IOTA Heroes is an NFT based managing style fantasy game where you can loot items, improve your Heroes as well as trade and earn $SMR and $IHG (IotaHeroGold) with your NFTs.
This guide is written without the actual technical knowledge behind the game, so things might be wrong and due to changes. Pls keep this in mind when reading.
But anyways it should give you a basic understanding of the game mechanics and principles. Later a separate and more in depth guide regarding monsters, loot tables and sweetspots for farming will be published. Different community members already gather data. But for now let’s get everyone on track for this amazing as addicting NFT game!
Attributes
An IOTA Hero (formerly “Hero”) has 3 different attributes and 3 according affinities:
STR = Strength
AGI = Agility
INT = Intelligence
Each attributes effect and how to increase it can be seen below:
Affinity
The affinity of a Hero determines how much this Hero benefits from STR, AGI & INT. Affinities come in various combinations and it seems that the sum of all affinities combined most often is 15.
Now let’s explore the correlation of attributes and affinities. The higher an affinity is, the higher bonus on combat stats u get.
For example if 2 Heroes each have 3 INT but they have different INT affinities, their INT based stats will also differ.
Training
First of all: Facility LVL is based on your Heros average LVL. That’s the average of the Heros STR, AGI & INT or in other terms: Heros total LVL divided by 3 and cut off decimals. ANd training is always free. You only have to pay for upgrades of your facilities.
To increase your Heros capabilities in adventures you can send them to training. This can be done BEFORE they go adventuring but starting, changing or ending is only possible when they are “at home”.
So a Hero of 13/8/7 has 28 total LVL → 28/3 = 9,666 → average LVL of 9.
This means for maximum training XP the chosen facility must be LVL 9. Lower LVL facilities just give less XP, which slows the leveling progress a bit down bc of the increasing amount of XP needed for a Level-Up. Accordingly when a Heros average LVL is higher then the facilitys LVL, then he will gain less %XP then a Hero that trained in an adequately leveled facility. Also “overleveling” facilities doesn’t help here bc in these cases the avg Hero LVL is used as limit.
There are four different facilities where you can train your heroes. One distributes experience (XP) equally to all three stats and the other three of them each focus on STR, AGI or INT while still giving a small bonus to the remaining attributes. Meaning that if you train in the Library (INT), you still get a small portion of XP to STR and AGI. So no attribute can be totally ignored and left behind. XP distribution in focussed facilities seems to be 60/20/20 favoring focussed attribute. This distribution is visualized via the pie charts in the top right corner.
There will be a more in depth guide including this but for now just repeat their training everytime your Heroes return from an adventure and before you go to sleep/work. See it like they become tired from training and don’t exercise well. So the longer they train, the less XP they gain per time period trained.
At first training in the Academy may seem like a good plan in general. It makes the game cheaper in terms of Gold bc you don’t have to upgrade all facilities but it also has some downsides.
So for example when a level (LVL) 30 Hero was trained in the Academy all the time each attribute is on 10 and he has to fight monsters of the respective LVL range around 30 (explained later).
Another Hero might have been leveled only in Gym and also be on LVL 30 but have around 15–17 STR instead of 10 from the Academy. This bonus in certain attributes could be the edge to carry a strong item that has high attribute requirements like “requires 15 Strength level”. An Academy Hero would have to be LVL 45 (15,15,15) to use that item whereas a focussed Hero might only need to be LVL 30 to reach the same attribute requirements.
Items / Equipment
There are different types of Items that can be dropped by monsters or bought in the General Store. Basically they can be divided into Equipment, Currency and miscellaneous items (Eggs, PVP Tickets, Trash etc). But for now let’s focus on Equipment so that your Heroes survive the end battle after each adventure you send them on.
The combat stats of a Hero can be temporarily increased by equipping them with items/gear. Most of them have certain requirements like total LVL or an attribute to be at least a certain LVL. Those attribute focussed items also often tell you what Hero it fits best regarding their affinity and attribute distribution. In the example below you can see a Hero with almost pure STR oriented gear almost giving them a 50% increase on their main combat stats:
Armor 22.25% → 30.4%
Attack power 16.08% → 23.14%
Fragility & Luck
You might have seen in the item stats that there is something called “fragility”. This is the percentage chance to lose this item when having it equipped on an adventure. In the above example both items have a 5% fragility.
But there are also some special items (most of them limited drops) that have a fragility of 0% which means you can’t lose such items on adventures. The Gold Plater Coin can be randomly found on adventures until Friday, November 3rd. The Pharaoh Headdress was an airdrop for holders of at least 5 Pharaohs. Both “luckily” also have the Luck stat on them giving the equipped Hero a chance for better or special loot (like hundreds of Gold) after a victorious adventure.
Sidenote: The end of the time frame during which the Gold Plater Coins can be found also marks the day of the snapshot of all holders of these coins.
Each Gold Plater Coin in your wallet will give you an airdrop of 50,000 $FUEL from EpochZero, a partnered NFT market analysis platform.
Abilities
Besides classic physical gear you also can equip your Hero with a set of up to 2 abilities. Abilities also have fragility meaning u can lose them on adventures and often are gated behind certain attribute or LVL requirements.When they do damage, this damage scales with either attack power (STR) or with magic power (INT). But regardless of scaling the ability requirement must be met to be able to use it.
Abilities work independent from attack speed and are based on the games time calculation unit “tick”. In the top middle there is the amount of ticks the battle already is lasting at that time. Taking the cooldown and duration of abilities into play here:
The fight lasted 546 ticks at the time of screenshot. the middle ability “Tome: Fireball” has a cooldown of 200 ticks, meaning that in the battle of 546 ticks it could have only been used 2 times bc it takes a 200 tick pause after using before it can be used again, whereas the “Tablet: Knee Kick” on the right only has 100 ticks cooldown which means that it could have been used 5 times in the battle of 546 ticks.
Reforging
There are some literal Trash items that for now only serve one purpose: being melted down and reforged into something new. The only thing that matters here is the item level of it (same with every other item you use for reforging).
Of course one could also reforge equipment but it would be wiser to simply use this equipment bc even Easy adventure get more difficult with increasing Hero LVLs. A spear here, a hat there and together with a pair of your dozens of leftover low LVL boots this might take the cake in battle.
Reforging has a 50% chance to produce something usefull like rings and necklaces but in the other 50% of cases you receive (probably) higher LVL trash items for higher LVL reforging. It doesn’t matter what kind of item you use, only item LVL matters. And based on that item LVL you can get loot, meaning that from reforging some broken wooden Trash items you won’t get a powerful necklace, ring or trinket. But the higher LVL your Heroes become, the harder enemies will be faced and the better loot (and trash) can be found.
Each reforging process consumes 1 Charcoal and 5 items with an item LVL. The Charcoal can be endlessly bought from the General Store for 50 Gold each.
Researching
Enough of crap crafting? What about some guaranteed positive outcome? That’s where the different colored Dust comes into play that sometimes is gotten as loot from adventures. Each quality has a different pool of outcomes, growing stronger from low yellow Dust over medium purple to the strongest abilities the high tier of green dust. Possible outcomes and their drop chances of the abilities can be checked ingame.
Outcome will always be one of the following:
Tablet, Tome or Scroll
Each researching process consumes 1 Scripters Kit and 8 Dust of the same color. The Scripters Kit can be endlessly bought from the General Store for 100 Gold.
Renting
And of course I didn’t want to leave out one of the best parts of a web3 game: Renting! While you’re sleeping, working or simply don’t hae the time/passtion to play at some given time, simply put up your hero for renting. That way you can earn some passive income from your Heroes and other people who are not (yet) convinced of the game can easily test it out by renting a Hero. Simply go to the renting tab and search a Hero of the orientation and LVL you want. Only have LVL 10ish Heroes but you want some better loot? No problem! Just hire a beefed up LVL 40 char and try your luck on an adventure.
Regardless if u put ur won Heros up for rent or if you rent someone elses Heros: They and you always have to use our own items. Nothing from ones items stays on the rented Hero. In case you should sell a Hero that beforehand was sent adventuring by you, you still get the loot of that last adventure when they return.
To put a Hero up for sale you simply create a smart contract with 3 clicks:
1) Choose the price per rent
2) Set the number of rents
3) Click on “Create”.
Make sure to send your Hero to Training before you rent them out to take double advantage of your time off. You also can set a high number of rents so that you don’t have to refresh the smart contract as often. This all depends on how much time u want to invest. Just need to sleep and start farming adventures as soon as you wake up? WHat about 3 rents leading to a maximum of 3 x 2:45h → 8:15h. Can’t play for the next week? Pump those rents up and give your hero away for 40 to 50 adventures. Just keep an eye on the average renting prices for what may go and maybe snipe some strong Hero for small SMR.
Conclusion
For now this should give you an understanding of how certain things in the game work and how to build your Heroes. As already mentioned above there will be another article that goes more into some details and fine tuning but for now you should be good to go ;)
If there are any questions or if you just want to join our community come to our discord. Item flexing, whining about bad loot luck, tactical tips for enemies… we got it all!
Thanks to those community members who are providing their data and also Credle who is incredibly responsive on Discord!
Official homepage and Blog: https://www.iotaheroes.com/
Game: https://game.iotaheroes.com/#/home
Discord: https://discord.gg/HEfTTsVTmX
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/IotaHeroes
