How do I upgrade champions in Teamfight Tactics? To win a match of League’s version of Auto Chess, you need to use all your resources and gold wisely to assemble the most effective lineup. But, while you might initially assume that ensuring you have a variety of champions in your team is the way to win, having multiple copies of the same character is a crucial way of sticking it to your seven real-world rivals.
Now that the Teamfight Tactics release date is here, you can finally get into Riot’s take on the autobattle genre without needing Honour Level Three to access the closed beta. Now that it’s out, you have the chance to see what all the fuss is about, and it’s heavily inspired by the original Dota Auto Chess mod from Drodo. So, if you’re in any way acquainted with that, you’ll know that upgrading champions in Teamfight Tactics is very important in securing victory.
If you know how to upgrade Dota Underlords heroes in Valve’s rival and official spin on the autobattler, you’ll probably know the basics of this system already. Combining duplicate heroes together upgrades them into a special soldier with a significantly buffed health pool and DPS (damage per second) capabilities. Since this is a very important part of turning the tables on your enemies and crafting TFT tactics, here’s how to upgrade champions in Teamfight Tactics.
How to upgrade Teamfight Tactics champions
Autobattlers feature mechanics that can be tough for newcomers to get their head around, but this one certainly isn’t. At the beginning, each champion you choose has a 1-star rating. Then, once you have three of the same champion on the field of battle at once, they’ll automatically be upgraded to a 2-star character. You don’t need to do anything and the change is immediate.
However, your health-boostin’, damage-buffin’ journey does not end there. If you’ve managed to combine your way to a third 2-star hero, they will merge to form a fearsome 3-star one. This is the highest rank a champion can get to, so get ready to unleash them when they get to that point.
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If you’re holding out to upgrade one Teamfight Tactics champion in particular, bear in mind that the shop with which you purchase them is affected by what your opponents are doing. In other words, if everyone else is working on one unit, it’s less likely they’ll appear in your shop. In that case, you might want to change tack and boost someone else, so you’re not wasting your time and money on undesirable shop re-rolls. If you have spare units lying around, make them useful and sell them for gold for further re-rolls and team strengthening.
In the end, it’s all about making sure you’re specialising – as that’s how to upgrade Teamfight Tactics champions, naturally – without neglecting the chance to have as many units as possible of tactically-sound class and origin combinations to form good TFT comps. Knowing your Teamfight Tactics recipes is important, but taking time to consider when and how to upgrade your champions can turn the tide of a match, so keep an eye on the opposition and do what they’re not doing to create a powerful squad to exploit their weaknesses.