It’s finally happening! The event that I’ve been looking forward to over this past year. I began saving orbs since about November, and am currently (as of writing this article) at about 1,050. In this article, I’ll talk about my predictions for the Non-Red units that will win in the A Hero Rises (AHR) 2023 event. In case you’d like to see my predictions for the red units, you can find that here.
Who is the Fire Emblem: Heroes playerbase currently voting for?
The Fire Emblem: Heroes official twitter released a list of the top heroes as of the end of the first day of voting. Reddit user Phoenixmaster1 created a visualization because a plain-text list is a bit boring to look at. It is sorted alphabetically.
As we can see from the graphic, 8 out of 16 of the top-voted units are red, and the rest are split evenly between Blue and Colorless.
For some reason, Edelgard: Hegemon Husk is still here despite losing in last year’s AHR event. The colorless Edelgard made it to the top 8 but lost to Azura: Hatari Duet in the first round.
How big of an impact are summoning rates affected if a non-red unit is on the banner?
Short answer: a lot.
Using this following site: https://www.fullyconcentrated.net/fehstatsim/, we can calculate approximately how many orbs it would cost on average per 5-star unit.
The Herofest banners from the past years have been a standard 6% banner (3% split evenly among the focus units, and 3% for non-focus units).
Here is a table with how many orbs it will take to summon some focus units. The following assumes no focus charges.
| Banner Type | Median orbs, any focus unit, sniping only focus colors | Median Orbs, Red focus unit, sniping only Red | Median Orbs, X focus unit, sniping only X | Median Orbs, Any +10 Red Focus*, sniping only Red | 90th Percentile, Any +10 Red Focus*, sniping only Red | 99th Percentile, Any +10 Red Focus*, sniping only Red |
| 3 Red, 1 Blue | 53 | 45 | X=Blue: 122 | 1309 | 1739 | 2124 |
| 3 Red, 1 Colorless | 53 | 45 | X=Colorless: 119 | 1308 | 1737 | 2113 |
| 4 Red | 34 | 34 | – | 1268 | 1660 | 1997 |
*Assuming 10 copies (as we will get 1 from the spark, and we can spark all 4).
Looking at the numbers in the table, if you’re looking at it from the orb value perspective, if the AHR banner for 3 Red and 1 non-Red wins, then we get less 5-stars per orb. It is actually more efficient to outright ignore that off-red unit and strictly snipe for only red orbs to maximize the amount of 5-stars obtained.
You may think “eh, there’s not much of a difference”. However, this is assuming that we are sniping only red. If you choose both red and another color, see what happens below.
Note that we’re using medians and not averages.
Below, you can find the charts with all the data obtained from the fullyconcentrated site:
Why voting for non-red is a bad idea
If there is 1 Blue or 1 Colorless unit on the banner, then the rates for getting that non-red unit on this AHR banner is actually identical to sniping that color on the New Heroes banner or Special Heroes banner that it came on.
For Blue, 122 orbs.
For Colorless, 119 orbs.
This means that pulling those non-red heroes could have been done on their original debut or rerun banners at the same rate as they would have shown up on the AHR banner. You could make the same argument in the same way with all the red heroes as well. However, the thing is that the AHR banner will most likely have at least 2 red units on it. The advantage we can get for reducing the orb cost per 5-star unit is by making the units color-share. It’s extremely unlikely that there will be any color-sharing blue or color-sharing colorless units on this banner. Repeating the same point from above, it is sadly more efficient to outright ignore the off-red units entirely and strictly snipe for only red orbs to maximize the amount of 5-stars obtained.
If a non-red unit is on the banner, should you summon for them?
Here’s another table showing how inefficient it is to choose the other color along with red:
| Banner | Median Orbs, Any +10 Red Focus*, sniping only Red | 90th Percentile, Any +10 Red Focus*, sniping only Red | Median Orbs, Any +10 focus unit*, sniping both focus colors | 90th Percentile, Any +10 focus unit*, sniping both focus colors |
| 3 Red, 1 Blue | 1309 | 1739 | 1981 | 2600 |
| 3 Red, 1 Colorless | 1308 | 1738 | 1951 | 2555 |
| 4 Red | 1268 | 1660 | – | – |
*Rates are to obtain 10 copies of the hero, as we can get the 11th from the spark.
Red dream summoning rates
If 4 red units win AHR, then here’s what the summoning rates would look like.
The median is 33 orbs per 5-star focus if it were an all-green banner for this year. That’s very good!
Hopefully this article convinced you to vote for a red unit for this A Hero Rises (AHR) event!