Leveling up increases the Attack, Defense, and Health of a hero. It also provides a chance to level up their Special Skill. It should be noted that although leveling does make a hero more powerful, it is not possible to convert any hero into a higher tier hero. A 1* hero will always be a 1* hero, no matter how high they are leveled and ascended.
Player level up is a different matter entirely and is a result of winning in World battles or Quest stages.
How to Level Up a Hero
At the bottom of the hero card you are presented with two different ways to level up your hero: "Level Up" and "Ascend". See Ascension for more on the ascension process.
- Choose a hero to level up and select "Level Up". You wil then be presented with a new screen that zooms in on the XP bar and your list of non-favorited heroes that are not in any of your teams.
- Select a hero from the list to the bottom, adding them to the queue of heroes to be used up in training. You'll see the experience that the selected heroes has is then queued to be added to the hero that you're leveling up. It will also show how much food is required for the training, and how much % chance the hero's special skill has of leveling up.
- Click on the now green "Level Up" button, at which point the experience will be added, and the selected heroes will be removed from your inventory. The chance of upgrading the hero's special skill will be applied, and if it gets upgraded, the hero's special skill will be permanently better. You will get a warning if you are about to use up a high-rarity or ascended hero in the process.
Best Practices
- If you intend to keep a hero and level them up, the very first thing you should do is find the little white lock icon in the upper left hand corner, just above the hero card, and click it to the 'locked' position. This make the hero a favorite, meaning said hero will be completely unavailable when selecting heroes to train with. Too many people have lost their brand new 5* hero for this step to be overlooked.
- Leveling up a hero using a hero of the same name will give an astounding 25% chance to level up the original's special skill for each other hero of the same name chosen.
- Training heroes with other same-element heroes provides 20% more experience than off-element heroes, as well as providing double the chance of the original's special skill upgrading.
- Leveling up a hero's special skill now has a 5x greater chance if the hero is at max level.
- Because trainer heroes come fully ascended and leveled, the amount of experience that they provide is substantial. It is best to sacrifice them only when none of their experience is being wasted, ideally on the higher ascension tiers.
- Leveling by using 10 heroes at a time vs. 1 hero at a time provides no true value with regards to exp gained or special skill level up chance, but it does serve as the most efficient food expenditure per level. Because of this efficiency, it is highly recommended to level using 10 heroes at a time until you reach max level, at which point, the 5x chance to level one's Special Skill may very well encourage using 1 at a time (at your tolerance for the randomness, of course).
5-at-a-Time vs 1
While on-element leveling is generally recommended for efficiency's sake, sometimes it is beneficial to just push all of your heroes into one more powerful hero, despite the loss in efficiency. This is because there comes a point in progression where leveling more efficiently means leveling more slowly, as several of those heroes are likely lower tier than the others and thus much less powerful. Since they won't have anywhere near the impact of the more powerful new heroes to your squad, on occasion it may be best to forego efficiency in favor of having that new, more powerful hero ready to go.
Here are some questions to consider as you ponder the need for efficiency vs the need for a new, fully leveled hero:
- Are you comfortable with your current roster depth?
- Do you have at least 1 hero in 3 or more separate elements that are each a priority to level?
- Will this one hero make it into the majority of my teams?
- Will this one hero massively impact an important aspect of my gameplay (such as Wu Kong on titans)?
Level Caps
How many stars a hero has (1*, 2*, etc) determines both it's maximum level potential, as well as the number of times that it may ascend, and the level at which they do that. Each Ascension also increases a hero's maximum level potential by 10. All heroes begin at the 1st tier of ascension.
| Stars | 1st Ascention | 2nd Ascention | 3rd Ascention | Max level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | 20 | ---- | ---- |
| 2 | 20 | 30 | 40 | ---- |
| 3 | 30 | 40 | 50 | ---- |
| 4 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 |
| 5 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 |
A full breakdown of experience required by hero tier and level may be found here thanks to some deep investigation on the part of Muaadip. The primary moral to the story is that exp required scales progressively with each new level for both heroes and troops, as he showed in several graphs on the original forum post.
Exp Values Per Hero
Credit to Mariamné for the graphic.
Hero Classes
Hero classes were released in January 2019 and serve as a way to enhance fully leveled heroes. See the Hero Classes page for more information.