AFK Arena guide - Tips and tricks for beginners

AFK Arena may be a less intense form of a gacha game, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally straightforward. As with other games in this genre, there’s a bevy of systems, modes, currencies, etc. that you’ll want to be familiar with as soon as you start playing, regardless of whether you’ll be engaging with them immediately or not. This is especially true if you don’t plan on spending any money on it.

To help you hit the ground running in AFK Arena, check out these handy tips. All of them are sure to help you get a head start on understanding this fascinating gacha/idle hybrid.

When in doubt, go AFK

True to its name, AFK Arena lets you accumulate rewards even while you aren’t playing the game. These rewards aren’t just slow drips of worthless currency, either. Experience in particular is one of the most important resources in the game, and it’s very possible that the key to your way forward is hoarding some before dumping it into a hero to level them up.

Going idle has its limits in the sense that you can’t just open it once and have it grind for weeks or months without you opening the app again. To maximize your idle rewards, you have to check in once every 12 hours, which—compared to a lot of other idle games with check-in limits—is pretty reasonable.

Focus on five

In AFK Arena, you need to put together teams of five heroes to fight other teams of five. Although there is a lot of variety in the characters you can choose from (and reasons to switch out certain heroes for others at certain times), the key to progressing easily and well in this game is through pouring your resources into only five heroes and ignoring all the others.

Why? For starters, resources are extremely limited, so focusing all your leveling into five characters—particularly if you’re playing for free—will let you maximize your power growth. The more important reason for this though is that AFK Arena eventually grants all players access to something called a Resonating Crystal, which lets you auto-level weaker heroes up to the strength of your fifth-weakest unit. So, if you have five units leveled using all your available resources, the Resonating Crystal can bring your lower level units up even higher without you having to spread your currencies too thinly across your hero pool.

Buy Hero’s Essence daily

There’s only one resource in AFK Arena that can cause major barriers to progress if you don’t actively buy it using other currencies, and that is Hero’s Essence. Hero’s Essence is something you have to use to level a hero past every tenth level or so, and gaining a lot of it quickly is nearly impossible if you buy it.

Luckily, AFK Arena's main store offers up 100 Hero's Essence every day. It may cost quite a bit of gold to purchase, but it's worth it if you have the spare coin. Note: Do not spend diamonds on Hero's Essence. More on that below.

How to spend diamonds

Heroes are pretty much the hardest thing to come by in AFK Arena, so save your precious diamonds for summons. There may be some slick offers for resources or gear that require just a few diamonds, but avoid these whenever you can. Unless you're rolling in diamonds from putting money into the game, diamonds should be hoarded for summons, specifically summons of ten heroes at a time.

The only possible exception to this rule early on is the Rickety Wagon. This structure allows you to reset heroes to their default state and give you all the resources you spent on them back. This can be useful if you pull a really high tier hero after a summon and want to change who your main five heroes are. Resetting costs 10 diamonds per hero, so it's not super expensive, but still: Use it sparingly if possible.

Get free stuff!

Lastly, the easiest way to get started off right in AFK Arena is to make sure you're taking advantage of all possible free resources out there. As of this writing, there are two very public codes that have proven to give out free resources. They are as follows:

• afklaunch - this code grants 10 summon scrolls, 100k gold, and 5 hour glasses (valid through May 10)
• bunnyfufuu - this code gives you 1,000 diamonds, 120 rare hero soulstones, and 100k gold

To redeem these codes, all you have to do is tap your character portrait in the game, tap the settings tab, and then then hit the redemption code button. Enter these codes into the text box and you can get your free stuff!

As a bonus for 148apps.com, we also have some exclusive one-time use codes to give away to our readers. For a chance to win one of these sweet, sweet codes, follow Reviews Editor Campbell Bird on Twitter and RT his post on this story.