Sigbog is an avid gamer whose addiction spans PC and mobile titles. They love to break games down and pick them apart.

Hero Growth / Upgrade Guide

What Is Hero Growth?

In October 2019, a new system was added to Archero allowing players to upgrade their Heroes. This upgrade system is called Hero Growth and is a significant source of stats and general power. At its core, it allows players to pay currencies to upgrade heroes, granting stats and perks. These stats are comparable to gear stats and thus Hero Growth is a major system for power progression. A level 60 Hero is similar to being able to equip an extra Epic armor plus an extra Epic weapon!

As an important side note, this article does not cover the Hero Evolution system added in September 2020. For more information on Hero Evolution check out this article instead.

Leveling Heroes

Leveling a hero requires two things:

• Sapphires found in chapters 3 and beyond
• Coins found in any chapter

There are no play or experience requirements, you can upgrade Heroes with just these 2 currencies even on Heroes you don't play. Currently, the maximum level appears to be 80 but you can only level your Heroes up to your own player level so 80 is far out of reach for the time being.

Farming Sapphires

Sapphires are regular drops on levels after Chapter 3. Apart from standard farming rules you can find in my guide, there isn't a lot of unique knowledge to be aware of. Higher chapters do appear to drop more Sapphires just as they drop more scrolls and coins. However, the Daily Challenges system also added in October 2019 can be a significant source of Sapphires so be sure to max that out every day.

They also can be purchased from the Mysterious vendor in small amounts for coins or gems, or in larger bulk amounts for gems. They cost 2000 each for coins or 9–13 each for gems. As with other bulk purchase options, the cost per unit is a bit higher for bulk purchases (~13.3 gems per sapphire). I generally do not recommend making this purchase as Coins are much more restrictive than Sapphires and you'll end up with enough Sapphires to upgrade but constrained on coins to upgrade (or upgrade gear/talents for that matter).

Hero Attributes

Leveling up a Hero grants 4 different advantages:

• Bonus attack for each level
• Bonus health for each level
• A Hero specific perk on some levels, usually 40 and 80
• A perk affecting all your Heroes on some levels, usually at levels 20 and 60

The bonus attack and health stats are comparable to a level on armor or on a weapon, making them overall very powerful. The perks vary in strength, the ones affecting all Heroes are weaker whereas the ones unique to a Hero can actually be quite strong.

Hero Growth Chart

Hero Growth Stats Table

Hero Upgrade Costs

Cumulative Upgrade Costs

Hero Upgrading Path Chart

Leveling Strategy

This starts to get a little tricky. Generally, you should focus on upgrading a single Hero, but you'll run into two problems. One is that you cannot upgrade a Hero past your player level, and two is that obviously, you want to reap the rewards of all the perks that impact all Heroes.

The precise optimal path isn't 100% clear or straightforward given many of the perks are percentage-based and will be more useful for higher stat players or can be more or less useful based on your build. Plus your access to various heroes or preferred heroes can change things as well.

However, here is a good rule of thumb to follow that's easy to remember. A more detailed path will be put further down.

• Upgrade your primary hero to level 40
• Upgrade premium or MTX heroes to 20
• Upgrade free or coin heroes to 20
• Max out your primary hero
• Continue with the rest to 60 prioritizing premium or MTX heroes

This path can vary for many reasons, but doing this will be at least somewhat efficient. Generally, the cost of reaching an ALL perk from a hero needs to be lower than the level stats you would gain from upgrading your main hero. This is only relevant in higher levels where costs start to balloon.

To be more precise, I've built out an example path for Helix users as Helix is very strong and quite commonly used. This path is:

• Helix to level 40, unlocking both the level 20 and level 40 perks plus accumulating tons of level stats.
• Rolla to level 20 as it's all perk at level 20 is pound for pound the best and outweighs how many stats you would gain from further leveling Helix at this point
• Bonnie to level 20 for that awesome crit damage perk. If you have very high attack (above ~2500) you can reasonably go for this perk before Rolla's but it's so easy to get to level 20 it's not much of a consideration.
• Helix to level 45, the perks from other heroes don't quite outweigh the cost of leveling until after 45.
• Meowgik to level 20, less attack than Rolla but not by a lot!
• Onir/Sylvan to level 20, simply put 200 health is not a bad figure!
• Urasil to level 20, not as strong as Rolla, but the raw attack is nice.
• Phoren and Taranis to level 20, the critical strike chance is likely not as good as the raw attack from Urasil, but if you're a big fan of crit builds and have incredibly high attack already (2600+) you could do these first.
• Helix to level 60, gaining level stats and a new perk.
• Atreus to level 20, a mere half the impact as Onir level 20, this is less efficient to do earlier on.
• Helix maxed out as high as you can get, and keeping it there as you level up
• Onir to level 60, the healing is nice. Albeit the healing calculation is such that it only impacts your Recover talent, adding 10 extra healing to your red hearts per point you have in Recover. However, healing is very critical as you get higher in the game and I still generally believe this is the best level 60 perk.
• Rolla/Sylvan to level 60, again some wonderful raw attack power. You could argue Rolla should be leveled up before Onir, it certainly wouldn't be crazy but I will level Onir first.
• Bonnie to level 60, generally attack is more valuable than health so you could do Taranis first, but I would personally aim for the 5% health before the 4% attack unless you've completed the game and are just looking to farm faster.
• Meowgik to level 60, same as above.
• Taranis to level 60, the same as Rolla just less.
• Atreus to level 60, the same percentage as Taranis, just for health instead.
• Urasil to level 60, the critical strike damage is generally underwhelming but it could shine in crit builds.
• Phoren to level 60, slightly weaker than the critical strike damage in many scenarios.

These calculations are based on assigning weights and values to stats to normalize and compare all of them based on how the game identifies them. For example, if upgrading a hero grants 10 attack and 40 health I generally consider 10 attack to be equal to 40 health.

The calculations are not perfect, but they are certainly usable and should be a good path to follow if you don't wish to sit down and do a lot of math tailored to yourself.

Questions & Answers

Question: So I gotta buy all the heroes in order for the ALL effect to work, I cant upgrade just 1 hero?

Answer: Leveling up a Hero and reaching an ALL perk will turn that perk on for any Hero you use. Upgrading a single Hero is most important, but to snag all these minor perks, upgrading as many as possible is optimal, though it takes time and resources.

Question: Helix has no "all heroes" effect?

Answer: Habby has fixed this as of update 1.2.7!

© 2019 sigbog

Comments

Kidkai on April 01, 2020:

1st time +14000 Gems

Does this mean if I purchase the biggest Gems pack I get 28,000 gems for the price of 14,000 Gems?

Shylok on January 19, 2020:

its not 9,975,000 cumulative to lvl 80 but 6.975.000 coins

sigbog (author) from USA on January 09, 2020:

thanks floppy kong! Yes you're right, that coin amount is incorrect. I'll fix it and update the later levels with the numbers you provided. Cheers!

floppy kong on January 09, 2020:

I think the gold cost for level 40 is off. That looks like the cost to get to 41 to me. It should be 385,000 gold.

Also for the missing data above 50:

51-55: 80 Saph // + 4k gold per lvl

56-60: 100 Saph // +10k gold per lvl

61-65: 120 Saph // +10k gold per lvl

66-67: 140 Saph // +10k gold per lvl

68-70: 140 Saph // +20k gold per lvl (goes to 20k increase at 200k cost)

71-75: 170 Saph // +20k gold per lvl

76-78: 200 Saph // +20k gold per lvl

79-80: 200 Saph // +40k gold per lvl (goes to 40k increase at 400k cost)

Cumulative to 70: 3,420 // 3,415,000

Cumulative to 80: 5,270 // 9,975,000

sigbog (author) from USA on November 14, 2019:

Yep, all automatic, nothing you have to do after reaching the level.

Sarah on November 14, 2019:

When my main hero got to level 20 it unlocked the perk of All Heros Max HP +100. Did they all automatically upgrade then? I usually only use Atreus. Have only unlocked 1 other character and that is Urasil. Thanks in advance.

Me on November 03, 2019:

@Billy

I believe you can only level your hero up to the max level you are currently at. So you have to gain more levels to continue to upgrade your hero.

Billy on November 01, 2019:

Does anyone know how to up the max hero level past 57?

sigbog (author) from USA on October 30, 2019:

Sorry guys, my table is a little misleading. The level column represents the level you are currently so you start at lv1, and upgrade to lv2 with 1 sapphire. Similarly your 19th upgrade brings you from 19 to 20 and costs 10 sapphires. It does actually cost 120 sapphires though. I'll update the table to reflect level reached as opposed to starting point so it's more clear. Thanks for pointing it out!

Kyle on October 30, 2019:

You need 137 to get level 20. i just manually counted it. Unless I miscounted.

lvl 1-4 is 1-4 each

lvl 5-9 is 5 each

lvl 10-15 is 7 each

lvl 16-20 is 10 each

Yo on October 30, 2019:

So going from lvl 1 to 20 with a hero costs 135 saphires, is that right?