Upgrading your Mercenary

Heroes War: Counterattack allows players to build their army by recruiting new characters (or Mercenaries as the game calls them) to bolster their ranks. However, without properly upgrading characters, they won’t be able to contribute that much and bring you victory. In this page, we’ll discuss several methods of upgrading your characters to make them more potent and effective on the battlefield.

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Leveling-Up

All mercenaries you recruit will start off as LV1 so they’ll have to work their way up the ladder to become powerful or catch up with your team. As mercenaries level up, their ATK, DEF, HP, and battle power will increase. However, their ATK Speed will remain unchanged when leveling up.

Mercenaries earn EXP by participating in story battles, Trace Specimens, or Battle Center activities. However, the fastest way to level up mercenaries is through the heavy usage of EXP Boosters. These consumables are perfect for boosting the levels of new mercenaries that you want to include to your team as soon as possible.

EXP Boosters come in different grades (S/M/L/XL), which represent the amount of EXP per booster can provide to a mercenary. You can collect these boosters from crafting, Trace Specimens, or Battle Center Sweep.

Ability Power-ups

Power-ups are permanent stat boosts that you can give to your mercenaries. You can access this by launching the Mercenaries window, selecting the mercenary you want to power-up, and tapping the Ability portion on the upper-right corner.

This will bring up the Ability Power-up window. Each mercenary will have different abilities that can be developed. Furthermore, all stats will start at rank C and you’ll be able to select which stats to improve upon. Due to the scarcity of the materials needed for powering-up, careful consideration of the stats you’ll improve on a mercenary is strongly recommended. For example, tank characters will greatly benefit by powering-up their DEF, HP, and Received Recovery Amount while damage-dealers can take advantage of powering-up their ATK, Crit Rate, and Penetration Rate.

Ability Power-ups consume Battle Badges as material. The required battle badges will differ from different character types. Thankfully, you don’t need to second-guess which badges are required by the mercenary since it will be displayed in the lower-left corner of the Ability Power-up screen. Furthermore, by tapping the Power-Up Material icon, the game will tell you where to farm the badges you’ll need. (The sources are the following: Battle Center Reward, Mercenaries Point Shop, Guild Point Shop, Story Reward)

For each power-up attempt the gauge will fill up by using the corresponding amount of badges. After completely filling up the gauge, the ability will be permanently upgraded. Take note that every time you submit badges for a power-up attempt, the amount of progress that will be counted in the gauge will differ. If you’re lucky, one power-up attempt can send the gauge to 100% but on normal days, you’ll have to submit badges several times for a single successful power-up. However, these attempts are still worth it since the abilities will get permanently boosted. When the stat of a corresponding grade’s ability is maximized, you can use an Ability Amplifier to promote the grade. You can promote a grade up to SSS grade.

Mercenary Superboost

The maximum level a mercenary can reach is LV40. Normally, that’s the end of his/her growth but thankfully, the game offers another option to further strengthen your mercenary and that’s through Superboost. Basically, each Superboost attempt will add 2 levels to your max level mercenary. You can Superboost a mercenary up to 5 times to reach LV50. Successfully superboosting a mercenary significantly increases their stats as well.

To Superboost a mercenary, you need a LV40, neostones, and cores for their character class. Neostones can be acquired through Mercenaries Misions, Daily Quests, and more. Cores in the other hand, can be earned from story rewards, Hello Challenges, Crafting (Conversion Station), etc.

That’s all the permanent upgrades you can apply to your mercenaries. However, you can improve your mercenaries even more through the use of equipment or cards. Please follow our individual guides for each.