Kingshot Eric

Full background story

In an earlier chapter of his life, people called Eric "The Pious One" for how readily he'd raise the paladin's hammer of correction against anyone who spoke ill of the Ecclesia or threatened its name and its holdings. He lived by one line, repeated so often it might as well have been carved into his hammer: "whoever is not absolutely loyal to us is against us." Whatever task the Ecclesia handed him, Eric took on gladly, including the grim work of forced tithing. He didn't bend for a nobleman's flattery or a landholder's pleading. The tithe stood at ten percent, no more and no less, and Eric collected it by whatever means the job called for. It took a certain kind of person to do that work well. Every so often, some subject of the Ecclesia balked at paying, and on those days it helped that Eric could put his hammer through the door of whatever storehouse was hiding the difference.

Loyal as he was, Eric might have gone on that way until he died on some forgotten battlefield defending the church, if not for the levy that changed everything. His final assignment sent him to collect from a town the Ecclesia described as prosperous and thriving. What he found instead was a huddle of shacks, sick with disease, picked clean by bandits, and starving after a bad harvest. An order was still an order, so Eric carried out some version of the levy, though he took as little as he could from people who would struggle to survive the winter regardless. His restraint meant the grain he sent back fell well short of what the Ecclesia expected. His answer came back at the next waypost. The grain wasn't worth the cost of hauling, so burn it and move Eric on to richer ground.

Eric could barely process the order. Burn grain that could keep people alive through the winter? He stopped where he was and let his journey sit until he could make sense of what he'd just been told to do. It was during that pause that he crossed paths with Hilde, who had been handing out food of her own to help the town through the famine. Eric was floored to learn that Hilde herself had come to work for the Ecclesia only after her parents sold her into slavery as a child, unable to scrape together their own tithe. Something in Eric broke open hearing her story. He shut himself away for a full day of quiet reflection, and when he came out again, he announced that he was no longer a Paladin of the Light. He was, in his own words, a dark hammer, made for breaking chains instead of forging them. These days that same hammer still delivers correction. It just aims at a different kind of sinner now, the hypocrites who've earned nothing gentler than force.

Skills

Conquest skills fire in the Arena. Expedition skills fire on rallies and the world map. A hero who carries one can be dead weight in the other.

Conquest

Ground Shock

Deals Attack×168% damage and reduces the target's Attack Speed by 50% for 4s.

Hammer of Justice

Deals Attack×112% damage in a fan-shaped arc with a 30% chance to stun for 1s.

Veterancy

Passive: on being hit, up to 16% chance to gain +20% Defense for 2s, stacking up to 5 times.

Expedition

Holy Warrior

-20% total Enemy Squads' Attack.

Conviction

-20% Squads' Damage Taken.

Exhortation

+25% Squads' Health.

Best pairings

• Hammer of Justice's stun chance and Veterancy's stacking Defense let him anchor the front while ranged heroes like Petra or Marlin stay out of range.
• Conviction shields your side while Jaeger's Rumormonger punishes theirs — the two don't overlap, they compound.
• As the Gen 3 tank alongside Petra, Jaeger and Marlin, he's the piece that lets the other three's damage and control kits survive long enough to go off.

• Petra
• Jaeger
• Marlin

Other Generation 3 heroes

• Jaeger
• Petra

Frequently asked questions