There is a way to lower the cost of a promoting a hero. Merging two of the same heroes together will give one hero a stat boost, and lower the feather cost by the feathers you’d earn for discarding the other. You can get up to 1,000 feathers for discarding a four star unit, but that’s for five star heroes you’re unlikely to discard. Three star units will net you 150 feathers, and four stars give 300 feathers, and that barely makes a dent in the cost for promotion. Even if you are somehow discarding or merging four star heroes all the time, you’d need to throw away 20 heroes to account for the cost of promoting one hero to five stars. Out my current roster of 34 heroes, 12 of them are four stars.

Advertisement

Furthermore, when you promote a hero that removes whatever stat bonuses you’ve received from merging, and puts them back down at level one. It just seems unlikely that a level four hero that’s been merged multiple times is worth promoting to five stars, especially if they’ve been leveled up to over level 20.

Other character collecting games with this kind of leveling mechanic have the same kind of frustrating grind, but I’ve never seen it laid out quite so pointlessly. In Love Live you can turn cards into more powerful versions of themselves if you have two of the same cards, and max out their “bond,” stat by using them in play enough times. While it can be difficult to get a second copy of very rare or event only cards, it feels a little more fair than dangling the option in front of you but making the requirements absurdly high.

Advertisement

You’re probably better off playing Fire Emblem Heroes ignoring the ability to promote characters entirely. Given the high cost, the difficulty in obtaining the currency, and the fact that you have to grind to level 20 just to be able to do it, it makes more sense to either use the heroes you’ve got or summon some more. You’ve probably got a better chance at that five star Donnel by rolling the dice.