There is probably no mobile gaming genre that encapsulates the thrill of multiplayer gaming better than MOBA – that’s multiplayer online battle arena, for those unfamiliar with the acronym. And Heroes Arena is the latest such MOBA for mobile – it’s now available for iOS and Android devices, courtesy of uCool. It’s advertised as a “lag-free” mobile game that’s also a “fast, fair, and fun” kind of eSports, and while MOBA is generally associated with PC, this game happens to be optimized for the mobile gamer. You can take part in 1v1, 3v3, 5v5, and other multiplayer modes, and you can join leagues, climbing the rankings, winning prizes, and earning bragging rights over other real, live, human players from all over the world. And just like it is in other MOBA games, the social element is strongly emphasized here, as you can team up with random players from around the world, collaborate in battle, and maybe make some real friendships along the way.
MOBA games are typically harder to learn than the average mobile game, but this particular game doesn’t have to be. There are some staples of MOBA gaming that we will be sharing to you, but there are also some new and unique elements for us to mention. And they’re all here in our Heroes Arena strategy guide, which should be your one-stop shop for anyone who wants to dominate the leagues and rise up the rankings quickly.
1. First Of All, Make Sure Your Comp Is Balanced
Comp is one of the more frequently-used terms, and it’s simply short for the word “composition,” or team composition. The very first thing you want to ensure is that you have a balanced comp, which you can do in the hero selection screen. Look closely at the types of heroes being selected by your teammates, and if they’ve chosen a certain hero type you were thinking of picking, go pick a hero corresponding to another type. For example, you don’t want to have a lineup of tanky heroes with no high-offense melee characters, and conversely, you don’t want a squishy lineup of assassins with no tanks to soak up the damage. Ideally, the ratio of players to roles/hero types should be one-is-to-one.
For a general description of the six roles or hero types in this game, tanks are high-health characters with low to slightly-above-average offense, warriors are melee characters with high offense, assassins are your quicker melee characters with low damage, mages cast spells, marksmen connect on ranged attacks, and support characters focus on healing and other maintenance-related duties.
2. Your Favorite Heroes Need To Have Their Own Runes Set Up
Any League of Legends veteran should know this, but in case you’re not familiar with that game, we might as well explain it for you. It’s important that you set up those runes for your best, or most frequently-used heroes. And it’s important because runes give heroes passive bonuses, and passive bonuses are often more important at the end of the day than their active counterparts. You’ll only have one slot at first to work with, but leveling up will unlock more of them. If you’ve got several slots available, having runes equipped in each of them will really help you out in the arena.
3. How Does Runes Work In Specific?
As we want to further underscore the importance of runes, we’ll be moving on next to the three basic types – pact, oath, and chant. But beyond that, the runes provide different kinds of passive bonuses, probably covering all of the possible stats in Heroes Arena. You can have a rune improve attack damage, magic resistance, and armor penetration or reduce cool down times – those are just a few of the examples, but there’s much more than that!
Initially, you won’t have to do much thinking when choosing which runes to equip on a given hero. But once you’ve leveled up quite a bit, that’s when you’ll want to be more specific when equipping runes. Attack damage runes, for instance, are helpful if you prefer playing as an assassin, or even a tank. Think of runes as a way to make up for a key weakness, though if you still find it hard to organize runes to make them correspond to a certain hero, you can always rename them and save them for convenience.
4. The Basics Of Jungling
We did suggest that this game does have some unique and important mechanics that set it apart from the average MOBA. That includes “jungling,” which essentially means heading to the wild forest zones located between the lanes, and defeating monsters for gold. That’s pretty much all there is to it – just a bunch of AI monsters who can yield some gold in solid, yet unspectacular amounts. Normally, you want to save jungling for specific types of heroes, such as assassins and tanks, and you want to have the Smite attack ability with you – this is an ability that deals an even 600 damage on monsters, which is enough to destroy the easier, smaller monsters in the jungle.
5. Watch Out For The Jungle Bosses
Although jungling is, in theory, easy if you consider that the monsters are AI-controlled, the game’s makers did make sure to add an element of challenge to the whole process. You’ll encounter the bosses halfway through each jungling expedition – watch for them to spawn near the river bisecting the map. And they happen to be especially tough – your entire team may need to work together to take the bosses down, but when you do, you’ll get a nice buff that could help you along the way, as you take on the REAL competition – other human players and their teams. Of course, you can’t rely on buffs alone to beat a team of human players, which means you have to utilize the social element and communicate with each other.
6. The Long-Term Benefits Of Jungling
See, we told you that jungling is a unique and important mechanic. For another reason why this is the case, consider that you’ll have one hero in your team getting the “jungler” designation after a few matches of performing this task. Heroes with the jungler designation will focus on destroying monsters for gold for most of the duration of a match. And as gold and experience keeps flowing in, that hero will likely become more powerful than most, if not all of the team, and will likewise be the go-to hero when it comes to arena battles in general. They’ll also become very useful when you’re trying to gain an edge over the “real” enemies of the game – opposing teams of human players. As the jungle has several exits or passageways, your jungler could set up ambush and sneak attacks.
7. The Last Hit Technique
Now this is another standby of the MOBA genre, and something you probably know from other titles. Last hitting is the term used to describe the process of landing the death blow on an enemy minion for bonus gold – far more than the gold you can receive if you’re in the vicinity of enemy minions as they die. More gold means more chances to buy better items than other teams’ heroes, and once again, that’s what this game all comes down to – the true enemies you face in this game are controlled by other players, as opposed to the AI that controls the monsters in the jungle.
That’s all there is to it. If you know other tips or tricks for Heroes Arena, that we haven’t mentioned in this guide, let us know in the comment section!