Power Leveling - How To (aka Speed Leveling, aka Instamaxing)

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I originally created this topic over a year ago, before I’d actually power-leveled any heroes. Now that I have plenty of experience doing so, I figured I should re-write it. I cut and pasted my original post into comment #5 below, for reference.

Aaaaanyway…

After searching the forums for a while, I didn’t find much in the way of guides/instructions on how best to do this. There are a few old videos floating around, but I always prefer a written set of instructions if I have the choice, and I suspect I’m not alone.

The first thing to do, in preparation for a power-leveling session, is store up food and feeder heroes. This means:

a) Bank food in a TC12, TC13, or TC20.

  • TC12 is the most efficient for food storage, but of course it produces nothing but 3-star heroes.

b) Bank feeder heroes in other TCs

  • The most common configuration is one TC2 and two TC11s.
  • Constantly having enough backpacks to keep a TC2 running is not easy! You have to farm constantly, and save up World Energy flasks to farm Province 1 during Atlantis Rises as well.

If you use nothing but the 1- & 2-star feeders that come from your TCs, you’ll need roughly 1260 feeders and 13M ham to go from 1/1 to 4/80 on the hero you’re maxing. (That 13M ham is the equivalent of about 90 days’ worth of TC20 storage, or about 170 days’ worth of TC12 storage.) If you focus on getting these storages up to where they need to be from scratch, it’ll take about two weeks.

If you want to read more about how I arrived at these conclusions, see my old post in reply #5 below.

That’s actually about it! Not too complicated!

But, I love to complicate things, and there’s some very valuable complications that can be implemented if you continue reading.

Since ham is the biggest long-term resource bottleneck for many (most?) advanced players, here are a few ways to reduce the amount of ham that’s needed:

  1. Save up trainer heroes.
  • I hold onto 2-star and higher trainers. The 1-star trainers are too common, and my roster would fill up too quickly if I tried saving them too. (Same goes for 3/4/5-star dupes.)
  • This should probably go without saying, but you’ll use these saved trainer heroes for finishing off the last few levels to save ham.

  1. Try to save your same-color 2-star feeders until the end of each tier. This probably doesn’t help MUCH, but it’s not nothing either. I haven’t done the math.

  2. This last tip is only for folks who have saved up an inordinately large number of feeders in their TCs, and therefore don’t mind “wasting” some of them. But, it’s also the biggest ham saver in this list.

To illustrate the point in its’ most extreme form: Imagine if TC2 ONLY pumped out 2-star feeders. This would reduce the amount of ham required to max a 5-star hero from 13M to under 9M, or roughly a 30% reduction!

Well, it’s possible to simulate that by doing something else with the 1-star feeders.

Again, to illustrate the point in its’ most extreme form: If you were to use ONLY 2-star feeders to max a 5-star hero, it would require ~870 of those 2-star feeders. Since TCs produce a roughly equal amount of 1-star and 2-star feeders, that would mean you’d have to find a way to get rid of ~870 1-star feeders.

The cheapest way to do that would be to feed them to each other. If you feed all your 1s to other 1s (and only to those that are at 1/1 themselves), it would cost just under 1M ham. So now you’re talking about ~10M total to max your 5. Still a 23% reduction! Not bad!

If you prefer to feed those 1s to other heroes that you may actually use some day (I’ll refer to them as “backups” below), you can still use this method to save ham, or to work on other projects while also maxing your 5, without it costing more ham than giving all the feeders to the 5*.

The formulae are:

If X * A / B > Y, then you should give the 1-star feeder to the backup
If X * A / B = Y, then it’s a wash in terms of ham efficiency
If X * A / B < Y, then you should give the 1-star feeder to the 5 you’re maxing

where:

X = the amount of ham it costs per feeder, to feed your 5-star at its’ current level (this would be 5000 at level 1, and 12800 at level 79)
A = the amount of hero XP that would come from the 1-star feeder in question (150 if an off-color feeder, 180 if same-color)
B = the amount of hero XP that would come from the 2-star feeder that you’ll actually be feeding to the 5-star hero you’re working on maxing (390 if off-color, 468 if same color; you should really only consider off-color feeders at low levels, and save the same-color 2s for higher levels)
Y = the amount of ham it costs per feeder, to feed your backup hero.

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Extra low cost

The reference sheet I use:

Example
If RT11 has 3000 finished heroes and RT20 has 150 unfinished heroes ( waiting to train or 300 days ) then you have enough heroes and food for 2x 5* 4.80.

Pace

I have done this at least 15 times on my various accounts. I keep promising to remember to pace myself.

Set a timer and stretch every 15 minutes.
Drink plenty of fluids.
Buy a stylus.

When I forget, my hands are usually sore for several days.

Order

I tried this a few times. You can also try and save all your same color 2* heroes:

([Wiki, Play style] Xero786 ( Zero )'s leveling one hero at a time technique from his video - #2 by Gryphonknight)

But.

I have 50 open roster slots. It takes 1,259 from Extra low cost training to go from 5* 1.1 to 5* 4.80 . So I am doing this at least 25 times.

Since you are doing so many times, the food savings gets lost.

Saving trainers heroes is nice, but those are more slots I lose. If I save ten trainers, that leaves me with 40 open slots which means 30 times collecting from camps instead of 25 times. Which means clicking on Layla 20% more and Sigrunn 20% more and Ragnhild 20% more.

My new methods:

Sort by power
Use top 10 highest power heroes to level
repeat until empty
get more heroes

Because you sort by power, the new heroes always go to the bottom.

Because you are using all the heroes, you do not need to waste time scrolling to the bottom, paying attention to colors, etc.

Trainers and tokens

Edit:
The problem with saving tokens for future Hero XP is claiming them takes forever since you must do a server call each time. Never again.

I saved 151 silver Daily summons tokens for leveling heroes from Sand Empire/ Ranvir ( no Ranvir :slightly_frowning_face: 2x Hisan :heart_eyes: ) and it took forever. Though Hisan did enjoy the Carver and Brienne I summoned.

Now I use silver Daily summons tokens and Trainer heroes when I get them.

And save heroes in Extra low cost training instead.

Food Budget

Food required

Hoarding food for Extra fast

Yearly food needed to use Extra fast training ( pre Atlantis Rising so Advanced Farm might be a good idea )

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There’s no chance for a bonus draw on the daily portal and one can’t pull Hisan by silver tokens. Did I get sth wrong?

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Good question!

I have edited the original for clarity

Click for edit

FIN

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Here’s what my original post at the top used to say:

Disclaimer I: I haven’t actually done it myself yet! As such, I plan to edit this post with any suggestions/corrections y’all post in response.

Disclaimer II: I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone use the term “instamaxing.”

I was motivated to write this guide because I’m finally at the point in my roster building progression where I don’t have heroes that I want to level in all five colors, so I’m no longer going to be exclusively same-color feeding. As such, I might as well start saving up to power-level new heroes when I get them, and after searching the forums for a while, I didn’t find much in the way of guides/instructions on how best to do it. There are a few old videos floating around, but I always prefer a written set of instructions if I have the choice, and I suspect I’m not alone. (On top of that, writing it down will help crystallize the process in my mind.)

So!

  1. The first thing to do, in preparation for a power-leveling session, is store up food and feeder heroes. This means:

a) Banking food in a TC12, TC13, or TC20.
(Note: TC12 is the most efficient for food storage, but of course it produces nothing but 3 star heroes. I’m personally using TC20, because I’m still waiting to pull a Marj and a Viv, but will switch to TC12 one day, whenever I finally get those two.)

b) Banking feeder heroes in one TC2 and two TC11s. (Note: Constantly having enough backpacks to keep a TC2 running is not easy! You have to farm constantly. Make use of level 1-2N during Atlantis Rises, in particular! That’s what all my World Energy flasks go towards.)

  1. Calculate how many feeders you’ll need, and how much food you’ll need.
  • 3-star heroes require 49,916 XP to max
  • 4-star heroes require 167,594 XP to max
  • 5-star heroes require 353,564 XP to max

For the rest of this guide, I’m going to focus on 5-star heroes, since that’s what people who do this are usually doing it with.

a) Calculating feeders

  • Since it takes a while to build up to the point of having enough food and feeders stored up to max a new 5, you’ll inevitably accumulate some trainer heroes along the way, along with a few 1 and 2 star feeders (and even a couple of 3-star feeders) via daily summons and map farming. There’s no harm in feeding away the 1s and 2s to make room in your roster when needed, but definitely hang on to the trainers and 3s for when you’re finishing off the final levels, since it’ll save you a bunch of food.
  • Keep an eye on how much XP you have saved up in those trainers and 3s. You’ll know you’re ready to complete a power leveling session when you can add that to the hero XP you have saved up in your TCs and come up with 353,564 (or more, obviously).
  • The average hero XP generated by the heroes coming from your TCs is 280.8 per hero, assuming a 50/50 distribution of 1s and 2s, and an even distribution of colors. Ignoring trainer heroes and 3s for a moment, that means you’d need 1260 of these feeders to max a 5 from scratch. Using one TC2 and two TC11s (which combine to produce 72 feeders per day), it would take 17.5 days to produce those 1260 feeders. Once you add trainer heroes and 3s back into the mix, that means it takes roughly two weeks to accumulate enough hero XP to max a 5. If you have bad luck (meaning that your TCs produce more 1s than 2s, and/or less than 20% in the same color as the hero you’re going to max), then 2.5 weeks is probably the worst case scenario.

b) Calculating food

  • For the purpose of these calculations, I’m going to assume something stupid: That these TC feeder heroes get fed to the hero being leveled indiscriminately. I’m doing that for two reasons:
    i. It makes the math WAY simpler/faster
    ii. It builds in a cushion, so that if you DO have bad luck with the distribution of 1s/2s and/or colors, you’ll still be able to max your 5. (And if you don’t have bad luck, you’ll just end up with some surplus feeders in your TCs.)
  • That being said, the obvious thing to do is to feed in the following order, to save food:
    i. Off-color 1s
    ii. Same color 1s
    iii. Off-color 2s
    iv. Same color 2s
    v. Off-color 3s
    vi. Same color 3s
    vii. Follow the same pattern for trainer heroes
  • Anyway, using the stupid assumption mentioned above, and also assuming you only use 1 and 2 star feeders for the entire leveling process, you’ll need the following amounts of food (approximately) for each step in the process:
    i. From 1/1 to 1/50: 750,000
    ii. Ascension to tier 2: 273,000
    iii. From 2/1 to 2/60: 1,464,980
    iv. Ascension to tier 3: 442,000
    v. From 3/1 to 3/70: 3,503,929
    vi. Ascension to tier 4: 708,000
    vii. From 4/1 to 4/80: 6,247,634
  • That comes to a total of 13,380,269 food. That’s a lot of food! It requires roughly 90 days worth of TC20 storage time. However, that gets cut down DRASTICALLY by using trainer heroes and 3s for the very top levels. Using my own situation as an example, in the last two weeks of June, I collected 41 1-star trainer heroes and 17 2-star trainer heroes from Wanted chests and titan loot. That’s worth almost 70,000 hero XP, which is enough to take care of levels 66 and up (including both tier 3 and tier 4), which would cost almost 3,000,000 in food if done with 1 and 2 star feeders instead of trainer heroes. That means you’re using 58 trainers instead of ~250 feeders for those high levels, which would cost closer to 700,000 food, reducing total food cost by 2,300,000.
  • If you take that a step further, by buying trainers in the shop, and/or by other methods, I believe it’s possible to max a 5 with as little as 9,000,000 food, which works out to roughly 60 days’ worth of TC20. Still a lot! But a pretty big reduction from 90 days, too.
  • How long does it take to store up that much food? I have no idea! That’s one of the things I’ll be trying to figure out over the next few weeks, while I prepare for my first power leveling session.

Edit: Dangit! I just realized the chest/titan data I mentioned above is from both of my accounts, not just my main. I guess cut the numbers above roughly in half. [sadface]

  1. Well, that’s pretty much it, really. Now, I haven’t really thought much yet about how to incorporate TC1 or TC19 into this whole thing. If you somehow have over 100 days’ worth of food stored up in your TC20 already, it would seem like a no-brainer to me to use TC19 to speed things up instead of waiting two full weeks to store enough feeders in TC11.

Any thoughts/comments/feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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It’s been this way for a while but if any new players are referring to these guides for power leveling- Alchemy lab should replace Training Camps as the default “Ham Bank” for power leveling. No more having to dump recruits back into another camp which will save you lots of time! (I have instamaxed in 15 minutes) +added bonus of generating goodies from Alkashards.

In particular- Alchemy Lab level 17 (Epic Crafting Material) is my go-to “Ham Bank” at 627,000 Ham and 3 days per training.

DD’s 5* Instamaxing Rules of Thumb:
To max 1x 5* 0-0 > 4-80 : 13,500,000 Ham + 1,350 TC2/11 Feeders
To max 1x 5* 0-0 > 4-80+20: 20,000,000 Ham + 2,200,000 Iron + 1,350 TC2/11 Feeders + 1,500 Emblems

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