The roster
Heroes
The player's build is up to five heroes — the five blades — positioned in a line. Each hero belongs to a species, equips one weapon that defines its attack action, and occupies a position that matters tactically. All 360 heroes on disk are listed below. Search by name, ability text or passive; click a hero for its full page.
The nine species
The identities below were measured from the assets, not declared by intent — this is what the content actually does. Each species has 40 heroes.
| Species | Measured identity | Racial passive |
|---|---|---|
| Elf | Stamina. onAtk → BuffStamina within the species, plus commerce. Not a crit race: one Ranger and one Bladesmith in the whole line. | — |
| Merfolk | Armor as an offensive engine — GainArmor nine times, and the onGainArmor → Hit loop on four cards. Heal appears once. | — |
| Werewolf | Rage — GainRage eight times, onGainRage → Heal/Hit five times, Bloodlust five times. Rage turns into healing, not raw burst. | — |
| Lizard | Fire immunity and spikes — Fireproof across the line, GainSpike three times, and the PerCharacterWithFireproof scaler. | Fireproof |
| Undead | Poison and death-and-return — Poison/Sap, onGainPoison, onDeath/onAllyDeath, SummonAlly. It wins by attrition and by dying. | Antidote |
| Dwarf | Armor and treasure — Aegis and Fortify across the line, and Prospector: every won battle drops a Treasure worth 30 gold, with abilities that grow per Treasure in the stash. The slow, rich species. | — |
| Goblin | Chaos that pays — abilities that put Burn, Poison, Sap or Slow on everyone, own team included, next to goblins that fire on gaining exactly those. And Scurry: at half health a goblin swaps with another Scurry goblin waiting in the stash. | — |
| Demon | Burn, Sap and Silence — the species that shuts abilities off. Silencer applies Silence with every weapon hit; a silenced character ignores its own ability triggers. Little same-species synergy: demons slot into other teams. | — |
| Human | Crit, weapon and versatility — Bladesmith/Ranger on about a third of the line, targets by weapon category, and the PerMeleeWielder / PerRangedWielder / PerDiffSpeciesOnField scalers. No engine of its own: it converts everyone else's. | — |
Lizard carries Fireproof and Undead carries Antidote across the whole line. It is what makes “a team of X” legible at a glance, before reading any ability. It is not mandatory — Elf, Merfolk, Werewolf and Human have none. For Human that was explicit: its visible signature is weapon mastery, and a single passive on the whole line would erase exactly the choice the race proposes — which weapon you put in its hand.
The only permitted exception is a hero whose ability fires on receiving the very thing the racial makes it immune to. Undead carriers of onGainPoison: Marrow Tick, Vorog, Wretched Molt. Lizard carriers of onGainBurn: Xarravek Ashbrood, Sszik Ashcrawl.
Stat convention
- HP between 25 and 46, median 36. It rises with rarity, gently.
- ATK 2–5, median 3. Interval 2.2–4.2 s, median 3.1 — the most elastic stat, and the one that carries the ladder.
- Power (
atk / interval × HP) median 38. By rarity: 31 → 34 → 38 → 42 → 55, consistent with +10% of index per step. - The envelope is tight on purpose: what spreads a team apart is ability and weapon, not raw stats. What must not exist is an entire species bunched at the median.
Position and order
- Index 0 — the front — is the target of enemy melee attacks, unless Taunt is in play.
- Front / Back ability targets are positional: the neighbour to the left or to the right.
- Heroes can only be reordered outside combat.
Merging duplicates
On acquiring a copy of a hero already in the build, the player may merge them. A single copy is enough to raise one tier — there is no stacking of multiple copies per level.
| Effect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Raises the decimal | Tier: 3 → 3.1 → 3.2 → 3.3 → 3.4…, within the run only. Promotion does not move the whole number: a promoted Tier 3 is still a Tier 3, priced and drawn as one. Every hero page has a selector to see the hero at each step. |
| Always pays stats | +1–2 ATK and +3–6 HP on every promotion, on top of the step below. When the hero has nothing the step can touch, the stats come doubled instead. |
| A fixed ladder, not a draw | .1 a random passive (curated bag: Resurrect, Double Attack, Reflect, Reach, Stun, Aegis, Barbed and Ruthless are never given, and a species passive only goes to its own species). .2 the target step. .3 every triggered ability grows by half of its own number (a 4 becomes 6). .4 the scaler step. .5 and beyond, half of the number again each time. |
| The target step (.2) | Every ability improves its target, and the choice is authored for each hero, never drawn. One, two or three bodies take the next bracket (one → two → three → all). An ability on self keeps the hero and brings neighbours: self and the ally in front, self and the ally behind, or self and both. An ability already hitting everyone, or a single triggering character, grows its number by half or lands twice on the same target instead. |
| The scaler step (.4) | Every ability improves its scaler, also authored per hero. Counts that start full at the opening bell (per ally, per species, per melee or ranged wielder) are rationed: one hero per species each. Most heroes count what the fight builds up instead — burning, poisoned, sapped or slowed enemies, allies with Rage or armor, hurt allies — or their neighbours (this position and the adjacent ones, 1 to 3). A wielding ability, which ignores scalers, grows its number by half. |
| The survivor | Whoever is already on the field. It inherits max() of the stats plus the tier bonus, the crit chance, the union of built abilities and the intersection of removals. The copy's weapon is returned. |
| At the cap | A Tier 5 copy still gives the prize without raising a tier — a duplicate is never garbage. A promoted hero glows red, in place of the tier colour. |
Promotion used to draw one prize out of four, and one of them was a brand new triggered ability. That made a promoted hero either boring or broken, and it buried the hero the author wrote under a random one. The ladder moves only what the hero already has, so a promoted hero is the same character, louder — and the power of a promotion is predictable instead of a coin flip.
Native versus promoted rarity
Promotion is the second way for a hero of any rarity to exist. If “a Tier 3 hero” could only be an asset authored at that rarity, the offer would be shackled to catalogue size, and Tier 4 and Tier 5 would always show the same two or three faces.
| Rarity requested | ~Native | ~Promoted |
|---|---|---|
| Tier: 1 | 100% | — |
| Tier: 2 | 70% | 30% |
| Tier: 3 | 50% | 50% |
| Tier: 4 | 35% | 65% |
| Tier: 5 | 10% | 90% |
The draw is recursive: if the hero is not native, it drops a tier and the same table decides again. A Tier 5 comes out 10% native, 32% Tier 4+1, 29% Tier 3+2, 21% Tier 2+3 and 9% Tier 1+4. This applies every time the game draws a hero. A promoted hero is stronger than a native of the same rarity and costs the same — finding one is a windfall.
Onboarding: the player starts with one hero and earns the other four over the run. That hero starts at Tier 3 — not a hand-picked Tier 3 asset, but born promoted by the same route as merging, arriving with the bonuses any promotion grants.
Combat rules
- Combat is automatic and real-time, resolved by attack bars: each combatant fills its bar in
AtkSpeedseconds and executes its action when full. Five versus five. - The player controls only the simulation speed — 0.5× / 1× / pause / 1.5× / 2× — and watches.
- Battle draws are seeded per match, and the seed travels in the snapshot.
- The battle is disposable. Nothing that happens inside is saved except the result and the loot. All heroes revive at 100% HP; damage, deaths, counters and temporary effects are cleared.
The Sandstorm — no battle lasts forever
After 45 seconds of battle clock, a sandstorm rolls in and kills both teams until one remains. The damage is true, starts at 5 and grows 20% per tick — by tick 40 it is roughly 1,470× the initial value, far above the HP ladder between biomes.
- It is a battle system, not an ability. Nobody summons it, nothing grants it, no character interacts with it.
- The clock is the battle clock, not real time: pausing does not bring the storm closer.
- The damage is environmental. It skips armour, evasion, Bodyguard, crit and Spikes.
- A technical draw is a player win: the tick visits enemies before allies. A warning appears ten seconds ahead.
- It happens identically in all seven biomes, including the ones that are not deserts — a clock that changes name and face per biome is a clock nobody learns.
Ability authoring
The player builds an ability by choosing a trigger + an effect + a target, and applies it to a hero. A rolled ability may never combine a trigger that fires outside battle with an effect that only exists inside it — and vice versa.
| Trigger | Permitted effects |
|---|---|
Inside battle — onSpawn, onAtk, onDeath, onGainArmor, onKill, onLowHP… | Battle effects only: Hit, Heal, GainArmor, GainRage, GainHealing, GainSpike, BuffStamina, Burn, Poison, Sap, Dispel, SummonAlly. |
Outside battle — GainKey, onUseFood, onMerge, onBuy*, onSell* | Permanent effects only: BuffAtk, BuffMaxHP, BuffAtkAndHP, GainCritChance, GivePassiveAbility, GainGold. |
Passives the roll never grants: Reach, Reflect, Stun, Double Tap, Aegis and Cleave — too strong or too strange to come for free — plus Resurrect and Last Stand, which buy a life and are worth two prizes. Those are authored rewards, not rolled ones. The full rules for every counter and passive live in the Glossary.