Beginner's Guide to AFK Arena

Beginner's Guide
  • Generally speaking, it's better to concentrate on a small selection of Heroes and save in-game resources. 
  • This guide goes over: how Ascention/Rarities work, the level cap, and budgeting of Gold, Diamonds and Labyrinth Coins. As a new player, goals will be to acquire as many Elite Heroes as possible and enhance them throughout the story.

Foreword

Many thanks to CapFat for sharing this guide! You can find the original post and discussion here.

Important Items

ResourceFunction

Hero's Essence
Used to enhance Heroes and Gear.

Diamonds
Premium Currency

Player EXP
Levels up the player

Hero Experience
Used to level Heroes; players can choose which Heroes to spend EXP on

Rare Hero Soulstone
60 of these allow you to summon a random Rare Hero.

Elite Hero Soulstone
60 of these allow you to summon a random Elite Hero.

Common Hero Scroll
Summons any type of Hero in the tavern

Faction Scroll
Summons Heroes from a certain faction.

Labyrinth Tokens
Earned by exploring the Labyrinth. Players can buy Elite Heroes with these.

Ascension

Compared to other Hero collectors, AFK Arena makes it quite easy to acquire the full roster. Enhancing their power to maximum potential takes many dupes consolidated through the process of Ascension. 

This site has a nice image grid showing how it works (via AFKarena.net) as does AFKarenax.com here.

Note: Celestials and Hypogeans are an exception

There are 6 tiers of heroes-- only the first three can be pulled from the Tavern. Beyond that, Heroes need to be built.

  • Common tier heroes (green)

  • Rare tier heroes (blue) - these max out at Legendary+.

  • Elite tier heroes (violet) - can be enhanced all the way to Mythic and Ascended

  • Legendary tier heroes (gold)

  • Mythic tier heroes (red)

  • Ascended tier heroes (glowing white)

You can check that out at the portrait painel at the heroes tab.

The first things to be noted are 2 main ascension caps for your heroes: Legendary+ and Ascended. To reach these ascension stages, you need copies of the hero you are ascending, any other ascension stage besides that, only requires fodder (stars aside). Getting copies of a specific hero is hard while, getting fodder is easy (time will do that for you). Focus on heroes that can get through these tier stages to have a smoother progress. Also, don't ascend too many heroes to Legendary/Mythic tier-- that will make you waste fodder and therefore time and progress. 

  • Common tier heroes serve as fodder for bounty board missions while you don't have enough heroes to complete them. You should retire excess common tier heroes for Hero Coins.

  • Legendary tier heroes can be used at the early/middle game or as fodder for the Ascended tier heroes or other legendary tier heroes. The most notorious Legendary tier heroes are Saveas (until around chapter 15), Arden (from level 81 onwards, useful at any part of the game), Vedan (Early to Mid game) and Silvina (Mid game).

  • Ascended tier heroes are the core of the gameplay, they have the greatest growth potential and are going to be used throughout all the game

The Level Cap

The level cap for elites is level 100, and every ascension tier beyond it increases the level cap by 20 levels, with the only exception being ascended, which increases the level cap by 40 levels. If you do the math, you will find a max level cap at level 240 (stars do not increase the level cap). However: for every ascended tier hero you have, you are able to increase the level cap of all other ascended tier heroes by 5 levels. When you get another Ascended tier hero, you'll be able to directly upgrade the resonating Crystal to increase the level cap of your ascended tier heroes (More info). This is the main reason the community created Rule 240: Never use Ascended tier heroes as fodder to ascend other heroes.

Why does the Rule 240 exists? For several reasons really, some of them are:

  • Heroes have ascendency caps. There are 2 main groups: legendary tier heroes (can reach up to legendary+ and level 160) and ascended tier heroes (can reach up to 5 star ascended and a non specified level, I'll get to it bellow) this causes the second and third reason:

  • There is the Challenger arena (after beating 9-20) and the Guild Wars, those 2 requires the players to fight 3 5v5 fights, so you need 15 heroes, those 2 features gives you resources, if you don't have enough heroes or not high enough rarity heroes you will get trashed and not get many resources out of those.

  • There are the Faction Towers: after chapter 15 you unlock 4 tower stances that work just like the original one, however, only heroes of 1 specific faction can participate in each.

  • Late Game: every ascension tier increases the level cap by 20 levels until ascended (getting into ascended increases the level cap by 40 levels). Adding stars does not increase the level cap. If you do the math, the level cap should be 240-- but every hero in your roster added to your Ascended pool increases the level cap by 5 levels. Therefore, using ascended tier heroes as fodder can cripple your late game. 

Two notable takeaways: 

  1. Your first five ascended heroes increase the total level cap upon reaching 240-- as in, can you make it to level 265 with only your main 5 heroes being ascended.
  2. Only heroes that have reached Ascended can go past 240 and to your current level cap-- green or blue drops will still be limited by their normal level caps when using the Resonating Crystal.

Spending Diamonds

Short Answer: only buy Elite Hero Soulstones and the 2700 diamonds 10-hero draw

Long Answer: The only things that can provide you constant progress in game are the ascendency tier and the level of your heroes. Gear will give you some boosts, but it is limited and there will be a point in which there will be gear floating in your bag and none of your heroes will want it-- even mythic rarity gear. Since the level cap is limited by ascension tier, what matters is getting copies of heroes, and therefore, buying heroes is the best way to get progress and anything that inhibits that is detrimental. Some people can say that in the lab store, the price of mythic gear makes it a worthy buy, since you can't get many heroes with that quantity of diamonds and mythic gear is quite good. However, keep in mind that even though this can be true, it's very subjective and getting more than a couple mythic gears this way is objectively bad.

Considering your options to buy hero copies:

  • Tavern draws:

  • 51.69% of common tier = 0.046 Elites every 10 draws (Purple soulstone)

  • 43.70% of Rare tier = 0.486 Elites every 10 draws

  • 4.61% of Elite tier heroes = 0.461 Elite every 10 draws

  • Tavern Tokens = 0.1 elites per 10 draws

  • Total = 1.093 elites every 10 draws. This makes every elite worth 2470 diamonds (~46.4% of fodder + ?% chance of fodder from elites and soulstones)

  • Elite Soulstones:

  • 113 diamonds per 5 pieces = 1356 diamonds per elite (?% chance of fodder)

  • 91 diamonds per 5 pieces = 1092 diamonds per elite (?% chance of fodder)

Purple stones > tavern, however, you can't rely on elite soulstones alone to spend all your diamonds, so you should still buy heroes at the tavern.

Spending Gold

He lies! Hero's Essence is the only good deal here.

Spend gold only to buy the Hero's Essence (PURPLE COCAINE) at the store, which is used to level heroes and upgrade gear.

Be aware that spending gold at early gear is not recommended. Gold is a very limited resource until the very late game. Upgrading gear costs gold and you can't recover that gold, even though you can recover the exp (use the gear as fodder for the next gear piece). Any gear rarity other than Mythic has a very small time frame in which you'll use them, and mythic gear is very expensive to upgrade. You should save your gold for mythic gear, some will say that you can add a couple of stars to non-mythic gear without loss, and indeed, the cost is so low, you might not notice the difference.

Labyrinth Store

First thing you need to know: You will be able to buy 2 heroes per month for a looooong time, (until sometime around player level 110 for f2p players). Choose 2 heroes and buy them until you have a total of 8 elites copies of them (enough for ascended)

Anything else other than the elite heroes at not worth it, this game is about the long run and that amount of purple dust is only worth 2 days of gameplay, can't you just wait another 2 days instead of "sacrificing" your chance of getting ascended tier heroes?

Which heroes to choose?

A general answer is: Nemora and Shemira, with Nemora being your first buy. Why? Shemira is the strongest unit of the game and nemora is super useful to get good progress at labyrinth and peaks of time, not to mention, Shemira is not the God Shemira until the end of the mid game (around level 161), when she has the skill setup that makes her... Shemira.

A specific answer is: it depends on what you got so far. For example: I got lucky at the early game and got copies of Nemora, Lucius, Belinda and Estrilda. That made lightbringers a very big payout for me (I also spent $1 in game and got myself an extra Estrilda and Hogan). I bought nemora and estrilda at the lab store for a long time until I had enough copies of estrilda to make her ascended and then I begun to buy Shemira instead. That allowed me to have the heroes I linked at the beginning of the post. If you have any doubts, ask someone about it on reddit or discord-- people are happy to share roster advice. Most people will, however, fall into the general answer above.

Challenger Arena Store

Fawkes is the best option from the Challenger Arena Store.

Maximizing the quantity of ascended tier heroes is important for the late game, try to think of what way will help you achieve this in the shortest amount of time and choose the order of who you buy accordingly

You need 14 copies of Athalia to get her to ascended instead of the 8 the other heroes require, and you can't get her from factional scrolls or tavern tokens, You will likely be able to buy enough copies of all the other heroes to get them to ascended before you have enough copies to get Athalia or Ezizh to ascended. That's why Celestial and Hypogean heroes are not considered f2p heroes.

There are several guides out there, but I will be linking this one

When building teams, try to get the factional buffs. They are buffs that make comps work better, and will help you progress while you are learning about how to use each one of your heroes

Some Heroes that have high strategic value are

Fawkes

Fawkes: He will take the highest enemy dpser out of the game for some time, his primary target from what I've seen is Khasos, and Morvus after that, they 2 heroes that causes a lot of interruption at the bginning of the battle. Fawkes can cancel shields with his ult, including Brutus's Immortality one

Tasi

Tasi: Does the same as Fawkes but for shorter periods of time and with a CC (Crowd Control) ultimate

Athalia

Athalia: The game's sniper, place her mirroing her target's position and she will make her target become useless at the beginning of the battle, very effective against Arden/Saveas/Mirael

Mehira

Mehira: Energy and Haste generator, better placed as middle backliner, with charm-styled ult, she has 175% health and is quite tanky despite low rarity tier

Lyca

Lyca: Gives energy and Haste at the beginning of the match and opens up several possibilities with other heroes such as Arden

arden

Arden: Possibly the strongest CC in game, his roots can make you win matches you wouldn't otherwise, very strong from level 161 onwards (capped at legendary+, unfortunately). Once a wandering redditor told me, those words of wisdom that I shall never forget, those words still echoes though my mind every time I see both Lyca and Arden in a late game stage: "You can only beat Arden with a faster Arden". Jokes aside, this isn't 100% true but still pretty accurate

Nemora

Nemora: an easily attainable early-game healer available for purchase in the Labyrinth store. For endurance modes like the Labyrinth and general longevity, Nemora helps a lot, especially with Haste speeding up her ultimate. 

Notes

The heroes above have such useful skills that even at low rarity can still be used against ascended tier heroes. My Athalia, Mehira and Arden are still at elite+ but still do their job. My Mehira can even tank level 200ish Ascended Silvinas of chap 18 (When Nemora uses individual heal on her and Silvina's tp doesn't crit)

Level distribution: There are 2 main ways to do so: with Carries (focus the exp on 1 hero) and with a more even team (close to equal distribution). The best carries of the game are:

  • Saveas

  • Shemira

  • Brutus

The Resonating Crystal takes your five highest-level Heroes and can boost other Heroes to that level.

You only need to level up 5 heroes at a time. You can reset the other ones at the Rickety Cart and level any other heroes with the resonating crystal. Heroes leveled by the resonating crystal are not any weaker than an exp based hero, you don't have to worry about a hero being weak just because you did not put exp into him, the attributes of your hero are going to be the same, doesn't matter if he got to that level with hero exp or with the resonating crystal.

Peaks of Time

You can quit from a fight and your heroes will be in the same way they were before the fight. For doing that, just click on the pause button at the lower left corner of the screen after the battle started. You can even challenge other enemies and come back to try that hard one later when you have more relics

Lucius/Nemora/Tasi/Mehira/Arden are all very strong heroes for peaks of time, for their sustain/CC. Peaks of time and the Labyrinth are all about surviving several fights without resetting the health of your heroes at the end of the battle. Have fun trying out the relics! Moonstone/Sunstone is a very strong relic combo btw

HOW TO CHECK VIP LEVEL AND BENEFITS (2 images)

Final Tips

  • Lillith Games often gives out free stuff using Redemption Codes. To see a list of currently working codes and rewards, see the page below:
  • Factional scrolls get you more fodder than elites-- but they do give you elites, so use them to focus on fodder/fixing the summons of 1 specific faction. Tavern tokens are more about fixing summons than creating fodder, so you don't really need to use both of them at the same faction. With this in mind, use them accordingly while planning your summon path. If you are at the early game, focus on getting your first 5 leg+, if you are past the leg+ cap, you can focus on trying to maximize the quantity of Ascended heroes you have.
  • Mythic gear will show up at the labyrinth merchant (in the lab run) and guild store after you beat stage 12-2 and as afk drops after you beat stage 16-11

  • To help you plan your summons, here are the Chapter and Stage Mission Rewards

  • Red flags in the Labyrinth give you better relics than the brown ones, build up your comp power by going though more red flag battles. If your team is strong enough for you to don't care too much about relics, you can try the way with the greater number of flags to max out the amount of labyrinth tokens instead.

  • Silvina's tp targets the mage with lowest defense, so you can shift her target by changing gear/artifact distribution. Her ult targets the enemy with the highest quantity of energy and only deals great amount of damage when the target has energy. If you hold the ult of a hero and as soon as Silvina ult, you use that hero's ultimate, Silvina will hit that hero and deal far lower damage than what she usually does.

Author(s)

Content Editor and News Writer at GamePress! I write about mobile games, maintain databases, and draw fanart of said games. Sometimes I play them too. Native to Austin, loves cacti and hiking. 

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