Augmenting is one of the ways to improve your heroes. It is done on the Hall of Heroes, clicking the "Augment" button on the main screen for each hero.
Heroes do not automatically get the full potential of their stats from leveling up. As you can see in this screen, they are usually far below it. When you level up, only the upper limit for the heroes' stats increases. The current level must be increased through Augmentation.
Upgrading the hero's rank improves Augmentation as well.
Mechanics
You can Augment at random for 100 gold. This is very useful in the beginning, however as you augment more and more, it becomes less and less probable that the next augmentation will be successful, as you can see in the table below. Strategy tip: Don't augment with gold if your success chance is 40% or lower. See "Strategy" section below for the full details on this.
The other option is to use Heroic Medals. Using these will guarantee a success. Moreover, not only one stat will increase, but all of them. If you lack Heroic Medals, you can use diamonds to complete the required number, at the standard marketplace price. Strategy tip: Unless you are paying for diamonds, don't do this while your success chance is still 50% or higher (and even then, don't do it while it's 80% or higher). See "Strategy" section below for the full details on this.
Augmenting (successfully) will increase your Battle Power. A single augmented stat will give you +5 BP, thus augmenting with Heroic Medals will guarantee +20 BP.
Each Augmentation, successful or not, adds 5 minutes to a cooldown. You can accumulate up to 30 minutes of cooldown (60 minutes with VIP level 3) before you're forced to wait.
Levels, success chance and cost
The maximum upgrade level is the hero's level (see "Stats" section below for the justification)
The formula is: Augmentation level = floor(total of each parameter success times / 8). An upgrade made with Heroic Medals counts as four upgrades for this formula.
| Augmentation level = floor(total of each parameter success times / 8) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level | Success % | Avg. gold/BP | Heroic Medals | Gold/Medal | Avg Acc Gold |
| 0 | 99 | 20 | 2 | 200 | 0 |
| 1 | 95 | 21 | 2 | 210 | 808 |
| 2 | 90 | 22 | 2 | 220 | 1697 |
| 3 | 85 | 24 | 2 | 240 | 2638 |
| 4 | 80 | 25 | 2 | 250 | 3638 |
| 5 | 75 | 27 | 2 | 270 | 4704 |
| 6 | 70 | 29 | 2 | 290 | 5847 |
| 7 | 65 | 31 | 2 | 310 | 7078 |
| 8 | 60 | 33 | 2 | 330 | 8411 |
| 9 | 55 | 36 | 2 | 360 | 9866 |
| 10~19 | 50 | 40 | 3 | 267 | 11466 (+1600/each lv above 10) |
| 20~29 | 40 | 50 | 3 | 333 | 27866 (+2000/each lv above 20) |
| 30~39 | 30 | 67 | 4 | 335 | 48533 (+2666/each lv above 30) |
| 40~49 | 20 | 100 | 6 | 333 | 76533 (+4000/each lv above 40) |
| 50~70 | 10 | 200 | 10 | 400 | 120533 (+8000/each lv above 50) |
- Legend
To get the average amount of gold you spend until a successful augmentation, you divide 100 gold by the success rate. Then you divide by 5 to get the average gold/BP, since it is 5BP per augment.
The "Avg. Gold/BP" column shows the average amount of gold you need to spend for each point of Battle Power you get. It is a useful measure to compare different upgrades, specially those that cost Tear of Shiva. Though below you will find the full logic, the short version is that until you reach 50% (or even 40%) success rate, you will do better to spend your gold in augmenting than in the Jewel Crafter.
The "Gold/Medal" column compares the cost in gold and in Heroic Medals (or more precisely, how much gold is worth each Heroic Medal at each level). See "Strategy" section below for more details.
The "Avg Acc Gold" column shows the Average Accumulated Gold Spent for a fully-augmented hero of this level. Remember to consider this cost * 4 to fully augment all of your heroes.
- Collated Cost
Roughly speaking, it takes (on average) to fully augment a hero's stats:
| To Level | Gold |
|---|---|
| 5 | ~5.000 |
| 10 | ~10.000 |
| 20 | ~25.000 |
| 30 | ~50.000 |
| 40 | ~75.000 |
| 50 | ~120.000 |
| 60 | ~200.000 |
| 70 | ~280.000 |
Talk about a gold sink. And remember this is for each hero. Also above level 29, Tear of Shiva provides a better gold/Battle Power ratio (see "Strategy" below).
Stats
- Main article: Stats
All stats are a multiple of 2 of the hero's level. Each hero has different stats because they have different multipliers for each stat. These are the values for the maximum stats, at each level, for their basic C rank.
- Sir Lance Alotte has HP of (lv)*140, Strength of (Lv)*12, Intelligence of (Lv)*12 and Agility of (Lv)*6
- Robin Eagleye has HP of (Lv)*100, Strength of (Lv)*10, Intelligence of (Lv)*18 and Agility of (Lv)*8.
- Korina Chantress has HP of (lv)*90, Strength of (Lv)*14, Intelligence of (Lv)*36 and Agility of (Lv)*4
- Durin Atomika has HP of (lv)*120, Strength of (Lv)*8, Intelligence of (Lv)*24 and Agility of (Lv)*2
When you upgrade a hero's rank, these multipliers change. See at each hero's page (Sir Lance Alotte, Robin Eagleye, Korina Chantress, Durin Atomika) for the multipliers at higher ranks. Keep in mind the multipliers given here are calculated as maximum at each level, while on the heroes' pages are in the form of basic + # sucessful augments (except for Strength. There it's given as min-max, the average of both is the one shown here).
Each successful upgrade increases a stat by a 1/(lv*2)th of the max stat. For example, Robin at level 25 has a maximum of (25*100=2500) HP. Each upgrade adds 1/50th of that, which is 50HP. Korina at level 26 has a max Intelligence of (26*36=936), and each step upgrades it by 1/52th of the max value, this is, +18 Intelligence.
Since each augment gives 1/(lv*2)th of the max stat, and the max stat is (lv*multiplier), each augment always gives (lv*multiplier)/(lv*2) thus a fixed value for each stat, which is Multiplier/2. Thus we can count the number of successful augments a character has by looking at its stats. Say, Robin at level 26 has 950/2600 HP, 120/260 attack, 216/468 Intelligence and 88/208 Agility. If you don't remember the multiplier of your hero, remember it's the (max stat/hero lv). Thus since Robin's HP multiplier is 100, we do (100/2) and see each HP augment will be 50, and he has been currently augmented a total of 950/50=19 times. In the same example and through the same means we'll see 24 Augments to Attack, 24 Augments to Intelligence and 22 Augments to Agility. This totals 89 augments, and from the formula above (Augmentation level = floor(total of each parameter success times / 8) ), the current level will be 11, thus the Success chance will be 50%.
Note: The health bonus gained in battle is actually much larger than the one shown in the Hall of Heroes. E.g. for Sir Lancelot (rank C) each health augmentation adds 70 HP in the Hall of Heroes, but 560 HP in battle.
In summary, when the hero levels up, his max stats are increased, and in case you had it fully-augmented before, you will be able to each stat twice. Thus (Lv*8) successful augments are needed to realize the full potential of a hero, and the maximum augment level is the hero's level.
Strategy
In this section we'll concern ourselves with the Gold/BP ratio to optimize Battle Power, and the equivalent Gold/diamonds ratio to optimize use of Heroic Medals.
Gold /BP
Our benchmark for Gold/BP, as always, is Tear of Shiva, which has a fixed ratio of 50. So, as you can see on the above table, Augmenting is better when your success chance is 50% or higher, equal when it's 40%, and worse when it's 30% or lower. So in short, when you have a new or under-augmented hero, you should spend gold on Augmenting it until its Augment Success Chance is at least 40%.
Once you reach 40%, Augmenting and Tears of Shiva have the same ratio, so it's somehow up to you. However, while getting Tears from the Jewel Crafter you may also win jewels. Also, Tears are useful to improve the soldiers (and Tier 2 Soldiers have a unique ratio of 45 Gold/BP when upgrading, so it's advantageous to Arm Soldiers at least until you can do this), and also the towers, helping you on the tower defense part of the game. I would thus recommend to stop (or at least reduce the rate of) Augmenting with gold when you reach 40% success chance, and I would heavily recommend to completely stop Augmenting with gold at the 30% success chance.
Gold/Heroic Medals
To decide what is the best choice between Gold and Heroic Medals for a certain augment we need a benchmark to compare them against. That benchmark is diamonds. This does not suppose you buy them, but uses the gold and diamonds ratios to real world money to compare diamonds and gold.
- For Gold: The basic deal is 1000 gold for $2, or 500 gold/$, and the best deal for bulk buying is 130000 gold for $200, or 650 gold/$.
- For Diamonds: The basic deal is $2 for 20 diamonds (10 diamonds/$), while the best regular offer is $200 for 2600 diamonds (13 diamonds/$)
- As you can see, the ratio of gold/diamonds (bought) is always 50.
- Heroic Medals can be bought for 5 diamonds each. Thus the price in gold would be 250 Gold. This is the benchmark we'll use for the free Heroic Medals won from Tavern and Reward Center
Now, let's compare the average cost of using gold to get 4 stat upgrades against the number of medals needed to do the same. See the table above. When the chance is 80% you need 25 gold/BP. Thus you need 25*5 = 125 gold (average) per increase, thus 500 gold for 4 increases. That is equivalent to 2 Heroic Medals, thus the Gold/Heroic Medal rate is 250. At 5 diamonds per Heroic Medal, this is the rate we've just seen, 50 gold/diamond. So it's just not worth using Heroic Medals to augment while the rate is over 80%. But wait, there's more. This ratio improves steadily until level 9, where 36 gold/BP * 20 = 720, while you only need 2 medals, thus each one is worth 360 gold. But then there is a bump. On level 10-19 (the 50% chance level) costs go up, and now 40 gold/BP*20 = 800 gold / 3 medals. The ratio lowers to 267 gold per medal. Still worth it, but not by much. At levels 20-29, though (the 40% level) this improves, to 333 gold, and keeps this way until 10%, where it finally bumps to 400 gold/medal.
As a conclusion, if you plan to pay real world money to augment, you should use/buy gold to pay augments until the chance becomes 75%, and from that point onwards you should use diamonds. The best "deal" happens at 10% chance of success, the Gold/Medal rate becomes 400, thus 80gold/diamond.
If you don't want to pay for upgrades, you're limited to the free Heroic Medals. This section also applies. If anything, the Medals are worth more by virtue of their rarity. Thus, consider the relative worth of gold and Heroic medals. Since it stabilizes on 333 gold/medal at success chance 40%, that's where your Medals save you the most gold (and coincidentally, where you should switch to expend the gold on Tear of Shiva, as seen on the previous section).