Introduction
The Tier List is one of our most popular resources and a central topic of discussion for FEH players in our community forum and servers. With so many users engaging with this resource, we’ve endeavoured to keep our Tier List relevant and representative of the state of the game. This aspiration has led to an overhaul of the current Tier List: outlined below are a series of changes, updates and perspectives on this resource. While a Tier List will always be subjective, the changes made strive to ensure that this resource is useful to players.
Addressing Game Modes
In the interest of versatility, our Tier List previously considered aspects of all of FEH’s major competitive game modes, including both Arena and Aether Raids. With this update, we are shifting the criteria of our Tier List to only consider viability in Aether Raids.
Arena viability has been a contentious topic for years, based on the systems of team scoring and the role of bonus heroes. It has become increasingly difficult to value a hero’s effectiveness in this gamemode, but more importantly, it’s become unnecessary. Therefore, the Tier List will only consider Aether Raids from now on, as this game mode is more popular among players and encourages the use of heroes beyond those with high BST totals who would score well in Arena.
We plan to supplement this change with updated guides and articles addressing both Aether Raids and Arena to ensure that players can still find relevant resources for whichever game mode they’re seeking content for.
Tier Explanations and Update Articles
Our intention for Tier Explanations was to offer a concise reasoning for a hero’s placement in their given tier, but this aspect of the Tier List has been an ever-surmounting problem: with every new skill added to the game, hundreds of units must be re-evaluated and explanations quickly become outdated. As more heroes are added to the game, this becomes increasingly unsustainable. As a result, we’re removing Tier Explanations from the Tier List page and introducing an alternative.
In order to more effectively future-proof our resources and ensure that the content we create is relevant, placement and tier explanations will be offered in articles published around the time of a new update. While this first article serves to introduce the Tier List’s shift of focus and introduce the new features, future articles will address each hero who sees a placement change and offer explanations and reasons for the change to ensure that players are not misled by outdated explanations.
A Sixth Tier
With well over 500 unique playable heroes in the game at the present moment, placing units within only five tiers was resulting in a bloat in specific areas of the tier list. There was also a surmounting, unsustainable problem where the reasons for separating heroes between tiers were unsubstantial considering how many similar units were tiered alongside each other. To address these issues, the tier list now has six tiers instead of five. While determining placements for borderline heroes will always be a problem, we hope that the addition of a sixth tier will help alleviate some of these issues.
Support Icons and Defense Icons
The addition of support icons; a symbol to denote heroes with unique and noteworthy support capability, was influenced by the playstyle unique to Arena. With the emphasis on using bonus heroes to secure kills, heroes with strong support were elevated in usefulness and warranted mention. However, with the shift of focus from Arena to Aether Raids, these icons are no longer relevant. As such, they have been removed from the graphic.
In place of support icons, we’ve made a new addition: defense icons. This icon is attributed to heroes who perform exceptionally well on Aether Raids Defense, whose performance in this role exceeds their role on Offense and heroes who are tiered highly on the merit of their defense role. Only heroes in Tier 3 and above will have defense icons: while heroes below Tier 3 can have a strong defense role, they are not considered notable enough to warrant the defense icon.
Broadleaf Fan and Spendthrift Bow
Among dagger users and archers respectively, two weapons have proven to be considerably strong: the Broadleaf Fan and Spendthrift Bow. The high tiering of many heroes in these weapon types can be attributed to these specific weapons; sometimes in place of their unique weapons like in the case of Sothe: Zephyr.
Other weapons such as the Temari have affected placements of some heroes who stand to benefit the most, but the Broadleaf Fan and Spendthrift Bow were the greatest examples. We have considered an icon to signify whether a hero is tiered for an inheritable weapon over a PRF weapon, e.g. Sothe would have this icon to signify his Tier 2 placement is with Broadleaf Fan rather than Peshkatz, but we decided against this for now as we had already decided on the previously mentioned changes to support and defense icons, and we did not want to introduce too many icons at once at risk of muddling the clarity of our graphics.
We’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this, so please leave any feedback on the Gamepress community forum or in the relevant channels on our Discord server.
Galeforce and Percentage Damage Reduction
With this new focus on Aether Raids, two qualities stood out among many of our top-tier heroes: the ability to utilise Galeforce and proficiency with damage reduction skills such as Close Call and Repel. These were two areas of focus with our initial overhaul, but as we monitor feedback from this update we’ll seek other roles and areas of interest to improve upon.
Conclusion
That’s all for now! Thank you all once again for your patience with this update. With this new article format, we hope to be able to more directly address the feedback we receive on the community forum, Discord server and other areas of Fire Emblem Heroes discussion. Please get in touch with us on these channels regarding what you want to see from these resources and we'll be sure to address your feedback in future articles.
We look forward to reading all of your feedback to the changes and we hope you look forward to future Tier List Articles!
