Skins guide

Every day, Hero Wars gives its players pop-ups with special discounts on hero skins, but do these items matter in any way or are they just cosmetic improvements for players who have too much money to spend? The short answer is both. The more you progress through the mid and endgame, the more obvious it becomes that your line-up needs to be fully enhanced in order to withstand the increase in difficulty.

Every day, Hero Wars lets you purchase three separate skins on discount. Aside from giving your characters and their main abilities a new look (Devil Skin Astaroth and Devil Skin Ginger are just badass), these skins will also improve one of your main stats. However, given that roles and abilities change from one unit to another, you’ll want to have a clear vision of what goes first.

Skin mechanics

In addition to real-money purchases, skins can be acquired through skin stones. There are three types of stones, namely strength, agility, and intellect. Whether you need one or the other is entirely dependent on the hero you want to dress up. For instance, Astaroth’s Devil Skin needs 5k strength stones to be unlocked. It’s a bit counter-intuitive in some instances, since the Flame Veil is actually based on his magic damage, but this is based on the unit’s main stat. In our case, that’s strength, so this is the stone we’ll need to get.

The advantage to purchases is that you not only get the skin itself, but also a hefty amount of upgrade materials to make it shine. Most of them will give you a buff to your main stat, but there are some that improve a secondary one. There are also a set of specific skins you can’t get in either way and those are the ones available in the guild shop. The latter can only be purchased with trophies (bronze, silver, or gold).

Lastly, some skins are only available during certain events. For example, the romantic skins can only be acquired during the Valentine’s day celebration, while winter-themed ones are reserved for the holidays. Naturally, you get more value from real-money purchases than skin stone ones. If you are going to spend money on the game anyways, this is one of the few places where you get the most bang for your buck.

If skins don’t seem that important right now, you should know that skin stones become increasingly more valuable the more you progress through the game. They’re rare and difficult to come by.

Default skins take 30,825 stones to upgrade, Champion ones need 54,330, while others are locked in at 55,410. These are definitely not rookie numbers. Another aspect of skins you may not be familiar with just yet is that the bonuses from each unlocked and upgraded one will be active at all times.

This means that it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing because all your hard-earned upgrades are cumulated. Hardcore role-players will disagree with us on this one, but if you’re committed to having a full Valentine’s day line-up, there’s nothing stopping you from doing so.

Which skins to buy?

Given that they all stack and that the costs of maxing out one of these items is tremendous, you’ll want to make sure that you start with the skins that are the most impactful to begin with. Here’s the golden stat priority you should follow for your tanks:

• Armor and/or Magic Defense.
• Health.
• Main Stat.
• Attack Stats.
• Penetration.

The reason we go with these is to improve our line-ups sustainability as much as possible.  The tanks are our frontline and they soak up all of the incoming DPS. The more time they get on the battlefield, the more chances for the rest of your line-up to cast their abilities and lay waste to your opponents. For hardcore damage dealers, though, the order changes to:

• Penetration (Armor or Magic).
• Physical or Magic Attack.
• Main Stat.
• Health.
• Armor and/or Magic Defense.

With these characters, e.g. Satori or Keira, you’ll want to prioritize the stats above. These will maximize their damage output and ensure that each cast ability hits as hard as possible. Lastly, healer or support units should go for:

• Health.
• Main Stat.
• Armor and/or Magic Defense.
• Attack and/or Magic Attack.

We prioritize health because supporters tend to be really squishy, so even if your tank can withstand Armageddon-like AoEs, your backline will not if they’re not beefed up properly. There are also some special cases where you’ll need to stray from these priorities in order to make the most out of your upgrade mats. In this category we have heroes such as Nebula, Lilith, or Aurora.

For example, Aurora already has one of the highest health pools in the game, but suffers in terms of Armor and Magic Defense. In fact, she has some of the lowest stats for the latter two. In her case, you’ll want to leave health last, and bump all the others one step higher.

Strategy

In many cases, you’ll notice that the stat order doesn’t necessarily improve a character’s main strength. Take our previous example – we’re using Astaroth in our lineup just for his Flame Veil. However, the latter ability is pegged to the hero’s Magic Attack, rather than Main Stat, which is strength. In this situation, we decided to go with Health and Magic Attack as our top two priorities, and then follow the list.

Naturally, whenever you make such decisions, you have to keep in mind that they’ll reflect heavily in your late game, where skin improvements become more and more influential. You can play around with various tactics, but keep in mind that every action will have a consequence later on.

So far, this is everything you need to know about skins in Hero Wars. Whatever you do, never forget that upgrading them all the way is, much like the titans themselves, a marathon, rather than a sprint.