As a mobile spinoff of the franchise, Heroes is no stranger to having mechanics that players tend to dislike or hate.
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In General
- The Timed Mission mechanic introduced in late Book 1. It puts a hard cap on the amount of turns you have, almost always three, meaning a player is pushed into aggressive playstyles that reward higher movement characters, which really made it hard for some to do them quickly enough or get the Orb rewards for Lunatic difficulty. The developers caught wind of the negative feedback and since mid-to-late Book 2 stopped doing that (however, two levels in late Book 2 are notorious for having enemies that won't move unless if you're in their position), but it makes going back to older levels for quests or things like Chain Battles frustrating.
- The game will penalize the player if a unit falls in battle by flat out treating the map as if the unit was not even on the team. While this was likely intended to prevent players from abusing difficult maps for higher experience without actually trying, this can be especially frustrating on maps that are designed to allow leveling up at a faster rate, such as the Warriors maps. In most cases you use those maps for leveling up a character, only to lose the unit and any levels/sp they earned. This was eventually fixed in the 2.5.0 update.
- The Super Asset and Flaw system, though on paper a good idea, is disliked by some because of the way it is handled. Essentially, some units have stats that, if their Asset or Flaw, either increases the stat, or decreases it, by 4 instead of 3. The idea seems to be a way to indicate a units strengths and weaknesses, but the issue is that not all units have either, and some can have multiple Assets and Flaws, making it seem like some units are just shafted stat wise, while others are given unfair advantages. Another part that makes it annoying is that the Super Asset or Flaw doesn't at times make sense with the units stats, such as Regular Xander getting one in Spd, despite being a Mighty Glacier, while Legendary Chrom has a Super Flaw in Def despite his largely tank focus build. While the Super Flaw goes away after the changes to the merge system, if the player never gets another copy, they have to potentially live with a weaker version of a unit because of random factors, not helped by the fact that a player will often want to chose a Super Asset when investing in a unit, since getting +4 to a stat is generally better for scoring purposes, but if its in a Dump Stat, it calls into question why it was ever handled that way. This is not helped by the number of top tier units very commonly having Super Assets in Atk or Spd.
- If you change a unit's Supports, their previous ones are erased and have to be built back up from scratch if you switch back. It really discourages experimenting with Support combinations, especially if you change the Summoner Support. Unless you purchase the FEH Pass, you have to pick a unit and stay with them until you change your mind.
- Arbitrary skill inheritance restrictions. Many skills are unable to be inherited by some weapons/colors or movement types, or at the very least, their upgraded forms cannot. In some cases this makes sense, like the Hone/Goad skills, Dragons Ire, and the Near/Far Save skills being locked to specific unit or movement types, but in most cases the restriction is random and outright silly; mounted units cannot use Flashing Blade despite Heavy Blade being available to them, while Healers cannot use any of the Blow skills at all. The strict limit on who can, and cannot, inherit skills makes it frustrating to invest in some units, because many top tier skills may just randomly be locked from units who need it, such as Cavaliers not being able to use Breath skills. The developers have been more willing to release unique skills for those limited to certain skills, but it remains very disliked because there isn't a clear reason why since most skills randomly limited are often not strong enough to really justify limits. This especially is bad for Colorless Healers, who can't use a wide amount of skills for no reason, and it took years for many to get skills that could just be used by them that were worth using.
- In some maps with reinforcements, more precisely ones where the enemy won't attack until you get into their range or attack them, enemies will spawn in depending on which foe you kill, rather than the turn or amount of foes you've slain. This can become very problematic if you were to kill one foe, only to then spawn another or even more, causing your units to be squashed in, or worse, end up beside a foe whom they can't kill or will be killed by. One glaring example is Eirika's LHB where defeating the Lance Fighter, who is the front of the lines, will spawn 3 cavaliers at the bottom section, 2 of which are ranged and a way from the rest of the foes.
- The Feh Pass exclusive quests not only still show up for players who aren't subscribed to it, the game will automatically redirect the player to those quests if they don't have any other quests cleared. It comes off as intrusive advertising for the Feh Pass, which, among other examples of this such as a popup reminding players that they need to subscribe to the pass if they reach 40 summons on a banner that can only be sparked with said pass, is a big part of why it's controversial among the fanbase. It notably used to be worse when the system was first introduced, as the quests were flagged as normal quests even if you didn't have it, meaning players were left with open quests they couldn't get rid of that made it hard to know what quests they had to finish, requiring a later update to make them their own color.
Summoning
- The bonus summoning chance only applies to the focus you summoned on, so if the focuses rotate, your chance resets. If you're really unlucky, you have to sink a lot of orbs into one focus just to utilize that bonus chance.
- The fact the player cannot do anything about what color orbs appear during a summoning session. Numerous times will a player want a specific unit or color, only to get none of the colored orbs they want, causing them to potentially waste their free summon/5 orbs. Despite this being something people have stated since launch to be a problem, nothing has been done to help fix this (likely due to the design), so it remains a highly disliked aspect of the summoning process.
- Some of the 3-4 star units from the summoning pool, notably Regular Hana, Peri, Clair, Regular Shigure, Regular Hawkeye, Regular Fae, Python, Kaze, Leon, Legault, Brady, and Kiragi have two text boxes of summoning dialogue instead of just one. There's no option to fast forward or skip the summoning dialogue, which can make summoning those units feel more like a chore to get through than other units who have only one text box of dialogue.
- Some of the instant demote units weren't given out as quest reward units when they debuted. These units are Bantu, Valbar, Ross, Tanya, Benny, Regular Tanith, Atlas, Ricken, Regular Elice, Lapis, and Wil. Given how large the summoning pool of 3-4 star units is, with it continuing to grow as more units get released, it's usually going to take a long time to obtain these units, let alone enough copies to +10 merge them. To put things in perspective, the odds of fully merging a 5 star focus unit on a New Heroes banner are much higher than fully merging an instant demote unit from that same banner.
Aether Raids
- One big issue, initially, was the ever-increasing Aether costs. At the higher tiers, you may have needed over a hundred just for one play. As you can only upgrade your fountain to restore 70 Aether each day, that meant that sometimes, all you got was your free play for the day. IS addressed this by capping the Aether cost at 50, but they removed the free play per day as well, so there may still be instances where you only get to play Aether Raids once that day.
- The way Lift loss works is a point of contention. When you lose lift due to your defensive team losing, there's a 20-hour period in which losses don't reduce your lift. This leaves how much lift you lose up to chance. You could have a ironclad defense and successfully fend off every raiding party... but if the encounter after that 20-hour grace period is one where your opponent completely curbstomps your defense, you suffer the full lift loss.
- And on the flip side, lift gain during offense as it's very luck-based — sometimes you might go up against a weak team; other times you might fight a near-perfect defense. Mess anything up, especially in the high tiers and with no take-backs, and you can suffer a hefty Lift penalty, if not an outright loss. With the (relatively speaking) high costs just to play and limited mulligans (Escape Ladders), it can quickly become very tedious and unenjoyable for a lot of players.note
- Structure and trap upgrades cannot be reversed, which is especially a problem for the Bolt Trap. This trap deals more damage at higher levels, but not only does it also damage the defending army, it can actually help offensive teams as their units hit by higher levels versions of this trap will fall under the HP threshold for their Wings of Mercy units. It's because of these reasons that several players never upgrade their Bolt Trap and use it just to end the action of whoever ends their turn on it, but unfortunately, those who have already done so are out of luck in that regard.
- If you delete the bookmark data or find yourself in a situation where you're unable to recover it, the Escape Ladder straight up doesn't trigger, resulting in your Aether going to complete waste.
- Chaos season throws a curveball when it comes to gaining lift. You have to get at least one kill with the bonus unit you are using to gain 20 extra lift per match (40 for doubled Aether matches). Prior to the 6.10.0 update, it was very easy to forget about this mechanic, since there was no indicator to let you know that you got a kill with the bonus unit, and if you defeated the opposing team and realize that you didn’t gain as much lift as you thought you would, then it was too late, as the Escape Ladder wouldn't help if you already won a match. Thankfully, the 6.10.0 update added a notification in the bottom left where the settings are that lets you know when you’ve achieved a kill with a bonus unit.
- Similar to Arena, one of the bonus unit slots rotates between Regular Alfonse, Regular Sharena, and Heroes Regular Anna during non-chaos weeks. However, Legendary Fjorm, a free-to-play water legendary hero, is also part of this rotation. This becomes a problem if water season is not active while she's a bonus unit (or if you don't have her), forcing you to use a different unit to score optimally in Offense for the week.
Other Game Modes
- The way teams are formed in the Voting Gauntlet takes Luck-Based Mission to an annoying extreme. Players can only pick one of their characters in their three man team, while the rest are chosen randomly from other players. Problem is, the game doesn't bother trying to keep the teams balanced at all. This can result in situations like the player having a team of blue units while the enemy team only has green units. Also, sometimes each team has a character with much lower stats than the rest, making them dead weight. This became more bearable starting with the April 2018 Gauntlet, since players can just try again immediately if they lose a battle.
- While Heroic Ordeals have few complaints, the Dragonflowers you receive as rewards are more disheartening. Trials for first and second-year units reward a measly two and eight Dragonflowers, respectively. Fully upgrading a unit's stats through Dragonflowers requires about 600-800 of them. Even if you own own a lot of those units, you might not have enough to increase even one unit's stats, so unless you get higher on tiered modes like Aether Raids, you basically need to work to get a copy of every unit released just to get a steady supply.
- The Shield phase of Mjölnir's Strike, the one with proper FEH gameplay, is only active for a day. Unable to log in that day or just forgot? Too bad. Thankfully, this was later changed to be extended to two days long in update 5.3.0.
- Speaking of Mjölnir's Strike, the feather rewards. To get them, you need to use any of your Counter Arrows in the Counter phase in order to be eligible to receive them (and Dragonflowers at Askr LV. 30) after the event ends. The thing is that the Counter phase last only 20 hours before it ends, and just after the Shield phase. Miss using any of your Arrows within that time, and you will not be able to receive those feathers, and considering that the amount of feathers you can receive is up to 3000, this is especially damning.
- Resonant Battles. You get only nine (formerly five) attempts per week with no way of gaining more (unlike the other Coliseum events where you get many dozens more — if not infinite — attempts depending on mode) and while letting Thieves escape or losing allies will dock you many points, failure will give you a zero score. The fact that Allegiance Battles (which arguably gives better rewards including Orbs and feathers) have been reduced to every other week doesn't help. This was later changed in update 4.10.0, where players are now been given unlimited amount of tries in Resonant Battles, allowing players to experiment with their heroes in that mode to get as much score as possible.
- Collecting the rewards in Rökkr Sieges after your first match can be rather tedious. The rewards all have their own message box pop up along with the quests, resulting in up to thirty-four text boxes that you have to manually close if you earn the max score of 200,000 points on your first match. And since there are three rounds, you have to do this three times every time this game mode rolls around.
- The level up quotes cannot be skipped, which becomes a problem in Hall of Forms where each forma unit starts at level 10. Reaching level 40 with all four units means having to sit through a grand total of 120 level up quotes, which can make this game mode feel longer than it should.
- If you want to collect all the daily rewards for Heroes' Journey and Attuned Auto Battles, you can't afford to miss a single day of playing these game modes at least once, or you'll miss out on those rewards. This is especially bad for the former, since each day of clearing a map in that mode gives you 3 orbs, which is something that no player is going to want to miss out on.
- The bonus unit kill mechanic in Arena is universally disliked. You have to kill at least one enemy unit with your bonus unit(s) to get an extra 12 points per match. This is especially brutal if you’re forced to use a weak bonus unit against a fully invested foe. Also, it was even worse when it was first introduced, since the bonus points were split across each of the enemy units, which meant you had to have your bonus unit kill every single unit on the opposing team to get all of the bonus points.
- In Hall of Forms, units that are redeemed as Formas are not eligible for skill inheritance. While this is an Obvious Rule Patch to prevent players from easily acquiring premium skills for their other units, this has the rather nasty side effect of making Rearmed and Attuned Heroes permanently ineligible for skill inheritance if you merge a Rearmed or Attuned Hero to their Forma version, taking away the most valuable aspect of these types of heroes.
- One of the bonus titles in Resonant Battles can be Tokyo Mirage Sessions, despite not only having no Harmonic Heroes, but also no new units from that game since January 2020. This forces you to rely entirely on the other bonus title of the week for this game mode.
Voting Events
- The Choose Your Legends voting polls sort characters by their game and portraits. This has lead to many characters having their votes divided up between two to three versions of themselves. Finn is the most infamous in this regard. His votes are divided into three selectable versions: One for his Thracia 776 appearance, and two different counts for his younger and older appearances in Genealogy of the Holy War! What makes this particularly baffling is that Lewyn and Arvis, two other characters who appear with different portraits in the different generations, don't have this problem. Marth in particular would have gotten second place in the second Choose Your Legends poll if his votes weren't divided between his Shadow Dragon and Mystery of the Emblem incarnations, costing him a Brave version of himself. Mercifully, the third poll fixes this by tallying the votes of characters with multiple appearances together (although there are some exceptions: Camus/Zeke/Sirius due to going under different names, and young and old Tiki due to a 2000 year Time Skip). This also applied to Arvis and Oifey in Choose Your Legends 5, though this was addressed the next year.
- When voting for heroes in certain voting events, notably A Hero Rises, the heroes are separated by color and are listed by the number of times that hero was tapped by the players from top to bottom. This makes it significantly tougher than it should be for players to find a specific hero to vote for if they are in the middle of the list. Even worse, it's easy for people to rig the number of taps with bots so that some heroes end up at the top of the list, making them more likely to be voted by people who don't scroll down the list.
