At the beginning of this year, we released our 100th Hero. Planning to celebrate that milestone prompted us to think more broadly about Heroes as a whole. We had many ideas of where we could go from here, but the team had a strong desire to improve the existing framework first. Thus began a year of learning, planning, optimizing, and more…
So in today’s Dev Diary, let’s talk about Heroes! How we look at problems from a development standpoint, our learnings, the improvements, and where we hope to go from here.
Our Goals
There are three pillars guiding our approach to Heroes’ work:
Value:
We want the value that Heroes provide to match the effort players are putting in. We can look to familiar aspects of the game, like gear, for inspiration.
Optimization:
We think we could do better at providing feel-good moments throughout the cycle of earning & leveling Heroes. This involves identifying and addressing existing pain points, particularly around how players source Hero Relics & upgrade materials in the game.
Mitigation:
Anything we build should avoid recklessly expanding the power gap between different levels of players. This is a similar philosophy we employed for last year’s Level Expansion, and involved introducing efficiencies to improve advancement for a wider audience of players.
Once a problem or opportunity is identified, these guiding principles are used to decide which solution is used to solve it, and what order to prioritize work.
Learnings
Earlier this year, we surveyed players and had several community discussions around Heroes. The feedback agreed with our own assessment- that we could be doing better in a few key areas. We wanted to tackle the most pressing of these before building anything new.
Hero Shop Enhancements
- Frustration around refreshing the Hero Shop was one of our most common feedback received. We needed to investigate ways to more consistently offer relevant and desirable items for players to ensure players always have a meaningful use for their Stags to help with collection progression.
Hero Sourcing Improvements
- ‘Sourcing’ here refers to how players collect Hero Relics, Seals, and upgrade materials like Oaths and XP. We heard feedback that these could be more deliberately incorporated across different areas of the game. We can also address some of these concerns by giving you ways to use your existing resources more efficiently. Ideally, players should feel that logging on and engaging in events each week leads to meaningful progress toward key Heroes over time.
Hero Summons Optimization
- Hero Summons could also be audited and optimized to support the wider catalogue more, in addition to the current headlining Heroes.
Thank you to all the players whose feedback helped identify what currently works for you, and what doesn’t. This feedback helps us focus development towards the most meaningful areas of improvement.
Quality of Life
So we know what our goals are, and we know where we want to improve. Now it’s time to start developing!
You may have even noticed that we have already been developing and releasing Quality of Life improvements all year to address these. There have been various tweaks relating to Heroes, such as adding additional preset slots to Hero Reserves and adding daily quests for Hero Summoning, but by far the biggest improvements tackled so far have been relating to the Hero Shop.
So far, we have released the following improvements to the Hero Shop based on player feedback:
- Slot 1 guarantees a Mythic hero on every refresh.
- Slot 2 guarantees a Heroics hero on every refresh.
- Slots 3 & 4 guarantee a Heroic or Mythic Hero.
- Rares appear less often, and only in Slots 5 & 6.
- Slot 7 offers building resources.
- Slot 8 offers research and dragon resources.
- Uncommon heroes have been removed.
- Maxed Heroes no longer appear in the Hero Shop.
We chose to prioritize Hero Shop Enhancements early, as it is a major avenue for sourcing Hero Relics. How successful these shop improvements are impacts how we move forward to address Hero Sourcing Improvements. ‘Hero Sourcing’ is also much broader of an effort- there are many types of rewards in the game and lots of ways to integrate them into daily, weekly, or seasonal cycles.
We will continue to make one change at a time, get feedback from players, and move on to the next until we feel they are incorporated across the player lifecycle in a satisfying way.
Upcoming quality of life focuses will include:
- Hero Summons Optimization in October
- Hero Sourcing Improvements will continue through November (and beyond, depending on player feedback!)
- Additional Quality of life improvements relating to how the game communicates where you can find Hero resources in rewards.
What’s Next?
Now that we have talked through all the existing areas of improvement, let’s talk about new feature development and return to that final goal:
Value.
If the only way a Hero can provide a player value is through equipping them to a limited number of Small Council seats or Marches, then over time, players will naturally accrue more Heroes than they can use. This is something we’d like to solve with our next feature release for Heroes.
We can look at something familiar to players like Gear, which has a similar utility (equipping one set at a time). This concern was solved by developing the Armory, ensuring that any effort put into crafting past gearsets is not wasted.
Of course, anything we build for Heroes should keep in mind our goal of Mitigation, as defined earlier.
We have more we’d like to discuss… but let’s do it face to face!
Keep the Conversation Going
Join us October 7th, 2025 at 4 PM Eastern LIVE on Youtube.
We’ll be celebrating our 8th Anniversary, and sitting down with our developers to chat more about the future of Heroes.