Well, when a mommy hero and a daddy hero love each other very much…

Tacticus has a lot of heroes.  There are 16 factions with 79 heroes between them, counting Machines of War, and every month sees at least one new hero introduced.

That’s a lot!  But, just like their plastic counterparts, these heroes don’t do anyone any good while they’re still on the digital sprue.  You gotta get your grubby little hands on them.  And this article is going to tell you how to do that.

There are, these days, five main ways to add heroes to your roster.  Snowprint is always adding more, and sometimes they do special one-off events, but for today we’ll focus on the ordinary, recurring ways to populate your toy shelf with little mans, womans, and thems.  Two of the ways I’ve discussed previously – requisition scrolls and shard farming – but we’ll set those aside for now because they’re boring.

HREs – Hero Release Events

The first and most common way to acquire new characters is via a hero release event, or HRE.  Every single month has one of these – a two-week-long event, usually called The Motive Force or For the Blood God or something similar.  These events are thematically linked to the specific hero being unlocked, but the bones of them is the same.  They always run in the second and third weeks of a five-week season (i.e. a battle pass season).

First, throughout the event, you will earn points for playing the game.  They’re never just called Points – they’re Blood Points, or Dark Secret Points, or what have you.  Almost every single game mode rewards points on a win – campaign missions, arena battles, guild raids, onslaught, etc.  You get more points if the mission was more difficult, or if you spent more energy (i.e. completed an Elite campaign node rather than a normal or Mirror node). 

As you accumulate points, they translate into currency.  This is a generic name, but typically these have names like Claimed Skulls, Interrogation Notes, and so on.  You get currency upon reaching certain point thresholds – 100 points, 250, 500, etc.  Early on you hit these milestones quickly, but it slows down over time; by the time you have 12000 points, you’re only hitting a new milestone every 2000 or so.  The amount of currency you earn for hitting each milestone increases to compensate.  You also get a shipment of currency every day, based on your total points collected.  The game maintains a leaderboard and you’ll get a shipment based on your leaderboard position.

Which is good, because you’re spending that currency on chests, the third element of the HRE.  If this seems needlessly complicated to you (why don’t points just directly translate into chests?) then you’re not alone, but let’s roll with it.  Exalted Chests, Lion Chests, they all work the same: you get them for hitting certain currency thresholds, which again, slow down the deeper you go.

Each chest contains some gold, some blackstone, a random upgrade (of increasing rarity the deeper you go) and a chance at a bonus prize (xp books, salvage, coins, or the booby prize of raid tickets).  And, of course, Event Shards (or Blood Shards, Inner Circle Shards, etc.).

And that’s where the character comes from.  Event shards act just like normal shards: accumulate enough of them and you get the character.  Common characters require 40 shards, uncommon characters require 80, rare characters require 130 and epic characters require 250.  Once you get all the shards, you instantly unlock the character – and as you continue to accumulate shards, the character is promoted and ascended accordingly.

How Do I Get All This Stuff?!

That’s the core structure, but there are a couple of wrinkles.  First, each HRE contains a quest chain: 20 quests, each of which rewards 100 currency, for 2000 total bonus currency.  These quests always follow the following structure, updating the allegiances based on what character is being unlocked:

1. Win 2 Lightning Victories and Defeat 5 enemies with Melee attacks
2. Raid 5 Campaign battles and Defeat 10 enemies with [Allegiance] units
3. Win 20 Campaign battles and Use abilities 30 times with characters
4. Play 8 Arena battles and Defeat 50 units with Ranged attacks
5. Deal 10,000 Damage using Abilities and Win 100 Campaign battles
6. Heal/Repair 2500 Health and Win 10 battles without Summoning any units
7. Use abilities 20 times with [Allegiance] units and play 2 Salvage Runs
8. Play 2 Guild Raids and Deal 20,000 damage to enemies in battle
9. Deal 7500 Psychic damage and Defeat 75 enemies with Ranged attacks
10. Win 15 battles using an all-[Allegiance] lineup and play 8 Arena battles
11. Win 25 Lightning Victories and Defeat 100 units of the Necrons faction (oddly, this one seems to always be Necrons, at least recently)
12. Heal/Repair 5000 Health and play 1 Onslaught
13. Defeat 75 enemies and Use abilities 50 times with [Allegiance] units
14. Win 25 battles with an all-[Allegiance] lineup and Deal 30,000 damage to enemies in battle
15. Use abilities 150 times with [Allegiance] units and Play 8 Arena battles [Note: they have announced that they’re changing this to just “use abilities 150 times”]
16. Defeat 100 enemies with [Allegiance] units and Raid 25 campaign battles
17. Deal 60,000 Damage to enemies and Defeat 75 enemies
18. Deal 50,000 damage using Abilities and Defeat 250 enemies with Ranged attacks
19. Defeat 100 enemies with Melee attacks and Win 75 Campaign battles
20. Use abilities 10 times with [Unlocked Character] and Win 250 campaign battles

Once you complete all 20 missions, you get a bonus mission: Deal 15,000 damage with [Unlocked Character] and Win 250 campaign battles.  This one doesn’t reward currency, but does give you a requisition scroll.

Taking a look at these missions, they are straightforward enough, though at Mission 15 and beyond they get a bit grindy – using 150 abilities is a lot of abilities, and by the end you really have to complete a lot of campaign missions.  Fortunately, all of the Win X Campaign Battles missions can be done by raiding, which saves you from carpal tunnel.

Tips and Tricks

As a rule of thumb, you really want to complete all 20 of the initial missions, at least.  It’s very doable, especially if you’re watching an ad for energy every day.  If you spend at least 50 blackstone each day on energy refills, you should be able to clear all 21 missions with some time to spare, especially as you get a bunch of energy from the Tournament Arena that runs concurrently with the HRE.  In general, if you are aiming to complete all 21 missions, you should aim to complete the first 19 missions in the first week of the event, leaving the two big 250-campaign-battle missions for week 2.  

The key is to not let yourself get blocked: look ahead to missions that require you to do Guild Raids, Onslaughts, Salvage Runs or Arena battles, and make sure you have enough tokens of the appropriate type saved up.  In addition, you may get jammed up if the first week of the HRE coincides with the week guild raids reset – if that happens, make sure to clear the first seven missions before the Guild Raid reset comes.  (That shouldn’t be difficult, since HREs always start three days before the reset, and the first few missions are quick as long as you have arena tickets saved).

In addition to the missions, at the halfway mark of the HRE and at the end, you’ll be given a chest that contains some shards, some currency, and some other trinkets.  This is also based on your leaderboard position and can put you over the top if you’re close to a new chest or a new rank!

Going into an HRE, it’s important to set your expectations appropriately.  As long as you spend all of your energy every day, watch an ad for more energy every day, play arena, tournament arena, and guild raids, and complete the first 20 missions on the chain, you will almost certainly unlock any rare or uncommon character.  If you spend 50 blackstone per day on an energy refresh, you will almost certainly unlock any rare or uncommon character and end up with them promoted to 1 red star.  The nature of HREs is such that, regardless of the character’s rarity, you will always end up in the same place for a given number of shards (i.e. your uncommon character will end up promoted to rare/epic and have the same number of stars as a character that started at rare).  If you also buy the 110 blackstone energy refresh, you will probably unlock an epic character or end up with your character at epic rarity with one red star, though this is a little dicier.

What can you do to tip the scales?  For people who really want the character, one popular technique involves “banking” energy.  Once you’re at the energy cap for your power level, you just… don’t spend any for a few days, and watch an ad/spend blackstone to get even more energy every day, so you go into day 1 with several hundred banked.  This is super inefficient, since it involves you losing out of hundreds of energy (it stops regenerating over time when you hit your cap), but if you really, really want to get a character at epic without spending real money, this is one way to do it.

Otherwise, just make sure you’re eking out points any way you can.  This means spending all of your Guild Raid, Arena, Tournament Arena, Salvage Run, and Onslaught tokens each and every day, and winning as many Arena games as possible.  Especially against harder opponents.

LREs – Legendary Release Events

When a new legendary hero comes along, things are a little trickier.  Legendaries are released via a type of event called an LRE, which bears some superficial resemblance to an HRE but really couldn’t be more different.  LREs always run in the fifth (and last) week of a season.

The first and biggest difference is that an LRE is an entirely new play mode.  HREs just give you points for things you were doing anyways.  LREs actually open up new missions.  Three tracks of them, to be precise.  The details vary between LREs, but typically one track has Xenos enemies, one track has Imperial enemies, and one has Chaos enemies.  Each mission functions basically like Onslaught: wave after wave of baddies spawn, to a preset limit, and you have five characters to take them all down with.  You start with 6 tokens for LRE missions, get a new one every 3 hours (plus one per day from watching an ad) and can store up to 12, so you’ll have dozens of attempts over the course of a weeklong event.

Like Onslaught, each LRE track has a number of missions (formerly 12, but from Kharn on, 14).  You don’t unlock one mission until you’ve beaten all the enemies in the one before it.  Also like Onslaught, the missions scale up in difficulty, but very quickly: while you’re still seeing Bronze enemies in Onslaught Sector 20 (more than a hundred Onslaught missions into a particular track), LRE enemies scale to silver by mission 7 or so and just get harder from there. 

Sounds Easy So Far

The real spice to LREs, though, is the restrictions.  Each track has some built-in restrictions: typically, Imperial won’t fight Imperial, Chaos won’t fight Chaos, and a Xenos race won’t fight that same race – though sometimes they mix things up a bit, like letting the followers of the Chaos Gods fight each other, or broadening the Xenos prohibition.  The key to victory, though, are the optional restrictions.  Each track has 5, and they’re totally different from event to event, and even within an event, from track to track.

Let’s take as an example the Ragnar LRE, which is just finishing up as I write this column.  The Alpha track has you facing Orks, so you can use anyone but Orks.  There are five optional restrictions: all Resilient characters, all characters with a ranged attack, all characters without a ranged attack, all characters that deal Bolter damage, and all characters that deal a maximum of 3 hits.  Clearing a mission the first time is worth points (2 points per enemy killed and a bonus 24 points for a full clear), but clearing it with restrictions is worth more, even on subsequent runs.  For example, if I were to bring only Resilient non-Ranged characters (like Rotbone and his Death Guard friends), I would earn an extra 175 points per mission cleared. 

You can only earn these points once per mission, so you can’t just grind the low missions endlessly – LREs encourage you to push yourself. You really need a deep roster to go far, as once you get to level 7 and beyond, non-Gold characters will have a hard time keeping up.  But you can’t just rely on a single diamond character to carry you to victory, since that character won’t meet every restriction (and might not even be allowed to participate in some tracks).

The actual mechanics of unlocking a character are basically the same as in an HRE: you earn Points, which translate into Currency, which lets you unlock Chests, which contain Event Shards.  It’s just the manner in which you earn points that’s totally different.

Also like HREs, LREs come with a quest chain that rewards Currency, though it’s only 10 missions instead of 20.  The quests vary between events, but typically look like this:

1. Play one LRE Battle, Deal 1000 damage
2. Defeat 30 [Alpha track faction] enemies
3. Defeat 75 [Beta track faction] enemies
4. Defeat 100 [Gamma track faction] enemies
5. Use abilities 15 times with Xenos units, Deal 10k damage with Abilities
6. Use abilities 20 times with Imperial units, Deal 15k damage with Abilities
7. Use abilities 25 times with Chaos units, Deal 20k damage with Abilities (note that these three aren’t always in the same order)
8. Play 3 Philosophy of War Battles, Deal 25k [Type] damage
9. Play 3 Philosophy of War Battles, Deal 25k [Type] damage
10. Play 3 Philosophy of War Battles, Deal 25k [Type] damage

The damage types vary, but are always damage types that are the subject of at least one restriction in the event – for instance, Ragnar’s mission chain had Bolter, Physical, and Piercing damage.

Ok, Maybe Not So Easy

Let’s be clear about something so your expectations are set appropriately: LREs are endgame content.  I was playing for about seven months before I unlocked my first LRE character (Ragnar), and it was a close-run thing, and that was after I built specifically towards unlocking Ragnar by targeting the characters that were good in his LRE for upgrades.  So don’t feel discouraged if you can’t do it at first; every shard you earn translates into a shard for the character later, so even if you don’t get them you’ll have a head start on unlocking them.

There’s another major difference between LREs and HREs: while the latter are one-and-done, each LRE comes around three times, separated by several months.  While Ragnar’s third and final event just ended, Magos Dominus Vitruvius’s third event is coming up (probably in September), and Kharn hasn’t even had his second yet.  I started playing Tacticus after Ragnar’s first event had ended, and I was able to get him on his third, so it’s very doable.  Subsequent LREs “remember” your progress, so you can’t re-earn the same points, but you get a head start from the work you’ve already done.  And because the quest chain repeats each time, you will get an extra 250 Currency every time, which actually significantly reduces the effort required.  To unlock a character on their first LRE (without spending cash for bundles that boost your output) requires you to score 12,500 total points across all three tracks.  If you cleared the mission chain the first time, the second time takes only 12,000 points.  And if you cleared it the first two times, the third time it’ll only take 11,500 points.  Those differences may not seem like much, but the nature of LREs is that you will often hit a wall and be unable to progress further; those last few points are the hardest to eke out.

Tacticusplanner.app is a really good resource for LREs, since it will help you build teams and recognize which characters are worth the most points so you can target them to level up.  How to succeed at LREs is an incredibly deep topic that’s worth its own article (someday), but broadly:

• Healers are incredibly important – Isabella and Rotbone are the two most important characters you can have, but Aleph-Null is hugely helpful as well.
• Durable tanks for your healers to heal are important – Maladus, Angrax, Burchard, Bellator, Re’vas (to pair with Aleph-Null).
• Summoners are great, especially as many of them have 1 hit in the melee or ranged attack and “Max 1 hit” is a very common track restriction – Abraxas, Sho’syl, Archimatos, Tan Gi’da.
• Failing all that, characters that can kill multiple enemies at once are always good – Maladus, Vindicta, Angrax.

But you really need to prep for the specific LRE that you’re looking to clear.  There’s no one-size-fits all solution. 

Incursions

Incursions are the newest type of event, used to unlock a Machine of War.  They’re still being tweaked as I write this, so it’s possible this guide will be out of date by the time it’s published.  But the basic structure should be the same.

Incursions show up in the fourth week of a season and last for five days.  At the start of an incursion, you pick a single Machine of War that you’re going for that season, and that’s your target.  Once you’re in the event, you are faced with “tiers” of missions: two Common tiers, two Uncommon tiers, three Rare tiers, three Epic tiers, and four Legendary tiers.  Entering a tier takes one token; you start with two, can hold up to three, and earn one every 15 hours.  Yes, you will only get 9 tokens in a given incursion, but there are more than 9 tiers, so you can’t complete an Incursion all in one go.  Like LREs, Incursions remember your progress – so if you pick the same machine multiple months in a row, you will get to cap it out, assuming your roster is strong enough (which is a big assumption – Legendary Incursion tiers are really hard).

Do The Robot

The actual gameplay of an Incursion resembles a campaign more than anything else.  Once you’ve spent your token, you’re deposited at the beginning of a track of 15 missions.  You don’t have to do them all in one sitting, but you can’t leave and come back – once you’re in a tier, you either finish all 15 missions, lose, or give up before you can pick another tier.  For each Incursion, you’re locked to one “allegiance” (Imperial, Chaos, or Xenos) based on the Machine you picked: you can only bring Xenos characters to the Malleus Incursion, only Imperial characters to the Forgefiend Incursion, and only Chaos characters to the Biovore incursion.  Beyond that, though, there are no restrictions, like in an LRE.

The missions themselves are pretty straightforward campaign-style missions with preset enemy spawns, always of the same faction as the Machine you’re targeting (so Astra Militarum for the Malleus, Tyranids for the Biovore and Black Legion for the Forgefiend).  They get harder as you go along, but not that much harder.  There are two twists that up the challenge, though.

First: in a given tier, characters are capped at that tier’s rarity.  That means that you can’t just waltz through the Common tiers with your full Diamond team – they’ll be squashed down to Iron 1.  The way the missions are set out, you should have no trouble with them with a rank-capped team, but at least you’ll have to think a little.

Second, within a given tier, damage is persistent.  If a character takes damage on Mission 1, and you choose to use them again on Mission 2, that damage will still be there.  Abilities will reset, of course, and you can heal that damage (which means it’s possible that the character will go into Mission 3 even healthier than they were for Mission 2), but it does mean that your characters will eventually wear down if they’re taking chip damage each mission.  Worse, if a character dies, you can’t use them for the rest of that Tier.  You don’t have to reuse characters between missions, so if someone survives at a sliver of health you probably want to bench them for the rest of the run.  Even if you lose your whole team, you can try again, but if you lose all of your eligible characters then your run at that Tier is over.  At least when you spend a new token to start a new run, everyone is back to full health.

What does this mean?  Well, it obviously makes healers a lot stronger, but it also means summoners are great in this mode.  The AI typically prefers going after summons, so a steady supply of summons can tank damage meant for your team, and when you re-summon the characters next mission they’ll be back to full health.

*Happy Machine Noises*

The rewards for Incursion are twofold: first, each mission has 1/2/3 medal rewards, just like a campaign mission.  Typically these are upgrades relevant to the Machine you’re unlocking, but they include Badges (Ability and Forge), Components, Munitions, and Shards for the Machine as well.  Every few missions, you’ll also get a crate, which contains Shards, Components, and other useful stuff.

The way the Incursion loot is distributed, completing the two Common tiers will suffice to unlock a Machine, and enough resources to level one ability to level 8.  Once you’ve cleared an Incursion tier, you can replay it, but you won’t get all of the same rewards again (even if you go back to the same Incursion in a later season).  If you missed any medals the first time, you can pick up those rewards, and the between-mission crates are always available, even on a replay. 

Incursions are… in some ways a bit frustrating, because if you lose a single character in a mission, it doesn’t doom your run, but it does mean you are leaving some rewards behind.  But replaying to get those rewards is pretty bad value.  It’s also a bit odd to have a fifteen hour cooldown on tokens.  Maybe just make the event shorter and the cooldown shorter too?  But I suppose it’s nice that the game isn’t forcing you to stay glued to it all the time.  I like my Machines of War, but they’re not really game-changers in most cases, so the thing I like most about Incursions is getting more upgrades; Machines and characters use the same upgrades to level up, and I’m much more excited about using all this Blasphemous Armor Trim to push Archimatos to Gold than I am about capping out my Forgefiend.  But to each their own.

The Birds and the Bots

Hopefully this is helpful for people studying the ever-expanding Tacticus roster and dreaming of stackin’ skills with the Betrayer.  If you liked this article, hit me up on the Goonhammer discord.  I’m in a great guild and we’re on the lookout for active players.  You can also enter my referral code – CUE-13-REV.  You can only do this once, but it’ll give you and me both some free stuff in game, plus this means that if we say the same thing at the same time and I say “jinx,” you won’t owe me a Coke.  It’s a permanent get-out-of-giving-Togepi a Coke pass.  What’s not to like?