Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake Creature Tier List

Creatures are the chess pieces. Factions are the boards they sit on. This list ranks upgraded units the way human games actually use them: as week-one tempo, as mid-game grinders, or as the stack you hide until the last town. The remake’s new models have already started arguments about silhouettes and “clay” animations. Those arguments are art. Damage, speed, shots, and abilities are still the 1999 table unless a patch says otherwise.

S — the stacks that end maps

Black Dragons (Dungeon) ignore spells and hit like a siege engine with wings. If they live, you lose buildings. Archangels (Castle) resurrect, fly, and make gold feel meaningful. Phoenixes (Conflux) are fast, fiery, and the reason people mutter about Armageddon’s Blade on small maps. Gold Dragons (Rampart) are the anti-spell cousins of the black ones with a different immunity profile. Titans (Tower) shoot, hit, and do not care about your morale plan. If two of these stacks meet, the rest of the army is supporting cast.

A — specialists that win their job

Hydras (Fortress) hit every adjacent hex and do not care about retaliation the way polite units do. Ancient Behemoths (Stronghold) reduce enemy Defense into a sad number. Arch Devils (Inferno) teleport, and Pit Lords behind them turn corpses into extra demons. Ghost Dragons and Bone Dragons (Necropolis) are the undead closer; aging and fear matter more than the model. Nagas (Tower) never miss and hold a line while Titans work. Champions (Castle) are the cavalry you forgot about until they trampled your shooters.

Mid-tier A names that decide week two: Arch Magi, Master Genies (the random-spell chaos gremlin), Sharpshooters if a campaign or map hands them to Gelu, and Vampire Lords who never want the fight to end. A map with early Vampire dens is not a balanced map.

B — honest workers

Royal Griffins, Unicorns, Medusas, Rocs, Basilisks, Efreet Sultans, Minotaur Kings, Diamond Golems, Marksmen, Grand Elves, Iron Golems. These units do jobs. They occupy hexes, they shoot, they fly over walls. They do not end an XL by themselves unless the enemy army is a pile of peasants. New players overbuy the pretty tier-5 and underbuy the boring tier-3 shooter. Stop doing that. Week-one Marksmen pay the rent that Angels later spend.

Liches / Power Liches deserve a special B-plus: death clouds win sieges and punish blobs. If you are learning Necropolis, they will feel S until you meet a Dispel and a flyer.

C — situational or bait

Pikemen are tutorial walls. Goblins exist to die informatively. Gnolls need numbers. Imps are a mana battery if you know the trick and a waste if you do not. Wood Elves before upgrade are not the unit you think they are. The remake’s 3D pass will make some of these look expensive. They are still cheap for a reason.

Neutral dragons, Diamond Golems in the wild, and campaign-only stacks can jump a letter on a given map. Rank the town tree, then adjust for the actual pile blocking your sawmill. The combat guide is how you beat a stack that outranks you; this page is how you know it outranks you.

Growth, cost, and why “DPS” lies

A unit with stunning damage and a growth of 1 is a different species from a unit with modest damage and a growth of 14. Weekly production is the real tier list. Necropolis cheats this with skeletons. Dungeon cheats it with the quality of the top end. Fortress cheats it when Hydras occupy six hexes of problem. When you rebuild a town in the remake, build the dwelling that feeds next Monday, not the statue that looks good in Snowdrop lighting.

For the towns that own these stacks, return to the faction tier list. For the heroes who make a B-tier stack behave like A, use the hero rankings. Artifacts that copy dragon immunities live in the artifact guide. None of those pages replace the habit of looking at growth before you look at the model.