Hey /r/PuzzleAndDragons, welcome to my little story. I've been playing this game pretty religously for a full year now and I wanted to thank you all for the community you have built and fostered. This subreddit has been my go-to source for news, help, and camaraderie for a good chunk of that year and I want all of you to know how important you are.

Firstly proof.

Now most of you here probably did this whole thing the smart way. Read some guides before you start, reroll a couple times till you get a decent starter or at the very least understand the basic rules of the system. I did none of those things.

Here are my first and second box pages. Open at your own risk.

Also note that my first REM roll, a light golem, was fed away at some point so does not make an appearance.

The story goes something like this: I found out about PaD from a forum post somewhere, listed as one of the top 5 games by some user. I thought the name sounded interesting so I went ahead and dowloaded it, breezed through the tutorial and went on my way. It wasn't until a few weeks in that I realized that leader skills were important. It wasn't until at least a month in that I realilzed YOUR FRIENDS GAVE YOU LEADER SKILLS! Not wanting to be that annoying Farmville friend I completely avoided sending or accepting any friend requests up to that point, and let me tell you the game is significantly harder when you are doing shitty-challenge-mode from the start.

BTW, does it ever say anywhere that you need friends for their leader skills? It only says that they won't activate when selecting non-friends, to the best of my knowledge it doesn't say "friend them, idiot" for silly people like me.

Well I managed to get all the way to Castle of Satan that way. I also thought the REM was a complete joke and didn't want to encourage this $5 per roll bullshit so I made do with my lighting holy dragon and light golem, using plenty of stones on the boss levels of various dungeons along the way because they came back anyway right? I did end up rolling the REM a few times until I got down to that volcano dragon, at which point I had a kickass rainbow dragon team!

At that Castle of Satan roadblock I finally figured out that friends mattered so I soon filled my friends list with Grodins and started using the 50% resist Grodin strat to beat everything up to OoH. I finally started reading PADx and figured out I needed a dragon leader, so I lucked out and got myself a green mystic knight to put together this awesome team.

Soon after I had my first real team I also managed to roll a Neptune which got me over the OoH hump. I used that team with Plesios subbed out for the Neptune and a Grodin friend to plink my way through, tons of fun.

Things finally broke open for me during the PC godfest of last summer, managing to roll this Ronia that appeared in every single guide on padx. Finally having some knowledge of team building and finding this subreddit to push me along I put together a Ronia team for Starlight Sanctuary tackling and actually managed to beat some high level biweeklies and a legend descend or two. I put my dragon team to rest and haven't looked back since (well, except to put this post together). I also don't have the heart to feed away those dragons for their plusses yet, but who knows when that fateful day will come.

Nowadays you see me around here telling everyone to run Urd, and I mostly use this team myself for daily farming with a few variations for descends. I even managed to beat Noah on Friday with this.

Feel free to check out my padherder. I would appreciate any new directions that people can see in there. I started non-IAP but have probably dropped $200 during godfests so that plus a years worth of stones means I have a bit to work with. I'm thinking my current project, besides getting Urd even more badass, is to get this LKali team up and running and see what it takes to become actually decent at matching.

Oh, and don't worry /u/zaquanimus, I still break out my Ronia team for some stuff. I even just rolled a Lu Bu, DA Lucifer and another Ronia so it seems the PaD gods don't want me to retire her quite yet.