Investment Guide

A character’s power comes from four separate investment layers, each with its own material and its own cost curve. None of them substitute for another: a maxed Level with no Star investment is a very different character from a mid-Level one with a high Star rank.

Character Level

Raised with Courage Essence and Coin, across 100 steps. Your characters’ level ceiling is banded by your own Account Level, so this layer grows in step with your account rather than being something you can rush ahead of.

Ability Level

Raised with Ability Essence and Coin, on its own separate 100-step curve from Character Level. This is what scales a character’s Ability past its base numbers: pulling the character gets you the unit, but the Ability pool is what makes their kit hit as hard as the numbers on the tin.

Star rank: what each star actually unlocks

Star rank runs through 16 steps on top of the base ★1–★5 range, consuming character duplicates. It’s not just a stat stick: every character starts with only their Basic Attack and Ultimate active, and star rank is what brings the rest of the kit online: the 3rd skill unlocks at ★2, the 4th at ★3, and the 5th and final skill at ★5. ★4 doesn’t unlock anything new; it’s a pure stat checkpoint on the way to ★5. Every step also stacks a flat bonus to HP, Attack, and Defense together, growing character by character up to a fully-invested ★5. See the Star Rank Costs guide for the exact duplicate cost of each star. This is the layer that turns a merely-built character into a top-end one: it’s worth prioritizing dupes for a character you’re actually committed to over spreading them thin.

The Star Tree

A separate node-based tree (132 nodes split across six shared trees), spent with Stone of Destiny and Coin. Filling the whole structure runs into the thousands of Stone of Destiny and well over a million Coin, so treat it as a long-run sink you feed steadily rather than something to clear in one sitting on any single character.

F2P pacing

None of these four layers are optional extras: they’re where a character’s real power lives past the initial pull. Character Level and Ability Level track your Account Level naturally as you play, so they rarely need deliberate planning. Star rank and the Star Tree are where deliberate choices matter: both consume real resources, so concentrate them on the characters you’re actually building around rather than spreading investment evenly across your whole roster.

Where each layer lives in the game

• Character Level and Ability Level: under each character’s own upgrade screen.
• Star rank: consumes duplicates of the character directly.
• Star Tree: its own dedicated screen, shared structure across characters.

Related

• Star Rank Costs: the exact duplicate cost of every star, star by star.
• Beginner’s Guide: day-one priorities before you’re deep into any of these.
• Currencies: where Courage Essence, Ability Essence, and Stone of Destiny come from.
• Spirit Board: the character power layer that opens at Account Lv.13.