Top 12 Mistakes New Players Usually Make

Here are top 12 mistakes newbies usually make during the early game in AFK Arena.

It’s not always easy for new players to not make mistakes when playing AFK Arena even though the game mechanic is pretty simple. However, there are some huge mistakes that need to be avoided in any way so that it won’t affect the growth of your account in the long term.

A guide by Whitesushii!

Ascending Wrong Heroes

During the early game, most players do not understand the properties, pros and cons of each Hero and usually upgrade random Heroes based on their feelings.

Understanding how each Hero works is very important. Or at least you should have a rough idea about the best Heroes worth upgrading. Check out AFK Arena Tier List for more details!

Here, we will talk about how to ascending Heroes properly.

Do not ascend any Ascended Hero (who has 4 skills) until you have 4 copies of him/her.

Why?

This is because, ascending Ascended Heroes to Legendary+ Tier requires 4 copies of them. If you upgrade a Hero blindly, you will be very likely getting stuck at Legendary Tier (Max Lvl. is 140). After ascending a hero to Legendary+ Tier, you do not need any other copy of that Hero until the Ascended Tier.

Thus, at the beginning, you should start with 3-skill Heroes (Legendary Heroes). It’s very easy to upgrade them to max Level. So that’s the easiest and fastest way to reach a Resonant Crystal level 160. Meanwhile, you can just scalping and wait for the 4th copy of the Ascended Heroes you love. 

If not, you will lack a lot of fodder Heroes, slowing down your game progress by a lot.

Accidentally using Ascend Tier Heroes as Fodder

No I don’t mean intentionally foddering Raine (that’s a topic for another day), but rather those careless clicks that lead to Lucius accidentally disappearing into Belinda. In order to be absolutely safe, you can “LOCK” the heroes from being used as fodder by selecting the lock on their hero page.

This feature is also great for locking fodder heroes used in unions to prevent accidentally using them.

Spreading Fooder & Ascending Too Many Heroes

Every ascension tier has a level cap. When you do this:

You run the risk of not obtaining more copies of the hero and end having insufficient fodder for the heroes you can ascend, thus get-ting ascension capped. Instead, the player should have a setup that looks like this:

Focusing on 1 hero per faction, especially fodder tier heroes (or labyrinth heroes), lets you not only comfortably get past ascension caps but also have the flexibility to transition into whichever hero you have enough copies of by using the fodder heroes to ascend them.

Being Hurry

Remember the name of this game. It’s AFK Arena. The word AFK is put into the name because of a reason, you need to chill and just go AFK.

Going AFK gives you resources to upgrades your Heroes and helps you pass through different stages of the game. It also gives you enough time to learning more about your Heroes, the game mechanics and team building strategies.

Being hurry is unnecessary. You don’t need to ask for advice from other players when getting stuck at the early game. All you need to do is just to go AFK a bit more until your Heroes’ levels get to high enough.

Spending Diamonds Inefficiently

Most new players like spending Diamonds on low-tier Gears instead of saving for Hero Scrolls and Elite Soul Stones deals.

Never buy Gears using diamonds. Instead, buy them with Guild tokens. Newer players without access to Mythic gear should save guild coins for them and only spend when absolutely capped out.

Never do single pull using Diamonds

I see some streamers doing this and I’m sure there are also players who do but you should NEVER do that!

• 300-Diamond Summon = 1 Pull
• 2700-Diamond Summon = 10 Pulls

Only do 2700-Diamond summon as it is essentially a 300 diamonds discount (10% off) for no additional effort besides some patience which is what this game is all about.

Check out the article Most Efficient Ways to Spend Diamonds for more details regarding to this topic!

Not Buying Dust In The Store

Especially at the beginning of the game.

Always buy this especially if you are pre-level 240. Even if you buy it every-time, you will still be dust-capped but not buying it means you are going to be stuck for a lot longer.

You-will-need-a-ton-of-Dust-later.

Past crystal 240, at around 260-270 depending on how fast you progress, dust becomes less of an issue so it’s fine to stop buying them then.

Using Wrong Gears for Heroes

Using the correct Gears for your Heroes is very important, even at the early game when you only have low-tier gears.

Luckily, it’s also easier for new players to pick the right gears. Just remember to equip gears with high DEF (defense) points for your tanks, and high attack points for your damage dealers or Supports (back-line Heroes).

It sounds very simple, however the advantages it provides are very huge. Try this when you get stuck at a stage and see the result.

Upgrading Gears The Wrong Way

At the beginning, fully upgrading Legendary/Elite Gears is not hard at all. However, is it really efficient?

It takes tons of Gold and Enhancement Tokens to upgrade gears. Unfortunately, you do not use those low-tier Gears for long.

There will be times you find that you even don’t have enough Gold to upgrade your Heroes, just because of spending too much on upgrading weak gears at the beginning.

Only upgrade Factional Mysthic Gears.

Upgrading Factional Mythic Gears boost the power by 30%. So you should focus your resources on this.

Messing Up the Wishlist

There are 2 parts to this

1. Make sure you have a good wishlist with the best heroes of each faction. These are my personal recommendations:

Recommended Wishlist	Alternatives	Get one copy

Check out our wishlist priority page to see the full list of each faction.

2. Do not switch a hero out if you already have copies of him but less than 8 copies total unless you really have to. You need 8 copies of a hero to ascend.

Wishlist is a long-term investment and it could easily take you a year to get all the heroes on it as FZP. As such, what is there will dictate the heroes and compositions available to you for possibly your entire time playing this game. Make sure it is the heroes that you want and will help you the most. Switching heroes around will set you back so avoid doing so unless it’s a big mistake (i.e. not having Rowan on your list)

Investing Emblems on Bad Signature Items

Faction emblems used to bring Signature Items to +30 trickle in at an extremely slow rate of approximately 220 per event per month, perhaps slightly higher.

This means that you are easily looking at 2-3 months per signature item or almost a year just for a full team of +30. That’s not to mention there are no resets available so every emblem committed inefficiently this way is effectively wasted.

For starters, get this hero signature item to +20 first:

Then get these Hero signature items to +30:

Using left-over emblems to get these to +20:

After all of those are done, work on these +30:

While using left-over Emblems to get these to +20:

For a full signture item guide, check our Signature Item Tier List.

Using Fast Rewards At The Start Of The Day

While it can be tempting to hit this right as you get on and get it out of your mind, you will lose out on potentially quite a bit of reward since it scales to your stage progression. This might not seem like much for a day or two but really starts to add up when you start factoring in the long term, how far you can push and how some people are spending 50/80 diamonds for the subsequent clicks too!

That said if you are literally stalling for the Mythic trick and not making any progress, this doesn’t matter. It is also justifiable to click early on an alt that you are just clearing bare minimum dailies on in case you forget to come back to it later!

Forgetting to Change Stagazer Hero

The default Stargazer heroes change daily so in order to avoid some heartbreaks, make sure you don’t pull the wrong one by changing them at the top right.

It is worth noting that since there’s suspected to be a pity timer, pulling a copy of a bad hero is actually worse than pulling nothing at all since it resets your timer

Wasting Arena Tickets

Firstly while attacking the top player and winning gets me more points, this point doesn’t make enough of a difference for how risky the fight can be (high power difference). There’s also no guarantee you can hold your “higher rank” by the time of the reset. As such, it’s better to attack the easiest opponent instead for the victory reward and potentially a Pit Master’s Chest.

Secondly, while it is possible to sell arena tickets directly for gold, it is not worth it since victory rewards are generally better (so spend them). The saved up tickets also make for good PvP practice when you need to refine formations as an added bonus to hoarding tickets.

Lastly, always use free arena attempts daily for the victory rewards especially if you have fast battle unlocked!

Spending Mistakes

Not buying the advancement rewards is the single biggest spending mistake you can make for anyone not entirely F2P since it is more than double the value of the monthly deluxe card, costing only $24.99 for 90 Stargazers or 167 Tavern Summons equivalent!

For Dolphins (VIP13/14)

Joining an earlier server thinking you can get ahead spending a little only to struggle to catch up with F2P, not to mention there’s almost no benefit play-ing an earlier server

For Whales (VIP15+/ $7,000 spent)

1. Not buying the limited deals every single time early on means losing out of $99.99 Stargazer deals which are the cheapest reliable method of bolstering your Celestial/Hypogean lineups
2. Wasting too much money getting stars or Mythic gear for heroes is also an inefficient allocation of resources and puts you behind other whales that spent the same amount but has wisely invested into more Stargazes, emblems and twisted essence.

Just don’t do the mistakes mentioned above while playing AFK Arena and you will be golden! Happy AFK!