History YMMV / HeroesOfMightAndMagic

* EnsembleDarkhorse: From the otherwise unremarkable Heroes IV expansions, Spazz Maticus, a young king on a mad quest to rule the world, gained somewhat of a cult following.

* EnsembleDarkhorse: From the otherwise unremarkable HoMM 4 expansions, Spazz Maticus, a young king on a mad quest to rule the world, gained somewhat of a cult following.

* JokeCharacter:

** Peasants in its expansion ''Armageddon's Blade''. They have ''1'' in every stat except speed, which is ''3'', which ties with the Walking Dead above. The game manual outright calls them useless, and mentions they're only good for being turned into skeletons. Even their IdleAnimation has them facepalming.

** GRIFFIN ETERNAL! *casts random spell* [[labelnote:Explanation]]''Heroes V'' characters have a penchant for silly battlecries during cutscenes. In the original game, they also talked while sitting on their horses and performing random casting animations having nothing to do with the dialogue. The specific quote is from the ScriptFic ''[[http://heroesinanutshell.blogspot.com/ Heroes V in a nutshell]]''.[[/labelnote]]

* MagnificentBastard:
** [[spoiler: Sandro]] in ''The Shadow of Death''. He manages to [[spoiler: trick heroes into giving him powerful artifacts]], kill all of his competitors, creates a comfortable position for himself as TheManBehindTheMan to his [[spoiler: puppet king Finneas Vilmar]], and nearly conquers the world. Even when his first attempt at world conquest is thwarted, he still singlehandedly [[spoiler: lays the foundations of the Restoration Wars]]. Near the end, [[spoiler: his title is stolen from him by his "puppet" king. Vilmar tricks Sandro into attacking an innocent Deyjan lord, giving Vilmar an excuse to imprison him and then take all of the credit for Sandro's plans to conquer Erathia]].
** [[spoiler:Vilmar]], however, botchers it when he proves to be too incompetent [[spoiler:to rule the necromancers]] without [[spoiler:Sandro]] to tell him what to do. [[spoiler:Sandro]], on the other hand, proves to be quite a KarmaHoudini, like the best Magnificent Bastards out there, paying for his crimes with just a bit of jail time. However, he seems to get a bit of a change of heart. He keeps being evil, but in Might and Magic VIII he seems to become the leader of the Necromancers Guild of Jadame and proves to be an effective protector of the necromancer's right to study dark magic. His motives once in the world of Axeoth are unknown, but his hero description points that it probably orbits around recovering the power he had on Colony.
*** To be fair to [[spoiler:Vilmar]], the necromancer campaign in the third game gives no indication that he was a lousy king. True, he wasn't capable matching Catherine Ironfist's tactical prowess, but since she's established as a brilliant commander there's no shame in that. He only makes one ''really'' stupid mistake: [[spoiler: reviving King Gryphonheart as a powerful lich in the hopes that this lich could defeat Catherine. The Gryphonheart lich immediately kills Vilmar and seizes power for himself]].
*** Sadly (if you happen to be one of his fans), if the Sandro mentioned in the fifth game is the same Sandro from previous games, [[spoiler: then he was KilledOffForReal in the game's backstory. His apprentice Markal, though he does a good job manipulating Isabel in his bid to take over the Griffin Empire, is too much of a CompleteMonster to be a MagnificentBastard]].
** [[spoiler:Sandro]] [[LampshadeHanging gets called]] so by his first apprentice Lucretia at the end of "Danse Macabre" after [[spoiler:he admits to manipulating her for his own purposes.]]
** Kha-Beleth, Demon Sovereign from Ashan universe. Let's see: [[spoiler: he plans to capture Isabel and impregante her in order to produce the [[TheAntichrist Dark Messiah]], who is predicted to break Sheogh and free all the demons. Heroes defeated him? The boy is already born, and the saved queen is succubus Biara, his Dragon, who is ordered to bring as much misery to the Griffin's Empire and the world as possible, all to distract heroes from finding Sareth... which is done quite flawlessly. Only Sareth's choices in the ''Dark Messiah of Might and Magic'' can avert his victory.]]

** Most factions have some sort of GoddamnedBats too, if not as bad as the ghost. For instance, pixies and cerberi, which move fast, act often and strike multiple targets that can't strike back. Or the assassin, which can decimate any valuable stack with their poison. Magic users dread the magnetic golem, which is not only immune to pretty much anything, but they even heal from damage spells and protect allies from area spells. Their annoyance factor declines in larger battles but they are dreaded as neutral monsters you want to deal with without taking too many losses.
** Neutral Shooter stacks in early game, especially those guarding resources, are horribly annoying to deal with. Unlike melee units, shooters will always get a shot off, which usually will kill a handful of your units since you gotta slog it across the field. It doesn't help that most early game units are slow and melee, meaning not only will you get shot at, but chances are you will get shot ''twice'' as you slowly make your way across no-man's land.

** Peasants in its expansion ''Armageddon's Blade''. They have ''1'' in every stat except speed, which is ''3'', which ties with the Walking Dead above. The game manual outright calls them useful, and mentions they're only good for being turned into skeletons. Even their IdleAnimation has them facepalming.

** The Pirate's Daughter in ""IV" seems to have been designed to punish people who got complacent with the relatively low difficulty of the previous campaigns. This first scenario is EarlyGameHell defined, you start with a small army of weak units, far away from any town, while your two opponents start with two each, and will aggressively pump out units from day 1. It takes days of sailing to reach the nearest neutral town, and it begins poorly developed and is in area that lacks in resources. Just stopping to build it up is not an option, or else the Green player to your immediate east will bowl over you with their superior resources and numbers, but executing an attack is no picnic either, due to their decently levelled heroes and strong starting position. And before you think about just using your heroes to overpower it, they have an AbsurdlyLowLevelCap of just 12, and are both thieves, who take multiple levels to get direct combat skills and have them on lower priority compared to their scouting skills, which are useless in direct combat. If you can survive the early part of the game and knock out Green, things ease up a lot, but getting to that point requires precise execution.

*** Um, the idea of the Demon Messiah is that he will be capable of freeing demons from their prison. Agrael is definitely not capable of that.

* ArtStyleDissonance: The campaign in ''III'' says outright that the Inferno faction represents the Kreegans from ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'', a race of PlanetLooters who look somewhat demon-like and are erroneously thought to be demons and devils by the unknowing inhabitants of planets they invade. Besides the story fragments in the campaign, everything else about the art, lore descriptions, hero biographies, unit design, etc. of the Inferno makes it clear that the people on the development team who cared about the plotline of ''Might and Magic'' had absolutely no say in the design of this faction, as the Inferno are a bunch of generic demons and devils from FireAndBrimstoneHell with no resemblance whatsoever to the Kreegans. This was actually a ''good'' thing for the GameMod community and the appeal of ''III'' to a wider audience, but it's pretty jarring when playing through the campaign and standalone missions that involve Kreegans.

*** Peasants in its expansion ''Armageddon's Blade''. They have ''1'' in every stat except speed, which is ''3'', which ties with the Walking Dead above. The game manual outright calls them useful, and mentions they're only good for being turned into skeletons. Even their IdleAnimation has them facepalming.
*** The Peasants in the first and second games aren't any better, since they're similarly weak and can't be turned into skeletons. Most Knight players will leave them out of their army once they gain access to Paladins.

** Also in the same tune is Heroes II's battle defeat scene. I shows the defeated Hero walking away from the battlefield in a rather gloomy tune. II shows the Hero running from the scene like a coward ''while vultures immediately pick on the flesh of his freshly-killed army.'' The music doesn't help either. The one from III is similar to the one in I, but a lone soldier runs towards the hero with a flaming arrow in his back then promptly falls dead.

* SacredCow: ''Heroes III'' has gained this legacy in many places throughout the world, especially in Eastern European countries where the game was exceptionally popular. It's lasting impact basically sustained the ''Heroes'' series for four more entires ''by itself'' for four more games, and it's widely looked at as both an incredible strategy game and an exceptionally fun game in it's own right. This, looking down on it for any reason isn't taken lightly.

** ''III'' is one of the most popular games in Russia and eastern Europe.

*** Peasants in it's expansion ''Armageddon's Blade''. They have ''1'' in every stat except speed, which is ''3'', which ties with the Walking Dead above. The game manual outright calls them useful, and mentions they're only good for being turned into skeletons. Even their IdleAnimation has them facepalming.

** The Shadow Council element for the ''Heroes VII'' blog has been... [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment rather venomous]].

** The Pirate's Daughter in ""IV" seems to have been designed to punish people who got complacent with the relatively low difficulty of the previous campaigns. This first scenario is EarlyGameHell defined, you start with a small army of weak units, far away from any town, while your two opponents start with two, and will aggressively pump out units from day 1. It takes days of sailing to reach the nearest neutral town, and it begins poorly developed and is in area that lacks in resources. Just stopping to build it up is not an option, or else the Green player to your immediate east will bowl over you with their superior resources and numbers, but executing an attack is not picnic either, due to their decently levelled heroes and strong starting position. And before you think about just using your heroes to overpower it, they have an AbsurdlyLowLevelCap of just 12, and are both thieves, who take multiple levels to get direct combat skills and have them on lower priority compared to their scouting skills, which are useless in direct combat. If you can survive the early part of the game and knock out Green, things ease up a lot, but getting to that point requires precise execution.

* The Faerie Dragon scenario from the Campaign "Dragon Slayer" in Armageddon's Blade. While it is not hard, it is incredibly long as it requires your hero to trudge through multiple rough terrain (and often backtrack) completing random objectives to unlock the next area. Your hero will also hit the level cap in this scenario long before you get close to finishing, meaning that the latter battles are more or less just a waste of time as you gain nothing from them while potentially losing troops and have to backtrack, which is even worse if you chose this as the second mission, as the next one has the same level cap rendering all those battles a pointless slog as well. Finally, much of the enemies in this mission, due to the time limit, are trick bosses that require specific usage of spells or creature abilities to overcome, the most infamous of which is a stack of Nagas numbering ''3500'' (nagas seldom reach 100 in normal gameplay).

** Low-level rangers guarding mines. During the early game you barely have any troops (especially on the first week) but this is also the critical time to build up your economy. Normally low-tier troops are slow enough that they will take 2 turns to get to your army, allow you some tactical flexibility to prevent casualties. Not rangers; rangers will almost always shave off a portion of your troops (or if you're unlucky, cripple your starting army) and once that happens your economy pretty much grinds to a halt as you're no longer able to take on other mobs guarding mines. Marksmen and Master Gremlins are particularly hated for causing a lot of damage; the former because they shoot twice doing double damage, the latter because they tend to come in bigger than usual sizes than other mobs allowing them to tank more damage and deal more damage.

* ComplacentGamingSyndrome: The vast, ''vast'' majority of HOMM3 competitive games are played on either the "Jebus Cross" template or one of its variants. Since players gain a boatload of power very quickly in the central "treasure" area, games usually boil down to one or two battles where a player's entire army is either annihilated or victorious, and JC multiplayer games typically end in a few in-game weeks.