Intermediate Guide

Who this Guide is Intended For?

This guide is mainly designed for those who've level capped their characters at their current level of progression, which is most likely beyond World 5. You haven't made the plunge into Limit Breaking your hero's levels yet but your awakening stone nodes are filling up quite nicely. You're basically at the stage where you'll soon be entering in the end-game.

Time to Plan: Focus on a few, rather than many

Look, this game takes money to progress heavily and the aim of these guides is to minimize your spend or at least help you know how to spend wisely. When you focus on too many characters at once, you spend too much money and unless you're a whale (near limitless funds), that will limit your rate of progression.

It's best to secure your 4 main heroes you want to push into the end-game. Hopefully it's the characters you're using right now but if not, that's fine too. Just understand that it's a long-term play and you'll want your best foot forward, even if it means you take a step back by bringing in a better (yet underdeveloped) meta character into your primary 4 heroes.

If you have a handful of options, the best way to choose is to go to the Coliseum Rankings and see what characters you have that frequent the top 100. Some will be obvious, such as Nari, Oghma and Future Princess (at the time of this guide's writing) while others will be synergy-specific (ranged team, melee team, tank team, etc). Read reddit posts, ask your guild, do the dew. Putting in a bit of research at this point in the game could save you a ton of frustration later on due to poor decision making.

Rares vs Uniques

Understanding the differences between rare and unique heroes are a very good thing (especially when planning).

As you may have guessed the primary differences are in the stats. Uniques have higher stat values and due to that, have higher stat ceilings than the rares. While the damage output of the rares can often rival that of the unique counterparts, it's the toughness that gets you. A rare (at full awakening) can have a much lower amount of toughness and while training dummies don't show it, they can get quickly obliterated in places like Kamazon and Coliseum.

Does that mean that rares aren't viable? Absolutely not. Some of my highest raid dps has come from rare hero compositions including Coco, Akayuki and Hekate. Raids are a great place for rare heroes (in the game's current state) and even as you progress through single player. The end-game however, won't be as hospitable.

Max Limit Breaking and Why

Limit Breaking a hero (or MLB) is a process that takes 700 Hero Crystals (5 limit breaks) and 66 Legendary Awakening Stones. In other words, it's expensive. Since there isn't a lot of in-game information as to why you should do this, I figured I'd provide a little here.

The benefit of MLB'ing a hero is two-fold. You get the passive stat increases from 5 extra levels (which isn't too shabby) and you get a handful of awakening nodes. The bummer about these awakening nodes is they are primarily the low grade awakening nodes outside of the completion nodes, which are sweet.

The completion nodes (nodes in the middle of each cluster) of your MLB levels cost 12 Legendary Awakening Stones for each with the exception of the final node costing 18 Legendary Awakening Stones. They also cost Dream Stones but the big costs are the legendaries. Anyways, these nodes give you large bumps. Generally the first 4 give you a variety between +3% HP or +3% Def or +3% Atk and the final with a +6% bonus to one of the aforementioned stats.

So even if you have the Hero Crystals to spend to get those levels, the real benefit comes from your Legendary Awakening Stones. Thankfully, you can pick and choose.

So let's see you've unlocked all 5 nodes for a Ranged Hero like Bari. 90% of the time Bari is going to be attacking while 10% she'll be getting hit. So you can prioritize the +3 / +6 Atk nodes and their corresponding Legendary Awakening Stone cost over the defensive. It's just situational. You can do this for your party matrix. My healer barely ever gets hit but she does do damage every second so out of my entire 4 hero party, she got her Def / HP nodes last. Hey, I'm not stingy, it's just hard to get those Legendary Awakening Stones in a timely manner!

Evolution Dungeons

As previously mentioned, Hero Crystals are the only way you can MLB your heroes. However, you have two ways to evolve your heroes: Hero Crystals or Evolution Stones via dungeons. Since you should be saving your highly coveted Hero Crystals for MLBs, we're gonna need to do some Evolution Dungeons.

Some fair warnings. On a fresh Unique hero, it'll take at least about 7,500 stamina to get enough Evolution runs to fully evolve that hero. That's a full month of every drop of stamina you have and that's actually adding in some additional stone/stamina collection through events. Needless to say, it's an undertaking.

You'll obviously want to be able to do a level 60 or 70 Evolution Dungeon on auto (given the extreme repetition) so don't even look at running the evolution dungeon until you can do so. Once you do though, try different heroes, keep in mind the elements and whatever gets you the fastest run time without dying is going to be your best bet. Now that you can sweep (once you reach Guardian Level 76), it's even faster!

Also worth mentioning, it's not the worst idea to start with Evolution Dungeons after you've fully cleared the storyline / side quests / Tower (perhaps not the challenge modes and Heavnhold Tower). Eventually the evolution dungeons will be a clear means of progression but you should probably prioritize other portions of content prior.

Using Mileage

This may be controversial but I'm gonna go with what works for me. You should use your summons on heroes and mileage for weapons (of the important heroes). Plain and simple. Hero summons gives you Hero Crystals which I will always use and Weapon Summons gives you Hero Metal which I sometimes may use but it usually won't boost my output unless I buy a 1,500 hammer (which is a big investment). It's just as simple as that.

There are, however, some events where summoning some weapons may give you Event Mission completion and you'll have to evaluate the worth of that expenditure but nonetheless, Mileage is used on weapons for me.

Just to give you a raw idea of how much easier it is to get heroes, than weapons on their respectable banners I have been pulling hero's from their banners since Bianca. The -ONLY- hero that took me more than 10 (10x) summons to obtain was Future Princess. All other heroes came within 5 summons or so and that's about 10+ heroes (as I have all the heroes in the game). The weapons however... due to weakness, I have tried to pull for almost all of those heroes weapons and the I've only gotten 2 of them from their banners. Others had to be picked up with mileage or ignored altogether. It's a costly mistake to learn and as it would turn out, I still haven't learned it.

Investments

At this point in the game, hopefully you've got a strong grasp on how things work and what to do and what not to do. You're now pushing your primary squad and you want to improve their progression as fast as possible. So this is how i prioritized my spend based on milestones of progression.

1st Milestone: Max Level / Max Awakening Stones

XP is obviously accomplished by Stamina so if you wanted to purchase a few extra Stamina packages, that would get you over the XP hump. More importantly, I wanted to cap my awakening stones. Every two weeks you can purchase up to 4 $19.99 awakening packages that gives you a really strong means of filling your hero's awakening nodes. On holidays, most often they'll give you a much more cost-effective packages to accomplish this so keep your eyes out.

2nd Milestone: MLB Primary Party

This is all about Hero Crystals so it just came down to summoning as much as I had the means to do so and being patient for my weekly Arena / Coliseum / Guild Raid earnings. It also meant not spending Hero Crystals on evolving heroes. If you want to spend money to accomplish this, you can just do so by buying the once a week 5,600 Gem package for $29.99 or the once every two weeks 10,8000 gem package for $69.99.

Remember, if you've MLB three heroes, you can get a 4th one for free in the Training Room. Which is a huuuuuuuge benefit.

3rd Milestone: Obtain the 264+ Legendary Awakening Stones

This is a helluva thing and on a largely gated resource. There's no fast way to do this but you do have various options. As far as free options, you can randomly receive them inside of daily awakening stone chests. You can get 6 each week from Bottle Caps and Gold. As far as paid options, you can purchase the Hero Growth package whenever you pickup a new hero. You can purchase Awakening Stone packages that award you with a handful of Legendary Awakening Stones. You can also purchase the Guardian Package that will culminate in 10 Legendary Stones.

4th Milestone: Mirror Equipment, Limit Breaking & Option Change Stones

When you get to the tippy top and you're ready to take your gear to the final level, you'll be running the Mirror Rifts endlessly to Limit Break your Accessories / Shields. So let's say you've got Oghma and you want to get him the Mirror Shield. You run the Mirror Rift (presumably Dark Mirror Rifts) until you obtain one (about 120 runs) for 3,000 Mirror Shards. You might have also picked up a Dark Mirror Accessory as well while doing the runs. Now you've got your shield and you want to Limit Break it so you do another 120 runs and probably pickup another Dark Mirror Accessory or two. You'll eventually use all of these Mirror Items to Limit Break each other. You'll do this however many times is needed to outfit your entire squad with Mirror items (with a few exceptional accessory omissions due to character specializations).

It's also worth mentioning that it would be unwise to just equip any old Mirror item to your character. You'll want to reroll the stats via Option Change Stones, which are rare. You can't really find paid packages to grab them, you just grab them from events whenever you can or by purchasing with Magic Metals every month in the Mileage tab in the Shop. However you reroll, just understand that the stats must be a good fit for the hero that will be equipping the item and it should go without saying that the type of skill damage should be that of the character's orientation.

5th Milestone: Limit Break Weapons

I've not talked about this in the guide simply because it's not an option for most players. Limit Breaking a weapon is a very expensive thing to do to only get 20% more stats but it is the final means of monetarily improving your character. It's also the only non-resettable means of progression. Meaning, you can reset a hero and get everything back but you can't reset a weapon and get the limit breaks back. This means that if you invest in a limit broken weapon, you should plan to use it for quite some time.

Extractions / Hero Crystal Overage

One last thing that will be useful upon completion of evolution dungeons and will become more viable the longer you play. Let's say you want to fully evolve a Oghma (dark hero) so you run his evolution dungeon 700 times. This will end up fully evolving Oghma as well as all of the rare heroes. Now, Oghma will gain stones much slower than the rare heroes and by the time Oghma is done evolving, the others will have already been fully evolving and it would seem that you're just wasting evolution stones on them. Not so!

You can go into your Inventory and then the Consumables tab and down at the bottom there will be a button called "Evolution Stone Exchange". There you can convert redundant evolution stones to Hero Crystals at a rate of 80:1 (rare), 40:1 (Unique). So doing a little math here, Let's say Oghma has 400 runs to go but you have already fully evolved your other rare heroes. Let's say each run nets you an average of 15 rare evolution stones (as low as 4, as high as 29) so those 400 runs nets us an extra 6,000 evolution stones which converts neatly into 75 Hero Crystals. Not too bad considering we'll need those bad boys for Limit Breaking Heros. If you had to do a full 750 runs (with already fully evolved rare heroes), you'd net about 140 extra Hero Crystals. Pretty sweet!