Heroes are among the most important aspects of the game that allow you to progress (if not the most important). Knowing which heroes are suitable for what tasks is essential to be able to do the following things with utmost efficiency:
- Gathering resources
- Completing events
- Mopping up zombies
- Fighting in the Arena
- Fighting in the duels
- Progressing in Expedition
- Progressing in exploration
- Using EXP and m-coins
- Taking cities
- Plundering
Let’s now take a closer look at what heroes there are and what they are good at.
Hero Lineups – If you want to know more about different lineups you can create and their uses, check out this separate guide on lineups.
Hero Factions
There are five original hero factions in Last Fortress:
- Solari
- Minutemen
- Vindicators
- Wildlings
- Watcher
The Solari are worker heroes whom you can use in your facilities to boost the production and construction capabilities of your base.
The other four original factions are heroes you use in your lineups to gather resources, kill zombies, fight on Arena, etc. You can consistently try getting heroes from these factions.
When you create a lineup, factions affect two things. First, based on how many heroes of one faction you have in your lineup, you will get a buff for that lineup:
- 3 heroes of the same faction = +10% TAC ATK, WPN ATK, and HP.
- 3 heroes of the same faction + 2 heroes of the same other faction = +10% TAC ATK and WPN ATK and +15% HP.
- 4 heroes of the same faction = +15% TAC ATK, WPN ATK, and HP.
- 5 heroes of the same faction = +20% TAC ATK, WPN ATK, and HP.
Ideally, you will want to have 4 or 5 heroes of the same faction in your lineup, but the 3+2 combination is also often viable.
And the second thing you should consider is that one faction deals 20% more damage to one other faction, and here is how it goes: Minutemen > Vindicators > Wildlings > Watchers
This is important to take into consideration when you are going through Expedition. You would generally have one strong lineup and pick the opponent’s faction that is inferior to yours. Suppose your main lineup is Watchers. In such a case, it would be wise to pick Minutemen when possible as opponents.
Another thing where you can leverage this is PvP meta. Meta is what heroes most players use for PvP. After going through many arena rounds, for example, you might notice that you meet one faction more often than others. In such a case, you can prepare a lineup for Arena that will counter this faction. However, usually, it is pretty hard to have more than one main faction in your lineup early in the game, even up to S5, if you don’t spend money on the game that is.
The 1-Year Anniversary event introduced two new factions – Lawbringers and Wreakers – with two new heroes – Palmer and Soros (First-Gen heroes), changing the faction balance menu and adding new faction bonuses:
You had only two weeks to get these heroes, which made it extremely expensive to get these heroes. Later on, they had another event where you could get those, but again, the cost was just too much.
Here’s what you need to know about Soros and Palmer:
- These heroes are the essence of pay to win.
- They were extremely expensive, making them available only for big spenders.
- They are overpowered – stronger than any other heroes in terms of stats.
- The only people who got them are people who you would not have been able to beat anyway, so it does not matter.
- For these reasons, I will not include them in any of my guides.
In August 2023, they presented The Boys Collaboration event featuring three new heroes designed by the main characters of the show: Butcher, Hughie and Starlight. Each hero would then have their own unique gear set you could only buy, of course. The heroes from this event were introduced in the new Spacetime Travelers faction with its own bonuses.
Later, in December 2023, they introduced three more Boys heroes: A-Train, Soldier Boy and Homelander. You could also get the previous three during whole month.
They Boys heroes were easier to get than Soros and Palmer. I got Starlight to 3-star Legendary level almost with no real money investment. But I wouldn’t say these heroes were as overpowered as Gen-one heroes. I later regretted that I focused on Starlight because Soldier Boy is actually not bad in Casino Meta. Overall, I’d say Soldier Boy, Starlight, and Homelander were the stronger among Spacetime Travelers.
Realistically speaking, these heroes could only be usable early on in the game, while people don’t have lineups with all 3-star Myth heroes. In the late game, it is extremely difficult to max out such a hero without hundreds of dollars spent, so these heroes are stashed, unusable. Besides that, you would also need special hero medals to level up skills of all these non-standard heroes, making it very difficult, once again, to use the hero even if you max it’s rarity.
Let’s hope there will be more events where you could get these.
That’s probably all you need to know about hero factions in this game, so let’s proceed to the next section.
Hero Types
Besides factions, heroes can be divided by:
- Rarity
- Quality
- Role
Rarity
There are five types of heroes based on rarity: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Elite, and Advanced Elite. You can see which are available to you in your Heroes Compendium (Portraits), or see the full list here.
Rarity affects the chance of getting the hero when recruiting. The higher the rarity, the lower the chances. We will cover this aspect further on in the corresponding section.
Common (grey) heroes can and should be disassembled into uncommon hero fragments in the nexus.
Quality
You can upgrade your heroes and increase their quality. You can upgrade an uncommon hero to a rare one, a rare one to an elite one, and so on. There’s a whole gradation of quality tiers and upgrade requirements past the elite level. This we will also cover further in the article.
Role
Each hero is best used for something. Solari heroes are all workers used at their specialized facility to improve it. As for the combat heroes, the roles here are as follows:
- Tank – first-row heroes with DMG mitigation skills.
- Secondary tank – basically any non-tank hero that’s put into tank position and tank gear.
- Support – heroes that debuff enemy heroes or heal your heroes.
- Single damage – heroes with skills that deal damage to a single enemy hero.
- AOE damage – heroes with skills that deal damage to more than one enemy hero.
- Utility – heroes that have gathering, speed, or destruction skills.
More on this, you can read in our Lineup guide.
Recruiting Heroes
There are a few ways you can obtain heroes in Last Fortress:
- Get in missions and events
- Recruit using recruitment points
- Get via cards (faction, alliance, raffle)
- Use hero fragments
- Purchase with real currency
- Recycle shards
Missions and Events
When you start the game, you will obtain the first nine Solari heroes of uncommon and rare rarity. Not so long ago, the only way you could obtain other Solari heroes was by purchasing them or using a Solari card given at the end of each season to be able to get some of them. But they changed that, adding more ways you could get these.
There was a way to get Wolowitz by completing the starter event Warpath. Make sure to do it, as you will also get many other things there. Although, I am not sure if they kept this in Season 0.
After they added the Excavation mode, you can get some of the Elite Solari heroes by completing missions in this mode. You can obtain Fernando, Beesly, Natalie, Lori, Brady, Pamela, Emma, Lemuros, and Bacchus if you clear all levels.
Just recently, they introduced the Mass Construction event, where you can draw Solari heroes and cards with special production hero coins, which can be obtained by leveling up the skills of Hero Growth event heroes. The main three heroes you could get there are Grace, Lemuros, and Bacchus, but it’s already something.
As for combat heroes, there aren’t that many events and places where you would be able to obtain them:
- You can get Kayas from the “Enemies Turn into Allies” (“Wilderness Survival”) event.
- You can get David from the “Crystal Wheel” event and the “Hero Growth: Gathering” event (its last-tier reward).
- You can get seasonal heroes (Kelly, Galande, etc.) as a reward for upgrading them in the “Hero Training” event.
- You can get Advanced Elite heroes in the “Cumulative Top-Up” event by getting 10,000 diamonds via purchases during the three days of the event.
- You can get random heroes of the chosen faction during the “Night Before the War” event when one season ends and the other is about to start.
- Tips: you can choose what advanced hero you want to go for. When previewing the heroes of any of the four factions, just close the preview and open it again – it will randomize the hero. Do it until you get the hero you want.
- You can get Kin Ogawa in the early S0 event, “Cheetah Warriors.”
- You can get Minutemen heroes (Rebecca, Alisa, Fujiwara, and Kobayakawa) by conquering Exploration levels. Later on, they gave S0 Advance selection cards for exploration.
- You can get Alisa, Bolton, Quinn, Roger, Elaine, Mira, Buccaneer, and Victoria in the Trading Center (Arena Shop) for dog tags. Getting your Quinn’s last skill this way is pretty good.
- You can get Roland, Sizuki Ren, Kelly, Galande, Ricardo, Penny, Buccaneer, and Heytex at the Trade Center in the Summit Arena Shop. I’d recommend getting the 33,600-point selectable card here unless you want to max any of the cheaper heroes.
- You can get Macklin, Buri, Chu, and Eva in the Season Special (Prestige Shop). These are available only once during a dimension.
- You can get Titan, Mira, Ricardo, Blanche, Roger, Quinn, and Kobayakawa in the Season Shop (Prestige Shop). These are pretty cheap; good if you need to max out some of the earlier heroes or Quinn.
Recruitment points (RP)
For every 100 recruitment points, you can get a random combat hero if you go to the Nexus => Recruit => Combat Heroes. You can spend 100 points and get one random hero or spend 900 and get ten random heroes, which is more efficient. Also, it is advised to save up your RP and spend it on the Alliance Duel’s Recruitment Day.
The chance of you getting a particular hero is affected by its rarity and goes as follows (Dimensions):
- Common – 12.35%
- Uncommon – 3.3%
- Rare – 1.5%
- Elite – 0.48%
- Advance Elite – 0.0421%
- Except for Kobayakawa and Kelly, who have 0.24%.
Keep in mind that probabilities will differ in the first five seasons.
Here are some of the ways you can get RP for free:
- S0 Events like Limited Time Competition, Warpath, etc.
- Daily Missions and early game quests.
- Trading diamonds in the Trade Center.
- Exchanging vouchers in the Nexus Exchange Shop.
- Doing Alliance growth missions.
- After each alliance level up.
- By exchanging Merit in the Alliance shop.
- By competing and winning battles in the Champion Duel.
- As rewards for getting levels in the Season Quest.
- By linking various accounts in the Link Account tab.
- As a reward for winning in the Alliance Duel.
- For ranking high in the Arena.
- Buying at the VIP Privilege shop, starting from level 5.
- Completing achievements.
- For collecting items from The Boys event.
- For checking the heroes’ stories in the Portraits section.
- As a reward in the Zombie Legion and Zombie Raid events.
- Permanent Radio Wave policy card grants you one free recruitment every 24 hours.
At some point, they added a reward system for every 40 recruitments you make (3,600 recruitment points spent).
- Once the progress meter is completely filled, you will earn Progress Rewards.
- After receiving these rewards, the progress meter resets.
- Each reward requires 40 recruitments for completion.
- After 12 recruitments, the reward system returns to its starting point.
- The completion of a full cycle requires a total of 440 recruitments (39,600 points).
Here’s the full cycle of rewards:
Cards
There are various cards in the game by using which you can get heroes. They either allow you to choose a hero (usually elite combat or Solari), choose a faction but get a random hero (Solari, Uncommon, Rare, Elite), or get an entirely random hero (Production Hero Card).
Here’s where you can get these cards for free:
- Zombie Raid event (up to 7 Solari cards)
- Daily Missions (1 uncommon selectable faction random hero card)
- Trade Center (a Solari card appears in about 4 out of 8 trades a day)
- Exploration (Solari cards)
- Merit Exchange (1 faction recruitment card a week)
- Arena shop (save up 280 dog tags for the best card)
- As a reward at the end of each season
- Exchange shop (rare cards)
- Eden Ruins exploration on Sundays
- Alliance Shop (2 faction cards a week)
- The Exchange Shop allows you to exchange 30 faction cards for 30 raffle tickets every 4 days.
- City Warfare rewards in the Fountain dimension feature raffle tickets.
As for the faction recruitment cards, you can choose one of the four factions and have a higher chance of getting better heroes:
- Common – 49.4%
- Uncommon – 16.5%
- Rare – 6%
- Elite – 1.8%
- Advance Elite – 0.5%
- Seasonal – 1%
And, for each recruitment without an advanced elite hero, the chance of getting one increases by 0.02% and can reach +2%.
After season six, they introduced new type of cards – Season of War Raffle Ticket. This was done to create a secondary pool of heroes and provide players with a choice. If they had added them to the same pool of heroes, it would have become much more random and harder for players to get one specific hero.
You can swap your regular faction cards to these new ones in the Exchange Shop for one Silver Shard Voucher.
Hero fragments
There are four types of hero fragments: Uncommon, Rare, Elite, and Advanced Elite.
For 50 fragments, you can get a random hero of the fragment type. But, 50 Advance Elite fragments can be merged into a selectable Advance Hero card.
- Uncommon fragments can be obtained from resource chests and disassembling common heroes in the nexus.
- Rare fragments can be obtained from resource chests.
- You can get one Elite fragment daily from the free Weekly Special chest at the Supply Station.
- Advanced Elite fragments are obtained from the Weekend Trials event. You can get around three a week.
Update 1.322.001 added Daily Hero Fragment Pack at the Supply Station. You can buy 2 fragments of any Advance Elite hero for $1 once a day. What this means is that once every 25 days you can get an advance elite hero shard for $25, which is 4 times cheaper than getting one shard at once in a pack.
In the Alliance Shop, you can get 15 shards of Bolton, Laurel, Elaine, Penny, or Buccaneer for 50,000 Alliance Contribution points once a week. Not a bad deal, considering there are Bauxite Mines that allow you to get a decent number of those points a week. And there are also 25 Harman Fragments for 90,000 – these I won’t recommend.
As for shards from other factions (gen-one and spacetravelers), those require a hundred to be merged into a shard (besides the incommon ones).
Oh, and let’s not forget about Frendship Points. You can get those by adding 40 people as you frinds and claiming those points each day in the Friend System tab of your profile, so you can have up to 40 daily. 100 of those points can be used to recrution 10 regular heroes in the Nexus.
Purchasing heroes
You can purchase any Solari hero by going to Heroes => Portraits (was Compendium before) => Choose your hero => Get more.
As for combat heroes, you cannot purchase them the same way at all times. Sometimes, there will be a promotional offer where you can buy seasonal heroes (heroes introduced in your current season) or some particular heroes.
However, it seems that they started to put David on sale much more often, for $10. Getting hom to orange is enough to use him in your gathering lineup.
With money, you can only buy recruitment points or cards or buy packs to reach high rewards in events like Cumulative Top up, where you can get heroes if you buy enough diamonds (in packs or separately).
Recycling shards
In the Satellite Nexus, there is an Exchange Shop where you can recycle hero shards for vouchers and exchange these vouchers for advanced elite hero shards, RPs, medals, cards, etc.
Each shard you recycle will yield a different number of gold and\or silver vouchers based on the rarity and quality of the shard.
I do not recommend recycling shards early on, as you would be better off using the shards for upgrading your heroes’ quality.
You can go for it if you have shards of heroes that you are not planning to develop soon. For example, you have a mixed lineup of Watchers and Minutemen with a pure Watchers transition in mind. In such a case, if you get a shard of an Advanced Elite hero of a different faction, you can consider recycling it.
Also, remember that most Advanced Elite shards will need 20 golden vouchers and 1 Exchange Token, which can either be obtained with 20 golden vouchers or after recycling heroes for 200 golden vouchers in total. That means if you want to have an Advanced Elite hero shard from this shop, you will have to recycle two Advanced Elite hero shards of your own.
The only exceptions are Kelly and Koba, who can be exchanged for 20 golden vouchers each.
Also, keep an eye for 500 recruitment points for 100 Silver Vouchers.
In the late game, this shop will be only useful for exchanging Faction cards for Raffle tickets and for exchanging gold vouchers for combat hero recruitment points and faction cards.
Upgrading Heroes
You can upgrade your combat and worker heroes’ quality to increase their stats and unlock skills. However, the requirements are a bit different for Solari and combat heroes. Also, upgrading a hero increases their maximum level.
Here’s how the quality progresses after the Elite level:
- Epic (orange)
- Master (red)
- Legendary (golden)
- Legendary with 1, 2, and 3 stars
- Myth (rainbow)
- Myth with 1, 2, and 3 stars.
You upgrade your heroes’ quality by using other hero shards or heroes.
Here’s how you upgrade combat heroes:
Here’s how you upgrade Solari heroes:
As you can see, you need more hero shards to upgrade combat heroes to the maximum quality.
- Save up orange shards of heroes you want to keep developing to upgrade their quality from Legendary to Legendary III and Myth to Myth III.
- For example, if I know that I will be maxing Rebecca, I will save her epic shards for upgrading only her.
- If you want to max Lunn, or some other rare hero, don’t use his rare shards to create elite shards of other heroes.
- Upgrade your damage-dealing backlaners first. But, overall, get every hero of your main lineup to legendary.
- If you’re not going to spend a lot of money on Solari heroes in this game, upgrade McKinley to maximum first. You will need power for research at all times.
- Don’t use epic (orange) shards of elite heroes to upgrade other heroes. Use them to upgrade these elite heroes from Legendary and further or recycle them.
- As to which heroes upgrade first, the following S1-S5 heroes are relevant in the late game: Mira, Elaine, Ricardo, Buccaneer, Heytex, and Benson.
Hero Contract: When you get into season one, you will get a hero contract option available in your Alliance Hall. In short, it allows you to upgrade the quality of one hero by up to three ranks for 100 diamonds. Here are the rules:
A bit more explanation:
- Only an Advanced Elite (5-skill) hero of at least Legendary (golden) quality and level 60 can be used as a Veteran.
- You can use any hero as a Rookie as long as they are 2 levels of quality lower than the Veteran.
- For example, if your Veternal is a 1-star Legend, your Rookie must be Master or lower.
- To ascend the Rookie hero, you must first break the contract.
- The level of your Rookie hero is kept after you break the contract, even if it is higher than the cap level of the hero’s quality after the contract termination.
You can also level up your heroes by using memento coins every five levels and experience (EXP). Leveling up heroes increases their overall stats. The maximum level you can upgrade a hero to is capped by its quality tier.
Here are some tips on leveling your heroes up:
- Don’t be afraid to reset your heroes to reallocate your memento coins differently. After level 30, resetting a hero will require a certain number of diamonds, up to 30.
- When upgrading your PvP lineup heroes, keep your front-row heroes about ten levels behind your back-row heroes to ensure their AGI is lower, and they can tank hits from Kelly and Rebecca.
- It is normal to have your back-row heroes at level 95 while your tanks are at 70-75.
- Don’t level up your Solari heroes until your facilities are past level 20, as you won’t get much until that point. And even then, don’t push them past level 40 for a while.
- Don’t level up your gathering and destruction heroes unless you use them in your combat lineups.
- Save up your minutes and hours of Exploration Memento Coins. Use them only when you can’t progress anywhere and need m-coins badly.
Skills
Heroes in Last Fortress have either four or five skills.
As I mentioned, those with five skills are Advanced Elite heroes and are pretty rare, but these heroes are considered the better ones.
As for combat heroes:
- Prioritize upgrading the first and the last skills. Basically, the skills that usually improve the damage or skill effect of the hero the most.
- But upgrade them to the fifth level only when all your main heroes have their first and last skills at level four.
- Good combat heroes are those whose all skills are useful in combat. Hence, avoid using gathering, destruction, and travel-speed heroes in your main battle lineup.
- The exception is Suzuki, as she provides a decent debuff early on and can be used in the front with some tank gear.
- Also, Quinn is not the best PvP hero, as she has four battle skills, even though her memento coin buff is very good for getting bonus m-coins during mutated zombie and regular zombie farming. And if you unlock her fifth skill, max it out ASAP.
- Try to get your destruction lineup’s destruction skills to level four by the end of S0.
- You can spend both combat-hero and simple medals for combat heroes, but you can only use simple ones for Solari heroes.
- After you max out all uncommon and rare hero skills, you can recycle the hero medals in the Alliance Shop => Recycle Bin. Notice that these medals become recyclable only after you change them from general to a specific hero. To do that, go to your inventory, select the general hero medal, select the number, press Use, and choose any hero. After that, these medals will be available for recycle in the Recycle Bin.
As for Solari heroes:
- Prioritize upgrading skills that give you memento coins buffs.
- Emma, Harrison, Wolowitz, Bacchus, Christine.
- The second in line are the construction speed buffing skills.
- Then, max McKinley’s first, third, and fifth skills.
- Then, get raw resource buffing and food skills to four.
- If you have Laura, having her first skill at level four will allow you to empty level four iron mines.
- If you have NATE, upgrading its skills doesn’t do much.
More about skill priority of Production Heroes you can read here – Solari Heroes Guide.
Hero Tier List
Here’s my subjective tier list of combat heroes based on several factors, such as the ease of getting the hero and the hero’s usability in PvP and my personal experience.
- S Tier: Kelly, Lunn, Rebecca, Alisa, Jessie
- I have not based the S-tier heroes purely on their combat power. I have also taken into account how easy their are to get and level up and their usefulness early on.
- Kelly is easier to get than other 5-skill heroes and she has good synergy with other strong heroes like Galande and Rebecca, who is also here. I think for the first two seasons, the Kelly+Rebecca combo is one of the easier-to-get strong combos.
- Lunn is the best rare tank as all his skills contribute to combat, and the fact that he is rare allows you to max out his skills and quality pretty fast.
- Alisa and Jessie are here because healers play a significant role in helping you to clear your first high-level mutant zombies and regular zombies with fewer to none troop casualties. They also help conquer Expedition faster.
- A Tier: Blanche, Bolton, Roland, Laurel, Galande, Elaine, Suzuki Ren, Ricardo, Betty
- Elaine is one of the core heroes of top lineups till the end of season four. I’d say she is one of the strongest core heroes power-wise.
- Ricardo is another core hero that is often seen in top lineups. In combination with Betty, Blanche, and strong single-hero damage dealers, lineups built around him can be quite deadly.
- B Tier: Benson, Roger, Harman, Marlen, Quinn, Kin Ogawa, Qian Qian, Park Ji-Mi, Enrique
- C Tier: Chihiro Fujiwara, Kobayakawa, Coleman, Max, Barron, Kate, Irma, Winston
- D Tier: Natalie, Doris, Cindy, Matthew, Ivan, Kaya, Duncan, Cloud, Dean, David, Patrick, Duke
Here’s the tier list of combat heroes based purely on their combat power and usefulness (excluding non-standard factions):
- S Tier: Heytex, Ricardo, Elaine, Buri, Casino, Victoria
- A Tier: Blanche, Galande, Roger, Bolton, Enrique, Chu, Penny, Macklin, Benson, Mira, Eva, Buccaneer
- B Tier: Kelly, Roland, Harman, Marlene, Titan, Kobayakawa, Laurel, Dylan
- C Tier: Fuji, Alisa, Quinn, Max, Kin, Jessie, Suzuki, Qian Qian, Lunn, Ji-Mi, Betty, Rebecca
- D Tier: Coleman, Barron, Kate, Kaya, Irma
Anyone who’s not here is not even worth considering for a battle lineup.
As for the Solari heroes, I have made a detailed one here – Production Hero Tier List and Commentaries.
Many of the elite Solari heroes I put lower on the scale because of how useful their first two skills are, without considering the others. I did that because you would need to buy a lot of that hero to get to the last skills, which is not an option for most players.
I will be glad if this guide helps you get better at the game; thanks for reading.