I’ve searched the forums, YouTube, and Reddit a fair bit and while I’ve found a lot of niche questions, and broad answers, I haven’t found this whole topic covered well enough to allow me to make my own decisions regarding my currently available heroes. As such, I want to ask y’all the broad question primarily… and will provide an example that we can apply it to secondarily.
Primary Series of Questions:
What are the characteristics of a good team?
Must every team have a defensive hero? What about a healer? Do you lump the two into the same category?
How do you determine who would make a good tank (center spot in the lineup)?
How do you determine who goes on the edges and who flanks the tank?
What kind of synergies do you aim for?
I’ve heard that single-target damage is better than AoE in general. How many of these single-target dmg dealers is too many?
When is it appropriate to double-up, or triple-up on one element type?
My Specific Example:
My hope is that due to the above, I can answer the inquiry below of my own accord with the newly found knowledge that y’all provide. That said, in pedagogy it is often best to use specific examples, so here’s mine:
I have a full rainbow of five 3* heroes (my only five, in fact). Each of these is single-target damage. I also have all of the 1* and 2* heroes available. Because of this, I have been using Olaf (2* def up) and Sharan (1* 23% heal all). My current raid defense includes four of my 3* along with Olaf (on the edge) as I’ve found this to be my most effective team in general combat… but I often find myself missing Sharan’s healing, too. What would you run out of the 7 of them, and in what order? (for the world map primarily, probably raiding, too)
My current main team, left to right:
Balthazar - Azar - Berden (highest health/def) - Olaf - Bane
Benched:
Valen - Sharan
There’s also a 2* healer with Sharan’s ability that I could replace her with (it’s yellow, though, which would mean doubling up on yellow with Bane).
Teams differ depending on your goal. Team for raid defense and a team for map farming are most likely different teams. A team for raid attack must be built with a respect to a defense team you are going to attack. But it is all possible if you have a roster of heroes to choose from.
If you play in a mode where you can’t use potions healer is highly recommended. Even if you can use items healer is a big plus. Say, in a Santa’s challenge event you hardly can bring enough potions to go through all stages without a healer (or even two). All the same in raids and Alliance wars.
For alliance wars where each hero is used only once you might want to have 6 healers and more.
High defense and strong health plus sume useful special that either does something good for your team (boosts defense or attack or does healing) or something bad to your enemy (burn them, reduce their mana or defense etc).
Edge heroes statistically receive least amont of tile hits, thus they get charged with mana slower than heroes in a middle. So usually fast mana heroes go to edges. Slow mana heroes usually are kind of harmless when they are on edges.
Heroes need different specials that don’t overlap. Say you have one hero that removes buffs from attackers, another hero buffs your team, third reduces enemy’s defense etc. If two heroes have the same special they might just cancel effect from each other.
In attack it can’t be too many of snipers, I’d say. In a raid defense you depend on a game’s AI (quite primitive one), so AoE heroes are kind of better as they can’t hit a wrong hero.
In any attack you might want to replace a hero of a weak color with one or two hero of a strong color. Usually in raids you want to kill a central defense hero first, so you stack agains a color of central hero (aka tank).
As a follow-up to all of this, my primary team has now settled into this form:
Balthazar - Sharan - Olaf - Berden - Bane
If I must double-up on a color, I try to ditch Sharan (1* fire) in favor of a higher star hero as she does have a tendency to die a bit too often. Once I get Sha Ji (2* holy) leveled up a bit more I’ll likely replace her with him.
I moved Olaf to the tank position as he has both more health and defense now that he’s nearly maxed out, and his defense buff wins matches when it goes off.
In the future, I’m keeping my eyes out for a 3* hero that either buffs my damage or debuffs the enemy. Once I get one, they’re going straight into this lineup ASAP.
