Anti Frustration Features / Fire Emblem Heroes

• Summoning Heroes:
  • The chance to get a 5-star Hero gradually increases the longer you go without drawing one. If you somehow reach 120 summons without getting one, the next summon will be guaranteed to be 5* (but it applies only to one summoning banner and resets when it ends).
  • If your summon session ends up having a pity-breaker but you still have stones left to summon from, you can roll on said stones and the appearance rate will remain the same until you end the summoning session or you summon all five units. This means that while a five star pity-breaker might occur, you can still summon on other stones to at least get the chance of more five stars before the pity rate resets.
  • With the 4.4.0 update in April 2020, after summoning 40 heroes in one banner, players can choose to summon any one of the focus heroes for free. There are limitations however: it can be only done on "New Heroes" and specific special banners, it can only be done once per banner (with the exception of the "A New Future" banner), and the heroes start with Normalized Traits.
  • With the 5.0.0 update players can now see their percentage of summoning a 5* hero in the summoning screen. The update will also include a feature that will only decrease the combined 5* rate by up to 2% of the total if the player summons an off-focus 5* unit instead of resetting it to 3% each (for example, if the 5* focus and the 5* rate are both 4.5%, summoning a non-focus unit will decrease that to 3.5% each).
  • With the 5.2.0 update, there is now a 4* Special Rate that starts at 3% (which can be alongside the 3% 4* focus if the banner has one) for all banners which includes all previous 5* heroes released from Launch to 2/3rds of Book V, and summoning those heroes will both make them 5* units and does not reset or decrease the pity rate, while at the same time excluding them from the 5* pool from future rerun banners if they're not the focus unit such as the weekly 4% banners.
  • With the 6.2.0 update, alongside the increase of the available heroes in the 4* Special Rate (and decrease of 5* heroes in the summoning pool), the update also introduces a 4* SH Special Rate for Special Heroes on Special Hero Revival banners from the "Spring Festival" banner in March 2017 to the "Hostile Springs" banner in January 2019, which will also be running along with the 4* Special Rate, as well as increasing the base 5* focus on that event to 4% while decreasing the 5* off-focus to 2% on those Special Hero Revival banners.
  • With the 7.2.0 update, alongside the increase of the available heroes in the 4* Special Rate on both the regular and 4* SH Special rate banners, there is a function called the Focus Charge where if players summon off-focus 5* heroes three times on a specific banner, the next 5* hero they summon will guarantee be a hero from the focus with the combined 5* and 5* focus rate and will consume all three charges, not including the free 40 summon free hero and any 5* focus heroes summoned during the charge, and can be repeated on the same banner.
• Skills:
  • All of the Staff + Assist skills, which use half the unit's Atk for healing (with some of them using an additional modifier), have a minimum number of HP recovered on an ally, to prevent certain cases where they could heal less than their prerequisite skills, such as a unit having less than 16 Atk for Physic+ healing less than Physic's fixed 8. The +1 maximum special cooldown their prerequisite skills had is also removed.
  • Because Bridal Lyn was available for a limited time and was initially released before the 2.0.0 update, which gave upgrades to all staves—including Candlelight—the 2.0.0 update gave Candlelight the ability to evolve into Candlelight+ with the use of refinery stones. Players who let other staff users inherit Candlelight could do this without having to wait for a re-release of Bridal Lyn. Mikoto's eventual Heroes debut in the Adrift banner can also count as this, since her staff Flash+ has the same effect as Candlelight+, and she is not a limited time unit like Bridal Lyn.
  • The 2.6.0 update added an option for a unit to auto-learn several skills at once. Not only does it account for inherited skills but for tiered skills as well, meaning the highest available rank of a skill can be learned without having to go through learning the prior skills first.
• Unlike the main series, battles don't rely on RNG at all — attacks are guaranteed to hit, there are no random critical hits, and skills that triggered randomly in the main Fire Emblem games instead activate every few actions or based on the unit's current HP.
• Compared to the main games, where a character could have a series of unlucky level-ups that leaves them with low stats at the level cap, characters will always get their maximum stats upon reaching level 40.
• Character-specific quests also include allies that are borrowed in the Voting Gauntlet, Rival Domains, and Grand Conquests.
• Units inflicted with the [Gravity] status can still enter terrain adjacent to them that would normally decrease their movement going through instead of being outright barred from entering into, such as Cavalry units still being able to enter trenches.
• Coliseum:
  • The Arena and Aether Raids will always include a panel of bonus heroes, comprised of units from a new ongoing banner (plus the new Legendary Hero on occasion), units from Grand Hero Battles (whether new, reran, or in the daily rotation), regularly summonable units or units that just got their weapon refines, and past Legendary heroes chosen at random. While bonus heroes slightly differ between the Arena and Aether Raids, the last of the bonus heroes for both modes will always be one of the Askr trio (Anna, Alfonse and Sharena) or Fjorm (before Book III took full swing). The player will always have them, as they are default/free units, so that means the player will always have at least one bonus unit for every Arena season. Many of the randomly selected heroes also have a habit of turning up units that you would have gotten for free from the weekly events, further widening your choices if you chose not to roll in the current banner.
  • In update 4.0.0, bonus units in Arena now need to eliminate at least 1 enemy hero in order to gain the 12 bonus points on the arena score, rather than have them need to eliminate all four enemy heroes to get the maximum score, which were worth 3 points each, and cutting down many unfavorable matchups as a result.
  • Before update 4.5.0, all 7 battles in Arena Assault had to be done in one run, with the only way to suspend it is to close the game and resume from there. Update 4.5.0 allows players to suspend their run after winning a battle and be able to play other modes in the meantime, and being able to resume it when entering the Arena Assault mode again.
  • Before update 4.10.0, Resonant Battles have a limited amount of attempts per season for players to acquire score, with the previous versions starting with 5 attempts, then up to 9 attempts in update 4.7.0. Update 4.10.0 removes the limit on the amount of attempts, on top of weakening the enemy units in that mode.
  • In update 5.8.0, players now have one Tactical Retreat per win streak in Arena, where players can have one loss or surrender and not reset their win streak, and also give players an option to reset their win streak in Arena without spending a Dueling Sword to have players enter in and surrender to reset beforehand, and update 6.5.0 raises the amount of Tactical Retreats in Arena per win streak to two.
  • In update 6.4.0, the Arena Assault+ mode replacing Arena Assault not only rewards Dragonflowers as well as Feathers, Sacred Coins and Refining Stones, but also has the Tactical Retreat feature from Arena, where players can use the Tactical Retreat option up to two times per win streak.
  • In update 7.2.0, players that deploy a Legendary Hero that is also a Bonus unit will now reach the highest possible score per battle from other player's defense teams instead of fluctuating and player can still earn the full points from that battle ones if they lose only 1 hero during that battle.
• Enemy Dancers units will never spawn in modes where units are randomly generated, to prevent unpredictability when training units in the Training Tower, and battling enemies in game modes like Tempest Trials. Some other units in the regular summoning pool are also tagged to never spawn where units are randomly generated due to them having very powerful and unfun skills and weapons equipped, with the current list including all the Rearmed and Attuned Heroes, Regular Surtr, Duo Ephraim & Lyon, Fallen Dimitri, Fallen Edelgard, Fallen Rhea and Fallen Female Byleth.
• If you don't fill your entire brigade in Rival Domains, Grand Conquests, and Pawns of Loki, any empty slots are filled randomly from a pool of units. They always come at 5 stars, have their base skills, and their weapons are refined if possible. This means that you can try the mode even if you don't have twenty high-level units ready to go.
• Voting Gauntlet:
  • Generally, the final round has a 1000-feather reward increase for a player's input to the round than the previous rounds. This doesn't really mean a player who has spent flags to win the top prizes in the prior two rounds will win the extra feathers, but this is done for players who were unable to spend enough flags at the right times but can attempt to do so in the final round to make up for losing out on previous rewards.
  • Starting with the "Bunny Battle Ballot" Voting Gauntlet in April 2018, if you lose or quit out of a Voting Gauntlet battle, you can try again immediately instead of waiting 30 minutes like before, reducing the annoyance of getting screwed over by unfavorable matchups.
  • Starting with the "Destructive Forces" Voting Gauntlet in April 2019, replacing the time-based half hour battles to vote, voting now requires ballots to consume, which replenishes 1 per hour and can go up to 8 stored, where the score multiplier increase for each one used after battle, letting players stock up on ballots and battle once every few hours instead of every half hour whenever possible to score highly.
• As of the 2.5.0 update, when your units are KO'd they no longer lose all SP and EXP gained, and replaying completed maps now grants units appropriate EXP and SP rather than half.
• If you exceed the 999 Orb limit, the game will still keep track of the extra Orbs and prevent you from buying any more until the extra Orbs are used up first. With the cap of the orbs raised to 9999 in version 2.8.0, the purchase limitation on 999+ no longer applies, only stopping at the new cap.
• Enemy heroes outside of modes where player-generated units are fought with randomly generated skills will never have skills that can counterattack at any range if they did not have them in their default kits, so that you can memorize and spot who exactly has the Counter skills, or a weapon with Distant Counter as its unique effect when you face against them. Enemies will also never be randomly generated with certain skills outside of their default skill kit that makes them annoying to fight, such as Cancel Affinity and Null Follow-Up, so you can spot certain heroes who have them in their default skill kit.
• The 2.7.0 update allows players to reset the map with those with 0 stamina costs, like the Grand Hero Battles, allowing less down time exiting and selecting the map again.
• Version 2.9.0 brought the new Combat Manual feature, an alternative to Send Home that allowed the player to clear up barracks space by turning as many as ten units at a time into manuals. While units turned into manuals can no longer fight, they can still be used for merges and skill inheritance. If the player ends up not needing certain manuals, they can instead exchange these manuals for feathers, and the player will receive feathers relative to the rarity of the manual(s) exchanged, as if the player were sending units home. Combat Manuals also came with a change to Unlock Potential, wherein units can be promoted without leveling up, letting the player conserve stamina, shards, crystals, and time, if they wish.
• Forging Bonds:
  • In Forging Bonds, when you max out a support score on a certain character, their matching support color will not show up again in battles for the rest of the event to allow the other characters to gain points without them being wasted on the maxed out ones.
  • Starting with the "Dueling Desires" Forging Bonds event, you are given the option to automatically equip any friendship-boosting accessories you have to your team before you set out to battle.
• Past Grand Hero Battle and Tempest Trials units can now be summoned using Heroic Grails, giving players who missed out on these units an opportunity to get them outside of those units being reran or gifted. There are a few catches to Heroic Grails, though: each unit summonable with Grails can only be summoned twenty times, at 4* only, and each summon of the same unit until the tenth raises the summon cost by 50 Grails.
• Traits, Assets, Flaws and Merges:
  • Since launch, summoned Heroes will have Assets and Flaws on two of their stats, with neutral taken into account as well. Flaws, however, would sometimes make certain Heroes weaker than other identical Heroes, especially with certain build. In February 2019, the first merge will now remove the Flaw as well as the two highest stats by +1, meaning players now will only need the Asset they want if they want to merge units, instead of worrying about their Flaws as well. Heroes with Normalized stats will also have the benefits of +3 stat increase from the first merge as well, albeit spread out on their top three stats at Level 1.
  • With update 3.2.0, players can see the Assets and Flaws of their and other players' units.
  • With update 4.9.0, players can use Trait Fruit to change a hero's Trait, even with heroes that are always be given Normalized Traits like the Askr Trio and the Grand Hero Battle units.
  • With update 6.4.0, players will no longer be able merge units if the one merging into another is at a lower rarity to prevent accidental merges that only gives SP and don't increase the unit's stats.
• In 3.1.0, Legendary and Mythic Heroes will now give the other stat boosts if they're sharing a season, with Mythic Heroes giving Legendary ones the stat boosts while also fulfilling extra lift gain and reduced lift loss conditions in Aether Raids, and Legendary Heroes giving the Mythic ones the stat boosts in most other modes, excluding the Blessed Gardens due to blessing restrictions.
• Aether Raids:
  • Prior to update 3.2.0, the first battle after a daily reset will always be free, due to the fact that the amount of Aether you recover every day might not be enough to spend on your next raid in higher lift tiers. The 3.2.0 update would later remove the free daily battle, in favor of halving Aether costs per raid, capping out at 50 Aether per raid, meaning that the player will always have enough Aether per day, even if the player did not upgrade their Fountain.
  • After a defense battle on your Aether Keep, even if you won or lost that battle, you will not lose any more lift for the next 20 hours, preventing a chain of defense losses from reducing your lift to a lower tier, but any more successful defense battles within that time will not reset the pity cooldown. There is also a threshold at 4000 lift and under where you do not lose any lift for losses at all.
  • Update 3.0.0 gave players the option to build the Escape Ladder for the Offense Team in Aether Raids. This structure refunds Aether when the Offense Team loses a raid (and before the 3.2.0 update, gives you another free attack if the daily free raid fails), and it can be used up to seven times per season (depending on its level).
  • Players can have the option to double down on Aether Raid attacks, where they can gain twice the lift and Aether resources at the cost of double of the Aether used to make maximum use of the player's Escape Ladders while also reducing the amount of time players need to play Aether Raids.
  • Update 4.4.0 have players now in Tier 17 and under have boosts to their Offense Fortress when attacking instead of at Tier 12 and under.
  • Update 4.7.0 has the Auto-Dispatch feature, which allow players send their raiding parties to automatically fight a weakened defense team and return after 20 hours up to three times per season, which can also be double downed, with 75% of the Lift gained from normally attacking, but cannot refund Aether with Escape Ladders and count towards quests this way.
  • Update 4.10.0 has the difference between the levels of the Offense Fortress and Defense Fortress become 0 if the Defense Fortress is a higher level than the Offense Fortress, preventing Defense Teams from gaining extra stats if such a scenario happens. The difference will also be calculated before low-tier tuning and bonus structures levels are calculated to the Fortresses.
  • Update 5.0.0, in addition to increasing the base lift from 80 to 100, allows players with specific Mythic bonus heroes on certain seasons on the attacking team will not lose lift gained if a player loses one of their heroes.
  • Update 5.8.0 gave players the option to build the Safety Fence structure for the Offense Teams, which forces the entire enemy team to end their turn after activating their start of turn skills if the Offense Team either is out of range of anyone on the Defense Team's attack range and/or all the Offense Team are within within 2 rows and 7 columns of the Structure (meaning that they never left the spawn area) until the end of Turn X, with X being the level of the Safety Fence structure, helping players by quashing Defense Team strategies that enable them to move and attack on Turn 1 and create extreme pressure on Offense Teams, such as the Rally, Restore and Dance Traps strategies, and any Defense Teams that include heroes with [Pathfinder] and units like Legendary Sigurd with his high mobility.
• Røkkr Sieges:
  • You will still deal full damage and gain score even if the Røkkr is at 1 HP remaining.
  • If you made a Røkkr go down to 1 HP and there are no more players in the queue to deal the final blow, an Anna will deal the last HP of damage to let you earn rewards and switch it to the next Røkkr boss.
• When an Idle Scout and Strike mission is finished in Lost Lore, which can take up to 20 hours, the game will notify you that it's finished, even with the game closed, and has an option to collect the rewards immediately as the notification pops up in-game.
• Completion on the quests for rewards in Heroes' Path will automatically count certain quests already completed for those who already cleared certain maps and reach certain tiers in competitive modes.
• Hall of Forms:
  • The randomized enemies will always attempt have at least one of each different weapons color outside of Colorless to allow all of your Formes to have at least one favorable matchup to allow any of them to have the first kill, and therefore be rewarded with acquiring skills or merges after battle.
  • There is an option to skip shaping your Forma to prevent overwriting any of their skills if any of the choices are undesirable and they are at the merge limit.
  • With Late-June 2020's Hall of Forms and beyond, all enemy heroes beyond Floor 8 will be from Book I and Book II, due to many heroes from Book III onwards have optimized stats and default loadouts that made them annoying and/or dangerous to face against, giving players a good chance to finish all the floors and get all the rewards, as well as having a lower chance to losing against those enemies, wasting a torch, and lose their chance to shape their Forma.
  • With update 6.1.0 in January 2022, beating Floor 13 and above will offer 2 options per A, B and C skill category rather than just 1 each. The same update also only offer skills that cost 240 SP or above as well as exclusive ones on the same floors as well, removing most of the undesirable skills that cost under 240 SP like Defiant Atk 3, later increasing it to 300 SP skills in update 8.2.0 in February 2024, and the April 2023 run onward also offer 2 options for the Weapon, Assist, Special and Sacred Seal skills.
• The Feint and Ruse skills can still be activated to debuff foes with the Rally skills if the target ally has either the same or better bonuses on the stats the Rally skill is supposed to be increasing.
• Pawns of Loki:
  • The first 5 heroes will always have a selection of at least one of each color if you included all of them in your Brigade to prevent any unfavorable matchups in the first three turns.
  • In update 5.2.0, playing on the Beginner difficulty and at Tier 1 on any difficulty will now generate enemy AI teams instead of player teams which they often field a very synergistic and powerful team, to help those starting the game mode or not wanting to face against those team have an easier time to score better.
  • In update 5.5.0, enemy units will no longer trigger [Savior] on their skills, due to how easy it is to activate that effect due to units being close together in that mode. Update 7.0.0 also negates the effect of the "prevent counterattack" status effect on the player's units, as well as any skills that immediately ends one of the player's unit's turn such as from Regular Seiðr's Future-Focused and Fomortiis's Nightmare.
• A merged unit will inherit almost everything from the unit that was merged into them. This includes all of their skills (base and inherited, learned and unlearned), weapon refinery, blessing, Dragonflower total and previous merges. While Dragonflowers don't add up^note for example, merging a unit with +4 Dragonflowers with a +1 unit will result in a +4 Dragonflower unit, not +5, merges luckily do. This means you can safely merge your +6 original unit into a new, unmerged copy with a more preferable boon and still end up with a +7 unit with all the original's skills, blessing, etc. available to them. The only things that don't carry over are their level and SP total, so you do need to spend some time or crystals re-leveling them.
• Tempest Trials:
  • Staff units are not part of the random spawn on the final maps of Tempest Trials to prevent healing to the boss of that map, especially from damage inflicted at the start of the map after losing and going to the player's next team.
  • In update 5.3.0, Tempest Trials+ will now have Target Score implemented, where players will now gain additional points if they reach a certain threshold for their high score in a run for the first time, starting from 150 points giving +300 points, up to 600 giving +3000 points, making it easier for players to get all the rewards faster without doing more runs for the entire duration of the Tempest Trials+.
• Limited Hero Battles place a restriction on which units you can bring, going by their game of origin, and all deployed units must survive. As a precaution against having too few heroes from said game (from bad gacha luck) or simply not having any good ones (which means Fake Difficulty from enemies targeting The Load), Limited Hero Battles allow you to deploy with less than 4 units, contrary to most other modes where you are forced to field a full team.
• Heroes Journey:
  • Like the above Hall of Forms, all the randomly generated enemies will not share a color outside of Colorless to provide favorable matchups for players.
  • In update 5.10.0, players can get Memory Fragments after watching Memento Events players have already seen equal to the amount of Rapport the Mementos Event gives to allow players to pick specific unseen Memento Events to watch, even from previous Heroes Journey events, at the cost of 20 Memory Fragments each.
• Summoner Duels:
  • Until a certain amount of wins are achieved, all Favor Battles are against bots named Kiran with 0 Favor Level to ease players into the mode without having to face other, potentially more competitive players first. Players can also face against the same bots if they lose enough times in a row to give them a win.
  • Players are still rewarded points Favor Levels for their characters even if they lose the match, but can only do so if they score beforehand, such as defeating units and controlling the Capture Area.
  • There is an option to limit matchups to only allow units released before and including Book III to have players play with and go against units that are not as potentially powerful as those released during Book IV and beyond.
• Seer's Snare:
  • Like the above Hall of Forms and Heroes Journey, all the randomly generated enemies will not share a color outside of Colorless to provide favorable matchups for players.
  • While skills that are offered does not include skills that trigger [Savior], trigger from Sing or Dance, affects movement after combat and only work in certain gamemodes, skills that compare the unit's stats to the foe's stats such as the Boost and Sabotage skills are also not options due to the increase in stats of enemies in later Timeless Rifts while the player's stats remain the same and therefore would not work as effectively against them.
  • The last two option of each A, B and C skills in the Vanir Seal rifts will always be 300 SP skills in order to offer powerful skills as options for players to power up their heroes without being screwed over by being offered only lower SP options.
  • Players have the Unwind Time option to go back either to the previous sub-boss or to the very beginning, where the latter can have players change their team and/or their skills while also retaining 20% of the Rift Vessels earned during the entire event, up to 20000 Rift Vessels retained, while also refunding the stamina used and transferring that stamina to the additional stamina that is not replenished daily.