A guide on retiring and rehiring your heroes

Introduction

Recreating heroes if they do not get the skills you are looking for when they level up early is a great way to ensure you get the best possible performance out of your new hero and not have to worry about spending gems to fix their initial skills when they level up later on. This is incredibly helpful for making heroes that are then titan souled later on, as they’ll have a great base to work from.

The idea itself is pretty straightforward – you set yourself a target level (usually 5 or 10), get your hero to that level and then if they haven’t got great skills you retire them and make a new one. By weeding out your weaker heroes early you save on potential disappointment later on.

It should also be noted that the first skill slots of a hero have lower odds to roll rare/epic skills – by getting them via a retire/rehire you’re not going to be at the mercy of RNG so much when trying for them (at least, you won’t have to burn boatloads of gems to acquire them.)

Below is a table showing the amount of experience required for each of the skill level unlocks:

Hero Level	Total Experience Required
5	1,585
10	20,655
23	570,845
35	4,648,793

There are a few ways you can go about hitting these numbers quickly.

Questing Talent Tree – Argon’s Finest

Update 14.0 introduced talent trees into the game. The talent “Argon’s Finest” (which is found early in the questing tree) allows you to hire heroes at a higher level – with 3 points invested into the talent you can hire heroes at level 10, allowing you to immediately check the first 2 skills without having to do any questing at all (you can do the entire process in about 10 seconds.)

This is fastest and easiest way to rehire heroes with the only limitation on it being how much you’re willing to spend/your patience – you could check potentially hundreds of heroes in an hour. That being said this does mean you need to invest talent points in questing which you might prefer to put elsewhere. Still worth considering though especially if you’re doing a big roster overhaul.

Experience Drinks

The second and the second fastest method to level them is to use experience drinks. They come in 3 different sizes which give varying amounts of experience:

XP Drink: Grants 500 experience
Super XP Drink: Grants 5,000 experience
Mega XP Drink: Grants 50,000 experience
Mythic XP Drink: Grants 1 level (DO NOT USE THIS ON A LOW LEVEL HERO.)

These are your best friends when it comes to leveling a new hero quickly. A Mega XP drink will allow you to check the first 2 skills on any hero, a Super will check the first skill, 4 XP drinks will also allow you to see the first skill. The downside to these unfortunately is they’re not easily obtained and you can burn through your supply of them very quickly, more so if luck is against you.

Mythic XP drinks add a flat +1 level to your hero so if your hero is level 35 for example it’ll make it 36 which is a lot of xp saved, but on the other hand it’ll make a level 1 hero level 2 which is a monumental waste of a drink. These should be used when you either:

A) want to get to 35 quicker to view your 4th skill (mythic xp drinks beat others once you reach level 28)
Or
B) want to go past your training hall cap – generally you do this on a hero you’re building to showoff or want to make perfect. Most guilds won’t have access to a max level hall so this is a way to get those final few levels.

If experience drinks are not your thing (or you ran out) then we turn to questing. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can go about levelling quickly.

Note: calculations are based on the assumption you either have the dungeons leveled up to give max hero xp, or you have ways to compensate for that if not.

Aurora Caves

First up we have the Aurora Caves. A hero can reach level 5 in one trip to the dungeon on Hard difficulty, or one trip on Medium difficulty if your guild is running the Quest experience boost (it’s very helpful) or you use at least 3 Owl spirits on your gear.

Now you can’t go sending your brand new hero into Aurora without some equipment (hey it’s one of the times power rating has a function) – you will need 450 power to enter Medium and 750 to enter Hard.

Building for Medium – 450

Due to their varying base stats, not every hero starts at the same power rating, and some will find it easier than others to hit 450 due to their being elemental blueprints they can wield. Fortunately 450 isn’t too difficult to hit – it can be achieved in normal quality gear, though some classes will need enchants to push them over the line (Spellcasters mainly cause they have very low base hero power.) Listed below are some suggested loadouts you could use for medium Aurora.

Reminder: if your guild is not running the XP boost, you will need owls to compensate.

Fighters (Red Types)

---

Rogues (Green Types)

---

Spellcasters (Blue Types)

Building for Hard – 750

For hard Aurora we need an extra 300 hero power to enter. This means we can’t quite get away with what we were using for medium (Berserker for example will need to actually wear something.)

Why we’ll be using Bear instead of raising the item quality: the Yeti’s that reside in Aurora Hard can pack a bit of a punch – Bear helps us prevent an unfortunate demise. We do not need to mix in Owls as it gives enough XP to hit level 5 regardless.

Here are some examples you can use (whenever you see an elemental item being used, it should take priority for your enchants):

Fighters (Red Types)

---

Rogues (Green Types)

---

Spellcasters (Blue Types)

Now whilst Aurora is great for doing a quick check for your hero’s first skill, it is not recommended to keep running to find out your second skill – due to the amount of runs involved there are better ways to find out, starting with paying a trip to the Barren Wastes.

Barren Wastes

Barren Wastes is where things start to get interesting. It requires a lot more hero power to enter which means we have some choices to make. We can go for a slower-but-cheaper route where we build up to Barren by going through Aurora first – the levels gained there will allow heroes to wear higher tier gear, thus allowing us to hit the required power a lot easier.

Alternatively we can go all out on gear and jump straight into Barren hard – 2 runs will get a hero to level 10 presuming you have the dungeon mastered. It’s faster but to run it at level 1 is going to require a lot more gear investment.

Route 1: Level 10 in 3 Quests

Stage 1: Aurora Hard
Stage 2: Whispering Bog Hard
Stage 3: Barren Hard

By staggering our runs to 3 quests, we can get away with running cheaper gear in places as we can rely on the level ups from each area to boost our power rating over the thresholds needed for each dungeon.

Some classes are able to use a loadout similar/identical to the one they use for Aurora, though there are a few classes which will need a gear change between Whispering and Barren. Below I have listed some suggested gear loadouts you can use.

About Champions: all gearsets for this section are based on the assumption you don’t have a champion running with them to boost the power rating (but you are using a hero/champion to help the team out where needed. Some classes won’t, others will.) I took this approach as I did not want to design loadouts that only worked if you had say Argon at rank X or Y. These should work regardless of what champion you use (if any), just you can use cheaper gear options if you do opt to run with one.

About Skills: following the same reasoning as champions, the sets are designed for worst-case scenario – that is, you roll Fast Learner as your level 5 skill. Any other skill would add more hero power, meaning you don’t need to match these sets exactly. Just trying to prepare you in case you’re cursed or something.

If your guild does not run the XP boost, you will need to enchant 1 item with an Owl at some point in the run – it doesn’t matter which dungeon you choose for that, just needs to be 1 piece for 1 dungeon. Or you can use an xp drink.

Fighters (Red Types)

---

Rogues (Green Types)

---

Spellcasters (Blue Types)

Route 2: Level 10 in 2 Quests

Stage 1: Whispering Bog Hard
Stage 2: Barren Wastes Hard

Now how costly this will be is going to come down to whether or not your guild is running the XP boost. I’ll outline 2 different loadouts you can go based on it whilst trying to adhere to the rules in the route 1 section.

Heaven Route – Guild runs XP boost

If your guild is running the XP boost guild perk at full power then you do not need to use Owls for this route which makes it way easier to gear for. You can get away with normal quality gear and enchants, as shown in the loadouts below.

Hero XP buff is critical: without it you’ll be the wrong level coming out of Whispering and will be under the power cap for Barren. If your guild xp buff isn’t at max, you can substitute one Owl for each 5% it’s missing, though you may not hit power requirements if you use too many.

Remember: you will likely be running these heroes with a Champion and/or won’t get Fast Learner at level 5¹. Using either of those will make the requirements easier to hit so you do not need to mirror these loadouts – they’re designed to act as a guideline/help for worst case, but will be overkill in most normal leveling scenarios.

Fighters (Red Types)

---

Rogues (Green Types)

---

Spellcasters (Blue Types)

Hell Route – Guild does not run XP boost

So this is referred to as the Hell route because without the XP buff we’re going to need Owls², which is going to make things a bit³ trickier when it comes to hitting power/survival threshholds.

The best way we can compensate for having to reduce our Bear count is to bring a Champion along – each of them can add enough power to cover the shortfall. We could also start taking into account the skill your hero rolls as well as that’ll also make it easier.

Remember: These are guidelines. They will work if you copy/paste but for the majority of leveling scenarios you won’t need to be this well equipped (cause you’ll have a Champion, or a team, maybe a power booster etc.)

Fighters (Red Types)

---

Rogues (Green Types)

---

Spellcasters (Blue Types)

“But Rei, I want it to go even faster”

Sun God’s Tomb

Note: this section is aimed at late-game players

With the release of tier 12 enchants we got a very welcome addition to the levelling crew with the addition of the Hydra spirit. This spirit gives a flat +100 Defence and +25 Health which (aside from helping ensure your low level hero survives) gives a lot of hero power – to the point where we can run Sun God’s Tomb on Hard difficulty to level 1-10 in a single quest and not need higher than normal quality gear.

Below is an image containing the different loadouts you should be using when running Sun God – pay attention to the times Argon is called for if you don’t want to use higher quality gear. If your guild does not use the XP boost you’ll be looking at having to use a booster as there isn’t a lot of room to use Owls here (or you could use Owl and use a power booster. You’ve got options.)

NOTE: You will need 1 decent hero in the party to act as a carry for the level 1’s.

Level 11+ and conclusion

So you’ve rolled your hero, got your 2 skills and are now wanting to push for 23. Your best options here involve the previously mentioned Owls and the Quest experience boost your guild can run. Bosses provide an incredible amount of exp and should be killed every spawn with heroes you are looking to level – combined with XP booster items they will cut the time to level down by a lot.

Outside of bosses you want to be pushing the hardest dungeons you can with them. There isn’t really any special tricks you can use here – i’m afraid you just have to bear with it (I consider this part one of the most boring parts of leveling a hero.) However know that if you rolled a hero to get 2 good skills already it’s going to be amazing when you finish. 

For late-game players who have access to Hydra and can run extreme dungeons this is a possible route you can use to get to 35 in as few quests as possible:

So there you have it, a reason to reroll heroes and some methods you can use to speed it along. Please note that you don’t actually need your heroes to have 2 epic skills, this is just something to consider for fun/potentially preparing for future content.

1. and if you do keep getting Fast Learner, I apologise for jinxing it
2. alternatively, this is a great time for Fast Learner to appear
3. a lot