Heir of Light: Eclipse is an idle gacha RPG game for Android and iOS, released earlier this year by South Korean developer Com2uS Studios. It’s a follow-up to their successful gacha game Heir of Light, which has been around since 2017.
In Heir of Light: Eclipse, you can passively gain resources to obtain powerful characters, build a strong team and win battles.
The game’s beautiful anime/fantasy art style makes the task of collecting characters very appealing. That said, navigating the game can be a little overwhelming to those totally new to the genre.
If you’re feeling a little lost, don’t worry — this guide will show you the ropes so you can get started!
Heir of Light: Eclipse Basic Gameplay Summary
The basic idea is that you put together a team of 5 characters, called “servants”, to fight battles against increasingly difficult enemies. Each servant has different strengths and skills that they can bring to battle.
You can grow your roster of servants by “summoning” — in other words, spending in-game currency to randomly generate — new ones. You can make your servants more powerful by leveling them up and equipping them with better gear.
The resources you need to summon and level up servants, as well as get better gear for them, can be obtained through battles, quests, as well as passively accrued over time.
Preparing for Battle
Before you go into each battle, you can select which servants to fight for you on that stage.
During the first chapter of the game—think of it as the tutorial stages—you’ll only have four servants at your disposal, so you’ll have one empty slot (but the enemies are so easy, you’ll be fine). Later in the game, choosing your five depending on class, enemy types, and factions will be a crucial part of your winning strategy.
You can switch the positions of your servants by dragging them into place. It’s a good idea to keep your tankier servants in front and the glass cannons in the back.
Combat Power
Towards the top of the screen, you’ll also find your team’s total Combat Power versus the enemy team’s. CP is a general indicator of strength based on your current lineup’s stats, levels, and gear. This can help you estimate how your team stacks up against the enemy in that battle (but know that a higher team CP doesn’t guarantee a win!)
How Battles Work in Heir of Light: Eclipse
The battle screen looks like what you might expect from an RPG, with your party of five facing off against the enemy team.
Bars below each servant portrait show you their HP (green), and Energy (Yellow).
However, unlike conventional RPGs, where you have to manually decide which ability your unit uses at each turn, HoL:Eclipse’s gameplay is idle. You don’t really have to do anything.
Whenever your servant’s energy meter is full, you can tap on their portrait to instantly use their ultimate ability. But for the most part, you can just let the battle play out on its own.
Resources
Each time you win a battle, you get a bunch of rewards. There is a plethora of resource types and items in the game, but just to spare you the overwhelm, here is a basic rundown of the things you want to pay attention to early on:
- Gold: You’ll need gold for upgrading both servants and gear.
- Nuu Crystals: Required for upgrading your servants.
- Aran Glyphs: At certain milestones, you’ll need these to keep leveling up your servants. These particular levels come with upgrades to your servant’s abilities. Aran Glyphs come in much smaller quantities than gold or Nuu Crystals.
- Karats: Also harder to obtain than gold or Nuu Crystals, these are used to “summon” (i.e., roll) new servants.
- Gear: You can equip these to boost the stats of your servants.
Making Your Servants More Powerful
Leveling Up
As you go through the different battle stages, eventually you will run into some tougher enemies and be handed your first losses. This means you’re going to have to make your team stronger!
Leveling up your servants is the main way to boost your team’s fighting abilities, with each level increasing their stats.
Leveling up your servants costs gold and Nuu Crystals. It’s very cheap to do at early levels, but gets progressively more costly.
However, at certain level milestones, you’ll need Aran Glyphs as well as gold and Nuu Crystals to proceed. These levels unlock new abilities for your servants, or upgrade their existing ones.
Equipping Gear
Apart from leveling up, you can also make your servants stronger by equipping them with better gear.
The simplest way to do this is by the Quick Equip button, which you’ll find on the individual servant’s page (the same page you use for leveling up). This will automatically equip the best gear that you own, that is suitable for that servant type.
Gear is obtained as battle rewards; you can also purchase gear by going to the Estate > Shop.
Building Your Team in Heir of Light: Eclipse
Summoning New Servants
After the first chapter of the game, you gain access to the “Estate”, a section of the game with various buildings for obtaining and managing your roster of Servants.
Most importantly, this is where you’ll be able to summon new servants. Summoning servants—in other words, rolling to get a randomly generated character—is a core part of the game and is crucial to building a stronger team.
Tap on “Summon” on the Estate page. It costs 400 Karats, or 1 Summon Stone, to summon once.
There is a large array of servants that can be summoned, and they can vary greatly in how powerful they are in combat. However, they fall into three main categories: normal, rare, and epic.
Of these three, the Epic servants are the ones you want in your team, as they have significantly better stats and will give you better value for the resources you spend leveling them up. Not surprisingly, these are the rarest of the lot.
These are the drop rates for each category:
- Epic: 5.2%
- Rare: 45.6%
- Normal: 49.2%
Servant Classes
As more servants become available to you, you’ll have more options for how you want to build your team. It’s time to take a closer look at your servants’ stats and classes.
In typical RPG fashion, the characters in this game fall into several classes:
- Warrior – Your all-around fighting class that deals good DPS but can also take a hit.
- Tank – High hit points and defense allow these servants to soak up a lot of your enemy’s damage.
- Ranger – These characters deal massive physical damage from the backline.
- Mage – Another class you’ll want to keep safe in the backline, mages deal lots of magic damage.
- Support – Supports specialize in abilities that benefit the team, whether it’s by directly aiding an ally with stat boosts or heals, or by crowd-controlling enemies.
As you can probably guess, you’ll want your sturdier warriors and tanks in the front spots, and your squishy rangers and mages safely in the back.
On each servant page you can see their HP, Attack, and Defense stats. Also, next to their level you can see their Combat Power, which basically sums up their battle prowess as it takes into account their level and their current gear.
Get More Resources from Auto Purify and Quests
If you tap on the main screen, you’ll bring up the Auto Purify dialogue. From here you can claim the resources and items that the game lets you accumulate passively over time. These resources cap out after certain lengths of time, so make a habit of claiming it periodically!
Apart from battles, you can also obtain a large amount of resources through the quests page. There is a main quest line and ones that refresh daily and weekly. Don’t forget to check this page from time to time as often you’ll find that you’ve accomplished quests without even trying!
Conclusion
Thanks to the idle gameplay, Heir of Light: Eclipse can be a nice easy choice for those looking to dip their toes into the gacha game genre, or simply to indulge in the beautiful anime/fantasy visuals without having to commit to a steep learning curve.
If you’re looking around for other games to try, go check out our News section for the scoop on latest releases!