This guide was written before the 1.0 release, which adjusted the progression so that you can get to World Ascension a lot quicker than you used to. In my view, that means that there's even less reason to delay World Ascension, and the goodies that lie on the other side. The substance of the guide remains correct, even though some of the anecdotes are now out of date.

Let's start by looking at the information tooltip about World Ascension.



The good news is that we get some things. Prestige abilities for areas and dungeons, and guild abilities. We don't know what they are right now (and I'm not going to spoil them), but the developers say that those abilities are worth it, and we're going to believe them.

Lots of things are going to be reset. In many ways, we will be starting again.

Lots of things are not going to be reset. Anything we invest in the stuff that won't be reset, we get to keep.

If we mouse over the Accomplishments icon, we get this list:



And so, we can see that as we earn Accomplishments, we get to keep even more stuff. The first two unlocks (keeping unique items, and keeping catalyst levels) are especially significant when we think about planning our first World Ascension.

This information gives us three strategic principles:

• Maximise your investment in the things you'll get to keep
  
• Minimise your investment in the things you won't get to keep
  
• Delay your investment in the things you might get to keep next time

Do your global quests and your dailies
You get to keep your global quests. Daily quests give you Epic Coins (which you get to keep) and Portal Orbs (which you get to keep. So do these and hand them in.

Claim your titles
You get to keep your titles. This means you get to keep skill slots and damage upgrades, and completion bonus increases, and damage reduction bonuses. So you absolutely should be pushing to get titles all the time.

Equipment mastery effects
Getting a class to level 10 on a piece of equipment is always worthwhile. Partly because the Apprentice titles are based on how many pieces of equipment you've raised to level 10. Also because it unlocks the mastery effect for that piece of equipment, and you get to keep that after World Ascension. (If you only get a piece of gear up to level 9, you're going to lose the progress you've made, I'll discuss that further in the 'timing' secion.)

Talisman progress
Given that talisman progress is extra-specially slow, it's great that you get to keep your talismans, talisman levels, and talisman fragments. So treat this like it's going to be around for a long time.

Alchemy upgrades and potion levels
Level 0 potions are appropriately scaled for when you really don't have any hitpoints and you're not up against anything serious. But if you want something that's actually going to help you against a level 250 monster, you're going to want potions level 50 or higher.

So do it! Because after you do a World Ascension, you're going to have those potions already levelled, and that means you'll be able to complete the low-level content.

Alchemy essence and materials
This doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's worth being aware just how much it will catapult you forward. Do you remember spending 3 days getting to 50 slime balls? You notice how you've got a thousand slime balls in your inventory now? That's three days of waiting that you can completely skip over.

Also, you remember how money was hard to come by when you were starting out? Not so much, now that you've got level 75 health potions and a massive stockpile of slime essence. 1 point of slime essence gets you 1 health potion. At level 75, those health potions will sell for more than 100 gold each. Which means that with a little preparation, you can have as big a gold stockpile as you want for buying those early-game upgrades. (The ones that make the most difference.)

Town building unlocks and research progress
Remember what it was like to be on 10K slime coins and be unable to spend any of them? You won't be facing that problem again (provided that you solved it before doing World Ascension).

There are also some really nice researchable effects from buildings. You may lose all your building levels, but you'll find those levels much easier to obtain (especially the low levels) when you've still got all the things you researched in order to make the high levels affordable.

Bestiary progress
Traps (and therefore taming points, therefore bestiary progress) are possibly the best long-term investment in the entire game. Because you get to keep that progress after World Ascension.

Expedition levels and XP
You don't get to keep an expedition that is in progress. But you do get to keep the XP rewards you earned from completing expeditions, and everything that you've unlocked on the expedition screen.

Epic coin purchases
The devs are not stupid enough to take these away from you. (By the way, the best items in the epic store are 'Improving minimum daily quest rarity' and 'equipment tenacity'. The rarity upgrade eventually pays for itself in increased epic coin income, but the real benefit is the extra portal orbs. Equipment tenacity means you can always equip a piece of gear, even if you don't have the stats for it. This makes it much much easier to get equipment mastery and related titles.)

Don't get serious about collecting unique equipment until you've got a successful strategy for keeping unique equipment. (Check out the 'equipment' section below.)

The materials you use to upgrade a catalyst are materials you get to keep when you ascend. But you don't get to keep the catalyst upgrades until you have 10 accomplishment points. So look at how much you have of each ingredient, and think about whether you're going to want to catalyst products before you ascend, or after you ascend. (Unless we're talking about the slime catalyst, because slime oil is obscenely easy to get.)

And that's actually it.

Because everything else is consuming resources that you're going to lose when you do world ascension anyway. There's no point in holding on to Mysterious Water instead of increasing the Mysterious Water cap: either way, the Mysterious Water is going to get spent, you might as well have the increase in water income that comes from increasing the cap.

Similarly, you should be rebirthing your heroes (especially tier 1 and 2 rebirth) whenever it makes sense for the development of that hero, because that contributes towards ascension milestones.

The things you can spend gold on are going to disappear, but so is the gold.

And, OK, converting potions into money means you won't have the potions after you ascend. But that process also generates alchemy research points, and you get to keep those.

Don't think of the resources that disappear as wasted. Think of them as invested in getting the milestones and unlocks to make the next cycle stronger.

Equipment is the big pain point when it comes to world ascension. Losing your equipment levels is one thing, but losing the gear itself is a pretty daunting prospect. There are three things you can do to minimise your equipment loss:

• Find gear with enchant slots and/or enchantments
  
• Add enchant slots to gear using the thief
  
• Get 5 points worth of World Ascension accomplishments

You get to keep gear that has an enchant slot or an enchantment. So once you have the blacksmith, you want to level it up to level 5 and "Unlock a new Dictionary Upgrade." That upgrade is "Treasure of Fortune 1" and it increases the chance that items you find will have enchant slots. Combined with "Treasure Hunting", you can build up a collection of enchanted gear, and have enough to equip everyone in your guild when you do world ascension. (Don't click the spoiler if you'd rather find out about hidden unlocks in-game.)

Alternatively, you can look at the mouse-over for any piece of gear in the game and notice that the Thief mastery ability adds enchantment slots. This means that (once you've unlocked the thief) within a couple of days, you can get Thief mastery on all of your Common gear, which means all of your Common gear will survive World Ascension. (You should do this anyway, because Common gear mastery is quick, and your thief will benefit from the extra equipment slots that you get from mastering lots of different gear pieces.) The 'equipment tenacity' purchase from the Epic Coin Store means this is really easy to do - if you only ever buy one thing from the Epic Coin Store, then buy 'equipment tenacity'. (Not to be confused with certain game marketplaces that aren't Steam.)

If you prioritize the important items from your uncommon gear, then you should be able to keep all of the high-priority items. (And hey, if you've got a really long list of high-priority gear, then just spend a bit more time before you ascend. There will be benefits from that.)

Unique equipment
This brings us to the problem of unique equipment. It takes forever to get mastery on a piece of unique gear, so most people will choose not to wait that long.

Part of the issue here is that there's a problem with the name: unique gear isn't 'unique' like you might think it is. I've found 4 slime ponchos so far, and disassembled 3 of them because I needed the inventory slots. At this moment, my mage is wearing a spider skirt, and I have another one in the inventory.

Each piece of unique gear is only found in one place, the unique place where you find it. But the gear itself is not unique at all - you can find it again and again, until you have as many copies as you want (or are willing to grind for, or you disassemble them because they're constantly showing up in your favourite grinding spot).

Unique gear will (rarely) drop with an enchantment on it already. Which means you get to keep it.

And, once you've got five World Ascension accomplishments, you get to keep your unique gear even if it isn't enchanted. It's impossible to get those accomplishments before you do world ascension, so you will need to face the clean-out at least once. The question then becomes whether you focus hard on getting five accomplishments with your first ascension (which means you'll want to study and plan pretty hard), or whether you're willing to plan on losing your uniques more than once.

There are times not to ascend, and there are times where ascending is more of a judgement call. The simplest situation is when you can't ascend, so you don't! There's probably no need to start thinking about timing your first ascension until you're on four milestone points. If you're anything like me, you'll be spending a few days on four milestone points, and that's plenty of time for working out whether you want to stop at five, or go further.

There's a bonus for the highest milestone level you've achieved per milestone. You don't have to ascend as soon as you have 5 milestone points. You could wait until you've got a higher maximum level on one or more milestones. You might decide to get every milestone to level 1 before ascending, so that you have a complete set of milestone bonuses. Or you might decide that you want to be able to go easier on something next time around, so you'll push it extra hard this time to get as much bonus as possible.

As you close in on being able to ascend, have a look at your guild level. Think about what you want to unlock before ascending, and what might be easier to unlock when you've got guild XP bonuses and rebirth bonuses on your side.

When not to ascend
Don't ascend when you're right in the middle of something that's going to be reset, when waiting for it to finish would give you a benefit that survives ascension.

So don't ascend with an expedition in progress, because you could wait for it to finish and keep the expedition XP and pet XP. (And maybe the reward, depending on what kind of expedition it is.)

Don't ascend before doing your daily quests for that day: claim the epic coins or the portal orbs before ascending. (Especially since your heroes are going to reset to level 1, and they might not be able to complete the quest after you've ascended.)

Don't ascend if you're 80% of the way through a guild level that ends with 4 or 9. Complete the guild level, unlock the content, and have it available after you ascend.

Don't ascend if you're 80% of the way through a Title Quest that you've been working on for two weeks. Spend a couple of days building up a stockpile of Portal Orbs and essence while you wait for it to finish.

Don't ascend if you're about to get called away from the game. You might not be able to win any of the timed challenges with your current stats, but you probably want to at least try, and to form an opinion about what you need to do better next time.

Unless you don't care. It's your game, and if you're willing to sacrifice some of those things because you're keen to get to new content or you know exactly what you want to do and can't wait to do it, then do it your way.

Reasons to think about delaying ascension
Do you have any pets that you want to capture or rank up before you lose access to those areas, and the traps in the shop disappear?

Are there any general quests that are close to ranking up that you want to get across the line so that their bonuses will help you have a quick start after ascension?

Are there any titles that are going to be easier to get with a powerful, high-level character that you want to claim? (Especially look at Class Master, Monster Study, and Proof of Rebirth.)

Are there any quests that you want to unlock so that you can work on them after ascension? (Think about Survival, Quester, and Equipment Master.)

Is there a equipment you want to keep, so you're going to need to wait until the thief has obtained mastery (or you get a lucky drop)?

Reasons to ascend sooner than later
Do you want to unlock the 'area/dungeon prestige' feature and the extra guild abilities?

Would your 'max level reached' bonuses for milestones make a big difference?

Would you be able to afford some nice ascension upgrades?

Do you want to test your ability to earn accomplishments?

Hopefully, this guide has helped you start to develop a plan for world ascension. I recommend also reading Cryts Guide on what to prepare for World Ascension[ieh2.fandom.com]. Crit will tell you exactly how many slime balls (and other ingredients) you'll need so that you can instantly rank up your buildings after ascending, and there's some really smart opinions about which pieces of equipment to bring across to win accomplishments early.

It's a significantly more spoilery guide than this one, and it assumes that you understand a lot of the game mechanics and underlying issues. It's also more prescriptive: not so much about how to develop your own strategy as how to follow Cryt's strategy. (Cryt has a good strategy, but I personally prefer to answer the questions myself, no matter how well someone else answered them.)