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 is shared across your whole roster: clearing a floor levels every hero you own, not just the one that fought.
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 are account-wide and bought with rune shards, 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. | 3 |
| 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 a third account-wide currency, 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 moment you claim all three of that day's Daily Quests, and 2 per boss or guardian kill, for your first 20 such kills each day. 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 nothing else — no stat, no combat effect, purely cosmetic. Each class has two, bought from 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.
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 and divine are drop-only and can never be fused into, no matter how much gear you feed the Cube. Mythic has exactly one forged path, and it is 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.
Clearing floor 100 only unlocks the next tier as selectable — it never switches your active difficulty for you. You always pick your own tier yourself from the Portal (the one exception is the one-time New Game Plus choice below), so nothing stops you from farming the tier you are already on 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 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. 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 account, on that first Normal floor 100 clear only — clearing floor 100 again, or clearing it on Hard, Nightmare, or Infernal, never triggers it a second time.
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. 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 account, ever. It unlocks when any hero reaches level 99, and costs a flat toll of 1,000,000 gold. Nothing about it is subtle:
- Every hero in your party resets to level 1, not just the one you rebirth.
- Every class's talent ranks are wiped.
- Every item is destroyed — equipped and bagged alike. Nothing is sold, nothing is refunded.
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 other hero can earn. Gold upgrades, runes, and account-wide progress are untouched. 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 account'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.