Yeah I ended up getting that 55 plate with 36% EE a few hours ago before I saw your reply.

Seems to be helping some but I still get hit pretty hard. Is it normal to need to heal after a handful of battles (like 4 to 7)?

Most of the Heavy hits you take are from Casting monsters and their abilities. So, when you say "Heal", I am guessing you are referring going to town to regen? Thus you may want to have +X Life regen gear placed in the first 3 slots of your inventory (if not in a vault which wastes fg). This seems to be normal.

I am a different kettle of fish... I use healing charm & Salvation ability while also adding to Int (excluding Guardian)

My setup is totally wrong for normal play, this is my level 68 Guardian setup that I am playing on Hardcore:

Mystical diamond longsword, level req 40, Damage: 98 to 985, +126% Enhanced Effect, +3% Armor Pierce, +9% Fire Mastery
Angelic tempered diamond plate mail,level req 45, Physical Defense: 49 to 148, Magical Defense: 0 to 22, +16 Vitality, +38 Intelligence, +8 Life Regen, +2% Mind Numb
Mystical wild heal VI, level req 15, Heals: 11 to 116, +30 Strength, +2% Life Steal, +1% Heal Mastery (MAIN SLOT)
Mystical heal VIII, level req 25, Heals: 108 to 289, +139% Enhanced Effect, +1 Critical Strike, +1% Glancing Blow ACC SLOT

NONE of my gear are level 55, and they are just crap or mediocre, BUT, they do the job on my guardian with:

Base 95 Vitality
Base 55 Intelligence

Abilities are only 2:
Salvation (72% charge now) & Retribution (55% charge now)

You can do better than my setup and go with the tom / dick n harry's ... EE wpn / armor and stat charm for more fun. Try to get these items and join groups and click, click click to their specifications and you will have more runs and get more upgrades.

hey, how do you open the game?
tried to start in mobile but I get error 4002 and can't manage to get in

How do Group-climbs work? What are the benefits or drawbacks (if any)?

Follow-up question.

That Hack-the-Horde Objective where there's 9 Slugsliders or whatever, is there some trick? They just keep respawning a few seconds after I kill any.

This post was edited by Breyers1 on Jan 8 2022 02:14pm

Slugsliders are not an objective, but can appear in any of them.

Simply kill off all the healers and whittle down the rest to near death, once all 9 are in 1 hit killing range, start killing them, hopefully they will only spawn like 1 or 2 more and you can kill them off as well.

Other trick if you don't want to waste time on them... Go to town, create group (if you haven't already) and leave group, this will remake a new catacomb... annoying if you are on a Well though, so you may have to contend with killing slugslider.

EDIT: group climbs are way faster, your main mission is to be actively killing things in group &/or Tanking, most people that setup a group will know what role they are in, and if you are new to them and accept you in run, they will ask you questions and ask you to either be tanker (front) or back. They can also advise you on what you should be looking for etc.

This post was edited by izParagonzi on Jan 8 2022 02:28pm

Oh okay, thanks.

I'll likely need to reset. I got dropped through a trap-door and the 9 Slugsliders were there to greet me. I can't survive long enough to kill more than 3 or 4 before I need to abandon ship back to town lol

yup, that would be wise to just create group and leave group... also another annoying monster is Gigabee (looks like a bee) and calls for help and 2 will turn up each time.