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Hero Wars (Nexters) Tower Guide: A Complete Guide to Tower Mode (Choosing Your Team, Completing More Levels, Earning Rewards)

Despite being more than a year old, Hero Wars is still a big hit among iOS and Android gamers. This game, as you may very well know, comes from Nexters, the same company that also released Island Experiment and Throne Rush, but it’s arguably their signature title, with many still playing the game and trying to collect and level up as many of the almost 50 Heroes available in the game. Each of these heroes has specific skills and attributes and can fall into one or more out of several different classes, and you can either compete against the AI or against/alongside other human players in a variety of game modes. One of these game modes is the Tower, which becomes available to players once they reach level 40.

It can be argued that the Tower is the most popular mode in the game, because it offers an easy way to grind for rewards, including those all-important Gold Coins. That’s the reason why we’ve come up with a new Hero Wars strategy guide that focuses solely on the Tower – read on if you need some tips on how to choose the best team(s) to compete in those Tower battles and to fulfill your Heroes’ potential by completing more levels in less time!

1. An Overview Of The Tower

As any experienced Hero Wars player will tell you, the Tower is an excellent place to earn tons of rewards, may it be Tower Coins, regular Gold coins, or items you can use to promote your Heroes. So how does it work, for the benefit of those who have yet to reach level 40 and unlock this feature? Well, for starters, it’s best to think of the Tower as a gauntlet mode, where you assemble a team of five Heroes and climb each of the Tower’s levels, defeating opposing teams of five AI-controlled Heroes that progressively increase in strength. In between the Towers where these 5-on-5 battles take place, you can open chests that contain either one of the aforementioned rewards, or use the Skulls you have earned and purchase one of three random buffs where you could increase your Magic Defense, Armor, or Damage, or recover Ability Points or Health for one or even all applicable Heroes.

hero wars tower stats

In each battle, you can earn Skulls – 15 if everyone survives the battle, 10 if one Hero gets killed, or 5 if two or more Heroes die during the course of the encounter. Battles last a maximum of two minutes, and while it’s considered a defeat if you fail to kill all rival Heroes during that time span but don’t have any casualties on your end, you can at least try again with all your Heroes’ stats just as they were when you lost the battle.

Another good thing about the Tower is the fact that you don’t have to redo all the battles once you replay this mode on the next day. Based on how many battles you have won, you will be able to skip a certain number of levels per day – for example, if you won 20 battles, your first battle for the new day would likely take place around level 21, with an automatic three Skulls if you choose to skip all the battles from level 1 to 20 and the opportunity to open chests and purchase buffs in between battles still available. Miss one day, however, and you’ll have to start out from the very first level with everybody’s Ability Points all at zero (as opposed to starting out in full), with no option to skip levels!

Related: Hero Wars (Nexters) Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Cheats & Strategies to Win Epic Battles

Each day, you can earn bonus Tower Coins and Gold, depending on the highest Tower level you’ve reached. So make sure you play this mode – even if it’s the only mode you end up playing in the day!

2. Level Up Your Heroes To Ensure Tower Success

As you level up in Hero Wars, Tower battles will also become progressively more difficult in general. In other words, a level 1 Tower battle while you’re at team level 50 will have much weaker enemies than a level 1 Tower battle while you’re already at team level 100. This requires you to have enough Heroes at a close enough level to your team level if you want to have the most success possible in this game mode regardless of where you’re at in the game.

Normally, we would recommend having a minimum of 10 Heroes at a level close to your team level (if you’re at team level 100, that would mean having them at level 75 or higher), with all their skills likewise leveled up sufficiently and all of these heroes at Violet rank or higher. It also doesn’t hurt if these Heroes have special skins equipped, as well as boosts from other areas such as Artifacts or the Gift of the Elements.

That way, you’ll have enough Heroes to substitute in and out for multiple battles, though you would also want to make sure that you aren’t focusing solely on a specific type of Hero – it’s a common mistake to neglect Support Heroes (including Tanks and Healers) and going all-out on offense, but as we’ll be explaining later on in this guide, you will definitely need to have these less flashy characters as part of your usual rotation of 10 to 15 Heroes (or even more, assuming you’ve taken part in many a special event) when playing Tower mode.

3. Team Construction / Best Heroes For Tower Mode: Balance Is Key

Typically, when assembling parties of Heroes for the Tower, you’ll need to have a balanced roster that has a good mix of offense and defense. Echoing our earlier point, that means complementing your heavy hitters with good Healer/Control/Support heroes that could heal allies, steal energy/health from enemies, or provide additional layers of defense through any one of their four skills. Your Hero choice may depend on your personal preferences, but the key here is to keep things balanced with one or two Healers/Support/Control, one or two Tanks, and one to three Marksmen/Mages/Warriors who could deal out tons of damage, and never having none from these three groups among your five Heroes.

hero wars tower mode tips

Based on our experience fighting in the Tower, some of our best teams have included Astaroth as our frontline Tank, Celeste as our Healer, Jorgen, Dorian, or Martha as additional Support Heroes, and any combination of Ginger (Marksman), Kiera (Marksman), Krista (Mage), Helios (Mage), or Galahad (Tank) as our top two offensive Heroes.

Normally, we’d go with Ginger, Kiera, Jorgen, Celeste, and Astaroth against most enemy teams, but since Astaroth is usually gone after about four or five battles (after level 20, that is), we tend to replace him with Galahad or Ziri as our primary tank. As Galahad’s offense is no slouch despite his Tank role, he could be lined up alongside Astaroth, with Kiera and Ginger (Krista, Helios, or even Cornelius or Faceless) firing away as Marksmen/Mages and the fifth slot being filled by someone with healing abilities, preferably Celeste or Martha. In any case, Astaroth is usually the best choice as a Tank, thanks to his use of protective spheres for everyone and his ability to resurrect himself or other Heroes once per battle.

We were fortunate to take advantage of special events to make Ginger and Keira among our top offensive options, with the former especially useful because she’s fairly durable for a Marksman. (Keira’s main skill is very effective on offense, but she tends to be rather easy to take out, mostly on account of her middle/frontline placement.) Alternately, Krista is a great AoE (area of effect) Hero thanks in no small part to her main skill, while Mojo is a good double-duty Hero who can deal tons of magic damage while using his second skill to heal allies.

Thea is also good to have on one’s team as their Healer, although she doesn’t have the ability to switch between Dark and Light forms that Celeste does – while in Light Form, Celeste uses her Purifying Sphere to heal the ally with the lowest health, and while in Dark Form, she creates a wide area of Cursed Flame to prevent any affected enemy from being healed. And while he appears to have been nerfed a bit in recent updates, Elmir could also be useful for his ability to create sand clones to serve as decoys that also help out on offense, and he’s pretty durable for a frontline fighter, if not exactly categorized as a Tank.

Related: Hero Wars (Nexters) Best Heroes Guide: A List of the Best Units (Tier List)

Aside from the concept of having a balanced team, you should also consider the lineup the enemy is going to be fielding. Everything in Tower battles is procedurally generated – the specific Heroes, their levels, and their rank are all randomized per battle, with the only constant being that their individual and combined power will all be appropriate for your team level at the time of the battle. (Simple example – don’t expect level 50 enemies anywhere in the Tower if you’re already at team level 80 or beyond.)

Take a look at the enemy lineup and make your lineup choice from there – an offensive-oriented team with one Support Hero or none at all would usually require two tanks, so you can field a lineup with one Healer, two of your best offensive Heroes, and two Tanks, preferably Astaroth and Galahad. And if there’s more than two Support Heroes on the enemy team, you may need to ensure someone like Cornelius is there to target these characters, whose main attribute is usually their Intelligence.

The nastiest team we’ve ever faced, we’d say, was a team solely composed of Support/Healer/Control Heroes. That time, we faced an enemy team that, to the best of our recollection, had Jorgen, Maya, Nebula, Dorian, and someone else. This team’s members kept healing each other while using their few damage-dealing skills to slowly pick away at our unit; the added fact that they had a combined power of 120,000-ish compared to our 95,000-ish made them virtually unbeatable! It’s counterintuitive to what we mentioned in the first paragraph, but if you’ve got five Support/Healer/Control Heroes rated at 20,000 or higher and have tried placing them all in one team in Tower mode, we’d like to hear from you.

4. The Importance Of Support Heroes

The game itself will tell you during the load screens – healers are rare and valuable, which makes it important to have a sufficiently leveled-up Celeste, Thea, Maya, Mojo, or Markus on your Tower teams. But you shouldn’t neglect the other characters that you could include in your party as a way of making each and every member more durable and harder to kill. You can even line them up together with a Healer (as long as you’ve got two or three hard-hitters to complement them) and still get good results while playing in Tower mode.

hero wars tower strategies

We would also like to specifically highlight the three additional support Heroes we mentioned above, as they tend to be underrated for many a Hero Wars player. Jorgen, for instance, was a Hero we paid little attention to until we saw how useful he is on enemy teams. His combination of skills, which mostly rely on helping allies gain Energy and depriving enemies of this attribute, work in such a way that enemies attack less while allies survive for longer periods of time.

Likewise, that is the case with Dorian, who marks enemies and helps allies regain Health when they attack those rival Heroes. His passive skill, Initiation, works by increasing allies’ Vampirism, and we’ve seen this manifest through enemies who take much longer than expected to be killed, even once he himself has been eliminated. As for Martha, she doesn’t contribute too much on offense, but her latter two skills are useful in healing the ally with the lowest Health; she also happens to be especially hard to take out because of her Secret of Longevity second skill, which allows her basic attacks to heal her once she fires a projectile at an enemy. (That, in itself, explains her secondary role as a Tank despite her usual placement as a backline Hero.)

Don’t discount Nebula either as a Support character, as her abilities remove negative effects from allies and specifically target enemies with the lowest health – it’s very easy for an enemy Thea or Celeste to quickly restore a dying rival’s Health, but if you’ve got Nebula on your team, you could nip things at the bud by killing that dying enemy before they can be healed.

5. Other Underrated Characters To Consider For Your Tower Teams

In addition to the support characters we mentioned, there are several other Hero Wars characters who could get you far in Tower mode. At this point, we need to remind you that personal preference could play a part in your choice of Tower favorites, but based on our months of playing the game, here are some other Heroes whom we feel are underrated.

Astrid and Lucas technically count as one character, but since this is essentially a girl and her pet cat who turns into a ferocious beast once her main skill is activated, we’d say this is a case of getting two for the price of one. While Astrid remains in the backline firing at enemies from a distance, Lucas will transform into a much larger cat as he terrorizes frontline enemies, thus making the duo particularly effective against opposing Tanks and taking away the enemy team’s designated damage-absorbers.

Related: Hero Wars (Nexters) Character Skills Guide: A Complete Guide to All 45 Heroes

Cornelius, who we mentioned above, can be quite useful against enemy Healers, as his main skill involves throwing a large monolith at the enemy team, hitting their smartest Hero (and dealing out a ton of damage) and robbing them of Intelligence points. We tend to use him in conjunction with Faceless, whose main skill is imitating those of others – if you’re in the right situation, you can have Cornelius activate Heavy Wisdom, then immediately use Faceless’ Doppelganger to throw two consecutive monoliths at the enemy’s smartest character, potentially taking them out in the process. Beware, though, as Cornelius appears to be squishier than the average Mage, and can also be targeted with Heavy Wisdom if the opposing team happens to have him in the lineup as well!

6. Try This Trick To Maximize Your Opportunties In The Tower

In general, the practice of rage-quitting is frowned upon, because it nullifies the hard work human opponents put into defeating their rivals. But there are times when doing so isn’t exactly a bad thing, and these all involve PvE situations. As we’ve noted a few times, Tower mode features PvE battles, which takes away most, how shall we put it, ethical concerns when it comes to rage-quitting if your team is about to be wiped out. Sure, it’s a case of gaming the system, but while it’s still legal, we suggest doing this as often as you could in order to complete more Tower levels without losing your best Heroes in the process.

hero wars tower skill points

Basically, the idea here is to hit on the Retreat button on the pause menu at the right time – normally, you’ll have enough time to do this after you notice how your team is getting wasted by the opposing unit, but there may be times when you’ll need to act faster than usual. (This would typically be after you’re down to just one Hero and their Health is quickly running out.)

By hitting on Retreat, you could return to the Hero selection screen and either choose the same team, with their Health and Ability Points still just as they were before the battle, or choose other Heroes to replace those that seemed to be underperforming. Most of the time, you’ll want to swap out the poor-performing Heroes for others, unless your team happened to be doing well for the most part before bad luck (or bad decisions) led to what would have been an imminent defeat.

To sum it up, rage-quitting is fine in such a situation – don’t be afraid to do it if you want your Heroes to last longer and you want to complete more levels in the Tower!

7. Softening Up Your Enemies – Not As Effective As Before, But Okay In A Pinch

In previous Hero Wars guides, we suggested that you can “soften up” your enemies by trotting out your lesser Heroes and having them do what they could to reduce the enemy team’s Health before they inevitably get wiped out. We don’t know if this is an actual nerf or a byproduct of progressively difficult Tower battles as we level up, but this strategy doesn’t seem as effective as it used to be. Still, it can work to your advantage if you do it the right way.

For example, if you’re unable to defeat the enemy team after trying several combinations of Heroes, you can do as we advised earlier and retreat, subbing out your presumably high-powered Heroes with lower-rated ones while making sure they aren’t THAT lowly-rated. Fielding a team whose combined power is in the 35,000 range won’t do much good, after all, against an enemy unit with a combined power of 90,000 or more; it will barely make a dent on their Health while also reducing the chances of the second softening-up unit of contributing because the enemy’s skills would likely to be ready to launch at that time. Given the above situation, you can start by fielding a team with combined power of 60,000, then a second team with 65,000, then going back to your top Heroes once you’ve either taken out at least one enemy, or if you’ve taken out at least half Health for most of the enemy characters.

Related: Hero Wars (Nexters) Guild Overview: Tips, Cheats & Tricks for Getting the Most Out of Your Guild

Taking all that into account, your best bet in most cases should now be to focus on that rotating group of 10 to 15 Heroes when trying to win most battles in the Tower.

8. Refrain From Using Your Main Skills On Dying Opponents

In concept, it does sound like a good idea to keep using your main skills as long as you’ve got the Ability Points to cast them, and that would include situations where you’re essentially sealing the deal and finishing off an enemy whose Health is but a sliver. But remember that doing so at that point of a Tower battle would also leave the Hero who used that skill with close to a full bar of Ability Points to fill up during the next battle where they’re used. Ideally, you want those main skills to be ready for the next battle, with your Ability Points for each Hero as close to full as possible.

hero wars tower buff

Of course, if you yourself are on the verge of defeat (or have at least one hero who’s close to death), you may be forced to hit the coup de grace on a dying enemy by using a main skill. Those situations are sadly unavoidable, but if you want to head into the next battle with your last five Heroes having their Ability Points close to intact (if not fully), this can usually be achieved by ganging up on an enemy team where Ziri or Martha is the last surviving Hero.

As Ziri can use one of her skills to burrow underneath every 15 seconds and regenerate her Health once it’s at 30 percent or less, you can defeat her with only one Hero using their main skill while letting her burrow up to twice. The same applies to Martha and her ability to regenerate her health through her basic attacks. Neither of these Heroes are anything special in terms of attack stats, so you wouldn’t really need to worry about receiving tons of damage on your end.

9. Rewards – Don’t Expect To Get Gold Most Of The Time

In a perfect world, Hero Wars’ Tower mode would allow you an even 33 percent chance of getting each of the three reward types – Tower Coins, Gold, and items for promotion. But we’re going out on a limb and saying that Gold is the reward type we tend to receive less frequently than the other two. It’s almost as if the game reduces the chances of getting Gold for the first chest we open (say, maybe reducing your chances to 20 percent as to 40 percent each of getting Tower Coins or items) and again for the second chest (30 percent chance of Gold, 70 percent of the other reward type).

We can’t blame Nexters for this – gold, after all, is by far the most useful resource, as you can use it to buy a plethora of items (including, but not limited to EXP potions for leveling up), and you will definitely need it to evolve your Heroes and upgrade their skills. Tower Coins can be used mainly for Soul Stones of select heroes (Kai, Dante, and Orion), though we’ve found it quite useful to spend 100 Tower Coins a day in exchange for 100,000 Gold. Items, as always, are rank-specific, and we’ve found this the least useful because we often end up with Orange items despite only having a couple of Orange-ranked Heroes out of 40-plus.

All in all, we’re just trying to set expectations here – there doesn’t seem to be a rock-solid way of improving one’s chances of earning Gold without paying Diamonds to open extra chests per level. But if you won some Gold in the second chest, for instance, you may want to open the first or third chest the next time you get the opportunity to open one.

And this ends our Tower mode guide for Hero Wars. We hope you’ve enjoyed the tips and tricks we shared in this article. In case you have anything to add, feel free to drop us a line in the comments below!

Darshaagan

Tuesday 5th of December 2023

wher or rather how do you spend tower coins to get money can't see that choice?

Said Rahmad Hidayat

Sunday 23rd of April 2023

If we have a quest in the tower to defeat the wizard, now we have instant clear, what do you think about the situation above?

Gray

Sunday 4th of July 2021

Nevermind on my previous comment. I figured it out. You have to skip all the Tower battles it lets you (without gems) then when you enter the first battle you have to fight, it allows you to change the roster at that point.

Gray

Sunday 4th of July 2021

I am new to this game and cannot figure out how to change the roster of heros to take on the tower.

The tower has reset to level 1 since yesterday but when I enter at level 1 it had my same champ roster from yesterday and I cannot see any way to reconfigure it.

It looks like the game is forcing me to use the same heroes as yesterday even though I'm back in level 1 of tower and it has reset.

I have much better heroes for my second attempt on the tower and want to use them.

Help?

proste

Wednesday 22nd of July 2020

Why am I not getting rewards on the second day for completing the tower?