New Player Guide

So you want to play Heroes' Will?
To start off, you should be doing everything in the Daily Quests list every day. Aside from that, the most important things to remember are: The only daily quests you should skip is to exchange crystals for gold. Buy energy with crystals can be skipped too, but you'll be doing this anyway in the early game to evo all your heroes.
 * Hit the Guild Bosses
 * Trade items in the Trade Market
 * Maintain your trees in Mystic Forest
 * Send a blessing at the Guild Chapel

Important times of the day to remember are:
 * 08:00 (8 a.m.) Free 60 energy, available until 10:00 (10 a.m.)
 * 12:00 (12 a.m.) Free 60 energy, available until 14:00 (2 p.m.)
 * 18:00 (6 p.m.) Free 60 energy, available until 20:00 (8 p.m.)
 * 21:00 (9 p.m.) Free 120 energy, available until 23:00 (11 p.m.). Deadline for daily Battle Arena ranks. Important Shops (Arena, Tower and Guild) get restocked.

Heroes' Will is for patient players. It doesn't matter if you are spending real money on it or not, you still have to play the long game. The things you can spend crystals on often increase in cost per additional purchase, so even spending will have diminishing returns after a while. This is good news for the game's balance. Opinion by AzakaZero

Beginner's Hero Guide
Heroes' Will is, as the name implies, all about its heroes. Heroes can be obtained in two ways; by Summoning or by collecting Hero Soulstones.

The number of soulstones required to summon a hero is affected by the hero's base number of stars. No heroes start with more than 3 stars.

Making your heroes stronger
There are five ways to improve your Heroes; EXP, Evolution, Gear, Main Weapon Upgrade and Hero Skills.

EXP/Level Up
Your heroes can earn EXP when you use them, but the amount is rather small compared to what you can get by using EXP Potions. These are available from many sources but the most notable are Mystic Forest and Goblin EXP Dungeon.

Remember that you only can store 999 potions of each type at a time, if you grind a lot it's pretty easy to hit this cap (especially with White potions) and everything beyond 999 will be lost. Make a habit of checking your potion stash often. Tip by AzakaZero

Levels are capped by a hero's Evolution (number of stars) as per the table below:

Hero Evolution
By collecting soulstones for a hero you can eventually add more stars to him/her through Evolution, up to a maximum of five. If you summon a hero that you already have then you will instead get soulstones for that hero.

Hero Gear and Power-up
TODO

Main Weapon Upgrade
Main weapon upgrade is basically a way to use soulstones once you've maxed out a hero's Evolution. It can be performed at the Forge. Visit the Main Weapon Upgrade section to learn more.

Hero Skill Level increase
Increasing Skills is the simplest way to improve, you just pay for the upgrade with Gold and Skill points. Improving skills becomes very expensive after a while, and it's arguably the most important thing to spend gold on, so don't go wasting it elsewhere without good reason. A million gold is pocket change in the late game. Opinion by AzakaZero

Which Heroes should you focus on collecting and improving?
This is not a simple matter of A is better than B. All heroes in Heroes' Will have an area where they shine. Some heroes are good in 1-vs-1 (Event Battle) while others are team players, some can do both. You have heroes that sacrifice crowd control (stun, silence, etc.) for pure damage and are therefore useful against bosses that are immune to cc (i.e. Guild Raids), and so on.

If you obtain a 3-star hero early on you will find that it is more powerful than your 1- and 2-stars and you may think that that Hero is inherently stronger. That assumption is generally false, however, and you should really look at the Heroes' skills to see which seem more useful to your needs. Tip by AzakaZero

When you start out you should focus on getting 5 heroes up to speed for Event Battle and 5-6 heroes for everything else, so 10-11 total. You don't want to have to move units between your Team Battle and Event Battle crews before every battle, you want to have separate heroes for each task. Your normal team is more important than your Event Battle team since you'll be using them for many different things, everything from Adventure to Daily Dungeon. Below is an outline of what to put in your regular team.

Get two tanks, you need 0-2 heroes up front that can soak damage, depending on the type of fight. Moik, Ethan, Karin and Jedy Cat are currently the strongest tanks in the game. If you don't have them then Natalie or Skull work OK too, and if you're not getting hammered too hard Charlotte, Lucy or Erin can be used.

Get a healer, not all battles require one but in Tower of Trial you are not going far without one. Sally is the most focused healer in the game and she's easy to obtain and evolve. If you feel adventurous you can go with Bloody but it's a lot harder to get her powered up, and she has a tendency to die easily.

Finally get 3-4 damage dealers with some crowd control (stuns) and you're set. Cherry and Richen are both relatively easy to obtain and Evo. Garmel has good crowd control, Rath does a ton of pure damage, but there are a lot of other options for this position as well.

Eventually you will get to the point where your basic team doesn't quite cut it anymore, and you'll have to start leveling other heroes so that you can try new strategies. At that point you should start looking at support-type heroes with team buffs and the ability to debuff enemies. Milla, Leonard, Mustang, Princy, Rudy and Yuffy are all worth looking at, for different tasks.

For guild raids you may want some single-target heavy-hitters with minimal crowd control, take a look at Ace, Genome, Windy and Rath.

When building your Event Battle team check out Ace, Charlotte, Emma, Erin, Lucy, Rath, Ethan, Clark and Wayne.

I would like to say that there are no heroes you can go wrong with, but there are a few that I'm a little wary of. Allen, the starting hero, seems like he's too weak to stand up front like he wants to, for example. Then there are some heroes that I'm still unsure what they're good for, and how to use them, these include Valdus, Dmitry and Epero. I'm sure they have their use, however, and only need some more experimentation to figure them out.

Opinion by AzakaZero

Some battles call for a healer, some call for damage to be applied faster. Switching the healer to a damage dealer or vice versa is the first thing to try when you run into something you can't beat. Tip by AzakaZero

Gold
Gold can be obtained from a variety of sources but the two most important are Goblin Dungeon and Mystic Forest.

What should I spend my gold on?
The two most critical uses for gold are improving Hero Skills and Hero Evolution. Evo to 4 stars costs 300,000 gold, and evo to 5 stars costs another 800,000. Pretty much everything else that has a gold cost attached to it (combining gear, etc.) is so cheap you don't have to worry much about it. It helps saving a 100,000 gold buffer for these smaller expenses, though. Opinion by AzakaZero

Should I exchange crystals for gold when I'm broke?
No. Unless you're very rich and in a hurry. The exchange rate is just too poor, you're better off waiting for 2X day in Goblin Gold Dungeon and spending some crystals on more attempts. And if you're in a hurry you can always try beating some levels in Dark Ruins since every 3:rd level rewards a decent chunk of gold. Opinion by AzakaZero

Crystals
Crystals can be obtained with real money or through some in-game rewards.

What should I spend my crystals on?
This comes down to your play style, how far you are in your progression, and how willing you are to open your wallet.

Hero Evolution limits your hero level, and skill levels are in turn limited by hero level. Power-up and gear is also limited by Evolution. The conclusion is therefore that the most important thing you can do to power up your heroes is to Evolve them. The cheapest and most consistent way to gain soulstones is by doing hero mode quests every day. To do this for all heroes you will need to refill energy with crystals. Refilling energy is therefore the best use of your crystals.

The second best use of crystals is to add random attributes to Main Weapons when you upgrade them. There is no other way to do this, you have to use crystals, so even if you are a free player you should save crystals for this purpose.

The third best way to use crystals is to reset Goblin Dungeon on 2X day for some quick EXP potions or gold. Especially once you can clear Hell or Hellfire with auto battle on.

The fourth best thing you can do with your crystals is also to buy energy, but for grinding item pieces. Always do this when the Adventure Normal Item X2 drop event is active, you really don't want to purchase energy for grinding items on any other day, so be patient and do it on 2X day.

And that's it, really. That's what you should use your crystals on. Opinion by AzakaZero

Is the monthly crystal pass worth it? What about the 3-month energy pass?
Yes and yes. If you're serious about the game, both of these are a great value. With both active you pay a ~17€ subscription fee each month which is not so bad. You'll boost your progression significantly.

For example, on Premium level Gold IV, using 200 crystals for refills gives ~600 energy. 600 plus 150 from 3-month pass and 300 free energy per day from logins is a total of 1,050 energy. With it you'll be able to do 1,050 / 36 = 29 hero mode dungeons which will net you ~43 soulstones per day on average. And that's excluding whatever energy you gain from regeneration over time. Opinion by AzakaZero

Premium levels? Do I need them?
The most important Premium level is Silver I (1,100 Crystals bought with real money). On that level you increase the skill point cap from 10 to 20, this is a nice feature early on when you have a ton of skills to increase and don't want to log in constantly. But more importantly, on Silver I you get 4 trees in Mystic Forest instead of 2. This is a huge upgrade in the long run so getting Silver I is strongly recommended. There are a bunch of other benefits to being premium as well, of course, such as getting a stack of Free Passes every day. Opinion by AzakaZero

Incarnites
Incarnites are also obtained through many different sources but the most substantial source is from weekly arena season rewards.

Incarnites are at the moment only used for summons, nothing else, so there's no need to save them beyond 2,590 for a 9+1 summon. For more info about summoning with Incarnites, check the Summoner's page.