So you want to to get a custom hero? Or maybe you already have one and are still trying out how to get the most of it, in either case this guide is for you.
What primary attribute should I pick? The main attribute on your hero varies depending on your own personal needs and playstyle but the main thing to take into consideration when choosing your primary attribute is the stat gain from the elemental stone. Agility gives armor and damage, but not attack speed as that bonus is disabled in FS. Strength gives health and health regeneration, whereas intelligence gives damage and mana.
What attack type should I choose? Chaos damage is the obvious choice as it gives you the highest damage.
How do I pick my custom hero model? After deciding what model you want you simply tell us the name of the model and we add that to your hero. The choices for you hero model include any non imported models in the Warcraft 3 game from the campaign and Bnet races.
How do I summon my hero? The 2 options for summoning your custom hero are giving us a password that you would like to use to summon it, after you summon it once with your password you will have to use the command center to respawn it when it dies. The other option for spawning your hero is that it can simply spawn with your builder in the middle of the map when the game starts.
What spells should I choose? You can mix and match any 5 spells on your custom hero from heros or possibly even units that already exist in the Fortress survival game. The spell selection is where it gets interesting when planning your custom hero because of all the choices you have but I'm going to help you narrow down that list. Out of the 5 spells you choose only 3 of them can be offensive spells and the other 2 have to be some form of utility/support or defensive spell.
1. Cogs of time. Whether your team basing or soloing in my opinion the #1 thing all custom heros should have is Cogs of time ( When cast on your builder, your next building is built instantly ) from tinker, it has a reduced cooldown compared to 6.42 and is an absolutely amazing utility spell to give you a headstart on your lumber, towers or other utility buildings.
2. Critical strike passive ( Each rank gives you 1% chance to deal x5 damage per hit on your hero, max of 20 ranks ) . Works great for solo or team play and never loses value. Critical strike is a must for all custom heros.
3. If you're going to be soloing a great deal or lumbering for a waller then you should definitely get area transmute on your custom hero so that you won't have to deal with alchemists much. ( Must have spell for solo play )
4. Your 4th spell should be a high damage AOE spell preferably. Some options for this are Moonbeam, stormcloud, deathwave, supernova, Nuke from marine. There are a lot of options for this so in the end it comes down to personal preference ( You could go with something such as adrenaline for a speed boost because it would work well with critical strike passive and could be pretty helpful early and mid game, but in the end I think high damaging AOE spells give you more value if you are fast at lumbering.
5. Again this should either be a high damaging AOE spell or possibly something for support. If you find yourself needing some extra heals for your walls then reinforce from alchemist or recontruct from tinker could work as well.
Because of how useful it is, I'm going to go into detail on how to get the most out of your cogs of time spell because again it is in my opinion, the best spell for all custom heros. Cogs of time should be the first thing you learn on your hero and ideally you want to max it out ( rank 10 is max ) as soon as possible. But once you put a point in cogs of time you want to use it as soon as possible so that you have very little downtime on your cogs of time spell.
The best thing to use your first COT on is a repair mechanic or repair factory if you trying to get your repair factory build completed quickly. Since cogs of time has a 50 second cooldown at rank 1 you can get 4 COT spells off before the game timer even starts and if you find yourself getting less than 4 off then you need to be faster. But your first 4 COTs should be on Repair factories, mechanics or lumber mills.
From there you want to be using COT on all your utility buildings ( Command centers, mechanics, vendors, mercenary tents, armor aura statue and even towers ) By planning out which buildings are going to be covered with your cogs of time spell you can have little to no downtime on your lumber mill production because building them will take no time away from it.
I cover all my utility buildings with COT and lose no uptime on Lumber mill production. Another thing that you can use COT for is for your level 7 Lumber mills. When your level 7s finish building you can transmute them right away, cast cogs of time on your builder and then it will create your level 7 instantly so that you can start getting lumber from your level 7 LMs quicker ( I cover all my level 7s with COT ) If you had too you could get a cycle going with COT and your goldmine by waiting for you Goldmine to generate a gold, transmute your GM, use COT and place it instantly and you could get x2 gold per cycle with your GM + COT. Even when you're not using COT on utility buildings or level 7s you should always be managing it and using it as soon as you can with lumber mills because this helps you get a lot of extra lumber mills.
