Lordrush Hero Gear Optimizer: Best Upgrade Path

Hero gear is a set of equipment pieces (helm, armor, gloves, boots, and weapon) that each of your individual heroes can equip. The stats from hero gear only apply when that specific hero is leading an expedition march (or in your Arena team). This is the key difference from governor gear, which applies globally to all your expedition marches simultaneously. Hero gear is portable though: you can reequip it on a different hero without losing any upgrades or mastery levels. That makes it a long-term investment that carries across your hero roster as your lineup evolves.

Getting to red gear is a significant milestone. You first need mythic (orange) gear at level 100 with forge mastery level 10, then you consume two additional mythic gear pieces to convert one piece to red (called gear Ascension). After that, you upgrade through levels 100–119 with increasing gear EXP costs and must use 10 mithril to clear your first imbuement milestone.

The milestones provide massive bonuses, but if you look at the cumulative resources to get there while going through increasingly diminishing returns, most players are actually better served in terms of their weighted stat gain per resources invested if they delay getting red gear. This seemingly contradicts the “conventional wisdom” of other hero gear guides, but the math is clear, and the Hero Gear Optimizer proves it.

This does not mean it is “not worth” getting to red gear as a F2P player, but you shouldn’t prioritize it in the same way. Gear being Ascended/red only increases the cap for further investment, but it does not confer any immediate benefit. Given the typical timelines for a F2P player, you should more likely expect to start getting into red gear as you approach the one-year mark of playing. By this point, you will have likely exhausted the other better-return investments with resources you gained from active playing.

No, and this surprises a lot of new Lordrush players. When you join someone else's rally, the rally leader's stats drive the combat calculations, not yours. Your hero gear on joiner heroes doesn't contribute to the rally's damage output. What does matter as a joiner is your troop count, your troop tier, and certain hero skills (some apply to joiners). This is one reason investing heavily in hero gear early is lower priority for F2P players who primarily join rather than lead rallies.

Squad lethality and squad health are universal stats that get added on top of every troop type's individual attack and defense. You can find these from e.g. certain research projects. Your effective Lancer lethality, for example, equals your base Lancer lethality plus squad lethality from all sources. Hero gear stat increases are always troop-specific and will say things like “archer lethality” in the description. When considering hero gear investments, it is important to remember that this is only one source of your final troop stats in battle.

Mithril is the top pick for long-term value once your Empire has unlocked it. As you start approaching red gear territory where mithril becomes the critical bottleneck, you will be thankful you started earlier. Even if red gear is months away, mithril is rare enough that stockpiling early pays off. Unlike Forgehammers and other rare rewards, the event currency rate per mithril never improves as Empires age. Therefore there is no reason to delay getting it. Also, you will eventually need multiple copies of mythic gear, not for outfitting more heroes, but because gear Ascension and high level Mastery improvement requires consuming excess pieces of gear. So again, try to stockpile it when you see good opportunities as you will need it eventually.

Hero Gear XP is generally good to pick up from shops if you can get some cheaply, but be mindful of the opportunity cost of other rewards you could be getting. While Hero Gear XP is a bottleneck in the early game, as you eventually get into red gear, you may start to become bottlenecked by Mastery and Imbuement materials over Hero Gear XP.

Yes, Hero Gear EXP can be fully recovered using the daily free reforge system once your Empire reaches the appropriate age. You get 100% of the XP back and can reallocate it to a different piece at no cost. Critically, reforging XP does not touch your forge mastery level, and you can experiment with gear XP allocation without fear of permanent loss. The free daily reforge per piece is one of the more underused features for players who want to adapt their setup as their account evolves. The Hero Gear Optimizer can tell you when it is the right time to use it to improve your stat distribution.

There is also the possibility to reforge mastery level for gear, but this comes with a 50% loss of Forgehammers used, which is a significant loss to an account. We never recommend such reforging and do not ever suggest it in our Optimizer. Instead, the best way to fix bad historic mastery investment is with future mastery investment to steer your account back in the right direction over time.

The optimizer takes your current hero gear levels, your available resources (gear EXP, forgehammers, mythic gear pieces), and your chosen build profile, then recommends the specific upgrades, including which pieces to level and where to reallocate XP, that give the biggest weighted stat gains for your resources. The primary use case is optimizing your top 3 heroes for Expedition-related gameplay since this is where most of the return on Hero Gear investment will come from. It puts precise numbers behind what most guides only describe qualitatively.

No. When the optimizer recommends a reforge, it means reforging the gear EXP only, never the mastery level. The daily free reforge per gear piece lets you pull all XP out and put it somewhere else with 100% recovery. Your mastery level (the one that costs forgehammers per level) is never touched or reduced. Do not attempt to reforge your gear mastery level!

Not necessarily. A 1–2% recommendation usually means you were already close to the optimal allocation for your chosen build. This commonly happens to players who have been following conventional wisdom reasonably well and are just looking to reforge for ideal optimization. If your gear is already significantly developed, even a lot of new materials to invest might only result in small gains due to diminishing returns. Small percentage improvements are still real gains; they just get naturally smaller as your gear matures. If the result still seems wrong, double-check that your input resources are fully and accurately entered. Missing a resource field is the most common cause of unexpected small recommendations.

Yes, if it fits your build selection. The optimizer does exactly what you tell it, it optimizes toward the build profile you chose. If Lancer is deprioritized in that build's weights, it will recommend moving XP away from Lancer pieces toward higher-priority stats. Right or wrong isn’t the correct framing in this case, but rather if you chose the correct build for how you intend to play. The Optimizer will give you the most efficient path to the goal you set.

You can adjust stat weights to target a specific enemy's weakness, but the practical impact is limited. Imbuement bonuses at high gear levels are so large that changing weights tends to produce similar results regardless. If your opponent has e.g., level 200 infantry gear with full imbuements, the counter is matching that investment level. The optimizer will confirm you're already as allocated as your resources allow, but it can't conjure resources you don't have. Use the optimizer to ensure nothing is wasted; accept that significant raw investment gaps require resources to close, not just smarter allocation.

It is possible that your alliance member was closer to an ideal stat distribution before using the Optimizer. Even if that was not the case, expedition battle results have significant RNG variance factor. Battle outcomes fluctuate wildly even with identical gear, heroes, and formations. A sample of 3–4 battles before and after isn't enough to confirm a real stat gain vs. a normal RNG swing. The Hero Gear Optimizer will optimize stat weights, but it doesn't guarantee favorable RNG in the combat formula. So treat small sample results (in either direction) with healthy skepticism.