Oh, and as a follow up both the Saurus and Armiger are fully booked from duplicates. They'd be pretty easy to level up if they are going to be helpful at this stage. 

You should probably level up Captian Tamilla + put Shield set on C.Tamilla.

She's the only healer I have, so I could see that. Don't have books for her but could ascend her for the good heal. I'd have to farm up some Shield gear, currently I don't have anything.  Where else do you think I'd use Capt?

I would focus on defense and cleanser. At stage 13, The dragon puts debuffs on you like poison, etc. So a good cleanser + defense champ is the way to go IMO. My current Dragon's 13 line up is: Elhain(nuker/DMG), Valkyrie(Defense/counter ATK), Athel(weaken), Maus. Mage(cleanser/healer) and Warmaiden(DEF Down). Still need a ton of work to get to 20 but slow and steady. Also - The more you upgrade gear/replace with better gear the stronger you will be to take on higher levels. Best of luck.

If you don't have Shield set, You can use Immortal sets, Divine Health sets, or Basic Health sets.

I'd love to have a champ like MMage - think Spirithost can fill in until something better rolls around, or is it just a waste to try and build her up?

The truth is your expectations are to high.

Your only 18 days in.

You have only 12 heroes in your Roster.

The only Dragon team I can see for you is:

- Doomscreech

- Spirithost

- Tayrel

- Kael

- Captian Temilla

But even if you make the above team you will still struggle.

- Your Accuracy is very low - You want at least 130 ACC for Dragon 13.

- You don't have any Shield gear.

- You don't have any Crowd Control heroes.

- You don't have any Revive heroes.

The problems you have are simply beginner problems.

Everyone starting out in the game has had these same problems.

You haven't had enough time in the game to grind more gear or collect more heroes.

Right, it's a new account and I'm further ahead than I thought I'd get at this stage. Pretty happy with the overall performance so far!

Those are some helpful steps - I just didn't know what to focus on to get towards beating this stage. working on Fire Knight then and getting some Shield Gear seems like a reasonable step. And I could try to get an ACC Banner off Spider for Kael, that'd fix his issues. Spirithost is on my list too. Shouldn't take more than a week to get that team to 50 and geared decently well.

If you're going to be using Temila as tank like that, get her to 60, not just 50. Leveling champs (if they're the right ones) is a higher priority than trying to farm a shield set, mostly because it's completely random what dungeons drop so you can't really farm any particular set (well, you can in campaign, but much lower quality gear there). 

Your odds of getting an accuracy banner from spider for Kael are very low as well - which doesn't mean you shouldn't be farming spider, if you can do so on a high enough level, just that you shouldn't count on that to resolve his accuracy issue in the short term. You got lucky to get a Dark Elf banner at all, getting another one with the stat you want could take quite a long time. But it's the usual problem with using Kael for everything - in the beginning, you kind of have to choose between sufficient accuracy (for dragon and CB) or sufficient crit rate/damage with lifesteal (for arena and campaign farming). With 60 accuracy, he's still fine for the waves in the dragon's lair, but on the dragon itself poison helps so much, and he won't land too many of them this way. 

Keep a look out in your Market, Shield sets can show up in your Market.

I know this first hand.

I was able to acquire 4 pieces from the Market myself.

It can be huge time savor if you can get it from there vs. having to farm Fire Knight.

Good call.  I have been keeping an eye out for Shield stuff. Found the odd piece, and I'll get that set built out. 

Managed to get a cleanser and Kael's ACC up and can take the dragon down. Can't autobattle the waves, but once I get past them the team auto's the dragon well enough. Just gotta focus on farming up some more 60's now.