How To Use Gems In Heroes vs Hordes

How To Earn Gems

Every day, when you first log into HvH, it seems like the game throws gems at you from all directions.

In this case, that's because it does, but in small amounts.

There are roughly seven sources of gems that add up over the course of the month.

• You get 50 gems from daily quests. That's 1,500 a month.
• You get 175 gems from the Weekly quest, that's 700 a month.
• The merchant gives you 10 gems daily, 50 gems a week, and 100 gems a month. That's 600 gems a month.
• Claim 20 daily in the shop, that's 600 a month.
• And 50 weekly in the webshop, which is good for another 200.

That's 3,600 gems a month income by clicking on everything every day.

However, if you're new to the game, you get even more. As you progress through Normal and Hard Mode Chapters, each Normal Chapter offers you 25 gems while Hard Mode gives 40.

But, there's still one more source of gems!

You'll grab assorted gems over the month from mining events and the loot goblin. These are highly volatile, but could be worth somewhere between 0 and 500 gems a month. Occasionally, you'll also grab some in the Login Calendar.

That means F2P players can expect to earn about 3,800 gems a month, plus more for grinding through chapters.

So, now let's try to figure out how much each gem is worth to appropriately spend them.

How Do You Measure, Measure A Gem?

In keys, in dust, or time saved grinding. In adventure heroes or real money??!!

As we shall see, the value of the gems comes from real money, time, and in-game equivalents.

Well, there are several ways to value a gem. The first is in real money using the daily merchant. He'll sell you 80 gems + other stuff for $.99. That makes a gem worth $.012 to get today.

Or you can buy 14,000 gems for $100 in the shop, which makes each one worth roughly $.007 to get them instantly, but in a large quantity.

Or look at daily gems for a month. That's 6,000 gems for $15 and 30 days of time, which equates to $.0025 per gem.

So it's fair to say a gem has a real-world value of between $.0025 and $.01 + some time cost. If you can wait, it drives the price down some 5 to 6 times.

I'm going to use $.007 per gem. Or $7 per 1000 in real money terms.

While that's one mental model for value, you can also look at in-game exchanges to see how much a gem is worth.

You can turn 1,300 gems + 30 days of time into a hero via Adventure. That's the most guaranteed gem-efficient way to get a hero in the game, but it does take 30 days. That's $10 in gem costs.

2,000 gems for Dark Ranger is $14. And so on. A lot less than $75, they are currently offering in the shop.

Elsewhere, you can see that renewing your energy for the day costs 100 gems. You can compare that to using a revive in a run for 60 gems.

The trade-off here is in time. That run will have cost you 8 to 15 minutes of time. The revive is trading roughly 35 gems in "value" for the time saved. That's worth it for a run right before you go to sleep, for example.

Now that we have a model for the value of a gem, here's how I recommend NOT spending gems.

What You Definitely Should Not Spend Gems On

Based on the value logic above, I can pretty definitively say you should NOT spend gems on the following resources:

Compare that to using an energy refill for 100 gems and 1 hour of your time. That's $.70 for the following value for me:

• ~80 million coins
• ~2 gold keys
• ~4 silver keys
• ~400 hero orbs
• ~400 dust.

That has a value of about ~$10.

So, try to gauge how much your hour of afk farming is worth relative to the price of any individual gem purchase.

But enough of this talk of saving and waiting. Let's see what to actually spend gems on.

Best Use Of Gems

We have established that we get 3,800 gems each month, so let's budget these out.

The single best use of gems, in my opinion, is getting the Adventure Hero. For 1,300 gems, it's a guaranteed hero for $10 in gem value.

That sets a baseline of value.

Next, if you NEED to use a revive to clear Arena 19 + 20 each week, that's worth it. Those last set of tokens and super tokens are incredibly valuable.

So let's say that's 400 gems/mo on revives.

That leaves us with 2,100 gems.

I think it's worth spinning once on Lucky Draw for 50 gems each week. The relative value there is worth it, and you'll make back the gems on the 200 space some. Let's say you hit that once a month, so it's actually a wash here.

That means you're saving 2,100 gems a month.

My favorite event to spend gems on is the mining/farm event. For 3,000 gems, you can guarantee yourself the weapon. That's $30 in value for a weapon.

For 3,000 gems, you're going to have to wait to do it every 6 weeks or so.

Next up, a lot of people like to spend them on spins for certain wheel events. The boards with a 1.5%+ greater shot at a hero with a pity around 100 spins can usually be obtained for between 7-8k gems. That's ~3 months of savings for a relatively guaranteed hero.

Or $70-80 in gem value.

Also, it makes you see the value in the adventure Hero.

I'd like to ideally have a quest wheel where you can spend something more like 2000-3000 gems to get the hero. That puts the gem cost at roughly $20-30, which is the sweet spot for me to start spinning.

The last, boring option, is to eventually grab all the F2P gem heroes like Frost Wizard, Dark Ranger, and Spirit Shaman. At 2000 gems, these are obviously a decent deal, particularly because their globals are good to great.

But I would wait until you can 2-star or 3-star them up and then buy them because they are only good for the globals.

And that's how to use gems.

Now, honestly, if you want to save time anywhere in your grind, gems are a shortcut; they just have an opportunity cost in the form of missed events or actual hard-earned cash.

I have as hard a time as anyone not using an extra revive in boss brawl or just finishing the Nightmare Mode chapter, but if you can conserve gems, they can be optimally spent in the long term. Eventually, it's nice to show off an armory full of special weapons.