Winterfest Guide

Foreword
The time of Christmas is approaching fast. In the game of Hero Wars this means a whole series
of annual events called collectively as ​Winter Festival​ (or ​Winterfest ​for short). These events
span over several weeks, and every single of them offers exceptionally good and numerous
rewards.

Many seem to consider it the best and most rewarding event in the whole year.

And, as with any other in-game events, those who prepare for it get so much more from the
event. Because this is such a big event, the difference between those who get prepared and
those who don’t can be much higher.

Additionally, many of the activities of the events require a high level of cooperation in the guild
or some additional considerations.

Disclaimer: This document is condensed from many resources, with the best intention to help all
of us in the guild, but of course there may be mistakes or omissions in the document. If you find
any feel free to contact me (@mity) in the game PM or on the guild Discord channel and I’ll try
to fix or expand the document.

Winter Festival Events

The Festival is composed by a group of related events:

1. Waiting for the Holiday (starting on December, 25th; takes 7 days)

https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Events/Waiting_for_the_Holiday

2. Letter to Winter Claus (starting on December, 25th; takes 7 days)

https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Events/Letter_to_Winter_Claus

3. Holiday Every Day (starting on December, 25th; takes 14 days)

https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Events/Holiday_Every_Day

4. Winter Tale (starting on January, 1st; takes 7 days)

https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Events/Winter_Tale

I won’t go over all of those and repeat what’s already on the linked web pages. Rather, consider
this document to be complementary to the information presented there.

How to Prepare
As for other important events: Collect resources needed to suck more rewards:

1. Overall, start saving standard event resources as soon as possible: ​emeralds​ and
stored energy​ (bottled or in forms of uncollected mail gifts or Quests). The more you
have, the better for you.

The energy is needed in the Waiting for the Holiday (there is a task to do a lot of
missions in the Campaign) and in the Winter Tale (classical task to spend energy). Both
give baubles for decorating the tree (described more below).

2. In 2019, there was a task to summon and promote Sebastian. He was a new hero at the
time, introduced just before or during the Xmas. Waiting for the Holiday event offered
rewards (glyphs and baubles) for having him promoted to higher ranks, up to red. I think
we can expect one of Yasmine, Corvus or Morrigan or maybe a newly introduced hero to
take the same place in the event. (According to a video I saw with the company’s
Community Manager Bob, they should introduce one more hero till the end of the year.)
 I.e., it’s a good idea to prepare a ​buffer of exp potions​ so you may bring one hero up to
about level 80 (for promoting up to orange) or 100 (for promoting up to red). Note you
don’t need gold to upgrade his skills: just the potions is enough for the event. Promoting
to the red can be quite a challenge (you would also need a lot of orange items), but
reaching the orange rank should be possible relatively easily for most of us.

3. Collect up to ​140 pet eggs​ beforehand: Holiday Every Day (14-day event!) gives
rewards for opening 3 eggs daily. Because you can open only 10 eggs when you have
10 or more of them, this requires you to save 140 eggs in order to be 100% ready.

4. Collect up to ​200 artifact keys​. Winter Tale event offers rewards for using them during
the event. 200 keys is a lot. With 4 keys per day, collecting all 200 keys requires 50
days. The best time to begin is yesterday. (Few more keys can be grabbed via daily
bonuses, gifts, quests etc.)

5. Prepare ​any resources which will allow you to generate 25 hero soul stones daily
in the 14 days of Holiday Every Day, ideally without using Campaign in the 1st 7 days
(better to use energy for cheaper Campaign missions during the first 7 days, to maximize
another task from Waiting for Holiday). I.e. it may be a buffer of various coins for the
town shops, certificates for the Titan Tournament Shop, any soul chests in your
inventory etc. Anything that works for you.

The Presents
There are some activities which generate Winterfest Presents. In 2019, there were 4 kinds of
the presents:

1. Titan Soul Stone Present: ​When opened, it randomly provides souls for a random
titans (including the super titans) or titan potions.

2. Pet Present: ​Randomly provides pet soul chests, eggs, chaos particles or pet potions.

(Update: in some screenshots, there is a Hero Artifact Present instead of Pet Present. I
assume those screenshots were from 2018 or from even older times. Or maybe there’s
some randomization of Presents which can be sent in the given day. I could not find
more info.)

3. Titan Artifact Present: ​Randomly provides certificates for the tournament shop, or any
stuff for upgrading titan artifacts (artifact spheres, seal artifact chests, or the coins
needed to upgrade level or stars of the titan artifacts).

4. Skin Present: ​This present unlocks a ​Winter Skin​ of a hero. (See the next section for
more details).
As you can see, all the presents provide quite good stuff which is hard/slow to get in bigger
amounts; or in the case of the last present kind, a stuff which is impossible to get in any other
way.

(More details in the video: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLgjq1IyEKo​)

Winter Skins
Important: ​Note that the Winter Festival is the only opportunity for obtaining the winter skins. If
you miss the chance, the next chance for getting it will come only after another 12 long months!

Opening the Skin Present gives you a Winter Skin selected randomly from those you still don’t
have. In the case you manage to unlock all Winter Skins, the Skin Presents then start giving you
1500 skin stones (there are 500 stones of every kind in the package).

There are currently the following 16 heroes who have a winter skin available:

● Andvari (physical attack)

● Arachne (health)
● Celeste (magic attack)
● Chabba (armor)
● Elmir (physical attack)
● Fox (physical attack)
● Heidi (dodge)
● Jhu (armor penetration)
● Kai (magic attack)
● Keira (armor penetration)
● Lilith (armor)
● Martha (armor)
● Maya (magic attack)
● Mojo (magic attack)
● Nebula (physical attack)
● Thea (armor)

Additionally, few more skins will likely be introduced during the Winter Festival. In 2019, 4 new
skins were introduced. Imho it’s likely that at least some new heroes could be affected (so
maybe Yasmine, Corvus and/or Morrigan?).

I’m quite sure that every single one of the guild members can find a few of his favorite heroes on
the list. And once again, do not consider what skin you need now. Think which heroes you plan
to build in the upcoming 12 months.
Because the Skin Present gives a random skin, the only winning strategy is to get as many skin
presents as possible until you get all the skins you are after.

Guild Tree and Decorating Baubles

During the festival, there is a Guild’s Winterfest Tree present in the game. The tree is ​shared​ by
all the members of the guild and the guild members are supposed to decorate the tree with
baubles​. (It’s also possible to use emeralds, but I assume the Baubles are going to be the
dominant tool for the task.)

The baubles can be obtained as rewards from the Winterfest events or for doing some
event-related activities.

More the tree is decorated, the higher level it gets. Whenever the tree reaches a higher level,
every guild member gets one Present, as described in one of the preceding sections.

I.e. the more baubles we collectively collect, the more Presents everybody gets.

Sending and Receiving Presents

Additionally to leveling the tree, the Presents can also be bought by Winterfest Coins and sent
from one player to another. Various events and activities during the festival reward you with the
Coins.
Even decorating the tree gives you them: Every bauble you use for decorating gives you one
coin.

When you have a required amount of coins, you can use them to buy and send Present to
another player (guild mate, a friend outside the guild, or even yourself). I.e. unlike when
decorating the tree, it’s up to you which Present type you buy and send.

Sending any Present also rewards you by giving you hero soul stones for the current ​Hero of
the Day​: Every day, one of heroes gets that status during the event. I.e. you can also improve
some heroes who are important to you if you choose the right day of the event to send as many
Presents as possible.

Recommendation: ​Please do ​not ​send the Presents to yourselves. If you do that you do not
contribute to the guild’s rank (see below) and it may cost us all good rewards. Instead exchange
the Presents with some other guild mate(s). I hope we’ll be able to cooperate and send each
other exactly the kind of Presents we need.

Recommendation:​ Do not send the gifts randomly! Ideally find a person in the guild who needs
the same kind of present and you can exchange the gifts: Player A sends it to B and B sends
the same gift back to A; it’s possible also to form a cycle of 3 people if an odd number of players
wants the same Present type.

UPDATE: I have created a new channel #Winterfest on our Discord server where we can
negotiate and search for the right person to exchange the Presents with.

Recommendation: ​I think we should generally focus a lot on the Skin Presents to unlock as
many Winter Skins as possible. According to some videos from the Winterfest 2019, people
were able to unlock all 16 Winter Skins available at the time. But even without so many
resources, I assume doing at least about 8 or 10 could be achievable for everyone if we do it
right.

Recommendation:​ Plan also when to send the present. In 2019, there were some rewards for
sending a gift every single day. So it’s better to spread the sending of the presents over multiple
days to get more of those rewards during the event.

(More details can be found in the video: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BNYqcp7DRg​)

The Ranking System

There is a ranking system for the event activities. The top ranked individuals and guilds get
some additional rewards.

There are three different ranking categories:

 ● For sending Presents (individual ranking)
● For receiving Presents (individual ranking)
● For leveling the winterfest tree (collective ranking, for a whole guild)

I’m afraid most of the top places in the individual ranks will likely be occupied by some crazy
cash spenders like Jasczurka, Kuro or Richtor.

However I believe we are a good guild on our server: At the time of this writing we are no. 14 in
collecting titanite and no. 13 in guild activity. That gives me a hope that perhaps we could be
able to achieve a similar ranking in the event activity, especially if we all prepare for the events
accordingly and work on it together.

According to the screenshot above from Winterfest 2019, it seems the reward may be ​as good
as a titan totem fragment ​for top places, at least in the individual categories.

(Unfortunately I could not find any info about rewards in the collective ranking for decorating the
tree.)
Using Energy
The event ​Waiting for the Holiday​ (the 1st week) also involves one not-so-common kind of
task: Instead of more common offering of rewards for spending energy, it gives the rewards
(baubles) for completed missions in the Campaign, up to 1700 missions.

In the (probably rather theoretical) case somebody might aim to get all the baubles from the
task, the required amount energy is 10.200 (= 6 x 1700). I.e., in practice, to get as many
baubles as possible requires to use all the energy as economically as possible.

Recommendation:​ So please, during the week of this event, focus heavily on the missions
which require only 6 energy per mission.

Additionally, the event ​Winter Tale​ (the 2nd week, strating on January 1st) provides the
standard energy spending task, the reward is also baubles. To take all rewards, even more
demanding amount of 14.000 energy is needed.

The first event (assuming you’re going to use only 6 energy per mission) gives slightly better
rewards (more baubles per energy used): If you cannot do both fully I recommend to focus more
on the first one.

Letter to Winter Claus

One event of the Winter Festival I would like to especially highlight is called ​Letter to Winter
Claus​. In this event the player chooses three wishes for a Christmas gifts:
 A screenshot of the Letter to Winter Claus event

By the end of the Winterfest, the player receives one of the chosen items, as randomly selected
by the game server.

Wish #1: 50,000 baubles please!

Please ask Winter Claus for the 50,000 baubles as one of your wishes. If we all do that then
about one third of the guild (randomly chosen 10 people) generates about 500,000 baubles and
our tree gets much more decorated than in guilds who do not cooperate as well.

That means:

1. It would bring more Presents to every single of us by leveling the tree.

2. Decorating the tree with the extra 50,000 baubles would generate additional 50,000
Winterfest coins, for each of the 10 chosen players.

3. It would give us a better ranking position for our guild.

4. The Presents and what they give are imho comparable in quality to what’s offered
directly in the Letter.
I understand some people may consider it unjust because it means that about 10 people (those
who are given the baubles and not any of their other two wishes) “donate” the baubles for the
shared benefit of the whole guild, while the other 20 people get the same benefits “for free” on
top to the thing Winter Claus got for them.

My counter-arguments are as follows:

1. If you really see it as unjust, the only situation which would be completely just is that
nobody ​makes a wish for the baubles. But then we all get fewer Presents and fewer
Winter skins and worse guild ranking.

2. If we all make a wish for the baubles, it’s as just as it can be. We all have exactly the
same chance to be the chosen ones who get the Baubles.

3. Imho, the truly unjust situation would be only if some people ask for the baubles but the
others decide not to. As a result it would harm all of us, including the one using that
strategy.

4. There are many aspects of the game which are random or randomized, and hence,
“unjust”. Some people are lucky to get Cleaver from the Heroic Chest and others are not.
Some people are lucky to get a totem fragment from an ordinary artifact sphere and
others are not.

5. There are aspects of the game where it’s required to cooperate: In obtaining the guild
activity to get a reasonable amount of glyphs, in obtaining the titanite in order to upgrade
our titans, in GW strategy or in sharing knowledge. This is simply yet one more such
case.

6. Almost all items offered in the event can be obtained in the game though normal
resource gathering or from other in-game events which are held more frequently than
Winterfest: It may take some time, but getting pet souls, hero souls, chaos particles, titan
artifact spheres, skin stone boxes and even emeralds is all possible. The Presents (and
especially the Winter Skins they can give) are not in that category.

Wish #2: Consider a totem fragment

A totem fragment is an item which is very hard to obtain, especially if you already got two (or
more) fragments, and at the same time it is essential for good titan development.

This event is a very rare opportunity to get one (with 33.333% chance).

Of course even if the wish is fulfilled, you still get a random fragment and not necessarily the
one you’re after (except if it is your very 1st or 2nd fragment to obtain: In that case the totems
are not given randomly, but the game gives you totem fragment of the element you have most
developed).

Yet, the same is true for all the other ways for obtaining the totem fragment (i.e. using emeralds
in the Altar of Elements; or to have a crazy amount of luck when opening an ordinary artifact
sphere). But those other methods are simply so much more expensive and/or require so much
more luck than using the Letter that I believe asking for the totem is the right thing to do almost
for everybody (unless you have a strong reason not to do so).

I can imagine only two situations why not to choose the totem:

1. If you decided to completely ignore the titans and that part of the game. (Of course, GW
players should not be in this category.)

2. If you get the totem fragment using this (or any other) way, your “bad luck protection”
gets reset. I.e. if you’re working systematically on your next totem fragment using
emeralds in the Altar of the Elements, selecting this option in the Letter might be
counter-productive as the high emerald investment made so far could be wasted.

If you’re not in any of those situations, I believe you should ask for the totem fragment.

(More details: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KVOYUPmhyk​ and

https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Special_Events/Letter_to_Winter_Claus​ about the letter and
https://hero-wars.fandom.com/wiki/Elemental_Spirit(Totem)​ about totems and the “bad luck
protection”)

Wish #3: Whatever you like

Well, the only other item which is really hard to get is Cleaver. However, while building a strong
totem is essential for good titan teams, Cleaver is not even close to be essential for a success
with heroes.

Don’t take me wrong: I don’t say he is bad. I only say he is not exceptionally good. There are
about 50 heroes in the game and Cleaver is just one of them. He is good in some teams and
against some teams, and he is a bad choice in other teams or against other opponents

The main reason he’s special is that he is so hard to get and that he became sort of a status
symbol.

Therefore I do not dare to recommend anything for your 3rd wish at all. Simply choose what you
think would help you the most.
A Hidden Mini-game
In Winterfest 2019, some more resources could be obtained by doing a hidden mini-game. I
think we can assume the mini-game would be available again. The mini-game is described in
these two videos:

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFm7H41Ga1E
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCUQ7D0hLAY

(They’re recorded by different authors. They have mostly the same contents but some details
may be better in the first one and other details in the other one.)