Which Hero do I Upgrade?

Which Guardian to Upgrade Next?

I see this question from guildmates, Reddit posts and general chat quite a lot. Not everyone is a huge nerd and sometimes it can be hard to choose the right guardians from the limited options you have, so I figured a guide was in order.

This site was created to keep you well informed without having to dig for the information. I've created a Guardian Suggestion page but it only really goes off of meta data (which is limited for certain game modes). So I figured I'd go into my selection process of whome I upgrade next. This will actually break out the entire game for you, if you give it a whirl.


Game Modes

There are a lot of game modes and some are more profitable than others. The way I see it, these game modes are there to help you earn resources to improve your guardians. While they do have rankings, I don't focus on that so much as the rewards. I'm here to progress my account and if you do it right, you'll progress through all the game modes more rapidly and get higher rankings passively. So let's go into the game modes and the resources you can gain:

Single Player / PvE - random rewards, single player progression

This team you use for PvE content is most likely the strongest team you wield. You'll obviously be using these 4 guardians in all other aspects of the game.

The one noteworthy item though is that if you’re looking to get past worlds 10+, investing heavily in Basic heroes may not get you the ease of progression as you hoped because you’ll be fighting a lot of Dark Enemies which will decrease your damage and damage mitigation by 30%. Given that resources are so scarce and so necessarily for those worlds, investing early-on in Basic characters may not be super useful.

Coliseum / Arena - Gems

The thing about the coliseum is the ranking tiers don't increase your gem intake too much. I generally reside in the Master range on my server. While I sway back and forth from Top 100 to Master, I don't care about Top 100. The effort or the spend required to push into the Top 100 (especially since it changes update to update) just isn't worth the extra 100 gems. That's right. The difference in cost from the Master to Top 100 is 100 gems. That's nothing at all. So why push so hard to get into the Top 100? Just pride and I'm more focused on progression so I'll stay in Master.

Arena isn't any different other than the fact that there is a very limited window of when you can participate. That being said, I generally maintain my same tier update after update because moving up in Arena is annoying because I just don't want to devote time to it and the gem increase is minimal.

Kamazon - Hero Crystals, Legendary Stones, All other stones, Hammers

So long as you get your 10,600 bottle caps every month, anything else just goes into Hammers for gear upgrades. Hovering around floor 10 will net you what you need each week so your goal is really Floor 12ish. If you have a team that can pull that off, you're golden. Move on.

Coop - Gems

Coop will be going to a new system that will give you 969 gems a week (if maximized) and so long as you play every 48 hours with 3 guardians, you'll be good to go. One major point though is you can play a level 60 coop and get 52 gems or a level 82 and get 58 gems. My account is perfectly capable of a level 82 completion but I just quickly complete my level 60 every day. It's super easy, it's only an 8 gem (ish) difference per day and I never have to do multiple attempts. I can even use any guardian I want to pull it off.

Orbital Lift / Heavenhold Tower - Random stuff

These are heavily situational game modes where it will require you to have a barrage of niche heros to progress into the later stages. Do not focus on it. Defeat stages passively as your power increases but do not make it a pivotal resource requirement for your upgrades.

Tower of Horizon - Random stuff

This is by far the most over-emphasized mode there is from the general playerbase. While not utterly worthless, the resources it takes to complete every 40 stages of the tower is absurd. The final prize is a Legendary Hammer? Should be an Epic for the multiple MLB'd heros you need to finalize the tower. I push the towers in progression out of something to do but it is so far from a priority from my progression. To do it properly you need the training room for at least one of your heros and 3 other very progressed, fully awakened heros to complete a tower and there's nothing really super rewarding to be found. Go as far as you can but don't push resources into heros for progression purposes.

Raiding - very, very minimal rewards

It's somewhat ironic that the most costly spend of the game gives the weakest rewards. I suppose that's simply because you can be carried. Nonetheless raiding progressively requires a minimal of 12 established heroes and most likely a few other established heroes to swap in and out depending on the boss. I see raiding as a way to really test your progression numerically and as a way to compete against guildies. It's also the one real chance you'll get to use some of the guardians that don't get much play time but really improve a raid team's damage output. It takes a lot of resources to do it right with very minimal gains but it's a pretty sweet benchmark of where your account is.

Evaluating Game Modes for Progression Purposes

Clearly Coliseum, Arena, Kamazon and now Co-Op are important due game modes for progression purposes. Those are your money makers, focus on those. If you delve into raiding, Tower of Horizon and Orbital Lift, it's just for spending stam and potentially smaller rewards. They are also one and done rewards so not for repeatable obtainment.

Since Co-Op rewards can be obtained with any 3 characters and the vast amount of the rewards can be achieved at level 60 (with 3 guardians), you really don't need to focus on account progression to obtain these rewards, just participate. However Coliseum, Arena and Kamazon require more progression.


But what Guardians do I use?!?

My general plan is to have 2 tanks (FP / Oghma), 1 Healer (Miya) and 1 Damage Dealer (Beth or Garam). This is a fantastic base and will do you no wrong. I use Beth or Garam because eventually you'll run across melee / range immune mobs so I choose the highest DPS guardians to swap between for that purpose.

With these 5 characters I break it down like this:

Coliseum: FP, Oghma, Miya, Garam are competitive are very consistent, sometimes in Top 100
Arena: FP, Oghma, Beth are very strong and are constantly in Top 100
Kamazon: FP, Oghma, Miya, Beth / Garam can get me up to tower 19
PvE: If you do well in Kamazon, you'll do fine in PvE

What's important isn't the characters, per se, it's the breakdown of the factors I'm using to figure out which characters to use. What modes are important for profit? What characters are good in those mode? What success do those characters have the other profitable game modes? You just want 1 healer, 2 tanks, and 2 damage dealers (one for each type of damage). Preferably, they should all be able to chain into each other.


Fun vs Progression

I realize my approach may not be your cup of tea and you may be more interested in getting that super sweet mono dark team off-the-ground and proving everyone wrong about how effective it can be in Coliseum and that's just fine. What I typically do is maximize my profits then progress my characters. If you maximize your profits with progression in mind, you will, over time, have a drastically better account than those that are not. Since time is money in this game, it only makes this means of gameplay all the more important (and frugal).

It's also worthy to note, when you progress your guardians just right, almost any means of gameplay is more fun when you're wrecking face.

Some links to help you out:

Guardian Suggestions
Current Coliseum meta Rankings
Current Arena meta Rankings
Current Raid meta Rankings