2020 is going to come to a close in a little more than a week. A few years ago, many people had been saying that 2020 would be a good year. “2020” was like the condition of your eye, meaning perfect vision. Unfortunately, this year does not turn out as expected, it has been not so good for many of us. Enough with the doom and gloom, let’s talk about Fire Emblem Heroes and where it stands as of the end of 2020.
Book 4 has come to an end not too long ago. Book 5 has started. We got a new 5 star Mythic Hero – Reginn. Some changes in AR. New tier 28 in AR. Updated Frontline Phalanx. Updated Pawns of Loki. Some changes in the summoning mechanic.
I’d say the ending of book 4 was a bit of anticlimactic. I was expecting something a bit more excitement. Book 5 is a bit interesting with some kind of robotic type suit. We’ll have to wait and see as it unfolds more of the story.
AR Changes
There are some changes in AR mode along with introduction of new tier 28. There can be up to 6 heroes when attacking and up to 7 heroes when defending in AR mode. However, it requires a new type of mythic hero to unlock the additional hero. Currently, only Reginn has this type of special. So, as of December 2020, AR on Astra season will be 6 attackers vs. 6 defenders. On Light season, still 5 attackers vs. 6 defenders. So, on Astra season, since it’s 6 vs. 6, it feels a bit easier when attacking. I don’t know yet how it’ll become when the 7 defenders start appearing.
Unlike before, now, there’ll be bonus mythic heroes for every season. Base attacking score increases from 80 to 100. Plus the additional hero (6th attacker) will not affect score. So, even if we lose 1 hero, our score won’t get penalized. The score will be counted as if it’s perfect. Defense base score is changed too, from -80 to -100. New tier 28 with rewards is added. However, IS does this without adjusting any of the rewards from the previous tiers, making the rewards distributions look wacky. To reach tier 28, players only have about 80 score buffer from perfect score, assuming no mythic merges. If you have mythic merges, you’ll get 16 additional score buffer per extra mythic merge. Each merge count as +1 and there are 16 max games per season. So, to reach tier 28, we’ll have to get perfect score on offense and suffer minimal score loss on defense.
I’ve reached tier 28 on both Light and Astra seasons, so this is no longer a goal for me.
Frontline Phalanx
IS updated Frontline Phalanx. When it was first introduced, players complained as it was not interesting and ended too soon. So, IS tweaked it that now it’s even worse than before. We couldn’t defeat the boss when the mode ended. There’s nothing after that. IS changed it so that the requirement to activate the shield so much higher than before. Yet, we’re still limited to have 3 max shield. So, for the entire duration, players can never get the shield activated. For the most part, shield level is showing as empty even though players use their shields. Plus the winning/losing is so random that we lost many times at 99% of winning.
IS managed to make the uninteresting game even worse than before. WOW!
Pawns of Loki
Pawns of Loki update is not out yet. The update will be coming in January 2021. Per the notes, it looks like IS will tone down the advance difficulty a bit. We’ll have to wait and see if it’s going to make the game a bit more enjoyable or not.
Summoning Changes
Lastly, IS changed the summoning mechanics a little bit. Now, when we got pity broken during our summoning session, the rate will not always reset back. Rate will be reduced by 2% at most. So, on a regular banner where Focus rate is 3% and regular 5 star rate is 3%, if your rate has increase to at least 4.25%, if you got pity broken, your rate will be down to focus rate 3.25% and regular rate 3.25% instead of back to 3%.
IS also tweaked the summoning UI a bit to show the rate on the summoning page.
Reddit Survey Result
Another round of Fire Emblem Heroes survey has come to a close. The survey on Reddit was taken right after book 4 ended. Here’s the result:
- About 34.3% respondent are F2P players
- The remaining respondent:
- 27.2% spent less than $100
- 18% spent between $100 – $499
- 6.7% spent between $500 – $999
- 10.2% spent more than $1,000
Not a whole lot of difference from the last result in March. In March, people was still upset with Feh Pass – only about 24% respondent reported to purchase it at least once. Now, people are accepting it more – more than 44% respondent reported to purchase it at least once. As time goes by, Feh pass is becoming a norm.
Survey
IS is asking for players feedback thru a survey. I’m going to skip the survey at this time, I just don’t want to fill it up. I’ve given them enough feedback.
There are so many issues they’ve yet to address. Players have complained many times regarding the summoning pool, the rampant power crept, the BST, the ridiculous inflated stats, arena issue, arena assault, etc. None of them are addressed.
Number of players are going down and they don’t seem to have a clue as to why that is. If only IS actually read and listen to the feedback we gave them, they should know it without even doing any kind of survey.
Considering that FEH is old now (will be 4 years in Feb 2021) and there are simply too many competition in the market, IS should be more generous than they were if they want to reduce players churn. Unfortunately, they are not. IS still think and act like they are the most generous one (we can see this from their line of questions on the survey).
The latest change they made to the arena late last year (Dec 2019) has caused a decreased in player base. Top tier 21 arena players have drop from about 4.2K/week to about 3.2K/week in a year. Tier 20 arena players have drop from more than14K/week to less than 11K/week in a year. It seems they don’t understand the basic premise, if more people are happy with the mode, then there’ll be more players. If people don’t like the change, then they’ll leave.
AR mode player based on tier 21+ is increasing every week, though the percentage of those who reach tier 21 that keep playing week after week may be decreasing, in the end, player base is still increasing.
In Closing
In closing, I don’t like the direction of where FEH is going. It’s going in the wrong direction. Many people who played FEH simply would like to collect heroes. Competition is not their main priority. But, this game made it really hard for those many people to collect all the heroes they want and kept on making competition to be the end game. They make it so that only a small portion of player base can get more rewards. I don’t think it’s that hard to understand why players left this game.