Need a helping hand picking out new units? Check out our Exos Heroes tier list for the best characters to add to your squad in 2021.
From veteran RPG fanatics to people wholly new to the genre – everyone’s got something to enjoy in Exos Heroes.
This South-Korean mobile gacha game is currently dominating the Android & iOS appstores. And for good reason too!
With vibrant characters, a smooth and engaging system, and so much content for players to explore and lose themselves in – this is definitely a game worth keeping on your radar if you’re a fan of turn-based RPGs.
In today’s quick read – let’s explore some of the top characters in the game!
Keep reading to check out our definitive Exos Heroes tier list and get a bit of helpful advice on how to scale up your characters and progress through the game as you chase the Emperor’s murderer to retrieve the deceased emperor’s legendary sword.
Let’s dive right in!
Our Exos Heroes Tier List For 2021
Before we dive into talking about the wealth of information to do with heroes, the power system, and how to progress through the game efficiently – let’s cover what most of you are here for – our ultimate Exos Heroes tier list.
S+ Tier Heroes
The only heroes deserving of a full S+ rating at the moment are Rachel and Bathory. They simply trump just about anyone else in their respective damage departments (single-target and multi-target/AoE).
S-Tier Characters
You need a good mix of offensive and defensive heroes and the S-class packs two of the strongest defensive units in-game: Shufraken and Garff, both of whom are excellent tanks with well-balanced elemental affinities and decent backup damage.
A-Class Heroes
The A-tier brings a few healers and support-type characters along with a chaotic that offers a mixed damage stream, which can be helpful in certain situations.
B-Tier Heroes
In the case of the B-tier, they are pretty much the last bunch of viable heroes in the game. Compared to the A-class or S-tier heroes we covered above, the dropoff in power is really noticeable.
B these heroes do offer some nice utility like Bernavas’s stun and Emma’s debuff as well as situational elemental affinity advantage.
What About C-Class?
While there are so many other heroes that you could choose between, the remaining pool of units doesn’t offer all that much. The S+, S, A, and B-tier that we covered above will give you everything you need to form a strong squad.
Everything else can be used for fusing rerolls or hero enhancement, which we’ll touch on in more detail further into this guide.
Exos Heroes Fatecore Tier List For 2021
Fatecore ups the ante a bit by playing on your commitment factor. Where fated units are rare, Fatecore units are super rare in the game, and you’ll be relying on Fated champions to keep upgrading your Fatecore heroes.
Whether you’re looking to do PvP or PvE content (PvX essentially) – Fatecore Zeon is absolutely insane, to the point where he can clear certain special maps and events solo, with zero help from tanks or supports.
In turn, Anastasia is comparable to Zeon but a tad weaker. And Bathory would be on par with Anastasia to wrap up the S-class.
Typically when rolling your Fatecore heroes, you should gun for Rachel, Garff, Rudley, or Bathory together with Zeon, with Baraka being a decent PvP off-pick to replace Rachel.
But in a more realistic scenario, we strongly recommend that you opt for Anastasia and another offensive type like Baraka or Rachel (Bernadette for regular picks).
That being said, Chaotics will also do you good thanks to the fact that they are essentially a strong mix of defensive and offensive capabilities and typically their ability kit plays up to this, so they can prove to be quite powerful early on.
What Makes A Strong Character In Exos Heroes?
First and foremost, it’s important to get a good grasp of how characters are ranked in this game.
Each character that you’ll come across is assigned a power rating measured in stars. In most cases, the more stars, the stronger a particular character is. This applies to the character’s rarity as well – after all, stronger units should be harder to come across to keep the game balanced.
| Rarity | Star Rating |
| Common Hero | One Star |
| Magic Unit | Two Stars |
| Rare Character | Three Stars |
| Legendary Unit | Four Stars |
| Fate Hero | Five Stars |
| Fatecore Hero | Six Stars |
Pretty simple, right? Now that we’ve got a grasp of how the basic rarity/power system works, let’s talk about levels in Exos Heroes.
Each star rating that a particular character has represents a particular level cap. For each star in their rating, a character can get 15 levels. So, for example, let’s say you roll Metron who is a 5-star base hero – since he’s got 5 stars, you can level him up to level 75 (15 levels * 5 stars).
On the other hand, if we look at Liffy, a Rare character – you’d have a level cap of 45 (3 stars * 15 levels).
However, maximum levels are more of a soft-cap in this game!
In reality, once a character reaches their maximum level, they can still go further by doing Dragon Raids and other specialized content.
But, levels aside – there’s still a bit more for us to cover. Namely, each hero in Exos Heroes comes with several key stats that you should keep in mind. In our case, we’ll want to look at the HP (Life), Attack (Atk), Defence (Def), and other important stats like Critical Hit (Crit), Attack Speed, (Aspeed), and defensives like Evasion and the Block rate.
These stats all play an important role in your hero’s strength. However, the easiest way to keep track of all of them is to simply look at the summary CP rating, otherwise known as the Combat Power (or the Combat Points stat). This stat is a good indicator of the character’s overall strength and can help you differentiate between the trash and treasure on the fly.
But here’s the kicker – only paying attention to the star rating and CP score isn’t actually a win-all approach!
Each character in the game has their own ability kit that contributes to particular group synergies which can make a well-built party of third-rate heroes way more powerful than randomly bunched-together Fated characters.
In particular, Tank and Support class heroes are super valuable, even if their rarity and power ratings are relatively low – as they’re a must-have for any sort of late-game content.
Can You Reroll Heroes?
Yup! Let’s say that you roll a hero that you’re not happy with – or maybe one of the more useless heroes (pretty much anything under Uloom, or B-tier or lower on our Exos Heroes tier list above).
What do you do now?
Thankfully, the game features a pretty nifty reroll option that we covered in our Exos Heroes reroll guide. It’s a bit of an exhausting process, but it lets you get the exact heroes you want, with a little bit of sweat labor.
How To Level & Grow Your Hero In Exos Heroes
Now that we’re a bit more up-to-speed on how character progression works in this game – let’s take a closer look at how you can level up and upgrade your characters in Exos Heroes.
Below, we’ll talk about why it’s important to upgrade your heroes, as well as the various systems that factor into progressing your units like leveling up, blessings, transcendence, enhancing, and more.
Why Is Upgrading Your Characters Important?
Just like in any other game out there – the more you upgrade a character or hero the stronger they’ll be.
However, aside from the obvious perks like dealing better damage or being tankier, there are plenty of other benefits that come with character upgrades in Exos Heroes.
Unlock New Skills
In Exos Heroes, everything revolves around star ratings to an extent. Each time your character is upgraded to the next available star-rating, they’ll gain access to a new skill.
For example, at 2-stars – your character will have an active skill added to the passive skill they have by default. At 3-stars, they’ll gain another active skill, and so on, for each and every star they gain.
Make Them Stronger
Every single time you level up, the characters’ base stats will also increase a fair bit, and this is crucial for getting your squad into endgame content.
You’d be surprised how many folks forget to upgrade their characters and then get stuck in their progression because of it.
Level Up Higher
Speaking of levels, as we mentioned earlier – each star allows a character to level up 15 times. This means that 1-star characters will always be way weaker (even just in terms of stats) than their 2-star or 3-star variants.
Keep in mind that stats start to scale quite high at the later levels (60+). So it’s definitely worthwhile to level up your heroes whenever it’s possible and upgrade their star rating as you progress through the game.
How To Level Up Your Heroes
Ok – so leveling up is pretty important. But how do you actually go about it in Exos Heroes?
Currently, there are two ways for you to level up your characters in-game:
- Run battles – grind out fights for EXP, the good old mind-numbing way.
- Use Experience Scrolls – these scrolls will award your squad with a set amount of experience (depending on the quality of the scroll) that scales with the characters’ levels.
How Do Experience Scrolls Work?
Each scroll, regardless of quality, is assigned a particular element, as do your heroes. So every time you use a scroll, you’ll award experience points to your entire squad, along with a 30% bonus for characters that have the same elemental affinity as the scroll does.
How To Get Experience Scrolls In Exos Heroes?
Early in the game, you should be able to stack up quite a few scrolls from just running basic content like the training/experience dungeon (the Sanctum of Experience).
There are 6 different levels of difficulty for you to train on, with increasing rewards. The higher difficulties also impose an elemental restriction – where a certain number of characters in your team have to have a specific element.
You can run the dungeon daily using the Experience Sanctum Pass, which refreshes every single day – and you can obtain additional passes as a special drop through certain in-game content and events.
What Is Hero Enhancement & Is It Worth It?
Remember how we said that you could only level up your heroes to a maximum level of 75, but there are ways to scale beyond that soft-cap?
Enhancement is exactly what we were talking about then!
To enhance a particular character, you’ll need to “sacrifice” a few other characters in order to give your unit of choice an additional “soft-level”. Think of it like a plus-system in most RPGs, where you’d be able to max out a piece of gear and then enhance it to +1 or +2 for additional stat benefits.
But there’s a catch to Enhancing!
Just as with leveling up, you can only enhance your characters 5 times for each star they’ve got to their name. So, for example, a 3-star Lepin will only be able to be enhanced to +15, giving her a soft level of 60 (45 base level + 15 enhancement levels).
Can Enhancement Fail In Exos Heroes?
The short answer is yes! Each time you enhance a character, the ensuing enhancements become increasingly more difficult.
But, there’s a bit of a white lining to it. When you fail to enhance your character, you get a slight percentile buff to your next enhancement attempt. Just like a fail-stack in Black Desert Online.
How To Fail-Stack Enhancements?
Instead of wasting your heroes on failed attempts – you can use your 1-star or 2-star heroes to build up a fail stack back to an acceptable percentile chance for your next enhancement to be successful.
And once you’re ready, you can start burning your 3-star and 4-star heroes to cap out your party’s core units.
Exos Heroes Blessing Guide
Remember how we talked about upgrading your characters’ star level as soon as you can? In Exos Heroes, the Blessing system is your magic wand when it comes to upping your units’ star levels.
Each time you’ve maxed out your heroes’ levels, you’ll be able to upgrade them to the next star level by burning some in-game materials and gold. This can be done up to a maximum sta level of 6-stars.
While the whole experience is pretty laid-back, higher levels can be a bit tough to complete on a budget. This is due to the fact that the end-game materials you’d need for a 5-star or 6-star level upgrade are pretty rare and you’ll need to invest a fair bit of time in order to farm them up.
How To Get Blessing Materials In Exos Heroes
In order to increase a unit’s star level, you’ll need a whole slew of different powders, fragments, vestige pieces, crystals, and all sorts of different essences too.
Most of these blessing materials can be obtained from disassembling the random loot you get while running different content. So in short, it’s time to buckle up, put your gold farmer pants on and get grinding.
The Transcendence System
If you’ve gotten your characters up to level 90 (6-stars), as well as up to a +30 enhancement rating – there’s still one more thing that you can do to increase your characters’ power.
To “Transcend” a character, you’ll need two things:
- A metric tonne of gold.
- Several copies of the hero you’re going to transcend.
Here’s the catch – you’ll need the copies to be at the same star level as your main character. For example, if you’re trying to transcend a 6-star Bathory (one of the best AoE attack heroes in the game) – you’ll need another 6-star Bathory.
Just like with Enhancements, you can Transcend a character up to 5 times at every star level. However, the levels here don’t stack like they would with Enhancements.
Instead, each of the five transcendences you can do at a given star level will up your character’s maximum level by 2. For example, if you transcend that 6-star Bathory at level 90, her maximum level would go up to 92, after which you’d apply the enhancement rating. So in the end, it would be level 92 +30, instead of level 90 +30.
Are There Any Other Ways To Power Up Your Heroes?
Leveling, transcendence, blessing, and enhancements aside – there’s one more major mechanic in the game that could help you scale your characters’ power.
As you may have guessed – that last piece of the puzzle is the gear you equip your unit with!
Different grades and types of equipment in Exos Heroes award different buffs, stats, and attributes to the character. And just like with the heroes themselves, the grades range from common to fated, with fated equipment offering some really insane stats.
In addition to this, you can also enhance the equipment by forging it, enchanting it, and upgrading it in other various ways to really add a whole new dimension of power to your heroes.
In fact, the itemization system, while pretty simple, deserves a guide of its own to really break it down in detail and begin to understand the various intricacies of gearing in Exos Heroes.
How Does The Summoning System Work?
As with most gacha games, the summoning system is honestly one of the most exciting things about playing Exos Heroes.
In all fairness – summoning in this game is the sort of experience that’ll easily drive you nuts. But, it’s worthwhile at the end of the day, so long as you can combine method and madness in order to actually make it efficient.
At the moment, there are 6 different ways for you to be able to summon a new character into your hero squad in-game.
Free Summoning
This quick and easy method allows you to roll heroes up to 3 stars (Rare). Just as the name may hint at – this method of summoning heroes to your character roster is entirely free.
Premium Summoning
If you want to shell out a little hard-earned cash, you can roll some high-end characters in Exos Heroes.
A single roll will run you 70 Zes, or you can drop a whole 700 Zes for 10 rolls, which grants you an extra roll for a total of 11, as well as 1 Myu for future character skin upgrades.
In addition to this, opting into 10 rolls from the get-go also guarantees that you’ll roll at least one character that’s 4-stars or higher.
Note: If you really want to drop some hard cash and cough up 7000 Zes, you’ll be guaranteed a 5-star hero.
Exodium Summoning
If you regularly run your daily quests and do expeditions, you’ll get plenty of Exodium that you can spend on rolling new heroes. Each roll will set you back 10 Exodium, which isn’t all too taxing, especially once you start getting into the later stages of the game.
Sunstone Summoning
While this method may seem like a bit of a moot point seeing as you’ve got free rolls and Exodium rolls already – it’s actually one of the best ways to buff up your chance at rolling the exact hero you’re after.
Using 300 sunstones, you can roll heroes from a specific continent that you get to select. This is a nice way to stack the odds a bit more in your favor since each hero is distinctly tied to a particular in-game continent.
Pro Tip: In the earlier stages of the game, rolling with sunstones is actually a huge waste! Use them to gear out your heroes instead or buy tickets with them.
Fusing Heroes
If you’ve got plenty of Zes and a whole bunch of heroes that you don’t see fitting into your roster – you can fuse heroes together for a chance to roll a new hero from the same tier, or even a tier above.
Obviously, you’ll need to have two heroes from the same tier for this to work.
For example, you can fuse two Rare heroes for a chance to get another Rare unit or even a Legendary character in some rare cases. This works with Legendary heroes and Fated heroes too.
There is one major setback to fusing units together in Exos Heroes. It costs a metric tonne of Zes!
In fact, it’s critically ill-advised for players that don’t have an expansive bankroll set up in-game to go with this method.
But, if you’re struggling to get a really specific hero – this might just be the perfect way to do it since the pool of Legendary and Fated (unique) characters is actually way smaller than a continent restriction. And it eliminates the two characters you’re fusing – so it’s better than dropping 700 Zes on a guaranteed Legendary roll (or 7000 Zes for a Fated roll) that could easily roll the heroes you’ve already got.
Limited Summoning
It’s no secret that there’s a pretty overwhelming amount of characters in this game. And that means your odds of rolling the exact hero you want are pretty much slim to none.
How Many Heroes Are In Exos Heroes?
Today, there are 200 heroes in the game. And there are plans underway to scale that number up by releasing new heroes over the next while.
So, what is Limited Summoning and how does it help you?
Limited summoning is actually more of a mechanic than a Summoning Method. It simply states that each and every time you summon a particular hero by rolling from the pool of 200, your next summoning roll won’t include the previously summoned heroes in the pool.
This basically means that eventually (once you’re old and gray) you’ll be able to roll the exact hero you want by eliminating other options from the pool by just repetitively grinding out your summons.
Our Top Tips On Managing Your In-Game Resources
As an entirely Free-To-Play game, Exos Heroes offers quite a lot of content for players to enjoy. And as with most games in the genre, the paid options typically simplify your life by a whole lot.
However, it’s not impossible to put together a highly efficient approach to managing your resources in-game, without having to open your real-life wallet.
Here are some of our best tips on progressing through the game while sticking to the “Free” in F2P.
Keep Exploring
By now, it should be obvious that leveling up your heroes is basically essential to getting anywhere with the game.
But let’s face it – not everyone has a whole uninterrupted 24 hours a day to play, right?
Thankfully, Exos Heroes implemented a feature called “Exploration Mode”, or as we lovingly call it – “The AFK Mode”. As the name suggests, this mode allows your squad to keep grinding while you’re not in-game. It will drain your stamina bar, get more EXP passively, and keep you progressing while you focus on your real-life errands and responsibilities.
Explore Before Doing Story Content
One thing that a lot of people don’t realize until way later into the game is the fact that playing through the Story doesn’t actually use any of your Stamina.
So if you’d like to be efficient with your gameplay, you should drain your stamina bar before you do story content. And once you work your way through some of the chapter at hand – your stamina will have recharged. Rinse and repeat for success!
Legendary Banner Pull
You can roll for a legendary or fate hero a whopping three times a month through the banner pull. All you need to do is aim for a clear-rating of 3 stars or higher on each episode that you work your way through in-game.
This is going to help you stack up your squad early on, which means you’ll progress more quickly, and rack up more high-end characters and gear faster.
Save Your Scrolls
A lot of newer players tend to use up all of their Experience Scrolls right away on whatever mediocre lineup of heroes they start with. Instead, you should save these scrolls for when you have a nice team of 4-star or 5-star heroes.
Keep in mind that early on in the game, the fights you play through will give more than enough EXP for you to progress the initial team you start with, so there’s just no need or rationale to burn those scrolls.
And while we’re talking about Experience Scrolls – it’s also very important to keep doing your Sanctum of Experience daily runs. And when you run out of passes, you can get more through the challenge assignments menu.
Closing Thoughts
And there you have it – our ultimate Exos Heroes tier list and getting started guide. If you’ve stuck it out this far, newbie or veteran, you should have a fairly good understanding of everything to do with characters (heroes) in Exos Heroes.
We’ve covered a wide range of topics including how characters work, how to tell which ones are good, how to upgrade their power and level them up, as well as how to manage the micro-resources and mechanics of the game to progress easily and efficiently.
Now, we’d love to hear from you!
What are your favorite team compositions? Let us know in the comments below.
