The Commander Skill Explained by Legendary Player, M.T.M.

The Commander Skill in Legendary: Game of Heroes isn’t as straightforward as the Slayer Skill is. If you have 10x Slayer then it’s a 10x bonus; however, the Commander Skill works in a completely different manner. We had Glazed & Confused’s M.T.M. give us a breakdown of how it actually works.

Here is M.T.M.’s “Five Step Guide to the Commander Skill”:

The basic idea of the Commander skill is simple. Your heroes place gems on the board, if they get matched you do more damage. Easy, right?

Well… okay, yeah, that is the basic idea and it actually is pretty easy. However, the way it does that is a bit more complicated, and the way it interacts with other mechanics often leaves players confused. This can hold a deck back from doing its best, or worse, cause a lot of disappointment when an exciting hero you’ve invested a lot of resources in doesn’t live up to expectations.

Fair warning, this is about to get pretty technical and mathy. If you’d prefer to skip straight to what it all means and how you can use it to make the most of your Commander heroes, I’d recommend scrolling down to #5. My feelings won’t be hurt, I promise.

1) Selfish Slayers, Communal Commanders

The first thing we need to clear up is why, unlike Slayers during a Slayer, when all else is equal, Commanders don’t do more damage during a Crusade event than non-Commanders. This occurs because Slayers hog the glory by only increasing their own damage output, while matching the gem placed by a Commander boosts all heroes of that affinity.

Specifically, it is a 25% Attack buff per multiplier. Matching a 4x Earth Commander Gem will give all your Earth heroes a 100% Attack buff during that attack, matching a 10x Water Commander Gem will be a 250% Attack buff for all your Water heroes, and so on. This means an old hero, even one not boosted by your relics and with low stats, can still benefit the entire group deck simply by being on the team.

2) Understanding ATK

The second major source of confusion, and by far the most complicated part of the whole thing, is how Legendary calculates “Attack” and Attack buffs. This often comes up with heroes like Masauwu from “Harbinger of Agony,” whose ability to increase his Attack by up to 100% didn’t do nearly as much as players might have expected.

That is because all Attack buffs are added together before being applied, and the Commander Gems themselves are a form of Attack buff. Also, they only apply to a hero’s base Attack score (listed on their card), with any “Flat Attack” bonuses (almost always from relics) added afterwards. To give an example, lets use my deck and Masauwu from that event.

He was level 44, with 4,701 ATK. I was pretty lucky during the event, so had 4 x10 Commander as well as a x13 Commander, for a total of x53 in Commander Gems (a 1325% Attack Buff if they are all matched). I was using most of my relic slots for other things, so I only had 1572 ATK in Flat Attack.

• Attack = Base Attack * (1 + Attack Buffs) + Flat Attack
• Attack = 4,701 * (1 + 13.25) + 1572 = 68,561.25

Now, we can try it with an extra 100% Attack from Masauwu’s Battle Skill, “5th World Blessing).

• Attack = 4,701 * (1 + 13.25 + 1) + 1572 = 73,262.25

As you can see, his Battle Skill only increased his final Attack value by about 7%. That isn’t nothing, and it will be proportionately larger outside of a Crusade event or in a deck with a smaller Commander Gem bonus, but it is still not nearly as high as one might initially expect.

3) The Damage Difference

Importantly, the above explanation only applies to “Attack” buffs. “Damage” buffs, on the other hand, apply at the end of the equation and multiply the entire thing. If a hero advertises a 20% Damage increase that basically means they are doing 20% more Damage, exactly as you’d expect. This includes heroes that “increase enemy damage taken” (such as Procambrius from “The Depths Below”) or older heroes that increase an Affinity’s “effectiveness” against another Affinity (as with Poseidon from “Endless War,” an event from May 2017).

4) On-Card Damage on the Crusade Map

If all of this wasn’t complicated enough, players sometimes notice that the damage listed on their heroes during an attack is very different against a Raid Boss than it is while battling on the Crusade map or similar areas (such as the Campaign, Challenge Dungeons, or even Guild vs Guild). When fighting a Raid Boss the hero displays the total damage they deal, in these situations only Attack modifiers are applied, not Damage modifiers.

This makes a lot of sense when you realize, during the Campaign or Crusade map, you may encounter several enemies at once. When your hero matches a Power Gem or makes a Team-Up Attack against all of them, the game would need to display up to five different damage numbers to account for different enemies, which would look very awkward. If you want to know exactly how much damage you are dealing during “wave-style” combat like this, you need to look at the numbers that pop up over enemies during an attack rather than what it says on the heroes themselves (I’d recommend taking a video or screenshot, they vanish quickly).

5) What It All Means

Alright, you just sat through a bunch of complicated technical explanations (or scrolled through them, still a bit of an endeavor), so now let’s get to the important part: what this means for doing well in Commander. There are lots of factors to balance and little caveats here and there, but we can break it down into a few key points to keep in mind:

• Hero Attack is More Important: The large Commander Buff only applies to a Hero’s listed Attack, so heroes with high Attack scores will get more benefit.
• Relic Attack is Less Important: Because the Commander buff doesn’t apply to relics, their Attack bonus is less important. That doesn’t mean Relics themselves aren’t important, though! Rather, it means you might want to concentrate on the other things they do like generating Power Gems or Intensity rather than trying to get lots of Attack directly.
• Attack Buffs are Less Important: In Slayer, a small Attack buff can mean a lot, as it is multiplied by the Slayer bonus. In Commander, it is instead added to the Commander bonus, so while a large enough buff (or several small buffs together) can have a big effect they will generally feel more modest than in Slayer or outside of events.
• Damage Buffs are Equally Important: Whether in Slayer, Commander, or some other part of the game, a damage buff is a damage buff. They’ll multiply your Slayer bonus or your Commander buff, and so work about the same in either event.

That was M.T.M.’s “Five Step Guide to the Commander Skill.” It certainly makes more sense to us now. We hope it helps you during this Crusade event. Happy crusading!