[1] In 1781 she became part of Suffren's force, consisting of the 16-gun corvette Fortune, five ships of the line, eight troopships and a thousand soldiers, all entrusted with carrying the French war effort into the Indian Ocean.

[7] Héros was stationed off the Cape from 21 June to 29 August to defend the Dutch colony from a British attack and to repair the damage done to her at Porto Praya.

[9] With Héros as Suffren's flagship, the eleven ships left Île de France on 7 December 1781 to attack the British force in the Indian Ocean.

On 19 January, the 64-gun Sévère detected HMS Hannibal (50) a fourth rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy under Captain Alexander Christie.

Héros, Artésien, and the 64-gun Vengeur were deployed but this time along with other ships as to ensure communication between the pursuers and the main body of the fleet, allowing Suffren to press on his chase.

...when sufficiently near us, she [Héros] opened her fire, and continued it until the shot of two more line-of-battle ships [Artésien and Vengeur], one on our weather quarter, and the other on our bow, began to tell: resistance was now useless, and our captain very prudently struck his colours.

The enemy instantly hoisted out his boats, boarded us, and separated our crew amongst his fleet.On 17 February 1782, under Suffren and Lieutenant de Moissac, his flag captain, Héros fought at the battle of Sadras off the coast of Coromandel, attacking the centre of the British formation and seriously damaging below the waterline Edward Hughes's flagship, the 74 gun HMS Superb.

Héros lost her mainmast and then her mizzenmast – the latter dragged the French flag into the water with it and for a moment the British thought that Suffren had struck his colours.

[23] She was present on 10 March when the squadron was reinforced by a large force under Bussy (consisting of the 74-gun Fendant and Argonaute, the 66-gun Hardi, and transports carrying 2,500 men).

However, Suffren was unable to capitalize upon the victory as nine days later he received a dispatch reporting the signing of a preliminary peace agreement in Europe five months earlier that would become the Treaty of Paris.

[28] On 3 January 1784 Héros resumed her journey, reaching Toulon on 26 March to a rapturous reception and festivities at the city's hôtel de l’Intendance.

On 6 April a local newspaper, the Courrier d'Avignon, reported a surprise dessert served to Suffren: "It is written of this town [Toulon] that she presented to one diner a symbol, whose allegory was expressed with equal ingenuity and delicacy.

This made her one of the most heavily engaged French warships of the time, though she was much-changed when she returned to Toulon – she had been dismasted twice (at Providien and Trincomalee) and repaired with modified rigging and masts from other ships and her launch had been so badly damaged by gunfire that Suffren suspended it from the stern at the level of the gallery.

[31] The good health and discipline of the ship's crew (or at least those who remained on the flagship) is also instructive as to the kind of men being recruited in Brest in March 1781.

[32] However, it is difficult to trace changes in personnel over the course of the campaign – for example, the ship's muster does not take into account the presence of slaves, Lascars, and sepoys, who at times formed a considerable proportion of the crew.

This was especially true during the final months in the Indian Ocean, when large numbers of the original crew had been killed in action or lost to sickness, wounds, or desertion.

Suffren made up these losses by taking men from frigates and transport ships, recruiting locally and redistributing among the squadron the crews of Orient and Bizarre, which both ran aground in 1782.

Early in 1793 war broke out again between France and Britain and the British seized Héros as she was moored at Toulon when a Royalist cabale surrendered the city to them on 29 August.