After-Thoughts: Archero Guides, Experiences, and Critiques

 Hello. This is unusual for me. I usually spend a lot of time talking about games but it rarely ever hops into the mobile market, mainly because mobile games don't have a lot of room for complexity or depth compared to PC and console games due to the limited interaction that smartphones and tablets present. Even games like Taimanin Asagi Battle Arena which I assume play just fine with the touch screen controls plays a lot better with a controller in your hand, it's just a shame the game was clearly made for the mobile market. Archero is a different beast, though. Archero is simple in terms of gameplay but surprisingly intricate on a moment to moment basis. I'd say its depth is similar in nature to Star Fox if Star Fox were a rogue-like.

Side Note: I don't know whether the devs are calling this game a rogue-like or a rogue-lite. However, as far as I've seen, there seems to be no meaningful difference in genre classification and the origin of rogue-lite can be traced back to Rogue Legacy, no further, and given that it was a rogue-like as well the entire idea of rogue-lite may very well be based on a typo. So I'm going to call this game a rogue-like just for the sake of simplicity.

Here I will jot down the basics of the game in question, what I've gleaned from it from my experiences, using some videos from Superteeds in particular to round out thoughts on things I have less of an idea on, and some critiques I'll offer for not only this game but others that use similar game design principles.

For context, I've been playing this game for around a year, I've got all of the free to play characters, my main is Ayana, and as far as pay to plays are concerned, I have unlocked Onir, Sylvan, and Ryan most recently. In addition, I'm on the cusp of unlocking Shade, Ophelia, and Rolla by way of Hero Shards, and almost every character in my roster that I've unlocked so far is level 60 or above. The ones that aren't are Onir, Urasil, and Ryan. I'm currently working on getting Urasil to Level 60 for his All Heroes Crit Damage buff but he hasn't made it yet at the time I've begun writing this. In addition, nearly every hero I've unlocked is at a 1 star evolution except for Ryan and Sylvan due to scarcity of shards for those particular characters. Other than them, however, Onir is my only 1 star, everyone else is 2 stars or above.

In addition, I've upgraded Talents 107 times according to the counter, and I've maxed out the levels for Glory, Patrol Earnings, and Agile. I've forged 581 runes, collected 16 eggs for the monster farm and successfully hatched 9 of them, obtained 2 outfits, gotten to chapter 14 of Normal mode and chapter 12 of Hero mode. I've got 4 total unique weapons of epic rarity or higher, with the Crossbow being Perfect Epic. In addition, I have a Perfect Epic Dexterity Robe, Wolf, Serpent, and Lion Ring, Laser Bat and Pixie Spirits, Frozen Bracelet, and Angel Locket, all at level 50 except for the Serpent Ring which is sitting comfortably at level 27. I've gotten to stage 266 of Expedition, and I've done all of the events multiple times that do not involve online interaction with other players.

Finally, although I've recently begun to pay more money for some things, I'm doing my best to maintain my pseudo-free to play play style where the only things I spend money on are the Daily and Weekly Packs, and the Battle Passes, and even then nothing over $5 USD per transaction. Everything else, I want to do within the confines of a free to play. Because of that, I don't purchase characters, I've only spent money on the first two gem packs once, only one chapter pack, and only spend my gems on 72 hour gold pack rewards.

What I'm trying to say is that I have a lot of experience playing this game with only characters that have been unlocked by way of Hero Shards, save for only two exceptions. The first is Phoren, who can only be bought with Gold, not a high price point overall, and Ayana, who I spent gems on mainly because her playstyle seemed interesting to me. I've played with every character I've unlocked at least once and I have a decent understanding of how all of them work.

So today, I'll be going over my interpretation of everything in the game, what's good, what's bad, my suggestions for improvements, and what I can tell you as a beginning player to focus on early on in your playthrough and what you can expect to accomplish or run into as you play for longer stretches.

Basic Gameplay

The basic gameplay of Archero is pretty straightforward. While in a dungeon, you move the analog pad on the screen to move your character and remain stationary to attack enemies. There are some additives later but that's the basic gist. When I say the depth is similar to Star Fox, this is what I'm referring to: both games are about choosing the moment to weave into danger to land blows and out of danger in order to stay safe. In other words, rather than being games about complex movelists or puzzle solving, these games are about choosing opportunities to attack and picking the right times to take them.

This on its own would make a decent enough gameplay loop but I also said this is a rogue-like and that shows up inside the dungeons. Inside the dungeons, your character has a level. Usually that level cap is somewhere between 10 and 15. Whenever you level up you can pick 1 to 3 randomly selected skills to add to your list that is then entirely refreshed whenever you perform another attempt. While in a dungeon, not accounting for other things like gear or talents, there are only 3 other ways to obtain skills in this game. These are the Angel Deals, Wheel Angel, and the Devil Deals.

Angel Deals show up every 5th or so level, or every other level if it's a short wave-based chapter. Sometimes they can show up on the floor right before the next boss but in general that's an easy way to conceptualize it. The Angel deals offer you two things, neither is very bad but neither is overly good either. With the Angel deals you can get either a heal for a certain amount of health, or a skill, which is always a minor stat upgrade.

The Wheel Angel will only spawn in boss rooms and will give you a random selection of 6 options: 2 spots for a small amount of gold, 1 spot for a large amount of gold, two separate unique skills, and a heal. Unlike the level up select, however, the wheel of fortune as it were determines which one you end up with.

Finally, the Devil Deals will only show up in boss rooms if you've taken very little damage in the entire encounter. Given that the Devil Deal seems to almost universally spawn in early chapters even after I take damage, I think the threshold for summoning the Devil is taking less than 1% of your max health damage. Assuming this is the case, this accounts for why the Devil can sometimes show up even if you take damage. Regardless, generally you want to avoid damage if you want to summon it. Once it's there, it takes the place of the Wheel Angel, and offers a deal. In exchange for taking away around 10-15% of your Max Health, it will grant you a very powerful skill. Some of these are just Major Stat Upgrades, usually Attack Boost, Attack Speed Boost, and Crit Master. However, some of these skills are more unique and are only offered by the Devil Deal. For example, Running on Water, Running through Walls, and Extra Life are only available through the Devil, and while Front Arrow and Multi-Shot are not, the Devil Deal's versions of these skills are modified so that they can be stacked with the variations of these skills that come with regular level ups. And while it is possible to get multiple front arrows through level ups alone, the Devil Deals are the only way to get multiple multi-shots. I've never seen the Devil spawn Multi-Shot more than once per run but even without that, it's still possible to have two multi-shots for up to 3 arrows fired per reload. Combined with Attack Speed Boosts, even the slowest weapons in the game will have some insane attack frequencies.

Once you finish a run, either by completing the stages or by dying, you leave and all of your rewards are brought with you. You can then use what you've acquired on things like equipment upgrades, runes, character level ups or evolutions, or just use the XP to increase your account level. Your account level can be thought of as the game's universal level cap. It goes up as you gather experience but none of the characters you've obtained will be able to level up past that Level cap. So my current account level is 72, which means if I want my main to be upgraded to level 73 I'm going to have to increase my account level to that first.

Early game, this creates an interesting dynamic with your characters where until your level cap reaches 40, you're leveling up your characters pretty much just so they're all relatively equal so that you can swap them out for whatever dungeon you're having trouble with. This forces a certain amount of experimentation but it mitigates the need for other characters. Once you reach Level 40, however, suddenly getting other characters is incredibly beneficial for two major reasons. Firstly, every hero has an All Hero Stat Upgrade at Level 20. The only exception I've run into thus far is Shari, whose first All Hero Stat Upgrade is actually at Level 40. When your account's at Level 20 though this won't matter much because the all hero upgrades are pretty low and you won't have access to evolution until the character in question is level 30. Once the character hits level 30, however, they can evolve to 1 star, which will usually offer a modifier to patrol.

Patrol is this game's version of offline earnings, it's a number that ticks to give you things like gold, XP, and other assorted currencies. And while you can gather the patrol earnings every hour if you want to, this will prevent you from gathering anything that's not Gold and XP. So it's generally a better idea to gather patrol earnings every 12-24 hours so that in addition to the patrol earnings themselves you can also watch an ad to get a free boost equivalent to 6 hours that is available once every 12 hours, turning earnings for a 24 hour span up to a 36 hour span.

On the second star, evolution, however, is another All Hero stat upgrade which is not much better than the Level 20 one but all together they add up pretty quickly. However, your hero needs to be level 35 to get to 2 stars because the evolutions also have a minimum character level requirement. For most characters, the evolution will be slow enough that this isn't something you should be too concerned about due to the scarcity of hero shards. Evolution chips are used to upgrade the Evolution meter at, generally, 10% intervals. Once it's at 100%, however, you need shards specific to each hero to upgrade them to the next star ranking, which also comes with whatever perk is assigned to that ranking on top of a pretty big general stat boost. For most heroes, shards are pretty rare. However, some heroes can farm 10 hero shards every 6 or so days during the Ancient Maze Event. I'll get more into that later. The four heroes this applies to are the first three free to plays Atreus, Urasil, and Phoren, and the first pay to play Onir. Everyone else's shards can be gained through the rewards if you wait for the refresh to bring their's in, or you can test your luck on random shard attempts.

Because of this, if you're planning on doing what I'm doing where you're only using hero shards to unlock characters and not spend money or gems on them, the only 4 heroes you're likely to get easily are Atreus, Urasil, Phoren, and Onir. Because the rewards on the other Free to plays and pay to plays not only have limits on shards but also cycle out with the other characters pretty regularly, early on you'll be spending a lot of time playing with either Phoren or Onir because those two are relatively high tier in general compared to Urasil and Atreus, who are both pretty weak by comparison.

This will also have the knock on effect that you'll end up saving up evolution chips, hero shards, and sapphires whenever your characters are maxed out on upgrades and evolutions until enough time passes that you can unlock one of the other locked characters, at which point you're likely to unlock a lot of those other heroes relatively close to each other since, provided you do well enough, you'll be getting around 9 shards per free to play and seven per pay to play, which will cause the free to plays to unlock first but each tier of characters to unlock slowly but pretty side by side. The only exceptions are Ryan and Lina currently, as they require 50 shards, compared to every other hero who only requires 30 to unlock. And while Ryan is easy enough if you use the battle pass in the seasons, Lina is going to require a lot more patience.

Other than that, though, I generally find that this method of unlocking heroes is disadvantageous to players because it gives them too long with heroes that are not particularly strong before shoveling a large number of strong heroes and stat upgrades on them that, at first, they may not be able to handle fully. I'll talk more about this in the critiques section but I think it would be better if the unlocking of heroes was a bit more spread out and more voluntary on the part of the player so that they're more likely to end up with specific heroes that they want and get enough practice with them before getting another hero that they're not spending so much of the early game with too little and a certain amount of the late game with too much. This is more a pacing issue than anything else.

Since I already talked about Patrol Earnings, I'll talk a little bit about different currencies in the game. There's gold, which is the general currency that almost everything in the game uses, gems, which can either substitute gold sometimes or can be used to purchase things like more gold or more energy to play the game with, or more attempts at events. Then there are more specific currencies, sapphires for leveling up heroes, evolution chips for evolving a hero's percentage meter, hero shards for actually evolving the character, rune stones for forging runes, and equipment specific scrolls for upgrading equipment.

It is a lot to take in for a new player who isn't yet to grips with everything the game has so I'll recommend to most players, don't worry about the other currencies for the early game. Early on, the only two things you should worry about are gold and XP. When you have enough gold that you want to spend it on something, look at what you want to spend it on and see what other material it requires besides gold. If it requires only gold, you're good. If it requires something else, look elsewhere to figure out how to farm it.

Generally farming currencies will come in 4 places, the hero and normal mode chapters, which I'm grouping together because they're mostly identical, expedition, events, and patrol. Normal and Hero mode are where you'll spend the most of your energy because it's not limited by attempts only limited by the energy you have. Normal mode generally has lower rewards than hero mode but normal is easier. There isn't a huge boost in any other currency but, relative to the chapter, hero mode offers around twice as much gold which generally makes it preferable over normal for farming gold.

Expedition is a sort of challenge tower type thing, where you enter rooms with random modifiers and begin with a small selection of skills in order to attempt the room. Completing the room will grant you rewards, failing will drain your deaths. Your deaths refresh only once per day and the mode only gives you ten but those ten only drain if you fail a room. If you get good enough that you never die or at least rarely die, you can get a really long session where you're playing a lot of rooms allowing your main energy to refresh. I'll go more into that in critiques, though.

Other than offering room specific awards, every 5th to 10th floor offers an increase in rune stone patrol earnings, which will help you forge runes and gather runes over time as well.

Next are events. There are a few very specific events. First is Infinite Adventure, which aside from dungeon rewards will reward you at event refresh for a certain amount of other rewards upon completing certain levels within it, if you get to the minimum of floor 51, beating the floor 50 boss.

Next is Ancient Maze, which has a total of 100 floors and offers additional drop rates for sapphires, evolution chips, and soul stones. Soul stones can only be used on Ancient Maze to be exchanged for one of a small subset of rewards. These rewards are refreshed every 6 days and are as follows: 1. up to 4 batches of 5 Evolution Chips for 5 Soul stones, making a maximum of 200, 2. Up to 10 attempts at a single random shard for 15 soul stones, 3, 4, 5, and 6, up to 10 attempts at a single shard for Atreus, Urasil, Phoren, and Onir for 8 soul stones for the former 3 and 20 soul stones for Onir, 7. 3 attempts at a pack of 3 free to play hero shards for between 70 and 90 soul stones depending on the character, 8. 2 attempts at a pack of 3 hero shards for a pay to play character costing between 90 and 120 soul stones, with an additional single hero shard for that character for free. Note two things about Ancient Maze: first, other than your weapon, all gear is cleared at the beginning of this Event, and can only be gained by exchanging certain coins for them with the blacksmith angel. And secondly, Ancient Maze is the only event with multiple difficulties, with Hard, and Extreme offering 150% and 200% rewards respectively but are only unlocked once you beat all 100 floors of the prior difficulty.

Next are a select group of lower cost events. Their names aren't important, only the items they have bonus drops for so I'll list them. One offers a boost in Gold and XP. One offers a boost in Common Item drops and equipment scrolls. One offers Rune Stones and Sapphires. And the online modes offer Gems, Sapphires, and Gold. I don't play online multiplayer with this game so I won't be discussing that. I'll talk more about these events in the guide section, however.

Finally, there's the patrol awards which have modifiers depending on a few things: Patrol Earnings Talent, which pertains to Gold and XP, the Battle Pass which offers a 10% boost to XP only, Expedition Stages, which offer Rune Stones, and character modifiers which modify other things. To my knowledge, no hero offers Rune stones so let's talk about the other rewards.

Generally, a hero's patrol modifiers are applied on character unlock and are only increased with a character's star ranking. Of the characters currently in the game Atreus, Shari, Helix, Bonnie, and Lina offer bonuses to Gold, Rolla and Taranis offer bonuses to XP, Phoren and Shade offer bonuses to Sapphires, and everyone else offers bonuses to specific types of scrolls.

Speaking of, there are 2 unlockable characters, 5 free to plays, 6 pay to plays, and 3 shard restricted characters. The unlockable characters are Atreus and Urasil, the former is the basic character and the latter is unlocked upon reaching chapter 2, the free to plays are Phoren, who can be purchased with gold, Taranis, Helix, Meowgick, and Ayana, who can be purchased with Gems, the pay to plays are Onir, Rolla, Bonnie, Sylvan, Shade, and Ophelia, who all cost real money, and the shard restricted characters are Shari, Ryan, and Lina from the looks of it. More will be added later but, at the time of writing this, Lina is the most recent character.

There are also costumes in the game which can come with stat upgrades for the character wearing it and all heroes as well, which I will talk about more in the guide section. And finally there's the monster farm, in which you can gather eggs for certain monsters whenever you battle them, then battle a certain number of that same monster to hatch its egg, and then once it's hatched, battle a certain number of that monster again for damage and defense modifiers. Once you have enough monsters of certain types they will drop emblems, poop, and rocks, which are purely aesthetic differences, they all yield either gold of an amount between 3000 and 5000 and gems for amounts between 2 and 4. They're not particularly huge rewards but they only require daily maintenance to acquire and they make it easier to save gold and gems so it's a welcome addition as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, I think that's everything with the basic gameplay, now let's move onto the guide section.

Guide: How to build the right character for your playstyle

Okay, so generally, there are circumstances where every character is stronger than others and there may be times where you want to use one character over another because you're struggling with a particular section. However, every hero can get past any challenge if you're good enough with them so instead I'm simply going to go over how to build your equipment and skill loads around your character of choice. Before we talk about characters though, we need to talk about build types.

In general, there seem to be 4 different viable build types within this game, any other you can think of is just a variation or combination of these 4. These are Damage Builds, Sustain Builds, Rating Builds, and Crowd Control Builds.

Damage builds are all about dealing the largest amount of damage possible for the least amount of effort. The idea behind this build is that you clear enemies quickly by killing them before they can hurt you. Because of this, when building skills, you're prioritizing damage over health or novelty so let's talk about that.

In terms of weapons, the three best ones to use for a damage build are the Crossbow, Spear, and Staff. The Crossbow offers the highest base damage as well as additional effects at range or on charge, including a crit rate increase. The spear attacks hit instantaneously, mitigating enemies just dodging or the attack whiffing. And the Staff's attacks track enemies which mitigates evasion as well. All of these are good for damage.

Armor is best for sustain builds but I will recommend the Bright Robes because that offers faster level ups and also a health bonus per level up. The rings you want to go for should be either the Lion or Wolf Rings. The Lion Ring will offer additional damage to bosses, a 5% general ATK buff and a 20% increase in Crit Damage. The Wolf Ring offers bonus damage to melee enemies and a 5% boost to Crit Rate. If you think consistent damage is better than risking crits, go for the Lion Ring because it has many more general damage benefits. However, early on you may end up using Wolf Rings instead because those have a higher drop rate.

In terms of Bracelets, it would be advised to go with the Frozen Bracelet as that now comes with a damage modifier and freezes enemies in place momentarily allowing you to deal additional damage for free. Most lockets are not useful until you go below a certain health threshold so I don't recommend any particular damage buffing locket, although I don't think there is one. The Spellbook you should go with is Enlightenment as that will give you extra skills every time it pops, which will only give you up to two total skills in most circumstances and is irrelevant in Ancient Maze but with the right room modifiers can make the difference between dying and pushing forward on Infinite Adventure.

Spirits are almost entirely optional as they all have the same stats and do basically the same things. Laser Bat seems better than the others as its attack hits instantaneously and through walls but other than that no particular spirit is better than any other for any build in particular.

Next let's talk skills to go for whenever you level up. The skills you get are somewhat random so this is more a general guideline than a specific perk tree upgrade but these are things to keep in mind: for stat upgrades, the ones you want are Attack Boost, Attack Speed Boost, and Crit Master. Attack Boost increases base Attack, Attack Speed Boost increases your Attack Frequency, and Crit Master Increases both Crit Rate and Crit Damage. For low health upgrades, Rage is good because it increases base damage the lower your health gets. For Aura Skills, Attack Speed Aura and Crit Aura are generally the best, especially when paired. Just be aware that Aura Skills run on a tick where they'll disable for a certain time then enable for a certain time and just cycle that way. Also, if you get Strong Strong Heart, take that for this build as this has the effect of increasing Attack Speed every time you get Strong Heart. Strong Heart isn't particularly suitable for Damage Builds but Strong Strong Heart just adds an additional option for damage in the event you're struggling with other stat buffs. Finally, get inspire whenever you can as that is probably the best attack speed boost for this build. For elements, Freeze is the best overall but if you want additional damage, Dark and Blaze go well together. For various Elemental Skills, I recommend the Sword Strikes and the Stars, as those autoattack even while moving, increasing your own damage potential. Same elements apply, except for Dark as that doesn't have a Strike or Star Variant. Get the Meteors of those elements if you really have no other options but they don't yield as much damage because they have low hit rates in exchange for a slightly wider radius. And for general character modifiers, Front Arrow and Multi-Shot go well with this build because they increase the hit count, which increase total damage as well as total number of crits by way of absolute numbers, making your overall damage even higher. However, if you're using the staff, substitute front arrow with diagonal arrows. This is because the arrows on the staff follow the target you're locked onto and diagonal arrow will offer two more arrows to a single target for no damage demerit, making it better than front arrow for that particular weapon.

Next are the Sustain Builds. I won't talk about Weapon here because weapons universally have zero effect on your HP or survival other than damage. However, Bright Robes are still recommended, your rings are best suited to either the Bull or Serpent Ring. Bull Ring will reduce collision damage, where the Serpent Ring will increase your Dodge Rate. Personally, I think the Serpent Ring is better because Dodge is more useful than defense generally. In addition, your bracelet should be the Invincible Bracelet or the Freeze Bracelet because both will increase your ability to survive, and the Angel Locket is suitable here because it has a chance to resurrect you upon death which is very handy. If you don't have an Angel Locket because that seems to have the lowest drop rate of any of the lockets, the Agile Locket is a nice substitute for this build. In terms of stat upgrades on skills, you want HP boost, Strong Heart, and Dodge Master. HP boost will increase max HP, Strong Heart will increase Heart Drop rate, which will help refuel your HP, and Dodge master will increase your dodge rate causing more attacks to miss even if they collide. Also get Bloodthirst so you can refuel health upon killing an enemy. For low health abilities, get Agility as that will increase your dodge rate as your health depletes. Avoid Grace at any cost as its effect and condition are at odds with each other and may cause a gray area where you get just enough health back to reduce the heart droprate on the next kill but still a small enough amount that you'll end up dying anyway if you don't get more. In terms of ticks, Healing Aura replenishes health, and Invincibility star prevents damage from being dealt. In terms of elements, Freeze is still the best one as it prevents enemies from attacking you but if you need a secondary, lightning has an additional hit stun in certain variations. In terms of the revolving abilities, the only one you might want to consider is the shield wall, which operates the same way as the swords and circles but puts up two shields instead, blocking all damage in a fairly unreliable but still substantial way. Finally, consider Wingman only if you have spirits. If you don't have spirits, ignore it. But if you do have spirits, Wingman can be used to protect you from projectiles while the spirit is in the way, very useful.

Next up are rating builds. Rating builds are builds based on the percentages for crit and dodge. Unlike the other builds which use the randomness as a modifier to help even the odds, this build relies on building up those ratings so high that it's as if those random modifiers are actually just the default state of play. The best weapon for this is the Crossbow because of its crit modifier, the best armor for this is the Dexterity Vest as that increases your dodge rate, the best rings are Wolf and Serpent for Crit and Dodge rate respectively, there is no best bracelet for this, and the best Locket is either Angel or Agility Locket for the sake of survival, though Agility Locket is more in line with the rating portion of this build. Best stat upgrades are Crit Master and Dodge Master, Crit and Attack Speed Aura, Rage and Agility, Strong Heart and Strong Strong Heart, Hermes Shoes, which increase dodge rate and running speed, and Dwarf, which increases both crit rate and dodge rate. Get enough of these skills and you could very well end up steam rolling through difficult areas. Invincibility Star should be considered a nice supplement as well. Freeze is the best element for this build, and you'll want to consider combining multi-directional arrows with bouncy wall and piercing shot for a grid sort of attack that can land a lot of crits and help with damage. Ricochet is also good for this. Also Multi-Shot and Front arrow as well to increase hit counts.

Finally is the crowd control build. This is a build that focuses entirely on crowd controlling multiple enemies, sometimes to the detriment of certain boss fights where there's only one enemy. That may sound bad but you'd be surprised how rare that sort of encounter becomes the further into the game you get. First is Equipment. Crossbow, Staff, and Spear are best for this, Crossbow for Knockback, and Staff and Spear for how they synergize with other abilities. Dexterity Vest because it deals lightning damage to nearby enemies, allowing more evasion to be possible while dealing damage to non-targeted enemies. Stat upgrades should only be chosen if no other alternative is available. The best element for this is lightning, and the best abilities for this are the sword strikes and the stars for their auto-attack feature. For this build to work best, however, you need a selection of skills that by themselves are not super powerful but together make a devastating combination: in order, these are diagonal arrows, side arrows, back arrow, bouncy wall, piercing shot, and ricochet. Bouncy wall will cause arrows that miss to bounce off the wall up to three times, piercing shot will cause the attack to continue until it hits a wall, the different arrow types add more arrows to attack with, and ricochet causes your arrows to bounce up to three time between a subset of nearby enemies. If possible get Ricochet first as it is easily the most powerful of these abilities individually and will help the most with early floors in difficult dungeons. Piercing shot is the next best first after that. Once those are obtained, begin working on gathering the others. This subset of abilities can absolutely devastate entire rooms of enemies, and if aimed correctly, can rip apart boss health bars in chunks. The summon abilities are optional but effective if you can't build this grid build effectively. The summon bat is better than the doppelganger but either one is helpful.

Now let's talk about characters. Provided you've obtained the Level Up Heal Perk in the Talent Section, the best sustain characters are Ryan and Atreus. Atreus because his skill, once you evolve him to 3 stars that is, increases his level cap by 1 level, giving him an additional level up heal. Ryan, however, is the best sustain character because his ability revives him upon death. Combine with extra life, and the angel locket and he can be given 3 and a half total lives to work on, giving him a substantial edge in terms of sustain.

In terms of DPS builds, the best ones in general seem to be Helix, Meowgick, Phoren, and Sylvan. All of them have a fairly sturdy amount of damage but Helix has a default skill that increases his damage as his health depletes, Meowgick summons cats that are not great for crowd control but do deal substantial damage to single targets, Phoren's fire effect is good for DPS, and Sylvan has high damage in general especially at higher star ratings that increase the damage and crit rate on his elements. Rolla and Urasil are nice backups in the event you don't have any of those characters, though given Phoren's easy price point I don't see that being a huge concern for any of you.

For rating builds, easily the best characters for this are Shade, Ayana, and Ophelia. All of them have modifiers that can increase both crit rate and dodge, and they're all just generally powerful characters. That said, Ayana and Ophelia are a bit more technical than average so if you want a guide to help you use them I recommend superteeds' videos on the subject. Her guide on Ayana wasn't particularly helpful to me as I'd figured out Ayana's ins and outs by then but her video on Ophelia is extremely useful so I recommend giving that a watch if you have her unlocked.

Finally, in terms of Crowd Control Builds, the ones that are best suited to that are Taranis, Shari, Onir, Bonnie, and Lina. All of them have their strengths and drawbacks. However, Shari is the worst one and also has the most inconvenient set of All Hero stat upgrades and as a result I recommend not getting Shari at all until you've obtained every other character and are lacking things to do with the ones you have.

In terms of terminology for unlocking characters, terms like free to play, pay to play, and event exclusive, are kind of misnomers in this game because all of them can be unlocked for free if you're patient enough or for money if you're not. All of the pay to play heroes can be unlocked for free if you do Ancient Maze enough to get enough shards for them. All of the free to play Heroes, barring Phoren to an extent, can be unlocked using money if you use it to purchase gems. The event exclusive characters can be unlocked with shards that comes from other random drops or purchased with some very specific packs. However, nonetheless some characters are obviously going to cost you more than others. Some will cost you currency, others will cost you time. Which ones are which will depend on how desperate you are for a particular character. However, the ones I recommend for beginning players are Phoren, Helix, and Meowgick for DPS builds, Atreus for Sustain, provided you have the Level Up Heal Talent, Ayana for Rating Builds, and Taranis and Onir for Crowd Control. Now of these characters, Ayana is the only one that's not beginner friendly due to her more technical playstyle. Ayana is extremely strong and I have a lot of fun with her. However, if you're new to this game and need to develop the basic dodge and punish strats first, start with another one of the listed characters. Once you've gotten accustomed to the strategy, then you can start experimenting with Ayana.

Once you've played with those characters enough that you start bulk unlocking the pay to plays, swap out the DPS characters for Sylvan, Atreus for Ryan, mix and match Ayana with Shade and Ophelia, and try out Bonnie and Lina. Urasil is entirely optional for DPS if you don't want to shell out the gold for Phoren, which I assume would be rare but I know someone in that category so they exist, and don't get Shari unless you absolutely need her All Hero Stat Upgrades because hers are obtuse for no real reason. I'll get to that in the Critiques Section.

Once you have a decent selection of characters, start upgrading and evolving them. Upgrade and Evolve your main character of choice before anyone else. Because they're your main, they'll yield the most benefit for you if you level them up and increase their star rankings. If you hit the level cap or can't evolve them any further for whatever reason, that's when you can start upgrading other characters. Get every character you have to level 20 until your level cap reaches level 60, then upgrade all of them to level 60. Then get every character to 2 star evolutions for the All Hero stat upgrades and then stop for a while. Once every character is at 2 stars and your main cannot evolve further either at all or until you get more shards, then start evolving other characters to get to their next All Hero Upgrade which is at 7 stars for all of them.

The exception here is going to be Shari as her All Hero Stat Upgrades are not on Levels 20 and 60, hers are on levels 40 and 80. Because of this, if you got Shari for whatever reason, do not upgrade her at all until your level cap is 40, then once she's at level 40 do not upgrade her again until your Level cap is 80. Only violate this rule if she cannot Evolve any further at her current level which I'll bring up in a moment.

Next is farming. Obviously, events are best suited for farming whatever currency they have bonus drops on which you can just look at but there are two other ways to achieve farming. Firstly, go through as many stages of Normal, Hero, or Expedition as possible. If you're pretty far on Normal or Hero, go to a stage of Hero that you can beat easily and just farm it. It will give you slightly higher drops on everything else but approximately double the gold. In terms of Expedition, do not tackle any at all unless you think you can get through a lot of stages quickly without dying. If you can't, then only do the requisite two per day until your hero is strong enough that they can blitz through large amounts of these levels. The Rune Stone patrol bonus is nice but it's too low even at 100% for it to be reliable so focus on building up your characters first.

I brought up earlier that you should prioritize your main for upgrades and evolutions but that's mainly for pushing through difficult stages. If you want better patrol earnings, the characters you want to prioritize should reflect the currency you want. In my experience, Gold and Sapphires are the hardest things to earn relative to how much you need them. Because of this, assuming you have these characters, the ones you want to evolve the most are the gold modifiers on Atreus, Shari, Helix, Bonnie, and Lina, and the Sapphire modifiers on Phoren and Shade. XP for Taranis and Rolla is an option technically but I don't find it particularly useful because in order to get the most out of it you need to evolve them and they won't be able to evolve if their level isn't high enough. Which means, for all intents and purposes, you won't even be able to get max XP upgrades for them anyway until they're already at level 80. And the scroll earnings are pretty much entirely optional as I've found that those are way too readily available relative to how many you'll end up using.

Now for some event specific tips. When playing Ancient Maze, you'll receive coins during your run that can be spent only during the run for abilities, equipment, food for your character, etc. Now, I ended up doing this by accident because I didn't see the value in it at first. However, do not spend those coins at all while you're on Normal Difficulty. Because the coins persist outside of Dungeons, it's better to get a feel for how Ancient Maze works on Normal before progressing to Hard and Extreme. Once on those two difficulties, spend those coins as much as you want as after saving them you'll find that you'll have enough left over to purchase pretty much whatever you want during the Ancient Maze run.

As for Infinite Adventure, the way it works is that you'll have three total attempts with three total characters as you progress. Over the course of my runs, I've made the mistake of having my main ten or more levels higher than everyone else, basically making it so that once Ayana dies, I'll only have around 5-10 stages, twenty if I'm lucky between these remaining two characters. So it's best to have two other characters of a similar playstyle up to the same level as your main, along with a few others of the other builds in the event you end up building one unsuited to the character you're using. In terms of floor pushing, get past floor 200 and then stop. Because after floor 200, rewards increment every 50 floors rather than every 10 and the rewards don't increase in amount to justify it. The rewards per floor end up dropping because the rewards increment at the same rate independent of the floors. So get past floor 200 and then only progress to see if you can get any further. If you can get to floor 250 or 300, good but if not, don't sweat it, it's really the dev's fault for granting such diminishing returns.

Critiques and Suggestions

Alright, so the previous two sections were for players, in particular new ones or veterans that want to know how to progress. This section is primarily for the dev team as I think there are many avenues for improvement on this game that, speaking as a novice game designer and programmer, wouldn't be hard to implement overall. I'll try to restrict suggestions to solutions that are either already in the game or that would be easy enough to code over the course of a weekend since the devs are concerned about making more money without spending much more it would seem.

Okay, so as far as a Superteeds criticism goes, there are too many currencies to farm and not enough ways to farm them. This is true enough when you look at the game, even after the updates following her criticisms. However, I'm not content with just making a criticism, I'm more interested in why. And, to me, this has just as much to do with the energy meter as it does with the availability of any given currency.

Now, I understand why the energy meter exists on principle. If you have a limited number of attempts you're likely to either make the most of the attempts you have, or try to earn more attempts. The problem I have with energy meters in most mobile games is just the fact that, aside from how manipulative it is, it really creates difficulty with getting into a groove of having a large number of stages that you complete successfully when you're in the zone because the energy meter decides that you're not allowed to continue unless you spend gems, or money if you don't have enough gems. For other games I've played on mobile, this isn't the biggest issue but Archero seems particularly ill-suited to this as both a rogue-like and a game with depth similar to a console game.

I bring all this up because there is a solution, one that's present in not only other mobile games but within Archero itself as well. Expedition tends to be the best example of what I'm getting at with grooves because you have ten total attempts but they drain upon death not upon entry. Meaning that you have ten total deaths but your attempts could in theory be infinite if you're good or in the zone for long enough. If the game implemented this it would make farming much easier for new players and would also allow players like me that like having a lot of long sessions spend more time actually playing the game.

If you're worried about how this would work in practice, let's say we swapped out the energy meter for one like in Expedition. Let's say instead of 20-30 energy that drains in increments of 5, let's say we have a meter that's 4-6 energy that drains in increments of 1. Energy would only be spent if you die, allowing players that go to easier or completed areas to farm as much currency for other things as they need to without breaking the character unlocks since that still relies on shards, which are not available outside of Ancient Maze for the most part. Infinite Adventure could consume 3 attempts by default unless every single floor is completed. Ancient Maze could consume between 2-4 attempts upon death depending on the difficulty. And every other event could consume 1-2 attempts if failed. This also wouldn't have too much of an effect on your ability to tackle events either since most events only have a limited number of attempts independent of energy. Normally, I'd say if the events are limited on attempts anyway, don't bother consuming energy. However, if they swap out the energy meter for this suggestion that would mostly nullify that complaint, since players would be limited either way but would only be punished if they fail, consuming a certain number of total attempts. Then just increment the attempt meter by 1 within the same amount of time the current energy meter increments 5 times, which I believe is around an hour, not a difficult thing to implement because it can use code that's already in the game.

As far as character unlocks are concerned, the way it works is a little bit frustrating to me. On the one hand, it's good that every single character in the game can be unlocked for free if you're patient enough. On the other hand, the unlocks are too lopsided and clustered for it to be satisfying, it's too difficult to unlock some heroes without spending money, and if your hero gets to an evolution of 7 stars which mine haven't but some of yours may have, that renders their hero shards completely worthless because they can't be used anymore. What I think would make a nice compromise is a way to substitute hero shards you have for an attempt to receive an equivalent number of random shards for any hero besides the one whose shards you're exchanging. This way, it's a bit easier to unlock heroes at a more steady pace, will not nullify the shards you have completely once your hero's done evolving, and if you want to find a way to monetize it, just have every exchange of hero shards cost a certain number of gems, making it possible for free to plays to do so but easier for it to be used for pay to plays. This will also balance out hero unlocks if a player finds it excessively easy to get shards for a particular hero.

As far as the heroes themselves are concerned, some of the heroes are just bizarre. On the one hand, I can see if the game is properly balanced there are tradeoffs and benefits to each hero. Although I think all the elemental heroes barring Sylvan are incredibly underpowered because elements are generally useless except in specific cases, I think in a properly balanced game having each one have advantages and disadvantages is an easy enough thing. I also understand the need for Atreus to be the weakest hero overall with Urasil not far behind. In a game where unlocking heroes via purchase or grinding is a thing, I understand why that would happen. However, some characters are excessively weak for how difficult they are to unlock, and some are just strange. I'm going to give Ryan a pass because he seems rather unique compared to other heroes in this game. However, Phoren and Urasil are far too similar because Poison and Blaze are basically identical save for specifics on ticks and damage, Shari is obtuse with her stat upgrades and ability and given that she's the only one it applies to, I think obtuse is accurate, Lina seems like an objective improvement on Bonnie, creating a clone character situation made specifically to make people shell out money. And certain characters either don't benefit at all from identical skills, like Bonnie with the summons, or they just aren't allowed to use overlapping skills at all, like Helix with Rage. 

So here are my suggestions for character alterations to make things just that little bit smoother. Firstly, for the elemental characters buff every element, allow them to use clones of their elements with skills from dungeon level ups, and allow their basic skills to crit. For the crowd control elements, particularly lightning and holy, which would apply to Onir and Taranis, have their elements deal additional damage to all enemies the more are caught in the group. Have it buff Onir's damage more since his is direction based and far more likely to miss, making an additional damage buff reward skillful play. Next, have fire deal more damage than poison but have poison deal a slow effect by default. Also have attacks from poisoned enemies have a slightly higher miss rate. Finally, have freeze deal the lowest amount of damage but a higher rate of stopping enemies. Finally, do not give Sylvan any additional buffs as he's already pretty strong. Same goes for Shade.

In terms of the summon characters, what Superteeds noted was that a summon skill on top of the summon that Bonnie already has doesn't seem to increase the clones count, just the distribution of the clones. Have it increase the clone count to make Bonnie more appealing to crowd control players, especially since Bonnie seems to be unnecessarily weak despite being a pay to play hero. Allow Helix to stack Rage on top of his existing skill in exchange for Rage having a lower drop rate. If that seems difficult, a nice compromise would be to allow a stackable Rage to be gained with the Devil Deal so it's not quite so overpowered. You can have that be the only version of rage that shows up for Helix, and allow everyone else to stack the normal version with it instead. This way it's relatively more balanced.

Have Shari's thorns fire bullets in a star pattern like the fire worm things at a higher fire rate to make her a bit more balanced and not quite so useless for how difficult she is to get. If this is already in place, it might be worth having the bullets on her thorns grant an explosion effect upon hit to make Shari less useless overall.

Don't edit Lina or Ryan at all yet as Ryan is already unique and I don't know how Lina differs from Bonnie enough to offer critiques on how to improve her at this time. Finally, Ayana and Ophelia don't need to change at all, just offer more explanation on how to use Ophelia in particular as Ophelia seems to require explanation far more than Ayana does. Ayana is easy enough to understand if you experiment but Ophelia may need more. Having number indicators on what her souls are doing during the dungeons would go some way toward telling players what they do as they're grabbed. If a soul say increases her crit rate, just as a random hypothetical example, have a number indicator showing by how much upon grabbing the soul. If that's too much, add a text read to the pause menu on Ophelia's movelist that players can read if they need to. It's a bit more out of the way but players that are serious about using Ophelia will memorize it eventually.

Finally, add an indicator to the player's stat screens for their attack speed, dodge rating, damage resistance, crit rate and crit damage so that players better understand why certain characters have higher or lower ATK and HP stats. If this would reveal that some characters are objectively worse than others, then simply change the numbers to make them more balanced before showing them to players, since they'll have no way of knowing the exact numbers until you show them off anyway.

Finally, Talents are a bit ridiculous in terms of how expensive they can get at higher levels. I've maxed out a few of the stats so it's easier for me to get what I'm looking for at this stage but the massive price point makes it difficult and it still doesn't necessarily guarantee that I'll get the one I want. So here's what I present as an easy enough fix.

Offer a rollback option on Talent rolls that will revoke a certain number of previous talent rolls and refund the cost for those rolls in exchange for a certain number of gems. Have a single roll be worth, I'd say, probably 20 gems per rollback roll, which will alleviate some of the issues with the randomness of the talents while still forcing players to choose whether they want to keep the talents they have or reroll for a different one, knowing it may be worse and cost gems. It's just an extra option and extra options are always nice.

Generally, I have no complaints about the Runes. I think the limit on stat upgrades at 400 rune attempts per section is a bit meh, and I don't like how difficult it is to get exactly the type of buffs per rune that you want. But, at the same time, this is a rogue-like, random elements are part of the whole game, so it's pretty redundant to complain about randomness in a game all about randomness. In addition, if you don't like the runes you have, swapping them is relatively easy since they only cost 5 rune stones and 5000 gold which late game are not super difficult to farm and early game is not likely for players to worry about anyway since Runes are only even added based on the talent system, mitigating the likelihood that early game players would even have a need for rune stones.

The last thing I'll add is the costumes. Now, for any other game, costumes would be purely cosmetic. However, in this game, costumes offer modifiers for both the character wearing them and an additional stat upgrade for all heroes. The problem is that these costumes can only be purchased via coupons and coupons are incredibly obtuse to obtain. You can buy a single coupon for gems, or more than that for real money. And you can't obtain gold coupons through the shop at all. Honestly, the suggestion I'd make to remedy this is to just get rid of the coupons outright and allow the costumes to be purchasable with gems. They're not super vital the way other things are and they don't offer nearly as much utility by themselves as a full character would so making them cost far more than any character in the game is just asinine. And if a player is low on gems, they can just purchase more anyway, and this may actually improve your bottom line since I'm sure there are many players who don't even bother with the coupons at all because they're so difficult to grab.

Conclusion

Archero is an oddity among mobile games. It's strangely complex despite its control scheme, its buggy at times more so in a hilarious or helpful way than in any game breaking way most of the time, the characters all have cool designs with a cutesy artstyle that matches the sort of tone its going for, and most of us that are here genuinely have fun playing this game. But there are clear avenues for improvement and once those improvements are added, I can definitely say it will remain a game I'll continue to play into the future.