I’ve been grinding through the campaign for the last week, and the difficulty spike after the recent patch feels a bit overtuned. Up until now, I was just brute-forcing everything with high-DPS units, but that strategy completely falls apart once you hit the elemental barrier stages in the mid-game. I realized way too late that I’ve been sleeping on the synergy bonuses. I spent some time going through the full breakdown of [Dragon Traveler Characters](https://dragontraveler.gg/characters) to understand the passive stacking mechanics better, and it turns out some of the supports I benched are actually essential for breaking shields. The in-game tooltips are a bit vague, so looking up the specific kit scaling helped me realize I was building my team completely wrong. My main worry now is resource scarcity. I don’t want to waste upgrade materials on a unit that’s going to be useless in the late game. I checked the latest [Dragon Traveler Tier List](https://dragontraveler.gg/tier-list) to see if my current roster is future-proof, and unfortunately, my main carry is ranked pretty low for the upcoming raid content. It seems the meta is shifting heavily toward crowd-control units rather than pure burst damage. Has anyone managed to clear the Ice Cavern using a budget team, or is the current banner unit pretty much mandatory for that zone? I'm trying to save my currency for the anniversary event.

I’ve been enjoying the game for the last couple of weeks, but I feel like I’ve hit a massive wall around Chapter 7. My current setup relies heavily on raw DPS, but I’m starting to get one-shot by the boss mechanics before I can even get my rotations off. I’m currently running a generic Fire team, but I’m thinking about swapping to a control-heavy lineup. I spent some time reading through the lore and skill breakdowns for some of the other [Dragon Traveler Characters](https://dragontraveler.gg/characters), and I realized I’ve been completely sleeping on some of the 4-star supports. It looks like a few of them have passive buffs that scale way better into the late game than the starter units I’ve been using. Does anyone know if the current meta is shifting towards sustainability? I don’t want to waste resources leveling up a unit that falls off next patch. I checked the latest [Dragon Traveler Tier List](https://dragontraveler.gg/tier-list) this morning, and I noticed that a lot of the tankier units have moved up to S-Tier recently. Is this accurate based on your experience, or is the list just hyping the new banner units? Let me know what comps you guys are using to clear the mid-game content. I’m F2P, so I need to be careful with my upgrade materials! Cheers.