Heroic Academy Skill Guide and Builds

Hello everyone! I am sure you are all excited about Soul Hunters addition Heroes Village like me but I wanted to put together a guide of what we know about the Heroic Academy that adds interesting new skills and stats to our favorite heroes. I will post what I know so far and have put together but I encourage the forum community to help grow the knowledge so we all can benefit from understanding what we are spending our resources on.

New skill features descriptions:

Physical Toughness: Reduces the amount of damage taken from Physical Critical Hits by %
Magic Toughness: Reduces the amount of damage taken from Magic Critical Hits by %
Physical Resistance: Reduces the amount of Physical Damage taken in general by %
Magic Resistance: Reduces the amount of Magic Damage taken in general by %
Physical Armor: Adds directly to physical armor rating
Magic Armor: Adds directly to magic armor rating
Dodge Rating: Adds directly to dodge rating
Max Health: Adds directly to the amount of hit points your hero has.

Healing Ratio: Increases the effect on healing by % on this hero. This appears to work for self heals as well as healing spells ONLY done to this hero. This does not effect healing spells done to other heroes. I do not believe this effects summons either.
Health Recovery: Adds directly to the health recovery rating of the hero. I believe this refers to the health restored after battles, such as in the Crucible of Fire. This could also effect "reviving heroes" such as Firehawk and Riley.
Healing: I believe this effects healing spells % done by ONLY the hero to allies, including summonsed units.

Spell Recovery Time: Reduces the amount of time the hero is affected by control abilities. Such as Slow, Snare, Sleep, etc.
Hit Recovery: Chance to resist the stun effect when hit by attacks. This is a different stun than the stun effect from ultimate's and abilities.
Silence Resist: Adds to the chance of resisting the silencing of spells. Note this only effects heroes who casts spells, this would not help heroes such as Ezio.
Ability Level: This adds to another skill level to your heroes skills. This can help with spells that can be resisted as it makes it a higher level. I believe this also adds to the stat increases as well.

Physical Crit Rating: Adds directly to physical criti rating that affects the chance of making a critical damage hit.
Magic Crit Rating: Adds directly to magic criti rating that affects the chance of making a critical damage hit.
Physical Crit Damage: Adds directly to physical damage done when making a critical damage hit.
Magic Crit Damage: Adds directly to magic damage done when making a critical damage hit.
Physical Attack: Adds directly to physical attack rating
Magic Attack: Adds directly to magic attack rating
Physical Piercing: Adds directly to physical pierce rating. This is the amount of damage done that is ignored from the target's armor rating.
Magic Piercing: Adds directly to magic pierce rating. This is the amount of damage done that is ignored from the target's armor rating.
Increase DOT: Increase the amount of damage over time spells by the hero.

Energy Bonus: This grants more energy given to the attacker when they kill a hero. For example if 100 energy is given for a kill then this would add to it for something like 140 instead.
Energy Efficiency: This is the amount of energy left over after you use your ultimate. For example if you ult your energy goes back to 0 and this could set it back to something like 50 energy to give you a head start on the next ultimate. This seems to be good for heroes that have draining ultimate's such as Zem and Riley.
Energy Recovery: Adds directly to the energy recovery rating of the hero. I believe this refers to the energy restored after battles, such as in the Crucible of Fire. This could also effect "reviving heroes" such as Firehawk and Riley.

Kill Bonus Resistance: When your hero dies they give the other team energy for their ultimate's. This skill reduces the chance that energy will be given when your hero is killed. This could be great for tanks and heroes who usually die early in battle.
Summoning: This adds to the stats of summoned units by the hero. Great for heroes like Dokras, Zem, Kong, etc.

Please note if you have any corrections to the descriptions please let me know so I can have the most accurate info. Note it also appears that depending on what column the skill is in will affect the amount added to the ability. For example a +attack in the first column may give +100 but in the last column it may give +400. Also remember only ONE skill can be chosen in each column on both pages, for a total of 10 skills. However once you invest the resources to a skill you can switch to a different skill keeping all points increased for a certain amount of resources ~1000 wood/steel 400 gems.

Hero Skill Build Ideas

Please feel free to post ideas of what skills you are adding to your heroes and what full skill build each tree will have.

Zem: Add to as many tank skills as possible. Add healing skills to help with his summons.
Firehawk: Add as many skills to help with interrupts such as Hit Recovery, Spell Recovery, and Silence.
Xanos: Add as many skills to help him as he is hit hard and fast. Recovery and Magic Resist/Toughness is a nice boost. DOT increase is nice as well.

Great thread, really helpful! Good work

Hey all! Can anyone confirm something for me. For health and energy recovery, does this help a hero who revives like Riley and Firehawk? Will they receive more health and energy or is this reliant only on their skill level and not Heroic talents besides more + levels?

Also what do people think about when choosing which skills to add for defense in the Heroic Academy. For example for someone like Dokras who has high magic resist, do you add more skills to help that or do you help balance cover physical resistance and toughness?

1 - I think it only helps when you finish a fight in COF or a wave in campaign. Its the most useless stat in the game.

2 - imo it is better to balance the heroes and improve their weaknesses.

Makes sense. Thank you. My next test is to figure out Healing and Healing Ratio talents. I'm going to test on Jasmine or Li Twins. I know there is a healing bonus stat on items and I believe the healing talent will boost that.

Great job! I hope other players can also help, for the ones that have suggestions please post on the topic.

Hey guys, I am a newbee to SH.
My question is, what skills help speed up a comm's firing of his ultimate? An example is Firehawk. If my Firehawk fires after my opponents, it is at a serious disadvantage because his health has been seriously depleted. How do I stand a better chance of firing 1st? (I have seen an opponents team with the exact same commanders as mine, but at a lower level, fire first on a consistent basis).
This might be a combination of not just the commander I am concerned with, but other commanders on the team (Taurus's 3rd and 4th skills causes his teammates to recover energy and buffs them). So speeding up Taurus can speed up how he speeds up Firehawk.
I am posting here because HellForce explained a lot of the skills and what they do. Thanks in advance.

Thx for your guide. I propose to add the numerical values ​​for each parameter, for example,
Physical Armor: +12 for one point

Altair wrote:

Thx for your guide. I propose to add the numerical values ​​for each parameter, for example,
Physical Armor: +12 for one point

There is no single answer for each ability, it depends on the tier the skill is located for a specific hero. If it's tier 1 it might be 12 and if it's tier 5 it might be 20 for example.

Blackhanders wrote:

Hey guys, I am a newbee to SH.
My question is, what skills help speed up a comm's firing of his ultimate? An example is Firehawk. If my Firehawk fires after my opponents, it is at a serious disadvantage because his health has been seriously depleted. How do I stand a better chance of firing 1st? (I have seen an opponents team with the exact same commanders as mine, but at a lower level, fire first on a consistent basis).
This might be a combination of not just the commander I am concerned with, but other commanders on the team (Taurus's 3rd and 4th skills causes his teammates to recover energy and buffs them). So speeding up Taurus can speed up how he speeds up Firehawk.
I am posting here because HellForce explained a lot of the skills and what they do. Thanks in advance.

Firehawk is my favorite hunter and I have him 7 starred, fully equipped, and trained in the academy. So from personal experience I can say Firehawk only gets better the more you invest on him! He is one of those heroes though that you need to invest in with a priority of +Health anywhere you can due to the nature of his ultimate. Energy is granted either by getting attacked, attacking (with a big boost from kills), and from skills like Taurus's, Tholin's, Lucius, etc. Taurus and Tholin with Firehawk can be great to build up that energy fast, also another great addition I found is adding a strong Jasmine. Sometimes I can time Firehawk and Jasmine's ultimate to keep Firehawk's ultimate firing! I hope this helps!

And for the comment on the individual +stats, that is something I can start keeping track of but yes their column tier is the major factor determining how much it adds. Thanks too from the comment from Hengli!