What REALLY Makes A Good Hero?

Why the three things you probably think matter for your heroes, probably don’t.

I’ve said it a few times in various articles I’ve written for this site, and I’ll continue to say it: Shop Titans is a deceptively complicated game for the silly cartoon shopkeeper game you see in the app store. One of the most complex aspects is the hero system, and we very often get questions related to the simple idea of what makes a hero good or not.

There are three very common metrics that people tend to use when judging their heroes and all three are surprisingly bad for similar reasons. These metrics are:

• The hero’s Power stat
• Skill rarity
• The skill ratings you see on our TL,DR Heroes page / on the Hero Tracker developed by drakeonfire¹

This might sound a bit harsh, but I’ve said that (and I stand by) – anybody who tries to seriously tell you that any of these three things are important quite frankly doesn’t know enough about the game to be giving advice. In this article, we’ll cover the pitfalls of all three methods, as well as helping you to figure out how to actually judge your heroes.

Power

First up is the one that everybody always thinks about before they learn better: the Power stat. It honestly makes perfect sense why you probably think this matters for a few reasons.

• First off, it’s easily the most prominent thing that appears on the character sheet. It’s the biggest number, it takes up a lot of space, stuff like that.
• Your heroes are typically sorted by their Power stat in the list, so it looks like the best ones are at the top. It’s also one of the only things you can see on the hero summary list, which means it MUST be important, right?
• Heroes on the Leaderboard are ranked by their Power stat.
• Similar games that also have a Power stat WILL use it for determining how good that character is / their effective combat stats.
• The game automatically picks heroes for quests based primarily on their Power stat.
• If you use the Optimize button to equip your heroes, it will typically try to give them gear that increases their Power stat.
• Finally, heroes with low Power aren’t allowed to enter some quests.

The thing is though… Power doesn’t actually DO anything in most cases. Kabam has directly said that this stat isn’t used anywhere in combat calculations.

This stat only does three things. If it’s not on this list below, then their Power stat does absolutely nothing to affect it.

• The Airship during the Dragon Invasion event uses a character’s Power stat to determine how much Airship Power they provide.
• Quests have a minimum Power rating to keep out heroes who probably would have died anyway (although this is usually low enough that heroes who are just barely over it are still Pillsbury Toaster Scrambled).
• Showing off / leaderboard flexing.

The Power system is a way for the game to estimate roughly how good a hero probably is by using a formula that applies a weighting system to their stats. This comes with some issues, with the two biggest ones being – heroes who have a hard time stacking Power valuable stats are inherently going to lag behind (Wanderers and Clerics are notoriously pretty awful for this stat) AND that any hero who’s built to maximize Power will usually be extremely squishy. The Power formula favors high Attack and crit stats. This means that heroes built solely to pump their Power stat might do great damage, but they will drop dead if a single stray attack touches them. This might sound fine in a “the best defense is overwhelming offense” way, but you have to remember that the quest monster always attacks first. If they use an AoE or target the high Power hero first, they’re dead before they can do anything. It’s not inherently bad to have a high Power rating, but you do need to be careful with it. There are a few ways to work around it, with the simplest one being to replace some equipment with Attack or crit chance out with items that have HP or Defense on them instead.

If you want a more in-depth look at the Power system / how it’s calculated, and why it ultimately means nothing, please check out Ress’ excellent writeup on Calculating the Power Rating of a Hero we have hosted on this site. This is complex and very mathy, fair warning.

Rarity

Next up is skill rarity. You’ve very likely heard something to the effect of “rehire new heroes until you get two gold skills” or people asking how an endgame player got four gold skills, stuff like that. Rarer skills have higher numbers than their more common counterparts and are often direct upgrades over them.

^{The Epic skill Survivor for example is a direct upgrade over its Rare counterpart, Fast Healer. Survivor has 50% HP and 40% Rest Time Reduction compared to Fast Healer’s 40% HP and 30% RTR.}

However, this isn’t always a good thing. What if you have four Epic skills and they don’t compliment the hero’s job? Say you have a Dancer with these four skills: Impervious, Cloak & Dagger, Survivor, and Blurred Movement.

Admittedly, this is a very silly example. Nobody would ever actually do this but it’s a great introduction to this concept. This is a very bad build for one exceedingly simple reason: Dancers are attackers and this set has no offensive power at all. (The free crits the Dancer will gain from dodging attacks don’t count because you have no Attack or Crit Damage to actually do anything with said crits).

The second case is more complex but just as important (if not more so). What happens if you have four Epic skills that don’t make any sense together? Say you have a Berserker with the skills Warlord, Extended Warranty, Death Dealer, and Blurred Movement.

These are all individually great skills for a Berserker by themselves, but the issue with this setup is that they don’t form a coherent whole.

• Warlord is a weapon skill with no bonus Attack to multiply off of
• Extended Warranty really wants other stat multipliers for HP / Def / Atk to work off of
• Death Dealer is a Crit Damage skill with no Critical Hit Chance to proc it and no Attack to multiply off of
• Blurred Movement is a strong defensive option, but needs HP and Defense to back it up – A Fighter is going to inevitably fail a dodge roll and will need to tank some hits

Finally, there’s also the simple case of sometimes there simply ISN’T an Epic skill for what you want.

All Natural, Telling Blows, and Shield Master are extremely powerful skills with no Epic counterpart. AN / TB are huge bonuses to both crit stats for offensive heroes and Shield Master is basically mandatory for Velites while providing fantastic bulk to any other hero who can learn it. If you want one of these skills, you inherently cannot have a set full of Epic skills.

Skill Ratings (click to expand)

This next part is honestly the entire reason why I wrote this post in the first place. If you’ve spent any time exploring external tools for this game, you’ve likely come across the skill tier list displayed on either the Hero Tracker tool or on the TL,DR Heroes page on this very website. This is a system designed to give you an idea of how good the skills are for each class as quick reference. This ends up falling into some of the same issues we just covered when talking about skill rarity – it’s very possible for a set of four Epic skills or one with four highly rated skills on the tier list to be very weak overall due to missing tools or a lack of cohesion.

Before we talk about that however, let’s go over the skill rating system itself in more of a metatextual sense. Reiga and I were directly responsible for the current rating system² so here’s some important caveats about what went into it.

How Skills are Rated

The critical thing with these skill ratings is that each skill was rated in isolation for each class. In general, we assigned a rating for each skill to all archetypes and then tuned them up or down for specific classes as needed.

The key takeaway here is that since each skill was rated on its own, that means we did not consider how well the skill works when combined with others.

What Ratings Mean

Next up, let’s talk about what these ratings actually mean.

Essential skill, always a strong option.

Great auxiliary option, or slightly outclassed by something in the tier above.

Very functional, but may be a little weak. Often has direct competition with something (or several somethings) in a higher tier.

Minimal reason to use, an option in one of the higher tiers is almost always better.

Actively avoid. The class either has very little use for this skill OR there are way too many better options to consider it.

It’s very common to want to go for a full set of the highest rated skills of course. This is a very natural gamer thing – we want the best and want to try and avoid weaker options. However, something I can’t stress enough:

LOWER RATED SKILLS ARE NOT ALWAYS BAD.

Often, a set of lower rated skills is still very functional as long as you get all the pieces you need. This Arch Druid set for example has one skill from each tier except the last one. However, it’s very functional and importantly is very easy to set up since all skills are Common.

Weaker Alternatives

Finally, sometimes skills are rated higher than their contemporaries for the sole reason of “one is a direct upgrade of the other”. Blurred Movement is a “green” rated skill for Fighters and Acrobatics is a “yellow” rated one. This is solely because in a vacuum (which again is how we rated these), Blurred Movement is an objectively superior choice so it’s in a higher tier.

As far as I recall, the single exception to this rule we made was Sturdy for Fighters. Its Epic counterpart Impervious is indeed a direct upgrade over it, but Sturdy is such a strong skill for your tanks that it’s worth considering anyway (plus we didn’t want people throwing away Fighters who rolled Sturdy over Impervious). It’s the second best HP skill in the entire game, only beaten out by its big brother.

How Skills are Ordered

This next part is simple but I’m covering it because it’s an occasional point of confusion. Unlike most tier lists you may have seen, the skills here are not ordered by how good they are within their individual ranks³. The skills in each tier are sorted by rarity and then alphabetically by their tier 1 name.

That’s it.

Axe Master isn’t above Gun Master for Wanderers because it’s secretly the better option – it just happens to come first alphabetically.

What Actually Works

Now that we’ve gone over some of the common things that aren’t great metrics for judging your heroes, what IS a good way to figure out how good they are?

The best way to figure out if a hero is decent or not is to go by their overall skillset synergy. We touched on this with some of the earlier examples, but it basically boils down to three questions. If you can answer “yes” to the first two at minimum, then they’re a decent hero. The third question is also important but it’s a lot more subjective and variable based on your current situation. If you’re not sure about what you’re doing, you can skip that third question until you have a better handle on things.

1. Do they have all the tools they need?
   • Think things like weapon skills & universal Attack on attackers, good defensive power on tanks, Evasion on Rogues, crit stats on your crit based attackers, etc.
2. Does the set make sense together overall?
   • For this one, every hero has a role / job. If you’re using them as an attacker, then their skillset should primarily support that. If they’re a tank, they should be bulky enough to eat several hits. If you’re building a hero unconventionally, does every skill compliment that direction?
   • You can usually get away with having one skill that doesn’t mesh. This will inevitably make them a bit weaker at their primary job, but it can often help a lot. A great example would be putting a purely defensive skill on your attacker to give them safety. Sure, their average damage and damage per hit will go down, but this can often lead to better returns because the extra bulk lets them stick around longer to keep doing damage. Heck, this is nearly mandatory and is genuinely a great idea in current endgame content.
3. Are all skills strong enough for your game stage?
   • This one is much more subjective and will depend a lot on your gamestage. If you’re fairly early or you just hit ML53 and are doing your first major roster overhaul, don’t be too strict here. The majority of skills will honestly be fine as long as they have the stats you’re looking for at all. If you’re further along, maybe you bump up your requirements.
   • For example, early on you’ll be OK with a skill like Magic Darts on your Spellcasters. As you get more strict, then maybe Arcane Blast or better becomes your minimum. Then as you get into really late in the game, a skill needs to be equal to or better than Fireball to be worth considering.

Putting it All Together

We’ve talked a lot about essential tools and set synergy, but what does this actually mean? In practice, you really only need a couple things for your heroes. That will depend on their role and what you want to do with them, but here are some general notes.

• If their primary job is “deal damage”, you need a weapon skill. There are some exceptions here, but these are generally rare⁴ and it’s honestly never a bad idea to have a weapon skill even among these exceptions. If your build isn’t on that list, then a weapon skill is mandatory.
  • Shield Master counts for Velites / Praetorians here.
• If their primary job is “deal damage”, you need Attack. Full stop. One skill at minimum needs to be providing this.
  • Important note – this is DIFFERENT than a weapon skill. The description text ingame is extremely similar, but the distinction is big. Weapon skills boost the Attack stat of the equipped weapon itself and then universal Attack multiplies all sources of Attack.
• If you’re using a crit build, you need both CHC and CD. You can get away with running lower amounts of one of these, but not both.
  • CHC can be augmented with Spirits and equipment, so it’s possible to run a crit build with no CHC skills (although it’s more difficult and you will sacrifice some bulk). It’s generally not recommended to build this way unless you’ve tested and you’re really sure you know what you’re doing.
  • Every character has a base crit multiplier so it’s not the end of the world if you have CHC but no CD on the set.
• If they’re a Rogue, you typically want good Evasion (preferably as close to 75% as you can get). This is how this archetype survives a fight. Musketeers and Monks can kinda get away with having less since they tend to be focused more on attacking with critical hits.
  • If you’re primarily running Extreme quests, consider bumping this up to 95% if possible. Extreme gives all characters a 20% penalty to Evasion.
• Fighters are generally tanks. They have naturally high Threat and need to be able to take at least a few hits (even ones with offensive builds).
• If they’re a Spellcaster, you’re typically going to be building them to stack Attack or run a crit setup.
• If you’re running a hybrid set or using an unusual build (say tank Velite or offensive Ranger), get any mandatory tools from the build styles you’re meshing together first and then fill in the rest from there. The Hero Simulator is super helpful here.
• You can usually fit one purely defensive or pure utility skill on a hero. This will obviously make them less directly good at their primary job, but the added utility can often mean they do it better. Fighters can often afford to drop some bulk to help contribute some damage output and no Spellcaster / Rogue will ever complain about being able to eat an extra hit to soften bad luck.

Practical Examples

There are two examples of these principles that I like to use when talking about this concept.

You may recognize the first set here – it was used earlier in this article. As mentioned there, this set’s main issue is that the skills are all individually very strong, but they don’t make much sense when viewed as a whole. The second set is the inverse. While the individual skills are weaker, every skill has some sort of defensive component to it. This leads to a unified design – this hero is a tank with a splash of offensive power.

You can also see this directly in their stats. Even though they have identical gear, the second set has higher HP and Defense, making them a better overall tank.

This example is one I’ve been using for a while, because it illustrates these principles perfectly. If you’re not familiar with the hero system of ST, the first set looks like it blows the second away. Look a little deeper however, and you start to see some major issues. Critically, this set fails the first major criteria we mentioned previously – it does not have all the tools it needs. This set has no weapon skill and no bonus Attack, both of which are crucial for heroes whose primary job is “deal damage”. The weapon is the single biggest source of Attack for most heroes and a weapon skill gives a 200% or 250% bonus to that item’s Attack stat, which is then multiplied by any universal Attack. You THEN multiply that by their crit multiplier on a critical hit to get their final damage. These build off of each other so it’s really important to have a little of all of them. A very simple example of this principle is:

• 1 x 100 = 100 (No weapon skill, high Attack)
• 100 x 1 = 100 (Two weapon skills, no bonus Attack)
• 50 x 50 = 2,500 (Single weapon skill, moderate Attack)

The second set is again the inverse. It has weaker skills yes, but it has all the tools it needs. This becomes really apparent if we put both builds into the Hero Simulator.

You can see that the first has 69K average damage and crits for 76K, compared to 76K average damage and 98K crits on the second. “But Archon” you may be wondering. “Those numbers aren’t THAT different!”

This is true. Now take another look at the weapon on each set.

The first set is using a T13 Instrument (the best weapon type in the game) with 1,230 base Attack. The second set is using a T9 Dagger (tied for the weakest weapon type in the game with a few others) with a measly 370 base Attack. This is an unfathomably large difference, and yet the two sets’ damage output is roughly equal (still favoring the ‘weaker’ option). That should give you an idea of how important it is to have the right pieces on your heroes.

Now, one thing you may be wondering is “Can’t you reroll a skill on the first build to make it better?” Absolutely, you can! Buuut then it’s still missing either a weapon skill or bonus Attack. “Well then you can reroll a second skill to get the other!” Also yes, but think about what you’re saying for a minute. You’re suggesting to reroll two skills on a set with four individually great skills just to surpass a set with four skills that aren’t nearly as good on their own.

“Perfect” Heroes are Overrated

This is another one that might sound like a hot take if you’re not familiar with building your heroes, but you genuinely do not need the absolute best skills. This one is very understandable – we’re gamers and we like to go for strong options – but you can do a LOT with a little if you’re smart about it.

You can clear all content in the game with nothing but “weak” skills as long as you have all the pieces you need. For an extreme example, here are three with full Common skills (most of them rated “yellow” or worse) and exclusively Flawless equipment clearing the Terror Titan. Ashley was used as the Champion here and there’s a 99% chance of success with no booster.

Terror Titan

This is against Ancient Jungle on Hard. It’s the same exact skillset and equipment / spirit choices as earlier, but this test is with full NORMAL rarity equipment and they still breeze through the quest.

Ancient Jungle – Hard

Better skillsets make it easier of course and can allow you to get by with weaker equipment, but that doesn’t mean they’re required.

Conclusion

As you can see from the length of this article, the hero system in Shop Titans is incredibly complex and it’s very easy to get lost in the sea trying to figure it out. Skillset synergy is easily the most important thing that goes into making good heroes, but it takes some experience to understand what that actually means for practical applications. Once you get over that large hurdle however, the hero system opens up and you can start getting pretty creative with them. I love all the intricacies of how everything meshes together if that wasn’t obvious from the word count here. There’s nearly limitless possibilities as long as you check a few boxes.

If you want to take things even further, I’d highly recommend checking out Yuki’s excellent guide Welcome to the Jungle⁵. There’s a bit of overlap in the information shared there and here because a lot of this stuff is really important and worth stressing, but she covers building for Ancient Jungle (the hardest content in the game as of the T15 era) in great detail.

I know this is a LOT of info to take in, so if you have any questions on this subject, please join us on our Discord server! We’d love to help clear up anything that you may be struggling with.

Until then, I’m gonna go take a nap. This has been a lot of smashing words on my keyboard.

Last updated on:

1. It’s the exact same tier list – the TL,DR page literally pulls directly from the Tracker ↩︎
2. With some assistance from the STC Discord community, thank you to everyone who provided their feedback! ↩︎
3. Ain’t no way we have the time or mental energy for that one. ↩︎
4. Said exceptions being Monks / Grandmasters (duh, they literally can’t use weapons), full crit Sorcerers / Warlocks, Sorcerers / Warlocks with 350% or less bonus Attack from skills, full crit Spellblades / Spellknights / Druids / Archdruids, and any hero you checked the Simulator for to find that a weapon skill isn’t objectively the best choice. ↩︎
5. We got fun and games! ↩︎