Progression

Combat resolves on its own; progression is the part you actually play. Several separate systems grow a hero, and each draws on its own currency — skill points, talent points, rune shards, gold, Arcanite, diamonds — so none of them competes with the others for the same pile. This page covers all of them, plus the difficulty tiers they are measured against. Gear itself is on Items and gear enhancement on The Forge.

Hero Level & Skill Points

Experience from every kill and floor clear levels your hero, up to level 99. Levelling raises base stats directly and pays out one skill point per level, to a lifetime budget of 60. Skill points rank up your basic attack and each of your class's abilities individually; every rank adds 5% to that ability's output. Ranking is per ability, so a build can pour everything into one signature spell or spread across the kit. See Abilities for what you are ranking up.

XP goes to the hero that fought. Each hero slot on your account is a separate character with its own level, gold, bag, runes, and floor records, so switching to another hero never borrows the first one's progress.

Training

The Training tab of the Hero panel sells permanent stat tiers for gold. Every class has five rows, each up to 20 tiers, and each tier costs more than the last: maxing one row costs between 199,457 and 1,007,355 gold. Training survives a wipe and belongs to the hero that bought it.

Every row raises a stat that class actually uses. Rows that would do nothing for a class give it a different stat instead, so a knight trains Warding rather than Intellect, and a mage's basic attack row is Channeling. In game, each row explains what it gives and how much you have gained so far.

Every class trains Vitality, +15 HP; Armor, +2 Defense; Speed, +1 Speed per tier. The other rows depend on the class:

Swipe to see the full table →

All amounts are per tier. Stats explains what each stat does in combat.

Talents

Talent points are earned from hero level and spent in a permanent, per-class talent web, up to 25 spendable points. The web runs three tiers deep:

• Tier 1 and 2 — passive stat nodes and per-ability damage nodes. The connective tissue you spend through on the way down.
• Tier 3 — five keystone capstones, one per keystone kind: lifesteal, thorns (reflect), execute, last stand, and retribution (on-kill heal). Every class has access to all five, and every rank anywhere in the web costs one point — so the cap is what forces a choice between them, and choosing is what makes a build a build.

Talents survive a wipe. Nothing you spend is ever locked in: a full respec is free, and you can also refund a single talent. Refunding one node also refunds anything hanging off it that would be left unreachable, so a branch collapses in one action rather than node by node. A talent still reachable through another route you own survives untouched.

Each class page under Classes renders that class's own tree, node by node, and Stats explains what the keystone stats do.

Runes

Runes belong to the hero that bought them, and so do the rune shards that pay for them, a separate currency that drops from the descent itself: 1 per floor cleared, +3 for a boss floor, and +1 the first time you set a new deepest floor. Unlike talents, runes do not raise combat stats at all — they shape the economy and the grind around it.

Economy

Riches & wisdom from every floor.

Rune	Effect	Max rank
Avarice	All gold rewards are increased.	3
Enlightenment	All experience gains are increased.	4
Fortune	Find more rune shards from the depths.	5

Repose

Rewards while you rest.

Rune	Effect	Max rank
Restful Hearth	Unlock offline rewards. Earn gold & xp while away.	1
Long Slumber	Increase the maximum offline reward window.	5
Dreaming Coffers	Increase the rate of offline gold & xp.	5
Sentinel's Vigil	Automatically drink a potion when gravely wounded.	1

Expedition

Tools for the long descent.

Rune	Effect	Max rank
Swift Descent	Cleared floors replay faster, never your frontier.	2
Field Salvager	Unlock auto salvage. Pick a rarity; lesser drops melt to materials.	1

The Vault Exchange

The rune tree has an end. Once every branch is bought, shards keep arriving with nothing left to spend them on — so the Vault will take them off your hands at 250 shards per Radiant Arcanite, up to 100 at a time. Radiant is the endgame material: it feeds the forge, apex re-targeting, and ascension. The trade runs one way only — radiant never converts back into shards.

Diamonds

Diamonds are the one currency your whole account shares: gold, rune shards, and Arcanite each belong to a single hero, but every hero draws on the same diamonds, kept in two separate ledgers. Red Diamonds are earned for free by playing; Gold Diamonds are HeroBrowser's premium currency, bought with real money.

Red Diamonds come from finite, one-time milestones — a boss or guardian floor's first clear on a given difficulty tier, floor 100's first clear per tier, and every Hardcore title you earn — plus two rate-capped daily faucets that reset every day: 10 the first time each day one of your heroes claims every core quest on its Daily Ritual board (each hero draws its own board of up to 6 quests, but this bonus is paid once per account), and 2 per boss or guardian kill, for your first 20 such kills each day across all your heroes. Together the two daily faucets cap out at 50 Red Diamonds a day, win or grind as much as you like beyond that.

Gold Diamonds convert into Red Diamonds one for one, from the market's Buy tab or the in-game menu — but only in that direction. There is no way to turn Red Diamonds back into Gold Diamonds.

Hero Skins

Skins change how your hero looks, and the skin your hero is wearing also adds a small stat bonus: two stats per skin, +1% each on an epic skin and +1.5% each on a legendary one. An owned skin you are not wearing adds nothing. They live in the "Skins" entry on that hero's Equip tab:

• Red Hunter — a direct buy for 2000 Red Diamonds, per class.
• Summer — a direct buy for 700 Gold Diamonds, per class. No chance involved — pay the price, own the skin.
• Hero Pass skin — earned from the season's Hero Pass rewards.

The Cube: Fusion

The Cube turns surplus gear into better gear. Feed it 5 items of the same slot and same rarity and it returns one item in that slot. On a success the result is one rarity higher; on a miss you still get an item back, but at the rarity you put in — you keep one of 5, and lose the rest.

You feed in	You can get	Upgrade chance
5× Common	Uncommon	100%
5× Uncommon	Rare	100%
5× Rare	Epic	50%
5× Epic	Legendary	40%

The ordinary ladder stops at legendary on purpose. Cursed has no forged path, and apex tiers can never be fused into, no matter how much gear you feed the Cube. Mythic and divine each have exactly one forged path, and both are deliberately punishing — see Ascension on The Forge. To reshape an apex relic you already own, see re-targeting on the same page.

Difficulty Tiers

The same 100 floors, in the same order, climb through 4 levels of tuning: Normal, Hard, Nightmare, and the gated Infernal tier below. Hard unlocks when you clear floor 100 on Normal, and Nightmare when you clear it on Hard. Higher tiers scale enemy stats and your rewards together, and every tier keeps its own deepest-floor record. Tiers are earned per hero: a new hero always starts on Normal and climbs the ladder itself, no matter how far your other heroes have gone.

Clearing floor 100 also carries you on: the hero restarts at floor 1 of the next tier as soon as that tier is unlocked for it. The first Normal clear asks first, through the New Game Plus choice below, and Infernal still needs its gear and Rebirth. Going back down is always one Portal trip away, so you can farm a lower tier for as long as you like. Guest accounts (Continue as Guest, no sign-in) are locked to Normal only; signing in with Google or an email account is what unlocks Hard, Nightmare, and Infernal as you clear the tier below each.

Tier	Enemy offense	Enemy HP	Enemy defense	Gold & shards
Normal	×1 (×2.5 reborn)	×1 (×2.5 reborn)	×1	×1
Hard	×3 (×3 reborn)	×3.4 (×3.4 reborn)	×2.7	×1.4
Nightmare	×3.48 (×3.65 reborn)	×4.15 (×4.36 reborn)	×3.14	×2
Infernal	×3.5 (×3.68 reborn)	×4.2 (×4.41 reborn)	×3.16	×2.6

Once you transcend, enemies scale up by the amount shown per tier. Defense and rewards are unchanged.

Nightmare is not simply Hard with bigger numbers: it also empowers elite enemies and steepens the final stretch of floors. Bosses carry their own per-tier tuning — see Bosses. Nightmare (and Infernal, below) is also a one-way descent: on Normal and Hard the portal can drop you on any floor you have already cleared, but on Nightmare or Infernal it only ever offers Floor 1 — every run on either tier is the full climb, and a wipe on floor 90 means starting that descent over.

The Ending & New Game Plus

HeroBrowser has a true ending. The first time a hero 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. Staying on Normal changes nothing; descending on Hard sets your active tier to Hard on the spot (and is only offered to signed in accounts, since guests cannot leave Normal). Either way, the choice fires exactly once per hero, on that hero's first Normal floor 100 clear only — clearing floor 100 again, or clearing it on Hard or Nightmare, never triggers it a second time.

Infernal ends differently. Felling Abraxion on Infernal floor 100 plays the game's true ending, and because there is no harder road left to offer, the hero then walks straight back into Infernal from floor 1 instead of being shown the New Game Plus choice.

Infernal: the Fourth Tier

Infernal sits above Nightmare and unlocks differently from every tier below it. Clearing floor 100 on Nightmare only opens the door: you also need mythic-or-better gear in all seven equipment slots and a completed Rebirth before the portal will take you there. All three conditions are checked live, not just the story flag.

Once you are in, Infernal replaces the descent with six entirely new biomes and their own bestiary (see Enemies and Biomes & Floors) rather than reusing the base world's six, and the whole screen carries its own dark, molten visual theme so it never reads as just a reskinned Nightmare. Every drop on Infernal is rare quality or better — common and uncommon items never appear here at all — and Divine, the rarest tier in the game, drops only from Infernal boss and guardian kills. Those kills also fill a Divine Guarantee: from floor 50 down, one divine is certain within 2,140 eligible boss and guardian kills, while Nightmare keeps its own mythic guarantee. Below divine, the ladder here reads legendary, cursed, mythic, divine: a chase legendary drops from about 2% of boss kills, and a cursed relic from about 1.5% of boss and guardian kills from floor 50. The only other road to a divine is Divine Ascension in the Cube (see The Forge). Every floor also drains you directly: a flat 5% of max HP is lost each turn spent in combat, plus another 2% just for setting foot on the next floor, shown as a visible drain effect on the walk-in, so sustain matters here more than anywhere else in the game. Guardians and act bosses carry their own enrage mechanics on top of the usual per-tier scaling, and floor 100 holds Abraxion, the Infernal Sovereign, the true final boss of the game.

Hardcore

Hardcore is an opt-in toggle on a run, not a fourth difficulty. It changes exactly one rule: a wipe destroys the gear your hero is wearing. Your gold, levels, talents, and runes survive as always. In exchange, gold and rune shards pay out at a premium for as long as the run is flagged hardcore, and clearing under hardcore earns its own cosmetic titles.

Rebirth

Rebirth is the endgame ceremony, available once per hero, ever. It unlocks when that hero reaches level 99, and costs a flat toll of 1,000,000 gold. You may be reborn as the same class or as any other. It is a true new beginning:

• The hero returns to level 1, and its skill ranks and talent ranks are wiped.
• Its Training (gold stat upgrades), forge levels, and rune ranks all return to the start.
• It walks back in at floor 1 on Normal. Hard, Nightmare, and Infernal lock again and open only as you earn them anew, though the Ranks keep the best floor you ever reached.
• Ordinary gear is destroyed, equipped and bagged alike, with nothing sold or refunded. Mythic, cursed, and divine relics and any gear you paid for survive, unequipped in your bag, and a card socketed into a destroyed piece is returned to your binder.

Your gold (after the toll), rune shards, Arcanite, potions, diamonds, and cosmetics are kept. What you get back is permanent: the reborn hero carries a class-specific blessing folded into its stats forever, and its talent budget rises from 25 to 28 — 3 extra points no hero that has not been reborn can earn. It is a deliberate, one-way trade, and nothing a new player needs to plan for.

Those 3 extra points open the transcendence talents, a set of 4 trans-only nodes per class no ordinary hero can reach. You can only afford 3 of the 4, so transcendence is not a checklist — it is a fork. Which ones you can even reach depends on which branch your other 25 points went into, so a reborn hero changes shape rather than simply growing stronger.

The dungeon answers in kind. Once you transcend, enemies scale up on every tier for the rest of that hero's life — the amounts are in the Difficulty Tiers table above.

Still working out where to start? The Beginner's Guide walks the whole loop in order.