Beginner's Guide
New to HeroBrowser? This page walks through the whole game loop, floor 1 to floor 100, in the order a new player meets it. Every number and picture on this page comes straight from the live game data.
Pick Your Hero
You field exactly ONE hero per run, chosen from 6 playable classes, and it soaks the whole dungeon alone. The tanky and sustain-focused classes are the forgiving picks; the crit and glass-cannon classes hit harder but punish mistakes. Click any card for that class's full stats, abilities, and talent tree.
First run? The Knight and the Archer and the Berserker are the roster's easy-rated picks. See Classes for the side-by-side comparison table.
Your account is not locked to one hero forever, either: it holds 3 free hero slots, with two more purchasable for a total of 5, so you can build several classes side by side and switch between them. Give each hero a nickname and it follows that hero everywhere it is shown, including the leaderboard.
How a Run Works
Combat is fully automatic: you never click an attack or choose a target mid-fight. Your job is everything BETWEEN fights, spending gold, gear, skill points, and talent points to make the next floor survivable. A floor is not one brawl but a gauntlet of waves, 5 per floor in the opening forest rising to 9 deep in the abyss, and the horde grows with every floor you descend. Every 10th floor is a boss fight, and each act also hides one earlier guardian miniboss with its own exclusive loot.
See Combat Mechanics for exactly how a fight resolves and Bosses for every boss and guardian and which floors they hold.
The Descent: Six Acts
The 100 floors are grouped into six biome acts, each with its own look, its own enemy roster, and its own act boss at the gate. This is the road down:
See Biomes & Floors for each act's enemy roster and Enemies for the full bestiary.
Death and Progression
HeroBrowser is a roguelite. A wipe sends you back to floor 1, but your permanent upgrades and talents carry over, so every attempt starts a little stronger than the last. An optional Hardcore mode also destroys your equipped gear on a wipe, for players who want the extra stakes. At the very far end of the game, a max-level hero can undergo a one-time Rebirth that resets nearly everything in exchange for a permanent blessing; it is strictly endgame and nothing a new player needs to plan for. Players chasing an extra challenge can also pledge Vows before a descent, trading a restriction for a combat bonus or, with Ordeals, for richer loot; see Vows & Ordeals for the full list.
Gold, Upgrades, and Potions
Gold drops from kills and floor clears. Spend it on permanent stat upgrades for your hero and on potions, your only source of healing outside of combat lifesteal (see Sustain, below). Each potion restores 30% of your max HP, your belt holds at most 5 at once, and prices climb as your hero grows, so an empty belt is a choice you feel.
Diamonds and Hero Skins
Diamonds are a separate account-wide currency, split into two ledgers. Red Diamonds are earned for free, from one-time milestones (bosses, guardians, floor 100, Hardcore titles) and from two daily faucets on the Daily Quests board: 10 for clearing all three of the day's quests, plus 2 per boss or guardian kill for your first 20 such kills each day, for a combined cap of 50 Red Diamonds per day. Gold Diamonds are the premium currency, bought with real money.
Gold Diamonds can be switched into Red Diamonds one for one, from the market's Buy tab or the in-game menu, but the trade only runs that direction: Red Diamonds never turn back into Gold Diamonds.
Diamonds also buy hero skins from the Skins entry on your hero's Equip tab. Skins only change how your hero looks; they carry no stat bonus and have no effect on combat. Both skins per class are direct buys, no chance involved: the Red Hunter skin costs 2000 Red Diamonds, and the Summer skin costs 700 Gold Diamonds.
Gear and Rarities
Your hero wears seven pieces of gear: a weapon, four armour pieces (helmet, armor, gloves, and boots), and two accessories (ring and necklace). An empty slot gives nothing, so filling all seven matters more than perfecting any one of them.
The full ladder, weakest to rarest, left to right.
Gear runs from common up to legendary. Common and uncommon pieces only ever drop from kills, never from the shop; the shop (rare and up) and the fusion Cube (any rarity) both top out at legendary, the ceiling that ordinary economy can reach. Three apex tiers sit above it: cursed and divine can only ever DROP, never bought or crafted; mythic comes from boss and guardian kills on Nightmare or Infernal difficulty from floor 50 on, but also has a forged path once Nightmare is unlocked, the Cube's Ascension recipe. Divine comes only from boss and guardian kills on Infernal (from floor 90), while cursed "blood pact" relics drop rarely from any enemy on floor 80+, and only one cursed relic can be equipped at a time. See Items for the full rarity ladder and every item, and Bosses for which fights can drop what.
The Forge and Salvage
Gear you already own is not finished gear. Every one of your seven slots carries its own forge level, up to +20, bought with gold and Arcanite. Two things make this friendlier than it sounds. First, the level belongs to the slot, not the item, so upgrading the piece in it never costs you the levels you paid for. Second, forging only ever adds flat Attack, Magic, Defense, HP, and Resistance — it never touches percentage stats like crit or lifesteal, so there is no hidden downside to it.
Arcanite is the fuel, and it comes from gear you no longer want: salvage a piece and it melts into crafting material, in three tiers, better gear giving better material. That is the loop — the drops you would have vendored become the levels on the drops you kept. Past +20 the forge enters Radiant Tempering, a deliberately expensive late-game tier that costs only the rarest Arcanite; it is somewhere to spend a deep-run surplus, not something to plan an early build around. Full cost ladder and bonus tables on The Forge.
Reading Your Hero: the Seven Attributes
The character sheet sums everything you have earned, levels, upgrades, gear, and talents, into seven primary attributes, and marks each class's signature attribute with a crown:
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Vitality
— How much punishment this hero can take before falling.
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Armor
— Combined physical and magical damage mitigation.
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Strength
— Raw physical power behind every attack.
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Intellect
— Magical power behind spells and heals.
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Speed
— How often this hero acts in the fight timeline.
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Agility
— Chance to slip an incoming hit entirely, offset by the attacker’s accuracy.
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Critical
— Chance to land a critical hit, and how hard it strikes.
Behind each attribute sit the raw combat stats the engine actually rolls; see Stats for every one of them.
Skills and Talents
Two separate systems grow your hero's kit. Skill points, earned from hero level, rank up your basic attack and each of your class's abilities individually, each rank adding more damage; see Abilities for the full list of what you're ranking up. Talent points build out a permanent, per-class talent web, up to 25 spendable points, including keystone capstones that define a build; see your class's own page under Classes for its tree. A third, account-wide currency — rune shards — buys runes, which raise your gold, XP, and offline earnings rather than your combat stats. Progression covers all three side by side.
Only three of a class's moves ever fire in a fight: the basic attack, always on, plus up to 2 of your abilities toggled on from the Skills page. Cooldowns run on the fight's own clock in real seconds rather than on turns, so which two you pick changes the whole rotation, not just your ranks.
Difficulties
HeroBrowser has four difficulty tiers: Normal, Hard, Nightmare, and Infernal. Hard unlocks once you clear floor 100 on Normal, and Nightmare unlocks once you clear floor 100 on Hard. Clearing a tier only unlocks the next one as selectable, though; it never switches your active difficulty for you, so you always choose your tier yourself from the Portal and can keep farming the one you are already on for as long as you like. Guest accounts (Continue as Guest, no sign-in) are limited to Normal; signing in unlocks Hard, Nightmare, and Infernal. Normal and Hard run the same floors in the same order as each other, just tuned harder, including the bosses along the way. Nightmare and Infernal are also one-way descents: the portal only ever offers Floor 1 on either of those two, so a wipe deep into one means climbing it again from the start.
HeroBrowser also has a true ending. The first time any account clears floor 100 on Normal, a story cutscene plays, followed by a one-time New Game Plus choice: descend again on Hard, or stay on Normal. It fires exactly once per account, so a later floor 100 clear, on any tier, never triggers it again.
Infernal is not just bigger numbers. It only unlocks once you have cleared floor 100 on Nightmare, equipped mythic-or-better gear in all seven slots, and completed your account's one-time Rebirth. In exchange it swaps in six entirely new biomes with their own bestiary (see Enemies), where every drop is rare quality or better, common and uncommon gear never appears at all. Every floor drains you directly: a flat 5% of max HP each turn spent in combat, plus another 2% just for stepping onto the next floor. Guardians and act bosses carry their own enrage mechanics on top of the usual scaling, and floor 100 holds Abraxion, the Infernal Sovereign, the true final boss of the game. Divine relics, the rarest tier in the game, drop only here.
Sustain
There is no rest heal between floors: your hero's HP carries straight from one fight into the next. The only ways to recover are lifesteal earned in combat and potions bought with gold. Managing that sustain across a whole descent, floor after floor, is the core tension of the run. See Stats for the lifesteal and heal-power stat entries and Combat Mechanics for how a fight actually plays out turn by turn.
Your First Descent: Five Tips
- Start with a forgiving class. The Knight and the Archer and the Berserker leave the most room for mistakes.
- Spend your gold. Permanent stat upgrades survive a wipe, so banking gold helps you less than buying strength that carries into every future attempt.
- Fill all seven gear slots before chasing upgrades for any single one. Even a common item beats an empty slot.
- Top up your potion belt before a boss floor. There is no rest heal, and walking into a boss gate with an empty belt is how runs end.
- Treat wipes as progress. Every run banks upgrades and talents, and the next attempt starts stronger for it.
Saving and Accounts
You can play instantly as a guest; a guest save lives only in that browser, and guest play is limited to Normal difficulty. Signing in with Google or an email account stores your save on the server, follows you across devices, places your best runs on the public leaderboard, and unlocks Hard, Nightmare, and Infernal.
Still have questions? Check the FAQ.