XCOM Legends - A Guide To Hero Progression
Heroes play a big part in XCOM Legends, where every action you take requires having the right units for the job. One of the best parts about playing the game is being able to collect a diverse set of heroes that boasts a wide range of cultures and ethnicities from the world that we live in today. Collecting your favorite heroes might be fun, but the real challenge is being able to raise them to be the strongest units that can take on even the most challenging opponents in this game.
XCOM Legends is all about which players have the best heroes, though not necessarily having the highest rarity units. Even if you’re a player that doesn’t like to spend money in the game, there are still a lot of things that you can accomplish to compete against players that have a budget to spare when making their team stronger. While those players definitely have the advantage over you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll always lose to them, as long as you know what you’re doing.
Rank Up Heroes
Ranking up heroes is the best way to ensure that you are using the strongest characters in the game. Heroes with a higher rank are always ensured to be better than characters from the lower tier because they have more equipment slots and higher base stats that can make all the difference on equal grounds. Even if you’re using a common hero, if it has a higher rank than one of a higher rarity, the chances of it beating the other unit is a lot higher because of this.
The problem with ranking up heroes is that it’s easier said than done. As mentioned in our Beginner’s Guide, ranking up your heroes requires collecting duplicate copies of those units that you can use to Fuse them together. Luckily, you can get those characters that you need just by claiming the free summon materials that you get from your missions, tasks, or daily chests. It might take longer for free-to-play users to get the heroes they need, but they’ll eventually get there.
Leveling & Upgrading
Something pretty obvious but often overlooked by a lot of players is the importance of leveling up your characters to the max level as soon as possible. Leveling up a character can be done by using the Training function, which costs Hero Memories and Credits, which is the standard currency in the game. Hero memories are a bit tricky to acquire, but you can collect them simply by farming up some stages in the game so you won’t ever feel like you’re low on resources.
In between levels, heroes are required to be upgraded before they can proceed to the next level. Upgrading a hero requires a certain amount of hero memories and credits as well but the amount varies depending on the value of the hero. The great thing about playing XCOM Legends is that it doesn’t use an energy system that severely bottlenecks the amount of resources that you can get each day. The idle rewards system also helps players get resources they need even if they don’t play as often.
Gearing Your Heroes
Items have such a huge boost in a hero’s development since they offer a lot of raw stats and even some passive abilities when you complete a set. Getting the right items for your heroes is probably one of the hardest grinds that you can do in XCOM Legends because the rewards are randomized and not every stage will drop any item at all. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about that since the game doesn’t feature an energy system that will make it difficult to do so.
Each item varies according to rarity and set bonus. Lower rarity items don’t necessarily have any set bonuses so equipping them for the sake of having an item is okay if you don’t have any other choice. Otherwise, it’s wise to equip high rank items to your characters that belong to a single set. While you might get tempted to equip simply for the sake of adding raw stats, set bonuses often give such a huge boost in the hero’s overall abilities that it’s worth ignoring the stat difference for.
Understanding Hero Abilities
Hero abilities are also something important that players need to learn about when choosing which characters they want to place in a team. Character roles are directly associated with what kind of abilities a unit has. Not all characters contain damaging abilities and not all damaging abilities are the same. While it’s generally good to have a lot of damage sources in your team, it shouldn’t mean that you should only add heroes with damage abilities in your team when playing PvP or even PvE.
Heroes have three types of abilities: basic attacks, passives, and actives. Each hero has their own basic ability which is almost always an attack ability. Passives can’t be used because they provide bonuses in fights instead which can be very useful depending on the situation. Active abilities are skills that do something when activated and often have a cooldown period before they can be used again.
War Stories
War stories is a game mode that’s reserved for special heroes. Special heroes often wield personal weapons that significantly boost their combat capabilities after the player completes the entire chapter and equips it to the specific unit. Personal weapons give a huge amount of stats that increase when the player upgrades it and also upgrades the ultimate ability of a hero. This is perfect if you have a full epic composition that can each equip a personal weapon.
Completing War Stories is really easy as long as your entire team is over Level 30. It can be really time consuming and even frustrating if you’re trying to do it on auto-battle mode, though. Keep in mind that war stories will always have the type advantage over the featured hero, so if you’re going to build a team to complete this game mode, you can add characters that are strong against the type that the enemy team will be using, so you’ll have a significantly easier time.
