or at least downplay this. A new champ from The Running event, he introduced a gameplay mechanic called "A Celestial Puzzle" where four random slots are tagged with a random tag ranging from gender (non-binary count as either), party role, and/or race. The more champions placed in an appropriate slot, the more buff you can get. Compounded with "Feast or Famine" upgrade (extra buff from tagged slots adjacent to Shaka, regardless of being filled correctly or not) and a choice whether to add tagged slots or reroll the random slots, he requires to fiddle with your formation every mission reset to get the most optimal buff, if not the maximum, and not rely on saved formations.
  • Paultin is a common sight in the earlier Trials of Mount Tiamat tiers, due to being one of the best Champions for increasing the amount of Scales of Tiamat you get, while also being weak enough that not having him available for a week isn't going to matter for most players. In the later tiers, Jarlaxle reigns supreme as the best champion in the "Increase Assault Party Damage" category, due to being a Core Champion and therefore easier to iLevel.
• Demonic Spiders: Certain Variants have enemies that have hit-based HP or can instantly kill units, or sometimes both.
  • Armored enemies. These not only require a number of individual hits to go down, said hits will only register if they deal over a certain amount of damage threshold. This means that you cannot rely on your buffers to grind them down at higher levels, as only your DPS will be able to do so, turning a slow-attacking but powerful DPS into a liability. The variant Durable Deep is especially bad with this where every enemy in the level has armored hit-based HP.
  • The Specters in The Haunted Jungle variant. Not only do they need to take a good number of individual hits before going down, they'll also One-Hit Kill your entire front-most row should it reach your party before disappearing, and more than one can appear at a time.
  • The Liar's Night event "Pirate's Night" has the drunken sailor who appears in every non-boss area with one of four abilities. Three of them aren't that bad, but the fourth is a cannon similar to the Pirate Captain's (takes certain amount of individual hits, One-Hit Kill on whoever it shoots) except that it targets a random champion instead of the front-most one, making it even more frustrating if it takes out your primary attacker.
  • Reviving Enemies are normally just Goddamned Bats, but the ones in the "Twilight Twist" variant manage to become Demonic Spiders because of the mechanics of one area of the variant; at level 28 and every 50 levels after that, there's a level where you have to keep progressing forward and putting out fires as you go. In this variant, you will be stonewalled at this level, as you'll eventually have too many undead on you to keep progressing, since there will always be some active undead attacking you and keeping you in place. The only reliable ways found to beat it online are with Viconia's Animate Dead, or Briv with guaranteed 1-, 3-, or 4-skip.^note 2-skip will still land you at level 28, and every 150 levels after that. If you don't have either, your only recourse is to do it in a background party, since the game doesn't take the wall of relentless undead into account in the offline progress calculations.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Before a much-needed Nerf, Barrowin was this. Her Blessed Hammer ability stacked multiplicatively with each other and could stack up to four times^note which means that if one stack gave a 7x buff for example, four stacks would multiply a character's damage by 7^4 = 2401x, and by using a Difficult, but Awesome swapping trick she could stack hammers and boost a Splash Damage DPS (usually Strix) to ridiculously high damage, then allow said DPS to nuke the enemies.
  • Most of the community agrees that any champion that reliably speeds up runs (Deekin, Shandie, Sentry, Briv, Melf) is considered this, as having shorter early game runs allows one to farm for favor far more efficiently.
  • Dungeon Master has the potential to be utterly broken - not only is he exempt from all restrictions (stats, alignment, evergreen/event, etc.), but one of his specializations allows him to bring in another champion that would ordinarily be locked out by restrictions.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Ranged enemies will usually be able to get a shot off in many cases before going down. Those who can target champions behind the front lines such as the skull-throwing flying monkeys in "Flying Monkey Skulls of Doom" are even more irritating. Doubly annoying if they stop just outside the range of a debuff like Strix' Poor Hygiene that relies on them being closer to the formation, meaning they'll take longer to deal with.
  • Reviving Enemies such as all undead in "March of the Undead" and "The Relentless Undead" variants and all Modrons in "The Neverending March" variant. If killed, they stay stunned for a short while before they get back up at full health and resume their attack. The only good news is that a revived mook counts towards level completion/has a second chance to drop level completion items. (Except when they're additional enemies who explicitly don't.)
  • The Nightmare Fuel flaming scarecrows in the "Nightmare Fuel" Liar's Night variant. They appear in every non-boss level, move fast, have segmented health each but don't hurt too much, and what makes them irritating is that one more is added after each encounter with the Masked Man, and you have to fight him around four times per 50 levels while making it to level 125. Thus, you get huge hordes of segmented-health enemies doing chip damage to your tanks in front.
  • Zombie Avren in the "The Clone War" Liar's Night variant. He has segmented hit-based health and once that goes down he revives after a few seconds, and his attack hits at range and can attack any party member. When it hits them, it doesn't hurt too much, but it does increase their attack delay, prolonging the levels further. He also appears in every stage that isn't a boss stage.
  • Doppelganger Vlahnya in the Feast of the Moon variant "Siren's Song". It appears in every non-boss area, stuns random characters while dealing low damage, has four hit-based HP and said hit-based HP can only be damaged by Vlahnya, meaning that Vlahnya has to personally hit it four times. Once it reverts back to a Doppelganger, it's easily dealt with.
  • In the Festival of Fools variant "Persistent Foolishness", some of the Drunken Fools have a large amount of hit-based health and prevent your Champions from attacking normal enemies while they're present. They're not much of a threat, but they grind gameplay to a halt while you deal with them, especially if you don't finish one off before another spawns.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Some of the special bosses have abilities that temporarily stun your heroes, which can get extremely irritating but isn't too dangerous otherwise. Examples include the Huge Queen Spider at the end of The Silken Swamp.
  • Nanny Pu'pu in the Grand Revel will summon a tanky Flesh Golem while she sits at the back casting long-range projectiles, and she has segmented health meaning that she needs to receive around 50 individual hits. If the golem is destroyed, she immediately re-summons it. Make sure you have characters that can target her instead of the Golem, or the fight will take a while at higher levels. (And now that the Golem actually powers up like a normal boss, so it's actually more dangerous in higher zones, the problem goes beyond "will take a while".)
  • The event boss of The Running is a Shielded Core Boss that requires you kill off a number of her minions before you can actually damage her. Meanwhile, she'll be mostly uninterrupted in attacking your characters. What makes this really annoying is that there's a pause in between waves of minions, which only serves to prolong the fight if you can destroy said minions with great ease.
  • The Dual Boss of Flameskull Trenzia and her Flesh Golem in "Hopelessly Lost". Every time Trenzia attacks, she electrifies the floor which hurts all your Champions for rather low damage, but also heals the Flesh Golem by a lot. Depending on who your champs target, this can get very annoying quickly as you need Trenzia to go down first, and she has Armored Hit-based health to boot. The Golem has hit-based health meaning that even after Trenzia goes down, it will take a fair amount of hits before it goes down too.
• Good Bad Bugs: Sadly, such bugs tend to have a finite lifespan.
  • The Milestone Quest requiring you to open chests with gear relating to the Champs of that Season can be completely cheesed by stockpiling Electrum Chests—since Electrum Chests can give gear for any champion, opening a ton at once gives decent odds that at least one will have gear for a Season Champ. Here's the trick—if even one Electrum Chest in 50 (the max you can open at once) drops a piece of gear for a Season Champ, then all 50 chests will count towards the Milestone. This is probably why such a task never appeared again in subsequent seasons.
  • When Nova was tweaked, players discovered that you could "double-dip" The Crew by choosing her second specialization (allows The Crew to apply to Champs 3 slots away at 50% effectiveness), then placing Valentine three slots away and the main DPS two slots away, or vice versa. The DPS would gain both the main The Crew buff plus the one passed on by Valentine's Socialite. This was patched in May 2023.
  • For a long time, during Events, you could open a time gate for a retired champion that was from that Event and gain the ability to purchase their chests via Event Currency for a week. This made it infinitely easier to fully epic retired champions before it finally got patched out in August 2023.
  • Not so much a bug as a design oversight, but for a while there was a strategy known as "Jimothy" that relied on, among other exploits, letting Jim slowly polymorph enough enemies into Abyssal Chickens, which had 10hp and could be instantly popped by click damage, to pass the level. It was one of the few reliable ways to reach the area cap of 2000 for early gold farming. Unfortunately, for Season 5, Jim was tweaked so that Abyssal Chickens no longer have only 10hp, instead having the health of the monster they were before divided by five orders of magnitude, making it much harder to pop enemies in later areas.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Many of Minsc's skins have some sort of matching costume for his giant miniature space hamster, Boo. In the "Boo Costume" skin, they're actually cosplaying each other.
  • Virgil & Kent, a gay couple from Rivals of Waterdeep, have matching Pride parade skins. They also can always be used together as long as one of them qualifies for the variant.
  • Karlach's teddy bear, Clive, shows up twice— once as a piece of equipment, and again as a Familiar.
    Karlach: Clivey baby boo boo boy I love you.
  • Most of Astarion's equipment consists of some of the few things he was permitted to hold onto during his Dark and Troubled Past as a vampire slave, or things he had to steal to survive. However, one item, the Smuggler's Ring, was actually given to him by Tav.
    Astarion: Tav gave this to me and said it would suit me well. They were right.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Festival of Fools event has Nayeli stating that Faerûn's calander has to many festivals and that they could do with losing a few. Starting in 2024, the game will remove 5 events as part of the changes made to them^note unfortunetly for Nayeli, the Festival of Fools isn't one of them.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Barrowin was considered a high-tier scrappy for a very long while thanks to her Blessed Hammer being capable of stacking multiplicatively on another character, giving that character ridiculously high damage for their next attack. After the nerf, she dropped down to the opposite end of the spectrum, being considered one of the lower-tier characters.
  • Delina is considered a low-tier scrappy because she shares a position slot with the much more useful Hitch, who is not only free (obtainable by signing up for the newsletter) but also provides the entire team with extremely useful buffs. As such, she's Overshadowed by Awesome thanks to him. Even after a Balance Buff, she's still considered a poor choice as DPS.
  • Pre-rebalance Arkhan was also considered one of the two worst characters alongside Delina, being inefficient as a tank or damager. After the rebalance that gave him an ability to steal others' Status Buffs, he's now on the opposite end of the trope, being one of the best DPS units in the entire game.
  • Rosie Beestinger is considered to be one of the worst DPS characters in the game, mainly because her damage is far lower than several other DPS characters.
  • Several DPS champions in general fall into this. Besides the aforementioned Delina and Rosie, there are other pure-DPS champions whose damage isn't enough to justify their use — and since a party usually only needs one DPS champion, those with lower overall DPS tend to be thrown to the wayside.
  • Almost everyone in Asharra's seat (Seat 6) except for Asharra herself, Krull, and (sometimes) Shandie counts. Asharra is a core champion (meaning you get her from the beginning) whose DPS can outclass almost every other DPS in the game with her Bond ability, Krull is a massive debuffer that can help both beating a campaign and acquiring gold and divine favor, and Shandie is a mid-end buffer with game speed increase ability (that can basically act as a free potion of speed) that is indispensable in farming the in-game currency. Every other champions in this seats can feel like B+ champions in the S+ seat, even if they are decent buffers like Reya or DPS like Krond, and almost every player will use the aforementioned three champions almost exclusively, barring any campaign or patron restriction.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Delina, for being Low-Tier Letdown. She's outclassed by Hitch, who shares her spot but also provides buffs. Even after a Balance Buff, she's still weak as a DPS champion.
  • Arkhan and Jarlaxle used to be considered this before their Balance Buffs, being heavily outclassed by champions in their spot.
  • The Mad Wizard adventure has the eponymous villain, since the freeplay is extremely good for gem farming runs and that you also fight him three times every 50 levels^note Two of them are fakes. As such, the mad wizard has become sort of a punching bag in the eyes of the community.
• More Popular Spin-Off: While Crusaders of the Lost Idols is still reasonably popular, Idle Champions being a decently expansive adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons means it drew in a much bigger playerbase than Codename Entertainment's self-made IP game, to the point that CNE eventually decided to "sunset" CotLI as a "complete" idle game to focus their efforts on this game.
• Porting Disaster: The mobile and console (Playstation especially) versions are notorious for performance issues that prevent them from being run for extended periods without crashing or freezing, which is pretty counterintuitive for an idle game.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Arkhan. Before a massive overhaul, he was considered one of the worst characters because Nayeli, Gromma and Evelyn could act as better tanks, and his attack damage wasn't all too good. After the overhaul, the HP mechanics for tanking changed, and Arkhan gained a new ability called Usurped Power, which allowed him to "steal" buffs affecting adjacent characters while boosting said buffs on himself. All this allowed him to become a much better attacker and tank, and he's now considered the best DPS character in certain situations thanks to Usurped Power.
  • Zorbu was considered rather lackluster as a 12-slot event champion because he had a great ability in Hunter's Pack that didn't affect himself (even if he had the Dexterity to qualify), and his damage was only so-so. After a Balance Buff, he's no longer this as Hunter's Pack affects him, and the other Fleetswake champion in Black Viper has great DPS, extremely high Dexterity to benefit from it and an ability that lets her benefit from it even more. The Year 1 Champion Update only made him even better, replacing his Favored Enemy with a more generally useful Lifelong Enemies buff.
  • Jarlaxle. His Gold Find multiplier was pathetic compared to Stoki's, Ishi's and Paultin's, and his abilities were counter-intuitive (one required no champion ahead of him, and another required champions near him). After a Balance Buff, his Master of Piracy allowed his Gold Find to shoot through the roof, his basic attack became a Kill Streak attack, and his damage became solid thanks to Master of Disguise.
• That One Boss:
  • Bosses with huge amounts of Armored health such as Frost Giant Wrendor in the Festival Of Fools. Not only do they need several individual hits to go down, the attack needs to deal damage over a threshold otherwise it does nothing. This in turn combined with the enrage timer will easily cause the boss to start plowing through your tanks.
  • Dragon bosses in general, such as the Bronze Dragon boss of the Dragondown event and the Red Dragon boss of Midsummer. These not only have segmented or even armored health, but have several attacks that either hurt a lot on groups of characters or stun.
  • The Pirate Captain boss in "The Lost Heir of Omu" on higher levels. The Pirate Captain is a standard fare boss, but stands there invulnerable until the cannon he comes in with is destroyed. Said cannon takes 30 individual hits to be destroyed, and will One-Hit Kill the front-most champion it shoots. Should that occur because you don't have Strix's Death Ward up or a way to stun the cannon, your DPS will be brought down by a significant margin which will then make the pirate captain who attacks you after that a lot tougher. It's even worse in the "Not Very Charming" variant where you're barred from using characters with 15 or higher charisma, that means you cannot use Ishi or Birdsong whose very fast attack speed and double hit would be effective, or Strix whose Death Ward would be invaluable.
  • The Devourer boss of Midwinter's event, mostly because every 10 seconds (8 in the "More Like the Scream Team" variant) it'll One-Hit Kill one of your champions while healing itself to full, thus greatly decreasing any damage bonuses from them or even making things unwinnable if the champ is your main attacker. Even worse, in the "Utterly Devoured" variant, any champion killed by this is gone for the rest of the adventure. The best way to deal with it is to overlevel your heroes to the point where they can One-Hit Kill it before anyone goes down, since it thankfully has regular HP unlike the cannon.
  • The Adolescent Kraken boss of the Fleetswake event at higher levels is a brutal DPS and attack rate check. The Kraken itself doesn't attack, but it has segmented health (taking 1 damage per hit) and comes with Sea Spawn that continually enter the battle as well as respawning tentacles. Each of the tentacles are very annoying, Stunning Tentacles will stun any heroes hit, Smashing Tentacles hurt a lot, and the worst are the Vampiric Tentacles that will heal the boss for a few HP-segments should they hit. If your characters cannot kill the tentacles and minions quickly, the boss will essentially be able to heal a good bit more than you can damage it.
  • Bailiearyl Tavebent and the Huge Spider Queen in the Brightswords event are a brutal Dual Boss. Both have segmented health, the Spider Queen who is already a Goddamned Boss by itself can stun champions with her webs, and their hordes of minions make it hard to get a hit in on either of them.
  • The Stone Juggernaut in the Tomb of the Nine Gods requires you to have an attacker or two that deals good damage at a fast rate, since it has armored hit-based HP while it keeps advancing towards you and can't be stunned, and deals massive damage to the champ it's attacking.
  • Acererak and the Soulmonger. Firstly, there's several targets such as Acererak, the Soulmonger, the soulmonger tentacles, and the random undead dwarves entering the screen. Acererak himself has armored hit-based HP meaning that you need a champ to hit him over a damage threshold in order to even deal a single point of damage, he needs to be hit several times from them, can stun party members, and has a lightning attack that either deals a set amount of damage or a percent of a character's Max HP, whichever is more. The Soulmonger takes 1 damage from everything and has tentacles that will respawn and hit your characters often.
• That One Level:
  • The Tomb of the Nine Gods, unsurprisingly. You need to beat level 250, and several boss encounters such as the Stone Juggernaut, the three Hags with extremely damaging lightning attacks, or Acererak and the Soulmonger are difficult and/or long, requiring sufficiently leveled characters to beat. The "The Soulmonger Calls" variant is worse, where you need to beat level 275 where all characters have 50% their max HP and any character who dies is gone for the whole adventure. The "Azaka's Procession" variant is even worse, where you need to beat level 300 with your center slot being taken up by Azaka's dead body.
  • Certain level Variants can be a massive pain, especially those that either force you with Arbitrary Mission Restrictions that prevent you from using your strongest buffers, those with Demonic Spiders, or those that force you to take unavoidable extra damage. "Durable Deep" is one of the more well-known ones, where every mook has Armored Hit-Based Health meaning that they need at least 3 sufficiently strong hits to go down.
• Ugly Cute: The Mindflayer alternative costume is this for some, since it just gives purple scaly skin and tentacled mouth without changing the head shape or removing the hair.
• Unexpected Character: Who would have guessed that the Nerds (yes, the candy mascots) would be a playable champion in this game?