Hero Wars (Nexters) Advanced Guide: Tips, Strategies & Tactics to Win Arena Battles and Dominate All Game Modes

The fight across Dominion rages on and it’s up to you to lend your strength to the forces of order and justice!

Welcome back to another guide of Hero Wars! Unlike what we’ve written thus far, this guide isn’t your average guide that talks about how to get a beginner running on their feet; this is a guide on how to keep your Heroes nice and powerful by earning a variety of artifacts, Soul Stones, special currencies, and more.

Before we get right to it, here’s a quick refresher to what you might have missed in our previous article:

• Play through the campaign and claim Maya early on
• Grind for equipment; this might be one of your main activities for the whole game
• Promote your Heroes to increase their overall performance in combat
• Summon more Heroes and diversify your team as much as possible
• Your skill timing is important because it could dictate the way a fight can go
• Claim your rewards whenever you can as it can help your team grow
• Visit the Theatre for free stuff albeit at the cost of your time
• Join a guild and make your gaming experience a more memorable one

If you’d like to read more about how to get around the game and see the basics of Hero Wars Mobile, please visit our Hero Wars Mobile Beginner’s Guide.

With that all out of the way, let’s now proceed into some advanced techniques and ways you can be even more ahead of rival players. Read our Hero Wars Mobile Advanced Guide below!

Why Playing Other Modes Helps

The Campaign is a nice way to get acquainted with the game but there’s more to just fighting Marax’s forces endlessly.

Sure, you’ll get a lot of cool rewards and equipment to grind for when you’re playing the campaign. The one thing you don’t get all too often are special Soul Stones that can be bought for with special currency and that’s through playing different modes like the Arena modes, Outland, or the Tower.

Another reason why you should try the other modes is because you gain perspective; you learn the different uses of different Heroes and notice that they work in certain modes better than others. In other words, you’ll learn very quickly which Heroes are perfect for every team setup. There’s always the possibility of you forming your very own generalist team that could suit almost every situation thrown at you, though some Heroes only work very well with others as we will discuss soon in this guide.

If you’ve hit level 25 or higher and you’re reading this guide right now, we’ll be covering most of the modes that Hero Wars can offer its players. Buckle up; because you’ll be diving into a world of tactics, team building, and many more!

Team Building — The Key to Most of Your Victories

What do you think makes a good team?

Is it a well-coordinated set of skills? Is it a balanced group of teammates? How about a team that exercises brute force above all else? Regardless of what you think makes a good team, it doesn’t often work like this in Hero Wars. A team of Heroes is like running a restaurant: you have someone to take guests in, another person to take orders, a couple of other people who prepare the orders, and a last person to calculate the guests’ bill.

Each person in this team could vary greatly in performance; some of them might be excellent at their job while others might be weak links that could use some extra training or, in a more unfortunate scenario, replacement. To simply put, you shouldn’t look at your team as a whole, but as individuals that need to mesh together.

To look closely at your team, you must first discern the classes of each Hero and get them to fill a role that’s needed. Typically, a well-balanced team needs the following:

• A tank; someone to soak up damage for the rest of the team
• A damage dealer or two; someone to cause great amounts of damage onto the enemy. These could be Heroes from the Warriors, Mages, or Marksmen classes.
• A support; someone who can buff friends, debuff enemies, or subject them to control statuses like stun.
• A healer; someone who can keep the team alive.

Here are a few of our recommendations for class picks:

• Tanks: Astaroth, Aurora, Galahad
• Damage Dealer: Artemis, Dark Star, Daredevil, K’arkh, Lilith, Satori, Tristan
• Support: Dorian, Fafnir, Jorgen, Martha, Phobos
• Healer: Celeste, Thea

If you’d like to know more about which Heroes might go well in your team, give our Hero Wars Tier List a quick read.

The key here to making a well-balanced team is making sure that each individual Hero’s skills should line up and create a chain of skills that would keep the team strong and put pressure on the enemy. Sure, it’s easy to get a team where everyone deals absurd amounts of damage, but it’s even better to invest in the skills of other Heroes and ensure that each of them have a role to play.

Certain Heroes already are quite powerful on their own and keeping them alive for as long as possible could easily make your team a strong contender. For instance, Lilith is so powerful that some players have turned her into a tank and damage dealer hybrid.

A few other things that you can consider is looking at the skills of each Hero and understanding what skills go well with which team. To illustrate, certain Heroes like Alvanor have skills that affect Heroes that they share factions with. Alvanor’s Violet skill instantly grants Heroes from the Way of Nature faction a buff that will always remain active.

There are a couple of team compositions present almost anywhere on the internet (or you can consult the veterans in the Official Hero Wars Mobile Discord), but here are a few examples of Heroes that go very well together:

• ADA — Aurora, Dante, Arachne
• FART — Fafnir, Artemis, Tristan
• E3D — Elmir, Dorian, Dark Star, Daredevil
• Twins — Lars, Krista
• Undead — Corvus, Morrigan, Phobos

There’s always room for experimentation. Some Hero teams that you come up with might be good for some modes like the Outland or the Campaign, whereas others will be good for the Arena in general, the Hydra from any Guild that you join, and so on. Eventually, you will settle down with a favorite team that could become your go-to team for everything. Just don’t stretch them out too thin and try to invest in another team that you’ll use for other modes—the meta is always changing!

Do you think you’ve already formed a deadly enough team? How about putting them up for a real challenge?

The Hero Arena — Winning Strategies and the Arena Shop

The higher you climb the leveling ladder of Hero Wars, you’ll find out very soon that the Arena is a brutal place to be.

The Arena in recent updates has been separated into two distinct versions: the Hero Arena and the Grand Arena. For all purposes of being specific, we’ll talk about the Hero Arena first which is what most players refer to when they talk about the Arena. To set differences aside, the Hero Arena is where you use just 1 team against the teams of other players from all across the globe. It comes with its own leaderboard which determines only the best players in your bracket.

Make no mistake that the Arena in general is a walk in the park; this is the place where most veterans prowl and where players who pay to improve and gain their Heroes lurk in its depths. You’ll most likely be put up for disappointment whenever you lap up the bitter taste of defeat, but let that not stop you. After all, a fighter will get knocked down each and every time they set foot in the ring, but only the best ones get up and keep fighting.

The best way you can secure a steady stream of victories is by putting together the team that you know syncs best. Just like the ones we mentioned above, this is all about team composition and ensuring that each and every one member in your team is impressive on their own.

For either Arena mode, we recommend having Astaroth as a tank because of his Violet Skill which is the only skill in the game that can revive fallen ally Heroes. You may also pick the likes of Dorian or Martha to stand in as healers if you find it difficult working with the healers you currently have, although earning the latter might take a bit long. We’ll discuss that later.

To further understand how you can make a formidable team is to study your replays. All you need to do is, in the Hero Arena interface, tap the Journal button and then tap the Camera icon in the line of the person who defeated you. There, you will see which of your Heroes might’ve not held on long enough.

Maybe your damage dealers didn’t do what you intended for them to do or maybe your healers didn’t provide the kind of healing you hoped they’d do. In that case, it’s always important to go back to basics: level them up, try to improve them, and if it really doesn’t work out or they don’t mesh well with your current team, try to invest in someone else to replace the weak link. Remember: the weak link is what breaks the chain.

Do you feel like the Hero Arena is getting a little too easy for you? How about a tussle with the big boys? Let’s go to the Grand Arena!

The Grand Arena — Ranking is Everything

This mode is a true test of your strategic acumen. If you think you have what it takes, then enter if you dare!

The Grand Arena, which you unlock upon reaching player level 50, operates so much differently from the Hero Arena. What makes it different from its more rudimentary counterpart is that it requires 3 different Hero teams as opposed to just 1. You will need at least 15 Heroes that you can call “good” or at least those that you might have invested in. Just like the Hero Arena, you will have to create a defensive lineup before partaking in its battles.

Once you’re ready to battle, picking an opponent will allow you to study their 3 defensive lineups before deploying your Heroes; this is where most of your critical thinking will come into play. Think of ways you can thwart the enemy team: are they lacking a tank? A proper healer? Do you think their damage dealers are underpowered? If you have Heroes that you think can easily do away with these weak links, deploy them but use them sparingly. You wouldn’t want your strongest team to miss their chance to win. Beat 2 of the enemy’s teams (or have 2 of your defensive lineups win), and you’ll score a  victory.

Another thing that sets the Grand Arena apart from the Hero Arena is the fact that upon winning a match, you don’t earn Grand Arena coins. Instead, you will earn Grand Arena coins from gaining a certain rank. If your rank is below 1000, you’ll be earning 5 coins an hour. Obtaining a rank from 999 to 501 will let you earn 10 coins an hour. The increments at which you gain Grand Arena Coins increases with how high you climb the ladder.

Though, if you happen to have fallen out of the top 1000 and you’ll be back to earning just 5 coins an hour. It’s made especially tough that you can only battle 5 times a day, just like the Hero Arena, and refilling these gets more expensive with each Emerald purchase. Once again, your thinking will be greatly tested here, especially if you want to keep your ranking.

A simple strategy to keep in mind when fighting in the Grand Arena, both offensively and defensively, is to make one of your 3 teams the weak link. This team will usually take the brunt of the enemy’s force. If anything, this weakest team can be deployed against the enemy’s strongest team. Do know that the team configurations get reset every time you remove the Heroes from a lineup.

For convenience, we recommend taking screenshots of your last teams used and viewing them outside of the game if you ever feel the need to revisit them. Unless you’ve hit a rank above 501 and are encountering a slew of enemy teams where they have more than 1 strong team, this tactic is viable. It gets difficult later on, but that’s why you should go back to Hero improvement—promote their ranking, increase their level, their star levels, Glyphs, etc. But we’ll touch upon all this shortly!

If you still aren’t worth your salt in PvP (pun intended), then how about taking yourself to other PvE modes besides the campaign?

The Outland — The Highwaymen and Boss Battles

We’ve briefly mentioned this feature in our Beginner’s Guide. Upon reaching player level 25, you unlock the Outland: a place where you can fight only the baddest Highwaymen and increasingly difficult Masters! Do you think you got what it takes?

The Outland has two kinds of battles: Highwaymen and Masters. Just like the Arena, these battles have a daily limit, but a lot can be done with the chances that you have. It’s up to you to keep Dominion safe from these immediate threats and get rewarded doing so. Let’s talk about the Highwaymen first.

The Highwaymen are difficult battles that are akin to battles you fight in the campaign. Each battle consists of 3 waves of different enemies where the third and final wave has the head honcho of the group. These Highwaymen are like minibosses with armies and they shouldn’t be taken lightly because these battles can be more difficult than the ones you’ve fought in the campaign (at first).

Upon defeating a Highwayman, you can raid them for their loot without having to face the possibility of defeat. Each Highwayman has a set of loot in chests and they come in the Green, Blue, and Violet rarities. What drops from these chests is usually equipment for Heroes.

That said, if you’re trying to promote a Hero and wish to get better equipment without having to spend exorbitant amounts of energy, testing your luck with the Highwayman chests is a good way to earn better equipment. Just be sure to defeat or raid the Highwaymen with the corresponding chest colors: you don’t want to raid a Highwayman that drops Violet chests when you need Blue-ranked items!

The Masters, on the other hand, are a trio of vicious bosses with different kinds of strengths and weaknesses. The trio of bosses is as follows:

• Vadjar the Incinerator — A towering, smoldering giant armed with a pair of giant swords. A sweep from his blades causes instant conflagration.
• Ilyssa the Weaver — An eldritch spider sorceress lurking from the deepest cavern depths. Her victims often meet a slow fate.
• Brog the Conqueror — A brutal orc warlord atop a mechanical chariot. He is feared from across the plains of Dominion.

While these three bosses may be intimidating at first, they can be a walk in the park if you haven’t been fighting them for long. To elaborate, each boss has a level of their own. This level goes up each time you defeat them. If you’ve been focusing solely on Vadjar this whole time, Ilyssa and Brog won’t gain levels. Therefore, fighting Ilyssa and Brog will be much easier than fighting Vadjar who you have now bumped up a couple of levels. With each new level reached, you will be rewarded with even more swag. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here; there’s still the challenge of defeating each of these Masters.

Each Master has their own gimmick:

• Vadjar is completely immune to magic damage and cannot be hurt by ranged attacks due to his armor.

• Ilyssa is completely immune to magic damage and cannot be hurt by melee attacks due to her hanging over a chasm covered by spiderwebs.

• Brog is completely immune to physical attacks due to…. Well, because he’s really big and strong, we surmise. Just look at him!

Unlike the battles against the Highwaymen, Master battles only allow you to deploy certain Heroes against them. For example, because Vadjar is immune to magic attacks and is protected against ranged attacks, you will not be able to use the likes of Kai or Ginger against him. Instead, you’ll be told to field only your strongest melee Heroes available.

Additionally, if you wish to succeed against Vadjar in the higher levels of this mode, you’d best want to invest in Heroes that can put pressure on him by dealing a lot of physical damage such as Corvus, K’arkh, or Yasmine. Though, Yasmine may require some timing with her ult since in the later levels, she could get easily killed by any of Vadjar’s attacks. If you feel like a Master is too much for you, you may retreat first and fight them again when you’re ready!

Fighting in the Outlands can really put your team building skills to the test, but what if you’re after a matter of endurance, especially for individual Heroes? Let’s hit the Tower and see how long they can really last.

The Tower — A Challenge of Hero Endurance

There’s no other way but up. Welcome to the Tower.

The Tower is an upward spiral of battles with increasing difficulty. This mode is unlocked once you hit player level 40. It’s a series of battles where you encounter a different floor each time you go up but what makes it truly difficult is that the teams you encounter as you ascend vary in strength and composition.

The floors of the Tower follow this pattern:

[Battle] → [Buff] → [Battle] → [Treasure]

Each battle grants you Skull Coins which you spend during buff floors. To know if you’re on a buff floor, these have magical obelisks in them that allow you to spend Skull Coins on. One thing you’ll need to keep in mind is that each buff presented to you has a different requirement of points; the more expensive ones are often more powerful, but these are not always the ones that you need. Usually, the buffs that you can receive are:

• Attack Up
• Physical Defense Up
• Magic Defense Up
• Skill Gauge Up 50% (for 1 Hero only)

We recommend taking a Skill Gauge Up occasionally, and especially if you’ve just recently used a White Skill. For example, if you’ve recently healed all your allies using Thea’s White Skill and she’s got an empty gauge, take this opportunity to fill it if you’ve got the Skull Coins.

Now, treasure floors are a bit different. Treasure floors have a mysterious-looking treasure chest in them that give you the chance to loot three different treasures within them. The treasures can randomly give you Tower Coins (which we’ll talk about later), item fragments, or gold. After opening one of the chests, you will need Emeralds to open the subsequent ones. While it may seem pricey to do this, we recommend not spending so much on these as Emeralds could be used for more important things.

In each battle, you will notice that your Heroes will carry on with whatever health they had left from their last battle. This could prove tricky if you lack a dedicated healer for your team or not enough of them. If you’ve fought a particularly difficult battle, you’ll also notice that any of the Heroes that have fallen then will stay dead even after you’ve won. Having a lot of Heroes will certainly help in any Tower run because that way, you’ll be able to strategize your attack in each floor; adjusting your team depending on the enemy team’s composition is key to seizing effortless victory.

If you know how some Heroes counter other Heroes, then this is an opportunity for you to use them. Just be sure that they’re of sufficient rank in their Promotion otherwise they’ll be among the few Heroes who will die first. A decent survival strategy you could exercise is to swap out tanks and healers occasionally. The damage they sustain will be spread out enough for them to survive each following floor.

Though, one thing worth noting is that the Tower will reset as soon as the server itself resets. But don’t worry about your progress: you will be given the option to skip battles at floors that you’ve won. For example, if you’ve completed floors 1-15, you will be given the choice to not play through those floors and instead be rewarded with Skull Coins for the buff floors you encounter along the way.

A word of warning, however: if you happen to miss a day that you access the Tower and run it to skip floors, you will have to fight at the bottom all over again. So be sure to login every day if you wish to conquer the Tower in all its entirety. It’s tough, but dedication pays off!

If you feel like there are still more battles that you wish to fight that are possibly more challenging and have a little world of their own, how about joining a Guild?

The Guild — Hydras, Titans, Oh My!

What do you think Guilds are good for whenever you play any RPG out there?

Whatever your reason, Guilds are quite beneficial as it often involves a group of players working together towards a common goal. In this case, for Hero Wars, a Guild works together to help it improve its level so it can sell more cool stuff in its shop. The items in a Guild store are exclusive and these also help other players improve their Heroes as well as unlock new ones. To earn Guild Coins, a way you can do this is by fighting the mighty Hydra.

The Hydra is a massive boss that is exclusive to the Guild. Granted that it’s called the Hydra, it has multiple heads: 6, to be precise. To fight any of the Hydra’s heads, you’ll require a special item called a Horn of Summoning which has two kinds: a Common Horn and a Golden Horn. Common Horns are finite and they get replenished with each server reset; each Guild member gets a total of 3 Common Horns per day. Golden Horns can be earned by playing the game and can be stored indefinitely. If you have no more Horns, you won’t be able to fight the Hydra.

A battle with a Hydra head will require a total of 3 teams of 5 Heroes, a total of 15 Heroes. Your goal is to deal as much damage as you possibly can to a single Hydra head before all of your Heroes die. Collectively, it will take the Guild’s effort to subdue these heads one at a time. Because the Hydra has multiple heads, each head has a different element and boss mechanic. The heads’ descriptions are as follows:

• Fire — Deals physical damage with its regular attacks and its elemental breath. It can set your Heroes alight and lower their armor while they’re burning.
• Water — Deals physical damage with its regular attacks and its elemental breath. Any Heroes affected by its breath will take more damage the closer they are to the Hydra. They will also be greatly slowed.
• Earth — Deals physical damage with its regular attacks and its elemental breath. Heroes affected by its breath will be stunned for a short while within a small area of effect.
• Wind — Deals physical damage with its regular attacks and magic damage with its elemental breath. The Hero most affected by its breath will be pushed back further than others and become slowed by a great amount.
• Light — Deals magic damage with its regular attacks and pure damage with its elemental breath. Affected Heroes are blinded and have their accuracy greatly decreased for a few seconds.
• Darkness — Deals magic damage with its regular attacks and its elemental breath. Heroes affected by its breath suffer Cursed Flames which prevent any form of healing.

If you’ve been fighting the Hydra solely on Auto this whole time, stop that right now. The Hydra is an incredibly difficult beast to handle, but with such difficulty comes an abundance of rewards for you to reap.

That said, tackling a Hydra on Auto is mostly suicide since Heroes would often activate their skills the moment their gauges fill. You won’t have the chance to properly heal your team or provide them with defensive buffs when needed. For each Hydra head, a specific group of Heroes will be needed in order to be successful.

However, we could suggest a couple of Heroes that stand out as well as which Hydra head to field them against. Do know that the below table assesses each Hero individually and not as a team; we’ll leave the team strategy for you to figure out:

HERO	GREAT AGAINST
Andvari	Earth, Wind
Artemis	Earth, Fire, Water
Astaroth	Fire, Water, Earth
Aurora	Wind, Light, Dark
Celeste	Water, Wind, Light, Dark
Cornelius	Light, Dark
Daredevil	Earth, Fire, Water
Dorian	All
Elmir	Earth, Fire, Water
Faceless	All (manually copy healer’s ult)
Fafnir	Earth, Fire, Water
Fox	Earth, Fire, Water
Galahad	Earth, Fire, Water
Jhu	All
Lilith	Wind, Light, Dark
Martha	All
Maya	Wind, Light, Dark
Mojo	All
Nebula	Light, Dark
Orion	All
Qing Mao	Earth, Fire, Water
Rufus	Wind, Light, Dark
Tristan	Earth, Fire, Water
Xe’Sha	Wind, Light, Dark
Yasmine	Earth, Fire, Water

It may take a while for you to form a proper set of teams against the Hydra, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Another feature that your Guild has to offer are Titans. These large, mighty warriors seem slow due to their hulking size and animation speed, but make no mistake that they are as powerful as they come. Fortunately, only Titans can fight other Titans. Summoning Titans through the Circle of Summoning will require a special item obtained through Guild activity called Summoning Spheres which give out their Soul Stones.

If you’ve got the Emeralds, you may summon them if you wish. Just be warned that it’s pretty expensive (that’s 700 Emeralds for 5 summons!). Currently, there are a total of 14 Titans in-game: 4 each for the elements of Fire, Water, and Earth, and 1 each for the elements of Light and Darkness. The 4 Titans in the elements of Fire, Water, and Earth are 1 of each class: Defender, Marksman, Support, and Super Titan:

• Water (Strong vs Fire) — Sigurd (Defender), Nova (Marksman), Mairi (Support), Hyperion (Super Titan)
• Fire (Strong vs Earth) — Moloch (Defender), Vulcan (Marksman), Ignis (Support), Araji (Super Titan)
• Earth (Strong vs Water) — Angus (Defender), Sylva (Marksman), Avalon (Support), Eden (Super Titan)
• Light (Strong vs Darkness) — Amon (Marksman)
• Darkness (Strong vs Light) —  Keros (Marksman)

Titans, by themselves, can be made stronger via the use of Titan Potions. Think of these as an extra large version of the EXP potion that you give to your Heroes and these can be earned by playing through the Dungeon in the Guild. Improving a Titan’s power by leveling them up and increasing their star level through obtaining their Soul Stones will give you Sparks of Power; a means to make any of your Heroes much more powerful using what’s called the Gift of the Elements.

Upgrading a Titan is just as simple as it sounds: tap on a Titan and then you’ll be given the option to use your Titan Potions on it (or Emeralds) and it’ll instantly gain power. If you ever run out of these, it’s time to hit the Dungeon or do a couple of your daily quests. Sometimes special events give Titan Potions. Other times, it involves exchanging your spoils from the Guild Wars store.

Titans are also a lot easier to understand than Heroes since they have just 2 stats: Health and Attack, and fewer skills. Each regular Titan has just 1 skill and Super Titans have 2. The only drawback here is that most Titan skills are even more timing-based, so playing a Dungeon run will require some extra attention from you. You might also review each Titan’s role as well as their skills before heading out into battle so you’re more successful.

Most Titan battles in the Dungeon, as you will soon notice, aren’t all reliant on brute force, but strategy comes into play once you notice that there are Titans of multiple elements on the enemy team. While it could be a no-brainer to send out Titans that the opposing enemy team is weak against (refer to our bullet list of Titan Elements a few paragraphs above), the mixed Titan teams will require you to send out some of your weaker Titans solely to exert elemental dominance over them; the bonuses really make all the difference.

If you happen to have Super Titans like Eden, Hyperion, or Araji, save them for mowing down the easy mono-elemental battles you’ll often encounter. It’ll make everything so much easier, especially if you have Titans in this current team that you need to survive (for example, Sigurd and his shielding ability). When it comes to strengthening any of your Titans, prioritize your Super Titans and they’ll carry you far!

Eventually, you might encounter these hulking beasts during the Guild Wars, but that’s only if you’ve been selected by your Guild Leader to fight for your Guild. Improve your Titans and your Heroes, and maybe you’ll be up for the next round. Good luck!

Now, with all this upgrading going on, you’d be sure to run out of currency. Let’s now talk about how you can earn these quickly.

The Emerald Exchange — Free Currency and More

Throughout the course of your game, you will be spending your gold on a lot of things.

You’ll use it to level up your Heroes’ skills, fuse their equipment fragments into usable pieces, buy things from the shop, and many other forms of expense. Your font of gold would eventually run dry, and you might need more if you want to keep your upgrades and purchases coming. If you feel the need to get more gold and think you might be lucky today, how about taking the Emerald Exchange for a spin?

To access the Emerald Exchange, you must simply tap the plus (+) sign next to your gold wherever you are. This will take you to an interface with a wheel that you need to spin. The wheel has different multipliers: 5 of them only earn you the amount of gold that’s shown in the center of the wheel (x1), 2 of them earn you twice the amount of that, and only 3 of these earn you 5-times, 10-times, and a whopping 100-times the amount of the gold presented.

Depending on your VIP level, you only have a set number of times you can perform this action and the amount of Emeralds needed to make different rolls for gold varies. For instance, spinning the wheel once will cost 20 Emeralds while spinning the wheel 10 times will cost 200 Emeralds. You may also choose to earn a free spin by watching an ad.

Be warned that spinning the wheel 10 times with the 200 Emeralds doesn’t mean that you’d get the chance to score a 100 multiplier; it only means that if you’ve chosen to spin the wheel 10 times, you’ll only get 10 times the amount of what you’ve spun. To illustrate, if the pointer lands on a x1 when you’ve tapped the 10 spins, you’ll only get x10 of the given gold amount. That’s still 10 times more than 1 spin, so you could earn a lot of gold from this. This is one place where we would highly encourage you to spend your Emeralds, especially if you need a quick buck. Save them up and spend 200 here when you’re feeling broke!

Though, one thing worth mentioning as well is that the amount of gold rises each time you spin the wheel. The cost to spin it with Emeralds also rises, so don’t get too carried away; you might need your Emeralds for other stuff as well.

Regular currencies like gold and Emeralds aside, it’s time to talk about the most important part of this guide: Special Currencies.

Special Currencies — Specialty Shops, Hero Stones, and a Boatload of Other Swag

There are currencies other than gold and Emeralds that can surely help you on your journey!

Remember all the other modes that we have mentioned prior? All of these give you different currencies and they’re all what you need to make your Heroes stronger or even get new Heroes! What do we mean? Well, let us show you what can be done to get your Heroes ahead. You may access all these different shops by tapping the Merchant in your City.

Let’s first talk about the Town Shop where you can spend your gold. Ostensibly, this is the easiest shop to buy things from since you earn gold from almost anywhere. But a few things worth noting here are:

• EXP Potion (30k gold)
• Big EXP Potion (150k gold)
• Bottled Energy (300 Emeralds)
• Dorian Soul Stone x5 (750k gold)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

EXP Potions aside, the Bottle Energy should only be bought if you have the Emeralds for it. This instantaneously gives you 200 Energy, but we don’t recommend it all that much since a bit of patience can go a long way. Perhaps the most important item on this list is the bundle of 5 Dorian Soul Stones.

As we’ve discussed in our Hero Wars Tier List, Dorian is an exemplary Support who doubles as a Healer due to his lifesteal abilities. He is also excellent to have in almost any situation. If you continuously spend on these, you’ll be giving Dorian his stars. If you don’t have him yet, gun for him and you won’t be disappointed!

Next, we have currencies from both Arenas. The Hero Arena grants you Arena Coins for every victory you score, defensively or otherwise; the more you win here, the more you will be rewarded with Arena Coins. These coins can be spent at—you guessed it—the Arena Shop which has a couple of items of interest:

• Judge Soul Stone x5 (500 Arena Coins)
• Dark Star Soul Stone x5 (500 Arena Coins)
• Chabba Soul Stone x5 (500 Arena Coins)
• Astrid and Lucas Soul Stone x5(500 Arena Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

The Arena Shop has a slew of readily-made equipment that you can use for hero Promotion, but most importantly it also sells the Soul Stones of the Heroes mentioned above. We recommend getting Dark Star and/or Judge, in particular since both of these Heroes are quite powerful. Chabba and Astrid and Lucas may be used for the Campaign but aren’t well-suited for the late game.

The Grand Arena Shop has this selection:

• Lian Soul Stone x5 (500 Grand Arena Coins)
• Markus Soul Stone x5 (500 Grand Arena Coins)
• Ishmael Soul Stone x5 (500 Grand Arena Coins)
• Rufus Soul Stone x5 (500 Grand Arena Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion (1250 Grand Arena Coins)
• Grand Enchantment Rune

The Grand Enchantment Rune is something we’ll discuss within the guide shortly. Among the Soul Stones we’ve mentioned above, we highly recommend investing in both Rufus and Ishmael. Rufus is an opposing presence when you’re up against enemy Mages and Ishmael is one of the mightiest members of the Warrior class due to his powerful skill setup.

We hope the Tower hasn’t slowed you down, because it’s got a couple of interesting things in store for you. The Tower only rewards those who have conquered many of its floors and this is what you can find in its shop:

• Kai Soul Stone x5 (500 Tower Coins)
• Orion Soul Stone x5 (500 Tower Coins)
• Dante Soul Stone x5 (500 Tower Coins)
• Maya Soul Stone x5 (500 Tower Coins)
• 100k Gold (100 Tower Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

If you want to keep earning all these juicy Tower Coins, it’s all about logging in every day so you can skip floors just like we told you earlier. In this shop, we recommend spending on the Orion and/or Dante Soul Stones. Orion because of his rather versatile setup and Dante due to his presence in the ADA team.

Now, the Highwaymen Shop is a rather interesting one. If you’ve been tussling with these baddies lately, the shop where you can buy things after claiming your bounties has a pretty good selection:

• Faceless Soul Stone x5 (500 Highwaymen Coins)
• Cornelius Soul Stone x5 (500 Highwaymen Coins)
• Satori Soul Stone x5 (500 Highwaymen Coins)
• Lilith Soul Stone x5 (500 Highwaymen Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

All of the heroes here are quite good to have, but we recommend getting Lilith and/or Satori ASAP. Both are dangerous powerhouses when it comes to dealing damage. Having either of them on a proper team will help you conquer many areas of the game, especially the Arena.

Remember the Highwaymen’s counterpart—the Masters? If you manage to best them and claim their treasure, you will be given Outland Coins which you can use in the Outland Shop. This shop has a really good set of merchandise as well:

• Luther Soul Stone x5 (500 Outland Coins)
• Jorgen Soul Stone x5 (500 Outland Coins)
• Elmir Soul Stone x5 (500 Outland Coins)
• Qing Mao Soul Stone x5 (500 Outland Coins)
• Skin Shop Certificate (17k Outland Coins)
• Large Skin Stone Chest (750 Outland Coins)
• Large Skin Stone Chest x3 (2k Outland Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

Among the Soul Stones, we recommend getting either Jorgen or Elmir. Jorgen is an excellent Mage that can occasionally double as a tank and Elmir is needed to complete the E3D team. One item really worth saving, however, is the Skin Shop Certificate which you can use to unlock a Hero’s skin. We’ll discuss the importance of Hero skins quite soon.

Have you been fighting alongside your Titans lately as well? There is a shop for this. Unlike most shops, the Dungeon Shop only sells Fairy Dust and Titan Skin Stones:

• Titan Skin Stone x400 (300 Dungeon Coins)
• Titan Skin Stone x600 (450 Dungeon Coins)
• Fairy Dust x150 (360 Dungeon Coins)
• Titan Potion x1000 (500 Dungeon Coins)
• Corvus Soul Stone x5 (500 Dungeon Coins)
• Alvanor Soul Stone x5 (500 Dungeon Coins)

Titan Skin Stones are important in strengthening any of your Titans and the Fairy Dust is used in empowering your Titans’ Artifacts. We mentioned earlier that the Titan Potions are used in leveling up the Titans themselves, but between Corvus and Alvanor? We’d recommend Corvus because of the Undead team. Alvanor is a good Mage, but he may need a decent team behind him to score you a good victory.

Speaking of Guild-related shops, there is a hidden shop that can only be accessed when you’re in the Guild itself. Entering the Elemental Cradle from the Guild menu, you’ll find yourself near the Castle Ruins where the dreaded Hydra wreaks havoc upon the lands owned by your Guild. There is, however, a mysterious Merchant that stays atop a gorge, trading precious Hydra Coins for his wares. He sells the following items:

• Yasmine Soul Stone x5 (500 Hydra Coins)
• Morrigan Soul Stone x5 (500 Hydra Coins)
• Elemental Sphere (700 Hydra Coins)
• Artifact Essence Chest x2 (225 Hydra Coins)
• Artifact Scroll Chest x2 (225 Hydra Coins)
• Artifact Metal Chest x2 (225 Hydra Coins)
• Artifact Coin x200 (300 Hydra Coins)
• Spark of Power x240 (300 Hydra Coins)
• 250k Gold (350 Hydra Coins)

Both Yasmine and Morrigan are recommended Heroes to have. Yasmine specializes in assassinating weak backliners while Morrigan is needed to complete the Undead team. You can also gain valuable items for upgrading your Artifacts as well as Sparks of Power which we’ll talk about soon in this guide.

Possibly the biggest shop in the game is the Guild War Shop. This is where you can spend your hard-earned Guild War Trophies after serving your Guild in any battle. Get ready for this selection because it’s going to be a long one:

• Jhu Soul Stone x5 (130 Guild War Trophies)
• Ziri Soul Stone x5 (130 Guild War Trophies)
• Nebula Soul Stone x5 (130 Guild War Trophies)
• K’arkh Soul Stone x5 (130 Guild War Trophies)
• Titan Potion x300 (40 Guild War Trophies)
• 250k Gold (45 Guild War Trophies)
• Legendary Chest (225 Guild War Trophies)
• Epic Chest (130 Guild War Trophies)
• Rare Chest (80 Guild War Trophies)
• Jhu – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Peppy – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Ziri – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Kai – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Cleaver – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Judge – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Maya – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Ishmael – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Jorgen – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Galahad – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Dorian – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Thea – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Helios – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)
• Ginger – Champion’s Skin (1250 Guild War Trophies)

As you can see, there are a lot of Champion’s Skins available for plenty of Heroes. If there are any of these Heroes you’re currently using, give them a purchase and get ready for a change in team power. Skins aside, we recommend spending your Guild War Trophies on the likes of K’arkh and Ziri for the long term. K’arkh is a highly capable Warrior who only fears Andvari, and Ziri is a unique Tank who is extremely hard to kill.

At a somewhat higher caliber lies the Guild Championship Shop which showcases a variety of boosters as well as Guild War Trophies. Here’s what the shop has for sale:

• EXP Booster (1500 Global Championship Trophies)
• Evolution Booster (1500 Global Championship Trophies)
• Skill Booster (1500 Global Championship Trophies)
• Guild War Trophy x10 (3 Global Championship Trophies)
• Guild War Trophy x100 (30 Global Championship Trophies)
• Various Avatar Frames (150 or 500 Global Championship Trophies)
• Various Avatars  (150 or 500 Global Championship Trophies)

As far as the Avatar Frames and Avatars go, the prices differ between styles; some cost 150 Trophies while others cost 500. The boosters, however, greatly raise a Hero’s aspect of your choice (level, star rank, skill rank), so these are all worth the hefty price. Though, getting Global Championship Trophies will require your Guild to participate in inter-server competitions. We’re talking about being the best of the best here, so strut your stuff if you’ve got it!

Lastly, there is the Hero’s Way Shop which allows you to spend Hero’s Way Coins. These coins can only be gained by completing tasks whenever a Hero’s Way event is active. The Hero’s Way Shop offers the following things:

• Tristan Soul Stone x5 (500 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Peppy Soul Stone x5 (500 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Grand Champion’s Coffer x3 (420 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Epic Champion’s Coffer (600 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Legendary Champion’s Coffer (1100 Hero’s Way Coins)
• 100k Gold (100 Hero’s Way Coins)
• 200k Gold (200 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Skin Stone Chest x10 (375 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Heroic Dolls (675 Hero’s Way Coins)
• Equipment for Hero Promotion

We highly recommend purchasing the Tristan Soul Stones as well as the ones belonging to Peppy. Tristan is a Warrior with a high damage output and is an essential asset to the FART team, while Peppy is an unpredictable agent of chaos with skills that can make any match completely unpredictable. The Coffers and the Heroic Dolls are items that also give out random rewards, so if you feel like today’s your lucky day and you have Hero’s Way Coins to spare, give those a buy.

Are you done shopping? How about we take to the skies for a quick field trip?

Airship Expeditions — Hero Artifacts and Empowerment

Nothing screams high fantasy than an airship ride!

The Airship, which you can access from your city, is a great place to gain a variety of Artifacts; powerful items that are exclusive to each Hero. You can find a Hero’s Artifact menu by choosing them in the Hero menu and then tapping the Artifacts tab. If you’ve newly received a Hero, this area will be most certainly empty until you decide to look for the Artifacts yourself.

You can do this by visiting the Airship and tapping on the Artifact Chest which shudders and glows to the left. You will need Artifact Chest Keys to open these, however, and getting Artifacts is just as similar as using the Heroic Chest in the city. Unlike the Heroic Chest, however, the Artifact Chest gains EXP each time you open it. Once it is leveled up, the Artifact Chest has an increased chance of giving you even more rewards than before. Opening this chest in particular means more avenues to empowering your Heroes—we’ll tackle this subject in the next header.

Artifact Chest Keys can be obtained by speaking to the Valkyrie each day. She floats atop the Airship. Another way for you to gain these elusive yet important items is by running Expeditions. The Expeditions themselves don’t exactly give you the Artifacts Chest Keys, but it’s the quests behind them.

Starting Expeditions can earn you Artifact Chest Keys as well as leveling up your Artifacts, as you can see above, but you can also earn these by participating in events or even just by playing the game. Conversely, you may also choose to pay $5 or an equivalent thereof to gain the Valkyrie’s Favor which grants you 10 Artifact Chest Keys as a bonus apart from gaining Artifact Coins.

Artifact Coins are just as important as Artifact Chest Keys, as these will allow you to purchase various Artifacts from the Artifact Merchant’s shop who is also in the Airship. You can obtain Artifact Coins by opening Artifact Chests or purchasing these from the Hydra Shop from within your Guild’s Elemental Cradle. With Artifact Coins, you can specifically purchase and prioritize the Artifacts of your favorite Heroes.

For instance, are you not getting Fafnir’s Ancestral Anvil from the Artifact Chest? Just buy it from the Artifact Merchant if you have the Artifact Coins for it. Remember that buying this once will get you the Artifact, but leveling up an Artifact will require you to buy its Fragments from the Artifact Merchant (or rely on luck by getting them from the Artifact Chest).

All this talk about Artifacts makes you curious, doesn’t it? Don’t worry—we’ll top this all off with new ways to make your Heroes even more powerful and we’ll start with upgrading their Artifacts!

Hero Improvement — More Ways to Make Heroes Stronger

There are many ways you can upgrade your Heroes. Tying into the last header, let’s start with giving them Artifacts and upgrading these!

As we’ve mentioned previously, each Hero has their own set of Artifacts. Many Artifacts give the Hero passive bonuses like increases to their main stat or increases to their offensive or defensive capabilities. The three Artifact types are, from top to bottom in a Hero’s Artifact menu: Weapon, Book, and Ring. Perhaps, the most important Artifact would be their Weapon; if it isn’t a weapon, this is typically an item that stands out greatly in their character design. Pictured above is Galahad and his Weapon-type Artifact is his massive Harunian Sword.

You can choose to upgrade an Artifact two ways: by level or by Evolution. Leveling up your Artifacts will require materials such as Artifact Essences, Artifact Metals, or Artifact Scrolls. These materials boost an Artifact’s main stat. In the Harunian Sword’s case, you need 33 Artifact Essences to grant it an increase in Physical Attack when it hits level 17.

Evolution also does the same thing, but by greater amounts and it also grants the Hero a special perk usually each time they perform their White Skill. This can prove to be advantageous to you in any situation since you’ll be indirectly buffing the rest of your team each time a White Skill is cast.

Remember when we talked about fighting Masters from the Outland? You gain special items called Skin Stones from them. There are 3 types of Skin Stone:

• Intelligence Skin Stone (Violet) — Dropped by Vadjar the Incinerator
• Strength Skin Stone (Red) — Dropped by Ilyssa the Weaver
• Agility Skin Stone (Blue) — Dropped by Brog the Conqueror

Each of these Skin Stone types correspond to a Hero’s main stat. Taking Galahad as an example again, his main stat is Strength. Therefore, Galahad can have his Strength increased by using Strength Skin Stones under the Skin tab in the Hero menu.

Make no mistake: every Hero does not require a new skin to get upgraded. Their vanilla skin (that means the skin they start with or their default look) can always be upgraded using whatever Skin Stones you have for them. Upon getting a new skin (Galahad’s Champion Skin in this case), you will be able to increase the stats that the new skin grants your Hero.

This particular skin for Galahad increases his health dramatically, making him much harder to kill. You may also save up Skin Stones to unlock a skin you’d like for a single Hero which usually costs a whopping 5000 Skin Stones, but we recommend just saving your Outland Coins for a Skin Shop Certificate since those 5000 Skin Stones, regardless of type, can go straight to the immediate improvement of your chosen Hero.

Under the Glyphs tab, you can also directly improve a Hero’s specific stats by going to your Guild’s Forge (tap the button that says To the Forge while browsing this tab). Each Glyph requires Runes to upgrade and you can get Runes by purchasing them from shops or earning them from quests and events. Runes increase a chosen Glyph’s Progress Bar by the amount given in the Rune’s yellow number.

For instance, a Great Enchantment Rune, the most powerful Rune you can use on a Glyph, increases a Glyph’s Progress Bar by 100. Be warned that the more Runes you use, and the higher their caliber, you’ll be paying more gold than usual. You may also use Emeralds to increase a Glyph’s level by 1, but this isn’t always recommended.

As far as priorities for Glyph improvement goes, we recommend increasing stats that fulfill your Hero’s role in a team. Because Galahad is classified as a Tank, we have opted to prioritize his defensive Glyphs like his Armor and Health. You might notice that there are five Glyphs for each Hero and some of them may be locked on your end. If you wish to unlock these, you’ll have to promote your Hero through their ranks.

One final way you can upgrade your Heroes is through using the Gift of the Elements. Much like the Glyphs, you’ll need to visit the Guild Forge for this. The Gift of the Elements is a tab right below the Glyphs wherein you can increase your chosen Hero’s 3 overall stats by using a special material called Sparks of Power.

A few ways to gain Sparks of Power are by upgrading your Titans or by purchasing them from the Hydra Shop. The requirements of imbuing your Hero with the Gift of the Elements are a set number of Sparks of Power and some gold. Much like how upgrading works in this game in general, the prices get steeper each level. Good luck!

Overall, playing different modes and learning how to use your Guild’s amenities to their fullest is important to making any Hero more powerful. If you wish to go even further than you did in Hero Wars, just remember what you’ve gathered from reading this article:

• A team that’s well-balanced or that has Heroes that are in-sync with one another will be the key to most of your victories.
• Learning from your defeats in the Hero Arena could help you analyze and set up your team better.
• Having 1 weak team accompanied by 2 strong ones in the Grand Arena could help you score a victory by having it lose to the enemy’s most powerful team.
• The Outland is a great place to get loot from.
• The Tower is where you can test the endurance of your team compositions.
• Joining a Guild will open you to the Hydra and the Dungeon.
• Fighting the Hydra will require certain Heroes.
• The Dungeon will test your Titans and reward you with Titan Potions which you can use to make them stronger.
• If you’ve run out of gold, you can use the Emerald Exchange to earn more.
• Special Currencies, which you can earn from playing all these various game modes, are important because they can earn you Soul Stones for Hero upgrades and/or new Heroes. Otherwise, you can also use these to buy equipment needed for Hero Promotion.
• Looking for Artifacts for any of your Heroes? Get to the Airship!
• Upgrading your Hero’s Artifacts will make them even more powerful than before.
• You may also upgrade your Heroes’ stats directly by visiting the Glyphs tab and powering them up through the use of Runes.
• The Gift of the Elements improves your Hero’s might overall; you just need to upgrade your Titans to gain Sparks of Power for it.

The road to restoring Dominion to its former, peaceful glory is a long and arduous one, and such a road will only get longer and more perilous as one treads its paths. You cannot do this alone, but you can do this with the help of your friends.

Ask around for help, join a Guild that you think you’ll feel at home in, and rise through your own little ranks. Setting goals will also help; for instance you’d want Astaroth to lead the charge of your team—focus mostly on him, but don’t forget the other Heroes that follow him wherever he goes. May luck and the blessings of Dominion’s divines shine onto you and your endeavors. Sally forth!

Are you a veteran in the war against Marax’s dark forces? Are you a champion of both Arenas? Have you conquered the Tower and all its floors? Do you happen to be the mighty lord or lady of a Guild that knows how to handle the Hydra or tend to its Titans? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below this article and lend your wisdom to any of those seeking help!