Hero Academia

Heroes! The arguable ‘true endgame’ in Shop Titans (and quite a lot of depth for a game about being a shopkeeper.)

Last Updated: 7th January 2023

Introduction

Hi there and welcome to the hero academia! On this page you’ll find a brief overview of the different hero classes and quest mechanics.

Hero Overview and Types

Let’s begin with one of the most important rules, especially if you’re new to making heroes:

What this means is that you should focus on acquiring a roster full of heroes that can clear all content, before you focus on making ‘perfect’ heroes, or rerolling! You don’t need to be rerolling 100 different geomancers when you’ve just hit level 53 to find a “perfect” one for example.

The second most important rule is never hire a class for gems. It’s really not worth it.

Heroes are segregated into 3 types –

• Fighter (Red)
• Rogue (Green)
• Spellcaster (Blue)

For the purposes of these analytics, we will refer to each type by their colors, red/green/blue.

Red Type (RT)

The ‘tank’ type. These guys simply do not die unless the odds are stacked wildly against them! Their base HP and DEF are incredibly high, allowing them to tank even the toughest opponents. That said, with great tankiness comes a burden of effectiveness in the fight, and it becomes much more difficult for red types to contribute as more than just a meat shield.

Let’s take a quick look at what ability each red type has and what role you might use it for.

All abilities are listed at their maximum level of potency, with any post-promotion benefits included.

A soldier is an excellent choice if you are not able to reach Training Hall levels that allow for normal skill acquisition. Mercenaries are able to grab their full set of skills far earlier, with the 4th skill coming in at level 29! The increased boost from Champion skills means they can have a pretty low rest time with Lilu as well.

Little known bonus fact: mercenaries have better odds to roll rare skills than any other class.

Barbarians are very tanky with their extra health but unfortunately being only a 2 skill hero means you can’t really take advantage of this. The additional threat is a neat bonus, but in practice the 90 base threat of any red type is normally more than enough to protect the heroes who need protection.

Once promoted however their extra threat is also added as a multiplier to their attack stat. This allows Chieftains to have a high damage output whilst also having incredibly high health and defence, making them one of the best tank options for your roster.

Super crazy defence values – we’re talking insane levels. This makes Knights a formidable option for your warrior slot – they can take damage like no tomorrow and are cheap to build/recruit. A solid member of any team.

Lords take this defence value to the extreme and when paired with some health skills can boast some incredible stats for tanking. Due to how well a Knight can tank you don’t always need to promote them to Lord. They also make a great choice for breaking Light-attribute elemental barriers.

Rest time is multiplicative, and with that comes diminishing returns. However, a Ranger will still rest faster than other heroes, and there is definitely merit in having a team of them on quick rotation. To fully benefit from this innate, you will want more than 1, or build them to solo! They also have a good amount of inbuilt evasion, making them very durable.

Promoted, a Warden is a great tank that can either be used to underman content or to form part of an amazing rest reduction team which can quest very frequently.

Samurai’s are a one trick pony, and while it’s a pretty cool trick they are expensive to optimize and not really rewarding. You could build a party of 4 of them and go round obliterating things, just that goal could be done in other less expensive ways.

Promoting a Samurai gives them a slight defence upgrade in the form of guaranteeing to evade an attack made in the first round of combat. This isn’t really a game changer though it is nice for solo builds.

This built-in ability has a max potency that overtakes even the best of the best ATK and EVA skills. When a Berserkers HP is below 25%, the total benefit of this innate shoots up to +120% ATK and +30% EVA. This is a colossal benefit and you should aim to take full advantage of this – a berserker can do respectable damage whilst still acting as a tank for your team.

A promoted Berserker isn’t a bad idea if you just want to have some sort of ungodly tank, but there are better options.

RT – General Strategy

Red types are mitigating most damage simply by being a red type. Adding extra health and defence is a solid plan but you should not sacrifice too much of the types damage output to do so.

If your fight has ended and you’re above 50% health for example, you might be over-mitigating the content and should think about some gear swaps to lower HP/DEF while increasing ATK/CR/CD.

RT – Fitting Into The Team

A single red type can make any team better.

You generally do not need more than 1 in the squad you send to whatever quest. They are fantastic heroes, but their damage output will normally not match the likes of the green and blue types. Your goal is to absorb the hits, while contributing as much damage as possible to assist in downing the enemy in the lowest amount of rounds possible.

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Green Type (GT)

These classes rely on either evasion or critical hits to get the job done. Many of the innate abilities enhance these traits and when equipped well green types will decimate their opponents! Their greatest weakness though lies in the fact that Evasion caps at 75% (with an exception for Pathfinders who cap at 78%) and these heroes are not known for their ability to take hits. The fight can start going badly if the enemy takes a swing at them and they fail to dodge.

Let’s take a look at what ability each green type has and what role you might use it for.

All abilities are listed at their maximum level of potency, with any post-promotion benefits included.

Your standard Thief comes with an in-built weapon skill which allows you some flexibility with their 2 skill slots. Their main power however comes from their promoted form – Tricksters get an improved version which allows for great weapon flexibility and the added health is nice as well, given that green types usually have issues bringing that stat up to par.

Their ability allows you to steal extra items when running them with Polonia – more details explaining the strategy and builds you would use can be found in Tyco’s Plundering with Polonia guide.

Monk’s receive heavy boosts to their Ring slots, and the added Critical Damage is excellent! These guys are sadly without a weapon slot, which is where a large portion of ATK value can come from when combined with a weapon skill.

When promoted a Grandmaster can obtain the Destructive Strikes skill, which gives them an extra 150% Attack and 300% Critical Damage (or “lots”.) It’s a skill you should aim for on any Grandmaster however it’s not possible to obtain until after you promote them.

Boosts to critical hit chance are always commendable, and always improve hero potential. Having a boosted critical hit chance built in, as well as increase critical damage to go with it, is a fantastic innate starting point! Musketeer’s biggest weakness is that the later green type classes overshadow them without a promotion.

Promoted you are rewarded for building your Conquistador around their innate. This opens up some build flexibility as you can look at some critical hit chance options and not be super concerned if you lack critical damage. They can reach some incredible crit damage numbers and are able to reliably land them, making them a solid choice for any roster.

The multiplier adds another .25 to your critical damage stat, so if you had a baseline critical hit damage stat of x3, at max stacks your critical damage stat would be x4. All stacks are lost should you fail to crit.

Wanderers have an incredibly easy time reaching the evasion cap due to their innate. Whilst this can sometimes be a bane as it can be a bit easy to overcap without meaning to, it also makes them a very useful/cheap hero for your roster that can afford to go for health/crit skills without trading survival.

They make a great choice for clearing Tower of Titans if you find yourself struggling there – 3 of them + Lilu can generally make short work of it.

Promoted they are a very formidable hero and are the only class that can currently surpass the evasion cap (they can reach 78%.) This helps slightly counter the issue wanderers can run into with regards to over-capping evasion but you’re probably still going to run into it (great for Extreme though as they’ll easily counter the penalty there.)

The classic Ninja has long been hailed as one of the most potent hero classes, and rightly so! Very evasive out the gate, with a built in 40% critical hit chance, these guys will likely make quick work of most enemies if given proper gear.

The greatest weakness though is the conditional on the innate. Being damaged kills these boosts, making the Ninja effectively have no innate. Additionally the enemy always attacks first, potentially hitting the Ninja and eliminating the passive boost before the Ninja even attacks!

Once promoted to Sensei they have a way to mitigate this – they will regain their passive 2 rounds after losing it. It works is like this:

-Enemy attacks and hits
-Sensei attacks (no passive)
-Enemy attacks again (doesn’t matter if it hits or you evade)
-Sensei attacks (no passive)
-Passive activates again now before the enemy attacks

Although it’s still possible for them to be locked out of their innate if they were to get very unlucky you can help limit that by using them in high burst-damage teams (and they can do some insane burst numbers.)

This built-in ability has a unique, and class defining trait – when a Dancer dodges and attacks, their next attack is guaranteed to crit. This effectively turns their evasion stat into a second critical hit chance! To top it off, the innate comes packaged with added critical damage to pump up the potency. This ability causes +EVA skills and gear to be weighted extremely high when designing a Dancer due to it essentially being 2 stats.

Acrobats are arguably the strongest class in the game at the moment (at one point the best roster was theoretically 25 of them although the introduction elemental barrier mechanic has tempered this.) However, given how strong dancers are already this should be considered a very low priority for promotion.

GT – General Strategy

Green types do not have incredible base stats, and particularly low HP. They need much more help than other classes to perform their roles with proficiency. That said, the amount of ‘help’ they need is not insurmountable by any means.

Generally, 50%+ EVA is the target, with stat priorities falling more toward ATK/CR and HP afterwards. Given the fact that you can hit upwards of 40% Evasion without skills on many green types, it is fairly easy to reach this baseline currently.

GT – Fitting Into The Team

A Green type fits nicely into any team, and anyone who says otherwise isn’t watching their fights.

On paper, it looks like if you send a Green type with let’s say, a Berserker, they will take almost no hits and never utilize their evasion or innate abilities. This is false, and threat cannot be trusted!

Yes the Berserker would probably take most of the single target hits to the face instead of your Green type, but all enemies AoE at a 20-25% rate!

This is huge, and a team with 1 or more Green types on it will absolutely conquer any AoE spam enemy (of which there is a surprising amount) in record time.

In short – They are not just solo’ers.

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Blue Type (BT)

Highest base attack values in the game… That is essentially the best way to describe these powerhouses. A Blue type will hit very hard, very consistently, and do it without needing much help from skills and gear. They do have some drawbacks, mainly low HP values, but generally nothing that cannot be fixed with gear choices. A Blue type on any squad is a substantial boost to the overall win chance, with great potential to enable low man teams to succeed.

Let’s take a look at what ability each blue type has and what role you might use it for.

All abilities are listed at their maximum level of potency, with any post-promotion benefits included.

Like Thief the Mage class comes with an inbuilt weapon ability, though not as potent it also comes with a nice overall attack multiplier too.

Mages receive a substantial boost to stats and innate with promotion – they are one of the few classes where you can double up on weapon skills and come out ahead. They are free to hire, meaning you could reroll them at little to no cost, hunting for that perfect 1st skill roll.

All that being said however they do come up a bit short when compared to other blue-types. The developers have stated they will get a buff to their innate at some point in future which should hopefully help them out.

Clerics heal themselves every turn – basically a built in, beefed up Lizard spirit. It has its merits, but is ultimately overshadowed by the raw ATK increases of other Blue types.

However, when promoted to Bishop their immense staying power becomes a massive boon – you are able to use them to solo fights that others would struggle in just by being able to heal most of the damage you take each turn or if you want to do something more exciting you can create a team of them that can never die – see this guide on the Immortal Quartet for details.

A Druid receives a big boost to their equipped Herbal Medicine, Meals and Amulets, which stacks HP, DEF, and ATK fairly high! Even pre-promoted, this class can very easily put up impressive numbers and be a very formidable spellcaster. The HP/DEF boosts from their Herbal Medicine, Meals and Amulets give them much needed survival assistance, and they will fit well in any team.

If promoted to Arch Druid, the scaling improves dramatically with the raw ATK boosts from herbs combined with +ATK skills, putting Druids on course to potentially perform even better than their other Blue type peers!

Even before promotion a Sorcerer is a wrecking ball capable of performing almost as well as its big brother the Geomancer. Post-promotion with the 4th skill slot and increased base stats, this is even more pronounced and they become one of the best damage dealers! Spells have insanely high attack values, which are further increased with the innate. The exclusive skills pack some of the highest additional value out of any skills, and some are even common rarity!

Keep in mind that for Sorcerer/Warlocks, raw attack will outperform weapon damage.

The Spellblade has built in power creep and can equip almost any piece of gear. This further power creeps with newly released items, as odds are the Spellblade can use them. 20% to all equipment means you can also get away with cheaper gearing options. Their ability to damage any elemental barrier is also pretty handy, though it should be seen as a supportive breaker rather than your main source.

Spellknights take the creep further and also get +50% stats from equipment with innate elements (this is referring to blueprints that craft already-enchanted items, as in the blueprints you can find from chests.)

This built-in ability has a max potency that reaches +250% ATK! That is higher than the best epic skills, and this class has it built in upon being hired. A Geomancer is only as beefy as his gear is enchanted! This is crucial, and you can not make concessions on element tier choice. A Geomancer demands all highest tier elements on all 6 pieces of gear, no exceptions.

Astramancers take that to a more ridiculous degree, though similar to Acrobats in that they shouldn’t be a high priority soul target.

BT – General Strategy

Blue types are all about bringing maximum firepower to smite the enemy in as few turns as possible. Though they can be a bit fragile and lack the evasion of green-types to help there they have gear choices that can keep them up and they’re also the lowest threat class – their odds of being attacked directly are slim if you have a red-type along with them.

BT – Fitting Into The Team

A Blue type fits into literally any team. They bring consistent damage output, and easy results.

Their true hidden talent lies in their ability to translate raw ATK into replacing the need for extra members entirely!

A Red type hero + 1 Blue type is a duo squad capable of anything, assuming they are both geared appropriately.

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Seeds and Blossoms

Seeds

Seeds give you extra stats on your heroes and champions. Each hero/champion can have 40 seeds of each type:

• Seeds of Power (red) give +4 ATK
• Seeds of Vitality (green) give +1 HP
• Seeds of Resistance (blue) give +4 DEF

As a general guideline you should normally aim to use seeds on your champions first – that’s because they’ll be around forever whereas your heroes may be replaced (more so if you’re not in the late game for hero building.)

There isn’t really a “wrong” order as such when it comes to picking champions to seed, the only one you may wish to keep in mind is to not rush to use Seeds of Power on Polonia (due to her ability needing the fight to go long you don’t want to increase her damage. It’s not a problem if you have or end up doing, just it’s not exactly a priority.)

Blossoms

Blossoms are an item which allow you to increase the seed cap on your champions and heroes to 80. The most potent of these is the blossom of vitality – being able to add another 40 base health to your heroes can be a pretty big increase to their survivability.

The trade-off here is the cost of blossoms – they can only be obtained via a full moon fusion recipe (so you either need to own Mundra or wait for a full moon in the real world) and cost 10 seeds and a T5/Epic quality or higher item.

Prioritise blossoming your titan souled heroes first but only after making sure your heroes/champions are already seeded (you could blossom your champions such as Donovan with the vitality one so he stops dying the moment an enemy says “boo” to him but it likely won’t give you as much as an impact as a hero would.)

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Quest Mechanics

Whilst questing itself is a pretty straightforward mechanic (send strong heroes to go rob innocent monsters) there are a few things you should know that aren’t really explained in game.

Bosses

Bosses respawn on a fixed schedule – it doesn’t matter if you last fought it 2 days before respawn or 1 minute before respawn they appear at the same time for everyone. You can find their schedule on Nerilea’s event calendar – everywhere you see a boss face is when it’ll spawn so try to make sure you’ve killed it before then so as to not miss out.

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Mini bosses

Mini bosses are random encounters that can appear in regular quests/ Every non-boss quest has a 1-3% chance to spawn as 1 of 5 ‘mini-boss’ variants, These are stronger than normal enemies and also have increased rewards.

	Boss	HP	Dmg	Crit Rate	Evasion	AoE Chance	Rewards
	Huge	2x	1x	1x	+0%	2x	2x Hero XP, 2x Loot, increased key drop %
	Agile	1x	1x	1x	+40%	1x	2x Hero XP, 2x Loot, increased key drop %
	Dire	1.5x	1x	3x	+0%	1x	2x Hero XP, 2x Loot, increased key drop %
	Wealthy	1x	1x	1x	+0%	1x	2x Hero XP, 3x Loot, very likely key drop
	Legendary	1.5x	1.25x	1.5x	+10%	1x	3x Hero XP, 2x Loot, increased key drop %

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Elemental Barriers

Every monster in Cinderlake Volcano (as well as Extreme difficulty enemies) has an elemental barrier protecting them. Whilst this barrier exists all damage dealt to the enemy is reduced – it starts at an 80% reduction (i.e. lots) and becomes weaker as the barrier is damaged. To destroy it, you need to attack the enemy with a hero whose element-type matches that of the barrier.

Example:

As you can see in the above picture, we’ve got a slightly upset crab with a barrier around him. We can see the barrier’s health (350) and its element type (Water.) Let’s hit him with the Astramancer (Geomancer/Astramancer element is Water.)

You can see that along with doing damage to the enemy the health of the barrier has been reduced. Once we lower it to 0 all heroes will do their full damage.

The amount of damage you deal to the barrier is based on that hero’s element score (so if you have an element score of 90, you’ll do 90 damage to the barrier if you match the element.) A higher score means you do more damage which encourages the use of the affinity system even if you don’t have skills that call for the extra element points.

Due to them being able to wield any element, Spellblades will only deal 30% of their element total as damage to the barrier. Whilst that doesn’t sound like much, the flexibility of having an answer to any barrier means they’re worth considering for your roster.

You can see what element type you need on the quest setup screen:

The barrier types are pre-determined and do not change. As an example, anyone running Cinderlake Volcano for Crush Claws will be faced with a Water barrier on Easy/Medium/Hard/Extreme. .

Champions also have an element assigned to them which allows them to damage matching barriers as well, allowing them to help cover any gaps you may have in your roster:

• Argon: Light
• Lilu: Water
• Sia: Air
• Yami: Dark
• Rudo: Fire
• Polonia: Water
• Donovan: Fire
• Hemma: Dark
• Ashley: Earth

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Extreme Difficulty

Extreme Difficulty unlocks at level 40. As well as having an elemental barrier on each of them Extreme difficulty quests also give a -20% evasion penalty to your heroes. Should this make your hero have negative evasion (as in below 0) they’ll have an increased chance to take critical hits from the enemy.

This tends to be more of an issue for tanks as you can only mitigate a small part of the damage a critical hit does but it’s something to keep in mind.