Fire Emblem Heroes mobile game has been around for quite some time now. We’re almost at it’s 3rd anniversary. It’s my current longest running game. There are many game modes and lots of ways to build any hero. I still enjoy playing the game until now. If I have to pick one thing out of all of Fire Emblem Heroes shortcomings, I’ll have to say that the summoning heroes is the one thing I like the least. In fact, I wish there’s no summoning heroes feature. Unfortunately, I think there’s no way that Intelligent Systems will ever change their gacha model to a purchase model. To me, gacha model is equivalent to gambling. It’s not a good model.
At the beginning when Fire Emblem Heroes was launched in Feb 2017, there’re only 90 heroes total in the game. Heroes appears in different rarities from 3 stars to 5 stars. I don’t quite recall the breakdown for each rarities, but at that time the heroes in the 5 stars pool was not as bloated as now. However, as time goes by, IS kept on adding new heroes after new heroes every single month, we’re now at 465 total heroes by the end of 2019. 70 of them are Grand Hero Battle or Tempest Trials heroes.
Here’s the chart that shows the trend of heroes count over time
On average, IS has been adding between 10-11 new heroes per month. In the past 5 months, they’re adding between 12-13 new heroes per month. So far, for January 2020, they have added another 10 new heroes (1 GHB and 1 Tempest Trials heroes). Based on the new calendar that’s just released, I project that we’re going to have 16 new heroes total for January 2020 (1 GHB, 2 Tempest Trials).
Since the heroes are being added every single month, the summoning pool becomes bigger all the time. This leads to smaller chance to get any particular heroes we want. The cost to summon a particular heroes has increased considerably.
Total number of heroes has increased from 90 to 475 heroes as of today (includes Travant which is the GHB hero on 1/12). 72 of them are GHB/TT heroes. 105 of them are special heroes (seasonal). 27 of them are Legendary/Mythic heroes. So, there are 271 heroes in the permanent pool. So, we’re at a point where the permanent pool is 3 times as big as when it was first introduced. For simplicity, let’s assume all heroes in the permanent pool has the same chance of being summoned. At the beginning, there’re 90 heroes (assume all of them are summonable), each heroes has a 1.11% chance to be summoned. With 271 heroes in the permanent pool, we’re at 0.37% chance to summon a particular hero. This is simply not sustainable for players to keep up. They need to do something. I wonder if other players recognized this pattern too..
The bloated number of heroes also has some effect to the game mode too, such as the bonus heroes on tempest trials, arena, aether raids. As the number of heroes increase, each hero will take longer to appear as bonus heroes in those modes. At the beginning, there’re only 90 heroes, there’re 10 slots for bonus heroes. 1 out of 9 chance for the heroes to appear as bonus. Now, there are 475 with specific turn out that usually include new heroes. Once the hero is no longer considered new, it just takes a long time before they appear again as bonus. I wonder if people complained about this too.
I think IS need to update their summoning pool. They are way out of balance right now.