Your primary progression focus is always going to be pumping medals into your units for enhancement. Transcending (also known as “transing” among the community) is the extra icing on top. A fully transed unit has significantly higher stats than one not transed at all – but at the same enhancement level. And a unit at trans 3 grants extra medals at revival.

Gaining medals to enhance your units costs nothing, but transcending them costs a lot of Gems or real money. A player who does not intend to spend money on the game needs to choose their transcendence focuses carefully. The Gem cost to get a unit to trans 3 is (almost disgustingly) high.

Why transcend your units?

In case you decided to skip the intro or want the full details, here’s why:

Each time you transcend a unit its attack, defense, and HP are increased by +50% (up to 150%) Each time you transcend a unit, you get +10% (up to 30%) more medals on revival

Those are pretty good reasons. More damage, more medals. That’s what every player should want.

The cost of transcendence

Something as valuable as unit transcendence is, well, expensive. And it’s expensive in both Gems and Honor Coins.

Transcending itself costs Honor Coins, but the real cost lies in evolving the requisite units to actually do the transcendence. (As a note, you can see any unit’s full trans material requirements in the Unit Book.)

Each unit requires you have specific evolved units to go through with a transcendence. Getting the units is a pain enough at times, but the Gem cost is the real killer.

Let’s break it down.

First, here’s a small evolve cost cheat sheet:

It costs 2800 Gems to evolve a unit to 6-star It costs 2000 Gems to evolve a unit to 5-star It costs 500 Gems to evolve a unit to 4-star

And with that in mind:

To trans 1 a unit, you need two 6-star units and one 4-star unit. This makes the cost 6100 Gems (+100 Honor Coins).

To trans 2 a unit, you need three 6-star units, one 5-star unit, and one 4-star unit. This makes the cost 10900 Gems (+200 Honor Coins).

To trans 3 a unit, you need three 6-star units and two 5-star units. This makes the cost 12400 Gems (+300 Honor Coins).

The total cost to fully transcend one unit is 29400 Gems and 600 Honor Coins.

That is indeed very expensive for any player not throwing cash at the game each mini-event. You can see why it’s so important to be picky about who you transcend.

Which units should you transcend?

This is really up to your preferred team and who you are using as your cores. If you’re not sure what that even means, see my unit priorities and best unit guides.

Moving forward, the answer is always going to be your cores. You want to focus all those Gems and Honor Coins on the units you’re going to be using on your teams often, not only because of the stat bonuses but because of the additional Medal gains.

It is rarely in your best interest to transcend a unit you’re using solely as a support, at least until your core units are trans 3. It costs too much to give a stat bonus to a unit that’s going to die as soon as they get to the frontline anyway. The medal bonus is another thing entirely, though – so it’s up to you once your cores are set.

Guild exception

The rules change a bit once you start getting involved in guild battles and raids, which ignore enhancement level and instead focus on a unit’s own merits along with their trans level.

Furthermore, units used as barracks instructors are good candidates for transcendence because they speed up unit production and are able to train even better units.

This is all important to remember as you consider transcending a unit, but your primary focus should be your actual team. If your team’s cores are transed, then you may want to focus on barracks instructors or supports.

Transcendence Tickets

The good folks over at Ekkorr throw Transcendence Tickets at us once in a while and a number of IAPs come with them, so what’s the best way for you to use them?

Your first instinct may be to hold onto your tickets for a unit’s third transcendence, but you have to keep in mind that the ticket cost goes up with each trans level.

The first trans costs 1 ticket, the second trans costs 2 tickets, and the third trans costs 3 tickets.

With the above in mind, using a ticket to give a unit its first trans is the most economical option as it’s a flat 6100 Gem value. Below is the ticket-to-Gem value breakdown of all three tiers so you can see it yourself.

This divides the total Gem cost of a trans tier by the ticket amount:

Trans 1 (1 ticket) - A ticket equates to 6100 Gems Trans 2 (2 tickets) - A ticket equates to 5450 Gems Trans 3 (3 tickets) - A ticket equates to 4133 Gems

The first transcendence tier is by far the most economical way to use them, but if you are trying to trans your cores up and are not sure you’ll be able to get the units or Gems to do it in a timely manner, you may want to just use your tickets on all three tiers and be done with it.

There isn’t much more to be said about Endless Frontier’s unit transcendence system. Enhancing with medals is more important than any other progression you’re going to do, but transing units is a vital. You need the stat gains for PvP (and they certainly help in stages), and you need any medal gain bonuses you can get.

If nothing else, this guide should at least make you more wary of spending those 5700 Gems on random units when rolling or tossing them at the roulette. Gems are far more valuable than the game initially lets on.